TBF you can still wait and see who he picks, in the event that it was someone less hackish than the current GOP judges it might help to seat them.
Sure. I’m done being fair. This administration and its enablers have no respect for law or constitution except as tools of power; the evidence was long since overwhelming.
Sadly, that is now an attitude on this side of the pond too.
There is something of a difference, though. We are some way off our PM refusing in advance to accept the result if the election unless he wins. How anyone might think it appropriate to even consider appointing this man’s Supreme Court nominee before the election is quite beyond me.
"Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful — there won't be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation,” Trump said. “The ballots are out of control. You know it, and you know who knows it better than anyone else? The Democrats know it better than anyone else.”
Get rid of people voting and there won't be a transfer there will be a continuation. People voting are out of control. Yes Trump, you're not supposed to control what people do with their ballots that is the point of democracy.
To be fair to Trump, it is clear he is talking about postal ballots there, and it is not unheard of for their veracity to be questioned even in this United Kingdom.
And is it that great a jump to our own government saying that it will abolish judicial reviews so it does not have to follow the law?
But almost no proof in the UK. You need evidence.
We did go through a phase of:- New Tory: Labour's cheating with postal votes; we should ban them Old Tory: yes but keep schtum because most postal votes are for the blue team
We received the daily mail each day on their app mainly as my wife likes their crosswords and puzzles
I tend to flick through it but today I read it in more detail and page after page attacks Boris demanding he stops pandering to the experts and reject increasing covid measures and address the economic consequences.
In some ways the mail seems to want to lock and isolate away all of us oldies and let the disease have it's way.
I believe this is the 'herd' immunity theory but when expressed in the pages of the mail it is just repulsive and to be honest I am grateful Boris is following the science and not bowing to these idiotic right wing loons.
We experienced on this forum in the last couple of days the pain felt by Dura Ace when his 81 year old mother fell and on going to hospital for an X-ray picked up covid and dreadfully died 11 days later
Before anyone accuses me of being a Boris cheerleader I have not changed my mind that he is not the right PM for these times but he is at least trying to respect the lives of all of us
The daily mail should hang it's head in shame
Buying the mail for the crossword is like buying the Star for the football.
App downloaded. Somewhat surprised to see that 'Area risk level' is 'Medium'. Earlier in the week it was Low on the Gov.UK site. Two Uni's within about 20 miles, of course.
When you go to the FAQ on the app about risk level, all of England is either medium or high - there is no low risk category. This seems daft to me; there are obviously many pockets of England with very low rates. In Wales, however, there is a low risk category. Maybe they don't want any of the English getting complacent?
Police in Scotland have made it clear that they do not want to be bothered with alleged breaches of these regulations for anything short of a large scale house party. They have better things to do, apparently.
Who'd have thought they'd rather be catching murderers or rapists than people having a drink with a friend?
Is HYUFD about? Earlier this week he was boosting a Scottish sub-sample which had the SNP on "only" 45%. Well, he who lives by the sub-sample, dies by the sub-sample. The IPSOS-MORI sub-sample has them on 60%!
Ah but that's IPSOS-MORI so it doesn't count if it wasn't Trafalgar.
Normally I have little sympathy for Matt Hancock in interviews but this morning on BBC1 the questioning on the app was dire, particularly in relation to elderly people who don't have smart phone or don't have mobiles at all. As Matt Hancock correctly pointed out he has been criticized for many things, but not being able to provide an app to people who don't have a mobile phone is the most bizarre.
The interviewer wasted so much time on this and was fairly aggressive in his irrational questioning. What a waste of an interview on the app.
I'm mournfully starting to believe that the tripe being paddled by the "lockdownsceptics" is, by percolating around the general population and convincing enough that covid isn't a thing, or not following restrictions magically makes it go away, or it's not actually around and all made up so that they ignore the restrictions, we'll continue having more and more of a surge so we do, in the end, find ourselves in another lockdown of some description.
It would be ironic if it wasn't so shit.
(The banging on about "It's false positives" was really illuminating as to how they can totally ignore any logic or arithmetic in favour of trumpeting a phrase they don't understand and haven't thought through:
1 - Conditional probability doesn't work like that; you can't bait and switch "random sample of entire population" with "sample of people who are symptomatic" when the latter has hugely greater positivity than the former. Of course, this bit does require understanding the use of the term and isn't instantly obvous
2 - Applying their claimed rate obviously meant that we would not only have had zero covid through much of July and August, it would actually have had to be a significant amount of negative covid (more false positives than the total of false and true positives, thus true positives need to be a negative number). I wonder how many covid-ill people landed in the UK and were instantly cured on breathing our air.
3 - The most obvious one, though - the larger the false positive number, the worse the surge in true positives had to be. If half the cases when it was 1,000 per day were false positives (500 false) and the testing rate was similar, then when it's 5,000 per day, it hasn't quintupled. It's gone up ten-fold. Choose a higher number of false positives (900 of those 1000), and it's gone up fifty-fold. Which probably screams for far harsher restrictions)
Yet they continued to bang on about it for days, obviously not actually thinking about it but clinging to it as the latest "proof" that it's all fine and an overreaction and let's please get back to normal it's all a Government conspiracy.
On (3) - people are getting the wrong end of the stick on how the stats work and what it all means.
Toby Young, the latest of these.
For me, the frustration is that my severely autistic son went through hell during the first lockdown. These denialist idiots are going to end up pushing us into a second one, aren't they?
Makes you wonder what their tune would be during the Blitz...."I'm not closing my curtains just because some non-existent German bomber threat might come tonight. You are taking away our freedoms!"
I can remember hearing them. Lying awake in our Morrison shelter and hearing the drone.
This test situation is a total mess isn't it. My wife is ill, with symptoms more suggestive of a bad cold than Covid, but certainly suggestive enough of Covid for us to want to know for sure. For instance, we're not keeping our kids off school, their education has been disrupted enough to keep them at home for a fortnight when it might be nothing and one has just started secondary and another just started GCSEs, but obviously we would if she tested positive. But she cannot get a test. And the system seems designed to frustrate too. And you wonder why this thing is spreading out of control.
[OT Admin] the site is still very slow and often will not reload on Firefox, leading to long and misleading display of the message that comments are closed. Perhaps after November the site might spend some of its winnings from the Biden/Trump landslide (delete as appropriate) on a Vanilla/Wordpress consultant to work with @rcs1000 for a day or two.
Or just move that line.
It is the extra scrollbar that irritates me and the text of the replies seems to need both scrollbars as sometimes part of the first or messages are not visible depending on which scrollbar you last scrolled with.
I agree with the slowness of loading and on this version of Chrome the comments do not load at all unless the initial box with "Comments are closed" is visible on screen. If that is off-screen, loading does not start until you scroll "Comments are closed" back into view.
From testing the Vanilla page alone on various platforms and browsers, the main issue is that it appears to load the comments, then hangs for a few seconds as all the Twitter embeds load. This probably causes a timeout on the main page as the Vanilla page is hung up.
The solution is to disable the Twitter embeds from Vanilla - and dare I say it, that's probably a good idea on a whole number of levels at the moment.
You should be able to disable this by blocking third party content on your browser or adblock software of choice, but a global setting for it would improve things dramatically.
I'm mournfully starting to believe that the tripe being paddled by the "lockdownsceptics" is, by percolating around the general population and convincing enough that covid isn't a thing, or not following restrictions magically makes it go away, or it's not actually around and all made up so that they ignore the restrictions, we'll continue having more and more of a surge so we do, in the end, find ourselves in another lockdown of some description.
It would be ironic if it wasn't so shit.
(The banging on about "It's false positives" was really illuminating as to how they can totally ignore any logic or arithmetic in favour of trumpeting a phrase they don't understand and haven't thought through:
1 - Conditional probability doesn't work like that; you can't bait and switch "random sample of entire population" with "sample of people who are symptomatic" when the latter has hugely greater positivity than the former. Of course, this bit does require understanding the use of the term and isn't instantly obvous
2 - Applying their claimed rate obviously meant that we would not only have had zero covid through much of July and August, it would actually have had to be a significant amount of negative covid (more false positives than the total of false and true positives, thus true positives need to be a negative number). I wonder how many covid-ill people landed in the UK and were instantly cured on breathing our air.
3 - The most obvious one, though - the larger the false positive number, the worse the surge in true positives had to be. If half the cases when it was 1,000 per day were false positives (500 false) and the testing rate was similar, then when it's 5,000 per day, it hasn't quintupled. It's gone up ten-fold. Choose a higher number of false positives (900 of those 1000), and it's gone up fifty-fold. Which probably screams for far harsher restrictions)
Yet they continued to bang on about it for days, obviously not actually thinking about it but clinging to it as the latest "proof" that it's all fine and an overreaction and let's please get back to normal it's all a Government conspiracy.
On (3) - people are getting the wrong end of the stick on how the stats work and what it all means.
Toby Young, the latest of these.
For me, the frustration is that my severely autistic son went through hell during the first lockdown. These denialist idiots are going to end up pushing us into a second one, aren't they?
Makes you wonder what their tune would be during the Blitz...."I'm not closing my curtains just because some non-existent German bomber threat might come tonight. You are taking away our freedoms!"
I can remember hearing them. Lying awake in our Morrison shelter and hearing the drone.
And that's the reason there weren't people denying the threat, because the threat was very apparent and very real.
This test situation is a total mess isn't it. My wife is ill, with symptoms more suggestive of a bad cold than Covid, but certainly suggestive enough of Covid for us to want to know for sure. For instance, we're not keeping our kids off school, their education has been disrupted enough to keep them at home for a fortnight when it might be nothing and one has just started secondary and another just started GCSEs, but obviously we would if she tested positive. But she cannot get a test. And the system seems designed to frustrate too. And you wonder why this thing is spreading out of control.
Keep trying on Saturday after utterly failing to get a test from 7am to 9am I wandered back to the computer at 10:00 and got one straight away.
I'm mournfully starting to believe that the tripe being paddled by the "lockdownsceptics" is, by percolating around the general population and convincing enough that covid isn't a thing, or not following restrictions magically makes it go away, or it's not actually around and all made up so that they ignore the restrictions, we'll continue having more and more of a surge so we do, in the end, find ourselves in another lockdown of some description.
It would be ironic if it wasn't so shit.
(The banging on about "It's false positives" was really illuminating as to how they can totally ignore any logic or arithmetic in favour of trumpeting a phrase they don't understand and haven't thought through:
1 - Conditional probability doesn't work like that; you can't bait and switch "random sample of entire population" with "sample of people who are symptomatic" when the latter has hugely greater positivity than the former. Of course, this bit does require understanding the use of the term and isn't instantly obvous
2 - Applying their claimed rate obviously meant that we would not only have had zero covid through much of July and August, it would actually have had to be a significant amount of negative covid (more false positives than the total of false and true positives, thus true positives need to be a negative number). I wonder how many covid-ill people landed in the UK and were instantly cured on breathing our air.
3 - The most obvious one, though - the larger the false positive number, the worse the surge in true positives had to be. If half the cases when it was 1,000 per day were false positives (500 false) and the testing rate was similar, then when it's 5,000 per day, it hasn't quintupled. It's gone up ten-fold. Choose a higher number of false positives (900 of those 1000), and it's gone up fifty-fold. Which probably screams for far harsher restrictions)
Yet they continued to bang on about it for days, obviously not actually thinking about it but clinging to it as the latest "proof" that it's all fine and an overreaction and let's please get back to normal it's all a Government conspiracy.
It's the scientists that I'm most disappointed in. A lot of the conspiracy and denialism comes from citing some scientist or other. Reasonable scientists can disagree, but too many are acting as advocates for some emotionally-held belief, not science.
I believe that experts being interviewed on the record have a moral duty to act somewhat like an expert witness: when an "opinion" is asked it should be a professional opinion backed by evidence rather than a personal opinion, and the expert has to be extremely careful not to stray from their area of expertise. (In court, one would hope that the opposing barrister would quickly expose an expert talking beyond their expertise or query the basis for opinion, but journalists conducting an interview are... rather far from forensic in their questioning.) An expert should also consider carefully whether they are engaging in motivated reasoning, and be willing to challenge themselves as best they can, though this is of course difficult.
I'm also a scientist, and ethics is an ever-increasing part of our job. But I see no discussion of the ethics of *not* answering a question when you don't really know the answer. Media training, sure - I've done piles of that, but it's mainly about how to get yourself in print or on TV, not whether you might do better shutting up about something, or considering carefully the consequences of what you say.
Perhaps after this is over the scientific establishment will take a look at how they behaved in the pandemic. Or perhaps they will feel self-satisfied at how many times they got on TV...
This test situation is a total mess isn't it. My wife is ill, with symptoms more suggestive of a bad cold than Covid, but certainly suggestive enough of Covid for us to want to know for sure. For instance, we're not keeping our kids off school, their education has been disrupted enough to keep them at home for a fortnight when it might be nothing and one has just started secondary and another just started GCSEs, but obviously we would if she tested positive. But she cannot get a test. And the system seems designed to frustrate too. And you wonder why this thing is spreading out of control.
AIUI you can just walk up to some of the tests sites and ask for one without booking. Could try that as a last resort?
40 days until the US election and Biden remains 7 points ahead in the national poll averages. It makes me wonder, when is most early voting (in person or by mail) expected to happen this year? And how big will the percentages be given Covid-19 etc?
It seems to me Trump is running out of time for a swing back to him, especially once a meaningful proportion of the votes have been cast. So the debate on Tuesday is surely critical for him - the next Presidential one is 2 weeks later, by which point he'll be running out of time.
It would be good to have a PB piece giving an overview of the key states and their position on early and postal voting, and any data on how it's going so far. I saw one post that said a million out of 6 million votes in that state had been sent out, though not many received back yet.
[OT Admin] the site is still very slow and often will not reload on Firefox, leading to long and misleading display of the message that comments are closed. Perhaps after November the site might spend some of its winnings from the Biden/Trump landslide (delete as appropriate) on a Vanilla/Wordpress consultant to work with @rcs1000 for a day or two.
Or just move that line.
It is the extra scrollbar that irritates me and the text of the replies seems to need both scrollbars as sometimes part of the first or messages are not visible depending on which scrollbar you last scrolled with.
I agree with the slowness of loading and on this version of Chrome the comments do not load at all unless the initial box with "Comments are closed" is visible on screen. If that is off-screen, loading does not start until you scroll "Comments are closed" back into view.
The extra scrollbar is the result of a quick-and-dirty workaround that I sent @rcs1000 for the previous problem where you couldn't see the lower comments at all. I think the size of the frame with the comments in it is supposed to automatically adjust itself, but that seems to have broken - probably because the browsers got stricter about communication between pages from different domains, which gets abused by hackers a lot. I think Robert got in touch with Vanilla about fixing the original problem, hopefully they'll work it out and the extra scrollbar won't be needed.
I'm mournfully starting to believe that the tripe being paddled by the "lockdownsceptics" is, by percolating around the general population and convincing enough that covid isn't a thing, or not following restrictions magically makes it go away, or it's not actually around and all made up so that they ignore the restrictions, we'll continue having more and more of a surge so we do, in the end, find ourselves in another lockdown of some description.
It would be ironic if it wasn't so shit.
(The banging on about "It's false positives" was really illuminating as to how they can totally ignore any logic or arithmetic in favour of trumpeting a phrase they don't understand and haven't thought through:
1 - Conditional probability doesn't work like that; you can't bait and switch "random sample of entire population" with "sample of people who are symptomatic" when the latter has hugely greater positivity than the former. Of course, this bit does require understanding the use of the term and isn't instantly obvous
2 - Applying their claimed rate obviously meant that we would not only have had zero covid through much of July and August, it would actually have had to be a significant amount of negative covid (more false positives than the total of false and true positives, thus true positives need to be a negative number). I wonder how many covid-ill people landed in the UK and were instantly cured on breathing our air.
3 - The most obvious one, though - the larger the false positive number, the worse the surge in true positives had to be. If half the cases when it was 1,000 per day were false positives (500 false) and the testing rate was similar, then when it's 5,000 per day, it hasn't quintupled. It's gone up ten-fold. Choose a higher number of false positives (900 of those 1000), and it's gone up fifty-fold. Which probably screams for far harsher restrictions)
Yet they continued to bang on about it for days, obviously not actually thinking about it but clinging to it as the latest "proof" that it's all fine and an overreaction and let's please get back to normal it's all a Government conspiracy.
On (3) - people are getting the wrong end of the stick on how the stats work and what it all means.
Toby Young, the latest of these.
For me, the frustration is that my severely autistic son went through hell during the first lockdown. These denialist idiots are going to end up pushing us into a second one, aren't they?
Makes you wonder what their tune would be during the Blitz...."I'm not closing my curtains just because some non-existent German bomber threat might come tonight. You are taking away our freedoms!"
I can remember hearing them. Lying awake in our Morrison shelter and hearing the drone.
And that's the reason there weren't people denying the threat, because the threat was very apparent and very real.
I know people who have had Covid-19 and while, so far as I know, no-one I know has died, a few I know of have and several more have been very ill.
This test situation is a total mess isn't it. My wife is ill, with symptoms more suggestive of a bad cold than Covid, but certainly suggestive enough of Covid for us to want to know for sure. For instance, we're not keeping our kids off school, their education has been disrupted enough to keep them at home for a fortnight when it might be nothing and one has just started secondary and another just started GCSEs, but obviously we would if she tested positive. But she cannot get a test. And the system seems designed to frustrate too. And you wonder why this thing is spreading out of control.
Not being funny but people who don't think they have got Covid, have not been traced with a contact who has Covid trying to use the tests are precisely why there are difficulties.
As far as I know there is a single country in the planet who is testing everyone who has got a bad cold. The tests are being reserved more for people who need them and for targetted contact tracing.
We received the daily mail each day on their app mainly as my wife likes their crosswords and puzzles
I tend to flick through it but today I read it in more detail and page after page attacks Boris demanding he stops pandering to the experts and reject increasing covid measures and address the economic consequences.
In some ways the mail seems to want to lock and isolate away all of us oldies and let the disease have it's way.
I believe this is the 'herd' immunity theory but when expressed in the pages of the mail it is just repulsive and to be honest I am grateful Boris is following the science and not bowing to these idiotic right wing loons.
We experienced on this forum in the last couple of days the pain felt by Dura Ace when his 81 year old mother fell and on going to hospital for an X-ray picked up covid and dreadfully died 11 days later
Before anyone accuses me of being a Boris cheerleader I have not changed my mind that he is not the right PM for these times but he is at least trying to respect the lives of all of us
The daily mail should hang it's head in shame
Buying the mail for the crossword is like buying the Star for the football.
Are you criticising my wife as I do not buy it
Just making a point, if all she does is the crossword and doesn’t read a single article then fair enough.
We received the daily mail each day on their app mainly as my wife likes their crosswords and puzzles
I tend to flick through it but today I read it in more detail and page after page attacks Boris demanding he stops pandering to the experts and reject increasing covid measures and address the economic consequences.
In some ways the mail seems to want to lock and isolate away all of us oldies and let the disease have it's way.
I believe this is the 'herd' immunity theory but when expressed in the pages of the mail it is just repulsive and to be honest I am grateful Boris is following the science and not bowing to these idiotic right wing loons.
We experienced on this forum in the last couple of days the pain felt by Dura Ace when his 81 year old mother fell and on going to hospital for an X-ray picked up covid and dreadfully died 11 days later
Before anyone accuses me of being a Boris cheerleader I have not changed my mind that he is not the right PM for these times but he is at least trying to respect the lives of all of us
The daily mail should hang it's head in shame
This is an extremely dangerous disease. If you are not locking and isolating yourself away anyway, irrespective of what the Daily Mail or the government says or does, you have a higher risk appetite than I have. The defensive principle is your friend.
40 days until the US election and Biden remains 7 points ahead in the national poll averages. It makes me wonder, when is most early voting (in person or by mail) expected to happen this year? And how big will the percentages be given Covid-19 etc?
It seems to me Trump is running out of time for a swing back to him, especially once a meaningful proportion of the votes have been cast. So the debate on Tuesday is surely critical for him - the next Presidential one is 2 weeks later, by which point he'll be running out of time.
It would be good to have a PB piece giving an overview of the key states and their position on early and postal voting, and any data on how it's going so far. I saw one post that said a million out of 6 million votes in that state had been sent out, though not many received back yet.
App downloaded. Somewhat surprised to see that 'Area risk level' is 'Medium'. Earlier in the week it was Low on the Gov.UK site. Two Uni's within about 20 miles, of course.
Mine says it only works in Newham, wherever that is.
This test situation is a total mess isn't it. My wife is ill, with symptoms more suggestive of a bad cold than Covid, but certainly suggestive enough of Covid for us to want to know for sure. For instance, we're not keeping our kids off school, their education has been disrupted enough to keep them at home for a fortnight when it might be nothing and one has just started secondary and another just started GCSEs, but obviously we would if she tested positive. But she cannot get a test. And the system seems designed to frustrate too. And you wonder why this thing is spreading out of control.
Not being funny but people who don't think they have got Covid, have not been traced with a contact who has Covid trying to use the tests are precisely why there are difficulties.
As far as I know there is a single country in the planet who is testing everyone who has got a bad cold. The tests are being reserved more for people who need them and for targetted contact tracing.
As far as I recall most other countries are triaging tests through GPs. Cummings and gang however think its better to just have a centralized free for all.
Ps im still waiting for you to supply evidence of other countries queuing up to copy our system.
I don’t know why people feel the need to comment on what Prince Harry or his wife say? Who gives a f*ck?
Some people are really obsessed with them.
And I don't know why he feels the need to tell the US electorate how they should be voting, when he himself has no right to be involved. Remember how well that went down with the Guardian did it?
[OT Admin] the site is still very slow and often will not reload on Firefox, leading to long and misleading display of the message that comments are closed. Perhaps after November the site might spend some of its winnings from the Biden/Trump landslide (delete as appropriate) on a Vanilla/Wordpress consultant to work with @rcs1000 for a day or two.
Or just move that line.
It is the extra scrollbar that irritates me and the text of the replies seems to need both scrollbars as sometimes part of the first or messages are not visible depending on which scrollbar you last scrolled with.
I agree with the slowness of loading and on this version of Chrome the comments do not load at all unless the initial box with "Comments are closed" is visible on screen. If that is off-screen, loading does not start until you scroll "Comments are closed" back into view.
From testing the Vanilla page alone on various platforms and browsers, the main issue is that it appears to load the comments, then hangs for a few seconds as all the Twitter embeds load. This probably causes a timeout on the main page as the Vanilla page is hung up.
The solution is to disable the Twitter embeds from Vanilla - and dare I say it, that's probably a good idea on a whole number of levels at the moment.
You should be able to disable this by blocking third party content on your browser or adblock software of choice, but a global setting for it would improve things dramatically.
The double scrollbar issue is because it is injecting an iframe into the reading area and there is what looks like a bodge to force the iframe to scroll. I assume this is to solve the issue that the comments were getting chopped off at the bottom because of a frame sizing error. The code really needs injecting into a DIV rather than an iframe.
I had thought that the comments not loading was perhaps due to some over-zealous coding where the javascript was sensitive to whether its load-point was onscreen or not. I may well try the vanilla twitter block and see what happens
I don’t know why people feel the need to comment on what Prince Harry or his wife say? Who gives a f*ck?
Some people are really obsessed with them.
And I don't know why he feels the need to tell the US electorate how they should be voting, when he himself has no right to be involved. Remember how well that went down with the Guardian did it?
Also, brown suede shoes with a blue suit. What kind of message does that send?
I don’t know why people feel the need to comment on what Prince Harry or his wife say? Who gives a f*ck?
Some people are really obsessed with them.
And I don't know why he feels the need to tell the US electorate how they should be voting, when he himself has no right to be involved. Remember how well that went down with the Guardian did it?
That could easily apply to tons of people including Nigel Farage.
This test situation is a total mess isn't it. My wife is ill, with symptoms more suggestive of a bad cold than Covid, but certainly suggestive enough of Covid for us to want to know for sure. For instance, we're not keeping our kids off school, their education has been disrupted enough to keep them at home for a fortnight when it might be nothing and one has just started secondary and another just started GCSEs, but obviously we would if she tested positive. But she cannot get a test. And the system seems designed to frustrate too. And you wonder why this thing is spreading out of control.
Not being funny but people who don't think they have got Covid, have not been traced with a contact who has Covid trying to use the tests are precisely why there are difficulties.
As far as I know there is a single country in the planet who is testing everyone who has got a bad cold. The tests are being reserved more for people who need them and for targetted contact tracing.
That's fine, but then don't blame us if our kids spread the virus to other people. I'm not going to keep them off school when on the balance of probability she probably has about a 3% chance of having it. But 3% of the people in our situation are going to be potentially spreading it because they can't get tested.
I don’t know why people feel the need to comment on what Prince Harry or his wife say? Who gives a f*ck?
Some people are really obsessed with them.
And I don't know why he feels the need to tell the US electorate how they should be voting, when he himself has no right to be involved. Remember how well that went down with the Guardian did it?
That could easily apply to tons of people including Nigel Farage.
He too should not stick his oar in. But for a member of the royal family to do it is something else.
We received the daily mail each day on their app mainly as my wife likes their crosswords and puzzles
I tend to flick through it but today I read it in more detail and page after page attacks Boris demanding he stops pandering to the experts and reject increasing covid measures and address the economic consequences.
In some ways the mail seems to want to lock and isolate away all of us oldies and let the disease have it's way.
I believe this is the 'herd' immunity theory but when expressed in the pages of the mail it is just repulsive and to be honest I am grateful Boris is following the science and not bowing to these idiotic right wing loons.
We experienced on this forum in the last couple of days the pain felt by Dura Ace when his 81 year old mother fell and on going to hospital for an X-ray picked up covid and dreadfully died 11 days later
Before anyone accuses me of being a Boris cheerleader I have not changed my mind that he is not the right PM for these times but he is at least trying to respect the lives of all of us
The daily mail should hang it's head in shame
This is an extremely dangerous disease. If you are not locking and isolating yourself away anyway, irrespective of what the Daily Mail or the government says or does, you have a higher risk appetite than I have. The defensive principle is your friend.
My wife and I have gone back into semi lockdown and strictly practice hands-face-space
This test situation is a total mess isn't it. My wife is ill, with symptoms more suggestive of a bad cold than Covid, but certainly suggestive enough of Covid for us to want to know for sure. For instance, we're not keeping our kids off school, their education has been disrupted enough to keep them at home for a fortnight when it might be nothing and one has just started secondary and another just started GCSEs, but obviously we would if she tested positive. But she cannot get a test. And the system seems designed to frustrate too. And you wonder why this thing is spreading out of control.
Not being funny but people who don't think they have got Covid, have not been traced with a contact who has Covid trying to use the tests are precisely why there are difficulties.
As far as I know there is a single country in the planet who is testing everyone who has got a bad cold. The tests are being reserved more for people who need them and for targetted contact tracing.
That's fine, but then don't blame us if our kids spread the virus to other people. I'm not going to keep them off school when on the balance of probability she probably has about a 3% chance of having it. But 3% of the people in our situation are going to be potentially spreading it because they can't get tested.
If she has symptoms I think it's perfectly fine for her to want or ask for a test.
This test situation is a total mess isn't it. My wife is ill, with symptoms more suggestive of a bad cold than Covid, but certainly suggestive enough of Covid for us to want to know for sure. For instance, we're not keeping our kids off school, their education has been disrupted enough to keep them at home for a fortnight when it might be nothing and one has just started secondary and another just started GCSEs, but obviously we would if she tested positive. But she cannot get a test. And the system seems designed to frustrate too. And you wonder why this thing is spreading out of control.
Not being funny but people who don't think they have got Covid, have not been traced with a contact who has Covid trying to use the tests are precisely why there are difficulties.
As far as I know there is a single country in the planet who is testing everyone who has got a bad cold. The tests are being reserved more for people who need them and for targetted contact tracing.
As far as I recall most other countries are triaging tests through GPs. Cummings and gang however think its better to just have a centralized free for all.
Ps im still waiting for you to supply evidence of other countries queuing up to copy our system.
Ha ha, its harder to get through to our GP than to get a Covid test through our world beating system.
We received the daily mail each day on their app mainly as my wife likes their crosswords and puzzles
I tend to flick through it but today I read it in more detail and page after page attacks Boris demanding he stops pandering to the experts and reject increasing covid measures and address the economic consequences.
In some ways the mail seems to want to lock and isolate away all of us oldies and let the disease have it's way.
I believe this is the 'herd' immunity theory but when expressed in the pages of the mail it is just repulsive and to be honest I am grateful Boris is following the science and not bowing to these idiotic right wing loons.
We experienced on this forum in the last couple of days the pain felt by Dura Ace when his 81 year old mother fell and on going to hospital for an X-ray picked up covid and dreadfully died 11 days later
Before anyone accuses me of being a Boris cheerleader I have not changed my mind that he is not the right PM for these times but he is at least trying to respect the lives of all of us
The daily mail should hang it's head in shame
Buying the mail for the crossword is like buying the Star for the football.
Are you criticising my wife as I do not buy it
Just making a point, if all she does is the crossword and doesn’t read a single article then fair enough.
To be fair, Mr N, if you don't sometimes look at what papers like the Mail are saying you don't realise why some people with whom you converse think the way they do. Staunch Labour friend of mine reads the Financial Times regularly for the articles.
Must be a big dilemma for the BIden campaign right now. Do they focus their remaining efforts on shoring up the mid-west states, which look good-ish but may just slip to Trump if there are shenanigans? Or is it better to try to expand the map to IA, GA and TX?
This is not binary. First shore up the Rust-Belt, and what resorces are left over cna be cahnnelled to the others. I would not include Texas in that second list though. It is unlikely to go Blue, but may well be with in a couple %. A Biden president and Texas being a toss up state will mean the Reps will have to spend a lot more on Texas next time round.
This test situation is a total mess isn't it. My wife is ill, with symptoms more suggestive of a bad cold than Covid, but certainly suggestive enough of Covid for us to want to know for sure. For instance, we're not keeping our kids off school, their education has been disrupted enough to keep them at home for a fortnight when it might be nothing and one has just started secondary and another just started GCSEs, but obviously we would if she tested positive. But she cannot get a test. And the system seems designed to frustrate too. And you wonder why this thing is spreading out of control.
Not being funny but people who don't think they have got Covid, have not been traced with a contact who has Covid trying to use the tests are precisely why there are difficulties.
As far as I know there is a single country in the planet who is testing everyone who has got a bad cold. The tests are being reserved more for people who need them and for targetted contact tracing.
That's fine, but then don't blame us if our kids spread the virus to other people. I'm not going to keep them off school when on the balance of probability she probably has about a 3% chance of having it. But 3% of the people in our situation are going to be potentially spreading it because they can't get tested.
[OT Admin] the site is still very slow and often will not reload on Firefox, leading to long and misleading display of the message that comments are closed. Perhaps after November the site might spend some of its winnings from the Biden/Trump landslide (delete as appropriate) on a Vanilla/Wordpress consultant to work with @rcs1000 for a day or two.
Or just move that line.
It is the extra scrollbar that irritates me and the text of the replies seems to need both scrollbars as sometimes part of the first or messages are not visible depending on which scrollbar you last scrolled with.
I agree with the slowness of loading and on this version of Chrome the comments do not load at all unless the initial box with "Comments are closed" is visible on screen. If that is off-screen, loading does not start until you scroll "Comments are closed" back into view.
From testing the Vanilla page alone on various platforms and browsers, the main issue is that it appears to load the comments, then hangs for a few seconds as all the Twitter embeds load. This probably causes a timeout on the main page as the Vanilla page is hung up.
The solution is to disable the Twitter embeds from Vanilla - and dare I say it, that's probably a good idea on a whole number of levels at the moment.
You should be able to disable this by blocking third party content on your browser or adblock software of choice, but a global setting for it would improve things dramatically.
The double scrollbar issue is because it is injecting an iframe into the reading area and there is what looks like a bodge to force the iframe to scroll. I assume this is to solve the issue that the comments were getting chopped off at the bottom because of a frame sizing error. The code really needs injecting into a DIV rather than an iframe.
I had thought that the comments not loading was perhaps due to some over-zealous coding where the javascript was sensitive to whether its load-point was onscreen or not. I may well try the vanilla twitter block and see what happens
One of the oddities of the new site is "Mike Smithson's Top Blogs". How did "The Virtual Stoa" (last updated 2017) escape the cull? And as for those online slot sites, I'd like to think OGH is old enough and wise enough to resist their attractions. Unless they are one of Robert's multifarious enterprises - in which case, good luck to him!
App downloaded. Somewhat surprised to see that 'Area risk level' is 'Medium'. Earlier in the week it was Low on the Gov.UK site. Two Uni's within about 20 miles, of course.
Mine says it only works in Newham, wherever that is.
I thought that refers to the place where one downloaded it? Gov.uk is still describing my area, and the areas around me as having a low incidence..... 2 or less. Although the data there's a week old.
Hancock now blathering over whether hope exists without truth. R4.
Why is he doing 'Thought for the Day'?
It is high time that R4 put ‘Platitude for the Day‘ out to grass. Along with ‘Poetry, No Thanks’, the ‘No-one’s Listening Project’, and ‘Saturday Comatose’.
Not to mention their 'Bad Racing Tips'.
But that's the only consistently amusing bit of their comedy output.
TBF you can still wait and see who he picks, in the event that it was someone less hackish than the current GOP judges it might help to seat them.
Sure. I’m done being fair. This administration and its enablers have no respect for law or constitution except as tools of power; the evidence was long since overwhelming.
Sadly, that is now an attitude on this side of the pond too.
There is something of a difference, though. We are some way off our PM refusing in advance to accept the result if the election unless he wins. How anyone might think it appropriate to even consider appointing this man’s Supreme Court nominee before the election is quite beyond me.
"Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful — there won't be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation,” Trump said. “The ballots are out of control. You know it, and you know who knows it better than anyone else? The Democrats know it better than anyone else.”
Get rid of people voting and there won't be a transfer there will be a continuation. People voting are out of control. Yes Trump, you're not supposed to control what people do with their ballots that is the point of democracy.
To be fair to Trump, it is clear he is talking about postal ballots there, and it is not unheard of for their veracity to be questioned even in this United Kingdom.
And is it that great a jump to our own government saying that it will abolish judicial reviews so it does not have to follow the law?
Normally I have little sympathy for Matt Hancock in interviews but this morning on BBC1 the questioning on the app was dire, particularly in relation to elderly people who don't have smart phone or don't have mobiles at all. As Matt Hancock correctly pointed out he has been criticized for many things, but not being able to provide an app to people who don't have a mobile phone is the most bizarre.
The interviewer wasted so much time on this and was fairly aggressive in his irrational questioning. What a waste of an interview on the app.
Ah, more examples of media being total idiots.
How long before OFCOM drag them all in for a stern talking-to about their platforms being given over to misinformation, and their interviewers’ inability to avoid inane and pointless questioning?
App downloaded. Somewhat surprised to see that 'Area risk level' is 'Medium'. Earlier in the week it was Low on the Gov.UK site. Two Uni's within about 20 miles, of course.
Mine says it only works in Newham, wherever that is.
I thought that refers to the place where one downloaded it? Gov.uk is still describing my area, and the areas around me as having a low incidence..... 2 or less. Although the data there's a week old.
Un- and re-installed and now it works ok. Says "medium" risk when actually there's about as much danger of contracting malaria in these parts, but medium is glossed as "high *or rising* cases," so perhaps we have gone from 0 to 1.
We received the daily mail each day on their app mainly as my wife likes their crosswords and puzzles
I tend to flick through it but today I read it in more detail and page after page attacks Boris demanding he stops pandering to the experts and reject increasing covid measures and address the economic consequences.
In some ways the mail seems to want to lock and isolate away all of us oldies and let the disease have it's way.
I believe this is the 'herd' immunity theory but when expressed in the pages of the mail it is just repulsive and to be honest I am grateful Boris is following the science and not bowing to these idiotic right wing loons.
We experienced on this forum in the last couple of days the pain felt by Dura Ace when his 81 year old mother fell and on going to hospital for an X-ray picked up covid and dreadfully died 11 days later
Before anyone accuses me of being a Boris cheerleader I have not changed my mind that he is not the right PM for these times but he is at least trying to respect the lives of all of us
The daily mail should hang it's head in shame
Buying the mail for the crossword is like buying the Star for the football.
App downloaded. Somewhat surprised to see that 'Area risk level' is 'Medium'. Earlier in the week it was Low on the Gov.UK site. Two Uni's within about 20 miles, of course.
Mine says it only works in Newham, wherever that is.
I thought that refers to the place where one downloaded it? Gov.uk is still describing my area, and the areas around me as having a low incidence..... 2 or less. Although the data there's a week old.
Un- and re-installed and now it works ok. Says "medium" risk when actually there's about as much danger of contracting malaria in these parts, but medium is glossed as "high *or rising* cases," so perhaps we have gone from 0 to 1.
And how many caught malaria in the same timeframe?
Covid-19: UK volunteers could be given virus to test vaccine
This is surpassingly odd. If we are comfortably beating the world in vaccine production, and not facing the problem that there's likely to be a shortage of virus in the wild to test on, why are we breaking ethical ranks like this to save ourselves a week or two? Answer presumably is that the government is even more shit scared than we thought.
Challenge trials are a thing, that AZ seem confident enough to use one is very positive news.
I wonder if they've hit enough events for an interim 'peek' and at least surpassed the futility boundary ?
It`s unworkable. A friend`s daughter`s "bubble" of 300 pupils, no less, has just been sent home to isolate for 14 days because one pupil in the bubble has tested positive (though is not any more ill than would be if it were a cold).
We received the daily mail each day on their app mainly as my wife likes their crosswords and puzzles
I tend to flick through it but today I read it in more detail and page after page attacks Boris demanding he stops pandering to the experts and reject increasing covid measures and address the economic consequences.
In some ways the mail seems to want to lock and isolate away all of us oldies and let the disease have it's way.
I believe this is the 'herd' immunity theory but when expressed in the pages of the mail it is just repulsive and to be honest I am grateful Boris is following the science and not bowing to these idiotic right wing loons.
We experienced on this forum in the last couple of days the pain felt by Dura Ace when his 81 year old mother fell and on going to hospital for an X-ray picked up covid and dreadfully died 11 days later
Before anyone accuses me of being a Boris cheerleader I have not changed my mind that he is not the right PM for these times but he is at least trying to respect the lives of all of us
The daily mail should hang it's head in shame
Buying the mail for the crossword is like buying the Star for the football.
Are you criticising my wife as I do not buy it
Just making a point, if all she does is the crossword and doesn’t read a single article then fair enough.
To be fair, Mr N, if you don't sometimes look at what papers like the Mail are saying you don't realise why some people with whom you converse think the way they do. Staunch Labour friend of mine reads the Financial Times regularly for the articles.
I don’t find the FT particularly biased, it has its Interest groups but tends to be factual on the whole.
As posited at the start of this thread, Cummings' centralisation of government information has led to a right old mess.
Perhaps the guidelines are to be updated?
Yes, that is the point, although some of them have been but still do not say the same things. Perhaps they would have been updated in synchrony if left to departments and not centralised in (or near) Number 10 by someone who cannot possibly keep abreast of all this. As @alex_ said at the start of this thread, politicians (and their advisors) think government press offices deal only with front page headlines whereas in fact the vast majority of their time is taken with more mundane but possibly more important information.
TBF you can still wait and see who he picks, in the event that it was someone less hackish than the current GOP judges it might help to seat them.
Sure. I’m done being fair. This administration and its enablers have no respect for law or constitution except as tools of power; the evidence was long since overwhelming.
Sadly, that is now an attitude on this side of the pond too.
There is something of a difference, though. We are some way off our PM refusing in advance to accept the result if the election unless he wins. How anyone might think it appropriate to even consider appointing this man’s Supreme Court nominee before the election is quite beyond me.
"Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful — there won't be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation,” Trump said. “The ballots are out of control. You know it, and you know who knows it better than anyone else? The Democrats know it better than anyone else.”
Get rid of people voting and there won't be a transfer there will be a continuation. People voting are out of control. Yes Trump, you're not supposed to control what people do with their ballots that is the point of democracy.
To be fair to Trump, it is clear he is talking about postal ballots there, and it is not unheard of for their veracity to be questioned even in this United Kingdom.
And is it that great a jump to our own government saying that it will abolish judicial reviews so it does not have to follow the law?
Covid-19: UK volunteers could be given virus to test vaccine
This is surpassingly odd. If we are comfortably beating the world in vaccine production, and not facing the problem that there's likely to be a shortage of virus in the wild to test on, why are we breaking ethical ranks like this to save ourselves a week or two? Answer presumably is that the government is even more shit scared than we thought.
Challenge trials are a thing, that AZ seem confident enough to use one is very positive news.
I wonder if they've hit enough events for an interim 'peek' and at least surpassed the futility boundary ?
Can someone please explain if they have why would the challenge trial be necessary? By the time the Challenge trial ends shouldn't they already be expect to be completing the routine trial?
App downloaded. Somewhat surprised to see that 'Area risk level' is 'Medium'. Earlier in the week it was Low on the Gov.UK site. Two Uni's within about 20 miles, of course.
Mine says it only works in Newham, wherever that is.
I thought that refers to the place where one downloaded it? Gov.uk is still describing my area, and the areas around me as having a low incidence..... 2 or less. Although the data there's a week old.
Un- and re-installed and now it works ok. Says "medium" risk when actually there's about as much danger of contracting malaria in these parts, but medium is glossed as "high *or rising* cases," so perhaps we have gone from 0 to 1.
And how many caught malaria in the same timeframe?
We will never know. If you can't get a GP appointment, how would you find out?
As posited at the start of this thread, Cummings' centralisation of government information has led to a right old mess.
Perhaps the guidelines are to be updated?
Yes, that is the point, although some of them have been but still do not say the same things. Perhaps they would have been updated in synchrony if left to departments and not centralised in (or near) Number 10 by someone who cannot possibly keep abreast of all this. As @alex_ said at the start of this thread, politicians (and their advisors) think government press offices deal only with front page headlines whereas in fact the vast majority of their time is taken with more mundane but possibly more important information.
I mean the two messages aren't contradictory. "It is not mandatory" vs. "It will be mandatory". Given how rapidly changing the current situation is I don't think it is that surprising to find some documents have yet to be updated.
So - if this morning’s newspaper reports are true - there will be no help for the one sector which has been specifically targeted by the latest restrictions: the hospitality sector, despite it being apparently a source of only 5% of the increase in infections.
If true, a disgrace.
This sector has lost most of its spring/summer season, will lose the Xmas/NY season, possibly the start of the next spring season and, even while open, is losing a very significant percentage of its normal trading. Early closing will do little to help stop the virus’s spread but will do a great deal of damage to this sector.
I really hope the newspaper reports are wrong.
In other news Trump makes it clear he’s going to steal the election.
Hancock now blathering over whether hope exists without truth. R4.
Why is he doing 'Thought for the Day'?
It is high time that R4 put ‘Platitude for the Day‘ out to grass. Along with ‘Poetry, No Thanks’, the ‘No-one’s Listening Project’, and ‘Saturday Comatose’.
Not to mention their 'Bad Racing Tips'.
But that's the only consistently amusing bit of their comedy output.
There is or was a truly, truly bizarre slot in the PM program where they report every day on a less than functional couple who have had 3 children taken into care and are struggling to hold on to a fourth. What is that about?
Covid-19: UK volunteers could be given virus to test vaccine
This is surpassingly odd. If we are comfortably beating the world in vaccine production, and not facing the problem that there's likely to be a shortage of virus in the wild to test on, why are we breaking ethical ranks like this to save ourselves a week or two? Answer presumably is that the government is even more shit scared than we thought.
Challenge trials are a thing, that AZ seem confident enough to use one is very positive news.
I wonder if they've hit enough events for an interim 'peek' and at least surpassed the futility boundary ?
Can someone please explain if they have why would the challenge trial be necessary? By the time the Challenge trial ends shouldn't they already be expect to be completing the routine trial?
I think this is for a different candidate, the one developed by Imperial.
It only takes one resident in a block of say 12 flats or a long road to report a breach of the rule of 6 by their neighbours for the police to get involved, it does not need a majority to report it
We received the daily mail each day on their app mainly as my wife likes their crosswords and puzzles
I tend to flick through it but today I read it in more detail and page after page attacks Boris demanding he stops pandering to the experts and reject increasing covid measures and address the economic consequences.
In some ways the mail seems to want to lock and isolate away all of us oldies and let the disease have it's way.
I believe this is the 'herd' immunity theory but when expressed in the pages of the mail it is just repulsive and to be honest I am grateful Boris is following the science and not bowing to these idiotic right wing loons.
We experienced on this forum in the last couple of days the pain felt by Dura Ace when his 81 year old mother fell and on going to hospital for an X-ray picked up covid and dreadfully died 11 days later
Before anyone accuses me of being a Boris cheerleader I have not changed my mind that he is not the right PM for these times but he is at least trying to respect the lives of all of us
The daily mail should hang it's head in shame
Buying the mail for the crossword is like buying the Star for the football.
Are you criticising my wife as I do not buy it
Just making a point, if all she does is the crossword and doesn’t read a single article then fair enough.
To be fair, Mr N, if you don't sometimes look at what papers like the Mail are saying you don't realise why some people with whom you converse think the way they do. Staunch Labour friend of mine reads the Financial Times regularly for the articles.
I don’t find the FT particularly biased, it has its Interest groups but tends to be factual on the whole.
Communists used to say that the FT was the most trustworthy paper because the bosses wouldn't lie to themselves. It is certainly the only UK newspaper whose stories I take absolutely at face value. It is a much more centrist paper than the WSJ in the US.
I don’t know why people feel the need to comment on what Prince Harry or his wife say? Who gives a f*ck?
Some people are really obsessed with them.
And I don't know why he feels the need to tell the US electorate how they should be voting, when he himself has no right to be involved. Remember how well that went down with the Guardian did it?
Indeed, the average voter in the rustbelt is not going to take too kindly to a descendant of King George III and his wife telling them how to vote from the large garden of their $15 million mansion in California
So - if this morning’s newspaper reports are true - there will be no help for the one sector which has been specifically targeted by the latest restrictions: the hospitality sector, despite it being apparently a source of only 5% of the increase in infections.
If true, a disgrace.
This sector has lost most of its spring/summer season, will lose the Xmas/NY season, possibly the start of the next spring season and, even while open, is losing a very significant percentage of its normal trading. Early closing will do little to help stop the virus’s spread but will do a great deal of damage to this sector.
I really hope the newspaper reports are wrong.
In other news Trump makes it clear he’s going to steal the election.
Please tell me there’s some good news somewhere.
2.5 hours to go until we find out.
I don't trust media reports. Remember Peston saying he'd been authoritatively told that the Chancellor had no major news to announce . . . about 30 minutes before the Chancellor announced the furlough scheme?
The media have to sell column inches and develop clickbait. Lets find out what the Chancellor actually announces, I'd be shocked if there's no help for hospitality considering his summer job support scheme was almost exclusively targetted at hospitality.
Perhaps if they looked at alternate media sources rather than MSM perhaps the stats would be diferent. It really didn't have to be this way https://youtu.be/CZuq4DyoMfI
I'm mournfully starting to believe that the tripe being paddled by the "lockdownsceptics" is, by percolating around the general population and convincing enough that covid isn't a thing, or not following restrictions magically makes it go away, or it's not actually around and all made up so that they ignore the restrictions, we'll continue having more and more of a surge so we do, in the end, find ourselves in another lockdown of some description.
It would be ironic if it wasn't so shit.
(The banging on about "It's false positives" was really illuminating as to how they can totally ignore any logic or arithmetic in favour of trumpeting a phrase they don't understand and haven't thought through:
1 - Conditional probability doesn't work like that; you can't bait and switch "random sample of entire population" with "sample of people who are symptomatic" when the latter has hugely greater positivity than the former. Of course, this bit does require understanding the use of the term and isn't instantly obvous
2 - Applying their claimed rate obviously meant that we would not only have had zero covid through much of July and August, it would actually have had to be a significant amount of negative covid (more false positives than the total of false and true positives, thus true positives need to be a negative number). I wonder how many covid-ill people landed in the UK and were instantly cured on breathing our air.
3 - The most obvious one, though - the larger the false positive number, the worse the surge in true positives had to be. If half the cases when it was 1,000 per day were false positives (500 false) and the testing rate was similar, then when it's 5,000 per day, it hasn't quintupled. It's gone up ten-fold. Choose a higher number of false positives (900 of those 1000), and it's gone up fifty-fold. Which probably screams for far harsher restrictions)
Yet they continued to bang on about it for days, obviously not actually thinking about it but clinging to it as the latest "proof" that it's all fine and an overreaction and let's please get back to normal it's all a Government conspiracy.
It's the scientists that I'm most disappointed in. A lot of the conspiracy and denialism comes from citing some scientist or other. Reasonable scientists can disagree, but too many are acting as advocates for some emotionally-held belief, not science.
I believe that experts being interviewed on the record have a moral duty to act somewhat like an expert witness: when an "opinion" is asked it should be a professional opinion backed by evidence rather than a personal opinion, and the expert has to be extremely careful not to stray from their area of expertise. (In court, one would hope that the opposing barrister would quickly expose an expert talking beyond their expertise or query the basis for opinion, but journalists conducting an interview are... rather far from forensic in their questioning.) An expert should also consider carefully whether they are engaging in motivated reasoning, and be willing to challenge themselves as best they can, though this is of course difficult.
I'm also a scientist, and ethics is an ever-increasing part of our job. But I see no discussion of the ethics of *not* answering a question when you don't really know the answer. Media training, sure - I've done piles of that, but it's mainly about how to get yourself in print or on TV, not whether you might do better shutting up about something, or considering carefully the consequences of what you say.
Perhaps after this is over the scientific establishment will take a look at how they behaved in the pandemic. Or perhaps they will feel self-satisfied at how many times they got on TV...
--AS
The Stanford scientists who were saying in March that the case fatality rate was only 0.01% have a lot to answer for.
I'm mournfully starting to believe that the tripe being paddled by the "lockdownsceptics" is, by percolating around the general population and convincing enough that covid isn't a thing, or not following restrictions magically makes it go away, or it's not actually around and all made up so that they ignore the restrictions, we'll continue having more and more of a surge so we do, in the end, find ourselves in another lockdown of some description.
It would be ironic if it wasn't so shit.
(The banging on about "It's false positives" was really illuminating as to how they can totally ignore any logic or arithmetic in favour of trumpeting a phrase they don't understand and haven't thought through:
1 - Conditional probability doesn't work like that; you can't bait and switch "random sample of entire population" with "sample of people who are symptomatic" when the latter has hugely greater positivity than the former. Of course, this bit does require understanding the use of the term and isn't instantly obvous
2 - Applying their claimed rate obviously meant that we would not only have had zero covid through much of July and August, it would actually have had to be a significant amount of negative covid (more false positives than the total of false and true positives, thus true positives need to be a negative number). I wonder how many covid-ill people landed in the UK and were instantly cured on breathing our air.
3 - The most obvious one, though - the larger the false positive number, the worse the surge in true positives had to be. If half the cases when it was 1,000 per day were false positives (500 false) and the testing rate was similar, then when it's 5,000 per day, it hasn't quintupled. It's gone up ten-fold. Choose a higher number of false positives (900 of those 1000), and it's gone up fifty-fold. Which probably screams for far harsher restrictions)
Yet they continued to bang on about it for days, obviously not actually thinking about it but clinging to it as the latest "proof" that it's all fine and an overreaction and let's please get back to normal it's all a Government conspiracy.
It's the scientists that I'm most disappointed in. A lot of the conspiracy and denialism comes from citing some scientist or other. Reasonable scientists can disagree, but too many are acting as advocates for some emotionally-held belief, not science.
I believe that experts being interviewed on the record have a moral duty to act somewhat like an expert witness: when an "opinion" is asked it should be a professional opinion backed by evidence rather than a personal opinion, and the expert has to be extremely careful not to stray from their area of expertise. (In court, one would hope that the opposing barrister would quickly expose an expert talking beyond their expertise or query the basis for opinion, but journalists conducting an interview are... rather far from forensic in their questioning.) An expert should also consider carefully whether they are engaging in motivated reasoning, and be willing to challenge themselves as best they can, though this is of course difficult.
I'm also a scientist, and ethics is an ever-increasing part of our job. But I see no discussion of the ethics of *not* answering a question when you don't really know the answer. Media training, sure - I've done piles of that, but it's mainly about how to get yourself in print or on TV, not whether you might do better shutting up about something, or considering carefully the consequences of what you say.
Perhaps after this is over the scientific establishment will take a look at how they behaved in the pandemic. Or perhaps they will feel self-satisfied at how many times they got on TV...
--AS
The Stanford scientists who were saying in March that the case fatality rate was only 0.01% have a lot to answer for.
Have they said anything since? Do they still have a job?
As posited at the start of this thread, Cummings' centralisation of government information has led to a right old mess.
Perhaps the guidelines are to be updated?
Yes, that is the point, although some of them have been but still do not say the same things. Perhaps they would have been updated in synchrony if left to departments and not centralised in (or near) Number 10 by someone who cannot possibly keep abreast of all this. As @alex_ said at the start of this thread, politicians (and their advisors) think government press offices deal only with front page headlines whereas in fact the vast majority of their time is taken with more mundane but possibly more important information.
I mean the two messages aren't contradictory. "It is not mandatory" vs. "It will be mandatory". Given how rapidly changing the current situation is I don't think it is that surprising to find some documents have yet to be updated.
How are ordinary people supposed to know which official government advice applies? That the document they found is contradicted by another page they have not seen (because most people will stop looking once they have found it). It is not much work to update a web page; civil servants are not chiselling Boris's words into Mount Rushmore. Most likely this inconsistency is a side effect of the Number 10 power grab of Whitehall's information machine.
So - if this morning’s newspaper reports are true - there will be no help for the one sector which has been specifically targeted by the latest restrictions: the hospitality sector, despite it being apparently a source of only 5% of the increase in infections.
If true, a disgrace.
This sector has lost most of its spring/summer season, will lose the Xmas/NY season, possibly the start of the next spring season and, even while open, is losing a very significant percentage of its normal trading. Early closing will do little to help stop the virus’s spread but will do a great deal of damage to this sector.
I really hope the newspaper reports are wrong.
In other news Trump makes it clear he’s going to steal the election.
Please tell me there’s some good news somewhere.
To be fair maybe wait until Rishi has spoken later today
5 live this morning suggested the assistance will be across the economy based on the German scheme but in a couple of hours we should hear the announcements and I hope your fears will be allayed somewhat
TBF you can still wait and see who he picks, in the event that it was someone less hackish than the current GOP judges it might help to seat them.
Sure. I’m done being fair. This administration and its enablers have no respect for law or constitution except as tools of power; the evidence was long since overwhelming.
Sadly, that is now an attitude on this side of the pond too.
There is something of a difference, though. We are some way off our PM refusing in advance to accept the result if the election unless he wins. How anyone might think it appropriate to even consider appointing this man’s Supreme Court nominee before the election is quite beyond me.
"Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful — there won't be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation,” Trump said. “The ballots are out of control. You know it, and you know who knows it better than anyone else? The Democrats know it better than anyone else.”
Get rid of people voting and there won't be a transfer there will be a continuation. People voting are out of control. Yes Trump, you're not supposed to control what people do with their ballots that is the point of democracy.
To be fair to Trump, it is clear he is talking about postal ballots there, and it is not unheard of for their veracity to be questioned even in this United Kingdom.
And is it that great a jump to our own government saying that it will abolish judicial reviews so it does not have to follow the law?
A single example in a safe Labour seat where the perpetrators have been brought to justice
There have been other examples - you can find a complete list here - www.parliament.uk/commons-library | intranet.parliament.uk/commons-library. The relevant document is Briefing Paper Number 6255, 11 January 2017 on All Electoral Fraud between 2010 - 2017.
As posited at the start of this thread, Cummings' centralisation of government information has led to a right old mess.
Perhaps the guidelines are to be updated?
Yes, that is the point, although some of them have been but still do not say the same things. Perhaps they would have been updated in synchrony if left to departments and not centralised in (or near) Number 10 by someone who cannot possibly keep abreast of all this. As @alex_ said at the start of this thread, politicians (and their advisors) think government press offices deal only with front page headlines whereas in fact the vast majority of their time is taken with more mundane but possibly more important information.
I mean the two messages aren't contradictory. "It is not mandatory" vs. "It will be mandatory". Given how rapidly changing the current situation is I don't think it is that surprising to find some documents have yet to be updated.
How are ordinary people supposed to know which official government advice applies? That the document they found is contradicted by another page they have not seen (because most people will stop looking once they have found it). It is not much work to update a web page; civil servants are not chiselling Boris's words into Mount Rushmore. Most likely this inconsistency is a side effect of the Number 10 power grab of Whitehall's information machine.
It's be one full day since that policy was announced? If confronted with two conflicting statements, wouldn't an ordinary person look at the dates that the two statements were published and come to the conclusion that the policy has changed in the interim?
It only takes one resident in a block of say 12 flats or a long road to report a breach of the rule of 6 by their neighbours for the police to get involved, it does not need a majority to report it
The police in Scotland seem to be taking a more reasonable view.
I don’t know why people feel the need to comment on what Prince Harry or his wife say? Who gives a f*ck?
Some people are really obsessed with them.
And I don't know why he feels the need to tell the US electorate how they should be voting, when he himself has no right to be involved. Remember how well that went down with the Guardian did it?
Indeed, the average voter in the rustbelt is not going to take too kindly to a descendant of King George III and his wife telling them how to vote from the large garden of their $15 million mansion in California
They didn’t tell anyone how to vote, don’t pedal falsehoods.
40 days until the US election and Biden remains 7 points ahead in the national poll averages. It makes me wonder, when is most early voting (in person or by mail) expected to happen this year? And how big will the percentages be given Covid-19 etc?
It seems to me Trump is running out of time for a swing back to him, especially once a meaningful proportion of the votes have been cast. So the debate on Tuesday is surely critical for him - the next Presidential one is 2 weeks later, by which point he'll be running out of time.
Most of the swing states are far tighter than 7% and Rasmussen has Biden only 1% ahead nationally.
Trump lost all the debates in 2016 and still won the EC.
I don’t know why people feel the need to comment on what Prince Harry or his wife say? Who gives a f*ck?
Some people are really obsessed with them.
And I don't know why he feels the need to tell the US electorate how they should be voting, when he himself has no right to be involved. Remember how well that went down with the Guardian did it?
Indeed, the average voter in the rustbelt is not going to take too kindly to a descendant of King George III and his wife telling them how to vote from the large garden of their $15 million mansion in California
They didn’t tell anyone how to vote, don’t pedal falsehoods.
Come off it, it was clear what the point of their message was.
So - if this morning’s newspaper reports are true - there will be no help for the one sector which has been specifically targeted by the latest restrictions: the hospitality sector, despite it being apparently a source of only 5% of the increase in infections.
If true, a disgrace.
This sector has lost most of its spring/summer season, will lose the Xmas/NY season, possibly the start of the next spring season and, even while open, is losing a very significant percentage of its normal trading. Early closing will do little to help stop the virus’s spread but will do a great deal of damage to this sector.
I really hope the newspaper reports are wrong.
In other news Trump makes it clear he’s going to steal the election.
Please tell me there’s some good news somewhere.
2.5 hours to go until we find out.
I don't trust media reports. Remember Peston saying he'd been authoritatively told that the Chancellor had no major news to announce . . . about 30 minutes before the Chancellor announced the furlough scheme?
The media have to sell column inches and develop clickbait. Lets find out what the Chancellor actually announces, I'd be shocked if there's no help for hospitality considering his summer job support scheme was almost exclusively targetted at hospitality.
I don't think it was Pesto, to be fair.
But the journalist who "broke" that story went further - he had inside knowledge that there would be *no* help for economy, apparently.
Is HYUFD about? Earlier this week he was boosting a Scottish sub-sample which had the SNP on "only" 45%. Well, he who lives by the sub-sample, dies by the sub-sample. The IPSOS-MORI sub-sample has them on 60%!
Kantar only has the SNP on 4% so no different to the 4% they got last year UK wide when they got only 45% in Scotland so similar to Yougov
Given the SNP got 46% at Holyrood 2016 and then only had a majority with the Greens, 45% would be a swing to the Unionists and that was before Sturgeon banned Scots visiting other households
As posited at the start of this thread, Cummings' centralisation of government information has led to a right old mess.
Perhaps the guidelines are to be updated?
Yes, that is the point, although some of them have been but still do not say the same things. Perhaps they would have been updated in synchrony if left to departments and not centralised in (or near) Number 10 by someone who cannot possibly keep abreast of all this. As @alex_ said at the start of this thread, politicians (and their advisors) think government press offices deal only with front page headlines whereas in fact the vast majority of their time is taken with more mundane but possibly more important information.
I mean the two messages aren't contradictory. "It is not mandatory" vs. "It will be mandatory". Given how rapidly changing the current situation is I don't think it is that surprising to find some documents have yet to be updated.
How are ordinary people supposed to know which official government advice applies? That the document they found is contradicted by another page they have not seen (because most people will stop looking once they have found it). It is not much work to update a web page; civil servants are not chiselling Boris's words into Mount Rushmore. Most likely this inconsistency is a side effect of the Number 10 power grab of Whitehall's information machine.
Unlikely. Its only 24 hours since the news was announced and the news has been broadcast all over the news so maybe they will have heard that? Or seen the press release.
Otherwise if it is civil servants updating the web pages maybe it takes them more than 24 hours to get around to updating it, since they've only just found it out themselves. If it had been centralised to Number 10 then Number 10 might have more easily updated it quickly since they're the ones who have made the decision.
You're acting like the media looking for "inconsistencies" which are no such thing.
The UK governmentS, both locaL and National should be grateful that every decision they take isn’t dragged through the courts as it seems to happen in Spain. Most of the time the courts come down in favor of the authorities but they have reversed decisions to close discos etc for whatever reason. A lot of time and energy wasted.
I'm mournfully starting to believe that the tripe being paddled by the "lockdownsceptics" is, by percolating around the general population and convincing enough that covid isn't a thing, or not following restrictions magically makes it go away, or it's not actually around and all made up so that they ignore the restrictions, we'll continue having more and more of a surge so we do, in the end, find ourselves in another lockdown of some description.
It would be ironic if it wasn't so shit.
(The banging on about "It's false positives" was really illuminating as to how they can totally ignore any logic or arithmetic in favour of trumpeting a phrase they don't understand and haven't thought through:
1 - Conditional probability doesn't work like that; you can't bait and switch "random sample of entire population" with "sample of people who are symptomatic" when the latter has hugely greater positivity than the former. Of course, this bit does require understanding the use of the term and isn't instantly obvous
2 - Applying their claimed rate obviously meant that we would not only have had zero covid through much of July and August, it would actually have had to be a significant amount of negative covid (more false positives than the total of false and true positives, thus true positives need to be a negative number). I wonder how many covid-ill people landed in the UK and were instantly cured on breathing our air.
3 - The most obvious one, though - the larger the false positive number, the worse the surge in true positives had to be. If half the cases when it was 1,000 per day were false positives (500 false) and the testing rate was similar, then when it's 5,000 per day, it hasn't quintupled. It's gone up ten-fold. Choose a higher number of false positives (900 of those 1000), and it's gone up fifty-fold. Which probably screams for far harsher restrictions)
Yet they continued to bang on about it for days, obviously not actually thinking about it but clinging to it as the latest "proof" that it's all fine and an overreaction and let's please get back to normal it's all a Government conspiracy.
It's the scientists that I'm most disappointed in. A lot of the conspiracy and denialism comes from citing some scientist or other. Reasonable scientists can disagree, but too many are acting as advocates for some emotionally-held belief, not science.
I believe that experts being interviewed on the record have a moral duty to act somewhat like an expert witness: when an "opinion" is asked it should be a professional opinion backed by evidence rather than a personal opinion, and the expert has to be extremely careful not to stray from their area of expertise...
App downloaded. Somewhat surprised to see that 'Area risk level' is 'Medium'. Earlier in the week it was Low on the Gov.UK site. Two Uni's within about 20 miles, of course.
I've also just downloaded the app. I notice it has had 100K+ downloads and is rated 1.5 stars out of five. I've never seen such a poor rating for any app!
40 days until the US election and Biden remains 7 points ahead in the national poll averages. It makes me wonder, when is most early voting (in person or by mail) expected to happen this year? And how big will the percentages be given Covid-19 etc?
It seems to me Trump is running out of time for a swing back to him, especially once a meaningful proportion of the votes have been cast. So the debate on Tuesday is surely critical for him - the next Presidential one is 2 weeks later, by which point he'll be running out of time.
Most of the swing states are far tighter than 7% and Rasmussen has Biden only 1% ahead nationally.
Trump lost all the debates in 2016 and still won the EC.
TBF you can still wait and see who he picks, in the event that it was someone less hackish than the current GOP judges it might help to seat them.
Sure. I’m done being fair. This administration and its enablers have no respect for law or constitution except as tools of power; the evidence was long since overwhelming.
Sadly, that is now an attitude on this side of the pond too.
There is something of a difference, though. We are some way off our PM refusing in advance to accept the result if the election unless he wins. How anyone might think it appropriate to even consider appointing this man’s Supreme Court nominee before the election is quite beyond me.
"Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful — there won't be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation,” Trump said. “The ballots are out of control. You know it, and you know who knows it better than anyone else? The Democrats know it better than anyone else.”
Get rid of people voting and there won't be a transfer there will be a continuation. People voting are out of control. Yes Trump, you're not supposed to control what people do with their ballots that is the point of democracy.
To be fair to Trump, it is clear he is talking about postal ballots there, and it is not unheard of for their veracity to be questioned even in this United Kingdom.
And is it that great a jump to our own government saying that it will abolish judicial reviews so it does not have to follow the law?
A single example in a safe Labour seat where the perpetrators have been brought to justice
There was also the embarrassing incident, where the police broke into a light industrial unit (based on information received) and found
a) several local councillors b) an operation to manufacture ballots c) sufficient ballots manufactured to turn the result(s) of local elections,
Birmingham, IIRC.
The point being that if that was a one off, it was extraordinarily well organised for a first attempt.
I lived in Tower Hamlets at the time the comedy was on. My flatmate had his vote stolen. The police weren't just not interested. They actively tried to stop him reporting it.
App downloaded. Somewhat surprised to see that 'Area risk level' is 'Medium'. Earlier in the week it was Low on the Gov.UK site. Two Uni's within about 20 miles, of course.
I've also just downloaded the app. I notice it has had 100K+ downloads and is rated 1.5 stars out of five. I've never seen such a poor rating for any app!
SW13 risk is medium.
In Newham we've had the app for a few weeks and we were put up to Medium yesterday evening so it doesn't sound all that sophisticated if I'm being honest.
So - if this morning’s newspaper reports are true - there will be no help for the one sector which has been specifically targeted by the latest restrictions: the hospitality sector, despite it being apparently a source of only 5% of the increase in infections.
If true, a disgrace.
This sector has lost most of its spring/summer season, will lose the Xmas/NY season, possibly the start of the next spring season and, even while open, is losing a very significant percentage of its normal trading. Early closing will do little to help stop the virus’s spread but will do a great deal of damage to this sector.
I really hope the newspaper reports are wrong.
In other news Trump makes it clear he’s going to steal the election.
Please tell me there’s some good news somewhere.
To be fair maybe wait until Rishi has spoken later today
5 live this morning suggested the assistance will be across the economy based on the German scheme but in a couple of hours we should hear the announcements and I hope your fears will be allayed somewhat
The German scheme is, as I understand it, based on supporting employees who are part-time working. That does not help when a business is open but can only do half its business because it is legally prevented from providing what it normally offers. I really hope the Treasury understands this and addresses this, because if it doesn’t these businesses cannot survive on 50% or less of their normal turnover. And table service requires more staff not less. So reduced turnover and increased costs - yay!
Anyway I hope I am wrong but let’s see.
Last night I worked as a waitress at daughter’s place- all masked up with sanitizer attached to my apron. Menus and everything sanitized after every use etc. I’d forgotten how much hard work it is to keep the food and drink flowing and everything else ship-shape while trying to keep the atmosphere lively despite looking like extras in a Venetian carnival float. So I may be deployed again as I am a free resource. Plus Daughter enjoys bossing me around!
Covid-19: UK volunteers could be given virus to test vaccine
This is surpassingly odd. If we are comfortably beating the world in vaccine production, and not facing the problem that there's likely to be a shortage of virus in the wild to test on, why are we breaking ethical ranks like this to save ourselves a week or two? Answer presumably is that the government is even more shit scared than we thought.
Challenge trials are a thing, that AZ seem confident enough to use one is very positive news.
I wonder if they've hit enough events for an interim 'peek' and at least surpassed the futility boundary ?
Can someone please explain if they have why would the challenge trial be necessary? By the time the Challenge trial ends shouldn't they already be expect to be completing the routine trial?
The current clinical trials will still take some time to get good proof of absolute efficacy, as they have to wait for people to become infected by chance. And, of course, if one vaccine gets emergency authorisation on the basis of reasonable evidence of efficacy, it's going to become increasingly difficult to recruit subjects for other clinical trials, and to run those trials for long enough to get statistically valid results.
A challenge trial will give proof of efficacy - and the degree of efficacy - very quickly indeed. What they will not do, of course, is provide the safety data that a large scale PIII trial will produce.
App downloaded. Somewhat surprised to see that 'Area risk level' is 'Medium'. Earlier in the week it was Low on the Gov.UK site. Two Uni's within about 20 miles, of course.
I've also just downloaded the app. I notice it has had 100K+ downloads and is rated 1.5 stars out of five. I've never seen such a poor rating for any app!
SW13 risk is medium.
I have.
The reviews seem to be mostly stupid issues from when it was in Beta phase ie "its not working in my area" when it was never meant to work in their area!
"Why is this only for Newham and the Isle of Wight" seems to be written in a lot of reviews. Muppets.
How's that going to work? The government announcing new restrictions but then parliament revoking them a week later will just create confusion. It should be done simultaneously, or introduced in Parliament before.
Hospital 12 de Octubre includes the first two pediatric patients in Europe in the clinical trial that proves the efficacy and safety of Remdesivir for the treatment of COVID-19 infection in children. The minors, admitted to Pediatrics, progress favorably and will receive a daily intravenous dose of the antiviral drug for a maximum period of 10 days.
Comments
New Tory: Labour's cheating with postal votes; we should ban them
Old Tory: yes but keep schtum because most postal votes are for the blue team
Or something.
The interviewer wasted so much time on this and was fairly aggressive in his irrational questioning. What a waste of an interview on the app.
The solution is to disable the Twitter embeds from Vanilla - and dare I say it, that's probably a good idea on a whole number of levels at the moment.
You should be able to disable this by blocking third party content on your browser or adblock software of choice, but a global setting for it would improve things dramatically.
I believe that experts being interviewed on the record have a moral duty to act somewhat like an expert witness: when an "opinion" is asked it should be a professional opinion backed by evidence rather than a personal opinion, and the expert has to be extremely careful not to stray from their area of expertise. (In court, one would hope that the opposing barrister would quickly expose an expert talking beyond their expertise or query the basis for opinion, but journalists conducting an interview are... rather far from forensic in their questioning.) An expert should also consider carefully whether they are engaging in motivated reasoning, and be willing to challenge themselves as best they can, though this is of course difficult.
I'm also a scientist, and ethics is an ever-increasing part of our job. But I see no discussion of the ethics of *not* answering a question when you don't really know the answer. Media training, sure - I've done piles of that, but it's mainly about how to get yourself in print or on TV, not whether you might do better shutting up about something, or considering carefully the consequences of what you say.
Perhaps after this is over the scientific establishment will take a look at how they behaved in the pandemic. Or perhaps they will feel self-satisfied at how many times they got on TV...
--AS
As far as I know there is a single country in the planet who is testing everyone who has got a bad cold. The tests are being reserved more for people who need them and for targetted contact tracing.
Some people are really obsessed with them.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/how-to-vote-2020/
Ps im still waiting for you to supply evidence of other countries queuing up to copy our system.
I had thought that the comments not loading was perhaps due to some over-zealous coding where the javascript was sensitive to whether its load-point was onscreen or not. I may well try the vanilla twitter block and see what happens
Staunch Labour friend of mine reads the Financial Times regularly for the articles.
One of the lessons which Democrats have to relearn (Howard Dean tried to teach them two decades ago) is to compete everywhere and at all levels - local, state and national.
This election they have sufficient resources to pursue this kind of effort, which will pay dividends in the future:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/23/you-can-win-this-how-beto-orourke-is-becoming-joe-bidens-greatest-ally
But yes, the Biden campaign itself should focus most closely on the states they have to win.
Takeaway workers do not need to wear masks, or do they?
No. 6.1 ... It is not mandatory for workers in pubs, restaurants or takeaways to wear face coverings where they are not part of usual health and safety measures.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5eb96e8e86650c278b077616/working-safely-during-covid-19-restaurants-pubs-takeaway-services-200918.pdf (page 41)
Maybe. From 24 September, it will be compulsory for retail, leisure and hospitality staff to wear a face covering in areas that are open to the public and where they come or are likely to come within close contact of a member of the public. This includes shops, supermarkets, bars, pubs, restaurants, cafes, banks, estate agents, post offices and the public areas of hotels and hostels.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/face-coverings-when-to-wear-one-and-how-to-make-your-own/face-coverings-when-to-wear-one-and-how-to-make-your-own
Yes. Staff in retail and hospitality settings will also be legally required to wear face coverings from 24 September.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/staying-alert-and-safe-social-distancing/staying-alert-and-safe-social-distancing-after-4-july
As posited at the start of this thread, Cummings' centralisation of government information has led to a right old mess.
Have you thought that one through ?
Although the data there's a week old.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-32428648
How long before OFCOM drag them all in for a stern talking-to about their platforms being given over to misinformation, and their interviewers’ inability to avoid inane and pointless questioning?
Half my wife's class absent this morning.
If true, a disgrace.
This sector has lost most of its spring/summer season, will lose the Xmas/NY season, possibly the start of the next spring season and, even while open, is losing a very significant percentage of its normal trading. Early closing will do little to help stop the virus’s spread but will do a great deal of damage to this sector.
I really hope the newspaper reports are wrong.
In other news Trump makes it clear he’s going to steal the election.
Please tell me there’s some good news somewhere.
I don't trust media reports. Remember Peston saying he'd been authoritatively told that the Chancellor had no major news to announce . . . about 30 minutes before the Chancellor announced the furlough scheme?
The media have to sell column inches and develop clickbait. Lets find out what the Chancellor actually announces, I'd be shocked if there's no help for hospitality considering his summer job support scheme was almost exclusively targetted at hospitality.
5 live this morning suggested the assistance will be across the economy based on the German scheme but in a couple of hours we should hear the announcements and I hope your fears will be allayed somewhat
Trump lost all the debates in 2016 and still won the EC.
https://twitter.com/Politics_Polls/status/1308859641519054849?s=20
https://twitter.com/Politics_Polls/status/1308957433272860673?s=20
https://twitter.com/Politics_Polls/status/1308802984495788032?s=20
But the journalist who "broke" that story went further - he had inside knowledge that there would be *no* help for economy, apparently.
https://www.kantar.com/inspiration/politics/what-do-people-in-the-uk-think-of-the-new-restrictions
Given the SNP got 46% at Holyrood 2016 and then only had a majority with the Greens, 45% would be a swing to the Unionists and that was before Sturgeon banned Scots visiting other households
Otherwise if it is civil servants updating the web pages maybe it takes them more than 24 hours to get around to updating it, since they've only just found it out themselves. If it had been centralised to Number 10 then Number 10 might have more easily updated it quickly since they're the ones who have made the decision.
You're acting like the media looking for "inconsistencies" which are no such thing.
https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/Disputed-French-Nobel-winner-Luc-Montagnier-says-Covid-19-was-made-in-a-lab-laboratory
I wouldn't be too worried until the announcement has been made.
SW13 risk is medium.
a) several local councillors
b) an operation to manufacture ballots
c) sufficient ballots manufactured to turn the result(s) of local elections,
Birmingham, IIRC.
The point being that if that was a one off, it was extraordinarily well organised for a first attempt.
I lived in Tower Hamlets at the time the comedy was on. My flatmate had his vote stolen. The police weren't just not interested. They actively tried to stop him reporting it.
https://twitter.com/standardnews/status/1309057626479693827?s=20
Anyway I hope I am wrong but let’s see.
Last night I worked as a waitress at daughter’s place- all masked up with sanitizer attached to my apron. Menus and everything sanitized after every use etc. I’d forgotten how much hard work it is to keep the food and drink flowing and everything else ship-shape while trying to keep the atmosphere lively despite looking like extras in a Venetian carnival float. So I may be deployed again as I am a free resource. Plus Daughter enjoys bossing me around!
A challenge trial will give proof of efficacy - and the degree of efficacy - very quickly indeed.
What they will not do, of course, is provide the safety data that a large scale PIII trial will produce.
The reviews seem to be mostly stupid issues from when it was in Beta phase ie "its not working in my area" when it was never meant to work in their area!
"Why is this only for Newham and the Isle of Wight" seems to be written in a lot of reviews. Muppets.
In essence, all Biden has to do is win Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and not lose any of Clinton's states and he's home.
For the record it's 278-144 with 116 in the TCTC column at this time though most of those leaning Trump.