Google Pixel 5 review: Stupid Stupid Stupid. Got the phone last week. Fabulous device, stock Android is wonderful. And then this weekend. Phone calls. Ah. The top speaker is under the screen. It works by making the screen vibrate. Which means that (a) calls sound shit and (b) the whole thing is resonating in your hand whilst on a call. Which is uncomfortable.
Brilliant phone which is sensational in every way apart from as a phone. Reminds me of the iPhone no signal when you hold it debacle. On its way back to Amazon tomorrow with a 4a 5g coming to replace it.
One annoyance in the “lockdown sceptics” series of arguments is the way they never hold their own arguments and predictions remotely accountable.
Confidently saying there were no excess deaths this year as the first wave built up. And then not even and “oops, I guess we were wrong.”
Each and every statement on Sweden, since disproved, all of which may never have been said for all they have to say on it.
That the IFR is well below one in a thousand, maybe one in ten thousand. Toby even tried to revive that briefly, using the death figures to make his point as we have to take them into accou... oh. Oops. And now silence there.
Opening schools will have no issues and children don’t even pass on the virus. That aged well.
We can release all restrictions and nothing bad will happen.
There won’t be a second wave.
There’s no point kicking the can down the road, vaccines won’t come along to save us.
There’s no excess deaths THIS time, and here’s a dodgy graph sourced from a conspiracy theorist on Twitter to “prove” it.
Never a single acknowledgement of the repeated wrong nature of any of it, never any hint of an analysis of where they went wrong, always the squeaking sound of goalposts shifting.
It's like all conspiracy theory stuff - anti-vaxxer stuff is a classic of this genre...... It is self healing. There is literally nothing you could do or say that will make them say - "Shit man. I was wrong".
Any evidence you provide or refute will just cause the bullshit stream to move, to flow round it.
Plus if one of them is wrong, there's always another to pop up and make predictions with a clean slate.
It would be interesting if these sceptics had to make a wager on a clear prediction. That would sort the sheep from the goats!
Google Pixel 5 review: Stupid Stupid Stupid. Got the phone last week. Fabulous device, stock Android is wonderful. And then this weekend. Phone calls. Ah. The top speaker is under the screen. It works by making the screen vibrate. Which means that (a) calls sound shit and (b) the whole thing is resonating in your hand whilst on a call. Which is uncomfortable.
Brilliant phone which is sensational in every way apart from as a phone. Reminds me of the iPhone no signal when you hold it debacle. On its way back to Amazon tomorrow with a 4a 5g coming to replace it.
You would think that perhaps they might QA test such a erhhh basic feature of their flagship PHONE.
The problem seems to be this set up that it's a binary either/or "you're a covid denier" or not stuff.
There's clearly a reasonable third way for people to be clear that the virus is a big issue but simultaneously recognising that spending a year in complete lockdown 1.0 is not a practical response to that for all the obvious reasons. After that it's merely a question of what level of restrictions are required, reasonable and maintainable.
It's not always been clear that all levels of restrictions have been reasonable, or justified, or indeed consistent, and questioning what comes after certain policies like firebreaks which inevitably only push the problem back by a matter of weeks is most definitely not unreasonable.
I've been offered a 13" M1 Macbook Pro through work, not sure whether to take it or wait for next year's version, will have to wait until 2023 to upgrade if I take it.
I’m waiting for the 64GB/4TB version, which should be next year. Modern laptops are impossible to upgrade, so get the best one you can. The current laptop is an old 2013 MBP which has finally reached its upgrade limit!
I got the M1 Mac Mini, simply because I was really excited to see how an ARM based PC would work out. (I handed a Surface Book X back after a week.)
And the answer is...
So long as you're running apps that are compiled for the M1, it's awesome. Stuff that is x64 code that is converted before running is usually good, but seems to fall over when its called upon to use multiple threads. (Brave with a dozen browser tabs open is unusable. Chrome - which is a native M1 binary - is fine.)
USB compatibility seems a bit spotty. There are quite a few peripherals (basically anything more than 18 months old) that don't seem to work.
Playing Steam games, I think only about 20% (Into the Breach) work OK, the other 80% don't. That will hopefully largely be solved ayes, thatsms people cross compile.
So...
I wouldn't get it yet, *unless* you live entirely with Apple native apps or in Chrome.
How does it do with complicated maths and ML in Python? That's my main use scenario and it's why I'm not sure I want to move away from my current setup.
I would be very careful until you make sure that there are native compiles of all the software you want to use, that are bug free.
The other issue is that some reviewers have encountered severe throttling under load - at least for the Air - as a way of dealing with thermal management.
Yes, that's my major worry with shifting to ARM none of what I use will be native for a while at least and Apple are prioritising Photoshop and other creative programs over stuff that I need.
I think, given the interesting architecture that the high performance lot will be all over this like alcoholics offered free single malt.
I would just give it x months of development before buying kit.
It also seems that they are changing their lines over starting with the low end machines.
I'm not looking to replace my hardware until there is a good 12 months of this chipset being out, software being ported over etc.
Yeah that's one of the reasons I'm thinking of deferring my upgrade for year and taking the M2 version and maybe getting the 14" MBP, ideally 16 or 32 GB RAM as well, 8GB just doesn't strike me as enough even without the x86 overhead.
Yes - if this is good as it seems to be, it would be pity to go for much less than the biggest of big iron, with all the memory. And the first generation of anything.....
And by next year, all the vaguely serious software outfits will have native compiles with a good history behind them.
The problem seems to be this set up that it's a binary either/or "you're a covid denier" or not stuff.
There's clearly a reasonable third way for people to be clear that the virus is a big issue but simultaneously recognising that spending a year in complete lockdown 1.0 is not a practical response to that for all the obvious reasons. After that it's merely a question of what level of restrictions are required, reasonable and maintainable.
It's not always been clear that all levels of restrictions have been reasonable, or justified, or indeed consistent, and questioning what comes after certain policies like firebreaks which inevitably only push the problem back by a matter of weeks is most definitely not unreasonable.
One annoyance in the “lockdown sceptics” series of arguments is the way they never hold their own arguments and predictions remotely accountable.
Confidently saying there were no excess deaths this year as the first wave built up. And then not even and “oops, I guess we were wrong.”
Each and every statement on Sweden, since disproved, all of which may never have been said for all they have to say on it.
That the IFR is well below one in a thousand, maybe one in ten thousand. Toby even tried to revive that briefly, using the death figures to make his point as we have to take them into accou... oh. Oops. And now silence there.
Opening schools will have no issues and children don’t even pass on the virus. That aged well.
We can release all restrictions and nothing bad will happen.
There won’t be a second wave.
There’s no point kicking the can down the road, vaccines won’t come along to save us.
There’s no excess deaths THIS time, and here’s a dodgy graph sourced from a conspiracy theorist on Twitter to “prove” it.
Never a single acknowledgement of the repeated wrong nature of any of it, never any hint of an analysis of where they went wrong, always the squeaking sound of goalposts shifting.
It's like all conspiracy theory stuff - anti-vaxxer stuff is a classic of this genre...... It is self healing. There is literally nothing you could do or say that will make them say - "Shit man. I was wrong".
Any evidence you provide or refute will just cause the bullshit stream to move, to flow round it.
Plus if one of them is wrong, there's always another to pop up and make predictions with a clean slate.
It would be interesting if these sceptics had to make a wager on a clear prediction. That would sort the sheep from the goats!
--AS
I'm up for a vaccine when it's my turn. But I did refuse Lariam as an anti-malarial many years ago and opted for it's less effective predecessor after reading about side effects.
The news emerged after Moulding – a major Conservative party donor who created the online retailing company in 2004....Moulding has donated £302,000 to the Conservative party since 2014.
Does that really make you a "major donor"? In the grand scheme of things £50k a year doesn't seem a very large donation for somebody so wealthy. Hardly Lord Ashcroft tipping millions into the Tory coffers.
As for security, I highly doubt any of these super wealthy people don't have it.
His company is bloody annoying with the spam promotion emails though. You buy a few bits and pieces off them once and you get "special offer" emails every other day from then on, I don't think anything is ever full price.
One annoyance in the “lockdown sceptics” series of arguments is the way they never hold their own arguments and predictions remotely accountable.
Confidently saying there were no excess deaths this year as the first wave built up. And then not even and “oops, I guess we were wrong.”
Each and every statement on Sweden, since disproved, all of which may never have been said for all they have to say on it.
That the IFR is well below one in a thousand, maybe one in ten thousand. Toby even tried to revive that briefly, using the death figures to make his point as we have to take them into accou... oh. Oops. And now silence there.
Opening schools will have no issues and children don’t even pass on the virus. That aged well.
We can release all restrictions and nothing bad will happen.
There won’t be a second wave.
There’s no point kicking the can down the road, vaccines won’t come along to save us.
There’s no excess deaths THIS time, and here’s a dodgy graph sourced from a conspiracy theorist on Twitter to “prove” it.
Never a single acknowledgement of the repeated wrong nature of any of it, never any hint of an analysis of where they went wrong, always the squeaking sound of goalposts shifting.
But, the problem is ONS/SAGE have hardly done much better. E.g. How have SAGE estimates of the growth rate of the epidemic matched up to reality over the long term? It is much easier to criticise the "lockdown sceptics" from a position of real strength, in which your data-driven forward models are nicely matching the data.
SAGE publish a weekly estimate not only of R, but also the daily growth rate, which is a directly interpretable number.
If you take SAGE's estimate of the daily growth rate and integrate it over time, you can plot this against the number of cases actually reported. They should be in good agreement.
The last time I did this (admittedly, in September), SAGE were grossly underestimating the size of the epidemic by a factor of 10. That is the integration of their daily growth rate over time underestimated the number of cases by an order of magnitude.
SAGE have done a really poor job of the modelling, the statistical interpretation and the communication.
I strongly believe that all their codes, data and methodology should be open access. Many people could be helping SAGE, but they are not going to re-derive and re-code everything from scratch.
The interaction and advice from scientists to politicians to the public has been much. much better in Germany. We have a lot to learn from this pandemic.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
What is it with people and this denial of how exponential growth works?
Gove was right: with a doubling time of (for the sake of argument) 10 days and a lag between infection and hospital admissions of about two weeks, if you wait for your hospitals to fill up before you impose a lockdown then you are far, far too late: at that point you’ve got roughly another doubling of cases to deal with before the lockdown starts to have any kind of effect.
If instead you don’t lockdown at all, then your health services become completely overwhelmed & non-covid cases start to die needlessly, as is apparently happening in some rural parts of the US right now.
You /have/ to lockdown early, because anything else is too late. That’s the way exponential growth with delayed onset works.
The facts...
1) during the first wave/lockdown, hospitals reached capacity. Everything was maxed out, and that by essentially stopping the NHS doing anything else. 2) the Nightingale hospitals are very much a last minute resort - to be manned by the retired, the students and and airline stewardesses 3) They nearly got pulled into use, none the less. 4) in the recent second wave, we were a few days away from reaching similar levels of hospital occupancy.
Without the Tiers/Lockdown, there was nothing to stop the same situation as 1) occurring followed by the Nightingale's going into operation, followed by.. extreme triage.... a few days later.
What the lockdown skeptics /also/ ignore that in this situation, your available medical staff are not some renewable resource that you can replenish at will. They are human beings subject to ordinary human limits & they /will/ burn out. You cannot run your medical staff on the kinds of shifts people were doing back in April for very long before people start failing on you. Which then compounds the effect on the rest of the staff.
Completely trashing the ability of the NHS to treat anyone at all seems like it might something that would be bad for the economy. This is why there are no good choices available to us. Until we can get everyone vaccinated we get to choose from a menu of bad and slightly less bad. As Gove says in his article, there is no simple trade-off between human lives and economic costs to make here. It doesn’t work like that.
That there is still such a thing as a lockdown sceptic in parliament is just another illustration of the truly terrifying levels of stupidity among our professional politicians.
It's not about stupidity.
For a sizeable chunk of people in the world, prioritising facts and emotion stimuli according to a scientific order is antithetical to their experience as human beings. Quite simply, if you put things in the logical, best-outcomes order, then you appear immoral or insane to them.
We have had, here many examples of people saying that they will break rules because human contact is so important to them.
Many people will travel to see their families this Christmas, because it is *vital* to them.
The study of human behaviour is a science too. How many psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists have been spoken to alongside the epidemiologists and economists?
I once read a harrowing tale of two deep sea divers in a decompression chamber on a ship about to go down. They had a choice of getting out and possibly suffering a crippling case of the bends, or staying with the ship in the hope they might get found in time before their oxygen ran out. They chose the latter - they were active people and the thought of the lifetime effects of the bends meant they wanted to take their chances in the chamber. They didn’t make it. Was that rational? To a bookish individual unfazed by staying at home no, but to a diver yes. Similarly there will come a point where people say they are not living but existing. Selfish? Yes, but in all societies and all people the communitarian spirit has limits. Those limits differ but it is absurd to call them “stupid”.
How do we know about that story if they didn’t make it?
Recover their bodies and deduce from their presence in the chamber, or read their written account of their thought process.
I think there are intercomms in these things.
I'm sure I heard about something similar but this was divers in a chamber on an oil rig in the path of a typhoon. When I try google it I cant find any evidence though. Makes me think it may have been an invention.
Have a google for: MeDermott Diving barge DB29
I’m know recreational divers who do dives which require ~1hr plus decompression stops. If they cock it up they’re dead. End of.
The saturation divers are doing way much more than that so leaving the chamber is instant death. Staying with it has at least a few hours more survival time until your oxygen runs out or the electronics fail.
The news emerged after Moulding – a major Conservative party donor who created the online retailing company in 2004....Moulding has donated £302,000 to the Conservative party since 2014.
Does that really make you a "major donor"? In the grand scheme of things £50k a year doesn't seem a very large donation for somebody so wealthy. Hardly Lord Ashcroft tipping millions into the Tory coffers.
As for security, I highly doubt any of these super wealthy people don't have it.
His company is bloody annoying with the spam promotion emails though. You buy a few bits and pieces off them once and you get "special offer" emails every other day from then on, I don't think anything is ever full price.
The news emerged after Moulding – a major Conservative party donor who created the online retailing company in 2004....Moulding has donated £302,000 to the Conservative party since 2014.
Does that really make you a "major donor"? In the grand scheme of things £50k a year doesn't seem a very large donation for somebody so wealthy. Hardly Lord Ashcroft tipping millions into the Tory coffers.
As for security, I highly doubt any of these super wealthy people don't have it.
His company is bloody annoying with the spam promotion emails though. You buy a few bits and pieces off them once and you get "special offer" emails every other day from then on, I don't think anything is ever full price.
One annoyance in the “lockdown sceptics” series of arguments is the way they never hold their own arguments and predictions remotely accountable.
Confidently saying there were no excess deaths this year as the first wave built up. And then not even and “oops, I guess we were wrong.”
Each and every statement on Sweden, since disproved, all of which may never have been said for all they have to say on it.
That the IFR is well below one in a thousand, maybe one in ten thousand. Toby even tried to revive that briefly, using the death figures to make his point as we have to take them into accou... oh. Oops. And now silence there.
Opening schools will have no issues and children don’t even pass on the virus. That aged well.
We can release all restrictions and nothing bad will happen.
There won’t be a second wave.
There’s no point kicking the can down the road, vaccines won’t come along to save us.
There’s no excess deaths THIS time, and here’s a dodgy graph sourced from a conspiracy theorist on Twitter to “prove” it.
Never a single acknowledgement of the repeated wrong nature of any of it, never any hint of an analysis of where they went wrong, always the squeaking sound of goalposts shifting.
But, the problem is ONS/SAGE have hardly done much better. E.g. How have SAGE estimates of the growth rate of the epidemic matched up to reality over the long term? It is much easier to criticise the "lockdown sceptics" from a position of real strength, in which your data-driven forward models are nicely matching the data.
SAGE publish a weekly estimate not only of R, but also the daily growth rate, which is a directly interpretable number.
If you take SAGE's estimate of the daily growth rate and integrate it over time, you can plot this against the number of cases actually reported. They should be in good agreement.
The last time I did this (admittedly, in September), SAGE were grossly underestimating the size of the epidemic by a factor of 10. That is the integration of their daily growth rate over time underestimated the number of cases by an order of magnitude.
SAGE have done a really poor job of the modelling, the statistical interpretation and the communication.
I strongly believe that all their codes, data and methodology should be open access. Many people could be helping SAGE, but they are not going to re-derive and re-code everything from scratch.
The interaction and advice from scientists to politicians to the public has been much. much better in Germany. We have a lot to learn from this pandemic.
on your thoughts on SAGE and modelling, coding and use of stats. its been appalling imho. there is way way too much reliance on imperial model (rated one of the worst in the world in a meta analysis paper last week).
The news emerged after Moulding – a major Conservative party donor who created the online retailing company in 2004....Moulding has donated £302,000 to the Conservative party since 2014.
Does that really make you a "major donor"? In the grand scheme of things £50k a year doesn't seem a very large donation for somebody so wealthy. Hardly Lord Ashcroft tipping millions into the Tory coffers.
As for security, I highly doubt any of these super wealthy people don't have it.
His company is bloody annoying with the spam promotion emails though. You buy a few bits and pieces off them once and you get "special offer" emails every other day from then on, I don't think anything is ever full price.
GDPR is your friend there though. Unsubscribe.
I have. Initially I didn't mind getting a few emails, but it never stops and it is clear the business model is based around you having to be on the list to get the discounts i.e. the price isn't really the price nor are the "huge" discounts real. You have to be are willing to be bombarded with spam in order to get the genuine price and not ripped off.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
What is it with people and this denial of how exponential growth works?
Gove was right: with a doubling time of (for the sake of argument) 10 days and a lag between infection and hospital admissions of about two weeks, if you wait for your hospitals to fill up before you impose a lockdown then you are far, far too late: at that point you’ve got roughly another doubling of cases to deal with before the lockdown starts to have any kind of effect.
If instead you don’t lockdown at all, then your health services become completely overwhelmed & non-covid cases start to die needlessly, as is apparently happening in some rural parts of the US right now.
You /have/ to lockdown early, because anything else is too late. That’s the way exponential growth with delayed onset works.
The facts...
1) during the first wave/lockdown, hospitals reached capacity. Everything was maxed out, and that by essentially stopping the NHS doing anything else. 2) the Nightingale hospitals are very much a last minute resort - to be manned by the retired, the students and and airline stewardesses 3) They nearly got pulled into use, none the less. 4) in the recent second wave, we were a few days away from reaching similar levels of hospital occupancy.
Without the Tiers/Lockdown, there was nothing to stop the same situation as 1) occurring followed by the Nightingale's going into operation, followed by.. extreme triage.... a few days later.
What the lockdown skeptics /also/ ignore that in this situation, your available medical staff are not some renewable resource that you can replenish at will. They are human beings subject to ordinary human limits & they /will/ burn out. You cannot run your medical staff on the kinds of shifts people were doing back in April for very long before people start failing on you. Which then compounds the effect on the rest of the staff.
Completely trashing the ability of the NHS to treat anyone at all seems like it might something that would be bad for the economy. This is why there are no good choices available to us. Until we can get everyone vaccinated we get to choose from a menu of bad and slightly less bad. As Gove says in his article, there is no simple trade-off between human lives and economic costs to make here. It doesn’t work like that.
That there is still such a thing as a lockdown sceptic in parliament is just another illustration of the truly terrifying levels of stupidity among our professional politicians.
It's not about stupidity.
For a sizeable chunk of people in the world, prioritising facts and emotion stimuli according to a scientific order is antithetical to their experience as human beings. Quite simply, if you put things in the logical, best-outcomes order, then you appear immoral or insane to them.
We have had, here many examples of people saying that they will break rules because human contact is so important to them.
Many people will travel to see their families this Christmas, because it is *vital* to them.
The study of human behaviour is a science too. How many psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists have been spoken to alongside the epidemiologists and economists?
I once read a harrowing tale of two deep sea divers in a decompression chamber on a ship about to go down. They had a choice of getting out and possibly suffering a crippling case of the bends, or staying with the ship in the hope they might get found in time before their oxygen ran out. They chose the latter - they were active people and the thought of the lifetime effects of the bends meant they wanted to take their chances in the chamber. They didn’t make it. Was that rational? To a bookish individual unfazed by staying at home no, but to a diver yes. Similarly there will come a point where people say they are not living but existing. Selfish? Yes, but in all societies and all people the communitarian spirit has limits. Those limits differ but it is absurd to call them “stupid”.
How do we know about that story if they didn’t make it?
Recover their bodies and deduce from their presence in the chamber, or read their written account of their thought process.
I think there are intercomms in these things.
I'm sure I heard about something similar but this was divers in a chamber on an oil rig in the path of a typhoon. When I try google it I cant find any evidence though. Makes me think it may have been an invention.
Have a google for: MeDermott Diving barge DB29
I’m know recreational divers who do dives which require ~1hr plus decompression stops. If they cock it up they’re dead. End of.
The saturation divers are doing way much more than that so leaving the chamber is instant death. Staying with it has at least a few hours more survival time until your oxygen runs out or the electronics fail.
Really not a nice way to go,
When I worked in the oil industry - one of the diving lot had a habit of showing pictures from a nasty decompression accident to executives. Pay for the proper kit or you get this... One of the ones where a chamber let go. 500 feet to zero in seconds....
Some people thought that was too much. I reckoned that if you can't face the meat factory, don't eat meat....
One annoyance in the “lockdown sceptics” series of arguments is the way they never hold their own arguments and predictions remotely accountable.
Confidently saying there were no excess deaths this year as the first wave built up. And then not even and “oops, I guess we were wrong.”
Each and every statement on Sweden, since disproved, all of which may never have been said for all they have to say on it.
That the IFR is well below one in a thousand, maybe one in ten thousand. Toby even tried to revive that briefly, using the death figures to make his point as we have to take them into accou... oh. Oops. And now silence there.
Opening schools will have no issues and children don’t even pass on the virus. That aged well.
We can release all restrictions and nothing bad will happen.
There won’t be a second wave.
There’s no point kicking the can down the road, vaccines won’t come along to save us.
There’s no excess deaths THIS time, and here’s a dodgy graph sourced from a conspiracy theorist on Twitter to “prove” it.
Never a single acknowledgement of the repeated wrong nature of any of it, never any hint of an analysis of where they went wrong, always the squeaking sound of goalposts shifting.
It's like all conspiracy theory stuff - anti-vaxxer stuff is a classic of this genre...... It is self healing. There is literally nothing you could do or say that will make them say - "Shit man. I was wrong".
Any evidence you provide or refute will just cause the bullshit stream to move, to flow round it.
Plus if one of them is wrong, there's always another to pop up and make predictions with a clean slate.
It would be interesting if these sceptics had to make a wager on a clear prediction. That would sort the sheep from the goats!
--AS
I'm up for a vaccine when it's my turn. But I did refuse Lariam as an anti-malarial many years ago and opted for it's less effective predecessor after reading about side effects.
I wouldn't touch Larium myself. The psychiatric side effects are too frequent.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
What is it with people and this denial of how exponential growth works?
Gove was right: with a doubling time of (for the sake of argument) 10 days and a lag between infection and hospital admissions of about two weeks, if you wait for your hospitals to fill up before you impose a lockdown then you are far, far too late: at that point you’ve got roughly another doubling of cases to deal with before the lockdown starts to have any kind of effect.
If instead you don’t lockdown at all, then your health services become completely overwhelmed & non-covid cases start to die needlessly, as is apparently happening in some rural parts of the US right now.
You /have/ to lockdown early, because anything else is too late. That’s the way exponential growth with delayed onset works.
The facts...
1) during the first wave/lockdown, hospitals reached capacity. Everything was maxed out, and that by essentially stopping the NHS doing anything else. 2) the Nightingale hospitals are very much a last minute resort - to be manned by the retired, the students and and airline stewardesses 3) They nearly got pulled into use, none the less. 4) in the recent second wave, we were a few days away from reaching similar levels of hospital occupancy.
Without the Tiers/Lockdown, there was nothing to stop the same situation as 1) occurring followed by the Nightingale's going into operation, followed by.. extreme triage.... a few days later.
What the lockdown skeptics /also/ ignore that in this situation, your available medical staff are not some renewable resource that you can replenish at will. They are human beings subject to ordinary human limits & they /will/ burn out. You cannot run your medical staff on the kinds of shifts people were doing back in April for very long before people start failing on you. Which then compounds the effect on the rest of the staff.
Completely trashing the ability of the NHS to treat anyone at all seems like it might something that would be bad for the economy. This is why there are no good choices available to us. Until we can get everyone vaccinated we get to choose from a menu of bad and slightly less bad. As Gove says in his article, there is no simple trade-off between human lives and economic costs to make here. It doesn’t work like that.
That there is still such a thing as a lockdown sceptic in parliament is just another illustration of the truly terrifying levels of stupidity among our professional politicians.
It's not about stupidity.
For a sizeable chunk of people in the world, prioritising facts and emotion stimuli according to a scientific order is antithetical to their experience as human beings. Quite simply, if you put things in the logical, best-outcomes order, then you appear immoral or insane to them.
We have had, here many examples of people saying that they will break rules because human contact is so important to them.
Many people will travel to see their families this Christmas, because it is *vital* to them.
The study of human behaviour is a science too. How many psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists have been spoken to alongside the epidemiologists and economists?
I once read a harrowing tale of two deep sea divers in a decompression chamber on a ship about to go down. They had a choice of getting out and possibly suffering a crippling case of the bends, or staying with the ship in the hope they might get found in time before their oxygen ran out. They chose the latter - they were active people and the thought of the lifetime effects of the bends meant they wanted to take their chances in the chamber. They didn’t make it. Was that rational? To a bookish individual unfazed by staying at home no, but to a diver yes. Similarly there will come a point where people say they are not living but existing. Selfish? Yes, but in all societies and all people the communitarian spirit has limits. Those limits differ but it is absurd to call them “stupid”.
How do we know about that story if they didn’t make it?
Recover their bodies and deduce from their presence in the chamber, or read their written account of their thought process.
I think there are intercomms in these things.
I'm sure I heard about something similar but this was divers in a chamber on an oil rig in the path of a typhoon. When I try google it I cant find any evidence though. Makes me think it may have been an invention.
Have a google for: MeDermott Diving barge DB29
I’m know recreational divers who do dives which require ~1hr plus decompression stops. If they cock it up they’re dead. End of.
The saturation divers are doing way much more than that so leaving the chamber is instant death. Staying with it has at least a few hours more survival time until your oxygen runs out or the electronics fail.
Really not a nice way to go,
I vaguely knew on e of the divers on the DB29. The real sadness about that was that they were not far underwater as the barge capsized but kind of stayed afloat.
I worked 7 years on the Byford Dolphin. If you are feeling particularly morbid then look up the decompression accident that happened on there. Very nasty.
Mind you the rig was a bit of a death trap altogether. It sank twice and was raised and in total 11 men died on there over the years including a friend of mine who we had to try and rescue from the moonpool after a piece of drillpipe took the back of his head off.
Well, it’s more direct than the ‘Eye Need’ comments.
Perhaps I should try it. I can prove why Betfair are being jackasses about paying out, but I need £200,000 for computer tech and to bribe people for it.
*Looks round hopefully*
Is this what you are thinking of?
£218,111.12 for a pair of 64 core EPYC processors, 1 TB RAM, and 8 A100 GPUs.
Google Pixel 5 review: Stupid Stupid Stupid. Got the phone last week. Fabulous device, stock Android is wonderful. And then this weekend. Phone calls. Ah. The top speaker is under the screen. It works by making the screen vibrate. Which means that (a) calls sound shit and (b) the whole thing is resonating in your hand whilst on a call. Which is uncomfortable.
Brilliant phone which is sensational in every way apart from as a phone. Reminds me of the iPhone no signal when you hold it debacle. On its way back to Amazon tomorrow with a 4a 5g coming to replace it.
I saw the 5 and opted to stay with my 4 XL. The 5 is a bit too barebones and budget for me, but it's a great phone for the price.
One annoyance in the “lockdown sceptics” series of arguments is the way they never hold their own arguments and predictions remotely accountable.
Confidently saying there were no excess deaths this year as the first wave built up. And then not even and “oops, I guess we were wrong.”
Each and every statement on Sweden, since disproved, all of which may never have been said for all they have to say on it.
That the IFR is well below one in a thousand, maybe one in ten thousand. Toby even tried to revive that briefly, using the death figures to make his point as we have to take them into accou... oh. Oops. And now silence there.
Opening schools will have no issues and children don’t even pass on the virus. That aged well.
We can release all restrictions and nothing bad will happen.
There won’t be a second wave.
There’s no point kicking the can down the road, vaccines won’t come along to save us.
There’s no excess deaths THIS time, and here’s a dodgy graph sourced from a conspiracy theorist on Twitter to “prove” it.
Never a single acknowledgement of the repeated wrong nature of any of it, never any hint of an analysis of where they went wrong, always the squeaking sound of goalposts shifting.
But, the problem is ONS/SAGE have hardly done much better. E.g. How have SAGE estimates of the growth rate of the epidemic matched up to reality over the long term? It is much easier to criticise the "lockdown sceptics" from a position of real strength, in which your data-driven forward models are nicely matching the data.
SAGE publish a weekly estimate not only of R, but also the daily growth rate, which is a directly interpretable number.
If you take SAGE's estimate of the daily growth rate and integrate it over time, you can plot this against the number of cases actually reported. They should be in good agreement.
The last time I did this (admittedly, in September), SAGE were grossly underestimating the size of the epidemic by a factor of 10. That is the integration of their daily growth rate over time underestimated the number of cases by an order of magnitude.
SAGE have done a really poor job of the modelling, the statistical interpretation and the communication.
I strongly believe that all their codes, data and methodology should be open access. Many people could be helping SAGE, but they are not going to re-derive and re-code everything from scratch.
The interaction and advice from scientists to politicians to the public has been much. much better in Germany. We have a lot to learn from this pandemic.
Should be in good agreement? I think it's questionable to expect that, multiplying an varying exponential over 50 infection cycles is likely to be in good agreement. Even if you are quite close most of the time, even very slight compounding errors in one direction are going to quickly make this kind of sanity check fly off into orbit, no? It doesn't strike me as a fair test.
Clearly the rebels have the numbers. Johnson rattled.
Even if they have Labour politicians said on the media today they will support HMG as anything else would see the whole system collapse with a free for all across England
One annoyance in the “lockdown sceptics” series of arguments is the way they never hold their own arguments and predictions remotely accountable.
Confidently saying there were no excess deaths this year as the first wave built up. And then not even and “oops, I guess we were wrong.”
Each and every statement on Sweden, since disproved, all of which may never have been said for all they have to say on it.
That the IFR is well below one in a thousand, maybe one in ten thousand. Toby even tried to revive that briefly, using the death figures to make his point as we have to take them into accou... oh. Oops. And now silence there.
Opening schools will have no issues and children don’t even pass on the virus. That aged well.
We can release all restrictions and nothing bad will happen.
There won’t be a second wave.
There’s no point kicking the can down the road, vaccines won’t come along to save us.
There’s no excess deaths THIS time, and here’s a dodgy graph sourced from a conspiracy theorist on Twitter to “prove” it.
Never a single acknowledgement of the repeated wrong nature of any of it, never any hint of an analysis of where they went wrong, always the squeaking sound of goalposts shifting.
It's like all conspiracy theory stuff - anti-vaxxer stuff is a classic of this genre...... It is self healing. There is literally nothing you could do or say that will make them say - "Shit man. I was wrong".
Any evidence you provide or refute will just cause the bullshit stream to move, to flow round it.
Plus if one of them is wrong, there's always another to pop up and make predictions with a clean slate.
It would be interesting if these sceptics had to make a wager on a clear prediction. That would sort the sheep from the goats!
--AS
I'm up for a vaccine when it's my turn. But I did refuse Lariam as an anti-malarial many years ago and opted for it's less effective predecessor after reading about side effects.
I wouldn't touch Larium myself. The psychiatric side effects are too frequent.
The fact that it is forbidden to aircrew is a giveaway. Doxycycline is my anti malarial of choice, I like the feeling in Africa of having a system full of broad spectrum antibiotic.
Clearly the rebels have the numbers. Johnson rattled.
Even if they have Labour politicians said on the media today they will support HMG as anything else would see the whole system collapse with a free for all across England
Yeh, but Johnson doesn't want to have to rely on Labour votes. Awful look for a PM with a 80 seat majority.
Last week, they put directional mics on the QBs in one game of the hand egg, which they played over the top of the coverage. One of the QBs was just awesome, full running commentary as he played, taking the piss out of the other players as they lined up. It was a one man stand up show.
I've always enjoyed picking up comments from Rugby players from the referee's mic, mostly them telling him they are following the rules or trying to point point out infractions of the other team 'He's holding me, sir' is unexpectedly funny from a 6ft 5 behemoth.
Clearly the rebels have the numbers. Johnson rattled.
Even if they have Labour politicians said on the media today they will support HMG as anything else would see the whole system collapse with a free for all across England
Yeh, but Johnson doesn't want to have to rely on Labour votes. Awful look for a PM with a 80 seat majority.
What a mess he has got into.
Not really.
In this case he is doing the right thing while some of his mps put at risk people's lives
Lord knows who this Brian Rose character who's trading at 'contender' odds on BF is.
COVID-19 conspiracy theorist who I presume put a big bet on himself so that he'd could claim to be a viable candidate.
If you know anything about Brian Rose you might be rather concerned that he is trying on a similar hustle to Trump's legal defence fund. He has a bit of a record of crowd funding for particular "projects".
One annoyance in the “lockdown sceptics” series of arguments is the way they never hold their own arguments and predictions remotely accountable.
Confidently saying there were no excess deaths this year as the first wave built up. And then not even and “oops, I guess we were wrong.”
Each and every statement on Sweden, since disproved, all of which may never have been said for all they have to say on it.
That the IFR is well below one in a thousand, maybe one in ten thousand. Toby even tried to revive that briefly, using the death figures to make his point as we have to take them into accou... oh. Oops. And now silence there.
Opening schools will have no issues and children don’t even pass on the virus. That aged well.
We can release all restrictions and nothing bad will happen.
There won’t be a second wave.
There’s no point kicking the can down the road, vaccines won’t come along to save us.
There’s no excess deaths THIS time, and here’s a dodgy graph sourced from a conspiracy theorist on Twitter to “prove” it.
Never a single acknowledgement of the repeated wrong nature of any of it, never any hint of an analysis of where they went wrong, always the squeaking sound of goalposts shifting.
It's like all conspiracy theory stuff - anti-vaxxer stuff is a classic of this genre...... It is self healing. There is literally nothing you could do or say that will make them say - "Shit man. I was wrong".
Any evidence you provide or refute will just cause the bullshit stream to move, to flow round it.
It is this, more than anything else, which proves the lie of the more reasonable sounding of some of them (and Trumpsters). There may be some reasonable points sprinkled throughout, but the shifting from one argument to another, without acknowledgement of being previously wrong yet with no dip in certainty, shows a closed mind. We're all wrong at times, and we're allowed to predispose to some ideas based on the info we have or had, but when nothing changes it, then protestations of reasonableness are revealed as mere covering.
An argument that restrictions are not worth the cost to society is at least consistent, even if people disagree on the calculation there.
Clearly the rebels have the numbers. Johnson rattled.
Even if they have Labour politicians said on the media today they will support HMG as anything else would see the whole system collapse with a free for all across England
Yeh, but Johnson doesn't want to have to rely on Labour votes. Awful look for a PM with a 80 seat majority.
What a mess he has got into.
He also seems to be throwing promises around that some of the Tory seats in tier two will be moved to tier one before Xmas.
One annoyance in the “lockdown sceptics” series of arguments is the way they never hold their own arguments and predictions remotely accountable.
Confidently saying there were no excess deaths this year as the first wave built up. And then not even and “oops, I guess we were wrong.”
Each and every statement on Sweden, since disproved, all of which may never have been said for all they have to say on it.
That the IFR is well below one in a thousand, maybe one in ten thousand. Toby even tried to revive that briefly, using the death figures to make his point as we have to take them into accou... oh. Oops. And now silence there.
Opening schools will have no issues and children don’t even pass on the virus. That aged well.
We can release all restrictions and nothing bad will happen.
There won’t be a second wave.
There’s no point kicking the can down the road, vaccines won’t come along to save us.
There’s no excess deaths THIS time, and here’s a dodgy graph sourced from a conspiracy theorist on Twitter to “prove” it.
Never a single acknowledgement of the repeated wrong nature of any of it, never any hint of an analysis of where they went wrong, always the squeaking sound of goalposts shifting.
It's like all conspiracy theory stuff - anti-vaxxer stuff is a classic of this genre...... It is self healing. There is literally nothing you could do or say that will make them say - "Shit man. I was wrong".
Any evidence you provide or refute will just cause the bullshit stream to move, to flow round it.
Plus if one of them is wrong, there's always another to pop up and make predictions with a clean slate.
It would be interesting if these sceptics had to make a wager on a clear prediction. That would sort the sheep from the goats!
--AS
I'm up for a vaccine when it's my turn. But I did refuse Lariam as an anti-malarial many years ago and opted for it's less effective predecessor after reading about side effects.
I wouldn't touch Larium myself. The psychiatric side effects are too frequent.
The fact that it is forbidden to aircrew is a giveaway. Doxycycline is my anti malarial of choice, I like the feeling in Africa of having a system full of broad spectrum antibiotic.
I know of a nurse with no psychiatric history who killed herself for no reason in Malawi while on Larium. Far too risky.
It still seems like she may well win, and Perdue, but it really would be appropriate for them both to lose because of their own tactics to tell people the voting in the state cannot be trusted.
Of course, the Democrats gaining parity in the Senate would be taken as yet more proof for tens of millions that it was all rigged, but if this were a story those two would be well due for a comeuppance.
The news emerged after Moulding – a major Conservative party donor who created the online retailing company in 2004....Moulding has donated £302,000 to the Conservative party since 2014.
Does that really make you a "major donor"? In the grand scheme of things £50k a year doesn't seem a very large donation for somebody so wealthy. Hardly Lord Ashcroft tipping millions into the Tory coffers.
Yes it would make them major. It is a lot. 50k would be what, 0.5-1% of the amount donated last year to the party? Maybe less than that for years with more donations? Sure, a pretty low percentage, but for one person that's a noticable chunk, and regardless of that and regardless of whether it is much to them, it is still an amount of money that will enable quite a bit of activity for the party so it is significant and clearly well beyond a casual donation.
It still seems like she may well win, and Perdue, but it really would be appropriate for them both to lose because of their own tactics to tell people the voting in the state cannot be trusted.
Of course, the Democrats gaining parity in the Senate would be taken as yet more proof for tens of millions that it was all rigged, but if this were a story those two would be well due for a comeuppance.
Also they’re both insider trading crooks. Allegedly.
Google Pixel 5 review: Stupid Stupid Stupid. Got the phone last week. Fabulous device, stock Android is wonderful. And then this weekend. Phone calls. Ah. The top speaker is under the screen. It works by making the screen vibrate. Which means that (a) calls sound shit and (b) the whole thing is resonating in your hand whilst on a call. Which is uncomfortable.
Brilliant phone which is sensational in every way apart from as a phone. Reminds me of the iPhone no signal when you hold it debacle. On its way back to Amazon tomorrow with a 4a 5g coming to replace it.
I saw the 5 and opted to stay with my 4 XL. The 5 is a bit too barebones and budget for me, but it's a great phone for the price.
Google stripped out most of the funny stuff, like Soli and Pixel Visual Core, and decided to pass on Qualcomm's high-end parts this year. To me the 4a, 4a 5G, and 5 look like place holders, just enough to keep Google in the market until their own silicon is ready, hopefully for 2021 not 2022.
The problem seems to be this set up that it's a binary either/or "you're a covid denier" or not stuff.
There's clearly a reasonable third way for people to be clear that the virus is a big issue but simultaneously recognising that spending a year in complete lockdown 1.0 is not a practical response to that for all the obvious reasons. After that it's merely a question of what level of restrictions are required, reasonable and maintainable.
It's not always been clear that all levels of restrictions have been reasonable, or justified, or indeed consistent, and questioning what comes after certain policies like firebreaks which inevitably only push the problem back by a matter of weeks is most definitely not unreasonable.
That is all true, I think most people are on the spectrum between absolute lockdown at the merest hint of virus and let her rip style deniers. What's key is reasoned argument and evidence for certain positions, which is why much of the Sweden talk has been unhelpful as it ignored some pretty relevant points.
I think the issue is people tend to throw as many reasons as they can against something they are opposed to in the belief it bolters a case, when in fact a weak argument can undermine the strong argument you also had. 'This cannot be bourne, despite the sad cost' is more compelling than many a data wrangler who could not stand up that data later.
The news emerged after Moulding – a major Conservative party donor who created the online retailing company in 2004....Moulding has donated £302,000 to the Conservative party since 2014.
Does that really make you a "major donor"? In the grand scheme of things £50k a year doesn't seem a very large donation for somebody so wealthy. Hardly Lord Ashcroft tipping millions into the Tory coffers.
Yes it would make them major. It is a lot. 50k would be what, 0.5-1% of the amount donated last year to the party? Maybe less than that for years with more donations? Sure, a pretty low percentage, but for one person that's a noticable chunk, and regardless of that and regardless of whether it is much to them, it is still an amount of money that will enable quite a bit of activity for the party so it is significant and clearly well beyond a casual donation.
I think you are out by a factor of 10. Tories get about £25-30 million a year, they got £50 million last year (and this is just counting the donations of more than the declarable £7500)
The 2019 spike for the Liberal Democrats was largely thanks to the biggest single political donation on record: £8m from Labour peer - and former Labour minister - Lord David Sainsbury.
The supermarket magnate - who said in 2017 he would no longer fund political causes - handed over the money to the anti-Brexit Lib Dems before the December election campaign kicked off.
Lord Sainsbury was also responsible for the second largest donation from an individual on record, when he gave £2.2m to the Labour Party in 2016.
Single donations like these can transform a party's finances. The Conservative Party's largest source of money over the decade has been JCB, which has also provided a reliable source of venues for photo opportunities. More than £10m has flowed into Tory coffers from JCB, on top of more than a million from Mark Bamford, a member of the family that owns the digger maker.
The Brexit Party's short life has been bankrolled by some of the largest donations on record.
Christopher Harborne, a largely unknown figure in the Westminster village, donated a total of £4m over the space of two months before the election.
The news emerged after Moulding – a major Conservative party donor who created the online retailing company in 2004....Moulding has donated £302,000 to the Conservative party since 2014.
Does that really make you a "major donor"? In the grand scheme of things £50k a year doesn't seem a very large donation for somebody so wealthy. Hardly Lord Ashcroft tipping millions into the Tory coffers.
Yes it would make them major. It is a lot. 50k would be what, 0.5-1% of the amount donated last year to the party? Maybe less than that for years with more donations? Sure, a pretty low percentage, but for one person that's a noticable chunk, and regardless of that and regardless of whether it is much to them, it is still an amount of money that will enable quite a bit of activity for the party so it is significant and clearly well beyond a casual donation.
I think you are out by a factor of 10. Tories get about £25-30 million a year, they got £50 million last year (and this is just counting the donations of more than the declarable £7500)
Ok, but it doesn't matter overmuch, since my point was while the percentage may be low (0.5% was my lower end guess) it is still a not insignificant amount since even 1/1000 of the funding of a party in government from a single individual or source is not insignificnant - if they were funded entirely by people funding the same amount such that 1000 people did it, that would be a pretty select, tight knit group.
Certainly it's no Ashcroft, not even close and you're quite right to point out the truly massive donors, so he's not a whale, but he wouldn't be a minnow either.
One annoyance in the “lockdown sceptics” series of arguments is the way they never hold their own arguments and predictions remotely accountable.
Confidently saying there were no excess deaths this year as the first wave built up. And then not even and “oops, I guess we were wrong.”
Each and every statement on Sweden, since disproved, all of which may never have been said for all they have to say on it.
That the IFR is well below one in a thousand, maybe one in ten thousand. Toby even tried to revive that briefly, using the death figures to make his point as we have to take them into accou... oh. Oops. And now silence there.
Opening schools will have no issues and children don’t even pass on the virus. That aged well.
We can release all restrictions and nothing bad will happen.
There won’t be a second wave.
There’s no point kicking the can down the road, vaccines won’t come along to save us.
There’s no excess deaths THIS time, and here’s a dodgy graph sourced from a conspiracy theorist on Twitter to “prove” it.
Never a single acknowledgement of the repeated wrong nature of any of it, never any hint of an analysis of where they went wrong, always the squeaking sound of goalposts shifting.
But, the problem is ONS/SAGE have hardly done much better. E.g. How have SAGE estimates of the growth rate of the epidemic matched up to reality over the long term? It is much easier to criticise the "lockdown sceptics" from a position of real strength, in which your data-driven forward models are nicely matching the data.
SAGE publish a weekly estimate not only of R, but also the daily growth rate, which is a directly interpretable number.
If you take SAGE's estimate of the daily growth rate and integrate it over time, you can plot this against the number of cases actually reported. They should be in good agreement.
The last time I did this (admittedly, in September), SAGE were grossly underestimating the size of the epidemic by a factor of 10. That is the integration of their daily growth rate over time underestimated the number of cases by an order of magnitude.
SAGE have done a really poor job of the modelling, the statistical interpretation and the communication.
I strongly believe that all their codes, data and methodology should be open access. Many people could be helping SAGE, but they are not going to re-derive and re-code everything from scratch.
The interaction and advice from scientists to politicians to the public has been much. much better in Germany. We have a lot to learn from this pandemic.
Should be in good agreement? I think it's questionable to expect that, multiplying an varying exponential over 50 infection cycles is likely to be in good agreement. Even if you are quite close most of the time, even very slight compounding errors in one direction are going to quickly make this kind of sanity check fly off into orbit, no? It doesn't strike me as a fair test.
I don't understand what you mean by a "multiplying a variable exponential over 50 infection cycles."
Please do explain. It is alway great to turn politicalbetting into a hot & geeky blog.
I have a day-to-day point estimate of the growth rate provided by SAGE. I integrate that. The integration is over one day. Then, I use the new SAGE estimate for the next day. I integrate over the next day. And so on. I add up the number of cases SAGE predicts and compare to the true number of cases. The error is bounded and controlled by the error in SAGE's daily estimate.
There are divergences over the timescale of 2 weeks, an order of magnitude over a few weeks (at least when I did it over September, October). The only explanation is a **consistent bias** in SAGE's methodology for estimating the daily growth rate, rather than any random uncertainty.
A discrepancy is not unusual, but a drift is telling me that their point estimator of the daily rate is consistently biased.(The only thing I have not done is explicitly factor in any increase in testing. I agree that could be an effect, but over the timescale of a few weeks -- I rather doubt it).
Incidentally, way back in March, I was one of SAGE's strongest supporters on this blog.
No more. I think this model of advising the government from a group of 50 odd random experts is seriously flawed. It belongs in the nineteenth century with Lord Palmerston.
What a chickenshit. Even Trump is at least stating his accusations plainly, if ludicrously, but the fake questions to cover his arse, the pathetic shot at big tech, it's undignified even in an enterprise which is already undignified.
Not that I expect the place was a bastion of debate before, but how can a Congress operate when half its members think the other half cheated to win the presidential election, or pretends to believe it?
Christ, our Commons wasn't split 50/50 even in the Civil War.
Comments
Brilliant phone which is sensational in every way apart from as a phone. Reminds me of the iPhone no signal when you hold it debacle. On its way back to Amazon tomorrow with a 4a 5g coming to replace it.
https://twitter.com/JuliaHB1/status/1333131622376411136
It would be interesting if these sceptics had to make a wager on a clear prediction. That would sort the sheep from the goats!
--AS
There's clearly a reasonable third way for people to be clear that the virus is a big issue but simultaneously recognising that spending a year in complete lockdown 1.0 is not a practical response to that for all the obvious reasons. After that it's merely a question of what level of restrictions are required, reasonable and maintainable.
It's not always been clear that all levels of restrictions have been reasonable, or justified, or indeed consistent, and questioning what comes after certain policies like firebreaks which inevitably only push the problem back by a matter of weeks is most definitely not unreasonable.
And by next year, all the vaguely serious software outfits will have native compiles with a good history behind them.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/nov/29/hut-group-to-fund-private-security-team-for-founder-matthew-moulding
Does that really make you a "major donor"? In the grand scheme of things £50k a year doesn't seem a very large donation for somebody so wealthy. Hardly Lord Ashcroft tipping millions into the Tory coffers.
As for security, I highly doubt any of these super wealthy people don't have it.
His company is bloody annoying with the spam promotion emails though. You buy a few bits and pieces off them once and you get "special offer" emails every other day from then on, I don't think anything is ever full price.
SAGE publish a weekly estimate not only of R, but also the daily growth rate, which is a directly interpretable number.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-r-number-in-the-uk
If you take SAGE's estimate of the daily growth rate and integrate it over time, you can plot this against the number of cases actually reported. They should be in good agreement.
The last time I did this (admittedly, in September), SAGE were grossly underestimating the size of the epidemic by a factor of 10. That is the integration of their daily growth rate over time underestimated the number of cases by an order of magnitude.
SAGE have done a really poor job of the modelling, the statistical interpretation and the communication.
I strongly believe that all their codes, data and methodology should be open access. Many people could be helping SAGE, but they are not going to re-derive and re-code everything from scratch.
The interaction and advice from scientists to politicians to the public has been much. much better in Germany. We have a lot to learn from this pandemic.
MeDermott Diving barge DB29
I’m know recreational divers who do dives which require ~1hr plus decompression stops. If they cock it up they’re dead. End of.
The saturation divers are doing way much more than that so leaving the chamber is instant death. Staying with it has at least a few hours more survival time until your oxygen runs out or the electronics fail.
Really not a nice way to go,
"The Crown should carry fiction warning, says culture secretary"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-55122965
Some people thought that was too much. I reckoned that if you can't face the meat factory, don't eat meat....
https://twitter.com/DanielWhatley18/status/1333072067722309637
https://twitter.com/hendopolis/status/1333172347134676999?s=20
I worked 7 years on the Byford Dolphin. If you are feeling particularly morbid then look up the decompression accident that happened on there. Very nasty.
Mind you the rig was a bit of a death trap altogether. It sank twice and was raised and in total 11 men died on there over the years including a friend of mine who we had to try and rescue from the moonpool after a piece of drillpipe took the back of his head off.
What @ydoethur really need is an 8.5in square piece of silicon, with 18GB of on chip SRAM.
https://www.cerebras.net/product/
Slightly more cash, though.
What a mess he has got into.
In this case he is doing the right thing while some of his mps put at risk people's lives
An argument that restrictions are not worth the cost to society is at least consistent, even if people disagree on the calculation there.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/lariam-hundreds-british-soldiers-suffering-mental-illness-after-being-given-anti-malarial-drug-10179792.html
Doxycycline is good, and has the advantage of cutting the rate of stomach upsets by 2/3, a useful bonus.
Of course, the Democrats gaining parity in the Senate would be taken as yet more proof for tens of millions that it was all rigged, but if this were a story those two would be well due for a comeuppance.
Allegedly.
I think the issue is people tend to throw as many reasons as they can against something they are opposed to in the belief it bolters a case, when in fact a weak argument can undermine the strong argument you also had. 'This cannot be bourne, despite the sad cost' is more compelling than many a data wrangler who could not stand up that data later.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-51665162
So £50k a year is 0.1% of last year.
When we are talking big donors....
The 2019 spike for the Liberal Democrats was largely thanks to the biggest single political donation on record: £8m from Labour peer - and former Labour minister - Lord David Sainsbury.
The supermarket magnate - who said in 2017 he would no longer fund political causes - handed over the money to the anti-Brexit Lib Dems before the December election campaign kicked off.
Lord Sainsbury was also responsible for the second largest donation from an individual on record, when he gave £2.2m to the Labour Party in 2016.
Single donations like these can transform a party's finances. The Conservative Party's largest source of money over the decade has been JCB, which has also provided a reliable source of venues for photo opportunities. More than £10m has flowed into Tory coffers from JCB, on top of more than a million from Mark Bamford, a member of the family that owns the digger maker.
The Brexit Party's short life has been bankrolled by some of the largest donations on record.
Christopher Harborne, a largely unknown figure in the Westminster village, donated a total of £4m over the space of two months before the election.
Certainly it's no Ashcroft, not even close and you're quite right to point out the truly massive donors, so he's not a whale, but he wouldn't be a minnow either.
Please do explain. It is alway great to turn politicalbetting into a hot & geeky blog.
I have a day-to-day point estimate of the growth rate provided by SAGE. I integrate that. The integration is over one day. Then, I use the new SAGE estimate for the next day. I integrate over the next day. And so on. I add up the number of cases SAGE predicts and compare to the true number of cases. The error is bounded and controlled by the error in SAGE's daily estimate.
There are divergences over the timescale of 2 weeks, an order of magnitude over a few weeks (at least when I did it over September, October). The only explanation is a **consistent bias** in SAGE's methodology for estimating the daily growth rate, rather than any random uncertainty.
A discrepancy is not unusual, but a drift is telling me that their point estimator of the daily rate is consistently biased.(The only thing I have not done is explicitly factor in any increase in testing. I agree that could be an effect, but over the timescale of a few weeks -- I rather doubt it).
Incidentally, way back in March, I was one of SAGE's strongest supporters on this blog.
No more. I think this model of advising the government from a group of 50 odd random experts is seriously flawed. It belongs in the nineteenth century with Lord Palmerston.
https://twitter.com/RandPaul/status/1333145534765428737?s=19
Not that I expect the place was a bastion of debate before, but how can a Congress operate when half its members think the other half cheated to win the presidential election, or pretends to believe it?
Christ, our Commons wasn't split 50/50 even in the Civil War.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1333207778643628032
https://twitter.com/JenniferJJacobs/status/1333204822158422017