For comparison, on the worst day of the outbreak in the UK, we recorded 8,600 cases, and then it fell away quite steeply. Florida is still going up fast.
A disaster is potentially unfolding there
I wonder if it's too late for Trump to get behind masks. Perhaps if they were red masks, with Make America Great Again on them.
I'm really not clear on the right wing objection to masks. You protect yourself with a gun, why not protect yourself with a mask? It has the added benefit of stopping the deep state from applying facial recognition software on you successfully. Lockdown - I completely see the objection to. Masks, not so much.
Indeed: especially as masks dramatically reduce the risk of needing lockdown.
Having thought about this, I think there are two reasons Trump hates masks:
1. It reminds him there is a problem. He's a massive fan of the Power of Positive Thinking (the book), and it has over the years worked for him. Wearing a mask goes against this, because it is in effect negative speech.
2. He's a bit vain. He thinks he looks good, and he thinks he'd look less good (and more scared) in a mask. And if he's not going to wear a mask, other people shouldn't either.
But it's also dumb. Modest mask etiquette reduces R substantially.
Masks are hugely uncomfortable, and a very significant social barrier.
I only wear them in close proximity environments in public (like trains or the tube) and I possibly would in a busy office too.
Otherwise, it's a rather dystopian placebo.
Masks are not really to protect you (they’re pretty crap at that role, although there is weak evidence is they do have some effect). What masks are very effective at is protecting everybody else from you, should you happen to be infected & not realise it.
So masks are essentially communitarian. We wear them & accept a certain mild level of discomfort in order to protect those around us from the possibility of being infected by a horrible disease. The more pro-social a society is, the more likely it is that people will wear masks & the less affected by Covid-19 that society will be.
(An aside: I bet the anti-vaxx conspiracy groups are full of anti-mask types.)
Is this guy really a Minister for the SNP??? His hatred just oozes. Extraordinary.
If this was in Westminster it would make headline news, I think
Except there's almost no interest in devolved politics in the main network news programmes or the UK-wide national newspapers. The occasional controversy achieves cut-through but the reality is that almost nobody in England who's not moved here from one of the devolved nations or has a very keen interest in politics would be able to name more than a small handful of devolved politicians. Sturgeon and Salmond are the obvious ones, some will be familiar with Arlene Foster and maybe one or two names like Gerry Adams from the peace process era. That's about it.
It's also why Nicola Sturgeon tends to poll well in GB-wide approval ratings - about 90% of the people being asked the questions don't know anything about her apart from her being in favour of independence for Scotland and, perhaps, that she comes across professionally on the television. They don't live in Scotland and are therefore unaffected by and almost entirely unaware of its Government's actions, and any of the successes or failures arising therefrom.
I'm not sure to what degree this ignorance is a cause of the gradual rotting away of the Union or a consequence thereof.
Both.
Most English folk neither know nor care about Scotland. The Union is gradually rotting away through neglect and apathy, and increasingly through straightforward hostility.
Arrant nonsense.
There is huge affection and love for Scotland in England.
There is, but it doesn't extend to listening to Scotland.
So we are supposed to be building - the era of the major capital project is upon us - and from where I sit in lowland East London, the future is flats, flats and more flats.
I'm thinking about all these flats and all the people in them, whether owners or renters, and thinking how well they will get to know their new accommodation if we have to lockdown once again.
Perhaps in the not-too-distant the notion of living in a little box flat in a huge clock with no external space to call your own will go the same way as the idea of travelling for 4 hours on trains and tubes to go to and from an office.
I can see the attraction of rural life and life well away from the capital.
Whenever I see those new flats in east London, they always look like you'd have to practically be a millionaire in order to afford to buy one.
We're only at the very start of the transformation of working and living in this country that will be delivered by coronavirus, and the resultant realisation that (a) most commuting and centralised office activity is without value and (b) low density living beats high density living hands down for quality of life and of health.
Much of London's commercial property is now obsolete, and many of the well-heeled customers who might previously have been willing to pay telephone number sums for poky little flats in the capital will be emigrating to its more upmarket suburbs or right out into the Home Counties.
Outside of the leafiest areas and the Government and tourist theme park zones in the centre, the future of London is as a giant slum for those too poor to be able to afford to leave. One vast banlieue on the Parisian model.
Possibly a little hyperbolic, but probably not entirely wrong. I have friends talking of leaving London, whereas before they were avid fans of the city.
The same forces will also hollow out crowded cities across the West, from Paris and New York, to San Francisco and Madrid. Indeed cities outside Britain could suffer more, as rural property overseas is cheaper - because America, Spain and France are simply bigger, and emptier.
New York in particular could be entirely screwed. Why live in a small apartment in a newly desolate Manhattan, which freezes every winter and costs a fortune in heating, when you can move to sunny New Mexico and have acres of land?
The ramifications of all this are enormous
Here's a little something I made reference to a few days back:
Dominic Jackman, the founder of Escape from City, which helps people find work beyond London, said inquiries over the last fortnight revealed “a fundamental change in jobseeker preferences”.
Of 1,000 people signing up to the service, 51% wanted to leave the capital compared with 20% for the same period in 2019.
“Pre-Covid, while our jobseekers wanted to ‘escape the rat race’, a lot of them actually were happy living and working in London,” he said. “For the first time ever we have more people wanting to leave London than stay in it which is a huge shift in aspirations.”
An awful lot of people who previously stayed in London because of its cultural attractions and nightlife - which are now, of course, all shut - have discovered what exceptionally shitty places cities are to be trapped in the midst of public health crises (and this one could drag on for years, and it may not be the last occasion on which this happens in our lifetimes, either.) Many of those same people have also found out that they don't need to travel into the city centre to do their jobs, and have realised through simple internet property searches that they can exchange paying an extortionate rent on a shoebox flat for buying a substantial house with a garden, through the simple expedient of shaping up and shipping out.
I've read elsewhere that a quarter-of-a-million Londoners fled in the run-up to lockdown and haven't come back, and the phenomenon of middle-class flight is being observed, at a smaller scale, in other urban centres across the country. The only limiting factor here isn't even property prices in the commuter belts of cities, but imagination: if you're considering leaving London for Buckinghamshire then cost might still give you pause for thought but, if you are one of the many well-paid Londoners who really can work from home full-time, then why not just up sticks to somewhere like Lincolnshire and buy a detached house, or move to Powys and trade up to a small mansion and several acres?
I don't know, perhaps if you're a twentysomething singleton who's desperate to go out clubbing, get pissed and try to get laid every other night then perhaps you might want to stick with a shoebox flat with a convenient nearby Tube station, but once you've grown up then why bother?
What if you want to meet interesting people?
The M25 doesn't generate a forcefield preventing "interesting" people from moving beyond it.
True, in a lower density living environment there will be fewer people to meet, but that has its advantages as well as its drawbacks. Fewer addicts, fewer dealers, a lot less violent crime. Also, under present circumstances, much less likelihood of catching a potentially lethal infectious disease.
If large companies are actually serious about work-from-home, and prepared to ditch the expensive city-centre offices in favour of occasional team meetings, it will lead to the biggest transformation in living arrangements in decades.
For years now, technologists have looked forward to the day that millions of people can work from anywhere and don’t need to waste several hours a day generating pollution, but companies have always insisted on everyone congregating together in the world’s most expensive real estate at 9am five days a week.
This does present other challenges though, such as railways dependent on season ticket revenue, and even the possibility of people being able to work mainly from abroad and spend fewer than 90 days per year in the UK - thereby avoiding UK income tax entirely. Plenty of Brits in the Middle East do this already.
A big issue is really fast internet connections in remote areas. Run a remote desktop, a couple of video sessions, and have bandwidth left for the kids Face timing their friends....
But very few areas in England are actually that remote. Plenty of semi-urban places, like Lichfield or Tamworth, that have excellent facilities, fibre broadband, fast trains to London AND lots of nice houses with gardens at affordable prices.
And some rural communities have been installing their own fibre cables - Kettlewell in Yorkshire, for example. Or this programme:
Where there’s a will, and the money, there will be a way. It helps that England is a small country and its transport network although congested is comprehensive. There is no insuperable difficulty to adding top notch broadband to pretty much every part of it.
So we are supposed to be building - the era of the major capital project is upon us - and from where I sit in lowland East London, the future is flats, flats and more flats.
I'm thinking about all these flats and all the people in them, whether owners or renters, and thinking how well they will get to know their new accommodation if we have to lockdown once again.
Perhaps in the not-too-distant the notion of living in a little box flat in a huge clock with no external space to call your own will go the same way as the idea of travelling for 4 hours on trains and tubes to go to and from an office.
I can see the attraction of rural life and life well away from the capital.
Whenever I see those new flats in east London, they always look like you'd have to practically be a millionaire in order to afford to buy one.
We're only at the very start of the transformation of working and living in this country that will be delivered by coronavirus, and the resultant realisation that (a) most commuting and centralised office activity is without value and (b) low density living beats high density living hands down for quality of life and of health.
Much of London's commercial property is now obsolete, and many of the well-heeled customers who might previously have been willing to pay telephone number sums for poky little flats in the capital will be emigrating to its more upmarket suburbs or right out into the Home Counties.
Outside of the leafiest areas and the Government and tourist theme park zones in the centre, the future of London is as a giant slum for those too poor to be able to afford to leave. One vast banlieue on the Parisian model.
Possibly a little hyperbolic, but probably not entirely wrong. I have friends talking of leaving London, whereas before they were avid fans of the city.
The same forces will also hollow out crowded cities across the West, from Paris and New York, to San Francisco and Madrid. Indeed cities outside Britain could suffer more, as rural property overseas is cheaper - because America, Spain and France are simply bigger, and emptier.
New York in particular could be entirely screwed. Why live in a small apartment in a newly desolate Manhattan, which freezes every winter and costs a fortune in heating, when you can move to sunny New Mexico and have acres of land?
The ramifications of all this are enormous
Here's a little something I made reference to a few days back:
Dominic Jackman, the founder of Escape from City, which helps people find work beyond London, said inquiries over the last fortnight revealed “a fundamental change in jobseeker preferences”.
Of 1,000 people signing up to the service, 51% wanted to leave the capital compared with 20% for the same period in 2019.
“Pre-Covid, while our jobseekers wanted to ‘escape the rat race’, a lot of them actually were happy living and working in London,” he said. “For the first time ever we have more people wanting to leave London than stay in it which is a huge shift in aspirations.”
An awful lot of people who previously stayed in London because of its cultural attractions and nightlife - which are now, of course, all shut - have discovered what exceptionally shitty places cities are to be trapped in the midst of public health crises (and this one could drag on for years, and it may not be the last occasion on which this happens in our lifetimes, either.) Many of those same people have also found out that they don't need to travel into the city centre to do their jobs, and have realised through simple internet property searches that they can exchange paying an extortionate rent on a shoebox flat for buying a substantial house with a garden, through the simple expedient of shaping up and shipping out.
I've read elsewhere that a quarter-of-a-million Londoners fled in the run-up to lockdown and haven't come back, and the phenomenon of middle-class flight is being observed, at a smaller scale, in other urban centres across the country. The only limiting factor here isn't even property prices in the commuter belts of cities, but imagination: if you're considering leaving London for Buckinghamshire then cost might still give you pause for thought but, if you are one of the many well-paid Londoners who really can work from home full-time, then why not just up sticks to somewhere like Lincolnshire and buy a detached house, or move to Powys and trade up to a small mansion and several acres?
I don't know, perhaps if you're a twentysomething singleton who's desperate to go out clubbing, get pissed and try to get laid every other night then perhaps you might want to stick with a shoebox flat with a convenient nearby Tube station, but once you've grown up then why bother?
What if you want to meet interesting people?
The M25 doesn't generate a forcefield preventing "interesting" people from moving beyond it.
True, in a lower density living environment there will be fewer people to meet, but that has its advantages as well as its drawbacks. Fewer addicts, fewer dealers, a lot less violent crime. Also, under present circumstances, much less likelihood of catching a potentially lethal infectious disease.
If large companies are actually serious about work-from-home, and prepared to ditch the expensive city-centre offices in favour of occasional team meetings, it will lead to the biggest transformation in living arrangements in decades.
For years now, technologists have looked forward to the day that millions of people can work from anywhere and don’t need to waste several hours a day generating pollution, but companies have always insisted on everyone congregating together in the world’s most expensive real estate at 9am five days a week.
This does present other challenges though, such as railways dependent on season ticket revenue, and even the possibility of people being able to work mainly from abroad and spend fewer than 90 days per year in the UK - thereby avoiding UK income tax entirely. Plenty of Brits in the Middle East do this already.
A big issue is really fast internet connections in remote areas. Run a remote desktop, a couple of video sessions, and have bandwidth left for the kids Face timing their friends....
We’ve had my daughter working from home on a call centre job, my son doing remote lessons from school and me trying to do various webex and zoom conferences and court appearances. It’s been a struggle. Sometimes I have lost the video on my links and got audio only.
Is this guy really a Minister for the SNP??? His hatred just oozes. Extraordinary.
If this was in Westminster it would make headline news, I think
Except there's almost no interest in devolved politics in the main network news programmes or the UK-wide national newspapers. The occasional controversy achieves cut-through but the reality is that almost nobody in England who's not moved here from one of the devolved nations or has a very keen interest in politics would be able to name more than a small handful of devolved politicians. Sturgeon and Salmond are the obvious ones, some will be familiar with Arlene Foster and maybe one or two names like Gerry Adams from the peace process era. That's about it.
It's also why Nicola Sturgeon tends to poll well in GB-wide approval ratings - about 90% of the people being asked the questions don't know anything about her apart from her being in favour of independence for Scotland and, perhaps, that she comes across professionally on the television. They don't live in Scotland and are therefore unaffected by and almost entirely unaware of its Government's actions, and any of the successes or failures arising therefrom.
I'm not sure to what degree this ignorance is a cause of the gradual rotting away of the Union or a consequence thereof.
Both.
Most English folk neither know nor care about Scotland. The Union is gradually rotting away through neglect and apathy, and increasingly through straightforward hostility.
Arrant nonsense.
There is huge affection and love for Scotland in England.
So we are supposed to be building - the era of the major capital project is upon us - and from where I sit in lowland East London, the future is flats, flats and more flats.
I'm thinking about all these flats and all the people in them, whether owners or renters, and thinking how well they will get to know their new accommodation if we have to lockdown once again.
Perhaps in the not-too-distant the notion of living in a little box flat in a huge clock with no external space to call your own will go the same way as the idea of travelling for 4 hours on trains and tubes to go to and from an office.
I can see the attraction of rural life and life well away from the capital.
Whenever I see those new flats in east London, they always look like you'd have to practically be a millionaire in order to afford to buy one.
We're only at the very start of the transformation of working and living in this country that will be delivered by coronavirus, and the resultant realisation that (a) most commuting and centralised office activity is without value and (b) low density living beats high density living hands down for quality of life and of health.
Much of London's commercial property is now obsolete, and many of the well-heeled customers who might previously have been willing to pay telephone number sums for poky little flats in the capital will be emigrating to its more upmarket suburbs or right out into the Home Counties.
Outside of the leafiest areas and the Government and tourist theme park zones in the centre, the future of London is as a giant slum for those too poor to be able to afford to leave. One vast banlieue on the Parisian model.
Possibly a little hyperbolic, but probably not entirely wrong. I have friends talking of leaving London, whereas before they were avid fans of the city.
The same forces will also hollow out crowded cities across the West, from Paris and New York, to San Francisco and Madrid. Indeed cities outside Britain could suffer more, as rural property overseas is cheaper - because America, Spain and France are simply bigger, and emptier.
New York in particular could be entirely screwed. Why live in a small apartment in a newly desolate Manhattan, which freezes every winter and costs a fortune in heating, when you can move to sunny New Mexico and have acres of land?
The ramifications of all this are enormous
Here's a little something I made reference to a few days back:
Dominic Jackman, the founder of Escape from City, which helps people find work beyond London, said inquiries over the last fortnight revealed “a fundamental change in jobseeker preferences”.
Of 1,000 people signing up to the service, 51% wanted to leave the capital compared with 20% for the same period in 2019.
“Pre-Covid, while our jobseekers wanted to ‘escape the rat race’, a lot of them actually were happy living and working in London,” he said. “For the first time ever we have more people wanting to leave London than stay in it which is a huge shift in aspirations.”
An awful lot of people who previously stayed in London because of its cultural attractions and nightlife - which are now, of course, all shut - have discovered what exceptionally shitty places cities are to be trapped in the midst of public health crises (and this one could drag on for years, and it may not be the last occasion on which this happens in our lifetimes, either.) Many of those same people have also found out that they don't need to travel into the city centre to do their jobs, and have realised through simple internet property searches that they can exchange paying an extortionate rent on a shoebox flat for buying a substantial house with a garden, through the simple expedient of shaping up and shipping out.
I've read elsewhere that a quarter-of-a-million Londoners fled in the run-up to lockdown and haven't come back, and the phenomenon of middle-class flight is being observed, at a smaller scale, in other urban centres across the country. The only limiting factor here isn't even property prices in the commuter belts of cities, but imagination: if you're considering leaving London for Buckinghamshire then cost might still give you pause for thought but, if you are one of the many well-paid Londoners who really can work from home full-time, then why not just up sticks to somewhere like Lincolnshire and buy a detached house, or move to Powys and trade up to a small mansion and several acres?
I don't know, perhaps if you're a twentysomething singleton who's desperate to go out clubbing, get pissed and try to get laid every other night then perhaps you might want to stick with a shoebox flat with a convenient nearby Tube station, but once you've grown up then why bother?
What if you want to meet interesting people?
The M25 doesn't generate a forcefield preventing "interesting" people from moving beyond it.
True, in a lower density living environment there will be fewer people to meet, but that has its advantages as well as its drawbacks. Fewer addicts, fewer dealers, a lot less violent crime. Also, under present circumstances, much less likelihood of catching a potentially lethal infectious disease.
If large companies are actually serious about work-from-home, and prepared to ditch the expensive city-centre offices in favour of occasional team meetings, it will lead to the biggest transformation in living arrangements in decades.
For years now, technologists have looked forward to the day that millions of people can work from anywhere and don’t need to waste several hours a day generating pollution, but companies have always insisted on everyone congregating together in the world’s most expensive real estate at 9am five days a week.
This does present other challenges though, such as railways dependent on season ticket revenue, and even the possibility of people being able to work mainly from abroad and spend fewer than 90 days per year in the UK - thereby avoiding UK income tax entirely. Plenty of Brits in the Middle East do this already.
A big issue is really fast internet connections in remote areas. Run a remote desktop, a couple of video sessions, and have bandwidth left for the kids Face timing their friends....
Indeed. Hopefully a combination of OneWeb, Starlink, 4G, Openreach and local fibre projects can end the digital divide sooner rather than later.
So we are supposed to be building - the era of the major capital project is upon us - and from where I sit in lowland East London, the future is flats, flats and more flats.
I'm thinking about all these flats and all the people in them, whether owners or renters, and thinking how well they will get to know their new accommodation if we have to lockdown once again.
Perhaps in the not-too-distant the notion of living in a little box flat in a huge clock with no external space to call your own will go the same way as the idea of travelling for 4 hours on trains and tubes to go to and from an office.
I can see the attraction of rural life and life well away from the capital.
Whenever I see those new flats in east London, they always look like you'd have to practically be a millionaire in order to afford to buy one.
We're only at the very start of the transformation of working and living in this country that will be delivered by coronavirus, and the resultant realisation that (a) most commuting and centralised office activity is without value and (b) low density living beats high density living hands down for quality of life and of health.
Much of London's commercial property is now obsolete, and many of the well-heeled customers who might previously have been willing to pay telephone number sums for poky little flats in the capital will be emigrating to its more upmarket suburbs or right out into the Home Counties.
Outside of the leafiest areas and the Government and tourist theme park zones in the centre, the future of London is as a giant slum for those too poor to be able to afford to leave. One vast banlieue on the Parisian model.
Possibly a little hyperbolic, but probably not entirely wrong. I have friends talking of leaving London, whereas before they were avid fans of the city.
The same forces will also hollow out crowded cities across the West, from Paris and New York, to San Francisco and Madrid. Indeed cities outside Britain could suffer more, as rural property overseas is cheaper - because America, Spain and France are simply bigger, and emptier.
New York in particular could be entirely screwed. Why live in a small apartment in a newly desolate Manhattan, which freezes every winter and costs a fortune in heating, when you can move to sunny New Mexico and have acres of land?
The ramifications of all this are enormous
Here's a little something I made reference to a few days back:
Dominic Jackman, the founder of Escape from City, which helps people find work beyond London, said inquiries over the last fortnight revealed “a fundamental change in jobseeker preferences”.
Of 1,000 people signing up to the service, 51% wanted to leave the capital compared with 20% for the same period in 2019.
“Pre-Covid, while our jobseekers wanted to ‘escape the rat race’, a lot of them actually were happy living and working in London,” he said. “For the first time ever we have more people wanting to leave London than stay in it which is a huge shift in aspirations.”
An awful lot of people who previously stayed in London because of its cultural attractions and nightlife - which are now, of course, all shut - have discovered what exceptionally shitty places cities are to be trapped in the midst of public health crises (and this one could drag on for years, and it may not be the last occasion on which this happens in our lifetimes, either.) Many of those same people have also found out that they don't need to travel into the city centre to do their jobs, and have realised through simple internet property searches that they can exchange paying an extortionate rent on a shoebox flat for buying a substantial house with a garden, through the simple expedient of shaping up and shipping out.
I've read elsewhere that a quarter-of-a-million Londoners fled in the run-up to lockdown and haven't come back, and the phenomenon of middle-class flight is being observed, at a smaller scale, in other urban centres across the country. The only limiting factor here isn't even property prices in the commuter belts of cities, but imagination: if you're considering leaving London for Buckinghamshire then cost might still give you pause for thought but, if you are one of the many well-paid Londoners who really can work from home full-time, then why not just up sticks to somewhere like Lincolnshire and buy a detached house, or move to Powys and trade up to a small mansion and several acres?
I don't know, perhaps if you're a twentysomething singleton who's desperate to go out clubbing, get pissed and try to get laid every other night then perhaps you might want to stick with a shoebox flat with a convenient nearby Tube station, but once you've grown up then why bother?
What if you want to meet interesting people?
The M25 doesn't generate a forcefield preventing "interesting" people from moving beyond it.
True, in a lower density living environment there will be fewer people to meet, but that has its advantages as well as its drawbacks. Fewer addicts, fewer dealers, a lot less violent crime. Also, under present circumstances, much less likelihood of catching a potentially lethal infectious disease.
If large companies are actually serious about work-from-home, and prepared to ditch the expensive city-centre offices in favour of occasional team meetings, it will lead to the biggest transformation in living arrangements in decades.
For years now, technologists have looked forward to the day that millions of people can work from anywhere and don’t need to waste several hours a day generating pollution, but companies have always insisted on everyone congregating together in the world’s most expensive real estate at 9am five days a week.
This does present other challenges though, such as railways dependent on season ticket revenue, and even the possibility of people being able to work mainly from abroad and spend fewer than 90 days per year in the UK - thereby avoiding UK income tax entirely. Plenty of Brits in the Middle East do this already.
A big issue is really fast internet connections in remote areas. Run a remote desktop, a couple of video sessions, and have bandwidth left for the kids Face timing their friends....
But very few areas in England are actually that remote. Plenty of semi-urban places, like Lichfield or Tamworth, that have excellent facilities, fibre broadband, fast trains to London AND lots of nice houses with gardens at affordable prices.
And some rural communities have been installing their own fibre cables - Kettlewell in Yorkshire, for example. Or this programme:
Where there’s a will, and the money, there will be a way. It helps that England is a small country and its transport network although congested is comprehensive. There is no insuperable difficulty to adding top notch broadband to pretty much every part of it.
When you stop for a moment (and what is lockdown, if it isn't stopping for a moment?) the economics of commuting are pretty grisly.
When I was doing Romford - Stratford on a regular basis, the cost was about 5 % of my salary. For the joy of about an hour a day in pretty stinky conditions. And it's safe to assume that many spent more time and money on commuting than I did.
Reduce that, and the net effect on national wellbeing is considerable. It would definitely pay for better broadband.
Off topic: Re the government changing the rules to allow travel to France, Spain, Greece, Italy etc.
Are those countries going to allow travellers from Britain in, given our worse coronavirus experience?
That will presumably be calculated based on (i) the level of perceived risk posed by British travellers, weighed against (ii) how desperate they are for our cash. The British customer represents a very substantial fraction of total demand for Mediterranean holidays, especially in Spain and Greece. I seem to recall reading somewhere that tourists from Britain also spend more per head in Greece than those from any other country, although I may have misremembered that.
Is this guy really a Minister for the SNP??? His hatred just oozes. Extraordinary.
If this was in Westminster it would make headline news, I think
Except there's almost no interest in devolved politics in the main network news programmes or the UK-wide national newspapers. The occasional controversy achieves cut-through but the reality is that almost nobody in England who's not moved here from one of the devolved nations or has a very keen interest in politics would be able to name more than a small handful of devolved politicians. Sturgeon and Salmond are the obvious ones, some will be familiar with Arlene Foster and maybe one or two names like Gerry Adams from the peace process era. That's about it.
It's also why Nicola Sturgeon tends to poll well in GB-wide approval ratings - about 90% of the people being asked the questions don't know anything about her apart from her being in favour of independence for Scotland and, perhaps, that she comes across professionally on the television. They don't live in Scotland and are therefore unaffected by and almost entirely unaware of its Government's actions, and any of the successes or failures arising therefrom.
I'm not sure to what degree this ignorance is a cause of the gradual rotting away of the Union or a consequence thereof.
Both.
Most English folk neither know nor care about Scotland. The Union is gradually rotting away through neglect and apathy, and increasingly through straightforward hostility.
Arrant nonsense.
There is huge affection and love for Scotland in England.
But not for Scots.
On the contrary, most English people think they’re Swede.
As we are discussing alcoholic beverages... I recently bough a half case from Naked Wines. I think they're quite nice, but as I only paid £5 a bottle I'm probably easy to please. Does anyone have any opinions on them, or is there a better source of a semi-regular mixed case or half case? I don't want a monthly subscription as I don't drink enough at home (in normal times)
Laithwaites is excellent
I pick and choose between Laithwaites, Virgin, Naked, Majestic and occasionally Lea and Sandeman. I recently bought two cases from Naked of "luxury" wine with some damage on their labels at half price reduced from £13.99 to £6.99. They are absolutely superb. Mostly reds. Some whites.
I have a Naked Wine voucher that came with an unrelated delivery (a shirt!); sounds like it would be worth using it.
As we are discussing alcoholic beverages... I recently bough a half case from Naked Wines. I think they're quite nice, but as I only paid £5 a bottle I'm probably easy to please. Does anyone have any opinions on them, or is there a better source of a semi-regular mixed case or half case? I don't want a monthly subscription as I don't drink enough at home (in normal times)
Laithwaites is excellent
I pick and choose between Laithwaites, Virgin, Naked, Majestic and occasionally Lea and Sandeman. I recently bought two cases from Naked of "luxury" wine with some damage on their labels at half price reduced from £13.99 to £6.99. They are absolutely superb. Mostly reds. Some whites.
I have a Naked Wine voucher that came with an unrelated delivery (a shirt!); sounds like it would be worth using it.
Weirdly ironic that a Naked Wine voucher came with an item of clothing.
So we are supposed to be building - the era of the major capital project is upon us - and from where I sit in lowland East London, the future is flats, flats and more flats.
I'm thinking about all these flats and all the people in them, whether owners or renters, and thinking how well they will get to know their new accommodation if we have to lockdown once again.
Perhaps in the not-too-distant the notion of living in a little box flat in a huge clock with no external space to call your own will go the same way as the idea of travelling for 4 hours on trains and tubes to go to and from an office.
I can see the attraction of rural life and life well away from the capital.
Whenever I see those new flats in east London, they always look like you'd have to practically be a millionaire in order to afford to buy one.
We're only at the very start of the transformation of working and living in this country that will be delivered by coronavirus, and the resultant realisation that (a) most commuting and centralised office activity is without value and (b) low density living beats high density living hands down for quality of life and of health.
Much of London's commercial property is now obsolete, and many of the well-heeled customers who might previously have been willing to pay telephone number sums for poky little flats in the capital will be emigrating to its more upmarket suburbs or right out into the Home Counties.
Outside of the leafiest areas and the Government and tourist theme park zones in the centre, the future of London is as a giant slum for those too poor to be able to afford to leave. One vast banlieue on the Parisian model.
Possibly a little hyperbolic, but probably not entirely wrong. I have friends talking of leaving London, whereas before they were avid fans of the city.
The same forces will also hollow out crowded cities across the West, from Paris and New York, to San Francisco and Madrid. Indeed cities outside Britain could suffer more, as rural property overseas is cheaper - because America, Spain and France are simply bigger, and emptier.
New York in particular could be entirely screwed. Why live in a small apartment in a newly desolate Manhattan, which freezes every winter and costs a fortune in heating, when you can move to sunny New Mexico and have acres of land?
The ramifications of all this are enormous
Here's a little something I made reference to a few days back:
Dominic Jackman, the founder of Escape from City, which helps people find work beyond London, said inquiries over the last fortnight revealed “a fundamental change in jobseeker preferences”.
Of 1,000 people signing up to the service, 51% wanted to leave the capital compared with 20% for the same period in 2019.
“Pre-Covid, while our jobseekers wanted to ‘escape the rat race’, a lot of them actually were happy living and working in London,” he said. “For the first time ever we have more people wanting to leave London than stay in it which is a huge shift in aspirations.”
An awful lot of people who previously stayed in London because of its cultural attractions and nightlife - which are now, of course, all shut - have discovered what exceptionally shitty places cities are to be trapped in the midst of public health crises (and this one could drag on for years, and it may not be the last occasion on which this happens in our lifetimes, either.) Many of those same people have also found out that they don't need to travel into the city centre to do their jobs, and have realised through simple internet property searches that they can exchange paying an extortionate rent on a shoebox flat for buying a substantial house with a garden, through the simple expedient of shaping up and shipping out.
I've read elsewhere that a quarter-of-a-million Londoners fled in the run-up to lockdown and haven't come back, and the phenomenon of middle-class flight is being observed, at a smaller scale, in other urban centres across the country. The only limiting factor here isn't even property prices in the commuter belts of cities, but imagination: if you're considering leaving London for Buckinghamshire then cost might still give you pause for thought but, if you are one of the many well-paid Londoners who really can work from home full-time, then why not just up sticks to somewhere like Lincolnshire and buy a detached house, or move to Powys and trade up to a small mansion and several acres?
I don't know, perhaps if you're a twentysomething singleton who's desperate to go out clubbing, get pissed and try to get laid every other night then perhaps you might want to stick with a shoebox flat with a convenient nearby Tube station, but once you've grown up then why bother?
What if you want to meet interesting people?
The M25 doesn't generate a forcefield preventing "interesting" people from moving beyond it.
True, in a lower density living environment there will be fewer people to meet, but that has its advantages as well as its drawbacks. Fewer addicts, fewer dealers, a lot less violent crime. Also, under present circumstances, much less likelihood of catching a potentially lethal infectious disease.
If large companies are actually serious about work-from-home, and prepared to ditch the expensive city-centre offices in favour of occasional team meetings, it will lead to the biggest transformation in living arrangements in decades.
For years now, technologists have looked forward to the day that millions of people can work from anywhere and don’t need to waste several hours a day generating pollution, but companies have always insisted on everyone congregating together in the world’s most expensive real estate at 9am five days a week.
This does present other challenges though, such as railways dependent on season ticket revenue, and even the possibility of people being able to work mainly from abroad and spend fewer than 90 days per year in the UK - thereby avoiding UK income tax entirely. Plenty of Brits in the Middle East do this already.
A big issue is really fast internet connections in remote areas. Run a remote desktop, a couple of video sessions, and have bandwidth left for the kids Face timing their friends....
But very few areas in England are actually that remote. Plenty of semi-urban places, like Lichfield or Tamworth, that have excellent facilities, fibre broadband, fast trains to London AND lots of nice houses with gardens at affordable prices.
And some rural communities have been installing their own fibre cables - Kettlewell in Yorkshire, for example. Or this programme:
Where there’s a will, and the money, there will be a way. It helps that England is a small country and its transport network although congested is comprehensive. There is no insuperable difficulty to adding top notch broadband to pretty much every part of it.
When you stop for a moment (and what is lockdown, if it isn't stopping for a moment?) the economics of commuting are pretty grisly.
When I was doing Romford - Stratford on a regular basis, the cost was about 5 % of my salary. For the joy of about an hour a day in pretty stinky conditions. And it's safe to assume that many spent more time and money on commuting than I did.
Reduce that, and the net effect on national wellbeing is considerable. It would definitely pay for better broadband.
Before my husband traded in a job in central London for one five minutes' walk away, he was spending something like £6,000pa on a rail season ticket and tube fares. It was the single biggest item in our household budget, and getting shot of it has left us greatly better off. Many other people will have been experiencing the same benefits because of coronavirus.
The median wage in the UK is just short of £30,000. If we assume that a typical worker is also relieved of about 30% of their pay in income tax, national insurance and council tax bills, then many commuters who aren't in very high-paying jobs won't be parting with 5% of their salary for the privilege of using cattle-truck class public transport - it'll be more like a quarter.
A radical reduction in commuting can only benefit more people than it harms.
I've always wondered why the NYTimes is so hostile to Brexit and Boris. What's it go to do with them?
They come from the mindset that people should 'know their place' and 'do as they are told'. Thompson has exhibited that in spades over the years. And indeed it is why the whole institution has now succumbed to the Woke ideals where contrary opinions should not be allowed or expressed.
So we are supposed to be building - the era of the major capital project is upon us - and from where I sit in lowland East London, the future is flats, flats and more flats.
I'm thinking about all these flats and all the people in them, whether owners or renters, and thinking how well they will get to know their new accommodation if we have to lockdown once again.
Perhaps in the not-too-distant the notion of living in a little box flat in a huge clock with no external space to call your own will go the same way as the idea of travelling for 4 hours on trains and tubes to go to and from an office.
I can see the attraction of rural life and life well away from the capital.
Whenever I see those new flats in east London, they always look like you'd have to practically be a millionaire in order to afford to buy one.
We're only at the very start of the transformation of working and living in this country that will be delivered by coronavirus, and the resultant realisation that (a) most commuting and centralised office activity is without value and (b) low density living beats high density living hands down for quality of life and of health.
Much of London's commercial property is now obsolete, and many of the well-heeled customers who might previously have been willing to pay telephone number sums for poky little flats in the capital will be emigrating to its more upmarket suburbs or right out into the Home Counties.
Outside of the leafiest areas and the Government and tourist theme park zones in the centre, the future of London is as a giant slum for those too poor to be able to afford to leave. One vast banlieue on the Parisian model.
Possibly a little hyperbolic, but probably not entirely wrong. I have friends talking of leaving London, whereas before they were avid fans of the city.
The same forces will also hollow out crowded cities across the West, from Paris and New York, to San Francisco and Madrid. Indeed cities outside Britain could suffer more, as rural property overseas is cheaper - because America, Spain and France are simply bigger, and emptier.
New York in particular could be entirely screwed. Why live in a small apartment in a newly desolate Manhattan, which freezes every winter and costs a fortune in heating, when you can move to sunny New Mexico and have acres of land?
The ramifications of all this are enormous
Here's a little something I made reference to a few days back:
Dominic Jackman, the founder of Escape from City, which helps people find work beyond London, said inquiries over the last fortnight revealed “a fundamental change in jobseeker preferences”.
Of 1,000 people signing up to the service, 51% wanted to leave the capital compared with 20% for the same period in 2019.
“Pre-Covid, while our jobseekers wanted to ‘escape the rat race’, a lot of them actually were happy living and working in London,” he said. “For the first time ever we have more people wanting to leave London than stay in it which is a huge shift in aspirations.”
An awful lot of people who previously stayed in London because of its cultural attractions and nightlife - which are now, of course, all shut - have discovered what exceptionally shitty places cities are to be trapped in the midst of public health crises (and this one could drag on for years, and it may not be the last occasion on which this happens in our lifetimes, either.) Many of those same people have also found out that they don't need to travel into the city centre to do their jobs, and have realised through simple internet property searches that they can exchange paying an extortionate rent on a shoebox flat for buying a substantial house with a garden, through the simple expedient of shaping up and shipping out.
I've read elsewhere that a quarter-of-a-million Londoners fled in the run-up to lockdown and haven't come back, and the phenomenon of middle-class flight is being observed, at a smaller scale, in other urban centres across the country. The only limiting factor here isn't even property prices in the commuter belts of cities, but imagination: if you're considering leaving London for Buckinghamshire then cost might still give you pause for thought but, if you are one of the many well-paid Londoners who really can work from home full-time, then why not just up sticks to somewhere like Lincolnshire and buy a detached house, or move to Powys and trade up to a small mansion and several acres?
I don't know, perhaps if you're a twentysomething singleton who's desperate to go out clubbing, get pissed and try to get laid every other night then perhaps you might want to stick with a shoebox flat with a convenient nearby Tube station, but once you've grown up then why bother?
What if you want to meet interesting people?
The M25 doesn't generate a forcefield preventing "interesting" people from moving beyond it.
True, in a lower density living environment there will be fewer people to meet, but that has its advantages as well as its drawbacks. Fewer addicts, fewer dealers, a lot less violent crime. Also, under present circumstances, much less likelihood of catching a potentially lethal infectious disease.
If large companies are actually serious about work-from-home, and prepared to ditch the expensive city-centre offices in favour of occasional team meetings, it will lead to the biggest transformation in living arrangements in decades.
For years now, technologists have looked forward to the day that millions of people can work from anywhere and don’t need to waste several hours a day generating pollution, but companies have always insisted on everyone congregating together in the world’s most expensive real estate at 9am five days a week.
This does present other challenges though, such as railways dependent on season ticket revenue, and even the possibility of people being able to work mainly from abroad and spend fewer than 90 days per year in the UK - thereby avoiding UK income tax entirely. Plenty of Brits in the Middle East do this already.
A big issue is really fast internet connections in remote areas. Run a remote desktop, a couple of video sessions, and have bandwidth left for the kids Face timing their friends....
But very few areas in England are actually that remote. Plenty of semi-urban places, like Lichfield or Tamworth, that have excellent facilities, fibre broadband, fast trains to London AND lots of nice houses with gardens at affordable prices.
And some rural communities have been installing their own fibre cables - Kettlewell in Yorkshire, for example. Or this programme:
Where there’s a will, and the money, there will be a way. It helps that England is a small country and its transport network although congested is comprehensive. There is no insuperable difficulty to adding top notch broadband to pretty much every part of it.
When you stop for a moment (and what is lockdown, if it isn't stopping for a moment?) the economics of commuting are pretty grisly.
When I was doing Romford - Stratford on a regular basis, the cost was about 5 % of my salary. For the joy of about an hour a day in pretty stinky conditions. And it's safe to assume that many spent more time and money on commuting than I did.
Reduce that, and the net effect on national wellbeing is considerable. It would definitely pay for better broadband.
Before my husband traded in a job in central London for one five minutes' walk away, he was spending something like £6,000pa on a rail season ticket and tube fares. It was the single biggest item in our household budget, and getting shot of it has left us greatly better off. Many other people will have been experiencing the same benefits because of coronavirus.
The median wage in the UK is just short of £30,000. If we assume that a typical worker is also relieved of about 30% of their pay in income tax, national insurance and council tax bills, then many commuters who aren't in very high-paying jobs won't be parting with 5% of their salary for the privilege of using cattle-truck class public transport - it'll be more like a quarter.
A radical reduction in commuting can only benefit more people than it harms.
Most firms in the City have empty offices scattered around the suburbs for emergencies. It would make a lot of sense, and save a lot of money to get the staff to work from them. My mate commutes to Canary Wharf from Romford when his firm have an empty office with computers set up in Romford! Seems crazy
So we are supposed to be building - the era of the major capital project is upon us - and from where I sit in lowland East London, the future is flats, flats and more flats.
I'm thinking about all these flats and all the people in them, whether owners or renters, and thinking how well they will get to know their new accommodation if we have to lockdown once again.
Perhaps in the not-too-distant the notion of living in a little box flat in a huge clock with no external space to call your own will go the same way as the idea of travelling for 4 hours on trains and tubes to go to and from an office.
I can see the attraction of rural life and life well away from the capital.
Whenever I see those new flats in east London, they always look like you'd have to practically be a millionaire in order to afford to buy one.
We're only at the very start of the transformation of working and living in this country that will be delivered by coronavirus, and the resultant realisation that (a) most commuting and centralised office activity is without value and (b) low density living beats high density living hands down for quality of life and of health.
Much of London's commercial property is now obsolete, and many of the well-heeled customers who might previously have been willing to pay telephone number sums for poky little flats in the capital will be emigrating to its more upmarket suburbs or right out into the Home Counties.
Outside of the leafiest areas and the Government and tourist theme park zones in the centre, the future of London is as a giant slum for those too poor to be able to afford to leave. One vast banlieue on the Parisian model.
Possibly a little hyperbolic, but probably not entirely wrong. I have friends talking of leaving London, whereas before they were avid fans of the city.
The same forces will also hollow out crowded cities across the West, from Paris and New York, to San Francisco and Madrid. Indeed cities outside Britain could suffer more, as rural property overseas is cheaper - because America, Spain and France are simply bigger, and emptier.
New York in particular could be entirely screwed. Why live in a small apartment in a newly desolate Manhattan, which freezes every winter and costs a fortune in heating, when you can move to sunny New Mexico and have acres of land?
The ramifications of all this are enormous
Here's a little something I made reference to a few days back:
Dominic Jackman, the founder of Escape from City, which helps people find work beyond London, said inquiries over the last fortnight revealed “a fundamental change in jobseeker preferences”.
Of 1,000 people signing up to the service, 51% wanted to leave the capital compared with 20% for the same period in 2019.
“Pre-Covid, while our jobseekers wanted to ‘escape the rat race’, a lot of them actually were happy living and working in London,” he said. “For the first time ever we have more people wanting to leave London than stay in it which is a huge shift in aspirations.”
An awful lot of people who previously stayed in London because of its cultural attractions and nightlife - which are now, of course, all shut - have discovered what exceptionally shitty places cities are to be trapped in the midst of public health crises (and this one could drag on for years, and it may not be the last occasion on which this happens in our lifetimes, either.) Many of those same people have also found out that they don't need to travel into the city centre to do their jobs, and have realised through simple internet property searches that they can exchange paying an extortionate rent on a shoebox flat for buying a substantial house with a garden, through the simple expedient of shaping up and shipping out.
I've read elsewhere that a quarter-of-a-million Londoners fled in the run-up to lockdown and haven't come back, and the phenomenon of middle-class flight is being observed, at a smaller scale, in other urban centres across the country. The only limiting factor here isn't even property prices in the commuter belts of cities, but imagination: if you're considering leaving London for Buckinghamshire then cost might still give you pause for thought but, if you are one of the many well-paid Londoners who really can work from home full-time, then why not just up sticks to somewhere like Lincolnshire and buy a detached house, or move to Powys and trade up to a small mansion and several acres?
I don't know, perhaps if you're a twentysomething singleton who's desperate to go out clubbing, get pissed and try to get laid every other night then perhaps you might want to stick with a shoebox flat with a convenient nearby Tube station, but once you've grown up then why bother?
What if you want to meet interesting people?
The M25 doesn't generate a forcefield preventing "interesting" people from moving beyond it.
True, in a lower density living environment there will be fewer people to meet, but that has its advantages as well as its drawbacks. Fewer addicts, fewer dealers, a lot less violent crime. Also, under present circumstances, much less likelihood of catching a potentially lethal infectious disease.
If large companies are actually serious about work-from-home, and prepared to ditch the expensive city-centre offices in favour of occasional team meetings, it will lead to the biggest transformation in living arrangements in decades.
For years now, technologists have looked forward to the day that millions of people can work from anywhere and don’t need to waste several hours a day generating pollution, but companies have always insisted on everyone congregating together in the world’s most expensive real estate at 9am five days a week.
This does present other challenges though, such as railways dependent on season ticket revenue, and even the possibility of people being able to work mainly from abroad and spend fewer than 90 days per year in the UK - thereby avoiding UK income tax entirely. Plenty of Brits in the Middle East do this already.
A big issue is really fast internet connections in remote areas. Run a remote desktop, a couple of video sessions, and have bandwidth left for the kids Face timing their friends....
We’ve had my daughter working from home on a call centre job, my son doing remote lessons from school and me trying to do various webex and zoom conferences and court appearances. It’s been a struggle. Sometimes I have lost the video on my links and got audio only.
You need a solid 100Mb connection for that kind of thing. That is what we need to aim for.
As we are discussing alcoholic beverages... I recently bough a half case from Naked Wines. I think they're quite nice, but as I only paid £5 a bottle I'm probably easy to please. Does anyone have any opinions on them, or is there a better source of a semi-regular mixed case or half case? I don't want a monthly subscription as I don't drink enough at home (in normal times)
I signed up to Naked wines and have had a couple of cases. I think you inevitably end up stuck with a subscription. Its £25 per month and for that you get about 3 cases per year (14 bottles or so). It is all incentivised to get you in to doing that. The wine seems ok but I am no expert. can't say much more than that.
As we are discussing alcoholic beverages... I recently bough a half case from Naked Wines. I think they're quite nice, but as I only paid £5 a bottle I'm probably easy to please. Does anyone have any opinions on them, or is there a better source of a semi-regular mixed case or half case? I don't want a monthly subscription as I don't drink enough at home (in normal times)
Laithwaites is excellent
I pick and choose between Laithwaites, Virgin, Naked, Majestic and occasionally Lea and Sandeman. I recently bought two cases from Naked of "luxury" wine with some damage on their labels at half price reduced from £13.99 to £6.99. They are absolutely superb. Mostly reds. Some whites.
I have a Naked Wine voucher that came with an unrelated delivery (a shirt!); sounds like it would be worth using it.
Weirdly ironic that a Naked Wine voucher came with an item of clothing.
Some of us have been pointing out for a while now that TikTok and Zoom are both basically Chinese spyware.
If you really have to use them, use on the computer and not the phone app.
When I helped setup a Chinese made laser cutter, it kept on trying to phone home to upload the designs we were cutting. A bit of code modification later, it was sending a continuous stream of video frames converted to dxfs.... I hope they liked them.
As we are discussing alcoholic beverages... I recently bough a half case from Naked Wines. I think they're quite nice, but as I only paid £5 a bottle I'm probably easy to please. Does anyone have any opinions on them, or is there a better source of a semi-regular mixed case or half case? I don't want a monthly subscription as I don't drink enough at home (in normal times)
Laithwaites is excellent
I pick and choose between Laithwaites, Virgin, Naked, Majestic and occasionally Lea and Sandeman. I recently bought two cases from Naked of "luxury" wine with some damage on their labels at half price reduced from £13.99 to £6.99. They are absolutely superb. Mostly reds. Some whites.
I have a Naked Wine voucher that came with an unrelated delivery (a shirt!); sounds like it would be worth using it.
Weirdly ironic that a Naked Wine voucher came with an item of clothing.
So we are supposed to be building - the era of the major capital project is upon us - and from where I sit in lowland East London, the future is flats, flats and more flats.
I'm thinking about all these flats and all the people in them, whether owners or renters, and thinking how well they will get to know their new accommodation if we have to lockdown once again.
Perhaps in the not-too-distant the notion of living in a little box flat in a huge clock with no external space to call your own will go the same way as the idea of travelling for 4 hours on trains and tubes to go to and from an office.
I can see the attraction of rural life and life well away from the capital.
Whenever I see those new flats in east London, they always look like you'd have to practically be a millionaire in order to afford to buy one.
We're only at the very start of the transformation of working and living in this country that will be delivered by coronavirus, and the resultant realisation that (a) most commuting and centralised office activity is without value and (b) low density living beats high density living hands down for quality of life and of health.
Much of London's commercial property is now obsolete, and many of the well-heeled customers who might previously have been willing to pay telephone number sums for poky little flats in the capital will be emigrating to its more upmarket suburbs or right out into the Home Counties.
Outside of the leafiest areas and the Government and tourist theme park zones in the centre, the future of London is as a giant slum for those too poor to be able to afford to leave. One vast banlieue on the Parisian model.
Possibly a little hyperbolic, but probably not entirely wrong. I have friends talking of leaving London, whereas before they were avid fans of the city.
The same forces will also hollow out crowded cities across the West, from Paris and New York, to San Francisco and Madrid. Indeed cities outside Britain could suffer more, as rural property overseas is cheaper - because America, Spain and France are simply bigger, and emptier.
New York in particular could be entirely screwed. Why live in a small apartment in a newly desolate Manhattan, which freezes every winter and costs a fortune in heating, when you can move to sunny New Mexico and have acres of land?
The ramifications of all this are enormous
Here's a little something I made reference to a few days back:
Dominic Jackman, the founder of Escape from City, which helps people find work beyond London, said inquiries over the last fortnight revealed “a fundamental change in jobseeker preferences”.
Of 1,000 people signing up to the service, 51% wanted to leave the capital compared with 20% for the same period in 2019.
“Pre-Covid, while our jobseekers wanted to ‘escape the rat race’, a lot of them actually were happy living and working in London,” he said. “For the first time ever we have more people wanting to leave London than stay in it which is a huge shift in aspirations.”
An awful lot of people who previously stayed in London because of its cultural attractions and nightlife - which are now, of course, all shut - have discovered what exceptionally shitty places cities are to be trapped in the midst of public health crises (and this one could drag on for years, and it may not be the last occasion on which this happens in our lifetimes, either.) Many of those same people have also found out that they don't need to travel into the city centre to do their jobs, and have realised through simple internet property searches that they can exchange paying an extortionate rent on a shoebox flat for buying a substantial house with a garden, through the simple expedient of shaping up and shipping out.
I've read elsewhere that a quarter-of-a-million Londoners fled in the run-up to lockdown and haven't come back, and the phenomenon of middle-class flight is being observed, at a smaller scale, in other urban centres across the country. The only limiting factor here isn't even property prices in the commuter belts of cities, but imagination: if you're considering leaving London for Buckinghamshire then cost might still give you pause for thought but, if you are one of the many well-paid Londoners who really can work from home full-time, then why not just up sticks to somewhere like Lincolnshire and buy a detached house, or move to Powys and trade up to a small mansion and several acres?
I don't know, perhaps if you're a twentysomething singleton who's desperate to go out clubbing, get pissed and try to get laid every other night then perhaps you might want to stick with a shoebox flat with a convenient nearby Tube station, but once you've grown up then why bother?
What if you want to meet interesting people?
The M25 doesn't generate a forcefield preventing "interesting" people from moving beyond it.
True, in a lower density living environment there will be fewer people to meet, but that has its advantages as well as its drawbacks. Fewer addicts, fewer dealers, a lot less violent crime. Also, under present circumstances, much less likelihood of catching a potentially lethal infectious disease.
If large companies are actually serious about work-from-home, and prepared to ditch the expensive city-centre offices in favour of occasional team meetings, it will lead to the biggest transformation in living arrangements in decades.
For years now, technologists have looked forward to the day that millions of people can work from anywhere and don’t need to waste several hours a day generating pollution, but companies have always insisted on everyone congregating together in the world’s most expensive real estate at 9am five days a week.
This does present other challenges though, such as railways dependent on season ticket revenue, and even the possibility of people being able to work mainly from abroad and spend fewer than 90 days per year in the UK - thereby avoiding UK income tax entirely. Plenty of Brits in the Middle East do this already.
A big issue is really fast internet connections in remote areas. Run a remote desktop, a couple of video sessions, and have bandwidth left for the kids Face timing their friends....
We’ve had my daughter working from home on a call centre job, my son doing remote lessons from school and me trying to do various webex and zoom conferences and court appearances. It’s been a struggle. Sometimes I have lost the video on my links and got audio only.
You need a solid 100Mb connection for that kind of thing. That is what we need to aim for.
We don’t even get 1/10th of that these days. It was in fairness a bit better before lockdown.
So we are supposed to be building - the era of the major capital project is upon us - and from where I sit in lowland East London, the future is flats, flats and more flats.
I'm thinking about all these flats and all the people in them, whether owners or renters, and thinking how well they will get to know their new accommodation if we have to lockdown once again.
Perhaps in the not-too-distant the notion of living in a little box flat in a huge clock with no external space to call your own will go the same way as the idea of travelling for 4 hours on trains and tubes to go to and from an office.
I can see the attraction of rural life and life well away from the capital.
Whenever I see those new flats in east London, they always look like you'd have to practically be a millionaire in order to afford to buy one.
We're only at the very start of the transformation of working and living in this country that will be delivered by coronavirus, and the resultant realisation that (a) most commuting and centralised office activity is without value and (b) low density living beats high density living hands down for quality of life and of health.
Much of London's commercial property is now obsolete, and many of the well-heeled customers who might previously have been willing to pay telephone number sums for poky little flats in the capital will be emigrating to its more upmarket suburbs or right out into the Home Counties.
Outside of the leafiest areas and the Government and tourist theme park zones in the centre, the future of London is as a giant slum for those too poor to be able to afford to leave. One vast banlieue on the Parisian model.
Possibly a little hyperbolic, but probably not entirely wrong. I have friends talking of leaving London, whereas before they were avid fans of the city.
The same forces will also hollow out crowded cities across the West, from Paris and New York, to San Francisco and Madrid. Indeed cities outside Britain could suffer more, as rural property overseas is cheaper - because America, Spain and France are simply bigger, and emptier.
New York in particular could be entirely screwed. Why live in a small apartment in a newly desolate Manhattan, which freezes every winter and costs a fortune in heating, when you can move to sunny New Mexico and have acres of land?
The ramifications of all this are enormous
Here's a little something I made reference to a few days back:
Dominic Jackman, the founder of Escape from City, which helps people find work beyond London, said inquiries over the last fortnight revealed “a fundamental change in jobseeker preferences”.
Of 1,000 people signing up to the service, 51% wanted to leave the capital compared with 20% for the same period in 2019.
“Pre-Covid, while our jobseekers wanted to ‘escape the rat race’, a lot of them actually were happy living and working in London,” he said. “For the first time ever we have more people wanting to leave London than stay in it which is a huge shift in aspirations.”
An awful lot of people who previously stayed in London because of its cultural attractions and nightlife - which are now, of course, all shut - have discovered what exceptionally shitty places cities are to be trapped in the midst of public health crises (and this one could drag on for years, and it may not be the last occasion on which this happens in our lifetimes, either.) Many of those same people have also found out that they don't need to travel into the city centre to do their jobs, and have realised through simple internet property searches that they can exchange paying an extortionate rent on a shoebox flat for buying a substantial house with a garden, through the simple expedient of shaping up and shipping out.
I've read elsewhere that a quarter-of-a-million Londoners fled in the run-up to lockdown and haven't come back, and the phenomenon of middle-class flight is being observed, at a smaller scale, in other urban centres across the country. The only limiting factor here isn't even property prices in the commuter belts of cities, but imagination: if you're considering leaving London for Buckinghamshire then cost might still give you pause for thought but, if you are one of the many well-paid Londoners who really can work from home full-time, then why not just up sticks to somewhere like Lincolnshire and buy a detached house, or move to Powys and trade up to a small mansion and several acres?
I don't know, perhaps if you're a twentysomething singleton who's desperate to go out clubbing, get pissed and try to get laid every other night then perhaps you might want to stick with a shoebox flat with a convenient nearby Tube station, but once you've grown up then why bother?
What if you want to meet interesting people?
The M25 doesn't generate a forcefield preventing "interesting" people from moving beyond it.
True, in a lower density living environment there will be fewer people to meet, but that has its advantages as well as its drawbacks. Fewer addicts, fewer dealers, a lot less violent crime. Also, under present circumstances, much less likelihood of catching a potentially lethal infectious disease.
If large companies are actually serious about work-from-home, and prepared to ditch the expensive city-centre offices in favour of occasional team meetings, it will lead to the biggest transformation in living arrangements in decades.
For years now, technologists have looked forward to the day that millions of people can work from anywhere and don’t need to waste several hours a day generating pollution, but companies have always insisted on everyone congregating together in the world’s most expensive real estate at 9am five days a week.
This does present other challenges though, such as railways dependent on season ticket revenue, and even the possibility of people being able to work mainly from abroad and spend fewer than 90 days per year in the UK - thereby avoiding UK income tax entirely. Plenty of Brits in the Middle East do this already.
A big issue is really fast internet connections in remote areas. Run a remote desktop, a couple of video sessions, and have bandwidth left for the kids Face timing their friends....
Indeed. Hopefully a combination of OneWeb, Starlink, 4G, Openreach and local fibre projects can end the digital divide sooner rather than later.
The satellite internet stuff is the killer app for a lot of the world - hi-speed internet. Anywhere. So it will fill in the holes in the access map. Cheaply.
Oh, it's because the NY Times is run by a Brit. Brilliant!
Not just any Brit, a full-on Ex-BBC Remoaner Brit. They can’t go a week without running an opinion piece on how the UK is screwed and the government is horrible. It’s just like MSNBC’s TDS, but from a publication that had a reputation as the paper of record.
Some of us have been pointing out for a while now that TikTok and Zoom are both basically Chinese spyware.
If you really have to use them, use on the computer and not the phone app.
When I helped setup a Chinese made laser cutter, it kept on trying to phone home to upload the designs we were cutting. A bit of code modification later, it was sending a continuous stream of video frames converted to dxfs.... I hope they liked them.
So we are supposed to be building - the era of the major capital project is upon us - and from where I sit in lowland East London, the future is flats, flats and more flats.
I'm thinking about all these flats and all the people in them, whether owners or renters, and thinking how well they will get to know their new accommodation if we have to lockdown once again.
Perhaps in the not-too-distant the notion of living in a little box flat in a huge clock with no external space to call your own will go the same way as the idea of travelling for 4 hours on trains and tubes to go to and from an office.
I can see the attraction of rural life and life well away from the capital.
Whenever I see those new flats in east London, they always look like you'd have to practically be a millionaire in order to afford to buy one.
We're only at the very start of the transformation of working and living in this country that will be delivered by coronavirus, and the resultant realisation that (a) most commuting and centralised office activity is without value and (b) low density living beats high density living hands down for quality of life and of health.
Much of London's commercial property is now obsolete, and many of the well-heeled customers who might previously have been willing to pay telephone number sums for poky little flats in the capital will be emigrating to its more upmarket suburbs or right out into the Home Counties.
Outside of the leafiest areas and the Government and tourist theme park zones in the centre, the future of London is as a giant slum for those too poor to be able to afford to leave. One vast banlieue on the Parisian model.
Possibly a little hyperbolic, but probably not entirely wrong. I have friends talking of leaving London, whereas before they were avid fans of the city.
The same forces will also hollow out crowded cities across the West, from Paris and New York, to San Francisco and Madrid. Indeed cities outside Britain could suffer more, as rural property overseas is cheaper - because America, Spain and France are simply bigger, and emptier.
New York in particular could be entirely screwed. Why live in a small apartment in a newly desolate Manhattan, which freezes every winter and costs a fortune in heating, when you can move to sunny New Mexico and have acres of land?
The ramifications of all this are enormous
Here's a little something I made reference to a few days back:
Dominic Jackman, the founder of Escape from City, which helps people find work beyond London, said inquiries over the last fortnight revealed “a fundamental change in jobseeker preferences”.
Of 1,000 people signing up to the service, 51% wanted to leave the capital compared with 20% for the same period in 2019.
“Pre-Covid, while our jobseekers wanted to ‘escape the rat race’, a lot of them actually were happy living and working in London,” he said. “For the first time ever we have more people wanting to leave London than stay in it which is a huge shift in aspirations.”
An awful lot of people who previously stayed in London because of its cultural attractions and nightlife - which are now, of course, all shut - have discovered what exceptionally shitty places cities are to be trapped in the midst of public health crises (and this one could drag on for years, and it may not be the last occasion on which this happens in our lifetimes, either.) Many of those same people have also found out that they don't need to travel into the city centre to do their jobs, and have realised through simple internet property searches that they can exchange paying an extortionate rent on a shoebox flat for buying a substantial house with a garden, through the simple expedient of shaping up and shipping out.
I've read elsewhere that a quarter-of-a-million Londoners fled in the run-up to lockdown and haven't come back, and the phenomenon of middle-class flight is being observed, at a smaller scale, in other urban centres across the country. The only limiting factor here isn't even property prices in the commuter belts of cities, but imagination: if you're considering leaving London for Buckinghamshire then cost might still give you pause for thought but, if you are one of the many well-paid Londoners who really can work from home full-time, then why not just up sticks to somewhere like Lincolnshire and buy a detached house, or move to Powys and trade up to a small mansion and several acres?
I don't know, perhaps if you're a twentysomething singleton who's desperate to go out clubbing, get pissed and try to get laid every other night then perhaps you might want to stick with a shoebox flat with a convenient nearby Tube station, but once you've grown up then why bother?
What if you want to meet interesting people?
The M25 doesn't generate a forcefield preventing "interesting" people from moving beyond it.
True, in a lower density living environment there will be fewer people to meet, but that has its advantages as well as its drawbacks. Fewer addicts, fewer dealers, a lot less violent crime. Also, under present circumstances, much less likelihood of catching a potentially lethal infectious disease.
If large companies are actually serious about work-from-home, and prepared to ditch the expensive city-centre offices in favour of occasional team meetings, it will lead to the biggest transformation in living arrangements in decades.
For years now, technologists have looked forward to the day that millions of people can work from anywhere and don’t need to waste several hours a day generating pollution, but companies have always insisted on everyone congregating together in the world’s most expensive real estate at 9am five days a week.
This does present other challenges though, such as railways dependent on season ticket revenue, and even the possibility of people being able to work mainly from abroad and spend fewer than 90 days per year in the UK - thereby avoiding UK income tax entirely. Plenty of Brits in the Middle East do this already.
A big issue is really fast internet connections in remote areas. Run a remote desktop, a couple of video sessions, and have bandwidth left for the kids Face timing their friends....
But very few areas in England are actually that remote. Plenty of semi-urban places, like Lichfield or Tamworth, that have excellent facilities, fibre broadband, fast trains to London AND lots of nice houses with gardens at affordable prices.
And some rural communities have been installing their own fibre cables - Kettlewell in Yorkshire, for example. Or this programme:
Where there’s a will, and the money, there will be a way. It helps that England is a small country and its transport network although congested is comprehensive. There is no insuperable difficulty to adding top notch broadband to pretty much every part of it.
When you stop for a moment (and what is lockdown, if it isn't stopping for a moment?) the economics of commuting are pretty grisly.
When I was doing Romford - Stratford on a regular basis, the cost was about 5 % of my salary. For the joy of about an hour a day in pretty stinky conditions. And it's safe to assume that many spent more time and money on commuting than I did.
Reduce that, and the net effect on national wellbeing is considerable. It would definitely pay for better broadband.
Before my husband traded in a job in central London for one five minutes' walk away, he was spending something like £6,000pa on a rail season ticket and tube fares. It was the single biggest item in our household budget, and getting shot of it has left us greatly better off. Many other people will have been experiencing the same benefits because of coronavirus.
The median wage in the UK is just short of £30,000. If we assume that a typical worker is also relieved of about 30% of their pay in income tax, national insurance and council tax bills, then many commuters who aren't in very high-paying jobs won't be parting with 5% of their salary for the privilege of using cattle-truck class public transport - it'll be more like a quarter.
A radical reduction in commuting can only benefit more people than it harms.
Not just that. Things like train networks would work much more easily (and in the medium term, viably) if they were catering for occasional working trips up to Town, rather than getting everyone into the office between 8 and 9 am.
London will still be needed as the Hub, and in a 2:3 or 1:4 world, people will still want to be nearish (and HS2 might be even more useful than we realised).
But the realisation that most people don't need to live there or work there all the time looks like the first gain to come from the virus.
It’s genuinely heartening to see many black conservatives come out batting against the hard left’s grievance culture, that attempts to paint every white man as inherently racist.
On topic, recent (June 8-18) NYT/Siena College poll of reg. voters in battleground states shows Biden ahead of Trump in FL +6% (JB 47% v DT 41% with 12% other / undecided). SO if election where held today, Our Fearless Leader would go down in his (new) home state like a overloaded garbage scow.
Re: trajectory of COVID-19 numbers in next few weeks, seems unlikely they will improve much this summer OR fall, given wide-spread flouting of CDC recommendations, not just by wing-nuts but by MANY people from sea to shining sea, most notably clueless teens & millennials, and savage yuppies.
There are just four months left until the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. AND note that in many states, early voting (absentee, in person or all vote-by-mail) commences two or three weeks prior to Election Day.
Methinks there just is NOT sufficient time left for the Sage of Mar-a-Lago to save himself from himself. Herbert Hoover (the man my GOP grandfather always called "Herbert God-Damn Hoover" couldn't do it in 1932, and seems less likely every day that his The Donald can do it in 2020.
Some of us have been pointing out for a while now that TikTok and Zoom are both basically Chinese spyware.
If you really have to use them, use on the computer and not the phone app.
When I helped setup a Chinese made laser cutter, it kept on trying to phone home to upload the designs we were cutting. A bit of code modification later, it was sending a continuous stream of video frames converted to dxfs.... I hope they liked them.
Naughty. What industry are you in?
This was just hobby stuff - a collective workshop. We were using a low end pro grade laser cutter.
So we are supposed to be building - the era of the major capital project is upon us - and from where I sit in lowland East London, the future is flats, flats and more flats.
I'm thinking about all these flats and all the people in them, whether owners or renters, and thinking how well they will get to know their new accommodation if we have to lockdown once again.
Perhaps in the not-too-distant the notion of living in a little box flat in a huge clock with no external space to call your own will go the same way as the idea of travelling for 4 hours on trains and tubes to go to and from an office.
I can see the attraction of rural life and life well away from the capital.
Whenever I see those new flats in east London, they always look like you'd have to practically be a millionaire in order to afford to buy one.
We're only at the very start of the transformation of working and living in this country that will be delivered by coronavirus, and the resultant realisation that (a) most commuting and centralised office activity is without value and (b) low density living beats high density living hands down for quality of life and of health.
Much of London's commercial property is now obsolete, and many of the well-heeled customers who might previously have been willing to pay telephone number sums for poky little flats in the capital will be emigrating to its more upmarket suburbs or right out into the Home Counties.
Outside of the leafiest areas and the Government and tourist theme park zones in the centre, the future of London is as a giant slum for those too poor to be able to afford to leave. One vast banlieue on the Parisian model.
Possibly a little hyperbolic, but probably not entirely wrong. I have friends talking of leaving London, whereas before they were avid fans of the city.
The same forces will also hollow out crowded cities across the West, from Paris and New York, to San Francisco and Madrid. Indeed cities outside Britain could suffer more, as rural property overseas is cheaper - because America, Spain and France are simply bigger, and emptier.
New York in particular could be entirely screwed. Why live in a small apartment in a newly desolate Manhattan, which freezes every winter and costs a fortune in heating, when you can move to sunny New Mexico and have acres of land?
The ramifications of all this are enormous
Here's a little something I made reference to a few days back:
Dominic Jackman, the founder of Escape from City, which helps people find work beyond London, said inquiries over the last fortnight revealed “a fundamental change in jobseeker preferences”.
Of 1,000 people signing up to the service, 51% wanted to leave the capital compared with 20% for the same period in 2019.
“Pre-Covid, while our jobseekers wanted to ‘escape the rat race’, a lot of them actually were happy living and working in London,” he said. “For the first time ever we have more people wanting to leave London than stay in it which is a huge shift in aspirations.”
An awful lot of people who previously stayed in London because of its cultural attractions and nightlife - which are now, of course, all shut - have discovered what exceptionally shitty places cities are to be trapped in the midst of public health crises (and this one could drag on for years, and it may not be the last occasion on which this happens in our lifetimes, either.) Many of those same people have also found out that they don't need to travel into the city centre to do their jobs, and have realised through simple internet property searches that they can exchange paying an extortionate rent on a shoebox flat for buying a substantial house with a garden, through the simple expedient of shaping up and shipping out.
I've read elsewhere that a quarter-of-a-million Londoners fled in the run-up to lockdown and haven't come back, and the phenomenon of middle-class flight is being observed, at a smaller scale, in other urban centres across the country. The only limiting factor here isn't even property prices in the commuter belts of cities, but imagination: if you're considering leaving London for Buckinghamshire then cost might still give you pause for thought but, if you are one of the many well-paid Londoners who really can work from home full-time, then why not just up sticks to somewhere like Lincolnshire and buy a detached house, or move to Powys and trade up to a small mansion and several acres?
I don't know, perhaps if you're a twentysomething singleton who's desperate to go out clubbing, get pissed and try to get laid every other night then perhaps you might want to stick with a shoebox flat with a convenient nearby Tube station, but once you've grown up then why bother?
What if you want to meet interesting people?
The M25 doesn't generate a forcefield preventing "interesting" people from moving beyond it.
True, in a lower density living environment there will be fewer people to meet, but that has its advantages as well as its drawbacks. Fewer addicts, fewer dealers, a lot less violent crime. Also, under present circumstances, much less likelihood of catching a potentially lethal infectious disease.
If large companies are actually serious about work-from-home, and prepared to ditch the expensive city-centre offices in favour of occasional team meetings, it will lead to the biggest transformation in living arrangements in decades.
For years now, technologists have looked forward to the day that millions of people can work from anywhere and don’t need to waste several hours a day generating pollution, but companies have always insisted on everyone congregating together in the world’s most expensive real estate at 9am five days a week.
This does present other challenges though, such as railways dependent on season ticket revenue, and even the possibility of people being able to work mainly from abroad and spend fewer than 90 days per year in the UK - thereby avoiding UK income tax entirely. Plenty of Brits in the Middle East do this already.
A big issue is really fast internet connections in remote areas. Run a remote desktop, a couple of video sessions, and have bandwidth left for the kids Face timing their friends....
We’ve had my daughter working from home on a call centre job, my son doing remote lessons from school and me trying to do various webex and zoom conferences and court appearances. It’s been a struggle. Sometimes I have lost the video on my links and got audio only.
You need a solid 100Mb connection for that kind of thing. That is what we need to aim for.
We don’t even get 1/10th of that these days. It was in fairness a bit better before lockdown.
If that can be delivered, then WFH becomes widely possible. If not, not.
So we are supposed to be building - the era of the major capital project is upon us - and from where I sit in lowland East London, the future is flats, flats and more flats.
I'm thinking about all these flats and all the people in them, whether owners or renters, and thinking how well they will get to know their new accommodation if we have to lockdown once again.
Perhaps in the not-too-distant the notion of living in a little box flat in a huge clock with no external space to call your own will go the same way as the idea of travelling for 4 hours on trains and tubes to go to and from an office.
I can see the attraction of rural life and life well away from the capital.
Whenever I see those new flats in east London, they always look like you'd have to practically be a millionaire in order to afford to buy one.
We're only at the very start of the transformation of working and living in this country that will be delivered by coronavirus, and the resultant realisation that (a) most commuting and centralised office activity is without value and (b) low density living beats high density living hands down for quality of life and of health.
Much of London's commercial property is now obsolete, and many of the well-heeled customers who might previously have been willing to pay telephone number sums for poky little flats in the capital will be emigrating to its more upmarket suburbs or right out into the Home Counties.
Outside of the leafiest areas and the Government and tourist theme park zones in the centre, the future of London is as a giant slum for those too poor to be able to afford to leave. One vast banlieue on the Parisian model.
Possibly a little hyperbolic, but probably not entirely wrong. I have friends talking of leaving London, whereas before they were avid fans of the city.
The same forces will also hollow out crowded cities across the West, from Paris and New York, to San Francisco and Madrid. Indeed cities outside Britain could suffer more, as rural property overseas is cheaper - because America, Spain and France are simply bigger, and emptier.
New York in particular could be entirely screwed. Why live in a small apartment in a newly desolate Manhattan, which freezes every winter and costs a fortune in heating, when you can move to sunny New Mexico and have acres of land?
The ramifications of all this are enormous
Here's a little something I made reference to a few days back:
Dominic Jackman, the founder of Escape from City, which helps people find work beyond London, said inquiries over the last fortnight revealed “a fundamental change in jobseeker preferences”.
Of 1,000 people signing up to the service, 51% wanted to leave the capital compared with 20% for the same period in 2019.
“Pre-Covid, while our jobseekers wanted to ‘escape the rat race’, a lot of them actually were happy living and working in London,” he said. “For the first time ever we have more people wanting to leave London than stay in it which is a huge shift in aspirations.”
An awful lot of people who previously stayed in London because of its cultural attractions and nightlife - which are now, of course, all shut - have discovered what exceptionally shitty places cities are to be trapped in the midst of public health crises (and this one could drag on for years, and it may not be the last occasion on which this happens in our lifetimes, either.) Many of those same people have also found out that they don't need to travel into the city centre to do their jobs, and have realised through simple internet property searches that they can exchange paying an extortionate rent on a shoebox flat for buying a substantial house with a garden, through the simple expedient of shaping up and shipping out.
I've read elsewhere that a quarter-of-a-million Londoners fled in the run-up to lockdown and haven't come back, and the phenomenon of middle-class flight is being observed, at a smaller scale, in other urban centres across the country. The only limiting factor here isn't even property prices in the commuter belts of cities, but imagination: if you're considering leaving London for Buckinghamshire then cost might still give you pause for thought but, if you are one of the many well-paid Londoners who really can work from home full-time, then why not just up sticks to somewhere like Lincolnshire and buy a detached house, or move to Powys and trade up to a small mansion and several acres?
I don't know, perhaps if you're a twentysomething singleton who's desperate to go out clubbing, get pissed and try to get laid every other night then perhaps you might want to stick with a shoebox flat with a convenient nearby Tube station, but once you've grown up then why bother?
What if you want to meet interesting people?
The M25 doesn't generate a forcefield preventing "interesting" people from moving beyond it.
True, in a lower density living environment there will be fewer people to meet, but that has its advantages as well as its drawbacks. Fewer addicts, fewer dealers, a lot less violent crime. Also, under present circumstances, much less likelihood of catching a potentially lethal infectious disease.
If large companies are actually serious about work-from-home, and prepared to ditch the expensive city-centre offices in favour of occasional team meetings, it will lead to the biggest transformation in living arrangements in decades.
For years now, technologists have looked forward to the day that millions of people can work from anywhere and don’t need to waste several hours a day generating pollution, but companies have always insisted on everyone congregating together in the world’s most expensive real estate at 9am five days a week.
This does present other challenges though, such as railways dependent on season ticket revenue, and even the possibility of people being able to work mainly from abroad and spend fewer than 90 days per year in the UK - thereby avoiding UK income tax entirely. Plenty of Brits in the Middle East do this already.
A big issue is really fast internet connections in remote areas. Run a remote desktop, a couple of video sessions, and have bandwidth left for the kids Face timing their friends....
Indeed. Hopefully a combination of OneWeb, Starlink, 4G, Openreach and local fibre projects can end the digital divide sooner rather than later.
The satellite internet stuff is the killer app for a lot of the world - hi-speed internet. Anywhere. So it will fill in the holes in the access map. Cheaply.
Yep, total game-changer. If Starlink does what it says on the tin, and Musk follows through on making massive profits connecting the world’s stock exchanges together a few milliseconds faster, while bringing 100Mbps broadband for less than $100 a month to most of the world, it’ll be the biggest technological innovation this decade.
"many black conservatives" = presume these cats are going to be boycotting NASCAR for banning the Confederate flag, and Quaker Oats for changing the name of Aunt Jemina syrup?
O wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us!
Except the boss isn't 'ithers', he's a standard issue remoaner. His readers are probably bemused at the Bojo hitpieces.
Amusingly, there is a paragraph in Gove's speech tonight somewhat on point:
"The views, tastes and concerns of those who write for the New York Times , who run higher education institutions, who chair business representative organisations, advise on ESG responsibilities for corporates and indeed run Government departments tend to have become more distant over time from those who build homes, manufacture automobiles, work in logistics, harvest food and dispose of waste. To colour it crudely: the former are more sensitive to the harm caused by alleged micro-aggressions; the latter are less likely to be squeamish about tougher sentences for those guilty of actual physical aggression."
Off topic: Re the government changing the rules to allow travel to France, Spain, Greece, Italy etc.
Are those countries going to allow travellers from Britain in, given our worse coronavirus experience?
They've bent the knee to the all mighty British tourist.
Its Portugal I feel sorry for.
For some reason the UK doesn’t seem to have active case numbers, like most countries, but the current level of critical cases and the current daily death rate are both low, suggesting that our active case numbers are also likely to be low.
That we had it worse, with more cases and more deaths, doesn’t present any risk to host countries if we go abroad. Indeed you could argue we are marginally more likely to be immune.
It is places like the US and Brazil with high and growing case numbers whose travellers present a risk.
O wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us!
Except the boss isn't 'ithers', he's a standard issue remoaner. His readers are probably bemused at the Bojo hitpieces.
Amusingly, there is a paragraph in Gove's speech tonight somewhat on point:
"The views, tastes and concerns of those who write for the New York Times , who run higher education institutions, who chair business representative organisations, advise on ESG responsibilities for corporates and indeed run Government departments tend to have become more distant over time from those who build homes, manufacture automobiles, work in logistics, harvest food and dispose of waste. To colour it crudely: the former are more sensitive to the harm caused by alleged micro-aggressions; the latter are less likely to be squeamish about tougher sentences for those guilty of actual physical aggression."
It was an excellent speech. Look forward to seeing some outputs.
I’m on an iPhone using Safari and on the Vanilla site Tweets have become unreadable as the last few letters on each row are cut off.
Great new feature: please don’t get rid of it...
Edited for missing words (ironically).
I find the PB.com site unusable on the iPhone due to characters being lopped off the right-hand side of the screen. I struggle to understand why a WordPress templated website doesn't work properly on an iPhone these days.
Is this guy really a Minister for the SNP??? His hatred just oozes. Extraordinary.
If this was in Westminster it would make headline news, I think
Except there's almost no interest in devolved politics in the main network news programmes or the UK-wide national newspapers. The occasional controversy achieves cut-through but the reality is that almost nobody in England who's not moved here from one of the devolved nations or has a very keen interest in politics would be able to name more than a small handful of devolved politicians. Sturgeon and Salmond are the obvious ones, some will be familiar with Arlene Foster and maybe one or two names like Gerry Adams from the peace process era. That's about it.
It's also why Nicola Sturgeon tends to poll well in GB-wide approval ratings - about 90% of the people being asked the questions don't know anything about her apart from her being in favour of independence for Scotland and, perhaps, that she comes across professionally on the television. They don't live in Scotland and are therefore unaffected by and almost entirely unaware of its Government's actions, and any of the successes or failures arising therefrom.
I'm not sure to what degree this ignorance is a cause of the gradual rotting away of the Union or a consequence thereof.
The population of Scotland is almost exactly the same as the population of Yorkshire. I suspect it gets more regional coverage than Yorkshire, and more national coverage too. Its politics is essentially regional and local from a UK point of view, just like where most of us live, in rather ignored parts of England.
Exactly, Essex has a quarter of the population of Scotland but how much coverage does Essex County Council get relative to Holyrood? Certainly less than 25% UK wide
In best Father Ted voice:
OK, one last time. This is a country… that one's a county. Country… county.
Also in Gove's speech I rather liked this: "The more that fluent, intelligent, kind and sensitive people explain that the Emperor’s New Clothes are a thoughtful co-creation blending public and private sector expertise from the textile and non-textile communities and these have been, benchmarked against international norms and sensitive to both body positivity feedback and non-judgemental protocols concerning the tone-policing of issues around personal space, the less likely someone is to say the guy is naked. "
Also in Gove's speech I rather liked this: "The more that fluent, intelligent, kind and sensitive people explain that the Emperor’s New Clothes are a thoughtful co-creation blending public and private sector expertise from the textile and non-textile communities and these have been, benchmarked against international norms and sensitive to both body positivity feedback and non-judgemental protocols concerning the tone-policing of issues around personal space, the less likely someone is to say the guy is naked. "
Brilliant!
I wonder when it actually dawns on the civil service that they’re in the firing line?
Is this guy really a Minister for the SNP??? His hatred just oozes. Extraordinary.
If this was in Westminster it would make headline news, I think
Except there's almost no interest in devolved politics in the main network news programmes or the UK-wide national newspapers. The occasional controversy achieves cut-through but the reality is that almost nobody in England who's not moved here from one of the devolved nations or has a very keen interest in politics would be able to name more than a small handful of devolved politicians. Sturgeon and Salmond are the obvious ones, some will be familiar with Arlene Foster and maybe one or two names like Gerry Adams from the peace process era. That's about it.
It's also why Nicola Sturgeon tends to poll well in GB-wide approval ratings - about 90% of the people being asked the questions don't know anything about her apart from her being in favour of independence for Scotland and, perhaps, that she comes across professionally on the television. They don't live in Scotland and are therefore unaffected by and almost entirely unaware of its Government's actions, and any of the successes or failures arising therefrom.
I'm not sure to what degree this ignorance is a cause of the gradual rotting away of the Union or a consequence thereof.
The population of Scotland is almost exactly the same as the population of Yorkshire. I suspect it gets more regional coverage than Yorkshire, and more national coverage too. Its politics is essentially regional and local from a UK point of view, just like where most of us live, in rather ignored parts of England.
Exactly, Essex has a quarter of the population of Scotland but how much coverage does Essex County Council get relative to Holyrood? Certainly less than 25% UK wide
In best Father Ted voice:
OK, one last time. This is a country… that one's a county. Country… county.
For all that I'm not the target audience, it's hard to see who that photo is meant to impress.
Dance monkey, dance...
The target audience is those saying Boris has been debilitated by Covid, time to resign/be retired. You know, the Boris that delivered Brexit and an 80-seat Tory majority in December. Hard to think why that target audience would want to see him leave the stage....
For all that I'm not the target audience, it's hard to see who that photo is meant to impress.
Dance monkey, dance...
The target audience is those saying Boris has been debilitated by Covid, time to resign/be retired. You know, the Boris that delivered Brexit and an 80-seat Tory majority in December. Hard to think why that target audience would want to see him leave the stage....
Fine. Picture him jogging, or playing tennis. He likes tennis, doesn't he?
But this photo is just humiliating. An enormous @rse, so to speak.
But you are rock-solid behind the Brexiteers, or do you expect us to believe that you have turned your back on the most Brexity Cabinet of the last 40 years?
I’m on an iPhone using Safari and on the Vanilla site Tweets have become unreadable as the last few letters on each row are cut off.
Great new feature: please don’t get rid of it...
Edited for missing words (ironically).
I find the PB.com site unusable on the iPhone due to characters being lopped off the right-hand side of the screen. I struggle to understand why a WordPress templated website doesn't work properly on an iPhone these days.
It is worse on my Samsung. It lops off both sides
I flip the phone into "Desktop mode" when using it for PB
And what are the serious ideas for Brexit from the Brexiteers?
They have none. Brexiteers are the worst winners in the history of the world. They generated this mess and they are waiting for someone else to fix it and, in the meantime, hoping nobody notices the mess...
Is this guy really a Minister for the SNP??? His hatred just oozes. Extraordinary.
If this was in Westminster it would make headline news, I think
Except there's almost no interest in devolved politics in the main network news programmes or the UK-wide national newspapers. The occasional controversy achieves cut-through but the reality is that almost nobody in England who's not moved here from one of the devolved nations or has a very keen interest in politics would be able to name more than a small handful of devolved politicians. Sturgeon and Salmond are the obvious ones, some will be familiar with Arlene Foster and maybe one or two names like Gerry Adams from the peace process era. That's about it.
It's also why Nicola Sturgeon tends to poll well in GB-wide approval ratings - about 90% of the people being asked the questions don't know anything about her apart from her being in favour of independence for Scotland and, perhaps, that she comes across professionally on the television. They don't live in Scotland and are therefore unaffected by and almost entirely unaware of its Government's actions, and any of the successes or failures arising therefrom.
I'm not sure to what degree this ignorance is a cause of the gradual rotting away of the Union or a consequence thereof.
The population of Scotland is almost exactly the same as the population of Yorkshire. I suspect it gets more regional coverage than Yorkshire, and more national coverage too. Its politics is essentially regional and local from a UK point of view, just like where most of us live, in rather ignored parts of England.
Exactly, Essex has a quarter of the population of Scotland but how much coverage does Essex County Council get relative to Holyrood? Certainly less than 25% UK wide
In best Father Ted voice:
OK, one last time. This is a country… that one's a county. Country… county.
Essex was a Kingdom. Similar status to Scotland. I think you'll find.
He’s simply a member of staff, and he reports to Mr Johnson, who was elected with a massive majority only six months ago.
The public will be allowed their say on Johnson and his government in due course, but right now they’re doing what they were elected to do - even if you don’t like it!
But you are rock-solid behind the Brexiteers, or do you expect us to believe that you have turned your back on the most Brexity Cabinet of the last 40 years?
Comments
So masks are essentially communitarian. We wear them & accept a certain mild level of discomfort in order to protect those around us from the possibility of being infected by a horrible disease. The more pro-social a society is, the more likely it is that people will wear masks & the less affected by Covid-19 that society will be.
(An aside: I bet the anti-vaxx conspiracy groups are full of anti-mask types.)
And some rural communities have been installing their own fibre cables - Kettlewell in Yorkshire, for example. Or this programme:
http://www.connectingcumbria.org.uk/
Where there’s a will, and the money, there will be a way. It helps that England is a small country and its transport network although congested is comprehensive. There is no insuperable difficulty to adding top notch broadband to pretty much every part of it.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/896041/Ditchley_lecture.pdf
Are those countries going to allow travellers from Britain in, given our worse coronavirus experience?
https://twitter.com/d1rtydan/status/1277081198624337920
https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1277327190321958914
When I was doing Romford - Stratford on a regular basis, the cost was about 5 % of my salary. For the joy of about an hour a day in pretty stinky conditions. And it's safe to assume that many spent more time and money on commuting than I did.
Reduce that, and the net effect on national wellbeing is considerable. It would definitely pay for better broadband.
If you really have to use them, use on the computer and not the phone app.
Its Portugal I feel sorry for.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-scotland-53203877
The median wage in the UK is just short of £30,000. If we assume that a typical worker is also relieved of about 30% of their pay in income tax, national insurance and council tax bills, then many commuters who aren't in very high-paying jobs won't be parting with 5% of their salary for the privilege of using cattle-truck class public transport - it'll be more like a quarter.
A radical reduction in commuting can only benefit more people than it harms.
O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
Very good read.
https://m.slashdot.org/story/372696
And the thing with apps, as highlighted on Silicon Valley comedy show, most people forget to uninstall them even if they don't use them anymore.
Good night.
Great new feature: please don’t get rid of it...
Edited for missing words (ironically).
London will still be needed as the Hub, and in a 2:3 or 1:4 world, people will still want to be nearish (and HS2 might be even more useful than we realised).
But the realisation that most people don't need to live there or work there all the time looks like the first gain to come from the virus.
Re: trajectory of COVID-19 numbers in next few weeks, seems unlikely they will improve much this summer OR fall, given wide-spread flouting of CDC recommendations, not just by wing-nuts but by MANY people from sea to shining sea, most notably clueless teens & millennials, and savage yuppies.
There are just four months left until the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. AND note that in many states, early voting (absentee, in person or all vote-by-mail) commences two or three weeks prior to Election Day.
Methinks there just is NOT sufficient time left for the Sage of Mar-a-Lago to save himself from himself. Herbert Hoover (the man my GOP grandfather always called "Herbert God-Damn Hoover" couldn't do it in 1932, and seems less likely every day that his The Donald can do it in 2020.
Dance monkey, dance...
"The views, tastes and concerns of those who write for the New York Times , who run higher education institutions, who chair business representative organisations, advise on ESG responsibilities for corporates and indeed run
Government departments tend to have become more distant over time from those who build homes, manufacture automobiles, work in logistics, harvest food and dispose of waste. To colour it crudely: the former are more sensitive to
the harm caused by alleged micro-aggressions; the latter are less likely to be squeamish about tougher sentences for those guilty of actual physical aggression."
That we had it worse, with more cases and more deaths, doesn’t present any risk to host countries if we go abroad. Indeed you could argue we are marginally more likely to be immune.
It is places like the US and Brazil with high and growing case numbers whose travellers present a risk.
OK, one last time. This is a country… that one's a county. Country… county.
https://twitter.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1277328726968147974?s=09
"The more that fluent, intelligent, kind and sensitive people
explain that the Emperor’s New Clothes are a thoughtful
co-creation blending public and private sector expertise from
the textile and non-textile communities and these have been,
benchmarked against international norms and sensitive to
both body positivity feedback and non-judgemental protocols
concerning the tone-policing of issues around personal
space, the less likely someone is to say the guy is naked. "
On the first point he may well turn out to be right. Sadly.
I wonder when it actually dawns on the civil service that they’re in the firing line?
This is yours. You made this mess. You sort it out.
https://twitter.com/FinancialTimes/status/1277342152566202368?s=20
Not my clowns
It is an utterly ridiculous way to run a country. The Northcote–Trevelyan report took months to prepare.
Even the Tory party don't have a clue what Cummings is up to.
But this photo is just humiliating. An enormous @rse, so to speak.
I flip the phone into "Desktop mode" when using it for PB
Labour (and Momentum) would chuck busloads of activists at a single, unwinnable seat.
I am a conservative and support the party and that has not changed
I am critical of Boris as you well know
And Matthew Goodwin's tweet actually hits the nail on the head
10m cases
500k deaths
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
The public will be allowed their say on Johnson and his government in due course, but right now they’re doing what they were elected to do - even if you don’t like it!