April looks like it will be broadly similar to March in terms of total doses,
1668863 1st doses 4823011 2nd doses
To come 6 million 2nd doses Maybe another million 1sts.
That'd give 13.5 million
14128391 in March
I'd gues at a higher figure for first doses, maybe another 2-3m to come in, I'm led to believe that the final week of April will have a "reasonable" number of first dose appointments available. We're going to do more total vaccinations in April than in March.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
Absolutely!
And it is "woke" attitudes that make that happen. The refusal to just take for granted that which has come before, the natural desire to challenge prior thinking, the willingness to challenge authority.
And Leon sees it as a weakness not a strength. Being "woke" is not a weakness, it is the west's greatest strength.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
And this, as Laloux states in his opening chapters, comes down to how its citizens can conceptualize their purpose and role in society, and hence how they are able to conceive of new ways of organizing.
For all those that decry the woke generation, they are in fact evolving those concepts and developing new approaches to organizing that we crusties hate because they make us uncomfortable. I, for one, do not despair with the coming generation, but see them as our hope to evolve away from the globe-destroying global corporate model to something more people, rather than product, oriented.
The next generation is, literally, stupider than us.
I guess every 20 or 30 years there must have been some nutter in Rome, during the Empire, who pointed to the East and screamed ‘the barbarians are coming!’
For 500 years he was wrong and everyone carried on, just ignoring him.
But then, one day, he was right.
I AM THAT SCREAMING NUTTER
Glad you've reached self-awareness.
I don't think any of us doubt that China will be the biggest power economically and militarily. The question is how dominant and for how long with their current blend of political and societal thinking.
For myself, I think they won't be the single hegemon, but the most powerful of 2 or 3 (US/West and India), and that they will not, unless they change their political and societal philosophy, achieve even leading group status on thought and culture. If they do change, then they won't be the beast to fear.
So I am reasonably confident the West will not be submerged under a Chinese political cultural wave, at least not in its current form.
ONS say 11k new cases per day in England. That doesn't pass the sniff test for me.
Why? Detected, tested cases are at -
Given that we have 0.2% test positivity rates what would make you think that we are missing 75% of positives?
We have never got close to testing and finding all the people actual with COVID.
Your figures combined with the ONS did say we were finding the majority of cases last summer.
To say that when we are doing well over a million tests a day now, tests equivalent to nearly 20% of the population per week, that we're finding between a fifth and a quarter of cases is rather preposterous.
Significant falls in the latest ONS survey (as of week ending last Friday). Prevalence dropped by about 30% in a week in England. Compatible with slowly building immunity, albeit still a fair way from herd immunity, but as per that reciprocal curve, the acceleration towards it will only increase with every step of immunity built.
Excellent news, what a shame the govt have committed to not looking at such evidence for examining our roadmap until mid May. Dates not data for them.
As some random bloke called.... Andy Cooke.. pointed out the other day on covidbetting.com, the roadmap appears to be linked quite closely to vaccination levels and the resultant population immunity.
As one Boris Johnson pointed out, the reduction in cases, hospitalisations and deaths is largely due the lockdown. We need replace that with vaccination derived herd immunity.
The timetable may be spot on. If it is that can only be due to data in place when the timetable was drawn up, not recent data. Ignoring real life data for five week blocks at a time (and for the June restrictions we cant consider this data for another ten weeks), when we are learning more and more on a daily basis is simply negligent.
I was making this same point yesterday but there seems little appetite for it. As far as I'm concerned the government should be pouring over the data on a daily basis, updating its models and doing its utmost to justify an earlier easing of lockdown restrictions, even if only by a week. Frankly even a day of unnecessary lockdown is one too many.
Significant falls in the latest ONS survey (as of week ending last Friday). Prevalence dropped by about 30% in a week in England. Compatible with slowly building immunity, albeit still a fair way from herd immunity, but as per that reciprocal curve, the acceleration towards it will only increase with every step of immunity built.
Excellent news, what a shame the govt have committed to not looking at such evidence for examining our roadmap until mid May. Dates not data for them.
As some random bloke called.... Andy Cooke.. pointed out the other day on covidbetting.com, the roadmap appears to be linked quite closely to vaccination levels and the resultant population immunity.
As one Boris Johnson pointed out, the reduction in cases, hospitalisations and deaths is largely due the lockdown. We need replace that with vaccination derived herd immunity.
The timetable may be spot on. If it is that can only be due to data in place when the timetable was drawn up, not recent data. Ignoring real life data for five week blocks at a time (and for the June restrictions we cant consider this data for another ten weeks), when we are learning more and more on a daily basis is simply negligent.
I was making this same point yesterday but there seems little appetite for it. As far as I'm concerned the government should be pouring over the data on a daily basis, updating its models and doing its utmost to justify an earlier easing of lockdown restrictions, even if only by a week. Frankly even a day of unnecessary lockdown is one too many.
Quite frankly the myth has been swallowed that you need to get data in to analyse before moving on without thinking through what it means or analysing the data already in.
When deaths were hundreds a day then if that levelled off or increased then that could be measurable, similarly with cases and hospitalisations. But frankly now numbers are so low that even if they level off, even if they increase, it would fall more under natural variation that is hard to measure anyway.
If eg deaths went from 300 per day to 360 per day, or 1000 per day to 1200 per day then you could say that is a 20% increase and is bad and we need to halt. If they go from 10 per day to 12 per day then is that an increase or just natural random natural variation? Would that stop the advance to the next stage? And if the advance to the next stage can't realistically be halted - and if the prevalence is low enough - then the data says to do it now.
Latest from the Zoe app: prof Spector suggesting that the vaccinated plus the previously infected is taking us close now to a degree of herd immunity.
The App data suggests the risk of getting the virus is now:
For the unvaccinated - one in 1100 For those with one dose (plus twelve days wait’ - one in 5100 For those with two doses (ditto) - one in 15000
He implies there has been one case of rare blood clotting from the 500,000 vaccinated AZN people in his database.
157 double-vaccinated people in his database have gone on to catch the virus, all with mild cases, compared to 18,000 in the same period among the unvaccinated.
He reckons case rates will stabilise around the current level for a few weeks as the focus now is on second doses so there will still be a degree of spread among younger people during the progressive unlocking.
Hmmmmmmmmmm.......
I'd be interested to see the cases chart using only PCR data for comparison. I think a lot of the positives are now from LFD.
The lateral flow tests are (mostly) being used for schools - not too many 65+ in secondary school.... Plus lots of the lateral flow tests are being checked with PCR.
In addition, the admissions are at a level that suggests that cases are not continuing to drop through the floor....
Could admission rates just be about hospitals lowering the bar to offering care for people with covid? People who might have just got sent home with an oxygen bottle are now getting admitted?
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
Absolutely!
And it is "woke" attitudes that make that happen. The refusal to just take for granted that which has come before, the natural desire to challenge prior thinking, the willingness to challenge authority.
And Leon sees it as a weakness not a strength. Being "woke" is not a weakness, it is the west's greatest strength.
You're getting hung up on terminology. Proponents of "wokeness" define it positively and therefore argue exactly as you are; detractors define it as what happens when those attitudes are taken to extremes and hence it is by definition a Bad Thing. You can't just ascribe all of America's positives to "woke" attitudes without acknowledging that it means very different things to different people.
Pfizer has shown the best resilience against variants so far in terms of antibody binding efficiency against the P1 Brazilian variant and the SA variant. That's in comparison to all other vaccines. AZ does very well in generating a very wide t-cell based immunity which could be which could lead to good long term immunity from severe symptoms against a very wide variety of variants but we can't say for sure just yet.
I heard one of the team who did that study on the radio last night. It did seem to be implied that mRNA vaccines like Pfizer might prove to be inferior for long term immunity compared to AZ.
Having just this week had AZ, and having been kept up half the night with a fever and chills born of powerful immune response, it did present as a blunt, six-hitting heavyweight – the Andrew Flintoff to Pfizer's Andrew Strauss.
Wow you are really selling this to me, Anabo mate. So tempted now.
Latest from the Zoe app: prof Spector suggesting that the vaccinated plus the previously infected is taking us close now to a degree of herd immunity.
The App data suggests the risk of getting the virus is now:
For the unvaccinated - one in 1100 For those with one dose (plus twelve days wait’ - one in 5100 For those with two doses (ditto) - one in 15000
He implies there has been one case of rare blood clotting from the 500,000 vaccinated AZN people in his database.
157 double-vaccinated people in his database have gone on to catch the virus, all with mild cases, compared to 18,000 in the same period among the unvaccinated.
He reckons case rates will stabilise around the current level for a few weeks as the focus now is on second doses so there will still be a degree of spread among younger people during the progressive unlocking.
Hmmmmmmmmmm.......
I'd be interested to see the cases chart using only PCR data for comparison. I think a lot of the positives are now from LFD.
The lateral flow tests are (mostly) being used for schools - not too many 65+ in secondary school.... Plus lots of the lateral flow tests are being checked with PCR.
In addition, the admissions are at a level that suggests that cases are not continuing to drop through the floor....
Could admission rates just be about hospitals lowering the bar to offering care for people with covid? People who might have just got sent home with an oxygen bottle are now getting admitted?
You'd have to ask Foxy - but I don't think that anyone who'd have been considered for admission would have been triaged home with a bottle of oxygen, at any stage, in this epidemic.
It would have been quite serious news if we had reached that stage - and that was what the Nightingale Hospitals were for....
EDIT: In Peru, that is what they are doing. A oxygen bottle sells for £600 now, there....
Off to East Sussex to meet a friend for a pub lunch tomorrow. There's 3 East Sussexes: the suburban bit, which is classic commuter belt but with acid soil and rhododendron bushes; the coastal bit, which is definitely a bit odd, especially Hastings; and the rather pretty bit in between the two which is decidedly odd, with some very good vineyards.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
And this, as Laloux states in his opening chapters, comes down to how its citizens can conceptualize their purpose and role in society, and hence how they are able to conceive of new ways of organizing.
For all those that decry the woke generation, they are in fact evolving those concepts and developing new approaches to organizing that we crusties hate because they make us uncomfortable. I, for one, do not despair with the coming generation, but see them as our hope to evolve away from the globe-destroying global corporate model to something more people, rather than product, oriented.
The next generation is, literally, stupider than us.
I guess every 20 or 30 years there must have been some nutter in Rome, during the Empire, who pointed to the East and screamed ‘the barbarians are coming!’
For 500 years he was wrong and everyone carried on, just ignoring him.
But then, one day, he was right.
I AM THAT SCREAMING NUTTER
There's a short story by Conan Doyle, The Coming of the Huns, that toyed with this question 100 years ago:
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
Absolutely!
And it is "woke" attitudes that make that happen. The refusal to just take for granted that which has come before, the natural desire to challenge prior thinking, the willingness to challenge authority.
And Leon sees it as a weakness not a strength. Being "woke" is not a weakness, it is the west's greatest strength.
You're getting hung up on terminology. Proponents of "wokeness" define it positively and therefore argue exactly as you are; detractors define it as what happens when those attitudes are taken to extremes and hence it is by definition a Bad Thing. You can't just ascribe all of America's positives to "woke" attitudes without acknowledging that it means very different things to different people.
Sure I can, because that's the very point. You can take whatever position you want in a free society and you can challenge whatever you want in a free society and that is our strength.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
Absolutely!
And it is "woke" attitudes that make that happen. The refusal to just take for granted that which has come before, the natural desire to challenge prior thinking, the willingness to challenge authority.
And Leon sees it as a weakness not a strength. Being "woke" is not a weakness, it is the west's greatest strength.
I'm going to disagree with you there Philip. What I see in my workplace is the throwing out of tried and tested ways of doing things (e.g. product development, project management) to be replaced by "agile" practices, which it seems to me involves producing something half-baked, watching it fail and then trying to fix it. For those of us who have been round the block a few times this is hugely frustrating not to mention inefficient and costly.
ONS say 11k new cases per day in England. That doesn't pass the sniff test for me.
Why? Detected, tested cases are at -
Given that we have 0.2% test positivity rates what would make you think that we are missing 75% of positives?
We have never got close to testing and finding all the people actual with COVID.
Your figures combined with the ONS did say we were finding the majority of cases last summer.
To say that when we are doing well over a million tests a day now, tests equivalent to nearly 20% of the population per week, that we're finding between a fifth and a quarter of cases is rather preposterous.
Most of the lateral flow tests are repeatedly testing one segment of the population.
ONS say 11k new cases per day in England. That doesn't pass the sniff test for me.
Why? Detected, tested cases are at -
Given that we have 0.2% test positivity rates what would make you think that we are missing 75% of positives?
We have never got close to testing and finding all the people actual with COVID.
Your figures combined with the ONS did say we were finding the majority of cases last summer.
To say that when we are doing well over a million tests a day now, tests equivalent to nearly 20% of the population per week, that we're finding between a fifth and a quarter of cases is rather preposterous.
Most of the lateral flow tests are repeatedly testing one segment of the population.
The ones who are totally fecking fed up with them?
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
Absolutely!
And it is "woke" attitudes that make that happen. The refusal to just take for granted that which has come before, the natural desire to challenge prior thinking, the willingness to challenge authority.
And Leon sees it as a weakness not a strength. Being "woke" is not a weakness, it is the west's greatest strength.
You're getting hung up on terminology. Proponents of "wokeness" define it positively and therefore argue exactly as you are; detractors define it as what happens when those attitudes are taken to extremes and hence it is by definition a Bad Thing. You can't just ascribe all of America's positives to "woke" attitudes without acknowledging that it means very different things to different people.
Sure I can, because that's the very point. You can take whatever position you want in a free society and you can challenge whatever you want in a free society and that is our strength.
I don't mean you literally aren't allowed to. I mean it's pointless, because you end up talking at crossed purposes.
ONS say 11k new cases per day in England. That doesn't pass the sniff test for me.
Why? Detected, tested cases are at -
Given that we have 0.2% test positivity rates what would make you think that we are missing 75% of positives?
We have never got close to testing and finding all the people actual with COVID.
Your figures combined with the ONS did say we were finding the majority of cases last summer.
To say that when we are doing well over a million tests a day now, tests equivalent to nearly 20% of the population per week, that we're finding between a fifth and a quarter of cases is rather preposterous.
Most of the lateral flow tests are repeatedly testing one segment of the population.
And if the virus were spreading out of control it would be reaching that segment of the population, who'd be testing positive and getting their relatives and contacts tested etc
Latest from the Zoe app: prof Spector suggesting that the vaccinated plus the previously infected is taking us close now to a degree of herd immunity.
The App data suggests the risk of getting the virus is now:
For the unvaccinated - one in 1100 For those with one dose (plus twelve days wait’ - one in 5100 For those with two doses (ditto) - one in 15000
He implies there has been one case of rare blood clotting from the 500,000 vaccinated AZN people in his database.
157 double-vaccinated people in his database have gone on to catch the virus, all with mild cases, compared to 18,000 in the same period among the unvaccinated.
He reckons case rates will stabilise around the current level for a few weeks as the focus now is on second doses so there will still be a degree of spread among younger people during the progressive unlocking.
Highly encouraging data, but speaking as - cough - a person who’s been one-dosed (a month ago) what does this actually mean? -
‘For those with one dose (plus twelve days wait’ - one in 5100 risk of getting the virus’
Does it mean per person per day? Per hour? Per year? It’s kinda vague (but sounds hopeful)
I thought the same, listening to his presentation. But the absolute chance obviously varies through time, and the point he was making was about the relative chance. Which is nearly five times better after one dose and about three times better again (i.e. fifteen times better than being unvaccinated) after two doses, plus twelve days waiting. That’s the takeaway from his data and the absolute chance doesn’t actually matter that much - because it is most significantly influenced by our behaviour and lifestyle anyway.
ONS say 11k new cases per day in England. That doesn't pass the sniff test for me.
Agreed. With massive levels of testing we are now under 2.5k average cases for the whole of the UK. To suggest that we are only finding about 20% of cases now seems highly pessimistic.
Pfizer has shown the best resilience against variants so far in terms of antibody binding efficiency against the P1 Brazilian variant and the SA variant. That's in comparison to all other vaccines. AZ does very well in generating a very wide t-cell based immunity which could be which could lead to good long term immunity from severe symptoms against a very wide variety of variants but we can't say for sure just yet.
I heard one of the team who did that study on the radio last night. It did seem to be implied that mRNA vaccines like Pfizer might prove to be inferior for long term immunity compared to AZ.
Having just this week had AZ, and having been kept up half the night with a fever and chills born of powerful immune response, it did present as a blunt, six-hitting heavyweight – the Andrew Flintoff to Pfizer's Andrew Strauss.
Wow you are really selling this to me, Anabo mate. So tempted now.
Have you STILL not had your vaccine?
FFS. Get on with it. You undermine everything else you write by refusing it.
I have a larger penis than the youth of today, but they do not want to know.
This is instantaneously a classic PB quote.
I would suggest that it is particularly the female youth of today that don't want to know, but that will just provoke a thread on how many 20+ somethings Sean is bedding/marrying this week.
Edit: Apologies to the Lion of Penarth. I had though it was Leon.
I had AZ yesterday and, other than the fact I can feel the injection site when I press it, I have had no reaction at all. Is this good or bad?
There's still time. My Mother didn't feel anything until the evening of the day after but then ended up feeling like she'd been floored by the flu for 24 hours.
I left Kent for only the second time in 13 months yesterday - to get vaccinated in East Sussex.
A strange place, East Sussex.
Yes it is rather.
West Sussex could do itself a favour and gift East Grinstead to East Sussex. It would improve the residual sanity of their county considerably, and East Sussex has no further to fall.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
And this, as Laloux states in his opening chapters, comes down to how its citizens can conceptualize their purpose and role in society, and hence how they are able to conceive of new ways of organizing.
For all those that decry the woke generation, they are in fact evolving those concepts and developing new approaches to organizing that we crusties hate because they make us uncomfortable. I, for one, do not despair with the coming generation, but see them as our hope to evolve away from the globe-destroying global corporate model to something more people, rather than product, oriented.
The next generation is, literally, stupider than us.
I guess every 20 or 30 years there must have been some nutter in Rome, during the Empire, who pointed to the East and screamed ‘the barbarians are coming!’
For 500 years he was wrong and everyone carried on, just ignoring him.
But then, one day, he was right.
I AM THAT SCREAMING NUTTER
Glad you've reached self-awareness.
I don't think any of us doubt that China will be the biggest power economically and militarily. The question is how dominant and for how long with their current blend of political and societal thinking.
For myself, I think they won't be the single hegemon, but the most powerful of 2 or 3 (US/West and India), and that they will not, unless they change their political and societal philosophy, achieve even leading group status on thought and culture. If they do change, then they won't be the beast to fear.
So I am reasonably confident the West will not be submerged under a Chinese political cultural wave, at least not in its current form.
Let’s hope you’re right
But consider this. What if it turns out state directed, high surveillance Asian capitalism is much more efficient, and enriching, than looser, western capitalism which obsesses about transphobic computers?
You don’t have to look far for an example. Covid 19. Yes the west has produced marvelous vaccines, it seems, but the East Asians don’t really need them, as they have managed the disease so much better than us. Their economies have barely shrunk. Ours have shriveled. They are better at this. Partly because they have applied technology in a cleverer but more imposing way.
If this trend continues and China becomes Singapore times a million, China will completely dominate, surrounded by hi tech Asian satellites, even as Philip Thompson is still wibbling on about multi-gender bogs
You can already see this Chinese leadership in developing countries. Does any African nation now look to the USA as an exemplar? The divided, violent USA which recently elected a madman, is riven with crime and drug addiction, and which endured an attempted coup about 5 minutes ago?
No, they do not. They look to China, which surges in strength and enriches its people. That’s the nation and the system they want to copy
I had AZ yesterday and, other than the fact I can feel the injection site when I press it, I have had no reaction at all. Is this good or bad?
Have you had, or think you might have had, Covid?
No.
Then judging from what other people have said, it isn’t likely to be significant. The reactions seem to be mostly among people who’ve had Covid. My dad had a pretty bad reaction, for example, and we’re fairly sure he had it early on.
ETA - or you might get a delayed reaction, of course, as others have said.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
Absolutely!
And it is "woke" attitudes that make that happen. The refusal to just take for granted that which has come before, the natural desire to challenge prior thinking, the willingness to challenge authority.
And Leon sees it as a weakness not a strength. Being "woke" is not a weakness, it is the west's greatest strength.
I'm going to disagree with you there Philip. What I see in my workplace is the throwing out of tried and tested ways of doing things (e.g. product development, project management) to be replaced by "agile" practices, which it seems to me involves producing something half-baked, watching it fail and then trying to fix it. For those of us who have been round the block a few times this is hugely frustrating not to mention inefficient and costly.
Sounds like the idiots who read about "Just In time delivery" in Forbes have read about "Agile software development". Presumably in Forbes.
I had AZ yesterday and, other than the fact I can feel the injection site when I press it, I have had no reaction at all. Is this good or bad?
Have you had, or think you might have had, Covid?
No.
Then judging from what other people have said, it isn’t likely to be significant. The reactions seem to be mostly among people who’ve had Covid. My dad had a pretty bad reaction, for example, and we’re fairly sure he had it early on.
ETA - or you might get a delayed reaction, of course, as others have said.
In any event, I wouldn’t complain!
It's just my naturally sunny disposition showing through.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
And this, as Laloux states in his opening chapters, comes down to how its citizens can conceptualize their purpose and role in society, and hence how they are able to conceive of new ways of organizing.
For all those that decry the woke generation, they are in fact evolving those concepts and developing new approaches to organizing that we crusties hate because they make us uncomfortable. I, for one, do not despair with the coming generation, but see them as our hope to evolve away from the globe-destroying global corporate model to something more people, rather than product, oriented.
The next generation is, literally, stupider than us.
I guess every 20 or 30 years there must have been some nutter in Rome, during the Empire, who pointed to the East and screamed ‘the barbarians are coming!’
For 500 years he was wrong and everyone carried on, just ignoring him.
But then, one day, he was right.
I AM THAT SCREAMING NUTTER
Glad you've reached self-awareness.
I don't think any of us doubt that China will be the biggest power economically and militarily. The question is how dominant and for how long with their current blend of political and societal thinking.
For myself, I think they won't be the single hegemon, but the most powerful of 2 or 3 (US/West and India), and that they will not, unless they change their political and societal philosophy, achieve even leading group status on thought and culture. If they do change, then they won't be the beast to fear.
So I am reasonably confident the West will not be submerged under a Chinese political cultural wave, at least not in its current form.
Let’s hope you’re right
But consider this. What if it turns out state directed, high surveillance Asian capitalism is much more efficient, and enriching, than looser, western capitalism which obsesses about transphobic computers?
You don’t have to look far for an example. Covid 19. Yes the west has produced marvelous vaccines, it seems, but the East Asians don’t really need them, as they have managed the disease so much better than us. Their economies have barely shrunk. Ours have shriveled. They are better at this. Partly because they have applied technology in a cleverer but more imposing way.
If this trend continues and China becomes Singapore times a million, China will completely dominate, surrounded by hi tech Asian satellites, even as Philip Thompson is still wibbling on about multi-gender bogs
You can already see this Chinese leadership in developing countries. Does any African nation now look to the USA as an exemplar? The divided, violent USA which recently elected a madman, is riven with crime and drug addiction, and which endured an attempted coup about 5 minutes ago?
No, they do not. They look to China, which surges in strength and enriches its people. That’s the nation and the system they want to copy
Except China will not be Singapore 2 as Singapore has democratic and free elections and a fair rule of law. If it was there would be nothing to worry about.
It needs India, as the largest democracy not only in Asia but the world, to act as a counterweight to China, the US and West alone are no longer big enough to do so
I had AZ yesterday and, other than the fact I can feel the injection site when I press it, I have had no reaction at all. Is this good or bad?
Have you had, or think you might have had, Covid?
No.
Then judging from what other people have said, it isn’t likely to be significant. The reactions seem to be mostly among people who’ve had Covid. My dad had a pretty bad reaction, for example, and we’re fairly sure he had it early on.
ETA - or you might get a delayed reaction, of course, as others have said.
In any event, I wouldn’t complain!
I was rough for 24 hours. If I have had Covid, it was in Feb 2020 when I had a funny bout of poorly feeling for a few days.
Latest from the Zoe app: prof Spector suggesting that the vaccinated plus the previously infected is taking us close now to a degree of herd immunity.
The App data suggests the risk of getting the virus is now:
For the unvaccinated - one in 1100 For those with one dose (plus twelve days wait’ - one in 5100 For those with two doses (ditto) - one in 15000
He implies there has been one case of rare blood clotting from the 500,000 vaccinated AZN people in his database.
157 double-vaccinated people in his database have gone on to catch the virus, all with mild cases, compared to 18,000 in the same period among the unvaccinated.
He reckons case rates will stabilise around the current level for a few weeks as the focus now is on second doses so there will still be a degree of spread among younger people during the progressive unlocking.
Highly encouraging data, but speaking as - cough - a person who’s been one-dosed (a month ago) what does this actually mean? -
‘For those with one dose (plus twelve days wait’ - one in 5100 risk of getting the virus’
Does it mean per person per day? Per hour? Per year? It’s kinda vague (but sounds hopeful)
I thought the same, listening to his presentation. But the absolute chance obviously varies through time, and the point he was making was about the relative chance. Which is nearly five times better after one dose and about three times better again (i.e. fifteen times better than being unvaccinated) after two doses, plus twelve days waiting. That’s the takeaway from his data and the absolute chance doesn’t actually matter that much - because it is most significantly influenced by our behaviour and lifestyle anyway.
Then the statistic is, I fear, near useless. It sounds great but without that context it is meaningless.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
And this, as Laloux states in his opening chapters, comes down to how its citizens can conceptualize their purpose and role in society, and hence how they are able to conceive of new ways of organizing.
For all those that decry the woke generation, they are in fact evolving those concepts and developing new approaches to organizing that we crusties hate because they make us uncomfortable. I, for one, do not despair with the coming generation, but see them as our hope to evolve away from the globe-destroying global corporate model to something more people, rather than product, oriented.
The next generation is, literally, stupider than us.
I guess every 20 or 30 years there must have been some nutter in Rome, during the Empire, who pointed to the East and screamed ‘the barbarians are coming!’
For 500 years he was wrong and everyone carried on, just ignoring him.
But then, one day, he was right.
I AM THAT SCREAMING NUTTER
Glad you've reached self-awareness.
I don't think any of us doubt that China will be the biggest power economically and militarily. The question is how dominant and for how long with their current blend of political and societal thinking.
For myself, I think they won't be the single hegemon, but the most powerful of 2 or 3 (US/West and India), and that they will not, unless they change their political and societal philosophy, achieve even leading group status on thought and culture. If they do change, then they won't be the beast to fear.
So I am reasonably confident the West will not be submerged under a Chinese political cultural wave, at least not in its current form.
Let’s hope you’re right
But consider this. What if it turns out state directed, high surveillance Asian capitalism is much more efficient, and enriching, than looser, western capitalism which obsesses about transphobic computers?
You don’t have to look far for an example. Covid 19. Yes the west has produced marvelous vaccines, it seems, but the East Asians don’t really need them, as they have managed the disease so much better than us. Their economies have barely shrunk. Ours have shriveled. They are better at this. Partly because they have applied technology in a cleverer but more imposing way.
If this trend continues and China becomes Singapore times a million, China will completely dominate, surrounded by hi tech Asian satellites, even as Philip Thompson is still wibbling on about multi-gender bogs
You can already see this Chinese leadership in developing countries. Does any African nation now look to the USA as an exemplar? The divided, violent USA which recently elected a madman, is riven with crime and drug addiction, and which endured an attempted coup about 5 minutes ago?
No, they do not. They look to China, which surges in strength and enriches its people. That’s the nation and the system they want to copy
One of the very few things of which I am absolutely sure, is that state-directed anything will ultimately turn out to be less efficient than any available alternative.
I have a larger penis than the youth of today, but they do not want to know.
This is instantaneously a classic PB quote.
I would suggest that it is particularly the female youth of today that don't want to know, but that will just provoke a thread on how many 20+ somethings Sean is bedding/marrying this week.
Edit: Apologies to the Lion of Penarth. I had though it was Leon.
I was too polite to ask how happily-married-to-a-twentysomething Byronic morphed into frustrated single dirty-old-man Leon. Perhaps the intervening period as transsexual LadyG offers something by way of explanation?
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
And this, as Laloux states in his opening chapters, comes down to how its citizens can conceptualize their purpose and role in society, and hence how they are able to conceive of new ways of organizing.
For all those that decry the woke generation, they are in fact evolving those concepts and developing new approaches to organizing that we crusties hate because they make us uncomfortable. I, for one, do not despair with the coming generation, but see them as our hope to evolve away from the globe-destroying global corporate model to something more people, rather than product, oriented.
The next generation is, literally, stupider than us.
I guess every 20 or 30 years there must have been some nutter in Rome, during the Empire, who pointed to the East and screamed ‘the barbarians are coming!’
For 500 years he was wrong and everyone carried on, just ignoring him.
But then, one day, he was right.
I AM THAT SCREAMING NUTTER
Glad you've reached self-awareness.
I don't think any of us doubt that China will be the biggest power economically and militarily. The question is how dominant and for how long with their current blend of political and societal thinking.
For myself, I think they won't be the single hegemon, but the most powerful of 2 or 3 (US/West and India), and that they will not, unless they change their political and societal philosophy, achieve even leading group status on thought and culture. If they do change, then they won't be the beast to fear.
So I am reasonably confident the West will not be submerged under a Chinese political cultural wave, at least not in its current form.
Let’s hope you’re right
But consider this. What if it turns out state directed, high surveillance Asian capitalism is much more efficient, and enriching, than looser, western capitalism which obsesses about transphobic computers?
You don’t have to look far for an example. Covid 19. Yes the west has produced marvelous vaccines, it seems, but the East Asians don’t really need them, as they have managed the disease so much better than us. Their economies have barely shrunk. Ours have shriveled. They are better at this. Partly because they have applied technology in a cleverer but more imposing way.
If this trend continues and China becomes Singapore times a million, China will completely dominate, surrounded by hi tech Asian satellites, even as Philip Thompson is still wibbling on about multi-gender bogs
You can already see this Chinese leadership in developing countries. Does any African nation now look to the USA as an exemplar? The divided, violent USA which recently elected a madman, is riven with crime and drug addiction, and which endured an attempted coup about 5 minutes ago?
No, they do not. They look to China, which surges in strength and enriches its people. That’s the nation and the system they want to copy
The first thing the Africans I meet ask me tends to be more along the lines of which (Premier League) club I support. They don't even say Premier League, or English. The assumption is that everyone supports and English club.
This is a trivial example, but it points to the cultural issue I am trying to make. Sure, in political elites, China is a key part of the conversation. When it comes to investments, China is omnipresent. But when it comes to daily lives and aspirations - it is Western cultural memes that dominate, and emigration goals point firmly West-ward.
China's mode of organizing is great for mass production. But at some point, mass production is commoditized and moves to the cheaper labour markets. IMO, China cannot stay the world's hegemon based solely on mass production.
Latest from the Zoe app: prof Spector suggesting that the vaccinated plus the previously infected is taking us close now to a degree of herd immunity.
The App data suggests the risk of getting the virus is now:
For the unvaccinated - one in 1100 For those with one dose (plus twelve days wait’ - one in 5100 For those with two doses (ditto) - one in 15000
He implies there has been one case of rare blood clotting from the 500,000 vaccinated AZN people in his database.
157 double-vaccinated people in his database have gone on to catch the virus, all with mild cases, compared to 18,000 in the same period among the unvaccinated.
He reckons case rates will stabilise around the current level for a few weeks as the focus now is on second doses so there will still be a degree of spread among younger people during the progressive unlocking.
Highly encouraging data, but speaking as - cough - a person who’s been one-dosed (a month ago) what does this actually mean? -
‘For those with one dose (plus twelve days wait’ - one in 5100 risk of getting the virus’
Does it mean per person per day? Per hour? Per year? It’s kinda vague (but sounds hopeful)
I thought the same, listening to his presentation. But the absolute chance obviously varies through time, and the point he was making was about the relative chance. Which is nearly five times better after one dose and about three times better again (i.e. fifteen times better than being unvaccinated) after two doses, plus twelve days waiting. That’s the takeaway from his data and the absolute chance doesn’t actually matter that much - because it is most significantly influenced by our behaviour and lifestyle anyway.
Then the statistic is, I fear, near useless. It sounds great but without that context it is meaningless.
It’s good to know that one dose reduces your chances fivefold and a second dose by three times again. TBH the data I have seen suggested that the relative benefit of the first dose was greater still, and his findings do point towards waiting until after the second dose before feeling truly safe.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
And this, as Laloux states in his opening chapters, comes down to how its citizens can conceptualize their purpose and role in society, and hence how they are able to conceive of new ways of organizing.
For all those that decry the woke generation, they are in fact evolving those concepts and developing new approaches to organizing that we crusties hate because they make us uncomfortable. I, for one, do not despair with the coming generation, but see them as our hope to evolve away from the globe-destroying global corporate model to something more people, rather than product, oriented.
The next generation is, literally, stupider than us.
I guess every 20 or 30 years there must have been some nutter in Rome, during the Empire, who pointed to the East and screamed ‘the barbarians are coming!’
For 500 years he was wrong and everyone carried on, just ignoring him.
But then, one day, he was right.
I AM THAT SCREAMING NUTTER
Glad you've reached self-awareness.
I don't think any of us doubt that China will be the biggest power economically and militarily. The question is how dominant and for how long with their current blend of political and societal thinking.
For myself, I think they won't be the single hegemon, but the most powerful of 2 or 3 (US/West and India), and that they will not, unless they change their political and societal philosophy, achieve even leading group status on thought and culture. If they do change, then they won't be the beast to fear.
So I am reasonably confident the West will not be submerged under a Chinese political cultural wave, at least not in its current form.
Let’s hope you’re right
But consider this. What if it turns out state directed, high surveillance Asian capitalism is much more efficient, and enriching, than looser, western capitalism which obsesses about transphobic computers?
You don’t have to look far for an example. Covid 19. Yes the west has produced marvelous vaccines, it seems, but the East Asians don’t really need them, as they have managed the disease so much better than us. Their economies have barely shrunk. Ours have shriveled. They are better at this. Partly because they have applied technology in a cleverer but more imposing way.
If this trend continues and China becomes Singapore times a million, China will completely dominate, surrounded by hi tech Asian satellites, even as Philip Thompson is still wibbling on about multi-gender bogs
You can already see this Chinese leadership in developing countries. Does any African nation now look to the USA as an exemplar? The divided, violent USA which recently elected a madman, is riven with crime and drug addiction, and which endured an attempted coup about 5 minutes ago?
No, they do not. They look to China, which surges in strength and enriches its people. That’s the nation and the system they want to copy
One of the very few things of which I am absolutely sure, is that state-directed anything will ultimately turn out to be less efficient than any available alternative.
You must have missed South Korea’s state directed surveillance of covid, which ensured their Covid outbreak was roughly 100 times less lethal than ours
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
And this, as Laloux states in his opening chapters, comes down to how its citizens can conceptualize their purpose and role in society, and hence how they are able to conceive of new ways of organizing.
For all those that decry the woke generation, they are in fact evolving those concepts and developing new approaches to organizing that we crusties hate because they make us uncomfortable. I, for one, do not despair with the coming generation, but see them as our hope to evolve away from the globe-destroying global corporate model to something more people, rather than product, oriented.
The next generation is, literally, stupider than us.
I guess every 20 or 30 years there must have been some nutter in Rome, during the Empire, who pointed to the East and screamed ‘the barbarians are coming!’
For 500 years he was wrong and everyone carried on, just ignoring him.
But then, one day, he was right.
I AM THAT SCREAMING NUTTER
Glad you've reached self-awareness.
I don't think any of us doubt that China will be the biggest power economically and militarily. The question is how dominant and for how long with their current blend of political and societal thinking.
For myself, I think they won't be the single hegemon, but the most powerful of 2 or 3 (US/West and India), and that they will not, unless they change their political and societal philosophy, achieve even leading group status on thought and culture. If they do change, then they won't be the beast to fear.
So I am reasonably confident the West will not be submerged under a Chinese political cultural wave, at least not in its current form.
Let’s hope you’re right
But consider this. What if it turns out state directed, high surveillance Asian capitalism is much more efficient, and enriching, than looser, western capitalism which obsesses about transphobic computers?
You don’t have to look far for an example. Covid 19. Yes the west has produced marvelous vaccines, it seems, but the East Asians don’t really need them, as they have managed the disease so much better than us. Their economies have barely shrunk. Ours have shriveled. They are better at this. Partly because they have applied technology in a cleverer but more imposing way.
If this trend continues and China becomes Singapore times a million, China will completely dominate, surrounded by hi tech Asian satellites, even as Philip Thompson is still wibbling on about multi-gender bogs
You can already see this Chinese leadership in developing countries. Does any African nation now look to the USA as an exemplar? The divided, violent USA which recently elected a madman, is riven with crime and drug addiction, and which endured an attempted coup about 5 minutes ago?
No, they do not. They look to China, which surges in strength and enriches its people. That’s the nation and the system they want to copy
One of the very few things of which I am absolutely sure, is that state-directed anything will ultimately turn out to be less efficient than any available alternative.
You must have missed South Korea’s state directed surveillance of covid, which ensured their Covid outbreak was roughly 100 times less lethal than ours
What, and we turned our response over to the private sector, did we?
I have a larger penis than the youth of today, but they do not want to know.
This is instantaneously a classic PB quote.
I would suggest that it is particularly the female youth of today that don't want to know, but that will just provoke a thread on how many 20+ somethings Sean is bedding/marrying this week.
Edit: Apologies to the Lion of Penarth. I had though it was Leon.
I was too polite to ask how happily-married-to-a-twentysomething Byronic morphed into frustrated single dirty-old-man Leon. Perhaps the intervening period as transsexual LadyG offers something by way of explanation?
For the avoidance of doubt I am not any of these people, particularly not the handsome, priapic, multilingual SeanT, who was also, as I understand, an international concert pianist?
The passing of HRH The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh was a significant event which generated a lot of interest both nationally and internationally.
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The decisions made reflect the role the BBC plays as the national broadcaster, during moments of national significance.
We are grateful for your feedback, and we always listen to the response from our audiences.
I have a larger penis than the youth of today, but they do not want to know.
This is instantaneously a classic PB quote.
I would suggest that it is particularly the female youth of today that don't want to know, but that will just provoke a thread on how many 20+ somethings Sean is bedding/marrying this week.
Edit: Apologies to the Lion of Penarth. I had though it was Leon.
I was too polite to ask how happily-married-to-a-twentysomething Byronic morphed into frustrated single dirty-old-man Leon. Perhaps the intervening period as transsexual LadyG offers something by way of explanation?
For the avoidance of doubt I am not any of these people, particularly not the handsome, priapic, multilingual SeanT, who was also, as I understand, an international concert pianist?
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
Absolutely!
And it is "woke" attitudes that make that happen. The refusal to just take for granted that which has come before, the natural desire to challenge prior thinking, the willingness to challenge authority.
And Leon sees it as a weakness not a strength. Being "woke" is not a weakness, it is the west's greatest strength.
I'm going to disagree with you there Philip. What I see in my workplace is the throwing out of tried and tested ways of doing things (e.g. product development, project management) to be replaced by "agile" practices, which it seems to me involves producing something half-baked, watching it fail and then trying to fix it. For those of us who have been round the block a few times this is hugely frustrating not to mention inefficient and costly.
Sounds like the idiots who read about "Just In time delivery" in Forbes have read about "Agile software development". Presumably in Forbes.
Indeed. Misunderstanding and misapplication of sound ideas does not make the ideas themselves any less sound.
The passing of HRH The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh was a significant event which generated a lot of interest both nationally and internationally.
We acknowledge your complaint about the level of coverage, particularly in relation to the BBC News Special simultaneously broadcasting on BBC One and Two on Friday 9 April. We do not make such changes to billed schedules without careful consideration.
The decisions made reflect the role the BBC plays as the national broadcaster, during moments of national significance.
We are grateful for your feedback, and we always listen to the response from our audiences.
This is not 1950, there are multiple other channels beyond the BBC and Netflix and Amazon Prime etc.
I would be annoyed as a royalist if the BBC as the national broadcaster had not covered the Duke's death wall to wall for 24 hours
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
Absolutely!
And it is "woke" attitudes that make that happen. The refusal to just take for granted that which has come before, the natural desire to challenge prior thinking, the willingness to challenge authority.
And Leon sees it as a weakness not a strength. Being "woke" is not a weakness, it is the west's greatest strength.
I'm going to disagree with you there Philip. What I see in my workplace is the throwing out of tried and tested ways of doing things (e.g. product development, project management) to be replaced by "agile" practices, which it seems to me involves producing something half-baked, watching it fail and then trying to fix it. For those of us who have been round the block a few times this is hugely frustrating not to mention inefficient and costly.
As SpaceX has shown, there's a happy medium between those two approaches.
I have a larger penis than the youth of today, but they do not want to know.
This is instantaneously a classic PB quote.
I would suggest that it is particularly the female youth of today that don't want to know, but that will just provoke a thread on how many 20+ somethings Sean is bedding/marrying this week.
Edit: Apologies to the Lion of Penarth. I had though it was Leon.
I was too polite to ask how happily-married-to-a-twentysomething Byronic morphed into frustrated single dirty-old-man Leon. Perhaps the intervening period as transsexual LadyG offers something by way of explanation?
It's like the interruptions in the fossil record. There are millions of SeanTs that you have missed in that progression.....
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
And this, as Laloux states in his opening chapters, comes down to how its citizens can conceptualize their purpose and role in society, and hence how they are able to conceive of new ways of organizing.
For all those that decry the woke generation, they are in fact evolving those concepts and developing new approaches to organizing that we crusties hate because they make us uncomfortable. I, for one, do not despair with the coming generation, but see them as our hope to evolve away from the globe-destroying global corporate model to something more people, rather than product, oriented.
The next generation is, literally, stupider than us.
I guess every 20 or 30 years there must have been some nutter in Rome, during the Empire, who pointed to the East and screamed ‘the barbarians are coming!’
For 500 years he was wrong and everyone carried on, just ignoring him.
But then, one day, he was right.
I AM THAT SCREAMING NUTTER
Glad you've reached self-awareness.
I don't think any of us doubt that China will be the biggest power economically and militarily. The question is how dominant and for how long with their current blend of political and societal thinking.
For myself, I think they won't be the single hegemon, but the most powerful of 2 or 3 (US/West and India), and that they will not, unless they change their political and societal philosophy, achieve even leading group status on thought and culture. If they do change, then they won't be the beast to fear.
So I am reasonably confident the West will not be submerged under a Chinese political cultural wave, at least not in its current form.
Let’s hope you’re right
But consider this. What if it turns out state directed, high surveillance Asian capitalism is much more efficient, and enriching, than looser, western capitalism which obsesses about transphobic computers?
You don’t have to look far for an example. Covid 19. Yes the west has produced marvelous vaccines, it seems, but the East Asians don’t really need them, as they have managed the disease so much better than us. Their economies have barely shrunk. Ours have shriveled. They are better at this. Partly because they have applied technology in a cleverer but more imposing way.
If this trend continues and China becomes Singapore times a million, China will completely dominate, surrounded by hi tech Asian satellites, even as Philip Thompson is still wibbling on about multi-gender bogs
You can already see this Chinese leadership in developing countries. Does any African nation now look to the USA as an exemplar? The divided, violent USA which recently elected a madman, is riven with crime and drug addiction, and which endured an attempted coup about 5 minutes ago?
No, they do not. They look to China, which surges in strength and enriches its people. That’s the nation and the system they want to copy
Except China will not be Singapore 2 as Singapore has democratic and free elections and a fair rule of law. If it was there would be nothing to worry about.
It needs India, as the largest democracy not only in Asia but the world, to act as a counterweight to China, the US and West alone are no longer big enough to do so
I’m not sure I would characterise Singapore’s elections as ‘democratic and free.’
I have a larger penis than the youth of today, but they do not want to know.
This is instantaneously a classic PB quote.
I would suggest that it is particularly the female youth of today that don't want to know, but that will just provoke a thread on how many 20+ somethings Sean is bedding/marrying this week.
Edit: Apologies to the Lion of Penarth. I had though it was Leon.
I was too polite to ask how happily-married-to-a-twentysomething Byronic morphed into frustrated single dirty-old-man Leon. Perhaps the intervening period as transsexual LadyG offers something by way of explanation?
For the avoidance of doubt I am not any of these people, particularly not the handsome, priapic, multilingual SeanT, who was also, as I understand, an international concert pianist?
He was certainly an Ivory pounder of the first order. But we haven’t seen his like for many a year. And I doubt he could ever have kept it up for the length of an entire concert in any case.
Seems like a good idea to help work through the backlog of cases that have been building up? Will probably be more use than the Nightingale Hospitals were.
Member of the legal community here (although I don't do criminal law). Extra court space to increase resources and deal with social distancing sounds like a great idea, the delays and resource shortages are appalling. However, only if they're doing things properly. I'd hope they are and have no reason to think they're not.
However, Nightingale Courts would fit right in as the name for some kangaroo court in a teen dystopia novel.
Sounds more like an address to me. Much classier than Nightingale Avenue.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
And this, as Laloux states in his opening chapters, comes down to how its citizens can conceptualize their purpose and role in society, and hence how they are able to conceive of new ways of organizing.
For all those that decry the woke generation, they are in fact evolving those concepts and developing new approaches to organizing that we crusties hate because they make us uncomfortable. I, for one, do not despair with the coming generation, but see them as our hope to evolve away from the globe-destroying global corporate model to something more people, rather than product, oriented.
The next generation is, literally, stupider than us.
I guess every 20 or 30 years there must have been some nutter in Rome, during the Empire, who pointed to the East and screamed ‘the barbarians are coming!’
For 500 years he was wrong and everyone carried on, just ignoring him.
But then, one day, he was right.
I AM THAT SCREAMING NUTTER
Glad you've reached self-awareness.
I don't think any of us doubt that China will be the biggest power economically and militarily. The question is how dominant and for how long with their current blend of political and societal thinking.
For myself, I think they won't be the single hegemon, but the most powerful of 2 or 3 (US/West and India), and that they will not, unless they change their political and societal philosophy, achieve even leading group status on thought and culture. If they do change, then they won't be the beast to fear.
So I am reasonably confident the West will not be submerged under a Chinese political cultural wave, at least not in its current form.
Let’s hope you’re right
But consider this. What if it turns out state directed, high surveillance Asian capitalism is much more efficient, and enriching, than looser, western capitalism which obsesses about transphobic computers?
You don’t have to look far for an example. Covid 19. Yes the west has produced marvelous vaccines, it seems, but the East Asians don’t really need them, as they have managed the disease so much better than us. Their economies have barely shrunk. Ours have shriveled. They are better at this. Partly because they have applied technology in a cleverer but more imposing way.
If this trend continues and China becomes Singapore times a million, China will completely dominate, surrounded by hi tech Asian satellites, even as Philip Thompson is still wibbling on about multi-gender bogs
You can already see this Chinese leadership in developing countries. Does any African nation now look to the USA as an exemplar? The divided, violent USA which recently elected a madman, is riven with crime and drug addiction, and which endured an attempted coup about 5 minutes ago?
No, they do not. They look to China, which surges in strength and enriches its people. That’s the nation and the system they want to copy
One of the very few things of which I am absolutely sure, is that state-directed anything will ultimately turn out to be less efficient than any available alternative.
You must have missed South Korea’s state directed surveillance of covid, which ensured their Covid outbreak was roughly 100 times less lethal than ours
What, and we turned our response over to the private sector, did we?
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
And this, as Laloux states in his opening chapters, comes down to how its citizens can conceptualize their purpose and role in society, and hence how they are able to conceive of new ways of organizing.
For all those that decry the woke generation, they are in fact evolving those concepts and developing new approaches to organizing that we crusties hate because they make us uncomfortable. I, for one, do not despair with the coming generation, but see them as our hope to evolve away from the globe-destroying global corporate model to something more people, rather than product, oriented.
The next generation is, literally, stupider than us.
I guess every 20 or 30 years there must have been some nutter in Rome, during the Empire, who pointed to the East and screamed ‘the barbarians are coming!’
For 500 years he was wrong and everyone carried on, just ignoring him.
But then, one day, he was right.
I AM THAT SCREAMING NUTTER
Glad you've reached self-awareness.
I don't think any of us doubt that China will be the biggest power economically and militarily. The question is how dominant and for how long with their current blend of political and societal thinking.
For myself, I think they won't be the single hegemon, but the most powerful of 2 or 3 (US/West and India), and that they will not, unless they change their political and societal philosophy, achieve even leading group status on thought and culture. If they do change, then they won't be the beast to fear.
So I am reasonably confident the West will not be submerged under a Chinese political cultural wave, at least not in its current form.
Let’s hope you’re right
But consider this. What if it turns out state directed, high surveillance Asian capitalism is much more efficient, and enriching, than looser, western capitalism which obsesses about transphobic computers?
You don’t have to look far for an example. Covid 19. Yes the west has produced marvelous vaccines, it seems, but the East Asians don’t really need them, as they have managed the disease so much better than us. Their economies have barely shrunk. Ours have shriveled. They are better at this. Partly because they have applied technology in a cleverer but more imposing way.
If this trend continues and China becomes Singapore times a million, China will completely dominate, surrounded by hi tech Asian satellites, even as Philip Thompson is still wibbling on about multi-gender bogs
You can already see this Chinese leadership in developing countries. Does any African nation now look to the USA as an exemplar? The divided, violent USA which recently elected a madman, is riven with crime and drug addiction, and which endured an attempted coup about 5 minutes ago?
No, they do not. They look to China, which surges in strength and enriches its people. That’s the nation and the system they want to copy
One of the very few things of which I am absolutely sure, is that state-directed anything will ultimately turn out to be less efficient than any available alternative.
You must have missed South Korea’s state directed surveillance of covid, which ensured their Covid outbreak was roughly 100 times less lethal than ours
What, and we turned our response over to the private sector, did we?
I fear we achieved a truly suboptimal mix of private and public, when it came to test, track and trace, at least initially
I have a larger penis than the youth of today, but they do not want to know.
This is instantaneously a classic PB quote.
I would suggest that it is particularly the female youth of today that don't want to know, but that will just provoke a thread on how many 20+ somethings Sean is bedding/marrying this week.
Edit: Apologies to the Lion of Penarth. I had though it was Leon.
I was too polite to ask how happily-married-to-a-twentysomething Byronic morphed into frustrated single dirty-old-man Leon. Perhaps the intervening period as transsexual LadyG offers something by way of explanation?
It's like the interruptions in the fossil record. There are millions of SeanTs that you have missed in that progression.....
It's an absolute tragedy what happened to the Seanderthals...
I had AZ yesterday and, other than the fact I can feel the injection site when I press it, I have had no reaction at all. Is this good or bad?
Have you had, or think you might have had, Covid?
No.
Then judging from what other people have said, it isn’t likely to be significant. The reactions seem to be mostly among people who’ve had Covid. My dad had a pretty bad reaction, for example, and we’re fairly sure he had it early on.
ETA - or you might get a delayed reaction, of course, as others have said.
In any event, I wouldn’t complain!
I was rough for 24 hours. If I have had Covid, it was in Feb 2020 when I had a funny bout of poorly feeling for a few days.
As far as I can work out, there is simply no reliable way of ascertaining whether one has previously had Covid, either symptomatically or asymptomatically?
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
And this, as Laloux states in his opening chapters, comes down to how its citizens can conceptualize their purpose and role in society, and hence how they are able to conceive of new ways of organizing.
For all those that decry the woke generation, they are in fact evolving those concepts and developing new approaches to organizing that we crusties hate because they make us uncomfortable. I, for one, do not despair with the coming generation, but see them as our hope to evolve away from the globe-destroying global corporate model to something more people, rather than product, oriented.
The next generation is, literally, stupider than us.
I guess every 20 or 30 years there must have been some nutter in Rome, during the Empire, who pointed to the East and screamed ‘the barbarians are coming!’
For 500 years he was wrong and everyone carried on, just ignoring him.
But then, one day, he was right.
I AM THAT SCREAMING NUTTER
Glad you've reached self-awareness.
I don't think any of us doubt that China will be the biggest power economically and militarily. The question is how dominant and for how long with their current blend of political and societal thinking.
For myself, I think they won't be the single hegemon, but the most powerful of 2 or 3 (US/West and India), and that they will not, unless they change their political and societal philosophy, achieve even leading group status on thought and culture. If they do change, then they won't be the beast to fear.
So I am reasonably confident the West will not be submerged under a Chinese political cultural wave, at least not in its current form.
Let’s hope you’re right
But consider this. What if it turns out state directed, high surveillance Asian capitalism is much more efficient, and enriching, than looser, western capitalism which obsesses about transphobic computers?
You don’t have to look far for an example. Covid 19. Yes the west has produced marvelous vaccines, it seems, but the East Asians don’t really need them, as they have managed the disease so much better than us. Their economies have barely shrunk. Ours have shriveled. They are better at this. Partly because they have applied technology in a cleverer but more imposing way.
If this trend continues and China becomes Singapore times a million, China will completely dominate, surrounded by hi tech Asian satellites, even as Philip Thompson is still wibbling on about multi-gender bogs
You can already see this Chinese leadership in developing countries. Does any African nation now look to the USA as an exemplar? The divided, violent USA which recently elected a madman, is riven with crime and drug addiction, and which endured an attempted coup about 5 minutes ago?
No, they do not. They look to China, which surges in strength and enriches its people. That’s the nation and the system they want to copy
One of the very few things of which I am absolutely sure, is that state-directed anything will ultimately turn out to be less efficient than any available alternative.
That might be true of state directed everything; it certainly isn't true about state directed anything.
I had AZ yesterday and, other than the fact I can feel the injection site when I press it, I have had no reaction at all. Is this good or bad?
Have you had, or think you might have had, Covid?
No.
Then judging from what other people have said, it isn’t likely to be significant. The reactions seem to be mostly among people who’ve had Covid. My dad had a pretty bad reaction, for example, and we’re fairly sure he had it early on.
ETA - or you might get a delayed reaction, of course, as others have said.
In any event, I wouldn’t complain!
I was rough for 24 hours. If I have had Covid, it was in Feb 2020 when I had a funny bout of poorly feeling for a few days.
As far as I can work out, there is simply no reliable way of ascertaining whether one has previously had Covid, either symptomatically or asymptomatically?
Pre-vaccination, and antibody test should tell you.
I have a larger penis than the youth of today, but they do not want to know.
This is instantaneously a classic PB quote.
I would suggest that it is particularly the female youth of today that don't want to know, but that will just provoke a thread on how many 20+ somethings Sean is bedding/marrying this week.
Edit: Apologies to the Lion of Penarth. I had though it was Leon.
I was too polite to ask how happily-married-to-a-twentysomething Byronic morphed into frustrated single dirty-old-man Leon. Perhaps the intervening period as transsexual LadyG offers something by way of explanation?
For the avoidance of doubt I am not any of these people, particularly not the handsome, priapic, multilingual SeanT, who was also, as I understand, an international concert pianist?
He was certainly an Ivory pounder of the first order. But we haven’t seen his like for many a year.
I have a larger penis than the youth of today, but they do not want to know.
This is instantaneously a classic PB quote.
I would suggest that it is particularly the female youth of today that don't want to know, but that will just provoke a thread on how many 20+ somethings Sean is bedding/marrying this week.
Edit: Apologies to the Lion of Penarth. I had though it was Leon.
I was too polite to ask how happily-married-to-a-twentysomething Byronic morphed into frustrated single dirty-old-man Leon. Perhaps the intervening period as transsexual LadyG offers something by way of explanation?
It's like the interruptions in the fossil record. There are millions of SeanTs that you have missed in that progression.....
It's an absolute tragedy what happened to the Seanderthals...
They were wiped out by the Piltdown men from Sussex.
I had AZ yesterday and, other than the fact I can feel the injection site when I press it, I have had no reaction at all. Is this good or bad?
Have you had, or think you might have had, Covid?
No.
Then judging from what other people have said, it isn’t likely to be significant. The reactions seem to be mostly among people who’ve had Covid. My dad had a pretty bad reaction, for example, and we’re fairly sure he had it early on.
ETA - or you might get a delayed reaction, of course, as others have said.
In any event, I wouldn’t complain!
I was rough for 24 hours. If I have had Covid, it was in Feb 2020 when I had a funny bout of poorly feeling for a few days.
As far as I can work out, there is simply no reliable way of ascertaining whether one has previously had Covid, either symptomatically or asymptomatically?
The antibody tests work - though levels x months after a mild infections etc....
I have a larger penis than the youth of today, but they do not want to know.
This is instantaneously a classic PB quote.
I would suggest that it is particularly the female youth of today that don't want to know, but that will just provoke a thread on how many 20+ somethings Sean is bedding/marrying this week.
Edit: Apologies to the Lion of Penarth. I had though it was Leon.
I was too polite to ask how happily-married-to-a-twentysomething Byronic morphed into frustrated single dirty-old-man Leon. Perhaps the intervening period as transsexual LadyG offers something by way of explanation?
For the avoidance of doubt I am not any of these people, particularly not the handsome, priapic, multilingual SeanT, who was also, as I understand, an international concert pianist?
He was certainly an Ivory pounder of the first order. But we haven’t seen his like for many a year.
I thought he was a merchant banker?
Only if you’re talking in rhyming slang.
On one memorable occasion he was hospitalised because of his, umm, over exuberance in that department.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
And this, as Laloux states in his opening chapters, comes down to how its citizens can conceptualize their purpose and role in society, and hence how they are able to conceive of new ways of organizing.
For all those that decry the woke generation, they are in fact evolving those concepts and developing new approaches to organizing that we crusties hate because they make us uncomfortable. I, for one, do not despair with the coming generation, but see them as our hope to evolve away from the globe-destroying global corporate model to something more people, rather than product, oriented.
The next generation is, literally, stupider than us.
I guess every 20 or 30 years there must have been some nutter in Rome, during the Empire, who pointed to the East and screamed ‘the barbarians are coming!’
For 500 years he was wrong and everyone carried on, just ignoring him.
But then, one day, he was right.
I AM THAT SCREAMING NUTTER
Glad you've reached self-awareness.
I don't think any of us doubt that China will be the biggest power economically and militarily. The question is how dominant and for how long with their current blend of political and societal thinking.
For myself, I think they won't be the single hegemon, but the most powerful of 2 or 3 (US/West and India), and that they will not, unless they change their political and societal philosophy, achieve even leading group status on thought and culture. If they do change, then they won't be the beast to fear.
So I am reasonably confident the West will not be submerged under a Chinese political cultural wave, at least not in its current form.
Let’s hope you’re right
But consider this. What if it turns out state directed, high surveillance Asian capitalism is much more efficient, and enriching, than looser, western capitalism which obsesses about transphobic computers?
You don’t have to look far for an example. Covid 19. Yes the west has produced marvelous vaccines, it seems, but the East Asians don’t really need them, as they have managed the disease so much better than us. Their economies have barely shrunk. Ours have shriveled. They are better at this. Partly because they have applied technology in a cleverer but more imposing way.
If this trend continues and China becomes Singapore times a million, China will completely dominate, surrounded by hi tech Asian satellites, even as Philip Thompson is still wibbling on about multi-gender bogs
You can already see this Chinese leadership in developing countries. Does any African nation now look to the USA as an exemplar? The divided, violent USA which recently elected a madman, is riven with crime and drug addiction, and which endured an attempted coup about 5 minutes ago?
No, they do not. They look to China, which surges in strength and enriches its people. That’s the nation and the system they want to copy
One of the very few things of which I am absolutely sure, is that state-directed anything will ultimately turn out to be less efficient than any available alternative.
That might be true of state directed everything; it certainly isn't true about state directed anything.
The NHS vacccine rollout turned out to be quite a lot more efficient than the contracted-out test-and-trace.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
And this, as Laloux states in his opening chapters, comes down to how its citizens can conceptualize their purpose and role in society, and hence how they are able to conceive of new ways of organizing.
For all those that decry the woke generation, they are in fact evolving those concepts and developing new approaches to organizing that we crusties hate because they make us uncomfortable. I, for one, do not despair with the coming generation, but see them as our hope to evolve away from the globe-destroying global corporate model to something more people, rather than product, oriented.
The next generation is, literally, stupider than us.
I guess every 20 or 30 years there must have been some nutter in Rome, during the Empire, who pointed to the East and screamed ‘the barbarians are coming!’
For 500 years he was wrong and everyone carried on, just ignoring him.
But then, one day, he was right.
I AM THAT SCREAMING NUTTER
Glad you've reached self-awareness.
I don't think any of us doubt that China will be the biggest power economically and militarily. The question is how dominant and for how long with their current blend of political and societal thinking.
For myself, I think they won't be the single hegemon, but the most powerful of 2 or 3 (US/West and India), and that they will not, unless they change their political and societal philosophy, achieve even leading group status on thought and culture. If they do change, then they won't be the beast to fear.
So I am reasonably confident the West will not be submerged under a Chinese political cultural wave, at least not in its current form.
Let’s hope you’re right
But consider this. What if it turns out state directed, high surveillance Asian capitalism is much more efficient, and enriching, than looser, western capitalism which obsesses about transphobic computers?
You don’t have to look far for an example. Covid 19. Yes the west has produced marvelous vaccines, it seems, but the East Asians don’t really need them, as they have managed the disease so much better than us. Their economies have barely shrunk. Ours have shriveled. They are better at this. Partly because they have applied technology in a cleverer but more imposing way.
If this trend continues and China becomes Singapore times a million, China will completely dominate, surrounded by hi tech Asian satellites, even as Philip Thompson is still wibbling on about multi-gender bogs
You can already see this Chinese leadership in developing countries. Does any African nation now look to the USA as an exemplar? The divided, violent USA which recently elected a madman, is riven with crime and drug addiction, and which endured an attempted coup about 5 minutes ago?
No, they do not. They look to China, which surges in strength and enriches its people. That’s the nation and the system they want to copy
The mid years of the 21st century might see a confluence of tech development, in quantum computing and AI, that would make everything else that came before a bit irrelevant. And whoever gets there first writes the rules, at least for a while (much like with nukes) but possibly permanently.
Now perhaps Leon is right and China gets there first. It does have a high r&d spend. More disturbingly perhaps it already has got there and the Chinese are the ones (to quote the most senior US officials) behind the UFO’s buzzing the US military with G’s beyond our understanding of materials science, hyper sonic acceleration with no sonic boom and equally capable performance in both water and air.
Or it’s not the Chinese. Which means it’s either the Americans. Or someone/something that’s guided human civilisation this far. It’ll be ok. Don’t worry about China. “You would all be speaking Chinese but for us” is not a barb that will work on the early 22nd Century remake of Fawlty Towers, because of course there’s no chance of you and me ever learning it even after gunpoint.
I have a larger penis than the youth of today, but they do not want to know.
This is instantaneously a classic PB quote.
I would suggest that it is particularly the female youth of today that don't want to know, but that will just provoke a thread on how many 20+ somethings Sean is bedding/marrying this week.
Edit: Apologies to the Lion of Penarth. I had though it was Leon.
I was too polite to ask how happily-married-to-a-twentysomething Byronic morphed into frustrated single dirty-old-man Leon. Perhaps the intervening period as transsexual LadyG offers something by way of explanation?
It's like the interruptions in the fossil record. There are millions of SeanTs that you have missed in that progression.....
It's an absolute tragedy what happened to the Seanderthals...
They were wiped out by the Piltdown men from Sussex.
The Neanderthals surely went and settled the Netherlands. You only have to rearrange a few of the letters to reveal this truth.
I have a larger penis than the youth of today, but they do not want to know.
This is instantaneously a classic PB quote.
I would suggest that it is particularly the female youth of today that don't want to know, but that will just provoke a thread on how many 20+ somethings Sean is bedding/marrying this week.
Edit: Apologies to the Lion of Penarth. I had though it was Leon.
I was too polite to ask how happily-married-to-a-twentysomething Byronic morphed into frustrated single dirty-old-man Leon. Perhaps the intervening period as transsexual LadyG offers something by way of explanation?
For the avoidance of doubt I am not any of these people, particularly not the handsome, priapic, multilingual SeanT, who was also, as I understand, an international concert pianist?
He was certainly an Ivory pounder of the first order. But we haven’t seen his like for many a year.
I thought he was a merchant banker?
Only if you’re talking in rhyming slang.
On one memorable occasion he was hospitalised because of his, umm, over exuberance in that department.
A refreshing change from the usual hypochondriac explanation, at least.
The passing of HRH The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh was a significant event which generated a lot of interest both nationally and internationally.
We acknowledge your complaint about the level of coverage, particularly in relation to the BBC News Special simultaneously broadcasting on BBC One and Two on Friday 9 April. We do not make such changes to billed schedules without careful consideration.
The decisions made reflect the role the BBC plays as the national broadcaster, during moments of national significance.
We are grateful for your feedback, and we always listen to the response from our audiences.
The passing of HRH The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh was a significant event which generated a lot of interest both nationally and internationally.
We acknowledge your complaint about the level of coverage, particularly in relation to the BBC News Special interrupting the usual Friday night tech-house rinse-up on Radio 1Xtra.
The decisions made reflect the role the BBC plays as the national broadcaster, during moments of national significance. Selecta!
I have a larger penis than the youth of today, but they do not want to know.
This is instantaneously a classic PB quote.
I would suggest that it is particularly the female youth of today that don't want to know, but that will just provoke a thread on how many 20+ somethings Sean is bedding/marrying this week.
Edit: Apologies to the Lion of Penarth. I had though it was Leon.
I was too polite to ask how happily-married-to-a-twentysomething Byronic morphed into frustrated single dirty-old-man Leon. Perhaps the intervening period as transsexual LadyG offers something by way of explanation?
It's like the interruptions in the fossil record. There are millions of SeanTs that you have missed in that progression.....
It's an absolute tragedy what happened to the Seanderthals...
They were wiped out by the Piltdown men from Sussex.
The Neanderthals surely went and settled the Netherlands. You only have to rearrange a few of the letters to reveal this truth.
They had to do that though, because when they tried to pronounce their original name they all ended up drenched in Flem.
Off to East Sussex to meet a friend for a pub lunch tomorrow. There's 3 East Sussexes: the suburban bit, which is classic commuter belt but with acid soil and rhododendron bushes; the coastal bit, which is definitely a bit odd, especially Hastings; and the rather pretty bit in between the two which is decidedly odd, with some very good vineyards.
Hmm, as a proud East Sussex man, I can't let that pass uncorrected! There are more than three parts, it's a very varied county.
The suburban/commute belt bit is a quite small part. Then you have the absolutely glorious High Weald, one of the loveliest unspoilt parts of the South East, dotted with historic villages and with a very fine selection of timber-framed mediaeval buildings; it's remarkably unknown. Then there's the South Downs, lovely again, but completely different. And there's Ashdown Forest - different again. And finally the southern coastal strip, which is indeed rather less attractive on the whole.
Hastings is a tragedy - it was a particularly fine example of a mediaeval town, but was wantonly wrecked by the local council in the 60s. But there's still Winchelsea and Rye. Lewes is also fine, in a different way.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
And this, as Laloux states in his opening chapters, comes down to how its citizens can conceptualize their purpose and role in society, and hence how they are able to conceive of new ways of organizing.
For all those that decry the woke generation, they are in fact evolving those concepts and developing new approaches to organizing that we crusties hate because they make us uncomfortable. I, for one, do not despair with the coming generation, but see them as our hope to evolve away from the globe-destroying global corporate model to something more people, rather than product, oriented.
The next generation is, literally, stupider than us.
I guess every 20 or 30 years there must have been some nutter in Rome, during the Empire, who pointed to the East and screamed ‘the barbarians are coming!’
For 500 years he was wrong and everyone carried on, just ignoring him.
Another devastating intervention from Sir Kir ‘Royale’ Starmer
He does have this uncanny ability to find a news story of the day, not necessarily that obvious, yet he’s able to turn it into a horrible, damaging issue for the government, with just one deft quote. As here.
‘We’ve got to get to the bottom of it’.
How do you even BEGIN to respond to that? You don’t. You’re floored. Dazed and confused.
Starmer is like a political Spock on the Starship Enterprise, approaching from behind and silently employing his ‘death-grip’
That is one of the feeblest attacks on a minister for a long time. Not only would it be entirely unremarkable and uncontroversial; for a document-shredding business to happen to have the NHS amongst its customers, in this case it was NHS Wales, which is nothing to do with Matt Hancock. And even if it were NHS England, does Labour really think that the Secretary of State knows anything at all about small contracts for document disposal, or that a minor shareholder has a list of all the company's customers?
They've completely lost their marbles. Smears as pathetic as that are counter-productive.
There is plenty of incidents of government ministers being far too chummy with people who have ended up getting contracts, but I am struggling to see the issue with this particular one. He was gifted shares in a company, who got a contract with NHS Wales, who are under Labour control.
Doesn’t look to me as though batting is too easy anywhere today, possibly due to the weather. Certainly it’s dark and cold at Taunton.
Wonderful sunny spring day here in Llandudno sitting on our patio drinking coffee and looking out the sun cream
I hate to be uncharacteristically pessimistic, but the warm sunny weather predicted for the rest of April, in london, at last - 17C and a southerly breeze - has suddenly reverted to cool, grey and cloudy. AGAIN
There is plenty of incidents of government ministers being far too chummy with people who have ended up getting contracts, but I am struggling to see the issue with this particular one. He was gifted shares in a company, who got a contract with NHS Wales, who are under Labour control.
Doesn’t look to me as though batting is too easy anywhere today, possibly due to the weather. Certainly it’s dark and cold at Taunton.
Wonderful sunny spring day here in Llandudno sitting on our patio drinking coffee and looking out the sun cream
I hate to be uncharacteristically pessimistic, but the warm sunny weather predicted for the rest of April, in london, at last - 17C and a southerly breeze - has suddenly reverted to cool, grey and cloudy. AGAIN
Get yourself into the country, boy. It’s warmer here; or at least it is, down by the sea.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Another telling point is Westerners who have taken positions in Chinese Universities have started to leave over the last few years. (Two of my friends have). The restrictions on foreign nationals have become more & more cumbersome & irritating.
Chinese science has made excellent progress, but it is still well behind the US, UK, all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea and some parts of Eastern Europe in terms of consistent quality of research outputs (but perhaps not quantity).
There is also extensive political interference in academic appointments & funding for scientific projects.
A gifted Chinese scientist will almost always prefer a job in a good Western University even against the most prestigIous & wealthy Chinese university like Tsinghua. China are still losing their very best scientists.
And yet, weirdly, Chinese universities are ascending the global rankings.
‘Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China's universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.‘
I feel like a man on the balcony of a hotel in Phuket, pointing at a distant but incoming tsunami, while the rest of you are down in the bar having a chat about the day’s surfing
Being bullied and patronised by the USA has not always been a comfortable experience since WW2 but we have on the main been on the same page and pretended to believe the same things. A century where China is the dominant power will have us harkening after the good old days without a doubt. Basic freedoms and principles that we hold dear will be quashed as will countries who find themselves in China's way and there will be nothing we can do about it.
I think we should be starting to brace ourselves for such a world, that we should stop China buying up enterprise companies with IP in the west, restrict their access to our markets and go as far as we need to go to make sure that we are not beholden to them for things our society needs to operate. But we can't stop it. The pass was sold when they were given pretty much unrestricted access to our markets in the name of "free trade" which has proven to be nothing of the sort. They now have sufficient critical mass not to be vulnerable anymore.
Yes. They are invulnerable. And uncontainable. In a way the USSR never was. Because they are the biggest trader on earth. When they absorb Taiwan - as they shall - this supremacy will harden.
So, as you say, it’s too late. The best we can do is make sure we keep crucial tech, science, etc, in western hands (even if they have them too) so they cannot bully us. And we really need to ditch the worst of wokeness, even as we pray their curtailed liberties hinder them assuming total power
At the moment the trends aren’t great, there is too much basic denial. As we see here
We should also ditch the defeatism.
China's regime needs to keep convincing its burgeoning middle class that its way is better than the west's. That the new Chinese don't need all this democracy bullsh8t.
If, as in the past, the West's enormous powers of innovation allow it to pull ahead technically once again, the Chinese regime has a big problem.
That is why China has tried desperately to get its fingers into as much Western know-how as possible. It needs absolutely to cover all those bases.
It cannot afford to have Westerners trolling about in air cars, making use of fusion power and flying from London to Sydney in four hours while its citizens cannot.
That is the way to beat Xi.
It’s easy to sneer at its politicians, its guns, its culture wars. But America remains the most extraordinary boiling pot of innovation, collaboration and optimism that arguably humans have ever constructed.
And this, as Laloux states in his opening chapters, comes down to how its citizens can conceptualize their purpose and role in society, and hence how they are able to conceive of new ways of organizing.
For all those that decry the woke generation, they are in fact evolving those concepts and developing new approaches to organizing that we crusties hate because they make us uncomfortable. I, for one, do not despair with the coming generation, but see them as our hope to evolve away from the globe-destroying global corporate model to something more people, rather than product, oriented.
The next generation is, literally, stupider than us.
I guess every 20 or 30 years there must have been some nutter in Rome, during the Empire, who pointed to the East and screamed ‘the barbarians are coming!’
For 500 years he was wrong and everyone carried on, just ignoring him.
But then, one day, he was right.
I AM THAT SCREAMING NUTTER
Glad you've reached self-awareness.
I don't think any of us doubt that China will be the biggest power economically and militarily. The question is how dominant and for how long with their current blend of political and societal thinking.
For myself, I think they won't be the single hegemon, but the most powerful of 2 or 3 (US/West and India), and that they will not, unless they change their political and societal philosophy, achieve even leading group status on thought and culture. If they do change, then they won't be the beast to fear.
So I am reasonably confident the West will not be submerged under a Chinese political cultural wave, at least not in its current form.
Let’s hope you’re right
But consider this. What if it turns out state directed, high surveillance Asian capitalism is much more efficient, and enriching, than looser, western capitalism which obsesses about transphobic computers?
You don’t have to look far for an example. Covid 19. Yes the west has produced marvelous vaccines, it seems, but the East Asians don’t really need them, as they have managed the disease so much better than us. Their economies have barely shrunk. Ours have shriveled. They are better at this. Partly because they have applied technology in a cleverer but more imposing way.
If this trend continues and China becomes Singapore times a million, China will completely dominate, surrounded by hi tech Asian satellites, even as Philip Thompson is still wibbling on about multi-gender bogs
You can already see this Chinese leadership in developing countries. Does any African nation now look to the USA as an exemplar? The divided, violent USA which recently elected a madman, is riven with crime and drug addiction, and which endured an attempted coup about 5 minutes ago?
No, they do not. They look to China, which surges in strength and enriches its people. That’s the nation and the system they want to copy
One of the very few things of which I am absolutely sure, is that state-directed anything will ultimately turn out to be less efficient than any available alternative.
You must have missed South Korea’s state directed surveillance of covid, which ensured their Covid outbreak was roughly 100 times less lethal than ours
What, and we turned our response over to the private sector, did we?
I fear we achieved a truly suboptimal mix of private and public, when it came to test, track and trace, at least initially
That's as maybe, but everything they do still has NHS branding all over it.
Comments
And it is "woke" attitudes that make that happen. The refusal to just take for granted that which has come before, the natural desire to challenge prior thinking, the willingness to challenge authority.
And Leon sees it as a weakness not a strength. Being "woke" is not a weakness, it is the west's greatest strength.
I don't think any of us doubt that China will be the biggest power economically and militarily. The question is how dominant and for how long with their current blend of political and societal thinking.
For myself, I think they won't be the single hegemon, but the most powerful of 2 or 3 (US/West and India), and that they will not, unless they change their political and societal philosophy, achieve even leading group status on thought and culture. If they do change, then they won't be the beast to fear.
So I am reasonably confident the West will not be submerged under a Chinese political cultural wave, at least not in its current form.
To say that when we are doing well over a million tests a day now, tests equivalent to nearly 20% of the population per week, that we're finding between a fifth and a quarter of cases is rather preposterous.
When deaths were hundreds a day then if that levelled off or increased then that could be measurable, similarly with cases and hospitalisations. But frankly now numbers are so low that even if they level off, even if they increase, it would fall more under natural variation that is hard to measure anyway.
If eg deaths went from 300 per day to 360 per day, or 1000 per day to 1200 per day then you could say that is a 20% increase and is bad and we need to halt. If they go from 10 per day to 12 per day then is that an increase or just natural random natural variation? Would that stop the advance to the next stage? And if the advance to the next stage can't realistically be halted - and if the prevalence is low enough - then the data says to do it now.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-56749105
Racist paint?
They’re the only people who can stomach a Bourbon.
It would have been quite serious news if we had reached that stage - and that was what the Nightingale Hospitals were for....
EDIT: In Peru, that is what they are doing. A oxygen bottle sells for £600 now, there....
https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/The_Coming_of_the_Huns
https://twitter.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1383037715126620163?s=20
The Tories also have a 10% lead with middle class ABC1 voters, 41% to 31%.
13% of 2019 Labour voters now voting Green and 6% now voting Tory.
Only 3% of 2019 Tory voters now back Labour, less than the 5% who now back Reform UK.
Only Labour gains of any significance come from 2019 LD voters, 28% of whom now back Starmer
https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/x3uculd6mi/TheTimes_Voting_Intention_Track_210414_W.pdf
FFS. Get on with it. You undermine everything else you write by refusing it.
Edit: Apologies to the Lion of Penarth. I had though it was Leon.
But consider this. What if it turns out state directed, high surveillance Asian capitalism is much more efficient, and enriching, than looser, western capitalism which obsesses about transphobic computers?
You don’t have to look far for an example. Covid 19. Yes the west has produced marvelous vaccines, it seems, but the East Asians don’t really need them, as they have managed the disease so much better than us. Their economies have barely shrunk. Ours have shriveled. They are better at this. Partly because they have applied technology in a cleverer but more imposing way.
If this trend continues and China becomes Singapore times a million, China will completely dominate, surrounded by hi tech Asian satellites, even as Philip Thompson is still wibbling on about multi-gender bogs
You can already see this Chinese leadership in developing countries. Does any African nation now look to the USA as an exemplar? The divided, violent USA which recently elected a madman, is riven with crime and drug addiction, and which endured an attempted coup about 5 minutes ago?
No, they do not. They look to China, which surges in strength and enriches its people. That’s the nation and the system they want to copy
ETA - or you might get a delayed reaction, of course, as others have said.
In any event, I wouldn’t complain!
My answer was: "How would I know?"
Aren't 30-50% of cases asymptomatic?
Extras are now only the fourth highest scorer.
With eight...
It needs India, as the largest democracy not only in Asia but the world, to act as a counterweight to China, the US and West alone are no longer big enough to do so
What would I answer?
PS - I hope you’re now feeling better.
This is a trivial example, but it points to the cultural issue I am trying to make. Sure, in political elites, China is a key part of the conversation. When it comes to investments, China is omnipresent. But when it comes to daily lives and aspirations - it is Western cultural memes that dominate, and emigration goals point firmly West-ward.
China's mode of organizing is great for mass production. But at some point, mass production is commoditized and moves to the cheaper labour markets. IMO, China cannot stay the world's hegemon based solely on mass production.
The passing of HRH The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh was a significant event which generated a lot of interest both nationally and internationally.
We acknowledge your complaint about the level of coverage, particularly in relation to the BBC News Special simultaneously broadcasting on BBC One and Two on Friday 9 April. We do not make such changes to billed schedules without careful consideration.
The decisions made reflect the role the BBC plays as the national broadcaster, during moments of national significance.
We are grateful for your feedback, and we always listen to the response from our audiences.
Not quite sure where the piano comes in.
I would be annoyed as a royalist if the BBC as the national broadcaster had not covered the Duke's death wall to wall for 24 hours
Good afternoon, everyone.
Only if not deployed alongside this:
https://www.culturehustleusa.com/products/black-3-0-the-worlds-blackest-black-acrylic-paint-150ml
Otherwise, neither.
On one memorable occasion he was hospitalised because of his, umm, over exuberance in that department.
Now perhaps Leon is right and China gets there first. It does have a high r&d spend. More disturbingly perhaps it already has got there and the Chinese are the ones (to quote the most senior US officials) behind the UFO’s buzzing the US military with G’s beyond our understanding of materials science, hyper sonic acceleration with no sonic boom and equally capable performance in both water and air.
Or it’s not the Chinese. Which means it’s either the Americans. Or someone/something that’s guided human civilisation this far. It’ll be ok. Don’t worry about China. “You would all be speaking Chinese but for us” is not a barb that will work on the early 22nd Century remake of Fawlty Towers, because of course there’s no chance of you and me ever learning it even after gunpoint.
We acknowledge your complaint about the level of coverage, particularly in relation to the BBC News Special interrupting the usual Friday night tech-house rinse-up on Radio 1Xtra.
The decisions made reflect the role the BBC plays as the national broadcaster, during moments of national significance. Selecta!
Labour's Keir Starmer says Matt Hancock has questions to answer about shares in company approved as potential NHS supplier
https://bbc.in/3x9BAsT https://twitter.com/BBCPolitics/status/1383054474063806465/video/1
The suburban/commute belt bit is a quite small part. Then you have the absolutely glorious High Weald, one of the loveliest unspoilt parts of the South East, dotted with historic villages and with a very fine selection of timber-framed mediaeval buildings; it's remarkably unknown. Then there's the South Downs, lovely again, but completely different. And there's Ashdown Forest - different again. And finally the southern coastal strip, which is indeed rather less attractive on the whole.
Hastings is a tragedy - it was a particularly fine example of a mediaeval town, but was wantonly wrecked by the local council in the 60s. But there's still Winchelsea and Rye. Lewes is also fine, in a different way.
And yes, some jolly good vineyards!
Another devastating intervention from Sir Kir ‘Royale’ Starmer
He does have this uncanny ability to find a news story of the day, not necessarily that obvious, yet he’s able to turn it into a horrible, damaging issue for the government, with just one deft quote. As here.
‘We’ve got to get to the bottom of it’.
How do you even BEGIN to respond to that? You don’t. You’re floored. Dazed and confused.
Starmer is like a political Spock on the Starship Enterprise, approaching from behind and silently employing his ‘death-grip’
148,000
137,000
133,000
53,000
33,000
33,000
51,000
25,000
14,000
Currently we're at an estimated 274,500 with far more prior infections and vaccinations.
Suggests cases should drop a lot tbh.
And maybe check with his colleague, the labour Wales Health Secretary, who awarded the contract
They've completely lost their marbles. Smears as pathetic as that are counter-productive.
Have I missed something?
Poor Owen.