This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
What's your problem? Whether @Heathener has that back story or not, who cares?
People can claim all sorts of things on an anonymous blog. There aren't many road sweepers or refuse collectors living in trailers in Weston-Super-Mare from what I can see on PB. We are all millionaires from the right side of the tracks, captains of industry posting 24/7. Maybe if any of us could be arsed, so to do, we might even question your back story, but as we aren't really interested we won't.
Just as a general point, if you are make some kind of appeal to authority based on personal/professional experience, then you should also expect that it will get scrutinised, even on an 'anonymous blog'.
Actually, I find Heathener's persona entirely credible. If one wanted a reasonably paid job in a hurry, and one where you could do as much overtime as you liked and then clear off for some walking or writing, the RM makes excellent sense - it's apparently desperate for staff almost anywhere and anywhen.
Maybe she does both: perhaps she squeezes in a round before assembly, or steps up to do it during the school holidays on a flexible contract to supplement her income.
It's bloody impressive. I certainly couldn't do it. Not around going to the opera, connecting with my friends in government, travelling abroad and going out onto the streets.
Isn't BlancheLivermore our postie?
I am the overworked postie
In a rather glorious part of the world.
Which part?
Marlborough in Wiltshire
I spent the first six months working in Aldbourne (of particular interest to Whovians)
For the last year I've been delivering in Marlborough Town, except on Sundays when I drive around the South side of town, as far away as an Army base on the North of Salisbury Plain, delivering parcels
On Sundays I often pretend to be a millionaire
I get many comments from people surprised that Royal Mail delivers on a Sunday, I say they don't, I'm an eccentric millionaire who does this for fun
Usually gets a laugh..
Ah yes, very nice round Marlborough, I always presume the whole economy there is driven by the school. Not sure Labour's private school policies are going to make Marlborough (or rather Devizes) a likely gain for them.
Marlborough is now the biggest town in the new East Wiltshire constituency
Probably, but it's no longer the certainty it used to seem
The Lib Dem candidate, David Kinnaird, has done a good job of getting himself known in town and seems rather popular
He might be worth a few quid as I expect Kruger's (notional) majority and name recognition will likely see him as a strong favourite in the betting
I delivered about seven hundred Kruger leaflets in the last two days
I had to hand about a hundred of them to people because they were standing by their door, or I had a parcel for them
About sixty of those people noticed the leaflet and made a face
I said to all of those people "For your dart board", every one of them laughed
That's a scientific poll
Interesting, thanks.
Is it your experience in your patch that it's only the Conservatives which make use of Royal Mail's excellent door-to-door leaflet delivery service? Around here that used to be the case, but more recently Labour have been using it too albeit not quite on the same scale.
Back on topic, listening to the people interviewed in Blackpool, the one thing that bound all of them together (even the Tory) was that the town is visibly crumbling all around them. Blackpool can't sustain chain shops despite tourist numbers, and when most of the shops are owned by non-UK companies there is little incentive to do anything other than leave them shuttered and hope values rise naturally.
Blackpool is unique in some ways and not in others. It has a real problem with former B&Bs that modern tourists don't want to stay in - what to do with them? Which is how so many have ended up filled with migrants and the very poorest, or left to rot.
The solution? Buy large numbers of empty buildings, bulldoze them, and build homes. Blackpool has a microclimate - you can drive down the M55 where there is drizzle in Preston and find Blackpool free of cloud. It has rail and motorway links, a small airport which could be reopened and a tourist industry. Its the kind of place that people could be drawn to, but it needs politicians with vision. And it has lacked them for a long long time.
I have little doubt that Labour will win the byelection, and then little will change. Unless we decide that we are going to modernise these places and reinvest in their next phase of development - rather than bemoaning that the old times have gone - then all of these decaying towns will just keep decaying.
Recognition of the need to change- that Mytown used to be famous for something and that something has died- is blooming difficult, though.
There must be examples of towns successfully reinventing themselves, but it's not a comfortable process.
Stockton-on-Tees is doing a great job. Steel and shipbuilding have long gone, but the old Teesside Development Corporation had the land redeveloped as houses and an office park - complete with a Durham University campus.
Go forward a few decades and the town was struggling - too much retail space. So the council have bought the 70s shopping mall and derelict hotel and has bulldozed them, to create a riverside park. The town theatre - a relatively big 4,000 seat one - was painstakingly restored and reopened, with a council-owned Hilton just round the corner.
The Tories hated all this of course - describing both the theatre and the hotel as "white elephants" as who will use them? Yet the theatre is booked out for a year at a time and the hotel needs a bigger car park. So it can be done, but you need council management who know how to get things done and political stability to get you through several rounds of elections. Had the Tories won, the plan was to halt the works and leave the town with more half-finished stuff which they would blame Labour for...
BIB (Bit In Bold) 1: Note the "Corporation": this had state involvement and functioned much better than the outsource-to-private-sector jobbies that are so fashionable.
BIB (Bit In Bold) 2: I think that's the best solution for places that can't be revived: knock them down and make a park out of it.
Why would [presumably] Scottish Conservative voters switch to an English nationalist party, Reform? You would think they would want to preserve the Union.
Fares fair. The Paris transport company runs buses in London.
Doesn’t surprise me, it’s rained almost non-stop in the Seine’s watershed for the last several months. I assume they have similar sewage overflow issues as London.
Because, in both cities, the drains and sewage systems are pretty much the same thing.
So rain water inflates the volume of sewage.
This is because they are old, old systems.
Th ere are some newer stuff being built which separates the two, but rebuilding to separate fully is impossible.
So more capacity is pretty much the only option.
Apart from reducing the population.
Cambourne was the first major settlement built with SuDS - Sustainable urban Drainage System. This involves a number of things; for instance the rainwater runoff is separate from brown (sewage) water in different drainage systems; the former goes into local runoff ponds and ditches that help reduce the peak flows into the local streams.
Though you get issues with rainwater run off going straight into streams/rivers. It does often need treatment of its own.
I think the documents i linked goes into that a little.
Yup - It's just I'm always slightly surprised at the enviro types who claim that separating the flows is a free lunch. Wanted to put that up in the debate here, since quite a few people don't seem to read the links.
A big part is making the storage as local as possible. A rainwater barrel fed from the guttering on a house/block of flats is ridiculously cheap and needs little maintenance.
Indeed.
We get a discount (for what it is worth) for having no drainage off the property other than the foul water.
It wasn't hard to do. Dig a soakaway or two, rainwater barrels everywhere, and a mesh / gravel / grass driveway.
Even in the biggest downpour nothing makes it to the street.
I despair when I see neighbours covering everything in sealed block paving. I wonder why we have flooding problems?
I also have a hospital appointment this am (though not as excruciating as MattW's I hope) and on checking my best route I see Glasgow or more precisely Bishopriggs has a Colston Rd. I wonder if it's named after the great man?
I believe so, yes.
However, there is no way to know for certain as Edward Colston, I've learnt from PB, has been "obliterated" from history.
I retracted that comment, which was over the top, but his name has certainly been removed from an awful lot of stuff in Bristol. If thats the will of the (majority of the) people then fine.
My bigger point is that I abhor judging people from the past with modern standards. How many of us on PB if we had lived in Colston's time, and had his lived experiences would have behaved the same way he did? You might cry that you would never be a slave trader, but we are all products of our time, our upbringing, the consensus beliefs of the world around us.
I was teasing you!
I would guess that very few of us on PB will be remembered in 300 years time, with streets or concert halls named after us. If someone 3 centuries for now is judging me, and condemns me for something that seems normal now… I don’t think I care, to be honest! It doesn’t affect me now. I hope people in 300 years are looking out for each other, not worrying about whether they’re hurting my feelings by renaming the Bondegezou Memorial Zero Gravity Skate Park.
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
One never ceases to be amazed at her ability to find people who share her worldview and then to present them as proof of a trend.
I rarely find people with a strong view either way on such matters. More concerned about their soccer team, what they are doing at the weekend and the weather. Perhaps I should look harder.
Don't forget she is also a renowned authority on the trans issue and regularly appears as a talking head to discuss it due to her undoubted knowledge although she did duck a debate on it with Ishmael when he was around these parts. Didn't want to trounce him with her knowledge.
Well if we are going to doubt integrity, I would question someone who claims to always vote Labour and then bellyaches when posters are "nasty" to the Conservatives.
Disliking a particular style of political invective, the crude, the vulgar, the ad hominem attack, and calling out the people who do it does not indicated ones politics either way.
It does when one writes that no one attacks Labour/LD/SNP/Green/Plaid/Ind. for their corruption but everyone attacks the poor Tories.
On your terms you should be outraged at Casino's attack on Rayner for liking the opera.
I never saw it. I also missed the night Casino flounced after offering everyone out.
Sadly I am not omnipresent nor do I spend my every waking hour here. Apols.
I just find it bizarre, nay, hypocritical that some people are woefully offended when a Tory does something wrong but if it is someone from Labour they give them a free pass. Still, whatever floats your boat.
Why would [presumably] Scottish Conservative voters switch to an English nationalist party, Reform? You would think they would want to preserve the Union.
Scottish UKIP/Reform voters are an underrepresented niche on PB. We need someone to come onto the board and say, this makes total sense.
Back on topic, listening to the people interviewed in Blackpool, the one thing that bound all of them together (even the Tory) was that the town is visibly crumbling all around them. Blackpool can't sustain chain shops despite tourist numbers, and when most of the shops are owned by non-UK companies there is little incentive to do anything other than leave them shuttered and hope values rise naturally.
Blackpool is unique in some ways and not in others. It has a real problem with former B&Bs that modern tourists don't want to stay in - what to do with them? Which is how so many have ended up filled with migrants and the very poorest, or left to rot.
The solution? Buy large numbers of empty buildings, bulldoze them, and build homes. Blackpool has a microclimate - you can drive down the M55 where there is drizzle in Preston and find Blackpool free of cloud. It has rail and motorway links, a small airport which could be reopened and a tourist industry. Its the kind of place that people could be drawn to, but it needs politicians with vision. And it has lacked them for a long long time.
I have little doubt that Labour will win the byelection, and then little will change. Unless we decide that we are going to modernise these places and reinvest in their next phase of development - rather than bemoaning that the old times have gone - then all of these decaying towns will just keep decaying.
I have only ever been to Blackpool once. I was staying in the genteel Inn at Whitewell during one of the COVID lockdown respites. I thought to myself I've never been to Blackpool let's give it a whirl, it's only half an hour away. My wife assured me I would regret this choice. My overarching memory of Scott Benton's Blackpool is that at approximately 11am I spied a drunk urinating on the pavement opposite the Tower ballroom. No furtive piddle against the bus stop wall. There he was, todger in hand spraying the litter and dog dirt with gay abandon.
It's only half an hour away and you have only been once?! Never been drawn to the Pleasure Beach (for my money, the best time you can have at a theme park anywhere in the country)? The zoo? The beaches? The Sandcastle (not everyone's cuo of tea, I grant you.) The murmurations of starlings around the North Pier? Hell, just a three mile walk down the prom at sunset is one of the best walks in Lancashire.
No, no, just half an our away from my luxurious weekend hotel.
If I lived near Blackpool, I would move.
Ah, I see. Don't make the mistake, by the way, of assuming Blackpool is typical of the Fylde. Lytham is rather posh, St. Anne's is resolutely middlebrow. Kirkham is a rather nice market town, Poulton is perfectly adequate. I've never been to Fleetwood or Knott End but I understand the latter is rather nice. And the villages between range from the nice-enough to the very pleasant. (Wrea Green is worth a visit). You could have a nice life in any of these places.
And as Rochdale says, Blackpool could be a really attractive place to live. Yes, the strip behind the front is grotty, but the grotty bit is rather narrow. The housing stock in the north and east of the town is actually surprisingly fine.
Oh, and whilst I'm wittering on about development (something I am *not* an expert in (*))
Things like SuDS can lead to much more 'natural' looking developments. But when my town was started, there were small clumps of woodland in the fields. Most of these were retained, and even expanded, rather than being destroyed, and means we have 'old' woodlands inside the development.
These are not vast areas, but when combined with the drainage ditches and ponds, lead to a more 'natural' feeling development - and also a feeling it is older than it really is.
Another thing is that there is often a vastly different style of housing on the same street, as three or four different developers, with their own styles and designs, built different areas of the town. Again this compares well with some other developments - but seems to have been forgotten with Cambourne West.
(*) I'm not an expert in anything any more...
Are you an expert on being an expert, though?
No
Although occasionally in the past I've talked to 'experts' in something and felt like they're b/s merchants as I was fairly sure some of the stuff they were spouting was wrong.
I see this more in the media. It's almost as though someone keeps experts in hutches, ready to be sold to the media....
For years there was an ‘expert on aviation’ that the BBC used to wheel out whenever there was a plane crash. He was I think a retired BA pilot, who knew almost nothing about engineering nor accident investigation beyond the very basics, and always said exactly the same irrespective of the circumstances of the accident.
I also have a hospital appointment this am (though not as excruciating as MattW's I hope) and on checking my best route I see Glasgow or more precisely Bishopriggs has a Colston Rd. I wonder if it's named after the great man?
I believe so, yes.
However, there is no way to know for certain as Edward Colston, I've learnt from PB, has been "obliterated" from history.
I retracted that comment, which was over the top, but his name has certainly been removed from an awful lot of stuff in Bristol. If thats the will of the (majority of the) people then fine.
My bigger point is that I abhor judging people from the past with modern standards. How many of us on PB if we had lived in Colston's time, and had his lived experiences would have behaved the same way he did? You might cry that you would never be a slave trader, but we are all products of our time, our upbringing, the consensus beliefs of the world around us.
The was a genealogical programme on the box last night. The ‘hero’ was part British, part immigrant from Jamaica, and the programme seemed to mainly research the Jamaican part. Turned out that the subjects great something grandfather had, in the very early 1800’s, been a slave, but was bought out of slavery. However, by the time slavery was abolished, he owned slaves, and was a beneficiary of the compensation scheme. What does one make of that?
Some interesting reading. This is the conclusion of the only paper on puberty blockers regarded as "high quality" by the reviewers:
"Transgender adolescents show poorer psychological well-being before treatment but show similar or better psychological functioning compared with cisgender peers from the general population after the start of specialized transgender care involving puberty suppression."
x-sectional though - those treated versus those not - doesn't make it invalid but doesn't give information on longer term outcomes and there may be unmeasured differences between the intervention and non-intervention groups. It is though, from a skim, a rare fairly well done paper in this field.
I'd tend to go with the review conclusions: "There is a lack of high-quality research assessing puberty suppression in adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria/incongruence. No conclusions can be drawn about the impact on gender dysphoria, mental and psychosocial health or cognitive development."
Disclaimer: I know some of the authors on these and I have seen pre-submission drafts of some of the papers where I was asked for an opinion on stats/methods. However, I had no input to or sight of the puberty blocker paper before today.
Sure more work is needed, but if the best paper shows benefit, then stopping treatment may not be ethical.
No problem of enrolling all patients in audits, but research requires voluntary participation and opting out without adversely affecting treatment, so I am dubious about insisting that these blockers are only used in a research context.
Yes, it's a strange and far from ideal situation now. Ideally, the blockers would have been trialed (or at least followed up) when first provided, but we are where we are. I agree on the general point re research - I'd rather see providers mandated to take part in a research programme - infrastructure in place to collect baseline and follow-up data, mandatory invitation of all recipients to join research but preserving the individual opt-out withou affecting access. However, the experience (I am told, by someone who attempted this) with the GIDS and adult endocrine clinics is that they have been very hostile to research access to existing records, effectively blocking it. This may be due to a (possibly justified) hostility to the approach and pre-existing views within the Cass review, but it does raise the risk that clinics (or some clinicians) may encourage their patients to opt out or even - as some primary care providers did for national data opt-outs - do mass opt-outs without asking.
Not sure what the solution is, but I do share your concerns.
As for the solution there are two: the low and the high.
The low is the creation of a trusted third party to monitor those in the field. If a research program cannot be sent up then at least people can be monitored in situ: appeal to the people directly, guarantee confidentiality, see if that works. Think of it as tracking a herd of wildebeest or mole rats: you don't invite a mole rat in for an interview with David Attenborough, you observe them in their natural environment and tag individuals with chips. Although the latter will probably be frowned upon.
The high is my suggested "Fill Out Your Fucking Forms Bill" (2024), where tracking and monitoring is compulsory and anonymised data is made public access so we can all play with the data. This is my preference but apparently people have those la-di-dah civil rights things.
I also have a hospital appointment this am (though not as excruciating as MattW's I hope) and on checking my best route I see Glasgow or more precisely Bishopriggs has a Colston Rd. I wonder if it's named after the great man?
I believe so, yes.
However, there is no way to know for certain as Edward Colston, I've learnt from PB, has been "obliterated" from history.
I retracted that comment, which was over the top, but his name has certainly been removed from an awful lot of stuff in Bristol. If thats the will of the (majority of the) people then fine.
My bigger point is that I abhor judging people from the past with modern standards. How many of us on PB if we had lived in Colston's time, and had his lived experiences would have behaved the same way he did? You might cry that you would never be a slave trader, but we are all products of our time, our upbringing, the consensus beliefs of the world around us.
The was a genealogical programme on the box last night. The ‘hero’ was part British, part immigrant from Jamaica, and the programme seemed to mainly research the Jamaican part. Turned out that the subjects great something grandfather had, in the very early 1800’s, been a slave, but was bought out of slavery. However, by the time slavery was abolished, he owned slaves, and was a beneficiary of the compensation scheme. What does one make of that?
Not exactly unheard of - there are example in the American South, Brazil etc of similar.
In ancient times it was something close to inevitable - all but the very poorest in Rome owned slaves. So a freedman/woman, unless they were very poor....
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
What's your problem? Whether @Heathener has that back story or not, who cares?
People can claim all sorts of things on an anonymous blog. There aren't many road sweepers or refuse collectors living in trailers in Weston-Super-Mare from what I can see on PB. We are all millionaires from the right side of the tracks, captains of industry posting 24/7. Maybe if any of us could be arsed, so to do, we might even question your back story, but as we aren't really interested we won't.
Just as a general point, if you are make some kind of appeal to authority based on personal/professional experience, then you should also expect that it will get scrutinised, even on an 'anonymous blog'.
Actually, I find Heathener's persona entirely credible. If one wanted a reasonably paid job in a hurry, and one where you could do as much overtime as you liked and then clear off for some walking or writing, the RM makes excellent sense - it's apparently desperate for staff almost anywhere and anywhen.
Maybe she does both: perhaps she squeezes in a round before assembly, or steps up to do it during the school holidays on a flexible contract to supplement her income.
It's bloody impressive. I certainly couldn't do it. Not around going to the opera, connecting with my friends in government, travelling abroad and going out onto the streets.
Isn't BlancheLivermore our postie?
I am the overworked postie
In a rather glorious part of the world.
Which part?
Marlborough in Wiltshire
I spent the first six months working in Aldbourne (of particular interest to Whovians)
For the last year I've been delivering in Marlborough Town, except on Sundays when I drive around the South side of town, as far away as an Army base on the North of Salisbury Plain, delivering parcels
On Sundays I often pretend to be a millionaire
I get many comments from people surprised that Royal Mail delivers on a Sunday, I say they don't, I'm an eccentric millionaire who does this for fun
Usually gets a laugh..
Ah yes, very nice round Marlborough, I always presume the whole economy there is driven by the school. Not sure Labour's private school policies are going to make Marlborough (or rather Devizes) a likely gain for them.
Marlborough is now the biggest town in the new East Wiltshire constituency
Probably, but it's no longer the certainty it used to seem
The Lib Dem candidate, David Kinnaird, has done a good job of getting himself known in town and seems rather popular
He might be worth a few quid as I expect Kruger's (notional) majority and name recognition will likely see him as a strong favourite in the betting
I delivered about seven hundred Kruger leaflets in the last two days
I had to hand about a hundred of them to people because they were standing by their door, or I had a parcel for them
About sixty of those people noticed the leaflet and made a face
I said to all of those people "For your dart board", every one of them laughed
That's a scientific poll
Interesting, thanks.
Is it your experience in your patch that it's only the Conservatives which make use of Royal Mail's excellent door-to-door leaflet delivery service? Around here that used to be the case, but more recently Labour have been using it too albeit not quite on the same scale.
This one was actually a PCC election leaflet that Danny had landed the back of, endorsing the Tory candidate
I've done one other Conservative local election leaflet, and one for the Lib Dems
I doubt Labour will bother spending any money in Marlborough. I don't think they're even standing any candidates in the local elections
I also have a hospital appointment this am (though not as excruciating as MattW's I hope) and on checking my best route I see Glasgow or more precisely Bishopriggs has a Colston Rd. I wonder if it's named after the great man?
I believe so, yes.
However, there is no way to know for certain as Edward Colston, I've learnt from PB, has been "obliterated" from history.
I retracted that comment, which was over the top, but his name has certainly been removed from an awful lot of stuff in Bristol. If thats the will of the (majority of the) people then fine.
My bigger point is that I abhor judging people from the past with modern standards. How many of us on PB if we had lived in Colston's time, and had his lived experiences would have behaved the same way he did? You might cry that you would never be a slave trader, but we are all products of our time, our upbringing, the consensus beliefs of the world around us.
I was teasing you!
I would guess that very few of us on PB will be remembered in 300 years time, with streets or concert halls named after us. If someone 3 centuries for now is judging me, and condemns me for something that seems normal now… I don’t think I care, to be honest! It doesn’t affect me now. I hope people in 300 years are looking out for each other, not worrying about whether they’re hurting my feelings by renaming the Bondegezou Memorial Zero Gravity Skate Park.
I know! And teasing accepted in good spirit! The point someone made about meat eating was very interesting. I'd guess most of us on here eat meat regularly, but its not inconceivable that the very near future will judge us all harshly.
Fares fair. The Paris transport company runs buses in London.
Doesn’t surprise me, it’s rained almost non-stop in the Seine’s watershed for the last several months. I assume they have similar sewage overflow issues as London.
Because, in both cities, the drains and sewage systems are pretty much the same thing.
So rain water inflates the volume of sewage.
This is because they are old, old systems.
Th ere are some newer stuff being built which separates the two, but rebuilding to separate fully is impossible.
So more capacity is pretty much the only option.
Apart from reducing the population.
Only a couple of weeks ago I heard some bloke on the TV from some water charity bashing Thames Water and the UK government and lauding the improvements the French have made regarding the Seine's water quality. It would be nice if journalists exercised some basic scrutiny of the claims from such organisations rather than taking them at face value, but all too often the thinking seems to be "charity" means they are good and true.
Back on topic, listening to the people interviewed in Blackpool, the one thing that bound all of them together (even the Tory) was that the town is visibly crumbling all around them. Blackpool can't sustain chain shops despite tourist numbers, and when most of the shops are owned by non-UK companies there is little incentive to do anything other than leave them shuttered and hope values rise naturally.
Blackpool is unique in some ways and not in others. It has a real problem with former B&Bs that modern tourists don't want to stay in - what to do with them? Which is how so many have ended up filled with migrants and the very poorest, or left to rot.
The solution? Buy large numbers of empty buildings, bulldoze them, and build homes. Blackpool has a microclimate - you can drive down the M55 where there is drizzle in Preston and find Blackpool free of cloud. It has rail and motorway links, a small airport which could be reopened and a tourist industry. Its the kind of place that people could be drawn to, but it needs politicians with vision. And it has lacked them for a long long time.
I have little doubt that Labour will win the byelection, and then little will change. Unless we decide that we are going to modernise these places and reinvest in their next phase of development - rather than bemoaning that the old times have gone - then all of these decaying towns will just keep decaying.
Recognition of the need to change- that Mytown used to be famous for something and that something has died- is blooming difficult, though.
There must be examples of towns successfully reinventing themselves, but it's not a comfortable process.
Stockton-on-Tees is doing a great job. Steel and shipbuilding have long gone, but the old Teesside Development Corporation had the land redeveloped as houses and an office park - complete with a Durham University campus.
Go forward a few decades and the town was struggling - too much retail space. So the council have bought the 70s shopping mall and derelict hotel and has bulldozed them, to create a riverside park. The town theatre - a relatively big 4,000 seat one - was painstakingly restored and reopened, with a council-owned Hilton just round the corner.
The Tories hated all this of course - describing both the theatre and the hotel as "white elephants" as who will use them? Yet the theatre is booked out for a year at a time and the hotel needs a bigger car park. So it can be done, but you need council management who know how to get things done and political stability to get you through several rounds of elections. Had the Tories won, the plan was to halt the works and leave the town with more half-finished stuff which they would blame Labour for...
BIB (Bit In Bold) 1: Note the "Corporation": this had state involvement and functioned much better than the outsource-to-private-sector jobbies that are so fashionable.
BIB (Bit In Bold) 2: I think that's the best solution for places that can't be revived: knock them down and make a park out of it.
Bradford is taking a similar approach. The City Council recognised it had a) some very ugly buildings, and b) too many offices by some way. It's solution was to rationalise office uses into the attractive Victorian buildings (of which Bradford has many) and knock down the ugly 1960s buildings, leaving the spaces as public open space. A win-win - but something of a surprise that a council can, if it wants, do such a thing; why haven't other towns knocked down their ugly buildings and replaced them with public open space? It seems such an open goal, if it's possible to do.
I also have a hospital appointment this am (though not as excruciating as MattW's I hope) and on checking my best route I see Glasgow or more precisely Bishopriggs has a Colston Rd. I wonder if it's named after the great man?
I believe so, yes.
However, there is no way to know for certain as Edward Colston, I've learnt from PB, has been "obliterated" from history.
I retracted that comment, which was over the top, but his name has certainly been removed from an awful lot of stuff in Bristol. If thats the will of the (majority of the) people then fine.
My bigger point is that I abhor judging people from the past with modern standards. How many of us on PB if we had lived in Colston's time, and had his lived experiences would have behaved the same way he did? You might cry that you would never be a slave trader, but we are all products of our time, our upbringing, the consensus beliefs of the world around us.
The was a genealogical programme on the box last night. The ‘hero’ was part British, part immigrant from Jamaica, and the programme seemed to mainly research the Jamaican part. Turned out that the subjects great something grandfather had, in the very early 1800’s, been a slave, but was bought out of slavery. However, by the time slavery was abolished, he owned slaves, and was a beneficiary of the compensation scheme. What does one make of that?
Erect a statue and the arrange a mob to tear it down. Cover all the bases...
Its a tricky point that we probably shouldn't start, but most of the African slaves that the British bought were sold by other Africans. By all means we should consider our history and legacy but the story was always complex.
Oh, and whilst I'm wittering on about development (something I am *not* an expert in (*))
Things like SuDS can lead to much more 'natural' looking developments. But when my town was started, there were small clumps of woodland in the fields. Most of these were retained, and even expanded, rather than being destroyed, and means we have 'old' woodlands inside the development.
These are not vast areas, but when combined with the drainage ditches and ponds, lead to a more 'natural' feeling development - and also a feeling it is older than it really is.
Another thing is that there is often a vastly different style of housing on the same street, as three or four different developers, with their own styles and designs, built different areas of the town. Again this compares well with some other developments - but seems to have been forgotten with Cambourne West.
(*) I'm not an expert in anything any more...
Are you an expert on being an expert, though?
No
Although occasionally in the past I've talked to 'experts' in something and felt like they're b/s merchants as I was fairly sure some of the stuff they were spouting was wrong.
I see this more in the media. It's almost as though someone keeps experts in hutches, ready to be sold to the media....
For years there was an ‘expert on aviation’ that the BBC used to wheel out whenever there was a plane crash. He was I think a retired BA pilot, who knew almost nothing about engineering nor accident investigation beyond the very basics, and always said exactly the same irrespective of the circumstances of the accident.
Fares fair. The Paris transport company runs buses in London.
Doesn’t surprise me, it’s rained almost non-stop in the Seine’s watershed for the last several months. I assume they have similar sewage overflow issues as London.
Climate change is real, and we need to adapt. It seems that warmer wetter winters are our future. In Leics we have had hardly any frosts. The clay soil here is waterlogged. Better for planting rice than barley!
We’ve actually had a run of a few pretty dry winters (but warm). Until a few months ago large parts of Western Europe were in severe drought restrictions mainly because of winter deficits.
What is happening with a warmer climate though is more extremes, and rutty weather.
Record alert ! I do believe this is the earliest in the year we've breached we've passed an average of 8 Celsius for England (Central England data series) (Well since 1772 when the records began).
To me, this seems a very plausible election result.
18 points is under the poll of poll average lead. Surely the poll of polls provides the most plausible result.
No it doesn't, and didn't in two recent cases: the 2016 Brexit referendum definitely, and possibly 2017 GenElection. If there is a mode effect (eg telephone v online panels giving different results) then the poll-of-polls will be wrong.
To me, this seems a very plausible election result.
18 points is under the poll of poll average lead. Surely the poll of polls provides the most plausible result.
No it doesn't, and didn't in two recent cases: the 2016 Brexit referendum definitely, and possibly 2017 GenElection. If there is a mode effect (eg telephone v online panels giving different results) then the poll-of-polls will be wrong.
There's something to be said for the idea that averaging different polls is a bad idea.
Comparing trends between polls over time is interesting.
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
What's wrong with good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon names like Athelstan or Wulfrith?
Or to embrace England’s variegated origins, that fine Norse name Cnut? I’m sure I’ve even heard Scottish kids attempting to address each other with it.
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
What's your problem? Whether @Heathener has that back story or not, who cares?
People can claim all sorts of things on an anonymous blog. There aren't many road sweepers or refuse collectors living in trailers in Weston-Super-Mare from what I can see on PB. We are all millionaires from the right side of the tracks, captains of industry posting 24/7. Maybe if any of us could be arsed, so to do, we might even question your back story, but as we aren't really interested we won't.
Just as a general point, if you are make some kind of appeal to authority based on personal/professional experience, then you should also expect that it will get scrutinised, even on an 'anonymous blog'.
Actually, I find Heathener's persona entirely credible. If one wanted a reasonably paid job in a hurry, and one where you could do as much overtime as you liked and then clear off for some walking or writing, the RM makes excellent sense - it's apparently desperate for staff almost anywhere and anywhen.
Maybe she does both: perhaps she squeezes in a round before assembly, or steps up to do it during the school holidays on a flexible contract to supplement her income.
It's bloody impressive. I certainly couldn't do it. Not around going to the opera, connecting with my friends in government, travelling abroad and going out onto the streets.
Isn't BlancheLivermore our postie?
I am the overworked postie
In a rather glorious part of the world.
Which part?
Marlborough in Wiltshire
I spent the first six months working in Aldbourne (of particular interest to Whovians)
For the last year I've been delivering in Marlborough Town, except on Sundays when I drive around the South side of town, as far away as an Army base on the North of Salisbury Plain, delivering parcels
On Sundays I often pretend to be a millionaire
I get many comments from people surprised that Royal Mail delivers on a Sunday, I say they don't, I'm an eccentric millionaire who does this for fun
Usually gets a laugh..
Ah yes, very nice round Marlborough, I always presume the whole economy there is driven by the school. Not sure Labour's private school policies are going to make Marlborough (or rather Devizes) a likely gain for them.
Marlborough is now the biggest town in the new East Wiltshire constituency
Probably, but it's no longer the certainty it used to seem
The Lib Dem candidate, David Kinnaird, has done a good job of getting himself known in town and seems rather popular
He might be worth a few quid as I expect Kruger's (notional) majority and name recognition will likely see him as a strong favourite in the betting
I delivered about seven hundred Kruger leaflets in the last two days
I had to hand about a hundred of them to people because they were standing by their door, or I had a parcel for them
About sixty of those people noticed the leaflet and made a face
I said to all of those people "For your dart board", every one of them laughed
That's a scientific poll
Interesting, thanks.
Is it your experience in your patch that it's only the Conservatives which make use of Royal Mail's excellent door-to-door leaflet delivery service? Around here that used to be the case, but more recently Labour have been using it too albeit not quite on the same scale.
This one was actually a PCC election leaflet that Danny had landed the back of, endorsing the Tory candidate
I've done one other Conservative local election leaflet, and one for the Lib Dems
I doubt Labour will bother spending any money in Marlborough. I don't think they're even standing any candidates in the local elections
So Labour will be running a Marlborough Light campaign?
Oh, and whilst I'm wittering on about development (something I am *not* an expert in (*))
Things like SuDS can lead to much more 'natural' looking developments. But when my town was started, there were small clumps of woodland in the fields. Most of these were retained, and even expanded, rather than being destroyed, and means we have 'old' woodlands inside the development.
These are not vast areas, but when combined with the drainage ditches and ponds, lead to a more 'natural' feeling development - and also a feeling it is older than it really is.
Another thing is that there is often a vastly different style of housing on the same street, as three or four different developers, with their own styles and designs, built different areas of the town. Again this compares well with some other developments - but seems to have been forgotten with Cambourne West.
(*) I'm not an expert in anything any more...
Are you an expert on being an expert, though?
No
Although occasionally in the past I've talked to 'experts' in something and felt like they're b/s merchants as I was fairly sure some of the stuff they were spouting was wrong.
I see this more in the media. It's almost as though someone keeps experts in hutches, ready to be sold to the media....
For years there was an ‘expert on aviation’ that the BBC used to wheel out whenever there was a plane crash. He was I think a retired BA pilot, who knew almost nothing about engineering nor accident investigation beyond the very basics, and always said exactly the same irrespective of the circumstances of the accident.
A friend of mine (well really a friend of a friend) was an accident investigator and appeared on the TV whenever there was a crash. Also appeared in several documentaries, including the one on the Concorde crash. He tells great stories.
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
Gratuitous misspelling is a scourge of our age.
I should be able to get some counselling just based on the variations of 'Kayleigh' that I've seen.
Do you remember? Chalk hearts melting on a playground wall Do you remember? Dawn escapes from moon washed college halls Do you remember? The cherry blossom in the market square Do you remember? I thought it was confetti in our hair
By the way, didn't I break your heart? Please excuse me, I never meant to break your heart So sorry, I never meant to break your heart But you broke mine
Kayleigh, is it too late to say I'm sorry? And, Kayleigh, could we get it together again? I just can't go on pretending That it came to a natural end Kayleigh, oh I never thought I'd miss you And, Kayleigh, I thought that we'd always be friends We said our love would last forever So how did it come to this bitter end?
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
Gratuitous misspelling is a scourge of our age.
I should be able to get some counselling just based on the variations of 'Kayleigh' that I've seen.
Why do they do it Araminta? Why? They are setting their kids up for a lifetime's inconvenience in explaining how their names are spelled. I remember someone at work a few years ago being inordinately pleased that he had chosen to spell his daughter's name as 'Jorja'.
Companies are no better. There was a piece in the Telegraph yesterday about bigwig's from Aberdeen Asset Management (who a few years ago decided to rename themselves 'Abrdn' (bafflingly this is apparently still pronounced 'Aberdeen', not 'Ab-ruh-dun'.)) complaining that mockery of their new spelling was 'corporate bullying'. But in my book gratuitous misspelling ought to be mocked. And if you can't mock a child, our of politeness and a recognition that it's not the child's fault, you can certainly mock a company.
Some interesting reading. This is the conclusion of the only paper on puberty blockers regarded as "high quality" by the reviewers:
"Transgender adolescents show poorer psychological well-being before treatment but show similar or better psychological functioning compared with cisgender peers from the general population after the start of specialized transgender care involving puberty suppression."
x-sectional though - those treated versus those not - doesn't make it invalid but doesn't give information on longer term outcomes and there may be unmeasured differences between the intervention and non-intervention groups. It is though, from a skim, a rare fairly well done paper in this field.
I'd tend to go with the review conclusions: "There is a lack of high-quality research assessing puberty suppression in adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria/incongruence. No conclusions can be drawn about the impact on gender dysphoria, mental and psychosocial health or cognitive development."
Disclaimer: I know some of the authors on these and I have seen pre-submission drafts of some of the papers where I was asked for an opinion on stats/methods. However, I had no input to or sight of the puberty blocker paper before today.
Sure more work is needed, but if the best paper shows benefit, then stopping treatment may not be ethical.
No problem of enrolling all patients in audits, but research requires voluntary participation and opting out without adversely affecting treatment, so I am dubious about insisting that these blockers are only used in a research context.
Yes, it's a strange and far from ideal situation now. Ideally, the blockers would have been trialed (or at least followed up) when first provided, but we are where we are. I agree on the general point re research - I'd rather see providers mandated to take part in a research programme - infrastructure in place to collect baseline and follow-up data, mandatory invitation of all recipients to join research but preserving the individual opt-out withou affecting access. However, the experience (I am told, by someone who attempted this) with the GIDS and adult endocrine clinics is that they have been very hostile to research access to existing records, effectively blocking it. This may be due to a (possibly justified) hostility to the approach and pre-existing views within the Cass review, but it does raise the risk that clinics (or some clinicians) may encourage their patients to opt out or even - as some primary care providers did for national data opt-outs - do mass opt-outs without asking.
Not sure what the solution is, but I do share your concerns.
As for the solution there are two: the low and the high.
The low is the creation of a trusted third party to monitor those in the field. If a research program cannot be sent up then at least people can be monitored in situ: appeal to the people directly, guarantee confidentiality, see if that works. Think of it as tracking a herd of wildebeest or mole rats: you don't invite a mole rat in for an interview with David Attenborough, you observe them in their natural environment and tag individuals with chips. Although the latter will probably be frowned upon.
The high is my suggested "Fill Out Your Fucking Forms Bill" (2024), where tracking and monitoring is compulsory and anonymised data is made public access so we can all play with the data. This is my preference but apparently people have those la-di-dah civil rights things.
The low is illegal in the transgender context, if your participants have a GRC (you cannot link pre- and post GRC data). That can be overcome by the Health Secretary (as happened for the Review) but you still have the practical issues where linkage is based on name (likely changed), medical record gender (likely changed), NHS number (likely changed) and address (who knows, may well have changed at similar point, too).
The high solution is not too far from what some of the Scandinavian countries do, but still with protected access to the data. Anonymisation is hard - particular here say for birth-registered females attending GIDS before 2014 or so. If you know Gavin/Gertrude from Doncaster attended GIDS in 2013 then that's probably enough to identify all his/her medical records in an 'anonymised' data set that contains GIDS admissions, birth sex and some geography. Even for other things - my neighbour recently had a knee op and I know where - I could probably find his complete medical records if I had access to such an whole population 'anonymised' dataset with home town, sex, some age info and hospital admissions and specialty (under current rules I'd need a very good reason to get access to such a dataset).
Instead of setting out to the public why Britain needs to spend more on defence, and winning public support for Britain to do so, and then sort out the MoD, Sunak is encouraging complacency by concentrating on criticising other NATO countries. How is that going to help?
Other countries may be doing worse (disclaimer: including my country of residence), but that doesn't give Sunak and Britain a pass on whether they're doing enough to ensure Britain's safety and to prevent the world becoming increasingly dominated by authoritarian dictatorships.
It's extremely poor.
My gut feeling is that SKS will end up a bit like Boris did after the election, ditching all the nice things he wants to do for all the necessary things. Dealing with the pandemic in the case of Boris, and rapidly increasing defence spending in Keir's case. And if Trump gets elected we could be in a situation that demands immediate action.
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
Yeah, I taught a Jaxon last year and it was as expected.
Jaxonn Teller, main character in Sons of Anarchy. The telly has a lot to answer for.
Though there is comedy good in naming a child after a character before the series ends.
{a whole flock of children named Daenerys have entered the chat}
My wife had a toddler in her Kindy class called Khaleesi! A family from the US, parents working for multinationals in the UK, so not what you'd typically expect the child of millionaire parents in an expensive private school kindergarten class to be called!
Not all bad news for the Nats though. That Con-Ref swing has to help them in Tory-SNP battlegrounds.
Since the GE that still means the Conservative vote share is down 9% and the SNP down 14%, with Labour up 14%, in terms of movement in the % for each party. So on UNS there is still a swing from the SNP to the Conservatives.
That said, proportionately the Conservatives have lost 36% of their 2019 vote share and with the Conservative vote being highly concentrated in a small minority of seats there might be proportional rather than uniform swing coming into play. If so, then you have more of a point.
Also, on current polling, Dumfries and Galloway should in my view be viewed as a 3 way marginal - Con, SNP and Lab. So it may not be the SNP alone which benefits if the Conservative vote does collapse most in the seats that it holds.
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
What's wrong with good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon names like Athelstan or Wulfrith?
Or to embrace England’s variegated origins, that fine Norse name Cnut? I’m sure I’ve even heard Scottish kids attempting to address each other with it.
I prefer the more elaborate spelling Canute myself.
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
What's wrong with good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon names like Athelstan or Wulfrith?
Or to embrace England’s variegated origins, that fine Norse name Cnut? I’m sure I’ve even heard Scottish kids attempting to address each other with it.
As opposed to Guy Ritchie wannabees who spell it with an A or more usually AAA?
This is with a reallocation of Don't Knows. There are few pollsters doing it now.
Yes, the discussion in their methodology section is interesting and quite controversial, in the same way as the arguments about MRP - doesn't mean it's wrong but quite important for the results shown (e.g. they assume in the headline figures that Conservatives are more likely to vote than Labour voters, even though the "certainty to vote" questions gets the same result for both). The poll details are also intriguing - higher willingness to change votes among the smaller parties EXCEPT Reform, though the Tories have the highest level of "definitely won't change" (62%), suggesting the presence of a floor below which they won't fall.
Fares fair. The Paris transport company runs buses in London.
Doesn’t surprise me, it’s rained almost non-stop in the Seine’s watershed for the last several months. I assume they have similar sewage overflow issues as London.
Climate change is real, and we need to adapt. It seems that warmer wetter winters are our future. In Leics we have had hardly any frosts. The clay soil here is waterlogged. Better for planting rice than barley!
We’ve actually had a run of a few pretty dry winters (but warm). Until a few months ago large parts of Western Europe were in severe drought restrictions mainly because of winter deficits.
What is happening with a warmer climate though is more extremes, and rutty weather.
Record alert ! I do believe this is the earliest in the year we've breached we've passed an average of 8 Celsius for England (Central England data series) (Well since 1772 when the records began).
What - so it's currently unseasonably warm? Doesn't feel it here! Though I am aware that people's perceptions of what 'seasonable' is is way out from reality. What sticks in the memory is the periods of high pressure, in any season.
Back on topic, listening to the people interviewed in Blackpool, the one thing that bound all of them together (even the Tory) was that the town is visibly crumbling all around them. Blackpool can't sustain chain shops despite tourist numbers, and when most of the shops are owned by non-UK companies there is little incentive to do anything other than leave them shuttered and hope values rise naturally.
Blackpool is unique in some ways and not in others. It has a real problem with former B&Bs that modern tourists don't want to stay in - what to do with them? Which is how so many have ended up filled with migrants and the very poorest, or left to rot.
The solution? Buy large numbers of empty buildings, bulldoze them, and build homes. Blackpool has a microclimate - you can drive down the M55 where there is drizzle in Preston and find Blackpool free of cloud. It has rail and motorway links, a small airport which could be reopened and a tourist industry. Its the kind of place that people could be drawn to, but it needs politicians with vision. And it has lacked them for a long long time.
I have little doubt that Labour will win the byelection, and then little will change. Unless we decide that we are going to modernise these places and reinvest in their next phase of development - rather than bemoaning that the old times have gone - then all of these decaying towns will just keep decaying.
Recognition of the need to change- that Mytown used to be famous for something and that something has died- is blooming difficult, though.
There must be examples of towns successfully reinventing themselves, but it's not a comfortable process.
Stockton-on-Tees is doing a great job. Steel and shipbuilding have long gone, but the old Teesside Development Corporation had the land redeveloped as houses and an office park - complete with a Durham University campus.
Go forward a few decades and the town was struggling - too much retail space. So the council have bought the 70s shopping mall and derelict hotel and has bulldozed them, to create a riverside park. The town theatre - a relatively big 4,000 seat one - was painstakingly restored and reopened, with a council-owned Hilton just round the corner.
The Tories hated all this of course - describing both the theatre and the hotel as "white elephants" as who will use them? Yet the theatre is booked out for a year at a time and the hotel needs a bigger car park. So it can be done, but you need council management who know how to get things done and political stability to get you through several rounds of elections. Had the Tories won, the plan was to halt the works and leave the town with more half-finished stuff which they would blame Labour for...
BIB (Bit In Bold) 1: Note the "Corporation": this had state involvement and functioned much better than the outsource-to-private-sector jobbies that are so fashionable.
BIB (Bit In Bold) 2: I think that's the best solution for places that can't be revived: knock them down and make a park out of it.
Bradford is taking a similar approach. The City Council recognised it had a) some very ugly buildings, and b) too many offices by some way. It's solution was to rationalise office uses into the attractive Victorian buildings (of which Bradford has many) and knock down the ugly 1960s buildings, leaving the spaces as public open space. A win-win - but something of a surprise that a council can, if it wants, do such a thing; why haven't other towns knocked down their ugly buildings and replaced them with public open space? It seems such an open goal, if it's possible to do.
There's a lot more wrong with Bradford than a few soulless office buildings.
Why would [presumably] Scottish Conservative voters switch to an English nationalist party, Reform? You would think they would want to preserve the Union.
Its title is ReformUK not ReformEngland, it is not the English Democrats
Fares fair. The Paris transport company runs buses in London.
Doesn’t surprise me, it’s rained almost non-stop in the Seine’s watershed for the last several months. I assume they have similar sewage overflow issues as London.
Climate change is real, and we need to adapt. It seems that warmer wetter winters are our future. In Leics we have had hardly any frosts. The clay soil here is waterlogged. Better for planting rice than barley!
We’ve actually had a run of a few pretty dry winters (but warm). Until a few months ago large parts of Western Europe were in severe drought restrictions mainly because of winter deficits.
What is happening with a warmer climate though is more extremes, and rutty weather.
Record alert ! I do believe this is the earliest in the year we've breached we've passed an average of 8 Celsius for England (Central England data series) (Well since 1772 when the records began).
What - so it's currently unseasonably warm? Doesn't feel it here! Though I am aware that people's perceptions of what 'seasonable' is is way out from reality. What sticks in the memory is the periods of high pressure, in any season.
The last month to be below the 1961-1990 average in mean Central England Temperature was December 2022. Britain is certainly having an extended run of abnormally warm weather.
February 2024 was the second-warmest February in the entire record. Five of the monthly records are held by years since 2000. Won't be too long until all the records fall.
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
I think it's lovely to see some creativity and originality in children's names. Far nicer than facing a monotonous wall of Marks, Davids and Bens, surely.
Some interesting reading. This is the conclusion of the only paper on puberty blockers regarded as "high quality" by the reviewers:
"Transgender adolescents show poorer psychological well-being before treatment but show similar or better psychological functioning compared with cisgender peers from the general population after the start of specialized transgender care involving puberty suppression."
x-sectional though - those treated versus those not - doesn't make it invalid but doesn't give information on longer term outcomes and there may be unmeasured differences between the intervention and non-intervention groups. It is though, from a skim, a rare fairly well done paper in this field.
I'd tend to go with the review conclusions: "There is a lack of high-quality research assessing puberty suppression in adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria/incongruence. No conclusions can be drawn about the impact on gender dysphoria, mental and psychosocial health or cognitive development."
Disclaimer: I know some of the authors on these and I have seen pre-submission drafts of some of the papers where I was asked for an opinion on stats/methods. However, I had no input to or sight of the puberty blocker paper before today.
Sure more work is needed, but if the best paper shows benefit, then stopping treatment may not be ethical.
No problem of enrolling all patients in audits, but research requires voluntary participation and opting out without adversely affecting treatment, so I am dubious about insisting that these blockers are only used in a research context.
Yes, it's a strange and far from ideal situation now. Ideally, the blockers would have been trialed (or at least followed up) when first provided, but we are where we are. I agree on the general point re research - I'd rather see providers mandated to take part in a research programme - infrastructure in place to collect baseline and follow-up data, mandatory invitation of all recipients to join research but preserving the individual opt-out withou affecting access. However, the experience (I am told, by someone who attempted this) with the GIDS and adult endocrine clinics is that they have been very hostile to research access to existing records, effectively blocking it. This may be due to a (possibly justified) hostility to the approach and pre-existing views within the Cass review, but it does raise the risk that clinics (or some clinicians) may encourage their patients to opt out or even - as some primary care providers did for national data opt-outs - do mass opt-outs without asking.
Not sure what the solution is, but I do share your concerns.
As for the solution there are two: the low and the high.
The low is the creation of a trusted third party to monitor those in the field. If a research program cannot be sent up then at least people can be monitored in situ: appeal to the people directly, guarantee confidentiality, see if that works. Think of it as tracking a herd of wildebeest or mole rats: you don't invite a mole rat in for an interview with David Attenborough, you observe them in their natural environment and tag individuals with chips. Although the latter will probably be frowned upon.
The high is my suggested "Fill Out Your Fucking Forms Bill" (2024), where tracking and monitoring is compulsory and anonymised data is made public access so we can all play with the data. This is my preference but apparently people have those la-di-dah civil rights things.
The low is illegal in the transgender context, if your participants have a GRC (you cannot link pre- and post GRC data). That can be overcome by the Health Secretary (as happened for the Review) but you still have the practical issues where linkage is based on name (likely changed), medical record gender (likely changed), NHS number (likely changed) and address (who knows, may well have changed at similar point, too).
The high solution is not too far from what some of the Scandinavian countries do, but still with protected access to the data. Anonymisation is hard - particular here say for birth-registered females attending GIDS before 2014 or so. If you know Gavin/Gertrude from Doncaster attended GIDS in 2013 then that's probably enough to identify all his/her medical records in an 'anonymised' data set that contains GIDS admissions, birth sex and some geography. Even for other things - my neighbour recently had a knee op and I know where - I could probably find his complete medical records if I had access to such an whole population 'anonymised' dataset with home town, sex, some age info and hospital admissions and specialty (under current rules I'd need a very good reason to get access to such a dataset).
The pre-post problem can be worked around by taking the individual now (or post-transition) and then (or pre-transition) but not linking between the two. You can still build one time series with paired data for the pre data, and another for the post data.
I do take your point about matching though: if Gavin sex M age 25 NHS number 9435797881 living at 9 Coronation Street Manchester enters treatment, and Gertrude sex F age 35 NHS number 9435792103 living at 10 Albert Square Walford leaves it, how do we link them without knowing they are the same person.
You point about jigsaw identification is valid, but this is the kind of thing statistical disclosure control is designed for.
[Edit. But I have to get back to work now before I start doodling graphs]
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
What's wrong with good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon names like Athelstan or Wulfrith?
Or to embrace England’s variegated origins, that fine Norse name Cnut? I’m sure I’ve even heard Scottish kids attempting to address each other with it.
I prefer the more elaborate spelling Canute myself.
How you took that reading from it I will never know. There was one – literally one – Tory pledge in there and there rest look certain to vote Labour. Looked pretty disastrous for the Tories TBH.
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
I think it's lovely to see some creativity and originality in children's names. Far nicer than facing a monotonous wall of Marks, Davids and Bens, surely.
When I was a student, it was wall-to-wall Andys and Sarahs. One Andy decided he would be known as Henry, just to differentiate himself from the masses.
Another way to differentiate the Andys was to apply a prefix or suffix.
Some of the female students gave one of them the name "Andy Undesirable", which did seem a bit harsh.
OT I clicked through to the writeup in Reuters on Biden leading Trump by 4% and it's a masterpiece of both-sides-ism:
Both candidates carry significant liabilities ahead of what is expected to be a close race and the first U.S. presidential election rematch in nearly 70 years. Trump is due to appear in a Manhattan courtroom on April 15 for the start of the first of four pending criminal trials. The trial in Manhattan involves accusations Trump covered up a payment to an adult film actress before the 2016 presidential election in exchange for the actress' silence about an alleged sexual encounter she had with Trump. Trump has pleaded not guilty to the charges and denies any such encounter. The other trials involve charges Trump tried to overturn his 2020 election defeat or that he mishandled sensitive documents after leaving the presidency in 2021. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges. Biden's liabilities include concerns about his age - 81 - as well as strong criticism from a slice of his Democratic Party over his support of Israel's war on Hamas militants.
Looking at the JL Partners site I see a survey of attitudes of British Muslims to a range of issues which makes quite interesting reading, though it's easy to cherry-pick results that fit with preconceptions. Some things that many people wary about Muslim attitudes would find reassuring (e.g. they nearly all dislike ISIS and, perhaps more surprisingly, would oppose Christianity ceasing to be the official religion), some that are in line with the general public (e.g. sympathy for Palestinians) and some which may raise eyebrows (e.g. a plurality favour a more traditional role for women). Positive things to make following Islam easier (e.g. prayer spaces, an Islamic public holiday) get solid support, negative things like banning gay marriage much less so.
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
I think it's lovely to see some creativity and originality in children's names. Far nicer than facing a monotonous wall of Marks, Davids and Bens, surely.
When I was a student, it was wall-to-wall Andys and Sarahs. One Andy decided he would be known as Henry, just to differentiate himself from the masses.
Another way to differentiate the Andys was to apply a prefix or suffix.
Some of the female students gave one of them the name "Andy Undesirable", which did seem a bit harsh.
OT I clicked through to the writeup in Reuters on Biden leading Trump by 4% and it's a masterpiece of both-sides-ism:
Both candidates carry significant liabilities ahead of what is expected to be a close race and the first U.S. presidential election rematch in nearly 70 years. Trump is due to appear in a Manhattan courtroom on April 15 for the start of the first of four pending criminal trials. The trial in Manhattan involves accusations Trump covered up a payment to an adult film actress before the 2016 presidential election in exchange for the actress' silence about an alleged sexual encounter she had with Trump. Trump has pleaded not guilty to the charges and denies any such encounter. The other trials involve charges Trump tried to overturn his 2020 election defeat or that he mishandled sensitive documents after leaving the presidency in 2021. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges. Biden's liabilities include concerns about his age - 81 - as well as strong criticism from a slice of his Democratic Party over his support of Israel's war on Hamas militants.
Wikipedia page tracking polls in Scotland for next UKGE
Whilst physically carried out by YouGov, the Scottish Election Study poll in late October showing a Labour lead came with a disclaimer: "the voting intention results used slightly different wording and did not include YouGov’s standard turnout weighting and so should not be directly tracked to other YouGov voting intention figures as they are not identical. Instead, they should be tracked to other SCOOP voting intention polls conducted by the Scottish Election Study".
So it's the first one using YouGov's preferred methodology to show a Labour lead, I think.
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
Yeah, I taught a Jaxon last year and it was as expected.
Jaxonn Teller, main character in Sons of Anarchy. The telly has a lot to answer for.
Though there is comedy good in naming a child after a character before the series ends.
{a whole flock of children named Daenerys have entered the chat}
My wife had a toddler in her Kindy class called Khaleesi! A family from the US, parents working for multinationals in the UK, so not what you'd typically expect the child of millionaire parents in an expensive private school kindergarten class to be called!
Isn’t it some social media / celebrity trend to give your kid a ‘unique’ name?
I’d do precisely the opposite, I’d choose something as close to John Smith as possible, that’s basically un-Googleable. If the child then wishes to be a public figure as an adult they can choose a stage name, as was always the case until recently. IIRC the actors’ union still insists on unique names in their database, so there’s a dozen actors out their with John Smith as their legal name who are better known as something else.
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
I think it's lovely to see some creativity and originality in children's names. Far nicer than facing a monotonous wall of Marks, Davids and Bens, surely.
When I was a student, it was wall-to-wall Andys and Sarahs. One Andy decided he would be known as Henry, just to differentiate himself from the masses.
Another way to differentiate the Andys was to apply a prefix or suffix.
Some of the female students gave one of them the name "Andy Undesirable", which did seem a bit harsh.
Gen X first names are particularly homogenous, and usually short (or shortened). For boys: Matt, Ben, Mark, Jamie, Andy, Tom, Mike, Dave. For girls, lots of androgynous names: Sam, Alex, George etc plus Liz/Lizzie, Becky, Kate, Zoe, Alice, Emily, Emma, Abi...
.@wesstreeting glad to see you are now openly critical of the gender ideology that led to the atrocities against children outlined in the Cass Report. I am open to accepting an apology from you. In 2008, when you were NUS President, I was no-platformed, alongside 5 fascist groups, for 'transphobia'. I contacted you and asked for your help. You gave none. I asked you to condemn those that had orchestrated the no-platforming, and you refused. Have you any idea of the reputational damage this caused me? How it gave others permission to no-platform, denounce and defame me? How it meant that I could be slandered by other organisations, and so many, many universities around the UK and elsewhere? If this sounds bitter then good, because I am.
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
Yeah, I taught a Jaxon last year and it was as expected.
Jaxonn Teller, main character in Sons of Anarchy. The telly has a lot to answer for.
Though there is comedy good in naming a child after a character before the series ends.
{a whole flock of children named Daenerys have entered the chat}
My wife had a toddler in her Kindy class called Khaleesi! A family from the US, parents working for multinationals in the UK, so not what you'd typically expect the child of millionaire parents in an expensive private school kindergarten class to be called!
Isn’t it some social media / celebrity trend to give your kid a ‘unique’ name?
I’d do precisely the opposite, I’d choose something as close to John Smith as possible, that’s basically un-Googleable. If the child then wishes to be a public figure as an adult they can choose a stage name, as was always the case until recently. IIRC the actors’ union still insists on unique names in their database, so there’s a dozen actors out their with John Smith as their legal name who are better known as something else.
We gave both our girls classic, but not extremely common, names. Names that have suited people in every generation.
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
One never ceases to be amazed at her ability to find people who share her worldview and then to present them as proof of a trend.
I rarely find people with a strong view either way on such matters. More concerned about their soccer team, what they are doing at the weekend and the weather. Perhaps I should look harder.
Don't forget she is also a renowned authority on the trans issue and regularly appears as a talking head to discuss it due to her undoubted knowledge although she did duck a debate on it with Ishmael when he was around these parts. Didn't want to trounce him with her knowledge.
Well if we are going to doubt integrity, I would question someone who claims to always vote Labour and then bellyaches when posters are "nasty" to the Conservatives.
Disliking a particular style of political invective, the crude, the vulgar, the ad hominem attack, and calling out the people who do it does not indicated ones politics either way.
It does when one writes that no one attacks Labour/LD/SNP/Green/Plaid/Ind. for their corruption but everyone attacks the poor Tories.
On your terms you should be outraged at Casino's attack on Rayner for liking the opera.
Um, I haven't attacked Rayner for liking the opera. Where have you got that from?
I did have a slight dig at @Heathener, but that's not quite the same thing.
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
Yeah, I taught a Jaxon last year and it was as expected.
Jaxonn Teller, main character in Sons of Anarchy. The telly has a lot to answer for.
Though there is comedy good in naming a child after a character before the series ends.
{a whole flock of children named Daenerys have entered the chat}
My wife had a toddler in her Kindy class called Khaleesi! A family from the US, parents working for multinationals in the UK, so not what you'd typically expect the child of millionaire parents in an expensive private school kindergarten class to be called!
Isn’t it some social media / celebrity trend to give your kid a ‘unique’ name?
I’d do precisely the opposite, I’d choose something as close to John Smith as possible, that’s basically un-Googleable. If the child then wishes to be a public figure as an adult they can choose a stage name, as was always the case until recently. IIRC the actors’ union still insists on unique names in their database, so there’s a dozen actors out their with John Smith as their legal name who are better known as something else.
It's long been a staple thread on mumsnet for someone to complain that a friend/relative/almost complete stranger has "stolen" the unique and special name with deep emotional meaning that the poster wanted to give to their child, but now feel that they can't because everyone will think they were copying someone else.
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
Gratuitous misspelling is a scourge of our age.
I should be able to get some counselling just based on the variations of 'Kayleigh' that I've seen.
Why do they do it Araminta? Why? They are setting their kids up for a lifetime's inconvenience in explaining how their names are spelled. I remember someone at work a few years ago being inordinately pleased that he had chosen to spell his daughter's name as 'Jorja'.
Companies are no better. There was a piece in the Telegraph yesterday about bigwig's from Aberdeen Asset Management (who a few years ago decided to rename themselves 'Abrdn' (bafflingly this is apparently still pronounced 'Aberdeen', not 'Ab-ruh-dun'.)) complaining that mockery of their new spelling was 'corporate bullying'. But in my book gratuitous misspelling ought to be mocked. And if you can't mock a child, our of politeness and a recognition that it's not the child's fault, you can certainly mock a company.
Jorja Fox was the star of ER, West Wing and CSI. That'll do it.
.@wesstreeting glad to see you are now openly critical of the gender ideology that led to the atrocities against children outlined in the Cass Report. I am open to accepting an apology from you. In 2008, when you were NUS President, I was no-platformed, alongside 5 fascist groups, for 'transphobia'. I contacted you and asked for your help. You gave none. I asked you to condemn those that had orchestrated the no-platforming, and you refused. Have you any idea of the reputational damage this caused me? How it gave others permission to no-platform, denounce and defame me? How it meant that I could be slandered by other organisations, and so many, many universities around the UK and elsewhere? If this sounds bitter then good, because I am.
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
I think it's lovely to see some creativity and originality in children's names. Far nicer than facing a monotonous wall of Marks, Davids and Bens, surely.
When I was a student, it was wall-to-wall Andys and Sarahs. One Andy decided he would be known as Henry, just to differentiate himself from the masses.
Another way to differentiate the Andys was to apply a prefix or suffix.
Some of the female students gave one of them the name "Andy Undesirable", which did seem a bit harsh.
When I was at school someone shouted Morris in my direction. I responded with I'm not Morris back. Needless to say my name became 'Not Morris' from then on.
Some interesting reading. This is the conclusion of the only paper on puberty blockers regarded as "high quality" by the reviewers:
"Transgender adolescents show poorer psychological well-being before treatment but show similar or better psychological functioning compared with cisgender peers from the general population after the start of specialized transgender care involving puberty suppression."
x-sectional though - those treated versus those not - doesn't make it invalid but doesn't give information on longer term outcomes and there may be unmeasured differences between the intervention and non-intervention groups. It is though, from a skim, a rare fairly well done paper in this field.
I'd tend to go with the review conclusions: "There is a lack of high-quality research assessing puberty suppression in adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria/incongruence. No conclusions can be drawn about the impact on gender dysphoria, mental and psychosocial health or cognitive development."
Disclaimer: I know some of the authors on these and I have seen pre-submission drafts of some of the papers where I was asked for an opinion on stats/methods. However, I had no input to or sight of the puberty blocker paper before today.
Sure more work is needed, but if the best paper shows benefit, then stopping treatment may not be ethical.
No problem of enrolling all patients in audits, but research requires voluntary participation and opting out without adversely affecting treatment, so I am dubious about insisting that these blockers are only used in a research context.
Yes, it's a strange and far from ideal situation now. Ideally, the blockers would have been trialed (or at least followed up) when first provided, but we are where we are. I agree on the general point re research - I'd rather see providers mandated to take part in a research programme - infrastructure in place to collect baseline and follow-up data, mandatory invitation of all recipients to join research but preserving the individual opt-out withou affecting access. However, the experience (I am told, by someone who attempted this) with the GIDS and adult endocrine clinics is that they have been very hostile to research access to existing records, effectively blocking it. This may be due to a (possibly justified) hostility to the approach and pre-existing views within the Cass review, but it does raise the risk that clinics (or some clinicians) may encourage their patients to opt out or even - as some primary care providers did for national data opt-outs - do mass opt-outs without asking.
Not sure what the solution is, but I do share your concerns.
As for the solution there are two: the low and the high.
The low is the creation of a trusted third party to monitor those in the field. If a research program cannot be sent up then at least people can be monitored in situ: appeal to the people directly, guarantee confidentiality, see if that works. Think of it as tracking a herd of wildebeest or mole rats: you don't invite a mole rat in for an interview with David Attenborough, you observe them in their natural environment and tag individuals with chips. Although the latter will probably be frowned upon.
The high is my suggested "Fill Out Your Fucking Forms Bill" (2024), where tracking and monitoring is compulsory and anonymised data is made public access so we can all play with the data. This is my preference but apparently people have those la-di-dah civil rights things.
The low is illegal in the transgender context, if your participants have a GRC (you cannot link pre- and post GRC data). That can be overcome by the Health Secretary (as happened for the Review) but you still have the practical issues where linkage is based on name (likely changed), medical record gender (likely changed), NHS number (likely changed) and address (who knows, may well have changed at similar point, too).
The high solution is not too far from what some of the Scandinavian countries do, but still with protected access to the data. Anonymisation is hard - particular here say for birth-registered females attending GIDS before 2014 or so. If you know Gavin/Gertrude from Doncaster attended GIDS in 2013 then that's probably enough to identify all his/her medical records in an 'anonymised' data set that contains GIDS admissions, birth sex and some geography. Even for other things - my neighbour recently had a knee op and I know where - I could probably find his complete medical records if I had access to such an whole population 'anonymised' dataset with home town, sex, some age info and hospital admissions and specialty (under current rules I'd need a very good reason to get access to such a dataset).
The pre-post problem can be worked around by taking the individual now (or post-transition) and then (or pre-transition) but not linking between the two. You can still build one time series with paired data for the pre data, and another for the post data.
I do take your point about matching though: if Gavin sex M age 25 NHS number 9435797881 living at 9 Coronation Street Manchester enters treatment, and Gertrude sex F age 35 NHS number 9435792103 living at 10 Albert Square Walford leaves it, how do we link them without knowing they are the same person.
You point about jigsaw identification is valid, but this is the kind of thing statistical disclosure control is designed for.
[Edit. But I have to get back to work now before I start doodling graphs]
The point is, that you don't know who is post-transition (unless you can infer that from medications, but they often also have other uses - there are other reasons for messing with hormones).
SDC is generally used at the last stage, after the analysis, in papers and reports etc - so that only applies with restricted data access. SDC before analysis is very hard as you probably end up nobbling stuff that you actually need to know for the research.
The openSAFELY style model has more potential, but it's often really useful to see the actual data when there are odd things happening. But can probably be managed with good design and repeated sampling sensitivity analyses.
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
Yeah, I taught a Jaxon last year and it was as expected.
Jaxonn Teller, main character in Sons of Anarchy. The telly has a lot to answer for.
Though there is comedy good in naming a child after a character before the series ends.
{a whole flock of children named Daenerys have entered the chat}
My wife had a toddler in her Kindy class called Khaleesi! A family from the US, parents working for multinationals in the UK, so not what you'd typically expect the child of millionaire parents in an expensive private school kindergarten class to be called!
Isn’t it some social media / celebrity trend to give your kid a ‘unique’ name?
I’d do precisely the opposite, I’d choose something as close to John Smith as possible, that’s basically un-Googleable. If the child then wishes to be a public figure as an adult they can choose a stage name, as was always the case until recently. IIRC the actors’ union still insists on unique names in their database, so there’s a dozen actors out their with John Smith as their legal name who are better known as something else.
Yes, you don't want them coming high on the list when there's a Google search. I've explained that repeatedly to my son, Fred West, and daughter, Bella Pasta.
Looking at the JL Partners site I see a survey of attitudes of British Muslims to a range of issues which makes quite interesting reading, though it's easy to cherry-pick results that fit with preconceptions. Some things that many people wary about Muslim attitudes would find reassuring (e.g. they nearly all dislike ISIS and, perhaps more surprisingly, would oppose Christianity ceasing to be the official religion), some that are in line with the general public (e.g. sympathy for Palestinians) and some which may raise eyebrows (e.g. a plurality favour a more traditional role for women). Positive things to make following Islam easier (e.g. prayer spaces, an Islamic public holiday) get solid support, negative things like banning gay marriage much less so.
The results on the Israel / Palestine conflict are horrific though.
Hamas committed murder and rape in Israel on October 7th 24 Hamas did not commit murder and rape in Israel on October 7th 39 Don’t know 38
Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish Homeland 24 Israel does not have a right to exist as a Jewish Homeland 49 Don’t know 27
Israel is a racist endeavour 72 Israel is not a racist endeavour 8 Don’t know 20
Those sort of numbers are seen only among muslims living in the West, and not among muslims living in the Middle East, which is potentially very worrying for Western governments.
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
Yeah, I taught a Jaxon last year and it was as expected.
Jaxonn Teller, main character in Sons of Anarchy. The telly has a lot to answer for.
Though there is comedy good in naming a child after a character before the series ends.
{a whole flock of children named Daenerys have entered the chat}
My wife had a toddler in her Kindy class called Khaleesi! A family from the US, parents working for multinationals in the UK, so not what you'd typically expect the child of millionaire parents in an expensive private school kindergarten class to be called!
Isn’t it some social media / celebrity trend to give your kid a ‘unique’ name?
I’d do precisely the opposite, I’d choose something as close to John Smith as possible, that’s basically un-Googleable. If the child then wishes to be a public figure as an adult they can choose a stage name, as was always the case until recently. IIRC the actors’ union still insists on unique names in their database, so there’s a dozen actors out their with John Smith as their legal name who are better known as something else.
We gave both our girls classic, but not extremely common, names. Names that have suited people in every generation.
We gave our girls Sri Lankan/Indian names. Combined with my Anglo Saxon surname it means they have, as far as I can see, completely unique names. My son we gave a then not too common (outside top 100) traditional British first name. As a result, his name isn't unique, especially as his first name has rocketed in popularity since then! I think my youngest plans to go by her first name only when she achieves showbiz fame, a la Zendaya.
Looking at the JL Partners site I see a survey of attitudes of British Muslims to a range of issues which makes quite interesting reading, though it's easy to cherry-pick results that fit with preconceptions. Some things that many people wary about Muslim attitudes would find reassuring (e.g. they nearly all dislike ISIS and, perhaps more surprisingly, would oppose Christianity ceasing to be the official religion), some that are in line with the general public (e.g. sympathy for Palestinians) and some which may raise eyebrows (e.g. a plurality favour a more traditional role for women). Positive things to make following Islam easier (e.g. prayer spaces, an Islamic public holiday) get solid support, negative things like banning gay marriage much less so.
The results on the Israel / Palestine conflict are horrific though.
Hamas committed murder and rape in Israel on October 7th 24 Hamas did not commit murder and rape in Israel on October 7th 39 Don’t know 38
Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish Homeland 24 Israel does not have a right to exist as a Jewish Homeland 49 Don’t know 27
Israel is a racist endeavour 72 Israel is not a racist endeavour 8 Don’t know 20
Those sort of numbers are seen only among muslims living in the West, and not among muslims living in the Middle East, which is potentially very worrying for Western government.
Antisemitism is absolutely rife there. I think, fundamentally, they think the Jews have absolutely no business whatsoever being in the Middle East.
.@wesstreeting glad to see you are now openly critical of the gender ideology that led to the atrocities against children outlined in the Cass Report. I am open to accepting an apology from you. In 2008, when you were NUS President, I was no-platformed, alongside 5 fascist groups, for 'transphobia'. I contacted you and asked for your help. You gave none. I asked you to condemn those that had orchestrated the no-platforming, and you refused. Have you any idea of the reputational damage this caused me? How it gave others permission to no-platform, denounce and defame me? How it meant that I could be slandered by other organisations, and so many, many universities around the UK and elsewhere? If this sounds bitter then good, because I am.
.@wesstreeting glad to see you are now openly critical of the gender ideology that led to the atrocities against children outlined in the Cass Report. I am open to accepting an apology from you. In 2008, when you were NUS President, I was no-platformed, alongside 5 fascist groups, for 'transphobia'. I contacted you and asked for your help. You gave none. I asked you to condemn those that had orchestrated the no-platforming, and you refused. Have you any idea of the reputational damage this caused me? How it gave others permission to no-platform, denounce and defame me? How it meant that I could be slandered by other organisations, and so many, many universities around the UK and elsewhere? If this sounds bitter then good, because I am.
If others have a terrible argument, then let that show and defeat it.
If you need to prevent others from speaking then maybe your own views aren't as strong as they should be,
To take an extreme example: if someone came on PB with clear Nazi or fascist views, and talked about how Jews were evil, awful people who controlled the world, and derailed every thread onto that topic, refusing to debate what he writes:
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
Gratuitous misspelling is a scourge of our age.
I should be able to get some counselling just based on the variations of 'Kayleigh' that I've seen.
Why do they do it Araminta? Why? They are setting their kids up for a lifetime's inconvenience in explaining how their names are spelled. I remember someone at work a few years ago being inordinately pleased that he had chosen to spell his daughter's name as 'Jorja'.
Companies are no better. There was a piece in the Telegraph yesterday about bigwig's from Aberdeen Asset Management (who a few years ago decided to rename themselves 'Abrdn' (bafflingly this is apparently still pronounced 'Aberdeen', not 'Ab-ruh-dun'.)) complaining that mockery of their new spelling was 'corporate bullying'. But in my book gratuitous misspelling ought to be mocked. And if you can't mock a child, our of politeness and a recognition that it's not the child's fault, you can certainly mock a company.
I assume it's driven by some desire to be different/unique - however last year in Year 9, there were four girls with virtually the same (unusual) name AND surname - slight variations on spelling.
I've seen some ridiculous things though, when I first started teaching twenty odd years ago, there were a couple of kids from the same family where the father had named them after characters in his favourite Western (including horses).
Immaturity of parents can't be underestimated - they're not thinking ahead twenty/thirty years when little Trigger is applying for employment.
Looking at the JL Partners site I see a survey of attitudes of British Muslims to a range of issues which makes quite interesting reading, though it's easy to cherry-pick results that fit with preconceptions. Some things that many people wary about Muslim attitudes would find reassuring (e.g. they nearly all dislike ISIS and, perhaps more surprisingly, would oppose Christianity ceasing to be the official religion), some that are in line with the general public (e.g. sympathy for Palestinians) and some which may raise eyebrows (e.g. a plurality favour a more traditional role for women). Positive things to make following Islam easier (e.g. prayer spaces, an Islamic public holiday) get solid support, negative things like banning gay marriage much less so.
The results on the Israel / Palestine conflict are horrific though.
Hamas committed murder and rape in Israel on October 7th 24 Hamas did not commit murder and rape in Israel on October 7th 39 Don’t know 38
Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish Homeland 24 Israel does not have a right to exist as a Jewish Homeland 49 Don’t know 27
Israel is a racist endeavour 72 Israel is not a racist endeavour 8 Don’t know 20
Those sort of numbers are seen only among muslims living in the West, and not among muslims living in the Middle East, which is potentially very worrying for Western government.
Antisemitism is absolutely rife there. I think, fundamentally, they think the Jews have absolutely no business whatsoever being in the Middle East.
That’s is what has been taught by The State(s) in the region. Literally and for generations now.
My mother taught twins in the Seventies. Named Shaun and Sean (pronounced Seen).
My father in law taught Sean Bean in primary school. Apparently in older years some of the kids called him Seen Bean or Shaun Born depending on their mood.
.@wesstreeting glad to see you are now openly critical of the gender ideology that led to the atrocities against children outlined in the Cass Report. I am open to accepting an apology from you. In 2008, when you were NUS President, I was no-platformed, alongside 5 fascist groups, for 'transphobia'. I contacted you and asked for your help. You gave none. I asked you to condemn those that had orchestrated the no-platforming, and you refused. Have you any idea of the reputational damage this caused me? How it gave others permission to no-platform, denounce and defame me? How it meant that I could be slandered by other organisations, and so many, many universities around the UK and elsewhere? If this sounds bitter then good, because I am.
The overriding message of the Cass report seems to have passed her by completely.
...Despite the best intentions of everyone with a stake in this complex issue, the toxicity of the debate is exceptional. I have faced criticism for engaging with groups and individuals who take a social justice approach and advocate for gender affirmation, and have equally been criticised for involving groups and individuals who urge more caution. The knowledge and expertise of experienced clinicians who have reached different conclusions about the best approach to care are sometimes dismissed and invalidated.
There are few other areas of healthcare where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media, and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behaviour. This must stop.
Polarisation and stifling of debate do nothing to help the young people caught in the middle of a stormy social discourse, and in the long run will also hamper the research that is essential to finding the best way of supporting them to thrive..
.@wesstreeting glad to see you are now openly critical of the gender ideology that led to the atrocities against children outlined in the Cass Report. I am open to accepting an apology from you. In 2008, when you were NUS President, I was no-platformed, alongside 5 fascist groups, for 'transphobia'. I contacted you and asked for your help. You gave none. I asked you to condemn those that had orchestrated the no-platforming, and you refused. Have you any idea of the reputational damage this caused me? How it gave others permission to no-platform, denounce and defame me? How it meant that I could be slandered by other organisations, and so many, many universities around the UK and elsewhere? If this sounds bitter then good, because I am.
If others have a terrible argument, then let that show and defeat it.
If you need to prevent others from speaking then maybe your own views aren't as strong as they should be,
To take an extreme example: if someone came on PB with clear Nazi or fascist views, and talked about how Jews were evil, awful people who controlled the world, and derailed every thread onto that topic, refusing to debate what he writes:
You'd be okay with that?
Derailing every thread and refusing to debate is not good behaviour so can justify a banning no matter what their views are.
If someone came here with clear Nazi or fascist views and debated them in a genuine manner, then I would dislike their views but yes I'd have no problem with their being here.
However this is a private platform so it would be up to the site owners what they think.
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
I think it's lovely to see some creativity and originality in children's names. Far nicer than facing a monotonous wall of Marks, Davids and Bens, surely.
Alan appears to be very rare these days. And a certain sit-com means no-one calls their child Derek or Rodney any more.
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
Yeah, I taught a Jaxon last year and it was as expected.
Jaxonn Teller, main character in Sons of Anarchy. The telly has a lot to answer for.
Though there is comedy good in naming a child after a character before the series ends.
{a whole flock of children named Daenerys have entered the chat}
My wife had a toddler in her Kindy class called Khaleesi! A family from the US, parents working for multinationals in the UK, so not what you'd typically expect the child of millionaire parents in an expensive private school kindergarten class to be called!
Isn’t it some social media / celebrity trend to give your kid a ‘unique’ name?
I’d do precisely the opposite, I’d choose something as close to John Smith as possible, that’s basically un-Googleable. If the child then wishes to be a public figure as an adult they can choose a stage name, as was always the case until recently. IIRC the actors’ union still insists on unique names in their database, so there’s a dozen actors out their with John Smith as their legal name who are better known as something else.
We gave both our girls classic, but not extremely common, names. Names that have suited people in every generation.
.@wesstreeting glad to see you are now openly critical of the gender ideology that led to the atrocities against children outlined in the Cass Report. I am open to accepting an apology from you. In 2008, when you were NUS President, I was no-platformed, alongside 5 fascist groups, for 'transphobia'. I contacted you and asked for your help. You gave none. I asked you to condemn those that had orchestrated the no-platforming, and you refused. Have you any idea of the reputational damage this caused me? How it gave others permission to no-platform, denounce and defame me? How it meant that I could be slandered by other organisations, and so many, many universities around the UK and elsewhere? If this sounds bitter then good, because I am.
The overriding message of the Cass report seems to have passed her by completely.
...Despite the best intentions of everyone with a stake in this complex issue, the toxicity of the debate is exceptional. I have faced criticism for engaging with groups and individuals who take a social justice approach and advocate for gender affirmation, and have equally been criticised for involving groups and individuals who urge more caution. The knowledge and expertise of experienced clinicians who have reached different conclusions about the best approach to care are sometimes dismissed and invalidated.
There are few other areas of healthcare where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media, and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behaviour. This must stop.
Polarisation and stifling of debate do nothing to help the young people caught in the middle of a stormy social discourse, and in the long run will also hamper the research that is essential to finding the best way of supporting them to thrive..
All this talk of rational debate, informed by evidence, is putrid heresy.
Anyone who disagrees with me needs to be burnt at the stake. For the profit of all our souls.
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
I think it's lovely to see some creativity and originality in children's names. Far nicer than facing a monotonous wall of Marks, Davids and Bens, surely.
Alan appears to be very rare these days. And a certain sit-com means no-one calls their child Derek or Rodney any more.
Any boy named Damian always seems to deserve the association with The Omen.
Looking at the JL Partners site I see a survey of attitudes of British Muslims to a range of issues which makes quite interesting reading, though it's easy to cherry-pick results that fit with preconceptions. Some things that many people wary about Muslim attitudes would find reassuring (e.g. they nearly all dislike ISIS and, perhaps more surprisingly, would oppose Christianity ceasing to be the official religion), some that are in line with the general public (e.g. sympathy for Palestinians) and some which may raise eyebrows (e.g. a plurality favour a more traditional role for women). Positive things to make following Islam easier (e.g. prayer spaces, an Islamic public holiday) get solid support, negative things like banning gay marriage much less so.
Yes all good stuff. I would say, on eyeballing it, that around 30-40% of these polled British Muslims hold values that don't necessarily coincide with those of a western liberal democracy.
What does q.03 mean when it says that 46% would vote for George Galloway's Workers Party. Is that prompted with no others mentioned?
OT I clicked through to the writeup in Reuters on Biden leading Trump by 4% and it's a masterpiece of both-sides-ism:
Both candidates carry significant liabilities ahead of what is expected to be a close race and the first U.S. presidential election rematch in nearly 70 years. Trump is due to appear in a Manhattan courtroom on April 15 for the start of the first of four pending criminal trials. The trial in Manhattan involves accusations Trump covered up a payment to an adult film actress before the 2016 presidential election in exchange for the actress' silence about an alleged sexual encounter she had with Trump. Trump has pleaded not guilty to the charges and denies any such encounter. The other trials involve charges Trump tried to overturn his 2020 election defeat or that he mishandled sensitive documents after leaving the presidency in 2021. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges. Biden's liabilities include concerns about his age - 81 - as well as strong criticism from a slice of his Democratic Party over his support of Israel's war on Hamas militants.
The other change in names is that whereas previously, a double-barrelled name might indicate membership of a particular social class, now it as likely indicates membership of another.
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
What's your problem? Whether @Heathener has that back story or not, who cares?
People can claim all sorts of things on an anonymous blog. There aren't many road sweepers or refuse collectors living in trailers in Weston-Super-Mare from what I can see on PB. We are all millionaires from the right side of the tracks, captains of industry posting 24/7. Maybe if any of us could be arsed, so to do, we might even question your back story, but as we aren't really interested we won't.
Just as a general point, if you are make some kind of appeal to authority based on personal/professional experience, then you should also expect that it will get scrutinised, even on an 'anonymous blog'.
Actually, I find Heathener's persona entirely credible. If one wanted a reasonably paid job in a hurry, and one where you could do as much overtime as you liked and then clear off for some walking or writing, the RM makes excellent sense - it's apparently desperate for staff almost anywhere and anywhen.
Maybe she does both: perhaps she squeezes in a round before assembly, or steps up to do it during the school holidays on a flexible contract to supplement her income.
It's bloody impressive. I certainly couldn't do it. Not around going to the opera, connecting with my friends in government, travelling abroad and going out onto the streets.
Isn't BlancheLivermore our postie?
I am the overworked postie
Sorry! Brain fart.
Had some very nice times in and around Marlborough myself ...
Comments
Is it your experience in your patch that it's only the Conservatives which make use of Royal Mail's excellent door-to-door leaflet delivery service? Around here that used to be the case, but more recently Labour have been using it too albeit not quite on the same scale.
BIB (Bit In Bold) 2: I think that's the best solution for places that can't be revived: knock them down and make a park out of it.
We get a discount (for what it is worth) for having no drainage off the property other than the foul water.
It wasn't hard to do. Dig a soakaway or two, rainwater barrels everywhere, and a mesh / gravel / grass driveway.
Even in the biggest downpour nothing makes it to the street.
I despair when I see neighbours covering everything in sealed block paving. I wonder why we have flooding problems?
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
I would guess that very few of us on PB will be remembered in 300 years time, with streets or concert halls named after us. If someone 3 centuries for now is judging me, and condemns me for something that seems normal now… I don’t think I care, to be honest! It doesn’t affect me now. I hope people in 300 years are looking out for each other, not worrying about whether they’re hurting my feelings by renaming the Bondegezou Memorial Zero Gravity Skate Park.
Sadly I am not omnipresent nor do I spend my every waking hour here. Apols.
I just find it bizarre, nay, hypocritical that some people are woefully offended when a Tory does something wrong but if it is someone from Labour they give them a free pass. Still, whatever floats your boat.
Don't make the mistake, by the way, of assuming Blackpool is typical of the Fylde. Lytham is rather posh, St. Anne's is resolutely middlebrow. Kirkham is a rather nice market town, Poulton is perfectly adequate. I've never been to Fleetwood or Knott End but I understand the latter is rather nice. And the villages between range from the nice-enough to the very pleasant. (Wrea Green is worth a visit). You could have a nice life in any of these places.
And as Rochdale says, Blackpool could be a really attractive place to live. Yes, the strip behind the front is grotty, but the grotty bit is rather narrow. The housing stock in the north and east of the town is actually surprisingly fine.
What does one make of that?
The low is the creation of a trusted third party to monitor those in the field. If a research program cannot be sent up then at least people can be monitored in situ: appeal to the people directly, guarantee confidentiality, see if that works. Think of it as tracking a herd of wildebeest or mole rats: you don't invite a mole rat in for an interview with David Attenborough, you observe them in their natural environment and tag individuals with chips. Although the latter will probably be frowned upon.
The high is my suggested "Fill Out Your Fucking Forms Bill" (2024), where tracking and monitoring is compulsory and anonymised data is made public access so we can all play with the data. This is my preference but apparently people have those la-di-dah civil rights things.
In ancient times it was something close to inevitable - all but the very poorest in Rome owned slaves. So a freedman/woman, unless they were very poor....
I've done one other Conservative local election leaflet, and one for the Lib Dems
I doubt Labour will bother spending any money in Marlborough. I don't think they're even standing any candidates in the local elections
What? There aren't any? Never mind.
Its a tricky point that we probably shouldn't start, but most of the African slaves that the British bought were sold by other Africans. By all means we should consider our history and legacy but the story was always complex.
https://x.com/labour_history/status/1777772645888536905?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
Comparing trends between polls over time is interesting.
I'll get my coat (and my fags).
Glibla and Toref as portmanteaus - roll off the tongue
Chalk hearts melting on a playground wall
Do you remember?
Dawn escapes from moon washed college halls
Do you remember?
The cherry blossom in the market square
Do you remember?
I thought it was confetti in our hair
By the way, didn't I break your heart?
Please excuse me, I never meant to break your heart
So sorry, I never meant to break your heart
But you broke mine
Kayleigh, is it too late to say I'm sorry?
And, Kayleigh, could we get it together again?
I just can't go on pretending
That it came to a natural end
Kayleigh, oh I never thought I'd miss you
And, Kayleigh, I thought that we'd always be friends
We said our love would last forever
So how did it come to this bitter end?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA4ROLQF4cs
{a whole flock of children named Daenerys have entered the chat}
Companies are no better. There was a piece in the Telegraph yesterday about bigwig's from Aberdeen Asset Management (who a few years ago decided to rename themselves 'Abrdn' (bafflingly this is apparently still pronounced 'Aberdeen', not 'Ab-ruh-dun'.)) complaining that mockery of their new spelling was 'corporate bullying'. But in my book gratuitous misspelling ought to be mocked. And if you can't mock a child, our of politeness and a recognition that it's not the child's fault, you can certainly mock a company.
The high solution is not too far from what some of the Scandinavian countries do, but still with protected access to the data. Anonymisation is hard - particular here say for birth-registered females attending GIDS before 2014 or so. If you know Gavin/Gertrude from Doncaster attended GIDS in 2013 then that's probably enough to identify all his/her medical records in an 'anonymised' data set that contains GIDS admissions, birth sex and some geography. Even for other things - my neighbour recently had a knee op and I know where - I could probably find his complete medical records if I had access to such an whole population 'anonymised' dataset with home town, sex, some age info and hospital admissions and specialty (under current rules I'd need a very good reason to get access to such a dataset).
That said, proportionately the Conservatives have lost 36% of their 2019 vote share and with the Conservative vote being highly concentrated in a small minority of seats there might be proportional rather than uniform swing coming into play. If so, then you have more of a point.
Also, on current polling, Dumfries and Galloway should in my view be viewed as a 3 way marginal - Con, SNP and Lab. So it may not be the SNP alone which benefits if the Conservative vote does collapse most in the seats that it holds.
The council has no money, either.
February 2024 was the second-warmest February in the entire record. Five of the monthly records are held by years since 2000. Won't be too long until all the records fall.
I do take your point about matching though: if Gavin sex M age 25 NHS number 9435797881 living at 9 Coronation Street Manchester enters treatment, and Gertrude sex F age 35 NHS number 9435792103 living at 10 Albert Square Walford leaves it, how do we link them without knowing they are the same person.
You point about jigsaw identification is valid, but this is the kind of thing statistical disclosure control is designed for.
[Edit. But I have to get back to work now before I start doodling graphs]
The Danish spelling
Did we watch the same film?
Another way to differentiate the Andys was to apply a prefix or suffix.
Some of the female students gave one of them the name "Andy Undesirable", which did seem a bit harsh.
Both candidates carry significant liabilities ahead of what is expected to be a close race and the first U.S. presidential election rematch in nearly 70 years.
Trump is due to appear in a Manhattan courtroom on April 15 for the start of the first of four pending criminal trials.
The trial in Manhattan involves accusations Trump covered up a payment to an adult film actress before the 2016 presidential election in exchange for the actress' silence about an alleged sexual encounter she had with Trump. Trump has pleaded not guilty to the charges and denies any such encounter.
The other trials involve charges Trump tried to overturn his 2020 election defeat or that he mishandled sensitive documents after leaving the presidency in 2021. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Biden's liabilities include concerns about his age - 81 - as well as strong criticism from a slice of his Democratic Party over his support of Israel's war on Hamas militants.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-has-marginal-1-point-lead-over-trump-reutersipsos-poll-shows-2024-03-14/
Inevitable he'll be nicknamed Jaxoff.
https://jlpartners.com/polling-results
Did one of their dads sell raspberries?
Biden's campaign financing can go on actual campaigning and advertising instead.
This election will put to the test the theory that money influences votes. If it does, Trump has less hope than a snowman in the Sahara desert.
So it's the first one using YouGov's preferred methodology to show a Labour lead, I think.
I’d do precisely the opposite, I’d choose something as close to John Smith as possible, that’s basically un-Googleable. If the child then wishes to be a public figure as an adult they can choose a stage name, as was always the case until recently. IIRC the actors’ union still insists on unique names in their database, so there’s a dozen actors out their with John Smith as their legal name who are better known as something else.
https://x.com/bindelj/status/1777996374891540610?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
I did have a slight dig at @Heathener, but that's not quite the same thing.
Unless you know something I don't.
That'll do it.
If others have a terrible argument, then let that show and defeat it.
If you need to prevent others from speaking then maybe your own views aren't as strong as they should be,
Best kids movie of the last couple of decades.
Edit. Nor indeed Riley Reid. (Don't google at work!!).
SDC is generally used at the last stage, after the analysis, in papers and reports etc - so that only applies with restricted data access. SDC before analysis is very hard as you probably end up nobbling stuff that you actually need to know for the research.
The openSAFELY style model has more potential, but it's often really useful to see the actual data when there are odd things happening. But can probably be managed with good design and repeated sampling sensitivity analyses.
Hamas committed murder and rape in Israel on October 7th 24
Hamas did not commit murder and rape in Israel on October 7th 39
Don’t know 38
Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish Homeland 24
Israel does not have a right to exist as a Jewish Homeland 49
Don’t know 27
Israel is a racist endeavour 72
Israel is not a racist endeavour 8
Don’t know 20
Those sort of numbers are seen only among muslims living in the West, and not among muslims living in the Middle East, which is potentially very worrying for Western governments.
To ask holders of such beliefs to hear arguments against those beliefs is to expect them to hear heresy.
You'd be okay with that?
I've seen some ridiculous things though, when I first started teaching twenty odd years ago, there were a couple of kids from the same family where the father had named them after characters in his favourite Western (including horses).
Immaturity of parents can't be underestimated - they're not thinking ahead twenty/thirty years when little Trigger is applying for employment.
Named Shaun and Sean (pronounced Seen).
...Despite the best intentions of everyone with a stake in this complex issue, the toxicity of the debate is exceptional. I have faced criticism for engaging with groups and individuals who take a social justice approach and advocate for gender affirmation, and have equally been criticised for involving groups and individuals who urge more caution. The knowledge and expertise of experienced clinicians who have reached different conclusions about the best approach to care are sometimes dismissed and invalidated.
There are few other areas of healthcare where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media, and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behaviour. This must stop.
Polarisation and stifling of debate do nothing to help the young people caught in the middle of a stormy social discourse, and in the long run will also hamper the research that is essential to finding the best way of supporting them to thrive..
If someone came here with clear Nazi or fascist views and debated them in a genuine manner, then I would dislike their views but yes I'd have no problem with their being here.
However this is a private platform so it would be up to the site owners what they think.
Anyone who disagrees with me needs to be burnt at the stake. For the profit of all our souls.
Yes all good stuff. I would say, on eyeballing it, that around 30-40% of these polled British Muslims hold values that don't necessarily coincide with those of a western liberal democracy.
What does q.03 mean when it says that 46% would vote for George Galloway's Workers Party. Is that prompted with no others mentioned?
Had some very nice times in and around Marlborough myself ...