This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
Wow. You have some issues there. Why are you putting scientists in quotation marks? And never forget - it was politicians who took the decisions on lockdowns and the rest. Do you feel we didn’t need to lockdown at all? That’s one view but I think it was essential in March 2020. Later events I think are less clear cut. But who is it that you think needs blackballing? I’m genuinely curious.
In retrospect I wouldn't have done the first lockdown either. The cost was too high and the lasting effects have been terrible and all so that a few people over 80 got an extra year or two.
Any "scientist" who pushed the "lab leak is racist" narrative including more than a few on here, any who pushed the lockdowns after seeing how awful the first one was, any who pushed for shitty mask mandates, any who pushed for closing schools, any who pushed for that idiotic "substantial meal" rubbish. It was all nonsense in the end and none of the guilty parties who thought it up have paid the price. Indeed, if there was another pandemic we'd rely on the same "scientists" who would plunge us back into endless lockdowns, I mean there were some who thought that we should never have let go of COVID measures and we're advocating for keeping social distancing indoors permanently etc... all in the name of "harm prevention".
Honestly fuck the scientists and "experts" and I say this holding a valid chemistry degree and having worked as a data scientist for the last half decade. We should never have handed over the levers of government to people who didn't get voted in, even for a temporary amount of time. The way the media venerated them was sickening and once they got a taste for it you could see how loath they were to give it up.
What would you have done if you didn’t do the first lockdown? Simply let hospitals be overwhelmed? Suggest people just live or die at home?
I think we got a lot of things wrong, but there were no easy choices. I think we failed to change our policies quickly enough when we knew more. We knew that it wasn’t droplet spread pretty early yet advice based on droplets carried on for years (2m social distancing is based on that). We should have used the not 100% accurate but pretty good lateral flow tests hugely more to open things up. We should have let outdoor events go on far more. We had a government that, I think it’s pretty clear, took a dim view of humanity and thought draconian rules were needed. I think that’s partly because that’s how they are themselves, Johnson certainly. Others have suggested using carrots rather than sticks might have worked.
I get that people now think we did too much, but that is hindsight and mostly not realistic. I too am frustrated with the inquiries, but perhaps we should judge at the end, when the reports come out.
Yup, people live or die at home. Only take COVID patients under 18, everyone else deals with it at home and assesses their own risk.
We can't halt everyone's lives because there isn't enough healthcare provision, it's completely nonsensical. To extend the lives of the very old by a few months or years we locked up the other 99% who wouldn't have died even without hospital intervention.
And if it was your parents or wife or you seriously ill with covid? You’d just stay meekly at home? Get real. Or an accident and no ambulance comes?
Yeah, but that’s bollocks. LLMs generate text. That text might seem to indicate all sorts of things, but it’s just generated text. That’s the key point about the Anthropic paper: they can actually map what the LLM is doing to generate the text and it’s just various associations. It has nothing to do with what the LLM says it’s doing, because when the LLM “says” what it’s doing, you’re just getting it to generate text with another prompt. It might say all sorts of things, but it’s just a sequence of words from a next token algorithm.
We generate words. The words might seem to indicate all sorts of things, but it's just generated words.
Someone produces words and that acts as a prompt to cause someone else to generate more words.
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
Wow. You have some issues there. Why are you putting scientists in quotation marks? And never forget - it was politicians who took the decisions on lockdowns and the rest. Do you feel we didn’t need to lockdown at all? That’s one view but I think it was essential in March 2020. Later events I think are less clear cut. But who is it that you think needs blackballing? I’m genuinely curious.
In retrospect I wouldn't have done the first lockdown either. The cost was too high and the lasting effects have been terrible and all so that a few people over 80 got an extra year or two.
Any "scientist" who pushed the "lab leak is racist" narrative including more than a few on here, any who pushed the lockdowns after seeing how awful the first one was, any who pushed for shitty mask mandates, any who pushed for closing schools, any who pushed for that idiotic "substantial meal" rubbish. It was all nonsense in the end and none of the guilty parties who thought it up have paid the price. Indeed, if there was another pandemic we'd rely on the same "scientists" who would plunge us back into endless lockdowns, I mean there were some who thought that we should never have let go of COVID measures and we're advocating for keeping social distancing indoors permanently etc... all in the name of "harm prevention".
Honestly fuck the scientists and "experts" and I say this holding a valid chemistry degree and having worked as a data scientist for the last half decade. We should never have handed over the levers of government to people who didn't get voted in, even for a temporary amount of time. The way the media venerated them was sickening and once they got a taste for it you could see how loath they were to give it up.
What would you have done if you didn’t do the first lockdown? Simply let hospitals be overwhelmed? Suggest people just live or die at home?
I think we got a lot of things wrong, but there were no easy choices. I think we failed to change our policies quickly enough when we knew more. We knew that it wasn’t droplet spread pretty early yet advice based on droplets carried on for years (2m social distancing is based on that). We should have used the not 100% accurate but pretty good lateral flow tests hugely more to open things up. We should have let outdoor events go on far more. We had a government that, I think it’s pretty clear, took a dim view of humanity and thought draconian rules were needed. I think that’s partly because that’s how they are themselves, Johnson certainly. Others have suggested using carrots rather than sticks might have worked.
I get that people now think we did too much, but that is hindsight and mostly not realistic. I too am frustrated with the inquiries, but perhaps we should judge at the end, when the reports come out.
Yup, people live or die at home. Only take COVID patients under 18, everyone else deals with it at home and assesses their own risk.
We can't halt everyone's lives because there isn't enough healthcare provision, it's completely nonsensical. To extend the lives of the very old by a few months or years we locked up the other 99% who wouldn't have died even without hospital intervention.
And if it was your parents or wife or you seriously ill with covid? You’d just stay meekly at home? Get real. Or an accident and no ambulance comes?
For the accident the ambulance still turns up, for COVID it doesn't. You get the advice to stay home unless it's for an under 18 year old and if you go to a hospital you get turned away and told to go back home to rest and recover. If that meant temporarily having security at A&E then that's the hard choice that needed to be made, not sabotaging the nation for 2 years on and off.
"Voiceover artist Gayanne Potter urging ScotRail to remove her voice from new AI announcements ScotRail unveiled its new AI announcer - nicknamed "Iona" - on board the railway network in Scotland this month."
Ms Potter, who lives on the outskirts of Edinburgh, believes the incident can be traced back to a job she completed during the COVID pandemic with Swedish company ReadSpeaker, where she recorded scripts for the visually impaired. Ms Potter alleges she was unaware the contract allowed her voice to be sold as part of AI years later."
One of the worst consequences of the Covid Lab Leak cover-up, and the warping and perversion of "science" so as to "protect the scientists", is that I no longer trust any of it (and I am certainly not alone). They all knowingly lied, and they lied in "respected" journals like the Lancet and Nature, and they lied because they were terrified of the possibility it was indeed a leak, and also because many of them were already bought and sold for Chinese gold
All of which means that when we have the NEXT medical emergency, everyone is going to be deeply suspicious, wary and hostile towards "the science". Which is really quite melancholy for us, as a species
Yes, these people have saved their careers, their grants, their Chinese donations, and not a single person has even gone in front of a court to answer for the deaths of 20 million.... but what is the cost, long term?
Yet again this requires that immortal quote from Chernobyl:
Every lie we tell incurs debt to the truth. Sooner or later this debt is paid
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
Wow. You have some issues there. Why are you putting scientists in quotation marks? And never forget - it was politicians who took the decisions on lockdowns and the rest. Do you feel we didn’t need to lockdown at all? That’s one view but I think it was essential in March 2020. Later events I think are less clear cut. But who is it that you think needs blackballing? I’m genuinely curious.
In retrospect I wouldn't have done the first lockdown either. The cost was too high and the lasting effects have been terrible and all so that a few people over 80 got an extra year or two.
Any "scientist" who pushed the "lab leak is racist" narrative including more than a few on here, any who pushed the lockdowns after seeing how awful the first one was, any who pushed for shitty mask mandates, any who pushed for closing schools, any who pushed for that idiotic "substantial meal" rubbish. It was all nonsense in the end and none of the guilty parties who thought it up have paid the price. Indeed, if there was another pandemic we'd rely on the same "scientists" who would plunge us back into endless lockdowns, I mean there were some who thought that we should never have let go of COVID measures and we're advocating for keeping social distancing indoors permanently etc... all in the name of "harm prevention".
Honestly fuck the scientists and "experts" and I say this holding a valid chemistry degree and having worked as a data scientist for the last half decade. We should never have handed over the levers of government to people who didn't get voted in, even for a temporary amount of time. The way the media venerated them was sickening and once they got a taste for it you could see how loath they were to give it up.
What would you have done if you didn’t do the first lockdown? Simply let hospitals be overwhelmed? Suggest people just live or die at home?
I think we got a lot of things wrong, but there were no easy choices. I think we failed to change our policies quickly enough when we knew more. We knew that it wasn’t droplet spread pretty early yet advice based on droplets carried on for years (2m social distancing is based on that). We should have used the not 100% accurate but pretty good lateral flow tests hugely more to open things up. We should have let outdoor events go on far more. We had a government that, I think it’s pretty clear, took a dim view of humanity and thought draconian rules were needed. I think that’s partly because that’s how they are themselves, Johnson certainly. Others have suggested using carrots rather than sticks might have worked.
I get that people now think we did too much, but that is hindsight and mostly not realistic. I too am frustrated with the inquiries, but perhaps we should judge at the end, when the reports come out.
Yup, people live or die at home. Only take COVID patients under 18, everyone else deals with it at home and assesses their own risk.
We can't halt everyone's lives because there isn't enough healthcare provision, it's completely nonsensical. To extend the lives of the very old by a few months or years we locked up the other 99% who wouldn't have died even without hospital intervention.
And if it was your parents or wife or you seriously ill with covid? You’d just stay meekly at home? Get real. Or an accident and no ambulance comes?
For the accident the ambulance still turns up, for COVID it doesn't. You get the advice to stay home unless it's for an under 18 year old and if you go to a hospital you get turned away and told to go back home to rest and recover. If that meant temporarily having security at A&E then that's the hard choice that needed to be made, not sabotaging the nation for 2 years on and off.
You don’t get it do you - you think the vast majority of the country would be happy to ‘go home and die’? Madness. And you are forgetting that a huge number of NHS staff including your security staff would be ill too, with covid.
I think you have in your head that if we had only taken the ‘hard but fair’ path you describe that it would all have been done in a few weeks. Except it wouldn’t. Covid remains nasty even after vaccination/prior infection.
One of the worst consequences of the Covid Lab Leak cover-up, and the warping and perversion of "science" so as to "protect the scientists", is that I no longer trust any of it (and I am certainly not alone). They all knowingly lied, and they lied in "respected" journals like the Lancet and Nature, and they lied because they were terrified of the possibility it was indeed a leak, and also because many of them were already bought and sold for Chinese gold
All of which means that when we have the NEXT medical emergency, everyone is going to be deeply suspicious, wary and hostile towards "the science". Which is really quite melancholy for us, as a species
Yes, these people have saved their careers, their grants, their Chinese donations, and not a single person has even gone in front of a court to answer for the deaths of 20 million.... but what is the cost, long term?
Yet again this requires that immortal quote from Chernobyl:
Every lie we tell incurs debt to the truth. Sooner or later this debt is paid
"Voiceover artist Gayanne Potter urging ScotRail to remove her voice from new AI announcements ScotRail unveiled its new AI announcer - nicknamed "Iona" - on board the railway network in Scotland this month."
Ms Potter, who lives on the outskirts of Edinburgh, believes the incident can be traced back to a job she completed during the COVID pandemic with Swedish company ReadSpeaker, where she recorded scripts for the visually impaired. Ms Potter alleges she was unaware the contract allowed her voice to be sold as part of AI years later."
From what I recall, chopping up sounds from a voice recording and automatically reconstituting them into other words and sentences is a technology which predates what is now being called AI. So this may not be new.
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
Wow. You have some issues there. Why are you putting scientists in quotation marks? And never forget - it was politicians who took the decisions on lockdowns and the rest. Do you feel we didn’t need to lockdown at all? That’s one view but I think it was essential in March 2020. Later events I think are less clear cut. But who is it that you think needs blackballing? I’m genuinely curious.
In retrospect I wouldn't have done the first lockdown either. The cost was too high and the lasting effects have been terrible and all so that a few people over 80 got an extra year or two.
Any "scientist" who pushed the "lab leak is racist" narrative including more than a few on here, any who pushed the lockdowns after seeing how awful the first one was, any who pushed for shitty mask mandates, any who pushed for closing schools, any who pushed for that idiotic "substantial meal" rubbish. It was all nonsense in the end and none of the guilty parties who thought it up have paid the price. Indeed, if there was another pandemic we'd rely on the same "scientists" who would plunge us back into endless lockdowns, I mean there were some who thought that we should never have let go of COVID measures and we're advocating for keeping social distancing indoors permanently etc... all in the name of "harm prevention".
Honestly fuck the scientists and "experts" and I say this holding a valid chemistry degree and having worked as a data scientist for the last half decade. We should never have handed over the levers of government to people who didn't get voted in, even for a temporary amount of time. The way the media venerated them was sickening and once they got a taste for it you could see how loath they were to give it up.
What would you have done if you didn’t do the first lockdown? Simply let hospitals be overwhelmed? Suggest people just live or die at home?
I think we got a lot of things wrong, but there were no easy choices. I think we failed to change our policies quickly enough when we knew more. We knew that it wasn’t droplet spread pretty early yet advice based on droplets carried on for years (2m social distancing is based on that). We should have used the not 100% accurate but pretty good lateral flow tests hugely more to open things up. We should have let outdoor events go on far more. We had a government that, I think it’s pretty clear, took a dim view of humanity and thought draconian rules were needed. I think that’s partly because that’s how they are themselves, Johnson certainly. Others have suggested using carrots rather than sticks might have worked.
I get that people now think we did too much, but that is hindsight and mostly not realistic. I too am frustrated with the inquiries, but perhaps we should judge at the end, when the reports come out.
Yup, people live or die at home. Only take COVID patients under 18, everyone else deals with it at home and assesses their own risk.
We can't halt everyone's lives because there isn't enough healthcare provision, it's completely nonsensical. To extend the lives of the very old by a few months or years we locked up the other 99% who wouldn't have died even without hospital intervention.
And if it was your parents or wife or you seriously ill with covid? You’d just stay meekly at home? Get real. Or an accident and no ambulance comes?
This mawkish sentimentality is why the NHS takes ever ballooning proportions of our spending yet is still failing.
You can't keep everyone alive forever. You can't defeat death. People die, it happens. You're the one who needs to get real.
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
Wow. You have some issues there. Why are you putting scientists in quotation marks? And never forget - it was politicians who took the decisions on lockdowns and the rest. Do you feel we didn’t need to lockdown at all? That’s one view but I think it was essential in March 2020. Later events I think are less clear cut. But who is it that you think needs blackballing? I’m genuinely curious.
In retrospect I wouldn't have done the first lockdown either. The cost was too high and the lasting effects have been terrible and all so that a few people over 80 got an extra year or two.
Any "scientist" who pushed the "lab leak is racist" narrative including more than a few on here, any who pushed the lockdowns after seeing how awful the first one was, any who pushed for shitty mask mandates, any who pushed for closing schools, any who pushed for that idiotic "substantial meal" rubbish. It was all nonsense in the end and none of the guilty parties who thought it up have paid the price. Indeed, if there was another pandemic we'd rely on the same "scientists" who would plunge us back into endless lockdowns, I mean there were some who thought that we should never have let go of COVID measures and we're advocating for keeping social distancing indoors permanently etc... all in the name of "harm prevention".
Honestly fuck the scientists and "experts" and I say this holding a valid chemistry degree and having worked as a data scientist for the last half decade. We should never have handed over the levers of government to people who didn't get voted in, even for a temporary amount of time. The way the media venerated them was sickening and once they got a taste for it you could see how loath they were to give it up.
What would you have done if you didn’t do the first lockdown? Simply let hospitals be overwhelmed? Suggest people just live or die at home?
I think we got a lot of things wrong, but there were no easy choices. I think we failed to change our policies quickly enough when we knew more. We knew that it wasn’t droplet spread pretty early yet advice based on droplets carried on for years (2m social distancing is based on that). We should have used the not 100% accurate but pretty good lateral flow tests hugely more to open things up. We should have let outdoor events go on far more. We had a government that, I think it’s pretty clear, took a dim view of humanity and thought draconian rules were needed. I think that’s partly because that’s how they are themselves, Johnson certainly. Others have suggested using carrots rather than sticks might have worked.
I get that people now think we did too much, but that is hindsight and mostly not realistic. I too am frustrated with the inquiries, but perhaps we should judge at the end, when the reports come out.
Yup, people live or die at home. Only take COVID patients under 18, everyone else deals with it at home and assesses their own risk.
We can't halt everyone's lives because there isn't enough healthcare provision, it's completely nonsensical. To extend the lives of the very old by a few months or years we locked up the other 99% who wouldn't have died even without hospital intervention.
And if it was your parents or wife or you seriously ill with covid? You’d just stay meekly at home? Get real. Or an accident and no ambulance comes?
This mawkish sentimentality is why the NHS takes ever ballooning proportions of our spending yet is still failing.
You can't keep everyone alive forever. You can't defeat death. People die, it happens. You're the one who needs to get real.
Seriously? Your wife is dying in your arms but you’d meekly accept the government diktat to stay home with some lemsip? You, of all people? Forgive me if I don’t believe you.
Just read in The New European about a fairly new detective show called Poker Face. Has anyone seen it and is it worth watching?
It’s ace (2nd series now). Somewhat like Columbo in that normally you see the crime at the start but the lead isn’t a detective as such, just someone who can tell if you are telling the truth or not. Well worth a go.
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
Wow. You have some issues there. Why are you putting scientists in quotation marks? And never forget - it was politicians who took the decisions on lockdowns and the rest. Do you feel we didn’t need to lockdown at all? That’s one view but I think it was essential in March 2020. Later events I think are less clear cut. But who is it that you think needs blackballing? I’m genuinely curious.
In retrospect I wouldn't have done the first lockdown either. The cost was too high and the lasting effects have been terrible and all so that a few people over 80 got an extra year or two.
Any "scientist" who pushed the "lab leak is racist" narrative including more than a few on here, any who pushed the lockdowns after seeing how awful the first one was, any who pushed for shitty mask mandates, any who pushed for closing schools, any who pushed for that idiotic "substantial meal" rubbish. It was all nonsense in the end and none of the guilty parties who thought it up have paid the price. Indeed, if there was another pandemic we'd rely on the same "scientists" who would plunge us back into endless lockdowns, I mean there were some who thought that we should never have let go of COVID measures and we're advocating for keeping social distancing indoors permanently etc... all in the name of "harm prevention".
Honestly fuck the scientists and "experts" and I say this holding a valid chemistry degree and having worked as a data scientist for the last half decade. We should never have handed over the levers of government to people who didn't get voted in, even for a temporary amount of time. The way the media venerated them was sickening and once they got a taste for it you could see how loath they were to give it up.
What would you have done if you didn’t do the first lockdown? Simply let hospitals be overwhelmed? Suggest people just live or die at home?
I think we got a lot of things wrong, but there were no easy choices. I think we failed to change our policies quickly enough when we knew more. We knew that it wasn’t droplet spread pretty early yet advice based on droplets carried on for years (2m social distancing is based on that). We should have used the not 100% accurate but pretty good lateral flow tests hugely more to open things up. We should have let outdoor events go on far more. We had a government that, I think it’s pretty clear, took a dim view of humanity and thought draconian rules were needed. I think that’s partly because that’s how they are themselves, Johnson certainly. Others have suggested using carrots rather than sticks might have worked.
I get that people now think we did too much, but that is hindsight and mostly not realistic. I too am frustrated with the inquiries, but perhaps we should judge at the end, when the reports come out.
Yup, people live or die at home. Only take COVID patients under 18, everyone else deals with it at home and assesses their own risk.
We can't halt everyone's lives because there isn't enough healthcare provision, it's completely nonsensical. To extend the lives of the very old by a few months or years we locked up the other 99% who wouldn't have died even without hospital intervention.
And if it was your parents or wife or you seriously ill with covid? You’d just stay meekly at home? Get real. Or an accident and no ambulance comes?
For the accident the ambulance still turns up, for COVID it doesn't. You get the advice to stay home unless it's for an under 18 year old and if you go to a hospital you get turned away and told to go back home to rest and recover. If that meant temporarily having security at A&E then that's the hard choice that needed to be made, not sabotaging the nation for 2 years on and off.
You don’t get it do you - you think the vast majority of the country would be happy to ‘go home and die’? Madness. And you are forgetting that a huge number of NHS staff including your security staff would be ill too, with covid.
I think you have in your head that if we had only taken the ‘hard but fair’ path you describe that it would all have been done in a few weeks. Except it wouldn’t. Covid remains nasty even after vaccination/prior infection.
Schools probably shouldn't have been closed for more than the initial 6 weeks or so. Too much damage has been caused by doing so.
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
Wow. You have some issues there. Why are you putting scientists in quotation marks? And never forget - it was politicians who took the decisions on lockdowns and the rest. Do you feel we didn’t need to lockdown at all? That’s one view but I think it was essential in March 2020. Later events I think are less clear cut. But who is it that you think needs blackballing? I’m genuinely curious.
In retrospect I wouldn't have done the first lockdown either. The cost was too high and the lasting effects have been terrible and all so that a few people over 80 got an extra year or two.
Any "scientist" who pushed the "lab leak is racist" narrative including more than a few on here, any who pushed the lockdowns after seeing how awful the first one was, any who pushed for shitty mask mandates, any who pushed for closing schools, any who pushed for that idiotic "substantial meal" rubbish. It was all nonsense in the end and none of the guilty parties who thought it up have paid the price. Indeed, if there was another pandemic we'd rely on the same "scientists" who would plunge us back into endless lockdowns, I mean there were some who thought that we should never have let go of COVID measures and we're advocating for keeping social distancing indoors permanently etc... all in the name of "harm prevention".
Honestly fuck the scientists and "experts" and I say this holding a valid chemistry degree and having worked as a data scientist for the last half decade. We should never have handed over the levers of government to people who didn't get voted in, even for a temporary amount of time. The way the media venerated them was sickening and once they got a taste for it you could see how loath they were to give it up.
What would you have done if you didn’t do the first lockdown? Simply let hospitals be overwhelmed? Suggest people just live or die at home?
I think we got a lot of things wrong, but there were no easy choices. I think we failed to change our policies quickly enough when we knew more. We knew that it wasn’t droplet spread pretty early yet advice based on droplets carried on for years (2m social distancing is based on that). We should have used the not 100% accurate but pretty good lateral flow tests hugely more to open things up. We should have let outdoor events go on far more. We had a government that, I think it’s pretty clear, took a dim view of humanity and thought draconian rules were needed. I think that’s partly because that’s how they are themselves, Johnson certainly. Others have suggested using carrots rather than sticks might have worked.
I get that people now think we did too much, but that is hindsight and mostly not realistic. I too am frustrated with the inquiries, but perhaps we should judge at the end, when the reports come out.
Yup, people live or die at home. Only take COVID patients under 18, everyone else deals with it at home and assesses their own risk.
We can't halt everyone's lives because there isn't enough healthcare provision, it's completely nonsensical. To extend the lives of the very old by a few months or years we locked up the other 99% who wouldn't have died even without hospital intervention.
And if it was your parents or wife or you seriously ill with covid? You’d just stay meekly at home? Get real. Or an accident and no ambulance comes?
For the accident the ambulance still turns up, for COVID it doesn't. You get the advice to stay home unless it's for an under 18 year old and if you go to a hospital you get turned away and told to go back home to rest and recover. If that meant temporarily having security at A&E then that's the hard choice that needed to be made, not sabotaging the nation for 2 years on and off.
You don’t get it do you - you think the vast majority of the country would be happy to ‘go home and die’? Madness. And you are forgetting that a huge number of NHS staff including your security staff would be ill too, with covid.
I think you have in your head that if we had only taken the ‘hard but fair’ path you describe that it would all have been done in a few weeks. Except it wouldn’t. Covid remains nasty even after vaccination/prior infection.
People die all the time. Everyday, in fact. I don't understand why you think death should be put on hold for people who get one type of disease. I had a minor risk of death after the vaccine fucked me over, I recovered, sadly quite a few people didn't. Why was it ok to push out the COVID vaccine on a "balance of risk" basis before a proper phase 3/4 trial had been completed and put younger people at risk but the same "balance of risk" approach couldn't be used for lockdowns?
One of the worst consequences of the Covid Lab Leak cover-up, and the warping and perversion of "science" so as to "protect the scientists", is that I no longer trust any of it (and I am certainly not alone). They all knowingly lied, and they lied in "respected" journals like the Lancet and Nature, and they lied because they were terrified of the possibility it was indeed a leak, and also because many of them were already bought and sold for Chinese gold
All of which means that when we have the NEXT medical emergency, everyone is going to be deeply suspicious, wary and hostile towards "the science". Which is really quite melancholy for us, as a species
Yes, these people have saved their careers, their grants, their Chinese donations, and not a single person has even gone in front of a court to answer for the deaths of 20 million.... but what is the cost, long term?
Yet again this requires that immortal quote from Chernobyl:
Every lie we tell incurs debt to the truth. Sooner or later this debt is paid
You lost me at Lancet being a respected journal.
lol. At least you show some self-awareness and honesty, unlike @bondegezou
How the Fuck is Richard Horton still the editor-in-chief? It's not like the Covid Lancet letter is the only scandal attached to him
All science is tainted by this stuff, and that is sad
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
Wow. You have some issues there. Why are you putting scientists in quotation marks? And never forget - it was politicians who took the decisions on lockdowns and the rest. Do you feel we didn’t need to lockdown at all? That’s one view but I think it was essential in March 2020. Later events I think are less clear cut. But who is it that you think needs blackballing? I’m genuinely curious.
No, it was absolutely the scientists who were refusing to listen to anything that contradicted what they already believed about where the virus originated.
I know some on here believe that they have won the argument over covid origins, but just shouting loudly on PB is not proof. I am open to both explanations. And take that side out, and I think there is some merit in the idea that lab leak was suppressed by some bad actors, the attutude of some in here to rerunning the pandemic without lockdown and without other measures is bonkers.
I am by no means a conspiracy theorist of this, it could have been the lab, could have been the wet market. No particular opinion either way.
Regardless however of where it originated there was definitely a scientific conspiracy by the likes of Vallance, Daczak, Fauci and others to say it couldn't possibly be the lab and they used means like its racist to shut down any thought it could be. Indeed many social media sites like facebook removed any posts implying maybe a lab leak. Sorry doesn't look good.
Now I worked in science for a few years, to me that seems like avoiding any evidence of something you dont want to be true rather than be willing to look at evidence and see where it leads. Maybe it would have led to the lab or maybe the market. Seems to me however none of them wanted to have one of those paths looked at. Even if eventually its proved it came from the market its still not a good look for them
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
Wow. You have some issues there. Why are you putting scientists in quotation marks? And never forget - it was politicians who took the decisions on lockdowns and the rest. Do you feel we didn’t need to lockdown at all? That’s one view but I think it was essential in March 2020. Later events I think are less clear cut. But who is it that you think needs blackballing? I’m genuinely curious.
In retrospect I wouldn't have done the first lockdown either. The cost was too high and the lasting effects have been terrible and all so that a few people over 80 got an extra year or two.
Any "scientist" who pushed the "lab leak is racist" narrative including more than a few on here, any who pushed the lockdowns after seeing how awful the first one was, any who pushed for shitty mask mandates, any who pushed for closing schools, any who pushed for that idiotic "substantial meal" rubbish. It was all nonsense in the end and none of the guilty parties who thought it up have paid the price. Indeed, if there was another pandemic we'd rely on the same "scientists" who would plunge us back into endless lockdowns, I mean there were some who thought that we should never have let go of COVID measures and we're advocating for keeping social distancing indoors permanently etc... all in the name of "harm prevention".
Honestly fuck the scientists and "experts" and I say this holding a valid chemistry degree and having worked as a data scientist for the last half decade. We should never have handed over the levers of government to people who didn't get voted in, even for a temporary amount of time. The way the media venerated them was sickening and once they got a taste for it you could see how loath they were to give it up.
What would you have done if you didn’t do the first lockdown? Simply let hospitals be overwhelmed? Suggest people just live or die at home?
I think we got a lot of things wrong, but there were no easy choices. I think we failed to change our policies quickly enough when we knew more. We knew that it wasn’t droplet spread pretty early yet advice based on droplets carried on for years (2m social distancing is based on that). We should have used the not 100% accurate but pretty good lateral flow tests hugely more to open things up. We should have let outdoor events go on far more. We had a government that, I think it’s pretty clear, took a dim view of humanity and thought draconian rules were needed. I think that’s partly because that’s how they are themselves, Johnson certainly. Others have suggested using carrots rather than sticks might have worked.
I get that people now think we did too much, but that is hindsight and mostly not realistic. I too am frustrated with the inquiries, but perhaps we should judge at the end, when the reports come out.
Yup, people live or die at home. Only take COVID patients under 18, everyone else deals with it at home and assesses their own risk.
We can't halt everyone's lives because there isn't enough healthcare provision, it's completely nonsensical. To extend the lives of the very old by a few months or years we locked up the other 99% who wouldn't have died even without hospital intervention.
And if it was your parents or wife or you seriously ill with covid? You’d just stay meekly at home? Get real. Or an accident and no ambulance comes?
For the accident the ambulance still turns up, for COVID it doesn't. You get the advice to stay home unless it's for an under 18 year old and if you go to a hospital you get turned away and told to go back home to rest and recover. If that meant temporarily having security at A&E then that's the hard choice that needed to be made, not sabotaging the nation for 2 years on and off.
Also I suspect you may be vaccine injured Max which may be driving your emotion. In my dads village someone just got a heart attack after the booster. Now everyone in the village is against the covid vax. This is normies now not the usual suspects and is destroying confidence in the medical profession. Notice as well the cancers of some on this board like cyclefree. Vaccine related Who knows But confidence is destroyed nevertheless
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
Wow. You have some issues there. Why are you putting scientists in quotation marks? And never forget - it was politicians who took the decisions on lockdowns and the rest. Do you feel we didn’t need to lockdown at all? That’s one view but I think it was essential in March 2020. Later events I think are less clear cut. But who is it that you think needs blackballing? I’m genuinely curious.
In retrospect I wouldn't have done the first lockdown either. The cost was too high and the lasting effects have been terrible and all so that a few people over 80 got an extra year or two.
Any "scientist" who pushed the "lab leak is racist" narrative including more than a few on here, any who pushed the lockdowns after seeing how awful the first one was, any who pushed for shitty mask mandates, any who pushed for closing schools, any who pushed for that idiotic "substantial meal" rubbish. It was all nonsense in the end and none of the guilty parties who thought it up have paid the price. Indeed, if there was another pandemic we'd rely on the same "scientists" who would plunge us back into endless lockdowns, I mean there were some who thought that we should never have let go of COVID measures and we're advocating for keeping social distancing indoors permanently etc... all in the name of "harm prevention".
Honestly fuck the scientists and "experts" and I say this holding a valid chemistry degree and having worked as a data scientist for the last half decade. We should never have handed over the levers of government to people who didn't get voted in, even for a temporary amount of time. The way the media venerated them was sickening and once they got a taste for it you could see how loath they were to give it up.
What would you have done if you didn’t do the first lockdown? Simply let hospitals be overwhelmed? Suggest people just live or die at home?
I think we got a lot of things wrong, but there were no easy choices. I think we failed to change our policies quickly enough when we knew more. We knew that it wasn’t droplet spread pretty early yet advice based on droplets carried on for years (2m social distancing is based on that). We should have used the not 100% accurate but pretty good lateral flow tests hugely more to open things up. We should have let outdoor events go on far more. We had a government that, I think it’s pretty clear, took a dim view of humanity and thought draconian rules were needed. I think that’s partly because that’s how they are themselves, Johnson certainly. Others have suggested using carrots rather than sticks might have worked.
I get that people now think we did too much, but that is hindsight and mostly not realistic. I too am frustrated with the inquiries, but perhaps we should judge at the end, when the reports come out.
Yup, people live or die at home. Only take COVID patients under 18, everyone else deals with it at home and assesses their own risk.
We can't halt everyone's lives because there isn't enough healthcare provision, it's completely nonsensical. To extend the lives of the very old by a few months or years we locked up the other 99% who wouldn't have died even without hospital intervention.
And if it was your parents or wife or you seriously ill with covid? You’d just stay meekly at home? Get real. Or an accident and no ambulance comes?
For the accident the ambulance still turns up, for COVID it doesn't. You get the advice to stay home unless it's for an under 18 year old and if you go to a hospital you get turned away and told to go back home to rest and recover. If that meant temporarily having security at A&E then that's the hard choice that needed to be made, not sabotaging the nation for 2 years on and off.
You don’t get it do you - you think the vast majority of the country would be happy to ‘go home and die’? Madness. And you are forgetting that a huge number of NHS staff including your security staff would be ill too, with covid.
I think you have in your head that if we had only taken the ‘hard but fair’ path you describe that it would all have been done in a few weeks. Except it wouldn’t. Covid remains nasty even after vaccination/prior infection.
Schools probably shouldn't have been closed for more than the initial 6 weeks or so. Too much damage has been caused by doing so.
Schools was tricky but (a) they stayed open for key workers kids anyway and (b) teachers needed to be considered too. I don’t think we did well over schools, notably so for the less affluent. Not every kid has a snazzy lap top.
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
Wow. You have some issues there. Why are you putting scientists in quotation marks? And never forget - it was politicians who took the decisions on lockdowns and the rest. Do you feel we didn’t need to lockdown at all? That’s one view but I think it was essential in March 2020. Later events I think are less clear cut. But who is it that you think needs blackballing? I’m genuinely curious.
No, it was absolutely the scientists who were refusing to listen to anything that contradicted what they already believed about where the virus originated.
I know some on here believe that they have won the argument over covid origins, but just shouting loudly on PB is not proof. I am open to both explanations. And take that side out, and I think there is some merit in the idea that lab leak was suppressed by some bad actors, the attutude of some in here to rerunning the pandemic without lockdown and without other measures is bonkers.
I am by no means a conspiracy theorist of this, it could have been the lab, could have been the wet market. No particular opinion either way.
Regardless however of where it originated there was definitely a scientific conspiracy by the likes of Vallance, Daczak, Fauci and others to say it couldn't possibly be the lab and they used means like its racist to shut down any thought it could be. Indeed many social media sites like facebook removed any posts implying maybe a lab leak. Sorry doesn't look good.
Now I worked in science for a few years, to me that seems like avoiding any evidence of something you dont want to be true rather than be willing to look at evidence and see where it leads. Maybe it would have led to the lab or maybe the market. Seems to me however none of them wanted to have one of those paths looked at. Even if eventually its proved it came from the market its still not a good look for them
I still don't understand why they took this stance, unless it was simply that they couldn't bear the idea of being on the same side as the alt-right.
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
Wow. You have some issues there. Why are you putting scientists in quotation marks? And never forget - it was politicians who took the decisions on lockdowns and the rest. Do you feel we didn’t need to lockdown at all? That’s one view but I think it was essential in March 2020. Later events I think are less clear cut. But who is it that you think needs blackballing? I’m genuinely curious.
In retrospect I wouldn't have done the first lockdown either. The cost was too high and the lasting effects have been terrible and all so that a few people over 80 got an extra year or two.
Any "scientist" who pushed the "lab leak is racist" narrative including more than a few on here, any who pushed the lockdowns after seeing how awful the first one was, any who pushed for shitty mask mandates, any who pushed for closing schools, any who pushed for that idiotic "substantial meal" rubbish. It was all nonsense in the end and none of the guilty parties who thought it up have paid the price. Indeed, if there was another pandemic we'd rely on the same "scientists" who would plunge us back into endless lockdowns, I mean there were some who thought that we should never have let go of COVID measures and we're advocating for keeping social distancing indoors permanently etc... all in the name of "harm prevention".
Honestly fuck the scientists and "experts" and I say this holding a valid chemistry degree and having worked as a data scientist for the last half decade. We should never have handed over the levers of government to people who didn't get voted in, even for a temporary amount of time. The way the media venerated them was sickening and once they got a taste for it you could see how loath they were to give it up.
What would you have done if you didn’t do the first lockdown? Simply let hospitals be overwhelmed? Suggest people just live or die at home?
I think we got a lot of things wrong, but there were no easy choices. I think we failed to change our policies quickly enough when we knew more. We knew that it wasn’t droplet spread pretty early yet advice based on droplets carried on for years (2m social distancing is based on that). We should have used the not 100% accurate but pretty good lateral flow tests hugely more to open things up. We should have let outdoor events go on far more. We had a government that, I think it’s pretty clear, took a dim view of humanity and thought draconian rules were needed. I think that’s partly because that’s how they are themselves, Johnson certainly. Others have suggested using carrots rather than sticks might have worked.
I get that people now think we did too much, but that is hindsight and mostly not realistic. I too am frustrated with the inquiries, but perhaps we should judge at the end, when the reports come out.
Yup, people live or die at home. Only take COVID patients under 18, everyone else deals with it at home and assesses their own risk.
We can't halt everyone's lives because there isn't enough healthcare provision, it's completely nonsensical. To extend the lives of the very old by a few months or years we locked up the other 99% who wouldn't have died even without hospital intervention.
And if it was your parents or wife or you seriously ill with covid? You’d just stay meekly at home? Get real. Or an accident and no ambulance comes?
For the accident the ambulance still turns up, for COVID it doesn't. You get the advice to stay home unless it's for an under 18 year old and if you go to a hospital you get turned away and told to go back home to rest and recover. If that meant temporarily having security at A&E then that's the hard choice that needed to be made, not sabotaging the nation for 2 years on and off.
You don’t get it do you - you think the vast majority of the country would be happy to ‘go home and die’? Madness. And you are forgetting that a huge number of NHS staff including your security staff would be ill too, with covid.
I think you have in your head that if we had only taken the ‘hard but fair’ path you describe that it would all have been done in a few weeks. Except it wouldn’t. Covid remains nasty even after vaccination/prior infection.
People die all the time. Everyday, in fact. I don't understand why you think death should be put on hold for people who get one type of disease. I had a minor risk of death after the vaccine fucked me over, I recovered, sadly quite a few people didn't. Why was it ok to push out the COVID vaccine on a "balance of risk" basis before a proper phase 3/4 trial had been completed and put younger people at risk but the same "balance of risk" approach couldn't be used for lockdowns?
Enlighten me - how do you have a phase 4 trial without approving it?
And I am not thinking death should be put on hold for one type of disease. Generally in healthcare we try to help,patients. You have not addressed the question of why you think the mass population would meekly accept their fate. They would not.
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
Wow. You have some issues there. Why are you putting scientists in quotation marks? And never forget - it was politicians who took the decisions on lockdowns and the rest. Do you feel we didn’t need to lockdown at all? That’s one view but I think it was essential in March 2020. Later events I think are less clear cut. But who is it that you think needs blackballing? I’m genuinely curious.
In retrospect I wouldn't have done the first lockdown either. The cost was too high and the lasting effects have been terrible and all so that a few people over 80 got an extra year or two.
Any "scientist" who pushed the "lab leak is racist" narrative including more than a few on here, any who pushed the lockdowns after seeing how awful the first one was, any who pushed for shitty mask mandates, any who pushed for closing schools, any who pushed for that idiotic "substantial meal" rubbish. It was all nonsense in the end and none of the guilty parties who thought it up have paid the price. Indeed, if there was another pandemic we'd rely on the same "scientists" who would plunge us back into endless lockdowns, I mean there were some who thought that we should never have let go of COVID measures and we're advocating for keeping social distancing indoors permanently etc... all in the name of "harm prevention".
Honestly fuck the scientists and "experts" and I say this holding a valid chemistry degree and having worked as a data scientist for the last half decade. We should never have handed over the levers of government to people who didn't get voted in, even for a temporary amount of time. The way the media venerated them was sickening and once they got a taste for it you could see how loath they were to give it up.
What would you have done if you didn’t do the first lockdown? Simply let hospitals be overwhelmed? Suggest people just live or die at home?
I think we got a lot of things wrong, but there were no easy choices. I think we failed to change our policies quickly enough when we knew more. We knew that it wasn’t droplet spread pretty early yet advice based on droplets carried on for years (2m social distancing is based on that). We should have used the not 100% accurate but pretty good lateral flow tests hugely more to open things up. We should have let outdoor events go on far more. We had a government that, I think it’s pretty clear, took a dim view of humanity and thought draconian rules were needed. I think that’s partly because that’s how they are themselves, Johnson certainly. Others have suggested using carrots rather than sticks might have worked.
I get that people now think we did too much, but that is hindsight and mostly not realistic. I too am frustrated with the inquiries, but perhaps we should judge at the end, when the reports come out.
Yup, people live or die at home. Only take COVID patients under 18, everyone else deals with it at home and assesses their own risk.
We can't halt everyone's lives because there isn't enough healthcare provision, it's completely nonsensical. To extend the lives of the very old by a few months or years we locked up the other 99% who wouldn't have died even without hospital intervention.
Sorry going to disagree somewhat
1st lockdown, I think justified we didnt really know what we were dealing with and we had horrific stories out of places like italy. Do not fault that lockdown particulary
2nd lockdown...I think still should have encouraged homeworking where possible and minimal contact but dropped the draconian rules and been advisory for social
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
Wow. You have some issues there. Why are you putting scientists in quotation marks? And never forget - it was politicians who took the decisions on lockdowns and the rest. Do you feel we didn’t need to lockdown at all? That’s one view but I think it was essential in March 2020. Later events I think are less clear cut. But who is it that you think needs blackballing? I’m genuinely curious.
In retrospect I wouldn't have done the first lockdown either. The cost was too high and the lasting effects have been terrible and all so that a few people over 80 got an extra year or two.
Any "scientist" who pushed the "lab leak is racist" narrative including more than a few on here, any who pushed the lockdowns after seeing how awful the first one was, any who pushed for shitty mask mandates, any who pushed for closing schools, any who pushed for that idiotic "substantial meal" rubbish. It was all nonsense in the end and none of the guilty parties who thought it up have paid the price. Indeed, if there was another pandemic we'd rely on the same "scientists" who would plunge us back into endless lockdowns, I mean there were some who thought that we should never have let go of COVID measures and we're advocating for keeping social distancing indoors permanently etc... all in the name of "harm prevention".
Honestly fuck the scientists and "experts" and I say this holding a valid chemistry degree and having worked as a data scientist for the last half decade. We should never have handed over the levers of government to people who didn't get voted in, even for a temporary amount of time. The way the media venerated them was sickening and once they got a taste for it you could see how loath they were to give it up.
What would you have done if you didn’t do the first lockdown? Simply let hospitals be overwhelmed? Suggest people just live or die at home?
I think we got a lot of things wrong, but there were no easy choices. I think we failed to change our policies quickly enough when we knew more. We knew that it wasn’t droplet spread pretty early yet advice based on droplets carried on for years (2m social distancing is based on that). We should have used the not 100% accurate but pretty good lateral flow tests hugely more to open things up. We should have let outdoor events go on far more. We had a government that, I think it’s pretty clear, took a dim view of humanity and thought draconian rules were needed. I think that’s partly because that’s how they are themselves, Johnson certainly. Others have suggested using carrots rather than sticks might have worked.
I get that people now think we did too much, but that is hindsight and mostly not realistic. I too am frustrated with the inquiries, but perhaps we should judge at the end, when the reports come out.
Yup, people live or die at home. Only take COVID patients under 18, everyone else deals with it at home and assesses their own risk.
We can't halt everyone's lives because there isn't enough healthcare provision, it's completely nonsensical. To extend the lives of the very old by a few months or years we locked up the other 99% who wouldn't have died even without hospital intervention.
Sorry going to disagree somewhat
1st lockdown, I think justified we didnt really know what we were dealing with and we had horrific stories out of places like italy. Do not fault that lockdown particulary
2nd lockdown...I think still should have encouraged homeworking where possible and minimal contact but dropped the draconian rules and been advisory for social
Covid was downgraded as a high consequence infectioys disrase prior to lockdown 1.
Just read in The New European about a fairly new detective show called Poker Face. Has anyone seen it and is it worth watching?
It’s ace (2nd series now). Somewhat like Columbo in that normally you see the crime at the start but the lead isn’t a detective as such, just someone who can tell if you are telling the truth or not. Well worth a go.
Thanks. I hardly ever watch new TV shows when they're new so to speak, (usually waiting until they're 20 years old like I did with Twin Peaks), but think I'll make an exception with this one.
Many people come up to me and complain about the explosion of dementia cases since the covid vax rollout. And this is normies not the usual suspects.
And don’t forget the BA pilots.
I am writing a letter of complaint to vladimir Putin as we speak. He is spoiling our fun by siccing his trolls on the forum late on a tuesday night when most are going to bed because they have real productive work to do on wednesday. I think the ICC should prosecute him on those grounds alone, denial of pisstaking fun
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
Wow. You have some issues there. Why are you putting scientists in quotation marks? And never forget - it was politicians who took the decisions on lockdowns and the rest. Do you feel we didn’t need to lockdown at all? That’s one view but I think it was essential in March 2020. Later events I think are less clear cut. But who is it that you think needs blackballing? I’m genuinely curious.
No, it was absolutely the scientists who were refusing to listen to anything that contradicted what they already believed about where the virus originated.
I know some on here believe that they have won the argument over covid origins, but just shouting loudly on PB is not proof. I am open to both explanations. And take that side out, and I think there is some merit in the idea that lab leak was suppressed by some bad actors, the attutude of some in here to rerunning the pandemic without lockdown and without other measures is bonkers.
I am by no means a conspiracy theorist of this, it could have been the lab, could have been the wet market. No particular opinion either way.
Regardless however of where it originated there was definitely a scientific conspiracy by the likes of Vallance, Daczak, Fauci and others to say it couldn't possibly be the lab and they used means like its racist to shut down any thought it could be. Indeed many social media sites like facebook removed any posts implying maybe a lab leak. Sorry doesn't look good.
Now I worked in science for a few years, to me that seems like avoiding any evidence of something you dont want to be true rather than be willing to look at evidence and see where it leads. Maybe it would have led to the lab or maybe the market. Seems to me however none of them wanted to have one of those paths looked at. Even if eventually its proved it came from the market its still not a good look for them
I still don't understand why they took this stance, unless it was simply that they couldn't bear the idea of being on the same side as the alt-right.
It's quite explicable
1. A lot of virologists and other boffins were implicated, and - crucially - this was true in the USA and China, the two superpowers. Fauci and the NIH in the USA funded the Gain of Function research in Wuhan (because it was banned by Obama as being too dangerous! - so it could not be done in the USA). And of course the leak itself - if it happened - happened in China. In labs so dangerously lax in biosecurity they were called "Wild West" by, yes, Jeremy Farrar
When America and China have a shared and vested interest in keeping a story quiet that is a lot of geopolitical pressure
2. Scientists elsewhere had similar motivations. If it was ever proven that warped science killed tens of millions of humans, what does that do to science itself? Who will ever get another grant, in virology, or anything? Hence the response of the scientists in the UK, Germany, Holland - put a lid on it, denounce it as a "racist conspiracy"
3. Chinese money now funds a lot of science - research and writing. Journals like the Lancet and Nature rely heavily on China for income. They are no longer neutral. They are scared of publishing anything that might upset Beijing. Add in pressure from the American scientific establishment to stay schtum and you have all the ingredients for a cover-up
4. Politics. Trump was ballyhooing about Wuhan Flu and "China lied and millions died". The Biden White House didn't want to aid Trump, they put pressure on Facebook and Twitter (as was) to ban even the mention of the "Trumpite lab leak theory"
"Mark Zuckerberg says White House ‘pressured’ Facebook to censor Covid-19 content
Meta boss regrets bowing to government power and says he would not make the same choices today"
5. Herding did the rest. Anyone allergic to Trump became allergic to the Lab Leak Hypothesis, beyond all logic. It took TWO YEARS before we were even allowed to discuss the hypothesis, fully and publicly
Many people come up to me and complain about the explosion of dementia cases since the covid vax rollout. And this is normies not the usual suspects.
And don’t forget the BA pilots.
BA pilots?
According to anti vax/russian trolls the covid vaccine killed many ba pilots
Trust in our institutions is at an all time low now. With incidents like what hapoened in my dads village you can see why.
They aren't your institutions, your institutions are the fsb,wagner and the kgb. Beware the womans institute will give all of those a thorough drubbing
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
Wow. You have some issues there. Why are you putting scientists in quotation marks? And never forget - it was politicians who took the decisions on lockdowns and the rest. Do you feel we didn’t need to lockdown at all? That’s one view but I think it was essential in March 2020. Later events I think are less clear cut. But who is it that you think needs blackballing? I’m genuinely curious.
No, it was absolutely the scientists who were refusing to listen to anything that contradicted what they already believed about where the virus originated.
I know some on here believe that they have won the argument over covid origins, but just shouting loudly on PB is not proof. I am open to both explanations. And take that side out, and I think there is some merit in the idea that lab leak was suppressed by some bad actors, the attutude of some in here to rerunning the pandemic without lockdown and without other measures is bonkers.
I am by no means a conspiracy theorist of this, it could have been the lab, could have been the wet market. No particular opinion either way.
Regardless however of where it originated there was definitely a scientific conspiracy by the likes of Vallance, Daczak, Fauci and others to say it couldn't possibly be the lab and they used means like its racist to shut down any thought it could be. Indeed many social media sites like facebook removed any posts implying maybe a lab leak. Sorry doesn't look good.
Now I worked in science for a few years, to me that seems like avoiding any evidence of something you dont want to be true rather than be willing to look at evidence and see where it leads. Maybe it would have led to the lab or maybe the market. Seems to me however none of them wanted to have one of those paths looked at. Even if eventually its proved it came from the market its still not a good look for them
I still don't understand why they took this stance, unless it was simply that they couldn't bear the idea of being on the same side as the alt-right.
It's quite explicable
1. A lot of virologists and other boffins were implicated, and - crucially - this was true in the USA and China, the two superpowers. Fauci and the NIH in the USA funded the Gain of Function research in Wuhan (because it was banned by Obama as being too dangerous! - so it could not be done in the USA). And of course the leak itself - if it happened - happened in China. In labs so dangerously lax in biosecurity they were called "Wild West" by, yes, Jeremy Farrar
When America and China have a shared and vested interest in keeping a story quiet that is a lot of geopolitical pressure
2. Scientists elsewhere had similar motivations. If it was ever proven that warped science killed tens of millions of humans, what does that do to science itself? Who will ever get another grant, in virology, or anything? Hence the response of the scientists in the UK, Germany, Holland - put a lid on it, denounce it as a "racist conspiracy"
3. Chinese money now funds a lot of science - research and writing. Journals like the Lancet and Nature rely heavily on China for income. They are no longer neutral. They are scared of publishing anything that might upset Beijing. Add in pressure from the American scientific establishment to stay schtum and you have all the ingredients for a cover-up
4. Politics. Trump was ballyhooing about Wuhan Flu and "China lied and millions died". The Biden White House didn't want to aid Trump, they put pressure on Facebook and Twitter (as was) to ban even the mention of the "Trumpite lab leak theory"
"Mark Zuckerberg says White House ‘pressured’ Facebook to censor Covid-19 content
Meta boss regrets bowing to government power and says he would not make the same choices today"
5. Herding did the rest. Anyone allergic to Trump became allergic to the Lab Leak Hypothesis, beyond all logic. It took TWO YEARS before we were even allowed to discuss the hypothesis, fully and publicly
Quite extraordinary madness
I was a 100% believer in science and scientists until this happpened, so it's a big shock for me. Still is.
Well you are a fool. Science is totally corrupted by money.
Remember how Leon said some of his friends were doubting the vax.
You do realise most people regard Leon as a reliable source of facts in the same way that they believe that men can get pregnant running widdershins round a maypole naked while shouting "I am a baboon my butt is so blue, watch it and weep"
I always wondered why if so many people say they would pay more to give the NHS more money, why dont we put it to the test by allowing people to voluntarily increase their NI/Tax contribution beyond the compulsory contributions.
Call it the Voluntary NHS Booster Fund or something and let them at it.
I always wondered why if so many people say they would pay more to give the NHS more money, why dont we put it to the test by allowing people to voluntarily increase their NI/Tax contribution beyond the compulsory contributions.
Call it the Voluntary NHS Booster Fund or something and let them at it.
Becayse generally what people really mean is they would happy for others to pay more to give the nhs more money.....no doubt to pay the new pay claim of the "resident doctors"....that stopping the strikes worked out so well didn't it
Remember how Leon said some of his friends were doubting the vax.
You do realise most people regard Leon as a reliable source of facts in the same way that they believe that men can get pregnant running widdershins round a maypole naked while shouting "I am a baboon my butt is so blue, watch it and weep"
See you guys in the morning if rcs doesnt ban me in the interim for speaking the truth.
I always wondered why if so many people say they would pay more to give the NHS more money, why dont we put it to the test by allowing people to voluntarily increase their NI/Tax contribution beyond the compulsory contributions.
Call it the Voluntary NHS Booster Fund or something and let them at it.
Becayse generally what people really mean is they would happy for others to pay more to give the nhs more money.....no doubt to pay the new pay claim of the "resident doctors"....that stopping the strikes worked out so well didn't it
I think some people would buy into it, it'd make them feel better about themselves. If they want to do it, give them a mechanism. Its win win, get some extra cash & flush out the popular perception about people being willing to pay more.
Course could just give people tax breaks for taking out private health plans and therefore trying to reduce the burden on parts of what the NHS do.
I always wondered why if so many people say they would pay more to give the NHS more money, why dont we put it to the test by allowing people to voluntarily increase their NI/Tax contribution beyond the compulsory contributions.
Call it the Voluntary NHS Booster Fund or something and let them at it.
Becayse generally what people really mean is they would happy for others to pay more to give the nhs more money.....no doubt to pay the new pay claim of the "resident doctors"....that stopping the strikes worked out so well didn't it
I think some people would buy into it, it'd make them feel better about themselves. If they want to do it, give them a mechanism. Its win win, get some extra cash & flush out the popular perception about people being willing to pay more.
Course could just give people tax breaks for taking out private health plans and therefore trying to reduce the burden on parts of what the NHS do.
It would be such a small percentage it wouldn't make much difference. IIRC George Bernard Shaw wrote about this sort of thing, talking about how it wouldn't do much good if he threw all his money off the top of a building.
Massive explosion at Shandong Youdao Chemical plant in Gaomi city. At least 5 dead, 19 injured, 6 missing. The factory manufactured Chlorpyrifos, neurotoxic organophosphate insecticide that acts as a nerve agent. https://x.com/igorsushko/status/1927370983708475769
What the hell are they doing with that? Banned in all sane countries.
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
Wow. You have some issues there. Why are you putting scientists in quotation marks? And never forget - it was politicians who took the decisions on lockdowns and the rest. Do you feel we didn’t need to lockdown at all? That’s one view but I think it was essential in March 2020. Later events I think are less clear cut. But who is it that you think needs blackballing? I’m genuinely curious.
In retrospect I wouldn't have done the first lockdown either. The cost was too high and the lasting effects have been terrible and all so that a few people over 80 got an extra year or two.
Any "scientist" who pushed the "lab leak is racist" narrative including more than a few on here, any who pushed the lockdowns after seeing how awful the first one was, any who pushed for shitty mask mandates, any who pushed for closing schools, any who pushed for that idiotic "substantial meal" rubbish. It was all nonsense in the end and none of the guilty parties who thought it up have paid the price. Indeed, if there was another pandemic we'd rely on the same "scientists" who would plunge us back into endless lockdowns, I mean there were some who thought that we should never have let go of COVID measures and we're advocating for keeping social distancing indoors permanently etc... all in the name of "harm prevention".
Honestly fuck the scientists and "experts" and I say this holding a valid chemistry degree and having worked as a data scientist for the last half decade. We should never have handed over the levers of government to people who didn't get voted in, even for a temporary amount of time. The way the media venerated them was sickening and once they got a taste for it you could see how loath they were to give it up.
Of course you still see maybe about 1-2% of people walking around wearing facemasks because they haven't been able to give up on it. Always makes me sad to see. (A small percentage of them may have a valid reason to do it).
I always wondered why if so many people say they would pay more to give the NHS more money, why dont we put it to the test by allowing people to voluntarily increase their NI/Tax contribution beyond the compulsory contributions.
Call it the Voluntary NHS Booster Fund or something and let them at it.
Can I just say and this is no reflection either on the quality or the contents of your posts its a me issue rather than a you issue....I feel somewhat discomfortable when I see you post because I suspect you are what is colloquially termed a spook. Guess its just like if you are having a conversation at a pub with people and smiley sat down reminds me people are probably watching
Raising the personal allowance to £20k would apparently "cost" in terms of missed tax receipts somewhere between £50 billion and £80 billion or 2-3 Chagos if you prefer in modern money.
Proponents will presumably take the Lafferite line all the extra money we will suddenly get via this tax "cut" will lead to consumption and economic growth which will, in terms of bringing in VAT and corporation tax receipts, somewhat offset the original "cost".
Raising the personal allowance to £20k by the end of the next Parliament probably won't cost very much actually in real terms.
That's barely over a 5% compound annual growth in the allowance.
With a bit of inflation and growth, £20k in 2034 is not that much more than £12.5k in 2025.
Even 5% is a hell of a lot of money, but I don't think it makes sense to start in 2025.
It's still going to be 12.5k in 2028. If Labour increase it by say 2.5% in the final year, then Reform are looking at 9% increases to hit £20k by 2034.
And if Reform said it was going to be £20k BEFORE the end of the Parliament, then they're probably looking at having to do it in under 5 years, pushing that up to 10%+.
5% in nominal terms is mostly written off in real terms.
I think it does make sense to take 2025 as a baseline as its today and our current baseline, so you're looking at real terms changes from today.
And this is a problem that politicians often have (and the media too) is they don't have a clue about economics or inflation.
Like if I recall correctly Ed Miliband made a big song and dance about pledging the minimum wage should go up to a certain figure in the next Parliament under Labour . . . then people pointed out that was not a real terms increase and Osborne brought it up to that figure within the current Parliament before the election.
I don't agree that it's anywhere near as easy as Miliband's increase would have been.
I also don't think you can start from now, if the money generated by the freeze is already allocated. Between now and 2028, inflation and those 'real terms' are working against you, because they're stacking up money for the treasury which will already be spent.
Massive explosion at Shandong Youdao Chemical plant in Gaomi city. At least 5 dead, 19 injured, 6 missing. The factory manufactured Chlorpyrifos, neurotoxic organophosphate insecticide that acts as a nerve agent. https://x.com/igorsushko/status/1927370983708475769
What the hell are they doing with that? Banned in all sane countries.
Massive explosion at Shandong Youdao Chemical plant in Gaomi city. At least 5 dead, 19 injured, 6 missing. The factory manufactured Chlorpyrifos, neurotoxic organophosphate insecticide that acts as a nerve agent. https://x.com/igorsushko/status/1927370983708475769
What the hell are they doing with that? Banned in all sane countries.
Occupational hazard of being a non-democracy.
Occupational hazard of being a peasant in a non democracy
Massive explosion at Shandong Youdao Chemical plant in Gaomi city. At least 5 dead, 19 injured, 6 missing. The factory manufactured Chlorpyrifos, neurotoxic organophosphate insecticide that acts as a nerve agent. https://x.com/igorsushko/status/1927370983708475769
What the hell are they doing with that? Banned in all sane countries.
Massive explosion at Shandong Youdao Chemical plant in Gaomi city. At least 5 dead, 19 injured, 6 missing. The factory manufactured Chlorpyrifos, neurotoxic organophosphate insecticide that acts as a nerve agent. https://x.com/igorsushko/status/1927370983708475769
What the hell are they doing with that? Banned in all sane countries.
Most of the world still uses it in some form
I did say sane countries...
To be fair it was only formally banned in the EU about 5 years ago.
Across Europe, governments have weaponized political institutions against their own citizens and against our shared heritage. Far from strengthening democratic principles, Europe has devolved into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom, and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance.
Across Europe, governments have weaponized political institutions against their own citizens and against our shared heritage. Far from strengthening democratic principles, Europe has devolved into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom, and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance.
They're entitled to their opinions, of course.
But can you imagine the uproar if the German government wrote the same about the US government? (And it is - of course - staggeringly hypocritical: the US government, like most governments, is in favour only of speech it agrees with.)
Just read in The New European about a fairly new detective show called Poker Face. Has anyone seen it and is it worth watching?
It's hardly new - it's in series 2.
Created by Rian Johnson (on Knives out) it's now got a different showrunner but happily passes an hour...
Recent includes anytime after 1990 for me. 😊 I only watched the original Twin Peaks a few years ago.
The first series of Knives Out is good. Not great, but good. It's a solid premise, and it nicely channels Columbo, right down to the same yellow font and colour palate. (Only the lead's tick is saying "bullshit" rather than "just one more thing...".)
The second season is more ... uneven. The first episode was good; the third not so good.
Across Europe, governments have weaponized political institutions against their own citizens and against our shared heritage. Far from strengthening democratic principles, Europe has devolved into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom, and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance.
They're entitled to their opinions, of course.
But can you imagine the uproar if the German government wrote the same about the US government? (And it is - of course - staggeringly hypocritical: the US government, like most governments, is in favour only of speech it agrees with.)
I’d have more sympathy with the US government’s position if they practised what they preached.
Across Europe, governments have weaponized political institutions against their own citizens and against our shared heritage. Far from strengthening democratic principles, Europe has devolved into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom, and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance.
They're entitled to their opinions, of course.
But can you imagine the uproar if the German government wrote the same about the US government? (And it is - of course - staggeringly hypocritical: the US government, like most governments, is in favour only of speech it agrees with.)
This administration calling out anyone at all for weaponising political institutions, and attacks on democratic principles, is pretty effing rich.
Thank you for your attention in this matter, @williamglenn !
Across Europe, governments have weaponized political institutions against their own citizens and against our shared heritage. Far from strengthening democratic principles, Europe has devolved into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom, and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance.
Across Europe, governments have weaponized political institutions against their own citizens and against our shared heritage. Far from strengthening democratic principles, Europe has devolved into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom, and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance.
They're entitled to their opinions, of course.
But can you imagine the uproar if the German government wrote the same about the US government? (And it is - of course - staggeringly hypocritical: the US government, like most governments, is in favour only of speech it agrees with.)
I’d have more sympathy with the US government’s position if they practised what they preached.
Well, there's two issues here:
(1) The US is choosing (not for the first time) to spend its resources berating allies vocally over perceived failure to support free speech, while failing (somehow) to note that most of these countries have -in general- pretty good records of supporting free speech
(2) The current US has also massively clamped down on free speech. Sam Harris - and it's hard to find any public intellectual more anti-Islamist and pro-Israel than him - did a whole podcast the government's clampdown on pro-Palestinian speech.
You know, I would find one without the other to be... you know... normal self centred human behaviour. We all have a tendency to excuse things that benefit our friends and our world view. But both together is just staggeringly hypocritical.
Across Europe, governments have weaponized political institutions against their own citizens and against our shared heritage. Far from strengthening democratic principles, Europe has devolved into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom, and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance.
They're entitled to their opinions, of course.
But can you imagine the uproar if the German government wrote the same about the US government? (And it is - of course - staggeringly hypocritical: the US government, like most governments, is in favour only of speech it agrees with.)
I’d have more sympathy with the US government’s position if they practised what they preached.
Well, there's two issues here:
(1) The US is choosing (not for the first time) to spend its resources berating allies vocally over perceived failure to support free speech, while failing (somehow) to note that most of these countries have -in general- pretty good records of supporting free speech
(2) The current US has also massively clamped down on free speech. Sam Harris - and it's hard to find any public intellectual more anti-Islamist and pro-Israel than him - did a whole podcast the government's clampdown on pro-Palestinian speech.
You know, I would find one without the other to be... you know... normal self centred human behaviour. We all have a tendency to excuse things that benefit our friends and our world view. But both together is just staggeringly hypocritical.
TBF, they're not so harsh about all of Europe.
CBS News: Hungary’s Viktor Orbán seized control of universities rewrote the Constitution and neutered the courts. Is that what you're advocating for in the US?
Serious TSE erasure amongst our Russian friends. It's all RCS and Leon.
I think since he posted that he will be wearing Louis Vuitton loafers with his morning suit even the hardest men in the Kremlin were disgusted and don’t want the risk of association with him and his deviant ways.
"Environmental rules that force developers in England to improve wildlife habitats could be eased under government plans to make it easier to build homes on smaller sites."
The Labour government is trying really hard to get me to resign my party membership.
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
As an aside, "The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea" could be read in one of two ways...
U.K. universities are home to a lot of left wing voters. After 2019 a colleague said to me how terrible it was, assuming that like everyone else I didn’t want a Johnson government. That said, I suspect there are quite a lot more Tories at Unis than it seems - a lot just keep their heads down.
Trump can play the personalities: Trrump the businessman Trump the celebrity Trump the dont give two fucks guy Trump the bloke Trump the charismatic, at least to some
Vance the......
Vance the VP who is therefore almost certainly the GOP nominee.
"Environmental rules that force developers in England to improve wildlife habitats could be eased under government plans to make it easier to build homes on smaller sites."
The Labour government is trying really hard to get me to resign my party membership.
It's not the rules (well, it might be with newts, bats and badgers) it's the process and its proportionality.
Junking the rules is a really crude way of tackling it and will have consequences.
Reeves looking at chances to pension contributions by changing the current salary sacrifice regime to plug the gap, or part plug the gap, in the hole in public finances.
I see last night, the board had an anti-vax outbreak. That was after a recent bout of Islamophobic “coming race war” nonsense. Is PB becoming like Twitter?
Remember how Leon said some of his friends were doubting the vax.
You do realise most people regard Leon as a reliable source of facts in the same way that they believe that men can get pregnant running widdershins round a maypole naked while shouting "I am a baboon my butt is so blue, watch it and weep"
See you guys in the morning if rcs doesnt ban me in the interim for speaking the truth.
I don't think there was ever much danger of this one being banned for speaking the truth.
It would have required him to speak some.
Is it just me, or are Russian bots a lot more active suddenly? Is something up with Russia perhaps?
Across Europe, governments have weaponized political institutions against their own citizens and against our shared heritage. Far from strengthening democratic principles, Europe has devolved into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom, and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance.
It started in America. From your link:-
Americans are familiar with these tactics. Indeed, a similar strategy of censorship, demonization, and bureaucratic weaponization was utilized against President Trump and his supporters.
There is very low trust in public discourse, but that's partly because that's actively demonstrated by those in it against the public. And both feed off each other.
I think the police made a serious error yesterday: they've essentially confirmed they take a two-tier approach on declaring the identity of suspects to the media on the basis they don't trust the public to handle the truth, because they believe some are latent racists.
That will simply widen suspicion of the police, who many believe - with some reason - are more interested in covering up inconvenient truths than being honest.
I see last night, the board had an anti-vax outbreak. That was after a recent bout of Islamophobic “coming race war” nonsense. Is PB becoming like Twitter?
It's not that bad yet.
Welcome to a world where Reform are the dominant party. Race war and conspiracy theory all round, pushed with an added measure of drunken misanthropy.
I see last night, the board had an anti-vax outbreak. That was after a recent bout of Islamophobic “coming race war” nonsense. Is PB becoming like Twitter?
PB late night discussion is often led by someone – no names, no pack drill – who follows (and swallows) alt-right TwiX, so yes, to that extent, it is.
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
Wow. You have some issues there. Why are you putting scientists in quotation marks? And never forget - it was politicians who took the decisions on lockdowns and the rest. Do you feel we didn’t need to lockdown at all? That’s one view but I think it was essential in March 2020. Later events I think are less clear cut. But who is it that you think needs blackballing? I’m genuinely curious.
In retrospect I wouldn't have done the first lockdown either. The cost was too high and the lasting effects have been terrible and all so that a few people over 80 got an extra year or two.
Any "scientist" who pushed the "lab leak is racist" narrative including more than a few on here, any who pushed the lockdowns after seeing how awful the first one was, any who pushed for shitty mask mandates, any who pushed for closing schools, any who pushed for that idiotic "substantial meal" rubbish. It was all nonsense in the end and none of the guilty parties who thought it up have paid the price. Indeed, if there was another pandemic we'd rely on the same "scientists" who would plunge us back into endless lockdowns, I mean there were some who thought that we should never have let go of COVID measures and we're advocating for keeping social distancing indoors permanently etc... all in the name of "harm prevention".
Honestly fuck the scientists and "experts" and I say this holding a valid chemistry degree and having worked as a data scientist for the last half decade. We should never have handed over the levers of government to people who didn't get voted in, even for a temporary amount of time. The way the media venerated them was sickening and once they got a taste for it you could see how loath they were to give it up.
What would you have done if you didn’t do the first lockdown? Simply let hospitals be overwhelmed? Suggest people just live or die at home?
I think we got a lot of things wrong, but there were no easy choices. I think we failed to change our policies quickly enough when we knew more. We knew that it wasn’t droplet spread pretty early yet advice based on droplets carried on for years (2m social distancing is based on that). We should have used the not 100% accurate but pretty good lateral flow tests hugely more to open things up. We should have let outdoor events go on far more. We had a government that, I think it’s pretty clear, took a dim view of humanity and thought draconian rules were needed. I think that’s partly because that’s how they are themselves, Johnson certainly. Others have suggested using carrots rather than sticks might have worked.
I get that people now think we did too much, but that is hindsight and mostly not realistic. I too am frustrated with the inquiries, but perhaps we should judge at the end, when the reports come out.
Yup, people live or die at home. Only take COVID patients under 18, everyone else deals with it at home and assesses their own risk.
We can't halt everyone's lives because there isn't enough healthcare provision, it's completely nonsensical. To extend the lives of the very old by a few months or years we locked up the other 99% who wouldn't have died even without hospital intervention.
And if it was your parents or wife or you seriously ill with covid? You’d just stay meekly at home? Get real. Or an accident and no ambulance comes?
For the accident the ambulance still turns up, for COVID it doesn't. You get the advice to stay home unless it's for an under 18 year old and if you go to a hospital you get turned away and told to go back home to rest and recover. If that meant temporarily having security at A&E then that's the hard choice that needed to be made, not sabotaging the nation for 2 years on and off.
So you would have killed my otherwise-healthy 40-somehting manager?
I was at a major (non hospital) NHS HQ yesterday in London and there were lots of people in it. Lots of meeting rooms, floors and desks. It was remarkably female (easy majority) and very ethnically diverse, I'd say largely black in the non-White category.
I'm sure they were all doing something but I was hard-pressed to work out what it was with lots of chatter and few bosses around. It appeared to just be the consultants hard at it.
Reeves looking at chances to pension contributions by changing the current salary sacrifice regime to plug the gap, or part plug the gap, in the hole in public finances.
If she wanted more cash now, she could of course look at making membership of government pension schemes attached to the individual rather than the employer.
For example, I am a member of the TPS but since walking out on those drunks and lowlifes ruining (sic) the education sector three years ago, I haven't paid anything in.
Equally, if I were able to continue doing so I would as, while it's very expensive, it's a much better pension than anything in the private sector (where I have two pensions, both pretty naff).
Which would mean the Treasury get another 30-odd years of payments from me to bridge the gap in the Ponzi scheme.
There is very low trust in public discourse, but that's partly because that's actively demonstrated by those in it against the public. And both feed off each other.
I think the police made a serious error yesterday: they've essentially confirmed they take a two-tier approach on declaring the identity of suspects to the media on the basis they don't trust the public to handle the truth, because they believe some are latent racists.
That will simply widen suspicion of the police, who many believe - with some reason - are more interested in covering up inconvenient truths than being honest.
There is very low trust in public discourse in part because some people push lies and conspiracy theories. After Southport, someone just invented the claim that the attacker was a Muslim asylum seeker and others spread that because it fitted their prejudices. Who are these people? Some do it for the attention, some are paid by foreign powers, some seek to advance extreme ideologies.
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
Wow. You have some issues there. Why are you putting scientists in quotation marks? And never forget - it was politicians who took the decisions on lockdowns and the rest. Do you feel we didn’t need to lockdown at all? That’s one view but I think it was essential in March 2020. Later events I think are less clear cut. But who is it that you think needs blackballing? I’m genuinely curious.
In retrospect I wouldn't have done the first lockdown either. The cost was too high and the lasting effects have been terrible and all so that a few people over 80 got an extra year or two.
Any "scientist" who pushed the "lab leak is racist" narrative including more than a few on here, any who pushed the lockdowns after seeing how awful the first one was, any who pushed for shitty mask mandates, any who pushed for closing schools, any who pushed for that idiotic "substantial meal" rubbish. It was all nonsense in the end and none of the guilty parties who thought it up have paid the price. Indeed, if there was another pandemic we'd rely on the same "scientists" who would plunge us back into endless lockdowns, I mean there were some who thought that we should never have let go of COVID measures and we're advocating for keeping social distancing indoors permanently etc... all in the name of "harm prevention".
Honestly fuck the scientists and "experts" and I say this holding a valid chemistry degree and having worked as a data scientist for the last half decade. We should never have handed over the levers of government to people who didn't get voted in, even for a temporary amount of time. The way the media venerated them was sickening and once they got a taste for it you could see how loath they were to give it up.
What would you have done if you didn’t do the first lockdown? Simply let hospitals be overwhelmed? Suggest people just live or die at home?
I think we got a lot of things wrong, but there were no easy choices. I think we failed to change our policies quickly enough when we knew more. We knew that it wasn’t droplet spread pretty early yet advice based on droplets carried on for years (2m social distancing is based on that). We should have used the not 100% accurate but pretty good lateral flow tests hugely more to open things up. We should have let outdoor events go on far more. We had a government that, I think it’s pretty clear, took a dim view of humanity and thought draconian rules were needed. I think that’s partly because that’s how they are themselves, Johnson certainly. Others have suggested using carrots rather than sticks might have worked.
I get that people now think we did too much, but that is hindsight and mostly not realistic. I too am frustrated with the inquiries, but perhaps we should judge at the end, when the reports come out.
Yup, people live or die at home. Only take COVID patients under 18, everyone else deals with it at home and assesses their own risk.
We can't halt everyone's lives because there isn't enough healthcare provision, it's completely nonsensical. To extend the lives of the very old by a few months or years we locked up the other 99% who wouldn't have died even without hospital intervention.
And if it was your parents or wife or you seriously ill with covid? You’d just stay meekly at home? Get real. Or an accident and no ambulance comes?
Max has gone crazy , so anyone over 18 is old and has only a few months left. Mental talk.
Reeves looking at chances to pension contributions by changing the current salary sacrifice regime to plug the gap, or part plug the gap, in the hole in public finances.
It seems like every week there is a new scare story about the Chancellor's next move. They have been wrong in the past but stopped clocks and all that.
Tax and benefit cliff edges have been condemned often enough, even on PB. Would it be that much of a surprise if they were addressed, although I doubt many proponents had ending salary sacrifice in mind.
The abiding feature of our times is that people seek an easy path for an easy life and look, in many things, to see only what's in it for them.
It's a somewhat juvenile culture we've built up, tbh, where honesty, integrity and duty are no longer front and centre. Nor popular.
The solutions to most things are complex and need leadership, competence, objective analysis and hard work to fix.
We can't be arsed. So we tantrum instead.
Tbf, that has always been true. James Mansergh's letters on the labour difficulties he encountered while building the Elan Valley dams, or Thomas Telford's complaints about his labourers on the Caledonian Canal, or Robert Stephenson's reports on Santa Ana all spring to mind.
The abiding feature of our times is that people seek an easy path for an easy life and look, in many things, to see only what's in it for them.
It's a somewhat juvenile culture we've built up, tbh, where honesty, integrity and duty are no longer front and centre. Nor popular.
The solutions to most things are complex and need leadership, competence, objective analysis and hard work to fix.
We can't be arsed. So we tantrum instead.
Tbf, that has always been true. James Mansergh's letters on the labour difficulties he encountered while building the Elan Valley dams, or Thomas Telford's complaints about his labourers on the Caledonian Canal, or Robert Stephenson's reports on Santa Ana all spring to mind.
Reeves looking at chances to pension contributions by changing the current salary sacrifice regime to plug the gap, or part plug the gap, in the hole in public finances.
It seems like every week there is a new scare story about the Chancellor's next move. They have been wrong in the past but stopped clocks and all that.
Tax and benefit cliff edges have been condemned often enough, even on PB. Would it be that much of a surprise if they were addressed, although I doubt many proponents had ending salary sacrifice in mind.
Note how it's only private sector workers who feature in this, and not public sector ones.
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
Wow. You have some issues there. Why are you putting scientists in quotation marks? And never forget - it was politicians who took the decisions on lockdowns and the rest. Do you feel we didn’t need to lockdown at all? That’s one view but I think it was essential in March 2020. Later events I think are less clear cut. But who is it that you think needs blackballing? I’m genuinely curious.
In retrospect I wouldn't have done the first lockdown either. The cost was too high and the lasting effects have been terrible and all so that a few people over 80 got an extra year or two.
Any "scientist" who pushed the "lab leak is racist" narrative including more than a few on here, any who pushed the lockdowns after seeing how awful the first one was, any who pushed for shitty mask mandates, any who pushed for closing schools, any who pushed for that idiotic "substantial meal" rubbish. It was all nonsense in the end and none of the guilty parties who thought it up have paid the price. Indeed, if there was another pandemic we'd rely on the same "scientists" who would plunge us back into endless lockdowns, I mean there were some who thought that we should never have let go of COVID measures and we're advocating for keeping social distancing indoors permanently etc... all in the name of "harm prevention".
Honestly fuck the scientists and "experts" and I say this holding a valid chemistry degree and having worked as a data scientist for the last half decade. We should never have handed over the levers of government to people who didn't get voted in, even for a temporary amount of time. The way the media venerated them was sickening and once they got a taste for it you could see how loath they were to give it up.
What would you have done if you didn’t do the first lockdown? Simply let hospitals be overwhelmed? Suggest people just live or die at home?
I think we got a lot of things wrong, but there were no easy choices. I think we failed to change our policies quickly enough when we knew more. We knew that it wasn’t droplet spread pretty early yet advice based on droplets carried on for years (2m social distancing is based on that). We should have used the not 100% accurate but pretty good lateral flow tests hugely more to open things up. We should have let outdoor events go on far more. We had a government that, I think it’s pretty clear, took a dim view of humanity and thought draconian rules were needed. I think that’s partly because that’s how they are themselves, Johnson certainly. Others have suggested using carrots rather than sticks might have worked.
I get that people now think we did too much, but that is hindsight and mostly not realistic. I too am frustrated with the inquiries, but perhaps we should judge at the end, when the reports come out.
Yup, people live or die at home. Only take COVID patients under 18, everyone else deals with it at home and assesses their own risk.
We can't halt everyone's lives because there isn't enough healthcare provision, it's completely nonsensical. To extend the lives of the very old by a few months or years we locked up the other 99% who wouldn't have died even without hospital intervention.
And if it was your parents or wife or you seriously ill with covid? You’d just stay meekly at home? Get real. Or an accident and no ambulance comes?
Max has gone crazy , so anyone over 18 is old and has only a few months left. Mental talk.
Vast numbers of those treated admittedly with covid got better with oxygen, rehydration and treatment of vascular complications. They survived as a result.
Max blames his cardiomyopathy on the vaccine, and that fuels his anger, but 10 times as many got cardiomyopathy as a result of the virus itself.
There is very low trust in public discourse, but that's partly because that's actively demonstrated by those in it against the public. And both feed off each other.
I think the police made a serious error yesterday: they've essentially confirmed they take a two-tier approach on declaring the identity of suspects to the media on the basis they don't trust the public to handle the truth, because they believe some are latent racists.
That will simply widen suspicion of the police, who many believe - with some reason - are more interested in covering up inconvenient truths than being honest.
There is very low trust in public discourse in part because some people push lies and conspiracy theories. After Southport, someone just invented the claim that the attacker was a Muslim asylum seeker and others spread that because it fitted their prejudices. Who are these people? Some do it for the attention, some are paid by foreign powers, some seek to advance extreme ideologies.
That doesn't excuse the police treating the public like fools because of the actions of a small minority of idiots.
It undermines trust in the whole police by consent culture.
You don't see this because you're a dogmatic establishment shrill.
Reeves looking at chances to pension contributions by changing the current salary sacrifice regime to plug the gap, or part plug the gap, in the hole in public finances.
It seems like every week there is a new scare story about the Chancellor's next move. They have been wrong in the past but stopped clocks and all that.
Tax and benefit cliff edges have been condemned often enough, even on PB. Would it be that much of a surprise if they were addressed, although I doubt many proponents had ending salary sacrifice in mind.
Tax and benefit cliff edges should be addressed. Especially when it comes to people’s benefits as it disincentivises people from going back to work.
At one stage I was paying 33% of my salary into my DC fund.
Comments
Someone produces words and that acts as a prompt to cause someone else to generate more words.
This is an example of that process.
"Voiceover artist Gayanne Potter urging ScotRail to remove her voice from new AI announcements
ScotRail unveiled its new AI announcer - nicknamed "Iona" - on board the railway network in Scotland this month."
Ms Potter, who lives on the outskirts of Edinburgh, believes the incident can be traced back to a job she completed during the COVID pandemic with Swedish company ReadSpeaker, where she recorded scripts for the visually impaired. Ms Potter alleges she was unaware the contract allowed her voice to be sold as part of AI years later."
https://news.sky.com/story/voiceover-artist-gayanne-potter-urging-scotrail-to-remove-her-voice-from-new-ai-announcements-13375535
All of which means that when we have the NEXT medical emergency, everyone is going to be deeply suspicious, wary and hostile towards "the science". Which is really quite melancholy for us, as a species
Yes, these people have saved their careers, their grants, their Chinese donations, and not a single person has even gone in front of a court to answer for the deaths of 20 million.... but what is the cost, long term?
Yet again this requires that immortal quote from Chernobyl:
Every lie we tell incurs debt to the truth. Sooner or later this debt is paid
I think you have in your head that if we had only taken the ‘hard but fair’ path you describe that it would all have been done in a few weeks. Except it wouldn’t. Covid remains nasty even after vaccination/prior infection.
You can't keep everyone alive forever. You can't defeat death. People die, it happens. You're the one who needs to get real.
How the Fuck is Richard Horton still the editor-in-chief? It's not like the Covid Lancet letter is the only scandal attached to him
All science is tainted by this stuff, and that is sad
Regardless however of where it originated there was definitely a scientific conspiracy by the likes of Vallance, Daczak, Fauci and others to say it couldn't possibly be the lab and they used means like its racist to shut down any thought it could be. Indeed many social media sites like facebook removed any posts implying maybe a lab leak. Sorry doesn't look good.
Now I worked in science for a few years, to me that seems like avoiding any evidence of something you dont want to be true rather than be willing to look at evidence and see where it leads. Maybe it would have led to the lab or maybe the market. Seems to me however none of them wanted to have one of those paths looked at. Even if eventually its proved it came from the market its still not a good look for them
In my dads village someone just got a heart attack after the booster.
Now everyone in the village is against the covid vax.
This is normies now not the usual suspects and is destroying confidence in the medical profession.
Notice as well the cancers of some on this board like cyclefree.
Vaccine related
Who knows
But confidence is destroyed nevertheless
And I am not thinking death should be put on hold for one type of disease. Generally in healthcare we try to help,patients. You have not addressed the question of why you think the mass population would meekly accept their fate. They would not.
1st lockdown, I think justified we didnt really know what we were dealing with and we had horrific stories out of places like italy. Do not fault that lockdown particulary
2nd lockdown...I think still should have encouraged homeworking where possible and minimal contact but dropped the draconian rules and been advisory for social
every village had its fool, I see you are taking up your fathers trade
With incidents like what hapoened in my dads village you can see why.
1. A lot of virologists and other boffins were implicated, and - crucially - this was true in the USA and China, the two superpowers. Fauci and the NIH in the USA funded the Gain of Function research in Wuhan (because it was banned by Obama as being too dangerous! - so it could not be done in the USA). And of course the leak itself - if it happened - happened in China. In labs so dangerously lax in biosecurity they were called "Wild West" by, yes, Jeremy Farrar
When America and China have a shared and vested interest in keeping a story quiet that is a lot of geopolitical pressure
2. Scientists elsewhere had similar motivations. If it was ever proven that warped science killed tens of millions of humans, what does that do to science itself? Who will ever get another grant, in virology, or anything? Hence the response of the scientists in the UK, Germany, Holland - put a lid on it, denounce it as a "racist conspiracy"
3. Chinese money now funds a lot of science - research and writing. Journals like the Lancet and Nature rely heavily on China for income. They are no longer neutral. They are scared of publishing anything that might upset Beijing. Add in pressure from the American scientific establishment to stay schtum and you have all the ingredients for a cover-up
4. Politics. Trump was ballyhooing about Wuhan Flu and "China lied and millions died". The Biden White House didn't want to aid Trump, they put pressure on Facebook and Twitter (as was) to ban even the mention of the "Trumpite lab leak theory"
"Mark Zuckerberg says White House ‘pressured’ Facebook to censor Covid-19 content
Meta boss regrets bowing to government power and says he would not make the same choices today"
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/27/mark-zuckerberg-says-white-house-pressured-facebook-to-censor-covid-19-content
5. Herding did the rest. Anyone allergic to Trump became allergic to the Lab Leak Hypothesis, beyond all logic. It took TWO YEARS before we were even allowed to discuss the hypothesis, fully and publicly
Quite extraordinary madness
Science is totally corrupted by money.
Call it the Voluntary NHS Booster Fund or something and let them at it.
Course could just give people tax breaks for taking out private health plans and therefore trying to reduce the burden on parts of what the NHS do.
I also don't think you can start from now, if the money generated by the freeze is already allocated. Between now and 2028, inflation and those 'real terms' are working against you, because they're stacking up money for the treasury which will already be spent.
To be fair it was only formally banned in the EU about 5 years ago.
https://statedept.substack.com/p/the-need-for-civilizational-allies-in-europe
Across Europe, governments have weaponized political institutions against their own citizens and against our shared heritage. Far from strengthening democratic principles, Europe has devolved into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom, and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance.
Created by Rian Johnson (on Knives out) it's now got a different showrunner but happily passes an hour...
But can you imagine the uproar if the German government wrote the same about the US government? (And it is - of course - staggeringly hypocritical: the US government, like most governments, is in favour only of speech it agrees with.)
The second season is more ... uneven. The first episode was good; the third not so good.
https://gizmodo.com/watch-live-as-spacex-tries-to-break-starships-explosive-losing-streak-2000607609
https://wccftech.com/pressure-mounts-on-spacex-after-starship-flight-9-ends-with-rocket-explosion-ship-control-failure/
https://xcancel.com/BN9/status/1927526052135354872
Thank you for your attention in this matter, @williamglenn !
The GOP Congress defends it because "it's done in the open".
Note that the pardon also means he gets off paying the compensation ordered by the court.
This guy stole $10 million from the employees of his nursing home to buy himself a luxury yacht and Cartier watches. He PLED GUILTY.
And because his Mom gave Trump $1 million, he just got a pardon.
And this story barely makes the news today.
https://x.com/ChrisMurphyCT/status/1927518355461976570
Thank you for your attention in this matter, @williamglenn !
(1) The US is choosing (not for the first time) to spend its resources berating allies vocally over perceived failure to support free speech, while failing (somehow) to note that most of these countries have -in general- pretty good records of supporting free speech
(2) The current US has also massively clamped down on free speech. Sam Harris - and it's hard to find any public intellectual more anti-Islamist and pro-Israel than him - did a whole podcast the government's clampdown on pro-Palestinian speech.
You know, I would find one without the other to be... you know... normal self centred human behaviour. We all have a tendency to excuse things that benefit our friends and our world view. But both together is just staggeringly hypocritical.
CBS News: Hungary’s Viktor Orbán seized control of universities rewrote the Constitution and neutered the courts. Is that what you're advocating for in the US?
JD Vance: I think Orbán made smart decisions that we could learn from in the US. (June 2024)
https://x.com/highbrow_nobrow/status/1927418126003573034
BBC:
"Environmental rules that force developers in England to improve wildlife habitats could be eased under government plans to make it easier to build homes on smaller sites."
The Labour government is trying really hard to get me to resign my party membership.
Junking the rules is a really crude way of tackling it and will have consequences.
Reeves looking at chances to pension contributions by changing the current salary sacrifice regime to plug the gap, or part plug the gap, in the hole in public finances.
It would have required him to speak some.
Is it just me, or are Russian bots a lot more active suddenly? Is something up with Russia perhaps?
Americans are familiar with these tactics. Indeed, a similar strategy of censorship, demonization, and bureaucratic weaponization was utilized against President Trump and his supporters.
I think the police made a serious error yesterday: they've essentially confirmed they take a two-tier approach on declaring the identity of suspects to the media on the basis they don't trust the public to handle the truth, because they believe some are latent racists.
That will simply widen suspicion of the police, who many believe - with some reason - are more interested in covering up inconvenient truths than being honest.
Welcome to a world where Reform are the dominant party. Race war and conspiracy theory all round, pushed with an added measure of drunken misanthropy.
I'm sure they were all doing something but I was hard-pressed to work out what it was with lots of chatter and few bosses around. It appeared to just be the consultants hard at it.
For example, I am a member of the TPS but since walking out on those drunks and lowlifes ruining (sic) the education sector three years ago, I haven't paid anything in.
Equally, if I were able to continue doing so I would as, while it's very expensive, it's a much better pension than anything in the private sector (where I have two pensions, both pretty naff).
Which would mean the Treasury get another 30-odd years of payments from me to bridge the gap in the Ponzi scheme.
SpaceX Starship rocket spins out of control on test flight, marking third failure in a row
SpaceX called it a partial success
The warnings come after it emerged that higher earners were increasingly using salary sacrifice to stuff their pensions and avoid tax “cliff edges”.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/tax/hmrc-tax-raid-pensions/ (£££)
Tax and benefit cliff edges have been condemned often enough, even on PB. Would it be that much of a surprise if they were addressed, although I doubt many proponents had ending salary sacrifice in mind.
It's a somewhat juvenile culture we've built up, tbh, where honesty, integrity and duty are no longer front and centre. Nor popular.
The solutions to most things are complex and need leadership, competence, objective analysis and hard work to fix.
We can't be arsed. So we tantrum instead.
It's all me me me.
Max blames his cardiomyopathy on the vaccine, and that fuels his anger, but 10 times as many got cardiomyopathy as a result of the virus itself.
It undermines trust in the whole police by consent culture.
You don't see this because you're a dogmatic establishment shrill.
At one stage I was paying 33% of my salary into my DC fund.