Doctors in Liverpool say those partying in the city do not care people are dying
It is sad but seems succinct
Sadly, too many people see having a good time as more important than controlling a pandemic. We saw the same over the summer, with the large number of people determined to have a foreign holiday.
I’m sorry but the two are not fundamentally comparable. Going on holiday for many is about more than just “having a good time”. Most people just need a break, for their physical and mental health. It is not showing contempt for the pandemic or people dying. But it will have been the only bright spot keeping people sane. And that will, incidentally, have included thousands of people working on the frontline of the pandemic in the NHS and elsewhere.
If people went on holiday and then spent the time exploiting lack of restrictions that might have been in place and spent the entire time packing into bars and nightspots then yes. But that is about how people behave in general, not the fact of having a holiday, foreign or otherwise. I went on holiday. Over the course of it I probably had less social contact than over an equivalent period of the last six months. All precautions were taken, and there was 2 weeks quarantine on return. That is completely different to people partying in packed streets in Liverpool or elsewhere and being in a totally uncontrolled environment. You may reject that - it’s up to you.
I should add of course that for all the talk of “circuit breakers” that is how large numbers of people will respond. Massive party before, and massive party after. Probably with a big “protest march” in the middle. It may look good to the scientists on paper in their modelling. But i’ll bet their modelling is limited on how people will behave in practice.
Also, I think it was never likely that young people would put their entires lives on hold for possibly years on end. I entirely understand why students want to meet other students & socialise in their university town. There are those on pb who believe students want to spend their whole lives with Mum & Dad.
In practical epidemiology, you do the thing that you know works.
We will have to follow the Chinese model, have much more testing and lock down those who are positive. Isolate the infected, isolate the contacts. And these lockdowns are backed up with both support and fines. Everyone else gets on with their lives.
There is no real point in theoretical epidemiological modelling of circuit breakers. Because there is an algorithm that we know actually works -- it will take huge political courage, will and organisation.
Do any of the leaders in E, W, S, NI have the will to do it?
Doctors in Liverpool say those partying in the city do not care people are dying
It is sad but seems succinct
This generation seems extraordinarily self-centred
Tell that to my 26 year-old, graduate son, who was unemployed for six months and applied for literally hundreds of jobs before finally starting one on Monday as a labourer in a recycling centre. He had also signed up for a year long course to train as a plumber and has been doing that for a month. Yesterday, after working his 7am to 4.30 pm shift, he got an email from the college saying two people in his class had tested positive for covid and he needed to self-isolate for two weeks. He phoned work this morning to tell them and now no longer has a job. Like millions of others all he’s tried to do is the right thing. Check your privilege, Charles!
1000 likes.
Self-centred my arse!
Daughter wakes up every morning wondering what new rules there will be making her business yet more unviable. Eldest is spending his days looking for work, after losing his job 6 weeks ago. Youngest - just graduated - has just got a job (in food retail) but is applying for others which will stretch him more.
Their futures are uncertain. They’ve complied with the rules. Their lives are constrained and frankly more than a bit shit. They care about their older relatives who are at risk. They don’t need patronising and untrue generalisations by those who have done very well indeed and don’t have the same worries.
Just to be clear about the level of detail you can get in North Carolina. I can tell you the name and address of every voter who has voted so far along with their age and race and give you their party registration and what elections they voted in going back a decade or so.
We are not talking about aggregated stats here.
Are we talking about a secret ballot here? Really?
You realise that, in the UK, there is a number on the back of your ballot paper that is written against your name on the electoral register? No idea if they do that in the US.
And, in the US, we're talking about a country where most people register a party affiliation with the state. Any tone of surprise seems a bit misplaced.
it used to be said, in the 60's, that MI5 checked the ballots afterwards and were on one occasion surprised to find several Communist votes that they hadn't expected.
There may be a time when it becomes necessary but the 3 tier system must be given a chance to work before we close down our economy again.
Furthermore, we all know that it is easy to put England/UK into lockdown but far more difficult to come out
The other issue is Boris would struggle to get his party to back a full lockdown
Hopefully the PM will put country before party.
On this I feel he will. However, it is not easy balancing the need for kids to be in school, the economy to be moving and the vulnerable to be kept safe. It would be nice if the media and others could understand and accept this.
It really isn't and the intergenerational challenges are really difficult too. So much of the cost of lockdowns falls on the young, whether it is their employment prospects as @SouthamObserver illustrates, their social life or their education they have paid the price for a disease that barely affects them. The needs of the old and the vulnerable need to be weighed against this when the risk is as severe as a premature death but it is so difficult.
I think that the government is right to prioritise education by keeping the schools and the Universities open but it is probably the case that this alone will keep the R rate over 1, no matter how much everything else is restricted. Its a real dilemma.
Doctors in Liverpool say those partying in the city do not care people are dying
It is sad but seems succinct
Sadly, too many people see having a good time as more important than controlling a pandemic. We saw the same over the summer, with the large number of people determined to have a foreign holiday.
I’m sorry but the two are not fundamentally comparable. Going on holiday for many is about more than just “having a good time”. Most people just need a break, for their physical and mental health. It is not showing contempt for the pandemic or people dying. But it will have been the only bright spot keeping people sane. And that will, incidentally, have included thousands of people working on the frontline of the pandemic in the NHS and elsewhere.
If people went on holiday and then spent the time exploiting lack of restrictions that might have been in place and spent the entire time packing into bars and nightspots then yes. But that is about how people behave in general, not the fact of having a holiday, foreign or otherwise. I went on holiday. Over the course of it I probably had less social contact than over an equivalent period of the last six months. All precautions were taken, and there was 2 weeks quarantine on return. That is completely different to people partying in packed streets in Liverpool or elsewhere and being in a totally uncontrolled environment. You may reject that - it’s up to you.
I should add of course that for all the talk of “circuit breakers” that is how large numbers of people will respond. Massive party before, and massive party after. Probably with a big “protest march” in the middle. It may look good to the scientists on paper in their modelling. But i’ll bet their modelling is limited on how people will behave in practice.
While there were certainly a few people who went away somewhere, were careful to social distance while away, and quarantined themselves on their return, there were many more who sought out places with fewer restrictions poorly enforced, who packed into nightclubs for 14 night straight, then went straight back to work the day after they got home.
Interesting though the polling data is, albeit not surprising, that last sentence seems to me to be key.
So around 5% have voted already? Plus presumably that figure should now start to rise rapidly. That’s bad news for Trump that so many are voting early.
I suppose to set against that people who vote that early are more likely to be firmly committed to one side or the other anyway. But again, this doesn’t look to be an election with many undecided voters. All other considerations aside, it’s more about personalities rather than issues - the mild, inoffensive, rather wet Biden against an orange haired lunatic - and personalities don’t change.
If I lived in a country where it can take up to eleven hours to cast a vote, I'd want to do it early.
I'd also make bloody sure I did vote, because somebody is obviously trying to make it very difficult for me to do so.
Absolutely. And its a self-fulfilling prophesy. The GOP want to stop people voting against them so are doing all these ludicrous things. Which creates 11 hour queues. If you had been planning to vote on the day but are seeing 11 hour queues now, you'd book a day off to vote early.
Because an 11 hour queue weeks ahead of polling day equals not being allowed to vote at all on polling day. Ordinarily this would be considered a disgrace to the so called leader of the free world. Under Trump? Meh.
A small but clear indication of the kind of discreet voter suppression practiced in some States can be seen in the voting hours. In Kansas and Indiana the polls close at 6pm. Now who do you think that hinders?
How is it even justified? Some of the measures I get the pretext for, but I cannot guess what the excuse is there
Just to be clear about the level of detail you can get in North Carolina. I can tell you the name and address of every voter who has voted so far along with their age and race and give you their party registration and what elections they voted in going back a decade or so.
We are not talking about aggregated stats here.
Are we talking about a secret ballot here? Really?
Well, I can't actually tell you how they voted.
But if they voted early I can tell you what day they voted on!
So yes, it truly is an astounding level of information you can have on an individual NC voter. Jaw droppingly open.
There may be a time when it becomes necessary but the 3 tier system must be given a chance to work before we close down our economy again.
Furthermore, we all know that it is easy to put England/UK into lockdown but far more difficult to come out
The other issue is Boris would struggle to get his party to back a full lockdown
Hopefully the PM will put country before party.
What does that mean in this context? Whatever he wants to do for the country, he needs support from his party to get it through parliament.
Not necessarily. I'm not recommending a Government of National Unity, but cross-party voting on pandemic control is a sensible option.
There are basically three factions in Parliament - lock down harder, start to relax, and tack your way through the middle. The third has been tried for some time and doesn't seemb to be working. There is a substantial Tory backbench group supporting "start to relax", but a much larger majority for "lock down harder". BJ can use it if he wants to.
I'm not against lockdown harder in principle but I want to see a strategy that isn't simply about delaying deaths down the road and acknowledging economic costs.
Is it lockdown until test and trace is working properly? Till we have a vaccine? And how long might that credibly take?
Southam - it saddens me but it's all well and good telling people to self-isolate for two weeks and blaming them for ignoring it but what support have the government offered them for doing so? In an era of zero hours and casual employment this might have been expected.
Right or wrong call im surprised it isn't a decision of or at least with the Speakers, as it seems a procedural matter.
I wonder if JRM heard MPs were super spreaders and thought this was a positive thing due to the word super.
It beggars belief that anyone can imagine it is a good thing to have politicians wander between London and their constituencies meeting hundreds of people a week during a pandemic. Add in 45 positive parliamentary police force officers and it might be a runner for worst decision of the pandemic so far.
Just to be clear about the level of detail you can get in North Carolina. I can tell you the name and address of every voter who has voted so far along with their age and race and give you their party registration and what elections they voted in going back a decade or so.
We are not talking about aggregated stats here.
Are we talking about a secret ballot here? Really?
This kind of shows that ballot secrecy isn't a great security trade-off. By far the easiest way to nobble a vote is by messing with who can participate in it, and you can predict which people you should prevent from voting with very high reliability by demographics and social media activity.
We should give up on it and just make the votes public, that makes everything else about the process (making sure they can vote, making sure their vote is counted as they cast it) way easier.
You might want to look back in history and see why the ballot was made secret...
It was made secret in the hope of dissuading intimidation, coercion and bribery.
However can only be partially successful at best because denial-of-service against known opponents, which is way easier, gets you at least 50% of the effect, ie if I know who you would have voted for and I can use intimidation, coercion and bribery to stop you from voting against me, that's half as good as forcing you to vote for me. Worse, the need for secrecy makes the logistics of voting vastly more complicated, which you can exploit to make the attack easier.
You can reduce some of the logistical problems with readily-available postal voting, but then you lose the bribery resistance, because I can bribe you into applying for a postal vote and letting me fill it in or check how you filled it in. And you still have a lot of the logistical problems arising from your now half-arsed attempt at secrecy, including a whole load of new attack vectors like attacks against the delivery systems.
I notice that on Twitter, Trump voters really do expect to win and rather handsomely at that. They cannot fathom any other outcome. I dread to think what the reaction will be if the polls are accurate.
Many of the Trump supporting accounts are just Russian bots
Doctors in Liverpool say those partying in the city do not care people are dying
It is sad but seems succinct
This generation seems extraordinarily self-centred
Tell that to my 26 year-old, graduate son, who was unemployed for six months and applied for literally hundreds of jobs before finally starting one on Monday as a labourer in a recycling centre. He had also signed up for a year long course to train as a plumber and has been doing that for a month. Yesterday, after working his 7am to 4.30 pm shift, he got an email from the college saying two people in his class had tested positive for covid and he needed to self-isolate for two weeks. He phoned work this morning to tell them and now no longer has a job. Like millions of others all he’s tried to do is the right thing. Check your privilege, Charles!
1000 likes.
Self-centred my arse!
Daughter wakes up every morning wondering what new rules there will be making her business yet more unviable. Eldest is spending his days looking for work, after losing his job 6 weeks ago. Youngest - just graduated - has just got a job (in food retail) but is applying for others which will stretch him more.
Their futures are uncertain. They’ve complied with the rules. Their lives are constrained and frankly more than a bit shit. They care about their older relatives who are at risk. They don’t need patronising and untrue generalisations by those who have done very well indeed and don’t have the same worries.
Best of luck to SO junior.
Agreed on all counts. From my admittedly partial knowledge of the immediate post university generation, they are remarkably unselfish.
Doctors in Liverpool say those partying in the city do not care people are dying
It is sad but seems succinct
This generation seems extraordinarily self-centred
Says every generation, grandad. I'd think a man with such extensive knowledge of his antecedents would know differences between generations exist but are usually very overplayed at the time.
He can't do it this week and he can't call it a circuit breaker. So Cummings and his team are spending this week entirely focused on a jazzy name for next weeks press release of something with the new name that is the same as a circuit breaker.
There may be a time when it becomes necessary but the 3 tier system must be given a chance to work before we close down our economy again.
Furthermore, we all know that it is easy to put England/UK into lockdown but far more difficult to come out
The other issue is Boris would struggle to get his party to back a full lockdown
Hopefully the PM will put country before party.
What does that mean in this context? Whatever he wants to do for the country, he needs support from his party to get it through parliament.
Not necessarily. I'm not recommending a Government of National Unity, but cross-party voting on pandemic control is a sensible option.
There are basically three factions in Parliament - lock down harder, start to relax, and tack your way through the middle. The third has been tried for some time and doesn't seemb to be working. There is a substantial Tory backbench group supporting "start to relax", but a much larger majority for "lock down harder". BJ can use it if he wants to.
I'm not against lockdown harder in principle but I want to see a strategy that isn't simply about delaying deaths down the road and acknowledging economic costs.
Is it lockdown until test and trace is working properly? Till we have a vaccine? And how long might that credibly take?
Southam - it saddens me but it's all well and good telling people to self-isolate for two weeks and blaming them for ignoring it but what support have the government offered them for doing so? In an era of zero hours and casual employment this might have been expected.
I understand they qualify for a £500 payment for the two weeks
Drakeford said Starmer and Reeves are talking in an English context
Drakeford says Wales is not at the level of England
Large chunks of England are not “at the level” of England. There is no border in place between England and Wales. There is no more or less reason to include, say, Cornwall in a “circuit breaker” policy, than there is Wales.
COVID really is exposing what a strange set up we have in the UK.
Interesting though the polling data is, albeit not surprising, that last sentence seems to me to be key.
So around 5% have voted already? Plus presumably that figure should now start to rise rapidly. That’s bad news for Trump that so many are voting early.
I suppose to set against that people who vote that early are more likely to be firmly committed to one side or the other anyway. But again, this doesn’t look to be an election with many undecided voters. All other considerations aside, it’s more about personalities rather than issues - the mild, inoffensive, rather wet Biden against an orange haired lunatic - and personalities don’t change.
If I lived in a country where it can take up to eleven hours to cast a vote, I'd want to do it early.
I'd also make bloody sure I did vote, because somebody is obviously trying to make it very difficult for me to do so.
Absolutely. And its a self-fulfilling prophesy. The GOP want to stop people voting against them so are doing all these ludicrous things. Which creates 11 hour queues. If you had been planning to vote on the day but are seeing 11 hour queues now, you'd book a day off to vote early.
Because an 11 hour queue weeks ahead of polling day equals not being allowed to vote at all on polling day. Ordinarily this would be considered a disgrace to the so called leader of the free world. Under Trump? Meh.
A small but clear indication of the kind of discreet voter suppression practiced in some States can be seen in the voting hours. In Kansas and Indiana the polls close at 6pm. Now who do you think that hinders?
How is it even justified? Some of the measures I get the pretext for, but I cannot guess what the excuse is there
That the party in power has the power to do it, and the courts have not ruled it unconstitutional. That’s the current Republican standard (see Amy Coney Barrett).
Right or wrong call im surprised it isn't a decision of or at least with the Speakers, as it seems a procedural matter.
I wonder if JRM heard MPs were super spreaders and thought this was a positive thing due to the word super.
It beggars belief that anyone can imagine it is a good thing to have politicians wander between London and their constituencies meeting hundreds of people a week during a pandemic. Add in 45 positive parliamentary police force officers and it might be a runner for worst decision of the pandemic so far.
When we were opening up their doing so as an example made some sense. But things are tightening so not now.
Doctors in Liverpool say those partying in the city do not care people are dying
It is sad but seems succinct
This generation seems extraordinarily self-centred
Tell that to my 26 year-old, graduate son, who was unemployed for six months and applied for literally hundreds of jobs before finally starting one on Monday as a labourer in a recycling centre. He had also signed up for a year long course to train as a plumber and has been doing that for a month. Yesterday, after working his 7am to 4.30 pm shift, he got an email from the college saying two people in his class had tested positive for covid and he needed to self-isolate for two weeks. He phoned work this morning to tell them and now no longer has a job. Like millions of others all he’s tried to do is the right thing. Check your privilege, Charles!
1000 likes.
Self-centred my arse!
Daughter wakes up every morning wondering what new rules there will be making her business yet more unviable. Eldest is spending his days looking for work, after losing his job 6 weeks ago. Youngest - just graduated - has just got a job (in food retail) but is applying for others which will stretch him more.
Their futures are uncertain. They’ve complied with the rules. Their lives are constrained and frankly more than a bit shit. They care about their older relatives who are at risk. They don’t need patronising and untrue generalisations by those who have done very well indeed and don’t have the same worries.
Best of luck to SO junior.
"Self-centred" - good grief - the opprobrium being poured on young people at the moment is yet another deeply concerning mob trait to go the existing pile that this pandemic has created.
For goodness sake, no-one intends to give someone a virus. If someone knows they have it and doesn`t isolate and acts recklessly then, sure, criticise that person - that would be immoral and probably criminal. But you cannot criticise people who are not aware that they have it. That`s going too far. There is no intent to harm - and that is everything.
If you catch the virus you cannot say "I caught it from that person" and neither can someone say "I gave it to that person". Each virus isn`t imprinted with the details of the giver.
This pandemic sure is bringing out the nastiness in humans.
I took all of your friendly advice and went for a little walk this morning before starting work. I think it has done me some good. Here’s a few photos of the city of Newcastle upon Tyne for your viewing pleasure.
We are trying a "circuit break" in central Scotland. Too early to tell yet but we should know whether it has worked in reducing the number of cases in a week or so. This is a real life experiment in UK conditions and I think that the government can wait to see the outcome before going further in England.
Doctors in Liverpool say those partying in the city do not care people are dying
It is sad but seems succinct
This generation seems extraordinarily self-centred
Tell that to my 26 year-old, graduate son, who was unemployed for six months and applied for literally hundreds of jobs before finally starting one on Monday as a labourer in a recycling centre. He had also signed up for a year long course to train as a plumber and has been doing that for a month. Yesterday, after working his 7am to 4.30 pm shift, he got an email from the college saying two people in his class had tested positive for covid and he needed to self-isolate for two weeks. He phoned work this morning to tell them and now no longer has a job. Like millions of others all he’s tried to do is the right thing. Check your privilege, Charles!
That is rich Tories for you, as long as they are OK and increasing their bank accounts they don't give a stuff about the Hoi Polloi
There may be a time when it becomes necessary but the 3 tier system must be given a chance to work before we close down our economy again.
Furthermore, we all know that it is easy to put England/UK into lockdown but far more difficult to come out
The other issue is Boris would struggle to get his party to back a full lockdown
Hopefully the PM will put country before party.
On this I feel he will. However, it is not easy balancing the need for kids to be in school, the economy to be moving and the vulnerable to be kept safe. It would be nice if the media and others could understand and accept this.
It really isn't and the intergenerational challenges are really difficult too. So much of the cost of lockdowns falls on the young, whether it is their employment prospects as @SouthamObserver illustrates, their social life or their education they have paid the price for a disease that barely affects them. The needs of the old and the vulnerable need to be weighed against this when the risk is as severe as a premature death but it is so difficult.
I think that the government is right to prioritise education by keeping the schools and the Universities open but it is probably the case that this alone will keep the R rate over 1, no matter how much everything else is restricted. Its a real dilemma.
But suggest that the older generation pick up any of the financial cost of what is happening...
The Marmalade Monster said "Suburban women: will you please like me? Please. Please. I saved your damn neighborhood, OK?" and that shows how little he understands women and how to talk to us. You do not win us over by swearing at us or by sounding tetchy at us.
Doctors in Liverpool say those partying in the city do not care people are dying
It is sad but seems succinct
This generation seems extraordinarily self-centred
Tell that to my 26 year-old, graduate son, who was unemployed for six months and applied for literally hundreds of jobs before finally starting one on Monday as a labourer in a recycling centre. He had also signed up for a year long course to train as a plumber and has been doing that for a month. Yesterday, after working his 7am to 4.30 pm shift, he got an email from the college saying two people in his class had tested positive for covid and he needed to self-isolate for two weeks. He phoned work this morning to tell them and now no longer has a job. Like millions of others all he’s tried to do is the right thing. Check your privilege, Charles!
That is rich Tories for you, as long as they are OK and increasing their bank accounts they don't give a stuff about the Hoi Polloi
Coincidentally Oi Polloi is a nice menswear shop in Manchester. You have to be a rich Tory to afford anything from there though.
We are trying a "circuit break" in central Scotland. Too early to tell yet but we should know whether it has worked in reducing the number of cases in a week or so. This is a real life experiment in UK conditions and I think that the government can wait to see the outcome before going further in England.
Doctors in Liverpool say those partying in the city do not care people are dying
It is sad but seems succinct
This generation seems extraordinarily self-centred
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”
We are trying a "circuit break" in central Scotland. Too early to tell yet but we should know whether it has worked in reducing the number of cases in a week or so. This is a real life experiment in UK conditions and I think that the government can wait to see the outcome before going further in England.
He can't do it this week and he can't call it a circuit breaker. So Cummings and his team are spending this week entirely focused on a jazzy name for next weeks press release of something with the new name that is the same as a circuit breaker.
Frankly it’s ridiculous that the Govt can announce a new strategy on Monday, to take effect on Wednesday, with review periods of every 28 days, and on Tuesday be said to be considering an alternative strategy within a week on the back of the release of scientific “advice” they already had and because the Opposition are demanding it.
They should argue their own position with more confidence and stick to it. Take a leaf out of the book of politicians in the Republic of Ireland who were confronted with the same situation and faced it down. Admittedly they’ve got the advantage there of effectively having a Govt of National Unity so can avoid the political mudslinging.
Doctors in Liverpool say those partying in the city do not care people are dying
It is sad but seems succinct
This generation seems extraordinarily self-centred
Tell that to my 26 year-old, graduate son, who was unemployed for six months and applied for literally hundreds of jobs before finally starting one on Monday as a labourer in a recycling centre. He had also signed up for a year long course to train as a plumber and has been doing that for a month. Yesterday, after working his 7am to 4.30 pm shift, he got an email from the college saying two people in his class had tested positive for covid and he needed to self-isolate for two weeks. He phoned work this morning to tell them and now no longer has a job. Like millions of others all he’s tried to do is the right thing. Check your privilege, Charles!
That is rich Tories for you, as long as they are OK and increasing their bank accounts they don't give a stuff about the Hoi Polloi
Coincidentally Oi Polloi is a nice menswear shop in Manchester. You have to be a rich Tory to afford anything from there though.
Hope you are feeling a bit better Gallowgate , was sorry to hear you were feeling down. Trying times at present.
The Marmalade Monster said "Suburban women: will you please like me? Please. Please. I saved your damn neighborhood, OK?" and that shows how little he understands women and how to talk to us. You do not win us over by swearing at us or by sounding tetchy at us.
Be fair: he’s more used to buying women than winning them over ....
Doctors in Liverpool say those partying in the city do not care people are dying
It is sad but seems succinct
This generation seems extraordinarily self-centred
Tell that to my 26 year-old, graduate son, who was unemployed for six months and applied for literally hundreds of jobs before finally starting one on Monday as a labourer in a recycling centre. He had also signed up for a year long course to train as a plumber and has been doing that for a month. Yesterday, after working his 7am to 4.30 pm shift, he got an email from the college saying two people in his class had tested positive for covid and he needed to self-isolate for two weeks. He phoned work this morning to tell them and now no longer has a job. Like millions of others all he’s tried to do is the right thing. Check your privilege, Charles!
That is rich Tories for you, as long as they are OK and increasing their bank accounts they don't give a stuff about the Hoi Polloi
Coincidentally Oi Polloi is a nice menswear shop in Manchester. You have to be a rich Tory to afford anything from there though.
Then they should call themselves Ou Tois Pollois, shurely.
Doctors in Liverpool say those partying in the city do not care people are dying
It is sad but seems succinct
This generation seems extraordinarily self-centred
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”
― Socrates
That's a lovely quote. He's a bit old-fashioned, but was a fine footballer.
The Marmalade Monster said "Suburban women: will you please like me? Please. Please. I saved your damn neighborhood, OK?" and that shows how little he understands women and how to talk to us. You do not win us over by swearing at us or by sounding tetchy at us.
Be fair: he’s more used to buying women than winning them over ....
Doctors in Liverpool say those partying in the city do not care people are dying
It is sad but seems succinct
This generation seems extraordinarily self-centred
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”
Their futures are uncertain. They’ve complied with the rules. Their lives are constrained and frankly more than a bit shit. They care about their older relatives who are at risk. They don’t need patronising and untrue generalisations by those who have done very well indeed and don’t have the same worries.
I have had a few of my A level tutees ask me for career guidance in these uncertain times. Fuck knows why. Perhaps because I've mastered the grise part of being an éminence grise. I have NFI what to tell them but they certainly don't seem to be getting any sensible advice or support anywhere else in the system.
He can't do it this week and he can't call it a circuit breaker. So Cummings and his team are spending this week entirely focused on a jazzy name for next weeks press release of something with the new name that is the same as a circuit breaker.
Frankly it’s ridiculous that the Govt can announce a new strategy on Monday, to take effect on Wednesday, with review periods of every 28 days, and on Tuesday be said to be considering an alternative strategy within a week on the back of the release of scientific “advice” they already had and because the Opposition are demanding it.
They should argue their own position with more confidence and stick to it. Take a leaf out of the book of politicians in the Republic of Ireland who were confronted with the same situation and faced it down. Admittedly they’ve got the advantage there of effectively having a Govt of National Unity so can avoid the political mudslinging.
The govt is ridiculous yes. The u-turn is inevitable, they just cannot admit it for another week whilst the situation gets worse.
We are trying a "circuit break" in central Scotland. Too early to tell yet but we should know whether it has worked in reducing the number of cases in a week or so. This is a real life experiment in UK conditions and I think that the government can wait to see the outcome before going further in England.
It looks like a similar trend to England, a levelling off at a high rate from the specimen day data. Today will show whether that is the case or not.
It is remarkable that this far in we still have to worry about weekend effects etc. The need for up to date and accurate data to inform decision making is absolute. I feel our government are doing their best but blundering around a dark room in a blindfold, occasionally managing a peak around the edges.
Just to be clear about the level of detail you can get in North Carolina. I can tell you the name and address of every voter who has voted so far along with their age and race and give you their party registration and what elections they voted in going back a decade or so.
We are not talking about aggregated stats here.
Are we talking about a secret ballot here? Really?
This kind of shows that ballot secrecy isn't a great security trade-off. By far the easiest way to nobble a vote is by messing with who can participate in it, and you can predict which people you should prevent from voting with very high reliability by demographics and social media activity.
We should give up on it and just make the votes public, that makes everything else about the process (making sure they can vote, making sure their vote is counted as they cast it) way easier.
You might want to look back in history and see why the ballot was made secret...
It was made secret in the hope of dissuading intimidation, coercion and bribery.
However can only be partially successful at best because denial-of-service against known opponents, which is way easier, gets you at least 50% of the effect, ie if I know who you would have voted for and I can use intimidation, coercion and bribery to stop you from voting against me, that's half as good as forcing you to vote for me. Worse, the need for secrecy makes the logistics of voting vastly more complicated, which you can exploit to make the attack easier.
You can reduce some of the logistical problems with readily-available postal voting, but then you lose the bribery resistance, because I can bribe you into applying for a postal vote and letting me fill it in or check how you filled it in. And you still have a lot of the logistical problems arising from your now half-arsed attempt at secrecy, including a whole load of new attack vectors like attacks against the delivery systems.
The consequences for privacy from data analytical approach strike me as very worrying. Since we can use basic information to get a very good idea of who you are anyway - what's the point of maintaining any actual privacy?
We are trying a "circuit break" in central Scotland. Too early to tell yet but we should know whether it has worked in reducing the number of cases in a week or so. This is a real life experiment in UK conditions and I think that the government can wait to see the outcome before going further in England.
So, the question is what are the politicians doing with the time they bought?
Not necessarily just about buying time.
If you have a test, trace, isolate system with a certain capacity, a circuit breaker could reduce cases down low enough to be within that capacity, so that you can control and reduce the disease.
If we had only 1 COVID case a day, presumably even Dido Harding would be able to successfully test, trace and isolate all of that case's contacts.
Whether this circuit breaker will get us within that capacity... no idea but probably not.
Doctors in Liverpool say those partying in the city do not care people are dying
It is sad but seems succinct
This generation seems extraordinarily self-centred
Tell that to my 26 year-old, graduate son, who was unemployed for six months and applied for literally hundreds of jobs before finally starting one on Monday as a labourer in a recycling centre. He had also signed up for a year long course to train as a plumber and has been doing that for a month. Yesterday, after working his 7am to 4.30 pm shift, he got an email from the college saying two people in his class had tested positive for covid and he needed to self-isolate for two weeks. He phoned work this morning to tell them and now no longer has a job. Like millions of others all he’s tried to do is the right thing. Check your privilege, Charles!
1000 likes.
Self-centred my arse!
Daughter wakes up every morning wondering what new rules there will be making her business yet more unviable. Eldest is spending his days looking for work, after losing his job 6 weeks ago. Youngest - just graduated - has just got a job (in food retail) but is applying for others which will stretch him more.
Their futures are uncertain. They’ve complied with the rules. Their lives are constrained and frankly more than a bit shit. They care about their older relatives who are at risk. They don’t need patronising and untrue generalisations by those who have done very well indeed and don’t have the same worries.
Best of luck to SO junior.
"Self-centred" - good grief - the opprobrium being poured on young people at the moment is yet another deeply concerning mob trait to go the existing pile that this pandemic has created.
For goodness sake, no-one intends to give someone a virus. If someone knows they have it and doesn`t isolate and acts recklessly then, sure, criticise that person - that would be immoral and probably criminal. But you cannot criticise people who are not aware that they have it. That`s going too far. There is no intent to harm - and that is everything.
If you catch the virus you cannot say "I caught it from that person" and neither can someone say "I gave it to that person". Each virus isn`t imprinted with the details of the giver.
This pandemic sure is bringing out the nastiness in humans.
I have been saying for some time that the younger generations are getting a raw deal from their elders. It particularly annoys me when I hear those who benefited from free education, good housing opportunities, good dental care, etc, etc telling the young that they need to pay more taxes and work harder to support the elderly whilst running up huge education debts and being unable to afford ridiculously overpriced housing.
Macmillan was on the money when he told them that they'd never had it so good...
He can't do it this week and he can't call it a circuit breaker. So Cummings and his team are spending this week entirely focused on a jazzy name for next weeks press release of something with the new name that is the same as a circuit breaker.
Frankly it’s ridiculous that the Govt can announce a new strategy on Monday, to take effect on Wednesday, with review periods of every 28 days, and on Tuesday be said to be considering an alternative strategy within a week on the back of the release of scientific “advice” they already had and because the Opposition are demanding it.
They should argue their own position with more confidence and stick to it. Take a leaf out of the book of politicians in the Republic of Ireland who were confronted with the same situation and faced it down. Admittedly they’ve got the advantage there of effectively having a Govt of National Unity so can avoid the political mudslinging.
The govt is ridiculous yes. The u-turn is inevitable, they just cannot admit it for another week whilst the situation gets worse.
It's all the media's fault for being insufficiently reverential toward Johnson.
We're all in a national scale remake of Human Centipede
We are trying a "circuit break" in central Scotland. Too early to tell yet but we should know whether it has worked in reducing the number of cases in a week or so. This is a real life experiment in UK conditions and I think that the government can wait to see the outcome before going further in England.
So, the question is what are the politicians doing with the time they bought?
What they should be doing is entirely refocusing our test and trace system to very fast results and backtracking to find the sources of infection, not so much those that might have been infected by the person with the +ve test. Boris, in fairness, seems to have seen this weeks ago but the 20 minute tests are still not rolled out.
Just to be clear about the level of detail you can get in North Carolina. I can tell you the name and address of every voter who has voted so far along with their age and race and give you their party registration and what elections they voted in going back a decade or so.
When I was young I rebelled in this manner which old people didn't like, that was a fine way to rebel. Now that I am old I find that young people are rebelling in a different manner, and I do not like that.
This comment piece makes a false claim about Birmingham nightinggale hospital being taken down and closed, which I think is completely untrue.
But this was funny:
"To be fair to Baroness Harding, the poor woman has only been given £12.6 billion to come up with a workable NHS tracking system. With that amount, you could have paid every single elderly and vulnerable person in the UK £60,000 to shield themselves in the Bahamas and used the change to recompense students for their non-existent university experience."
It may seem funny but its absolutely terrible maths and entirely untrue. Its the same terrible mistake as was made earlier in the year with this infamous Tweet being read on TV. https://twitter.com/jsmooth995/status/1235788534067482624
There are 30 million elderly and vulnerable people in the UK. Spending £60,000 on each of them would come not to £12.6 billion but instead £1,800,000,000,000 or £1.8 trillion. That's without considering the students.
Just to be clear about the level of detail you can get in North Carolina. I can tell you the name and address of every voter who has voted so far along with their age and race and give you their party registration and what elections they voted in going back a decade or so.
We are not talking about aggregated stats here.
Is this typical for all states?
No. The amount of info available is highly highly variable from state to state.
North Carolina data is particularly detailed, well structured and easily available (if you are okay with downloading and processing multi gigabyte csv files - hint, don't use excel)
Doctors in Liverpool say those partying in the city do not care people are dying
It is sad but seems succinct
This generation seems extraordinarily self-centred
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”
― Socrates
That's a lovely quote. He's a bit old-fashioned, but was a fine footballer.
I had no idea that boring game was around in ancient Greece. I always thought of ancient Greece as a country sparkling with new ideas and interests and philosophies, sweeping away old ideas and shaping the world to come.
Not a bunch of grumpy blokes sitting in the taverna grousing about the offside rule.....
Doctors in Liverpool say those partying in the city do not care people are dying
It is sad but seems succinct
This generation seems extraordinarily self-centred
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”
― Socrates
That's a lovely quote. He's a bit old-fashioned, but was a fine footballer.
I had no idea that boring game was around in ancient Greece. I always thought of ancient Greece as a country sparkling with new ideas and interests and philosophies, sweeping away old ideas and shaping the world to come.
Not a bunch of grumpy blokes sitting in the taverna grousing about the offside rule.....
I am sure that it was better when they didn't have to worry about VAR.
Mrs C, in The Alexiad, Anna Comnena complains of the youth of 'today' not learning important matters and wasting their time playing draughts.
I believe a similar sentiment was expressed a century or two ago about Parisian youths who had an appalling new habit. And they were doing it everywhere. In public. In the street. Outrageous!
They were playing chess, the scoundrels.
Edited extra bit: on partying youths right now - they're idiots.
This comment piece makes a false claim about Birmingham nightinggale hospital being taken down and closed, which I think is completely untrue.
But this was funny:
"To be fair to Baroness Harding, the poor woman has only been given £12.6 billion to come up with a workable NHS tracking system. With that amount, you could have paid every single elderly and vulnerable person in the UK £60,000 to shield themselves in the Bahamas and used the change to recompense students for their non-existent university experience."
It may seem funny but its absolutely terrible maths and entirely untrue. Its the same terrible mistake as was made earlier in the year with this infamous Tweet being read on TV. https://twitter.com/jsmooth995/status/1235788534067482624
There are 30 million elderly and vulnerable people in the UK. Spending £60,000 on each of them would come not to £12.6 billion but instead £1,800,000,000,000 or £1.8 trillion. That's without considering the students.
- the UK government has no clearly defined policy objective, nor identifiable medium term strategy; - it frittered away much of its political capital on defending Cummings and the like; - Boris is ill-equipped for and inattentive toward the politics of reconciling conflicting interests and building alliances;
the government does not have the resilience to stick to any approach for any length of time; the PM tacks this way and that depending upon the imprint of whoever sat on him the last.
Thus on the very day that a supposedly new and comprehensive set of regulations come in, which need to be communicated to and understood by millions of people, we find ourselves in the ridiculous situation where the new approach is already under immense pressure and the government is meeting today to consider changing it.
This comment piece makes a false claim about Birmingham nightinggale hospital being taken down and closed, which I think is completely untrue.
But this was funny:
"To be fair to Baroness Harding, the poor woman has only been given £12.6 billion to come up with a workable NHS tracking system. With that amount, you could have paid every single elderly and vulnerable person in the UK £60,000 to shield themselves in the Bahamas and used the change to recompense students for their non-existent university experience."
It may seem funny but its absolutely terrible maths and entirely untrue. Its the same terrible mistake as was made earlier in the year with this infamous Tweet being read on TV. https://twitter.com/jsmooth995/status/1235788534067482624
There are 30 million elderly and vulnerable people in the UK. Spending £60,000 on each of them would come not to £12.6 billion but instead £1,800,000,000,000 or £1.8 trillion. That's without considering the students.
I expect the GOP will take the lead there shortly. Well until Clark County starts getting their ballots !
Interesting that the mailed out ballots favour the GOP by 2.8:1 yet the Dems have a slight majority in returned ballots. GOP not voting or voting later? Dems more motivated?
I come back to the obvious. The fact that the Republicans on Capitol Hill are so desperate to get Amy Coney Barrett confirmed to the Supreme Court ahead of Nov 3rd tells you they know they've lost. And almost certainly not only the White House but Congress.
Surprised no-one picked up on this in the thread header. Apologies if I missed someone who did.
"As can be seen in the breakdown Trump is 14% behind with women but just a point off with men. Trump’s appeals to women, seen in the Tweets above, are a reflection that he fully understands where his problem lies – the question is whether with just 20 days to go he can do something about it.
With an estimated 53% of the electorate women are a bigger block than men so the differing views makes his position even worse. At WH2016 Clinton did capture majority of female voters—54%, according to exit polling"
Clinton won women's votes by 54-41 according to the exit poll, little different to the 54-40 split in the Morning Consult poll shown for Biden.
Clinton lost men's votes by 41-52, so the poll for Biden shows a massive swing in his favour to 48-47.
Does the Morning Consult poll show different gender swings to other recent polls?
I know the accepted wisdom is that there is a swing among suburban women similar to that which led to the Democrat victory in the midterms, but the poll here is showing a different gender swing.
There may be a time when it becomes necessary but the 3 tier system must be given a chance to work before we close down our economy again.
Furthermore, we all know that it is easy to put England/UK into lockdown but far more difficult to come out
The other issue is Boris would struggle to get his party to back a full lockdown
Hopefully the PM will put country before party.
What does that mean in this context? Whatever he wants to do for the country, he needs support from his party to get it through parliament.
Not necessarily. I'm not recommending a Government of National Unity, but cross-party voting on pandemic control is a sensible option.
There are basically three factions in Parliament - lock down harder, start to relax, and tack your way through the middle. The third has been tried for some time and doesn't seemb to be working. There is a substantial Tory backbench group supporting "start to relax", but a much larger majority for "lock down harder". BJ can use it if he wants to.
I'm not against lockdown harder in principle but I want to see a strategy that isn't simply about delaying deaths down the road and acknowledging economic costs.
Is it lockdown until test and trace is working properly? Till we have a vaccine? And how long might that credibly take?
Southam - it saddens me but it's all well and good telling people to self-isolate for two weeks and blaming them for ignoring it but what support have the government offered them for doing so? In an era of zero hours and casual employment this might have been expected.
My understanding of the SAGE approach (leaving aside Starmer's support for it) is to recommend periodic lockdowns of 2-3 weeks to interrupt the spread, which I assume would be a pattern repeating through the winter. There was a suggestion here that it should explicitly be the first two weeks of every odd-numbered month, so we could all plan for it. When the circuit-break ends, the virus would resume expanding, but from a lower level, so we would get a series of bumps through the winter instead of a remorseless rise. And of course it should be accompanied by financial support for those impacted, on the lines of what Sunak has been doing but with the various gaps that have been identified filled in.
Is it a perfect strategy? Probably not - certainly it would further increase the support cost, and there is a risk of binge-socialising in the gaps in between the lockdowns. But it seems to offer a credible and coherent approach, which at present - not being partisan about it but just factual - we do do not appear to have.
I come back to the obvious. The fact that the Republicans on Capitol Hill are so desperate to get Amy Coney Barrett confirmed to the Supreme Court ahead of Nov 3rd tells you they know they've lost. And almost certainly not only the White House but Congress.
I hope Biden adds two more Justices so as to compound the Republican's defeat...
p.s. total and utter shambles in the UK. We're not only back at square one, we've undone many of the people's goodwill and support so that when the inevitable lockdowns re-occur we won't have the public on board.
Doctors in Liverpool say those partying in the city do not care people are dying
It is sad but seems succinct
This generation seems extraordinarily self-centred
What a blinkered thing to say. Have you stopped to reflect on how "this [partying] generation" might be viewing us oldies who (in the round) have benefitted so hugely from an economic settlement now tilted so much against the young?
Surprised no-one picked up on this in the thread header. Apologies if I missed someone who did.
"As can be seen in the breakdown Trump is 14% behind with women but just a point off with men. Trump’s appeals to women, seen in the Tweets above, are a reflection that he fully understands where his problem lies – the question is whether with just 20 days to go he can do something about it.
With an estimated 53% of the electorate women are a bigger block than men so the differing views makes his position even worse. At WH2016 Clinton did capture majority of female voters—54%, according to exit polling"
Clinton won women's votes by 54-41 according to the exit poll, little different to the 54-40 split in the Morning Consult poll shown for Biden.
Clinton lost men's votes by 41-52, so the poll for Biden shows a massive swing in his favour to 48-47.
Does the Morning Consult poll show different gender swings to other recent polls?
I know the accepted wisdom is that there is a swing among suburban women similar to that which led to the Democrat victory in the midterms, but the poll here is showing a different gender swing.
Yes, it is Biden being a lot more acceptable to groups that Trump won handily 4 years ago that is putting him in a strong position. Keeping the lead amongst women that was in part based on a female candidate is quite an achievement too of course but what he is essentially doing there is holding what he inherited.
There may be a time when it becomes necessary but the 3 tier system must be given a chance to work before we close down our economy again.
Furthermore, we all know that it is easy to put England/UK into lockdown but far more difficult to come out
The other issue is Boris would struggle to get his party to back a full lockdown
Hopefully the PM will put country before party.
What does that mean in this context? Whatever he wants to do for the country, he needs support from his party to get it through parliament.
Not necessarily. I'm not recommending a Government of National Unity, but cross-party voting on pandemic control is a sensible option.
There are basically three factions in Parliament - lock down harder, start to relax, and tack your way through the middle. The third has been tried for some time and doesn't seemb to be working. There is a substantial Tory backbench group supporting "start to relax", but a much larger majority for "lock down harder". BJ can use it if he wants to.
I'm not against lockdown harder in principle but I want to see a strategy that isn't simply about delaying deaths down the road and acknowledging economic costs.
Is it lockdown until test and trace is working properly? Till we have a vaccine? And how long might that credibly take?
Southam - it saddens me but it's all well and good telling people to self-isolate for two weeks and blaming them for ignoring it but what support have the government offered them for doing so? In an era of zero hours and casual employment this might have been expected.
My understanding of the SAGE approach (leaving aside Starmer's support for it) is to recommend periodic lockdowns of 2-3 weeks to interrupt the spread, which I assume would be a pattern repeating through the winter. There was a suggestion here that it should explicitly be the first two weeks of every odd-numbered month, so we could all plan for it. When the circuit-break ends, the virus would resume expanding, but from a lower level, so we would get a series of bumps through the winter instead of a remorseless rise. And of course it should be accompanied by financial support for those impacted, on the lines of what Sunak has been doing but with the various gaps that have been identified filled in.
Is it a perfect strategy? Probably not - certainly it would further increase the support cost, and there is a risk of binge-socialising in the gaps in between the lockdowns. But it seems to offer a credible and coherent approach, which at present - not being partisan about it but just factual - we do do not appear to have.
You'd be better off paying pubs and restaurants to close until the Spring than expecting them to trade in those conditions.
Easy for someone to write down what they think is a good idea on paper, entirely different to actually put it into practice.
This comment piece makes a false claim about Birmingham nightinggale hospital being taken down and closed, which I think is completely untrue.
But this was funny:
"To be fair to Baroness Harding, the poor woman has only been given £12.6 billion to come up with a workable NHS tracking system. With that amount, you could have paid every single elderly and vulnerable person in the UK £60,000 to shield themselves in the Bahamas and used the change to recompense students for their non-existent university experience."
It may seem funny but its absolutely terrible maths and entirely untrue. Its the same terrible mistake as was made earlier in the year with this infamous Tweet being read on TV. https://twitter.com/jsmooth995/status/1235788534067482624
There are 30 million elderly and vulnerable people in the UK. Spending £60,000 on each of them would come not to £12.6 billion but instead £1,800,000,000,000 or £1.8 trillion. That's without considering the students.
There aren't 30m elderly or vulnerable. There are certainly more than 200,000 though.
- the UK government has no clearly defined policy objective, nor identifiable medium term strategy; - it frittered away much of its political capital on defending Cummings and the like; - Boris is ill-equipped for and inattentive toward the politics of reconciling conflicting interests and building alliances;
the government does not have the resilience to stick to any approach for any length of time; the PM tacks this way and that depending upon the imprint of whoever sat on him the last.
Thus on the very day that a supposedly new and comprehensive set of regulations come in, which need to be communicated to and understood by millions of people, we find ourselves in the ridiculous situation where the new approach is already under immense pressure and the government is meeting today to consider changing it.
It's almost as if there is no policy that can actually deliver everything the country's competing interests need and desire. Like being trapped in a room with only a broken stool to sit on: sure, you can just about balance on it, but not comfortably, and not for long.
I come back to the obvious. The fact that the Republicans on Capitol Hill are so desperate to get Amy Coney Barrett confirmed to the Supreme Court ahead of Nov 3rd tells you they know they've lost. And almost certainly not only the White House but Congress.
I hope Biden adds two more Justices so as to compound the Republican's defeat...
Doctors in Liverpool say those partying in the city do not care people are dying
It is sad but seems succinct
This generation seems extraordinarily self-centred
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”
― Socrates
That's a lovely quote. He's a bit old-fashioned, but was a fine footballer.
I had no idea that boring game was around in ancient Greece. I always thought of ancient Greece as a country sparkling with new ideas and interests and philosophies, sweeping away old ideas and shaping the world to come.
Not a bunch of grumpy blokes sitting in the taverna grousing about the offside rule.....
I am sure that it was better when they didn't have to worry about VAR.
The game isn't what it used to be. Here's a classic to remind you just how good it could be:
Just to be clear about the level of detail you can get in North Carolina. I can tell you the name and address of every voter who has voted so far along with their age and race and give you their party registration and what elections they voted in going back a decade or so.
We are not talking about aggregated stats here.
Are we talking about a secret ballot here? Really?
This kind of shows that ballot secrecy isn't a great security trade-off. By far the easiest way to nobble a vote is by messing with who can participate in it, and you can predict which people you should prevent from voting with very high reliability by demographics and social media activity.
We should give up on it and just make the votes public, that makes everything else about the process (making sure they can vote, making sure their vote is counted as they cast it) way easier.
You might want to look back in history and see why the ballot was made secret...
It was made secret in the hope of dissuading intimidation, coercion and bribery.
And a lot of the arcane and apparently strange rules we still have as to how our elections are carried out - such as that ballot box papers must be verified face up; papers with writing on that might conceivably identify the voter are disqualified - stem from that original concern to stop candidates buying or bullying their way to election.
This comment piece makes a false claim about Birmingham nightinggale hospital being taken down and closed, which I think is completely untrue.
But this was funny:
"To be fair to Baroness Harding, the poor woman has only been given £12.6 billion to come up with a workable NHS tracking system. With that amount, you could have paid every single elderly and vulnerable person in the UK £60,000 to shield themselves in the Bahamas and used the change to recompense students for their non-existent university experience."
It may seem funny but its absolutely terrible maths and entirely untrue. Its the same terrible mistake as was made earlier in the year with this infamous Tweet being read on TV. https://twitter.com/jsmooth995/status/1235788534067482624
There are 30 million elderly and vulnerable people in the UK. Spending £60,000 on each of them would come not to £12.6 billion but instead £1,800,000,000,000 or £1.8 trillion. That's without considering the students.
There aren't 30m elderly or vulnerable.
It depends how you define elderly or vulnerable but that is how many have been considered vulnerable enough to be made eligible for the flu shot.
I come back to the obvious. The fact that the Republicans on Capitol Hill are so desperate to get Amy Coney Barrett confirmed to the Supreme Court ahead of Nov 3rd tells you they know they've lost. And almost certainly not only the White House but Congress.
I hope Biden adds two more Justices so as to compound the Republican's defeat...
I come back to the obvious. The fact that the Republicans on Capitol Hill are so desperate to get Amy Coney Barrett confirmed to the Supreme Court ahead of Nov 3rd tells you they know they've lost. And almost certainly not only the White House but Congress.
I hope Biden adds two more Justices so as to compound the Republican's defeat...
Biden should add 4 justices and 2 States.
Packing the court is a rubbish idea.
It is.
Doing nothing after the Republicans packed the court is a rubbish idea too.
This comment piece makes a false claim about Birmingham nightinggale hospital being taken down and closed, which I think is completely untrue.
But this was funny:
"To be fair to Baroness Harding, the poor woman has only been given £12.6 billion to come up with a workable NHS tracking system. With that amount, you could have paid every single elderly and vulnerable person in the UK £60,000 to shield themselves in the Bahamas and used the change to recompense students for their non-existent university experience."
It may seem funny but its absolutely terrible maths and entirely untrue. Its the same terrible mistake as was made earlier in the year with this infamous Tweet being read on TV. https://twitter.com/jsmooth995/status/1235788534067482624
There are 30 million elderly and vulnerable people in the UK. Spending £60,000 on each of them would come not to £12.6 billion but instead £1,800,000,000,000 or £1.8 trillion. That's without considering the students.
There aren't 30m elderly or vulnerable.
It depends how you define elderly or vulnerable but that is how many have been considered vulnerable enough to be made eligible for the flu shot.
Does that include all NHS staff, who as far as I'm aware are eligible for the flu shot? That's 1.5m people right there.
Surprised no-one picked up on this in the thread header. Apologies if I missed someone who did.
"As can be seen in the breakdown Trump is 14% behind with women but just a point off with men. Trump’s appeals to women, seen in the Tweets above, are a reflection that he fully understands where his problem lies – the question is whether with just 20 days to go he can do something about it.
With an estimated 53% of the electorate women are a bigger block than men so the differing views makes his position even worse. At WH2016 Clinton did capture majority of female voters—54%, according to exit polling"
Clinton won women's votes by 54-41 according to the exit poll, little different to the 54-40 split in the Morning Consult poll shown for Biden.
Clinton lost men's votes by 41-52, so the poll for Biden shows a massive swing in his favour to 48-47.
Does the Morning Consult poll show different gender swings to other recent polls?
I know the accepted wisdom is that there is a swing among suburban women similar to that which led to the Democrat victory in the midterms, but the poll here is showing a different gender swing.
Yes, it is Biden being a lot more acceptable to groups that Trump won handily 4 years ago that is putting him in a strong position. Keeping the lead amongst women that was in part based on a female candidate is quite an achievement too of course but what he is essentially doing there is holding what he inherited.
Biden's best recruiter is Trump. The more outrageous stuff he does the better for Biden. Trump efforts seem to be focused on securing his base which he really doesn't need to do. I suspect however this is not deliberate. I suspect Trump thinks what he is doing is recruiting new voters rather than putting them off.
There may be a time when it becomes necessary but the 3 tier system must be given a chance to work before we close down our economy again.
Furthermore, we all know that it is easy to put England/UK into lockdown but far more difficult to come out
The other issue is Boris would struggle to get his party to back a full lockdown
Hopefully the PM will put country before party.
On this I feel he will. However, it is not easy balancing the need for kids to be in school, the economy to be moving and the vulnerable to be kept safe. It would be nice if the media and others could understand and accept this.
It really isn't and the intergenerational challenges are really difficult too. So much of the cost of lockdowns falls on the young, whether it is their employment prospects as @SouthamObserver illustrates, their social life or their education they have paid the price for a disease that barely affects them. The needs of the old and the vulnerable need to be weighed against this when the risk is as severe as a premature death but it is so difficult.
I think that the government is right to prioritise education by keeping the schools and the Universities open but it is probably the case that this alone will keep the R rate over 1, no matter how much everything else is restricted. Its a real dilemma.
But suggest that the older generation pick up any of the financial cost of what is happening...
I'm still looking for the posts where Charles condemned the older generation as "extraordinarily self centred" for defending their free TV licences, the pension triple lock, the exclusion of pensioners from many austerity benefit cuts, WASPI, and the rest.....?
I come back to the obvious. The fact that the Republicans on Capitol Hill are so desperate to get Amy Coney Barrett confirmed to the Supreme Court ahead of Nov 3rd tells you they know they've lost. And almost certainly not only the White House but Congress.
I hope Biden adds two more Justices so as to compound the Republican's defeat...
Biden should add 4 justices and 2 States.
Packing the court is a rubbish idea.
It is.
Doing nothing after the Republicans packed the court is a rubbish idea too.
The rebuplicans had a fair wind, they didn't add justices. It just means the next time there's a GOP president and house they'll add 6 more until the bench becomes huge.
There may be a time when it becomes necessary but the 3 tier system must be given a chance to work before we close down our economy again.
Furthermore, we all know that it is easy to put England/UK into lockdown but far more difficult to come out
The other issue is Boris would struggle to get his party to back a full lockdown
Hopefully the PM will put country before party.
What does that mean in this context? Whatever he wants to do for the country, he needs support from his party to get it through parliament.
Not necessarily. I'm not recommending a Government of National Unity, but cross-party voting on pandemic control is a sensible option.
There are basically three factions in Parliament - lock down harder, start to relax, and tack your way through the middle. The third has been tried for some time and doesn't seemb to be working. There is a substantial Tory backbench group supporting "start to relax", but a much larger majority for "lock down harder". BJ can use it if he wants to.
I'm not against lockdown harder in principle but I want to see a strategy that isn't simply about delaying deaths down the road and acknowledging economic costs.
Is it lockdown until test and trace is working properly? Till we have a vaccine? And how long might that credibly take?
Southam - it saddens me but it's all well and good telling people to self-isolate for two weeks and blaming them for ignoring it but what support have the government offered them for doing so? In an era of zero hours and casual employment this might have been expected.
My understanding of the SAGE approach (leaving aside Starmer's support for it) is to recommend periodic lockdowns of 2-3 weeks to interrupt the spread, which I assume would be a pattern repeating through the winter. There was a suggestion here that it should explicitly be the first two weeks of every odd-numbered month, so we could all plan for it. When the circuit-break ends, the virus would resume expanding, but from a lower level, so we would get a series of bumps through the winter instead of a remorseless rise. And of course it should be accompanied by financial support for those impacted, on the lines of what Sunak has been doing but with the various gaps that have been identified filled in.
Is it a perfect strategy? Probably not - certainly it would further increase the support cost, and there is a risk of binge-socialising in the gaps in between the lockdowns. But it seems to offer a credible and coherent approach, which at present - not being partisan about it but just factual - we do do not appear to have.
That seems right, and the complaint that lockdowns are temporary, need repeating, are merely delaying something are entirely misconceived. There are plenty of areas of life where repeated temporary fixes are the only, but an adequate, solution to a problem - cleaning your house, or pumping the bilges of your ship, or indeed eating food.
This comment piece makes a false claim about Birmingham nightinggale hospital being taken down and closed, which I think is completely untrue.
But this was funny:
"To be fair to Baroness Harding, the poor woman has only been given £12.6 billion to come up with a workable NHS tracking system. With that amount, you could have paid every single elderly and vulnerable person in the UK £60,000 to shield themselves in the Bahamas and used the change to recompense students for their non-existent university experience."
It may seem funny but its absolutely terrible maths and entirely untrue. Its the same terrible mistake as was made earlier in the year with this infamous Tweet being read on TV. https://twitter.com/jsmooth995/status/1235788534067482624
There are 30 million elderly and vulnerable people in the UK. Spending £60,000 on each of them would come not to £12.6 billion but instead £1,800,000,000,000 or £1.8 trillion. That's without considering the students.
There aren't 30m elderly or vulnerable.
It depends how you define elderly or vulnerable but that is how many have been considered vulnerable enough to be made eligible for the flu shot.
Does that include all NHS staff, who as far as I'm aware are eligible for the flu shot? That's 1.5m people right there.
Probably, fair point. And care staff is about the same again so that brings the total to about 27 million. So that brings the bill down to £1.62 trillion.
Then again how many NHS and care staff died in the first wave?
The other massive demographic which is going to defeat Donald Trump are senior citizens. And many of them have already voted. It's worth watching this brief clip from CNN.
I come back to the obvious. The fact that the Republicans on Capitol Hill are so desperate to get Amy Coney Barrett confirmed to the Supreme Court ahead of Nov 3rd tells you they know they've lost. And almost certainly not only the White House but Congress.
The republicans will probably appeal to SCOTUS after the election that SCOTUS is not allowed to expand ex a senate supermajority or some such. I don't think all Democrat senators - Bollier ?!, Manchin perhaps will vote for an extra justice or two. So the Dems probably need 53, 54 seats to get it through.
This comment piece makes a false claim about Birmingham nightinggale hospital being taken down and closed, which I think is completely untrue.
But this was funny:
"To be fair to Baroness Harding, the poor woman has only been given £12.6 billion to come up with a workable NHS tracking system. With that amount, you could have paid every single elderly and vulnerable person in the UK £60,000 to shield themselves in the Bahamas and used the change to recompense students for their non-existent university experience."
It may seem funny but its absolutely terrible maths and entirely untrue. Its the same terrible mistake as was made earlier in the year with this infamous Tweet being read on TV. https://twitter.com/jsmooth995/status/1235788534067482624
There are 30 million elderly and vulnerable people in the UK. Spending £60,000 on each of them would come not to £12.6 billion but instead £1,800,000,000,000 or £1.8 trillion. That's without considering the students.
There aren't 30m elderly or vulnerable.
It depends how you define elderly or vulnerable but that is how many have been considered vulnerable enough to be made eligible for the flu shot.
Loads of people get the flu jab. I get it through work, I'm definitely not on the list of vulnerable people. I think there's something like 3m people who got the shielding letter plus around 8m elderly who could be considered at risk.
Surprised no-one picked up on this in the thread header. Apologies if I missed someone who did.
"As can be seen in the breakdown Trump is 14% behind with women but just a point off with men. Trump’s appeals to women, seen in the Tweets above, are a reflection that he fully understands where his problem lies – the question is whether with just 20 days to go he can do something about it.
With an estimated 53% of the electorate women are a bigger block than men so the differing views makes his position even worse. At WH2016 Clinton did capture majority of female voters—54%, according to exit polling"
Clinton won women's votes by 54-41 according to the exit poll, little different to the 54-40 split in the Morning Consult poll shown for Biden.
Clinton lost men's votes by 41-52, so the poll for Biden shows a massive swing in his favour to 48-47.
Does the Morning Consult poll show different gender swings to other recent polls?
I know the accepted wisdom is that there is a swing among suburban women similar to that which led to the Democrat victory in the midterms, but the poll here is showing a different gender swing.
Yes, it is Biden being a lot more acceptable to groups that Trump won handily 4 years ago that is putting him in a strong position. Keeping the lead amongst women that was in part based on a female candidate is quite an achievement too of course but what he is essentially doing there is holding what he inherited.
Biden's best recruiter is Trump. The more outrageous stuff he does the better for Biden. Trump efforts seem to be focused on securing his base which he really doesn't need to do. I suspect however this is not deliberate. I suspect Trump thinks what he is doing is recruiting new voters rather than putting them off.
He needs a higher percentage of his base to vote than did in 2016 given the lack of third party spoilers. Given the appalling level of turnout in US Presidential elections this is possible but whether it will offset the loss of so many independents remains to be seen. Right now its looking very unlikely but its not the daftest political strategy.
Doctors in Liverpool say those partying in the city do not care people are dying
It is sad but seems succinct
This generation seems extraordinarily self-centred
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”
― Socrates
That's a lovely quote. He's a bit old-fashioned, but was a fine footballer.
I had no idea that boring game was around in ancient Greece. I always thought of ancient Greece as a country sparkling with new ideas and interests and philosophies, sweeping away old ideas and shaping the world to come.
Not a bunch of grumpy blokes sitting in the taverna grousing about the offside rule.....
Not sure if you know, “Socrates” was also a fine Brazilian footballer and star of the 1982 World Cup team.
I come back to the obvious. The fact that the Republicans on Capitol Hill are so desperate to get Amy Coney Barrett confirmed to the Supreme Court ahead of Nov 3rd tells you they know they've lost. And almost certainly not only the White House but Congress.
I hope Biden adds two more Justices so as to compound the Republican's defeat...
Biden should add 4 justices and 2 States.
Packing the court is a rubbish idea.
It is.
Doing nothing after the Republicans packed the court is a rubbish idea too.
The rebuplicans had a fair wind, they didn't add justices. It just means the next time there's a GOP president and house they'll add 6 more until the bench becomes huge.
It'll end up like the House of Lords Can't blame the Dems if they do add justices after Mitch McConnell's behaviour though. He really does remind me of a human toad (Apologies to toads)
This comment piece makes a false claim about Birmingham nightinggale hospital being taken down and closed, which I think is completely untrue.
But this was funny:
"To be fair to Baroness Harding, the poor woman has only been given £12.6 billion to come up with a workable NHS tracking system. With that amount, you could have paid every single elderly and vulnerable person in the UK £60,000 to shield themselves in the Bahamas and used the change to recompense students for their non-existent university experience."
It may seem funny but its absolutely terrible maths and entirely untrue. Its the same terrible mistake as was made earlier in the year with this infamous Tweet being read on TV. https://twitter.com/jsmooth995/status/1235788534067482624
There are 30 million elderly and vulnerable people in the UK. Spending £60,000 on each of them would come not to £12.6 billion but instead £1,800,000,000,000 or £1.8 trillion. That's without considering the students.
Innumeracy is the true curse of the age.
I feel like it would help if we rebased the currency to correct for accumulated inflation, and reintroduced more divisions of the pound, so that people generally had smaller numbers to work with.
If you make a new (King Charles) pound worth 100 current pounds, then the incomprehensible sum of money spent on test and trace is rendered slightly more comprehensible by being 126 million new pounds.
Each new pound would need to be divisible into maybe 2000 units, to match the value of a current 5 pence, which could be done with 24 shillings to a new pound, 24 pence to a new shilling, halfpennies and farthings.
The Scots are welcome to use this for their new currency if they vote for independence.
There may be a time when it becomes necessary but the 3 tier system must be given a chance to work before we close down our economy again.
Furthermore, we all know that it is easy to put England/UK into lockdown but far more difficult to come out
The other issue is Boris would struggle to get his party to back a full lockdown
Hopefully the PM will put country before party.
What does that mean in this context? Whatever he wants to do for the country, he needs support from his party to get it through parliament.
Not necessarily. I'm not recommending a Government of National Unity, but cross-party voting on pandemic control is a sensible option.
There are basically three factions in Parliament - lock down harder, start to relax, and tack your way through the middle. The third has been tried for some time and doesn't seemb to be working. There is a substantial Tory backbench group supporting "start to relax", but a much larger majority for "lock down harder". BJ can use it if he wants to.
I'm not against lockdown harder in principle but I want to see a strategy that isn't simply about delaying deaths down the road and acknowledging economic costs.
Is it lockdown until test and trace is working properly? Till we have a vaccine? And how long might that credibly take?
Southam - it saddens me but it's all well and good telling people to self-isolate for two weeks and blaming them for ignoring it but what support have the government offered them for doing so? In an era of zero hours and casual employment this might have been expected.
My understanding of the SAGE approach (leaving aside Starmer's support for it) is to recommend periodic lockdowns of 2-3 weeks to interrupt the spread, which I assume would be a pattern repeating through the winter. There was a suggestion here that it should explicitly be the first two weeks of every odd-numbered month, so we could all plan for it. When the circuit-break ends, the virus would resume expanding, but from a lower level, so we would get a series of bumps through the winter instead of a remorseless rise. And of course it should be accompanied by financial support for those impacted, on the lines of what Sunak has been doing but with the various gaps that have been identified filled in.
Is it a perfect strategy? Probably not - certainly it would further increase the support cost, and there is a risk of binge-socialising in the gaps in between the lockdowns. But it seems to offer a credible and coherent approach, which at present - not being partisan about it but just factual - we do do not appear to have.
You'd be better off paying pubs and restaurants to close until the Spring than expecting them to trade in those conditions.
Easy for someone to write down what they think is a good idea on paper, entirely different to actually put it into practice.
Exactly. 2 weeks off and on trading will simply destroy hospitality. The cost in lost stock - especially beer - would wipe them out.
It’s not even a good idea on paper let alone in reality.
This comment piece makes a false claim about Birmingham nightinggale hospital being taken down and closed, which I think is completely untrue.
But this was funny:
"To be fair to Baroness Harding, the poor woman has only been given £12.6 billion to come up with a workable NHS tracking system. With that amount, you could have paid every single elderly and vulnerable person in the UK £60,000 to shield themselves in the Bahamas and used the change to recompense students for their non-existent university experience."
It may seem funny but its absolutely terrible maths and entirely untrue. Its the same terrible mistake as was made earlier in the year with this infamous Tweet being read on TV. https://twitter.com/jsmooth995/status/1235788534067482624
There are 30 million elderly and vulnerable people in the UK. Spending £60,000 on each of them would come not to £12.6 billion but instead £1,800,000,000,000 or £1.8 trillion. That's without considering the students.
There aren't 30m elderly or vulnerable.
It depends how you define elderly or vulnerable but that is how many have been considered vulnerable enough to be made eligible for the flu shot.
Does that include all NHS staff, who as far as I'm aware are eligible for the flu shot? That's 1.5m people right there.
Probably, fair point. And care staff is about the same again so that brings the total to about 27 million. So that brings the bill down to £1.62 trillion.
Then again how many NHS and care staff died in the first wave?
Proportionally it was the same rate as the rest of the country, supermarket retail workers and construction workers fared the worst.
I come back to the obvious. The fact that the Republicans on Capitol Hill are so desperate to get Amy Coney Barrett confirmed to the Supreme Court ahead of Nov 3rd tells you they know they've lost. And almost certainly not only the White House but Congress.
I hope Biden adds two more Justices so as to compound the Republican's defeat...
Biden should add 4 justices and 2 States.
Packing the court is a rubbish idea.
It is.
Doing nothing after the Republicans packed the court is a rubbish idea too.
The rebuplicans had a fair wind, they didn't add justices. It just means the next time there's a GOP president and house they'll add 6 more until the bench becomes huge.
I think the shanigans the Republicans have gotten up to are more than a 'fair wind' but so what if the GOP do that next time? That's next time's problem, the Democrats adding Justices now would be payback for what the Republicans have already done not may theoretically do next time.
The bridge has already been crossed of bending the rules past breaking point, so two need to play at that game. If traditional rules still applied then the Democrats could fillibuster ACB until after the new President is inaugurated, they can't because the GOP have changed the rules. Adding Justices is within the rules.
Comments
In practical epidemiology, you do the thing that you know works.
We will have to follow the Chinese model, have much more testing and lock down those who are positive. Isolate the infected, isolate the contacts. And these lockdowns are backed up with both support and fines. Everyone else gets on with their lives.
There is no real point in theoretical epidemiological modelling of circuit breakers. Because there is an algorithm that we know actually works -- it will take huge political courage, will and organisation.
Do any of the leaders in E, W, S, NI have the will to do it?
Self-centred my arse!
Daughter wakes up every morning wondering what new rules there will be making her business yet more unviable. Eldest is spending his days looking for work, after losing his job 6 weeks ago. Youngest - just graduated - has just got a job (in food retail) but is applying for others which will stretch him more.
Their futures are uncertain. They’ve complied with the rules. Their lives are constrained and frankly more than a bit shit. They care about their older relatives who are at risk. They don’t need patronising and untrue generalisations by those who have done very well indeed and don’t have the same worries.
Best of luck to SO junior.
I think that the government is right to prioritise education by keeping the schools and the Universities open but it is probably the case that this alone will keep the R rate over 1, no matter how much everything else is restricted. Its a real dilemma.
But if they voted early I can tell you what day they voted on!
So yes, it truly is an astounding level of information you can have on an individual NC voter. Jaw droppingly open.
Is it lockdown until test and trace is working properly? Till we have a vaccine? And how long might that credibly take?
Southam - it saddens me but it's all well and good telling people to self-isolate for two weeks and blaming them for ignoring it but what support have the government offered them for doing so? In an era of zero hours and casual employment this might have been expected.
It beggars belief that anyone can imagine it is a good thing to have politicians wander between London and their constituencies meeting hundreds of people a week during a pandemic. Add in 45 positive parliamentary police force officers and it might be a runner for worst decision of the pandemic so far.
However can only be partially successful at best because denial-of-service against known opponents, which is way easier, gets you at least 50% of the effect, ie if I know who you would have voted for and I can use intimidation, coercion and bribery to stop you from voting against me, that's half as good as forcing you to vote for me. Worse, the need for secrecy makes the logistics of voting vastly more complicated, which you can exploit to make the attack easier.
You can reduce some of the logistical problems with readily-available postal voting, but then you lose the bribery resistance, because I can bribe you into applying for a postal vote and letting me fill it in or check how you filled it in. And you still have a lot of the logistical problems arising from your now half-arsed attempt at secrecy, including a whole load of new attack vectors like attacks against the delivery systems.
From my admittedly partial knowledge of the immediate post university generation, they are remarkably unselfish.
That’s the current Republican standard (see Amy Coney Barrett).
We are a republic, not a democracy....
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/10/republic-democracy-mike-lee-astra-taylor.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/13/election-poll-biden-leads-trump-17-points
For goodness sake, no-one intends to give someone a virus. If someone knows they have it and doesn`t isolate and acts recklessly then, sure, criticise that person - that would be immoral and probably criminal. But you cannot criticise people who are not aware that they have it. That`s going too far. There is no intent to harm - and that is everything.
If you catch the virus you cannot say "I caught it from that person" and neither can someone say "I gave it to that person". Each virus isn`t imprinted with the details of the giver.
This pandemic sure is bringing out the nastiness in humans.
https://twitter.com/gallowgatepb/status/1316286235971854336?s=21
https://twitter.com/gallowgatepb/status/1316286305647632385?s=21
As I say, early days, but the initial trends are not particularly optimistic: https://www.gov.scot/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-daily-data-for-scotland/
The Marmalade Monster said "Suburban women: will you please like me? Please. Please. I saved your damn neighborhood, OK?" and that shows how little he understands women and how to talk to us. You do not win us over by swearing at us or by sounding tetchy at us.
So, the question is what are the politicians doing with the time they bought?
― Socrates
Frankly it’s ridiculous that the Govt can announce a new strategy on Monday, to take effect on Wednesday, with review periods of every 28 days, and on Tuesday be said to be considering an alternative strategy within a week on the back of the release of scientific “advice” they already had and because the Opposition are demanding it.
They should argue their own position with more confidence and stick to it. Take a leaf out of the book of politicians in the Republic of Ireland who were confronted with the same situation and faced it down. Admittedly they’ve got the advantage there of effectively having a Govt of National Unity so can avoid the political mudslinging.
I hope he loses
If you have a test, trace, isolate system with a certain capacity, a circuit breaker could reduce cases down low enough to be within that capacity, so that you can control and reduce the disease.
If we had only 1 COVID case a day, presumably even Dido Harding would be able to successfully test, trace and isolate all of that case's contacts.
Whether this circuit breaker will get us within that capacity... no idea but probably not.
https://twitter.com/Politics_Polls/status/1316264667971571712
https://twitter.com/Politics_Polls/status/1316260505657511936
These are districts Clinton won by a couple of points.
Macmillan was on the money when he told them that they'd never had it so good...
We're all in a national scale remake of Human Centipede
CUMMINGS -> JOHNSON -> THE BRITISH PEOPLE
'I can do nice, but i'm rich, I gotta go quick, so just let me grab that *****'.
It's hardly going to go down well.
https://twitter.com/jsmooth995/status/1235788534067482624
There are 30 million elderly and vulnerable people in the UK. Spending £60,000 on each of them would come not to £12.6 billion but instead £1,800,000,000,000 or £1.8 trillion. That's without considering the students.
North Carolina data is particularly detailed, well structured and easily available (if you are okay with downloading and processing multi gigabyte csv files - hint, don't use excel)
Not a bunch of grumpy blokes sitting in the taverna grousing about the offside rule.....
Mrs C, in The Alexiad, Anna Comnena complains of the youth of 'today' not learning important matters and wasting their time playing draughts.
I believe a similar sentiment was expressed a century or two ago about Parisian youths who had an appalling new habit. And they were doing it everywhere. In public. In the street. Outrageous!
They were playing chess, the scoundrels.
Edited extra bit: on partying youths right now - they're idiots.
- the UK government has no clearly defined policy objective, nor identifiable medium term strategy;
- it frittered away much of its political capital on defending Cummings and the like;
- Boris is ill-equipped for and inattentive toward the politics of reconciling conflicting interests and building alliances;
the government does not have the resilience to stick to any approach for any length of time; the PM tacks this way and that depending upon the imprint of whoever sat on him the last.
Thus on the very day that a supposedly new and comprehensive set of regulations come in, which need to be communicated to and understood by millions of people, we find ourselves in the ridiculous situation where the new approach is already under immense pressure and the government is meeting today to consider changing it.
"As can be seen in the breakdown Trump is 14% behind with women but just a point off with men. Trump’s appeals to women, seen in the Tweets above, are a reflection that he fully understands where his problem lies – the question is whether with just 20 days to go he can do something about it.
With an estimated 53% of the electorate women are a bigger block than men so the differing views makes his position even worse. At WH2016 Clinton did capture majority of female voters—54%, according to exit polling"
Clinton won women's votes by 54-41 according to the exit poll, little different to the 54-40 split in the Morning Consult poll shown for Biden.
Clinton lost men's votes by 41-52, so the poll for Biden shows a massive swing in his favour to 48-47.
Does the Morning Consult poll show different gender swings to other recent polls?
I know the accepted wisdom is that there is a swing among suburban women similar to that which led to the Democrat victory in the midterms, but the poll here is showing a different gender swing.
Is it a perfect strategy? Probably not - certainly it would further increase the support cost, and there is a risk of binge-socialising in the gaps in between the lockdowns. But it seems to offer a credible and coherent approach, which at present - not being partisan about it but just factual - we do do not appear to have.
Easy for someone to write down what they think is a good idea on paper, entirely different to actually put it into practice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cl7Zg8P0z3M
Doing nothing after the Republicans packed the court is a rubbish idea too.
Then again how many NHS and care staff died in the first wave?
https://edition.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/10/14/florida-seniors-2020-vote-kaye-dnt-ac360-vpx.cnn
I don't think all Democrat senators - Bollier
Believe he was also a medical doctor.
If you make a new (King Charles) pound worth 100 current pounds, then the incomprehensible sum of money spent on test and trace is rendered slightly more comprehensible by being 126 million new pounds.
Each new pound would need to be divisible into maybe 2000 units, to match the value of a current 5 pence, which could be done with 24 shillings to a new pound, 24 pence to a new shilling, halfpennies and farthings.
The Scots are welcome to use this for their new currency if they vote for independence.
It’s not even a good idea on paper let alone in reality.
The bridge has already been crossed of bending the rules past breaking point, so two need to play at that game. If traditional rules still applied then the Democrats could fillibuster ACB until after the new President is inaugurated, they can't because the GOP have changed the rules. Adding Justices is within the rules.