Toby Perkins @tobyperkinsmp · 6m Meanwhile in Derbyshire we have capacity for 600 tests and are testing 100 a day. Maybe we need to extend the eligibility.
Contemplating a new future. What are going to be the really big changes? Travel and tourism is surely going to be one of them. As a next exporter of tourists, that could be of benefit to the UK. We should also be able to create jobs in the health and care sectors, while there will need to be domestic manufacturing of PPE, so that will be good, too. On top of that, our digital economy could be a significant beneficiary. Where else can we win?
New services in public hygiene in the course of our normal work, shopping and social activities. Britain, for all the whining and self-bashing on this site, has an excellent reputation in this field.
PS what I mean is consulting and certification that work practices and facilities are hygienic with regards to infectious diseases, as are transport, hotel rooms, and so on.
People looking after family members instead of sending them to die in care homes.
Try holding down a full-time job whilst caring for an incontinent 90 year old with dementia and then see how you get onl. If people with family in care homes are as heartless as you seem to believe wouldn't they desperately be clinging on to their inheritance instead of forking out nearly £5,000 a month to the care home? You really have no idea
Some Calafornian hairdresser was on CNN on Thursday saying he was reopening yesterday despite the fact the Authorities would fine him $1000 dollars a day.
We've reached the Freedom Fries stage. Good to have the marker.
I just want China to cede back control of Hong Kong, for perpetuity.
Why? We had it in perpetuity before. Our Foreign Office would just find a way to cede it back.
We didn't, we had it on a 99 year leasehold, I want it back as a freehold.
To be exact, we had Hong Kong Island and Kowloon Peninsula in perpetuity, and the mainland part of it on a 99 year leasehold.
Yes. We should have held the Chinese to their word.
Personally, though, I think it's probably gone for good. But we can have Hong Kongers without Hong Kong. We should give Hong Kong ID card holders UK citizenship if they want it, certainly if China breaks the One Country Two Systems formula. We should have done so in 1997.
China's word on Hong Kong was that it was an integral part of China extracted by force. I'm not sure holding them to their word would have delivered a different result.
The problem was that without the mainland Kowloon and the Island would not be viable. The power and water supplies were too integrated.
Thatcher, in 1982 and flushed with success from the Falklands War, proposed to Deng that this meant the entire colony should stay with Britain.
Deng replies if that was her attitude he would simply reoccupy it immediately using force. He claimed had only not done so before because he had expected the British to keep their word on returning it.
Thatcher, not being stupid and realising the PLA were an altogether different proposition from the Argentines, realised the position was hopeless. So she agreed a handover over of the whole lot on the One Country, Two Systems basis.
That's my understanding too. The other reason for not taking Hong Kong earlier was that it was too useful to China as an outpost and source of hard currency etc. Hong Kong is much less useful to China now as the rest of the country has developed.
If the UK was really to hold China to its word it would be better to focus on China's commitments to maintain Hong Kong:s institutions through the One Country, Two Systems policy. And the UK should have given Hong Kong Chinese British citizenship.
The Financial Times is reporting that thousands of UK office staff working from home are unlikely to return to their place of work anytime soon.
If you don't need to, why expose yourself to unnecessary risk? Especially if you commute by public transport.
I expect to be WFH until at least the Autumn.
A few of my clients have already suggested taking less space in future, as some people WFH never return to office work, or cumulatively work fewer office hours.
I wait to see if the trickle becomes a flood, but I wouldn't be wholly surprised.
We are in the planning process for merging 3 offices into 1. I imagine the specification for how many desks are required is being rewritten.
What's the end game of demonising the UK media? Has anybody in Government, i.e. the one man who is actually the government, thought of the long-term consequences? It would not be so difficult for a future Labour government to create a captive state media alternative to the BBC and to regulate Twitter and Facebook into submission.
See America, Fox and the GOP. If your party has its own channel, it can have its own facts. The war is not against the MSM but against the very concept of truth.
Yes. I'm afraid this is often the case. If those who routinely shout about "fake news!" in the dreaded "MSM" were instead turning to a plethora of intellectually rigorous, unbiased and well researched alternative outlets/sources, that would be fine and dandy. But they're not. They tend to be staggeringly dumb units, easily led, gorging on a diet of utter drivel. It's a real worry.
The cure is to raise the game.
Not to say "so what to" when their reputation for facts looks like this -
But most people who decry the MSM are not looking for facts. They're looking for validation of the mush in their head.
Well, I am looking for facts. And there are quite a few people who are as well. Hence ArsTechnica being a good business etc.
I am sure you are. And of course many others. All power to you. But that is not the template for MSM haters. I'd draw a comparison with intelligent, humane and knowledgeable Leavers. There are plenty of them too, some on here, but they are nevertheless highly unrepresentative of the breed.
You should look at some the surveys of beliefs of anti-vaxers - might surprise you.
But to the main point - you can't fight back by saying "Our opponents are morally wrong to point out our mistakes"
The Catholic church tried that for centuries, for example. It hasn't worked.
If you want to have a reputation for accuracy, you have to earn it. Demanding a reputation doesn't work.
Hang Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize on your wall, if you like. But you will be judged for it.
I'm not saying it's wrong to point out (the many) mistakes in the MSM. It isn't. It's completely right to do so. What I'm saying is that those who are forever accusing the MSM of fake news - and especially if they use that phrase - are almost without exception softheads and nutters. This makes it more difficult than it should be for people like you - rational critics of the MSM - to be heard. The smearers of the MSM are a bigger menace to you, to me, than the MSM is.
What would surprise me about the views of anti-vaxers? Not sure I follow what you're getting at there.
Its not so much it is fake news but that any time the press write about a subject you know a fair amount about you find them so hideously wrong about everything that it is more or less misinformation. Frankly if a journalist told me it was raining these days I would insist on checking for myself.
If when they talk about things I know about they are so ill informed I can only assume that when they are talking about something I know nothing about they are probably just as ill informed and I would be better off ignoring anything they say as its likely claptrap.
Really? I can't say I find that myself. It could be that I have little expertise in anything (which is true) or it could be I tend to read quality publications (also true). Certainly if I have a skim through, say, the Sun or the Mirror I will feel as you do. Which is why I rarely do that.
Once you screen out the celeb rubbish and the "outrage" stories, I actually find the quality of journalism in the Sun and Mirror surprisingly good. I'm particularly impressed by their ability to express the key facts in relatively straightforward language (certainly would do better on a "reading age score" or similar). I would agree that the media in general does badly on almost anything that requires in-depth technical/subject-specific knowledge, and on plenty of stuff that doesn't. There's definitely a shortage of specialist journalists in the mainstream media and they're working with smaller newsrooms than before - the trade press is often the better place to read things up on specialist/industry-specific areas, if possible. But I don't think the Sun and Mirror are particularly worse than the supposedly more prestigious papers - The Express sticks out far more for me.
What's the end game of demonising the UK media? Has anybody in Government, i.e. the one man who is actually the government, thought of the long-term consequences? It would not be so difficult for a future Labour government to create a captive state media alternative to the BBC and to regulate Twitter and Facebook into submission.
See America, Fox and the GOP. If your party has its own channel, it can have its own facts. The war is not against the MSM but against the very concept of truth.
Yes. I'm afraid this is often the case. If those who routinely shout about "fake news!" in the dreaded "MSM" were instead turning to a plethora of intellectually rigorous, unbiased and well researched alternative outlets/sources, that would be fine and dandy. But they're not. They tend to be staggeringly dumb units, easily led, gorging on a diet of utter drivel. It's a real worry.
The cure is to raise the game.
Not to say "so what to" when their reputation for facts looks like this -
But most people who decry the MSM are not looking for facts. They're looking for validation of the mush in their head.
Well, I am looking for facts. And there are quite a few people who are as well. Hence ArsTechnica being a good business etc.
I am sure you are. And of course many others. All power to you. But that is not the template for MSM haters. I'd draw a comparison with intelligent, humane and knowledgeable Leavers. There are plenty of them too, some on here, but they are nevertheless highly unrepresentative of the breed.
You should look at some the surveys of beliefs of anti-vaxers - might surprise you.
But to the main point - you can't fight back by saying "Our opponents are morally wrong to point out our mistakes"
The Catholic church tried that for centuries, for example. It hasn't worked.
If you want to have a reputation for accuracy, you have to earn it. Demanding a reputation doesn't work.
Hang Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize on your wall, if you like. But you will be judged for it.
I'm not saying it's wrong to point out (the many) mistakes in the MSM. It isn't. It's completely right to do so. What I'm saying is that those who are forever accusing the MSM of fake news - and especially if they use that phrase - are almost without exception softheads and nutters. This makes it more difficult than it should be for people like you - rational critics of the MSM - to be heard. The smearers of the MSM are a bigger menace to you, to me, than the MSM is.
What would surprise me about the views of anti-vaxers? Not sure I follow what you're getting at there.
Its not so much it is fake news but that any time the press write about a subject you know a fair amount about you find them so hideously wrong about everything that it is more or less misinformation. Frankly if a journalist told me it was raining these days I would insist on checking for myself.
If when they talk about things I know about they are so ill informed I can only assume that when they are talking about something I know nothing about they are probably just as ill informed and I would be better off ignoring anything they say as its likely claptrap.
Really? I can't say I find that myself. It could be that I have little expertise in anything (which is true) or it could be I tend to read quality publications (also true). Certainly if I have a skim through, say, the Sun or the Mirror I will feel as you do. Which is why I rarely do.
I work in IT, even the times manages to get most things about it completely wrong, the bbc even more so. They are both dire and the rest are generally even worse. Why should I then believe they do a better job at anything else.
A good example of their idiocy was that letter signed by all those professors about the virus....only most were grad students and even the professors were in subjects that had nothing to do with biology let alone virology.
In my view anyone who pays any attention on any subject to anything the MSM have to say is asking to be given their information as filtered by dunces. These days I find it much better to visit specialist websites for all the information I need.
For example I will check out the register, techdirt, ars technica, wired for information on it related stuff. For general politics I will come here as my main site and read a couple of others.
Frankly that probably makes me about 10 times as informed as people that rely on the tv news, Times, Guardian etc.
MSM is not fit for purpose and hopefully will goto the wall before long
I am an IT professional - generally major media stories get at least one thing wrong.
I am also a professional in the field of Operations Research - stories that touch on that are usually badly wrong.
I work in finance - but not a subject matter trained expert. A recent story in the FT was something I knew about directly. In the three sentences they made 4 errors of fact. This was something that was re-casting a press release...
I have serious hobby interests in engineering, chemistry, physics, cryptography & military history - stories on these generally have major errors,
Politics around the world is a hobby. The mistakes the UK media makes about even US politics are staggering.
At some point you have to wonder if their stories on who will win the Oscars are bollocks as well... Where's Woger?
Newspapers get things wrong, as do radio and TV but mostly they are trying. Decrying 'MSM' as Trump supporters do implies that the non-mainstream peripheral media (Infowars, Breitbart, Fox News?) is fair and factual. That's patently rubbish.
Holding people and organisations to a standard doesn't mean you in favour of people and organisations that miss the standard by an even greater amount.
What's the end game of demonising the UK media? Has anybody in Government, i.e. the one man who is actually the government, thought of the long-term consequences? It would not be so difficult for a future Labour government to create a captive state media alternative to the BBC and to regulate Twitter and Facebook into submission.
See America, Fox and the GOP. If your party has its own channel, it can have its own facts. The war is not against the MSM but against the very concept of truth.
Yes. I'm afraid this is often the case. If those who routinely shout about "fake news!" in the dreaded "MSM" were instead turning to a plethora of intellectually rigorous, unbiased and well researched alternative outlets/sources, that would be fine and dandy. But they're not. They tend to be staggeringly dumb units, easily led, gorging on a diet of utter drivel. It's a real worry.
The cure is to raise the game.
Not to say "so what to" when their reputation for facts looks like this -
But most people who decry the MSM are not looking for facts. They're looking for validation of the mush in their head.
Well, I am looking for facts. And there are quite a few people who are as well. Hence ArsTechnica being a good business etc.
I am sure you are. And of course many others. All power to you. But that is not the template for MSM haters. I'd draw a comparison with intelligent, humane and knowledgeable Leavers. There are plenty of them too, some on here, but they are nevertheless highly unrepresentative of the breed.
You should look at some the surveys of beliefs of anti-vaxers - might surprise you.
But to the main point - you can't fight back by saying "Our opponents are morally wrong to point out our mistakes"
The Catholic church tried that for centuries, for example. It hasn't worked.
If you want to have a reputation for accuracy, you have to earn it. Demanding a reputation doesn't work.
Hang Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize on your wall, if you like. But you will be judged for it.
I'm not saying it's wrong to point out (the many) mistakes in the MSM. It isn't. It's completely right to do so. What I'm saying is that those who are forever accusing the MSM of fake news - and especially if they use that phrase - are almost without exception softheads and nutters. This makes it more difficult than it should be for people like you - rational critics of the MSM - to be heard. The smearers of the MSM are a bigger menace to you, to me, than the MSM is.
What would surprise me about the views of anti-vaxers? Not sure I follow what you're getting at there.
Its not so much it is fake news but that any time the press write about a subject you know a fair amount about you find them so hideously wrong about everything that it is more or less misinformation. Frankly if a journalist told me it was raining these days I would insist on checking for myself.
If when they talk about things I know about they are so ill informed I can only assume that when they are talking about something I know nothing about they are probably just as ill informed and I would be better off ignoring anything they say as its likely claptrap.
Really? I can't say I find that myself. It could be that I have little expertise in anything (which is true) or it could be I tend to read quality publications (also true). Certainly if I have a skim through, say, the Sun or the Mirror I will feel as you do. Which is why I rarely do that.
Once you screen out the celeb rubbish and the "outrage" stories, I actually find the quality of journalism in the Sun and Mirror surprisingly good. I'm particularly impressed by their ability to express the key facts in relatively straightforward language (certainly would do better on a "reading age score" or similar). I would agree that the media in general does badly on almost anything that requires in-depth technical/subject-specific knowledge, and on plenty of stuff that doesn't. There's definitely a shortage of specialist journalists in the mainstream media and they're working with smaller newsrooms than before - the trade press is often the better place to read things up, if possible. But I don't think the Sun and Mirror are particularly worse than the supposedly more prestigious papers - The Express sticks out far more for me.
Most readers do not get further that the 3 inch headlines and first two lines in bold, these rarely have much to do with actual story.
What's the end game of demonising the UK media? Has anybody in Government, i.e. the one man who is actually the government, thought of the long-term consequences? It would not be so difficult for a future Labour government to create a captive state media alternative to the BBC and to regulate Twitter and Facebook into submission.
See America, Fox and the GOP. If your party has its own channel, it can have its own facts. The war is not against the MSM but against the very concept of truth.
Yes. I'm afraid this is often the case. If those who routinely shout about "fake news!" in the dreaded "MSM" were instead turning to a plethora of intellectually rigorous, unbiased and well researched alternative outlets/sources, that would be fine and dandy. But they're not. They tend to be staggeringly dumb units, easily led, gorging on a diet of utter drivel. It's a real worry.
The cure is to raise the game.
Not to say "so what to" when their reputation for facts looks like this -
But most people who decry the MSM are not looking for facts. They're looking for validation of the mush in their head.
Well, I am looking for facts. And there are quite a few people who are as well. Hence ArsTechnica being a good business etc.
I am sure you are. And of course many others. All power to you. But that is not the template for MSM haters. I'd draw a comparison with intelligent, humane and knowledgeable Leavers. There are plenty of them too, some on here, but they are nevertheless highly unrepresentative of the breed.
You should look at some the surveys of beliefs of anti-vaxers - might surprise you.
But to the main point - you can't fight back by saying "Our opponents are morally wrong to point out our mistakes"
The Catholic church tried that for centuries, for example. It hasn't worked.
If you want to have a reputation for accuracy, you have to earn it. Demanding a reputation doesn't work.
Hang Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize on your wall, if you like. But you will be judged for it.
I'm not saying it's wrong to point out (the many) mistakes in the MSM. It isn't. It's completely right to do so. What I'm saying is that those who are forever accusing the MSM of fake news - and especially if they use that phrase - are almost without exception softheads and nutters. This makes it more difficult than it should be for people like you - rational critics of the MSM - to be heard. The smearers of the MSM are a bigger menace to you, to me, than the MSM is.
What would surprise me about the views of anti-vaxers? Not sure I follow what you're getting at there.
Its not so much it is fake news but that any time the press write about a subject you know a fair amount about you find them so hideously wrong about everything that it is more or less misinformation. Frankly if a journalist told me it was raining these days I would insist on checking for myself.
If when they talk about things I know about they are so ill informed I can only assume that when they are talking about something I know nothing about they are probably just as ill informed and I would be better off ignoring anything they say as its likely claptrap.
Really? I can't say I find that myself. It could be that I have little expertise in anything (which is true) or it could be I tend to read quality publications (also true). Certainly if I have a skim through, say, the Sun or the Mirror I will feel as you do. Which is why I rarely do.
I work in IT, even the times manages to get most things about it completely wrong, the bbc even more so. They are both dire and the rest are generally even worse. Why should I then believe they do a better job at anything else.
A good example of their idiocy was that letter signed by all those professors about the virus....only most were grad students and even the professors were in subjects that had nothing to do with biology let alone virology.
In my view anyone who pays any attention on any subject to anything the MSM have to say is asking to be given their information as filtered by dunces. These days I find it much better to visit specialist websites for all the information I need.
For example I will check out the register, techdirt, ars technica, wired for information on it related stuff. For general politics I will come here as my main site and read a couple of others.
Frankly that probably makes me about 10 times as informed as people that rely on the tv news, Times, Guardian etc.
MSM is not fit for purpose and hopefully will goto the wall before long
I am an IT professional - generally major media stories get at least one thing wrong.
I am also a professional in the field of Operations Research - stories that touch on that are usually badly wrong.
I work in finance - but not a subject matter trained expert. A recent story in the FT was something I knew about directly. In the three sentences they made 4 errors of fact. This was something that was re-casting a press release...
I have serious hobby interests in engineering, chemistry, physics, cryptography & military history - stories on these generally have major errors,
Politics around the world is a hobby. The mistakes the UK media makes about even US politics are staggering.
At some point you have to wonder if their stories on who will win the Oscars are bollocks as well... Where's Woger?
Newspapers get things wrong, as do radio and TV but mostly they are trying. Decrying 'MSM' as Trump supporters do implies that the non-mainstream peripheral media (Infowars, Breitbart, Fox News?) is fair and factual. That's patently rubbish.
I don't think anyone claimed they are factual. Decrying the MSM for being slapdash and usually wrong does not imply support for sites that are equally non factual
Just as criticising the police doesn't make you pro-criminal...
People will go voluntarily to where they feel safe. We're going to email back our delayed UK holiday and let them know we'll be taking the holiday with them as soon as they're legally allowed to open.
We've reached the Freedom Fries stage. Good to have the marker.
I just want China to cede back control of Hong Kong, for perpetuity.
Why? We had it in perpetuity before. Our Foreign Office would just find a way to cede it back.
We didn't, we had it on a 99 year leasehold, I want it back as a freehold.
To be exact, we had Hong Kong Island and Kowloon Peninsula in perpetuity, and the mainland part of it on a 99 year leasehold.
Yes. We should have held the Chinese to their word.
Personally, though, I think it's probably gone for good. But we can have Hong Kongers without Hong Kong. We should give Hong Kong ID card holders UK citizenship if they want it, certainly if China breaks the One Country Two Systems formula. We should have done so in 1997.
The Labour party threatened all kinds of things over the rumour that John Major was considering handing out 100s of thousands of UK passports to Hong Kong people.
Apparently they were the wrong kind of (potential) immigrants.
'Apparently'?
I'm sure after a jaunt through the concept of unreliable media you can give chapter and verse on this being the actual case.
He's talking nonsense. The refusal to offer passports to Hong Kong citizens was a policy conceived by the then Home Secretary Michael Howard, albeit endorsed by the Labour opposition.
One should never underestimate the inclination of Tories for blaming other parties for forcing them to act against their better natures.
Some Calafornian hairdresser was on CNN on Thursday saying he was reopening yesterday despite the fact the Authorities would fine him $1000 dollars a day.
He is not going to pay his fines
His shop opened yesterday
Hardly anyone turned up.
Shocked
Mind you the virus makes some industries very different to how they were before
Some Calafornian hairdresser was on CNN on Thursday saying he was reopening yesterday despite the fact the Authorities would fine him $1000 dollars a day.
He is not going to pay his fines
His shop opened yesterday
Hardly anyone turned up.
Shocked
Mind you the virus makes some industries very different to how they were before
Just had two magpies having a fight in the back garden. Never observed that behaviour before.
We use to have a particularly murderous tag team of 2 magpies who got through various pigeons and a fledgling gull; their MO was one would hold the struggling victim with their beak while the other pecked it to death. I did catch the pair doing it with another magpie, though they desisted when I rushed out to the back garden. Unreasonably sentimental of me I know..
Some Calafornian hairdresser was on CNN on Thursday saying he was reopening yesterday despite the fact the Authorities would fine him $1000 dollars a day.
He is not going to pay his fines
His shop opened yesterday
Hardly anyone turned up.
Shocked
Mind you the virus makes some industries very different to how they were before
Comments
@tobyperkinsmp
·
6m
Meanwhile in Derbyshire we have capacity for 600 tests and are testing 100 a day.
Maybe we need to extend the eligibility.
Some Calafornian hairdresser was on CNN on Thursday saying he was reopening yesterday despite the fact the Authorities would fine him $1000 dollars a day.
He is not going to pay his fines
His shop opened yesterday
Hardly anyone turned up.
Shocked
If the UK was really to hold China to its word it would be better to focus on China's commitments to maintain Hong Kong:s institutions through the One Country, Two Systems policy. And the UK should have given Hong Kong Chinese British citizenship.
https://twitter.com/NoamJStein/status/1256615001751724032
NEW THREAD
I get what you're saying. And kudos for seeking out the best sources for what interests you.
But here's my point in a nutshell -
"It must be true. It was in the paper."
"Never believe anything you read in the press."
Both the above sentiments are misguided and dangerous - ESPECIALLY the second one.