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.
A brilliant thread here on the young not wanting to work:
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.
A brilliant thread here on the young not wanting to work:
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.
How many public sector workers earn £100,000 to £140,000 in the first place? Of those, how many can easily use salary sacrifice to reduce their salaries to below these cliff-edges?
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.
A brilliant thread here on the young not wanting to work:
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.
How many public sector workers earn £100,000 to £140,000 in the first place? Of those, how many can easily use salary sacrifice to reduce their salaries to below these cliff-edges?
If you look at their actual pension - anyone on over £75,000 in the public sector is earning the equivalent of £100,000 in the private sector.
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
Since both the leaky lab and wet market are in Wuhan, China, how is one origin hypothesis racist and the one just down the road not? Either way, it was the Chinese wotdunnit.
"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.
They’re talking of easing the rules not junking them and for smaller sites and, quite frankly, they are right to look at it.
We need to build more and streamline the process.
Bat tunnels and fish discos may be extreme examples but we have housing developments held up due to stuff like nutrient neutrality rules. People need somewhere to live.
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.
A brilliant thread here on the young not wanting to work:
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.
It’s always the case, isn’t it.
The employers contribution in the NHS for my wife’s pension is about 26%
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.
How many public sector workers earn £100,000 to £140,000 in the first place? Of those, how many can easily use salary sacrifice to reduce their salaries to below these cliff-edges?
It's not something that is easy for us to do via pensions contributions, as get caught by the Annual Allowance etc. Reducing hours to work part time is often the only way.
Smoothing out the marginal rates would help everyone. The current cliff edges are not being indexed so gradually affecting more and more higher earners.
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.
Human nature hasn't changed... Heck, human nature hasn't changed that much since we were hunter-gatherers.
But the specific manifestations of that nature do seem to be changing for the worse. Though that may be the middle-aged bit of my temperament coming through.
As to why, search me. Maybe communication technology is making it too easy for massive egos to project too far. Maybe the relatively peaceful times we have grown up through have made us assume that we are brilliant rather than lucky. Maybe we're bored.
Maybe it's modern communications allowing individual egos to be projected far further than is humane. Maybe
"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.
The rules are currently part of the long list of (expensive) hurdles you have up jump through for the smallest development which requires planning permission.
Highly lucrative for the industry of ecologists which has sprung up in response.
Depending on the detail, this could be entirely sensible.
All those UK universities who are worried about foreign student intake - should fill their boots - and thank The Donald.
US President Donald Trump's administration has ordered embassies to stop scheduling appointments for student visas as it prepares to expand social media vetting of such applicants. In a copy of a memo sent to diplomatic posts, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the pause would last "until further guidance is issued".
"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.
They’re talking of easing the rules not junking them and for smaller sites and, quite frankly, they are right to look at it.
We need to build more and streamline the process.
Bat tunnels and fish discos may be extreme examples but we have housing developments held up due to stuff like nutrient neutrality rules. People need somewhere to live.
Sure they do. But the track record of major housing developers even on that isn't great with, often, homes built with atrocious build quality.
I'm sceptical they're going to get the environmentals right when they're pretty shit at the basics.
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.
How many public sector workers earn £100,000 to £140,000 in the first place? Of those, how many can easily use salary sacrifice to reduce their salaries to below these cliff-edges?
If you look at their actual pension - anyone on over £75,000 in the public sector is earning the equivalent of £100,000 in the private sector.
That's a lot more people than you may think..
Even if so, that is irrelevant to the question of whether they face income tax, NI and child benefit cliff edges when their actual salaries reach £100,000 to £140,000. That is the point. The cliff edges are real (due to earnings limits on subsidised childcare and, separately, on the withdrawal of the income tax personal allowance) and increasingly people on these salaries are using (some would say abusing) salary sacrifice to reduce their salaries by making additional pension contributions instead. There is even anecdotal evidence of people turning down promotion.
The closest public sector equivalent story might be of doctors retiring early when they hit lifetime upper bounds on their pension scheme (which iirc was addressed last year) but this is a different issue.
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
The last sentence is a full summary of the rest of your piece.
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.
It’s always the case, isn’t it.
The employers contribution in the NHS for my wife’s pension is about 26%
My employees contributions is 13.5% too. Still pretty good value, even after the recent scheme changes.
Most NHS pensions are more modest though. Mrs Foxy has been paying in since she was 18, albeit with some gaps due to children, and the last 3 decades part time. Later this year she gets a pension of £8 000, and lump sum of £16000. I think that pretty typical for a nurse etc.
All those UK universities who are worried about foreign student intake - should fill their boots - and thank The Donald.
US President Donald Trump's administration has ordered embassies to stop scheduling appointments for student visas as it prepares to expand social media vetting of such applicants. In a copy of a memo sent to diplomatic posts, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the pause would last "until further guidance is issued".
So if you’ve ever been critical of Trump you won’t get a visa. Only complete loyalty to the “ dear leader “ is allowed . And they lecture others about free speech and democracy .
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.
It’s always the case, isn’t it.
The employers contribution in the NHS for my wife’s pension is about 26%
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.
It’s always the case, isn’t it.
The employers contribution in the NHS for my wife’s pension is about 26%
Mine is 6% for my private employer, which is considered generous by most.
All those UK universities who are worried about foreign student intake - should fill their boots - and thank The Donald.
US President Donald Trump's administration has ordered embassies to stop scheduling appointments for student visas as it prepares to expand social media vetting of such applicants. In a copy of a memo sent to diplomatic posts, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the pause would last "until further guidance is issued".
So if you’ve ever been critical of Trump you won’t get a visa. Only complete loyalty to the “ dear leader “ is allowed . And they lecture others about free speech and democracy .
Trump only approves of democracy when it gives him the result he wants.
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.
I believe that there might have been a better way to achieve similar outcomes, by posting a 'Covid care pack' through peoples' door when they reported it. The pack could contain an oximeter, some helpful advice (the more the better, as this makes people feel in control), and some zinc/vit C/vit D supplements. Patients would be asked to call for further help when their oxygen levels got to a certain point. I think this would have kept so many people out of hospital. Panic is a factor in these things, especially with respiratory condititons.
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.
I'm at a loss as to what you would do instead of lockdowns given that I suspect it went
1) we need to cut down inter people contacts because it's going to be bad - do something 2) we really need to cut down inter people contacts because it's going to be bad - do something 3) we really really need to cut down people contacts because it's going to be bad - do something 4) if you don't stop people living their houses the NHS will be overwhelmed in 2 weeks and the time frame to do so is NOW not tomorrow.
The two things we picked up from Covid were that we were using estimates for aerial distance spreads that came from the 50s and wouldn't have stood scrutiny if anyone had been bothered to look at the "science" behind things.
There is a lot of sense in reacting early because at least you take your profit early (and I can thank Leon for that).
Then you let the NHS get overwhelmed for a while. It's a health service, it's there to treat sick people not save the world.
That is what happened in Northern Italy. On TV and everything.
Lots of people died, badly.
Which is why everyone else (pretty much) tried lockdowns.
As @rcs1000 has pointed out about 1000 times, if you don’t have lockdowns, you get messy, imperfect self lockdowns. As seen from the medieval plagues onwards.
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.
The death and severe injury rate for COVID in the 0-60 age range was non-trivial.
Who the f*ck could not have foreseen this? They're meant to be smart?
"Trump’s second administration has, predictably, embraced this cynical conception of executive authority, with devastating results for democracy and civil liberties."
Trump has weaponized the court's decision to elevate himself above democratic institutions and target his enemies with unlawful retribution in ways the justices never could have foreseen when they wiped away his criminal prosecutions, Stern wrote.
"The majority may have also failed to foresee the ways that Trump would use the decision to diminish the court’s own power," Stern wrote. "Having freed the president to burst past existing constitutional restraints, the justices must now try to preserve their own authority from executive encroachment."
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.
Trump’s belief that people who fight for their country, or who keep their promises to their contractors, are just “suckers and losers”, may always have been widespread, but it’s new to have it openly articulated.
All those UK universities who are worried about foreign student intake - should fill their boots - and thank The Donald.
US President Donald Trump's administration has ordered embassies to stop scheduling appointments for student visas as it prepares to expand social media vetting of such applicants. In a copy of a memo sent to diplomatic posts, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the pause would last "until further guidance is issued".
So if you’ve ever been critical of Trump you won’t get a visa. Only complete loyalty to the “ dear leader “ is allowed . And they lecture others about free speech and democracy .
Trump only approves of democracy when it gives him the result he wants.
"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.
They’re talking of easing the rules not junking them and for smaller sites and, quite frankly, they are right to look at it.
We need to build more and streamline the process.
Bat tunnels and fish discos may be extreme examples but we have housing developments held up due to stuff like nutrient neutrality rules. People need somewhere to live.
Nutrient neutrality is impossible to hit on small site (heck it’s hard on a large one). It’s simply another expensive “tax” that people have to pay that doesn’t solve anything
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.
It’s always the case, isn’t it.
The employers contribution in the NHS for my wife’s pension is about 26%
My employees contributions is 13.5% too. Still pretty good value, even after the recent scheme changes.
Most NHS pensions are more modest though. Mrs Foxy has been paying in since she was 18, albeit with some gaps due to children, and the last 3 decades part time. Later this year she gets a pension of £8 000, and lump sum of £16000. I think that pretty typical for a nurse etc.
The issue here is although your wife's pension is modest and no doubt well deserved it represents a liability to the Government ( Future tax payers.) The equivalent fund required to but an escalating income with dependents benefits at age 65 would be about £250,000 and as the NHS Scheme is unfunded ( Essentially the current contributions go to fund the current Pensioners) .
Average Employer contributions into a Defined Contribution Pension stand at 4.1% according the Tax Payer Allowance.
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 don't disagree that trust is low, and the police (and other bodies) take some of the blame for this.
But we should all share the blame around. Your last paragraph is the lazy person's way out - don't bother to understand the reasons why the police might be doing this in good faith, just impute bad intentions on the part of a whole cadre of people working for us.
It also applies a double standard that is rife - many who subscribe to the suspicion you rightly highlight would have scoffed at the words 'institutional racism' which is the mirror image when applied to covering up inconvenient truths about the treatment of black and brown people.
(It's not clear whether you count yourself amongst the 'many' who believe this - so I am not directing this at you personally.)
Problem with the @MaxPB approach to Covid is that it wilfully ignores psychology and the herd mentality. "No lockdown 1" - by which he means everyone told Go About Your Business.
So how do we enforce that? Weeks before lockdown Tesco abruptly closed their campus to visitors - would Max have sent the police round to enforce them to open up?
People don't carry on as normal when they see the impacts of Covid. The Australian grand prix was pulled due to personnel getting ill. Football & Rugby would have been decimated, putting the fear into people. Lockdown or no lockdown, a lot of people aren't going to work and their employers aren't forcing them to do so. Work From Home happens anyway with increasing speed.
Does Max send in the police to force everyone to be "normal"?
As for "let the NHS be overwhelmed". Again, the psychological impact on people would have been huge. Same with schools where so many staff are sick that the school cannot open. Max sending the police round again? The police are also desperately ill.
It is - sorry to say it - whining bullshit. Nobody liked lockdown. It was a disaster in so many ways. But the alternative to a controlled lockdown was an uncontrolled lockdown. Instead of the authorities managing the situation we have panicked people managing it themselves. Chaos. Which is a bigger economic and social disaster as Covid rips deeper through society.
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
Hello.
A plane crashes on the Ukraine/Republic of China border. Which side do you bury the survivors?
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.
A huge chunk of the staff in the private health care system are NHS staff, working extra hours.
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.
A brilliant thread here on the young not wanting to work:
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.
It’s always the case, isn’t it.
The employers contribution in the NHS for my wife’s pension is about 26%
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.
It’s always the case, isn’t it.
The employers contribution in the NHS for my wife’s pension is about 26%
Mine is 6% for my private employer, which is considered generous by most.
Mine was 6% if I put 3% in rising to 9% if I put 6% in.
My previous employer now only offers NEST.
Perhaps the public sector, when moaning about pay, should sacrifice some pension for a higher pay award?
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.
It’s always the case, isn’t it.
The employers contribution in the NHS for my wife’s pension is about 26%
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.
It’s always the case, isn’t it.
The employers contribution in the NHS for my wife’s pension is about 26%
Mine is 6% for my private employer, which is considered generous by most.
Mine was 6% if I put 3% in rising to 9% if I put 6% in.
My previous employer now only offers NEST.
Perhaps the public sector, when moaning about pay, should sacrifice some pension for a higher pay award?
Is this our mutual previous employer you’re talking about?
Comments
https://bsky.app/profile/paulisci.bsky.social/post/3lq6otwsofk22
That's a lot more people than you may think..
We need to build more and streamline the process.
Bat tunnels and fish discos may be extreme examples but we have housing developments held up due to stuff like nutrient neutrality rules. People need somewhere to live.
No. This is at all levels across all of society. I'd say it's a function of atomisation and a breakdown in aspiration.
I don't think people think hard work will be rewarded anymore so simply decide to keep their heads down and get what they can get.
The employers contribution in the NHS for my wife’s pension is about 26%
Smoothing out the marginal rates would help everyone. The current cliff edges are not being indexed so gradually affecting more and more higher earners.
But the specific manifestations of that nature do seem to be changing for the worse. Though that may be the middle-aged bit of my temperament coming through.
As to why, search me. Maybe communication technology is making it too easy for massive egos to project too far. Maybe the relatively peaceful times we have grown up through have made us assume that we are brilliant rather than lucky. Maybe we're bored.
Maybe it's modern communications allowing individual egos to be projected far further than is humane. Maybe
Highly lucrative for the industry of ecologists which has sprung up in response.
Depending on the detail, this could be entirely sensible.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy75eenl46eo
I'm sceptical they're going to get the environmentals right when they're pretty shit at the basics.
The closest public sector equivalent story might be of doctors retiring early when they hit lifetime upper bounds on their pension scheme (which iirc was addressed last year) but this is a different issue.
Most NHS pensions are more modest though. Mrs Foxy has been paying in since she was 18, albeit with some gaps due to children, and the last 3 decades part time. Later this year she gets a pension of £8 000, and lump sum of £16000. I think that pretty typical for a nurse etc.
NEW THREAD
Lots of people died, badly.
Which is why everyone else (pretty much) tried lockdowns.
As @rcs1000 has pointed out about 1000 times, if you don’t have lockdowns, you get messy, imperfect self lockdowns. As seen from the medieval plagues onwards.
People who spend time around him end up without brains leaking out of their ears.
Average Employer contributions into a Defined Contribution Pension stand at 4.1% according the Tax Payer Allowance.
But we should all share the blame around. Your last paragraph is the lazy person's way out - don't bother to understand the reasons why the police might be doing this in good faith, just impute bad intentions on the part of a whole cadre of people working for us.
It also applies a double standard that is rife - many who subscribe to the suspicion you rightly highlight would have scoffed at the words 'institutional racism' which is the mirror image when applied to covering up inconvenient truths about the treatment of black and brown people.
(It's not clear whether you count yourself amongst the 'many' who believe this - so I am not directing this at you personally.)
So how do we enforce that? Weeks before lockdown Tesco abruptly closed their campus to visitors - would Max have sent the police round to enforce them to open up?
People don't carry on as normal when they see the impacts of Covid. The Australian grand prix was pulled due to personnel getting ill. Football & Rugby would have been decimated, putting the fear into people. Lockdown or no lockdown, a lot of people aren't going to work and their employers aren't forcing them to do so. Work From Home happens anyway with increasing speed.
Does Max send in the police to force everyone to be "normal"?
As for "let the NHS be overwhelmed". Again, the psychological impact on people would have been huge. Same with schools where so many staff are sick that the school cannot open. Max sending the police round again? The police are also desperately ill.
It is - sorry to say it - whining bullshit. Nobody liked lockdown. It was a disaster in so many ways. But the alternative to a controlled lockdown was an uncontrolled lockdown. Instead of the authorities managing the situation we have panicked people managing it themselves. Chaos. Which is a bigger economic and social disaster as Covid rips deeper through society.
A plane crashes on the Ukraine/Republic of China border. Which side do you bury the survivors?
All they wanted to do was hang around scent shops, drink wine and sing silly songs.
Instead of listening to philosophy and attending to the politics of the city, like their forefathers.
My previous employer now only offers NEST.
Perhaps the public sector, when moaning about pay, should sacrifice some pension for a higher pay award?
1) GO UP
2) STAY UP FOR A BIT
3) COME BACK DOWN INTACT AND LAND
So that's about 1.5 out of 3.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/28/economy/trump-wall-street-taco-trade-nastiest-question