During this intense period of public health scrutiny, washing our hands every four minutes, there's probably going to be some really exotic bugs that suffer terribly. Maybe even become extinct.
Won't somebody think of them?
"This is an emotional moment for all of us, all right? I know that. But let's not make snap judgments, please. This is clearly an important species we're dealing with here, and I don't think you or I or anybody has the right to arbitrarily exterminate them."
Updated guidance now. Anyone returning from anywhere in Italy showing any symptoms should self isolate.
That's going to be a lot of people.
Just last week I listened to Simon Calder tell everyone on 5Live to crack on and get travelling to Italy. I'll refrain from posting what I think about that man.
If I’m fit enough to go skiing it’s not going to kill me so I’m going to go skiing, bugger every one else
Not sure if this is a parody. But if not, see my other post: 'I'm alright Jack'.
It's called public health for a reason.
Bad attempt at sarcasm, it’s up to individuals what they do you have to assess the risks both to yourself and to others on your return. We can’t rely on governments or travel journalists to give the ‘correct’ advice because they come from different perspectives. My only advice is don’t put yourself or others at risk after you have done taken everything else into account. I have kept saying the bug itself will not be the real problem it will be the knock on impact on so much else.
That is far superior and nuanced versus what Simon Calder was giving out. For context, this was one of 5Live's ask the experts segments last Monday. He then went on to do the media rounds giving his wisdom everywhere. He's still doing it now, as far as I can tell.
Needless to say his advice on the risks is going to prove to be very poor indeed.
As much as certain people have a tendency to panic and become hysterical in these situations, there are others who see it as a sort of bravado to show that they aren't "scared" like all the other sheeple.
If you've been round the blocks. You've seen SARS, MERS, you've seen terrorism come and go you might think you know what the risks are. Unfortunately that experience makes you particularly vulnerable to not spotting a once in a century pandemic.
Best just stick to advising on insurance policy then and avoid giving out very bad advice.
If anyone thinks I am being overly harsh I suggest you have a listen. It hasn't aged well in about 10 days. It will look unbelievable in a few weeks.
During this intense period of public health scrutiny, washing our hands every four minutes, there's probably going to be some really exotic bugs that suffer terribly. Maybe even become extinct.
Won't somebody think of them?
"This is an emotional moment for all of us, all right? I know that. But let's not make snap judgments, please. This is clearly an important species we're dealing with here, and I don't think you or I or anybody has the right to arbitrarily exterminate them."
You're crazy Sunil, you know that? You really think that you can get a dangerous organism like that past PB quarantine?
So the news is dominated by "poorly old person dies of something".
Suppose we better get used to it.
If the mortality and infection rates for this thing match the worst case scenarios, then it'll carry off over a million poorly old people in this country before it's done.
There won't be enough space in the morgues to cope.
As a general point which folks can take or leave, I don't think humour is always a bad thing in the midst of trauma. Anyone who has studied WW1 will know that gallows humour was rife in the trenches, brilliantly portrayed in The Wipers Times. Or, as, they put it in Dad's Army (episode: Turkey Dinner):
Mainwaring: 'Oh come come. That's not like an old soldier. Tommy Atkins was always one for a laugh even when he was up to his chin in mud.' Cpl Jones: 'Ah you're right there, Sir. We did a lot of laughing in the mud in the last War. We was doing it nearly all the time. Except when we got shot.'
The one foundation for this though is that it's humour out of adversity. A coping strategy.
What it is not doing is denying altogether the existence of the crisis.
'Coming under pressure'. Journalists love this phrase. What it usually means is that someone with an agenda has issued a press release or written a letter.
See also “Questions will be asked” [but I’m not clever enough to work out what those questions might be]. A bit of smoke disguises the pathetic fire.
As a general point which folks can take or leave, I don't think humour is always a bad thing in the midst of trauma. Anyone who has studied WW1 will know that gallows humour was rife in the trenches, brilliantly portrayed in The Wipers Times. Or, as, they put it in Dad's Army (episode: Turkey Dinner):
Mainwaring: 'Oh come come. That's not like an old soldier. Tommy Atkins was always one for a laugh even when he was up to his chin in mud.' Cpl Jones: 'Ah you're right there, Sir. We did a lot of laughing in the mud in the last War. We was doing it nearly all the time. Except when we got shot.'
The one foundation for this though is that it's humour out of adversity. A coping strategy.
What it is not doing is denying altogether the existence of the crisis.
Hum our is what gets me through life it’s not always funny to others but I normally try to make myself the subject rather than others, it’s probably the best British trait I can sign up to, if all else fails take the piss out of yourself. A good laugh beats any medicine.
Wonder why the government isn't fitting somewhere into their message that "NOW WOULD BE A BRILLIANT TIME TO GIVE UP SMOKING".*
With the damage that smoking does to the lungs, the medical consensus seems to be that smokers are at a higher risk of dying if they get the disease.
Now obviously recent ex-smokers have already knackered their lungs, but they do at least give the lungs a bit of breathing space to regenerate (which seems to happen pretty fast, with improvements even on a timescale of months, but I don't know if there's any medical consensus that a couple of months of recovery would substantially reduce your risk of death from a COVID-19 infection).
But if one took advantage of the desperate lengths people are apparently going to go to in order to protect themselves from COVID-19, this might be a good time to make a dent in that stubborn remainder of people who are still smoking. Giving up smoking is seldom going to be bad advice. Might even save enough lives from preventing future lung cancer cases to offset some of the additional deaths from this epidemic...
*(Probably because they want to keep their message nice and simple, and don't want non-smokers to be complacent, but "looking after yourself" to give yourself the best chance of surviving infection would certainly include giving up smoking.)
'Coming under pressure'. Journalists love this phrase. What it usually means is that someone with an agenda has issued a press release or written a letter.
See also “Questions will be asked” but I’m not clever enough to work out what those questions might be]. A bit of smoke disguises the pathetic fire.
The Labour Party is institutionally racist. The Conservative Party is not.
Yes there may be a handful of disreputable individual Tories but the entire organisation is not riddled with hatred.
A victorious RLB will do nothing to resolve the scourge within Labour.
Mortality in China has now reached one per half million of the population...
That is already the most embarrassing post in the history of this site, and that's before it starts aging.
Not embarrassed at all. Just pointing out a panic bubble.
We have sensible ranges of probabilities being published and the tabloid media, including the broadcast tabloid media and the formerly broadsheet tabloid media, selecting the upper bound and ignoring the more likely scenarios.
I think that it is very possible for us to control this with an order of magnitude or two fewer fatalities than the worst case scenario, but that requires strict and firm isolation. Taking action to prevent such an event is drastic, but the downside risk of not doing it is far worse.
How do you weigh up the economic and social cost of a strict containment against the increased mortaility of a looser regime?
Some form of cost benefit analysis using the QALY, most likely.
How many £ does a QALY equate to?
Roughly £30 000 usually.
In the US there is absolutely no agreed number. I've seen it, even in different or the same government department(s), vary from $250k to $5m. I guess the upper end number is the NPV of that person's lost lifetime economic activity and other valuable social contributions.
Mortality in China has now reached one per half million of the population...
That is already the most embarrassing post in the history of this site, and that's before it starts aging.
Not embarrassed at all. Just pointing out a panic bubble.
We have sensible ranges of probabilities being published and the tabloid media, including the broadcast tabloid media and the formerly broadsheet tabloid media, selecting the upper bound and ignoring the more likely scenarios.
I think that it is very possible for us to control this with an order of magnitude or two fewer fatalities than the worst case scenario, but that requires strict and firm isolation. Taking action to prevent such an event is drastic, but the downside risk of not doing it is far worse.
How do you weigh up the economic and social cost of a strict containment against the increased mortaility of a looser regime?
I agree with the Doc on that one. A straw in the wind is the different infection / mortality rates between eg London and Manchester in the Spanish Flu, where the authorities in London gave up and Manchester tried to put in place Public HEalth measures - of the sort that will be everywhere now; BBC4 did a programme about it in 2009.
The advice I am getting from specialists in this area, as a member of a vulnerable group (Type I Diabetic with Anaemia) is:
1 - Avoid hospitals and GP surgeries. 2 - Make sure you have decent supplies of any meds, and methods in place to get them without visiting the surgery (ie online and delivered). 3 - Avoid enclosed gatherings of large numbers of people, especially public transport. 4 - Otherwise keep calm and carry on.
Personally I am also making sure that I am in a position to self-isolate for a couple of months, and will not be visiting or taking visitors with flu-like symptoms.
Were I commuting into London or a large city, I would be switching to motorbike or pushbike (or car plus pushbike were the distance great) for isolation reasons.
That sounds a reasonable plan, and I will be doing much the same, except of course I have a professional exposure risk.
I fortunately had one Annual Checkup today, and the big Diabetes one is in the hospital clinic on Monday - just in time.
But I am in the Blood Dr's bad books for avoiding a bone marrow biopsy * whilst off for a month with a horrible winter lurgy that lost me 10kg. For some weird reason my HBA1c has gone from moderate to excellent whilst I have been ill. Strange times.
We can cheer ourselves up tonight by watching BBC1's new blockbuster drama about an apartheid Britain in which black people rule the roost over the white peasants.
Wonder why the government isn't fitting somewhere into their message that "NOW WOULD BE A BRILLIANT TIME TO GIVE UP SMOKING".*
With the damage that smoking does to the lungs, the medical consensus seems to be that smokers are at a higher risk of dying if they get the disease.
Now obviously recent ex-smokers have already knackered their lungs, but they do at least give the lungs a bit of breathing space to regenerate (which seems to happen pretty fast, with improvements even on a timescale of months, but I don't know if there's any medical consensus that a couple of months of recovery would substantially reduce your risk of death from a COVID-19 infection).
But if one took advantage of the desperate lengths people are apparently going to go to in order to protect themselves from COVID-19, this might be a good time to make a dent in that stubborn remainder of people who are still smoking. Giving up smoking is seldom going to be bad advice. Might even save enough lives from preventing future lung cancer cases to offset some of the additional deaths from this epidemic...
*(Probably because they want to keep their message nice and simple, and don't want non-smokers to be complacent, but "looking after yourself" to give yourself the best chance of surviving infection would certainly include giving up smoking.)
Alternatively, it's a gonna be a tough time for tax receipts and they need the money.....
'Coming under pressure'. Journalists love this phrase. What it usually means is that someone with an agenda has issued a press release or written a letter.
See also “Questions will be asked” but I’m not clever enough to work out what those questions might be]. A bit of smoke disguises the pathetic fire.
The Labour Party is institutionally racist. The Conservative Party is not.
Yes there may be a handful of disreputable individual Tories but the entire organisation is not riddled with hatred.
A victorious RLB will do nothing to resolve the scourge within Labour.
On topic Bernie is toast with or without Warren!
I’m not reaching a judgment either way on the Conservative Party. I’d don’t know all (or indeed really any) of the accusations In detail and how they relate to reality. There are, though, certain journalistic code words and phrases which suggest that a story has to be manufactured and does not flow easily and naturally.
As someone who voted remain but now supports leave, and am in the highest risk group, I believe coronavirus is serious but people need to take sensible precautions and follow advice.
In my case my wife and I may defer our Canada trip from May to September but we are leaving that decision to the last minute
My views of a few days back remains unchanged:
1) Those with pre-existing pulmonary and respiratory conditions have every right to be concerned and those caring for them and close to them will also be concerned. Trying to mitigate the risk of infection for those people (even if that means self-isolation) has to be a priority.
2) The impact of large scale infection is going to be varied - transport services will suffer if a significant number of drivers are off sick. That in turn will disrupt travel for many others as services are involuntarily reduced,
3) I'm worried there are those who will try to continue even if they are sick because they literally cannot afford to be sick or miss a day's pay. That's how this will spread - from those who can't afford to self-isolate.
4) The economic shock of all this is going to be interesting - bothering about 1000 point variations in the DJIA is one thing but is there going to be a significant effect especially in Q1 of 20/21. Straws in the wind suggest there will be a hit to be taken and of course if the virus becomes significant at home the weakened retail estate may suffer worst.
There was a Twitter thread from Singapore yesterday; basically everyone indoors, working from home as best they can, answering the door only to masked delivery drivers who are leaving boxes of food outside and running off before the door is answered.
Is SeanT moonlighting in Singapore at the moment out of morbid curiousity?
The whole coronavirus episode is naturally worrisome for all those of us who are either in vulnerable groups or have friends and family who are part of them. However, I do find the suggestion that there's ultimately nothing that can be done to stop most of us getting it - and it's merely a matter of hoping that the peak doesn't come until this seemingly endless Winter finally eases off - to be convincing.
In any event, the idea that we're going to lower the infection rate and stem the transmission of this illness through mass self-isolation is for the birds. It will be entirely undone by the attitudes of peoples' employers, which will provoke mass presenteeism amongst the unwell. Consider:
1. Most employers are unsympathetic to sickness absence, and regard those without cast-iron excuses as likely guilty of swinging the lead. In my place you go straight onto the automatic treadmill of capability reviews with HR if you're off more than once in a six-month period, or only once but for more than five days. You can't self-certify for more than five days' absence, and the NHS is going to have more important things to worry about than writing out millions and millions of sick notes for people if and when this thing really takes off. So, an awful lot of workers with mild or moderate symptoms are going to drag themselves in because they're terrified of disciplinary sanctions or getting the sack.
2. The more employees who are literally bedridden or forced to stay home to look after children, the greater the pressure on those who aren't to keep turning up to work. Especially due to point one above, attempts to protest that one is perfectly well but self-isolating for two weeks for the good of the community are apt to be received with less than complete equanimity.
3. Those who don't receive time off ill on full-pay, and are therefore faced, variously, with coping on statutory sick pay, draining their savings, or having to wait until the heat death of the universe for emergency benefit payments, will also find themselves under enormous financial pressure to haul arse back into work as soon as possible. Mortgage lenders and landlords alike are not renowned for their sympathetic attitudes towards people who can't cough up the required cash, for reason of illness or anything else.
It will take draconian measures from the Government to even begin to address all these problems, and it has little incentive to act. It wants as many people to stay at work as possible, after all. The worse the slowdown in economic activity, the lower the tax take and the higher the demand for social security payments.
My employer has basically passed the buck to its clients.
As someone who voted remain but now supports leave, and am in the highest risk group, I believe coronavirus is serious but people need to take sensible precautions and follow advice.
In my case my wife and I may defer our Canada trip from May to September but we are leaving that decision to the last minute
That's going to be a tough call Big_G.
We have a trip to NY on QM2 booked for early May. We definitely plan to go unless Cunard cancel or the FO advise against but I am slightly worried we may end up with a 7 day crossing followed by two weeks in quarantine in NY harbour.
Edit: Cunard have written to us and told us to take two weeks spare meds just in case lol!
By May you’ll probably have more problems trying to return anywhere from the US.
Lol!
I am thinking a happy outcome for us might be 7 nights of full board luxury across the Atlantic, a couple of days of being refused entry to the US en mass, then 7 days luxury cruising back to Southampton followed by a full refund from Cunard.
Somehow I don't think it's going to work out that way though.
Cunard are already being very careful, cancelling stops on their cruises and screening everyone before boarding. At the least you can expect things to take longer than usual.
I wish you a pleasant crossing. Don’t miss the planetarium, the library, and the commodore club. If you end up in the lower dining room give my regards to Frederic.
Sibelius 1 is better than Sibelius 3 IMO.
But does it count as underrated ?
For a genuinely underrated, indeed almost unknown, piece then try Alnaes 1:
We can cheer ourselves up tonight by watching BBC1's new blockbuster drama about an apartheid Britain in which black people rule the roost over the white peasants.
Valuing risks to life and health 6.36 Changes in risks to life or health as a result of government interventions should be valued as part of appraisal and will usually require non-market valuation techniques. The choice of technique will depend on the nature of the specific intervention being appraised. 6.37 The Value of a Prevented Fatality (VPF) measures the social value of changes in risk to life. It is used to value small changes in fatality risks, where levels of human safety vary between options. This is not the value of a life, it is the value of a small change in the risk or probability of losing a statistical life. Not to value this in appraisal would effectively value human safety at zero. 6.38 In cases where alternative levels of fatality risk are involved in option design, VPF allows this to be taken into account. The value concerned is known as the value of the risk of “a statistically prevented fatality.” It has been widely used for many years, particularly in transport. The current value and how it may be applied is discussed in Annex 2. 6.39 Valuation can also involve estimating the impact of risks to the length of life, measured using Statistical Life Years (SLYs), and risks to health related quality of life (QoL) measured using QualityAdjusted Life Years (QALYs). In practice, particularly in the health sector, QoL can be thought of as different dimensions of health (e.g. the capacities for mobility, self-care, usual activities, pain or discomfort and anxiety or depression).17 Observations used will be based on self-reported health and provide equal weight to whatever full health means to each respondent.
Sainsbury's yesterday seemed very short of Coke, of all things.
Well, if they've run out of disinfectant washes, it's the next best thing.
That was probably me - I drink 2 cans a day (have done most days all my adult life) and periodically stock up! For some reason people find this odd
I did notice that things like cheap pasta and long-life milk had disappeared off the shelves - suspect there's some discreet stockpiling going on. I'll confess to buying some cans and some frozen food - I think there's a distinction between massive hoarding (silly and anti-social) and having enough tinned stuff to keep you going for a couple of weeks (sensible).
What I've been doing for weeks.
Went out and bought £100 of frozen organic meat from the farm butcher today.
'Coming under pressure'. Journalists love this phrase. What it usually means is that someone with an agenda has issued a press release or written a letter.
I take it that means a couple of chaps at the Guardian and the BBC are talking about it.
Has there been one of these dossiers which has yet been shown to be substantially serious matters and more than half-true, yet?
Well the Sunday Times/Hope Not Hate one last weekend say the Tory party suspend 20 members for Islamophobia.
So they took action immediately?
Don't they know they're supposed to call this all a vicious tabloid conspiracy trying to bring down the dear leader and get all indignant about it?
6.40 The value of a SLY is derived from the social value of a small change in the probability (the risk) of losing or gaining a year of life expectancy. This value can be of use when appraising options that involve different changes to life expectancy. These risks may involve regulation or provision of goods and services that affect or directly relate to human life and health. 6.41 The gain or loss of a QALY can represent the social value of an improvement in life expectancy and QoL in a way that is comparable to the gain or loss of a SLY. The QALY is two dimensional, combining both longevity and level of health in a single measure. This is useful when appraising options that result in different effects on both longevity and QoL. The current values of a SLY and a QALY, how they can be applied, and background information is contained in Annex 2. 6.42 On grounds of equity in appraisal, the VPF, QALY and SLY values are based on average values from representative samples of the population. For the avoidance of doubt VPF, QALYs and SLYs are used when analysing and planning the provision of assets, goods and services at a population or sub-population level. They are not designed for contexts such as situations of emergency or rescue.
------------------
Annex 2 contains the meat of the valuation and is well worth a read if you're an economic evaluation geek.
Word of caution - the way health economists and NICE value £ per QALY is actually slightly divergent from the Green Book.
Mortality in China has now reached one per half million of the population...
That is already the most embarrassing post in the history of this site, and that's before it starts aging.
Not embarrassed at all. Just pointing out a panic bubble.
We have sensible ranges of probabilities being published and the tabloid media, including the broadcast tabloid media and the formerly broadsheet tabloid media, selecting the upper bound and ignoring the more likely scenarios.
I think that it is very possible for us to control this with an order of magnitude or two fewer fatalities than the worst case scenario, but that requires strict and firm isolation. Taking action to prevent such an event is drastic, but the downside risk of not doing it is far worse.
How do you weigh up the economic and social cost of a strict containment against the increased mortaility of a looser regime?
Some form of cost benefit analysis using the QALY, most likely.
How many £ does a QALY equate to?
Roughly £30 000 usually.
In the US there is absolutely no agreed number. I've seen it, even in different or the same government department(s), vary from $250k to $5m. I guess the upper end number is the NPV of that person's lost lifetime economic activity and other valuable social contributions.
Yes £30 000 is what is used by NICE, but other values are used in other industries.
Anyone heard from @eadric or is he self-isolating from PB in case corvid-19 is transmitted over the internet?
Perhaps he's going round the supermarkets of Essex in an attempt to find panic buying.
The panic buying over the border in Hertfordshire has already started. Brain dead idiots had completely cleared out the entire supply of floor and surface wipes in Tesco today. The pasta shelves also looked uncommonly empty - this apparently being a favourite amongst panic hoarders - but the tinned food aisle still seemed well-stocked so we're clearly not at the supply chain collapse stage.
"displayed Islamophobia or made anti-Islam or anti-Muslim comments."
There's a lot of heavy lifting going on there with the word 'or'.
That's a pathetic definition!
As an atheist along the lines of Dawkins I'm quite happy to be anti-religion whether that be anti-Christianity or anti-Islam. But I'm not happy for anyone to discriminate based upon religion.
Does that make me Islamophobic? That's pathetically meaningless if so.
'Coming under pressure'. Journalists love this phrase. What it usually means is that someone with an agenda has issued a press release or written a letter.
See also “Questions will be asked” but I’m not clever enough to work out what those questions might be]. A bit of smoke disguises the pathetic fire.
The Labour Party is institutionally racist. The Conservative Party is not.
Yes there may be a handful of disreputable individual Tories but the entire organisation is not riddled with hatred.
A victorious RLB will do nothing to resolve the scourge within Labour.
On topic Bernie is toast with or without Warren!
I’m not reaching a judgment either way on the Conservative Party. I’d don’t know all (or indeed really any) of the accusations In detail and how they relate to reality. There are, though, certain journalistic code words and phrases which suggest that a story has to be manufactured and does not flow easily and naturally.
The Tory Party has a long history of pretty overt racism - as reflected in support for Ian Smith in Rhodesia and Apartheid in South Africa. The Monday Club had a substantial following. Many have conveniently forgotten about the Powellist wing of the party too.
'Coming under pressure'. Journalists love this phrase. What it usually means is that someone with an agenda has issued a press release or written a letter.
See also “Questions will be asked” but I’m not clever enough to work out what those questions might be]. A bit of smoke disguises the pathetic fire.
The Labour Party is institutionally racist. The Conservative Party is not.
Yes there may be a handful of disreputable individual Tories but the entire organisation is not riddled with hatred.
A victorious RLB will do nothing to resolve the scourge within Labour.
On topic Bernie is toast with or without Warren!
I’m not reaching a judgment either way on the Conservative Party. I’d don’t know all (or indeed really any) of the accusations In detail and how they relate to reality. There are, though, certain journalistic code words and phrases which suggest that a story has to be manufactured and does not flow easily and naturally.
Not of the Tory persuasion myself and there are undoubtedly some unpleasant individuals within.
I don't believe it is the tacit policy of the Tories to specifically pick on one faith group. I cannot say the same of Labour under Corbyn.
Sainsbury's yesterday seemed very short of Coke, of all things.
Well, if they've run out of disinfectant washes, it's the next best thing.
That was probably me - I drink 2 cans a day (have done most days all my adult life) and periodically stock up! For some reason people find this odd
I did notice that things like cheap pasta and long-life milk had disappeared off the shelves - suspect there's some discreet stockpiling going on. I'll confess to buying some cans and some frozen food - I think there's a distinction between massive hoarding (silly and anti-social) and having enough tinned stuff to keep you going for a couple of weeks (sensible).
What I've been doing for weeks.
Went out and bought £100 of frozen organic meat from the farm butcher today.
Tinned food, microwave rice, frozen jacket potatoes and chocolate biscuits here. Basically all stuff that I know I'll end up using anyway, just in slightly larger than usual quantities.
Oh, and bog roll. I saw all those weird reports about bog roll stockpiling in Australia, and considered the possibility that panicking idiots might at some point start taking home three family-sized packs of the stuff each, kind of like what they've been doing already for the surface wipes.
The whole surface wipe thing is very annoying BTW. My husband is messy and clumsy and uses them for cleaning up stuff like food spillages all the time. Kitchen roll is a poor substitute.
1. Most employers are unsympathetic to sickness absence, and regard those without cast-iron excuses as likely guilty of swinging the lead. In my place you go straight onto the automatic treadmill of capability reviews with HR if you're off more than once in a six-month period, or only once but for more than five days. You can't self-certify for more than five days' absence, and the NHS is going to have more important things to worry about than writing out millions and millions of sick notes for people if and when this thing really takes off. So, an awful lot of workers with mild or moderate symptoms are going to drag themselves in because they're terrified of disciplinary sanctions or getting the sack. ... 3. Those who don't receive time off ill on full-pay, and are therefore faced, variously, with coping on statutory sick pay, draining their savings, or having to wait until the heat death of the universe for emergency benefit payments, will also find themselves under enormous financial pressure to haul arse back into work as soon as possible. Mortgage lenders and landlords alike are not renowned for their sympathetic attitudes towards people who can't cough up the required cash, for reason of illness or anything else.
It will take draconian measures from the Government to even begin to address all these problems, and it has little incentive to act. It wants as many people to stay at work as possible, after all. The worse the slowdown in economic activity, the lower the tax take and the higher the demand for social security payments.
Well thought-out post. One bit that could be fiddled with in a non-draconian way is the timing issue for self-certification. If GP surgeries are under pressure re sick notes (also don't want people coming in with COVID-19 symptoms to ask for one!) then a logical, simple solution is either to extent the self-certification period (which government could do fairly easily I'd have thought?) or telephone appointments for COVID-19-symptom-related sick notes. Obviously the incentives are mixed here, as you point out, because of the widespread economic damage and general chaos (which would also have knock-on effects on healthcare delivery) of a significant proportion being off-sick.
'Coming under pressure'. Journalists love this phrase. What it usually means is that someone with an agenda has issued a press release or written a letter.
See also “Questions will be asked” but I’m not clever enough to work out what those questions might be]. A bit of smoke disguises the pathetic fire.
The Labour Party is institutionally racist. The Conservative Party is not.
Yes there may be a handful of disreputable individual Tories but the entire organisation is not riddled with hatred.
A victorious RLB will do nothing to resolve the scourge within Labour.
On topic Bernie is toast with or without Warren!
I’m not reaching a judgment either way on the Conservative Party. I’d don’t know all (or indeed really any) of the accusations In detail and how they relate to reality. There are, though, certain journalistic code words and phrases which suggest that a story has to be manufactured and does not flow easily and naturally.
Not of the Tory persuasion myself and there are undoubtedly some unpleasant individuals within.
I don't believe it is the tacit policy of the Tories to specifically pick on one faith group. I cannot say the same of Labour under Corbyn.
I don't recall any anti-Hindu, Sikh, Bhuddist, Taoist, Christian comments by Tory activists, but maybe I haven't been paying attention.
Anyone heard from @eadric or is he self-isolating from PB in case corvid-19 is transmitted over the internet?
Perhaps he's going round the supermarkets of Essex in an attempt to find panic buying.
The panic buying over the border in Hertfordshire has already started. Brain dead idiots had completely cleared out the entire supply of floor and surface wipes in Tesco today. The pasta shelves also looked uncommonly empty - this apparently being a favourite amongst panic hoarders - but the tinned food aisle still seemed well-stocked so we're clearly not at the supply chain collapse stage.
Yet.
Tinned food is the intelligent person's choice of food hoarding - tasty, nutritious and long lasting.
Can you imagine living off cheap pasta for a fortnight ?
On more trivial matters, my council tax (Trafford) has gone up 4.8%. Is this normal?
No, I'd have expected it to be 4.9%
Got mine today, up 2% but add-ons mean an overall rise of about 2.5%. £2313 per year. I find this astonishingly high. I can afford it OK (begrudgingly) but how do some others manage?
"displayed Islamophobia or made anti-Islam or anti-Muslim comments."
There's a lot of heavy lifting going on there with the word 'or'.
That's a pathetic definition!
As an atheist along the lines of Dawkins I'm quite happy to be anti-religion whether that be anti-Christianity or anti-Islam. But I'm not happy for anyone to discriminate based upon religion.
Does that make me Islamophobic? That's pathetically meaningless if so.
Some on the left would call you Islamaphobic. They wouldn`t criticise you for being similarly anti-Christianity. That doesn`t count in their befuddled minds.
Anyone heard from @eadric or is he self-isolating from PB in case corvid-19 is transmitted over the internet?
Perhaps he's going round the supermarkets of Essex in an attempt to find panic buying.
The panic buying over the border in Hertfordshire has already started. Brain dead idiots had completely cleared out the entire supply of floor and surface wipes in Tesco today. The pasta shelves also looked uncommonly empty - this apparently being a favourite amongst panic hoarders - but the tinned food aisle still seemed well-stocked so we're clearly not at the supply chain collapse stage.
Yet.
Tinned food is the intelligent person's choice of food hoarding - tasty, nutritious and long lasting.
Can you imagine living off cheap pasta for a fortnight ?
The saving made on the cheap pasta will be quickly offset by expensive and highly calorific shop-bought sauces (unless these people are planning to use it for cooking from scratch, which I strongly suspect that most of them aren't.)
Tinned food is a vastly underappreciated source of delicious and healthy meals. I made particular use of it when I was losing weight with Slimming World: if you make the right choices then there are plenty of options that are very low in Syn value, i.e. not loaded full of fat and sugar. Also, tinned peaches are of the gods.
Sainsbury's yesterday seemed very short of Coke, of all things.
Well, if they've run out of disinfectant washes, it's the next best thing.
That was probably me - I drink 2 cans a day (have done most days all my adult life) and periodically stock up! For some reason people find this odd
I did notice that things like cheap pasta and long-life milk had disappeared off the shelves - suspect there's some discreet stockpiling going on. I'll confess to buying some cans and some frozen food - I think there's a distinction between massive hoarding (silly and anti-social) and having enough tinned stuff to keep you going for a couple of weeks (sensible).
What I've been doing for weeks.
Went out and bought £100 of frozen organic meat from the farm butcher today.
Tinned food, microwave rice, frozen jacket potatoes and chocolate biscuits here. Basically all stuff that I know I'll end up using anyway, just in slightly larger than usual quantities.
Oh, and bog roll. I saw all those weird reports about bog roll stockpiling in Australia, and considered the possibility that panicking idiots might at some point start taking home three family-sized packs of the stuff each, kind of like what they've been doing already for the surface wipes.
The whole surface wipe thing is very annoying BTW. My husband is messy and clumsy and uses them for cleaning up stuff like food spillages all the time. Kitchen roll is a poor substitute.
Dried fruit Long life juice Oat biscuits (go well with soup) Porridge Hand soap
Grated parmesan, flavoured oil, seeds and lemon juice might give some flavour to the cheap pasta.
Mortality in China has now reached one per half million of the population...
That is already the most embarrassing post in the history of this site, and that's before it starts aging.
Not embarrassed at all. Just pointing out a panic bubble.
We have sensible ranges of probabilities being published and the tabloid media, including the broadcast tabloid media and the formerly broadsheet tabloid media, selecting the upper bound and ignoring the more likely scenarios.
I think that it is very possible for us to control this with an order of magnitude or two fewer fatalities than the worst case scenario, but that requires strict and firm isolation. Taking action to prevent such an event is drastic, but the downside risk of not doing it is far worse.
How do you weigh up the economic and social cost of a strict containment against the increased mortaility of a looser regime?
Some form of cost benefit analysis using the QALY, most likely.
How many £ does a QALY equate to?
Roughly £30 000 usually.
In the US there is absolutely no agreed number. I've seen it, even in different or the same government department(s), vary from $250k to $5m. I guess the upper end number is the NPV of that person's lost lifetime economic activity and other valuable social contributions.
Yes £30 000 is what is used by NICE, but other values are used in other industries.
Anyone heard from @eadric or is he self-isolating from PB in case corvid-19 is transmitted over the internet?
Perhaps he's going round the supermarkets of Essex in an attempt to find panic buying.
The panic buying over the border in Hertfordshire has already started. Brain dead idiots had completely cleared out the entire supply of floor and surface wipes in Tesco today. The pasta shelves also looked uncommonly empty - this apparently being a favourite amongst panic hoarders - but the tinned food aisle still seemed well-stocked so we're clearly not at the supply chain collapse stage.
Yet.
Tinned food is the intelligent person's choice of food hoarding - tasty, nutritious and long lasting.
Can you imagine living off cheap pasta for a fortnight ?
The saving made on the cheap pasta will be quickly offset by expensive and highly calorific shop-bought sauces (unless these people are planning to use it for cooking from scratch, which I strongly suspect that most of them aren't.)
Tinned food is a vastly underappreciated source of delicious and healthy meals. I made particular use of it when I was losing weight with Slimming World: if you make the right choices then there are plenty of options that are very low in Syn value, i.e. not loaded full of fat and sugar. Also, tinned peaches are of the gods.
I think I need to give tinned peaches another go. As a child I detested them - found them slimy - and never plucked up the courage to give them another go. Best peaches are picked straight from my own espalier peach tree!
1. Most employers are unsympathetic to sickness absence, and regard those without cast-iron excuses as likely guilty of swinging the lead. In my place you go straight onto the automatic treadmill of capability reviews with HR if you're off more than once in a six-month period, or only once but for more than five days. You can't self-certify for more than five days' absence, and the NHS is going to have more important things to worry about than writing out millions and millions of sick notes for people if and when this thing really takes off. So, an awful lot of workers with mild or moderate symptoms are going to drag themselves in because they're terrified of disciplinary sanctions or getting the sack. ... 3. Those who don't receive time off ill on full-pay, and are therefore faced, variously, with coping on statutory sick pay, draining their savings, or having to wait until the heat death of the universe for emergency benefit payments, will also find themselves under enormous financial pressure to haul arse back into work as soon as possible. Mortgage lenders and landlords alike are not renowned for their sympathetic attitudes towards people who can't cough up the required cash, for reason of illness or anything else.
It will take draconian measures from the Government to even begin to address all these problems, and it has little incentive to act. It wants as many people to stay at work as possible, after all. The worse the slowdown in economic activity, the lower the tax take and the higher the demand for social security payments.
Well thought-out post. One bit that could be fiddled with in a non-draconian way is the timing issue for self-certification. If GP surgeries are under pressure re sick notes (also don't want people coming in with COVID-19 symptoms to ask for one!) then a logical, simple solution is either to extent the self-certification period (which government could do fairly easily I'd have thought?) or telephone appointments for COVID-19-symptom-related sick notes. Obviously the incentives are mixed here, as you point out, because of the widespread economic damage and general chaos (which would also have knock-on effects on healthcare delivery) of a significant proportion being off-sick.
That, and there's the mammoth problem of whether we are going to advise people to self-isolate as households if one family member comes down with this thing. You could have working age people faced with multiple 14-day quarantine periods, whether discrete or overlapping, and then having to prove the diagnosis of each person affected and when they were first declared to have the thing. It's completely impractical.
'Coming under pressure'. Journalists love this phrase. What it usually means is that someone with an agenda has issued a press release or written a letter.
See also “Questions will be asked” but I’m not clever enough to work out what those questions might be]. A bit of smoke disguises the pathetic fire.
The Labour Party is institutionally racist. The Conservative Party is not.
Yes there may be a handful of disreputable individual Tories but the entire organisation is not riddled with hatred.
A victorious RLB will do nothing to resolve the scourge within Labour.
On topic Bernie is toast with or without Warren!
I’m not reaching a judgment either way on the Conservative Party. I’d don’t know all (or indeed really any) of the accusations In detail and how they relate to reality. There are, though, certain journalistic code words and phrases which suggest that a story has to be manufactured and does not flow easily and naturally.
Not of the Tory persuasion myself and there are undoubtedly some unpleasant individuals within.
I don't believe it is the tacit policy of the Tories to specifically pick on one faith group. I cannot say the same of Labour under Corbyn.
I don't recall any anti-Hindu, Sikh, Bhuddist, Taoist, Christian comments by Tory activists, but maybe I haven't been paying attention.
I agree any individual anti Islamic individuals should be given short shrift by the Tories. My point was Corbyn and his acolytes actively encouraged anti-Israel and anti-Jewish activities
Anyone heard from @eadric or is he self-isolating from PB in case corvid-19 is transmitted over the internet?
Perhaps he's going round the supermarkets of Essex in an attempt to find panic buying.
The panic buying over the border in Hertfordshire has already started. Brain dead idiots had completely cleared out the entire supply of floor and surface wipes in Tesco today. The pasta shelves also looked uncommonly empty - this apparently being a favourite amongst panic hoarders - but the tinned food aisle still seemed well-stocked so we're clearly not at the supply chain collapse stage.
Yet.
Tinned food is the intelligent person's choice of food hoarding - tasty, nutritious and long lasting.
Can you imagine living off cheap pasta for a fortnight ?
The saving made on the cheap pasta will be quickly offset by expensive and highly calorific shop-bought sauces (unless these people are planning to use it for cooking from scratch, which I strongly suspect that most of them aren't.)
Tinned food is a vastly underappreciated source of delicious and healthy meals. I made particular use of it when I was losing weight with Slimming World: if you make the right choices then there are plenty of options that are very low in Syn value, i.e. not loaded full of fat and sugar. Also, tinned peaches are of the gods.
I think I need to give tinned peaches another go. As a child I detested them - found them slimy - and never plucked up the courage to give them another go. Best peaches are picked straight from my own espalier peach tree!
I feel we are verging on the edge of a discussion about pineapple folks.
Anyone heard from @eadric or is he self-isolating from PB in case corvid-19 is transmitted over the internet?
Perhaps he's going round the supermarkets of Essex in an attempt to find panic buying.
The panic buying over the border in Hertfordshire has already started. Brain dead idiots had completely cleared out the entire supply of floor and surface wipes in Tesco today. The pasta shelves also looked uncommonly empty - this apparently being a favourite amongst panic hoarders - but the tinned food aisle still seemed well-stocked so we're clearly not at the supply chain collapse stage.
Yet.
Tinned food is the intelligent person's choice of food hoarding - tasty, nutritious and long lasting.
Can you imagine living off cheap pasta for a fortnight ?
The saving made on the cheap pasta will be quickly offset by expensive and highly calorific shop-bought sauces (unless these people are planning to use it for cooking from scratch, which I strongly suspect that most of them aren't.)
Tinned food is a vastly underappreciated source of delicious and healthy meals. I made particular use of it when I was losing weight with Slimming World: if you make the right choices then there are plenty of options that are very low in Syn value, i.e. not loaded full of fat and sugar. Also, tinned peaches are of the gods.
I think I need to give tinned peaches another go. As a child I detested them - found them slimy - and never plucked up the courage to give them another go. Best peaches are picked straight from my own espalier peach tree!
I can't think of tinned peaches without The Presidents of the United States of America song going through my head. Probably haven't even heard it in 20 years!
Anyone heard from @eadric or is he self-isolating from PB in case corvid-19 is transmitted over the internet?
Perhaps he's going round the supermarkets of Essex in an attempt to find panic buying.
The panic buying over the border in Hertfordshire has already started. Brain dead idiots had completely cleared out the entire supply of floor and surface wipes in Tesco today. The pasta shelves also looked uncommonly empty - this apparently being a favourite amongst panic hoarders - but the tinned food aisle still seemed well-stocked so we're clearly not at the supply chain collapse stage.
Yet.
Tinned food is the intelligent person's choice of food hoarding - tasty, nutritious and long lasting.
Can you imagine living off cheap pasta for a fortnight ?
The saving made on the cheap pasta will be quickly offset by expensive and highly calorific shop-bought sauces (unless these people are planning to use it for cooking from scratch, which I strongly suspect that most of them aren't.)
Tinned food is a vastly underappreciated source of delicious and healthy meals. I made particular use of it when I was losing weight with Slimming World: if you make the right choices then there are plenty of options that are very low in Syn value, i.e. not loaded full of fat and sugar. Also, tinned peaches are of the gods.
I think I need to give tinned peaches another go. As a child I detested them - found them slimy - and never plucked up the courage to give them another go. Best peaches are picked straight from my own espalier peach tree!
I feel we are verging on the edge of a discussion about pineapple folks.
Funny you should mention that - had cottage cheese with pineapple on my baked potato this evening. It was jolly good.
Sainsbury's yesterday seemed very short of Coke, of all things.
Well, if they've run out of disinfectant washes, it's the next best thing.
That was probably me - I drink 2 cans a day (have done most days all my adult life) and periodically stock up! For some reason people find this odd
I did notice that things like cheap pasta and long-life milk had disappeared off the shelves - suspect there's some discreet stockpiling going on. I'll confess to buying some cans and some frozen food - I think there's a distinction between massive hoarding (silly and anti-social) and having enough tinned stuff to keep you going for a couple of weeks (sensible).
What I've been doing for weeks.
Went out and bought £100 of frozen organic meat from the farm butcher today.
Tinned food, microwave rice, frozen jacket potatoes and chocolate biscuits here. Basically all stuff that I know I'll end up using anyway, just in slightly larger than usual quantities.
Oh, and bog roll. I saw all those weird reports about bog roll stockpiling in Australia, and considered the possibility that panicking idiots might at some point start taking home three family-sized packs of the stuff each, kind of like what they've been doing already for the surface wipes.
The whole surface wipe thing is very annoying BTW. My husband is messy and clumsy and uses them for cleaning up stuff like food spillages all the time. Kitchen roll is a poor substitute.
Dried fruit Long life juice Oat biscuits (go well with soup) Porridge Hand soap
Grated parmesan, flavoured oil, seeds and lemon juice might give some flavour to the cheap pasta.
Porridge. Easy to store. Just mix with water. Meal after meal.
Anyone heard from @eadric or is he self-isolating from PB in case corvid-19 is transmitted over the internet?
Perhaps he's going round the supermarkets of Essex in an attempt to find panic buying.
The panic buying over the border in Hertfordshire has already started. Brain dead idiots had completely cleared out the entire supply of floor and surface wipes in Tesco today. The pasta shelves also looked uncommonly empty - this apparently being a favourite amongst panic hoarders - but the tinned food aisle still seemed well-stocked so we're clearly not at the supply chain collapse stage.
Yet.
Tinned food is the intelligent person's choice of food hoarding - tasty, nutritious and long lasting.
Can you imagine living off cheap pasta for a fortnight ?
The saving made on the cheap pasta will be quickly offset by expensive and highly calorific shop-bought sauces (unless these people are planning to use it for cooking from scratch, which I strongly suspect that most of them aren't.)
Tinned food is a vastly underappreciated source of delicious and healthy meals. I made particular use of it when I was losing weight with Slimming World: if you make the right choices then there are plenty of options that are very low in Syn value, i.e. not loaded full of fat and sugar. Also, tinned peaches are of the gods.
I think I need to give tinned peaches another go. As a child I detested them - found them slimy - and never plucked up the courage to give them another go. Best peaches are picked straight from my own espalier peach tree!
I feel we are verging on the edge of a discussion about pineapple folks.
Sainsbury's yesterday seemed very short of Coke, of all things.
Well, if they've run out of disinfectant washes, it's the next best thing.
That was probably me - I drink 2 cans a day (have done most days all my adult life) and periodically stock up! For some reason people find this odd
I did notice that things like cheap pasta and long-life milk had disappeared off the shelves - suspect there's some discreet stockpiling going on. I'll confess to buying some cans and some frozen food - I think there's a distinction between massive hoarding (silly and anti-social) and having enough tinned stuff to keep you going for a couple of weeks (sensible).
What I've been doing for weeks.
Went out and bought £100 of frozen organic meat from the farm butcher today.
Tinned food, microwave rice, frozen jacket potatoes and chocolate biscuits here. Basically all stuff that I know I'll end up using anyway, just in slightly larger than usual quantities.
Oh, and bog roll. I saw all those weird reports about bog roll stockpiling in Australia, and considered the possibility that panicking idiots might at some point start taking home three family-sized packs of the stuff each, kind of like what they've been doing already for the surface wipes.
The whole surface wipe thing is very annoying BTW. My husband is messy and clumsy and uses them for cleaning up stuff like food spillages all the time. Kitchen roll is a poor substitute.
Dried fruit Long life juice Oat biscuits (go well with soup) Porridge Hand soap
Grated parmesan, flavoured oil, seeds and lemon juice might give some flavour to the cheap pasta.
Long life juice? Juice doesn't last very long once opened, a few glasses and its gone. Wouldn't cordial be a better choice if you were going for the long term?
Anyone heard from @eadric or is he self-isolating from PB in case corvid-19 is transmitted over the internet?
Perhaps he's going round the supermarkets of Essex in an attempt to find panic buying.
The panic buying over the border in Hertfordshire has already started. Brain dead idiots had completely cleared out the entire supply of floor and surface wipes in Tesco today. The pasta shelves also looked uncommonly empty - this apparently being a favourite amongst panic hoarders - but the tinned food aisle still seemed well-stocked so we're clearly not at the supply chain collapse stage.
Yet.
Tinned food is the intelligent person's choice of food hoarding - tasty, nutritious and long lasting.
Can you imagine living off cheap pasta for a fortnight ?
The saving made on the cheap pasta will be quickly offset by expensive and highly calorific shop-bought sauces (unless these people are planning to use it for cooking from scratch, which I strongly suspect that most of them aren't.)
Tinned food is a vastly underappreciated source of delicious and healthy meals. I made particular use of it when I was losing weight with Slimming World: if you make the right choices then there are plenty of options that are very low in Syn value, i.e. not loaded full of fat and sugar. Also, tinned peaches are of the gods.
I think I need to give tinned peaches another go. As a child I detested them - found them slimy - and never plucked up the courage to give them another go. Best peaches are picked straight from my own espalier peach tree!
Tinned peaches are certainly softer than fresh fruit; I've never found them slimy, although these things are, of course, a matter of personal taste.
I buy mine canned in juice rather than syrup, drain them thoroughly before serving and top them with fat-free Greek yoghurt, to which I add just a little sweetener (this being a method that I discovered when I was losing weight, because in that case the whole thing has a Syn value of zero and you can eat as much of it as you like.) But they also go very nicely with cream or custard.
Sainsbury's yesterday seemed very short of Coke, of all things.
Well, if they've run out of disinfectant washes, it's the next best thing.
That was probably me - I drink 2 cans a day (have done most days all my adult life) and periodically stock up! For some reason people find this odd
I did notice that things like cheap pasta and long-life milk had disappeared off the shelves - suspect there's some discreet stockpiling going on. I'll confess to buying some cans and some frozen food - I think there's a distinction between massive hoarding (silly and anti-social) and having enough tinned stuff to keep you going for a couple of weeks (sensible).
What I've been doing for weeks.
Went out and bought £100 of frozen organic meat from the farm butcher today.
Tinned food, microwave rice, frozen jacket potatoes and chocolate biscuits here. Basically all stuff that I know I'll end up using anyway, just in slightly larger than usual quantities.
Oh, and bog roll. I saw all those weird reports about bog roll stockpiling in Australia, and considered the possibility that panicking idiots might at some point start taking home three family-sized packs of the stuff each, kind of like what they've been doing already for the surface wipes.
The whole surface wipe thing is very annoying BTW. My husband is messy and clumsy and uses them for cleaning up stuff like food spillages all the time. Kitchen roll is a poor substitute.
Dried fruit Long life juice Oat biscuits (go well with soup) Porridge Hand soap
Grated parmesan, flavoured oil, seeds and lemon juice might give some flavour to the cheap pasta.
Porridge. Easy to store. Just mix with water. Meal after meal.
Don`t go over the top with this bulk buying. I still have almost all of the condoms left from the bulk buy I made in the late 80s.
Mortality in China has now reached one per half million of the population...
That is already the most embarrassing post in the history of this site, and that's before it starts aging.
Not embarrassed at all. Just pointing out a panic bubble.
We have sensible ranges of probabilities being published and the tabloid media, including the broadcast tabloid media and the formerly broadsheet tabloid media, selecting the upper bound and ignoring the more likely scenarios.
I think that it is very possible for us to control this with an order of magnitude or two fewer fatalities than the worst case scenario, but that requires strict and firm isolation. Taking action to prevent such an event is drastic, but the downside risk of not doing it is far worse.
How do you weigh up the economic and social cost of a strict containment against the increased mortaility of a looser regime?
Some form of cost benefit analysis using the QALY, most likely.
How many £ does a QALY equate to?
Roughly £30 000 usually.
In the US there is absolutely no agreed number. I've seen it, even in different or the same government department(s), vary from $250k to $5m. I guess the upper end number is the NPV of that person's lost lifetime economic activity and other valuable social contributions.
Yes £30 000 is what is used by NICE, but other values are used in other industries.
For comparison, the Green Book values a Statistical Life Year (a different concept and not usually used in medical evaluations) at £60k.
Should have added that the Green Book also says
monetary valuations of QALYs are available for the UK. The current monetary WTP value for a QALY is £60,000. Further information on the basis for the value of a QALY can be obtained by contacting the Department of Health and Social Care
(WTP = Willingness To Pay, yet another way of valuing a QALY)
So totally at variance with what NICE uses, completely different to the marginal cost approach, and yet equivalent to the (quite different concept) of a Statistical Life Year!
Sainsbury's yesterday seemed very short of Coke, of all things.
Well, if they've run out of disinfectant washes, it's the next best thing.
That was probably me - I drink 2 cans a day (have done most days all my adult life) and periodically stock up! For some reason people find this odd
I did notice that things like cheap pasta and long-life milk had disappeared off the shelves - suspect there's some discreet stockpiling going on. I'll confess to buying some cans and some frozen food - I think there's a distinction between massive hoarding (silly and anti-social) and having enough tinned stuff to keep you going for a couple of weeks (sensible).
What I've been doing for weeks.
Went out and bought £100 of frozen organic meat from the farm butcher today.
Tinned food, microwave rice, frozen jacket potatoes and chocolate biscuits here. Basically all stuff that I know I'll end up using anyway, just in slightly larger than usual quantities.
Oh, and bog roll. I saw all those weird reports about bog roll stockpiling in Australia, and considered the possibility that panicking idiots might at some point start taking home three family-sized packs of the stuff each, kind of like what they've been doing already for the surface wipes.
The whole surface wipe thing is very annoying BTW. My husband is messy and clumsy and uses them for cleaning up stuff like food spillages all the time. Kitchen roll is a poor substitute.
Dried fruit Long life juice Oat biscuits (go well with soup) Porridge Hand soap
Grated parmesan, flavoured oil, seeds and lemon juice might give some flavour to the cheap pasta.
Long life juice? Juice doesn't last very long once opened, a few glasses and its gone. Wouldn't cordial be a better choice if you were going for the long term?
Need to stick a couple of bottles of squash on my next shopping list. Cheers for the reminder
Anyone heard from @eadric or is he self-isolating from PB in case corvid-19 is transmitted over the internet?
Perhaps he's going round the supermarkets of Essex in an attempt to find panic buying.
The panic buying over the border in Hertfordshire has already started. Brain dead idiots had completely cleared out the entire supply of floor and surface wipes in Tesco today. The pasta shelves also looked uncommonly empty - this apparently being a favourite amongst panic hoarders - but the tinned food aisle still seemed well-stocked so we're clearly not at the supply chain collapse stage.
Yet.
Tinned food is the intelligent person's choice of food hoarding - tasty, nutritious and long lasting.
Can you imagine living off cheap pasta for a fortnight ?
The saving made on the cheap pasta will be quickly offset by expensive and highly calorific shop-bought sauces (unless these people are planning to use it for cooking from scratch, which I strongly suspect that most of them aren't.)
Tinned food is a vastly underappreciated source of delicious and healthy meals. I made particular use of it when I was losing weight with Slimming World: if you make the right choices then there are plenty of options that are very low in Syn value, i.e. not loaded full of fat and sugar. Also, tinned peaches are of the gods.
I think I need to give tinned peaches another go. As a child I detested them - found them slimy - and never plucked up the courage to give them another go. Best peaches are picked straight from my own espalier peach tree!
Tinned peaches are certainly softer than fresh fruit; I've never found them slimy, although these things are, of course, a matter of personal taste.
I buy mine canned in juice rather than syrup, drain them thoroughly before serving and top them with fat-free Greek yoghurt, to which I add just a little sweetener (this being a method that I discovered when I was losing weight, because in that case the whole thing has a Syn value of zero and you can eat as much of it as you like.) But they also go very nicely with cream or custard.
Does that work with all tinned fruit or just a few?
Sainsbury's yesterday seemed very short of Coke, of all things.
Well, if they've run out of disinfectant washes, it's the next best thing.
That was probably me - I drink 2 cans a day (have done most days all my adult life) and periodically stock up! For some reason people find this odd
I did notice that things like cheap pasta and long-life milk had disappeared off the shelves - suspect there's some discreet stockpiling going on. I'll confess to buying some cans and some frozen food - I think there's a distinction between massive hoarding (silly and anti-social) and having enough tinned stuff to keep you going for a couple of weeks (sensible).
What I've been doing for weeks.
Went out and bought £100 of frozen organic meat from the farm butcher today.
Tinned food, microwave rice, frozen jacket potatoes and chocolate biscuits here. Basically all stuff that I know I'll end up using anyway, just in slightly larger than usual quantities.
Oh, and bog roll. I saw all those weird reports about bog roll stockpiling in Australia, and considered the possibility that panicking idiots might at some point start taking home three family-sized packs of the stuff each, kind of like what they've been doing already for the surface wipes.
The whole surface wipe thing is very annoying BTW. My husband is messy and clumsy and uses them for cleaning up stuff like food spillages all the time. Kitchen roll is a poor substitute.
Dried fruit Long life juice Oat biscuits (go well with soup) Porridge Hand soap
Grated parmesan, flavoured oil, seeds and lemon juice might give some flavour to the cheap pasta.
Porridge. Easy to store. Just mix with water. Meal after meal.
Don`t go over the top with this bulk buying. I still have almost all of the condoms left from the bulk buy I made in the late 80s.
Anyone heard from @eadric or is he self-isolating from PB in case corvid-19 is transmitted over the internet?
Perhaps he's going round the supermarkets of Essex in an attempt to find panic buying.
The panic buying over the border in Hertfordshire has already started. Brain dead idiots had completely cleared out the entire supply of floor and surface wipes in Tesco today. The pasta shelves also looked uncommonly empty - this apparently being a favourite amongst panic hoarders - but the tinned food aisle still seemed well-stocked so we're clearly not at the supply chain collapse stage.
Yet.
Tinned food is the intelligent person's choice of food hoarding - tasty, nutritious and long lasting.
Can you imagine living off cheap pasta for a fortnight ?
The saving made on the cheap pasta will be quickly offset by expensive and highly calorific shop-bought sauces (unless these people are planning to use it for cooking from scratch, which I strongly suspect that most of them aren't.)
Tinned food is a vastly underappreciated source of delicious and healthy meals. I made particular use of it when I was losing weight with Slimming World: if you make the right choices then there are plenty of options that are very low in Syn value, i.e. not loaded full of fat and sugar. Also, tinned peaches are of the gods.
I think I need to give tinned peaches another go. As a child I detested them - found them slimy - and never plucked up the courage to give them another go. Best peaches are picked straight from my own espalier peach tree!
Tinned peaches are certainly softer than fresh fruit; I've never found them slimy, although these things are, of course, a matter of personal taste.
I buy mine canned in juice rather than syrup, drain them thoroughly before serving and top them with fat-free Greek yoghurt, to which I add just a little sweetener (this being a method that I discovered when I was losing weight, because in that case the whole thing has a Syn value of zero and you can eat as much of it as you like.) But they also go very nicely with cream or custard.
The sweetener is calorie-free I guess? I`ve never heard of Syn value. There would still be a fair few calories in the yoghurt.
Sainsbury's yesterday seemed very short of Coke, of all things.
Well, if they've run out of disinfectant washes, it's the next best thing.
That was probably me - I drink 2 cans a day (have done most days all my adult life) and periodically stock up! For some reason people find this odd
I did notice that things like cheap pasta and long-life milk had disappeared off the shelves - suspect there's some discreet stockpiling going on. I'll confess to buying some cans and some frozen food - I think there's a distinction between massive hoarding (silly and anti-social) and having enough tinned stuff to keep you going for a couple of weeks (sensible).
What I've been doing for weeks.
Went out and bought £100 of frozen organic meat from the farm butcher today.
Tinned food, microwave rice, frozen jacket potatoes and chocolate biscuits here. Basically all stuff that I know I'll end up using anyway, just in slightly larger than usual quantities.
Oh, and bog roll. I saw all those weird reports about bog roll stockpiling in Australia, and considered the possibility that panicking idiots might at some point start taking home three family-sized packs of the stuff each, kind of like what they've been doing already for the surface wipes.
The whole surface wipe thing is very annoying BTW. My husband is messy and clumsy and uses them for cleaning up stuff like food spillages all the time. Kitchen roll is a poor substitute.
Dried fruit Long life juice Oat biscuits (go well with soup) Porridge Hand soap
Grated parmesan, flavoured oil, seeds and lemon juice might give some flavour to the cheap pasta.
Porridge. Easy to store. Just mix with water. Meal after meal.
Don`t go over the top with this bulk buying. I still have almost all of the condoms left from the bulk buy I made in the late 80s.
I wonder if there'll be a baby boom starting around Christmas time.
Sainsbury's yesterday seemed very short of Coke, of all things.
Well, if they've run out of disinfectant washes, it's the next best thing.
That was probably me - I drink 2 cans a day (have done most days all my adult life) and periodically stock up! For some reason people find this odd
I did notice that things like cheap pasta and long-life milk had disappeared off the shelves - suspect there's some discreet stockpiling going on. I'll confess to buying some cans and some frozen food - I think there's a distinction between massive hoarding (silly and anti-social) and having enough tinned stuff to keep you going for a couple of weeks (sensible).
What I've been doing for weeks.
Went out and bought £100 of frozen organic meat from the farm butcher today.
Tinned food, microwave rice, frozen jacket potatoes and chocolate biscuits here. Basically all stuff that I know I'll end up using anyway, just in slightly larger than usual quantities.
Oh, and bog roll. I saw all those weird reports about bog roll stockpiling in Australia, and considered the possibility that panicking idiots might at some point start taking home three family-sized packs of the stuff each, kind of like what they've been doing already for the surface wipes.
The whole surface wipe thing is very annoying BTW. My husband is messy and clumsy and uses them for cleaning up stuff like food spillages all the time. Kitchen roll is a poor substitute.
Dried fruit Long life juice Oat biscuits (go well with soup) Porridge Hand soap
Grated parmesan, flavoured oil, seeds and lemon juice might give some flavour to the cheap pasta.
Long life juice? Juice doesn't last very long once opened, a few glasses and its gone. Wouldn't cordial be a better choice if you were going for the long term?
The advantages are that it doesn't need to be stored in a fridge and doesn't need to be opened for months.
I think your father was right, community spread is well under way. I wonder if they are related to the couple of were in hospital for unrelated issues and found to have it?
Yes I suggested 48 hours ago that I reckoned it was now spreading fast. Well, 'rampant' was the admittedly strong word. This all chimes with the Gov't's stated new tactic to try to divert the peak into the summer months.
Sainsbury's yesterday seemed very short of Coke, of all things.
Well, if they've run out of disinfectant washes, it's the next best thing.
That was probably me - I drink 2 cans a day (have done most days all my adult life) and periodically stock up! For some reason people find this odd
I did notice that things like cheap pasta and long-life milk had disappeared off the shelves - suspect there's some discreet stockpiling going on. I'll confess to buying some cans and some frozen food - I think there's a distinction between massive hoarding (silly and anti-social) and having enough tinned stuff to keep you going for a couple of weeks (sensible).
What I've been doing for weeks.
Went out and bought £100 of frozen organic meat from the farm butcher today.
Tinned food, microwave rice, frozen jacket potatoes and chocolate biscuits here. Basically all stuff that I know I'll end up using anyway, just in slightly larger than usual quantities.
Oh, and bog roll. I saw all those weird reports about bog roll stockpiling in Australia, and considered the possibility that panicking idiots might at some point start taking home three family-sized packs of the stuff each, kind of like what they've been doing already for the surface wipes.
The whole surface wipe thing is very annoying BTW. My husband is messy and clumsy and uses them for cleaning up stuff like food spillages all the time. Kitchen roll is a poor substitute.
Dried fruit Long life juice Oat biscuits (go well with soup) Porridge Hand soap
Grated parmesan, flavoured oil, seeds and lemon juice might give some flavour to the cheap pasta.
Long life juice? Juice doesn't last very long once opened, a few glasses and its gone. Wouldn't cordial be a better choice if you were going for the long term?
The advantages are that it doesn't need to be stored in a fridge and doesn't need to be opened for months.
I get that. I suppose if you've got pantry space for that then fair enough - I wouldn't have enough space for months-worth of juice if we were going that hardcore.
That, and there's the mammoth problem of whether we are going to advise people to self-isolate as households if one family member comes down with this thing. You could have working age people faced with multiple 14-day quarantine periods, whether discrete or overlapping, and then having to prove the diagnosis of each person affected and when they were first declared to have the thing. It's completely impractical.
My guess is that the "prove the diagnosis" bit would get more flexible if/when we get to that point, particularly if we give up on testing absolutely everyone with minor symptoms. But you're right that the overlapping isolation periods would be an impractical nightmare.
Sainsbury's yesterday seemed very short of Coke, of all things.
Well, if they've run out of disinfectant washes, it's the next best thing.
That was probably me - I drink 2 cans a day (have done most days all my adult life) and periodically stock up! For some reason people find this odd
I did notice that things like cheap pasta and long-life milk had disappeared off the shelves - suspect there's some discreet stockpiling going on. I'll confess to buying some cans and some frozen food - I think there's a distinction between massive hoarding (silly and anti-social) and having enough tinned stuff to keep you going for a couple of weeks (sensible).
What I've been doing for weeks.
Went out and bought £100 of frozen organic meat from the farm butcher today.
Tinned food, microwave rice, frozen jacket potatoes and chocolate biscuits here. Basically all stuff that I know I'll end up using anyway, just in slightly larger than usual quantities.
Oh, and bog roll. I saw all those weird reports about bog roll stockpiling in Australia, and considered the possibility that panicking idiots might at some point start taking home three family-sized packs of the stuff each, kind of like what they've been doing already for the surface wipes.
The whole surface wipe thing is very annoying BTW. My husband is messy and clumsy and uses them for cleaning up stuff like food spillages all the time. Kitchen roll is a poor substitute.
Dried fruit Long life juice Oat biscuits (go well with soup) Porridge Hand soap
Grated parmesan, flavoured oil, seeds and lemon juice might give some flavour to the cheap pasta.
Long life juice? Juice doesn't last very long once opened, a few glasses and its gone. Wouldn't cordial be a better choice if you were going for the long term?
The advantages are that it doesn't need to be stored in a fridge and doesn't need to be opened for months.
I get that. I suppose if you've got pantry space for that then fair enough - I wouldn't have enough space for months-worth of juice if we were going that hardcore.
It depends on how you drink it.
A small glass at breakfast is different to a big glass at dinner.
I've stockpiled medications, rice, various protein sources, various tinned foods, surgical spirit, aloe vera gel, soap, and frozen ham and pineapple pizza.
Sainsbury's yesterday seemed very short of Coke, of all things.
Well, if they've run out of disinfectant washes, it's the next best thing.
That was probably me - I drink 2 cans a day (have done most days all my adult life) and periodically stock up! For some reason people find this odd
I did notice that things like cheap pasta and long-life milk had disappeared off the shelves - suspect there's some discreet stockpiling going on. I'll confess to buying some cans and some frozen food - I think there's a distinction between massive hoarding (silly and anti-social) and having enough tinned stuff to keep you going for a couple of weeks (sensible).
What I've been doing for weeks.
Went out and bought £100 of frozen organic meat from the farm butcher today.
Tinned food, microwave rice, frozen jacket potatoes and chocolate biscuits here. Basically all stuff that I know I'll end up using anyway, just in slightly larger than usual quantities.
Oh, and bog roll. I saw all those weird reports about bog roll stockpiling in Australia, and considered the possibility that panicking idiots might at some point start taking home three family-sized packs of the stuff each, kind of like what they've been doing already for the surface wipes.
The whole surface wipe thing is very annoying BTW. My husband is messy and clumsy and uses them for cleaning up stuff like food spillages all the time. Kitchen roll is a poor substitute.
Dried fruit Long life juice Oat biscuits (go well with soup) Porridge Hand soap
Grated parmesan, flavoured oil, seeds and lemon juice might give some flavour to the cheap pasta.
Porridge. Easy to store. Just mix with water. Meal after meal.
Don`t go over the top with this bulk buying. I still have almost all of the condoms left from the bulk buy I made in the late 80s.
There's a martket for them on ebay if you're prepared to post to Australia, apparently:
Sainsbury's yesterday seemed very short of Coke, of all things.
Well, if they've run out of disinfectant washes, it's the next best thing.
That was probably me - I drink 2 cans a day (have done most days all my adult life) and periodically stock up! For some reason people find this odd
I did notice that things like cheap pasta and long-life milk had disappeared off the shelves - suspect there's some discreet stockpiling going on. I'll confess to buying some cans and some frozen food - I think there's a distinction between massive hoarding (silly and anti-social) and having enough tinned stuff to keep you going for a couple of weeks (sensible).
What I've been doing for weeks.
Went out and bought £100 of frozen organic meat from the farm butcher today.
Tinned food, microwave rice, frozen jacket potatoes and chocolate biscuits here. Basically all stuff that I know I'll end up using anyway, just in slightly larger than usual quantities.
Oh, and bog roll. I saw all those weird reports about bog roll stockpiling in Australia, and considered the possibility that panicking idiots might at some point start taking home three family-sized packs of the stuff each, kind of like what they've been doing already for the surface wipes.
The whole surface wipe thing is very annoying BTW. My husband is messy and clumsy and uses them for cleaning up stuff like food spillages all the time. Kitchen roll is a poor substitute.
Dried fruit Long life juice Oat biscuits (go well with soup) Porridge Hand soap
Grated parmesan, flavoured oil, seeds and lemon juice might give some flavour to the cheap pasta.
Porridge. Easy to store. Just mix with water. Meal after meal.
Don`t go over the top with this bulk buying. I still have almost all of the condoms left from the bulk buy I made in the late 80s.
Has anyone suggested that you need to get out more?
Anyone heard from @eadric or is he self-isolating from PB in case corvid-19 is transmitted over the internet?
Perhaps he's going round the supermarkets of Essex in an attempt to find panic buying.
The panic buying over the border in Hertfordshire has already started. Brain dead idiots had completely cleared out the entire supply of floor and surface wipes in Tesco today. The pasta shelves also looked uncommonly empty - this apparently being a favourite amongst panic hoarders - but the tinned food aisle still seemed well-stocked so we're clearly not at the supply chain collapse stage.
Yet.
Tinned food is the intelligent person's choice of food hoarding - tasty, nutritious and long lasting.
Can you imagine living off cheap pasta for a fortnight ?
The saving made on the cheap pasta will be quickly offset by expensive and highly calorific shop-bought sauces (unless these people are planning to use it for cooking from scratch, which I strongly suspect that most of them aren't.)
Tinned food is a vastly underappreciated source of delicious and healthy meals. I made particular use of it when I was losing weight with Slimming World: if you make the right choices then there are plenty of options that are very low in Syn value, i.e. not loaded full of fat and sugar. Also, tinned peaches are of the gods.
I think I need to give tinned peaches another go. As a child I detested them - found them slimy - and never plucked up the courage to give them another go. Best peaches are picked straight from my own espalier peach tree!
Tinned peaches are certainly softer than fresh fruit; I've never found them slimy, although these things are, of course, a matter of personal taste.
I buy mine canned in juice rather than syrup, drain them thoroughly before serving and top them with fat-free Greek yoghurt, to which I add just a little sweetener (this being a method that I discovered when I was losing weight, because in that case the whole thing has a Syn value of zero and you can eat as much of it as you like.) But they also go very nicely with cream or custard.
The sweetener is calorie-free I guess? I`ve never heard of Syn value. There would still be a fair few calories in the yoghurt.
I think the stuff I buy is low rather than zero calorie, but then again the point of the regime I was on was merely to direct ones' food consumption towards choices that were of lower energy density rather than trying to really hammer down on calories as much as possible. Diets that rely on people living off hardly anything aren't sustainable and don't work.
Basically, pasta, potatoes, fresh fruit, vegetables, lean meat, fish, eggs and fat-free dairy products = eat as much as you like. All manner of fatty and sugary stuff = Syns (i.e. penalty points.) As well as sweets, biscuits and cakes, bread and pastry are also very high tariff. The plan also makes some allowances with respect to whether or not certain foods have filling power, but basically it's an easy way to control what you're eating without having to get a calculator out and tot up the calorific and nutritional content of everything, which isn't practical.
Sainsbury's yesterday seemed very short of Coke, of all things.
Well, if they've run out of disinfectant washes, it's the next best thing.
That was probably me - I drink 2 cans a day (have done most days all my adult life) and periodically stock up! For some reason people find this odd
I did notice that things like cheap pasta and long-life milk had disappeared off the shelves - suspect there's some discreet stockpiling going on. I'll confess to buying some cans and some frozen food - I think there's a distinction between massive hoarding (silly and anti-social) and having enough tinned stuff to keep you going for a couple of weeks (sensible).
What I've been doing for weeks.
Went out and bought £100 of frozen organic meat from the farm butcher today.
Tinned food, microwave rice, frozen jacket potatoes and chocolate biscuits here. Basically all stuff that I know I'll end up using anyway, just in slightly larger than usual quantities.
Oh, and bog roll. I saw all those weird reports about bog roll stockpiling in Australia, and considered the possibility that panicking idiots might at some point start taking home three family-sized packs of the stuff each, kind of like what they've been doing already for the surface wipes.
The whole surface wipe thing is very annoying BTW. My husband is messy and clumsy and uses them for cleaning up stuff like food spillages all the time. Kitchen roll is a poor substitute.
Dried fruit Long life juice Oat biscuits (go well with soup) Porridge Hand soap
Grated parmesan, flavoured oil, seeds and lemon juice might give some flavour to the cheap pasta.
Porridge. Easy to store. Just mix with water. Meal after meal.
Don`t go over the top with this bulk buying. I still have almost all of the condoms left from the bulk buy I made in the late 80s.
There's a martket for them on ebay if you're prepared to post to Australia, apparently:
Sainsbury's yesterday seemed very short of Coke, of all things.
Well, if they've run out of disinfectant washes, it's the next best thing.
That was probably me - I drink 2 cans a day (have done most days all my adult life) and periodically stock up! For some reason people find this odd
I did notice that things like cheap pasta and long-life milk had disappeared off the shelves - suspect there's some discreet stockpiling going on. I'll confess to buying some cans and some frozen food - I think there's a distinction between massive hoarding (silly and anti-social) and having enough tinned stuff to keep you going for a couple of weeks (sensible).
What I've been doing for weeks.
Went out and bought £100 of frozen organic meat from the farm butcher today.
Tinned food, microwave rice, frozen jacket potatoes and chocolate biscuits here. Basically all stuff that I know I'll end up using anyway, just in slightly larger than usual quantities.
Oh, and bog roll. I saw all those weird reports about bog roll stockpiling in Australia, and considered the possibility that panicking idiots might at some point start taking home three family-sized packs of the stuff each, kind of like what they've been doing already for the surface wipes.
The whole surface wipe thing is very annoying BTW. My husband is messy and clumsy and uses them for cleaning up stuff like food spillages all the time. Kitchen roll is a poor substitute.
Microwave rice?? Why not just buy rice - it's so simple to cook?
Sainsbury's yesterday seemed very short of Coke, of all things.
Well, if they've run out of disinfectant washes, it's the next best thing.
That was probably me - I drink 2 cans a day (have done most days all my adult life) and periodically stock up! For some reason people find this odd
I did notice that things like cheap pasta and long-life milk had disappeared off the shelves - suspect there's some discreet stockpiling going on. I'll confess to buying some cans and some frozen food - I think there's a distinction between massive hoarding (silly and anti-social) and having enough tinned stuff to keep you going for a couple of weeks (sensible).
What I've been doing for weeks.
Went out and bought £100 of frozen organic meat from the farm butcher today.
Tinned food, microwave rice, frozen jacket potatoes and chocolate biscuits here. Basically all stuff that I know I'll end up using anyway, just in slightly larger than usual quantities.
Oh, and bog roll. I saw all those weird reports about bog roll stockpiling in Australia, and considered the possibility that panicking idiots might at some point start taking home three family-sized packs of the stuff each, kind of like what they've been doing already for the surface wipes.
The whole surface wipe thing is very annoying BTW. My husband is messy and clumsy and uses them for cleaning up stuff like food spillages all the time. Kitchen roll is a poor substitute.
Dried fruit Long life juice Oat biscuits (go well with soup) Porridge Hand soap
Grated parmesan, flavoured oil, seeds and lemon juice might give some flavour to the cheap pasta.
Porridge. Easy to store. Just mix with water. Meal after meal.
Don`t go over the top with this bulk buying. I still have almost all of the condoms left from the bulk buy I made in the late 80s.
There's a martket for them on ebay if you're prepared to post to Australia, apparently:
I think your father was right, community spread is well under way. I wonder if they are related to the couple of were in hospital for unrelated issues and found to have it?
Yes I suggested 48 hours ago that I reckoned it was now spreading fast. Well, 'rampant' was the admittedly strong word. This all chimes with the Gov't's stated new tactic to try to divert the peak into the summer months.
Fruitcake rubbish as usual
Actually fruitcake keeps pretty well without refrigeration, and is packed with nutrients. Stockpile fruitcake,
'Coming under pressure'. Journalists love this phrase. What it usually means is that someone with an agenda has issued a press release or written a letter.
See also “Questions will be asked” but I’m not clever enough to work out what those questions might be]. A bit of smoke disguises the pathetic fire.
The Labour Party is institutionally racist. The Conservative Party is not.
Yes there may be a handful of disreputable individual Tories but the entire organisation is not riddled with hatred.
A victorious RLB will do nothing to resolve the scourge within Labour.
On topic Bernie is toast with or without Warren!
I’m not reaching a judgment either way on the Conservative Party. I’d don’t know all (or indeed really any) of the accusations In detail and how they relate to reality. There are, though, certain journalistic code words and phrases which suggest that a story has to be manufactured and does not flow easily and naturally.
Not of the Tory persuasion myself and there are undoubtedly some unpleasant individuals within.
I don't believe it is the tacit policy of the Tories to specifically pick on one faith group. I cannot say the same of Labour under Corbyn.
I don't recall any anti-Hindu, Sikh, Bhuddist, Taoist, Christian comments by Tory activists, but maybe I haven't been paying attention.
One issue is that none of those other religions have a foundational or dominant orthodoxy which integrates politics under religion as a matter of divine fiat.
Arguably the Medieval Roman Catholics developed that, but for this country Henry VIII ... er ... beheaded that one.
Sainsbury's yesterday seemed very short of Coke, of all things.
Well, if they've run out of disinfectant washes, it's the next best thing.
That was probably me - I drink 2 cans a day (have done most days all my adult life) and periodically stock up! For some reason people find this odd
I did notice that things like cheap pasta and long-life milk had disappeared off the shelves - suspect there's some discreet stockpiling going on. I'll confess to buying some cans and some frozen food - I think there's a distinction between massive hoarding (silly and anti-social) and having enough tinned stuff to keep you going for a couple of weeks (sensible).
What I've been doing for weeks.
Went out and bought £100 of frozen organic meat from the farm butcher today.
Tinned food, microwave rice, frozen jacket potatoes and chocolate biscuits here. Basically all stuff that I know I'll end up using anyway, just in slightly larger than usual quantities.
Oh, and bog roll. I saw all those weird reports about bog roll stockpiling in Australia, and considered the possibility that panicking idiots might at some point start taking home three family-sized packs of the stuff each, kind of like what they've been doing already for the surface wipes.
The whole surface wipe thing is very annoying BTW. My husband is messy and clumsy and uses them for cleaning up stuff like food spillages all the time. Kitchen roll is a poor substitute.
Dried fruit Long life juice Oat biscuits (go well with soup) Porridge Hand soap
Grated parmesan, flavoured oil, seeds and lemon juice might give some flavour to the cheap pasta.
Porridge. Easy to store. Just mix with water. Meal after meal.
Don`t go over the top with this bulk buying. I still have almost all of the condoms left from the bulk buy I made in the late 80s.
There's a martket for them on ebay if you're prepared to post to Australia, apparently:
Anyone heard from @eadric or is he self-isolating from PB in case corvid-19 is transmitted over the internet?
Perhaps he's going round the supermarkets of Essex in an attempt to find panic buying.
The panic buying over the border in Hertfordshire has already started. Brain dead idiots had completely cleared out the entire supply of floor and surface wipes in Tesco today. The pasta shelves also looked uncommonly empty - this apparently being a favourite amongst panic hoarders - but the tinned food aisle still seemed well-stocked so we're clearly not at the supply chain collapse stage.
Yet.
Tinned food is the intelligent person's choice of food hoarding - tasty, nutritious and long lasting.
Can you imagine living off cheap pasta for a fortnight ?
The saving made on the cheap pasta will be quickly offset by expensive and highly calorific shop-bought sauces (unless these people are planning to use it for cooking from scratch, which I strongly suspect that most of them aren't.)
Tinned food is a vastly underappreciated source of delicious and healthy meals. I made particular use of it when I was losing weight with Slimming World: if you make the right choices then there are plenty of options that are very low in Syn value, i.e. not loaded full of fat and sugar. Also, tinned peaches are of the gods.
I think I need to give tinned peaches another go. As a child I detested them - found them slimy - and never plucked up the courage to give them another go. Best peaches are picked straight from my own espalier peach tree!
Tinned peaches are certainly softer than fresh fruit; I've never found them slimy, although these things are, of course, a matter of personal taste.
I buy mine canned in juice rather than syrup, drain them thoroughly before serving and top them with fat-free Greek yoghurt, to which I add just a little sweetener (this being a method that I discovered when I was losing weight, because in that case the whole thing has a Syn value of zero and you can eat as much of it as you like.) But they also go very nicely with cream or custard.
The sweetener is calorie-free I guess? I`ve never heard of Syn value. There would still be a fair few calories in the yoghurt.
I think the stuff I buy is low rather than zero calorie, but then again the point of the regime I was on was merely to direct ones' food consumption towards choices that were of lower energy density rather than trying to really hammer down on calories as much as possible. Diets that rely on people living off hardly anything aren't sustainable and don't work.
Basically, pasta, potatoes, fresh fruit, vegetables, lean meat, fish, eggs and fat-free dairy products = eat as much as you like. All manner of fatty and sugary stuff = Syns (i.e. penalty points.) As well as sweets, biscuits and cakes, bread and pastry are also very high tariff. The plan also makes some allowances with respect to whether or not certain foods have filling power, but basically it's an easy way to control what you're eating without having to get a calculator out and tot up the calorific and nutritional content of everything, which isn't practical.
Wow unlimited pasta or potatoes goes quite against many diets nowadays.
I'm currently [temporarily] trying to avoid pasta or potatoes both to lose weight and to think of alternatives that I can use instead that I might keep in the future when I start eating the starchy carbs again.
Sainsbury's yesterday seemed very short of Coke, of all things.
Well, if they've run out of disinfectant washes, it's the next best thing.
That was probably me - I drink 2 cans a day (have done most days all my adult life) and periodically stock up! For some reason people find this odd
I did notice that things like cheap pasta and long-life milk had disappeared off the shelves - suspect there's some discreet stockpiling going on. I'll confess to buying some cans and some frozen food - I think there's a distinction between massive hoarding (silly and anti-social) and having enough tinned stuff to keep you going for a couple of weeks (sensible).
What I've been doing for weeks.
Went out and bought £100 of frozen organic meat from the farm butcher today.
Tinned food, microwave rice, frozen jacket potatoes and chocolate biscuits here. Basically all stuff that I know I'll end up using anyway, just in slightly larger than usual quantities.
Oh, and bog roll. I saw all those weird reports about bog roll stockpiling in Australia, and considered the possibility that panicking idiots might at some point start taking home three family-sized packs of the stuff each, kind of like what they've been doing already for the surface wipes.
The whole surface wipe thing is very annoying BTW. My husband is messy and clumsy and uses them for cleaning up stuff like food spillages all the time. Kitchen roll is a poor substitute.
Microwave rice?? Why not just buy rice - it's so simple to cook?
Because sometimes when you get home from work (and this goes double if there's been a trip to the gym as well) then you want something that you can nuke rather than titting around for half-an-hour with a pan of water. Or I do, anyway...
But I do also have a kilo bag of the stuff in the pantry.
Sainsbury's yesterday seemed very short of Coke, of all things.
Well, if they've run out of disinfectant washes, it's the next best thing.
That was probably me - I drink 2 cans a day (have done most days all my adult life) and periodically stock up! For some reason people find this odd
I did notice that things like cheap pasta and long-life milk had disappeared off the shelves - suspect there's some discreet stockpiling going on. I'll confess to buying some cans and some frozen food - I think there's a distinction between massive hoarding (silly and anti-social) and having enough tinned stuff to keep you going for a couple of weeks (sensible).
What I've been doing for weeks.
Went out and bought £100 of frozen organic meat from the farm butcher today.
Tinned food, microwave rice, frozen jacket potatoes and chocolate biscuits here. Basically all stuff that I know I'll end up using anyway, just in slightly larger than usual quantities.
Oh, and bog roll. I saw all those weird reports about bog roll stockpiling in Australia, and considered the possibility that panicking idiots might at some point start taking home three family-sized packs of the stuff each, kind of like what they've been doing already for the surface wipes.
The whole surface wipe thing is very annoying BTW. My husband is messy and clumsy and uses them for cleaning up stuff like food spillages all the time. Kitchen roll is a poor substitute.
Dried fruit Long life juice Oat biscuits (go well with soup) Porridge Hand soap
Grated parmesan, flavoured oil, seeds and lemon juice might give some flavour to the cheap pasta.
Porridge. Easy to store. Just mix with water. Meal after meal.
Don`t go over the top with this bulk buying. I still have almost all of the condoms left from the bulk buy I made in the late 80s.
Sainsbury's yesterday seemed very short of Coke, of all things.
Well, if they've run out of disinfectant washes, it's the next best thing.
That was probably me - I drink 2 cans a day (have done most days all my adult life) and periodically stock up! For some reason people find this odd
I did notice that things like cheap pasta and long-life milk had disappeared off the shelves - suspect there's some discreet stockpiling going on. I'll confess to buying some cans and some frozen food - I think there's a distinction between massive hoarding (silly and anti-social) and having enough tinned stuff to keep you going for a couple of weeks (sensible).
What I've been doing for weeks.
Went out and bought £100 of frozen organic meat from the farm butcher today.
Tinned food, microwave rice, frozen jacket potatoes and chocolate biscuits here. Basically all stuff that I know I'll end up using anyway, just in slightly larger than usual quantities.
Oh, and bog roll. I saw all those weird reports about bog roll stockpiling in Australia, and considered the possibility that panicking idiots might at some point start taking home three family-sized packs of the stuff each, kind of like what they've been doing already for the surface wipes.
The whole surface wipe thing is very annoying BTW. My husband is messy and clumsy and uses them for cleaning up stuff like food spillages all the time. Kitchen roll is a poor substitute.
Microwave rice?? Why not just buy rice - it's so simple to cook?
Because sometimes when you get home from work (and this goes double if there's been a trip to the gym as well) then you want something that you can nuke rather than titting around for half-an-hour with a pan of water. Or I do, anyway...
But I do also have a kilo bag of the stuff in the pantry.
Ok (although 8-10 mins for boiling basmati) but...
In self-isolation you won't be coming home from the gym and you'll have all the time in the world. Thinking about it, stockpile a few recipe books - it'll be something to keep you occupied.
I've stockpiled medications, rice, various protein sources, various tinned foods, surgical spirit, aloe vera gel, soap, and frozen ham and pineapple pizza.
What about wine, beer, coffee and crisps...preferably Pringles....??
As someone who voted remain but now supports leave, and am in the highest risk group, I believe coronavirus is serious but people need to take sensible precautions and follow advice.
In my case my wife and I may defer our Canada trip from May to September but we are leaving that decision to the last minute
That's going to be a tough call Big_G.
We have a trip to NY on QM2 booked for early May. We definitely plan to go unless Cunard cancel or the FO advise against but I am slightly worried we may end up with a 7 day crossing followed by two weeks in quarantine in NY harbour.
Edit: Cunard have written to us and told us to take two weeks spare meds just in case lol!
By May you’ll probably have more problems trying to return anywhere from the US.
Lol!
I am thinking a happy outcome for us might be 7 nights of full board luxury across the Atlantic, a couple of days of being refused entry to the US en mass, then 7 days luxury cruising back to Southampton followed by a full refund from Cunard.
Somehow I don't think it's going to work out that way though.
Cunard are already being very careful, cancelling stops on their cruises and screening everyone before boarding. At the least you can expect things to take longer than usual.
I wish you a pleasant crossing. Don’t miss the planetarium, the library, and the commodore club. If you end up in the lower dining room give my regards to Frederic.
Sibelius 1 is better than Sibelius 3 IMO.
But does it count as underrated ?
For a genuinely underrated, indeed almost unknown, piece then try Alnaes 1:
Not for me, just cleaning and sanitation supplies. I expect to be able to drop by on the way home from work for food, but will also work my way through the cupboards and shed a bit of waistline too.
Not for me, just cleaning and sanitation supplies. I expect to be able to drop by on the way home from work for food, but will also work my way through the cupboards and shed a bit of waistline too.
Indeed. Tbf Mrs. P and I did discuss it but we reckon we could survive for about a month without shopping with what we have in the house anyway. After that we'd be getting a bit short of wine
Meals would be getting increasingly innovative by the end of the month though.
Anyone heard from @eadric or is he self-isolating from PB in case corvid-19 is transmitted over the internet?
Perhaps he's going round the supermarkets of Essex in an attempt to find panic buying.
The panic buying over the border in Hertfordshire has already started. Brain dead idiots had completely cleared out the entire supply of floor and surface wipes in Tesco today. The pasta shelves also looked uncommonly empty - this apparently being a favourite amongst panic hoarders - but the tinned food aisle still seemed well-stocked so we're clearly not at the supply chain collapse stage.
Yet.
Tinned food is the intelligent person's choice of food hoarding - tasty, nutritious and long lasting.
Can you imagine living off cheap pasta for a fortnight ?
The saving made on the cheap pasta will be quickly offset by expensive and highly calorific shop-bought sauces (unless these people are planning to use it for cooking from scratch, which I strongly suspect that most of them aren't.)
Tinned food is a vastly underappreciated source of delicious and healthy meals. I made particular use of it when I was losing weight with Slimming World: if you make the right choices then there are plenty of options that are very low in Syn value, i.e. not loaded full of fat and sugar. Also, tinned peaches are of the gods.
I think I need to give tinned peaches another go. As a child I detested them - found them slimy - and never plucked up the courage to give them another go. Best peaches are picked straight from my own espalier peach tree!
Tinned peaches are certainly softer than fresh fruit; I've never found them slimy, although these things are, of course, a matter of personal taste.
I buy mine canned in juice rather than syrup, drain them thoroughly before serving and top them with fat-free Greek yoghurt, to which I add just a little sweetener (this being a method that I discovered when I was losing weight, because in that case the whole thing has a Syn value of zero and you can eat as much of it as you like.) But they also go very nicely with cream or custard.
The sweetener is calorie-free I guess? I`ve never heard of Syn value. There would still be a fair few calories in the yoghurt.
I think the stuff I buy is low rather than zero calorie, but then again the point of the regime I was on was merely to direct ones' food consumption towards choices that were of lower energy density rather than trying to really hammer down on calories as much as possible. Diets that rely on people living off hardly anything aren't sustainable and don't work.
Basically, pasta, potatoes, fresh fruit, vegetables, lean meat, fish, eggs and fat-free dairy products = eat as much as you like. All manner of fatty and sugary stuff = Syns (i.e. penalty points.) As well as sweets, biscuits and cakes, bread and pastry are also very high tariff. The plan also makes some allowances with respect to whether or not certain foods have filling power, but basically it's an easy way to control what you're eating without having to get a calculator out and tot up the calorific and nutritional content of everything, which isn't practical.
Wow unlimited pasta or potatoes goes quite against many diets nowadays.
I'm currently [temporarily] trying to avoid pasta or potatoes both to lose weight and to think of alternatives that I can use instead that I might keep in the future when I start eating the starchy carbs again.
Well, if you're looking to reduce the energy content of your diet without ending up living off Ryvita and lettuce then the easiest thing to target is high fat and high sugar snacks and desserts, and alcohol. Getting by without starch staples ain't so smart and easy.
Changes in eating habits are most likely to be sustainable if they involve maintaining a varied diet, whilst cutting down on the things that are at once the most calorific and the most easily done without. The main problem with trying to eat less in the way of stuff like crisps, pastry and chocolate crap and drink less booze is getting out of bad habits: once the habits are broken then it's surprisingly easy to avoid a relapse.
Anyone heard from @eadric or is he self-isolating from PB in case corvid-19 is transmitted over the internet?
Perhaps he's going round the supermarkets of Essex in an attempt to find panic buying.
The panic buying over the border in Hertfordshire has already started. Brain dead idiots had completely cleared out the entire supply of floor and surface wipes in Tesco today. The pasta shelves also looked uncommonly empty - this apparently being a favourite amongst panic hoarders - but the tinned food aisle still seemed well-stocked so we're clearly not at the supply chain collapse stage.
Yet.
Tinned food is the intelligent person's choice of food hoarding - tasty, nutritious and long lasting.
Can you imagine living off cheap pasta for a fortnight ?
The saving made on the cheap pasta will be quickly offset by expensive and highly calorific shop-bought sauces (unless these people are planning to use it for cooking from scratch, which I strongly suspect that most of them aren't.)
Tinned food is a vastly underappreciated source of delicious and healthy meals. I made particular use of it when I was losing weight with Slimming World: if you make the right choices then there are plenty of options that are very low in Syn value, i.e. not loaded full of fat and sugar. Also, tinned peaches are of the gods.
I think I need to give tinned peaches another go. As a child I detested them - found them slimy - and never plucked up the courage to give them another go. Best peaches are picked straight from my own espalier peach tree!
Tinned peaches are certainly softer than fresh fruit; I've never found them slimy, although these things are, of course, a matter of personal taste.
I buy mine canned in juice rather than syrup, drain them thoroughly before serving and top them with fat-free Greek yoghurt, to which I add just a little sweetener (this being a method that I discovered when I was losing weight, because in that case the whole thing has a Syn value of zero and you can eat as much of it as you like.) But they also go very nicely with cream or custard.
The sweetener is calorie-free I guess? I`ve never heard of Syn value. There would still be a fair few calories in the yoghurt.
I think the stuff I buy is low rather than zero calorie, but then again the point of the regime I was on was merely to direct ones' food consumption towards choices that were of lower energy density rather than trying to really hammer down on calories as much as possible. Diets that rely on people living off hardly anything aren't sustainable and don't work.
Basically, pasta, potatoes, fresh fruit, vegetables, lean meat, fish, eggs and fat-free dairy products = eat as much as you like. All manner of fatty and sugary stuff = Syns (i.e. penalty points.) As well as sweets, biscuits and cakes, bread and pastry are also very high tariff. The plan also makes some allowances with respect to whether or not certain foods have filling power, but basically it's an easy way to control what you're eating without having to get a calculator out and tot up the calorific and nutritional content of everything, which isn't practical.
Wow unlimited pasta or potatoes goes quite against many diets nowadays.
I'm currently [temporarily] trying to avoid pasta or potatoes both to lose weight and to think of alternatives that I can use instead that I might keep in the future when I start eating the starchy carbs again.
Sweet potatoes are OK. But there is probably a weight advantage in reducing the carbs somewhat.
So get used to interesting fruit and greens, and try some of the vegan substitutes maybe.
Not for me, just cleaning and sanitation supplies. I expect to be able to drop by on the way home from work for food, but will also work my way through the cupboards and shed a bit of waistline too.
I'm hoarding the special buy 16oz rump steaks from Aldi last week, which are beautiful. Had to portion them pronto and into the freezer, as otherwise I would have had a very high protein week.
Not for me, just cleaning and sanitation supplies. I expect to be able to drop by on the way home from work for food, but will also work my way through the cupboards and shed a bit of waistline too.
I'm hoarding the special buy 16oz rump steaks from Aldi last week, which are beautiful. Had to portion them pronto and into the freezer, as otherwise I would have had a very high protein week.
The problem with those steaks is that those sentient mammals probably lived and died in a brutal way...but they are cheap, so good luck to you comrade...chomp ahead
Anyone heard from @eadric or is he self-isolating from PB in case corvid-19 is transmitted over the internet?
Perhaps he's going round the supermarkets of Essex in an attempt to find panic buying.
The panic buying over the border in Hertfordshire has already started. Brain dead idiots had completely cleared out the entire supply of floor and surface wipes in Tesco today. The pasta shelves also looked uncommonly empty - this apparently being a favourite amongst panic hoarders - but the tinned food aisle still seemed well-stocked so we're clearly not at the supply chain collapse stage.
Yet.
Tinned food is the intelligent person's choice of food hoarding - tasty, nutritious and long lasting.
Can you imagine living off cheap pasta for a fortnight ?
The saving made on the cheap pasta will be quickly offset by expensive and highly calorific shop-bought sauces (unless these people are planning to use it for cooking from scratch, which I strongly suspect that most of them aren't.)
Tinned food is a vastly underappreciated source of delicious and healthy meals. I made particular use of it when I was losing weight with Slimming World: if you make the right choices then there are plenty of options that are very low in Syn value, i.e. not loaded full of fat and sugar. Also, tinned peaches are of the gods.
I think I need to give tinned peaches another go. As a child I detested them - found them slimy - and never plucked up the courage to give them another go. Best peaches are picked straight from my own espalier peach tree!
Tinned peaches are certainly softer than fresh fruit; I've never found them slimy, although these things are, of course, a matter of personal taste.
I buy mine canned in juice rather than syrup, drain them thoroughly before serving and top them with fat-free Greek yoghurt, to which I add just a little sweetener (this being a method that I discovered when I was losing weight, because in that case the whole thing has a Syn value of zero and you can eat as much of it as you like.) But they also go very nicely with cream or custard.
The sweetener is calorie-free I guess? I`ve never heard of Syn value. There would still be a fair few calories in the yoghurt.
I think the stuff I buy is low rather than zero calorie, but then again the point of the regime I was on was merely to direct ones' food consumption towards choices that were of lower energy density rather than trying to really hammer down on calories as much as possible. Diets that rely on people living off hardly anything aren't sustainable and don't work.
Basically, pasta, potatoes, fresh fruit, vegetables, lean meat, fish, eggs and fat-free dairy products = eat as much as you like. All manner of fatty and sugary stuff = Syns (i.e. penalty points.) As well as sweets, biscuits and cakes, bread and pastry are also very high tariff. The plan also makes some allowances with respect to whether or not certain foods have filling power, but basically it's an easy way to control what you're eating without having to get a calculator out and tot up the calorific and nutritional content of everything, which isn't practical.
Wow unlimited pasta or potatoes goes quite against many diets nowadays.
I'm currently [temporarily] trying to avoid pasta or potatoes both to lose weight and to think of alternatives that I can use instead that I might keep in the future when I start eating the starchy carbs again.
Well, if you're looking to reduce the energy content of your diet without ending up living off Ryvita and lettuce then the easiest thing to target is high fat and high sugar snacks and desserts, and alcohol. Getting by without starch staples ain't so smart and easy.
Changes in eating habits are most likely to be sustainable if they involve maintaining a varied diet, whilst cutting down on the things that are at once the most calorific and the most easily done without. The main problem with trying to eat less in the way of stuff like crisps, pastry and chocolate crap and drink less booze is getting out of bad habits: once the habits are broken then it's surprisingly easy to avoid a relapse.
The thing that worked best for us was cutting out lunch. Switch from carb-based breakfasts to protein-based and you soon don't get hungry in the day.
Lost 4 stone that way and kept it off for 3 years now. It's a permanent change in eating habits though.
Not for me, just cleaning and sanitation supplies. I expect to be able to drop by on the way home from work for food, but will also work my way through the cupboards and shed a bit of waistline too.
I'm hoarding the special buy 16oz rump steaks from Aldi last week, which are beautiful. Had to portion them pronto and into the freezer, as otherwise I would have had a very high protein week.
Are Aldi/ Lidl steaks any good ? I’m too snobby to go in but I might for cheap steak.
The best way to not get fat is not be greedy...and exercise....then you can do pretty much what you want....and drink alcohol and not to think about it
That said, meat eating is pretty disgusting...but that is another story.....
Sainsbury's yesterday seemed very short of Coke, of all things.
Well, if they've run out of disinfectant washes, it's the next best thing.
That was probably me - I drink 2 cans a day (have done most days all my adult life) and periodically stock up! For some reason people find this odd
I did notice that things like cheap pasta and long-life milk had disappeared off the shelves - suspect there's some discreet stockpiling going on. I'll confess to buying some cans and some frozen food - I think there's a distinction between massive hoarding (silly and anti-social) and having enough tinned stuff to keep you going for a couple of weeks (sensible).
What I've been doing for weeks.
Went out and bought £100 of frozen organic meat from the farm butcher today.
Tinned food, microwave rice, frozen jacket potatoes and chocolate biscuits here. Basically all stuff that I know I'll end up using anyway, just in slightly larger than usual quantities.
Oh, and bog roll. I saw all those weird reports about bog roll stockpiling in Australia, and considered the possibility that panicking idiots might at some point start taking home three family-sized packs of the stuff each, kind of like what they've been doing already for the surface wipes.
The whole surface wipe thing is very annoying BTW. My husband is messy and clumsy and uses them for cleaning up stuff like food spillages all the time. Kitchen roll is a poor substitute.
Microwave rice?? Why not just buy rice - it's so simple to cook?
Because sometimes when you get home from work (and this goes double if there's been a trip to the gym as well) then you want something that you can nuke rather than titting around for half-an-hour with a pan of water. Or I do, anyway...
But I do also have a kilo bag of the stuff in the pantry.
Ok (although 8-10 mins for boiling basmati) but...
In self-isolation you won't be coming home from the gym and you'll have all the time in the world. Thinking about it, stockpile a few recipe books - it'll be something to keep you occupied.
For reasons I previously described, most people who have jobs to hold down will not be spending fourteen days or more in self-imposed quarantine. Even if our financial positions allow us to take all that time off, the behaviour of our employers is liable to encourage/compel mass presenteeism.
That aside, I'm a terrible book hoarder. I've so many unread volumes knocking about this flat that, if I were forced to stay in, they'd keep me occupied for the rest of the year.
I've stockpiled medications, rice, various protein sources, various tinned foods, surgical spirit, aloe vera gel, soap, and frozen ham and pineapple pizza.
What about wine, beer, coffee and crisps...preferably Pringles....??
Not for me, just cleaning and sanitation supplies. I expect to be able to drop by on the way home from work for food, but will also work my way through the cupboards and shed a bit of waistline too.
I'm hoarding the special buy 16oz rump steaks from Aldi last week, which are beautiful. Had to portion them pronto and into the freezer, as otherwise I would have had a very high protein week.
Are Aldi/ Lidl steaks any good ? I’m too snobby to go in but I might for cheap steak.
Do they do tomahawks ?
If you do not mind cruelly consigning animals to a horrible and disease ridden life and death...why not go cheaper??
Not for me, just cleaning and sanitation supplies. I expect to be able to drop by on the way home from work for food, but will also work my way through the cupboards and shed a bit of waistline too.
I'm hoarding the special buy 16oz rump steaks from Aldi last week, which are beautiful. Had to portion them pronto and into the freezer, as otherwise I would have had a very high protein week.
I agree on the bread maker!
A tee total and pescatorian Lent for me, in a get healthy for the pandemic diet.
Sainsbury's yesterday seemed very short of Coke, of all things.
Well, if they've run out of disinfectant washes, it's the next best thing.
That was probably me - I drink 2 cans a day (have done most days all my adult life) and periodically stock up! For some reason people find this odd
I did notice that things like cheap pasta and long-life milk had disappeared off the shelves - suspect there's some discreet stockpiling going on. I'll confess to buying some cans and some frozen food - I think there's a distinction between massive hoarding (silly and anti-social) and having enough tinned stuff to keep you going for a couple of weeks (sensible).
What I've been doing for weeks.
Went out and bought £100 of frozen organic meat from the farm butcher today.
Tinned food, microwave rice, frozen jacket potatoes and chocolate biscuits here. Basically all stuff that I know I'll end up using anyway, just in slightly larger than usual quantities.
Oh, and bog roll. I saw all those weird reports about bog roll stockpiling in Australia, and considered the possibility that panicking idiots might at some point start taking home three family-sized packs of the stuff each, kind of like what they've been doing already for the surface wipes.
The whole surface wipe thing is very annoying BTW. My husband is messy and clumsy and uses them for cleaning up stuff like food spillages all the time. Kitchen roll is a poor substitute.
Microwave rice?? Why not just buy rice - it's so simple to cook?
Because sometimes when you get home from work (and this goes double if there's been a trip to the gym as well) then you want something that you can nuke rather than titting around for half-an-hour with a pan of water. Or I do, anyway...
But I do also have a kilo bag of the stuff in the pantry.
Ok (although 8-10 mins for boiling basmati) but...
In self-isolation you won't be coming home from the gym and you'll have all the time in the world. Thinking about it, stockpile a few recipe books - it'll be something to keep you occupied.
For reasons I previously described, most people who have jobs to hold down will not be spending fourteen days or more in self-imposed quarantine. Even if our financial positions allow us to take all that time off, the behaviour of our employers is liable to encourage/compel mass presenteeism.
That aside, I'm a terrible book hoarder. I've so many unread volumes knocking about this flat that, if I were forced to stay in, they'd keep me occupied for the rest of the year.
Comments
Best just stick to advising on insurance policy then and avoid giving out very bad advice.
If anyone thinks I am being overly harsh I suggest you have a listen. It hasn't aged well in about 10 days. It will look unbelievable in a few weeks.
There won't be enough space in the morgues to cope.
Mainwaring: 'Oh come come. That's not like an old soldier. Tommy Atkins was always one for a laugh even when he was up to his chin in mud.'
Cpl Jones: 'Ah you're right there, Sir. We did a lot of laughing in the mud in the last War. We was doing it nearly all the time. Except when we got shot.'
The one foundation for this though is that it's humour out of adversity. A coping strategy.
What it is not doing is denying altogether the existence of the crisis.
With the damage that smoking does to the lungs, the medical consensus seems to be that smokers are at a higher risk of dying if they get the disease.
Now obviously recent ex-smokers have already knackered their lungs, but they do at least give the lungs a bit of breathing space to regenerate (which seems to happen pretty fast, with improvements even on a timescale of months, but I don't know if there's any medical consensus that a couple of months of recovery would substantially reduce your risk of death from a COVID-19 infection).
But if one took advantage of the desperate lengths people are apparently going to go to in order to protect themselves from COVID-19, this might be a good time to make a dent in that stubborn remainder of people who are still smoking. Giving up smoking is seldom going to be bad advice. Might even save enough lives from preventing future lung cancer cases to offset some of the additional deaths from this epidemic...
*(Probably because they want to keep their message nice and simple, and don't want non-smokers to be complacent, but "looking after yourself" to give yourself the best chance of surviving infection would certainly include giving up smoking.)
Yes there may be a handful of disreputable individual Tories but the entire organisation is not riddled with hatred.
A victorious RLB will do nothing to resolve the scourge within Labour.
On topic Bernie is toast with or without Warren!
I can't say I'm impressed by that.
But does it count as underrated ?
For a genuinely underrated, indeed almost unknown, piece then try Alnaes 1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt1BbDQqsjk
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-green-book-appraisal-and-evaluation-in-central-governent
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/685903/The_Green_Book.pdf
Valuing risks to life and health
6.36 Changes in risks to life or health as a result of government interventions should be valued as part of appraisal and will usually require non-market valuation techniques. The choice of technique will depend on the nature of the specific intervention being appraised.
6.37 The Value of a Prevented Fatality (VPF) measures the social value of changes in risk to life. It is used to value small changes in fatality risks, where levels of human safety vary between options. This is not the value of a life, it is the value of a small change in the risk or probability of losing a statistical life. Not to value this in appraisal would effectively value human safety at zero.
6.38 In cases where alternative levels of fatality risk are involved in option design, VPF allows this to be taken into account. The value concerned is known as the value of the risk of “a statistically prevented fatality.” It has been widely used for many years, particularly in transport. The current value and how it may be applied is discussed in Annex 2.
6.39 Valuation can also involve estimating the impact of risks to the length of life, measured using Statistical Life Years (SLYs), and risks to health related quality of life (QoL) measured using QualityAdjusted Life Years (QALYs). In practice, particularly in the health sector, QoL can be thought of as different dimensions of health (e.g. the capacities for mobility, self-care, usual activities, pain or
discomfort and anxiety or depression).17 Observations used will be based on self-reported health and provide equal weight to whatever full health means to each respondent.
Went out and bought £100 of frozen organic meat from the farm butcher today.
Don't they know they're supposed to call this all a vicious tabloid conspiracy trying to bring down the dear leader and get all indignant about it?
6.40 The value of a SLY is derived from the social value of a small change in the probability (the risk) of losing or gaining a year of life expectancy. This value can be of use when appraising options that involve different changes to life expectancy. These risks may involve regulation or provision of goods and services that affect or directly relate to human life and health.
6.41 The gain or loss of a QALY can represent the social value of an improvement in life expectancy and QoL in a way that is comparable to the gain or loss of a SLY. The QALY is two dimensional, combining both longevity and level of health in a single measure. This is useful when appraising options that result in different effects on both longevity and QoL. The current values of a SLY and
a QALY, how they can be applied, and background information is contained in Annex 2.
6.42 On grounds of equity in appraisal, the VPF, QALY and SLY values are based on average values from representative samples of the population. For the avoidance of doubt VPF, QALYs and SLYs are used when analysing and planning the provision of assets, goods and services at a population or sub-population level. They are not designed for contexts such as situations of emergency or rescue.
------------------
Annex 2 contains the meat of the valuation and is well worth a read if you're an economic evaluation geek.
Word of caution - the way health economists and NICE value £ per QALY is actually slightly divergent from the Green Book.
Yet.
As an atheist along the lines of Dawkins I'm quite happy to be anti-religion whether that be anti-Christianity or anti-Islam. But I'm not happy for anyone to discriminate based upon religion.
Does that make me Islamophobic? That's pathetically meaningless if so.
I don't believe it is the tacit policy of the Tories to specifically pick on one faith group. I cannot say the same of Labour under Corbyn.
Oh, and bog roll. I saw all those weird reports about bog roll stockpiling in Australia, and considered the possibility that panicking idiots might at some point start taking home three family-sized packs of the stuff each, kind of like what they've been doing already for the surface wipes.
The whole surface wipe thing is very annoying BTW. My husband is messy and clumsy and uses them for cleaning up stuff like food spillages all the time. Kitchen roll is a poor substitute.
Can you imagine living off cheap pasta for a fortnight ?
Tinned food is a vastly underappreciated source of delicious and healthy meals. I made particular use of it when I was losing weight with Slimming World: if you make the right choices then there are plenty of options that are very low in Syn value, i.e. not loaded full of fat and sugar. Also, tinned peaches are of the gods.
Long life juice
Oat biscuits (go well with soup)
Porridge
Hand soap
Grated parmesan, flavoured oil, seeds and lemon juice might give some flavour to the cheap pasta.
For comparison, the Green Book values a Statistical Life Year (a different concept and not usually used in medical evaluations) at £60k.
Is that what a cannibal puts on his pizza?
I buy mine canned in juice rather than syrup, drain them thoroughly before serving and top them with fat-free Greek yoghurt, to which I add just a little sweetener (this being a method that I discovered when I was losing weight, because in that case the whole thing has a Syn value of zero and you can eat as much of it as you like.) But they also go very nicely with cream or custard.
monetary valuations of QALYs are available for the UK. The current monetary WTP value for a QALY is £60,000. Further information on the basis for the value of a QALY can be obtained by contacting the Department of Health and Social Care
(WTP = Willingness To Pay, yet another way of valuing a QALY)
So totally at variance with what NICE uses, completely different to the marginal cost approach, and yet equivalent to the (quite different concept) of a Statistical Life Year!
281 new cases for new total of 543 - more than doubled in a day
But I do have a couple of bottles of cordial.
A small glass at breakfast is different to a big glass at dinner.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/11095937/condoms-coronavirus-shelves-empty-panic-buying/
Not yet, obviously...
Basically, pasta, potatoes, fresh fruit, vegetables, lean meat, fish, eggs and fat-free dairy products = eat as much as you like. All manner of fatty and sugary stuff = Syns (i.e. penalty points.) As well as sweets, biscuits and cakes, bread and pastry are also very high tariff. The plan also makes some allowances with respect to whether or not certain foods have filling power, but basically it's an easy way to control what you're eating without having to get a calculator out and tot up the calorific and nutritional content of everything, which isn't practical.
Stockpile fruitcake,
Arguably the Medieval Roman Catholics developed that, but for this country Henry VIII ... er ... beheaded that one.
I'm currently [temporarily] trying to avoid pasta or potatoes both to lose weight and to think of alternatives that I can use instead that I might keep in the future when I start eating the starchy carbs again.
But I do also have a kilo bag of the stuff in the pantry.
In self-isolation you won't be coming home from the gym and you'll have all the time in the world. Thinking about it, stockpile a few recipe books - it'll be something to keep you occupied.
Goodbye to the status quo, eh?
Meals would be getting increasingly innovative by the end of the month though.
Changes in eating habits are most likely to be sustainable if they involve maintaining a varied diet, whilst cutting down on the things that are at once the most calorific and the most easily done without. The main problem with trying to eat less in the way of stuff like crisps, pastry and chocolate crap and drink less booze is getting out of bad habits: once the habits are broken then it's surprisingly easy to avoid a relapse.
So get used to interesting fruit and greens, and try some of the vegan substitutes maybe.
Don't get a bread machine - they are perilous.
Lost 4 stone that way and kept it off for 3 years now. It's a permanent change in eating habits though.
Do they do tomahawks ?
That said, meat eating is pretty disgusting...but that is another story.....
That aside, I'm a terrible book hoarder. I've so many unread volumes knocking about this flat that, if I were forced to stay in, they'd keep me occupied for the rest of the year.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/05/really-stressful-italians-struggle-to-cope-with-education-closures
A tee total and pescatorian Lent for me, in a get healthy for the pandemic diet.
Doing wonders for my blood pressure, alarmingly.