Just a comment on vaccination rates - I think they are highly variable by locality.
My 84 year old father in law lives in the same village in Bucks as us almost on the Buckinghamshire/Oxfordshire border. He has not been vaccinated yet. The local surgery has grouped together with others in the Bucks area to vaccinate at a new dedicated site at a sports centre in Aylesbury (7 miles away). They are now saying they won't be doing their first shots until Friday having said previously it was going to be on Tuesday.
Bucks in my view is underperforming having given 12K vaccines so far. For the population size compared to the rest of England it should have done about 80K. I don't know whether being a mainly rural county comes into play.
For comparison my father in law's friend who lives in the town closest to us (2.5 miles away but in Oxfordshire) is younger than him, albeit still in her 80s, was vaccinated 2 weeks ago. Strangely the site she went to have it was in Bucks!
Given the disparity in vaccination rates it would not surprise me if they start vaccinating below 80s in some parts long before others have finished the 80+s. Whether that is just accepted or it causes consternation I do not know. The postcode lottery is not fair, but postcode lotteries have existed in many other aspects of life for a long time.
I said that the idea that this was charged £30 for two weeks was going to be fake news and I said I was prepared to do a charity bet to a food bank or other charity of your choice if I was wrong, if you wanted to take the bet.
I also said that the parcels were poor quality, unacceptable and something should be done about it but we should get to the truth.
Well *drum roll* it turns out I was . . . 100% correct.
The parcel involved was poor and I am glad there's been an apology and they're fixing it for the future - but it was not a £30 parcel. Instead it was a £10.50 one.
Still poor value for £10.50 but poor value for £10.50 and poor value for £30 are an order of magnitude different.
So I don't know if you took up my offer of the bet. If you did, please feel free to donate to a food bank or other charity of your choice. Thank you.
You get a like for continuing to dig your pit down towards Java.
I'm not digging a pit, I was right. 100% unambiguously correct.
The schools were charged £10.50 not £30 which was my contention, that there wasn't a chance on earth that was a £30 box. It was a £10 box (£10.50 technically) not a £30 box.
Last I checked £10 does not equal £30. Nor does £10.50.
Still poor, still needs sorting, I said all that, but the idea it was "what £30 gets you"? Unadulterated bullshit. Of course.
Unless you think the truth does not matter I was correct, wasn't I?
How do you end up with a £10.50 box given that the allowance is £3 per child per day?
Chartwells, the company that provided the parcel, said it was actually only intended to last one school week and had cost £10.50 for food, packing and distribution.
£10.50 is not £30. Why was it only £10.50? Was the school not spending the full allowance and trying to cut costs? I don't know, that isn't addressed in the article. It should be.
I believe there were several hundred chaps from the Indian Army at Dunkirk.
Mind you, later in the war, the Germans did become quite multi-cultural.
Were they in the film, though? If not, perhaps that backs up the original point? The criticism as I understand it is of Dunkirk the film not Dunkirk the historical event, an important distinction no doubt lost in Harry Cole's Culture War (now that does sound like a boring film - white boys waiting for bantz). I've not seen the film (or the historical event) although I do remember the Dunkirk scenes in Atonement dragging on a bit.
It's a Nolan film, ie its overhyped.
It was good in the cinema (remember them) with the surround sound effects and the big screen. On the TV it was meh.
His films are typically pretty good , and I liked it. But he gets a pass on storytelling in some films because of technical brilliance in my opinion. Tenet springs to mind.
I watched it again over Christmas and it definitely hasn’t improved with age. For a movie with minimal dialogue, what there is is pretty dire. Also how much fecking ammunition was Tom Hardy’s Spitfire carrying?
More than 16sec? It had little elves in the wing bays to reload the .303s, obvs. Artistic licence.
I went into the film with great expectations (probably an error), found it unwatchable and gave up before Hardy even made his first appearance. Wallowing comes to mind as a descriptor. The worst type of nostalgia.
Am I alone in thinking that national treasure Mark Rylance has become a bit of an unbearable luvvie in his onscreen performances ?
I believe there were several hundred chaps from the Indian Army at Dunkirk.
Mind you, later in the war, the Germans did become quite multi-cultural.
Were they in the film, though? If not, perhaps that backs up the original point? The criticism as I understand it is of Dunkirk the film not Dunkirk the historical event, an important distinction no doubt lost in Harry Cole's Culture War (now that does sound like a boring film - white boys waiting for bantz). I've not seen the film (or the historical event) although I do remember the Dunkirk scenes in Atonement dragging on a bit.
It's a Nolan film, ie its overhyped.
It was good in the cinema (remember them) with the surround sound effects and the big screen. On the TV it was meh.
His films are typically pretty good , and I liked it. But he gets a pass on storytelling in some films because of technical brilliance in my opinion. Tenet springs to mind.
I watched it again over Christmas and it definitely hasn’t improved with age. For a movie with minimal dialogue, what there is is pretty dire. Also how much fecking ammunition was Tom Hardy’s Spitfire carrying?
More than 16sec? It had little elves in the wing bays to reload the .303s, obvs. Artistic licence.
I went into the film with great expectations (probably an error), found it unwatchable and gave up before Hardy even made his first appearance. Wallowing comes to mind as a descriptor. The worst type of nostalgia.
I managed to sit through the whole thing. Am I alone in thinking that national treasure Mark Rylance has become a bit of an unbearable luvvie in his onscreen performances ?
Now that Philip has successfully defended the reputation of Tory donors, shall we go back to the issue of feeding deprived children?
The only reason we have this story at all is that the previous system - handing out vouchers to parents - was kiboshed by Tory MP moral outrage that poor parents spend the vouchers on "crack cocaine".
What is abundantly clear is that the most cost-effective way of getting cash for food to parents is a voucher. And the most reliable way of getting food to kids that can be turned into a meal that they will eat is a voucher.
ManCock was made a mess of this morning trying to justify why he is so happy that something he voted against is now being implemented. Local Teesside Tories - including the always resplendently morally outraged adulterer Simon Clarke - also voted against feeding these kids.
When I retweeted the clip of ManCock squirming and tagged in Clarke and Matt Vickers, a conversation about why they did so prompted me to reply "ve vere just obeying orders". Which got a like from Matt Vickers. Having met Matt I know that he isn't a Simon Clarke style degenerate, so his like feels like a sign that he knows he was only following orders as well...
I said that the idea that this was charged £30 for two weeks was going to be fake news and I said I was prepared to do a charity bet to a food bank or other charity of your choice if I was wrong, if you wanted to take the bet.
I also said that the parcels were poor quality, unacceptable and something should be done about it but we should get to the truth.
Well *drum roll* it turns out I was . . . 100% correct.
The parcel involved was poor and I am glad there's been an apology and they're fixing it for the future - but it was not a £30 parcel. Instead it was a £10.50 one.
Still poor value for £10.50 but poor value for £10.50 and poor value for £30 are an order of magnitude different.
So I don't know if you took up my offer of the bet. If you did, please feel free to donate to a food bank or other charity of your choice. Thank you.
You get a like for continuing to dig your pit down towards Java.
I'm not digging a pit, I was right. 100% unambiguously correct.
The schools were charged £10.50 not £30 which was my contention, that there wasn't a chance on earth that was a £30 box. It was a £10 box (£10.50 technically) not a £30 box.
Last I checked £10 does not equal £30. Nor does £10.50.
Still poor, still needs sorting, I said all that, but the idea it was "what £30 gets you"? Unadulterated bullshit. Of course.
Unless you think the truth does not matter I was correct, wasn't I?
In Derbyshire a £30 box costs £14.40 retail so well under a tenner for Compass at wholesale
Still got to pay £4.7m PA to the CEO somehow I suppose
Now that Philip has successfully defended the reputation of Tory donors, shall we go back to the issue of feeding deprived children?
The only reason we have this story at all is that the previous system - handing out vouchers to parents - was kiboshed by Tory MP moral outrage that poor parents spend the vouchers on "crack cocaine".
What is abundantly clear is that the most cost-effective way of getting cash for food to parents is a voucher. And the most reliable way of getting food to kids that can be turned into a meal that they will eat is a voucher.
ManCock was made a mess of this morning trying to justify why he is so happy that something he voted against is now being implemented. Local Teesside Tories - including the always resplendently morally outraged adulterer Simon Clarke - also voted against feeding these kids.
When I retweeted the clip of ManCock squirming and tagged in Clarke and Matt Vickers, a conversation about why they did so prompted me to reply "ve vere just obeying orders". Which got a like from Matt Vickers. Having met Matt I know that he isn't a Simon Clarke style degenerate, so his like feels like a sign that he knows he was only following orders as well...
Can we *please* go back to handing out vouchers?
I said all along I would prefer vouchers.
If you're doing anything then do vouchers and let the parents and the free market decide how it is spent best. No need to get food packaging companies into the middle.
I have no bone for Tory donors, no skin in the game, I just get like a dog with the bone in wanting to find the truth and call out BS. Even at £10.50 it is a total and utter waste of money to get a middle company involved in picking out food rather than having parents do it.
Watching US politics, it is striking how obsessed their procedures seem to be with seniority. Which I guess underpins their country being run by people who in many democracies would already be in retirement homes.
Watching US politics, it is striking how obsessed their procedures seem to be with seniority. Which I guess underpins their country being run by people who in many democracies would already be in retirement homes.
That has not always been the case however, certainly outside the Senate (which like our House of Lords is basically a retirement home for senior politicians). Paul Ryan was Speaker of the House at 45, Bill Clinton and JFK were elected President in their 40s too.
Watching US politics, it is striking how obsessed their procedures seem to be with seniority. Which I guess underpins their country being run by people who in many democracies would already be in retirement homes.
Well I think I just smashed that litigation exam. Hopefully I'm not just deluded.
Great stuff!
Also, only just saw the good news re: @DavidL 's son. Should be back to normal by Michaelmas, too. Congrats!
Thanks. That gives me an excuse to go back to a link made to the Guardian (I think) where they are improving diversity by accepting some students with BBB grades.
Over 2,200 people applied to do PPE at Oxford this year. Roughly 750 got an interview and of them 254 got places, just over 1/10. Would it really fair if someone loses one of those rare places despite having AAA to improve diversity?
It's quite a difficult question. If you are at a poor school BBB may be an incredible achievement showing genuine talent but people do not get in by accident. They get in by incredibly hard work over an extended period (consistency is important) and a genuine commitment and passion for the subjects. For those in that group to lose out when they otherwise tick the right boxes seems pretty egregious. Tricky.
Whats really funny about the "see I told you it was only a £10.50 box" is that there is only £5 of food in it. Provided for a £15 contract.
So the markup of the £15 of food in a £23 box is now £5 of food in a £10 box.
Its a funny hill to die on.
No s**t Sherlock.
I always said I thought it was poor. I always said that vouchers would be better. I also said that getting a middle company involved adds costs and markup so you'd never get the same.
Scrap it and get vouchers. That's what I'm saying.
But £30? That was obviously not true - and I was right. Does the truth matter to you?
Just a comment on vaccination rates - I think they are highly variable by locality.
My 84 year old father in law lives in the same village in Bucks as us almost on the Buckinghamshire/Oxfordshire border. He has not been vaccinated yet. The local surgery has grouped together with others in the Bucks area to vaccinate at a new dedicated site at a sports centre in Aylesbury (7 miles away). They are now saying they won't be doing their first shots until Friday having said previously it was going to be on Tuesday.
Bucks in my view is underperforming having given 12K vaccines so far. For the population size compared to the rest of England it should have done about 80K. I don't know whether being a mainly rural county comes into play.
For comparison my father in law's friend who lives in the town closest to us (2.5 miles away but in Oxfordshire) is younger than him, albeit still in her 80s, was vaccinated 2 weeks ago. Strangely the site she went to have it was in Bucks!
Given the disparity in vaccination rates it would not surprise me if they start vaccinating below 80s in some parts long before others have finished the 80+s. Whether that is just accepted or it causes consternation I do not know. The postcode lottery is not fair, but postcode lotteries have existed in many other aspects of life for a long time.
Poscode lottery = Bad Regional differences= neutral Local specialisation=good.
In reality we do not want there to be no variability that would be a disaster. What we do want is for the level in worst regions to be acceptable. I'm not claiming that Bucks is acceptable or unacceptable, just trying to point out that a "postcode lottery" is inevitable. I hope you father does get vaccinated on Friday and wish him well.
I said that the idea that this was charged £30 for two weeks was going to be fake news and I said I was prepared to do a charity bet to a food bank or other charity of your choice if I was wrong, if you wanted to take the bet.
I also said that the parcels were poor quality, unacceptable and something should be done about it but we should get to the truth.
Well *drum roll* it turns out I was . . . 100% correct.
The parcel involved was poor and I am glad there's been an apology and they're fixing it for the future - but it was not a £30 parcel. Instead it was a £10.50 one.
Still poor value for £10.50 but poor value for £10.50 and poor value for £30 are an order of magnitude different.
So I don't know if you took up my offer of the bet. If you did, please feel free to donate to a food bank or other charity of your choice. Thank you.
You get a like for continuing to dig your pit down towards Java.
I'm not digging a pit, I was right. 100% unambiguously correct.
The schools were charged £10.50 not £30 which was my contention, that there wasn't a chance on earth that was a £30 box. It was a £10 box (£10.50 technically) not a £30 box.
Last I checked £10 does not equal £30. Nor does £10.50.
Still poor, still needs sorting, I said all that, but the idea it was "what £30 gets you"? Unadulterated bullshit. Of course.
Unless you think the truth does not matter I was correct, wasn't I?
In Derbyshire a £30 box costs £14.40 retail so well under a tenner for Compass at wholesale
Still got to pay £4.7m PA to the CEO somehow I suppose
I'm sorry, but this sort of stuff is utter, vindictive, childish crap. The company makes virtually no money whatsoever from this contract. It's not a large part of its business at all. It's an extremely well-run company - one of the best in the world at what it does - and we need more such companies in the UK and paying UK corporation tax.
I can't comment on the actual food boxes (except that a lot of the pictures were quite obviously nothing to do with any big supplier), but I can make the very obvious point that the cost of sourcing, packing, and delivering food boxes is not just the cost of the raw ingredients. I'd have thought that at the very least £5 per box for putting it together, taking into account dietary requirements per child, and delivering it, would be what you'd expect, maybe quite a bit more depending on the quantities and the location. (That's one reason why vouchers probably make more sense, but that's a different argument).
ManCock: "I'm really glad that we're able to send out food for those who receive free school meals" Piers Moron: "If you're that glad, why did you vote against it?" ManCock: "I'm glad that we were able to put this into place" Moron: "If you're that glad why did you, as Health Secretary, vote against it"
It's just so painful to watch. Why can't people just say yup, I got that one wrong? You can even make a virtue out of looking twice at an issue. People with fragile egos are the worst kind of leader.
" We were looking at a range of options and had not chosen that one at the time so I voted against it. The alternative was never to do nothing, it was to find the best solution. Recent problems with the boxes show that it was not an ideal solution but within days of the original vote the need to do something quickly overrode those objections so we changed our position."
I mean, this isn't hard. Why do Hancock and Williamson have to make it so?
Nicely worded, but why the trashing of the box idea? Is that Government policy? As far as I'm aware Boris has criticised what he's seen of some of the execution, not the whole box policy. If Hancock said that surely it would set the cat amongst the pigeons?
That wouldn't be trashing it, it would simply suggest that it is not without problems which is now unarguable. What Rashford wanted (other than a bloody goal, yet again) was the kitchens to remain open so that kids could (a) have a decent choice for a hot meal and (b) have some contact with "authority" if that was a good idea. If the kitchens are closed we are in the land of second best. Vouchers seems more sensible to me but IANAE.
The original plan was vouchers but then an MP decided that the vouchers could be traded for drugs - hence the need for a crappier solution...
It always depresses me how supposedly Conservative politicians find ideas of individual responsibility and respect of the individual so difficult to get their head around.
My brother has been getting these food boxes because he has terminal cancer and is shielding. He has given away most of the contents because it is not what he likes to eat. He has about 50 cans of minestrone though because his daughter doesn't like that every much. My guess would be that vouchers "wasted" on cigarettes and drink< contents wasted because no one wants to eat them, but, as I say, IANAE.
Vouchers exchanged for items other than food doesn't help kids, having food around the house does. I'm sure it's a baffler to nice, sensible people, but substance abuse issues clearly affect some people who are being helped by these boxes, and this is one way around it.
It pains me to say it (as the care system is itself riddled with problems) but children in households in which the parents would trade food vouchers to buy drugs, thus leaving the children hungry should not be left in those households. The problem isn't food vouchers in that case, it is that the children should not be there at all (and that the parents need help).
Maybe I'm just a naive nice sensible person, but I can't help believing that such situations are massively in the minority of those helped by free school meals/vouchers/boxes.
You point out the issue with your own argument. Such kids are not necessarily better off joining the care merry-go-round.
I have a lot of issues with the food boxes, not just relating to the monetary value of the contents, but also the nature of the contents - specifically the lack of protein and healthy fats, which kids growing up need - they can't live on carrot sticks. However, I'm not against the basic concept. This is to stop kids going hungry - there's nothing wrong in principle with giving food directly. It should just be done with thoughtfulness and care.
Been away all day working on my novel so am just picking this up.
I agree with Mike that those odds are attractive.
Either way, the Republicans will be out of office for at least 8 years. The first signs of traction would be the 2026 mid-terms.
The blood-letting which is about to begin inside the GOP is analogous to Labour in the 1980's only a whole heap deeper and more public. Even if the Republicans dispatch Trump in the next seven days the legacy of what has happened will take a long time to dissipate. What took place on Capitol Hill will be etched into American consciousness for a generation.
There is a comparison to be made between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler. And I'm delighted to write: 'fuck-off Godwin.' If we can't draw lessons from that most heinous period of human history then we will never learn our lessons. Trump, like that other Führer, is an oik. Both of them were rabble-rousers who were not establishment figures. Hitler's generals loathed him but, like Trump, felt powerless to do anything about it, or else lacked the courage. That's because both Trump and Hitler built a cult like obedience around them. Anyone who dissented was bumped off either literally (Hitler) or figuratively (Trump).
Perhaps the most sinister aspect to me of that comparison is that I think Trump would have gone through with a full-blown coup had this been 80 or 90 years ago.
Democrats will be in power now until at least 2028.
The Mystic has spoken. The Mystic has been pretty accurate on the U.S.
Well I think I just smashed that litigation exam. Hopefully I'm not just deluded.
Great stuff!
Also, only just saw the good news re: @DavidL 's son. Should be back to normal by Michaelmas, too. Congrats!
Thanks. That gives me an excuse to go back to a link made to the Guardian (I think) where they are improving diversity by accepting some students with BBB grades.
Over 2,200 people applied to do PPE at Oxford this year. Roughly 750 got an interview and of them 254 got places, just over 1/10. Would it really fair if someone loses one of those rare places despite having AAA to improve diversity?
It's quite a difficult question. If you are at a poor school BBB may be an incredible achievement showing genuine talent but people do not get in by accident. They get in by incredibly hard work over an extended period (consistency is important) and a genuine commitment and passion for the subjects. For those in that group to lose out when they otherwise tick the right boxes seems pretty egregious. Tricky.
Now that Philip has successfully defended the reputation of Tory donors, shall we go back to the issue of feeding deprived children?
The only reason we have this story at all is that the previous system - handing out vouchers to parents - was kiboshed by Tory MP moral outrage that poor parents spend the vouchers on "crack cocaine".
What is abundantly clear is that the most cost-effective way of getting cash for food to parents is a voucher. And the most reliable way of getting food to kids that can be turned into a meal that they will eat is a voucher.
ManCock was made a mess of this morning trying to justify why he is so happy that something he voted against is now being implemented. Local Teesside Tories - including the always resplendently morally outraged adulterer Simon Clarke - also voted against feeding these kids.
When I retweeted the clip of ManCock squirming and tagged in Clarke and Matt Vickers, a conversation about why they did so prompted me to reply "ve vere just obeying orders". Which got a like from Matt Vickers. Having met Matt I know that he isn't a Simon Clarke style degenerate, so his like feels like a sign that he knows he was only following orders as well...
Can we *please* go back to handing out vouchers?
It highlights the problem for thoughtful, principled small state libertarians. And such people clearly exist in significant numbers.
To get access to the corridors of power in the UK and US, they have allied themselves with the authoritarian populist element of the right wing. Again, that's a legitimate brand of politics, until you get to full-on-tonto Trumpism. (Not everything he said was intrinsically deplorable- just quite a lot of it.)
But once in power, thoughtful, principled small state libertarians have a problem. Disown the authoritarian bits, and your coalition is too small to win. Accept it, and seek to justify it, and you risk being dragged down by it. It's the old adage about tiger-riding being a brilliant idea, until you seek to dismount.
What's a thoughtful, principled small state libertarian to do?
ManCock: "I'm really glad that we're able to send out food for those who receive free school meals" Piers Moron: "If you're that glad, why did you vote against it?" ManCock: "I'm glad that we were able to put this into place" Moron: "If you're that glad why did you, as Health Secretary, vote against it"
It's just so painful to watch. Why can't people just say yup, I got that one wrong? You can even make a virtue out of looking twice at an issue. People with fragile egos are the worst kind of leader.
" We were looking at a range of options and had not chosen that one at the time so I voted against it. The alternative was never to do nothing, it was to find the best solution. Recent problems with the boxes show that it was not an ideal solution but within days of the original vote the need to do something quickly overrode those objections so we changed our position."
I mean, this isn't hard. Why do Hancock and Williamson have to make it so?
Nicely worded, but why the trashing of the box idea? Is that Government policy? As far as I'm aware Boris has criticised what he's seen of some of the execution, not the whole box policy. If Hancock said that surely it would set the cat amongst the pigeons?
That wouldn't be trashing it, it would simply suggest that it is not without problems which is now unarguable. What Rashford wanted (other than a bloody goal, yet again) was the kitchens to remain open so that kids could (a) have a decent choice for a hot meal and (b) have some contact with "authority" if that was a good idea. If the kitchens are closed we are in the land of second best. Vouchers seems more sensible to me but IANAE.
The original plan was vouchers but then an MP decided that the vouchers could be traded for drugs - hence the need for a crappier solution...
It always depresses me how supposedly Conservative politicians find ideas of individual responsibility and respect of the individual so difficult to get their head around.
My brother has been getting these food boxes because he has terminal cancer and is shielding. He has given away most of the contents because it is not what he likes to eat. He has about 50 cans of minestrone though because his daughter doesn't like that every much. My guess would be that vouchers "wasted" on cigarettes and drink< contents wasted because no one wants to eat them, but, as I say, IANAE.
Vouchers exchanged for items other than food doesn't help kids, having food around the house does. I'm sure it's a baffler to nice, sensible people, but substance abuse issues clearly affect some people who are being helped by these boxes, and this is one way around it.
It pains me to say it (as the care system is itself riddled with problems) but children in households in which the parents would trade food vouchers to buy drugs, thus leaving the children hungry should not be left in those households. The problem isn't food vouchers in that case, it is that the children should not be there at all (and that the parents need help).
Maybe I'm just a naive nice sensible person, but I can't help believing that such situations are massively in the minority of those helped by free school meals/vouchers/boxes.
You point out the issue with your own argument. Such kids are not necessarily better off joining the care merry-go-round.
I have a lot of issues with the food boxes, not just relating to the monetary value of the contents, but also the nature of the contents - specifically the lack of protein and healthy fats, which kids growing up need - they can't live on carrot sticks. However, I'm not against the basic concept. This is to stop kids going hungry - there's nothing wrong in principle with giving food directly. It should just be done with thoughtfulness and care.
So it's better children are stuck (24 hours a day at the moment) with drug addicted parents than giving them a chance in a care system.
Is Boris PMQ announcement of 24/7 vaccination another one of his moonshot promises? Isn't the issue at the moment supply?
We definitely should be doing as longer hours if supply is there, the "people said they don't fancy coming before 8am" was a nonsense argument. But you have to have the infrastructure and supply there to do it.
Surely the correct answer to this is :.
"At the moment we're supply/manufacture constrained but once supply is no longer a bottleneck we envision our specialist vaccination centres will be going 24/7"
And all the posts trying to claim there was no story. I mean really.
The media can choose to make anything a story by banging on and on about it on 24 hour rolling news (usually to give a job to Phillippa Space).
Odd how Phillippa chooses to make it about the PM cycling within London for his exercise, whilst never choosing to make the story about media types taking intercontinental holidays in a pandemic. Perks of the job I guess....
I'm sure I would agree with that if I knew who the hell Phillippa Space was (I have never thought about it before but there are an awful lot of 'p's, 'i's and 'l's in Phillippa - there is no chance I would get that spelling right in my own)
Generic name for a jouirnalist who fills up space - geddit?
Ediut: the Eye equivalent is Polly Filler, after the DIY gunge.
The name is always female of course, because serious journalism should be left to the chaps.
n = 2, assumed p = 0.5, null hypothesis of chance occurrence of two females = 25%. Need more data.
Now I'll be keeping an eye open (so to speak) in the next issue of the Eye,. thanks to you ...
Private Eye is littered with casual sexism. The much more serious charge against it is that it's just not very funny. The state of satire in this country is abysmal right now, I'm not sure why. Good satire should be angry and funny, seems to me that right now people seem to manage only one of those at a time. The US does a much better job on this front although perhaps they have better material to work with.
Been away all day working on my novel so am just picking this up.
I agree with Mike that those odds are attractive.
Either way, the Republicans will be out of office for at least 8 years. The first signs of traction would be the 2026 mid-terms.
The blood-letting which is about to begin inside the GOP is analogous to Labour in the 1980's only a whole heap deeper and more public. Even if the Republicans dispatch Trump in the next seven days the legacy of what has happened will take a long time to dissipate. What took place on Capitol Hill will be etched into American consciousness for a generation.
There is a comparison to be made between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler. And I'm delighted to write: 'fuck-off Godwin.' If we can't draw lessons from that most heinous period of human history then we will never learn our lessons. Trump, like that other Führer, is an oik. Both of them were rabble-rousers who were not establishment figures. Hitler's generals loathed him but, like Trump, felt powerless to do anything about it, or else lacked the courage. That's because both Trump and Hitler built a cult like obedience around them. Anyone who dissented was bumped off either literally (Hitler) or figuratively (Trump).
Perhaps the most sinister aspect to me of that comparison is that I think Trump would have gone through with a full-blown coup had this been 80 or 90 years ago.
Democrats will be in power now until at least 2028.
The Mystic has spoken. The Mystic has been pretty accurate on the U.S.
I think the Republicans will be back a lot sooner than that. American politics is famously short-term and I expect the GOP to at least win the House in 2022. It is probably fair to say the Dems are strong favourites to hold the presidency in 2024 though.
Well I think I just smashed that litigation exam. Hopefully I'm not just deluded.
Great stuff!
Also, only just saw the good news re: @DavidL 's son. Should be back to normal by Michaelmas, too. Congrats!
Thanks. That gives me an excuse to go back to a link made to the Guardian (I think) where they are improving diversity by accepting some students with BBB grades.
Over 2,200 people applied to do PPE at Oxford this year. Roughly 750 got an interview and of them 254 got places, just over 1/10. Would it really fair if someone loses one of those rare places despite having AAA to improve diversity?
It's quite a difficult question. If you are at a poor school BBB may be an incredible achievement showing genuine talent but people do not get in by accident. They get in by incredibly hard work over an extended period (consistency is important) and a genuine commitment and passion for the subjects. For those in that group to lose out when they otherwise tick the right boxes seems pretty egregious. Tricky.
BBB is a ridiculously low offer for such places. If they were saying 3 As or AAB, rather than usual offer of AAA*, after considering a range of other factors, doesn't seem unreasonable. But BBB is miles below that.
Also remember the rules will be changing to post exam entry for unis in the near future, so all the predicted grade games will have gone away. It quite rightly will be based on what you actually achieved.
Is Boris PMQ announcement of 24/7 vaccination another one of his moonshot promises? Isn't the issue at the moment supply?
We definitely should be doing as longer hours if supply is there, the "people said they don't fancy coming before 8am" was a nonsense argument. But you have to have the infrastructure and supply there to do it.
Surely the correct answer to this is :.
"At the moment we're supply/manufacture constrained but once supply is no longer a bottleneck we envision our specialist vaccination centres will be going 24/7"
I suspect at some stage vaccination shot personnel might become the rate limiting factor - with the pandemic full on, is there enough staff to provide 24/7 coverage?
There's a psychological condition called Wernicke's Aphasia[sp] whereby people think they provide information but don't.
So, a conversation might go like this:
A: What did you do today? B: Oh, we had such a good time, it was very entertaining. My friend was there, you know the one.
People with it don't know they have it, so it tends to annoy everyone else. Unlike Broca's Aphasia (whereby people struggle to remember the word they wanted to say).
And all the posts trying to claim there was no story. I mean really.
The media can choose to make anything a story by banging on and on about it on 24 hour rolling news (usually to give a job to Phillippa Space).
Odd how Phillippa chooses to make it about the PM cycling within London for his exercise, whilst never choosing to make the story about media types taking intercontinental holidays in a pandemic. Perks of the job I guess....
I'm sure I would agree with that if I knew who the hell Phillippa Space was (I have never thought about it before but there are an awful lot of 'p's, 'i's and 'l's in Phillippa - there is no chance I would get that spelling right in my own)
Generic name for a jouirnalist who fills up space - geddit?
Ediut: the Eye equivalent is Polly Filler, after the DIY gunge.
The name is always female of course, because serious journalism should be left to the chaps.
n = 2, assumed p = 0.5, null hypothesis of chance occurrence of two females = 25%. Need more data.
Now I'll be keeping an eye open (so to speak) in the next issue of the Eye,. thanks to you ...
Private Eye is littered with casual sexism. The much more serious charge against it is that it's just not very funny. The state of satire in this country is abysmal right now, I'm not sure why. Good satire should be angry and funny, seems to me that right now people seem to manage only one of those at a time. The US does a much better job on this front although perhaps they have better material to work with.
Polly Filler is specifically a mockery of Polly Toynbee, I thought.
ManCock: "I'm really glad that we're able to send out food for those who receive free school meals" Piers Moron: "If you're that glad, why did you vote against it?" ManCock: "I'm glad that we were able to put this into place" Moron: "If you're that glad why did you, as Health Secretary, vote against it"
It's just so painful to watch. Why can't people just say yup, I got that one wrong? You can even make a virtue out of looking twice at an issue. People with fragile egos are the worst kind of leader.
" We were looking at a range of options and had not chosen that one at the time so I voted against it. The alternative was never to do nothing, it was to find the best solution. Recent problems with the boxes show that it was not an ideal solution but within days of the original vote the need to do something quickly overrode those objections so we changed our position."
I mean, this isn't hard. Why do Hancock and Williamson have to make it so?
Nicely worded, but why the trashing of the box idea? Is that Government policy? As far as I'm aware Boris has criticised what he's seen of some of the execution, not the whole box policy. If Hancock said that surely it would set the cat amongst the pigeons?
That wouldn't be trashing it, it would simply suggest that it is not without problems which is now unarguable. What Rashford wanted (other than a bloody goal, yet again) was the kitchens to remain open so that kids could (a) have a decent choice for a hot meal and (b) have some contact with "authority" if that was a good idea. If the kitchens are closed we are in the land of second best. Vouchers seems more sensible to me but IANAE.
The original plan was vouchers but then an MP decided that the vouchers could be traded for drugs - hence the need for a crappier solution...
It always depresses me how supposedly Conservative politicians find ideas of individual responsibility and respect of the individual so difficult to get their head around.
My brother has been getting these food boxes because he has terminal cancer and is shielding. He has given away most of the contents because it is not what he likes to eat. He has about 50 cans of minestrone though because his daughter doesn't like that every much. My guess would be that vouchers "wasted" on cigarettes and drink< contents wasted because no one wants to eat them, but, as I say, IANAE.
Vouchers exchanged for items other than food doesn't help kids, having food around the house does. I'm sure it's a baffler to nice, sensible people, but substance abuse issues clearly affect some people who are being helped by these boxes, and this is one way around it.
It pains me to say it (as the care system is itself riddled with problems) but children in households in which the parents would trade food vouchers to buy drugs, thus leaving the children hungry should not be left in those households. The problem isn't food vouchers in that case, it is that the children should not be there at all (and that the parents need help).
Maybe I'm just a naive nice sensible person, but I can't help believing that such situations are massively in the minority of those helped by free school meals/vouchers/boxes.
You point out the issue with your own argument. Such kids are not necessarily better off joining the care merry-go-round.
I have a lot of issues with the food boxes, not just relating to the monetary value of the contents, but also the nature of the contents - specifically the lack of protein and healthy fats, which kids growing up need - they can't live on carrot sticks. However, I'm not against the basic concept. This is to stop kids going hungry - there's nothing wrong in principle with giving food directly. It should just be done with thoughtfulness and care.
So it's better children are stuck (24 hours a day at the moment) with drug addicted parents than giving them a chance in a care system.
It's a view I suppose...
To be fair, @Luckyguy1983 did say that the kinds are not necessarily better off joining the care merry-go-round. He's right. In some cases it would be better for them to stay with the parents (or, more likely, mother). It would depend on the circumstances. Not an easy decision to take.
Been away all day working on my novel so am just picking this up.
I agree with Mike that those odds are attractive.
Either way, the Republicans will be out of office for at least 8 years. The first signs of traction would be the 2026 mid-terms.
The blood-letting which is about to begin inside the GOP is analogous to Labour in the 1980's only a whole heap deeper and more public. Even if the Republicans despatch Trump in the next seven days the legacy of what has happened will take a long time to dissipate. What took place on Capitol Hill will be etched into American consciousness for a generation. as concrete as the There is a comparison to be made between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler. And I'm delighted to write: 'fuck-off Godwin.' If we can't draw lessons from that most heinous period of human history then we will never learn our lessons. Trump, like that other Führer, is an oik. Both of them were rabble-rousers who were not establishment figures. Hitler's generals loathed him but, like Trump, felt powerless to do anything about it, or else lacked the courage. That's because both Trump and Hitler built a cult like obedience around them. Anyone who dissented was bumped off either literally (Hitler) or figuratively (Trump).
Perhaps the most sinister aspect to me of that comparison is that I think Trump would have gone through with a full-blown coup had this been 80 or 90 years ago.
Democrats will be in power now until at least 2028.
The Mystic has spoken. The Mystic has been pretty accurate on the U.S.
They are polar opposites. Trump has no motivation; he trolls the world to see what the outcome will be. He didn't particularly want a coup to happen or not happen, he just did and said a few things which tended to make one more likely, to see what would happen. What specific aim can you attribute to him which is as concrete and passionate as Hitler's goals of racial purity and territorial expansion?
Well I think I just smashed that litigation exam. Hopefully I'm not just deluded.
Great stuff!
Also, only just saw the good news re: @DavidL 's son. Should be back to normal by Michaelmas, too. Congrats!
Thanks. That gives me an excuse to go back to a link made to the Guardian (I think) where they are improving diversity by accepting some students with BBB grades.
Over 2,200 people applied to do PPE at Oxford this year. Roughly 750 got an interview and of them 254 got places, just over 1/10. Would it really fair if someone loses one of those rare places despite having AAA to improve diversity?
It's quite a difficult question. If you are at a poor school BBB may be an incredible achievement showing genuine talent but people do not get in by accident. They get in by incredibly hard work over an extended period (consistency is important) and a genuine commitment and passion for the subjects. For those in that group to lose out when they otherwise tick the right boxes seems pretty egregious. Tricky.
The nub of this is: you are much more likely to get AAA if you go to a private school. Is that because private school pupils are innately better than state school pupils? I don't think so.
The solution is very difficult but leaving things as they are is not a solution.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
And all the posts trying to claim there was no story. I mean really.
The media can choose to make anything a story by banging on and on about it on 24 hour rolling news (usually to give a job to Phillippa Space).
Odd how Phillippa chooses to make it about the PM cycling within London for his exercise, whilst never choosing to make the story about media types taking intercontinental holidays in a pandemic. Perks of the job I guess....
I'm sure I would agree with that if I knew who the hell Phillippa Space was (I have never thought about it before but there are an awful lot of 'p's, 'i's and 'l's in Phillippa - there is no chance I would get that spelling right in my own)
Generic name for a jouirnalist who fills up space - geddit?
Ediut: the Eye equivalent is Polly Filler, after the DIY gunge.
The name is always female of course, because serious journalism should be left to the chaps.
n = 2, assumed p = 0.5, null hypothesis of chance occurrence of two females = 25%. Need more data.
Now I'll be keeping an eye open (so to speak) in the next issue of the Eye,. thanks to you ...
Private Eye is littered with casual sexism. The much more serious charge against it is that it's just not very funny. The state of satire in this country is abysmal right now, I'm not sure why. Good satire should be angry and funny, seems to me that right now people seem to manage only one of those at a time. The US does a much better job on this front although perhaps they have better material to work with.
Oh, I take your point all right - it's a genuine one: I can't think of any male equivalent in the Eye.
Now that Philip has successfully defended the reputation of Tory donors, shall we go back to the issue of feeding deprived children?
The only reason we have this story at all is that the previous system - handing out vouchers to parents - was kiboshed by Tory MP moral outrage that poor parents spend the vouchers on "crack cocaine".
What is abundantly clear is that the most cost-effective way of getting cash for food to parents is a voucher. And the most reliable way of getting food to kids that can be turned into a meal that they will eat is a voucher.
ManCock was made a mess of this morning trying to justify why he is so happy that something he voted against is now being implemented. Local Teesside Tories - including the always resplendently morally outraged adulterer Simon Clarke - also voted against feeding these kids.
When I retweeted the clip of ManCock squirming and tagged in Clarke and Matt Vickers, a conversation about why they did so prompted me to reply "ve vere just obeying orders". Which got a like from Matt Vickers. Having met Matt I know that he isn't a Simon Clarke style degenerate, so his like feels like a sign that he knows he was only following orders as well...
Can we *please* go back to handing out vouchers?
It highlights the problem for thoughtful, principled small state libertarians. And such people clearly exist in significant numbers.
To get access to the corridors of power in the UK and US, they have allied themselves with the authoritarian populist element of the right wing. Again, that's a legitimate brand of politics, until you get to full-on-tonto Trumpism. (Not everything he said was intrinsically deplorable- just quite a lot of it.)
But once in power, thoughtful, principled small state libertarians have a problem. Disown the authoritarian bits, and your coalition is too small to win. Accept it, and seek to justify it, and you risk being dragged down by it. It's the old adage about tiger-riding being a brilliant idea, until you seek to dismount.
What's a thoughtful, principled small state libertarian to do?
As a self-professed one, put more effort into winning the argument?
Been away all day working on my novel so am just picking this up.
I agree with Mike that those odds are attractive.
Either way, the Republicans will be out of office for at least 8 years. The first signs of traction would be the 2026 mid-terms.
The blood-letting which is about to begin inside the GOP is analogous to Labour in the 1980's only a whole heap deeper and more public. Even if the Republicans dispatch Trump in the next seven days the legacy of what has happened will take a long time to dissipate. What took place on Capitol Hill will be etched into American consciousness for a generation.
There is a comparison to be made between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler. And I'm delighted to write: 'fuck-off Godwin.' If we can't draw lessons from that most heinous period of human history then we will never learn our lessons. Trump, like that other Führer, is an oik. Both of them were rabble-rousers who were not establishment figures. Hitler's generals loathed him but, like Trump, felt powerless to do anything about it, or else lacked the courage. That's because both Trump and Hitler built a cult like obedience around them. Anyone who dissented was bumped off either literally (Hitler) or figuratively (Trump).
Perhaps the most sinister aspect to me of that comparison is that I think Trump would have gone through with a full-blown coup had this been 80 or 90 years ago.
Democrats will be in power now until at least 2028.
The Mystic has spoken. The Mystic has been pretty accurate on the U.S.
I think the Republicans will be back a lot sooner than that. American politics is famously short-term and I expect the GOP to at least win the House in 2022. It is probably fair to say the Dems are strong favourites to hold the presidency in 2024 though.
I agree the last time a party lost the White House after 1 term, the Democrats in 1980, they did not retake the Presidency until 1992.
However the Democrats controlled the House throughout the Reagan and Bush 41 Presidencies
I believe there were several hundred chaps from the Indian Army at Dunkirk.
Mind you, later in the war, the Germans did become quite multi-cultural.
Were they in the film, though? If not, perhaps that backs up the original point? The criticism as I understand it is of Dunkirk the film not Dunkirk the historical event, an important distinction no doubt lost in Harry Cole's Culture War (now that does sound like a boring film - white boys waiting for bantz). I've not seen the film (or the historical event) although I do remember the Dunkirk scenes in Atonement dragging on a bit.
It's a Nolan film, ie its overhyped.
It was good in the cinema (remember them) with the surround sound effects and the big screen. On the TV it was meh.
His films are typically pretty good , and I liked it. But he gets a pass on storytelling in some films because of technical brilliance in my opinion. Tenet springs to mind.
I watched it again over Christmas and it definitely hasn’t improved with age. For a movie with minimal dialogue, what there is is pretty dire. Also how much fecking ammunition was Tom Hardy’s Spitfire carrying?
More than 16sec? It had little elves in the wing bays to reload the .303s, obvs. Artistic licence.
I went into the film with great expectations (probably an error), found it unwatchable and gave up before Hardy even made his first appearance. Wallowing comes to mind as a descriptor. The worst type of nostalgia.
I managed to sit through the whole thing. Am I alone in thinking that national treasure Mark Rylance has become a bit of an unbearable luvvie in his onscreen performances ?
It needed some more robust subplots, for those to whom it was not a revelation that the white boys [spoiler] got their boats by and large.
Dunkirk worked for me on a PC with headphones but I had been forewarned about the three different timelines.
Rather like The Imitation Game (Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing) Dunkirk suffered from writers who'd not understood fundamental points about their subject matter:- 1) The sheer scale of the thing -- it should have used CGI to fill in hundreds of thousands of people on the beach, rather than a socially distanced queue outside a supermarket 2) The French sub-plot was silly given it was policy to evacuate French soldiers alongside British
ManCock: "I'm really glad that we're able to send out food for those who receive free school meals" Piers Moron: "If you're that glad, why did you vote against it?" ManCock: "I'm glad that we were able to put this into place" Moron: "If you're that glad why did you, as Health Secretary, vote against it"
It's just so painful to watch. Why can't people just say yup, I got that one wrong? You can even make a virtue out of looking twice at an issue. People with fragile egos are the worst kind of leader.
" We were looking at a range of options and had not chosen that one at the time so I voted against it. The alternative was never to do nothing, it was to find the best solution. Recent problems with the boxes show that it was not an ideal solution but within days of the original vote the need to do something quickly overrode those objections so we changed our position."
I mean, this isn't hard. Why do Hancock and Williamson have to make it so?
Nicely worded, but why the trashing of the box idea? Is that Government policy? As far as I'm aware Boris has criticised what he's seen of some of the execution, not the whole box policy. If Hancock said that surely it would set the cat amongst the pigeons?
That wouldn't be trashing it, it would simply suggest that it is not without problems which is now unarguable. What Rashford wanted (other than a bloody goal, yet again) was the kitchens to remain open so that kids could (a) have a decent choice for a hot meal and (b) have some contact with "authority" if that was a good idea. If the kitchens are closed we are in the land of second best. Vouchers seems more sensible to me but IANAE.
The original plan was vouchers but then an MP decided that the vouchers could be traded for drugs - hence the need for a crappier solution...
It always depresses me how supposedly Conservative politicians find ideas of individual responsibility and respect of the individual so difficult to get their head around.
My brother has been getting these food boxes because he has terminal cancer and is shielding. He has given away most of the contents because it is not what he likes to eat. He has about 50 cans of minestrone though because his daughter doesn't like that every much. My guess would be that vouchers "wasted" on cigarettes and drink< contents wasted because no one wants to eat them, but, as I say, IANAE.
Vouchers exchanged for items other than food doesn't help kids, having food around the house does. I'm sure it's a baffler to nice, sensible people, but substance abuse issues clearly affect some people who are being helped by these boxes, and this is one way around it.
It pains me to say it (as the care system is itself riddled with problems) but children in households in which the parents would trade food vouchers to buy drugs, thus leaving the children hungry should not be left in those households. The problem isn't food vouchers in that case, it is that the children should not be there at all (and that the parents need help).
Maybe I'm just a naive nice sensible person, but I can't help believing that such situations are massively in the minority of those helped by free school meals/vouchers/boxes.
You point out the issue with your own argument. Such kids are not necessarily better off joining the care merry-go-round.
I have a lot of issues with the food boxes, not just relating to the monetary value of the contents, but also the nature of the contents - specifically the lack of protein and healthy fats, which kids growing up need - they can't live on carrot sticks. However, I'm not against the basic concept. This is to stop kids going hungry - there's nothing wrong in principle with giving food directly. It should just be done with thoughtfulness and care.
So it's better children are stuck (24 hours a day at the moment) with drug addicted parents than giving them a chance in a care system.
It's a view I suppose...
To be fair, @Luckyguy1983 did say that the kinds are not necessarily better off joining the care merry-go-round. He's right. In some cases it would be better for them to stay with the parents (or, more likely, mother). It would depend on the circumstances. Not an easy decision to take.
If the parents are drug addicted the children should at the very least known to social services. If they aren't that's already a failure elsewhere in the education / social care departments.
If the parents are drug addicted the children should at the very least known to social services. If they aren't that's already a failure elsewhere in the education / social care departments.
Yes, of course, but that's a different point again.
ManCock: "I'm really glad that we're able to send out food for those who receive free school meals" Piers Moron: "If you're that glad, why did you vote against it?" ManCock: "I'm glad that we were able to put this into place" Moron: "If you're that glad why did you, as Health Secretary, vote against it"
It's just so painful to watch. Why can't people just say yup, I got that one wrong? You can even make a virtue out of looking twice at an issue. People with fragile egos are the worst kind of leader.
" We were looking at a range of options and had not chosen that one at the time so I voted against it. The alternative was never to do nothing, it was to find the best solution. Recent problems with the boxes show that it was not an ideal solution but within days of the original vote the need to do something quickly overrode those objections so we changed our position."
I mean, this isn't hard. Why do Hancock and Williamson have to make it so?
Nicely worded, but why the trashing of the box idea? Is that Government policy? As far as I'm aware Boris has criticised what he's seen of some of the execution, not the whole box policy. If Hancock said that surely it would set the cat amongst the pigeons?
That wouldn't be trashing it, it would simply suggest that it is not without problems which is now unarguable. What Rashford wanted (other than a bloody goal, yet again) was the kitchens to remain open so that kids could (a) have a decent choice for a hot meal and (b) have some contact with "authority" if that was a good idea. If the kitchens are closed we are in the land of second best. Vouchers seems more sensible to me but IANAE.
The original plan was vouchers but then an MP decided that the vouchers could be traded for drugs - hence the need for a crappier solution...
It always depresses me how supposedly Conservative politicians find ideas of individual responsibility and respect of the individual so difficult to get their head around.
My brother has been getting these food boxes because he has terminal cancer and is shielding. He has given away most of the contents because it is not what he likes to eat. He has about 50 cans of minestrone though because his daughter doesn't like that every much. My guess would be that vouchers "wasted" on cigarettes and drink< contents wasted because no one wants to eat them, but, as I say, IANAE.
Vouchers exchanged for items other than food doesn't help kids, having food around the house does. I'm sure it's a baffler to nice, sensible people, but substance abuse issues clearly affect some people who are being helped by these boxes, and this is one way around it.
It pains me to say it (as the care system is itself riddled with problems) but children in households in which the parents would trade food vouchers to buy drugs, thus leaving the children hungry should not be left in those households. The problem isn't food vouchers in that case, it is that the children should not be there at all (and that the parents need help).
Maybe I'm just a naive nice sensible person, but I can't help believing that such situations are massively in the minority of those helped by free school meals/vouchers/boxes.
You point out the issue with your own argument. Such kids are not necessarily better off joining the care merry-go-round.
I have a lot of issues with the food boxes, not just relating to the monetary value of the contents, but also the nature of the contents - specifically the lack of protein and healthy fats, which kids growing up need - they can't live on carrot sticks. However, I'm not against the basic concept. This is to stop kids going hungry - there's nothing wrong in principle with giving food directly. It should just be done with thoughtfulness and care.
So it's better children are stuck (24 hours a day at the moment) with drug addicted parents than giving them a chance in a care system.
It's a view I suppose...
I am saying that there is an entire spectrum of families in difficult financial circumstances, and not all who might, in a weak moment, be tempted by the opportunity to trade in a voucher for ready-cash are necessarily 24-7 dangerous junkies.
I merely maintain that the problem here was about shitty food boxes, not food boxes.
There is also a side issue of the Government's favoured contractor for this work having a poor track record in this area - that's also an issue that needs to be dealth with. Personally, I'd have chosen someone like Morrissons to do it.
Been away all day working on my novel so am just picking this up.
I agree with Mike that those odds are attractive.
Either way, the Republicans will be out of office for at least 8 years. The first signs of traction would be the 2026 mid-terms.
The blood-letting which is about to begin inside the GOP is analogous to Labour in the 1980's only a whole heap deeper and more public. Even if the Republicans dispatch Trump in the next seven days the legacy of what has happened will take a long time to dissipate. What took place on Capitol Hill will be etched into American consciousness for a generation.
There is a comparison to be made between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler. And I'm delighted to write: 'fuck-off Godwin.' If we can't draw lessons from that most heinous period of human history then we will never learn our lessons. Trump, like that other Führer, is an oik. Both of them were rabble-rousers who were not establishment figures. Hitler's generals loathed him but, like Trump, felt powerless to do anything about it, or else lacked the courage. That's because both Trump and Hitler built a cult like obedience around them. Anyone who dissented was bumped off either literally (Hitler) or figuratively (Trump).
Perhaps the most sinister aspect to me of that comparison is that I think Trump would have gone through with a full-blown coup had this been 80 or 90 years ago.
Democrats will be in power now until at least 2028.
The Mystic has spoken. The Mystic has been pretty accurate on the U.S.
I think the Republicans will be back a lot sooner than that. American politics is famously short-term and I expect the GOP to at least win the House in 2022.
Not a chance.
And you should be worried that HYUD liked that. No more certain a bellweather on American politics could you find. The Dennis Healey of pb.com. You can be sure that everything he says, the opposite is in fact true.
By 2022 the Dems will be seen to be putting covid behind the country and Americans will be looking back to these 4 years as they did to the Vietnam War.
It will be a long, long, time before the GOP hold power again.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
And AAA from Gasworks St Comp is a better predictor of a first class degree in the end than from Eton, I suspect, from observations amongst my friends - all more or less equally bright in their wats but some of the ones from proivate schools had less staying power when the magisterial lash was removed and thet had to self-motivate much more once at Uni. Though all got goods and productive careers in their ways.
Is Boris PMQ announcement of 24/7 vaccination another one of his moonshot promises? Isn't the issue at the moment supply?
We definitely should be doing as longer hours if supply is there, the "people said they don't fancy coming before 8am" was a nonsense argument. But you have to have the infrastructure and supply there to do it.
Surely the correct answer to this is :.
"At the moment we're supply/manufacture constrained but once supply is no longer a bottleneck we envision our specialist vaccination centres will be going 24/7"
It is. Gordon Brittas knows that supply is the issue and trying to score cheap political point and Boris can't help himself and come up with some new moonshot.
Stratton comments yesterday about people not keen on getting vaccinated outside of 8am to 8pm was stupid.
When it comes to population wide vaccination programme you have to be willing to take what you are given (provided not some obvious issues). If you are fit, healthy and have access to a car, being asked to go 30 miles for 7am, you do it.
Its like masks, it isn't all about you, its about everybody.
Well I think I just smashed that litigation exam. Hopefully I'm not just deluded.
Great stuff!
Also, only just saw the good news re: @DavidL 's son. Should be back to normal by Michaelmas, too. Congrats!
Thanks. That gives me an excuse to go back to a link made to the Guardian (I think) where they are improving diversity by accepting some students with BBB grades.
Over 2,200 people applied to do PPE at Oxford this year. Roughly 750 got an interview and of them 254 got places, just over 1/10. Would it really fair if someone loses one of those rare places despite having AAA to improve diversity?
It's quite a difficult question. If you are at a poor school BBB may be an incredible achievement showing genuine talent but people do not get in by accident. They get in by incredibly hard work over an extended period (consistency is important) and a genuine commitment and passion for the subjects. For those in that group to lose out when they otherwise tick the right boxes seems pretty egregious. Tricky.
In my day they tended to take the BBBs or equivalent and then quietly chuck them out again a year later for failing mods/prelims. It is sad but true that the BBB may be a relatively incredible achievement but doesn't mean you can make up lost ground to the extent the syllabus requires.
Well I think I just smashed that litigation exam. Hopefully I'm not just deluded.
Great stuff!
Also, only just saw the good news re: @DavidL 's son. Should be back to normal by Michaelmas, too. Congrats!
Thanks. That gives me an excuse to go back to a link made to the Guardian (I think) where they are improving diversity by accepting some students with BBB grades.
Over 2,200 people applied to do PPE at Oxford this year. Roughly 750 got an interview and of them 254 got places, just over 1/10. Would it really fair if someone loses one of those rare places despite having AAA to improve diversity?
It's quite a difficult question. If you are at a poor school BBB may be an incredible achievement showing genuine talent but people do not get in by accident. They get in by incredibly hard work over an extended period (consistency is important) and a genuine commitment and passion for the subjects. For those in that group to lose out when they otherwise tick the right boxes seems pretty egregious. Tricky.
The nub of this is: you are much more likely to get AAA if you go to a private school. Is that because private school pupils are innately better than state school pupils? I don't think so.
The solution is very difficult but leaving things as they are is not a solution.
I don't disagree. Its not easy. My wife went to a school where she had no Chemistry teacher for 2 of the 3 terms when she was doing her Higher, where, when she and her pal who had gone to night school in despair, they were approached by her maths teacher and told just because she had passed the prelim didn't mean that they would pass the exam, where her modern studies teacher was found using her notes, you get the picture. To get enough qualifications from that to get to University was an astounding achievement.
The fact that that school is no better 40 years on is the real tragedy.
If the parents are drug addicted the children should at the very least known to social services. If they aren't that's already a failure elsewhere in the education / social care departments.
Yes, of course, but that's a different point again.
It's not.
The starting point of the entire story is drug addicted parents can't be trusted not to trade the vouchers for drugs.
So we ended up with overpriced food parcels instead.
Well I think I just smashed that litigation exam. Hopefully I'm not just deluded.
Great stuff!
Also, only just saw the good news re: @DavidL 's son. Should be back to normal by Michaelmas, too. Congrats!
Thanks. That gives me an excuse to go back to a link made to the Guardian (I think) where they are improving diversity by accepting some students with BBB grades.
Over 2,200 people applied to do PPE at Oxford this year. Roughly 750 got an interview and of them 254 got places, just over 1/10. Would it really fair if someone loses one of those rare places despite having AAA to improve diversity?
It's quite a difficult question. If you are at a poor school BBB may be an incredible achievement showing genuine talent but people do not get in by accident. They get in by incredibly hard work over an extended period (consistency is important) and a genuine commitment and passion for the subjects. For those in that group to lose out when they otherwise tick the right boxes seems pretty egregious. Tricky.
BBB is a ridiculously low offer for such places. If they were saying 3 As or AAB, rather than usual offer of AAA*, after considering a range of other factors, doesn't seem unreasonable. But BBB is miles below that.
Also remember the rules will be changing to post exam entry for unis in the near future, so all the predicted grade games will have gone away. It quite rightly will be based on what you actually achieved.
I thought the discussion within education these days was moving from a winnowing system to one that actually concentrates on education. Seems not from this post.
I said that the idea that this was charged £30 for two weeks was going to be fake news and I said I was prepared to do a charity bet to a food bank or other charity of your choice if I was wrong, if you wanted to take the bet.
I also said that the parcels were poor quality, unacceptable and something should be done about it but we should get to the truth.
Well *drum roll* it turns out I was . . . 100% correct.
The parcel involved was poor and I am glad there's been an apology and they're fixing it for the future - but it was not a £30 parcel. Instead it was a £10.50 one.
Still poor value for £10.50 but poor value for £10.50 and poor value for £30 are an order of magnitude different.
So I don't know if you took up my offer of the bet. If you did, please feel free to donate to a food bank or other charity of your choice. Thank you.
You get a like for continuing to dig your pit down towards Java.
I'm not digging a pit, I was right. 100% unambiguously correct.
The schools were charged £10.50 not £30 which was my contention, that there wasn't a chance on earth that was a £30 box. It was a £10 box (£10.50 technically) not a £30 box.
Last I checked £10 does not equal £30. Nor does £10.50.
Still poor, still needs sorting, I said all that, but the idea it was "what £30 gets you"? Unadulterated bullshit. Of course.
Unless you think the truth does not matter I was correct, wasn't I?
In Derbyshire a £30 box costs £14.40 retail so well under a tenner for Compass at wholesale
Still got to pay £4.7m PA to the CEO somehow I suppose
I'm sorry, but this sort of stuff is utter, vindictive, childish crap. The company makes virtually no money whatsoever from this contract. It's not a large part of its business at all. It's an extremely well-run company - one of the best in the world at what it does - and we need more such companies in the UK and paying UK corporation tax.
I can't comment on the actual food boxes (except that a lot of the pictures were quite obviously nothing to do with any big supplier), but I can make the very obvious point that the cost of sourcing, packing, and delivering food boxes is not just the cost of the raw ingredients. I'd have thought that at the very least £5 per box for putting it together, taking into account dietary requirements per child, and delivering it, would be what you'd expect, maybe quite a bit more depending on the quantities and the location. (That's one reason why vouchers probably make more sense, but that's a different argument).
Look at the Morrison £20 boxes for comparison. They manage to do far more for much less, with better nutrition and variety.
To be honest that is probably sufficient but it still leaves £10 for delivery and some more items.
As for the existing suppliers:
Why are they using mostly overpriced branded stuff? Why are they giving bottled water? Why do they repeatedly get in trouble for poor quality and quantity?
At best they really dont care, so if they dont make any money from it either why dont they leave it to someone else?
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
And AAA from Gasworks St Comp is a better predictor of a first class degree in the end than from Eton, I suspect, from observations amongst my friends - all more or less equally bright in their wats but some of the ones from proivate schools had less staying power when the magisterial lash was removed and thet had to self-motivate much more once at Uni. Though all got goods and productive careers in their ways.
I think the point is that from some schools a BBB from Gasworks St Comp is a better indicator than AAA from Eton.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
The point is whether BBB from Hackney is equivalent to AAA from St Cakes, though.
Is Boris PMQ announcement of 24/7 vaccination another one of his moonshot promises? Isn't the issue at the moment supply?
We definitely should be doing as longer hours if supply is there, the "people said they don't fancy coming before 8am" was a nonsense argument. But you have to have the infrastructure and supply there to do it.
Surely the correct answer to this is :.
"At the moment we're supply/manufacture constrained but once supply is no longer a bottleneck we envision our specialist vaccination centres will be going 24/7"
It is. Gordon Brittas knows that supply is the issue and trying to score cheap political point and Boris can't help himself and come up with some new moonshot.
Stratton comments yesterday about people not keen on getting vaccinated outside of 8am to 8pm was stupid.
When it comes to population wide vaccination programme you have to be willing to take what you are given (provided not some obvious issues). If you are fit, healthy and have access to a car, being asked to go 30 miles for 7am, you do it.
Its like masks, it isn't all about you, its about everybody.
If you're fit and healthy then why are you being asked to get vaccinated at the minute? Apart from healthcare workers who ought to be able to take whatever slot they're given at the minute.
How many octogenarians are keen to get a slot outside of 8am-8pm? If we're supply limited and we can get through the supply in those 12 hours its surely better to do so.
The problem with giving people a silly timeslot they don't want is they're more likely to not turn up for the slot, which then means you're potentially wasting the vaccine because it isn't getting used as expected and you only have 3 days to use it. Make sure you use it all, but make sure people turn up for their appointments to do so too.
Been away all day working on my novel so am just picking this up.
I agree with Mike that those odds are attractive.
Either way, the Republicans will be out of office for at least 8 years. The first signs of traction would be the 2026 mid-terms.
The blood-letting which is about to begin inside the GOP is analogous to Labour in the 1980's only a whole heap deeper and more public. Even if the Republicans dispatch Trump in the next seven days the legacy of what has happened will take a long time to dissipate. What took place on Capitol Hill will be etched into American consciousness for a generation.
There is a comparison to be made between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler. And I'm delighted to write: 'fuck-off Godwin.' If we can't draw lessons from that most heinous period of human history then we will never learn our lessons. Trump, like that other Führer, is an oik. Both of them were rabble-rousers who were not establishment figures. Hitler's generals loathed him but, like Trump, felt powerless to do anything about it, or else lacked the courage. That's because both Trump and Hitler built a cult like obedience around them. Anyone who dissented was bumped off either literally (Hitler) or figuratively (Trump).
Perhaps the most sinister aspect to me of that comparison is that I think Trump would have gone through with a full-blown coup had this been 80 or 90 years ago.
Democrats will be in power now until at least 2028.
The Mystic has spoken. The Mystic has been pretty accurate on the U.S.
I think the Republicans will be back a lot sooner than that. American politics is famously short-term and I expect the GOP to at least win the House in 2022.
Not a chance.
And you should be worried that HYUD liked that. No more certain a bellweather on American politics could you find. The Dennis Healey of pb.com. You can be sure that everything he says, the opposite is in fact true.
By 2022 the Dems will be seen to be putting covid behind the country and Americans will be looking back to these 4 years as they did to the Vietnam War.
It will be a long, long, time before the GOP hold power again.
I'm no fan of HYUFD's prediction but the precedent for how the President's party does in the midterms is pretty clear. bear in mind that redistricting alone will wipe out the Dems' majority.
The single biggest policy move for social mobility / access to the best unis is post exam application. Gone is all the horseplay, unis can see what the students achieved vs the population on the same exams, how the school they came from actually did and can then assess a candidate based on all these performance factors.
And all the posts trying to claim there was no story. I mean really.
The media can choose to make anything a story by banging on and on about it on 24 hour rolling news (usually to give a job to Phillippa Space).
Odd how Phillippa chooses to make it about the PM cycling within London for his exercise, whilst never choosing to make the story about media types taking intercontinental holidays in a pandemic. Perks of the job I guess....
I'm sure I would agree with that if I knew who the hell Phillippa Space was (I have never thought about it before but there are an awful lot of 'p's, 'i's and 'l's in Phillippa - there is no chance I would get that spelling right in my own)
Generic name for a jouirnalist who fills up space - geddit?
Ediut: the Eye equivalent is Polly Filler, after the DIY gunge.
The name is always female of course, because serious journalism should be left to the chaps.
n = 2, assumed p = 0.5, null hypothesis of chance occurrence of two females = 25%. Need more data.
Now I'll be keeping an eye open (so to speak) in the next issue of the Eye,. thanks to you ...
Private Eye is littered with casual sexism. The much more serious charge against it is that it's just not very funny. The state of satire in this country is abysmal right now, I'm not sure why. Good satire should be angry and funny, seems to me that right now people seem to manage only one of those at a time. The US does a much better job on this front although perhaps they have better material to work with.
Oh, I take your point all right - it's a genuine one: I can't think of any male equivalent in the Eye.
Polly Filla could be based in part on a well-known Guardian lady columnist, perhaps?
I said that the idea that this was charged £30 for two weeks was going to be fake news and I said I was prepared to do a charity bet to a food bank or other charity of your choice if I was wrong, if you wanted to take the bet.
I also said that the parcels were poor quality, unacceptable and something should be done about it but we should get to the truth.
Well *drum roll* it turns out I was . . . 100% correct.
The parcel involved was poor and I am glad there's been an apology and they're fixing it for the future - but it was not a £30 parcel. Instead it was a £10.50 one.
Still poor value for £10.50 but poor value for £10.50 and poor value for £30 are an order of magnitude different.
So I don't know if you took up my offer of the bet. If you did, please feel free to donate to a food bank or other charity of your choice. Thank you.
You get a like for continuing to dig your pit down towards Java.
I'm not digging a pit, I was right. 100% unambiguously correct.
The schools were charged £10.50 not £30 which was my contention, that there wasn't a chance on earth that was a £30 box. It was a £10 box (£10.50 technically) not a £30 box.
Last I checked £10 does not equal £30. Nor does £10.50.
Still poor, still needs sorting, I said all that, but the idea it was "what £30 gets you"? Unadulterated bullshit. Of course.
Unless you think the truth does not matter I was correct, wasn't I?
In Derbyshire a £30 box costs £14.40 retail so well under a tenner for Compass at wholesale
Still got to pay £4.7m PA to the CEO somehow I suppose
I'm sorry, but this sort of stuff is utter, vindictive, childish crap. The company makes virtually no money whatsoever from this contract. It's not a large part of its business at all. It's an extremely well-run company - one of the best in the world at what it does - and we need more such companies in the UK and paying UK corporation tax.
I can't comment on the actual food boxes (except that a lot of the pictures were quite obviously nothing to do with any big supplier), but I can make the very obvious point that the cost of sourcing, packing, and delivering food boxes is not just the cost of the raw ingredients. I'd have thought that at the very least £5 per box for putting it together, taking into account dietary requirements per child, and delivering it, would be what you'd expect, maybe quite a bit more depending on the quantities and the location. (That's one reason why vouchers probably make more sense, but that's a different argument).
With apologies, but this really is a mile off reality. 1) The company makes virtually no money from this. They are packing £5 of food into a £10 package, or £15 into a £23 package. Thats a whole lot of profit. Yes they have to be packed, but they pack a lot of boxes all day every day. As do the supermarkets who actively make a loss on their operations 2) They don't need to consider nutritional needs whilst packing a list of products specified by the client. They just need someone to pack them into the box. Assume £9 per head per hour thats a pack rate of less than 2 boxes an hour. I've seen some padding on factory costs in my time but this is off the scale
The best case scenario in this operation is that the taxpayer is throwing money at contractors like Chartwells who are pocketing significant amounts of it. To deliver largely random food that barely makes meals at all never mind ones that the child its aimed at will eat.
All because Tory MPs think poor parents spend handouts on crack.
I said that the idea that this was charged £30 for two weeks was going to be fake news and I said I was prepared to do a charity bet to a food bank or other charity of your choice if I was wrong, if you wanted to take the bet.
I also said that the parcels were poor quality, unacceptable and something should be done about it but we should get to the truth.
Well *drum roll* it turns out I was . . . 100% correct.
The parcel involved was poor and I am glad there's been an apology and they're fixing it for the future - but it was not a £30 parcel. Instead it was a £10.50 one.
Still poor value for £10.50 but poor value for £10.50 and poor value for £30 are an order of magnitude different.
So I don't know if you took up my offer of the bet. If you did, please feel free to donate to a food bank or other charity of your choice. Thank you.
You get a like for continuing to dig your pit down towards Java.
I'm not digging a pit, I was right. 100% unambiguously correct.
The schools were charged £10.50 not £30 which was my contention, that there wasn't a chance on earth that was a £30 box. It was a £10 box (£10.50 technically) not a £30 box.
Last I checked £10 does not equal £30. Nor does £10.50.
Still poor, still needs sorting, I said all that, but the idea it was "what £30 gets you"? Unadulterated bullshit. Of course.
Unless you think the truth does not matter I was correct, wasn't I?
In Derbyshire a £30 box costs £14.40 retail so well under a tenner for Compass at wholesale
Still got to pay £4.7m PA to the CEO somehow I suppose
I'm sorry, but this sort of stuff is utter, vindictive, childish crap. The company makes virtually no money whatsoever from this contract. It's not a large part of its business at all. It's an extremely well-run company - one of the best in the world at what it does - and we need more such companies in the UK and paying UK corporation tax.
I can't comment on the actual food boxes (except that a lot of the pictures were quite obviously nothing to do with any big supplier), but I can make the very obvious point that the cost of sourcing, packing, and delivering food boxes is not just the cost of the raw ingredients. I'd have thought that at the very least £5 per box for putting it together, taking into account dietary requirements per child, and delivering it, would be what you'd expect, maybe quite a bit more depending on the quantities and the location. (That's one reason why vouchers probably make more sense, but that's a different argument).
Look at the Morrison £20 boxes for comparison. They manage to do far more for much less, with better nutrition and variety.
To be honest that is probably sufficient but it still leaves £10 for delivery and some more items.
As for the existing suppliers:
Why are they using mostly overpriced branded stuff? Why are they giving bottled water? Why do they repeatedly get in trouble for poor quality and quantity?
At best they really dont care, so if they dont make any money from it either why dont they leave it to someone else?
Supermarkets are always going to be cheaper and better value for money than any alternative as they have the scale and buying power to dominate. Getting a middle company involved to box it up is never going to be cost efficient.
Which is another reason why vouchers are far superior. If you're going to offer help then let the free market decide, give a voucher they can spend anywhere and let the parents take responsibility for themselves. Free market economics.
On topic, thinking from McConnell's standpoint, I am struggling to see the logic of why he would come out for impeachment:
Reasons why to back impeachment
- gets rid of Trump, - can possibly re-establish control of the party (but not certain); - can recover suburban voters (but not certain - trends have been shifting away from the Republicans)
Reasons why not to back impeachment
- Major risk of civil war in the party - RNC is controlled by Trump supporters and the WSJ poll showed well over half choosing Trump over the GOP if forced to choose; - limited support in the House - max 20 (<10% of base) GOP Congress members to vote for it, McCarthy has said he doesn't want a vote; - Rebellion in the Senate - not only from Hawley, Cruz et al but those who are up for re-election in 2022 who might feel this puts them at risk (e.g. Rubio); - Crucially, puts at risk a 2022 Senate Republican majority - 3 Republican seats (PA, WI, NC) are in very marginal states and incumbents are retiring. It's possible a backlash against the move puts Grassley's seat at risk also. In addition, McConnell probably hopeful he could pick up Arizona, Warlock's seat and possibly Nevada in a backlash year.
Joe Manchin, who I'm guessing probably has a decent relationship with McConnell, has said the numbers are not there for impeachment and I'd probably trust his word on this than the NYT.
And all the posts trying to claim there was no story. I mean really.
The media can choose to make anything a story by banging on and on about it on 24 hour rolling news (usually to give a job to Phillippa Space).
Odd how Phillippa chooses to make it about the PM cycling within London for his exercise, whilst never choosing to make the story about media types taking intercontinental holidays in a pandemic. Perks of the job I guess....
I'm sure I would agree with that if I knew who the hell Phillippa Space was (I have never thought about it before but there are an awful lot of 'p's, 'i's and 'l's in Phillippa - there is no chance I would get that spelling right in my own)
Generic name for a jouirnalist who fills up space - geddit?
Ediut: the Eye equivalent is Polly Filler, after the DIY gunge.
The name is always female of course, because serious journalism should be left to the chaps.
n = 2, assumed p = 0.5, null hypothesis of chance occurrence of two females = 25%. Need more data.
Now I'll be keeping an eye open (so to speak) in the next issue of the Eye,. thanks to you ...
Private Eye is littered with casual sexism. The much more serious charge against it is that it's just not very funny. The state of satire in this country is abysmal right now, I'm not sure why. Good satire should be angry and funny, seems to me that right now people seem to manage only one of those at a time. The US does a much better job on this front although perhaps they have better material to work with.
You are spot on as regards the sexism point. It is clearly evident from its employment practices. Can you, for example, name a single female cartoonist that they regularly use? It's not that there aren't any around.
Well I think I just smashed that litigation exam. Hopefully I'm not just deluded.
Great stuff!
Also, only just saw the good news re: @DavidL 's son. Should be back to normal by Michaelmas, too. Congrats!
Thanks. That gives me an excuse to go back to a link made to the Guardian (I think) where they are improving diversity by accepting some students with BBB grades.
Over 2,200 people applied to do PPE at Oxford this year. Roughly 750 got an interview and of them 254 got places, just over 1/10. Would it really fair if someone loses one of those rare places despite having AAA to improve diversity?
It's quite a difficult question. If you are at a poor school BBB may be an incredible achievement showing genuine talent but people do not get in by accident. They get in by incredibly hard work over an extended period (consistency is important) and a genuine commitment and passion for the subjects. For those in that group to lose out when they otherwise tick the right boxes seems pretty egregious. Tricky.
In my day they tended to take the BBBs or equivalent and then quietly chuck them out again a year later for failing mods/prelims. It is sad but true that the BBB may be a relatively incredible achievement but doesn't mean you can make up lost ground to the extent the syllabus requires.
The reason we have paid private school fees for our children is that they not only get the grades they need but they get a thorough and detailed education which gives them a great foundation on which to build. I think the Universities do try to help with supplementary classes for this. How successful they are, I don't know.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Been away all day working on my novel so am just picking this up.
I agree with Mike that those odds are attractive.
Either way, the Republicans will be out of office for at least 8 years. The first signs of traction would be the 2026 mid-terms.
The blood-letting which is about to begin inside the GOP is analogous to Labour in the 1980's only a whole heap deeper and more public. Even if the Republicans dispatch Trump in the next seven days the legacy of what has happened will take a long time to dissipate. What took place on Capitol Hill will be etched into American consciousness for a generation.
There is a comparison to be made between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler. And I'm delighted to write: 'fuck-off Godwin.' If we can't draw lessons from that most heinous period of human history then we will never learn our lessons. Trump, like that other Führer, is an oik. Both of them were rabble-rousers who were not establishment figures. Hitler's generals loathed him but, like Trump, felt powerless to do anything about it, or else lacked the courage. That's because both Trump and Hitler built a cult like obedience around them. Anyone who dissented was bumped off either literally (Hitler) or figuratively (Trump).
Perhaps the most sinister aspect to me of that comparison is that I think Trump would have gone through with a full-blown coup had this been 80 or 90 years ago.
Democrats will be in power now until at least 2028.
The Mystic has spoken. The Mystic has been pretty accurate on the U.S.
I think the Republicans will be back a lot sooner than that. American politics is famously short-term and I expect the GOP to at least win the House in 2022.
Not a chance.
And you should be worried that HYUD liked that. No more certain a bellweather on American politics could you find. The Dennis Healey of pb.com. You can be sure that everything he says, the opposite is in fact true.
By 2022 the Dems will be seen to be putting covid behind the country and Americans will be looking back to these 4 years as they did to the Vietnam War.
It will be a long, long, time before the GOP hold power again.
I said that the idea that this was charged £30 for two weeks was going to be fake news and I said I was prepared to do a charity bet to a food bank or other charity of your choice if I was wrong, if you wanted to take the bet.
I also said that the parcels were poor quality, unacceptable and something should be done about it but we should get to the truth.
Well *drum roll* it turns out I was . . . 100% correct.
The parcel involved was poor and I am glad there's been an apology and they're fixing it for the future - but it was not a £30 parcel. Instead it was a £10.50 one.
Still poor value for £10.50 but poor value for £10.50 and poor value for £30 are an order of magnitude different.
So I don't know if you took up my offer of the bet. If you did, please feel free to donate to a food bank or other charity of your choice. Thank you.
You get a like for continuing to dig your pit down towards Java.
I'm not digging a pit, I was right. 100% unambiguously correct.
The schools were charged £10.50 not £30 which was my contention, that there wasn't a chance on earth that was a £30 box. It was a £10 box (£10.50 technically) not a £30 box.
Last I checked £10 does not equal £30. Nor does £10.50.
Still poor, still needs sorting, I said all that, but the idea it was "what £30 gets you"? Unadulterated bullshit. Of course.
Unless you think the truth does not matter I was correct, wasn't I?
In Derbyshire a £30 box costs £14.40 retail so well under a tenner for Compass at wholesale
Still got to pay £4.7m PA to the CEO somehow I suppose
I'm sorry, but this sort of stuff is utter, vindictive, childish crap. The company makes virtually no money whatsoever from this contract. It's not a large part of its business at all. It's an extremely well-run company - one of the best in the world at what it does - and we need more such companies in the UK and paying UK corporation tax.
I can't comment on the actual food boxes (except that a lot of the pictures were quite obviously nothing to do with any big supplier), but I can make the very obvious point that the cost of sourcing, packing, and delivering food boxes is not just the cost of the raw ingredients. I'd have thought that at the very least £5 per box for putting it together, taking into account dietary requirements per child, and delivering it, would be what you'd expect, maybe quite a bit more depending on the quantities and the location. (That's one reason why vouchers probably make more sense, but that's a different argument).
With apologies, but this really is a mile off reality. 1) The company makes virtually no money from this. They are packing £5 of food into a £10 package, or £15 into a £23 package. Thats a whole lot of profit. Yes they have to be packed, but they pack a lot of boxes all day every day. As do the supermarkets who actively make a loss on their operations 2) They don't need to consider nutritional needs whilst packing a list of products specified by the client. They just need someone to pack them into the box. Assume £9 per head per hour thats a pack rate of less than 2 boxes an hour. I've seen some padding on factory costs in my time but this is off the scale
The best case scenario in this operation is that the taxpayer is throwing money at contractors like Chartwells who are pocketing significant amounts of it. To deliver largely random food that barely makes meals at all never mind ones that the child its aimed at will eat.
All because Tory MPs think poor parents spend handouts on crack.
Remarkable why they keep bidding for these contracts here and abroad when they make "virtually no money" from it. Most curious from an "extremely well run company", what a bizarre use of capital.
I said that the idea that this was charged £30 for two weeks was going to be fake news and I said I was prepared to do a charity bet to a food bank or other charity of your choice if I was wrong, if you wanted to take the bet.
I also said that the parcels were poor quality, unacceptable and something should be done about it but we should get to the truth.
Well *drum roll* it turns out I was . . . 100% correct.
The parcel involved was poor and I am glad there's been an apology and they're fixing it for the future - but it was not a £30 parcel. Instead it was a £10.50 one.
Still poor value for £10.50 but poor value for £10.50 and poor value for £30 are an order of magnitude different.
So I don't know if you took up my offer of the bet. If you did, please feel free to donate to a food bank or other charity of your choice. Thank you.
You get a like for continuing to dig your pit down towards Java.
I'm not digging a pit, I was right. 100% unambiguously correct.
The schools were charged £10.50 not £30 which was my contention, that there wasn't a chance on earth that was a £30 box. It was a £10 box (£10.50 technically) not a £30 box.
Last I checked £10 does not equal £30. Nor does £10.50.
Still poor, still needs sorting, I said all that, but the idea it was "what £30 gets you"? Unadulterated bullshit. Of course.
Unless you think the truth does not matter I was correct, wasn't I?
In Derbyshire a £30 box costs £14.40 retail so well under a tenner for Compass at wholesale
Still got to pay £4.7m PA to the CEO somehow I suppose
I'm sorry, but this sort of stuff is utter, vindictive, childish crap. The company makes virtually no money whatsoever from this contract. It's not a large part of its business at all. It's an extremely well-run company - one of the best in the world at what it does - and we need more such companies in the UK and paying UK corporation tax.
I can't comment on the actual food boxes (except that a lot of the pictures were quite obviously nothing to do with any big supplier), but I can make the very obvious point that the cost of sourcing, packing, and delivering food boxes is not just the cost of the raw ingredients. I'd have thought that at the very least £5 per box for putting it together, taking into account dietary requirements per child, and delivering it, would be what you'd expect, maybe quite a bit more depending on the quantities and the location. (That's one reason why vouchers probably make more sense, but that's a different argument).
With apologies, but this really is a mile off reality. 1) The company makes virtually no money from this. They are packing £5 of food into a £10 package, or £15 into a £23 package. Thats a whole lot of profit. Yes they have to be packed, but they pack a lot of boxes all day every day. As do the supermarkets who actively make a loss on their operations 2) They don't need to consider nutritional needs whilst packing a list of products specified by the client. They just need someone to pack them into the box. Assume £9 per head per hour thats a pack rate of less than 2 boxes an hour. I've seen some padding on factory costs in my time but this is off the scale
The best case scenario in this operation is that the taxpayer is throwing money at contractors like Chartwells who are pocketing significant amounts of it. To deliver largely random food that barely makes meals at all never mind ones that the child its aimed at will eat.
All because Tory MPs think poor parents spend handouts on crack.
You've never ran a business if you think COGS and Labour Costs are the only costs to a business.
Well I think I just smashed that litigation exam. Hopefully I'm not just deluded.
Great stuff!
Also, only just saw the good news re: @DavidL 's son. Should be back to normal by Michaelmas, too. Congrats!
Thanks. That gives me an excuse to go back to a link made to the Guardian (I think) where they are improving diversity by accepting some students with BBB grades.
Over 2,200 people applied to do PPE at Oxford this year. Roughly 750 got an interview and of them 254 got places, just over 1/10. Would it really fair if someone loses one of those rare places despite having AAA to improve diversity?
It's quite a difficult question. If you are at a poor school BBB may be an incredible achievement showing genuine talent but people do not get in by accident. They get in by incredibly hard work over an extended period (consistency is important) and a genuine commitment and passion for the subjects. For those in that group to lose out when they otherwise tick the right boxes seems pretty egregious. Tricky.
In my day they tended to take the BBBs or equivalent and then quietly chuck them out again a year later for failing mods/prelims. It is sad but true that the BBB may be a relatively incredible achievement but doesn't mean you can make up lost ground to the extent the syllabus requires.
Wasn't the idea that they were going to take these BBBs in and give them an extra (free) foundation year?
And all the posts trying to claim there was no story. I mean really.
The media can choose to make anything a story by banging on and on about it on 24 hour rolling news (usually to give a job to Phillippa Space).
Odd how Phillippa chooses to make it about the PM cycling within London for his exercise, whilst never choosing to make the story about media types taking intercontinental holidays in a pandemic. Perks of the job I guess....
I'm sure I would agree with that if I knew who the hell Phillippa Space was (I have never thought about it before but there are an awful lot of 'p's, 'i's and 'l's in Phillippa - there is no chance I would get that spelling right in my own)
Generic name for a jouirnalist who fills up space - geddit?
Ediut: the Eye equivalent is Polly Filler, after the DIY gunge.
The name is always female of course, because serious journalism should be left to the chaps.
n = 2, assumed p = 0.5, null hypothesis of chance occurrence of two females = 25%. Need more data.
Now I'll be keeping an eye open (so to speak) in the next issue of the Eye,. thanks to you ...
Private Eye is littered with casual sexism. The much more serious charge against it is that it's just not very funny. The state of satire in this country is abysmal right now, I'm not sure why. Good satire should be angry and funny, seems to me that right now people seem to manage only one of those at a time. The US does a much better job on this front although perhaps they have better material to work with.
Oh, I take your point all right - it's a genuine one: I can't think of any male equivalent in the Eye.
Polly Filla could be based in part on a well-known Guardian lady columnist, perhaps?
Presumably. As for Phillippa Space, you'd think something like Phil de Space might be more obvious, unless one was looking for a female name.
Well I think I just smashed that litigation exam. Hopefully I'm not just deluded.
Great stuff!
Also, only just saw the good news re: @DavidL 's son. Should be back to normal by Michaelmas, too. Congrats!
Thanks. That gives me an excuse to go back to a link made to the Guardian (I think) where they are improving diversity by accepting some students with BBB grades.
Over 2,200 people applied to do PPE at Oxford this year. Roughly 750 got an interview and of them 254 got places, just over 1/10. Would it really fair if someone loses one of those rare places despite having AAA to improve diversity?
It's quite a difficult question. If you are at a poor school BBB may be an incredible achievement showing genuine talent but people do not get in by accident. They get in by incredibly hard work over an extended period (consistency is important) and a genuine commitment and passion for the subjects. For those in that group to lose out when they otherwise tick the right boxes seems pretty egregious. Tricky.
In my day they tended to take the BBBs or equivalent and then quietly chuck them out again a year later for failing mods/prelims. It is sad but true that the BBB may be a relatively incredible achievement but doesn't mean you can make up lost ground to the extent the syllabus requires.
Wasn't the idea that they were going to take these BBBs in and give them an extra (free) foundation year?
A man who was photographed wearing a T-shirt that read “Camp Auschwitz” while inside the Capitol last week was arrested in Newport News, Va., on Wednesday morning in connection to the Capitol riot, according to two law enforcement officials.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
And AAA from Gasworks St Comp is a better predictor of a first class degree in the end than from Eton, I suspect, from observations amongst my friends - all more or less equally bright in their wats but some of the ones from proivate schools had less staying power when the magisterial lash was removed and thet had to self-motivate much more once at Uni. Though all got goods and productive careers in their ways.
I think the point is that from some schools a BBB from Gasworks St Comp is a better indicator than AAA from Eton.
That assumes that knowledge imparted at school is not really important at university.
A mathematics professor of my acquaintance was, several years ago, having to run supplementary basic maths courses for his first years. Since a chunk of the incoming students couldn't differentiate or integrate with any faculty, or ease - for example.
Is Boris PMQ announcement of 24/7 vaccination another one of his moonshot promises? Isn't the issue at the moment supply?
We definitely should be doing as longer hours if supply is there, the "people said they don't fancy coming before 8am" was a nonsense argument. But you have to have the infrastructure and supply there to do it.
Surely the correct answer to this is :.
"At the moment we're supply/manufacture constrained but once supply is no longer a bottleneck we envision our specialist vaccination centres will be going 24/7"
It is. Gordon Brittas knows that supply is the issue and trying to score cheap political point and Boris can't help himself and come up with some new moonshot.
Stratton comments yesterday about people not keen on getting vaccinated outside of 8am to 8pm was stupid.
When it comes to population wide vaccination programme you have to be willing to take what you are given (provided not some obvious issues). If you are fit, healthy and have access to a car, being asked to go 30 miles for 7am, you do it.
Its like masks, it isn't all about you, its about everybody.
If you're fit and healthy then why are you being asked to get vaccinated at the minute? Apart from healthcare workers who ought to be able to take whatever slot they're given at the minute.
How many octogenarians are keen to get a slot outside of 8am-8pm? If we're supply limited and we can get through the supply in those 12 hours its surely better to do so.
The problem with giving people a silly timeslot they don't want is they're more likely to not turn up for the slot, which then means you're potentially wasting the vaccine because it isn't getting used as expected and you only have 3 days to use it. Make sure you use it all, but make sure people turn up for their appointments to do so too.
That's why i caveated with fit and healthy, I am not talking about doing the 80 year olds.
As for people not turning up. Employ the airline ticketing model. You slightly overbook knowing not everybody will turn up. We can do that with Oxford and J&J vaccine, especially when plenty of supply. Also, we could do a "come between x and y", if we have any left, you can get one without an appointment.
I think given how long restrictions have been going on, the uptake will be significant, even if people are being asked to go for 7am or 9pm.
I believe there were several hundred chaps from the Indian Army at Dunkirk.
Mind you, later in the war, the Germans did become quite multi-cultural.
Were they in the film, though? If not, perhaps that backs up the original point? The criticism as I understand it is of Dunkirk the film not Dunkirk the historical event, an important distinction no doubt lost in Harry Cole's Culture War (now that does sound like a boring film - white boys waiting for bantz). I've not seen the film (or the historical event) although I do remember the Dunkirk scenes in Atonement dragging on a bit.
It's a Nolan film, ie its overhyped.
It was good in the cinema (remember them) with the surround sound effects and the big screen. On the TV it was meh.
His films are typically pretty good , and I liked it. But he gets a pass on storytelling in some films because of technical brilliance in my opinion. Tenet springs to mind.
I watched it again over Christmas and it definitely hasn’t improved with age. For a movie with minimal dialogue, what there is is pretty dire. Also how much fecking ammunition was Tom Hardy’s Spitfire carrying?
I saw it the first time in a cinema, where you are forced to focus on it and the size of the screen and the sound makes a bigger impact. It was an impressive film, one of those that make you feel you are there yourself, private Ryan style, although it was confusing that you kept being shown the same incident from different angles, and the timeline seemed all over the place.
I too watched it on TV over Xmas, and on a small screen, having seen it before, it was very meh. One of those films you only need to see once.
I know my opinion on this matter is stongly opposed by many people, but for me if a film is "meh" on the small screen then it is not worth seeing it in a cinema. The quality of the plot, the acting, the dialogue, the humour and the tension etc. of a good film is good enough to carry over to the small screen.
Another point is that I find the audio in a cinema is overworked to the level of being unrealistic. Just one example was in a serious film someone on screen slams a car door shut, but the sound engineer has produced has made the sound come over my left shoulder i.e. from a totally unrealistic place. And this kind of thing happens all the time in the cinema. When it happens it brings me out of the story and back again to sitting in a cinema.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
I trust you disapprove the record of the Education Secretary who closed the most (one M. Thatcher)?
Been away all day working on my novel so am just picking this up.
I agree with Mike that those odds are attractive.
Either way, the Republicans will be out of office for at least 8 years. The first signs of traction would be the 2026 mid-terms.
The blood-letting which is about to begin inside the GOP is analogous to Labour in the 1980's only a whole heap deeper and more public. Even if the Republicans despatch Trump in the next seven days the legacy of what has happened will take a long time to dissipate. What took place on Capitol Hill will be etched into American consciousness for a generation. as concrete as the There is a comparison to be made between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler. And I'm delighted to write: 'fuck-off Godwin.' If we can't draw lessons from that most heinous period of human history then we will never learn our lessons. Trump, like that other Führer, is an oik. Both of them were rabble-rousers who were not establishment figures. Hitler's generals loathed him but, like Trump, felt powerless to do anything about it, or else lacked the courage. That's because both Trump and Hitler built a cult like obedience around them. Anyone who dissented was bumped off either literally (Hitler) or figuratively (Trump).
Perhaps the most sinister aspect to me of that comparison is that I think Trump would have gone through with a full-blown coup had this been 80 or 90 years ago.
Democrats will be in power now until at least 2028.
The Mystic has spoken. The Mystic has been pretty accurate on the U.S.
They are polar opposites. Trump has no motivation; he trolls the world to see what the outcome will be. He didn't particularly want a coup to happen or not happen, he just did and said a few things which tended to make one more likely, to see what would happen. What specific aim can you attribute to him which is as concrete and passionate as Hitler's goals of racial purity and territorial expansion?
Hitler invading Western Europe made no sense in view of his stated aims -- lebensraum, uniting German speakers, Ukrainian agriculture, oil, Jews. There are times I think Ken was right about Hitler going a bit mad.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's had to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
I said that the idea that this was charged £30 for two weeks was going to be fake news and I said I was prepared to do a charity bet to a food bank or other charity of your choice if I was wrong, if you wanted to take the bet.
I also said that the parcels were poor quality, unacceptable and something should be done about it but we should get to the truth.
Well *drum roll* it turns out I was . . . 100% correct.
The parcel involved was poor and I am glad there's been an apology and they're fixing it for the future - but it was not a £30 parcel. Instead it was a £10.50 one.
Still poor value for £10.50 but poor value for £10.50 and poor value for £30 are an order of magnitude different.
So I don't know if you took up my offer of the bet. If you did, please feel free to donate to a food bank or other charity of your choice. Thank you.
You get a like for continuing to dig your pit down towards Java.
I'm not digging a pit, I was right. 100% unambiguously correct.
The schools were charged £10.50 not £30 which was my contention, that there wasn't a chance on earth that was a £30 box. It was a £10 box (£10.50 technically) not a £30 box.
Last I checked £10 does not equal £30. Nor does £10.50.
Still poor, still needs sorting, I said all that, but the idea it was "what £30 gets you"? Unadulterated bullshit. Of course.
Unless you think the truth does not matter I was correct, wasn't I?
In Derbyshire a £30 box costs £14.40 retail so well under a tenner for Compass at wholesale
Still got to pay £4.7m PA to the CEO somehow I suppose
I'm sorry, but this sort of stuff is utter, vindictive, childish crap. The company makes virtually no money whatsoever from this contract. It's not a large part of its business at all. It's an extremely well-run company - one of the best in the world at what it does - and we need more such companies in the UK and paying UK corporation tax.
I can't comment on the actual food boxes (except that a lot of the pictures were quite obviously nothing to do with any big supplier), but I can make the very obvious point that the cost of sourcing, packing, and delivering food boxes is not just the cost of the raw ingredients. I'd have thought that at the very least £5 per box for putting it together, taking into account dietary requirements per child, and delivering it, would be what you'd expect, maybe quite a bit more depending on the quantities and the location. (That's one reason why vouchers probably make more sense, but that's a different argument).
Look at the Morrison £20 boxes for comparison. They manage to do far more for much less, with better nutrition and variety.
To be honest that is probably sufficient but it still leaves £10 for delivery and some more items.
As for the existing suppliers:
Why are they using mostly overpriced branded stuff? Why are they giving bottled water? Why do they repeatedly get in trouble for poor quality and quantity?
At best they really dont care, so if they dont make any money from it either why dont they leave it to someone else?
Supermarkets are always going to be cheaper and better value for money than any alternative as they have the scale and buying power to dominate. Getting a middle company involved to box it up is never going to be cost efficient.
Which is another reason why vouchers are far superior. If you're going to offer help then let the free market decide, give a voucher they can spend anywhere and let the parents take responsibility for themselves. Free market economics.
Morrisons is a box! All anyone else would need to do is deliver it for under £10. Even Royal Mail could do that.
But yes it goes back to vouchers are best but the Tory party voted against continuing the national voucher scheme because they think it goes on crack and prostitutes.
I said that the idea that this was charged £30 for two weeks was going to be fake news and I said I was prepared to do a charity bet to a food bank or other charity of your choice if I was wrong, if you wanted to take the bet.
I also said that the parcels were poor quality, unacceptable and something should be done about it but we should get to the truth.
Well *drum roll* it turns out I was . . . 100% correct.
The parcel involved was poor and I am glad there's been an apology and they're fixing it for the future - but it was not a £30 parcel. Instead it was a £10.50 one.
Still poor value for £10.50 but poor value for £10.50 and poor value for £30 are an order of magnitude different.
So I don't know if you took up my offer of the bet. If you did, please feel free to donate to a food bank or other charity of your choice. Thank you.
You get a like for continuing to dig your pit down towards Java.
I'm not digging a pit, I was right. 100% unambiguously correct.
The schools were charged £10.50 not £30 which was my contention, that there wasn't a chance on earth that was a £30 box. It was a £10 box (£10.50 technically) not a £30 box.
Last I checked £10 does not equal £30. Nor does £10.50.
Still poor, still needs sorting, I said all that, but the idea it was "what £30 gets you"? Unadulterated bullshit. Of course.
Unless you think the truth does not matter I was correct, wasn't I?
In Derbyshire a £30 box costs £14.40 retail so well under a tenner for Compass at wholesale
Still got to pay £4.7m PA to the CEO somehow I suppose
I'm sorry, but this sort of stuff is utter, vindictive, childish crap. The company makes virtually no money whatsoever from this contract. It's not a large part of its business at all. It's an extremely well-run company - one of the best in the world at what it does - and we need more such companies in the UK and paying UK corporation tax.
I can't comment on the actual food boxes (except that a lot of the pictures were quite obviously nothing to do with any big supplier), but I can make the very obvious point that the cost of sourcing, packing, and delivering food boxes is not just the cost of the raw ingredients. I'd have thought that at the very least £5 per box for putting it together, taking into account dietary requirements per child, and delivering it, would be what you'd expect, maybe quite a bit more depending on the quantities and the location. (That's one reason why vouchers probably make more sense, but that's a different argument).
With apologies, but this really is a mile off reality. 1) The company makes virtually no money from this. They are packing £5 of food into a £10 package, or £15 into a £23 package. Thats a whole lot of profit. Yes they have to be packed, but they pack a lot of boxes all day every day. As do the supermarkets who actively make a loss on their operations 2) They don't need to consider nutritional needs whilst packing a list of products specified by the client. They just need someone to pack them into the box. Assume £9 per head per hour thats a pack rate of less than 2 boxes an hour. I've seen some padding on factory costs in my time but this is off the scale
The best case scenario in this operation is that the taxpayer is throwing money at contractors like Chartwells who are pocketing significant amounts of it. To deliver largely random food that barely makes meals at all never mind ones that the child its aimed at will eat.
All because Tory MPs think poor parents spend handouts on crack.
You've never ran a business if you think COGS and Labour Costs are the only costs to a business.
£9 an hour doesn't even cover minimum wage.
They aren't but the point is that packing a box should be less than £2 max. And delivery to a central location probably another £1 max on top.
In all cases that means excessive profits are being taken especially when we are looking at £5 of food (at supermarket prices) in a £10.50 box.
Been away all day working on my novel so am just picking this up.
I agree with Mike that those odds are attractive.
Either way, the Republicans will be out of office for at least 8 years. The first signs of traction would be the 2026 mid-terms.
The blood-letting which is about to begin inside the GOP is analogous to Labour in the 1980's only a whole heap deeper and more public. Even if the Republicans dispatch Trump in the next seven days the legacy of what has happened will take a long time to dissipate. What took place on Capitol Hill will be etched into American consciousness for a generation.
There is a comparison to be made between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler. And I'm delighted to write: 'fuck-off Godwin.' If we can't draw lessons from that most heinous period of human history then we will never learn our lessons. Trump, like that other Führer, is an oik. Both of them were rabble-rousers who were not establishment figures. Hitler's generals loathed him but, like Trump, felt powerless to do anything about it, or else lacked the courage. That's because both Trump and Hitler built a cult like obedience around them. Anyone who dissented was bumped off either literally (Hitler) or figuratively (Trump).
Perhaps the most sinister aspect to me of that comparison is that I think Trump would have gone through with a full-blown coup had this been 80 or 90 years ago.
Democrats will be in power now until at least 2028.
The Mystic has spoken. The Mystic has been pretty accurate on the U.S.
I think the Republicans will be back a lot sooner than that. American politics is famously short-term and I expect the GOP to at least win the House in 2022.
Not a chance.
And you should be worried that HYUD liked that. No more certain a bellweather on American politics could you find. The Dennis Healey of pb.com. You can be sure that everything he says, the opposite is in fact true.
By 2022 the Dems will be seen to be putting covid behind the country and Americans will be looking back to these 4 years as they did to the Vietnam War.
It will be a long, long, time before the GOP hold power again.
I'm no fan of HYUFD's prediction but the precedent for how the President's party does in the midterms is pretty clear. bear in mind that redistricting alone will wipe out the Dems' majority.
Could go either way. Which will be reasonably clear by this summer.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
I trust you disapprove the record of the Education Secretary who closed the most (one M. Thatcher)?
It was Labour Education Secretaries Tony Crosland and Shirley Williams who began the process of closing grammars, Heath simply told Thatcher not to block Labour councils from doing so. Even today grammar schools remain only in mainly Tory areas like Kent, Chelmsford, Bucks and Lincolnshire and Trafford and Ripon.
Thatcher was actually a member and supporter of Graham Brady's Tory grammar school group before her death.
I said that the idea that this was charged £30 for two weeks was going to be fake news and I said I was prepared to do a charity bet to a food bank or other charity of your choice if I was wrong, if you wanted to take the bet.
I also said that the parcels were poor quality, unacceptable and something should be done about it but we should get to the truth.
Well *drum roll* it turns out I was . . . 100% correct.
The parcel involved was poor and I am glad there's been an apology and they're fixing it for the future - but it was not a £30 parcel. Instead it was a £10.50 one.
Still poor value for £10.50 but poor value for £10.50 and poor value for £30 are an order of magnitude different.
So I don't know if you took up my offer of the bet. If you did, please feel free to donate to a food bank or other charity of your choice. Thank you.
You get a like for continuing to dig your pit down towards Java.
I'm not digging a pit, I was right. 100% unambiguously correct.
The schools were charged £10.50 not £30 which was my contention, that there wasn't a chance on earth that was a £30 box. It was a £10 box (£10.50 technically) not a £30 box.
Last I checked £10 does not equal £30. Nor does £10.50.
Still poor, still needs sorting, I said all that, but the idea it was "what £30 gets you"? Unadulterated bullshit. Of course.
Unless you think the truth does not matter I was correct, wasn't I?
In Derbyshire a £30 box costs £14.40 retail so well under a tenner for Compass at wholesale
Still got to pay £4.7m PA to the CEO somehow I suppose
I'm sorry, but this sort of stuff is utter, vindictive, childish crap. The company makes virtually no money whatsoever from this contract. It's not a large part of its business at all. It's an extremely well-run company - one of the best in the world at what it does - and we need more such companies in the UK and paying UK corporation tax.
I can't comment on the actual food boxes (except that a lot of the pictures were quite obviously nothing to do with any big supplier), but I can make the very obvious point that the cost of sourcing, packing, and delivering food boxes is not just the cost of the raw ingredients. I'd have thought that at the very least £5 per box for putting it together, taking into account dietary requirements per child, and delivering it, would be what you'd expect, maybe quite a bit more depending on the quantities and the location. (That's one reason why vouchers probably make more sense, but that's a different argument).
Look at the Morrison £20 boxes for comparison. They manage to do far more for much less, with better nutrition and variety.
To be honest that is probably sufficient but it still leaves £10 for delivery and some more items.
As for the existing suppliers:
Why are they using mostly overpriced branded stuff? Why are they giving bottled water? Why do they repeatedly get in trouble for poor quality and quantity?
At best they really dont care, so if they dont make any money from it either why dont they leave it to someone else?
Supermarkets are always going to be cheaper and better value for money than any alternative as they have the scale and buying power to dominate. Getting a middle company involved to box it up is never going to be cost efficient.
Which is another reason why vouchers are far superior. If you're going to offer help then let the free market decide, give a voucher they can spend anywhere and let the parents take responsibility for themselves. Free market economics.
Morrisons is a box! All anyone else would need to do is deliver it for under £10. Even Royal Mail could do that.
But yes it goes back to vouchers are best but the Tory party voted against continuing the national voucher scheme because they think it goes on crack and prostitutes.
I'm saying it should be vouchers, I have never said crack and prostitutes and I am against any such judgementalism. I believe in libertarianism and free market economics - if you need to give to someone then give to them and let them choose how to spend it.
But yes Morrisons is in a box - the cost to them largely is the box. They're a supermarket they have a ton of food on site. That is the point. They can bulk order and get massive deliveries that go into the shelves or into boxes. That is why supermarkets are such good value. Morrisons may have marginal overheads in packing the box, but they will be tiny compared to others businesses.
A company with overheads is never going to compete with Morrisons.
I believe there were several hundred chaps from the Indian Army at Dunkirk.
Mind you, later in the war, the Germans did become quite multi-cultural.
Were they in the film, though? If not, perhaps that backs up the original point? The criticism as I understand it is of Dunkirk the film not Dunkirk the historical event, an important distinction no doubt lost in Harry Cole's Culture War (now that does sound like a boring film - white boys waiting for bantz). I've not seen the film (or the historical event) although I do remember the Dunkirk scenes in Atonement dragging on a bit.
It's a Nolan film, ie its overhyped.
It was good in the cinema (remember them) with the surround sound effects and the big screen. On the TV it was meh.
His films are typically pretty good , and I liked it. But he gets a pass on storytelling in some films because of technical brilliance in my opinion. Tenet springs to mind.
I watched it again over Christmas and it definitely hasn’t improved with age. For a movie with minimal dialogue, what there is is pretty dire. Also how much fecking ammunition was Tom Hardy’s Spitfire carrying?
I saw it the first time in a cinema, where you are forced to focus on it and the size of the screen and the sound makes a bigger impact. It was an impressive film, one of those that make you feel you are there yourself, private Ryan style, although it was confusing that you kept being shown the same incident from different angles, and the timeline seemed all over the place.
I too watched it on TV over Xmas, and on a small screen, having seen it before, it was very meh. One of those films you only need to see once.
I know my opinion on this matter is stongly opposed by many people, but for me if a film is "meh" on the small screen then it is not worth seeing it in a cinema. The quality of the plot, the acting, the dialogue, the humour and the tension etc. of a good film is good enough to carry over to the small screen.
Another point is that I find the audio in a cinema is overworked to the level of being unrealistic. Just one example was in a serious film someone on screen slams a car door shut, but the sound engineer has produced has made the sound come over my left shoulder i.e. from a totally unrealistic place. And this kind of thing happens all the time in the cinema. When it happens it brings me out of the story and back again to sitting in a cinema.
The sound effect that most irks me, on television mostly, is a cigarette burning. Smoking is more or less silent but on screen sounds like a firework fuse.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
The point is whether BBB from Hackney is equivalent to AAA from St Cakes, though.
Some 40 per cent of the entire Oxbridge intake comes from Hackney or St Cakes or the like. That is, some 40 per cent comes from London & the South East.
Surrey sends more people to Oxbridge than the North of England.
Scotland, Wales North East & West of England are grotesquely underrepresented.
There are huge, huge biases in the system -- but the very first thing to do is restrict London & the South East to a fair share, population-wise.
The universities should apply a difficulty multiplier to each candidate's UCAS points based on the quality of the school they went to. E.g. 0.5 for Eton, 1.0 for a failing inner city comp.
Might even have the side effect of encouraging middle class parents to put their kids in the local comp.
Comments
My 84 year old father in law lives in the same village in Bucks as us almost on the Buckinghamshire/Oxfordshire border. He has not been vaccinated yet. The local surgery has grouped together with others in the Bucks area to vaccinate at a new dedicated site at a sports centre in Aylesbury (7 miles away). They are now saying they won't be doing their first shots until Friday having said previously it was going to be on Tuesday.
Bucks in my view is underperforming having given 12K vaccines so far. For the population size compared to the rest of England it should have done about 80K. I don't know whether being a mainly rural county comes into play.
For comparison my father in law's friend who lives in the town closest to us (2.5 miles away but in Oxfordshire) is younger than him, albeit still in her 80s, was vaccinated 2 weeks ago. Strangely the site she went to have it was in Bucks!
Given the disparity in vaccination rates it would not surprise me if they start vaccinating below 80s in some parts long before others have finished the 80+s. Whether that is just accepted or it causes consternation I do not know. The postcode lottery is not fair, but postcode lotteries have existed in many other aspects of life for a long time.
https://twitter.com/Telegraph/status/1349361164195684356?s=20
Chartwells, the company that provided the parcel, said it was actually only intended to last one school week and had cost £10.50 for food, packing and distribution.
£10.50 is not £30. Why was it only £10.50? Was the school not spending the full allowance and trying to cut costs? I don't know, that isn't addressed in the article. It should be.
It's only a matter of time until you're earning the big bucks prosecuting Hong Kong dissidents on behalf of the Chinese state.
The only reason we have this story at all is that the previous system - handing out vouchers to parents - was kiboshed by Tory MP moral outrage that poor parents spend the vouchers on "crack cocaine".
What is abundantly clear is that the most cost-effective way of getting cash for food to parents is a voucher. And the most reliable way of getting food to kids that can be turned into a meal that they will eat is a voucher.
ManCock was made a mess of this morning trying to justify why he is so happy that something he voted against is now being implemented. Local Teesside Tories - including the always resplendently morally outraged adulterer Simon Clarke - also voted against feeding these kids.
When I retweeted the clip of ManCock squirming and tagged in Clarke and Matt Vickers, a conversation about why they did so prompted me to reply "ve vere just obeying orders". Which got a like from Matt Vickers. Having met Matt I know that he isn't a Simon Clarke style degenerate, so his like feels like a sign that he knows he was only following orders as well...
Can we *please* go back to handing out vouchers?
Still got to pay £4.7m PA to the CEO somehow I suppose
https://twitter.com/hendopolis/status/1349351389693059081?s=19
Edit: just don't represent yourself in case you really aren't as good as you think...
So the markup of the £15 of food in a £23 box is now £5 of food in a £10 box.
Its a funny hill to die on.
If you're doing anything then do vouchers and let the parents and the free market decide how it is spent best. No need to get food packaging companies into the middle.
I have no bone for Tory donors, no skin in the game, I just get like a dog with the bone in wanting to find the truth and call out BS. Even at £10.50 it is a total and utter waste of money to get a middle company involved in picking out food rather than having parents do it.
https://twitter.com/susie_dent/status/1349350316022636544?s=21
https://www.thedailybeast.com/adam-newbold-ex-navy-seal-boasted-on-video-about-breaching-the-capitol
Over 2,200 people applied to do PPE at Oxford this year. Roughly 750 got an interview and of them 254 got places, just over 1/10. Would it really fair if someone loses one of those rare places despite having AAA to improve diversity?
It's quite a difficult question. If you are at a poor school BBB may be an incredible achievement showing genuine talent but people do not get in by accident. They get in by incredibly hard work over an extended period (consistency is important) and a genuine commitment and passion for the subjects. For those in that group to lose out when they otherwise tick the right boxes seems pretty egregious. Tricky.
I always said I thought it was poor.
I always said that vouchers would be better.
I also said that getting a middle company involved adds costs and markup so you'd never get the same.
Scrap it and get vouchers. That's what I'm saying.
But £30? That was obviously not true - and I was right. Does the truth matter to you?
Regional differences= neutral
Local specialisation=good.
In reality we do not want there to be no variability that would be a disaster. What we do want is for the level in worst regions to be acceptable. I'm not claiming that Bucks is acceptable or unacceptable, just trying to point out that a "postcode lottery" is inevitable. I hope you father does get vaccinated on Friday and wish him well.
I can't comment on the actual food boxes (except that a lot of the pictures were quite obviously nothing to do with any big supplier), but I can make the very obvious point that the cost of sourcing, packing, and delivering food boxes is not just the cost of the raw ingredients. I'd have thought that at the very least £5 per box for putting it together, taking into account dietary requirements per child, and delivering it, would be what you'd expect, maybe quite a bit more depending on the quantities and the location. (That's one reason why vouchers probably make more sense, but that's a different argument).
I have a lot of issues with the food boxes, not just relating to the monetary value of the contents, but also the nature of the contents - specifically the lack of protein and healthy fats, which kids growing up need - they can't live on carrot sticks. However, I'm not against the basic concept. This is to stop kids going hungry - there's nothing wrong in principle with giving food directly. It should just be done with thoughtfulness and care.
I agree with Mike that those odds are attractive.
Either way, the Republicans will be out of office for at least 8 years. The first signs of traction would be the 2026 mid-terms.
The blood-letting which is about to begin inside the GOP is analogous to Labour in the 1980's only a whole heap deeper and more public. Even if the Republicans dispatch Trump in the next seven days the legacy of what has happened will take a long time to dissipate. What took place on Capitol Hill will be etched into American consciousness for a generation.
There is a comparison to be made between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler. And I'm delighted to write: 'fuck-off Godwin.' If we can't draw lessons from that most heinous period of human history then we will never learn our lessons. Trump, like that other Führer, is an oik. Both of them were rabble-rousers who were not establishment figures. Hitler's generals loathed him but, like Trump, felt powerless to do anything about it, or else lacked the courage. That's because both Trump and Hitler built a cult like obedience around them. Anyone who dissented was bumped off either literally (Hitler) or figuratively (Trump).
Perhaps the most sinister aspect to me of that comparison is that I think Trump would have gone through with a full-blown coup had this been 80 or 90 years ago.
Democrats will be in power now until at least 2028.
The Mystic has spoken. The Mystic has been pretty accurate on the U.S.
To get access to the corridors of power in the UK and US, they have allied themselves with the authoritarian populist element of the right wing. Again, that's a legitimate brand of politics, until you get to full-on-tonto Trumpism. (Not everything he said was intrinsically deplorable- just quite a lot of it.)
But once in power, thoughtful, principled small state libertarians have a problem. Disown the authoritarian bits, and your coalition is too small to win. Accept it, and seek to justify it, and you risk being dragged down by it. It's the old adage about tiger-riding being a brilliant idea, until you seek to dismount.
What's a thoughtful, principled small state libertarian to do?
It's a view I suppose...
"At the moment we're supply/manufacture constrained but once supply is no longer a bottleneck we envision our specialist vaccination centres will be going 24/7"
Also remember the rules will be changing to post exam entry for unis in the near future, so all the predicted grade games will have gone away. It quite rightly will be based on what you actually achieved.
https://twitter.com/Douglas4Moray/status/1349355354510020608?s=20
So, a conversation might go like this:
A: What did you do today?
B: Oh, we had such a good time, it was very entertaining. My friend was there, you know the one.
People with it don't know they have it, so it tends to annoy everyone else. Unlike Broca's Aphasia (whereby people struggle to remember the word they wanted to say).
Polly Filler is specifically a mockery of Polly Toynbee, I thought.
The solution is very difficult but leaving things as they are is not a solution.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
However the Democrats controlled the House throughout the Reagan and Bush 41 Presidencies
Rather like The Imitation Game (Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing) Dunkirk suffered from writers who'd not understood fundamental points about their subject matter:-
1) The sheer scale of the thing -- it should have used CGI to fill in hundreds of thousands of people on the beach, rather than a socially distanced queue outside a supermarket
2) The French sub-plot was silly given it was policy to evacuate French soldiers alongside British
I merely maintain that the problem here was about shitty food boxes, not food boxes.
There is also a side issue of the Government's favoured contractor for this work having a poor track record in this area - that's also an issue that needs to be dealth with. Personally, I'd have chosen someone like Morrissons to do it.
And you should be worried that HYUD liked that. No more certain a bellweather on American politics could you find. The Dennis Healey of pb.com. You can be sure that everything he says, the opposite is in fact true.
By 2022 the Dems will be seen to be putting covid behind the country and Americans will be looking back to these 4 years as they did to the Vietnam War.
It will be a long, long, time before the GOP hold power again.
Stratton comments yesterday about people not keen on getting vaccinated outside of 8am to 8pm was stupid.
When it comes to population wide vaccination programme you have to be willing to take what you are given (provided not some obvious issues). If you are fit, healthy and have access to a car, being asked to go 30 miles for 7am, you do it.
Its like masks, it isn't all about you, its about everybody.
The fact that that school is no better 40 years on is the real tragedy.
The starting point of the entire story is drug addicted parents can't be trusted not to trade the vouchers for drugs.
So we ended up with overpriced food parcels instead.
https://www.morrisons.com/food-boxes/box/cupboard-essentials-box
To be honest that is probably sufficient but it still leaves £10 for delivery and some more items.
As for the existing suppliers:
Why are they using mostly overpriced branded stuff?
Why are they giving bottled water?
Why do they repeatedly get in trouble for poor quality and quantity?
At best they really dont care, so if they dont make any money from it either why dont they leave it to someone else?
How many octogenarians are keen to get a slot outside of 8am-8pm? If we're supply limited and we can get through the supply in those 12 hours its surely better to do so.
The problem with giving people a silly timeslot they don't want is they're more likely to not turn up for the slot, which then means you're potentially wasting the vaccine because it isn't getting used as expected and you only have 3 days to use it. Make sure you use it all, but make sure people turn up for their appointments to do so too.
1) The company makes virtually no money from this. They are packing £5 of food into a £10 package, or £15 into a £23 package. Thats a whole lot of profit. Yes they have to be packed, but they pack a lot of boxes all day every day. As do the supermarkets who actively make a loss on their operations
2) They don't need to consider nutritional needs whilst packing a list of products specified by the client. They just need someone to pack them into the box. Assume £9 per head per hour thats a pack rate of less than 2 boxes an hour. I've seen some padding on factory costs in my time but this is off the scale
The best case scenario in this operation is that the taxpayer is throwing money at contractors like Chartwells who are pocketing significant amounts of it. To deliver largely random food that barely makes meals at all never mind ones that the child its aimed at will eat.
All because Tory MPs think poor parents spend handouts on crack.
Which is another reason why vouchers are far superior. If you're going to offer help then let the free market decide, give a voucher they can spend anywhere and let the parents take responsibility for themselves. Free market economics.
Reasons why to back impeachment
- gets rid of Trump,
- can possibly re-establish control of the party (but not certain);
- can recover suburban voters (but not certain - trends have been shifting away from the Republicans)
Reasons why not to back impeachment
- Major risk of civil war in the party - RNC is controlled by Trump supporters and the WSJ poll showed well over half choosing Trump over the GOP if forced to choose;
- limited support in the House - max 20 (<10% of base) GOP Congress members to vote for it, McCarthy has said he doesn't want a vote;
- Rebellion in the Senate - not only from Hawley, Cruz et al but those who are up for re-election in 2022 who might feel this puts them at risk (e.g. Rubio);
- Crucially, puts at risk a 2022 Senate Republican majority - 3 Republican seats (PA, WI, NC) are in very marginal states and incumbents are retiring. It's possible a backlash against the move puts Grassley's seat at risk also. In addition, McConnell probably hopeful he could pick up Arizona, Warlock's seat and possibly Nevada in a backlash year.
Joe Manchin, who I'm guessing probably has a decent relationship with McConnell, has said the numbers are not there for impeachment and I'd probably trust his word on this than the NYT.
It's a boys' club.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
£9 an hour doesn't even cover minimum wage.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/jan/13/cambridge-university-to-offer-free-foundation-year-for-disadvantaged-pupils
Seems like a good idea to me.
NYTimes
A mathematics professor of my acquaintance was, several years ago, having to run supplementary basic maths courses for his first years. Since a chunk of the incoming students couldn't differentiate or integrate with any faculty, or ease - for example.
As for people not turning up. Employ the airline ticketing model. You slightly overbook knowing not everybody will turn up. We can do that with Oxford and J&J vaccine, especially when plenty of supply. Also, we could do a "come between x and y", if we have any left, you can get one without an appointment.
I think given how long restrictions have been going on, the uptake will be significant, even if people are being asked to go for 7am or 9pm.
Another point is that I find the audio in a cinema is overworked to the level of being unrealistic. Just one example was in a serious film someone on screen slams a car door shut, but the sound engineer has produced has made the sound come over my left shoulder i.e. from a totally unrealistic place. And this kind of thing happens all the time in the cinema. When it happens it brings me out of the story and back again to sitting in a cinema.
But yes it goes back to vouchers are best but the Tory party voted against continuing the national voucher scheme because they think it goes on crack and prostitutes.
In all cases that means excessive profits are being taken especially when we are looking at £5 of food (at supermarket prices) in a £10.50 box.
Which will be reasonably clear by this summer.
Thatcher was actually a member and supporter of Graham Brady's Tory grammar school group before her death.
But yes Morrisons is in a box - the cost to them largely is the box. They're a supermarket they have a ton of food on site. That is the point. They can bulk order and get massive deliveries that go into the shelves or into boxes. That is why supermarkets are such good value. Morrisons may have marginal overheads in packing the box, but they will be tiny compared to others businesses.
A company with overheads is never going to compete with Morrisons.
Surrey sends more people to Oxbridge than the North of England.
Scotland, Wales North East & West of England are grotesquely underrepresented.
There are huge, huge biases in the system -- but the very first thing to do is restrict London & the South East to a fair share, population-wise.
Might even have the side effect of encouraging middle class parents to put their kids in the local comp.
Actually this is bound to happen before too long.