On a slightly less happy note the Courier reported yesterday that 62% of Covid deaths in Angus took place in care homes. And that almost certainly understates the issue since some residents of care homes will have been taken to hospital and died there. 62%. Its an absolute national disgrace.
Is it? Surely it depends what’s happening to non care home deaths? I have this discussion at work a lot.
A question about testing - no doubt others have thought/asked the same. How come it is that we still have no little idea about how prevalent the virus is in the population. Why could the principles of scientific polling not apply to testing? Test a representative sample of 1500 people and extrapolate.
Basic rules of sampling that the important thing is not the size of the sample (above a certain level) but how representative it is. All the talk is of contact tracing and test, test, test. But surely a massive amount can be done and learned with far less resource intensitivity required? And in a far more pro-active way which means you’re not chasing your tail all the time?
That's being done regularly by the government already. Though a reliable antibody test is what's needed more to know how many people have had it.
Contract tracing is to break the transmission chain. Random testing is for information. Two completely different purposes.
Metric measures are good for scientific calculations (brilliant, in fact) but they're not very human and a bit boring.
Imperial measures of yards, feet and inches are better for estimating as their origins relate to the human body itself, and they are also far more interesting.
Horses for courses.
I love the way they are all messed up. Cars are generally imperial, until you have to change a nut or talk about engine capacity, which has generally been in cc or litres. 🤷♂️
I use farenheit for above freezing, celsius for below!
Was Fahrenheit for body temperature until lockdown. Otherwise Celsius. Now Celsius all the way.
The great thing about Celsius, and the reason it has become standard, is because it’s simple and intuitive. Water boils at 100 degrees and freezes at 0 degrees (yes, I know it’s not as simple as that but in practice that’s the way we all think of it). Everyone can understand that.
Fahrenheit meanwhile is officially more confusing than Labour’s policy on private school taxation.
The disadvantage of other metric systems for ordinary people is that actually they neither look nor sound intuitive, and for all they are easy to multiply they’re a right bloody sod to divide.
Ultimately, that’s why I think they’ve never quite caught on. A mile a minute is a more useful and reasonable measurement than 1.66km a minute.
On a slightly less happy note the Courier reported yesterday that 62% of Covid deaths in Angus took place in care homes. And that almost certainly understates the issue since some residents of care homes will have been taken to hospital and died there. 62%. Its an absolute national disgrace.
Is it?
Care homes are one of the only places in the country where social distancing is literally impossible. It also holds the very vulnerable and mass numbers of people. It's also the only place where the over 70s literally can't be shielded. If you were to design a virus that would affect care homes most it would look much like this.
It's almost more surprising the 38% that aren't in care homes.
I said if the first didn't work they would just switch to the second. Not the end of the world.
How much extra lockdown are we going to endure? How many additional people will catch it and not be tested and spread it? How much extra money is it going to cost to fund all of the various measures we have? How many additional deaths is the extended lockdown going to result in?
It's a serious, serious failing and your dismissive attitude is both disappointing and unsurprising.
The worst part is that the government has been screamed at by the tech industry for weeks that their approach wouldn't work. That lack of dialogue between the government and the people has become typical in this crisis and time and again we've seen that the government and its experts haven't got a clue.
I said if the first didn't work they would just switch to the second. Not the end of the world.
Yes because that's just the sort of government we want. Blundering on wasting time in the face of obvious deficiencies until forced into a U-turn. Especially now.
On a slightly less happy note the Courier reported yesterday that 62% of Covid deaths in Angus took place in care homes. And that almost certainly understates the issue since some residents of care homes will have been taken to hospital and died there. 62%. Its an absolute national disgrace.
Is it?
Care homes are one of the only places in the country where social distancing is literally impossible. It also holds the very vulnerable and mass numbers of people. It's also the only place where the over 70s literally can't be shielded. If you were to design a virus that would affect care homes most it would look much like this.
It's almost more surprising the 38% that aren't in care homes.
Yes. It is awful in care homes and something needs to be done but that means the non care home population is that much safer.
On a slightly less happy note the Courier reported yesterday that 62% of Covid deaths in Angus took place in care homes. And that almost certainly understates the issue since some residents of care homes will have been taken to hospital and died there. 62%. Its an absolute national disgrace.
Is it? Surely it depends what’s happening to non care home deaths? I have this discussion at work a lot.
What it says is that our attempts to protect the most vulnerable in our society have been inept, half-hearted and totally incompetent. So we had bed blockers moved out of wards with the Virus introduced into care homes without care packages. We had people ranting about nurses (and I have some sympathy) not being able to change their PPE often enough whilst those dealing with personal care in care homes had none (Wednesday's Courier had 3 local women on the front page who had caught Covid and died from working in Care Homes) and we have a very, very large number of people being signed up for DNR so that they never even make a hospital but simply die in their Home.
What this comes down to essentially is money. Our care for the elderly is done on a shoestring with every conceivable corner cut. When something like this comes along there is simply no capacity, no competence, no training, no equipment, no ability to isolate, nothing to prevent carnage. This virus finds the vulnerable sectors in society whether it is foreign workers in dormitories in Singapore or Care Home residents here and exploits them.
Social care needs transformational levels of funding. It is time to revisit May's ideas about how that could be done.
I said if the first didn't work they would just switch to the second. Not the end of the world.
Yes because that's just the sort of government we want. Blundering on wasting time in the face of obvious deficiencies until forced into a U-turn. Especially now.
Yes that is the sort of government we want. Cracking straight on with things not wasting time dithering to decide and not being embarrassed about "u-turns" if a wrong move is made. Especially now.
They could have spent a few weeks or months in committee trying to figure out every possible problem or just crack on and within 24 hours of these problems being highlighted they said there was a Plan B now it's confirmed they're working on Plan B.
You and @eek were outstanding on this. Others I'm sure also but you showed off PB at its best.
Thanks! I have been doing a fair bit of work recently for a startup developing a consumer mobile app, it wasn't too difficult to see that the approach taken by NHSX was doomed to failure - and plenty of tech people online saw it too.
I've been generally supportive of what the government has done in the past few months, decisions taken are really easy to judge with 20/20 hindsight. This one was a definite screw-up though, the head of NHSX is going to have a very hard time telling the Select Committee why they took the approach they did with no backup.
Was Fahrenheit for body temperature until lockdown. Otherwise Celsius. Now Celsius all the way.
The great thing about Celsius, and the reason it has become standard, is because it’s simple and intuitive. Water boils at 100 degrees and freezes at 0 degrees (yes, I know it’s not as simple as that but in practice that’s the way we all think of it). Everyone can understand that.
Fahrenheit meanwhile is officially more confusing than Labour’s policy on private school taxation.
The disadvantage of other metric systems for ordinary people is that actually they neither look nor sound intuitive, and for all they are easy to multiply they’re a right bloody sod to divide.
Ultimately, that’s why I think they’ve never quite caught on. A mile a minute is a more useful and reasonable measurement than 1.66km a minute.
I blame the Sumerians. Instead of 24 hour days of 60 minutes and 60 seconds, we could have 10 hour days of 100 minutes and 100 (shorter) seconds. Much more logical.
I said if the first didn't work they would just switch to the second. Not the end of the world.
How much extra lockdown are we going to endure? How many additional people will catch it and not be tested and spread it? How much extra money is it going to cost to fund all of the various measures we have? How many additional deaths is the extended lockdown going to result in?
It's a serious, serious failing and your dismissive attitude is both disappointing and unsurprising.
The worst part is that the government has been screamed at by the tech industry for weeks that their approach wouldn't work. That lack of dialogue between the government and the people has become typical in this crisis and time and again we've seen that the government and its experts haven't got a clue.
How much? Who knows probably not much. They've confirmed already there was a Plan B and it wouldn't surprise me if they were already working on Plan B.
The first app was designed by people in the tech industry not NHS staff.
On a slightly less happy note the Courier reported yesterday that 62% of Covid deaths in Angus took place in care homes. And that almost certainly understates the issue since some residents of care homes will have been taken to hospital and died there. 62%. Its an absolute national disgrace.
Is it?
Care homes are one of the only places in the country where social distancing is literally impossible. It also holds the very vulnerable and mass numbers of people. It's also the only place where the over 70s literally can't be shielded. If you were to design a virus that would affect care homes most it would look much like this.
It's almost more surprising the 38% that aren't in care homes.
They can be shielded. Some of the private care homes, for example, have their staff staying on site with no Covid deaths. And remember this is place of death. How many of that 38% caught Covid in their home and died in hospital despite the government's best efforts to keep them away? They have become the killing fields of our society.
I said if the first didn't work they would just switch to the second. Not the end of the world.
Yes because that's just the sort of government we want. Blundering on wasting time in the face of obvious deficiencies until forced into a U-turn. Especially now.
Yes that is the sort of government we want. Cracking straight on with things not wasting time dithering to decide and not being embarrassed about "u-turns" if a wrong move is made. Especially now.
They could have spent a few weeks or months in committee trying to figure out every possible problem or just crack on and within 24 hours of these problems being highlighted they said there was a Plan B now it's confirmed they're working on Plan B.
Or they could have listened to the tech industry three weeks ago and we'd have the app ready to go using the correct approach.
Personally I had no idea if the app was going to work or not, but listening to those with more knowledge than me on the subject here seems to have worked remarkably well in predicting that it wouldn't. An approach that works with political betting too.
I said if the first didn't work they would just switch to the second. Not the end of the world.
Yes because that's just the sort of government we want. Blundering on wasting time in the face of obvious deficiencies until forced into a U-turn. Especially now.
Yes that is the sort of government we want. Cracking straight on with things not wasting time dithering to decide and not being embarrassed about "u-turns" if a wrong move is made. Especially now.
They could have spent a few weeks or months in committee trying to figure out every possible problem or just crack on and within 24 hours of these problems being highlighted they said there was a Plan B now it's confirmed they're working on Plan B.
We need a competent government.
If two random posters on PB get it instantly what do you think that says about the government's competence?
You of all people I didn't expect to give the govt such a free pass. But I appreciate the virus has addled people's brains as well as the bodies of those directly affected.
On a slightly less happy note the Courier reported yesterday that 62% of Covid deaths in Angus took place in care homes. And that almost certainly understates the issue since some residents of care homes will have been taken to hospital and died there. 62%. Its an absolute national disgrace.
Is it? Surely it depends what’s happening to non care home deaths? I have this discussion at work a lot.
What it says is that our attempts to protect the most vulnerable in our society have been inept, half-hearted and totally incompetent. So we had bed blockers moved out of wards with the Virus introduced into care homes without care packages. We had people ranting about nurses (and I have some sympathy) not being able to change their PPE often enough whilst those dealing with personal care in care homes had none (Wednesday's Courier had 3 local women on the front page who had caught Covid and died from working in Care Homes) and we have a very, very large number of people being signed up for DNR so that they never even make a hospital but simply die in their Home.
What this comes down to essentially is money. Our care for the elderly is done on a shoestring with every conceivable corner cut. When something like this comes along there is simply no capacity, no competence, no training, no equipment, no ability to isolate, nothing to prevent carnage. This virus finds the vulnerable sectors in society whether it is foreign workers in dormitories in Singapore or Care Home residents here and exploits them.
Social care needs transformational levels of funding. It is time to revisit May's ideas about how that could be done.
Whilst I get the general point, the specific stat is obviously misleading without context. It potentially confuses by getting the casual observer to think that 62% of people in care homes have died. Whereas actually it is a stat relative to overall deaths but says nothing about actual levels of deaths. 62% of 100 is much better than 20% of 500
I said if the first didn't work they would just switch to the second. Not the end of the world.
How much extra lockdown are we going to endure? How many additional people will catch it and not be tested and spread it? How much extra money is it going to cost to fund all of the various measures we have? How many additional deaths is the extended lockdown going to result in?
It's a serious, serious failing and your dismissive attitude is both disappointing and unsurprising.
The worst part is that the government has been screamed at by the tech industry for weeks that their approach wouldn't work. That lack of dialogue between the government and the people has become typical in this crisis and time and again we've seen that the government and its experts haven't got a clue.
How much? Who knows probably not much. They've confirmed already there was a Plan B and it wouldn't surprise me if they were already working on Plan B.
The first app was designed by people in the tech industry not NHS staff.
No, the first app was designed by public sector data engineers and then developed by a third party consultancy who build to a spec.
Every week we spend in lockdown costs 1% of GDP. That's not a small number. This delay will cost us three weeks by my estimate, that's £65bn taken off the nation's wealth, "not much". Your argument is laughable.
"Prof Dingwall said he had been told by a senior public health specialist that "we knew it was one metre but we doubled it to two because we did not think the British population would understand what one metre was and we could not trust them to observe it so we doubled it to be on the safe side"."
They did not think the public would understand one metre and were too pig-headed to call it a yard, or three feet, or the length of a supermarket trolley.
Anyone under 50 knows what a metre is more than they know what a yard is.
Football is the last global refuge of the imperial system - back 10 yards for a free kick, 12 yards from the penalty spot to the goal, which is eight yards wide and eight feet tall and lives in the 18 yard box!
A Cricket pitch is 22yards in Bangalore, Brisbane, Barbados and Brechin.
Another terrible legacy of the British empire probably.
If football is the bastion of imperial then horse racing is the bastion of medieval - furlongs , winning my necks etc
Hands?
But really, outside of your metropolitan elites my experience is whatever their age most people continue to (a) either use imperial or (b) have no fucking clue about weights and measures anyway. If anything, I would say my generation is less metricated than my father’s is. He often uses metric, and prefers it. I can use it, but I tend not to.
Distances, lengths/heights and draught drinks being in imperial is the main reason.
Im a complete mish mash.
Driving - miles Running - kilometers Height - imperial Weight - metric Beer - imperial Other drinks - metric
etc
Dont know if its good to be able to just choose what feels right for the scenario or if it would have been better to just stick with one.
I think most of us are, though I do find it a bit odd you don't weigh yourself in stones. What is the metric equivalent?
I use imperial for driving because that's how the road signs are written - I don't understand why we didn't switch to km like the Irish but I guess it's related to everything else that's wrong with this country, an absurd reluctance to embrace modernity and terrible fear of doing what other countries do in case we realise we're not the centre of the fucking universe. I use imperial for making pancakes because that's how I learned the recipe and it's easy to scale up or down in proportion to the number of eggs. I use metric for everything else, especially post Brexit.
Was Fahrenheit for body temperature until lockdown. Otherwise Celsius. Now Celsius all the way.
The great thing about Celsius, and the reason it has become standard, is because it’s simple and intuitive. Water boils at 100 degrees and freezes at 0 degrees (yes, I know it’s not as simple as that but in practice that’s the way we all think of it). Everyone can understand that.
Fahrenheit meanwhile is officially more confusing than Labour’s policy on private school taxation.
The disadvantage of other metric systems for ordinary people is that actually they neither look nor sound intuitive, and for all they are easy to multiply they’re a right bloody sod to divide.
Ultimately, that’s why I think they’ve never quite caught on. A mile a minute is a more useful and reasonable measurement than 1.66km a minute.
1.609km a minute, surely?
You would be doing 100kmh (62mph) under those circumstances, not 96.54.
"Prof Dingwall said he had been told by a senior public health specialist that "we knew it was one metre but we doubled it to two because we did not think the British population would understand what one metre was and we could not trust them to observe it so we doubled it to be on the safe side"."
They did not think the public would understand one metre and were too pig-headed to call it a yard, or three feet, or the length of a supermarket trolley.
Anyone under 50 knows what a metre is more than they know what a yard is.
Well, that certainly isn’t true.
I must admit (at the age of 50) that I only know how long a yard is from being interested in athletics and hurdling - so its the 110M hurdles as it was originally a 120 yard standard to allow standard 10 hurdles . Being curious as a boy I looked up why it was 110 m not 100m . As a result I knew about yards. It was definitely not taught about yards in 1970s /80s schooling
The metre is a block of metal held somewhere in Paris???. I have no idea how they calibrate it is as metal expands and contract under different temperature conditions.
No it is not and hasn't been for 60 years. The measurement has been changed twice since then to make it more accurate. The metre is defined as the length of the path travelled by monochromatic light in a vacuum in 1/299 792 458 of a second.
Ok the metre WAS....
Well they 'all' were based upon simple standards originally (although not simple for the time). Bit tricky making the now more accurate measurement in seventeen hundred and whatever it was. Re the expansion - it was measured at a fixed temperature (although of course that was also difficult to calibrate also)
"Prof Dingwall said he had been told by a senior public health specialist that "we knew it was one metre but we doubled it to two because we did not think the British population would understand what one metre was and we could not trust them to observe it so we doubled it to be on the safe side"."
They did not think the public would understand one metre and were too pig-headed to call it a yard, or three feet, or the length of a supermarket trolley.
Anyone under 50 knows what a metre is more than they know what a yard is.
Football is the last global refuge of the imperial system - back 10 yards for a free kick, 12 yards from the penalty spot to the goal, which is eight yards wide and eight feet tall and lives in the 18 yard box!
A Cricket pitch is 22yards in Bangalore, Brisbane, Barbados and Brechin.
Another terrible legacy of the British empire probably.
If football is the bastion of imperial then horse racing is the bastion of medieval - furlongs , winning my necks etc
Hands?
But really, outside of your metropolitan elites my experience is whatever their age most people continue to (a) either use imperial or (b) have no fucking clue about weights and measures anyway. If anything, I would say my generation is less metricated than my father’s is. He often uses metric, and prefers it. I can use it, but I tend not to.
Distances, lengths/heights and draught drinks being in imperial is the main reason.
Im a complete mish mash.
Driving - miles Running - kilometers Height - imperial Weight - metric Beer - imperial Other drinks - metric
etc
Dont know if its good to be able to just choose what feels right for the scenario or if it would have been better to just stick with one.
I think most of us are, though I do find it a bit odd you don't weigh yourself in stones. What is the metric equivalent?
I use imperial for driving because that's how the road signs are written - I don't understand why we didn't switch to km like the Irish but I guess it's related to everything else that's wrong with this country, an absurd reluctance to embrace modernity and terrible fear of doing what other countries do in case we realise we're not the centre of the fucking universe. I use imperial for making pancakes because that's how I learned the recipe and it's easy to scale up or down in proportion to the number of eggs. I use metric for everything else, especially post Brexit.
On a slightly less happy note the Courier reported yesterday that 62% of Covid deaths in Angus took place in care homes. And that almost certainly understates the issue since some residents of care homes will have been taken to hospital and died there. 62%. Its an absolute national disgrace.
Is it?
Care homes are one of the only places in the country where social distancing is literally impossible. It also holds the very vulnerable and mass numbers of people. It's also the only place where the over 70s literally can't be shielded. If you were to design a virus that would affect care homes most it would look much like this.
It's almost more surprising the 38% that aren't in care homes.
They can be shielded. Some of the private care homes, for example, have their staff staying on site with no Covid deaths. And remember this is place of death. How many of that 38% caught Covid in their home and died in hospital despite the government's best efforts to keep them away? They have become the killing fields of our society.
I'm sorry but they can't be shielded. The homes frequently have and need dozens of staff and yes in some homes moving in staff may be possible but not others.
My wife works in a care home. Was she supposed to move away from our very young children for months on end? She has dozens of colleagues, where are they supposed to sleep as the home has no spare beds?
We can't just wave a magic wand and wish it away. My grandparents thankfully aren't in homes and are shielding. They're not having guests, they're not leaving their homes and are getting food dropped off. They have negligible risk.
In my wife's care home dozens of staff go into the home every single day and if they didn't the residents would die of neglect or starvation first. Thankfully the virus hasn't hit her home but it's remarkable it hasn't and more good luck than good management I suspect. The risk is immeasurably greater than for the self sufficient elderly.
"Prof Dingwall said he had been told by a senior public health specialist that "we knew it was one metre but we doubled it to two because we did not think the British population would understand what one metre was and we could not trust them to observe it so we doubled it to be on the safe side"."
They did not think the public would understand one metre and were too pig-headed to call it a yard, or three feet, or the length of a supermarket trolley.
Anyone under 50 knows what a metre is more than they know what a yard is.
Football is the last global refuge of the imperial system - back 10 yards for a free kick, 12 yards from the penalty spot to the goal, which is eight yards wide and eight feet tall and lives in the 18 yard box!
A Cricket pitch is 22yards in Bangalore, Brisbane, Barbados and Brechin.
Another terrible legacy of the British empire probably.
If football is the bastion of imperial then horse racing is the bastion of medieval - furlongs , winning my necks etc
Hands?
But really, outside of your metropolitan elites my experience is whatever their age most people continue to (a) either use imperial or (b) have no fucking clue about weights and measures anyway. If anything, I would say my generation is less metricated than my father’s is. He often uses metric, and prefers it. I can use it, but I tend not to.
Distances, lengths/heights and draught drinks being in imperial is the main reason.
Im a complete mish mash.
Driving - miles Running - kilometers Height - imperial Weight - metric Beer - imperial Other drinks - metric
etc
Dont know if its good to be able to just choose what feels right for the scenario or if it would have been better to just stick with one.
I think most of us are, though I do find it a bit odd you don't weigh yourself in stones. What is the metric equivalent?
I use imperial for driving because that's how the road signs are written - I don't understand why we didn't switch to km like the Irish but I guess it's related to everything else that's wrong with this country, an absurd reluctance to embrace modernity and terrible fear of doing what other countries do in case we realise we're not the centre of the fucking universe. I use imperial for making pancakes because that's how I learned the recipe and it's easy to scale up or down in proportion to the number of eggs. I use metric for everything else, especially post Brexit.
I am about as far from a tech geek as it is possible to get but I find the fact that it was so obvious to the likes of @Sandpit and @eek that this app wasn't going to work on a significant number of phones and would not allow the transmission or collation of the relevant information just depressing.
We now, belatedly, have the testing capacity, we now have the numbers down to more manageable levels, we need an app that makes trace and isolate work. A delay in this third element means more economic damage, more unemployment and, ultimately, more death. Disappointing.
I said if the first didn't work they would just switch to the second. Not the end of the world.
Yes because that's just the sort of government we want. Blundering on wasting time in the face of obvious deficiencies until forced into a U-turn. Especially now.
Yes that is the sort of government we want. Cracking straight on with things not wasting time dithering to decide and not being embarrassed about "u-turns" if a wrong move is made. Especially now.
They could have spent a few weeks or months in committee trying to figure out every possible problem or just crack on and within 24 hours of these problems being highlighted they said there was a Plan B now it's confirmed they're working on Plan B.
Or they could have listened to the tech industry three weeks ago and we'd have the app ready to go using the correct approach.
Who in the tech industry do you listen to? They listened to some in the tech industry who said they could get it to work then when others in the tech industry said it wouldn't they started working on Plan B.
If they'd ignored the warnings and had no Plan B then yes I'd be more concerned.
On a slightly less happy note the Courier reported yesterday that 62% of Covid deaths in Angus took place in care homes. And that almost certainly understates the issue since some residents of care homes will have been taken to hospital and died there. 62%. Its an absolute national disgrace.
Is it?
Care homes are one of the only places in the country where social distancing is literally impossible. It also holds the very vulnerable and mass numbers of people. It's also the only place where the over 70s literally can't be shielded. If you were to design a virus that would affect care homes most it would look much like this.
It's almost more surprising the 38% that aren't in care homes.
They can be shielded. Some of the private care homes, for example, have their staff staying on site with no Covid deaths. And remember this is place of death. How many of that 38% caught Covid in their home and died in hospital despite the government's best efforts to keep them away? They have become the killing fields of our society.
Unless things have changed from when I was inspecting them, it's by no means uncommon to find care staff doing shifts in both hospital and care homes, and sometimes in two care homes. We used to try and discourage employers from letting that sort of thing happen, but it's what one sees in a low wage industry.
I said if the first didn't work they would just switch to the second. Not the end of the world.
Yes because that's just the sort of government we want. Blundering on wasting time in the face of obvious deficiencies until forced into a U-turn. Especially now.
Yes that is the sort of government we want. Cracking straight on with things not wasting time dithering to decide and not being embarrassed about "u-turns" if a wrong move is made. Especially now.
They could have spent a few weeks or months in committee trying to figure out every possible problem or just crack on and within 24 hours of these problems being highlighted they said there was a Plan B now it's confirmed they're working on Plan B.
We need a competent government.
If two random posters on PB get it instantly what do you think that says about the government's competence?
You of all people I didn't expect to give the govt such a free pass. But I appreciate the virus has addled people's brains as well as the bodies of those directly affected.
I have real difficulty understanding the government's thinking on this app fiasco. Sandpit and eek understood almost immediately why it would be balls. Did nobody involved in the production of the app speak up and say it would be balls? Were they just ignored? For somebody who know fuck all about how apps are made it's just baffling.
"Prof Dingwall said he had been told by a senior public health specialist that "we knew it was one metre but we doubled it to two because we did not think the British population would understand what one metre was and we could not trust them to observe it so we doubled it to be on the safe side"."
They did not think the public would understand one metre and were too pig-headed to call it a yard, or three feet, or the length of a supermarket trolley.
Anyone under 50 knows what a metre is more than they know what a yard is.
Football is the last global refuge of the imperial system - back 10 yards for a free kick, 12 yards from the penalty spot to the goal, which is eight yards wide and eight feet tall and lives in the 18 yard box!
A Cricket pitch is 22yards in Bangalore, Brisbane, Barbados and Brechin.
Another terrible legacy of the British empire probably.
If football is the bastion of imperial then horse racing is the bastion of medieval - furlongs , winning my necks etc
Hands?
But really, outside of your metropolitan elites my experience is whatever their age most people continue to (a) either use imperial or (b) have no fucking clue about weights and measures anyway. If anything, I would say my generation is less metricated than my father’s is. He often uses metric, and prefers it. I can use it, but I tend not to.
Distances, lengths/heights and draught drinks being in imperial is the main reason.
Im a complete mish mash.
Driving - miles Running - kilometers Height - imperial Weight - metric Beer - imperial Other drinks - metric
etc
Dont know if its good to be able to just choose what feels right for the scenario or if it would have been better to just stick with one.
I think most of us are, though I do find it a bit odd you don't weigh yourself in stones. What is the metric equivalent?
I use imperial for driving because that's how the road signs are written - I don't understand why we didn't switch to km like the Irish but I guess it's related to everything else that's wrong with this country, an absurd reluctance to embrace modernity and terrible fear of doing what other countries do in case we realise we're not the centre of the fucking universe. I use imperial for making pancakes because that's how I learned the recipe and it's easy to scale up or down in proportion to the number of eggs. I use metric for everything else, especially post Brexit.
Brexit is measured in metric?
It will be measured in pounds.
Ok, in fairness that was very good.
I suppose the Brexiteer response could be we need to bring back Sovereigns.
I said if the first didn't work they would just switch to the second. Not the end of the world.
Yes because that's just the sort of government we want. Blundering on wasting time in the face of obvious deficiencies until forced into a U-turn. Especially now.
Yes that is the sort of government we want. Cracking straight on with things not wasting time dithering to decide and not being embarrassed about "u-turns" if a wrong move is made. Especially now.
They could have spent a few weeks or months in committee trying to figure out every possible problem or just crack on and within 24 hours of these problems being highlighted they said there was a Plan B now it's confirmed they're working on Plan B.
We need a competent government.
If two random posters on PB get it instantly what do you think that says about the government's competence?
You of all people I didn't expect to give the govt such a free pass. But I appreciate the virus has addled people's brains as well as the bodies of those directly affected.
I have real difficulty understanding the government's thinking.
I think you’ve made an important false assumption there.
On a slightly less happy note the Courier reported yesterday that 62% of Covid deaths in Angus took place in care homes. And that almost certainly understates the issue since some residents of care homes will have been taken to hospital and died there. 62%. Its an absolute national disgrace.
Is it?
Care homes are one of the only places in the country where social distancing is literally impossible. It also holds the very vulnerable and mass numbers of people. It's also the only place where the over 70s literally can't be shielded. If you were to design a virus that would affect care homes most it would look much like this.
It's almost more surprising the 38% that aren't in care homes.
They can be shielded. Some of the private care homes, for example, have their staff staying on site with no Covid deaths. And remember this is place of death. How many of that 38% caught Covid in their home and died in hospital despite the government's best efforts to keep them away? They have become the killing fields of our society.
To be fair nursing and care homes are mostly involved in looking after those who are in their latter days or as in my sister's case terminally ill with cancer. My sister had a DNR and they are widely in use
My son in laws father (87) has just been admitted to a care home following a covid test and he is in a poor way health wise
Of course in China and large populations elsewhere they do not exist as the family is the primary carer
It was wrong to allow patients to go from hospital to care homes untested but I suspect the enquiry in due course will see the advice and the government action was wholly concentrated on stopping the NHS mirroring Italy
I would just say 'killing fields' is a harsh description as even in normal times most residents pass away either in them or in hospital
I am metric on everything except pints in pubs and miles on roads. 65 but from a science background.
I was at school when we had recently moved from Imperial to what from memory was CGS units? Have I got that right? Consequently I do jump between Calories and Joules re energy.
On a slightly less happy note the Courier reported yesterday that 62% of Covid deaths in Angus took place in care homes. And that almost certainly understates the issue since some residents of care homes will have been taken to hospital and died there. 62%. Its an absolute national disgrace.
Is it? Surely it depends what’s happening to non care home deaths? I have this discussion at work a lot.
What it says is that our attempts to protect the most vulnerable in our society have been inept, half-hearted and totally incompetent. So we had bed blockers moved out of wards with the Virus introduced into care homes without care packages. We had people ranting about nurses (and I have some sympathy) not being able to change their PPE often enough whilst those dealing with personal care in care homes had none (Wednesday's Courier had 3 local women on the front page who had caught Covid and died from working in Care Homes) and we have a very, very large number of people being signed up for DNR so that they never even make a hospital but simply die in their Home.
What this comes down to essentially is money. Our care for the elderly is done on a shoestring with every conceivable corner cut. When something like this comes along there is simply no capacity, no competence, no training, no equipment, no ability to isolate, nothing to prevent carnage. This virus finds the vulnerable sectors in society whether it is foreign workers in dormitories in Singapore or Care Home residents here and exploits them.
Social care needs transformational levels of funding. It is time to revisit May's ideas about how that could be done.
Whilst I get the general point, the specific stat is obviously misleading without context. It potentially confuses by getting the casual observer to think that 62% of people in care homes have died. Whereas actually it is a stat relative to overall deaths but says nothing about actual levels of deaths. 62% of 100 is much better than 20% of 500
I didn't say that 62% of people in care homes had died. What I am saying is that if we are looking at vectors where this virus is causing harm care homes make any other single vector almost irrelevant. It is our weak spot. Schools, not so much.
I said if the first didn't work they would just switch to the second. Not the end of the world.
Yes because that's just the sort of government we want. Blundering on wasting time in the face of obvious deficiencies until forced into a U-turn. Especially now.
Yes that is the sort of government we want. Cracking straight on with things not wasting time dithering to decide and not being embarrassed about "u-turns" if a wrong move is made. Especially now.
They could have spent a few weeks or months in committee trying to figure out every possible problem or just crack on and within 24 hours of these problems being highlighted they said there was a Plan B now it's confirmed they're working on Plan B.
We need a competent government.
If two random posters on PB get it instantly what do you think that says about the government's competence?
You of all people I didn't expect to give the govt such a free pass. But I appreciate the virus has addled people's brains as well as the bodies of those directly affected.
I don't give the government a free pass. I think they're working spinning many plates in a fast moving environment. Mistakes will be made inevitably especially when it comes to IT. If someone says something can work I can see why they'd go with it and if someone else says it can't but it's already been developed by now then the logical thing to do is test it while simultaneously working on a Plan B.
I don't see a great difference between this and the failed antibody tests. Sometimes things don't work out but you need to be trying.
If you never make mistakes you aren't trying to do enough!
Personally I had no idea if the app was going to work or not, but listening to those with more knowledge than me on the subject here seems to have worked remarkably well in predicting that it wouldn't. An approach that works with political betting too.
I'm in the same category as you.
What I found curious was that the government does not, so far as I know, go in for apps much. Yet it was proposing to depart from this with an app of huge importance that appeared to conflict with how the app hosts ordinarily operated. As a non-expert, that sounded exceptionally high-risk to me from the start. But since it's not my area I imagined I was wrong.
I said if the first didn't work they would just switch to the second. Not the end of the world.
Yes because that's just the sort of government we want. Blundering on wasting time in the face of obvious deficiencies until forced into a U-turn. Especially now.
Yes that is the sort of government we want. Cracking straight on with things not wasting time dithering to decide and not being embarrassed about "u-turns" if a wrong move is made. Especially now.
They could have spent a few weeks or months in committee trying to figure out every possible problem or just crack on and within 24 hours of these problems being highlighted they said there was a Plan B now it's confirmed they're working on Plan B.
Or they could have listened to the tech industry three weeks ago and we'd have the app ready to go using the correct approach.
Who in the tech industry do you listen to? They listened to some in the tech industry who said they could get it to work then when others in the tech industry said it wouldn't they started working on Plan B.
If they'd ignored the warnings and had no Plan B then yes I'd be more concerned.
There is no plan b, when are you going to get it through your skull. They are only starting to concept the correct approach. That means at least three weeks until we get a beta test. This is a new plan a. This isn't a political argument where there's no real right answer, the people who were touting the original method are simply incompetent yes men. There is only one method that is viable, it's the pathway provided by the OS developers to hook into the system management of Bluetooth. Anyone who said we can get two unknown devices to reliably handshake via a third party app using BLE is an incompetent fool or more dangerously a fantasist.
We've had weeks of ignored warnings from the tech industry. Hopefully there's a proper investigation and everyone involved gets the sack.
On a slightly less happy note the Courier reported yesterday that 62% of Covid deaths in Angus took place in care homes. And that almost certainly understates the issue since some residents of care homes will have been taken to hospital and died there. 62%. Its an absolute national disgrace.
Is it?
Care homes are one of the only places in the country where social distancing is literally impossible. It also holds the very vulnerable and mass numbers of people. It's also the only place where the over 70s literally can't be shielded. If you were to design a virus that would affect care homes most it would look much like this.
It's almost more surprising the 38% that aren't in care homes.
They can be shielded. Some of the private care homes, for example, have their staff staying on site with no Covid deaths. And remember this is place of death. How many of that 38% caught Covid in their home and died in hospital despite the government's best efforts to keep them away? They have become the killing fields of our society.
I'm sorry but they can't be shielded. The homes frequently have and need dozens of staff and yes in some homes moving in staff may be possible but not others.
My wife works in a care home. Was she supposed to move away from our very young children for months on end? She has dozens of colleagues, where are they supposed to sleep as the home has no spare beds?
We can't just wave a magic wand and wish it away. My grandparents thankfully aren't in homes and are shielding. They're not having guests, they're not leaving their homes and are getting food dropped off. They have negligible risk.
In my wife's care home dozens of staff go into the home every single day and if they didn't the residents would die of neglect or starvation first. Thankfully the virus hasn't hit her home but it's remarkable it hasn't and more good luck than good management I suspect. The risk is immeasurably greater than for the self sufficient elderly.
And how much PPE do they have? How much training in how to use it? How many are tested and how often? Our fetish with the NHS has caused us to take our eye off the ball.
I said if the first didn't work they would just switch to the second. Not the end of the world.
Yes because that's just the sort of government we want. Blundering on wasting time in the face of obvious deficiencies until forced into a U-turn. Especially now.
Yes that is the sort of government we want. Cracking straight on with things not wasting time dithering to decide and not being embarrassed about "u-turns" if a wrong move is made. Especially now.
They could have spent a few weeks or months in committee trying to figure out every possible problem or just crack on and within 24 hours of these problems being highlighted they said there was a Plan B now it's confirmed they're working on Plan B.
We need a competent government.
If two random posters on PB get it instantly what do you think that says about the government's competence?
You of all people I didn't expect to give the govt such a free pass. But I appreciate the virus has addled people's brains as well as the bodies of those directly affected.
I have real difficulty understanding the government's thinking on this app fiasco. Sandpit and eek understood almost immediately why it would be balls. Did nobody involved in the production of the app speak up and say it would be balls? Were they just ignored? For somebody who know fuck all about how apps are made it's just baffling.
Sandpit and eek understood yes but the app was already developed by that point. So what do you do? Scrap it and not trial it?
Those involved in production who were independent IT contractors clearly thought it would work.
"Prof Dingwall said he had been told by a senior public health specialist that "we knew it was one metre but we doubled it to two because we did not think the British population would understand what one metre was and we could not trust them to observe it so we doubled it to be on the safe side"."
They did not think the public would understand one metre and were too pig-headed to call it a yard, or three feet, or the length of a supermarket trolley.
Anyone under 50 knows what a metre is more than they know what a yard is.
Football is the last global refuge of the imperial system - back 10 yards for a free kick, 12 yards from the penalty spot to the goal, which is eight yards wide and eight feet tall and lives in the 18 yard box!
A Cricket pitch is 22yards in Bangalore, Brisbane, Barbados and Brechin.
Another terrible legacy of the British empire probably.
If football is the bastion of imperial then horse racing is the bastion of medieval - furlongs , winning my necks etc
Hands?
But really, outside of your metropolitan elites my experience is whatever their age most people continue to (a) either use imperial or (b) have no fucking clue about weights and measures anyway. If anything, I would say my generation is less metricated than my father’s is. He often uses metric, and prefers it. I can use it, but I tend not to.
Distances, lengths/heights and draught drinks being in imperial is the main reason.
Im a complete mish mash.
Driving - miles Running - kilometers Height - imperial Weight - metric Beer - imperial Other drinks - metric
etc
Dont know if its good to be able to just choose what feels right for the scenario or if it would have been better to just stick with one.
I think most of us are, though I do find it a bit odd you don't weigh yourself in stones. What is the metric equivalent?
I use imperial for driving because that's how the road signs are written - I don't understand why we didn't switch to km like the Irish but I guess it's related to everything else that's wrong with this country, an absurd reluctance to embrace modernity and terrible fear of doing what other countries do in case we realise we're not the centre of the fucking universe. I use imperial for making pancakes because that's how I learned the recipe and it's easy to scale up or down in proportion to the number of eggs. I use metric for everything else, especially post Brexit.
Metric measures are good for scientific calculations (brilliant, in fact) but they're not very human and a bit boring.
Imperial measures of yards, feet and inches are better for estimating as their origins relate to the human body itself, and they are also far more interesting.
Horses for courses.
I love the way they are all messed up. Cars are generally imperial, until you have to change a nut or talk about engine capacity, which has generally been in cc or litres. 🤷♂️
I use farenheit for above freezing, celsius for below!
I think it is good for brain training. It helps ward off dementia. It's like learning a second language.
I said if the first didn't work they would just switch to the second. Not the end of the world.
Yes because that's just the sort of government we want. Blundering on wasting time in the face of obvious deficiencies until forced into a U-turn. Especially now.
Yes that is the sort of government we want. Cracking straight on with things not wasting time dithering to decide and not being embarrassed about "u-turns" if a wrong move is made. Especially now.
They could have spent a few weeks or months in committee trying to figure out every possible problem or just crack on and within 24 hours of these problems being highlighted they said there was a Plan B now it's confirmed they're working on Plan B.
We need a competent government.
If two random posters on PB get it instantly what do you think that says about the government's competence?
You of all people I didn't expect to give the govt such a free pass. But I appreciate the virus has addled people's brains as well as the bodies of those directly affected.
I don't give the government a free pass. I think they're working spinning many plates in a fast moving environment. Mistakes will be made inevitably especially when it comes to IT. If someone says something can work I can see why they'd go with it and if someone else says it can't but it's already been developed by now then the logical thing to do is test it while simultaneously working on a Plan B.
I don't see a great difference between this and the failed antibody tests. Sometimes things don't work out but you need to be trying.
If you never make mistakes you aren't trying to do enough!
I don't think that cuts it right now. When working out how high the pasty tax should be or whether Jaffa Cakes are a cake or a biscuit (biscuit) that's fine.
Partly not their fault because governments for decades have been spin machines designed to perpetuate themselves rather than benefit us lot but also their fault because when it matters (and it matters now) they need to get the big calls right and so far it appears they have failed to do so.
But as some of us have been saying for some time, this government, and in particular this Prime Minister, is simply not cut out for a proper local crisis which affects British people in the UK. And so it seems to be proving.
I said if the first didn't work they would just switch to the second. Not the end of the world.
Yes because that's just the sort of government we want. Blundering on wasting time in the face of obvious deficiencies until forced into a U-turn. Especially now.
Yes that is the sort of government we want. Cracking straight on with things not wasting time dithering to decide and not being embarrassed about "u-turns" if a wrong move is made. Especially now.
They could have spent a few weeks or months in committee trying to figure out every possible problem or just crack on and within 24 hours of these problems being highlighted they said there was a Plan B now it's confirmed they're working on Plan B.
We need a competent government.
If two random posters on PB get it instantly what do you think that says about the government's competence?
You of all people I didn't expect to give the govt such a free pass. But I appreciate the virus has addled people's brains as well as the bodies of those directly affected.
I have real difficulty understanding the government's thinking on this app fiasco. Sandpit and eek understood almost immediately why it would be balls. Did nobody involved in the production of the app speak up and say it would be balls? Were they just ignored? For somebody who know fuck all about how apps are made it's just baffling.
Sandpit and eek understood yes but the app was already developed by that point. So what do you do? Scrap it and not trial it?
Those involved in production who were independent IT contractors clearly thought it would work.
Or you listen to the tech industry three weeks ago when they told you that your approach wasn't going to work properly.
Again, the app development is completely separate from the concepting. The developer on this scenario is justa code house, they build to a spec. The spec has public sector written all over it.
I said if the first didn't work they would just switch to the second. Not the end of the world.
Yes because that's just the sort of government we want. Blundering on wasting time in the face of obvious deficiencies until forced into a U-turn. Especially now.
Yes that is the sort of government we want. Cracking straight on with things not wasting time dithering to decide and not being embarrassed about "u-turns" if a wrong move is made. Especially now.
They could have spent a few weeks or months in committee trying to figure out every possible problem or just crack on and within 24 hours of these problems being highlighted they said there was a Plan B now it's confirmed they're working on Plan B.
We need a competent government.
If two random posters on PB get it instantly what do you think that says about the government's competence?
You of all people I didn't expect to give the govt such a free pass. But I appreciate the virus has addled people's brains as well as the bodies of those directly affected.
I have real difficulty understanding the government's thinking on this app fiasco. Sandpit and eek understood almost immediately why it would be balls. Did nobody involved in the production of the app speak up and say it would be balls? Were they just ignored? For somebody who know fuck all about how apps are made it's just baffling.
Sandpit and eek understood yes but the app was already developed by that point. So what do you do? Scrap it and not trial it?
Those involved in production who were independent IT contractors clearly thought it would work.
Except that it wasn't Sandpit and eek telling them it wouldn't work, it was Apple and Google.
On a slightly less happy note the Courier reported yesterday that 62% of Covid deaths in Angus took place in care homes. And that almost certainly understates the issue since some residents of care homes will have been taken to hospital and died there. 62%. Its an absolute national disgrace.
Is it?
Care homes are one of the only places in the country where social distancing is literally impossible. It also holds the very vulnerable and mass numbers of people. It's also the only place where the over 70s literally can't be shielded. If you were to design a virus that would affect care homes most it would look much like this.
It's almost more surprising the 38% that aren't in care homes.
They can be shielded. Some of the private care homes, for example, have their staff staying on site with no Covid deaths. And remember this is place of death. How many of that 38% caught Covid in their home and died in hospital despite the government's best efforts to keep them away? They have become the killing fields of our society.
I'm sorry but they can't be shielded. The homes frequently have and need dozens of staff and yes in some homes moving in staff may be possible but not others.
My wife works in a care home. Was she supposed to move away from our very young children for months on end? She has dozens of colleagues, where are they supposed to sleep as the home has no spare beds?
We can't just wave a magic wand and wish it away. My grandparents thankfully aren't in homes and are shielding. They're not having guests, they're not leaving their homes and are getting food dropped off. They have negligible risk.
In my wife's care home dozens of staff go into the home every single day and if they didn't the residents would die of neglect or starvation first. Thankfully the virus hasn't hit her home but it's remarkable it hasn't and more good luck than good management I suspect. The risk is immeasurably greater than for the self sufficient elderly.
And how much PPE do they have? How much training in how to use it? How many are tested and how often? Our fetish with the NHS has caused us to take our eye off the ball.
They didn't have much PPE at the start beyond gloves because they didn't normally need much. Within a week or so it was all delivered and they're using it every day now. They were all trained right at the start.
They weren't getting tested because there wasn't testing capacity. As of about two weeks ago they were all told they could get a test if they thought they needed it and how to get it.
But the PPE doesn't help as much as you'd hope. Eg she wears a mask all the time now but says that scares some of the residents who don't understand why (dementia they forget) while other residents because they're hard of hearing and have gotten used to lip reading now end up getting very close into her personal space because they can't understand what she's saying otherwise even when she speaks loudly.
People with dementia coming into close personal contact with many many staff will inevitably be more at risk than those shielding at home.
I qualified as a pharmacist in 1962, and we used BOTH the old Apothecaries system and metric, depending on when the medication being handled had been developed. Sometimes there were doses in both systems for the same drug. There was a very awkward number for converting Apothecaries/Imperial to Metric for solid doses forms and another for liquids. About 1967, IIRC, a decision was made to phase out the old Apothecaries system and go for metric, and there were meetings up and down the country to explain the system and the equivalents. Some older doctors never converted though and just occasionally one would have to explain to newly qualified pharmacists what 'old Dr X' wanted. The Apothecaries system had it's advantages in that it was almost impossible to make a mistake by a factor of 10, which I've seen done several times with metric.
Was Fahrenheit for body temperature until lockdown. Otherwise Celsius. Now Celsius all the way.
The great thing about Celsius, and the reason it has become standard, is because it’s simple and intuitive. Water boils at 100 degrees and freezes at 0 degrees (yes, I know it’s not as simple as that but in practice that’s the way we all think of it). Everyone can understand that.
Fahrenheit meanwhile is officially more confusing than Labour’s policy on private school taxation.
Private schools? Hmm. I wonder if they are on their way out, with or without the tax breaks. In this era of common struggle against enormous external threats, they seem increasingly out of place. Will take a while to work through, of course.
On temp, somewhat oddly I go with F for heat and C for cold. A warm, sunny day to me is "in the 70s" - the C equivalent just does not work in my head for some reason. However, for a cold crisp one, there the F is all wrong and I go with C. Here, I can explain why. It's because a very cold day is "fucking freezing" and I know water freezes at zero C, thus it will be a degree or two above or below that.
It’s astounding to think it’s ten years since the Labour defeat in 2010.
It feels like a lifetime ago.
Yes, my son had a class in modern studies yesterday about the rise and fall of new Labour. It felt more like a history topic to me. My wife read yesterday that Derek Draper has been on a ventilator for a month now. Not looking good.
I said if the first didn't work they would just switch to the second. Not the end of the world.
Yes because that's just the sort of government we want. Blundering on wasting time in the face of obvious deficiencies until forced into a U-turn. Especially now.
Yes that is the sort of government we want. Cracking straight on with things not wasting time dithering to decide and not being embarrassed about "u-turns" if a wrong move is made. Especially now.
They could have spent a few weeks or months in committee trying to figure out every possible problem or just crack on and within 24 hours of these problems being highlighted they said there was a Plan B now it's confirmed they're working on Plan B.
Or they could have listened to the tech industry three weeks ago and we'd have the app ready to go using the correct approach.
Who in the tech industry do you listen to? They listened to some in the tech industry who said they could get it to work then when others in the tech industry said it wouldn't they started working on Plan B.
If they'd ignored the warnings and had no Plan B then yes I'd be more concerned.
There is no plan b, when are you going to get it through your skull. They are only starting to concept the correct approach. That means at least three weeks until we get a beta test. This is a new plan a. This isn't a political argument where there's no real right answer, the people who were touting the original method are simply incompetent yes men. There is only one method that is viable, it's the pathway provided by the OS developers to hook into the system management of Bluetooth. Anyone who said we can get two unknown devices to reliably handshake via a third party app using BLE is an incompetent fool or more dangerously a fantasist.
We've had weeks of ignored warnings from the tech industry. Hopefully there's a proper investigation and everyone involved gets the sack.
They said there was a plan B already. And this sack anyone who makes a mistake or does a u turn mentality is part of what is wrong with this country. It's why decisions take months or years to make with committee after committee after committee never bloody getting anything done.
Just bloody do what you think is right and if it's wrong learn from your mistake so you don't make it again. That's the right attitude.
A good quote someone working for a multinational once said to me was he realised he'd made a mistake that would cost his company a million dollars. He informed his boss and said he'd hand in his resignation for the mistake. The boss said "why would I want you to resign? I've just spent a million dollars training you."
"Prof Dingwall said he had been told by a senior public health specialist that "we knew it was one metre but we doubled it to two because we did not think the British population would understand what one metre was and we could not trust them to observe it so we doubled it to be on the safe side"."
They did not think the public would understand one metre and were too pig-headed to call it a yard, or three feet, or the length of a supermarket trolley.
Anyone under 50 knows what a metre is more than they know what a yard is.
Football is the last global refuge of the imperial system - back 10 yards for a free kick, 12 yards from the penalty spot to the goal, which is eight yards wide and eight feet tall and lives in the 18 yard box!
A Cricket pitch is 22yards in Bangalore, Brisbane, Barbados and Brechin.
Another terrible legacy of the British empire probably.
If football is the bastion of imperial then horse racing is the bastion of medieval - furlongs , winning my necks etc
Hands?
But really, outside of your metropolitan elites my experience is whatever their age most people continue to (a) either use imperial or (b) have no fucking clue about weights and measures anyway. If anything, I would say my generation is less metricated than my father’s is. He often uses metric, and prefers it. I can use it, but I tend not to.
Distances, lengths/heights and draught drinks being in imperial is the main reason.
Im a complete mish mash.
Driving - miles Running - kilometers Height - imperial Weight - metric Beer - imperial Other drinks - metric
etc
Dont know if its good to be able to just choose what feels right for the scenario or if it would have been better to just stick with one.
I think most of us are, though I do find it a bit odd you don't weigh yourself in stones. What is the metric equivalent?
I use imperial for driving because that's how the road signs are written - I don't understand why we didn't switch to km like the Irish but I guess it's related to everything else that's wrong with this country, an absurd reluctance to embrace modernity and terrible fear of doing what other countries do in case we realise we're not the centre of the fucking universe. I use imperial for making pancakes because that's how I learned the recipe and it's easy to scale up or down in proportion to the number of eggs. I use metric for everything else, especially post Brexit.
Brexit is measured in metric?
It will be measured in pounds.
On the side of a bus.
But the bus is almost certainly a furrin one, no Whitworth threads or "bare 3/32nd of an inch".
It’s astounding to think it’s ten years since the Labour defeat in 2010.
It feels like a lifetime ago.
Yes, my son had a class in modern studies yesterday about the rise and fall of new Labour. It felt more like a history topic to me. My wife read yesterday that Derek Draper has been on a ventilator for a month now. Not looking good.
On a slightly less happy note the Courier reported yesterday that 62% of Covid deaths in Angus took place in care homes. And that almost certainly understates the issue since some residents of care homes will have been taken to hospital and died there. 62%. Its an absolute national disgrace.
Is it? Surely it depends what’s happening to non care home deaths? I have this discussion at work a lot.
What it says is that our attempts to protect the most vulnerable in our society have been inept, half-hearted and totally incompetent. So we had bed blockers moved out of wards with the Virus introduced into care homes without care packages. We had people ranting about nurses (and I have some sympathy) not being able to change their PPE often enough whilst those dealing with personal care in care homes had none (Wednesday's Courier had 3 local women on the front page who had caught Covid and died from working in Care Homes) and we have a very, very large number of people being signed up for DNR so that they never even make a hospital but simply die in their Home.
What this comes down to essentially is money. Our care for the elderly is done on a shoestring with every conceivable corner cut. When something like this comes along there is simply no capacity, no competence, no training, no equipment, no ability to isolate, nothing to prevent carnage. This virus finds the vulnerable sectors in society whether it is foreign workers in dormitories in Singapore or Care Home residents here and exploits them.
Social care needs transformational levels of funding. It is time to revisit May's ideas about how that could be done.
Whilst I get the general point, the specific stat is obviously misleading without context. It potentially confuses by getting the casual observer to think that 62% of people in care homes have died. Whereas actually it is a stat relative to overall deaths but says nothing about actual levels of deaths. 62% of 100 is much better than 20% of 500
I didn't say that 62% of people in care homes had died. What I am saying is that if we are looking at vectors where this virus is causing harm care homes make any other single vector almost irrelevant. It is our weak spot. Schools, not so much.
Care homes are very high risk yes but with the best will in the world they're going to be. And they can't be closed like schools or shielded like the elderly at home. Without the homes they die and that's why they're in a home.
Care home workers I have a lot of respect for. They're trying their best in very difficult circumstances.
Its interesting that some people who sort of agreed with Mr Thompson in the past now find his arguments much less persuasive.
The baby steps policy shows this is a government of cowards and teenagers whose sole 'policy' is the avoidance of bad headlines and blame for anything. A government that cedes responsibility and avoids accountability at every turn.
The irony is that they will run into far worse headlines down the road than they would have by abandoning this insane long lock down.
Johnson governs by the day. He gets up in the morning and thinks he can use his charm and vast communication skills to get him out of anything. And he doesn;t really care what that 'anything' is.
It’s astounding to think it’s ten years since the Labour defeat in 2010.
It feels like a lifetime ago.
Yes, my son had a class in modern studies yesterday about the rise and fall of new Labour. It felt more like a history topic to me. My wife read yesterday that Derek Draper has been on a ventilator for a month now. Not looking good.
Was Fahrenheit for body temperature until lockdown. Otherwise Celsius. Now Celsius all the way.
The great thing about Celsius, and the reason it has become standard, is because it’s simple and intuitive. Water boils at 100 degrees and freezes at 0 degrees (yes, I know it’s not as simple as that but in practice that’s the way we all think of it). Everyone can understand that.
Fahrenheit meanwhile is officially more confusing than Labour’s policy on private school taxation.
The disadvantage of other metric systems for ordinary people is that actually they neither look nor sound intuitive, and for all they are easy to multiply they’re a right bloody sod to divide.
Ultimately, that’s why I think they’ve never quite caught on. A mile a minute is a more useful and reasonable measurement than 1.66km a minute.
Running a 4 minute 1k is a lot easier than running a 4 minute mile!
It’s astounding to think it’s ten years since the Labour defeat in 2010.
It feels like a lifetime ago.
Yes, my son had a class in modern studies yesterday about the rise and fall of new Labour. It felt more like a history topic to me. My wife read yesterday that Derek Draper has been on a ventilator for a month now. Not looking good.
Why? Does he have Coronavirus?
Yes.
I didn’t know.
Dislike the man, but obviously wish him a recovery even though you wonder how much of a recovery it would be after a month on a ventilator.
It’s astounding to think it’s ten years since the Labour defeat in 2010.
It feels like a lifetime ago.
Yes, my son had a class in modern studies yesterday about the rise and fall of new Labour. It felt more like a history topic to me. My wife read yesterday that Derek Draper has been on a ventilator for a month now. Not looking good.
Why? Does he have Coronavirus?
Yes.
I didn’t know.
Dislike the man, but obviously wish him a recovery even though you wonder how much of a recovery it would be after a month on a ventilator.
Indeed. His lungs must be shot. As you say not a particularly likeable person but I wouldn't wish that on anyone.
I said if the first didn't work they would just switch to the second. Not the end of the world.
Yes because that's just the sort of government we want. Blundering on wasting time in the face of obvious deficiencies until forced into a U-turn. Especially now.
Yes that is the sort of government we want. Cracking straight on with things not wasting time dithering to decide and not being embarrassed about "u-turns" if a wrong move is made. Especially now.
They could have spent a few weeks or months in committee trying to figure out every possible problem or just crack on and within 24 hours of these problems being highlighted they said there was a Plan B now it's confirmed they're working on Plan B.
Or they could have listened to the tech industry three weeks ago and we'd have the app ready to go using the correct approach.
Who in the tech industry do you listen to? They listened to some in the tech industry who said they could get it to work then when others in the tech industry said it wouldn't they started working on Plan B.
If they'd ignored the warnings and had no Plan B then yes I'd be more concerned.
There is no plan b, when are you going to get it through your skull. They are only starting to concept the correct approach. That means at least three weeks until we get a beta test. This is a new plan a. This isn't a political argument where there's no real right answer, the people who were touting the original method are simply incompetent yes men. There is only one method that is viable, it's the pathway provided by the OS developers to hook into the system management of Bluetooth. Anyone who said we can get two unknown devices to reliably handshake via a third party app using BLE is an incompetent fool or more dangerously a fantasist.
We've had weeks of ignored warnings from the tech industry. Hopefully there's a proper investigation and everyone involved gets the sack.
They said there was a plan B already. And this sack anyone who makes a mistake or does a u turn mentality is part of what is wrong with this country. It's why decisions take months or years to make with committee after committee after committee never bloody getting anything done.
Just bloody do what you think is right and if it's wrong learn from your mistake so you don't make it again. That's the right attitude.
A good quote someone working for a multinational once said to me was he realised he'd made a mistake that would cost his company a million dollars. He informed his boss and said he'd hand in his resignation for the mistake. The boss said "why would I want you to resign? I've just spent a million dollars training you."
Except this is not that situation, the people involved went against industry advice, now they have to pay for that.
I said if the first didn't work they would just switch to the second. Not the end of the world.
Yes because that's just the sort of government we want. Blundering on wasting time in the face of obvious deficiencies until forced into a U-turn. Especially now.
Yes that is the sort of government we want. Cracking straight on with things not wasting time dithering to decide and not being embarrassed about "u-turns" if a wrong move is made. Especially now.
They could have spent a few weeks or months in committee trying to figure out every possible problem or just crack on and within 24 hours of these problems being highlighted they said there was a Plan B now it's confirmed they're working on Plan B.
We need a competent government.
If two random posters on PB get it instantly what do you think that says about the government's competence?
You of all people I didn't expect to give the govt such a free pass. But I appreciate the virus has addled people's brains as well as the bodies of those directly affected.
I don't give the government a free pass. I think they're working spinning many plates in a fast moving environment. Mistakes will be made inevitably especially when it comes to IT. If someone says something can work I can see why they'd go with it and if someone else says it can't but it's already been developed by now then the logical thing to do is test it while simultaneously working on a Plan B.
I don't see a great difference between this and the failed antibody tests. Sometimes things don't work out but you need to be trying.
If you never make mistakes you aren't trying to do enough!
I don't think that cuts it right now. When working out how high the pasty tax should be or whether Jaffa Cakes are a cake or a biscuit (biscuit) that's fine.
Partly not their fault because governments for decades have been spin machines designed to perpetuate themselves rather than benefit us lot but also their fault because when it matters (and it matters now) they need to get the big calls right and so far it appears they have failed to do so.
But as some of us have been saying for some time, this government, and in particular this Prime Minister, is simply not cut out for a proper local crisis which affects British people in the UK. And so it seems to be proving.
I think it cuts it now more than ever. There's less time for deliberation or committees so more mistakes will be made. A refusal to u turn when mistakes are made would be far far worse.
I'd rather a government trying it's best willing to fail and move on than a sclerotic behemoth only doing what is right after the 30th committee gives it the green light.
According to Guido a few weeks ago, Arron Banks and Darren Grimes are seriously looking at a private prosecution against the Electoral Commission. Get the popcorn ready for that one!
Frankly for any kind of physical activity using Kilometres sounds wimpish
"The whole 9 yards" is better than the whole 9 metres (which strangely goes from sounding really tough to sounding like something you do to mow the lawn )
"I ran 3 miles today" gets people to think "wow he must be fit" "I ran 5K today " sounds like its all jolly hockey sticks
And the Proclaimers song saying " I would walk 500 miles to see " as opposed to " I would nearly 800 kilometres" goes from sounding "deranged obsessive but obviously fit stalker " to " fking walking nerd"
On a slightly less happy note the Courier reported yesterday that 62% of Covid deaths in Angus took place in care homes. And that almost certainly understates the issue since some residents of care homes will have been taken to hospital and died there. 62%. Its an absolute national disgrace.
Is it? Surely it depends what’s happening to non care home deaths? I have this discussion at work a lot.
What it says is that our attempts to protect the most vulnerable in our society have been inept, half-hearted and totally incompetent. So we had bed blockers moved out of wards with the Virus introduced into care homes without care packages. We had people ranting about nurses (and I have some sympathy) not being able to change their PPE often enough whilst those dealing with personal care in care homes had none (Wednesday's Courier had 3 local women on the front page who had caught Covid and died from working in Care Homes) and we have a very, very large number of people being signed up for DNR so that they never even make a hospital but simply die in their Home.
What this comes down to essentially is money. Our care for the elderly is done on a shoestring with every conceivable corner cut. When something like this comes along there is simply no capacity, no competence, no training, no equipment, no ability to isolate, nothing to prevent carnage. This virus finds the vulnerable sectors in society whether it is foreign workers in dormitories in Singapore or Care Home residents here and exploits them.
Social care needs transformational levels of funding. It is time to revisit May's ideas about how that could be done.
Whilst I get the general point, the specific stat is obviously misleading without context. It potentially confuses by getting the casual observer to think that 62% of people in care homes have died. Whereas actually it is a stat relative to overall deaths but says nothing about actual levels of deaths. 62% of 100 is much better than 20% of 500
I didn't say that 62% of people in care homes had died. What I am saying is that if we are looking at vectors where this virus is causing harm care homes make any other single vector almost irrelevant. It is our weak spot. Schools, not so much.
Care homes are very high risk yes but with the best will in the world they're going to be. And they can't be closed like schools or shielded like the elderly at home. Without the homes they die and that's why they're in a home.
Care home workers I have a lot of respect for. They're trying their best in very difficult circumstances.
I have huge respect for them. I just feel that they and the residents have been badly let down.
It’s astounding to think it’s ten years since the Labour defeat in 2010.
It feels like a lifetime ago.
Yes, my son had a class in modern studies yesterday about the rise and fall of new Labour. It felt more like a history topic to me. My wife read yesterday that Derek Draper has been on a ventilator for a month now. Not looking good.
Why? Does he have Coronavirus?
Yes.
I didn’t know.
Dislike the man, but obviously wish him a recovery even though you wonder how much of a recovery it would be after a month on a ventilator.
Indeed. His lungs must be shot. As you say not a particularly likeable person but I wouldn't wish that on anyone.
I tend to agree but I can think of one possible exception.
Was Fahrenheit for body temperature until lockdown. Otherwise Celsius. Now Celsius all the way.
The great thing about Celsius, and the reason it has become standard, is because it’s simple and intuitive. Water boils at 100 degrees and freezes at 0 degrees (yes, I know it’s not as simple as that but in practice that’s the way we all think of it). Everyone can understand that.
Fahrenheit meanwhile is officially more confusing than Labour’s policy on private school taxation.
The disadvantage of other metric systems for ordinary people is that actually they neither look nor sound intuitive, and for all they are easy to multiply they’re a right bloody sod to divide.
Ultimately, that’s why I think they’ve never quite caught on. A mile a minute is a more useful and reasonable measurement than 1.66km a minute.
Running a 4 minute 1k is a lot easier than running a 4 minute mile!
Easier but not easy. 9.3mph for 4 minutes. Not sure I could do that anymore, I could have up to about 45.
It’s astounding to think it’s ten years since the Labour defeat in 2010.
It feels like a lifetime ago.
Yes, my son had a class in modern studies yesterday about the rise and fall of new Labour. It felt more like a history topic to me. My wife read yesterday that Derek Draper has been on a ventilator for a month now. Not looking good.
Why? Does he have Coronavirus?
Yes.
I didn’t know.
Dislike the man, but obviously wish him a recovery even though you wonder how much of a recovery it would be after a month on a ventilator.
To give him his due, I think that Dolly was one individual from the underbelly of New Labour who managed to reinvent himself as a decent human being. There has been the occasional comment from his wife Kate Garraway in the press.
I said if the first didn't work they would just switch to the second. Not the end of the world.
Yes because that's just the sort of government we want. Blundering on wasting time in the face of obvious deficiencies until forced into a U-turn. Especially now.
Yes that is the sort of government we want. Cracking straight on with things not wasting time dithering to decide and not being embarrassed about "u-turns" if a wrong move is made. Especially now.
They could have spent a few weeks or months in committee trying to figure out every possible problem or just crack on and within 24 hours of these problems being highlighted they said there was a Plan B now it's confirmed they're working on Plan B.
We need a competent government.
If two random posters on PB get it instantly what do you think that says about the government's competence?
You of all people I didn't expect to give the govt such a free pass. But I appreciate the virus has addled people's brains as well as the bodies of those directly affected.
I don't give the government a free pass. I think they're working spinning many plates in a fast moving environment. Mistakes will be made inevitably especially when it comes to IT. If someone says something can work I can see why they'd go with it and if someone else says it can't but it's already been developed by now then the logical thing to do is test it while simultaneously working on a Plan B.
I don't see a great difference between this and the failed antibody tests. Sometimes things don't work out but you need to be trying.
If you never make mistakes you aren't trying to do enough!
I don't think that cuts it right now. When working out how high the pasty tax should be or whether Jaffa Cakes are a cake or a biscuit (biscuit) that's fine.
Partly not their fault because governments for decades have been spin machines designed to perpetuate themselves rather than benefit us lot but also their fault because when it matters (and it matters now) they need to get the big calls right and so far it appears they have failed to do so.
But as some of us have been saying for some time, this government, and in particular this Prime Minister, is simply not cut out for a proper local crisis which affects British people in the UK. And so it seems to be proving.
I think it cuts it now more than ever. There's less time for deliberation or committees so more mistakes will be made. A refusal to u turn when mistakes are made would be far far worse.
I'd rather a government trying it's best willing to fail and move on than a sclerotic behemoth only doing what is right after the 30th committee gives it the green light.
Except we got advice from industry experts and the OS makers and ignored it. This isn't a situation where we were doing something unknown or the app was a shot in the dark. We are dealing with known quantities. You're trying to dress this up as a decision made in emergency, but it wasn't. We've known we would need this app since the beginning of February. We've known what the OS limitations of Android and especially iOS are. We've known that both OS makers would and now have delivered a pathway to access what we needed to make the app work. We've had advice from other major tech industry players that the OS developer method is the only game in town.
Who was involved in the decision to ignore all of these known factors and who gave the go ahead for our shot in the dark when it didn't need to be?
These people should not be anywhere near the decision making process again.
I said if the first didn't work they would just switch to the second. Not the end of the world.
Yes because that's just the sort of government we want. Blundering on wasting time in the face of obvious deficiencies until forced into a U-turn. Especially now.
Yes that is the sort of government we want. Cracking straight on with things not wasting time dithering to decide and not being embarrassed about "u-turns" if a wrong move is made. Especially now.
They could have spent a few weeks or months in committee trying to figure out every possible problem or just crack on and within 24 hours of these problems being highlighted they said there was a Plan B now it's confirmed they're working on Plan B.
We need a competent government.
If two random posters on PB get it instantly what do you think that says about the government's competence?
You of all people I didn't expect to give the govt such a free pass. But I appreciate the virus has addled people's brains as well as the bodies of those directly affected.
I don't give the government a free pass. I think they're working spinning many plates in a fast moving environment. Mistakes will be made inevitably especially when it comes to IT. If someone says something can work I can see why they'd go with it and if someone else says it can't but it's already been developed by now then the logical thing to do is test it while simultaneously working on a Plan B.
I don't see a great difference between this and the failed antibody tests. Sometimes things don't work out but you need to be trying.
If you never make mistakes you aren't trying to do enough!
I don't think that cuts it right now. When working out how high the pasty tax should be or whether Jaffa Cakes are a cake or a biscuit (biscuit) that's fine.
Partly not their fault because governments for decades have been spin machines designed to perpetuate themselves rather than benefit us lot but also their fault because when it matters (and it matters now) they need to get the big calls right and so far it appears they have failed to do so.
But as some of us have been saying for some time, this government, and in particular this Prime Minister, is simply not cut out for a proper local crisis which affects British people in the UK. And so it seems to be proving.
I think it cuts it now more than ever. There's less time for deliberation or committees so more mistakes will be made. A refusal to u turn when mistakes are made would be far far worse.
I'd rather a government trying it's best willing to fail and move on than a sclerotic behemoth only doing what is right after the 30th committee gives it the green light.
I said if the first didn't work they would just switch to the second. Not the end of the world.
Yes because that's just the sort of government we want. Blundering on wasting time in the face of obvious deficiencies until forced into a U-turn. Especially now.
Yes that is the sort of government we want. Cracking straight on with things not wasting time dithering to decide and not being embarrassed about "u-turns" if a wrong move is made. Especially now.
They could have spent a few weeks or months in committee trying to figure out every possible problem or just crack on and within 24 hours of these problems being highlighted they said there was a Plan B now it's confirmed they're working on Plan B.
Or they could have listened to the tech industry three weeks ago and we'd have the app ready to go using the correct approach.
Who in the tech industry do you listen to? They listened to some in the tech industry who said they could get it to work then when others in the tech industry said it wouldn't they started working on Plan B.
If they'd ignored the warnings and had no Plan B then yes I'd be more concerned.
There is no plan b, when are you going to get it through your skull. They are only starting to concept the correct approach. That means at least three weeks until we get a beta test. This is a new plan a. This isn't a political argument where there's no real right answer, the people who were touting the original method are simply incompetent yes men. There is only one method that is viable, it's the pathway provided by the OS developers to hook into the system management of Bluetooth. Anyone who said we can get two unknown devices to reliably handshake via a third party app using BLE is an incompetent fool or more dangerously a fantasist.
We've had weeks of ignored warnings from the tech industry. Hopefully there's a proper investigation and everyone involved gets the sack.
Goodness I hope you're wrong.
We've had numerous wrong calls already and have fallen weeks behind other countries in the timetable for recovery. It looked at least that finally we had a viable strategy for recovery, finally there was some hope of getting out of this soon. Now if you're right there's been another wrong call that will set us back another couple of weeks. I'm not convinced about the supposed recruitment of those 18,000 trackers either - when is that actually going to become real rather than imagined and why did it not start much earlier? No wonder they are damping down expectations today. It's not the individual wrong calls, it's the serial incompetance across the board that is getting to me, combined with the continuing attempts to window dress in the face of reality.
According to Guido a few weeks ago, Arron Banks and Darren Grimes are seriously looking at a private prosecution against the Electoral Commission. Get the popcorn ready for that one!
Ah, Guido...
I'll give £20 to your favourite charity if that comes to pass.
I said if the first didn't work they would just switch to the second. Not the end of the world.
Yes because that's just the sort of government we want. Blundering on wasting time in the face of obvious deficiencies until forced into a U-turn. Especially now.
Yes that is the sort of government we want. Cracking straight on with things not wasting time dithering to decide and not being embarrassed about "u-turns" if a wrong move is made. Especially now.
They could have spent a few weeks or months in committee trying to figure out every possible problem or just crack on and within 24 hours of these problems being highlighted they said there was a Plan B now it's confirmed they're working on Plan B.
Or they could have listened to the tech industry three weeks ago and we'd have the app ready to go using the correct approach.
Who in the tech industry do you listen to? They listened to some in the tech industry who said they could get it to work then when others in the tech industry said it wouldn't they started working on Plan B.
If they'd ignored the warnings and had no Plan B then yes I'd be more concerned.
There is no plan b, when are you going to get it through your skull. They are only starting to concept the correct approach. That means at least three weeks until we get a beta test. This is a new plan a. This isn't a political argument where there's no real right answer, the people who were touting the original method are simply incompetent yes men. There is only one method that is viable, it's the pathway provided by the OS developers to hook into the system management of Bluetooth. Anyone who said we can get two unknown devices to reliably handshake via a third party app using BLE is an incompetent fool or more dangerously a fantasist.
We've had weeks of ignored warnings from the tech industry. Hopefully there's a proper investigation and everyone involved gets the sack.
They said there was a plan B already. And this sack anyone who makes a mistake or does a u turn mentality is part of what is wrong with this country. It's why decisions take months or years to make with committee after committee after committee never bloody getting anything done.
Just bloody do what you think is right and if it's wrong learn from your mistake so you don't make it again. That's the right attitude.
A good quote someone working for a multinational once said to me was he realised he'd made a mistake that would cost his company a million dollars. He informed his boss and said he'd hand in his resignation for the mistake. The boss said "why would I want you to resign? I've just spent a million dollars training you."
Except this is not that situation, the people involved went against industry advice, now they have to pay for that.
They went with industry contractors who said they can make it work. As did many other nations.
If the contractors were wrong so badly then don't pay them.
Just wanted to say thank you to Robert for the article. I am taking an interest in the senate and house competitions, but have little personal knowledge. Can you do something on the house competition? I read recently that the house is now looking like less than a handful of gains in possibly in either direction.
According to Guido a few weeks ago, Arron Banks and Darren Grimes are seriously looking at a private prosecution against the Electoral Commission. Get the popcorn ready for that one!
The politically motivated nature of these complaints and allegations has been troubling, all the more so since it is belatedly admitted that there is nothing to them.
On a slightly less happy note the Courier reported yesterday that 62% of Covid deaths in Angus took place in care homes. And that almost certainly understates the issue since some residents of care homes will have been taken to hospital and died there. 62%. Its an absolute national disgrace.
Is it? Surely it depends what’s happening to non care home deaths? I have this discussion at work a lot.
What it says is that our attempts to protect the most vulnerable in our society have been inept, half-hearted and totally incompetent. So we had bed blockers moved out of wards with the Virus introduced into care homes without care packages. We had people ranting about nurses (and I have some sympathy) not being able to change their PPE often enough whilst those dealing with personal care in care homes had none (Wednesday's Courier had 3 local women on the front page who had caught Covid and died from working in Care Homes) and we have a very, very large number of people being signed up for DNR so that they never even make a hospital but simply die in their Home.
What this comes down to essentially is money. Our care for the elderly is done on a shoestring with every conceivable corner cut. When something like this comes along there is simply no capacity, no competence, no training, no equipment, no ability to isolate, nothing to prevent carnage. This virus finds the vulnerable sectors in society whether it is foreign workers in dormitories in Singapore or Care Home residents here and exploits them.
Social care needs transformational levels of funding. It is time to revisit May's ideas about how that could be done.
Whilst I get the general point, the specific stat is obviously misleading without context. It potentially confuses by getting the casual observer to think that 62% of people in care homes have died. Whereas actually it is a stat relative to overall deaths but says nothing about actual levels of deaths. 62% of 100 is much better than 20% of 500
I didn't say that 62% of people in care homes had died. What I am saying is that if we are looking at vectors where this virus is causing harm care homes make any other single vector almost irrelevant. It is our weak spot. Schools, not so much.
Care homes are very high risk yes but with the best will in the world they're going to be. And they can't be closed like schools or shielded like the elderly at home. Without the homes they die and that's why they're in a home.
What people shouldn't pretend is that we can have a strategy of letting the less vulnerable "get on with their lives" while shielding the vulnerable. A large proportion of the vulnerable can't be shielded, because they depend on the less vulnerable for care.
I said if the first didn't work they would just switch to the second. Not the end of the world.
Yes because that's just the sort of government we want. Blundering on wasting time in the face of obvious deficiencies until forced into a U-turn. Especially now.
Yes that is the sort of government we want. Cracking straight on with things not wasting time dithering to decide and not being embarrassed about "u-turns" if a wrong move is made. Especially now.
They could have spent a few weeks or months in committee trying to figure out every possible problem or just crack on and within 24 hours of these problems being highlighted they said there was a Plan B now it's confirmed they're working on Plan B.
We need a competent government. If two random posters on PB get it instantly what do you think that says about the government's competence? You of all people I didn't expect to give the govt such a free pass. But I appreciate the virus has addled people's brains as well as the bodies of those directly affected.
I don't give the government a free pass. I think they're working spinning many plates in a fast moving environment. Mistakes will be made inevitably especially when it comes to IT. If someone says something can work I can see why they'd go with it and if someone else says it can't but it's already been developed by now then the logical thing to do is test it while simultaneously working on a Plan B.
I don't see a great difference between this and the failed antibody tests. Sometimes things don't work out but you need to be trying.
If you never make mistakes you aren't trying to do enough!
I don't think that cuts it right now. When working out how high the pasty tax should be or whether Jaffa Cakes are a cake or a biscuit (biscuit) that's fine.
Partly not their fault because governments for decades have been spin machines designed to perpetuate themselves rather than benefit us lot but also their fault because when it matters (and it matters now) they need to get the big calls right and so far it appears they have failed to do so.
But as some of us have been saying for some time, this government, and in particular this Prime Minister, is simply not cut out for a proper local crisis which affects British people in the UK. And so it seems to be proving.
I think it cuts it now more than ever. There's less time for deliberation or committees so more mistakes will be made. A refusal to u turn when mistakes are made would be far far worse.
I'd rather a government trying it's best willing to fail and move on than a sclerotic behemoth only doing what is right after the 30th committee gives it the green light.
Except we got advice from industry experts and the OS makers and ignored it. This isn't a situation where we were doing something unknown or the app was a shot in the dark. We are dealing with known quantities. You're trying to dress this up as a decision made in emergency, but it wasn't. We've known we would need this app since the beginning of February. We've known what the OS limitations of Android and especially iOS are. We've known that both OS makers would and now have delivered a pathway to access what we needed to make the app work. We've had advice from other major tech industry players that the OS developer method is the only game in town. Who was involved in the decision to ignore all of these known factors and who gave the go ahead for our shot in the dark when it didn't need to be? These people should not be anywhere near the decision making process again.
Hazarding a guess, I would go for Johnson and Cummings, and you are quite right. They should not be anywhere near the decision making process.
On a slightly less happy note the Courier reported yesterday that 62% of Covid deaths in Angus took place in care homes. And that almost certainly understates the issue since some residents of care homes will have been taken to hospital and died there. 62%. Its an absolute national disgrace.
Is it? Surely it depends what’s happening to non care home deaths? I have this discussion at work a lot.
What it says is that our attempts to protect the most vulnerable in our society have been inept, half-hearted and totally incompetent. So we had bed blockers moved out of wards with the Virus introduced into care homes without care packages. We had people ranting about nurses (and I have some sympathy) not being able to change their PPE often enough whilst those dealing with personal care in care homes had none (Wednesday's Courier had 3 local women on the front page who had caught Covid and died from working in Care Homes) and we have a very, very large number of people being signed up for DNR so that they never even make a hospital but simply die in their Home.
What this comes down to essentially is money. Our care for the elderly is done on a shoestring with every conceivable corner cut. When something like this comes along there is simply no capacity, no competence, no training, no equipment, no ability to isolate, nothing to prevent carnage. This virus finds the vulnerable sectors in society whether it is foreign workers in dormitories in Singapore or Care Home residents here and exploits them.
Social care needs transformational levels of funding. It is time to revisit May's ideas about how that could be done.
Whilst I get the general point, the specific stat is obviously misleading without context. It potentially confuses by getting the casual observer to think that 62% of people in care homes have died. Whereas actually it is a stat relative to overall deaths but says nothing about actual levels of deaths. 62% of 100 is much better than 20% of 500
I didn't say that 62% of people in care homes had died. What I am saying is that if we are looking at vectors where this virus is causing harm care homes make any other single vector almost irrelevant. It is our weak spot. Schools, not so much.
Care homes are very high risk yes but with the best will in the world they're going to be. And they can't be closed like schools or shielded like the elderly at home. Without the homes they die and that's why they're in a home.
What people shouldn't pretend is that we can have a strategy of letting the less vulnerable "get on with their lives" while shielding the vulnerable. A large proportion of the vulnerable can't be shielded, because they depend on the less vulnerable for care.
I said if the first didn't work they would just switch to the second. Not the end of the world.
Yes because that's just the sort of government we want. Blundering on wasting time in the face of obvious deficiencies until forced into a U-turn. Especially now.
Yes that is the sort of government we want. Cracking straight on with things not wasting time dithering to decide and not being embarrassed about "u-turns" if a wrong move is made. Especially now.
They could have spent a few weeks or months in committee trying to figure out every possible problem or just crack on and within 24 hours of these problems being highlighted they said there was a Plan B now it's confirmed they're working on Plan B.
Or they could have listened to the tech industry three weeks ago and we'd have the app ready to go using the correct approach.
Who in the tech industry do you listen to? They listened to some in the tech industry who said they could get it to work then when others in the tech industry said it wouldn't they started working on Plan B.
If they'd ignored the warnings and had no Plan B then yes I'd be more concerned.
There is no plan b, when are you going to get it through your skull. They are only starting to concept the correct approach. That means at least three weeks until we get a beta test. This is a new plan a. This isn't a political argument where there's no real right answer, the people who were touting the original method are simply incompetent yes men. There is only one method that is viable, it's the pathway provided by the OS developers to hook into the system management of Bluetooth. Anyone who said we can get two unknown devices to reliably handshake via a third party app using BLE is an incompetent fool or more dangerously a fantasist.
We've had weeks of ignored warnings from the tech industry. Hopefully there's a proper investigation and everyone involved gets the sack.
They said there was a plan B already. And this sack anyone who makes a mistake or does a u turn mentality is part of what is wrong with this country. It's why decisions take months or years to make with committee after committee after committee never bloody getting anything done.
Just bloody do what you think is right and if it's wrong learn from your mistake so you don't make it again. That's the right attitude.
A good quote someone working for a multinational once said to me was he realised he'd made a mistake that would cost his company a million dollars. He informed his boss and said he'd hand in his resignation for the mistake. The boss said "why would I want you to resign? I've just spent a million dollars training you."
Except this is not that situation, the people involved went against industry advice, now they have to pay for that.
They went with industry contractors who said they can make it work. As did many other nations.
If the contractors were wrong so badly then don't pay them.
They went with people who said what the ministers wanted to hear. That's rarely a good basis for taking advice, however common it may be.
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Contract tracing is to break the transmission chain. Random testing is for information. Two completely different purposes.
Care homes are one of the only places in the country where social distancing is literally impossible. It also holds the very vulnerable and mass numbers of people. It's also the only place where the over 70s literally can't be shielded. If you were to design a virus that would affect care homes most it would look much like this.
It's almost more surprising the 38% that aren't in care homes.
It's a serious, serious failing and your dismissive attitude is both disappointing and unsurprising.
The worst part is that the government has been screamed at by the tech industry for weeks that their approach wouldn't work. That lack of dialogue between the government and the people has become typical in this crisis and time and again we've seen that the government and its experts haven't got a clue.
I did say to my wife that it is time to stop as it loses its impact and it cannot go on every thursday throughout covid 19
As far as Starmer is concerned I was surprised and disappointed at his first misstep
Mind you, if had been Boris the media would have it on repeat every half hour through today
What this comes down to essentially is money. Our care for the elderly is done on a shoestring with every conceivable corner cut. When something like this comes along there is simply no capacity, no competence, no training, no equipment, no ability to isolate, nothing to prevent carnage. This virus finds the vulnerable sectors in society whether it is foreign workers in dormitories in Singapore or Care Home residents here and exploits them.
Social care needs transformational levels of funding. It is time to revisit May's ideas about how that could be done.
They could have spent a few weeks or months in committee trying to figure out every possible problem or just crack on and within 24 hours of these problems being highlighted they said there was a Plan B now it's confirmed they're working on Plan B.
I've been generally supportive of what the government has done in the past few months, decisions taken are really easy to judge with 20/20 hindsight. This one was a definite screw-up though, the head of NHSX is going to have a very hard time telling the Select Committee why they took the approach they did with no backup.
The first app was designed by people in the tech industry not NHS staff.
If two random posters on PB get it instantly what do you think that says about the government's competence?
You of all people I didn't expect to give the govt such a free pass. But I appreciate the virus has addled people's brains as well as the bodies of those directly affected.
Every week we spend in lockdown costs 1% of GDP. That's not a small number. This delay will cost us three weeks by my estimate, that's £65bn taken off the nation's wealth, "not much". Your argument is laughable.
I use imperial for making pancakes because that's how I learned the recipe and it's easy to scale up or down in proportion to the number of eggs.
I use metric for everything else, especially post Brexit.
My wife works in a care home. Was she supposed to move away from our very young children for months on end? She has dozens of colleagues, where are they supposed to sleep as the home has no spare beds?
We can't just wave a magic wand and wish it away. My grandparents thankfully aren't in homes and are shielding. They're not having guests, they're not leaving their homes and are getting food dropped off. They have negligible risk.
In my wife's care home dozens of staff go into the home every single day and if they didn't the residents would die of neglect or starvation first. Thankfully the virus hasn't hit her home but it's remarkable it hasn't and more good luck than good management I suspect. The risk is immeasurably greater than for the self sufficient elderly.
We now, belatedly, have the testing capacity, we now have the numbers down to more manageable levels, we need an app that makes trace and isolate work. A delay in this third element means more economic damage, more unemployment and, ultimately, more death. Disappointing.
If they'd ignored the warnings and had no Plan B then yes I'd be more concerned.
I suppose the Brexiteer response could be we need to bring back Sovereigns.
My son in laws father (87) has just been admitted to a care home following a covid test and he is in a poor way health wise
Of course in China and large populations elsewhere they do not exist as the family is the primary carer
It was wrong to allow patients to go from hospital to care homes untested but I suspect the enquiry in due course will see the advice and the government action was wholly concentrated on stopping the NHS mirroring Italy
I would just say 'killing fields' is a harsh description as even in normal times most residents pass away either in them or in hospital
I was at school when we had recently moved from Imperial to what from memory was CGS units? Have I got that right? Consequently I do jump between Calories and Joules re energy.
I don't see a great difference between this and the failed antibody tests. Sometimes things don't work out but you need to be trying.
If you never make mistakes you aren't trying to do enough!
What I found curious was that the government does not, so far as I know, go in for apps much. Yet it was proposing to depart from this with an app of huge importance that appeared to conflict with how the app hosts ordinarily operated. As a non-expert, that sounded exceptionally high-risk to me from the start. But since it's not my area I imagined I was wrong.
We've had weeks of ignored warnings from the tech industry. Hopefully there's a proper investigation and everyone involved gets the sack.
The AfD is opposed though on the grounds it marks a heavy defeat for Germany and loss of German territory
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-52574748
Those involved in production who were independent IT contractors clearly thought it would work.
Partly not their fault because governments for decades have been spin machines designed to perpetuate themselves rather than benefit us lot but also their fault because when it matters (and it matters now) they need to get the big calls right and so far it appears they have failed to do so.
But as some of us have been saying for some time, this government, and in particular this Prime Minister, is simply not cut out for a proper local crisis which affects British people in the UK. And so it seems to be proving.
Again, the app development is completely separate from the concepting. The developer on this scenario is justa code house, they build to a spec. The spec has public sector written all over it.
It feels like a lifetime ago.
They weren't getting tested because there wasn't testing capacity. As of about two weeks ago they were all told they could get a test if they thought they needed it and how to get it.
But the PPE doesn't help as much as you'd hope. Eg she wears a mask all the time now but says that scares some of the residents who don't understand why (dementia they forget) while other residents because they're hard of hearing and have gotten used to lip reading now end up getting very close into her personal space because they can't understand what she's saying otherwise even when she speaks loudly.
People with dementia coming into close personal contact with many many staff will inevitably be more at risk than those shielding at home.
About 1967, IIRC, a decision was made to phase out the old Apothecaries system and go for metric, and there were meetings up and down the country to explain the system and the equivalents. Some older doctors never converted though and just occasionally one would have to explain to newly qualified pharmacists what 'old Dr X' wanted.
The Apothecaries system had it's advantages in that it was almost impossible to make a mistake by a factor of 10, which I've seen done several times with metric.
On temp, somewhat oddly I go with F for heat and C for cold. A warm, sunny day to me is "in the 70s" - the C equivalent just does not work in my head for some reason. However, for a cold crisp one, there the F is all wrong and I go with C. Here, I can explain why. It's because a very cold day is "fucking freezing" and I know water freezes at zero C, thus it will be a degree or two above or below that.
https://twitter.com/Politics_Polls/status/1258581547386580993?s=20
Just bloody do what you think is right and if it's wrong learn from your mistake so you don't make it again. That's the right attitude.
A good quote someone working for a multinational once said to me was he realised he'd made a mistake that would cost his company a million dollars. He informed his boss and said he'd hand in his resignation for the mistake. The boss said "why would I want you to resign? I've just spent a million dollars training you."
Which is hardly less staggering.
Care home workers I have a lot of respect for. They're trying their best in very difficult circumstances.
And who was sitting next to Mandy?
Edit - also quite funny to see her talking about Labour’s loss of majority as a loss of legitimacy!
The baby steps policy shows this is a government of cowards and teenagers whose sole 'policy' is the avoidance of bad headlines and blame for anything. A government that cedes responsibility and avoids accountability at every turn.
The irony is that they will run into far worse headlines down the road than they would have by abandoning this insane long lock down.
Johnson governs by the day. He gets up in the morning and thinks he can use his charm and vast communication skills to get him out of anything. And he doesn;t really care what that 'anything' is.
https://twitter.com/SamCoatesSky/status/1258688833459236865
https://twitter.com/carolynharris24/status/1258389826140884995?s=20
Dislike the man, but obviously wish him a recovery even though you wonder how much of a recovery it would be after a month on a ventilator.
I'd rather a government trying it's best willing to fail and move on than a sclerotic behemoth only doing what is right after the 30th committee gives it the green light.
"The whole 9 yards" is better than the whole 9 metres (which strangely goes from sounding really tough to sounding like something you do to mow the lawn )
"I ran 3 miles today" gets people to think "wow he must be fit" "I ran 5K today " sounds like its all jolly hockey sticks
And the Proclaimers song saying " I would walk 500 miles to see " as opposed to " I would nearly 800 kilometres" goes from sounding "deranged obsessive but obviously fit stalker " to " fking walking nerd"
Piers Morgan was a pig ignorant stuck up wanker in 2010.
And he still is.
https://twitter.com/darrengrimes_/status/1258679788778262529?s=20
https://twitter.com/darrengrimes_/status/1258680836762804226?s=20
Who was involved in the decision to ignore all of these known factors and who gave the go ahead for our shot in the dark when it didn't need to be?
These people should not be anywhere near the decision making process again.
We've had numerous wrong calls already and have fallen weeks behind other countries in the timetable for recovery. It looked at least that finally we had a viable strategy for recovery, finally there was some hope of getting out of this soon. Now if you're right there's been another wrong call that will set us back another couple of weeks. I'm not convinced about the supposed recruitment of those 18,000 trackers either - when is that actually going to become real rather than imagined and why did it not start much earlier? No wonder they are damping down expectations today. It's not the individual wrong calls, it's the serial incompetance across the board that is getting to me, combined with the continuing attempts to window dress in the face of reality.
I'll give £20 to your favourite charity if that comes to pass.
If the contractors were wrong so badly then don't pay them.