On topic: Re our ongoing battle of the 2 opinion camps re the GE – Tory brand trashed, Labour majority nailed on, maybe a biggie vs Mountain to climb, Hung Parliament or small Labour majority – the byelection imo slightly (but only slightly) favours the first.
Even if nothing else goes wrong between now and the GE, and assuming the war ends and inflation is heading back towards 'normal' and somehow the strikers are placated etc etc the GE will still have a tired Tory government (14 years? Probably) and its time for a change. I'm never convinced that most people pay a lot of attention to politics. On PB we are the extreme minority. But people do make their minds up and I think a lot have said 'enough'.
I think the only issue is whether its Labour as most seats, in power with confidence and supply/formal coalition (unlikely) or Labour majority. I think the sides issues will stop it being a stupidly large majority - Scotland for one, and also Sunak is a less polarising figure than Truss would have been. That and the boundary changes. but time will tell!
If the economic forecasts are half right, and Britain does see a large drop in living standards as a result then, given the coincidence of The Truss Event with this period of economic calamity and it's hard to see why the voting public wouldn't decide not just to turf the Tories out of government, but to leave nothing to chance and to ensure the result is beyond any doubt.
Nuking the Tories from orbit is the only way to be sure.
If Elon Musk had not gutted Twitter’s legal department he might have had a few lawyers warning him about the implications for a social media platform when it begins to take editorial decisions.
Ludicrously rich businessmen are ten to a trilllion pounds but we have one here who thinks of himself as something more than that. When Musk looks in the mirror he sees a visionary genius with plans for mankind. Ally this pretentious self-image to immaturity, a brittle temperament, and a predilection for political activism on the grimy Maga side of the street, and I think we have a risk here. The Musk story could be going to a bad place. I feel queasy about him.
There is a growing tendency within big business and amongst its leaders to engage in political activism rather than being content to provide shareholder value and make profit within the law. I agree the trend is a negative one, but I find it strange that you're only just registering an objection now when an example has cropped up featuring someone who isn't aligned with your own political views.
I'm struggling to think of a left liberal equivalent to Musk. The world's (then) richest man has bought Twitter and is leaning heavily into right wing, conspiracy tinged, culture war politics.
Gates? Soros? Musk is only an oddity because of his stance, not because of his involvement with activism.
Gates and Soros don't use their wealth to silence criticism of them.
Erhhhhh.....Gates funding of journalism has attracted a lot of attention from some quarters (not just the conspiracy nutters), and due to the way it has been done you can't even trace all the money.
However, it does strangely seem to have led to some what disinterested view of some of his activities.
Have we done the latest Savanta poll? I remember MoonRabbit writing at length about the significance of the lead being down to 11% last time. Just random fluctuation in both cases, probably.
Recent Tweet from Britain Elects Westminster voting intention:
We await a multitude of interminable posts overanalysing the reasons behind the Tories’ incredible popularity were the Labour and Conservative figures transposed.
If Elon Musk had not gutted Twitter’s legal department he might have had a few lawyers warning him about the implications for a social media platform when it begins to take editorial decisions.
Ludicrously rich businessmen are ten to a trilllion pounds but we have one here who thinks of himself as something more than that. When Musk looks in the mirror he sees a visionary genius with plans for mankind. Ally this pretentious self-image to immaturity, a brittle temperament, and a predilection for political activism on the grimy Maga side of the street, and I think we have a risk here. The Musk story could be going to a bad place. I feel queasy about him.
There is a growing tendency within big business and amongst its leaders to engage in political activism rather than being content to provide shareholder value and make profit within the law. I agree the trend is a negative one, but I find it strange that you're only just registering an objection now when an example has cropped up featuring someone who isn't aligned with your own political views.
I'm struggling to think of a left liberal equivalent to Musk. The world's (then) richest man has bought Twitter and is leaning heavily into right wing, conspiracy tinged, culture war politics.
Gates? Soros? Musk is only an oddity because of his stance, not because of his involvement with activism.
Gates and Soros don't use their wealth to silence criticism of them.
To be fair, we dont know if the tiny microchips Gates snuck into the Covid vaccines are powerful enough to subconsciously stop us criticising him.
Oh, and one thing about the boundary changes. FPTP is a capricious system. If you have a set of boundaries that are ideal for giving you a seats advantage when the votes are close, chances are that it's a set of boundaries that will be particularly unforgiving if you're a long way behind.
Sydney Thunder was dismissed for 15 - the lowest score in men's Twenty20 history - as they were thrashed by Adelaide Strikers in the Big Bash League on Friday.
Chasing 140 to win, Thunder were bowled out in just 35 balls, with number 10 Brendan Doggett top-scoring with four.
Five players made a duck, including England T20 World Cup winner and opening batter Alex Hales.
The previous lowest score was Turkey's 21 against the Czech Republic in 2019.
Strikers' pace bowler Henry Thornton took 5-3 and Wes Agar 4-6 as they claimed a 124-run victory against the abject Thunder.
China’s government has decided how it’s going to deal with its last, terrible Covid wave, as they finally reopen. They will pretend it’s not happening. Which, fittingly, is where we all began, three long years ago
I am sure China have been covering up real death figures from the day dot...well.we know they did in Wuhan, but I am sure this has continued. Even if the Winnie the Pooh himself doesn't order a cover up, local officials can never admit their province is doing worse than others.
This will test their skills
It is estimated ~1m extra Chinese deaths will be recorded in the next 3 months. We can also expect chaos at overwhelmed hospitals. That’s REALLY hard to hide
Also, I believe the number of ICU beds / capita in China is very low. Yes they shown they can impressively knock up those temporary building in a few days, but they aren't ICU facilities.
Look at this. The latest BA7 strain of Omicron in China has R0 = R16
Phenomenally infectious. Everyone in China is going to get this in the coming weeks. Already seems to be happening in Beijing and Shanghai according to multiple tweets
The IFR of the new strain is optimistically put at 0.1%. Let’s hope and say that’s true
If 70% of Chinese get sick and 0.1% die the numbers say 980,000 - a million - will die. And 3-5 million will get REALLY ill and rush to hospital. Between now and feb
For months now my mum's home has insisted on masks, as per gov guidelines (even though they were not laws), and the home had a pile of masks at the door for those visitors that forgot to bring one.
So I would duly don a mask when walking through the home to mum's room.
During that walk you would see that residents were not wearing masks (the guidelines didn't specify this). The carers were generally wearing masks but not always and those that were wearing one tended to cover their mouth but not nose. Occasionally a staff member would take a photo for posting on the home's Facebook page and then they made sure that all visitors and carers had a mask worn properly for the photo!
In short, the whole thing was a farce.
As soon as I got to mum's room I took it off, of course, and would only put it back on when prompted by a passing carer, and then took it off again. The government should have changed these guidelines months ago. I won't go on about how all this has affected my mum because I've done this before but I'm still simmering with rage over this.
I visited a geriatric ward in a hospital recently (several times) - it was exactly as you describe. Absolutely farcical, and bloody pointless.
Don't see why that's especially pointless (my late uncle's care home had the same). There will be an existing level of illness within the ward/home, and management has decided to accept that without masks but try to avoid bringing in new infections. Wearing a mask 24/7 is a lot more challenging than wearing one for a 30-minute visit.
There's clearly a trade-off with somewhat reduced risk vs somewhat reduced pleasure for the resident seeing the visitor (on one occasion my uncle didn't recognise me, though he was quite far gone by then). I can see both sides of that, but the visitor's feelings at putting up with it for a short visit seem relatively unimportant.
It is clear to anyone that actually values free speech that this is a incredibly dangerous precedent for democracy. It is a billionaire wielding a platform for his own political ends, deliberately selecting which speech is allowed and ending criticism of him.
The only difference from pre-Musk Twitter being the direction of it.
If Elon Musk had not gutted Twitter’s legal department he might have had a few lawyers warning him about the implications for a social media platform when it begins to take editorial decisions.
Ludicrously rich businessmen are ten to a trilllion pounds but we have one here who thinks of himself as something more than that. When Musk looks in the mirror he sees a visionary genius with plans for mankind. Ally this pretentious self-image to immaturity, a brittle temperament, and a predilection for political activism on the grimy Maga side of the street, and I think we have a risk here. The Musk story could be going to a bad place. I feel queasy about him.
Seems to me Musk is yet another one of these middle aged rich blokes who goes off the deep end for constant adulation from social media (albeit with his wealth on a different scale to your Lineker's and Piers Morgan's of this world). Post the latest "cool" meme that you know your fans will give you the thumbs up and waste hours trying to "own" those who don't like you.
It seems a bit like the 21st Century equivalent of what middle aged men used to do buying flashy cars and motorbikes that looked like penis extensions.
There is that aspect, very much so, but this is a different level of power and influence to the likes of those names. It's above my paygrade to design a remedy but it again makes me ponder what a crazy and surely improvable economic model it is that allows single individuals to amass wealth on this scale in a world of scarce and finite resource.
It isn't exactly a new concept that a small number of people are big winners in capitalist societies, nor that they have then tried to use that wealth to influence / shape the world towards their beliefs / vision of how things should be.
The difference now is that you can message millions of people instantly.
And on the bright side, instantly have millions of people telling you that your message is bullshit (apart from the the ones you've banned from the media platform you bought of course).
If Elon Musk had not gutted Twitter’s legal department he might have had a few lawyers warning him about the implications for a social media platform when it begins to take editorial decisions.
Ludicrously rich businessmen are ten to a trilllion pounds but we have one here who thinks of himself as something more than that. When Musk looks in the mirror he sees a visionary genius with plans for mankind. Ally this pretentious self-image to immaturity, a brittle temperament, and a predilection for political activism on the grimy Maga side of the street, and I think we have a risk here. The Musk story could be going to a bad place. I feel queasy about him.
There is a growing tendency within big business and amongst its leaders to engage in political activism rather than being content to provide shareholder value and make profit within the law. I agree the trend is a negative one, but I find it strange that you're only just registering an objection now when an example has cropped up featuring someone who isn't aligned with your own political views.
I'm struggling to think of a left liberal equivalent to Musk. The world's (then) richest man has bought Twitter and is leaning heavily into right wing, conspiracy tinged, culture war politics.
Gates? Soros? Musk is only an oddity because of his stance, not because of his involvement with activism.
Some resemblance - ie rich and politically active - but Gates and Soros are in the more traditional mould of uber wealthy, low key philanthropists and influence mongers. Musk looks different. How his story pans out we will see. I sense it's going dark but perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps he'll help trigger a new and better social media, or perhaps he'll drop all this nonsense and return to finding us fresh unsullied planets to live on. In which case, count me a fan.
China’s government has decided how it’s going to deal with its last, terrible Covid wave, as they finally reopen. They will pretend it’s not happening. Which, fittingly, is where we all began, three long years ago
I am sure China have been covering up real death figures from the day dot...well.we know they did in Wuhan, but I am sure this has continued. Even if the Winnie the Pooh himself doesn't order a cover up, local officials can never admit their province is doing worse than others.
This will test their skills
It is estimated ~1m extra Chinese deaths will be recorded in the next 3 months. We can also expect chaos at overwhelmed hospitals. That’s REALLY hard to hide
Also, I believe the number of ICU beds / capita in China is very low. Yes they shown they can impressively knock up those temporary building in a few days, but they aren't ICU facilities.
Look at this. The latest BA7 strain of Omicron in China has R0 = R16
Phenomenally infectious. Everyone in China is going to get this in the coming weeks. Already seems to be happening in Beijing and Shanghai according to multiple tweets
The IFR of the new strain is optimistically put at 0.1%. Let’s hope and say that’s true
If 70% of Chinese get sick and 0.1% die the numbers say 980,000 - a million - will die. And 3-5 million will get REALLY ill and rush to hospital. Between now and feb
支撐
That isn’t news really - Omicron’s staggeringly high R number was one reason that Western governments gave up on lockdowns. The other, of course, being the vaccines.
At that level of infectiousness, no lockdown will stop COVID. Which is why Xi’s policies were seen as stupid, months back.
If Elon Musk had not gutted Twitter’s legal department he might have had a few lawyers warning him about the implications for a social media platform when it begins to take editorial decisions.
Ludicrously rich businessmen are ten to a trilllion pounds but we have one here who thinks of himself as something more than that. When Musk looks in the mirror he sees a visionary genius with plans for mankind. Ally this pretentious self-image to immaturity, a brittle temperament, and a predilection for political activism on the grimy Maga side of the street, and I think we have a risk here. The Musk story could be going to a bad place. I feel queasy about him.
There is a growing tendency within big business and amongst its leaders to engage in political activism rather than being content to provide shareholder value and make profit within the law. I agree the trend is a negative one, but I find it strange that you're only just registering an objection now when an example has cropped up featuring someone who isn't aligned with your own political views.
I'm struggling to think of a left liberal equivalent to Musk. The world's (then) richest man has bought Twitter and is leaning heavily into right wing, conspiracy tinged, culture war politics.
Gates? Soros? Musk is only an oddity because of his stance, not because of his involvement with activism.
Gates and Soros are centrists not left wing. I suppose you don't really get left wing billionaires.
For months now my mum's home has insisted on masks, as per gov guidelines (even though they were not laws), and the home had a pile of masks at the door for those visitors that forgot to bring one.
So I would duly don a mask when walking through the home to mum's room.
During that walk you would see that residents were not wearing masks (the guidelines didn't specify this). The carers were generally wearing masks but not always and those that were wearing one tended to cover their mouth but not nose. Occasionally a staff member would take a photo for posting on the home's Facebook page and then they made sure that all visitors and carers had a mask worn properly for the photo!
In short, the whole thing was a farce.
As soon as I got to mum's room I took it off, of course, and would only put it back on when prompted by a passing carer, and then took it off again. The government should have changed these guidelines months ago. I won't go on about how all this has affected my mum because I've done this before but I'm still simmering with rage over this.
I visited a geriatric ward in a hospital recently (several times) - it was exactly as you describe. Absolutely farcical, and bloody pointless.
Don't see why that's especially pointless (my late uncle's care home had the same). There will be an existing level of illness within the ward/home, and management has decided to accept that without masks but try to avoid bringing in new infections. Wearing a mask 24/7 is a lot more challenging than wearing one for a 30-minute visit.
There's clearly a trade-off with somewhat reduced risk vs somewhat reduced pleasure for the resident seeing the visitor (on one occasion my uncle didn't recognise me, though he was quite far gone by then). I can see both sides of that, but the visitor's feelings at putting up with it for a short visit seem relatively unimportant.
The question is - what good do the masks do. Being mostly paper. And tissue paper at that.
The strange belief that N95 (or similar) require some special fitting or something seems odd to me. You put them on, just like the paper masks.
And unlike the paper masks, the N95s are scientifically designed and tested to stop particles the size of the virus.
China’s government has decided how it’s going to deal with its last, terrible Covid wave, as they finally reopen. They will pretend it’s not happening. Which, fittingly, is where we all began, three long years ago
I am sure China have been covering up real death figures from the day dot...well.we know they did in Wuhan, but I am sure this has continued. Even if the Winnie the Pooh himself doesn't order a cover up, local officials can never admit their province is doing worse than others.
This will test their skills
It is estimated ~1m extra Chinese deaths will be recorded in the next 3 months. We can also expect chaos at overwhelmed hospitals. That’s REALLY hard to hide
Also, I believe the number of ICU beds / capita in China is very low. Yes they shown they can impressively knock up those temporary building in a few days, but they aren't ICU facilities.
Look at this. The latest BA7 strain of Omicron in China has R0 = R16
Phenomenally infectious. Everyone in China is going to get this in the coming weeks. Already seems to be happening in Beijing and Shanghai according to multiple tweets
The IFR of the new strain is optimistically put at 0.1%. Let’s hope and say that’s true
If 70% of Chinese get sick and 0.1% die the numbers say 980,000 - a million - will die. And 3-5 million will get REALLY ill and rush to hospital. Between now and feb
支撐
That isn’t news really - Omicron’s staggeringly high R number was one reason that Western governments gave up on lockdowns. The other, of course, being the vaccines.
At that level of infectiousness, no lockdown will stop COVID. Which is why Xi’s policies were seen as stupid, months back.
I believe these are new evolutions of the virus. R16 is extreme
On this list it would make BA7 the most infectious disease in history (alongside the worst kinds of measles)
Yes, he undoubtedly has a message. I am not saying it's one I agree with.
I am reminded of a US interview by Piers Morgan of Jesse Ventura, sometime US politician and nowadays conspiracy theorist TV presenter. Ventura was so polite, measured and convincing in his answers that he made Morgan lose his cool, and provoked a widespread discussion about the theories he was elucidating.
The next week, the same show featured Piers interviewing Alex Jones - with the opposite outcome - Jones shouty and unpleasant, actively repelling the viewer from being convinced by anything he said. Wittingly or unwittingly, Jones was being used to put people off - undoing the damage caused by Ventura.
Yes, I've found throughout my life that appearing to be the most reasonable person in a discussion gives you an edge with uncommitted listeners. People who shout but actually have the better case are doing themselves no favours, unless their objective is simply to boost the morale of existing sympathisers.
There was a spoof email that I once saw about carrying "reasonableness" to extremes, namely on how to put the case for slaughter of the first-born - "First, we must stress that we are flatly opposed to slaughter of the second-born, which I think we can all agree would be entirely unacceptable..."
For months now my mum's home has insisted on masks, as per gov guidelines (even though they were not laws), and the home had a pile of masks at the door for those visitors that forgot to bring one.
So I would duly don a mask when walking through the home to mum's room.
During that walk you would see that residents were not wearing masks (the guidelines didn't specify this). The carers were generally wearing masks but not always and those that were wearing one tended to cover their mouth but not nose. Occasionally a staff member would take a photo for posting on the home's Facebook page and then they made sure that all visitors and carers had a mask worn properly for the photo!
In short, the whole thing was a farce.
As soon as I got to mum's room I took it off, of course, and would only put it back on when prompted by a passing carer, and then took it off again. The government should have changed these guidelines months ago. I won't go on about how all this has affected my mum because I've done this before but I'm still simmering with rage over this.
I visited a geriatric ward in a hospital recently (several times) - it was exactly as you describe. Absolutely farcical, and bloody pointless.
Don't see why that's especially pointless (my late uncle's care home had the same). There will be an existing level of illness within the ward/home, and management has decided to accept that without masks but try to avoid bringing in new infections. Wearing a mask 24/7 is a lot more challenging than wearing one for a 30-minute visit.
There's clearly a trade-off with somewhat reduced risk vs somewhat reduced pleasure for the resident seeing the visitor (on one occasion my uncle didn't recognise me, though he was quite far gone by then). I can see both sides of that, but the visitor's feelings at putting up with it for a short visit seem relatively unimportant.
The question is - what good do the masks do. Being mostly paper. And tissue paper at that.
The strange belief that N95 (or similar) require some special fitting or something seems odd to me. You put them on, just like the paper masks.
And unlike the paper masks, the N95s are scientifically designed and tested to stop particles the size of the virus.
Actually you do need special fitting for all masks if they are going to work fully in an environment where you are going to be exposed significant levels of COVID. Its actually a problem the NHS workers have faced, that "proper" masks only come in a limited set of sizing / shapes and they don't actually fit all people's faces.
Hospital workers have to go for a "fitting" to assess which of them works for them. In some cases they haven't been able to provide one as they don't have a skew that forms the required seal.
China’s government has decided how it’s going to deal with its last, terrible Covid wave, as they finally reopen. They will pretend it’s not happening. Which, fittingly, is where we all began, three long years ago
I am sure China have been covering up real death figures from the day dot...well.we know they did in Wuhan, but I am sure this has continued. Even if the Winnie the Pooh himself doesn't order a cover up, local officials can never admit their province is doing worse than others.
This will test their skills
It is estimated ~1m extra Chinese deaths will be recorded in the next 3 months. We can also expect chaos at overwhelmed hospitals. That’s REALLY hard to hide
Also, I believe the number of ICU beds / capita in China is very low. Yes they shown they can impressively knock up those temporary building in a few days, but they aren't ICU facilities.
Look at this. The latest BA7 strain of Omicron in China has R0 = R16
Phenomenally infectious. Everyone in China is going to get this in the coming weeks. Already seems to be happening in Beijing and Shanghai according to multiple tweets
The IFR of the new strain is optimistically put at 0.1%. Let’s hope and say that’s true
If 70% of Chinese get sick and 0.1% die the numbers say 980,000 - a million - will die. And 3-5 million will get REALLY ill and rush to hospital. Between now and feb
支撐
That isn’t news really - Omicron’s staggeringly high R number was one reason that Western governments gave up on lockdowns. The other, of course, being the vaccines.
At that level of infectiousness, no lockdown will stop COVID. Which is why Xi’s policies were seen as stupid, months back.
I believe these are new evolutions of the virus. R16 is extreme
On this list it would make BA7 the most infectious disease in history (alongside the worst kinds of measles)
China’s government has decided how it’s going to deal with its last, terrible Covid wave, as they finally reopen. They will pretend it’s not happening. Which, fittingly, is where we all began, three long years ago
I am sure China have been covering up real death figures from the day dot...well.we know they did in Wuhan, but I am sure this has continued. Even if the Winnie the Pooh himself doesn't order a cover up, local officials can never admit their province is doing worse than others.
This will test their skills
It is estimated ~1m extra Chinese deaths will be recorded in the next 3 months. We can also expect chaos at overwhelmed hospitals. That’s REALLY hard to hide
Also, I believe the number of ICU beds / capita in China is very low. Yes they shown they can impressively knock up those temporary building in a few days, but they aren't ICU facilities.
Look at this. The latest BA7 strain of Omicron in China has R0 = R16
Phenomenally infectious. Everyone in China is going to get this in the coming weeks. Already seems to be happening in Beijing and Shanghai according to multiple tweets
The IFR of the new strain is optimistically put at 0.1%. Let’s hope and say that’s true
If 70% of Chinese get sick and 0.1% die the numbers say 980,000 - a million - will die. And 3-5 million will get REALLY ill and rush to hospital. Between now and feb
支撐
That isn’t news really - Omicron’s staggeringly high R number was one reason that Western governments gave up on lockdowns. The other, of course, being the vaccines.
At that level of infectiousness, no lockdown will stop COVID. Which is why Xi’s policies were seen as stupid, months back.
I believe these are new evolutions of the virus. R16 is extreme
On this list it would make BA7 the most infectious disease in history (alongside the worst kinds of measles)
If Elon Musk had not gutted Twitter’s legal department he might have had a few lawyers warning him about the implications for a social media platform when it begins to take editorial decisions.
Ludicrously rich businessmen are ten to a trilllion pounds but we have one here who thinks of himself as something more than that. When Musk looks in the mirror he sees a visionary genius with plans for mankind. Ally this pretentious self-image to immaturity, a brittle temperament, and a predilection for political activism on the grimy Maga side of the street, and I think we have a risk here. The Musk story could be going to a bad place. I feel queasy about him.
There is a growing tendency within big business and amongst its leaders to engage in political activism rather than being content to provide shareholder value and make profit within the law. I agree the trend is a negative one, but I find it strange that you're only just registering an objection now when an example has cropped up featuring someone who isn't aligned with your own political views.
I'm struggling to think of a left liberal equivalent to Musk. The world's (then) richest man has bought Twitter and is leaning heavily into right wing, conspiracy tinged, culture war politics.
Gates? Soros? Musk is only an oddity because of his stance, not because of his involvement with activism.
If you think it an oddity that a right wing billionaire businessman is deeply involved in US politics, then you don't have much knowledge of US politics.
Have we done the latest Savanta poll? I remember MoonRabbit writing at length about the significance of the lead being down to 11% last time. Just random fluctuation in both cases, probably.
Recent Tweet from Britain Elects Westminster voting intention:
Two weeks ago I deduced from the Opinium the Tories were on the up, Labour on way down, and polls over the following two weeks actually proved me right Nick. I definitely picked up a trend in its early stages.
Tory share from last one to present one
Redfield +3 Omnisis +5 Delta +4 Savanta +5 Yougov, opinium, Techne all up too.
Though, over the last couple of days polls show a “meh” MOE stalling of this trend.
How did I do it?
Instead of waiting for a poll, assess the media narrative, front pages, government and opposition response, editorials etc, and then guess the poll movement before it is published.
For example, my assessment of what Opinium should be this weekend, if they bother to do one, the Conservative share is up 2% to 31.
Based on the Opinium doing that, my prediction is the current pause in Tory recovery is temporary, the trend is for most pollsters to show single digit gaps in new year.
Yes, he undoubtedly has a message. I am not saying it's one I agree with.
I am reminded of a US interview by Piers Morgan of Jesse Ventura, sometime US politician and nowadays conspiracy theorist TV presenter. Ventura was so polite, measured and convincing in his answers that he made Morgan lose his cool, and provoked a widespread discussion about the theories he was elucidating.
The next week, the same show featured Piers interviewing Alex Jones - with the opposite outcome - Jones shouty and unpleasant, actively repelling the viewer from being convinced by anything he said. Wittingly or unwittingly, Jones was being used to put people off - undoing the damage caused by Ventura.
Yes, I've found throughout my life that appearing to be the most reasonable person in a discussion gives you an edge with uncommitted listeners. People who shout but actually have the better case are doing themselves no favours, unless their objective is simply to boost the morale of existing sympathisers.
There was a spoof email that I once saw about carrying "reasonableness" to extremes, namely on how to put the case for slaughter of the first-born - "First, we must stress that we are flatly opposed to slaughter of the second-born, which I think we can all agree would be entirely unacceptable..."
Yep, the fluent, calmly spoken advocacy of the evil, the bad and the mediocre - in home or square or workplace - is one of life's biggest menaces.
China’s government has decided how it’s going to deal with its last, terrible Covid wave, as they finally reopen. They will pretend it’s not happening. Which, fittingly, is where we all began, three long years ago
I am sure China have been covering up real death figures from the day dot...well.we know they did in Wuhan, but I am sure this has continued. Even if the Winnie the Pooh himself doesn't order a cover up, local officials can never admit their province is doing worse than others.
This will test their skills
It is estimated ~1m extra Chinese deaths will be recorded in the next 3 months. We can also expect chaos at overwhelmed hospitals. That’s REALLY hard to hide
Also, I believe the number of ICU beds / capita in China is very low. Yes they shown they can impressively knock up those temporary building in a few days, but they aren't ICU facilities.
Look at this. The latest BA7 strain of Omicron in China has R0 = R16
Phenomenally infectious. Everyone in China is going to get this in the coming weeks. Already seems to be happening in Beijing and Shanghai according to multiple tweets
The IFR of the new strain is optimistically put at 0.1%. Let’s hope and say that’s true
If 70% of Chinese get sick and 0.1% die the numbers say 980,000 - a million - will die. And 3-5 million will get REALLY ill and rush to hospital. Between now and feb
支撐
That isn’t news really - Omicron’s staggeringly high R number was one reason that Western governments gave up on lockdowns. The other, of course, being the vaccines.
At that level of infectiousness, no lockdown will stop COVID. Which is why Xi’s policies were seen as stupid, months back.
I believe these are new evolutions of the virus. R16 is extreme
On this list it would make BA7 the most infectious disease in history (alongside the worst kinds of measles)
A lot of the estimates for the Omicron varieties are very suspect. Because the effective R number is also affected by immune evasion.
To show an extreme: If you had perfect immunity and a disease with an R0 of 5 and 80% now had immunity (from vax or virus), it'd slip under an R-eff of 1 about then. If, though, it evolved into perfect immune evasion from previous immunity but only an R0 of 3, it'd out-compete the previous strain by a factor of 3.
Even though R0 is actually lower, it's got that entire pool of previously-immune to feast upon, so it has an R-eff of 3 and the earlier strain has an R-eff of 1.
So a crude estimate would be: the old one had an R0 of 5, this is outcompeting it by a factor of 3, so it's got an R0 of 15 (when it's actually 3).
This is an extreme example, but increasing partial immune evasion will fall between the extremes.
Will moderated automation actually work, though? As blackhats work out how the algorithms work there will be a constant battle between updates to the automation and the blackhats, with the risk of innocent users being blacklisted / shadowbanned etc - and which needs people to actually address.
Allegedly YouTube creators have suffered from this recently, with videos being flagged or demonetised for no apparent reason, and finding it difficult to get the 'decision' reversed. And there are far more Twitter users than YouTube creators.
Content moderation is one of the most difficult things web services like social media and instant messaging have to do. The systems side of their operations are an easier but still difficult task. The rules that need to be applied can be extremely complicated, vary by situation and place, have all sorts of context related issues, and exceptions galore. It's not an easy problem, and if you get it wrong you can end up in real bit trouble. For example Meta is currently being sued in Kenya for Facebook fuelling violence in Ethiopia.
If Elon Musk had not gutted Twitter’s legal department he might have had a few lawyers warning him about the implications for a social media platform when it begins to take editorial decisions.
Ludicrously rich businessmen are ten to a trilllion pounds but we have one here who thinks of himself as something more than that. When Musk looks in the mirror he sees a visionary genius with plans for mankind. Ally this pretentious self-image to immaturity, a brittle temperament, and a predilection for political activism on the grimy Maga side of the street, and I think we have a risk here. The Musk story could be going to a bad place. I feel queasy about him.
There is a growing tendency within big business and amongst its leaders to engage in political activism rather than being content to provide shareholder value and make profit within the law. I agree the trend is a negative one, but I find it strange that you're only just registering an objection now when an example has cropped up featuring someone who isn't aligned with your own political views.
I'm struggling to think of a left liberal equivalent to Musk. The world's (then) richest man has bought Twitter and is leaning heavily into right wing, conspiracy tinged, culture war politics.
Gates? Soros? Musk is only an oddity because of his stance, not because of his involvement with activism.
Gates and Soros are centrists not left wing. I suppose you don't really get left wing billionaires.
One pictures Jeremy patenting a new jam and it taking off beyond his wildest dreams.
If Elon Musk had not gutted Twitter’s legal department he might have had a few lawyers warning him about the implications for a social media platform when it begins to take editorial decisions.
Ludicrously rich businessmen are ten to a trilllion pounds but we have one here who thinks of himself as something more than that. When Musk looks in the mirror he sees a visionary genius with plans for mankind. Ally this pretentious self-image to immaturity, a brittle temperament, and a predilection for political activism on the grimy Maga side of the street, and I think we have a risk here. The Musk story could be going to a bad place. I feel queasy about him.
There is a growing tendency within big business and amongst its leaders to engage in political activism rather than being content to provide shareholder value and make profit within the law. I agree the trend is a negative one, but I find it strange that you're only just registering an objection now when an example has cropped up featuring someone who isn't aligned with your own political views.
I'm struggling to think of a left liberal equivalent to Musk. The world's (then) richest man has bought Twitter and is leaning heavily into right wing, conspiracy tinged, culture war politics.
Gates? Soros? Musk is only an oddity because of his stance, not because of his involvement with activism.
Gates and Soros don't use their wealth to silence criticism of them.
The previous management of Twitter was quite fond of silencing a lot of people.
It is clear to anyone that actually values free speech that this is a incredibly dangerous precedent for democracy. It is a billionaire wielding a platform for his own political ends, deliberately selecting which speech is allowed and ending criticism of him.
The only difference from pre-Musk Twitter being the direction of it.
Musk is just like Dorsey except for his politics? C'mon. It's gone again. It's back in the drawer.
I also read that, found the wording interesting. From the description, I'd have said it burst, rather than exploded, but maybe that's down to my own (idiosyncratic?) interpretation of those terms. The article later uses 'burst'.
More importantly, what happened to the fish? I'm guessing it didn't end well for them, but that doesn't seem to be reported. I'd like to imagine a few got washed into drains and escape, eventually, to the open sea. Could be a film, Auf Wiedersehen, Pets but I'm guessing that as they were tropical fish they would be unlikely to do well in the wilds of Berlin
Tbf, the aftermath looks like an explosion occurred.
It does. Will be interesting to learn the mode of failure when it's investigated.
More than a thousand tonnes of water involved. A heck of a lot of force released even if it was just that the glass cracked and collapsed.
Sure hope they have CCTV to show what happened.
The current stage is engineers checking that the hotel itself is structurally safe. It has just been confirmed that the cause was material failure, and "so far" there is no evidence of tampering/explosion etc.
China’s government has decided how it’s going to deal with its last, terrible Covid wave, as they finally reopen. They will pretend it’s not happening. Which, fittingly, is where we all began, three long years ago
I am sure China have been covering up real death figures from the day dot...well.we know they did in Wuhan, but I am sure this has continued. Even if the Winnie the Pooh himself doesn't order a cover up, local officials can never admit their province is doing worse than others.
I became completely convinced of a cover-up when some back of an envelope calculations showed that China's outcomes were about 20 times better (IIRC) than New Zealand's, despite China achieving less vaccination of the most vulnerable parts of the population using worse vaccines.
If Elon Musk had not gutted Twitter’s legal department he might have had a few lawyers warning him about the implications for a social media platform when it begins to take editorial decisions.
Ludicrously rich businessmen are ten to a trilllion pounds but we have one here who thinks of himself as something more than that. When Musk looks in the mirror he sees a visionary genius with plans for mankind. Ally this pretentious self-image to immaturity, a brittle temperament, and a predilection for political activism on the grimy Maga side of the street, and I think we have a risk here. The Musk story could be going to a bad place. I feel queasy about him.
There is a growing tendency within big business and amongst its leaders to engage in political activism rather than being content to provide shareholder value and make profit within the law. I agree the trend is a negative one, but I find it strange that you're only just registering an objection now when an example has cropped up featuring someone who isn't aligned with your own political views.
I'm struggling to think of a left liberal equivalent to Musk. The world's (then) richest man has bought Twitter and is leaning heavily into right wing, conspiracy tinged, culture war politics.
Gates? Soros? Musk is only an oddity because of his stance, not because of his involvement with activism.
If you think it an oddity that a right wing billionaire businessman is deeply involved in US politics, then you don't have much knowledge of US politics.
I assume that isn't directed at me, because I am the one suggesting that it isn't.
Will moderated automation actually work, though? As blackhats work out how the algorithms work there will be a constant battle between updates to the automation and the blackhats, with the risk of innocent users being blacklisted / shadowbanned etc - and which needs people to actually address.
Allegedly YouTube creators have suffered from this recently, with videos being flagged or demonetised for no apparent reason, and finding it difficult to get the 'decision' reversed. And there are far more Twitter users than YouTube creators.
Content moderation is one of the most difficult things web services like social media and instant messaging have to do. The systems side of their operations are an easier but still difficult task. The rules that need to be applied can be extremely complicated, vary by situation and place, have all sorts of context related issues, and exceptions galore. It's not an easy problem, and if you get it wrong you can end up in real bit trouble. For example Meta is currently being sued in Kenya for Facebook fuelling violence in Ethiopia.
Context is hard enough that I don’t see an answer that doesn’t involve real people. For example, me saying I want to shoot someone in the head is, on the face of it, unacceptable. But online we might be part of a group discussing an online computer game.
China’s government has decided how it’s going to deal with its last, terrible Covid wave, as they finally reopen. They will pretend it’s not happening. Which, fittingly, is where we all began, three long years ago
I am sure China have been covering up real death figures from the day dot...well.we know they did in Wuhan, but I am sure this has continued. Even if the Winnie the Pooh himself doesn't order a cover up, local officials can never admit their province is doing worse than others.
This will test their skills
It is estimated ~1m extra Chinese deaths will be recorded in the next 3 months. We can also expect chaos at overwhelmed hospitals. That’s REALLY hard to hide
Also, I believe the number of ICU beds / capita in China is very low. Yes they shown they can impressively knock up those temporary building in a few days, but they aren't ICU facilities.
Look at this. The latest BA7 strain of Omicron in China has R0 = R16
Phenomenally infectious. Everyone in China is going to get this in the coming weeks. Already seems to be happening in Beijing and Shanghai according to multiple tweets
The IFR of the new strain is optimistically put at 0.1%. Let’s hope and say that’s true
If 70% of Chinese get sick and 0.1% die the numbers say 980,000 - a million - will die. And 3-5 million will get REALLY ill and rush to hospital. Between now and feb
支撐
That isn’t news really - Omicron’s staggeringly high R number was one reason that Western governments gave up on lockdowns. The other, of course, being the vaccines.
At that level of infectiousness, no lockdown will stop COVID. Which is why Xi’s policies were seen as stupid, months back.
I believe these are new evolutions of the virus. R16 is extreme
On this list it would make BA7 the most infectious disease in history (alongside the worst kinds of measles)
No, we’ve been through the worst. Something like 95% of Brits have had Covid. We’ve got good take up of good vaccines. Our immunity is high
For us Covid is now normality. So we have to cope with an extra flu (which is serious - it kills people - but not so bad we stop living). For China this is all horribly new. They’ve never had a serious nationwide demic. Their immunity is low. Their vax is iffy
A grim few weeks ahead in China
“Only two people working at The Economist Group’s Beijing office today, including myself. Feels like half of Beijing got Covid in just five days. A city of 23 million people.”
For months now my mum's home has insisted on masks, as per gov guidelines (even though they were not laws), and the home had a pile of masks at the door for those visitors that forgot to bring one.
So I would duly don a mask when walking through the home to mum's room.
During that walk you would see that residents were not wearing masks (the guidelines didn't specify this). The carers were generally wearing masks but not always and those that were wearing one tended to cover their mouth but not nose. Occasionally a staff member would take a photo for posting on the home's Facebook page and then they made sure that all visitors and carers had a mask worn properly for the photo!
In short, the whole thing was a farce.
As soon as I got to mum's room I took it off, of course, and would only put it back on when prompted by a passing carer, and then took it off again. The government should have changed these guidelines months ago. I won't go on about how all this has affected my mum because I've done this before but I'm still simmering with rage over this.
I visited a geriatric ward in a hospital recently (several times) - it was exactly as you describe. Absolutely farcical, and bloody pointless.
Don't see why that's especially pointless (my late uncle's care home had the same). There will be an existing level of illness within the ward/home, and management has decided to accept that without masks but try to avoid bringing in new infections. Wearing a mask 24/7 is a lot more challenging than wearing one for a 30-minute visit.
There's clearly a trade-off with somewhat reduced risk vs somewhat reduced pleasure for the resident seeing the visitor (on one occasion my uncle didn't recognise me, though he was quite far gone by then). I can see both sides of that, but the visitor's feelings at putting up with it for a short visit seem relatively unimportant.
The question is - what good do the masks do. Being mostly paper. And tissue paper at that.
The strange belief that N95 (or similar) require some special fitting or something seems odd to me. You put them on, just like the paper masks.
And unlike the paper masks, the N95s are scientifically designed and tested to stop particles the size of the virus.
Actually you do need special fitting for all masks if they are going to work fully in an environment where you are going to be exposed significant levels of COVID. Its actually a problem the NHS workers have faced, that "proper" masks only come in a limited set of sizing / shapes and they don't actually fit all people's faces.
Hospital workers have to go for a "fitting" to assess which of them works for them. In some cases they haven't been able to provide one as they don't have a skew that forms the required seal.
Yes - but this idea has spread so that people believe that N95 disposables are somehow expert only, while paper masks just fit.
If anything, the paper masks seem more prone to yawning gaps.
N95s are used on building site and industrial situations all the time. The way it works is - “we have a couple of brands. Try one. Put it on, breathe in. If it sucks onto your face, we are good to go.”
I am a fan of non-disposable, fitted masks for health workers. The next plague might be really airborne. The arrays of masks and eye shields etc they currently use are awkward and full of gaps. Modern tech means that sterilising reusable stuff is much easier. The reusable systems can be lighter and more comfortable. And not require a mountain of disposable PPE to buy.
Have we done the latest Savanta poll? I remember MoonRabbit writing at length about the significance of the lead being down to 11% last time. Just random fluctuation in both cases, probably.
Recent Tweet from Britain Elects Westminster voting intention:
I think we have. It's at the lower end of recent LLG scores at 56% but one up from the previous. Some other pollsters have LLG at over 60%. Mid 50s is closer to what we were seeing in the latter days of Boris, before the Truss disaster.
One of the misconceptions of the truss event was the idea the high labour share came from bigger Tory collapse than actually happened. LLG only moved up about 6, Labour were just taking more of it. Hence our focus should be on party shares, not gap between top two.
If Elon Musk had not gutted Twitter’s legal department he might have had a few lawyers warning him about the implications for a social media platform when it begins to take editorial decisions.
Ludicrously rich businessmen are ten to a trilllion pounds but we have one here who thinks of himself as something more than that. When Musk looks in the mirror he sees a visionary genius with plans for mankind. Ally this pretentious self-image to immaturity, a brittle temperament, and a predilection for political activism on the grimy Maga side of the street, and I think we have a risk here. The Musk story could be going to a bad place. I feel queasy about him.
There is a growing tendency within big business and amongst its leaders to engage in political activism rather than being content to provide shareholder value and make profit within the law. I agree the trend is a negative one, but I find it strange that you're only just registering an objection now when an example has cropped up featuring someone who isn't aligned with your own political views.
I'm struggling to think of a left liberal equivalent to Musk. The world's (then) richest man has bought Twitter and is leaning heavily into right wing, conspiracy tinged, culture war politics.
Gates? Soros? Musk is only an oddity because of his stance, not because of his involvement with activism.
Gates and Soros are centrists not left wing. I suppose you don't really get left wing billionaires.
I'm not sure that they can be placed easily on a standard right/left spectrum. Some of Soros' sponsored judges seem very left wing, but again, not in a way that Kier Hardy or Clement Atlee would have reocgnised.
China’s government has decided how it’s going to deal with its last, terrible Covid wave, as they finally reopen. They will pretend it’s not happening. Which, fittingly, is where we all began, three long years ago
I am sure China have been covering up real death figures from the day dot...well.we know they did in Wuhan, but I am sure this has continued. Even if the Winnie the Pooh himself doesn't order a cover up, local officials can never admit their province is doing worse than others.
This will test their skills
It is estimated ~1m extra Chinese deaths will be recorded in the next 3 months. We can also expect chaos at overwhelmed hospitals. That’s REALLY hard to hide
Also, I believe the number of ICU beds / capita in China is very low. Yes they shown they can impressively knock up those temporary building in a few days, but they aren't ICU facilities.
Look at this. The latest BA7 strain of Omicron in China has R0 = R16
Phenomenally infectious. Everyone in China is going to get this in the coming weeks. Already seems to be happening in Beijing and Shanghai according to multiple tweets
The IFR of the new strain is optimistically put at 0.1%. Let’s hope and say that’s true
If 70% of Chinese get sick and 0.1% die the numbers say 980,000 - a million - will die. And 3-5 million will get REALLY ill and rush to hospital. Between now and feb
支撐
That isn’t news really - Omicron’s staggeringly high R number was one reason that Western governments gave up on lockdowns. The other, of course, being the vaccines.
At that level of infectiousness, no lockdown will stop COVID. Which is why Xi’s policies were seen as stupid, months back.
I believe these are new evolutions of the virus. R16 is extreme
On this list it would make BA7 the most infectious disease in history (alongside the worst kinds of measles)
All the variants are here, I believe. There is a reason that no Western government is using lockdown anymore. Even in New Zealand.
This is because the vaccines have reduced the lethality and damage of the virus AND the infectiousness of Omicron variants exceeds the ability of lockdowns to confine it.
China’s government has decided how it’s going to deal with its last, terrible Covid wave, as they finally reopen. They will pretend it’s not happening. Which, fittingly, is where we all began, three long years ago
I am sure China have been covering up real death figures from the day dot...well.we know they did in Wuhan, but I am sure this has continued. Even if the Winnie the Pooh himself doesn't order a cover up, local officials can never admit their province is doing worse than others.
This will test their skills
It is estimated ~1m extra Chinese deaths will be recorded in the next 3 months. We can also expect chaos at overwhelmed hospitals. That’s REALLY hard to hide
Also, I believe the number of ICU beds / capita in China is very low. Yes they shown they can impressively knock up those temporary building in a few days, but they aren't ICU facilities.
Look at this. The latest BA7 strain of Omicron in China has R0 = R16
Phenomenally infectious. Everyone in China is going to get this in the coming weeks. Already seems to be happening in Beijing and Shanghai according to multiple tweets
The IFR of the new strain is optimistically put at 0.1%. Let’s hope and say that’s true
If 70% of Chinese get sick and 0.1% die the numbers say 980,000 - a million - will die. And 3-5 million will get REALLY ill and rush to hospital. Between now and feb
支撐
That isn’t news really - Omicron’s staggeringly high R number was one reason that Western governments gave up on lockdowns. The other, of course, being the vaccines.
At that level of infectiousness, no lockdown will stop COVID. Which is why Xi’s policies were seen as stupid, months back.
I believe these are new evolutions of the virus. R16 is extreme
On this list it would make BA7 the most infectious disease in history (alongside the worst kinds of measles)
No, we’ve been through the worst. Something like 95% of Brits have had Covid. We’ve got good take up of good vaccines. Our immunity is high
For us Covid is now normality. So we have to cope with an extra flu (which is serious - it kills people - but not so bad we stop living). For China this is all horribly new. They’ve never had a serious nationwide demic. Their immunity is low. Their vax is iffy
A grim few weeks ahead in China
“Only two people working at The Economist Group’s Beijing office today, including myself. Feels like half of Beijing got Covid in just five days. A city of 23 million people.”
A seat that used to be marginal for Labour but now where they pile up the votes, which isn't necessarily helpful under the FPTP system.
Which is one of several reasons that FPTP with piles of safe seats isn't a great system.
The more efficiently distributed Tory vote is a function of their percentage vote. Once that vote drops below a certain point the gearing works the other way and becomes a bloodbath, with the Labour vote being more efficient.
Overall this result is good for Labour, getting a 10% swing in such a low turnout.
And in so safe a seat. That is unusually good, according to Prof Curtis, FWIW.
That's my reading too and not because I want it to be.
I continue to think the Conservatives are in for an absolute shellacking at the next General Election. There's so much anger around and most of it is directed at them.
Any different though than a normal mid term?
Any different though than 87-90?
If you believe the wikiworm for opinion polls in that Parliament, Conservative were ahead until about April '89, and the worst it got for them was about L44C33 around March/April '90. The worst single poll for the Conservatives was L57C29.
So in terms of "bad for the Conservatives", yes this is worse than that. Not as good for Labour, but in 1990 the LibDems were still working out who they were.
Besides- a lot of that was fury about the Poll Tax, which is why it and its only friend in Cabinet had to go. Once Major came in, the polls were closeish right up to polling day. The Conservatives have changed leader twice this year, without getting close in the polls. And there isn't a flick-of-a-switch policy change they can make to stop people being cross with them.
“LibDems were still working out who they were.”
Here we are in 2022, and like to think they are getting somewhere with that.
Obviously I rely on you old codgers for your 97-92 and all that, but I’m going on my Dad telling me this is beginning to look like 92 all over again everyday day now Rishi government has wiped slate clean of everything that has gone before.
Changing leaders and direction and relaunching mid term, without going to membership, is a powerful tool. Starmer’s Labour are now looking so old hat and yesterdays option, and the massively inexperienced option to boot.
I don't get the fixation on here of drawing parallels from past elections. It won't be 1992, it won't be 1997, it won't be 2010. It'll be 2024. Sunak is not Major; Starmer is neither Blair nor Kinnock. The world is different, the political landscape is different.
Sounds glib, but it's true. We won't be seeing a repeat of any election here; that's not how history works.
That post's a keeper 😇
As is "...Rishi government has wiped slate clean of everything that has gone before..."
Count me among the unconvinced. And I was around to vote in 1992.
Are you thinking in binary terms? 100% wiped 0% wiped?
I think if you argued for 0% wiped you couldn’t convince me.
Labour are not laying a glove on Sunak and his government at the moment - otherwise how to you explain the change in the polls?
In contrast Starmer floored Truss with his first PMQ question, are you really not going to do a windfall tax?
Yes, he undoubtedly has a message. I am not saying it's one I agree with.
I am reminded of a US interview by Piers Morgan of Jesse Ventura, sometime US politician and nowadays conspiracy theorist TV presenter. Ventura was so polite, measured and convincing in his answers that he made Morgan lose his cool, and provoked a widespread discussion about the theories he was elucidating.
The next week, the same show featured Piers interviewing Alex Jones - with the opposite outcome - Jones shouty and unpleasant, actively repelling the viewer from being convinced by anything he said. Wittingly or unwittingly, Jones was being used to put people off - undoing the damage caused by Ventura.
Yes, I've found throughout my life that appearing to be the most reasonable person in a discussion gives you an edge with uncommitted listeners. People who shout but actually have the better case are doing themselves no favours, unless their objective is simply to boost the morale of existing sympathisers.
There was a spoof email that I once saw about carrying "reasonableness" to extremes, namely on how to put the case for slaughter of the first-born - "First, we must stress that we are flatly opposed to slaughter of the second-born, which I think we can all agree would be entirely unacceptable..."
Yep, the fluent, calmly spoken advocacy of the evil, the bad and the mediocre - in home or square or workplace - is one of life's biggest menaces.
If it's any consolation - I've never found you that fluent.
For months now my mum's home has insisted on masks, as per gov guidelines (even though they were not laws), and the home had a pile of masks at the door for those visitors that forgot to bring one.
So I would duly don a mask when walking through the home to mum's room.
During that walk you would see that residents were not wearing masks (the guidelines didn't specify this). The carers were generally wearing masks but not always and those that were wearing one tended to cover their mouth but not nose. Occasionally a staff member would take a photo for posting on the home's Facebook page and then they made sure that all visitors and carers had a mask worn properly for the photo!
In short, the whole thing was a farce.
As soon as I got to mum's room I took it off, of course, and would only put it back on when prompted by a passing carer, and then took it off again. The government should have changed these guidelines months ago. I won't go on about how all this has affected my mum because I've done this before but I'm still simmering with rage over this.
I visited a geriatric ward in a hospital recently (several times) - it was exactly as you describe. Absolutely farcical, and bloody pointless.
Don't see why that's especially pointless (my late uncle's care home had the same). There will be an existing level of illness within the ward/home, and management has decided to accept that without masks but try to avoid bringing in new infections. Wearing a mask 24/7 is a lot more challenging than wearing one for a 30-minute visit.
There's clearly a trade-off with somewhat reduced risk vs somewhat reduced pleasure for the resident seeing the visitor (on one occasion my uncle didn't recognise me, though he was quite far gone by then). I can see both sides of that, but the visitor's feelings at putting up with it for a short visit seem relatively unimportant.
The question is - what good do the masks do. Being mostly paper. And tissue paper at that.
The strange belief that N95 (or similar) require some special fitting or something seems odd to me. You put them on, just like the paper masks.
And unlike the paper masks, the N95s are scientifically designed and tested to stop particles the size of the virus.
Actually you do need special fitting for all masks if they are going to work fully in an environment where you are going to be exposed significant levels of COVID. Its actually a problem the NHS workers have faced, that "proper" masks only come in a limited set of sizing / shapes and they don't actually fit all people's faces.
Hospital workers have to go for a "fitting" to assess which of them works for them. In some cases they haven't been able to provide one as they don't have a skew that forms the required seal.
Yes - but this idea has spread so that people believe that N95 disposables are somehow expert only, while paper masks just fit.
If anything, the paper masks seem more prone to yawning gaps.
N95s are used on building site and industrial situations all the time. The way it works is - “we have a couple of brands. Try one. Put it on, breathe in. If it sucks onto your face, we are good to go.”
I am a fan of non-disposable, fitted masks for health workers. The next plague might be really airborne. The arrays of masks and eye shields etc they currently use are awkward and full of gaps. Modern tech means that sterilising reusable stuff is much easier. The reusable systems can be lighter and more comfortable. And not require a mountain of disposable PPE to buy.
Oh I see what you mean. Really, people think N95 / FFP2/3 are "expert" only?
The public reaction to the whole mask situation has always been totally unscientific. Cloth / disposable papers masks pretty pointless, especially the way people spent half the time with them as chin diapers, but people got really angsty if they saw somebody without one.
"Proper" masks people seemed to think were "weird". I sourced an FFP3 respirator at the start of the pandemic and would use it if I had to go to crowded locations (prior to vaccines) and got really weird looks from paper mask wearers. Not only was the protection of such a mask vastly superior to a paper mask, its reusable, so I spent £30 on one and a I think a new set of filters at one point and that was that (other than cleaning it).
It's not just the R0 that matters, it also has a very short serial interval. That's why it spreads like wildfire, because not only does each infection spread to many more people but each step takes only a few days. Omicron's serial interval is less than 3 days, something like measles which also has a high R0 has a serial interval of about 12 days. Omicron is amongst the highest R0 and shortest serial intervals of all viruses.
China’s government has decided how it’s going to deal with its last, terrible Covid wave, as they finally reopen. They will pretend it’s not happening. Which, fittingly, is where we all began, three long years ago
I am sure China have been covering up real death figures from the day dot...well.we know they did in Wuhan, but I am sure this has continued. Even if the Winnie the Pooh himself doesn't order a cover up, local officials can never admit their province is doing worse than others.
This will test their skills
It is estimated ~1m extra Chinese deaths will be recorded in the next 3 months. We can also expect chaos at overwhelmed hospitals. That’s REALLY hard to hide
Also, I believe the number of ICU beds / capita in China is very low. Yes they shown they can impressively knock up those temporary building in a few days, but they aren't ICU facilities.
Look at this. The latest BA7 strain of Omicron in China has R0 = R16
Phenomenally infectious. Everyone in China is going to get this in the coming weeks. Already seems to be happening in Beijing and Shanghai according to multiple tweets
The IFR of the new strain is optimistically put at 0.1%. Let’s hope and say that’s true
If 70% of Chinese get sick and 0.1% die the numbers say 980,000 - a million - will die. And 3-5 million will get REALLY ill and rush to hospital. Between now and feb
支撐
That isn’t news really - Omicron’s staggeringly high R number was one reason that Western governments gave up on lockdowns. The other, of course, being the vaccines.
At that level of infectiousness, no lockdown will stop COVID. Which is why Xi’s policies were seen as stupid, months back.
I believe these are new evolutions of the virus. R16 is extreme
On this list it would make BA7 the most infectious disease in history (alongside the worst kinds of measles)
All the variants are here, I believe. There is a reason that no Western government is using lockdown anymore. Even in New Zealand.
This is because the vaccines have reduced the lethality and damage of the virus AND the infectiousness of Omicron variants exceeds the ability of lockdowns to confine it.
Ah ok. So China needs a big vax push then. Late but better late than never.
China’s government has decided how it’s going to deal with its last, terrible Covid wave, as they finally reopen. They will pretend it’s not happening. Which, fittingly, is where we all began, three long years ago
I am sure China have been covering up real death figures from the day dot...well.we know they did in Wuhan, but I am sure this has continued. Even if the Winnie the Pooh himself doesn't order a cover up, local officials can never admit their province is doing worse than others.
This will test their skills
It is estimated ~1m extra Chinese deaths will be recorded in the next 3 months. We can also expect chaos at overwhelmed hospitals. That’s REALLY hard to hide
Also, I believe the number of ICU beds / capita in China is very low. Yes they shown they can impressively knock up those temporary building in a few days, but they aren't ICU facilities.
Look at this. The latest BA7 strain of Omicron in China has R0 = R16
Phenomenally infectious. Everyone in China is going to get this in the coming weeks. Already seems to be happening in Beijing and Shanghai according to multiple tweets
The IFR of the new strain is optimistically put at 0.1%. Let’s hope and say that’s true
If 70% of Chinese get sick and 0.1% die the numbers say 980,000 - a million - will die. And 3-5 million will get REALLY ill and rush to hospital. Between now and feb
支撐
That isn’t news really - Omicron’s staggeringly high R number was one reason that Western governments gave up on lockdowns. The other, of course, being the vaccines.
At that level of infectiousness, no lockdown will stop COVID. Which is why Xi’s policies were seen as stupid, months back.
I believe these are new evolutions of the virus. R16 is extreme
On this list it would make BA7 the most infectious disease in history (alongside the worst kinds of measles)
All the variants are here, I believe. There is a reason that no Western government is using lockdown anymore. Even in New Zealand.
This is because the vaccines have reduced the lethality and damage of the virus AND the infectiousness of Omicron variants exceeds the ability of lockdowns to confine it.
Ah ok. So China needs a big vax push then. Late but better late than never.
Except they won't use the effective western ones and because of all the anti-western propaganda even if they did, people won't go for them (as seen in Hong Kong).
Context is hard enough that I don’t see an answer that doesn’t involve real people. For example, me saying I want to shoot someone in the head is, on the face of it, unacceptable. But online we might be part of a group discussing an online computer game.
I agree which is why most of Twitter's rivals employ a lot of people to handle content moderation, Musk as per usual thinks he knows better.
Just to reinforce this point the Savanta MRP published earlier this week which had a Labour majority of 314 and the Tories on 69 seats showed Stretford as:
That MRP came in for a heck of a lot of criticism here on PB. I think your post shows that is should be taken seriously. I’m sure that in the privacy of their own forums, Conservative strategists are indeed extremely worried.
Well, I mean, if you think the next general election will be exactly like 650 mid-term by-elections, yes.
Your criticism is valid for normal VI polling, however MRP is not a poll.
(1) It's still based on how people say now how they'll vote, right? (2) The result was entirely consistent with a mid-term by-election.
Consequently we can conclude that this is evidence to support the proposition that "how people say in mid term they'll vote in a general election tomorrow" coincides with "how they would vote in a mid-term by-election tomorrow", which we know doesn't correlate well with "how they will end up voting in a general election in a couple of years time".
I’m a huge advocate of “swingback” theory (which is one reason I’m confident that the SNP will hold SLab at bay), but occasionally, just occasionally, the rule doesn’t hold. I’m slowly coming round to the conclusion that we are about to witness a rare exception for the Tory performance at the next UK GE.
My hunch is that it comes down to the economy - a government in control of events makes sure that there's a decent splash of feel good four years after the last election.
In which case:
1. Maybe the government was in trouble from the minute it had to spend money on Covid and stop afterwards. Right policy, electorally unfortunate timing.
2. The economic prognosis for the next two years matters. Is there a pathway where the average voter, navigating by whether money or month runs out first, will feel good over the next two years?
Context is hard enough that I don’t see an answer that doesn’t involve real people. For example, me saying I want to shoot someone in the head is, on the face of it, unacceptable. But online we might be part of a group discussing an online computer game.
I agree which is why most of Twitter's rivals employ a lot of people to handle content moderation, Musk as per usual thinks he knows better.
Context is used in the training models for current “AI”. Training really consists of “teaching” the “AI” - “this is an example of a bad post in forum Y”. After a few million examples….
What Meta is being sued about is actually more interesting. They were (and are) using algorithms to promote content that might be of interest to a user. What this can end up with is a user being presented with ever more radical and violent ideas, which are, at each step, “just a bit more”.
This creates an automated radicalisation engine, leading the user in a spiral of ever more extreme content.
It is this that is one of the biggest, real concerns about social media.
Yes, he undoubtedly has a message. I am not saying it's one I agree with.
I am reminded of a US interview by Piers Morgan of Jesse Ventura, sometime US politician and nowadays conspiracy theorist TV presenter. Ventura was so polite, measured and convincing in his answers that he made Morgan lose his cool, and provoked a widespread discussion about the theories he was elucidating.
The next week, the same show featured Piers interviewing Alex Jones - with the opposite outcome - Jones shouty and unpleasant, actively repelling the viewer from being convinced by anything he said. Wittingly or unwittingly, Jones was being used to put people off - undoing the damage caused by Ventura.
Yes, I've found throughout my life that appearing to be the most reasonable person in a discussion gives you an edge with uncommitted listeners. People who shout but actually have the better case are doing themselves no favours, unless their objective is simply to boost the morale of existing sympathisers.
There was a spoof email that I once saw about carrying "reasonableness" to extremes, namely on how to put the case for slaughter of the first-born - "First, we must stress that we are flatly opposed to slaughter of the second-born, which I think we can all agree would be entirely unacceptable..."
Yep, the fluent, calmly spoken advocacy of the evil, the bad and the mediocre - in home or square or workplace - is one of life's biggest menaces.
If it's any consolation - I've never found you that fluent.
Good spot. No, I'm not fluent. Quite the opposite. My ideas are better than my ability to express them*. Many on here are the opposite. Can be frustrating for me at times.
* Like Alex Jones! - according to you and only you.
Have we done the latest Savanta poll? I remember MoonRabbit writing at length about the significance of the lead being down to 11% last time. Just random fluctuation in both cases, probably.
Recent Tweet from Britain Elects Westminster voting intention:
We await a multitude of interminable posts overanalysing the reasons behind the Tories’ incredible popularity were the Labour and Conservative figures transposed.
You do concede though, the Tories were brutal and sharp not just to depose a PM after just over a month, after deposing the most successful Tory since Thatcher 3 years after a stonking landslide, and this has resulted in Sunak and his government bringing more and more “don’t know” Tories back all the time? They weren’t just tough on Truss but dismantled her lock stock and barrel, hence they are popular. These things are facts arn’t they?
What’s not yet fact, but arguable between us, Labour finding it much harder to lay punches on Sunak, the voting public seem to like him, at the moment? And that if this continues, suddenly it’s a completely different ball game and change of government not at all certain come election time?
China’s government has decided how it’s going to deal with its last, terrible Covid wave, as they finally reopen. They will pretend it’s not happening. Which, fittingly, is where we all began, three long years ago
I am sure China have been covering up real death figures from the day dot...well.we know they did in Wuhan, but I am sure this has continued. Even if the Winnie the Pooh himself doesn't order a cover up, local officials can never admit their province is doing worse than others.
This will test their skills
It is estimated ~1m extra Chinese deaths will be recorded in the next 3 months. We can also expect chaos at overwhelmed hospitals. That’s REALLY hard to hide
Also, I believe the number of ICU beds / capita in China is very low. Yes they shown they can impressively knock up those temporary building in a few days, but they aren't ICU facilities.
Look at this. The latest BA7 strain of Omicron in China has R0 = R16
Phenomenally infectious. Everyone in China is going to get this in the coming weeks. Already seems to be happening in Beijing and Shanghai according to multiple tweets
The IFR of the new strain is optimistically put at 0.1%. Let’s hope and say that’s true
If 70% of Chinese get sick and 0.1% die the numbers say 980,000 - a million - will die. And 3-5 million will get REALLY ill and rush to hospital. Between now and feb
支撐
That isn’t news really - Omicron’s staggeringly high R number was one reason that Western governments gave up on lockdowns. The other, of course, being the vaccines.
At that level of infectiousness, no lockdown will stop COVID. Which is why Xi’s policies were seen as stupid, months back.
I believe these are new evolutions of the virus. R16 is extreme
On this list it would make BA7 the most infectious disease in history (alongside the worst kinds of measles)
No, we’ve been through the worst. Something like 95% of Brits have had Covid. We’ve got good take up of good vaccines. Our immunity is high
For us Covid is now normality. So we have to cope with an extra flu (which is serious - it kills people - but not so bad we stop living). For China this is all horribly new. They’ve never had a serious nationwide demic. Their immunity is low. Their vax is iffy
A grim few weeks ahead in China
“Only two people working at The Economist Group’s Beijing office today, including myself. Feels like half of Beijing got Covid in just five days. A city of 23 million people.”
Yes. I'm not scared. Bring it on. But this strain in China - is it different to the those we have circulating here?
AIUI not dramatically (but can we be sure? So much inside China is opaque)
Certainly they seem to have, of late, encountered a lineage so infectious and kinetic - yet with apparently low lethality - they've surrended Zero Covid almost overnight (plus the protests, of course). It is a terrible risk but they had no choices left
China’s government has decided how it’s going to deal with its last, terrible Covid wave, as they finally reopen. They will pretend it’s not happening. Which, fittingly, is where we all began, three long years ago
I am sure China have been covering up real death figures from the day dot...well.we know they did in Wuhan, but I am sure this has continued. Even if the Winnie the Pooh himself doesn't order a cover up, local officials can never admit their province is doing worse than others.
This will test their skills
It is estimated ~1m extra Chinese deaths will be recorded in the next 3 months. We can also expect chaos at overwhelmed hospitals. That’s REALLY hard to hide
Also, I believe the number of ICU beds / capita in China is very low. Yes they shown they can impressively knock up those temporary building in a few days, but they aren't ICU facilities.
Look at this. The latest BA7 strain of Omicron in China has R0 = R16
Phenomenally infectious. Everyone in China is going to get this in the coming weeks. Already seems to be happening in Beijing and Shanghai according to multiple tweets
The IFR of the new strain is optimistically put at 0.1%. Let’s hope and say that’s true
If 70% of Chinese get sick and 0.1% die the numbers say 980,000 - a million - will die. And 3-5 million will get REALLY ill and rush to hospital. Between now and feb
支撐
That isn’t news really - Omicron’s staggeringly high R number was one reason that Western governments gave up on lockdowns. The other, of course, being the vaccines.
At that level of infectiousness, no lockdown will stop COVID. Which is why Xi’s policies were seen as stupid, months back.
I believe these are new evolutions of the virus. R16 is extreme
On this list it would make BA7 the most infectious disease in history (alongside the worst kinds of measles)
All the variants are here, I believe. There is a reason that no Western government is using lockdown anymore. Even in New Zealand.
This is because the vaccines have reduced the lethality and damage of the virus AND the infectiousness of Omicron variants exceeds the ability of lockdowns to confine it.
Ah ok. So China needs a big vax push then. Late but better late than never.
Except they won't use the effective western ones and because of all the anti-western propaganda even if they did, people won't go for them (as seen in Hong Kong).
It really is a shame. You'd have thought they'd be good at enforcing v high levels of vaccination - theirs being far better than nothing - but no.
For months now my mum's home has insisted on masks, as per gov guidelines (even though they were not laws), and the home had a pile of masks at the door for those visitors that forgot to bring one.
So I would duly don a mask when walking through the home to mum's room.
During that walk you would see that residents were not wearing masks (the guidelines didn't specify this). The carers were generally wearing masks but not always and those that were wearing one tended to cover their mouth but not nose. Occasionally a staff member would take a photo for posting on the home's Facebook page and then they made sure that all visitors and carers had a mask worn properly for the photo!
In short, the whole thing was a farce.
As soon as I got to mum's room I took it off, of course, and would only put it back on when prompted by a passing carer, and then took it off again. The government should have changed these guidelines months ago. I won't go on about how all this has affected my mum because I've done this before but I'm still simmering with rage over this.
I visited a geriatric ward in a hospital recently (several times) - it was exactly as you describe. Absolutely farcical, and bloody pointless.
Don't see why that's especially pointless (my late uncle's care home had the same). There will be an existing level of illness within the ward/home, and management has decided to accept that without masks but try to avoid bringing in new infections. Wearing a mask 24/7 is a lot more challenging than wearing one for a 30-minute visit.
There's clearly a trade-off with somewhat reduced risk vs somewhat reduced pleasure for the resident seeing the visitor (on one occasion my uncle didn't recognise me, though he was quite far gone by then). I can see both sides of that, but the visitor's feelings at putting up with it for a short visit seem relatively unimportant.
The question is - what good do the masks do. Being mostly paper. And tissue paper at that.
The strange belief that N95 (or similar) require some special fitting or something seems odd to me. You put them on, just like the paper masks.
And unlike the paper masks, the N95s are scientifically designed and tested to stop particles the size of the virus.
Actually you do need special fitting for all masks if they are going to work fully in an environment where you are going to be exposed significant levels of COVID. Its actually a problem the NHS workers have faced, that "proper" masks only come in a limited set of sizing / shapes and they don't actually fit all people's faces.
Hospital workers have to go for a "fitting" to assess which of them works for them. In some cases they haven't been able to provide one as they don't have a skew that forms the required seal.
Yes - but this idea has spread so that people believe that N95 disposables are somehow expert only, while paper masks just fit.
If anything, the paper masks seem more prone to yawning gaps.
N95s are used on building site and industrial situations all the time. The way it works is - “we have a couple of brands. Try one. Put it on, breathe in. If it sucks onto your face, we are good to go.”
I am a fan of non-disposable, fitted masks for health workers. The next plague might be really airborne. The arrays of masks and eye shields etc they currently use are awkward and full of gaps. Modern tech means that sterilising reusable stuff is much easier. The reusable systems can be lighter and more comfortable. And not require a mountain of disposable PPE to buy.
Oh I see what you mean. Really, people think N95 / FFP2/3 are "expert" only?
The public reaction to the whole mask situation has always been totally unscientific. Cloth / disposable papers masks pretty pointless, especially the way people spent half the time with them as chin diapers, but people got really angsty if they saw somebody without one.
"Proper" masks people seemed to think were "weird". I sourced an FFP3 respirator at the start of the pandemic and would use it if I had to go to crowded locations (prior to vaccines) and got really weird looks from paper mask wearers. Not only was the protection of such a mask vastly superior to a paper mask, its reusable, so I spent £30 on one and a I think a new set of filters at one point and that was that (other than cleaning it).
Ask some of the the cloth mask wearers why not a mask designed to block viruses. The answers will probably amuse….
One of the systems I came across for welding offers the following - the main face mask/respirator bit clips to the flexible piece that seals to your face. The main structures and systems are universal, the flexible bit is custom to face types, and can even be 3D printed to your face profile.
Which means that you’d just need to make/buy a custom piece (probably a few spares) per member of the medical team, then they would fit that to their respirator for their shift.
It's not just the R0 that matters, it also has a very short serial interval. That's why it spreads like wildfire, because not only does each infection spread to many more people but each step takes only a few days. Omicron's serial interval is less than 3 days, something like measles which also has a high R0 has a serial interval of about 12 days. Omicron is amongst the highest R0 and shortest serial intervals of all viruses.
China’s government has decided how it’s going to deal with its last, terrible Covid wave, as they finally reopen. They will pretend it’s not happening. Which, fittingly, is where we all began, three long years ago
I am sure China have been covering up real death figures from the day dot...well.we know they did in Wuhan, but I am sure this has continued. Even if the Winnie the Pooh himself doesn't order a cover up, local officials can never admit their province is doing worse than others.
This will test their skills
It is estimated ~1m extra Chinese deaths will be recorded in the next 3 months. We can also expect chaos at overwhelmed hospitals. That’s REALLY hard to hide
Also, I believe the number of ICU beds / capita in China is very low. Yes they shown they can impressively knock up those temporary building in a few days, but they aren't ICU facilities.
Look at this. The latest BA7 strain of Omicron in China has R0 = R16
Phenomenally infectious. Everyone in China is going to get this in the coming weeks. Already seems to be happening in Beijing and Shanghai according to multiple tweets
The IFR of the new strain is optimistically put at 0.1%. Let’s hope and say that’s true
If 70% of Chinese get sick and 0.1% die the numbers say 980,000 - a million - will die. And 3-5 million will get REALLY ill and rush to hospital. Between now and feb
支撐
That isn’t news really - Omicron’s staggeringly high R number was one reason that Western governments gave up on lockdowns. The other, of course, being the vaccines.
At that level of infectiousness, no lockdown will stop COVID. Which is why Xi’s policies were seen as stupid, months back.
I believe these are new evolutions of the virus. R16 is extreme
On this list it would make BA7 the most infectious disease in history (alongside the worst kinds of measles)
All the variants are here, I believe. There is a reason that no Western government is using lockdown anymore. Even in New Zealand.
This is because the vaccines have reduced the lethality and damage of the virus AND the infectiousness of Omicron variants exceeds the ability of lockdowns to confine it.
Ah ok. So China needs a big vax push then. Late but better late than never.
Except they won't use the effective western ones and because of all the anti-western propaganda even if they did, people won't go for them (as seen in Hong Kong).
It really is a shame. You'd have thought they'd be good at enforcing v high levels of vaccination - theirs being far better than nothing - but no.
It is peculiar. I've still not read a single good explanation why a regime which will harvest organs and imprison all its Muslims and happily spread Covid around the world - because fuck the farangs - will not pin down a few pensioners and jab them
One reason given is that in Chinese culture "the body is sacred". What a crock of crap. These people were into footbinding. And slavery. They are also happy to pin down people and beat them unconscious for not wearing a mask. And they brutally shackle people so they can be invasively and involuntarily tested for Covid
Yet they won't stick a compulsory needle in the Old. Very very strange
China’s government has decided how it’s going to deal with its last, terrible Covid wave, as they finally reopen. They will pretend it’s not happening. Which, fittingly, is where we all began, three long years ago
I am sure China have been covering up real death figures from the day dot...well.we know they did in Wuhan, but I am sure this has continued. Even if the Winnie the Pooh himself doesn't order a cover up, local officials can never admit their province is doing worse than others.
This will test their skills
It is estimated ~1m extra Chinese deaths will be recorded in the next 3 months. We can also expect chaos at overwhelmed hospitals. That’s REALLY hard to hide
Also, I believe the number of ICU beds / capita in China is very low. Yes they shown they can impressively knock up those temporary building in a few days, but they aren't ICU facilities.
Look at this. The latest BA7 strain of Omicron in China has R0 = R16
Phenomenally infectious. Everyone in China is going to get this in the coming weeks. Already seems to be happening in Beijing and Shanghai according to multiple tweets
The IFR of the new strain is optimistically put at 0.1%. Let’s hope and say that’s true
If 70% of Chinese get sick and 0.1% die the numbers say 980,000 - a million - will die. And 3-5 million will get REALLY ill and rush to hospital. Between now and feb
支撐
That isn’t news really - Omicron’s staggeringly high R number was one reason that Western governments gave up on lockdowns. The other, of course, being the vaccines.
At that level of infectiousness, no lockdown will stop COVID. Which is why Xi’s policies were seen as stupid, months back.
I believe these are new evolutions of the virus. R16 is extreme
On this list it would make BA7 the most infectious disease in history (alongside the worst kinds of measles)
All the variants are here, I believe. There is a reason that no Western government is using lockdown anymore. Even in New Zealand.
This is because the vaccines have reduced the lethality and damage of the virus AND the infectiousness of Omicron variants exceeds the ability of lockdowns to confine it.
Ah ok. So China needs a big vax push then. Late but better late than never.
Rather too late for a lot of its elderly population - who tend to have been the most reluctant to get vaccinated.
The one thing the policy debacle does show is that they didn't plan for the pandemic.
China’s government has decided how it’s going to deal with its last, terrible Covid wave, as they finally reopen. They will pretend it’s not happening. Which, fittingly, is where we all began, three long years ago
I am sure China have been covering up real death figures from the day dot...well.we know they did in Wuhan, but I am sure this has continued. Even if the Winnie the Pooh himself doesn't order a cover up, local officials can never admit their province is doing worse than others.
This will test their skills
It is estimated ~1m extra Chinese deaths will be recorded in the next 3 months. We can also expect chaos at overwhelmed hospitals. That’s REALLY hard to hide
Also, I believe the number of ICU beds / capita in China is very low. Yes they shown they can impressively knock up those temporary building in a few days, but they aren't ICU facilities.
Look at this. The latest BA7 strain of Omicron in China has R0 = R16
Phenomenally infectious. Everyone in China is going to get this in the coming weeks. Already seems to be happening in Beijing and Shanghai according to multiple tweets
The IFR of the new strain is optimistically put at 0.1%. Let’s hope and say that’s true
If 70% of Chinese get sick and 0.1% die the numbers say 980,000 - a million - will die. And 3-5 million will get REALLY ill and rush to hospital. Between now and feb
支撐
That isn’t news really - Omicron’s staggeringly high R number was one reason that Western governments gave up on lockdowns. The other, of course, being the vaccines.
At that level of infectiousness, no lockdown will stop COVID. Which is why Xi’s policies were seen as stupid, months back.
I believe these are new evolutions of the virus. R16 is extreme
On this list it would make BA7 the most infectious disease in history (alongside the worst kinds of measles)
All the variants are here, I believe. There is a reason that no Western government is using lockdown anymore. Even in New Zealand.
This is because the vaccines have reduced the lethality and damage of the virus AND the infectiousness of Omicron variants exceeds the ability of lockdowns to confine it.
Ah ok. So China needs a big vax push then. Late but better late than never.
Except they won't use the effective western ones and because of all the anti-western propaganda even if they did, people won't go for them (as seen in Hong Kong).
It really is a shame. You'd have thought they'd be good at enforcing v high levels of vaccination - theirs being far better than nothing - but no.
Part of it is racism. There was a persistent meme on Chinese social media that Western vaccine were no good for Chinese. Because they are literally a different, better species!
Then you add in distrust of the government - would you trust the Chinese government with stuff to be injected?
Further, the vaccine campaigns there were strangely half hearted affairs. The Party line seemed to be that the Awesome Chinese Lockdowns are The Answer.
China’s government has decided how it’s going to deal with its last, terrible Covid wave, as they finally reopen. They will pretend it’s not happening. Which, fittingly, is where we all began, three long years ago
I am sure China have been covering up real death figures from the day dot...well.we know they did in Wuhan, but I am sure this has continued. Even if the Winnie the Pooh himself doesn't order a cover up, local officials can never admit their province is doing worse than others.
This will test their skills
It is estimated ~1m extra Chinese deaths will be recorded in the next 3 months. We can also expect chaos at overwhelmed hospitals. That’s REALLY hard to hide
Also, I believe the number of ICU beds / capita in China is very low. Yes they shown they can impressively knock up those temporary building in a few days, but they aren't ICU facilities.
Look at this. The latest BA7 strain of Omicron in China has R0 = R16
Phenomenally infectious. Everyone in China is going to get this in the coming weeks. Already seems to be happening in Beijing and Shanghai according to multiple tweets
The IFR of the new strain is optimistically put at 0.1%. Let’s hope and say that’s true
If 70% of Chinese get sick and 0.1% die the numbers say 980,000 - a million - will die. And 3-5 million will get REALLY ill and rush to hospital. Between now and feb
支撐
That isn’t news really - Omicron’s staggeringly high R number was one reason that Western governments gave up on lockdowns. The other, of course, being the vaccines.
At that level of infectiousness, no lockdown will stop COVID. Which is why Xi’s policies were seen as stupid, months back.
I believe these are new evolutions of the virus. R16 is extreme
On this list it would make BA7 the most infectious disease in history (alongside the worst kinds of measles)
All the variants are here, I believe. There is a reason that no Western government is using lockdown anymore. Even in New Zealand.
This is because the vaccines have reduced the lethality and damage of the virus AND the infectiousness of Omicron variants exceeds the ability of lockdowns to confine it.
Ah ok. So China needs a big vax push then. Late but better late than never.
Except they won't use the effective western ones and because of all the anti-western propaganda even if they did, people won't go for them (as seen in Hong Kong).
It really is a shame. You'd have thought they'd be good at enforcing v high levels of vaccination - theirs being far better than nothing - but no.
It is peculiar. I've still not read a single good explanation why a regime which will harvest organs and imprison all its Muslims and happily spread Covid around the world - because fuck the farangs - will not pin down a few pensioners and jab them
One reason given is that in Chinese culture "the body is sacred". What a crock of crap. These people were into footbinding. And slavery. They are also happy to pin down people and beat them unconscious for not wearing a mask. And they brutally shackle people so they can be invasively and involuntarily tested for Covid
Yet they won't stick a compulsory needle in the Old. Very very strange
Reverence for the elderly? I've wandered around the old quarter of HK a few times and it has a very trad 'no modern medicine' feel to it.
It's not just the R0 that matters, it also has a very short serial interval. That's why it spreads like wildfire, because not only does each infection spread to many more people but each step takes only a few days. Omicron's serial interval is less than 3 days, something like measles which also has a high R0 has a serial interval of about 12 days. Omicron is amongst the highest R0 and shortest serial intervals of all viruses.
Whoever designed that genome deserves a pay rise.
Yes, if I weren't so clever and mentally immune to "racist conspiracy theories" I'd start to speculate that this novel bat coronavirus which emerged in central Wuhan in China in 2019 and which shows signs of laboratory engineering and is apparently "designed" to be super infectious for humans maybe somehow - God knows how! - came from the central Wuhan laboratory in China that was actually taking novel bat coronaviruses in 2019 and engineering them in the laboratory to super be infectious for humans - but thank God I don't believe in any of that nonsense. Ridiculous
It's not just the R0 that matters, it also has a very short serial interval. That's why it spreads like wildfire, because not only does each infection spread to many more people but each step takes only a few days. Omicron's serial interval is less than 3 days, something like measles which also has a high R0 has a serial interval of about 12 days. Omicron is amongst the highest R0 and shortest serial intervals of all viruses.
Whoever designed that genome deserves a pay rise.
Yes, if I weren't so clever and mentally immune to "racist conspiracy theories" I'd start to speculate that this novel bat coronavirus which emerged in central Wuhan in China in 2019 and which shows signs of laboratory engineering and is apparently "designed" to be super infectious for humans maybe somehow - God knows how! - came from the central Wuhan laboratory in China that was actually taking novel bat coronaviruses in 2019 and engineering them in the laboratory to super be infectious for humans - but thank God I don't believe in any of that nonsense. Ridiculous
As someone once said… “I believe in coincidences. Coincidences happen every day. But I don't trust coincidences.”
China’s government has decided how it’s going to deal with its last, terrible Covid wave, as they finally reopen. They will pretend it’s not happening. Which, fittingly, is where we all began, three long years ago
I am sure China have been covering up real death figures from the day dot...well.we know they did in Wuhan, but I am sure this has continued. Even if the Winnie the Pooh himself doesn't order a cover up, local officials can never admit their province is doing worse than others.
This will test their skills
It is estimated ~1m extra Chinese deaths will be recorded in the next 3 months. We can also expect chaos at overwhelmed hospitals. That’s REALLY hard to hide
Also, I believe the number of ICU beds / capita in China is very low. Yes they shown they can impressively knock up those temporary building in a few days, but they aren't ICU facilities.
Look at this. The latest BA7 strain of Omicron in China has R0 = R16
Phenomenally infectious. Everyone in China is going to get this in the coming weeks. Already seems to be happening in Beijing and Shanghai according to multiple tweets
The IFR of the new strain is optimistically put at 0.1%. Let’s hope and say that’s true
If 70% of Chinese get sick and 0.1% die the numbers say 980,000 - a million - will die. And 3-5 million will get REALLY ill and rush to hospital. Between now and feb
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That isn’t news really - Omicron’s staggeringly high R number was one reason that Western governments gave up on lockdowns. The other, of course, being the vaccines.
At that level of infectiousness, no lockdown will stop COVID. Which is why Xi’s policies were seen as stupid, months back.
I believe these are new evolutions of the virus. R16 is extreme
On this list it would make BA7 the most infectious disease in history (alongside the worst kinds of measles)
All the variants are here, I believe. There is a reason that no Western government is using lockdown anymore. Even in New Zealand.
This is because the vaccines have reduced the lethality and damage of the virus AND the infectiousness of Omicron variants exceeds the ability of lockdowns to confine it.
Ah ok. So China needs a big vax push then. Late but better late than never.
Except they won't use the effective western ones and because of all the anti-western propaganda even if they did, people won't go for them (as seen in Hong Kong).
It really is a shame. You'd have thought they'd be good at enforcing v high levels of vaccination - theirs being far better than nothing - but no.
It is peculiar. I've still not read a single good explanation why a regime which will harvest organs and imprison all its Muslims and happily spread Covid around the world - because fuck the farangs - will not pin down a few pensioners and jab them
One reason given is that in Chinese culture "the body is sacred". What a crock of crap. These people were into footbinding. And slavery. They are also happy to pin down people and beat them unconscious for not wearing a mask. And they brutally shackle people so they can be invasively and involuntarily tested for Covid
Yet they won't stick a compulsory needle in the Old. Very very strange
Reverence for the elderly? I've wandered around the old quarter of HK a few times and it has a very trad 'no modern medicine' feel to it.
They have stapled old people in their apartments and happily carted them off to quarantine camps to die
No, that doesn't work either. There is no good explanation, it is a genuine oddity
It's not just the R0 that matters, it also has a very short serial interval. That's why it spreads like wildfire, because not only does each infection spread to many more people but each step takes only a few days. Omicron's serial interval is less than 3 days, something like measles which also has a high R0 has a serial interval of about 12 days. Omicron is amongst the highest R0 and shortest serial intervals of all viruses.
Whoever designed that genome deserves a pay rise.
Yes, if I weren't so clever and mentally immune to "racist conspiracy theories" I'd start to speculate that this novel bat coronavirus which emerged in central Wuhan in China in 2019 and which shows signs of laboratory engineering and is apparently "designed" to be super infectious for humans maybe somehow - God knows how! - came from the central Wuhan laboratory in China that was actually taking novel bat coronaviruses in 2019 and engineering them in the laboratory to super be infectious for humans - but thank God I don't believe in any of that nonsense. Ridiculous
As someone once said… “I believe in coincidences. Coincidences happen every day. But I don't trust coincidences.”
1,000,000 to 1 chances alway happen 999,999 to 1, on the other hand….
If Elon Musk had not gutted Twitter’s legal department he might have had a few lawyers warning him about the implications for a social media platform when it begins to take editorial decisions.
Ludicrously rich businessmen are ten to a trilllion pounds but we have one here who thinks of himself as something more than that. When Musk looks in the mirror he sees a visionary genius with plans for mankind. Ally this pretentious self-image to immaturity, a brittle temperament, and a predilection for political activism on the grimy Maga side of the street, and I think we have a risk here. The Musk story could be going to a bad place. I feel queasy about him.
There is a growing tendency within big business and amongst its leaders to engage in political activism rather than being content to provide shareholder value and make profit within the law. I agree the trend is a negative one, but I find it strange that you're only just registering an objection now when an example has cropped up featuring someone who isn't aligned with your own political views.
I'm struggling to think of a left liberal equivalent to Musk. The world's (then) richest man has bought Twitter and is leaning heavily into right wing, conspiracy tinged, culture war politics.
Gates? Soros? Musk is only an oddity because of his stance, not because of his involvement with activism.
Gates and Soros don't use their wealth to silence criticism of them.
The previous management of Twitter was quite fond of silencing a lot of people.
Surely the answer is very simple:
You have a set of rules. Those rules are clear. Those rules are applicable to everyone, whether Musk or John Smith. Content that breaks the rules will be deleted. People who repeatedly post content that breaks the rules will be banned.
Now, that is not quite "free speech absolutist" and the set of rules needs to be open for discussion, but that doesn't seem to be an unreasonable place to start.
Where it gets difficult is - of course - edge cases. One person telling another that they are a cock is not harassment. When that person is receiving thousands of messages that they are a cock, such that they can't use the platform, then that is harassment.
Context is hard enough that I don’t see an answer that doesn’t involve real people. For example, me saying I want to shoot someone in the head is, on the face of it, unacceptable. But online we might be part of a group discussing an online computer game.
I agree which is why most of Twitter's rivals employ a lot of people to handle content moderation, Musk as per usual thinks he knows better.
Context is used in the training models for current “AI”. Training really consists of “teaching” the “AI” - “this is an example of a bad post in forum Y”. After a few million examples….
What Meta is being sued about is actually more interesting. They were (and are) using algorithms to promote content that might be of interest to a user. What this can end up with is a user being presented with ever more radical and violent ideas, which are, at each step, “just a bit more”.
This creates an automated radicalisation engine, leading the user in a spiral of ever more extreme content.
It is this that is one of the biggest, real concerns about social media.
A good while back - maybe during early lockdown days - I was on youtube and it's 'Recommended for you' section had a 'Behind the scenes at Newsnight' video. I clicked it thinking 'Oh, that might be interesting'.
After a few minutes I realised it was actually that Tommy Whatsisname right-wing national-front-esque guy just with some conspiracies about the BBC and Newsnight in particular. Closed the video.
But for the next 6-12 months youtube would just scatter out-there 'Here's a nutter talking crazy conspiracy nonsense about vaccines/politics/the great reset/whatever' all over my recommendations.
It's not just the R0 that matters, it also has a very short serial interval. That's why it spreads like wildfire, because not only does each infection spread to many more people but each step takes only a few days. Omicron's serial interval is less than 3 days, something like measles which also has a high R0 has a serial interval of about 12 days. Omicron is amongst the highest R0 and shortest serial intervals of all viruses.
Whoever designed that genome deserves a pay rise.
Yes, if I weren't so clever and mentally immune to "racist conspiracy theories" I'd start to speculate that this novel bat coronavirus which emerged in central Wuhan in China in 2019 and which shows signs of laboratory engineering and is apparently "designed" to be super infectious for humans maybe somehow - God knows how! - came from the central Wuhan laboratory in China that was actually taking novel bat coronaviruses in 2019 and engineering them in the laboratory to super be infectious for humans - but thank God I don't believe in any of that nonsense. Ridiculous
As someone once said… “I believe in coincidences. Coincidences happen every day. But I don't trust coincidences.”
We ALL know it came naturally from a bat via a pangolin, and it happened in a wet market that has never sold bats or pangolins, that's obvious, and we know this because the market had quite a few of the early cases
The fact the wet market is 300 yards from the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, a weak leaky BSL2 biolab - Jeremy Farrar called it Wild West! - which was doing its own coronavirus experiments on its own bats which they kept in rusty cages is irrelevant and only fools take it into account
Bill Gates uses charitable causes to cover up his own personal malfeasance. It's not an unknown way of hiding in plain sight as a dick head or worse. Jimmy Savile did it too.
It's not just the R0 that matters, it also has a very short serial interval. That's why it spreads like wildfire, because not only does each infection spread to many more people but each step takes only a few days. Omicron's serial interval is less than 3 days, something like measles which also has a high R0 has a serial interval of about 12 days. Omicron is amongst the highest R0 and shortest serial intervals of all viruses.
Whoever designed that genome deserves a pay rise.
Yes, if I weren't so clever and mentally immune to "racist conspiracy theories" I'd start to speculate that this novel bat coronavirus which emerged in central Wuhan in China in 2019 and which shows signs of laboratory engineering and is apparently "designed" to be super infectious for humans maybe somehow - God knows how! - came from the central Wuhan laboratory in China that was actually taking novel bat coronaviruses in 2019 and engineering them in the laboratory to super be infectious for humans - but thank God I don't believe in any of that nonsense. Ridiculous
As someone once said… “I believe in coincidences. Coincidences happen every day. But I don't trust coincidences.”
China’s government has decided how it’s going to deal with its last, terrible Covid wave, as they finally reopen. They will pretend it’s not happening. Which, fittingly, is where we all began, three long years ago
I am sure China have been covering up real death figures from the day dot...well.we know they did in Wuhan, but I am sure this has continued. Even if the Winnie the Pooh himself doesn't order a cover up, local officials can never admit their province is doing worse than others.
This will test their skills
It is estimated ~1m extra Chinese deaths will be recorded in the next 3 months. We can also expect chaos at overwhelmed hospitals. That’s REALLY hard to hide
Also, I believe the number of ICU beds / capita in China is very low. Yes they shown they can impressively knock up those temporary building in a few days, but they aren't ICU facilities.
Look at this. The latest BA7 strain of Omicron in China has R0 = R16
Phenomenally infectious. Everyone in China is going to get this in the coming weeks. Already seems to be happening in Beijing and Shanghai according to multiple tweets
The IFR of the new strain is optimistically put at 0.1%. Let’s hope and say that’s true
If 70% of Chinese get sick and 0.1% die the numbers say 980,000 - a million - will die. And 3-5 million will get REALLY ill and rush to hospital. Between now and feb
支撐
That isn’t news really - Omicron’s staggeringly high R number was one reason that Western governments gave up on lockdowns. The other, of course, being the vaccines.
At that level of infectiousness, no lockdown will stop COVID. Which is why Xi’s policies were seen as stupid, months back.
I believe these are new evolutions of the virus. R16 is extreme
On this list it would make BA7 the most infectious disease in history (alongside the worst kinds of measles)
No, we’ve been through the worst. Something like 95% of Brits have had Covid. We’ve got good take up of good vaccines. Our immunity is high
For us Covid is now normality. So we have to cope with an extra flu (which is serious - it kills people - but not so bad we stop living). For China this is all horribly new. They’ve never had a serious nationwide demic. Their immunity is low. Their vax is iffy
A grim few weeks ahead in China
“Only two people working at The Economist Group’s Beijing office today, including myself. Feels like half of Beijing got Covid in just five days. A city of 23 million people.”
I was listening to one of The Economist podcasts through the week and they said much the same. Until recently knowing someone who had Covid was like knowing someone who'd climbed Everest. Just that rare. Now every other person either has it. In the space of just a few weeks.
If Elon Musk had not gutted Twitter’s legal department he might have had a few lawyers warning him about the implications for a social media platform when it begins to take editorial decisions.
Ludicrously rich businessmen are ten to a trilllion pounds but we have one here who thinks of himself as something more than that. When Musk looks in the mirror he sees a visionary genius with plans for mankind. Ally this pretentious self-image to immaturity, a brittle temperament, and a predilection for political activism on the grimy Maga side of the street, and I think we have a risk here. The Musk story could be going to a bad place. I feel queasy about him.
There is a growing tendency within big business and amongst its leaders to engage in political activism rather than being content to provide shareholder value and make profit within the law. I agree the trend is a negative one, but I find it strange that you're only just registering an objection now when an example has cropped up featuring someone who isn't aligned with your own political views.
I'm struggling to think of a left liberal equivalent to Musk. The world's (then) richest man has bought Twitter and is leaning heavily into right wing, conspiracy tinged, culture war politics.
Gates? Soros? Musk is only an oddity because of his stance, not because of his involvement with activism.
Gates and Soros don't use their wealth to silence criticism of them.
The previous management of Twitter was quite fond of silencing a lot of people.
Surely the answer is very simple:
You have a set of rules. Those rules are clear. Those rules are applicable to everyone, whether Musk or John Smith. Content that breaks the rules will be deleted. People who repeatedly post content that breaks the rules will be banned.
Now, that is not quite "free speech absolutist" and the set of rules needs to be open for discussion, but that doesn't seem to be an unreasonable place to start.
Where it gets difficult is - of course - edge cases. One person telling another that they are a cock is not harassment. When that person is receiving thousands of messages that they are a cock, such that they can't use the platform, then that is harassment.
That’s “worryingly” close to what Elon Musk professes to be doing.
It's not just the R0 that matters, it also has a very short serial interval. That's why it spreads like wildfire, because not only does each infection spread to many more people but each step takes only a few days. Omicron's serial interval is less than 3 days, something like measles which also has a high R0 has a serial interval of about 12 days. Omicron is amongst the highest R0 and shortest serial intervals of all viruses.
Whoever designed that genome deserves a pay rise.
Yes, if I weren't so clever and mentally immune to "racist conspiracy theories" I'd start to speculate that this novel bat coronavirus which emerged in central Wuhan in China in 2019 and which shows signs of laboratory engineering and is apparently "designed" to be super infectious for humans maybe somehow - God knows how! - came from the central Wuhan laboratory in China that was actually taking novel bat coronaviruses in 2019 and engineering them in the laboratory to super be infectious for humans - but thank God I don't believe in any of that nonsense. Ridiculous
As someone once said… “I believe in coincidences. Coincidences happen every day. But I don't trust coincidences.”
Bill Gates uses charitable causes to cover up his own personal malfeasance. It's not an unknown way of hiding in plain sight as a dick head or worse. Jimmy Savile did it too.
If anyone is interested in that stuff, Gate’s ex-wife have some interesting reasons for the divorce.
Bill Gates uses charitable causes to cover up his own personal malfeasance. It's not an unknown way of hiding in plain sight as a dick head or worse. Jimmy Savile did it too.
Been doing this for ages. This was 10 years ago and the Seattle Times was wondering if giving all this money to journalists could taint objectivity.
Two years after the story appeared, the Seattle Times accepted substantial funding from the Gates Foundation for an education reporting project and became uninterested in this issue.
Since then the funding of these programmes is huge, $300+ millions in public donations (and nobody knows how much via contracts / dark money).
Obviously Jeff Bezos just cut out the middle man and bought the Washington Post.
Bill Gates uses charitable causes to cover up his own personal malfeasance. It's not an unknown way of hiding in plain sight as a dick head or worse. Jimmy Savile did it too.
If anyone is interested in that stuff, Gate’s ex-wife have some interesting reasons for the divorce.
His friendship with Epstein was chief among the reasons. He's as bad as Prince Andrew but because he gives to the right causes people have decided to ignore it. It's another Jimmy Savile scandal waiting to be blown open.
Two days ago a car carrying Musk’s two year old child from the airstrip was followed by an unknown driver. Musk himself was not present. The driver wore black gloves and balaclava and cut the Musk car off. He then jumped on the bonnet of Musk’s car to look through the windscreen. His intention was presumably not to take a selfie.
I am not surprised in the least that Musk is on a mission to shut down accounts that seek to amplify the movements of his jet in real time, even if he can’t stop the information at source. He had previously offered the kid running the ElonJet account $5k to shut it down, but the kid rebuffed him and asked for a $50k car instead.
Now you have members of the hostile US press piling into this story and amplifying the same data, thinking it a great way to antagonise someone they have a pathological hatred of. Shame on them, when you consider this was sparked by a 2 year old being threatened by a masked assailant.
He is just a fruitcake with far too much power, time he was cut down to size.
Yes, he is a whiny bell-end who paid far too much for a media company and has taken his eye off the ball on his other businesses.
Right wing tycoons buying up media companies in order to push their own agendas is nothing new, but previously more at a national rather than global level.
Twitter can be a great source of news, but best to stay away from Musks psychodrama.
For those of us who are not wholeheartedly supportive of the 'woke' agenda, the breakdown and trauma people are experiencing over Musk and Twitter is quite enjoyable to watch. The reality is that this was an organisation that had vast control over public discourse, but had been entirely captured by a particular political outlook which was increasingly asserting itself by way of 'content moderation'. Elon Musk may be making a bit of an idiot of himself at times; but fundamentally, he is conducting an act of great altruism and public service.
That's one take on it. A more rational one is that every social media site has to engage in content moderation. And Musk is demonstrating that he hasn't the first clue about how to go about it.
Absolutely right. And he can paint the fleeing advertisers as 'pressured by activists' or whatever, but the fact is they see his platform is a brand risk and it's quite easy to invest their money elsewhere.
If Twitter fails, it won't be because the user base collapses, it'll be revenue loss and/or infrastructure breakdown.
Bloomberg reckons Musk has raised around $40bn from seeing Tesla stock in the last year and a bit. He put about $27bn of his own cash into buying Tesla so he likely has sufficient to pay down most of the debt associated with the purchase, if he so chose - or cover the interest costs for a while.
His remaining Tesla stock is worth somewhere around $65bn.
Tax!
Do billionaires pay tax ?
Musk will be paying a lot of tax.
He recently dumped ~$6 billion in to a foundation.
If Elon Musk had not gutted Twitter’s legal department he might have had a few lawyers warning him about the implications for a social media platform when it begins to take editorial decisions.
Ludicrously rich businessmen are ten to a trilllion pounds but we have one here who thinks of himself as something more than that. When Musk looks in the mirror he sees a visionary genius with plans for mankind. Ally this pretentious self-image to immaturity, a brittle temperament, and a predilection for political activism on the grimy Maga side of the street, and I think we have a risk here. The Musk story could be going to a bad place. I feel queasy about him.
There is a growing tendency within big business and amongst its leaders to engage in political activism rather than being content to provide shareholder value and make profit within the law. I agree the trend is a negative one, but I find it strange that you're only just registering an objection now when an example has cropped up featuring someone who isn't aligned with your own political views.
I'm struggling to think of a left liberal equivalent to Musk. The world's (then) richest man has bought Twitter and is leaning heavily into right wing, conspiracy tinged, culture war politics.
Gates? Soros? Musk is only an oddity because of his stance, not because of his involvement with activism.
Gates and Soros don't use their wealth to silence criticism of them.
The previous management of Twitter was quite fond of silencing a lot of people.
Surely the answer is very simple:
You have a set of rules. Those rules are clear. Those rules are applicable to everyone, whether Musk or John Smith. Content that breaks the rules will be deleted. People who repeatedly post content that breaks the rules will be banned.
Now, that is not quite "free speech absolutist" and the set of rules needs to be open for discussion, but that doesn't seem to be an unreasonable place to start.
Where it gets difficult is - of course - edge cases. One person telling another that they are a cock is not harassment. When that person is receiving thousands of messages that they are a cock, such that they can't use the platform, then that is harassment.
That’s “worryingly” close to what Elon Musk professes to be doing.
That's also what previous Twitter management professed to doing.
If Elon Musk had not gutted Twitter’s legal department he might have had a few lawyers warning him about the implications for a social media platform when it begins to take editorial decisions.
Ludicrously rich businessmen are ten to a trilllion pounds but we have one here who thinks of himself as something more than that. When Musk looks in the mirror he sees a visionary genius with plans for mankind. Ally this pretentious self-image to immaturity, a brittle temperament, and a predilection for political activism on the grimy Maga side of the street, and I think we have a risk here. The Musk story could be going to a bad place. I feel queasy about him.
There is a growing tendency within big business and amongst its leaders to engage in political activism rather than being content to provide shareholder value and make profit within the law. I agree the trend is a negative one, but I find it strange that you're only just registering an objection now when an example has cropped up featuring someone who isn't aligned with your own political views.
I'm struggling to think of a left liberal equivalent to Musk. The world's (then) richest man has bought Twitter and is leaning heavily into right wing, conspiracy tinged, culture war politics.
Gates? Soros? Musk is only an oddity because of his stance, not because of his involvement with activism.
Gates and Soros don't use their wealth to silence criticism of them.
The previous management of Twitter was quite fond of silencing a lot of people.
Surely the answer is very simple:
You have a set of rules. Those rules are clear. Those rules are applicable to everyone, whether Musk or John Smith. Content that breaks the rules will be deleted. People who repeatedly post content that breaks the rules will be banned.
Now, that is not quite "free speech absolutist" and the set of rules needs to be open for discussion, but that doesn't seem to be an unreasonable place to start.
Where it gets difficult is - of course - edge cases. One person telling another that they are a cock is not harassment. When that person is receiving thousands of messages that they are a cock, such that they can't use the platform, then that is harassment.
Sadly this response says two things. One, that the rules can be clear and simple. Two, that the actuality is the opposite of clear and simple.
Once you not an absolutist then there are boundaries to test. This is permanently complicated.
The internet thingy is new, and by its nature breaks all the rules of communication. We are nowhere close to an understanding of how to deal with it. We don't even have a clue how to keep 8 year olds from extreme forms of pornography or beheading videos.
This world is one in which domestic law means little or nothing; copyright, trademark, confidentiality, privacy, libel, injunction, child protection are all pushed to one side. It is fascinating and scary.
If I were wargaming a Chinese policy response to the quandary it has found itself in the what they now seem to be doing would be high up on the likelihood list: open up, get it all over with quickly, but maintain tight control of the narrative and falsify the stats to make it look like nobody is dying of it (or just let a few death stats through - the CCP public health equivalent of allowing the opposition in a fixed election get a few percent of the vote).
It seems the population were getting much more cross about being locked down than they would about a few hundred thousand dying, so politically it was probably the right decision.
Bill Gates uses charitable causes to cover up his own personal malfeasance. It's not an unknown way of hiding in plain sight as a dick head or worse. Jimmy Savile did it too.
If anyone is interested in that stuff, Gate’s ex-wife have some interesting reasons for the divorce.
His friendship with Epstein was chief among the reasons. He's as bad as Prince Andrew but because he gives to the right causes people have decided to ignore it. It's another Jimmy Savile scandal waiting to be blown open.
SBF clearly was following the same approach, but its all gone tits up....I imagine quite a lot of politicians are rather nervous about how close they have got to this con man and how much money it took for him to get that close.
Comments
Nuking the Tories from orbit is the only way to be sure.
However, it does strangely seem to have led to some what disinterested view of some of his activities.
Chasing 140 to win, Thunder were bowled out in just 35 balls, with number 10 Brendan Doggett top-scoring with four.
Five players made a duck, including England T20 World Cup winner and opening batter Alex Hales.
The previous lowest score was Turkey's 21 against the Czech Republic in 2019.
Strikers' pace bowler Henry Thornton took 5-3 and Wes Agar 4-6 as they claimed a 124-run victory against the abject Thunder.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricket/63998982
Phenomenally infectious. Everyone in China is going to get this in the coming weeks. Already seems to be happening in Beijing and Shanghai according to multiple tweets
The IFR of the new strain is optimistically put at 0.1%. Let’s hope and say that’s true
If 70% of Chinese get sick and 0.1% die the numbers say 980,000 - a million - will die. And 3-5 million will get REALLY ill and rush to hospital. Between now and feb
支撐
There's clearly a trade-off with somewhat reduced risk vs somewhat reduced pleasure for the resident seeing the visitor (on one occasion my uncle didn't recognise me, though he was quite far gone by then). I can see both sides of that, but the visitor's feelings at putting up with it for a short visit seem relatively unimportant.
At that level of infectiousness, no lockdown will stop COVID. Which is why Xi’s policies were seen as stupid, months back.
The strange belief that N95 (or similar) require some special fitting or something seems odd to me. You put them on, just like the paper masks.
And unlike the paper masks, the N95s are scientifically designed and tested to stop particles the size of the virus.
On this list it would make BA7 the most infectious disease in history (alongside the worst kinds of measles)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number
R16! By contrast Original Covid was R2.9
There was a spoof email that I once saw about carrying "reasonableness" to extremes, namely on how to put the case for slaughter of the first-born - "First, we must stress that we are flatly opposed to slaughter of the second-born, which I think we can all agree would be entirely unacceptable..."
Hospital workers have to go for a "fitting" to assess which of them works for them. In some cases they haven't been able to provide one as they don't have a skew that forms the required seal.
One estimate of BA.5 had an R of 18!
https://www.pharmatimes.com/news/omicron_ba.2_variant_triggers_covid-19_surge_in_england_1389089
https://www.thehartford.com/insights/home-workplace-safety/virus-mutations-covid-19
Two weeks ago I deduced from the Opinium the Tories were on the up, Labour on way down, and polls over the following two weeks actually proved me right Nick. I definitely picked up a trend in its early stages.
Tory share from last one to present one
Redfield +3
Omnisis +5
Delta +4
Savanta +5
Yougov, opinium, Techne all up too.
Though, over the last couple of days polls show a “meh” MOE stalling of this trend.
How did I do it?
Instead of waiting for a poll, assess the media narrative, front pages, government and opposition response, editorials etc, and then guess the poll movement before it is published.
For example, my assessment of what Opinium should be this weekend, if they bother to do one, the Conservative share is up 2% to 31.
Based on the Opinium doing that, my prediction is the current pause in Tory recovery is temporary, the trend is for most pollsters to show single digit gaps in new year.
Look. I’m proved right so far
To show an extreme: If you had perfect immunity and a disease with an R0 of 5 and 80% now had immunity (from vax or virus), it'd slip under an R-eff of 1 about then. If, though, it evolved into perfect immune evasion from previous immunity but only an R0 of 3, it'd out-compete the previous strain by a factor of 3.
Even though R0 is actually lower, it's got that entire pool of previously-immune to feast upon, so it has an R-eff of 3 and the earlier strain has an R-eff of 1.
So a crude estimate would be: the old one had an R0 of 5, this is outcompeting it by a factor of 3, so it's got an R0 of 15 (when it's actually 3).
This is an extreme example, but increasing partial immune evasion will fall between the extremes.
For us Covid is now normality. So we have to cope with an extra flu (which is serious - it kills people - but not so bad we stop living). For China this is all horribly new. They’ve never had a serious nationwide demic. Their immunity is low. Their vax is iffy
A grim few weeks ahead in China
“Only two people working at The Economist Group’s Beijing office today, including myself. Feels like half of Beijing got Covid in just five days. A city of 23 million people.”
https://twitter.com/qianliuchina/status/1602177270260826112?s=46&t=etGvJ3o8E7vA_6xkR4zNrA
If anything, the paper masks seem more prone to yawning gaps.
N95s are used on building site and industrial situations all the time. The way it works is - “we have a couple of brands. Try one. Put it on, breathe in. If it sucks onto your face, we are good to go.”
I am a fan of non-disposable, fitted masks for health workers. The next plague might be really airborne. The arrays of masks and eye shields etc they currently use are awkward and full of gaps. Modern tech means that sterilising reusable stuff is much easier. The reusable systems can be lighter and more comfortable. And not require a mountain of disposable PPE to buy.
This is because the vaccines have reduced the lethality and damage of the virus AND the infectiousness of Omicron variants exceeds the ability of lockdowns to confine it.
I think if you argued for 0% wiped you couldn’t convince me.
Labour are not laying a glove on Sunak and his government at the moment - otherwise how to you explain the change in the polls?
In contrast Starmer floored Truss with his first PMQ question, are you really not going to do a windfall tax?
The public reaction to the whole mask situation has always been totally unscientific. Cloth / disposable papers masks pretty pointless, especially the way people spent half the time with them as chin diapers, but people got really angsty if they saw somebody without one.
"Proper" masks people seemed to think were "weird". I sourced an FFP3 respirator at the start of the pandemic and would use it if I had to go to crowded locations (prior to vaccines) and got really weird looks from paper mask wearers. Not only was the protection of such a mask vastly superior to a paper mask, its reusable, so I spent £30 on one and a I think a new set of filters at one point and that was that (other than cleaning it).
2. Probably not.
What Meta is being sued about is actually more interesting. They were (and are) using algorithms to promote content that might be of interest to a user. What this can end up with is a user being presented with ever more radical and violent ideas, which are, at each step, “just a bit more”.
This creates an automated radicalisation engine, leading the user in a spiral of ever more extreme content.
It is this that is one of the biggest, real concerns about social media.
* Like Alex Jones! - according to you and only you.
What’s not yet fact, but arguable between us, Labour finding it much harder to lay punches on Sunak, the voting public seem to like him, at the moment? And that if this continues, suddenly it’s a completely different ball game and change of government not at all certain come election time?
Certainly they seem to have, of late, encountered a lineage so infectious and kinetic - yet with apparently low lethality - they've surrended Zero Covid almost overnight (plus the protests, of course). It is a terrible risk but they had no choices left
One of the systems I came across for welding offers the following - the main face mask/respirator bit clips to the flexible piece that seals to your face. The main structures and systems are universal, the flexible bit is custom to face types, and can even be 3D printed to your face profile.
Which means that you’d just need to make/buy a custom piece (probably a few spares) per member of the medical team, then they would fit that to their respirator for their shift.
One reason given is that in Chinese culture "the body is sacred". What a crock of crap. These people were into footbinding. And slavery. They are also happy to pin down people and beat them unconscious for not wearing a mask. And they brutally shackle people so they can be invasively and involuntarily tested for Covid
Yet they won't stick a compulsory needle in the Old. Very very strange
The one thing the policy debacle does show is that they didn't plan for the pandemic.
Then you add in distrust of the government - would you trust the Chinese government with stuff to be injected?
Further, the vaccine campaigns there were strangely half hearted affairs. The Party line seemed to be that the Awesome Chinese Lockdowns are The Answer.
No, that doesn't work either. There is no good explanation, it is a genuine oddity
999,999 to 1, on the other hand….
You have a set of rules.
Those rules are clear.
Those rules are applicable to everyone, whether Musk or John Smith.
Content that breaks the rules will be deleted.
People who repeatedly post content that breaks the rules will be banned.
Now, that is not quite "free speech absolutist" and the set of rules needs to be open for discussion, but that doesn't seem to be an unreasonable place to start.
Where it gets difficult is - of course - edge cases. One person telling another that they are a cock is not harassment. When that person is receiving thousands of messages that they are a cock, such that they can't use the platform, then that is harassment.
After a few minutes I realised it was actually that Tommy Whatsisname right-wing national-front-esque guy just with some conspiracies about the BBC and Newsnight in particular. Closed the video.
But for the next 6-12 months youtube would just scatter out-there 'Here's a nutter talking crazy conspiracy nonsense about vaccines/politics/the great reset/whatever' all over my recommendations.
The fact the wet market is 300 yards from the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, a weak leaky BSL2 biolab - Jeremy Farrar called it Wild West! - which was doing its own coronavirus experiments on its own bats which they kept in rusty cages is irrelevant and only fools take it into account
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/does-gates-funding-of-media-taint-objectivity/
Two years after the story appeared, the Seattle Times accepted substantial funding from the Gates Foundation for an education reporting project and became uninterested in this issue.
Since then the funding of these programmes is huge, $300+ millions in public donations (and nobody knows how much via contracts / dark money).
Obviously Jeff Bezos just cut out the middle man and bought the Washington Post.
Once you not an absolutist then there are boundaries to test. This is permanently complicated.
The internet thingy is new, and by its nature breaks all the rules of communication. We are nowhere close to an understanding of how to deal with it. We don't even have a clue how to keep 8 year olds from extreme forms of pornography or beheading videos.
This world is one in which domestic law means little or nothing; copyright, trademark, confidentiality, privacy, libel, injunction, child protection are all pushed to one side. It is fascinating and scary.
It seems the population were getting much more cross about being locked down than they would about a few hundred thousand dying, so politically it was probably the right decision.