FPT for @Anabobazina on near 100% Japanese masking
"This is excruciatingly sad, if true. What is the driver for this? I assumed they would have similar immunity to us?"
+++
My guess is it is a mixture of a naturally quite introverted people, and also a highly conformist society. Japan is not a nation of rebels. Until they get at least 40% of people unmasking (my random guess) then no one will dare to copy
We saw it in the UK - and we are much more individualistic and bolshy. Recall the clap for carers, and the pressure to follow the crowd. Recall ALL THE BLOODY LOCKDOWNS
It is also certainly true. I have friends in Bangkok who tell me that 100% masking has only now begun to wane in BKK, and they say in HK, Taiwan and Japan it is still dreadful
it is indeed awful sad
Tokyo always had lots of masks before Covid, on the basis that they kept out pollution. There's a difference in cultural habit there - there's no iron law that wearing a mask when you go out must spoil your quality of life any more than, say, wearing a hat.
Relatedly - I know wfh is not equal lockdown, but this is quite interesting in offering some polling data on how much money people are willing to forego in order not to have to go out to work in an office:
This isn't the way everyone feels, but I do wonder if wfh isn't going to gradually become the norm for office work, incidentally easing the shortage of job applicants (because you can recruit internationally). Anecdotally I know several organisations who are both struggling to recruit and losing staff because of a rigid policy requiring attendance in the office at least one day a week. It's only partly the appeal of being in your chosen home surroundings and not having to commute, but also the opportunity to move somewhere cheaper so your perhaps spartan home surroundings actually get BETTER.
I'd require extra money in order to WFH.
The cost of the extra 200 sq foot or so of my home that my employer is now colonising in order to turn into their office space.
Plus the cost of heating, electricity etc.
People willing to take a pay cut to WFH are literally paying their employer to work. Suckers.
The answer is to make offices better. End open plan battery hen cages, give people privacy and space. I don't think its offices people hate, its the cramped, dehumanising, zero-privacy failed open plan experiment that people hate. When people say they like WFH, what they mean is they like having their own space and a bit of privacy.
I'd still expect my employer to pay for that, though, if they're using part of my house as their office space.
Good luck with that, especially if your WFH is voluntary (or "voluntary").
Had this conversation with a recruiter a few months ago.
"And the best part is, this is a WFH job!" "Great, how much extra are they going to pay me?" "Huh?" "How much extra? For the rental of part of my home as their office space." "Uhhh.... But it's work from home!" "I know. How much extra do I get from my employer in rent for turning parts of my home into their office?" "Uhhh....."
Needless to say I didn't go for the job...
I despised WFH when it was mandated by lockdown. It obliterated any sense of being part of a team, made it easy for my manager to cut me out of the loop and control access to information (i.e. keep me from knowing what was really going on), favoured those who were part of the "in" group and god knows how new people were onboarded/upskilled. When given the ability to pick team members I chose people I knew from pre-lockdown times, not faces on a screen I'd never met and couldn't trust.
I can understand people WFH a day or two a week, but having no real life interaction, ever, with the people you're expected to work with day in day out dehumanises us all and turns us into cogs in a machine. No longer a person, just a face on a screen.
I have worked from home for years - since long before the pandemic. I do one week every 6 or 8 up in Aberdeen to catch up with people and otherwise everything is online. When most of your team is 120 miles offshore in the middle of the North Sea, what difference does it make if you talk to them from Aberdeen or rural Lincolnshire? We are far more responsive being online rather than face to face given the job is 24/7 and it means, for example, that I will be able to have Christmas at home rather than stuck in a hotel and office 350 miles from my family and yet still run the drilling operations on Christmas Day just as I do the whole of the rest of the year.
The world of work has changed (and for the better) and people need to change with it.
It's different for different jobs.
My job has two elements - dealing with customers and dealing with staff. The first of these it doesn't matter where it's done - it's all by phone or email anyway. But the latter is much less effective from 100+ miles away.
Morning all! On topic I cannot see a winning outcome either for the Tories or for their remaining desperate shills like the Daily Mail. Of all the groups they could attack, nurses is worses. They are not going to persuade people that the nurses are some militant commie group trying to bring down the country. Nor that the unaffiliated RCN is Labour's puppetmaster. Nor that refusal to negotiate is them being reasonable.
So ultimately the government will back down and will lose. And in all the time it sit there sniffily attacking the perfidious NHS heroes it provides succour to the unions who really are trying to bring down the country.
What they should have done was agreed to negotiate, avoided the strikes completely, and quietly reached a compromise whilst contrasting the heroic nurses against the evil train people. Instead we have this. Sunak is a spanner.
Same goes for the ambulance drivers. They are going out of their way to try and make sure that they don't end up killing people (for obvious reasons both humanitarian and public relations) and all the Trusts/Unions have procedures in place where they can ask for staff from the picket line if there are emergency cases to be answered.
These are not militant, politically motivated actions, they are a cry for help. I just don't see any way that Sunak wins, all the more so if he does 'win' in the dispute. Not least because he will draw exactly the wrong conclusion from such a 'victory'.
Nobody is going to "win", least of all the taxpayer and the patient. The reality is that the NHS is an anachronism. It is a system that has evolved to favour the vested interests rather than the patient. The best way to reward the staff would be to first completely decentralise all of it. Sadly this will never happen as there are still plenty of gullible fools who really believe it is "the envy of the world".
The NHS used to be the "envy of the world" and it still was at the end of the last Labour government when public satisfaction with the NHS had reached an all time record high. Compare and contrast, 12 years on.
Essentially it is down to cash. Spending on health as a proportion of GDP is the key measure. We have always had health on the cheap in the UK, because the health service is relatively efficient especially compared to private and insurance based systems. The gap between the UK and other developed countries did narrow slightly with the investment under Labour, but spending on health in the UK has fallen behind badly since then. The cash simply hasn't been there to meet the rising demand of an ageing population.
"envy of the world" lol !
I have worked in healthcare systems across Europe. I can assure you that the only people who believe the NHS was ever the "envy of the world" (even when Blair was hosing money at the vested interests) are those who are very gullible to propaganda. No European I ever spoke to at that time who had a view thought the NHS was anything less than an antiquated system.
So which taxes will go up to pay for a better pay offer for nurses?
Taxes on wealth, and pensioners.
Although I am a beneficiary, I cannot see the slightest justification for preserving the triple lock.
Really? The case for linking pensions to inflation looks obvious. The case for raising pensions with average earnings allows pensioners to share in national growth. But in any case, the only relevant part now is the inflation link.
But why are we a protected species? What makes us a special case?
Statistically, you're the only supporters the government still has.
Morning all! On topic I cannot see a winning outcome either for the Tories or for their remaining desperate shills like the Daily Mail. Of all the groups they could attack, nurses is worses. They are not going to persuade people that the nurses are some militant commie group trying to bring down the country. Nor that the unaffiliated RCN is Labour's puppetmaster. Nor that refusal to negotiate is them being reasonable.
So ultimately the government will back down and will lose. And in all the time it sit there sniffily attacking the perfidious NHS heroes it provides succour to the unions who really are trying to bring down the country.
What they should have done was agreed to negotiate, avoided the strikes completely, and quietly reached a compromise whilst contrasting the heroic nurses against the evil train people. Instead we have this. Sunak is a spanner.
Same goes for the ambulance drivers. They are going out of their way to try and make sure that they don't end up killing people (for obvious reasons both humanitarian and public relations) and all the Trusts/Unions have procedures in place where they can ask for staff from the picket line if there are emergency cases to be answered.
These are not militant, politically motivated actions, they are a cry for help. I just don't see any way that Sunak wins, all the more so if he does 'win' in the dispute. Not least because he will draw exactly the wrong conclusion from such a 'victory'.
Nobody is going to "win", least of all the taxpayer and the patient. The reality is that the NHS is an anachronism. It is a system that has evolved to favour the vested interests rather than the patient. The best way to reward the staff would be to first completely decentralise all of it. Sadly this will never happen as there are still plenty of gullible fools who really believe it is "the envy of the world".
The NHS used to be the "envy of the world" and it still was at the end of the last Labour government when public satisfaction with the NHS had reached an all time record high. Compare and contrast, 12 years on.
Essentially it is down to cash. Spending on health as a proportion of GDP is the key measure. We have always had health on the cheap in the UK, because the health service is relatively efficient especially compared to private and insurance based systems. The gap between the UK and other developed countries did narrow slightly with the investment under Labour, but spending on health in the UK has fallen behind badly since then. The cash simply hasn't been there to meet the rising demand of an ageing population.
The NHS was only "envy of the world" amongst those who had never experienced health systems elsewhere in Europe. Those of us who had didn't believe the hype then and certainly don't believe it now.
I thought the ‘free at the point of use’ was the unique thing about the NHS.
No, it isn’t.
To start with, it isn’t entirely free. Prescription charges, for example.
But in much of the developed world you get a lot medical treatment for the asking, without any insurance style excess payment.
FPT for @Anabobazina on near 100% Japanese masking
"This is excruciatingly sad, if true. What is the driver for this? I assumed they would have similar immunity to us?"
+++
My guess is it is a mixture of a naturally quite introverted people, and also a highly conformist society. Japan is not a nation of rebels. Until they get at least 40% of people unmasking (my random guess) then no one will dare to copy
We saw it in the UK - and we are much more individualistic and bolshy. Recall the clap for carers, and the pressure to follow the crowd. Recall ALL THE BLOODY LOCKDOWNS
It is also certainly true. I have friends in Bangkok who tell me that 100% masking has only now begun to wane in BKK, and they say in HK, Taiwan and Japan it is still dreadful
it is indeed awful sad
Tokyo always had lots of masks before Covid, on the basis that they kept out pollution. There's a difference in cultural habit there - there's no iron law that wearing a mask when you go out must spoil your quality of life any more than, say, wearing a hat.
Relatedly - I know wfh is not equal lockdown, but this is quite interesting in offering some polling data on how much money people are willing to forego in order not to have to go out to work in an office:
This isn't the way everyone feels, but I do wonder if wfh isn't going to gradually become the norm for office work, incidentally easing the shortage of job applicants (because you can recruit internationally). Anecdotally I know several organisations who are both struggling to recruit and losing staff because of a rigid policy requiring attendance in the office at least one day a week. It's only partly the appeal of being in your chosen home surroundings and not having to commute, but also the opportunity to move somewhere cheaper so your perhaps spartan home surroundings actually get BETTER.
I'd require extra money in order to WFH.
The cost of the extra 200 sq foot or so of my home that my employer is now colonising in order to turn into their office space.
Plus the cost of heating, electricity etc.
People willing to take a pay cut to WFH are literally paying their employer to work. Suckers.
The answer is to make offices better. End open plan battery hen cages, give people privacy and space. I don't think its offices people hate, its the cramped, dehumanising, zero-privacy failed open plan experiment that people hate. When people say they like WFH, what they mean is they like having their own space and a bit of privacy.
I'd still expect my employer to pay for that, though, if they're using part of my house as their office space.
I appreciate what you're saying but surely you would just negotiate for whatever you can get and hopefully that will be more. Framing it as 'extra' for working from home will just put people off.
What pisses me off is employers framing WFH as a great perk for me when in reality it is passing their office costs onto me.
Living and working 24/7 in the same four walls. Twelve hours of staring at spreadsheets, then moving twelve feet into the next room (if you're lucky enough to have a next room) to eat your dinner and watch telly and try to switch off from work. No thanks. For my sanity, I prefer a separation between work space and living space.
Zero camaraderie with the people you're working with. Never finding out about their lives, never making friends, just having the same robotic weekly stand-up where everyone delivers a status update then back to staring at your spreadsheets alone.
I get that a lot of people enjoy WFH. More power to them. I despised every minute of it.
On the rare occasions, back in the day, when I worked from home, the only good thing about it was that all those fiddly minor maintenance jobs around the house, that I'd been putting off the months, all got done. I was too conscientious to be dossing around when I was supposed to be working, but doing something else that I didn't really want to do didn't seem so bad.
I suspect the bottom line is that WFH works just fine for older people who already have the friends, contacts and insight from office work and so enjoyed the saving on Southern Rail and Starbucks whilst working in the conservatory, whereas for the young in their town centre second floor one-bed flats trying to start building their career, it was often grim.
I'd have thought the best way out would be to simply ask the independent pay review body to do their work again. The answer will be higher than 4.5% as at the time of their work inflation was 6.2%, now it is 11ish I think.
So which taxes will go up to pay for a better pay offer for nurses?
Taxes on wealth, and pensioners.
Although I am a beneficiary, I cannot see the slightest justification for preserving the triple lock.
Really? The case for linking pensions to inflation looks obvious. The case for raising pensions with average earnings allows pensioners to share in national growth. But in any case, the only relevant part now is the inflation link.
But why are we a protected species? What makes us a special case?
It’s a good question. Clearly not all pensioners are the same. Some have great private pensions, like my folks. Others are almost totally reliant on the state pension. And all grades in between. The headlines if a government doesn’t put up the state pension write themselves. And yer older people are more likely to need healthcare and potentially social care. I suspect the special treatment is partly linked to the levels of voting among the oldies.
Morning all! On topic I cannot see a winning outcome either for the Tories or for their remaining desperate shills like the Daily Mail. Of all the groups they could attack, nurses is worses. They are not going to persuade people that the nurses are some militant commie group trying to bring down the country. Nor that the unaffiliated RCN is Labour's puppetmaster. Nor that refusal to negotiate is them being reasonable.
So ultimately the government will back down and will lose. And in all the time it sit there sniffily attacking the perfidious NHS heroes it provides succour to the unions who really are trying to bring down the country.
What they should have done was agreed to negotiate, avoided the strikes completely, and quietly reached a compromise whilst contrasting the heroic nurses against the evil train people. Instead we have this. Sunak is a spanner.
Same goes for the ambulance drivers. They are going out of their way to try and make sure that they don't end up killing people (for obvious reasons both humanitarian and public relations) and all the Trusts/Unions have procedures in place where they can ask for staff from the picket line if there are emergency cases to be answered.
These are not militant, politically motivated actions, they are a cry for help. I just don't see any way that Sunak wins, all the more so if he does 'win' in the dispute. Not least because he will draw exactly the wrong conclusion from such a 'victory'.
Nobody is going to "win", least of all the taxpayer and the patient. The reality is that the NHS is an anachronism. It is a system that has evolved to favour the vested interests rather than the patient. The best way to reward the staff would be to first completely decentralise all of it. Sadly this will never happen as there are still plenty of gullible fools who really believe it is "the envy of the world".
The NHS used to be the "envy of the world" and it still was at the end of the last Labour government when public satisfaction with the NHS had reached an all time record high. Compare and contrast, 12 years on.
Essentially it is down to cash. Spending on health as a proportion of GDP is the key measure. We have always had health on the cheap in the UK, because the health service is relatively efficient especially compared to private and insurance based systems. The gap between the UK and other developed countries did narrow slightly with the investment under Labour, but spending on health in the UK has fallen behind badly since then. The cash simply hasn't been there to meet the rising demand of an ageing population.
Which begs the question as to where the cash is going to come from.
I suspect the answer is higher tax on the middle class, since that's the only way of raising significant new revenue.
The brave decision would be to extend NI to all ages and tap the over 65s, particularly given it's largely for their benefit.
For all the fine words on this site about these strikes, I cannot help but feel that if a family member of friend of mine suffers, or even dies, because of the strikes, I shall hold the unions and the strikers responsible. I will also stop thinking of the medical profession as being a 'caring' one.
Who would you hold responsible if what you describe happened when there were no strikes? Given the terrible waiting times for ambulances reported in recent months due to the backing-up at hospitals, I'm sure there will have been people suffering or even dying due to delayed treatment.
In that case, the NHS trust or, potentially, the government. It would very much depend on the circumstances.
We really must stop this lionisation of the health service and its staff. Many failures and abuses have been made worse by people not wanting to criticise the service - Stafford being a classic and hideous example.
There is this prevailing attitude that when it does something good, it's the NHS and when it does something bad, blame the government.
Back onto the nurses for a sec, I see that someone asked who pays for it up thread. Flip the question - who pays for them *not* getting a pay rise?
This is capitalism, and we have millions of workers unable to pay their bills. Ignore the basic immorality of having nurses reliant on foodbanks in their own hospital for a minute and think about the economics.
Growth relies on consumption. To consume with scale you need spare cash having paid your bills. All the people who can't pay their bills can't consume enough, which costs others their own jobs and the doom loop spirals lower and lower.
The Tories - and specifically their patrons and owners - have forgotten how capitalism works. There is a cost to not paying people decently, and the narrow-minded immoral people saying "who pays" need to answer who pays the bill for productivity dropping and growth disappearing and all the job losses and business closures.
Money needs to circulate. It can't all sit in off-shore bank accounts of a tiny number of individuals.
Interesting day to see how much my solar battery charges today. Today is the solstice but it's a) Relatively clear b) Relatively warm (Batteries shouldn't be temperature thottled on charge) 22% charged at the moment. (Of 5.8 kwh)
My app tells me I've saved 115.4Kg of CO2 too since November 25th compared to no panels and no battery too. No christmas card from Greta mind.
So which taxes will go up to pay for a better pay offer for nurses?
Taxes on wealth, and pensioners.
Although I am a beneficiary, I cannot see the slightest justification for preserving the triple lock.
Really? The case for linking pensions to inflation looks obvious. The case for raising pensions with average earnings allows pensioners to share in national growth. But in any case, the only relevant part now is the inflation link.
But why are we a protected species? What makes us a special case?
Hi Peter. We have gone around this loop loads of times recently here, with many putting your argument. My answer would be that the pension is so low that the triple lock is useful in gradually raising it to an acceptable level for those that have no other income. For those of us for whom this is an unnecessary bonus, like I assume you and me, this should be largely taxed away. Some of it will be anyway. Incorporating NI into Income Tax would help do that also (and it should be anyway for other reasons such as simplicity). There may be other things that can be done so that those more well off don't benefit too much from it.
So which taxes will go up to pay for a better pay offer for nurses?
Taxes on wealth, and pensioners.
Although I am a beneficiary, I cannot see the slightest justification for preserving the triple lock.
Really? The case for linking pensions to inflation looks obvious. The case for raising pensions with average earnings allows pensioners to share in national growth. But in any case, the only relevant part now is the inflation link.
But why are we a protected species? What makes us a special case?
It’s a good question. Clearly not all pensioners are the same. Some have great private pensions, like my folks. Others are almost totally reliant on the state pension. And all grades in between. The headlines if a government doesn’t put up the state pension write themselves. And yer older people are more likely to need healthcare and potentially social care. I suspect the special treatment is partly linked to the levels of voting among the oldies.
There is also the renting pensioner crisis heading down the road towards us. Of the people paying eye watering rents with no prospect of buying their homes, how many have a pension that will pay their rent in retirement?
Gurwinder is one of my favourite recent Twitter additions.
I like his latest tweet because I don't think I've seen this variation on the old "simple answers to complex problems" chestnut before.
"You can gauge someone's ignorance by the number of phenomena they explain with the same answer. Those who blame many different issues (e.g. war, poverty, pollution) on just 1 cause (e.g. capitalism) are recycling explanations because the demand for answers outstrips their supply."
We all do it. I have certainly indulged in the past regarding Brexit. I'd say it's sometimes ignorance, but often also a type of tribal double-think where deep down we know the Tories aren't completely to blame for raw sewage releases into rivers and Gordon Brown didn't cause the financial crisis, but we say it anyway.
That's the other problem the government has. Even without the strikes, things are visibly going badly in the health services.
£350m a week...
It's had more than a £350M a week increase since Brexit.
Which seems to have made naff all difference.
If we raised spending on healthcare as a % of GDP from c.10% of GDP to 12% or 13% (between £50-80bn extra a year) would we really get a European healthcare system?
"If the pre-war dividing line between Ukraine and Russia cannot be achieved by combat or by negotiation, recourse to the principle of self-determination could be explored. Internationally supervised referendums concerning self-determination could be applied to particularly divisive territories".
There's even some AI:
"As the world’s leaders strive to end the war in which two nuclear powers contest a conventionally armed country, they should also reflect on the impact on this conflict and on long-term strategy of incipient high–technology and artificial intelligence. Auto-nomous weapons already exist, capable of defining, assessing and targeting their own perceived threats and thus in a position to start their own war.
Once the line into this realm is crossed and hi-tech becomes standard weaponry – and computers become the principal executors of strategy – the world will find itself in a condition for which as yet it has no established concept. How can leaders exercise control when computers prescribe strategic instructions on a scale and in a manner that inherently limits and threatens human input? How can civilisation be preserved amid such a maelstrom of conflicting information, perceptions and destructive capabilities?
...and a veiled reference to as yet undisclosed "discoveries".
"No theory for this encroaching world yet exists, and consultative efforts on this subject have yet to evolve – perhaps because meaningful negotiations might disclose new discoveries, and that disclosure itself constitutes a risk for the future."
I do wonder how up with things Mr Kissinger may be. It's a rare and fortunate 99 year old who could stay up with it all. And his pre-war attitude was just rehashed cold war sphere of influence peddling.
It sounds as though he may have missed the 1991 Independence Referendum in Ukraine, when every single region including Crimea voted 'Yes'.
Morning all! On topic I cannot see a winning outcome either for the Tories or for their remaining desperate shills like the Daily Mail. Of all the groups they could attack, nurses is worses. They are not going to persuade people that the nurses are some militant commie group trying to bring down the country. Nor that the unaffiliated RCN is Labour's puppetmaster. Nor that refusal to negotiate is them being reasonable.
So ultimately the government will back down and will lose. And in all the time it sit there sniffily attacking the perfidious NHS heroes it provides succour to the unions who really are trying to bring down the country.
What they should have done was agreed to negotiate, avoided the strikes completely, and quietly reached a compromise whilst contrasting the heroic nurses against the evil train people. Instead we have this. Sunak is a spanner.
Same goes for the ambulance drivers. They are going out of their way to try and make sure that they don't end up killing people (for obvious reasons both humanitarian and public relations) and all the Trusts/Unions have procedures in place where they can ask for staff from the picket line if there are emergency cases to be answered.
These are not militant, politically motivated actions, they are a cry for help. I just don't see any way that Sunak wins, all the more so if he does 'win' in the dispute. Not least because he will draw exactly the wrong conclusion from such a 'victory'.
Nobody is going to "win", least of all the taxpayer and the patient. The reality is that the NHS is an anachronism. It is a system that has evolved to favour the vested interests rather than the patient. The best way to reward the staff would be to first completely decentralise all of it. Sadly this will never happen as there are still plenty of gullible fools who really believe it is "the envy of the world".
The NHS used to be the "envy of the world" and it still was at the end of the last Labour government when public satisfaction with the NHS had reached an all time record high. Compare and contrast, 12 years on.
Essentially it is down to cash. Spending on health as a proportion of GDP is the key measure. We have always had health on the cheap in the UK, because the health service is relatively efficient especially compared to private and insurance based systems. The gap between the UK and other developed countries did narrow slightly with the investment under Labour, but spending on health in the UK has fallen behind badly since then. The cash simply hasn't been there to meet the rising demand of an ageing population.
Which begs the question as to where the cash is going to come from.
I suspect the answer is higher tax on the middle class, since that's the only way of raising significant new revenue.
The brave decision would be to extend NI to all ages and tap the over 65s, particularly given it's largely for their benefit.
It's the reason why, much a I hate the voting system with its false majorities, the political situation argues for a new government with a big mandate to take the bold but necessary decisions early in its first term - those that there is no chance the current tired, discredited lot can attempt, with their poliitical capital all wasted away by the clown and the lunatic.
The problem is what confidence can we have that, once elected, Starmer will go into the phonebox and come out with a new set of clothes?
I don't want to give Hunt/Sunak ideas but I strongly suspect the NISC levy might come back in the next budget at 1.5% (or similar) to "save the NHS".
That will be yet another massive fiscal squeeze on working people's budget.
If they want to be politically brave they can can-kick it because Labour almost certainly will do the same, and take the flak instead, if they don't but there are possibly two more winters for the Tories to get through first.
Gurwinder is one of my favourite recent Twitter additions.
I like his latest tweet because I don't think I've seen this variation on the old "simple answers to complex problems" chestnut before.
"You can gauge someone's ignorance by the number of phenomena they explain with the same answer. Those who blame many different issues (e.g. war, poverty, pollution) on just 1 cause (e.g. capitalism) are recycling explanations because the demand for answers outstrips their supply."
We all do it. I have certainly indulged in the past regarding Brexit. I'd say it's sometimes ignorance, but often also a type of tribal double-think where deep down we know the Tories aren't completely to blame for raw sewage releases into rivers and Gordon Brown didn't cause the financial crisis, but we say it anyway.
I agree - but on the other hand, Brexit has been a huge distraction for government for half a decade. It doesn't explain many problems, but it's part of the reason they haven't been addressed.
Morning all! On topic I cannot see a winning outcome either for the Tories or for their remaining desperate shills like the Daily Mail. Of all the groups they could attack, nurses is worses. They are not going to persuade people that the nurses are some militant commie group trying to bring down the country. Nor that the unaffiliated RCN is Labour's puppetmaster. Nor that refusal to negotiate is them being reasonable.
So ultimately the government will back down and will lose. And in all the time it sit there sniffily attacking the perfidious NHS heroes it provides succour to the unions who really are trying to bring down the country.
What they should have done was agreed to negotiate, avoided the strikes completely, and quietly reached a compromise whilst contrasting the heroic nurses against the evil train people. Instead we have this. Sunak is a spanner.
Same goes for the ambulance drivers. They are going out of their way to try and make sure that they don't end up killing people (for obvious reasons both humanitarian and public relations) and all the Trusts/Unions have procedures in place where they can ask for staff from the picket line if there are emergency cases to be answered.
These are not militant, politically motivated actions, they are a cry for help. I just don't see any way that Sunak wins, all the more so if he does 'win' in the dispute. Not least because he will draw exactly the wrong conclusion from such a 'victory'.
Nobody is going to "win", least of all the taxpayer and the patient. The reality is that the NHS is an anachronism. It is a system that has evolved to favour the vested interests rather than the patient. The best way to reward the staff would be to first completely decentralise all of it. Sadly this will never happen as there are still plenty of gullible fools who really believe it is "the envy of the world".
The NHS used to be the "envy of the world" and it still was at the end of the last Labour government when public satisfaction with the NHS had reached an all time record high. Compare and contrast, 12 years on.
Essentially it is down to cash. Spending on health as a proportion of GDP is the key measure. We have always had health on the cheap in the UK, because the health service is relatively efficient especially compared to private and insurance based systems. The gap between the UK and other developed countries did narrow slightly with the investment under Labour, but spending on health in the UK has fallen behind badly since then. The cash simply hasn't been there to meet the rising demand of an ageing population.
Which begs the question as to where the cash is going to come from.
I suspect the answer is higher tax on the middle class, since that's the only way of raising significant new revenue.
The brave decision would be to extend NI to all ages and tap the over 65s, particularly given it's largely for their benefit.
It's the reason why, much a I hate the voting system with its false majorities, the political situation argues for a new government with a big mandate to take the bold but necessary decisions early in its first term - those that there is no chance the current tired, discredited lot can attempt, with their poliitical capital all wasted away by the clown and the lunatic.
The problem is what confidence can we have that, once elected, Starmer will go into the phonebox and come out with a new set of clothes?
We can't.
I don't think Starmer is capable of this brave and visionary thinking - with the leadership to sell it- and I think what's most likely is he just tactically triangulates and then administers government in a fairly competent way, whilst throwing some chunks of red meat to his base.
FPT for @Anabobazina on near 100% Japanese masking
"This is excruciatingly sad, if true. What is the driver for this? I assumed they would have similar immunity to us?"
+++
My guess is it is a mixture of a naturally quite introverted people, and also a highly conformist society. Japan is not a nation of rebels. Until they get at least 40% of people unmasking (my random guess) then no one will dare to copy
We saw it in the UK - and we are much more individualistic and bolshy. Recall the clap for carers, and the pressure to follow the crowd. Recall ALL THE BLOODY LOCKDOWNS
It is also certainly true. I have friends in Bangkok who tell me that 100% masking has only now begun to wane in BKK, and they say in HK, Taiwan and Japan it is still dreadful
it is indeed awful sad
Tokyo always had lots of masks before Covid, on the basis that they kept out pollution. There's a difference in cultural habit there - there's no iron law that wearing a mask when you go out must spoil your quality of life any more than, say, wearing a hat.
Relatedly - I know wfh is not equal lockdown, but this is quite interesting in offering some polling data on how much money people are willing to forego in order not to have to go out to work in an office:
This isn't the way everyone feels, but I do wonder if wfh isn't going to gradually become the norm for office work, incidentally easing the shortage of job applicants (because you can recruit internationally). Anecdotally I know several organisations who are both struggling to recruit and losing staff because of a rigid policy requiring attendance in the office at least one day a week. It's only partly the appeal of being in your chosen home surroundings and not having to commute, but also the opportunity to move somewhere cheaper so your perhaps spartan home surroundings actually get BETTER.
I'd require extra money in order to WFH.
The cost of the extra 200 sq foot or so of my home that my employer is now colonising in order to turn into their office space.
Plus the cost of heating, electricity etc.
People willing to take a pay cut to WFH are literally paying their employer to work. Suckers.
The answer is to make offices better. End open plan battery hen cages, give people privacy and space. I don't think its offices people hate, its the cramped, dehumanising, zero-privacy failed open plan experiment that people hate. When people say they like WFH, what they mean is they like having their own space and a bit of privacy.
I'd still expect my employer to pay for that, though, if they're using part of my house as their office space.
I appreciate what you're saying but surely you would just negotiate for whatever you can get and hopefully that will be more. Framing it as 'extra' for working from home will just put people off.
What pisses me off is employers framing WFH as a great perk for me when in reality it is passing their office costs onto me.
Living and working 24/7 in the same four walls. Twelve hours of staring at spreadsheets, then moving twelve feet into the next room (if you're lucky enough to have a next room) to eat your dinner and watch telly and try to switch off from work. No thanks. For my sanity, I prefer a separation between work space and living space.
Zero camaraderie with the people you're working with. Never finding out about their lives, never making friends, just having the same robotic weekly stand-up where everyone delivers a status update then back to staring at your spreadsheets alone.
I get that a lot of people enjoy WFH. More power to them. I despised every minute of it.
That is the downside. It is easier for me as somebody established in my career than someone starting out. Personally if I never saw the inside of an office again, it will be too soon. But some things are best done in the office, and I recognise too that there is a benefit to more junior staff if I go in regularly so they can network with me, even if I don't care about that sort of thing any more!
There is a difference too between Full WFH and Hybrid working. My employer views WFH as a privilege, and so if you want to go in every day you can. I don't know what they would do if we all did! We are now trying to find the right balance - we all did some WFH before Covid anyway but the proportion has flipped since.
FPT for @Anabobazina on near 100% Japanese masking
"This is excruciatingly sad, if true. What is the driver for this? I assumed they would have similar immunity to us?"
+++
My guess is it is a mixture of a naturally quite introverted people, and also a highly conformist society. Japan is not a nation of rebels. Until they get at least 40% of people unmasking (my random guess) then no one will dare to copy
We saw it in the UK - and we are much more individualistic and bolshy. Recall the clap for carers, and the pressure to follow the crowd. Recall ALL THE BLOODY LOCKDOWNS
It is also certainly true. I have friends in Bangkok who tell me that 100% masking has only now begun to wane in BKK, and they say in HK, Taiwan and Japan it is still dreadful
it is indeed awful sad
Tokyo always had lots of masks before Covid, on the basis that they kept out pollution. There's a difference in cultural habit there - there's no iron law that wearing a mask when you go out must spoil your quality of life any more than, say, wearing a hat.
Relatedly - I know wfh is not equal lockdown, but this is quite interesting in offering some polling data on how much money people are willing to forego in order not to have to go out to work in an office:
This isn't the way everyone feels, but I do wonder if wfh isn't going to gradually become the norm for office work, incidentally easing the shortage of job applicants (because you can recruit internationally). Anecdotally I know several organisations who are both struggling to recruit and losing staff because of a rigid policy requiring attendance in the office at least one day a week. It's only partly the appeal of being in your chosen home surroundings and not having to commute, but also the opportunity to move somewhere cheaper so your perhaps spartan home surroundings actually get BETTER.
I'd require extra money in order to WFH.
The cost of the extra 200 sq foot or so of my home that my employer is now colonising in order to turn into their office space.
Plus the cost of heating, electricity etc.
People willing to take a pay cut to WFH are literally paying their employer to work. Suckers.
The answer is to make offices better. End open plan battery hen cages, give people privacy and space. I don't think its offices people hate, its the cramped, dehumanising, zero-privacy failed open plan experiment that people hate. When people say they like WFH, what they mean is they like having their own space and a bit of privacy.
I'd still expect my employer to pay for that, though, if they're using part of my house as their office space.
Good luck with that, especially if your WFH is voluntary (or "voluntary").
Had this conversation with a recruiter a few months ago.
"And the best part is, this is a WFH job!" "Great, how much extra are they going to pay me?" "Huh?" "How much extra? For the rental of part of my home as their office space." "Uhhh.... But it's work from home!" "I know. How much extra do I get from my employer in rent for turning parts of my home into their office?" "Uhhh....."
Needless to say I didn't go for the job...
I despised WFH when it was mandated by lockdown. It obliterated any sense of being part of a team, made it easy for my manager to cut me out of the loop and control access to information (i.e. keep me from knowing what was really going on), favoured those who were part of the "in" group and god knows how new people were onboarded/upskilled. When given the ability to pick team members I chose people I knew from pre-lockdown times, not faces on a screen I'd never met and couldn't trust.
I can understand people WFH a day or two a week, but having no real life interaction, ever, with the people you're expected to work with day in day out dehumanises us all and turns us into cogs in a machine. No longer a person, just a face on a screen.
I have worked from home for years - since long before the pandemic. I do one week every 6 or 8 up in Aberdeen to catch up with people and otherwise everything is online. When most of your team is 120 miles offshore in the middle of the North Sea, what difference does it make if you talk to them from Aberdeen or rural Lincolnshire? We are far more responsive being online rather than face to face given the job is 24/7 and it means, for example, that I will be able to have Christmas at home rather than stuck in a hotel and office 350 miles from my family and yet still run the drilling operations on Christmas Day just as I do the whole of the rest of the year.
The world of work has changed (and for the better) and people need to change with it.
It's different for different jobs.
My job has two elements - dealing with customers and dealing with staff. The first of these it doesn't matter where it's done - it's all by phone or email anyway. But the latter is much less effective from 100+ miles away.
Really? All you are telling me is that you have a long standing internal communication issue.
I’ve run projects remotely for years - there are times when I need to visit people but that’s because when a customer is paying £x00,000 for a team to do a project physically talking to the customer is very important.
That's the other problem the government has. Even without the strikes, things are visibly going badly in the health services.
£350m a week...
Has been provided and then some. Trouble is not just with money but with lack of foresight in training and retaining staff.
Yep, if you allow their wages to drop 19% in real terms compared to 2010, a lot of them seek more rewarding work elsewhere.
Last year there were over 60,000 applications to start nursing training in England and yet we only accepted 18,000 on to courses. This has been the way for years. Why? The applications are there - in spite of the issues with pay and conditions - and yet we are accepting less than 1/3rd of the applicants.
It's been that way for years as far as I know - and the same for doctors. Government determines the number of positions on training courses it's prepared to fund, and deliberately sets the level materially below that needed to meet future demand for medical personnel. We then fill the supply gap by recruiting from overseas.
I understood this was originally policy by Blair's government as a way of acclimatising the public to mass immigration (it's a lot more palatable to be importing doctors and nurses than construction workers). However, the simpler explanation is it's just typically poor long term planning from politicians, because they won't spend money on something for which the electoral benefit will arrive long after they retire.
It is unlikely the Blair government thought any such thing. Did they reduce the number of places that Thatcher and Major had created? Medical schools had been rearranged and combined under Thatcher and Blair. Does combining medical schools constitute a cut?
Theresa May's government opened five new medical schools, so there has been some increase, offset by a lot of retirement of older doctors.
On the subject of missing workers and part time working.
A relative rubs a building business. He tells me that a serious problem for him now is people who are working x hours a week, could do more, but won’t.
Because their benefits would get withdrawn at suck a rate that they would, in effect, by working for pennies to the hour.
So he has to hire more people, which is much less efficient.
Gurwinder is one of my favourite recent Twitter additions.
I like his latest tweet because I don't think I've seen this variation on the old "simple answers to complex problems" chestnut before.
"You can gauge someone's ignorance by the number of phenomena they explain with the same answer. Those who blame many different issues (e.g. war, poverty, pollution) on just 1 cause (e.g. capitalism) are recycling explanations because the demand for answers outstrips their supply."
We all do it. I have certainly indulged in the past regarding Brexit. I'd say it's sometimes ignorance, but often also a type of tribal double-think where deep down we know the Tories aren't completely to blame for raw sewage releases into rivers and Gordon Brown didn't cause the financial crisis, but we say it anyway.
A tangent on this is people who blame a complex situation on one thing. In reality, there are often many causal factors - the reasons something happens. People (including myself) often just pick their 'favourite' causal factor, rather than look at the full reasons something happened. This probably feeds into the above.
So which taxes will go up to pay for a better pay offer for nurses?
Taxes on wealth, and pensioners.
Although I am a beneficiary, I cannot see the slightest justification for preserving the triple lock.
Really? The case for linking pensions to inflation looks obvious. The case for raising pensions with average earnings allows pensioners to share in national growth. But in any case, the only relevant part now is the inflation link.
But why are we a protected species? What makes us a special case?
Being retired and on a fixed income calls for rises with inflation. The same reasoning applies to dole recipients (or whatever IDS renamed it). The same reasoning applies to workers, hence the strikes.
So, Conservative legislator “Lady” (Michelle) Mone OBE is on an Alpine break is she? Nice work. I assume she’ll be in police custody by the end of the week.
I actually have no problem with you being repetitive on this one Dicky, if SNP, Lib Dem or Labour were responsible for something like this the Tory press and Tory party would be raging about it from Dawn to Dusk day in day out, repetitively - it’s no different than what you hear about in other countries around the world and conclude it’s a corrupt country, those in power merely using it to line the pockets of themselves, friends and supporters.
However, you do concede you made a false step yesterday, trying to smear the English for the theft of relics around the world when it was so quickly called out by Leon the Scottish were up to their eyebrows with the English, and other European colonial powers, in the era of all that? A Scot stole some marbles, and then sold them on for profit, does that not sound criminal to you? My advice to all ScotNats on this sort of thing is not to stir it but use the line “not all the shared history is good.” You see what I mean?
The Scots were the underlings ( like theEnglish plebs ), it was all the English toffs and the handful of fake pretendy Scots who went to Eton etc that gave the orders and got the booty and the glory.
World Cup - Winner jointly Canada/Mexico/US June – July 2026
Brazil 7 France 8 England 10 Argentina 11 Germany 11 Spain 12 Portugal 17 Netherlands 21 Italy 26 Belgium 34
Oooh! You're making an anti-English post. What an incredibly unexpected thing for you to do. Are we wound up enough for you? Are you enjoying our English faces twisted in paroxisms of rage at your little jokes, you little scamp you.
It's an inferiority complex. He secretly quite likes England - remember that post he made about how much he enjoyed visiting Henley and having tea and cakes? - but he quietly hates himself for that.
There's so much going on here and, at the same time, so little.
I really don’t think he does like England or the English.
World Cup - Winner jointly Canada/Mexico/US June – July 2026
Brazil 7 France 8 England 10 Argentina 11 Germany 11 Spain 12 Portugal 17 Netherlands 21 Italy 26 Belgium 34
Oooh! You're making an anti-English post. What an incredibly unexpected thing for you to do. Are we wound up enough for you? Are you enjoying our English faces twisted in paroxisms of rage at your little jokes, you little scamp you.
World Cup - Winner jointly Canada/Mexico/US June – July 2026
Brazil 7 France 8 England 10 Argentina 11 Germany 11 Spain 12 Portugal 17 Netherlands 21 Italy 26 Belgium 34
Oooh! You're making an anti-English post. What an incredibly unexpected thing for you to do. Are we wound up enough for you? Are you enjoying our English faces twisted in paroxisms of rage at your little jokes, you little scamp you.
It's an inferiority complex. He secretly quite likes England - remember that post he made about how much he enjoyed visiting Henley and having tea and cakes? - but he quietly hates himself for that.
There's so much going on here and, at the same time, so little.
I really don’t think he does like England or the English.
Usual pity party from you
Get a job will you. Pay into the coffers you so gleefully trough from.
So, Conservative legislator “Lady” (Michelle) Mone OBE is on an Alpine break is she? Nice work. I assume she’ll be in police custody by the end of the week.
I actually have no problem with you being repetitive on this one Dicky, if SNP, Lib Dem or Labour were responsible for something like this the Tory press and Tory party would be raging about it from Dawn to Dusk day in day out, repetitively - it’s no different than what you hear about in other countries around the world and conclude it’s a corrupt country, those in power merely using it to line the pockets of themselves, friends and supporters.
However, you do concede you made a false step yesterday, trying to smear the English for the theft of relics around the world when it was so quickly called out by Leon the Scottish were up to their eyebrows with the English, and other European colonial powers, in the era of all that? A Scot stole some marbles, and then sold them on for profit, does that not sound criminal to you? My advice to all ScotNats on this sort of thing is not to stir it but use the line “not all the shared history is good.” You see what I mean?
The Scots were the underlings ( like theEnglish plebs ), it was all the English toffs and the handful of fake pretendy Scots who went to Eton etc that gave the orders and got the booty and the glory.
FPT for @Anabobazina on near 100% Japanese masking
"This is excruciatingly sad, if true. What is the driver for this? I assumed they would have similar immunity to us?"
+++
My guess is it is a mixture of a naturally quite introverted people, and also a highly conformist society. Japan is not a nation of rebels. Until they get at least 40% of people unmasking (my random guess) then no one will dare to copy
We saw it in the UK - and we are much more individualistic and bolshy. Recall the clap for carers, and the pressure to follow the crowd. Recall ALL THE BLOODY LOCKDOWNS
It is also certainly true. I have friends in Bangkok who tell me that 100% masking has only now begun to wane in BKK, and they say in HK, Taiwan and Japan it is still dreadful
it is indeed awful sad
Tokyo always had lots of masks before Covid, on the basis that they kept out pollution. There's a difference in cultural habit there - there's no iron law that wearing a mask when you go out must spoil your quality of life any more than, say, wearing a hat.
Relatedly - I know wfh is not equal lockdown, but this is quite interesting in offering some polling data on how much money people are willing to forego in order not to have to go out to work in an office:
This isn't the way everyone feels, but I do wonder if wfh isn't going to gradually become the norm for office work, incidentally easing the shortage of job applicants (because you can recruit internationally). Anecdotally I know several organisations who are both struggling to recruit and losing staff because of a rigid policy requiring attendance in the office at least one day a week. It's only partly the appeal of being in your chosen home surroundings and not having to commute, but also the opportunity to move somewhere cheaper so your perhaps spartan home surroundings actually get BETTER.
I'd require extra money in order to WFH.
The cost of the extra 200 sq foot or so of my home that my employer is now colonising in order to turn into their office space.
Plus the cost of heating, electricity etc.
People willing to take a pay cut to WFH are literally paying their employer to work. Suckers.
The answer is to make offices better. End open plan battery hen cages, give people privacy and space. I don't think its offices people hate, its the cramped, dehumanising, zero-privacy failed open plan experiment that people hate. When people say they like WFH, what they mean is they like having their own space and a bit of privacy.
I'd still expect my employer to pay for that, though, if they're using part of my house as their office space.
Good luck with that, especially if your WFH is voluntary (or "voluntary").
Had this conversation with a recruiter a few months ago.
"And the best part is, this is a WFH job!" "Great, how much extra are they going to pay me?" "Huh?" "How much extra? For the rental of part of my home as their office space." "Uhhh.... But it's work from home!" "I know. How much extra do I get from my employer in rent for turning parts of my home into their office?" "Uhhh....."
Needless to say I didn't go for the job...
I despised WFH when it was mandated by lockdown. It obliterated any sense of being part of a team, made it easy for my manager to cut me out of the loop and control access to information (i.e. keep me from knowing what was really going on), favoured those who were part of the "in" group and god knows how new people were onboarded/upskilled. When given the ability to pick team members I chose people I knew from pre-lockdown times, not faces on a screen I'd never met and couldn't trust.
I can understand people WFH a day or two a week, but having no real life interaction, ever, with the people you're expected to work with day in day out dehumanises us all and turns us into cogs in a machine. No longer a person, just a face on a screen.
I have worked from home for years - since long before the pandemic. I do one week every 6 or 8 up in Aberdeen to catch up with people and otherwise everything is online. When most of your team is 120 miles offshore in the middle of the North Sea, what difference does it make if you talk to them from Aberdeen or rural Lincolnshire? We are far more responsive being online rather than face to face given the job is 24/7 and it means, for example, that I will be able to have Christmas at home rather than stuck in a hotel and office 350 miles from my family and yet still run the drilling operations on Christmas Day just as I do the whole of the rest of the year.
The world of work has changed (and for the better) and people need to change with it.
It's different for different jobs.
My job has two elements - dealing with customers and dealing with staff. The first of these it doesn't matter where it's done - it's all by phone or email anyway. But the latter is much less effective from 100+ miles away.
That's really interesting how different jobs/people prioritise interaction. I would deal with customers face to face, as that's where it most makes a difference to the relationship, and most staffing matters remotely.
World Cup - Winner jointly Canada/Mexico/US June – July 2026
Brazil 7 France 8 England 10 Argentina 11 Germany 11 Spain 12 Portugal 17 Netherlands 21 Italy 26 Belgium 34
Oooh! You're making an anti-English post. What an incredibly unexpected thing for you to do. Are we wound up enough for you? Are you enjoying our English faces twisted in paroxisms of rage at your little jokes, you little scamp you.
Barking , you see everything any Scot posts through a racist prism. Get a life.
World Cup - Winner jointly Canada/Mexico/US June – July 2026
Brazil 7 France 8 England 10 Argentina 11 Germany 11 Spain 12 Portugal 17 Netherlands 21 Italy 26 Belgium 34
Oooh! You're making an anti-English post. What an incredibly unexpected thing for you to do. Are we wound up enough for you? Are you enjoying our English faces twisted in paroxisms of rage at your little jokes, you little scamp you.
Great that you avoided taking the bait.
Yes. I am just one of those awful, awful Sassenachs you love to wind up with your cheeky little ways. I bow to your genetic superiority.
FPT for @Anabobazina on near 100% Japanese masking
"This is excruciatingly sad, if true. What is the driver for this? I assumed they would have similar immunity to us?"
+++
My guess is it is a mixture of a naturally quite introverted people, and also a highly conformist society. Japan is not a nation of rebels. Until they get at least 40% of people unmasking (my random guess) then no one will dare to copy
We saw it in the UK - and we are much more individualistic and bolshy. Recall the clap for carers, and the pressure to follow the crowd. Recall ALL THE BLOODY LOCKDOWNS
It is also certainly true. I have friends in Bangkok who tell me that 100% masking has only now begun to wane in BKK, and they say in HK, Taiwan and Japan it is still dreadful
it is indeed awful sad
Tokyo always had lots of masks before Covid, on the basis that they kept out pollution. There's a difference in cultural habit there - there's no iron law that wearing a mask when you go out must spoil your quality of life any more than, say, wearing a hat.
Relatedly - I know wfh is not equal lockdown, but this is quite interesting in offering some polling data on how much money people are willing to forego in order not to have to go out to work in an office:
This isn't the way everyone feels, but I do wonder if wfh isn't going to gradually become the norm for office work, incidentally easing the shortage of job applicants (because you can recruit internationally). Anecdotally I know several organisations who are both struggling to recruit and losing staff because of a rigid policy requiring attendance in the office at least one day a week. It's only partly the appeal of being in your chosen home surroundings and not having to commute, but also the opportunity to move somewhere cheaper so your perhaps spartan home surroundings actually get BETTER.
I'd require extra money in order to WFH.
The cost of the extra 200 sq foot or so of my home that my employer is now colonising in order to turn into their office space.
Plus the cost of heating, electricity etc.
People willing to take a pay cut to WFH are literally paying their employer to work. Suckers.
The answer is to make offices better. End open plan battery hen cages, give people privacy and space. I don't think its offices people hate, its the cramped, dehumanising, zero-privacy failed open plan experiment that people hate. When people say they like WFH, what they mean is they like having their own space and a bit of privacy.
I'd still expect my employer to pay for that, though, if they're using part of my house as their office space.
Since WFH'ing I've been saving about £500 per month in commuting costs. I've started commuting again for 1-2 days per week and it is costing me a fortune in travel and other random expenditure.
So which taxes will go up to pay for a better pay offer for nurses?
Taxes on wealth, and pensioners.
Although I am a beneficiary, I cannot see the slightest justification for preserving the triple lock.
Really? The case for linking pensions to inflation looks obvious. The case for raising pensions with average earnings allows pensioners to share in national growth. But in any case, the only relevant part now is the inflation link.
But why are we a protected species? What makes us a special case?
It’s a good question. Clearly not all pensioners are the same. Some have great private pensions, like my folks. Others are almost totally reliant on the state pension. And all grades in between. The headlines if a government doesn’t put up the state pension write themselves. And yer older people are more likely to need healthcare and potentially social care. I suspect the special treatment is partly linked to the levels of voting among the oldies.
There is also the renting pensioner crisis heading down the road towards us. Of the people paying eye watering rents with no prospect of buying their homes, how many have a pension that will pay their rent in retirement?
None of them - you already knew that but best to state the obvious.
FPT for @Anabobazina on near 100% Japanese masking
"This is excruciatingly sad, if true. What is the driver for this? I assumed they would have similar immunity to us?"
+++
My guess is it is a mixture of a naturally quite introverted people, and also a highly conformist society. Japan is not a nation of rebels. Until they get at least 40% of people unmasking (my random guess) then no one will dare to copy
We saw it in the UK - and we are much more individualistic and bolshy. Recall the clap for carers, and the pressure to follow the crowd. Recall ALL THE BLOODY LOCKDOWNS
It is also certainly true. I have friends in Bangkok who tell me that 100% masking has only now begun to wane in BKK, and they say in HK, Taiwan and Japan it is still dreadful
it is indeed awful sad
Tokyo always had lots of masks before Covid, on the basis that they kept out pollution. There's a difference in cultural habit there - there's no iron law that wearing a mask when you go out must spoil your quality of life any more than, say, wearing a hat.
Relatedly - I know wfh is not equal lockdown, but this is quite interesting in offering some polling data on how much money people are willing to forego in order not to have to go out to work in an office:
This isn't the way everyone feels, but I do wonder if wfh isn't going to gradually become the norm for office work, incidentally easing the shortage of job applicants (because you can recruit internationally). Anecdotally I know several organisations who are both struggling to recruit and losing staff because of a rigid policy requiring attendance in the office at least one day a week. It's only partly the appeal of being in your chosen home surroundings and not having to commute, but also the opportunity to move somewhere cheaper so your perhaps spartan home surroundings actually get BETTER.
I'd require extra money in order to WFH.
The cost of the extra 200 sq foot or so of my home that my employer is now colonising in order to turn into their office space.
Plus the cost of heating, electricity etc.
People willing to take a pay cut to WFH are literally paying their employer to work. Suckers.
The answer is to make offices better. End open plan battery hen cages, give people privacy and space. I don't think its offices people hate, its the cramped, dehumanising, zero-privacy failed open plan experiment that people hate. When people say they like WFH, what they mean is they like having their own space and a bit of privacy.
I'd still expect my employer to pay for that, though, if they're using part of my house as their office space.
Good luck with that, especially if your WFH is voluntary (or "voluntary").
Had this conversation with a recruiter a few months ago.
"And the best part is, this is a WFH job!" "Great, how much extra are they going to pay me?" "Huh?" "How much extra? For the rental of part of my home as their office space." "Uhhh.... But it's work from home!" "I know. How much extra do I get from my employer in rent for turning parts of my home into their office?" "Uhhh....."
Needless to say I didn't go for the job...
I despised WFH when it was mandated by lockdown. It obliterated any sense of being part of a team, made it easy for my manager to cut me out of the loop and control access to information (i.e. keep me from knowing what was really going on), favoured those who were part of the "in" group and god knows how new people were onboarded/upskilled. When given the ability to pick team members I chose people I knew from pre-lockdown times, not faces on a screen I'd never met and couldn't trust.
I can understand people WFH a day or two a week, but having no real life interaction, ever, with the people you're expected to work with day in day out dehumanises us all and turns us into cogs in a machine. No longer a person, just a face on a screen.
I have worked from home for years - since long before the pandemic. I do one week every 6 or 8 up in Aberdeen to catch up with people and otherwise everything is online. When most of your team is 120 miles offshore in the middle of the North Sea, what difference does it make if you talk to them from Aberdeen or rural Lincolnshire? We are far more responsive being online rather than face to face given the job is 24/7 and it means, for example, that I will be able to have Christmas at home rather than stuck in a hotel and office 350 miles from my family and yet still run the drilling operations on Christmas Day just as I do the whole of the rest of the year.
The world of work has changed (and for the better) and people need to change with it.
It's different for different jobs.
My job has two elements - dealing with customers and dealing with staff. The first of these it doesn't matter where it's done - it's all by phone or email anyway. But the latter is much less effective from 100+ miles away.
Really? All you are telling me is that you have a long standing internal communication issue.
I’ve run projects remotely for years - there are times when I need to visit people but that’s because when a customer is paying £x00,000 for a team to do a project physically talking to the customer is very important.
No, it's intrinsic. To take one basic example, if we are waiting for a delivery of X, if I am in the office I can see when X arrives, and I know that if it hasn't arrived by a certain time I can chase the supplier and nobody else needs to be involved. WFH I'm relying on someone in the office doing that for me - which isn't a problem but it inevitably uses up some of their time when they could and should be doing something else.
So, Conservative legislator “Lady” (Michelle) Mone OBE is on an Alpine break is she? Nice work. I assume she’ll be in police custody by the end of the week.
I actually have no problem with you being repetitive on this one Dicky, if SNP, Lib Dem or Labour were responsible for something like this the Tory press and Tory party would be raging about it from Dawn to Dusk day in day out, repetitively - it’s no different than what you hear about in other countries around the world and conclude it’s a corrupt country, those in power merely using it to line the pockets of themselves, friends and supporters.
However, you do concede you made a false step yesterday, trying to smear the English for the theft of relics around the world when it was so quickly called out by Leon the Scottish were up to their eyebrows with the English, and other European colonial powers, in the era of all that? A Scot stole some marbles, and then sold them on for profit, does that not sound criminal to you? My advice to all ScotNats on this sort of thing is not to stir it but use the line “not all the shared history is good.” You see what I mean?
The Scots were the underlings ( like theEnglish plebs ), it was all the English toffs and the handful of fake pretendy Scots who went to Eton etc that gave the orders and got the booty and the glory.
What I find odd about the current debate here is that apparently the same people want to skimp a few hundred pounds a year off poorer pensioners, but also want to allow wealthy pensioners to get social care for free so houses worth hundreds of thousands can be inherited by their families.
So, Conservative legislator “Lady” (Michelle) Mone OBE is on an Alpine break is she? Nice work. I assume she’ll be in police custody by the end of the week.
I actually have no problem with you being repetitive on this one Dicky, if SNP, Lib Dem or Labour were responsible for something like this the Tory press and Tory party would be raging about it from Dawn to Dusk day in day out, repetitively - it’s no different than what you hear about in other countries around the world and conclude it’s a corrupt country, those in power merely using it to line the pockets of themselves, friends and supporters.
However, you do concede you made a false step yesterday, trying to smear the English for the theft of relics around the world when it was so quickly called out by Leon the Scottish were up to their eyebrows with the English, and other European colonial powers, in the era of all that? A Scot stole some marbles, and then sold them on for profit, does that not sound criminal to you? My advice to all ScotNats on this sort of thing is not to stir it but use the line “not all the shared history is good.” You see what I mean?
The Scots were the underlings ( like theEnglish plebs ), it was all the English toffs and the handful of fake pretendy Scots who went to Eton etc that gave the orders and got the booty and the glory.
A member of the formerly royal house of Bruce, Elgin was born at the family seat, Broomhall House, Fife, the second son of Charles Bruce, 5th Earl of Elgin and his wife Martha Whyte. He succeeded his older brother William Robert, the 6th Earl, in 1771 when he was only five.[1] He was educated at Harrow and Westminster, and studied at St Andrews and Paris.[1]
Like it or not, you don't get more Scottish than that. You seem to have an anti emigrant prejudice, which is a nice change.
On the subject of missing workers and part time working.
A relative rubs a building business. He tells me that a serious problem for him now is people who are working x hours a week, could do more, but won’t.
Because their benefits would get withdrawn at suck a rate that they would, in effect, by working for pennies to the hour.
So he has to hire more people, which is much less efficient.
Which is a problem @BartholomewRoberts has been highlighting for ages and occurs at various points in the system.
Instantly for those who receive tax credits As soon as you hit £50,000 if you have children - I spent years ensuring I never crossed that barrier - it wasn’t difficult when I used a limited company and could pay dividends to the wife. As soon as you hit £100,000 - again people cut back the hours
Gurwinder is one of my favourite recent Twitter additions.
I like his latest tweet because I don't think I've seen this variation on the old "simple answers to complex problems" chestnut before.
"You can gauge someone's ignorance by the number of phenomena they explain with the same answer. Those who blame many different issues (e.g. war, poverty, pollution) on just 1 cause (e.g. capitalism) are recycling explanations because the demand for answers outstrips their supply."
We all do it. I have certainly indulged in the past regarding Brexit. I'd say it's sometimes ignorance, but often also a type of tribal double-think where deep down we know the Tories aren't completely to blame for raw sewage releases into rivers and Gordon Brown didn't cause the financial crisis, but we say it anyway.
A tangent on this is people who blame a complex situation on one thing. In reality, there are often many causal factors - the reasons something happens. People (including myself) often just pick their 'favourite' causal factor, rather than look at the full reasons something happened. This probably feeds into the above.
Yes, inflation being a nice example this year. Better or worse national outcomes from Covid another over the last 2 years. National sporting success or failure a perennial (I remember when pundits were confidently stating in the 1990s nadir that English cricket just needed a smaller county championship more like the Sheffield Shield, and all would be well)
FPT for @Anabobazina on near 100% Japanese masking
"This is excruciatingly sad, if true. What is the driver for this? I assumed they would have similar immunity to us?"
+++
My guess is it is a mixture of a naturally quite introverted people, and also a highly conformist society. Japan is not a nation of rebels. Until they get at least 40% of people unmasking (my random guess) then no one will dare to copy
We saw it in the UK - and we are much more individualistic and bolshy. Recall the clap for carers, and the pressure to follow the crowd. Recall ALL THE BLOODY LOCKDOWNS
It is also certainly true. I have friends in Bangkok who tell me that 100% masking has only now begun to wane in BKK, and they say in HK, Taiwan and Japan it is still dreadful
it is indeed awful sad
Tokyo always had lots of masks before Covid, on the basis that they kept out pollution. There's a difference in cultural habit there - there's no iron law that wearing a mask when you go out must spoil your quality of life any more than, say, wearing a hat.
Relatedly - I know wfh is not equal lockdown, but this is quite interesting in offering some polling data on how much money people are willing to forego in order not to have to go out to work in an office:
This isn't the way everyone feels, but I do wonder if wfh isn't going to gradually become the norm for office work, incidentally easing the shortage of job applicants (because you can recruit internationally). Anecdotally I know several organisations who are both struggling to recruit and losing staff because of a rigid policy requiring attendance in the office at least one day a week. It's only partly the appeal of being in your chosen home surroundings and not having to commute, but also the opportunity to move somewhere cheaper so your perhaps spartan home surroundings actually get BETTER.
I'd require extra money in order to WFH.
The cost of the extra 200 sq foot or so of my home that my employer is now colonising in order to turn into their office space.
Plus the cost of heating, electricity etc.
People willing to take a pay cut to WFH are literally paying their employer to work. Suckers.
The answer is to make offices better. End open plan battery hen cages, give people privacy and space. I don't think its offices people hate, its the cramped, dehumanising, zero-privacy failed open plan experiment that people hate. When people say they like WFH, what they mean is they like having their own space and a bit of privacy.
I'd still expect my employer to pay for that, though, if they're using part of my house as their office space.
Good luck with that, especially if your WFH is voluntary (or "voluntary").
Had this conversation with a recruiter a few months ago.
"And the best part is, this is a WFH job!" "Great, how much extra are they going to pay me?" "Huh?" "How much extra? For the rental of part of my home as their office space." "Uhhh.... But it's work from home!" "I know. How much extra do I get from my employer in rent for turning parts of my home into their office?" "Uhhh....."
Needless to say I didn't go for the job...
I despised WFH when it was mandated by lockdown. It obliterated any sense of being part of a team, made it easy for my manager to cut me out of the loop and control access to information (i.e. keep me from knowing what was really going on), favoured those who were part of the "in" group and god knows how new people were onboarded/upskilled. When given the ability to pick team members I chose people I knew from pre-lockdown times, not faces on a screen I'd never met and couldn't trust.
I can understand people WFH a day or two a week, but having no real life interaction, ever, with the people you're expected to work with day in day out dehumanises us all and turns us into cogs in a machine. No longer a person, just a face on a screen.
I have worked from home for years - since long before the pandemic. I do one week every 6 or 8 up in Aberdeen to catch up with people and otherwise everything is online. When most of your team is 120 miles offshore in the middle of the North Sea, what difference does it make if you talk to them from Aberdeen or rural Lincolnshire? We are far more responsive being online rather than face to face given the job is 24/7 and it means, for example, that I will be able to have Christmas at home rather than stuck in a hotel and office 350 miles from my family and yet still run the drilling operations on Christmas Day just as I do the whole of the rest of the year.
The world of work has changed (and for the better) and people need to change with it.
It's different for different jobs.
My job has two elements - dealing with customers and dealing with staff. The first of these it doesn't matter where it's done - it's all by phone or email anyway. But the latter is much less effective from 100+ miles away.
That's really interesting how different jobs/people prioritise interaction. I would deal with customers face to face, as that's where it most makes a difference to the relationship, and most staffing matters remotely.
We have a salesman who deals face to face with customers. Every once in a while I do myself, but that's really only a couple of times a year and so far at least I've always been able to arrange it with one of my semi-regular monthly-ish trips to London.
But we're in manufacturing, so there's something to physically see happening.
So which taxes will go up to pay for a better pay offer for nurses?
Taxes on wealth, and pensioners.
Although I am a beneficiary, I cannot see the slightest justification for preserving the triple lock.
Really? The case for linking pensions to inflation looks obvious. The case for raising pensions with average earnings allows pensioners to share in national growth. But in any case, the only relevant part now is the inflation link.
But why are we a protected species? What makes us a special case?
Being retired and on a fixed income calls for rises with inflation. The same reasoning applies to dole recipients (or whatever IDS renamed it). The same reasoning applies to workers, hence the strikes.
So we all have to be flexible and reasonable. No special cases then.
WFH is a matter for employees and employers. The former should have the right to request it, the latter should have the right to say no or to put limits on it. If the boundaries are set properly everyone wins. If not, the market will sort it all out. My view is that companies which put a blanket ban on WFH will have to pay a premium to ensure they get who they need and that they can then keep them.
What I find odd about the current debate here is that apparently the same people want to skimp a few hundred pounds a year off poorer pensioners, but also want to allow wealthy pensioners to get social care for free so houses worth hundreds of thousands can be inherited by their families.
Nope - I want social care functioning as it’s currently one of the main reasons the NHS has the issues it has (bedblocking seriously impacts A&E who can’t send patients to wards, which then impacts ambulances because they are left managing patients that should be in a&e).
World Cup - Winner jointly Canada/Mexico/US June – July 2026
Brazil 7 France 8 England 10 Argentina 11 Germany 11 Spain 12 Portugal 17 Netherlands 21 Italy 26 Belgium 34
Oooh! You're making an anti-English post. What an incredibly unexpected thing for you to do. Are we wound up enough for you? Are you enjoying our English faces twisted in paroxisms of rage at your little jokes, you little scamp you.
Great that you avoided taking the bait.
Yes. I am just one of those awful, awful Sassenachs you love to wind up with your cheeky little ways. I bow to your genetic superiority.
Leaden 5th form sarcasm, great stuff. There’s a few people on here who suffer an allergic reaction to a whiff of Scotch but you’re definitely tops. Did yer maw eat an out of date Tunnock’s tea cake while bearing you?
FPT for @Anabobazina on near 100% Japanese masking
"This is excruciatingly sad, if true. What is the driver for this? I assumed they would have similar immunity to us?"
+++
My guess is it is a mixture of a naturally quite introverted people, and also a highly conformist society. Japan is not a nation of rebels. Until they get at least 40% of people unmasking (my random guess) then no one will dare to copy
We saw it in the UK - and we are much more individualistic and bolshy. Recall the clap for carers, and the pressure to follow the crowd. Recall ALL THE BLOODY LOCKDOWNS
It is also certainly true. I have friends in Bangkok who tell me that 100% masking has only now begun to wane in BKK, and they say in HK, Taiwan and Japan it is still dreadful
it is indeed awful sad
Tokyo always had lots of masks before Covid, on the basis that they kept out pollution. There's a difference in cultural habit there - there's no iron law that wearing a mask when you go out must spoil your quality of life any more than, say, wearing a hat.
Relatedly - I know wfh is not equal lockdown, but this is quite interesting in offering some polling data on how much money people are willing to forego in order not to have to go out to work in an office:
This isn't the way everyone feels, but I do wonder if wfh isn't going to gradually become the norm for office work, incidentally easing the shortage of job applicants (because you can recruit internationally). Anecdotally I know several organisations who are both struggling to recruit and losing staff because of a rigid policy requiring attendance in the office at least one day a week. It's only partly the appeal of being in your chosen home surroundings and not having to commute, but also the opportunity to move somewhere cheaper so your perhaps spartan home surroundings actually get BETTER.
I'd require extra money in order to WFH.
The cost of the extra 200 sq foot or so of my home that my employer is now colonising in order to turn into their office space.
Plus the cost of heating, electricity etc.
People willing to take a pay cut to WFH are literally paying their employer to work. Suckers.
The answer is to make offices better. End open plan battery hen cages, give people privacy and space. I don't think its offices people hate, its the cramped, dehumanising, zero-privacy failed open plan experiment that people hate. When people say they like WFH, what they mean is they like having their own space and a bit of privacy.
I'd still expect my employer to pay for that, though, if they're using part of my house as their office space.
Good luck with that, especially if your WFH is voluntary (or "voluntary").
Had this conversation with a recruiter a few months ago.
"And the best part is, this is a WFH job!" "Great, how much extra are they going to pay me?" "Huh?" "How much extra? For the rental of part of my home as their office space." "Uhhh.... But it's work from home!" "I know. How much extra do I get from my employer in rent for turning parts of my home into their office?" "Uhhh....."
Needless to say I didn't go for the job...
I despised WFH when it was mandated by lockdown. It obliterated any sense of being part of a team, made it easy for my manager to cut me out of the loop and control access to information (i.e. keep me from knowing what was really going on), favoured those who were part of the "in" group and god knows how new people were onboarded/upskilled. When given the ability to pick team members I chose people I knew from pre-lockdown times, not faces on a screen I'd never met and couldn't trust.
I can understand people WFH a day or two a week, but having no real life interaction, ever, with the people you're expected to work with day in day out dehumanises us all and turns us into cogs in a machine. No longer a person, just a face on a screen.
I have worked from home for years - since long before the pandemic. I do one week every 6 or 8 up in Aberdeen to catch up with people and otherwise everything is online. When most of your team is 120 miles offshore in the middle of the North Sea, what difference does it make if you talk to them from Aberdeen or rural Lincolnshire? We are far more responsive being online rather than face to face given the job is 24/7 and it means, for example, that I will be able to have Christmas at home rather than stuck in a hotel and office 350 miles from my family and yet still run the drilling operations on Christmas Day just as I do the whole of the rest of the year.
The world of work has changed (and for the better) and people need to change with it.
It's different for different jobs.
My job has two elements - dealing with customers and dealing with staff. The first of these it doesn't matter where it's done - it's all by phone or email anyway. But the latter is much less effective from 100+ miles away.
Really? All you are telling me is that you have a long standing internal communication issue.
I’ve run projects remotely for years - there are times when I need to visit people but that’s because when a customer is paying £x00,000 for a team to do a project physically talking to the customer is very important.
No, it's intrinsic. To take one basic example, if we are waiting for a delivery of X, if I am in the office I can see when X arrives, and I know that if it hasn't arrived by a certain time I can chase the supplier and nobody else needs to be involved. WFH I'm relying on someone in the office doing that for me - which isn't a problem but it inevitably uses up some of their time when they could and should be doing something else.
What you described there is not dealing with staff it’s performing a goods inward task - which may or may not be the best use of your time.
Gurwinder is one of my favourite recent Twitter additions.
I like his latest tweet because I don't think I've seen this variation on the old "simple answers to complex problems" chestnut before.
"You can gauge someone's ignorance by the number of phenomena they explain with the same answer. Those who blame many different issues (e.g. war, poverty, pollution) on just 1 cause (e.g. capitalism) are recycling explanations because the demand for answers outstrips their supply."
We all do it. I have certainly indulged in the past regarding Brexit. I'd say it's sometimes ignorance, but often also a type of tribal double-think where deep down we know the Tories aren't completely to blame for raw sewage releases into rivers and Gordon Brown didn't cause the financial crisis, but we say it anyway.
A tangent on this is people who blame a complex situation on one thing. In reality, there are often many causal factors - the reasons something happens. People (including myself) often just pick their 'favourite' causal factor, rather than look at the full reasons something happened. This probably feeds into the above.
Yes, inflation being a nice example this year. Better or worse national outcomes from Covid another over the last 2 years. National sporting success or failure a perennial (I remember when pundits were confidently stating in the 1990s nadir that English cricket just needed a smaller county championship more like the Sheffield Shield, and all would be well)
Brexit is the big one on PB. Everything is down to Brexit, even when exactly the same thing is happening in Europe.
FPT for @Anabobazina on near 100% Japanese masking
"This is excruciatingly sad, if true. What is the driver for this? I assumed they would have similar immunity to us?"
+++
My guess is it is a mixture of a naturally quite introverted people, and also a highly conformist society. Japan is not a nation of rebels. Until they get at least 40% of people unmasking (my random guess) then no one will dare to copy
We saw it in the UK - and we are much more individualistic and bolshy. Recall the clap for carers, and the pressure to follow the crowd. Recall ALL THE BLOODY LOCKDOWNS
It is also certainly true. I have friends in Bangkok who tell me that 100% masking has only now begun to wane in BKK, and they say in HK, Taiwan and Japan it is still dreadful
it is indeed awful sad
Tokyo always had lots of masks before Covid, on the basis that they kept out pollution. There's a difference in cultural habit there - there's no iron law that wearing a mask when you go out must spoil your quality of life any more than, say, wearing a hat.
Relatedly - I know wfh is not equal lockdown, but this is quite interesting in offering some polling data on how much money people are willing to forego in order not to have to go out to work in an office:
This isn't the way everyone feels, but I do wonder if wfh isn't going to gradually become the norm for office work, incidentally easing the shortage of job applicants (because you can recruit internationally). Anecdotally I know several organisations who are both struggling to recruit and losing staff because of a rigid policy requiring attendance in the office at least one day a week. It's only partly the appeal of being in your chosen home surroundings and not having to commute, but also the opportunity to move somewhere cheaper so your perhaps spartan home surroundings actually get BETTER.
I'd require extra money in order to WFH.
The cost of the extra 200 sq foot or so of my home that my employer is now colonising in order to turn into their office space.
Plus the cost of heating, electricity etc.
People willing to take a pay cut to WFH are literally paying their employer to work. Suckers.
The answer is to make offices better. End open plan battery hen cages, give people privacy and space. I don't think its offices people hate, its the cramped, dehumanising, zero-privacy failed open plan experiment that people hate. When people say they like WFH, what they mean is they like having their own space and a bit of privacy.
I'd still expect my employer to pay for that, though, if they're using part of my house as their office space.
Good luck with that, especially if your WFH is voluntary (or "voluntary").
Had this conversation with a recruiter a few months ago.
"And the best part is, this is a WFH job!" "Great, how much extra are they going to pay me?" "Huh?" "How much extra? For the rental of part of my home as their office space." "Uhhh.... But it's work from home!" "I know. How much extra do I get from my employer in rent for turning parts of my home into their office?" "Uhhh....."
Needless to say I didn't go for the job...
I despised WFH when it was mandated by lockdown. It obliterated any sense of being part of a team, made it easy for my manager to cut me out of the loop and control access to information (i.e. keep me from knowing what was really going on), favoured those who were part of the "in" group and god knows how new people were onboarded/upskilled. When given the ability to pick team members I chose people I knew from pre-lockdown times, not faces on a screen I'd never met and couldn't trust.
I can understand people WFH a day or two a week, but having no real life interaction, ever, with the people you're expected to work with day in day out dehumanises us all and turns us into cogs in a machine. No longer a person, just a face on a screen.
I have worked from home for years - since long before the pandemic. I do one week every 6 or 8 up in Aberdeen to catch up with people and otherwise everything is online. When most of your team is 120 miles offshore in the middle of the North Sea, what difference does it make if you talk to them from Aberdeen or rural Lincolnshire? We are far more responsive being online rather than face to face given the job is 24/7 and it means, for example, that I will be able to have Christmas at home rather than stuck in a hotel and office 350 miles from my family and yet still run the drilling operations on Christmas Day just as I do the whole of the rest of the year.
The world of work has changed (and for the better) and people need to change with it.
It's different for different jobs.
My job has two elements - dealing with customers and dealing with staff. The first of these it doesn't matter where it's done - it's all by phone or email anyway. But the latter is much less effective from 100+ miles away.
Really? All you are telling me is that you have a long standing internal communication issue.
I’ve run projects remotely for years - there are times when I need to visit people but that’s because when a customer is paying £x00,000 for a team to do a project physically talking to the customer is very important.
No, it's intrinsic. To take one basic example, if we are waiting for a delivery of X, if I am in the office I can see when X arrives, and I know that if it hasn't arrived by a certain time I can chase the supplier and nobody else needs to be involved. WFH I'm relying on someone in the office doing that for me - which isn't a problem but it inevitably uses up some of their time when they could and should be doing something else.
What you described there is not dealing with staff it’s performing a goods inward task - which may or may not be the best use of your time.
When I'm WFH, it's dealing with staff.
There are other things, though - given that I'm more experienced than all the team, if I'm on site I can see that a problem is coming well before anyone else notices that it has happened. No amount of reporting is as good as the old Mark One Eyeball.
World Cup - Winner jointly Canada/Mexico/US June – July 2026
Brazil 7 France 8 England 10 Argentina 11 Germany 11 Spain 12 Portugal 17 Netherlands 21 Italy 26 Belgium 34
Oooh! You're making an anti-English post. What an incredibly unexpected thing for you to do. Are we wound up enough for you? Are you enjoying our English faces twisted in paroxisms of rage at your little jokes, you little scamp you.
Great that you avoided taking the bait.
Yes. I am just one of those awful, awful Sassenachs you love to wind up with your cheeky little ways. I bow to your genetic superiority.
Leaden 5th form sarcasm, great stuff. There’s a few people on here who suffer an allergic reaction to a whiff of Scotch but you’re definitely tops. Did yer maw eat an out of date Tunnock’s tea cake while bearing you?
I’ve no problem with Scottish people. Despite your own position to the contra Scottish Nationalism has nothing to do with Anti-Englishness. In fact I’m doing the Anglophobic contingent of the same on here a favour by rising to your bait. The less prejudiced types I just merrily converse with.
Gurwinder is one of my favourite recent Twitter additions.
I like his latest tweet because I don't think I've seen this variation on the old "simple answers to complex problems" chestnut before.
"You can gauge someone's ignorance by the number of phenomena they explain with the same answer. Those who blame many different issues (e.g. war, poverty, pollution) on just 1 cause (e.g. capitalism) are recycling explanations because the demand for answers outstrips their supply."
We all do it. I have certainly indulged in the past regarding Brexit. I'd say it's sometimes ignorance, but often also a type of tribal double-think where deep down we know the Tories aren't completely to blame for raw sewage releases into rivers and Gordon Brown didn't cause the financial crisis, but we say it anyway.
A tangent on this is people who blame a complex situation on one thing. In reality, there are often many causal factors - the reasons something happens. People (including myself) often just pick their 'favourite' causal factor, rather than look at the full reasons something happened. This probably feeds into the above.
Yes, inflation being a nice example this year. Better or worse national outcomes from Covid another over the last 2 years. National sporting success or failure a perennial (I remember when pundits were confidently stating in the 1990s nadir that English cricket just needed a smaller county championship more like the Sheffield Shield, and all would be well)
Brexit is the big one on PB. Everything is down to Brexit, even when exactly the same thing is happening in Europe.
Us remainers did warn that Brexit would not only be bad for us, but also for the rest of the EU. What we didn't predict was the negative effects on the US, China....
Gurwinder is one of my favourite recent Twitter additions.
I like his latest tweet because I don't think I've seen this variation on the old "simple answers to complex problems" chestnut before.
"You can gauge someone's ignorance by the number of phenomena they explain with the same answer. Those who blame many different issues (e.g. war, poverty, pollution) on just 1 cause (e.g. capitalism) are recycling explanations because the demand for answers outstrips their supply."
We all do it. I have certainly indulged in the past regarding Brexit. I'd say it's sometimes ignorance, but often also a type of tribal double-think where deep down we know the Tories aren't completely to blame for raw sewage releases into rivers and Gordon Brown didn't cause the financial crisis, but we say it anyway.
A tangent on this is people who blame a complex situation on one thing. In reality, there are often many causal factors - the reasons something happens. People (including myself) often just pick their 'favourite' causal factor, rather than look at the full reasons something happened. This probably feeds into the above.
Yes, inflation being a nice example this year. Better or worse national outcomes from Covid another over the last 2 years. National sporting success or failure a perennial (I remember when pundits were confidently stating in the 1990s nadir that English cricket just needed a smaller county championship more like the Sheffield Shield, and all would be well)
Brexit is the big one on PB. Everything is down to Brexit, even when exactly the same thing is happening in Europe.
Brexit Tories Woke The English
One close to my heart which causes irritation sometimes is climate change (not so much on here). Blaming a cold snap on climate change, as some in the media did, is stretching things to say the least and just undermines all the other compelling evidence around us.
On the subject of missing workers and part time working.
A relative rubs a building business. He tells me that a serious problem for him now is people who are working x hours a week, could do more, but won’t.
Because their benefits would get withdrawn at suck a rate that they would, in effect, by working for pennies to the hour.
So he has to hire more people, which is much less efficient.
Which is a problem @BartholomewRoberts has been highlighting for ages and occurs at various points in the system.
Instantly for those who receive tax credits As soon as you hit £50,000 if you have children - I spent years ensuring I never crossed that barrier - it wasn’t difficult when I used a limited company and could pay dividends to the wife. As soon as you hit £100,000 - again people cut back the hours
Me also - we are literally paying people not to work.
I would be interested in hearing how other countries deal with GP services. It strikes me that this is the real pinch point in the NHS. It deters genuinely ill people from getting the help they need, and creates a bottleneck for those that do seek it.
It will be interesting to see what happens as over the next few years as company office leases come up for renewals.
I am not sure anybody has quite figured out what is the best balance, what are the right systems, processes and tools to use make this happen and it is very much an industry by industry / job role by job role thing.
It doesn't help that in the UK we had a particular issue with productivity, especially in white collar jobs, before we underwent this large scale change.
That's the other problem the government has. Even without the strikes, things are visibly going badly in the health services.
£350m a week...
Has been provided and then some. Trouble is not just with money but with lack of foresight in training and retaining staff.
Yep, if you allow their wages to drop 19% in real terms compared to 2010, a lot of them seek more rewarding work elsewhere.
Last year there were over 60,000 applications to start nursing training in England and yet we only accepted 18,000 on to courses. This has been the way for years. Why? The applications are there - in spite of the issues with pay and conditions - and yet we are accepting less than 1/3rd of the applicants.
Be interested in more on those stats. 60k people or 60k applications? Most applicants would make multiple applications, afterall. For those not accepted on to courses, what did they do - did they have multiple applications and choose another path. Overall - was it down to a lack of capacity, lack of quality in the applicants or many good applicants ultimately choosing other things? Each points to a different solution (increase capacity; improve primary/secondary education AND/OR attract more high quality applicants; make nursing more attractive).
It is my understanding that all healthcare degrees are over subscribed - that there are far more applicants than places for degrees to become doctors and nurses.
This isn’t terribly surprising. All the highly rated degree courses are over subscribed.
And healthcare is an area where there is a deep, worldwide shortage of personnel that looks likely to persist through our life times. Despite massive increases in training, the increasing standards living in India, China and elsewhere mean that demand for medical staff is increasing faster.
Meanwhile, despite the PB scrimmage, the number of nurses in the NHS has been steadily increasing for the last 10 years.
"If the pre-war dividing line between Ukraine and Russia cannot be achieved by combat or by negotiation, recourse to the principle of self-determination could be explored. Internationally supervised referendums concerning self-determination could be applied to particularly divisive territories".
There's even some AI:
"As the world’s leaders strive to end the war in which two nuclear powers contest a conventionally armed country, they should also reflect on the impact on this conflict and on long-term strategy of incipient high–technology and artificial intelligence. Auto-nomous weapons already exist, capable of defining, assessing and targeting their own perceived threats and thus in a position to start their own war.
Once the line into this realm is crossed and hi-tech becomes standard weaponry – and computers become the principal executors of strategy – the world will find itself in a condition for which as yet it has no established concept. How can leaders exercise control when computers prescribe strategic instructions on a scale and in a manner that inherently limits and threatens human input? How can civilisation be preserved amid such a maelstrom of conflicting information, perceptions and destructive capabilities?
...and a veiled reference to as yet undisclosed "discoveries".
"No theory for this encroaching world yet exists, and consultative efforts on this subject have yet to evolve – perhaps because meaningful negotiations might disclose new discoveries, and that disclosure itself constitutes a risk for the future."
That reads like a number of articles I’ve read by people who try and use the “scare” of some new technology, to reinforce their existing worldview. Without actually understanding what they are talking about.
It all comes down to - how could you trust Poo Tin and his chums in any deal?
Personally I would sell* Ukraine nuclear weapons, as a start. But I get the impression you might not like that.
*too right. At a good price, on HP. A great big Union Jack on each and every one.
I am all for self-determination. But the idea that meaningful referendums can be held at gunpoint, or after massive population changes caused by war, is a bit naive. It is basically saying that the 'winning' side gets the territory.
Absolutely agree with that last.
Your occasional reminder that a Referendums were held, and all areas of Ukraine, including Crimea, voted for independence from Russia. Such independence was recognised by Russia at the time when Ukraine became an independent sovereign state in 1991.
National turnout: 84.18% Vote for Independence: 92.3%
FPT for @Anabobazina on near 100% Japanese masking
"This is excruciatingly sad, if true. What is the driver for this? I assumed they would have similar immunity to us?"
+++
My guess is it is a mixture of a naturally quite introverted people, and also a highly conformist society. Japan is not a nation of rebels. Until they get at least 40% of people unmasking (my random guess) then no one will dare to copy
We saw it in the UK - and we are much more individualistic and bolshy. Recall the clap for carers, and the pressure to follow the crowd. Recall ALL THE BLOODY LOCKDOWNS
It is also certainly true. I have friends in Bangkok who tell me that 100% masking has only now begun to wane in BKK, and they say in HK, Taiwan and Japan it is still dreadful
it is indeed awful sad
Tokyo always had lots of masks before Covid, on the basis that they kept out pollution. There's a difference in cultural habit there - there's no iron law that wearing a mask when you go out must spoil your quality of life any more than, say, wearing a hat.
Relatedly - I know wfh is not equal lockdown, but this is quite interesting in offering some polling data on how much money people are willing to forego in order not to have to go out to work in an office:
This isn't the way everyone feels, but I do wonder if wfh isn't going to gradually become the norm for office work, incidentally easing the shortage of job applicants (because you can recruit internationally). Anecdotally I know several organisations who are both struggling to recruit and losing staff because of a rigid policy requiring attendance in the office at least one day a week. It's only partly the appeal of being in your chosen home surroundings and not having to commute, but also the opportunity to move somewhere cheaper so your perhaps spartan home surroundings actually get BETTER.
I'd require extra money in order to WFH.
The cost of the extra 200 sq foot or so of my home that my employer is now colonising in order to turn into their office space.
Plus the cost of heating, electricity etc.
People willing to take a pay cut to WFH are literally paying their employer to work. Suckers.
The answer is to make offices better. End open plan battery hen cages, give people privacy and space. I don't think its offices people hate, its the cramped, dehumanising, zero-privacy failed open plan experiment that people hate. When people say they like WFH, what they mean is they like having their own space and a bit of privacy.
I'd still expect my employer to pay for that, though, if they're using part of my house as their office space.
Good luck with that, especially if your WFH is voluntary (or "voluntary").
Had this conversation with a recruiter a few months ago.
"And the best part is, this is a WFH job!" "Great, how much extra are they going to pay me?" "Huh?" "How much extra? For the rental of part of my home as their office space." "Uhhh.... But it's work from home!" "I know. How much extra do I get from my employer in rent for turning parts of my home into their office?" "Uhhh....."
Needless to say I didn't go for the job...
I despised WFH when it was mandated by lockdown. It obliterated any sense of being part of a team, made it easy for my manager to cut me out of the loop and control access to information (i.e. keep me from knowing what was really going on), favoured those who were part of the "in" group and god knows how new people were onboarded/upskilled. When given the ability to pick team members I chose people I knew from pre-lockdown times, not faces on a screen I'd never met and couldn't trust.
I can understand people WFH a day or two a week, but having no real life interaction, ever, with the people you're expected to work with day in day out dehumanises us all and turns us into cogs in a machine. No longer a person, just a face on a screen.
I have worked from home for years - since long before the pandemic. I do one week every 6 or 8 up in Aberdeen to catch up with people and otherwise everything is online. When most of your team is 120 miles offshore in the middle of the North Sea, what difference does it make if you talk to them from Aberdeen or rural Lincolnshire? We are far more responsive being online rather than face to face given the job is 24/7 and it means, for example, that I will be able to have Christmas at home rather than stuck in a hotel and office 350 miles from my family and yet still run the drilling operations on Christmas Day just as I do the whole of the rest of the year.
The world of work has changed (and for the better) and people need to change with it.
It's different for different jobs.
My job has two elements - dealing with customers and dealing with staff. The first of these it doesn't matter where it's done - it's all by phone or email anyway. But the latter is much less effective from 100+ miles away.
That's really interesting how different jobs/people prioritise interaction. I would deal with customers face to face, as that's where it most makes a difference to the relationship, and most staffing matters remotely.
We have a salesman who deals face to face with customers. Every once in a while I do myself, but that's really only a couple of times a year and so far at least I've always been able to arrange it with one of my semi-regular monthly-ish trips to London.
But we're in manufacturing, so there's something to physically see happening.
Makes sense. I'm in IT so you need to see the customer to make sure you understand what they want (and that they understand what you have agreed to do). Half the staff in IT would prefer never to see another human being anyway (I joke, but not entirely).
That's the other problem the government has. Even without the strikes, things are visibly going badly in the health services.
£350m a week...
Has been provided and then some. Trouble is not just with money but with lack of foresight in training and retaining staff.
Yep, if you allow their wages to drop 19% in real terms compared to 2010, a lot of them seek more rewarding work elsewhere.
Last year there were over 60,000 applications to start nursing training in England and yet we only accepted 18,000 on to courses. This has been the way for years. Why? The applications are there - in spite of the issues with pay and conditions - and yet we are accepting less than 1/3rd of the applicants.
Be interested in more on those stats. 60k people or 60k applications? Most applicants would make multiple applications, afterall. For those not accepted on to courses, what did they do - did they have multiple applications and choose another path. Overall - was it down to a lack of capacity, lack of quality in the applicants or many good applicants ultimately choosing other things? Each points to a different solution (increase capacity; improve primary/secondary education AND/OR attract more high quality applicants; make nursing more attractive).
It is my understanding that all healthcare degrees are over subscribed - that there are far more applicants than places for degrees to become doctors and nurses.
This isn’t terribly surprising. All the highly rated degree courses are over subscribed.
And healthcare is an area where there is a deep, worldwide shortage of personnel that looks likely to persist through our life times. Despite massive increases in training, the increasing standards living in India, China and elsewhere mean that demand for medical staff is increasing faster.
Meanwhile, despite the PB scrimmage, the number of nurses in the NHS has been steadily increasing for the last 10 years.
"If the pre-war dividing line between Ukraine and Russia cannot be achieved by combat or by negotiation, recourse to the principle of self-determination could be explored. Internationally supervised referendums concerning self-determination could be applied to particularly divisive territories".
There's even some AI:
"As the world’s leaders strive to end the war in which two nuclear powers contest a conventionally armed country, they should also reflect on the impact on this conflict and on long-term strategy of incipient high–technology and artificial intelligence. Auto-nomous weapons already exist, capable of defining, assessing and targeting their own perceived threats and thus in a position to start their own war.
Once the line into this realm is crossed and hi-tech becomes standard weaponry – and computers become the principal executors of strategy – the world will find itself in a condition for which as yet it has no established concept. How can leaders exercise control when computers prescribe strategic instructions on a scale and in a manner that inherently limits and threatens human input? How can civilisation be preserved amid such a maelstrom of conflicting information, perceptions and destructive capabilities?
...and a veiled reference to as yet undisclosed "discoveries".
"No theory for this encroaching world yet exists, and consultative efforts on this subject have yet to evolve – perhaps because meaningful negotiations might disclose new discoveries, and that disclosure itself constitutes a risk for the future."
That reads like a number of articles I’ve read by people who try and use the “scare” of some new technology, to reinforce their existing worldview. Without actually understanding what they are talking about.
It all comes down to - how could you trust Poo Tin and his chums in any deal?
Personally I would sell* Ukraine nuclear weapons, as a start. But I get the impression you might not like that.
*too right. At a good price, on HP. A great big Union Jack on each and every one.
I am all for self-determination. But the idea that meaningful referendums can be held at gunpoint, or after massive population changes caused by war, is a bit naive. It is basically saying that the 'winning' side gets the territory.
Absolutely agree with that last.
Your occasional reminder that a Referendums were held, and all areas of Ukraine, including Crimea, voted for independence from Russia. Such independence was recognised by Russia at the time when Ukraine became an independent sovereign state in 1991.
National turnout: 84.18% Vote for Independence: 92.3%
FPT for @Anabobazina on near 100% Japanese masking
"This is excruciatingly sad, if true. What is the driver for this? I assumed they would have similar immunity to us?"
+++
My guess is it is a mixture of a naturally quite introverted people, and also a highly conformist society. Japan is not a nation of rebels. Until they get at least 40% of people unmasking (my random guess) then no one will dare to copy
We saw it in the UK - and we are much more individualistic and bolshy. Recall the clap for carers, and the pressure to follow the crowd. Recall ALL THE BLOODY LOCKDOWNS
It is also certainly true. I have friends in Bangkok who tell me that 100% masking has only now begun to wane in BKK, and they say in HK, Taiwan and Japan it is still dreadful
it is indeed awful sad
Tokyo always had lots of masks before Covid, on the basis that they kept out pollution. There's a difference in cultural habit there - there's no iron law that wearing a mask when you go out must spoil your quality of life any more than, say, wearing a hat.
Relatedly - I know wfh is not equal lockdown, but this is quite interesting in offering some polling data on how much money people are willing to forego in order not to have to go out to work in an office:
This isn't the way everyone feels, but I do wonder if wfh isn't going to gradually become the norm for office work, incidentally easing the shortage of job applicants (because you can recruit internationally). Anecdotally I know several organisations who are both struggling to recruit and losing staff because of a rigid policy requiring attendance in the office at least one day a week. It's only partly the appeal of being in your chosen home surroundings and not having to commute, but also the opportunity to move somewhere cheaper so your perhaps spartan home surroundings actually get BETTER.
I'd require extra money in order to WFH.
The cost of the extra 200 sq foot or so of my home that my employer is now colonising in order to turn into their office space.
Plus the cost of heating, electricity etc.
People willing to take a pay cut to WFH are literally paying their employer to work. Suckers.
The answer is to make offices better. End open plan battery hen cages, give people privacy and space. I don't think its offices people hate, its the cramped, dehumanising, zero-privacy failed open plan experiment that people hate. When people say they like WFH, what they mean is they like having their own space and a bit of privacy.
I'd still expect my employer to pay for that, though, if they're using part of my house as their office space.
Good luck with that, especially if your WFH is voluntary (or "voluntary").
Had this conversation with a recruiter a few months ago.
"And the best part is, this is a WFH job!" "Great, how much extra are they going to pay me?" "Huh?" "How much extra? For the rental of part of my home as their office space." "Uhhh.... But it's work from home!" "I know. How much extra do I get from my employer in rent for turning parts of my home into their office?" "Uhhh....."
Needless to say I didn't go for the job...
I despised WFH when it was mandated by lockdown. It obliterated any sense of being part of a team, made it easy for my manager to cut me out of the loop and control access to information (i.e. keep me from knowing what was really going on), favoured those who were part of the "in" group and god knows how new people were onboarded/upskilled. When given the ability to pick team members I chose people I knew from pre-lockdown times, not faces on a screen I'd never met and couldn't trust.
I can understand people WFH a day or two a week, but having no real life interaction, ever, with the people you're expected to work with day in day out dehumanises us all and turns us into cogs in a machine. No longer a person, just a face on a screen.
I have worked from home for years - since long before the pandemic. I do one week every 6 or 8 up in Aberdeen to catch up with people and otherwise everything is online. When most of your team is 120 miles offshore in the middle of the North Sea, what difference does it make if you talk to them from Aberdeen or rural Lincolnshire? We are far more responsive being online rather than face to face given the job is 24/7 and it means, for example, that I will be able to have Christmas at home rather than stuck in a hotel and office 350 miles from my family and yet still run the drilling operations on Christmas Day just as I do the whole of the rest of the year.
The world of work has changed (and for the better) and people need to change with it.
It's different for different jobs.
My job has two elements - dealing with customers and dealing with staff. The first of these it doesn't matter where it's done - it's all by phone or email anyway. But the latter is much less effective from 100+ miles away.
That's really interesting how different jobs/people prioritise interaction. I would deal with customers face to face, as that's where it most makes a difference to the relationship, and most staffing matters remotely.
We have a salesman who deals face to face with customers. Every once in a while I do myself, but that's really only a couple of times a year and so far at least I've always been able to arrange it with one of my semi-regular monthly-ish trips to London.
But we're in manufacturing, so there's something to physically see happening.
Makes sense. I'm in IT so you need to see the customer to make sure you understand what they want (and that they understand what you have agreed to do). Half the staff in IT would prefer never to see another human being anyway (I joke, but not entirely).
Suella Braverman confirms that the Home Office is considering using cruise ships to accommodate asylum seekers.
She tells @LordsJHACom: "We are in discussions with a wide variety of providers... everything is still on the table, and nothing is excluded." https://bit.ly/3VnV2go
Morning all! On topic I cannot see a winning outcome either for the Tories or for their remaining desperate shills like the Daily Mail. Of all the groups they could attack, nurses is worses. They are not going to persuade people that the nurses are some militant commie group trying to bring down the country. Nor that the unaffiliated RCN is Labour's puppetmaster. Nor that refusal to negotiate is them being reasonable.
So ultimately the government will back down and will lose. And in all the time it sit there sniffily attacking the perfidious NHS heroes it provides succour to the unions who really are trying to bring down the country.
What they should have done was agreed to negotiate, avoided the strikes completely, and quietly reached a compromise whilst contrasting the heroic nurses against the evil train people. Instead we have this. Sunak is a spanner.
Same goes for the ambulance drivers. They are going out of their way to try and make sure that they don't end up killing people (for obvious reasons both humanitarian and public relations) and all the Trusts/Unions have procedures in place where they can ask for staff from the picket line if there are emergency cases to be answered.
These are not militant, politically motivated actions, they are a cry for help. I just don't see any way that Sunak wins, all the more so if he does 'win' in the dispute. Not least because he will draw exactly the wrong conclusion from such a 'victory'.
Nobody is going to "win", least of all the taxpayer and the patient. The reality is that the NHS is an anachronism. It is a system that has evolved to favour the vested interests rather than the patient. The best way to reward the staff would be to first completely decentralise all of it. Sadly this will never happen as there are still plenty of gullible fools who really believe it is "the envy of the world".
The NHS used to be the "envy of the world" and it still was at the end of the last Labour government when public satisfaction with the NHS had reached an all time record high. Compare and contrast, 12 years on.
Essentially it is down to cash. Spending on health as a proportion of GDP is the key measure. We have always had health on the cheap in the UK, because the health service is relatively efficient especially compared to private and insurance based systems. The gap between the UK and other developed countries did narrow slightly with the investment under Labour, but spending on health in the UK has fallen behind badly since then. The cash simply hasn't been there to meet the rising demand of an ageing population.
Which begs the question as to where the cash is going to come from.
I suspect the answer is higher tax on the middle class, since that's the only way of raising significant new revenue.
The brave decision would be to extend NI to all ages and tap the over 65s, particularly given it's largely for their benefit.
It's the reason why, much a I hate the voting system with its false majorities, the political situation argues for a new government with a big mandate to take the bold but necessary decisions early in its first term - those that there is no chance the current tired, discredited lot can attempt, with their poliitical capital all wasted away by the clown and the lunatic.
The problem is what confidence can we have that, once elected, Starmer will go into the phonebox and come out with a new set of clothes?
We can't.
I don't think Starmer is capable of this brave and visionary thinking - with the leadership to sell it- and I think what's most likely is he just tactically triangulates and then administers government in a fairly competent way, whilst throwing some chunks of red meat to his base.
Which would be a distinct improvement on the current s**tshow, whilst leaving the underlying problems we face mostly unresolved.
The "NHS was / is the envy of the world" is exactly the kind of thing I posted about yesterday.
It isn't, it wasn't e.g. in Europe, I have never met anybody who says if only we had the UK system. Most have some sort of insurance based system, with protections for those without employment. Other than I think Canada (and ask most Canadians and they ain't exactly happy with their system), no major nation has our system, nor desires to copy it. Does it mean its totally rubbish, no. By international comparisons, for the money, the NHS has done some things well, some things always struggled with (even when more money has been provided).
The core problem with such a massive centralised system, it is very unwieldy, making changes slow and very difficult (and making it such that a one sized fit all with a constraint that it might be free at the point of use come what may). Then you layer on top idiot politicians vs a system that has a inertia to any change.
The problem with narrative "its envy of the world" vs "only other option is US system / Tories with privatise it all" is that we don't actually get anywhere.
FPT for @Anabobazina on near 100% Japanese masking
"This is excruciatingly sad, if true. What is the driver for this? I assumed they would have similar immunity to us?"
+++
My guess is it is a mixture of a naturally quite introverted people, and also a highly conformist society. Japan is not a nation of rebels. Until they get at least 40% of people unmasking (my random guess) then no one will dare to copy
We saw it in the UK - and we are much more individualistic and bolshy. Recall the clap for carers, and the pressure to follow the crowd. Recall ALL THE BLOODY LOCKDOWNS
It is also certainly true. I have friends in Bangkok who tell me that 100% masking has only now begun to wane in BKK, and they say in HK, Taiwan and Japan it is still dreadful
it is indeed awful sad
Tokyo always had lots of masks before Covid, on the basis that they kept out pollution. There's a difference in cultural habit there - there's no iron law that wearing a mask when you go out must spoil your quality of life any more than, say, wearing a hat.
Relatedly - I know wfh is not equal lockdown, but this is quite interesting in offering some polling data on how much money people are willing to forego in order not to have to go out to work in an office:
This isn't the way everyone feels, but I do wonder if wfh isn't going to gradually become the norm for office work, incidentally easing the shortage of job applicants (because you can recruit internationally). Anecdotally I know several organisations who are both struggling to recruit and losing staff because of a rigid policy requiring attendance in the office at least one day a week. It's only partly the appeal of being in your chosen home surroundings and not having to commute, but also the opportunity to move somewhere cheaper so your perhaps spartan home surroundings actually get BETTER.
I'd require extra money in order to WFH.
The cost of the extra 200 sq foot or so of my home that my employer is now colonising in order to turn into their office space.
Plus the cost of heating, electricity etc.
People willing to take a pay cut to WFH are literally paying their employer to work. Suckers.
The answer is to make offices better. End open plan battery hen cages, give people privacy and space. I don't think its offices people hate, its the cramped, dehumanising, zero-privacy failed open plan experiment that people hate. When people say they like WFH, what they mean is they like having their own space and a bit of privacy.
I'd still expect my employer to pay for that, though, if they're using part of my house as their office space.
Good luck with that, especially if your WFH is voluntary (or "voluntary").
Had this conversation with a recruiter a few months ago.
"And the best part is, this is a WFH job!" "Great, how much extra are they going to pay me?" "Huh?" "How much extra? For the rental of part of my home as their office space." "Uhhh.... But it's work from home!" "I know. How much extra do I get from my employer in rent for turning parts of my home into their office?" "Uhhh....."
Needless to say I didn't go for the job...
I despised WFH when it was mandated by lockdown. It obliterated any sense of being part of a team, made it easy for my manager to cut me out of the loop and control access to information (i.e. keep me from knowing what was really going on), favoured those who were part of the "in" group and god knows how new people were onboarded/upskilled. When given the ability to pick team members I chose people I knew from pre-lockdown times, not faces on a screen I'd never met and couldn't trust.
I can understand people WFH a day or two a week, but having no real life interaction, ever, with the people you're expected to work with day in day out dehumanises us all and turns us into cogs in a machine. No longer a person, just a face on a screen.
I have worked from home for years - since long before the pandemic. I do one week every 6 or 8 up in Aberdeen to catch up with people and otherwise everything is online. When most of your team is 120 miles offshore in the middle of the North Sea, what difference does it make if you talk to them from Aberdeen or rural Lincolnshire? We are far more responsive being online rather than face to face given the job is 24/7 and it means, for example, that I will be able to have Christmas at home rather than stuck in a hotel and office 350 miles from my family and yet still run the drilling operations on Christmas Day just as I do the whole of the rest of the year.
The world of work has changed (and for the better) and people need to change with it.
It's different for different jobs.
My job has two elements - dealing with customers and dealing with staff. The first of these it doesn't matter where it's done - it's all by phone or email anyway. But the latter is much less effective from 100+ miles away.
That's really interesting how different jobs/people prioritise interaction. I would deal with customers face to face, as that's where it most makes a difference to the relationship, and most staffing matters remotely.
We have a salesman who deals face to face with customers. Every once in a while I do myself, but that's really only a couple of times a year and so far at least I've always been able to arrange it with one of my semi-regular monthly-ish trips to London.
But we're in manufacturing, so there's something to physically see happening.
Makes sense. I'm in IT so you need to see the customer to make sure you understand what they want (and that they understand what you have agreed to do). Half the staff in IT would prefer never to see another human being anyway (I joke, but not entirely).
Gurwinder is one of my favourite recent Twitter additions.
I like his latest tweet because I don't think I've seen this variation on the old "simple answers to complex problems" chestnut before.
"You can gauge someone's ignorance by the number of phenomena they explain with the same answer. Those who blame many different issues (e.g. war, poverty, pollution) on just 1 cause (e.g. capitalism) are recycling explanations because the demand for answers outstrips their supply."
We all do it. I have certainly indulged in the past regarding Brexit. I'd say it's sometimes ignorance, but often also a type of tribal double-think where deep down we know the Tories aren't completely to blame for raw sewage releases into rivers and Gordon Brown didn't cause the financial crisis, but we say it anyway.
And yet, just occasionally, there is an input into the system that has such systematic consequences that it is the answer to many different questions . The internet is a good example.
It’s this occasional truth that allows us to hold onto the delusion that our own hobby horse is at the root of all our ills. Just occasionally we might be right. Though almost certainly not when we think we are.
I am all for self-determination. But the idea that meaningful referendums can be held at gunpoint, or after massive population changes caused by war, is a bit naive. It is basically saying that the 'winning' side gets the territory.
Yes, as someone who sees a Ukraine deal ending with local referendums, I do agree this is a real problem. If France invades the Channel Islands, displacing half the population, and a lot of French people move in, who votes in any subsequent referendum? And does the answer change if the referendum is in 5 years? In 20? Palestine and the West Bank offer other examples to ponder.
I think I feel that displaced people need to be compensated lavishly to help them settle in their new home, but referendums should be of the people living in the area now. I'm not very interested in arguments about historical boundaries and who ceded what to whom in the past, de facto or de jure, even if it was by force. But as you say it tends to reward the "winning" side, and I'm not comfortable with that either.
Morning all! On topic I cannot see a winning outcome either for the Tories or for their remaining desperate shills like the Daily Mail. Of all the groups they could attack, nurses is worses. They are not going to persuade people that the nurses are some militant commie group trying to bring down the country. Nor that the unaffiliated RCN is Labour's puppetmaster. Nor that refusal to negotiate is them being reasonable.
So ultimately the government will back down and will lose. And in all the time it sit there sniffily attacking the perfidious NHS heroes it provides succour to the unions who really are trying to bring down the country.
What they should have done was agreed to negotiate, avoided the strikes completely, and quietly reached a compromise whilst contrasting the heroic nurses against the evil train people. Instead we have this. Sunak is a spanner.
Same goes for the ambulance drivers. They are going out of their way to try and make sure that they don't end up killing people (for obvious reasons both humanitarian and public relations) and all the Trusts/Unions have procedures in place where they can ask for staff from the picket line if there are emergency cases to be answered.
These are not militant, politically motivated actions, they are a cry for help. I just don't see any way that Sunak wins, all the more so if he does 'win' in the dispute. Not least because he will draw exactly the wrong conclusion from such a 'victory'.
Nobody is going to "win", least of all the taxpayer and the patient. The reality is that the NHS is an anachronism. It is a system that has evolved to favour the vested interests rather than the patient. The best way to reward the staff would be to first completely decentralise all of it. Sadly this will never happen as there are still plenty of gullible fools who really believe it is "the envy of the world".
The NHS used to be the "envy of the world" and it still was at the end of the last Labour government when public satisfaction with the NHS had reached an all time record high. Compare and contrast, 12 years on.
Essentially it is down to cash. Spending on health as a proportion of GDP is the key measure. We have always had health on the cheap in the UK, because the health service is relatively efficient especially compared to private and insurance based systems. The gap between the UK and other developed countries did narrow slightly with the investment under Labour, but spending on health in the UK has fallen behind badly since then. The cash simply hasn't been there to meet the rising demand of an ageing population.
The NHS was only "envy of the world" amongst those who had never experienced health systems elsewhere in Europe. Those of us who had didn't believe the hype then and certainly don't believe it now.
I thought the ‘free at the point of use’ was the unique thing about the NHS.
No, it isn’t.
To start with, it isn’t entirely free. Prescription charges, for example.
But in much of the developed world you get a lot medical treatment for the asking, without any insurance style excess payment.
Meanwhile, whilst the denizens of PB were telling each other whatever they had been telling each other for the previous X years, NHS England had quietly increased the number of nurses by 11% between Aug 2019 and Aug 2022.
From 287,458 in Aug 2019 to 319,616 in Aug 2022. FTE equivalent numbers for nurses and health visitors in NHS England.
That traditional point in any speakership when they move from self important twat in love with the sound of their own voice to actively sticking their oar in. Just a coincidence that his old dad is in the HoL I'm sure.
That traditional point in any speakership when they move from self important twat in love with the sound of their own voice to actively sticking their oar in. Just a coincidence that his old dad is in the HoL I'm sure.
There aren't many political issues where it's appropriate for the Speaker to have a public opinion, but this is one of them - it's literally his job to represent the interests of the Commons.
I am all for self-determination. But the idea that meaningful referendums can be held at gunpoint, or after massive population changes caused by war, is a bit naive. It is basically saying that the 'winning' side gets the territory.
Yes, as someone who sees a Ukraine deal ending with local referendums, I do agree this is a real problem. If France invades the Channel Islands, displacing half the population, and a lot of French people move in, who votes in any subsequent referendum? And does the answer change if the referendum is in 5 years? In 20? Palestine and the West Bank offer other examples to ponder.
I think I feel that displaced people need to be compensated lavishly to help them settle in their new home, but referendums should be of the people living in the area now. I'm not very interested in arguments about historical boundaries and who ceded what to whom in the past, de facto or de jure, even if it was by force. But as you say it tends to reward the "winning" side, and I'm not comfortable with that either.
So that’s all fine then.
Judging by the preparations being made and the chatter in Russian social media, the pro Russian population of Crimea will run like hell if/when the Ukrainians get there.
That traditional point in any speakership when they move from self important twat in love with the sound of their own voice to actively sticking their oar in. Just a coincidence that his old dad is in the HoL I'm sure.
There aren't many political issues where it's appropriate for the Speaker to have a public opinion, but this is one of them - it's literally his job to represent the interests of the Commons.
Just imagining the prolapsing if Bercow was still in charge and had made similar comments.
Of course the HoL is what a particular partisan wants it to be at any given time, ie they back the policies I support, a marvellous adornment to the mother of parliaments, they block the policies I support, an undemocratic, antedeluvian anomaly. See also parties packing it with their own supporters. Thank feck the party I vote for won't touch it with a shitty stick.
That traditional point in any speakership when they move from self important twat in love with the sound of their own voice to actively sticking their oar in. Just a coincidence that his old dad is in the HoL I'm sure.
There aren't many political issues where it's appropriate for the Speaker to have a public opinion, but this is one of them - it's literally his job to represent the interests of the Commons.
It's worth repeating my comment from last night again.
We really should decide what the purpose of the House of Lords is / should be before deciding how it's members are selected.
The Speaker is right that changing how it's selected will fundamentally change the relationship between the Commons and the Lords and probably not in a good way.
That traditional point in any speakership when they move from self important twat in love with the sound of their own voice to actively sticking their oar in. Just a coincidence that his old dad is in the HoL I'm sure.
That traditional point in any speakership when they move from self important twat in love with the sound of their own voice to actively sticking their oar in. Just a coincidence that his old dad is in the HoL I'm sure.
There aren't many political issues where it's appropriate for the Speaker to have a public opinion, but this is one of them - it's literally his job to represent the interests of the Commons.
Just imagining the prolapsing if Bercow was still in charge and had made similar comments.
Sure. But Bercow had a long history of interfering where he shouldn't.
Morning all! On topic I cannot see a winning outcome either for the Tories or for their remaining desperate shills like the Daily Mail. Of all the groups they could attack, nurses is worses. They are not going to persuade people that the nurses are some militant commie group trying to bring down the country. Nor that the unaffiliated RCN is Labour's puppetmaster. Nor that refusal to negotiate is them being reasonable.
So ultimately the government will back down and will lose. And in all the time it sit there sniffily attacking the perfidious NHS heroes it provides succour to the unions who really are trying to bring down the country.
What they should have done was agreed to negotiate, avoided the strikes completely, and quietly reached a compromise whilst contrasting the heroic nurses against the evil train people. Instead we have this. Sunak is a spanner.
Same goes for the ambulance drivers. They are going out of their way to try and make sure that they don't end up killing people (for obvious reasons both humanitarian and public relations) and all the Trusts/Unions have procedures in place where they can ask for staff from the picket line if there are emergency cases to be answered.
These are not militant, politically motivated actions, they are a cry for help. I just don't see any way that Sunak wins, all the more so if he does 'win' in the dispute. Not least because he will draw exactly the wrong conclusion from such a 'victory'.
Nobody is going to "win", least of all the taxpayer and the patient. The reality is that the NHS is an anachronism. It is a system that has evolved to favour the vested interests rather than the patient. The best way to reward the staff would be to first completely decentralise all of it. Sadly this will never happen as there are still plenty of gullible fools who really believe it is "the envy of the world".
The NHS used to be the "envy of the world" and it still was at the end of the last Labour government when public satisfaction with the NHS had reached an all time record high. Compare and contrast, 12 years on.
Essentially it is down to cash. Spending on health as a proportion of GDP is the key measure. We have always had health on the cheap in the UK, because the health service is relatively efficient especially compared to private and insurance based systems. The gap between the UK and other developed countries did narrow slightly with the investment under Labour, but spending on health in the UK has fallen behind badly since then. The cash simply hasn't been there to meet the rising demand of an ageing population.
The NHS was only "envy of the world" amongst those who had never experienced health systems elsewhere in Europe. Those of us who had didn't believe the hype then and certainly don't believe it now.
I thought the ‘free at the point of use’ was the unique thing about the NHS.
No, it isn’t.
To start with, it isn’t entirely free. Prescription charges, for example.
But in much of the developed world you get a lot medical treatment for the asking, without any insurance style excess payment.
Meanwhile, whilst the denizens of PB were telling each other whatever they had been telling each other for the previous X years, NHS England had quietly increased the number of nurses by 11% between Aug 2019 and Aug 2022.
From 287,458 in Aug 2019 to 319,616 in Aug 2022. FTE equivalent numbers for nurses and health visitors in NHS England.
Before anyone asks, Doctors are up by 13% over the same period. And it's a very nice interactive tool.
On the headline numbers it looks like a sticky wicket for the nursing unions.
I have no idea what the numbers are for SWNI, or whether they publish any timely or relevant data.
It's sunny; I need to go on the roof an investigate a suspicious sounding scratching noise heard last night.
Have a nice day, all.
Please stop with those ugly fact things. They very rudely upset prejudices, many of which are very dear to the hearts of those who hold them.
I recall that in the first few days of Johnson becoming prime minister his leading the cabinet in a literal chant of x more medics and x more police (is that right) was commented on here.
Morning all! On topic I cannot see a winning outcome either for the Tories or for their remaining desperate shills like the Daily Mail. Of all the groups they could attack, nurses is worses. They are not going to persuade people that the nurses are some militant commie group trying to bring down the country. Nor that the unaffiliated RCN is Labour's puppetmaster. Nor that refusal to negotiate is them being reasonable.
So ultimately the government will back down and will lose. And in all the time it sit there sniffily attacking the perfidious NHS heroes it provides succour to the unions who really are trying to bring down the country.
What they should have done was agreed to negotiate, avoided the strikes completely, and quietly reached a compromise whilst contrasting the heroic nurses against the evil train people. Instead we have this. Sunak is a spanner.
Same goes for the ambulance drivers. They are going out of their way to try and make sure that they don't end up killing people (for obvious reasons both humanitarian and public relations) and all the Trusts/Unions have procedures in place where they can ask for staff from the picket line if there are emergency cases to be answered.
These are not militant, politically motivated actions, they are a cry for help. I just don't see any way that Sunak wins, all the more so if he does 'win' in the dispute. Not least because he will draw exactly the wrong conclusion from such a 'victory'.
Nobody is going to "win", least of all the taxpayer and the patient. The reality is that the NHS is an anachronism. It is a system that has evolved to favour the vested interests rather than the patient. The best way to reward the staff would be to first completely decentralise all of it. Sadly this will never happen as there are still plenty of gullible fools who really believe it is "the envy of the world".
The NHS used to be the "envy of the world" and it still was at the end of the last Labour government when public satisfaction with the NHS had reached an all time record high. Compare and contrast, 12 years on.
Essentially it is down to cash. Spending on health as a proportion of GDP is the key measure. We have always had health on the cheap in the UK, because the health service is relatively efficient especially compared to private and insurance based systems. The gap between the UK and other developed countries did narrow slightly with the investment under Labour, but spending on health in the UK has fallen behind badly since then. The cash simply hasn't been there to meet the rising demand of an ageing population.
The NHS was only "envy of the world" amongst those who had never experienced health systems elsewhere in Europe. Those of us who had didn't believe the hype then and certainly don't believe it now.
I thought the ‘free at the point of use’ was the unique thing about the NHS.
No, it isn’t.
To start with, it isn’t entirely free. Prescription charges, for example.
But in much of the developed world you get a lot medical treatment for the asking, without any insurance style excess payment.
Meanwhile, whilst the denizens of PB were telling each other whatever they had been telling each other for the previous X years, NHS England had quietly increased the number of nurses by 11% between Aug 2019 and Aug 2022.
From 287,458 in Aug 2019 to 319,616 in Aug 2022. FTE equivalent numbers for nurses and health visitors in NHS England.
Before anyone asks, Doctors are up by 13% over the same period. And it's a very nice interactive tool.
On the headline numbers it looks like a sticky wicket for the nursing unions.
I have no idea what the numbers are for SWNI, or whether they publish any timely or relevant data.
It's sunny; I need to go on the roof an investigate a suspicious sounding scratching noise heard last night.
Have a nice day, all.
Which opens up a very interesting question - how if staff numbers are rising (and elsewhere there is evidence that there are more GP appointments than ever before) is the NHS in such a mess.
I am all for self-determination. But the idea that meaningful referendums can be held at gunpoint, or after massive population changes caused by war, is a bit naive. It is basically saying that the 'winning' side gets the territory.
Yes, as someone who sees a Ukraine deal ending with local referendums, I do agree this is a real problem. If France invades the Channel Islands, displacing half the population, and a lot of French people move in, who votes in any subsequent referendum? And does the answer change if the referendum is in 5 years? In 20? Palestine and the West Bank offer other examples to ponder.
I think I feel that displaced people need to be compensated lavishly to help them settle in their new home, but referendums should be of the people living in the area now. I'm not very interested in arguments about historical boundaries and who ceded what to whom in the past, de facto or de jure, even if it was by force. But as you say it tends to reward the "winning" side, and I'm not comfortable with that either.
So that’s all fine then.
Judging by the preparations being made and the chatter in Russian social media, the pro Russian population of Crimea will run like hell if/when the Ukrainians get there.
That will surely be just another wave. The number who have gone from Ukraine to Russia is estimated at something like 2.8 million by the UN. https://data.unhcr.org/en/situations/ukraine
AFAICS we can have no idea how many of those are fleeing the legitimate Ukraine Govt, how many have been forcibly deported Stalin-style by Putin (who is following the Stalin playbook), how many are kidnapped children given to pro-Putin parents China CCP style, how many have gone via Russia to escape to Finland etc.
Plus how numbers have changed because many are dead because the armed forces of Russia or proxies have killed them, how many are dead having been pressganged by Kadyrov and friends and killed by UA armed forces, how many have fled to the rest of UA or Western Europe and so on and so on.
So I agree post-war referenda are ridiculous. And I am inclined to return to the referendum that *was* representative.
I am all for self-determination. But the idea that meaningful referendums can be held at gunpoint, or after massive population changes caused by war, is a bit naive. It is basically saying that the 'winning' side gets the territory.
Yes, as someone who sees a Ukraine deal ending with local referendums, I do agree this is a real problem. If France invades the Channel Islands, displacing half the population, and a lot of French people move in, who votes in any subsequent referendum? And does the answer change if the referendum is in 5 years? In 20? Palestine and the West Bank offer other examples to ponder.
I think I feel that displaced people need to be compensated lavishly to help them settle in their new home, but referendums should be of the people living in the area now. I'm not very interested in arguments about historical boundaries and who ceded what to whom in the past, de facto or de jure, even if it was by force. But as you say it tends to reward the "winning" side, and I'm not comfortable with that either.
It’s pretty simple - I hold a referendum. Just me and the
That traditional point in any speakership when they move from self important twat in love with the sound of their own voice to actively sticking their oar in. Just a coincidence that his old dad is in the HoL I'm sure.
There aren't many political issues where it's appropriate for the Speaker to have a public opinion, but this is one of them - it's literally his job to represent the interests of the Commons.
Just imagining the prolapsing if Bercow was still in charge and had made similar comments.
Sure. But Bercow had a long history of interfering where he shouldn't.
And it’s not as if this point hasn’t been raised before - an elected second chamber will, instinctively, have the mandate to challenge the Commons. At the best this ends up with a reduction on power of the commons. At worst we end up with a U.S. style grid lock between the two chambers fighting each other.
An elected second chamber and its powers who have to be carefully designed from the ground up. And provision made for adjustments in light of how it works.
Simply giving the Lords powers to an elected chamber would be a disaster, I suspect.
That traditional point in any speakership when they move from self important twat in love with the sound of their own voice to actively sticking their oar in. Just a coincidence that his old dad is in the HoL I'm sure.
There aren't many political issues where it's appropriate for the Speaker to have a public opinion, but this is one of them - it's literally his job to represent the interests of the Commons.
It's worth repeating my comment from last night again.
We really should decide what the purpose of the House of Lords is / should be before deciding how it's members are selected.
The Speaker is right that changing how it's selected will fundamentally change the relationship between the Commons and the Lords and probably not in a good way.
That’s why it should be indirectly elected by the devolved governments and local authorities (at risk of being a broken record on this front as I must post this every time the topic is broached).
That gives it a democratic element but without the directly-elected legitimacy to challenge the Commons.
That traditional point in any speakership when they move from self important twat in love with the sound of their own voice to actively sticking their oar in. Just a coincidence that his old dad is in the HoL I'm sure.
There aren't many political issues where it's appropriate for the Speaker to have a public opinion, but this is one of them - it's literally his job to represent the interests of the Commons.
It's worth repeating my comment from last night again.
We really should decide what the purpose of the House of Lords is / should be before deciding how it's members are selected.
The Speaker is right that changing how it's selected will fundamentally change the relationship between the Commons and the Lords and probably not in a good way.
Indeed - and not in isolation. It necessarily feeds into questions about how the Commons and government are elected.
FPT for @Anabobazina on near 100% Japanese masking
"This is excruciatingly sad, if true. What is the driver for this? I assumed they would have similar immunity to us?"
+++
My guess is it is a mixture of a naturally quite introverted people, and also a highly conformist society. Japan is not a nation of rebels. Until they get at least 40% of people unmasking (my random guess) then no one will dare to copy
We saw it in the UK - and we are much more individualistic and bolshy. Recall the clap for carers, and the pressure to follow the crowd. Recall ALL THE BLOODY LOCKDOWNS
It is also certainly true. I have friends in Bangkok who tell me that 100% masking has only now begun to wane in BKK, and they say in HK, Taiwan and Japan it is still dreadful
it is indeed awful sad
Tokyo always had lots of masks before Covid, on the basis that they kept out pollution. There's a difference in cultural habit there - there's no iron law that wearing a mask when you go out must spoil your quality of life any more than, say, wearing a hat.
Relatedly - I know wfh is not equal lockdown, but this is quite interesting in offering some polling data on how much money people are willing to forego in order not to have to go out to work in an office:
This isn't the way everyone feels, but I do wonder if wfh isn't going to gradually become the norm for office work, incidentally easing the shortage of job applicants (because you can recruit internationally). Anecdotally I know several organisations who are both struggling to recruit and losing staff because of a rigid policy requiring attendance in the office at least one day a week. It's only partly the appeal of being in your chosen home surroundings and not having to commute, but also the opportunity to move somewhere cheaper so your perhaps spartan home surroundings actually get BETTER.
I'd require extra money in order to WFH.
The cost of the extra 200 sq foot or so of my home that my employer is now colonising in order to turn into their office space.
Plus the cost of heating, electricity etc.
People willing to take a pay cut to WFH are literally paying their employer to work. Suckers.
The answer is to make offices better. End open plan battery hen cages, give people privacy and space. I don't think its offices people hate, its the cramped, dehumanising, zero-privacy failed open plan experiment that people hate. When people say they like WFH, what they mean is they like having their own space and a bit of privacy.
I'd still expect my employer to pay for that, though, if they're using part of my house as their office space.
Good luck with that, especially if your WFH is voluntary (or "voluntary").
Had this conversation with a recruiter a few months ago.
"And the best part is, this is a WFH job!" "Great, how much extra are they going to pay me?" "Huh?" "How much extra? For the rental of part of my home as their office space." "Uhhh.... But it's work from home!" "I know. How much extra do I get from my employer in rent for turning parts of my home into their office?" "Uhhh....."
Needless to say I didn't go for the job...
I despised WFH when it was mandated by lockdown. It obliterated any sense of being part of a team, made it easy for my manager to cut me out of the loop and control access to information (i.e. keep me from knowing what was really going on), favoured those who were part of the "in" group and god knows how new people were onboarded/upskilled. When given the ability to pick team members I chose people I knew from pre-lockdown times, not faces on a screen I'd never met and couldn't trust.
I can understand people WFH a day or two a week, but having no real life interaction, ever, with the people you're expected to work with day in day out dehumanises us all and turns us into cogs in a machine. No longer a person, just a face on a screen.
I have worked from home for years - since long before the pandemic. I do one week every 6 or 8 up in Aberdeen to catch up with people and otherwise everything is online. When most of your team is 120 miles offshore in the middle of the North Sea, what difference does it make if you talk to them from Aberdeen or rural Lincolnshire? We are far more responsive being online rather than face to face given the job is 24/7 and it means, for example, that I will be able to have Christmas at home rather than stuck in a hotel and office 350 miles from my family and yet still run the drilling operations on Christmas Day just as I do the whole of the rest of the year.
The world of work has changed (and for the better) and people need to change with it.
It's different for different jobs.
My job has two elements - dealing with customers and dealing with staff. The first of these it doesn't matter where it's done - it's all by phone or email anyway. But the latter is much less effective from 100+ miles away.
Really? All you are telling me is that you have a long standing internal communication issue.
I’ve run projects remotely for years - there are times when I need to visit people but that’s because when a customer is paying £x00,000 for a team to do a project physically talking to the customer is very important.
No, it's intrinsic. To take one basic example, if we are waiting for a delivery of X, if I am in the office I can see when X arrives, and I know that if it hasn't arrived by a certain time I can chase the supplier and nobody else needs to be involved. WFH I'm relying on someone in the office doing that for me - which isn't a problem but it inevitably uses up some of their time when they could and should be doing something else.
What you described there is not dealing with staff it’s performing a goods inward task - which may or may not be the best use of your time.
When I'm WFH, it's dealing with staff.
There are other things, though - given that I'm more experienced than all the team, if I'm on site I can see that a problem is coming well before anyone else notices that it has happened. No amount of reporting is as good as the old Mark One Eyeball.
But that's because you are in manufacturing so need to be physically there to see what is happening.
I can do the same things remotely - just because I understand the software internals better than most so can equally highlight the problems far earlier than anyone else..
Morning all! On topic I cannot see a winning outcome either for the Tories or for their remaining desperate shills like the Daily Mail. Of all the groups they could attack, nurses is worses. They are not going to persuade people that the nurses are some militant commie group trying to bring down the country. Nor that the unaffiliated RCN is Labour's puppetmaster. Nor that refusal to negotiate is them being reasonable.
So ultimately the government will back down and will lose. And in all the time it sit there sniffily attacking the perfidious NHS heroes it provides succour to the unions who really are trying to bring down the country.
What they should have done was agreed to negotiate, avoided the strikes completely, and quietly reached a compromise whilst contrasting the heroic nurses against the evil train people. Instead we have this. Sunak is a spanner.
Same goes for the ambulance drivers. They are going out of their way to try and make sure that they don't end up killing people (for obvious reasons both humanitarian and public relations) and all the Trusts/Unions have procedures in place where they can ask for staff from the picket line if there are emergency cases to be answered.
These are not militant, politically motivated actions, they are a cry for help. I just don't see any way that Sunak wins, all the more so if he does 'win' in the dispute. Not least because he will draw exactly the wrong conclusion from such a 'victory'.
Nobody is going to "win", least of all the taxpayer and the patient. The reality is that the NHS is an anachronism. It is a system that has evolved to favour the vested interests rather than the patient. The best way to reward the staff would be to first completely decentralise all of it. Sadly this will never happen as there are still plenty of gullible fools who really believe it is "the envy of the world".
The NHS used to be the "envy of the world" and it still was at the end of the last Labour government when public satisfaction with the NHS had reached an all time record high. Compare and contrast, 12 years on.
Essentially it is down to cash. Spending on health as a proportion of GDP is the key measure. We have always had health on the cheap in the UK, because the health service is relatively efficient especially compared to private and insurance based systems. The gap between the UK and other developed countries did narrow slightly with the investment under Labour, but spending on health in the UK has fallen behind badly since then. The cash simply hasn't been there to meet the rising demand of an ageing population.
The NHS was only "envy of the world" amongst those who had never experienced health systems elsewhere in Europe. Those of us who had didn't believe the hype then and certainly don't believe it now.
I thought the ‘free at the point of use’ was the unique thing about the NHS.
No, it isn’t.
To start with, it isn’t entirely free. Prescription charges, for example.
But in much of the developed world you get a lot medical treatment for the asking, without any insurance style excess payment.
Meanwhile, whilst the denizens of PB were telling each other whatever they had been telling each other for the previous X years, NHS England had quietly increased the number of nurses by 11% between Aug 2019 and Aug 2022.
From 287,458 in Aug 2019 to 319,616 in Aug 2022. FTE equivalent numbers for nurses and health visitors in NHS England.
Before anyone asks, Doctors are up by 13% over the same period. And it's a very nice interactive tool.
On the headline numbers it looks like a sticky wicket for the nursing unions.
I have no idea what the numbers are for SWNI, or whether they publish any timely or relevant data.
It's sunny; I need to go on the roof an investigate a suspicious sounding scratching noise heard last night.
Have a nice day, all.
Which opens up a very interesting question - how if staff numbers are rising (and elsewhere there is evidence that there are more GP appointments than ever before) is the NHS in such a mess.
Particularly given that the number of staff vacancies is also increasing. Currently there are 47,000 nurse vacancies in England - the highest on record and equivalent to 13% of the workforce. Numbers for GP vacancies are similar - around 12% of the workforce and predicted to rise to 25% by the end of the decade. .
That traditional point in any speakership when they move from self important twat in love with the sound of their own voice to actively sticking their oar in. Just a coincidence that his old dad is in the HoL I'm sure.
There aren't many political issues where it's appropriate for the Speaker to have a public opinion, but this is one of them - it's literally his job to represent the interests of the Commons.
It's worth repeating my comment from last night again.
We really should decide what the purpose of the House of Lords is / should be before deciding how it's members are selected.
The Speaker is right that changing how it's selected will fundamentally change the relationship between the Commons and the Lords and probably not in a good way.
Indeed. If Starmer replaced the Lords with a fully elected Upper House in his first term as PM and elections were held midterm, as the old European elections were, it is very likely the Conservatives would win control of the Upper House on US style midterm protest vote. Even Hague won the 1999 European elections after all in Blair's first term.
The Conservatives would then use their new mandate to try and block and amend as much legislation coming from the Labour dominated House of Commons for as long as possible.
Better would be to still have a half appointed Upper House with half elected, for example by the English regions, Scotland, Wales and NI
Morning all! On topic I cannot see a winning outcome either for the Tories or for their remaining desperate shills like the Daily Mail. Of all the groups they could attack, nurses is worses. They are not going to persuade people that the nurses are some militant commie group trying to bring down the country. Nor that the unaffiliated RCN is Labour's puppetmaster. Nor that refusal to negotiate is them being reasonable.
So ultimately the government will back down and will lose. And in all the time it sit there sniffily attacking the perfidious NHS heroes it provides succour to the unions who really are trying to bring down the country.
What they should have done was agreed to negotiate, avoided the strikes completely, and quietly reached a compromise whilst contrasting the heroic nurses against the evil train people. Instead we have this. Sunak is a spanner.
Same goes for the ambulance drivers. They are going out of their way to try and make sure that they don't end up killing people (for obvious reasons both humanitarian and public relations) and all the Trusts/Unions have procedures in place where they can ask for staff from the picket line if there are emergency cases to be answered.
These are not militant, politically motivated actions, they are a cry for help. I just don't see any way that Sunak wins, all the more so if he does 'win' in the dispute. Not least because he will draw exactly the wrong conclusion from such a 'victory'.
Nobody is going to "win", least of all the taxpayer and the patient. The reality is that the NHS is an anachronism. It is a system that has evolved to favour the vested interests rather than the patient. The best way to reward the staff would be to first completely decentralise all of it. Sadly this will never happen as there are still plenty of gullible fools who really believe it is "the envy of the world".
The NHS used to be the "envy of the world" and it still was at the end of the last Labour government when public satisfaction with the NHS had reached an all time record high. Compare and contrast, 12 years on.
Essentially it is down to cash. Spending on health as a proportion of GDP is the key measure. We have always had health on the cheap in the UK, because the health service is relatively efficient especially compared to private and insurance based systems. The gap between the UK and other developed countries did narrow slightly with the investment under Labour, but spending on health in the UK has fallen behind badly since then. The cash simply hasn't been there to meet the rising demand of an ageing population.
The NHS was only "envy of the world" amongst those who had never experienced health systems elsewhere in Europe. Those of us who had didn't believe the hype then and certainly don't believe it now.
I thought the ‘free at the point of use’ was the unique thing about the NHS.
No, it isn’t.
To start with, it isn’t entirely free. Prescription charges, for example.
But in much of the developed world you get a lot medical treatment for the asking, without any insurance style excess payment.
Meanwhile, whilst the denizens of PB were telling each other whatever they had been telling each other for the previous X years, NHS England had quietly increased the number of nurses by 11% between Aug 2019 and Aug 2022.
From 287,458 in Aug 2019 to 319,616 in Aug 2022. FTE equivalent numbers for nurses and health visitors in NHS England.
Before anyone asks, Doctors are up by 13% over the same period. And it's a very nice interactive tool.
On the headline numbers it looks like a sticky wicket for the nursing unions.
I have no idea what the numbers are for SWNI, or whether they publish any timely or relevant data.
It's sunny; I need to go on the roof an investigate a suspicious sounding scratching noise heard last night.
Have a nice day, all.
Which opens up a very interesting question - how if staff numbers are rising (and elsewhere there is evidence that there are more GP appointments than ever before) is the NHS in such a mess.
Particularly given that the number of staff vacancies is also increasing. Currently there are 47,000 nurse vacancies in England - the highest on record and equivalent to 13% of the workforce. Numbers for GP vacancies are similar - around 12% of the workforce and predicted to rise to 25% by the end of the decade. .
GPs are hardly pay constrained. And it seems quite cushty to me compared to being a hospital doctor in all honesty.
That traditional point in any speakership when they move from self important twat in love with the sound of their own voice to actively sticking their oar in. Just a coincidence that his old dad is in the HoL I'm sure.
There aren't many political issues where it's appropriate for the Speaker to have a public opinion, but this is one of them - it's literally his job to represent the interests of the Commons.
I'd say listen to what he says. It seems like a series of statements of the blatantly obvious.
He's telling Starmer to make sure he thinks his proposals through, rather than jerk his knee like an overreacting fool then refuse to back down out of obstinacy.
That traditional point in any speakership when they move from self important twat in love with the sound of their own voice to actively sticking their oar in. Just a coincidence that his old dad is in the HoL I'm sure.
There aren't many political issues where it's appropriate for the Speaker to have a public opinion, but this is one of them - it's literally his job to represent the interests of the Commons.
It's worth repeating my comment from last night again.
We really should decide what the purpose of the House of Lords is / should be before deciding how it's members are selected.
The Speaker is right that changing how it's selected will fundamentally change the relationship between the Commons and the Lords and probably not in a good way.
Fear not, the chances of SKS and co shaking up the system are minimal. In fact I'm guessing the larger the majority he gets, the more comfortable he'll be with maintaining the status quo.
That traditional point in any speakership when they move from self important twat in love with the sound of their own voice to actively sticking their oar in. Just a coincidence that his old dad is in the HoL I'm sure.
There aren't many political issues where it's appropriate for the Speaker to have a public opinion, but this is one of them - it's literally his job to represent the interests of the Commons.
It is to protect the constitutional rights of the commons, whatever those happen at the time to be.
And it’s not like the proposal is to abolish the Lords by decree under a Royal Prerogative, it will be done,, if its done at all, and its successor established, by the Commons anyway.
Morning all! On topic I cannot see a winning outcome either for the Tories or for their remaining desperate shills like the Daily Mail. Of all the groups they could attack, nurses is worses. They are not going to persuade people that the nurses are some militant commie group trying to bring down the country. Nor that the unaffiliated RCN is Labour's puppetmaster. Nor that refusal to negotiate is them being reasonable.
So ultimately the government will back down and will lose. And in all the time it sit there sniffily attacking the perfidious NHS heroes it provides succour to the unions who really are trying to bring down the country.
What they should have done was agreed to negotiate, avoided the strikes completely, and quietly reached a compromise whilst contrasting the heroic nurses against the evil train people. Instead we have this. Sunak is a spanner.
Same goes for the ambulance drivers. They are going out of their way to try and make sure that they don't end up killing people (for obvious reasons both humanitarian and public relations) and all the Trusts/Unions have procedures in place where they can ask for staff from the picket line if there are emergency cases to be answered.
These are not militant, politically motivated actions, they are a cry for help. I just don't see any way that Sunak wins, all the more so if he does 'win' in the dispute. Not least because he will draw exactly the wrong conclusion from such a 'victory'.
Nobody is going to "win", least of all the taxpayer and the patient. The reality is that the NHS is an anachronism. It is a system that has evolved to favour the vested interests rather than the patient. The best way to reward the staff would be to first completely decentralise all of it. Sadly this will never happen as there are still plenty of gullible fools who really believe it is "the envy of the world".
The NHS used to be the "envy of the world" and it still was at the end of the last Labour government when public satisfaction with the NHS had reached an all time record high. Compare and contrast, 12 years on.
Essentially it is down to cash. Spending on health as a proportion of GDP is the key measure. We have always had health on the cheap in the UK, because the health service is relatively efficient especially compared to private and insurance based systems. The gap between the UK and other developed countries did narrow slightly with the investment under Labour, but spending on health in the UK has fallen behind badly since then. The cash simply hasn't been there to meet the rising demand of an ageing population.
The NHS was only "envy of the world" amongst those who had never experienced health systems elsewhere in Europe. Those of us who had didn't believe the hype then and certainly don't believe it now.
I thought the ‘free at the point of use’ was the unique thing about the NHS.
No, it isn’t.
To start with, it isn’t entirely free. Prescription charges, for example.
But in much of the developed world you get a lot medical treatment for the asking, without any insurance style excess payment.
Meanwhile, whilst the denizens of PB were telling each other whatever they had been telling each other for the previous X years, NHS England had quietly increased the number of nurses by 11% between Aug 2019 and Aug 2022.
From 287,458 in Aug 2019 to 319,616 in Aug 2022. FTE equivalent numbers for nurses and health visitors in NHS England.
Before anyone asks, Doctors are up by 13% over the same period. And it's a very nice interactive tool.
On the headline numbers it looks like a sticky wicket for the nursing unions.
I have no idea what the numbers are for SWNI, or whether they publish any timely or relevant data.
It's sunny; I need to go on the roof an investigate a suspicious sounding scratching noise heard last night.
Have a nice day, all.
Which opens up a very interesting question - how if staff numbers are rising (and elsewhere there is evidence that there are more GP appointments than ever before) is the NHS in such a mess.
Particularly given that the number of staff vacancies is also increasing. Currently there are 47,000 nurse vacancies in England - the highest on record and equivalent to 13% of the workforce. Numbers for GP vacancies are similar - around 12% of the workforce and predicted to rise to 25% by the end of the decade. .
GPs are hardly pay constrained. And it seems quite cushty to me compared to being a hospital doctor in all honesty.
I don't begin to understand the reasons for the shortages and it is not my job to solve them but clearly there is a massive issue and those who are supposed to understand these things are failing to address them.
So, Conservative legislator “Lady” (Michelle) Mone OBE is on an Alpine break is she? Nice work. I assume she’ll be in police custody by the end of the week.
I actually have no problem with you being repetitive on this one Dicky, if SNP, Lib Dem or Labour were responsible for something like this the Tory press and Tory party would be raging about it from Dawn to Dusk day in day out, repetitively - it’s no different than what you hear about in other countries around the world and conclude it’s a corrupt country, those in power merely using it to line the pockets of themselves, friends and supporters.
And one of the people accused is John Swinney, deputy First Minister, Minister for Education (in which role he makes Williamson look capable) and acting Minister of Finance.
Strangely, I haven’t seen much call from Stuart for him to be taken into police custody.
He may be useless but I have not seen proof that he diddled hundreds of millions of public money for chums as we see re the people in Stuart's post. Where does it say he made multi-millions for chums he introduced and agreed to ignore any process in place. Bit of hyperbole there and usual whine when they are caught grifting down south , point to some minor deal in Scotland and claim it si fine for the swindlers as some clown in Scotland made a bad decision.
FPT for @Anabobazina on near 100% Japanese masking
"This is excruciatingly sad, if true. What is the driver for this? I assumed they would have similar immunity to us?"
+++
My guess is it is a mixture of a naturally quite introverted people, and also a highly conformist society. Japan is not a nation of rebels. Until they get at least 40% of people unmasking (my random guess) then no one will dare to copy
We saw it in the UK - and we are much more individualistic and bolshy. Recall the clap for carers, and the pressure to follow the crowd. Recall ALL THE BLOODY LOCKDOWNS
It is also certainly true. I have friends in Bangkok who tell me that 100% masking has only now begun to wane in BKK, and they say in HK, Taiwan and Japan it is still dreadful
it is indeed awful sad
Tokyo always had lots of masks before Covid, on the basis that they kept out pollution. There's a difference in cultural habit there - there's no iron law that wearing a mask when you go out must spoil your quality of life any more than, say, wearing a hat.
Relatedly - I know wfh is not equal lockdown, but this is quite interesting in offering some polling data on how much money people are willing to forego in order not to have to go out to work in an office:
This isn't the way everyone feels, but I do wonder if wfh isn't going to gradually become the norm for office work, incidentally easing the shortage of job applicants (because you can recruit internationally). Anecdotally I know several organisations who are both struggling to recruit and losing staff because of a rigid policy requiring attendance in the office at least one day a week. It's only partly the appeal of being in your chosen home surroundings and not having to commute, but also the opportunity to move somewhere cheaper so your perhaps spartan home surroundings actually get BETTER.
I'd require extra money in order to WFH.
The cost of the extra 200 sq foot or so of my home that my employer is now colonising in order to turn into their office space.
Plus the cost of heating, electricity etc.
People willing to take a pay cut to WFH are literally paying their employer to work. Suckers.
The answer is to make offices better. End open plan battery hen cages, give people privacy and space. I don't think its offices people hate, its the cramped, dehumanising, zero-privacy failed open plan experiment that people hate. When people say they like WFH, what they mean is they like having their own space and a bit of privacy.
I'd still expect my employer to pay for that, though, if they're using part of my house as their office space.
Good luck with that, especially if your WFH is voluntary (or "voluntary").
Had this conversation with a recruiter a few months ago.
"And the best part is, this is a WFH job!" "Great, how much extra are they going to pay me?" "Huh?" "How much extra? For the rental of part of my home as their office space." "Uhhh.... But it's work from home!" "I know. How much extra do I get from my employer in rent for turning parts of my home into their office?" "Uhhh....."
Needless to say I didn't go for the job...
I despised WFH when it was mandated by lockdown. It obliterated any sense of being part of a team, made it easy for my manager to cut me out of the loop and control access to information (i.e. keep me from knowing what was really going on), favoured those who were part of the "in" group and god knows how new people were onboarded/upskilled. When given the ability to pick team members I chose people I knew from pre-lockdown times, not faces on a screen I'd never met and couldn't trust.
I can understand people WFH a day or two a week, but having no real life interaction, ever, with the people you're expected to work with day in day out dehumanises us all and turns us into cogs in a machine. No longer a person, just a face on a screen.
I have worked from home for years - since long before the pandemic. I do one week every 6 or 8 up in Aberdeen to catch up with people and otherwise everything is online. When most of your team is 120 miles offshore in the middle of the North Sea, what difference does it make if you talk to them from Aberdeen or rural Lincolnshire? We are far more responsive being online rather than face to face given the job is 24/7 and it means, for example, that I will be able to have Christmas at home rather than stuck in a hotel and office 350 miles from my family and yet still run the drilling operations on Christmas Day just as I do the whole of the rest of the year.
The world of work has changed (and for the better) and people need to change with it.
It's different for different jobs.
My job has two elements - dealing with customers and dealing with staff. The first of these it doesn't matter where it's done - it's all by phone or email anyway. But the latter is much less effective from 100+ miles away.
Really? All you are telling me is that you have a long standing internal communication issue.
I’ve run projects remotely for years - there are times when I need to visit people but that’s because when a customer is paying £x00,000 for a team to do a project physically talking to the customer is very important.
No, it's intrinsic. To take one basic example, if we are waiting for a delivery of X, if I am in the office I can see when X arrives, and I know that if it hasn't arrived by a certain time I can chase the supplier and nobody else needs to be involved. WFH I'm relying on someone in the office doing that for me - which isn't a problem but it inevitably uses up some of their time when they could and should be doing something else.
What you described there is not dealing with staff it’s performing a goods inward task - which may or may not be the best use of your time.
When I'm WFH, it's dealing with staff.
There are other things, though - given that I'm more experienced than all the team, if I'm on site I can see that a problem is coming well before anyone else notices that it has happened. No amount of reporting is as good as the old Mark One Eyeball.
But that's because you are in manufacturing so need to be physically there to see what is happening.
I can do the same things remotely - just because I understand the software internals better than most so can equally highlight the problems far earlier than anyone else..
Yes, that was exactly my point - it's different for different jobs.
I am all for self-determination. But the idea that meaningful referendums can be held at gunpoint, or after massive population changes caused by war, is a bit naive. It is basically saying that the 'winning' side gets the territory.
Yes, as someone who sees a Ukraine deal ending with local referendums, I do agree this is a real problem. If France invades the Channel Islands, displacing half the population, and a lot of French people move in, who votes in any subsequent referendum? And does the answer change if the referendum is in 5 years? In 20? Palestine and the West Bank offer other examples to ponder.
I think I feel that displaced people need to be compensated lavishly to help them settle in their new home, but referendums should be of the people living in the area now. I'm not very interested in arguments about historical boundaries and who ceded what to whom in the past, de facto or de jure, even if it was by force. But as you say it tends to reward the "winning" side, and I'm not comfortable with that either.
So that’s all fine then.
Judging by the preparations being made and the chatter in Russian social media, the pro Russian population of Crimea will run like hell if/when the Ukrainians get there.
That will surely be just another wave. The number who have gone from Ukraine to Russia is estimated at something like 2.8 million by the UN. https://data.unhcr.org/en/situations/ukraine
AFAICS we can have no idea how many of those are fleeing the legitimate Ukraine Govt, how many have been forcibly deported Stalin-style by Putin (who is following the Stalin playbook), how many are kidnapped children given to pro-Putin parents China CCP style, how many have gone via Russia to escape to Finland etc.
Plus how numbers have changed because many are dead because the armed forces of Russia or proxies have killed them, how many are dead having been pressganged by Kadyrov and friends and killed by UA armed forces, how many have fled to the rest of UA or Western Europe and so on and so on.
So I agree post-war referenda are ridiculous. And I am inclined to return to the referendum that *was* representative.
Apparently life in the Russian held territories is pretty shitty - literally run by warlords in “I steal what I like, when I see it” style borrowed from the lower quality films in the Expendables franchise.
So lots have left, if they can.
Talking of refugees, some of the first wave at my daughters school are beginning to go back, to Western Ukraine. When the refugee thing kicked up, the school (private) and a grouping of parents, together, provided places for a number of Ukrainian children. Some families were out up in spare staff accommodation, others with various families with children at the school.
One thing that worked extremely well was the extra pastoral care - like most high end private schools they spend a lot on SENS (and other issues) detection, treatment and counselling. Some of the Ukrainian kids… well, the obvious. Having trained counsellors, trick cyclists on tap etc was a god send for some of them.
Comments
My job has two elements - dealing with customers and dealing with staff. The first of these it doesn't matter where it's done - it's all by phone or email anyway. But the latter is much less effective from 100+ miles away.
I have worked in healthcare systems across Europe. I can assure you that the only people who believe the NHS was ever the "envy of the world" (even when Blair was hosing money at the vested interests) are those who are very gullible to propaganda. No European I ever spoke to at that time who had a view thought the NHS was anything less than an antiquated system.
To start with, it isn’t entirely free. Prescription charges, for example.
But in much of the developed world you get a lot medical treatment for the asking, without any insurance style excess payment.
I suspect the bottom line is that WFH works just fine for older people who already have the friends, contacts and insight from office work and so enjoyed the saving on Southern Rail and Starbucks whilst working in the conservatory, whereas for the young in their town centre second floor one-bed flats trying to start building their career, it was often grim.
And yer older people are more likely to need healthcare and potentially social care.
I suspect the special treatment is partly linked to the levels of voting among the oldies.
I suspect the answer is higher tax on the middle class, since that's the only way of raising significant new revenue.
The brave decision would be to extend NI to all ages and tap the over 65s, particularly given it's largely for their benefit.
That's not good for anyone.
Not even the NHS.
This is capitalism, and we have millions of workers unable to pay their bills. Ignore the basic immorality of having nurses reliant on foodbanks in their own hospital for a minute and think about the economics.
Growth relies on consumption. To consume with scale you need spare cash having paid your bills. All the people who can't pay their bills can't consume enough, which costs others their own jobs and the doom loop spirals lower and lower.
The Tories - and specifically their patrons and owners - have forgotten how capitalism works. There is a cost to not paying people decently, and the narrow-minded immoral people saying "who pays" need to answer who pays the bill for productivity dropping and growth disappearing and all the job losses and business closures.
Money needs to circulate. It can't all sit in off-shore bank accounts of a tiny number of individuals.
I like his latest tweet because I don't think I've seen this variation on the old "simple answers to complex problems" chestnut before.
"You can gauge someone's ignorance by the number of phenomena they explain with the same answer. Those who blame many different issues (e.g. war, poverty, pollution) on just 1 cause (e.g. capitalism) are recycling explanations because the demand for answers outstrips their supply."
https://twitter.com/G_S_Bhogal/status/1605373514147586048?s=20&t=-ruqH5ws6wErO_oEQVd5aA
We all do it. I have certainly indulged in the past regarding Brexit. I'd say it's sometimes ignorance, but often also a type of tribal double-think where deep down we know the Tories aren't completely to blame for raw sewage releases into rivers and Gordon Brown didn't cause the financial crisis, but we say it anyway.
If we raised spending on healthcare as a % of GDP from c.10% of GDP to 12% or 13% (between £50-80bn extra a year) would we really get a European healthcare system?
Personally, I doubt it.
The problem is what confidence can we have that, once elected, Starmer will go into the phonebox and come out with a new set of clothes?
That will be yet another massive fiscal squeeze on working people's budget.
If they want to be politically brave they can can-kick it because Labour almost certainly will do the same, and take the flak instead, if they don't but there are possibly two more winters for the Tories to get through first.
It doesn't explain many problems, but it's part of the reason they haven't been addressed.
I don't think Starmer is capable of this brave and visionary thinking - with the leadership to sell it- and I think what's most likely is he just tactically triangulates and then administers government in a fairly competent way, whilst throwing some chunks of red meat to his base.
There is a difference too between Full WFH and Hybrid working. My employer views WFH as a privilege, and so if you want to go in every day you can. I don't know what they would do if we all did! We are now trying to find the right balance - we all did some WFH before Covid anyway but the proportion has flipped since.
I’ve run projects remotely for years - there are times when I need to visit people but that’s because when a customer is paying £x00,000 for a team to do a project physically talking to the customer is very important.
Theresa May's government opened five new medical schools, so there has been some increase, offset by a lot of retirement of older doctors.
A relative rubs a building business. He tells me that a serious problem for him now is people who are working x hours a week, could do more, but won’t.
Because their benefits would get withdrawn at suck a rate that they would, in effect, by working for pennies to the hour.
So he has to hire more people, which is much less efficient.
They said we could still come into the office, there just wasn't any desks for us to sit at...
Now I WFH because until last year all of my colleagues were in the US. I have been over and met most, but not all, of them.
We hired another guy in the UK who I have met and worked with before, but he has never met the rest of the team.
For me I thinks it's fine as I approach the end of my career. For him it might be more of an issue as he is just starting out.
The benefits of sovereignty have been illusory or trivial; the economic, social and other impacts, significant and real.
https://twitter.com/DavidHerdson/status/1605514584776855554
https://twitter.com/DavidHenigUK/status/1605489042497236993
I've started commuting again for 1-2 days per week and it is costing me a fortune in travel and other random expenditure.
Like it or not, you don't get more Scottish than that. You seem to have an anti emigrant prejudice, which is a nice change.
Instantly for those who receive tax credits
As soon as you hit £50,000 if you have children - I spent years ensuring I never crossed that barrier - it wasn’t difficult when I used a limited company and could pay dividends to the wife.
As soon as you hit £100,000 - again people cut back the hours
But we're in manufacturing, so there's something to physically see happening.
There’s a few people on here who suffer an allergic reaction to a whiff of Scotch but you’re definitely tops. Did yer maw eat an out of date Tunnock’s tea cake while bearing you?
There are other things, though - given that I'm more experienced than all the team, if I'm on site I can see that a problem is coming well before anyone else notices that it has happened. No amount of reporting is as good as the old Mark One Eyeball.
Tories
Woke
The English
One close to my heart which causes irritation sometimes is climate change (not so much on here). Blaming a cold snap on climate change, as some in the media did, is stretching things to say the least and just undermines all the other compelling evidence around us.
Then discovering that they don’t work.
I am not sure anybody has quite figured out what is the best balance, what are the right systems, processes and tools to use make this happen and it is very much an industry by industry / job role by job role thing.
It doesn't help that in the UK we had a particular issue with productivity, especially in white collar jobs, before we underwent this large scale change.
Your occasional reminder that a Referendums were held, and all areas of Ukraine, including Crimea, voted for independence from Russia. Such independence was recognised by Russia at the time when Ukraine became an independent sovereign state in 1991.
National turnout: 84.18%
Vote for Independence: 92.3%
All areas voted in favour.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Ukrainian_independence_referendum
And that polls since then confirming the desire for Ukrainian independence, by such organisations as CNN, are “shitty and irrelevant”
https://twitter.com/fesshole/status/1605494542358249472?s=20&t=-ruqH5ws6wErO_oEQVd5aA
She tells @LordsJHACom: "We are in discussions with a wide variety of providers... everything is still on the table, and nothing is excluded."
https://bit.ly/3VnV2go
It isn't, it wasn't e.g. in Europe, I have never met anybody who says if only we had the UK system. Most have some sort of insurance based system, with protections for those without employment. Other than I think Canada (and ask most Canadians and they ain't exactly happy with their system), no major nation has our system, nor desires to copy it. Does it mean its totally rubbish, no. By international comparisons, for the money, the NHS has done some things well, some things always struggled with (even when more money has been provided).
The core problem with such a massive centralised system, it is very unwieldy, making changes slow and very difficult (and making it such that a one sized fit all with a constraint that it might be free at the point of use come what may). Then you layer on top idiot politicians vs a system that has a inertia to any change.
The problem with narrative "its envy of the world" vs "only other option is US system / Tories with privatise it all" is that we don't actually get anywhere.
The economic hit from Brexit is now even bigger than previously predicted, a new study has found.
https://www.bylinesupplement.com/p/brexit-costs-us-750-million-a-week
It’s this occasional truth that allows us to hold onto the delusion that our own hobby horse is at the root of all our ills. Just occasionally we might be right. Though almost certainly not when we think we are.
I think I feel that displaced people need to be compensated lavishly to help them settle in their new home, but referendums should be of the people living in the area now. I'm not very interested in arguments about historical boundaries and who ceded what to whom in the past, de facto or de jure, even if it was by force. But as you say it tends to reward the "winning" side, and I'm not comfortable with that either.
From 287,458 in Aug 2019 to 319,616 in Aug 2022. FTE equivalent numbers for nurses and health visitors in NHS England.
https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/nhs-workforce-statistics/august-2022
Before anyone asks, Doctors are up by 13% over the same period. And it's a very nice interactive tool.
On the headline numbers it looks like a sticky wicket for the nursing unions.
I have no idea what the numbers are for SWNI, or whether they publish any timely or relevant data.
It's sunny; I need to go on the roof an investigate a suspicious sounding scratching noise heard last night.
Have a nice day, all.
https://tinyurl.com/muvayf53
Judging by the preparations being made and the chatter in Russian social media, the pro Russian population of Crimea will run like hell if/when the Ukrainians get there.
Of course the HoL is what a particular partisan wants it to be at any given time, ie they back the policies I support, a marvellous adornment to the mother of parliaments, they block the policies I support, an undemocratic, antedeluvian anomaly. See also parties packing it with their own supporters.
Thank feck the party I vote for won't touch it with a shitty stick.
We really should decide what the purpose of the House of Lords is / should be before deciding how it's members are selected.
The Speaker is right that changing how it's selected will fundamentally change the relationship between the Commons and the Lords and probably not in a good way.
I recall that in the first few days of Johnson becoming prime minister his leading the cabinet in a literal chant of x more medics and x more police (is that right) was commented on here.
https://data.unhcr.org/en/situations/ukraine
AFAICS we can have no idea how many of those are fleeing the legitimate Ukraine Govt, how many have been forcibly deported Stalin-style by Putin (who is following the Stalin playbook), how many are kidnapped children given to pro-Putin parents China CCP style, how many have gone via Russia to escape to Finland etc.
Plus how numbers have changed because many are dead because the armed forces of Russia or proxies have killed them, how many are dead having been pressganged by Kadyrov and friends and killed by UA armed forces, how many have fled to the rest of UA or Western Europe and so on and so on.
So I agree post-war referenda are ridiculous. And I am inclined to return to the referendum that *was* representative.
An elected second chamber and its powers who have to be carefully designed from the ground up. And provision made for adjustments in light of how it works.
Simply giving the Lords powers to an elected chamber would be a disaster, I suspect.
That gives it a democratic element but without the directly-elected legitimacy to challenge the Commons.
I can do the same things remotely - just because I understand the software internals better than most so can equally highlight the problems far earlier than anyone else..
The Conservatives would then use their new mandate to try and block and amend as much legislation coming from the Labour dominated House of Commons for as long as possible.
Better would be to still have a half appointed Upper House with half elected, for example by the English regions, Scotland, Wales and NI
He's telling Starmer to make sure he thinks his proposals through, rather than jerk his knee like an overreacting fool then refuse to back down out of obstinacy.
IMO quite appropriate comments for the Speaker.
And it’s not like the proposal is to abolish the Lords by decree under a Royal Prerogative, it will be done,, if its done at all, and its successor established, by the Commons anyway.
So lots have left, if they can.
Talking of refugees, some of the first wave at my daughters school are beginning to go back, to Western Ukraine. When the refugee thing kicked up, the school (private) and a grouping of parents, together, provided places for a number of Ukrainian children. Some families were out up in spare staff accommodation, others with various families with children at the school.
One thing that worked extremely well was the extra pastoral care - like most high end private schools they spend a lot on SENS (and other issues) detection, treatment and counselling. Some of the Ukrainian kids… well, the obvious. Having trained counsellors, trick cyclists on tap etc was a god send for some of them.