I can't keep up with the woke stuff....the BBC describe Chloe Zhao as the first woman of colour to win best director.
Since when have people from China been described as people of colour? Or am I missing something?
About a year. People of color now means anyone who is the tiniest bit non-white (but not Jews, obvs)
The phrase “of color” has about 2 years of life left, I reckon. After that it will be seen as grossly offensive, and it will follow BAME into the lexical bin
The slow vaccine roll-out in Asia may turn out to be a humongous error. There is no reason a rich, advanced country like Japan shouldn’t be jabbing away furiously, like almost every western nation
Instead they’ve done about 2% of the populace and they have plans to increase the rate of vaccinations to “10,000 a day”
All they can do now is pray they don’t get hit by a variant. An absurd failure
What a hopeless rollout for such a rich country.
It is incredibly crap. A mixture of bureaucracy, inertia and an ethnocentric belief that vaccines must be tested on Japanese people, first. Or so I have read
Many of the Asian countries that did really well last year might be in for a nasty surprise. This virus has a habit of punishing smugness
You'd have thought there'd be a bit more urgency with the Olympics and all.
French vaccine producer Valneva announced it is "deprioritizing" negotiations with the European Commission after more than six months of talks have yielded no results.
"We’ve committed significant time and effort to try to meet the needs of the central EC [European Commission] procurement process," Valneva CEO Thomas Lingelbach wrote in a press release late Tuesday. "Despite our recent clinical data, we have not made meaningful progress and have not yet secured a supply agreement."
The company said it instead would shift to negotiations with individual EU countries and interested nations outside the EU.
Don't read too much into this. Thanks to BioNTech's incredible progress and rock solid supply chain the EU's vaccine supply is now really solid already, and especially so by the time Valneva would be ready to ship any vaccines to the EU.\
I think Reuters is now behind a paywall - but it sounds like the EU argument is still "We're later in signing a deal, but you've still got to give them to us first anyway because we're the EU."
The actual line is The Commission has also not yet completed a deal with Novavax, an American vaccine producer, due to issues with its delivery schedule.
which if the issue is that the UK has a first supply clause because we got their first is an EU (and EU speed / competency) issue more than anything else.
And if that means spare stock to go to the third world rather than the EU so be it.
The EU won't sign any more deals for vaccines now anyway. They have bet the farm on Pfizer with a 1.8bn dose order valued at $40bn. For all their penny pinching, they've now had to knuckle under and accept that these things cost money. Again, it's good because it looks like an increase the size of the pie type of deal rather than what they did the first time around. It frees up capacity of other vaccines and Pfizer are essentially saying that this deal will be fulfilled in addition to existing capacity.
The Conservatives have plunged five points after weeks of growing sleaze controversy, pollsters Ipsos MORI survey reveal in tonight’s Evening Standard.
It will fuel Tory fears that the “drip drip” of allegations is undermining their hopes in the Hartlepool by election and in local and Scottish elections on May 6.
The pollsters found the Tories on 40 per cent, down from 45 per cent in March, three points clear of Labour who are on 37 per cent, down from 38. The monthly survey put the Liberal Democrats on eight (from six), and the Greens unchanged at five.
The data will dismay Labour MPs because they suggest Sir Keir Starmer has so far failed to capture voters getting disenchanted with the Government and the Prime Minister.
eek said: show previous quotes And it's especially hard if you've been there a long time - I find it easier to point stuff out because I have enough money to live with the consequences of being asked to clear my desk.
I don't think many people within the organisation were in a position to do that - and that is a problem that is virtually impossible to fix.
"I found it easier the longer I had been there - partly because I had established my credibility and toughness (the first time I called out some serious bad behaviour it did not go down well but I had my boss's backing and just kept going. The individual concerned was later put in front of one of the Parliamentary committees on Banking Misbehaviour and had a very uncomfortable time claiming not to know anything), partly because there was external pressure on the organisation ie a regulator and partly because of the context. It was obvious that banks were cocking a lot up even if many did not want to admit how widespread it was.
The Post Office had no external regulator, Ministers were ineffective, the senior leadership believed IT could never go wrong, their internal staff saw themselves as acting only in the interests of the PO and being judge, jury and prosecutor in your own cause is a recipe for disaster. Plus a large dose of cowardice by lots of people - a very common factor in all these situations. Lots of people will fail to do the right thing because they are scared for their jobs, cannot afford to lose them etc etc. Individually they may not be bad people but the consequence of their inaction is that bad things happen."
It sounds like they’d convinced themselves - with little evidence - that there was a massive theft problem, and the funky new computer system was going to expose the scale of the problem.
When the errors started, they were cheering that they’d found the theft, and everything else flowed from there.
No-one senior ever stood back and asked “Are you completely sure we have got this right?”
It raises questions for the Post Office's auditors too. If they really thought there was all this fraud going on, how come it had not been picked up before? And why did the auditors not notice anything wrong with what Horizon was showing?
Spot on.
I have to deal with small time auditors a bit over small charities. They look at every detail of (entirely honest) accounts and report back something like that there is 37p expenditure under 'utilities' that ought to be under 'costs of trading' but otherwise it's fine.
It seems to me that the big outfits do nothing of the sort and take no responsibility.
The thing is that you can't do that. Small accounts are very easy to audit, larger ones are way harder and you are reliant on the computer having everything. Now in this case that wasn't the case but no one would think that was the case as there was a lot of testing that saying everything was fine with the core system.
Open banking is actually going to make that side of things a bit better as it's no longer what the system says the bank paid out, you can now see (from the bank themselves) exactly what the bank did pay out.
Confession time. I'm a Chartered Accountant and therefore did lots of auditing as a young man. IMO there's a structural issue preventing the big firms doing rigorous audits - our old friend, the Conflict of Interest. Perhaps this has been fixed now, I've lost touch, but the audit used to be treated as a loss leader to get juicy consulting work. If that's your game you'll be loath to piss off management with too many tough questions about the accounts. Indeed I often saw people ticked off for "upsetting" the client in this manner.
Isn't it a balancing act? If you have a reputation of being a highly effective auditing firm then that would should trump the alleged "conflict". Of course that benefit of capitalism is lost if your only major competitors are in the same boat...
I wonder if an mRNA vaccine can be developed for the common flu ?
I've heard of side effects with the regular flu vaccine which has always made it seem a bit unappealing (I've never particularly been a priority either tbh & so never had it); Pfizer nada, nil, zero on the first dose at least...
We’ve not even started to scratch the surface of what’s going to be possible with mRNA technology.
Necessity having been the mother of invention, the next few years are going to be a very exciting time indeed for the advancement of medical science.
I can't keep up with the woke stuff....the BBC describe Chloe Zhao as the first woman of colour to win best director.
Since when have people from China been described as people of colour? Or am I missing something?
About a year. People of color now means anyone who is the tiniest bit non-white (but not Jews, obvs)
The phrase “of color” has about 2 years of life left, I reckon. After that it will be seen as grossly offensive, and it will follow BAME into the lexical bin
I was genuinely presuming I didn't know something about her background, that she is actually of mixed race or something. I have honestly never heard people from Asia being described as such.
Do the wokies not realise that labelling every non-white person as such sounds very much like "othering" that genuine racists / racist countries practice e.g South Africa back in the day, describing all none 100% white European as the coloureds.
Of course, under apartheid Chinese were classified as 'Coloured' so that's consistent. If she was Japanese, however it might be different, as she would have been 'White'.
eek said: show previous quotes And it's especially hard if you've been there a long time - I find it easier to point stuff out because I have enough money to live with the consequences of being asked to clear my desk.
I don't think many people within the organisation were in a position to do that - and that is a problem that is virtually impossible to fix.
"I found it easier the longer I had been there - partly because I had established my credibility and toughness (the first time I called out some serious bad behaviour it did not go down well but I had my boss's backing and just kept going. The individual concerned was later put in front of one of the Parliamentary committees on Banking Misbehaviour and had a very uncomfortable time claiming not to know anything), partly because there was external pressure on the organisation ie a regulator and partly because of the context. It was obvious that banks were cocking a lot up even if many did not want to admit how widespread it was.
The Post Office had no external regulator, Ministers were ineffective, the senior leadership believed IT could never go wrong, their internal staff saw themselves as acting only in the interests of the PO and being judge, jury and prosecutor in your own cause is a recipe for disaster. Plus a large dose of cowardice by lots of people - a very common factor in all these situations. Lots of people will fail to do the right thing because they are scared for their jobs, cannot afford to lose them etc etc. Individually they may not be bad people but the consequence of their inaction is that bad things happen."
It sounds like they’d convinced themselves - with little evidence - that there was a massive theft problem, and the funky new computer system was going to expose the scale of the problem.
When the errors started, they were cheering that they’d found the theft, and everything else flowed from there.
No-one senior ever stood back and asked “Are you completely sure we have got this right?”
It raises questions for the Post Office's auditors too. If they really thought there was all this fraud going on, how come it had not been picked up before? And why did the auditors not notice anything wrong with what Horizon was showing?
Spot on.
I have to deal with small time auditors a bit over small charities. They look at every detail of (entirely honest) accounts and report back something like that there is 37p expenditure under 'utilities' that ought to be under 'costs of trading' but otherwise it's fine.
It seems to me that the big outfits do nothing of the sort and take no responsibility.
The thing is that you can't do that. Small accounts are very easy to audit, larger ones are way harder and you are reliant on the computer having everything. Now in this case that wasn't the case but no one would think that was the case as there was a lot of testing that saying everything was fine with the core system.
Open banking is actually going to make that side of things a bit better as it's no longer what the system says the bank paid out, you can now see (from the bank themselves) exactly what the bank did pay out.
Confession time. I'm a Chartered Accountant and therefore did lots of auditing as a young man. IMO there's a structural issue preventing the big firms doing rigorous audits - our old friend, the Conflict of Interest. Perhaps this has been fixed now, I've lost touch, but the audit used to be treated as a loss leader to get juicy consulting work. If that's your game you'll be loath to piss off management with too many tough questions about the accounts. Indeed I often saw people ticked off for "upsetting" the client in this manner.
I'd be interested in those charts further split by age and sex (probably not the sample size to do it).
Men more interested in football and more interested in politics (are either of those true, now?). Of course, it's net approval, but it you're not interested in/have a dim view of politics/politiicians then you're maybe more likely to have a negative view of the leaders.
Older people more interested in football* and [ditto]
*Afterall, the ESL was needed because youngsters don't care any more, no?
Did you see those comments from Perez about making football more like FIFA and having ultimate team style matches or splitting the game into more than two parts becuase kids are used to 15 minute match times in games and 90 minute matches can't hold their attention.
The guy is a complete cretin.
Mercifully, I managed to avoid just about everything Perez had said.
Interesting ideas though, we could do the same with politics. Five years is far too long between goals (elections). Public vote once per week to eliminate a few from the house, with new entries each week too. And why not bring in the best/worst of Europe too? VdL's post-eviction interview would be fun, no doubt.
I know the Chartists had a yearly parliament view, but didn't someone on here have an interesting idea of every MP serving at least five years. Elections in constituents would only be held every five years, so initially they'd all line up but death and resignation would reset that five years so eventually every constituency would be running on their own timetable. Unpopular governments would fall 'slowly' rather than all at once as the scheduled elections slowly eroded their majority.
It wouldn't work - because how would you deal with constituency changes; and what would happen when a government went from 325 seats to 324 randomly one Thursday night - but it was an interesting thought exercise.
I wonder if an mRNA vaccine can be developed for the common flu ?
I've heard of side effects with the regular flu vaccine which has always made it seem a bit unappealing (I've never particularly been a priority either tbh & so never had it); Pfizer nada, nil, zero on the first dose at least...
We’ve not even started to scratch the surface of what’s going to be possible with mRNA technology.
Necessity having been the mother of invention, the next few years are going to be a very exciting time indeed for the advancement of medical science.
In the early weeks of the pandenic Bill Gates said exactly this about mRNA technology, that it was a technology up to now that hadn't had that necessarity to push it into the mainstream, but if it could be shown to work for COVID, that incredibly exciting opportunities.
I wonder if an mRNA vaccine can be developed for the common flu ?
I've heard of side effects with the regular flu vaccine which has always made it seem a bit unappealing (I've never particularly been a priority either tbh & so never had it); Pfizer nada, nil, zero on the first dose at least...
We’ve not even started to scratch the surface of what’s going to be possible with mRNA technology.
Necessity having been the mother of invention, the next few years are going to be a very exciting time indeed for the advancement of medical science.
In the early weeks of the pandenic Bill Gates said exactly this about mRNA technology.
I'd be interested in those charts further split by age and sex (probably not the sample size to do it).
Men more interested in football and more interested in politics (are either of those true, now?). Of course, it's net approval, but it you're not interested in/have a dim view of politics/politiicians then you're maybe more likely to have a negative view of the leaders.
Older people more interested in football* and [ditto]
*Afterall, the ESL was needed because youngsters don't care any more, no?
Did you see those comments from Perez about making football more like FIFA and having ultimate team style matches or splitting the game into more than two parts becuase kids are used to 15 minute match times in games and 90 minute matches can't hold their attention.
The guy is a complete cretin.
Mercifully, I managed to avoid just about everything Perez had said.
Interesting ideas though, we could do the same with politics. Five years is far too long between goals (elections). Public vote once per week to eliminate a few from the house, with new entries each week too. And why not bring in the best/worst of Europe too? VdL's post-eviction interview would be fun, no doubt.
I know the Chartists had a yearly parliament view, but didn't someone on here have an interesting idea of every MP serving at least five years. Elections in constituents would only be held every five years, so initially they'd all line up but death and resignation would reset that five years so eventually every constituency would be running on their own timetable. Unpopular governments would fall 'slowly' rather than all at once as the scheduled elections slowly eroded their majority.
It wouldn't work - because how would you deal with constituency changes; and what would happen when a government went from 325 seats to 324 randomly one Thursday night - but it was an interesting thought exercise.
What if we have iterative elections, where 4 seats have scheduled by-elections each week. Get a new House every 3 years or so.
Boris Johnson's biographer Andrew Gimson says the PM 'may well have' made 'tasteless' remark about allowing dead bodies to pile up but believes it will 'strengthen his reputation as a man who talks as a man in the pub would' https://twitter.com/JasonGroves1/status/1386631561265750017
This "pub" line is getting a bit of a flogging. It must have focus grouped well.
I wonder if an mRNA vaccine can be developed for the common flu ?
I've heard of side effects with the regular flu vaccine which has always made it seem a bit unappealing (I've never particularly been a priority either tbh & so never had it); Pfizer nada, nil, zero on the first dose at least...
We’ve not even started to scratch the surface of what’s going to be possible with mRNA technology.
Necessity having been the mother of invention, the next few years are going to be a very exciting time indeed for the advancement of medical science.
In the early weeks of the pandenic Bill Gates said exactly this about mRNA technology.
Well he would say that!
I am hoping in May I might get incorporated into the Borg network with a covid vaccine shot.
and an ethnocentric belief that vaccines must be tested on Japanese people, first.
Yep lol - clear racism.
Bhavani Nelavelly, Pharma Analyst at GlobalData, said this is important because “Japan is one of the very few countries that require additional clinical trials within the country to ensure safety. With a comparatively small COVID-19 outbreak in Japan, a valid assessment in a late-stage trial in Japan will be difficult to effectively demonstrate the high efficacy of the vaccines confirmed globally. However, this may be sufficient to demonstrate safety.
eek said: show previous quotes And it's especially hard if you've been there a long time - I find it easier to point stuff out because I have enough money to live with the consequences of being asked to clear my desk.
I don't think many people within the organisation were in a position to do that - and that is a problem that is virtually impossible to fix.
"I found it easier the longer I had been there - partly because I had established my credibility and toughness (the first time I called out some serious bad behaviour it did not go down well but I had my boss's backing and just kept going. The individual concerned was later put in front of one of the Parliamentary committees on Banking Misbehaviour and had a very uncomfortable time claiming not to know anything), partly because there was external pressure on the organisation ie a regulator and partly because of the context. It was obvious that banks were cocking a lot up even if many did not want to admit how widespread it was.
The Post Office had no external regulator, Ministers were ineffective, the senior leadership believed IT could never go wrong, their internal staff saw themselves as acting only in the interests of the PO and being judge, jury and prosecutor in your own cause is a recipe for disaster. Plus a large dose of cowardice by lots of people - a very common factor in all these situations. Lots of people will fail to do the right thing because they are scared for their jobs, cannot afford to lose them etc etc. Individually they may not be bad people but the consequence of their inaction is that bad things happen."
It sounds like they’d convinced themselves - with little evidence - that there was a massive theft problem, and the funky new computer system was going to expose the scale of the problem.
When the errors started, they were cheering that they’d found the theft, and everything else flowed from there.
No-one senior ever stood back and asked “Are you completely sure we have got this right?”
It raises questions for the Post Office's auditors too. If they really thought there was all this fraud going on, how come it had not been picked up before? And why did the auditors not notice anything wrong with what Horizon was showing?
Spot on.
I have to deal with small time auditors a bit over small charities. They look at every detail of (entirely honest) accounts and report back something like that there is 37p expenditure under 'utilities' that ought to be under 'costs of trading' but otherwise it's fine.
It seems to me that the big outfits do nothing of the sort and take no responsibility.
The thing is that you can't do that. Small accounts are very easy to audit, larger ones are way harder and you are reliant on the computer having everything. Now in this case that wasn't the case but no one would think that was the case as there was a lot of testing that saying everything was fine with the core system.
Open banking is actually going to make that side of things a bit better as it's no longer what the system says the bank paid out, you can now see (from the bank themselves) exactly what the bank did pay out.
Confession time. I'm a Chartered Accountant and therefore did lots of auditing as a young man. IMO there's a structural issue preventing the big firms doing rigorous audits - our old friend, the Conflict of Interest. Perhaps this has been fixed now, I've lost touch, but the audit used to be treated as a loss leader to get juicy consulting work. If that's your game you'll be loath to piss off management with too many tough questions about the accounts. Indeed I often saw people ticked off for "upsetting" the client in this manner.
Confession time. I'm a Chartered Accountant STILL in the (SME) audit sector for twenty years. As already said, nothing has changed. Audits are a huge conflict of interest. I've sat in a final meeting with the partner. We spent two days calculating how, per accounting standards, something should be shown and expensed through the P&L. Partner explained in detail what we'd done and how it was right. We expected owner to just accept as he himself was a Chartered Accountant, but bizarelly he didn't. "I want it done this way." This way being materially wrong.
Partner folded instantly. Client was worth £100k a year in fees (we're a small firm). Another member of staff had spent two full days calculating this. Junked in a second to keep the fee.
I have to deal with small time auditors a bit over small charities. They look at every detail of (entirely honest) accounts and report back something like that there is 37p expenditure under 'utilities' that ought to be under 'costs of trading' but otherwise it's fine.
It seems to me that the big outfits do nothing of the sort and take no responsibility.
As a small time auditor, my limited dealings with large audit firms is poor. They are huge themselves, and really don't care what they do. 1st year junior on transactions, 2nd year junior on the balance sheet, 3rd year is the manager and the partner doesn't even glance at the file.
Materiality of £50m. Who cares about anything. Plus, if there is an IT problem, the last people to be able to understand complex IT issues are accountants.
External audits are largely worthless, and just an arse covering exercise (albeit an expensive one) by accountancy firms who will never see any sanction. Sooner the audit is scrapped the better.... but I'm not holding my breath.
The way to fix audit is accountability. The guy who signs the paperwork is in just as much trouble as the engineer of the bridge that falls down. Make the partners actually work for their money - which in almost all cases, is quite a lot of money.
Problem is there is little money in audit compared to absolutely anything else in an accountancy firm.
Auditing is a manual task and hence expensive - short cuts will be taken where possible as as absolutely everyone involved wants the job down as cheaply as possible
Also the person paying the bill is rarely someone who wants the bad news revealed.
More importantly, my caveat when we see any unusual poll is to *wait and see if other polls show a similar trend or pattern*.
In this case we don't need to - there are already other polls by Redfield&Wilton, ComRes, Survation, Opinium & YouGov that had fieldwork that overlapped.
Respectively, they showed a 10 point Tory lead, a 9 point Tory lead, a 6 point Tory lead, an 11 point Tory lead and a 10 point Tory lead.
So this one is in all likelihood just an outlier. No harm in that - but you need to look at the polls as a whole, not focus on the fun ones.
Time for my occasional report from my redneck, Brexit fanatic, Daily Mail loving father in law.
Flat refurb (but not Dyson thing) is having cut through. I didn't realise the level of dislike some on the right have for Carrie Symonds. She'e being blamed more than Johnson for what some see as lavish spending needs. People aspire to John Lewis furnishings and feel insulted that they have been dissed. £30k for a flat refurb is seen as plenty. They think flat is owned by Johnson/Symonds not a public asset.
On Brexit: not hard enough. Everyone should know that the EU is a front for German car manufacturers. Johnson "got Brexit done but only just". He should have played hardball by banning imports of German cars - full on trade war would sort them out.
I have to deal with small time auditors a bit over small charities. They look at every detail of (entirely honest) accounts and report back something like that there is 37p expenditure under 'utilities' that ought to be under 'costs of trading' but otherwise it's fine.
It seems to me that the big outfits do nothing of the sort and take no responsibility.
As a small time auditor, my limited dealings with large audit firms is poor. They are huge themselves, and really don't care what they do. 1st year junior on transactions, 2nd year junior on the balance sheet, 3rd year is the manager and the partner doesn't even glance at the file.
Materiality of £50m. Who cares about anything. Plus, if there is an IT problem, the last people to be able to understand complex IT issues are accountants.
External audits are largely worthless, and just an arse covering exercise (albeit an expensive one) by accountancy firms who will never see any sanction. Sooner the audit is scrapped the better.... but I'm not holding my breath.
The way to fix audit is accountability. The guy who signs the paperwork is in just as much trouble as the engineer of the bridge that falls down. Make the partners actually work for their money - which in almost all cases, is quite a lot of money.
Problem is there is little money in audit compared to absolutely anything else in an accountancy firm.
Auditing is a manual task and hence expensive - short cuts will be taken where possible as as absolutely everyone involved wants the job down as cheaply as possible
Also the person paying the bill is rarely someone who wants the bad news revealed.
Funny that an auditing firm's raison d'être is not actually their raison d'être...
eek said: show previous quotes And it's especially hard if you've been there a long time - I find it easier to point stuff out because I have enough money to live with the consequences of being asked to clear my desk.
I don't think many people within the organisation were in a position to do that - and that is a problem that is virtually impossible to fix.
"I found it easier the longer I had been there - partly because I had established my credibility and toughness (the first time I called out some serious bad behaviour it did not go down well but I had my boss's backing and just kept going. The individual concerned was later put in front of one of the Parliamentary committees on Banking Misbehaviour and had a very uncomfortable time claiming not to know anything), partly because there was external pressure on the organisation ie a regulator and partly because of the context. It was obvious that banks were cocking a lot up even if many did not want to admit how widespread it was.
The Post Office had no external regulator, Ministers were ineffective, the senior leadership believed IT could never go wrong, their internal staff saw themselves as acting only in the interests of the PO and being judge, jury and prosecutor in your own cause is a recipe for disaster. Plus a large dose of cowardice by lots of people - a very common factor in all these situations. Lots of people will fail to do the right thing because they are scared for their jobs, cannot afford to lose them etc etc. Individually they may not be bad people but the consequence of their inaction is that bad things happen."
It sounds like they’d convinced themselves - with little evidence - that there was a massive theft problem, and the funky new computer system was going to expose the scale of the problem.
When the errors started, they were cheering that they’d found the theft, and everything else flowed from there.
No-one senior ever stood back and asked “Are you completely sure we have got this right?”
It raises questions for the Post Office's auditors too. If they really thought there was all this fraud going on, how come it had not been picked up before? And why did the auditors not notice anything wrong with what Horizon was showing?
I suspect the auditors bit comes down to the sheer scale of the post office - auditing would merely picking up the end figures which would be £x,000 missing at this post office especially as all the transactions seem to be correct and in place? Remember the issue stems from transactions that were placed in the custom written "messaging" system
It really was the case that Horizon cost so much and was written by experts so it can't be wrong.
The potential liabilities for wrongly prosecuting so many people are, of course, enormous.
Less than the £1bn the post office spent on the software though.
£1bn reasons why the software is right and the innocent postmaster guilty as....
Though large enough for any barely competent auditor to take note of, I'd suggest ?
Netflix still rules the streaming universe. As of the end of March, it had 207.6 million total paying subscribers, with about 67 million in the United States, the company noted in an earnings report on Tuesday. But its main competitors — Disney+, HBO Max, Paramount+ and AppleTV+, as well as the old-guard streamers Amazon Prime Video and Hulu — have cut into Netflix's share of viewers' attention... according to the data firm Parrot Analytics, which has developed a metric to rate not only the number of viewers for given shows, but their likelihood of attracting subscribers to a streaming service.
I can't keep up with the woke stuff....the BBC describe Chloe Zhao as the first woman of colour to win best director.
Since when have people from China been described as people of colour? Or am I missing something?
About a year. People of color now means anyone who is the tiniest bit non-white (but not Jews, obvs)
The phrase “of color” has about 2 years of life left, I reckon. After that it will be seen as grossly offensive, and it will follow BAME into the lexical bin
Don't know why you guys obsess so much about this stuff. It's in your top 3 topics for sure and Francis is forever wittering on about it. And not to pick on him because quite a few others do too.
"So what do we call a mixed race Afro-Tibetan these days? Same as last week? I've totally lost track ... bla bla."
It's really naff. Just let it go and chill. It's not a big deal. And in any case the new game in town - and it's from your side of the fence - is that to talk about race is a sign of racism. So all you need to do is comply with your own mantra.
I'd be interested in those charts further split by age and sex (probably not the sample size to do it).
Men more interested in football and more interested in politics (are either of those true, now?). Of course, it's net approval, but it you're not interested in/have a dim view of politics/politiicians then you're maybe more likely to have a negative view of the leaders.
Older people more interested in football* and [ditto]
*Afterall, the ESL was needed because youngsters don't care any more, no?
Did you see those comments from Perez about making football more like FIFA and having ultimate team style matches or splitting the game into more than two parts becuase kids are used to 15 minute match times in games and 90 minute matches can't hold their attention.
The guy is a complete cretin.
Mercifully, I managed to avoid just about everything Perez had said.
Interesting ideas though, we could do the same with politics. Five years is far too long between goals (elections). Public vote once per week to eliminate a few from the house, with new entries each week too. And why not bring in the best/worst of Europe too? VdL's post-eviction interview would be fun, no doubt.
I know the Chartists had a yearly parliament view, but didn't someone on here have an interesting idea of every MP serving at least five years. Elections in constituents would only be held every five years, so initially they'd all line up but death and resignation would reset that five years so eventually every constituency would be running on their own timetable. Unpopular governments would fall 'slowly' rather than all at once as the scheduled elections slowly eroded their majority.
It wouldn't work - because how would you deal with constituency changes; and what would happen when a government went from 325 seats to 324 randomly one Thursday night - but it was an interesting thought exercise.
It was rcs but it was explicitly have two by-elections every week.
Personally I think the Chartists were right. Annual Parliaments. Have parties campaign on much more focused manifestos of what they will do that year, in that session of Parliament.
I have to deal with small time auditors a bit over small charities. They look at every detail of (entirely honest) accounts and report back something like that there is 37p expenditure under 'utilities' that ought to be under 'costs of trading' but otherwise it's fine.
It seems to me that the big outfits do nothing of the sort and take no responsibility.
As a small time auditor, my limited dealings with large audit firms is poor. They are huge themselves, and really don't care what they do. 1st year junior on transactions, 2nd year junior on the balance sheet, 3rd year is the manager and the partner doesn't even glance at the file.
Materiality of £50m. Who cares about anything. Plus, if there is an IT problem, the last people to be able to understand complex IT issues are accountants.
External audits are largely worthless, and just an arse covering exercise (albeit an expensive one) by accountancy firms who will never see any sanction. Sooner the audit is scrapped the better.... but I'm not holding my breath.
The way to fix audit is accountability. The guy who signs the paperwork is in just as much trouble as the engineer of the bridge that falls down. Make the partners actually work for their money - which in almost all cases, is quite a lot of money.
Problem is there is little money in audit compared to absolutely anything else in an accountancy firm.
Auditing is a manual task and hence expensive - short cuts will be taken where possible as as absolutely everyone involved wants the job down as cheaply as possible
Also the person paying the bill is rarely someone who wants the bad news revealed.
Fraud in companies is usually committed by management. Either distorting profits to paint a rosy picture, or reducing profits to pay less tax. Either way, the same people massaging the figures are often the same people drawing the cheque to the auditors; and don't the auditors know it.
I can't imagine big audits are really much different. Large institutional investors may own the company but they rarely care about how its run and would never side with the auditor over management.
The UK has done 38 million does, and a lot of those are Pfizer, so I think we can say AZ are still not on track. But the relaxed attitude to winter lockdowns would have made a lot more sense if there was an assumption of simply huge quantities of vaccine on the way.
The UK is up to 46m done, but yes it seems unlikely that AZ will deliver all 100m by the end of June. We're not going to have any major issues because Novavax and Moderna will make up for the supply shortfalls (and aiui, the deals were signed for that reason, in case one of Pfizer or AZ failed to deliver on time) and in Q3/4 we'll have 40m more Pfizer, the remainder of our Novavax order and the first 40m batch of Valneva. I'm led to believe that the government is also looking at getting more Moderna for next year now that the EU has made its long term bet on Pfizer which frees up 2022/3 delivery of Moderna doses.
Absolutely- the point is that first world countries are getting to the point where they can start thinking in terms of what to do with their excesses.
You're closer to the numbers than I am- what's your thinking about whether the boosters are going to be needed? Prudent to plan and all that, but there's not much sign so far of either immunity decaying significantly, or variants that can beat a vaccinated population, is there?
With my bleeding-heart-liberal heart.... erm... bleeding, I do feel a bit uncomfortable about the idea of being given a third vaccine dose when most of the world won't have had their first.
Isn't the issue going to be won't know if a third vaccine is required as no one will be in a position this year to answer that question.
Better instead to give people a third vaccination and not take the risk.
We can be a little bit more targeted than that.
https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1385664891109838848 To extent possible, we should prioritize #SARSCoV2 vaccines that elicit polyclonal antibody neutralization to multiple co-dominant epitopes (like measles), & avoid flu-like situation where neutralization is narrowly focused and appreciably impacted by single mutations
The whole thread is worth reading. Note that the Moderna vaccine seems to elicit a broader antibody response than some of the other vaccines.
The slow vaccine roll-out in Asia may turn out to be a humongous error. There is no reason a rich, advanced country like Japan shouldn’t be jabbing away furiously, like almost every western nation
Instead they’ve done about 2% of the populace and they have plans to increase the rate of vaccinations to “10,000 a day”
All they can do now is pray they don’t get hit by a variant. An absurd failure
What a hopeless rollout for such a rich country.
It would be incredible under any circumstances but when you've spent a few billion preparing for an already delayed Olympics that you had to, eh, invest fairly heavily in specific interests, to get it just becomes inexplicable. I find it remarkable that the Olympics have not been abandoned yet but it must surely be a matter of time.
Time for my occasional report from my redneck, Brexit fanatic, Daily Mail loving father in law.
Flat refurb (but not Dyson thing) is having cut through. I didn't realise the level of dislike some on the right have for Carrie Symonds. She'e being blamed more than Johnson for what some see as lavish spending needs. People aspire to John Lewis furnishings and feel insulted that they have been dissed. £30k for a flat refurb is seen as plenty. They think flat is owned by Johnson/Symonds not a public asset.
On Brexit: not hard enough. Everyone should know that the EU is a front for German car manufacturers. Johnson "got Brexit done but only just". He should have played hardball by banning imports of German cars - full on trade war would sort them out.
I have to walk away after a while to be honest.
My uncle is super irritated that Brexit didn't mean the closure of the local pizza, Chinese and kebab takeaways, replacing them with fish and chips and pie shops.
I'd be interested in those charts further split by age and sex (probably not the sample size to do it).
Men more interested in football and more interested in politics (are either of those true, now?). Of course, it's net approval, but it you're not interested in/have a dim view of politics/politiicians then you're maybe more likely to have a negative view of the leaders.
Older people more interested in football* and [ditto]
*Afterall, the ESL was needed because youngsters don't care any more, no?
Did you see those comments from Perez about making football more like FIFA and having ultimate team style matches or splitting the game into more than two parts becuase kids are used to 15 minute match times in games and 90 minute matches can't hold their attention.
The guy is a complete cretin.
Mercifully, I managed to avoid just about everything Perez had said.
Interesting ideas though, we could do the same with politics. Five years is far too long between goals (elections). Public vote once per week to eliminate a few from the house, with new entries each week too. And why not bring in the best/worst of Europe too? VdL's post-eviction interview would be fun, no doubt.
I know the Chartists had a yearly parliament view, but didn't someone on here have an interesting idea of every MP serving at least five years. Elections in constituents would only be held every five years, so initially they'd all line up but death and resignation would reset that five years so eventually every constituency would be running on their own timetable. Unpopular governments would fall 'slowly' rather than all at once as the scheduled elections slowly eroded their majority.
It wouldn't work - because how would you deal with constituency changes; and what would happen when a government went from 325 seats to 324 randomly one Thursday night - but it was an interesting thought exercise.
It was rcs but it was explicitly have two by-elections every week.
Personally I think the Chartists were right. Annual Parliaments. Have parties campaign on much more focused manifestos of what they will do that year, in that session of Parliament.
The only possible reason I can see for this would be the betting opportunities it would generate. Otherwise I quite like the fact that our politicians happily ignore this for 3-4 years at a time. Its entirely mutual.
I'd be interested in those charts further split by age and sex (probably not the sample size to do it).
Men more interested in football and more interested in politics (are either of those true, now?). Of course, it's net approval, but it you're not interested in/have a dim view of politics/politiicians then you're maybe more likely to have a negative view of the leaders.
Older people more interested in football* and [ditto]
*Afterall, the ESL was needed because youngsters don't care any more, no?
Did you see those comments from Perez about making football more like FIFA and having ultimate team style matches or splitting the game into more than two parts becuase kids are used to 15 minute match times in games and 90 minute matches can't hold their attention.
The guy is a complete cretin.
Mercifully, I managed to avoid just about everything Perez had said.
Interesting ideas though, we could do the same with politics. Five years is far too long between goals (elections). Public vote once per week to eliminate a few from the house, with new entries each week too. And why not bring in the best/worst of Europe too? VdL's post-eviction interview would be fun, no doubt.
I know the Chartists had a yearly parliament view, but didn't someone on here have an interesting idea of every MP serving at least five years. Elections in constituents would only be held every five years, so initially they'd all line up but death and resignation would reset that five years so eventually every constituency would be running on their own timetable. Unpopular governments would fall 'slowly' rather than all at once as the scheduled elections slowly eroded their majority.
It wouldn't work - because how would you deal with constituency changes; and what would happen when a government went from 325 seats to 324 randomly one Thursday night - but it was an interesting thought exercise.
It was rcs but it was explicitly have two by-elections every week.
Personally I think the Chartists were right. Annual Parliaments. Have parties campaign on much more focused manifestos of what they will do that year, in that session of Parliament.
Annual parliaments would be a nightmare, we'd be in a constant state of electioneering and whip adherence would be near 100% - the US House is bad enough with it's bi-annual terms.
eek said: show previous quotes And it's especially hard if you've been there a long time - I find it easier to point stuff out because I have enough money to live with the consequences of being asked to clear my desk.
I don't think many people within the organisation were in a position to do that - and that is a problem that is virtually impossible to fix.
"I found it easier the longer I had been there - partly because I had established my credibility and toughness (the first time I called out some serious bad behaviour it did not go down well but I had my boss's backing and just kept going. The individual concerned was later put in front of one of the Parliamentary committees on Banking Misbehaviour and had a very uncomfortable time claiming not to know anything), partly because there was external pressure on the organisation ie a regulator and partly because of the context. It was obvious that banks were cocking a lot up even if many did not want to admit how widespread it was.
The Post Office had no external regulator, Ministers were ineffective, the senior leadership believed IT could never go wrong, their internal staff saw themselves as acting only in the interests of the PO and being judge, jury and prosecutor in your own cause is a recipe for disaster. Plus a large dose of cowardice by lots of people - a very common factor in all these situations. Lots of people will fail to do the right thing because they are scared for their jobs, cannot afford to lose them etc etc. Individually they may not be bad people but the consequence of their inaction is that bad things happen."
It sounds like they’d convinced themselves - with little evidence - that there was a massive theft problem, and the funky new computer system was going to expose the scale of the problem.
When the errors started, they were cheering that they’d found the theft, and everything else flowed from there.
No-one senior ever stood back and asked “Are you completely sure we have got this right?”
It raises questions for the Post Office's auditors too. If they really thought there was all this fraud going on, how come it had not been picked up before? And why did the auditors not notice anything wrong with what Horizon was showing?
I suspect the auditors bit comes down to the sheer scale of the post office - auditing would merely picking up the end figures which would be £x,000 missing at this post office especially as all the transactions seem to be correct and in place? Remember the issue stems from transactions that were placed in the custom written "messaging" system
It really was the case that Horizon cost so much and was written by experts so it can't be wrong.
The potential liabilities for wrongly prosecuting so many people are, of course, enormous.
Less than the £1bn the post office spent on the software though.
£1bn reasons why the software is right and the innocent postmaster guilty as....
Though large enough for any barely competent auditor to take note of, I'd suggest ?
It's worth looking at the issue.
You have a cash balance sheet at a branch that doesn't quite match
And a set of recorded transactions that look 100% complete with no obvious gaps.
Those transactions match in 99.9% of all other branches for that day.
Who do you think is going to take the blame, the computer system that cost £1bn has been fully tested and has recorded 99.9999% of transactions correctly or the post master?
The truth is this was one of those awful instances where the computer system was not 100% perfect (yet seemed to be) and a company who thought they had finally identified a means of catching fraud...
Keir Starmer and Labour are not yet benefiting from the Tory collapse, it's going to don't know again which happened last time the lead went down.
He needs to do something about converting those don't knows to the Labour column, or even the Lib Dem column would do.
Indeed. But it would be a start. Have said before that the Tory number is key. If they score 42% they win. Under 40% it is game on. However, I do think this is an outlier.
I can't keep up with the woke stuff....the BBC describe Chloe Zhao as the first woman of colour to win best director.
Since when have people from China been described as people of colour? Or am I missing something?
About a year. People of color now means anyone who is the tiniest bit non-white (but not Jews, obvs)
The phrase “of color” has about 2 years of life left, I reckon. After that it will be seen as grossly offensive, and it will follow BAME into the lexical bin
I was genuinely presuming I didn't know something about her background, that she is actually of mixed race or something. I have honestly never heard people from Asia being described as such.
Do the wokies not realise that labelling every non-white person as such sounds very much like "othering" that genuine racists / racist countries practice e.g South Africa back in the day, describing all none 100% white European as the coloureds.
It's rather more to do with the fact that the Oscars have basically ignored anything that wasn't either from the US or the UK for most of their history.
The BBC, struggling as it does to represent the broad span of British culture, is always going to come across as muddled. It's neither woke nor reactionary - just a muddled compromise between the two.
The more notable thing about a director out of China winning the Oscar is that Chinese media has deliberately ignored it, as she is not politically acceptable to them.
I'd be interested in those charts further split by age and sex (probably not the sample size to do it).
Men more interested in football and more interested in politics (are either of those true, now?). Of course, it's net approval, but it you're not interested in/have a dim view of politics/politiicians then you're maybe more likely to have a negative view of the leaders.
Older people more interested in football* and [ditto]
*Afterall, the ESL was needed because youngsters don't care any more, no?
Did you see those comments from Perez about making football more like FIFA and having ultimate team style matches or splitting the game into more than two parts becuase kids are used to 15 minute match times in games and 90 minute matches can't hold their attention.
The guy is a complete cretin.
Mercifully, I managed to avoid just about everything Perez had said.
Interesting ideas though, we could do the same with politics. Five years is far too long between goals (elections). Public vote once per week to eliminate a few from the house, with new entries each week too. And why not bring in the best/worst of Europe too? VdL's post-eviction interview would be fun, no doubt.
I know the Chartists had a yearly parliament view, but didn't someone on here have an interesting idea of every MP serving at least five years. Elections in constituents would only be held every five years, so initially they'd all line up but death and resignation would reset that five years so eventually every constituency would be running on their own timetable. Unpopular governments would fall 'slowly' rather than all at once as the scheduled elections slowly eroded their majority.
It wouldn't work - because how would you deal with constituency changes; and what would happen when a government went from 325 seats to 324 randomly one Thursday night - but it was an interesting thought exercise.
It was rcs but it was explicitly have two by-elections every week.
Personally I think the Chartists were right. Annual Parliaments. Have parties campaign on much more focused manifestos of what they will do that year, in that session of Parliament.
The closest real-word example of that is probably the US House - where everyone’s priority is their own campaign for re-election, and very little ever gets done because they don’t want to upset anyone.
My uncle is super irritated that Brexit didn't mean the closure of the local pizza, Chinese and kebab takeaways, replacing them with fish and chips and pie shops.
I did a trackday in my 924 at Thruxton recently. A bloke there thought Brexit had been cancelled and that "whatever this is" wasn't really Brexit. He did have an Audi RS6 which is generally a sign of catastrophic mental impairment.
I have to deal with small time auditors a bit over small charities. They look at every detail of (entirely honest) accounts and report back something like that there is 37p expenditure under 'utilities' that ought to be under 'costs of trading' but otherwise it's fine.
It seems to me that the big outfits do nothing of the sort and take no responsibility.
As a small time auditor, my limited dealings with large audit firms is poor. They are huge themselves, and really don't care what they do. 1st year junior on transactions, 2nd year junior on the balance sheet, 3rd year is the manager and the partner doesn't even glance at the file.
Materiality of £50m. Who cares about anything. Plus, if there is an IT problem, the last people to be able to understand complex IT issues are accountants.
External audits are largely worthless, and just an arse covering exercise (albeit an expensive one) by accountancy firms who will never see any sanction. Sooner the audit is scrapped the better.... but I'm not holding my breath.
The way to fix audit is accountability. The guy who signs the paperwork is in just as much trouble as the engineer of the bridge that falls down. Make the partners actually work for their money - which in almost all cases, is quite a lot of money.
Problem is there is little money in audit compared to absolutely anything else in an accountancy firm.
Auditing is a manual task and hence expensive - short cuts will be taken where possible as as absolutely everyone involved wants the job down as cheaply as possible
Also the person paying the bill is rarely someone who wants the bad news revealed.
Fraud in companies is usually committed by management. Either distorting profits to paint a rosy picture, or reducing profits to pay less tax. Either way, the same people massaging the figures are often the same people drawing the cheque to the auditors; and don't the auditors know it.
I can't imagine big audits are really much different. Large institutional investors may own the company but they rarely care about how its run and would never side with the auditor over management.
Please don't get me started on auditors doing investigations.......I have enough stress in my life as it is without recalling the messes they have made in the past. They can be OK on technical stuff but beyond that can rarely see the wood for the trees. And their understanding of how to interview people could be written - with room to spare - on the back of a postage stamp.
I can't keep up with the woke stuff....the BBC describe Chloe Zhao as the first woman of colour to win best director.
Since when have people from China been described as people of colour? Or am I missing something?
About a year. People of color now means anyone who is the tiniest bit non-white (but not Jews, obvs)
The phrase “of color” has about 2 years of life left, I reckon. After that it will be seen as grossly offensive, and it will follow BAME into the lexical bin
I was genuinely presuming I didn't know something about her background, that she is actually of mixed race or something. I have honestly never heard people from Asia being described as such.
Do the wokies not realise that labelling every non-white person as such sounds very much like "othering" that genuine racists / racist countries practice e.g South Africa back in the day, describing all none 100% white European as the coloureds.
It's rather more to do with the fact that the Oscars have basically ignored anything that wasn't either from the US or the UK for most of their history.
The BBC, struggling as it does to represent the broad span of British culture, is always going to come across as muddled. It's neither woke nor reactionary - just a muddled compromise between the two.
The more notable thing about a director out of China winning the Oscar is that Chinese media has deliberately ignored it, as she is not politically acceptable to them.
I went and did a google and it isn't just the BBC, the whole entertainment media are describing it as such. That is why I presumed I was missing something about her heritage.
If the two major parties have lost 6% and lib dems gain 2, wher3 have the other 4 gone?
And no that isnt a gcse maths question.
The other 4 have gone to the pub.
The other 4% are furious ex-tory voters like myself who are incensed that every conservative principle in the book has been abandoned wholesale by the Johnson government over the past year. Voters who would never vote labour or liberal but cannot vote tory right now....
Not to worry. its 4% now, this time next year it will be 14%,
eek said: show previous quotes And it's especially hard if you've been there a long time - I find it easier to point stuff out because I have enough money to live with the consequences of being asked to clear my desk.
I don't think many people within the organisation were in a position to do that - and that is a problem that is virtually impossible to fix.
"I found it easier the longer I had been there - partly because I had established my credibility and toughness (the first time I called out some serious bad behaviour it did not go down well but I had my boss's backing and just kept going. The individual concerned was later put in front of one of the Parliamentary committees on Banking Misbehaviour and had a very uncomfortable time claiming not to know anything), partly because there was external pressure on the organisation ie a regulator and partly because of the context. It was obvious that banks were cocking a lot up even if many did not want to admit how widespread it was.
The Post Office had no external regulator, Ministers were ineffective, the senior leadership believed IT could never go wrong, their internal staff saw themselves as acting only in the interests of the PO and being judge, jury and prosecutor in your own cause is a recipe for disaster. Plus a large dose of cowardice by lots of people - a very common factor in all these situations. Lots of people will fail to do the right thing because they are scared for their jobs, cannot afford to lose them etc etc. Individually they may not be bad people but the consequence of their inaction is that bad things happen."
It sounds like they’d convinced themselves - with little evidence - that there was a massive theft problem, and the funky new computer system was going to expose the scale of the problem.
When the errors started, they were cheering that they’d found the theft, and everything else flowed from there.
No-one senior ever stood back and asked “Are you completely sure we have got this right?”
It raises questions for the Post Office's auditors too. If they really thought there was all this fraud going on, how come it had not been picked up before? And why did the auditors not notice anything wrong with what Horizon was showing?
Spot on.
I have to deal with small time auditors a bit over small charities. They look at every detail of (entirely honest) accounts and report back something like that there is 37p expenditure under 'utilities' that ought to be under 'costs of trading' but otherwise it's fine.
It seems to me that the big outfits do nothing of the sort and take no responsibility.
The thing is that you can't do that. Small accounts are very easy to audit, larger ones are way harder and you are reliant on the computer having everything. Now in this case that wasn't the case but no one would think that was the case as there was a lot of testing that saying everything was fine with the core system.
Open banking is actually going to make that side of things a bit better as it's no longer what the system says the bank paid out, you can now see (from the bank themselves) exactly what the bank did pay out.
I take your point but:
1) Big outfits are audited by big and expert firms who know how to charge and have duties.
2) Auditing is about checking that details from source A match details from source B. The idea that auditing does not have a duty to check whether a computer is creating money/transactions that don't really exist is fantasy.
3) For these innocent people to the found to be criminals must have involved false accounting either by other people or by the systems other people created. Auditors exist to spot these things.
eek said: show previous quotes And it's especially hard if you've been there a long time - I find it easier to point stuff out because I have enough money to live with the consequences of being asked to clear my desk.
I don't think many people within the organisation were in a position to do that - and that is a problem that is virtually impossible to fix.
"I found it easier the longer I had been there - partly because I had established my credibility and toughness (the first time I called out some serious bad behaviour it did not go down well but I had my boss's backing and just kept going. The individual concerned was later put in front of one of the Parliamentary committees on Banking Misbehaviour and had a very uncomfortable time claiming not to know anything), partly because there was external pressure on the organisation ie a regulator and partly because of the context. It was obvious that banks were cocking a lot up even if many did not want to admit how widespread it was.
The Post Office had no external regulator, Ministers were ineffective, the senior leadership believed IT could never go wrong, their internal staff saw themselves as acting only in the interests of the PO and being judge, jury and prosecutor in your own cause is a recipe for disaster. Plus a large dose of cowardice by lots of people - a very common factor in all these situations. Lots of people will fail to do the right thing because they are scared for their jobs, cannot afford to lose them etc etc. Individually they may not be bad people but the consequence of their inaction is that bad things happen."
It sounds like they’d convinced themselves - with little evidence - that there was a massive theft problem, and the funky new computer system was going to expose the scale of the problem.
When the errors started, they were cheering that they’d found the theft, and everything else flowed from there.
No-one senior ever stood back and asked “Are you completely sure we have got this right?”
It raises questions for the Post Office's auditors too. If they really thought there was all this fraud going on, how come it had not been picked up before? And why did the auditors not notice anything wrong with what Horizon was showing?
Spot on.
I have to deal with small time auditors a bit over small charities. They look at every detail of (entirely honest) accounts and report back something like that there is 37p expenditure under 'utilities' that ought to be under 'costs of trading' but otherwise it's fine.
It seems to me that the big outfits do nothing of the sort and take no responsibility.
The thing is that you can't do that. Small accounts are very easy to audit, larger ones are way harder and you are reliant on the computer having everything. Now in this case that wasn't the case but no one would think that was the case as there was a lot of testing that saying everything was fine with the core system.
Open banking is actually going to make that side of things a bit better as it's no longer what the system says the bank paid out, you can now see (from the bank themselves) exactly what the bank did pay out.
Confession time. I'm a Chartered Accountant and therefore did lots of auditing as a young man. IMO there's a structural issue preventing the big firms doing rigorous audits - our old friend, the Conflict of Interest. Perhaps this has been fixed now, I've lost touch, but the audit used to be treated as a loss leader to get juicy consulting work. If that's your game you'll be loath to piss off management with too many tough questions about the accounts. Indeed I often saw people ticked off for "upsetting" the client in this manner.
Confession time. I'm a Chartered Accountant STILL in the (SME) audit sector for twenty years. As already said, nothing has changed. Audits are a huge conflict of interest. I've sat in a final meeting with the partner. We spent two days calculating how, per accounting standards, something should be shown and expensed through the P&L. Partner explained in detail what we'd done and how it was right. We expected owner to just accept as he himself was a Chartered Accountant, but bizarelly he didn't. "I want it done this way." This way being materially wrong.
Partner folded instantly. Client was worth £100k a year in fees (we're a small firm). Another member of staff had spent two full days calculating this. Junked in a second to keep the fee.
Ha. Yes, I could give you some similar stories back. I think there's a case for statutory auditing being public sector and controlled by budget and goals not profit motive. A bunch of people who do that and only that and have one objective. Check out the accounts and the key controls. I know the arguments the other way - closeness to the business makes you more astute, public sector leads to sleepy sclerosis, you wouldn't get quality people, corruption is possible - but the upside (removing the conflict of interest and restoring genuine rigour and independence to the audit) is considerable.
If suspicion of a hostile outside world helped blind German authorities to the fraud at Wirecard, so did a desire to join that world. Global leadership has become an obsession in Germany, and this obsession has lent itself to a particular kind of low-grade scam: one that simulates worldly sophistication for a hometown crowd.
Der Spiegel journalist Claas Relotius published blockbuster reports about Trump’s America that were full of fabrications and screaming inaccuracies. German academics, politicians, and corporate leaders often claim to have “attended” famous global universities, when in fact they held little more than a library card there. Current European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, for example, got in some hot water in 2015 for having claimed she studied at Stanford, when in fact she appears to have sat in on a few classes. Wirecard exploited this mix of interconnectedness and provincialism. It made its “profits” in this no-man’s-land of phony globalization, and the country’s press and regulators seemed unsuited to call the company out on it, because plenty of them make their home in that same zone.
If suspicion of a hostile outside world helped blind German authorities to the fraud at Wirecard, so did a desire to join that world. Global leadership has become an obsession in Germany, and this obsession has lent itself to a particular kind of low-grade scam: one that simulates worldly sophistication for a hometown crowd.
Der Spiegel journalist Claas Relotius published blockbuster reports about Trump’s America that were full of fabrications and screaming inaccuracies. German academics, politicians, and corporate leaders often claim to have “attended” famous global universities, when in fact they held little more than a library card there. Current European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, for example, got in some hot water in 2015 for having claimed she studied at Stanford, when in fact she appears to have sat in on a few classes. Wirecard exploited this mix of interconnectedness and provincialism. It made its “profits” in this no-man’s-land of phony globalization, and the country’s press and regulators seemed unsuited to call the company out on it, because plenty of them make their home in that same zone.
The movie about WireCard is going to be CRAAAZZZYYYYYY....
Boris Johnson asked, did you say you would let "bodies pile high in their thousands"? PM: "No, but I think the important thing that people want us to get on and do as a government is to make sure that the lockdowns work, and they have." https://twitter.com/HugoGye/status/1386645111245885444
Tory lead is evaporating, I mentioned before it was not as solid as it seemed.
Labour will lead again soon, mark my words.
Much as I would like that to be true, there's no sign of that being the case. If you look at recent polls in the round, it seems clear that this poll is most likely a slight outlier on the low side for the Tories after previously being a slight outlier on the high side.
It's the Labour share that is drifting downward. They've lost four points since the start of the year.
eek said: show previous quotes And it's especially hard if you've been there a long time - I find it easier to point stuff out because I have enough money to live with the consequences of being asked to clear my desk.
I don't think many people within the organisation were in a position to do that - and that is a problem that is virtually impossible to fix.
"I found it easier the longer I had been there - partly because I had established my credibility and toughness (the first time I called out some serious bad behaviour it did not go down well but I had my boss's backing and just kept going. The individual concerned was later put in front of one of the Parliamentary committees on Banking Misbehaviour and had a very uncomfortable time claiming not to know anything), partly because there was external pressure on the organisation ie a regulator and partly because of the context. It was obvious that banks were cocking a lot up even if many did not want to admit how widespread it was.
The Post Office had no external regulator, Ministers were ineffective, the senior leadership believed IT could never go wrong, their internal staff saw themselves as acting only in the interests of the PO and being judge, jury and prosecutor in your own cause is a recipe for disaster. Plus a large dose of cowardice by lots of people - a very common factor in all these situations. Lots of people will fail to do the right thing because they are scared for their jobs, cannot afford to lose them etc etc. Individually they may not be bad people but the consequence of their inaction is that bad things happen."
What I don’t understand is why the auditors didn’t pick up on it
- Horizon says income but no cash - Subpostmasters say income and cash - Bank account says cash
Keir Starmer and Labour are not yet benefiting from the Tory collapse, it's going to don't know again which happened last time the lead went down.
He needs to do something about converting those don't knows to the Labour column, or even the Lib Dem column would do.
Collapse 🙄
If a poll showed Labour dropping by 5% there would be no end of comments and threads about how woke out of touch Labour are nowhere and irrelevant...
To be fair it is a fall of 5% over one month and it shows Labour down as well. Too early to say if it's significant or not. The key data of course will be through at the end of next week. I remain confident for Teeside and West Midlands for the blues but right from day 1 I have expected a narrow labour hold in Hartlepool. I also think they might squeeze the West of England Mayoralty.
Asked repeatedly about the allegations made by Cummings et al. the PM talks about how pleased he is to be in Wrexham, the nearby Wockhardt factory and the importance of the Union. Taking media lessons from Theresa May.
eek said: show previous quotes And it's especially hard if you've been there a long time - I find it easier to point stuff out because I have enough money to live with the consequences of being asked to clear my desk.
I don't think many people within the organisation were in a position to do that - and that is a problem that is virtually impossible to fix.
"I found it easier the longer I had been there - partly because I had established my credibility and toughness (the first time I called out some serious bad behaviour it did not go down well but I had my boss's backing and just kept going. The individual concerned was later put in front of one of the Parliamentary committees on Banking Misbehaviour and had a very uncomfortable time claiming not to know anything), partly because there was external pressure on the organisation ie a regulator and partly because of the context. It was obvious that banks were cocking a lot up even if many did not want to admit how widespread it was.
The Post Office had no external regulator, Ministers were ineffective, the senior leadership believed IT could never go wrong, their internal staff saw themselves as acting only in the interests of the PO and being judge, jury and prosecutor in your own cause is a recipe for disaster. Plus a large dose of cowardice by lots of people - a very common factor in all these situations. Lots of people will fail to do the right thing because they are scared for their jobs, cannot afford to lose them etc etc. Individually they may not be bad people but the consequence of their inaction is that bad things happen."
It sounds like they’d convinced themselves - with little evidence - that there was a massive theft problem, and the funky new computer system was going to expose the scale of the problem.
When the errors started, they were cheering that they’d found the theft, and everything else flowed from there.
No-one senior ever stood back and asked “Are you completely sure we have got this right?”
It raises questions for the Post Office's auditors too. If they really thought there was all this fraud going on, how come it had not been picked up before? And why did the auditors not notice anything wrong with what Horizon was showing?
I suspect the auditors bit comes down to the sheer scale of the post office - auditing would merely picking up the end figures which would be £x,000 missing at this post office especially as all the transactions seem to be correct and in place? Remember the issue stems from transactions that were placed in the custom written "messaging" system
It really was the case that Horizon cost so much and was written by experts so it can't be wrong.
The potential liabilities for wrongly prosecuting so many people are, of course, enormous.
Less than the £1bn the post office spent on the software though.
£1bn reasons why the software is right and the innocent postmaster guilty as....
Though large enough for any barely competent auditor to take note of, I'd suggest ?
It's worth looking at the issue.
You have a cash balance sheet at a branch that doesn't quite match
And a set of recorded transactions that look 100% complete with no obvious gaps.
Those transactions match in 99.9% of all other branches for that day.
Who do you think is going to take the blame, the computer system that cost £1bn has been fully tested and has recorded 99.9999% of transactions correctly or the post master?
The truth is this was one of those awful instances where the computer system was not 100% perfect (yet seemed to be) and a company who thought they had finally identified a means of catching fraud...
Agreed - it was initially (probably) a cockup. But it became increasingly, and publicly obvious that a gross miscarriage of justice had occurred, and both the Post Office and its auditors consciously ignored the issue. The broad outlines were publicly known and reported as far back as 2009.
The details of the previously agreed settlement are almost as disgraceful. https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252499377/Only-Government-standing-in-the-way-of-fair-compensation-for-subpostmasters ...Paul Marshall, a barrister at Cornerstone Barristers, has worked on the cases of subpostmasters who were sent to prison based on flawed evidence. He said claimants who had received criminal records were barred as part of the settlement in the High Court, with other claimants giving up some of their compensation to pay them.
“It is easy to forget that it was an express term of the settlement of the group litigation, settled in December 2019, that it was expressly agreed that claimants in that litigation with criminal convictions were not paid, as part of that settlement, anything at all by the Post Office,” he said.
“Convicted postmasters gave up all their claims in settlement of that litigation except a right to claim against the Post Office malicious prosecution – which may now be causing the Post Office concern, given what has emerged.”...
A total of 46 percent of respondents to the CBS News-YouGov poll who identified as Republican said the Hennepin County jury reached the "wrong verdict." Only 10 percent of Democrats said the same thing.
Among all respondents, 75 percent said the jury reached the right verdict, while 25 percent said it did not....
Because they are a shower of misogynistic, demented, corrupt and deeply unpleasant fools who use innocent people as tools in their internal battles with total disregard to their welfare or because Boris said something that could have been misinterpreted more than 3 years ago now, take your pick. And if you pick the latter have a good look at yourselves.
Boris Johnson's biographer Andrew Gimson says the PM 'may well have' made 'tasteless' remark about allowing dead bodies to pile up but believes it will 'strengthen his reputation as a man who talks as a man in the pub would' https://twitter.com/JasonGroves1/status/1386631561265750017
This "pub" line is getting a bit of a flogging. It must have focus grouped well.
I keep saying this about Boris. I worked in pubs for 8 years and been in hundreds of them - people in pubs love Boris. I don't know why, just that he does. I do know that all the Westminster guff on here doesn't seem to be noticed in pubs.
eek said: show previous quotes And it's especially hard if you've been there a long time - I find it easier to point stuff out because I have enough money to live with the consequences of being asked to clear my desk.
I don't think many people within the organisation were in a position to do that - and that is a problem that is virtually impossible to fix.
"I found it easier the longer I had been there - partly because I had established my credibility and toughness (the first time I called out some serious bad behaviour it did not go down well but I had my boss's backing and just kept going. The individual concerned was later put in front of one of the Parliamentary committees on Banking Misbehaviour and had a very uncomfortable time claiming not to know anything), partly because there was external pressure on the organisation ie a regulator and partly because of the context. It was obvious that banks were cocking a lot up even if many did not want to admit how widespread it was.
The Post Office had no external regulator, Ministers were ineffective, the senior leadership believed IT could never go wrong, their internal staff saw themselves as acting only in the interests of the PO and being judge, jury and prosecutor in your own cause is a recipe for disaster. Plus a large dose of cowardice by lots of people - a very common factor in all these situations. Lots of people will fail to do the right thing because they are scared for their jobs, cannot afford to lose them etc etc. Individually they may not be bad people but the consequence of their inaction is that bad things happen."
It sounds like they’d convinced themselves - with little evidence - that there was a massive theft problem, and the funky new computer system was going to expose the scale of the problem.
When the errors started, they were cheering that they’d found the theft, and everything else flowed from there.
No-one senior ever stood back and asked “Are you completely sure we have got this right?”
It raises questions for the Post Office's auditors too. If they really thought there was all this fraud going on, how come it had not been picked up before? And why did the auditors not notice anything wrong with what Horizon was showing?
I suspect the auditors bit comes down to the sheer scale of the post office - auditing would merely picking up the end figures which would be £x,000 missing at this post office especially as all the transactions seem to be correct and in place? Remember the issue stems from transactions that were placed in the custom written "messaging" system
It really was the case that Horizon cost so much and was written by experts so it can't be wrong.
The potential liabilities for wrongly prosecuting so many people are, of course, enormous.
Less than the £1bn the post office spent on the software though.
£1bn reasons why the software is right and the innocent postmaster guilty as....
Though large enough for any barely competent auditor to take note of, I'd suggest ?
It's worth looking at the issue.
You have a cash balance sheet at a branch that doesn't quite match
And a set of recorded transactions that look 100% complete with no obvious gaps.
Those transactions match in 99.9% of all other branches for that day.
Who do you think is going to take the blame, the computer system that cost £1bn has been fully tested and has recorded 99.9999% of transactions correctly or the post master?
The truth is this was one of those awful instances where the computer system was not 100% perfect (yet seemed to be) and a company who thought they had finally identified a means of catching fraud...
Agreed - it was initially (probably) a cockup. But it became increasingly, and publicly obvious that a gross miscarriage of justice had occurred, and both the Post Office and its auditors consciously ignored the issue. The broad outlines were publicly known and reported as far back as 2009.
The details of the previously agreed settlement are almost as disgraceful. https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252499377/Only-Government-standing-in-the-way-of-fair-compensation-for-subpostmasters ...Paul Marshall, a barrister at Cornerstone Barristers, has worked on the cases of subpostmasters who were sent to prison based on flawed evidence. He said claimants who had received criminal records were barred as part of the settlement in the High Court, with other claimants giving up some of their compensation to pay them.
“It is easy to forget that it was an express term of the settlement of the group litigation, settled in December 2019, that it was expressly agreed that claimants in that litigation with criminal convictions were not paid, as part of that settlement, anything at all by the Post Office,” he said.
“Convicted postmasters gave up all their claims in settlement of that litigation except a right to claim against the Post Office malicious prosecution – which may now be causing the Post Office concern, given what has emerged.”...
I think I covered that earlier as did others.
The issue was once you've got someone sat in prison, the last thing you can do is go "whoops we've made a mistake" because of XYZ.
And what we then see is a combination of backside covering / cover ups as this escalate out of control and the initial cover ups themselves need to be covered up.
A total of 46 percent of respondents to the CBS News-YouGov poll who identified as Republican said the Hennepin County jury reached the "wrong verdict." Only 10 percent of Democrats said the same thing.
Among all respondents, 75 percent said the jury reached the right verdict, while 25 percent said it did not....
Sort of depends what they asked / meant by wrong verdict. He was charged with 3 different things, I don't think the more sane legal minds thought all 3 counts were a slam dunk.
French vaccine producer Valneva announced it is "deprioritizing" negotiations with the European Commission after more than six months of talks have yielded no results.
"We’ve committed significant time and effort to try to meet the needs of the central EC [European Commission] procurement process," Valneva CEO Thomas Lingelbach wrote in a press release late Tuesday. "Despite our recent clinical data, we have not made meaningful progress and have not yet secured a supply agreement."
The company said it instead would shift to negotiations with individual EU countries and interested nations outside the EU.
Don't read too much into this. Thanks to BioNTech's incredible progress and rock solid supply chain the EU's vaccine supply is now really solid already, and especially so by the time Valneva would be ready to ship any vaccines to the EU.\
I think Reuters is now behind a paywall - but it sounds like the EU argument is still "We're later in signing a deal, but you've still got to give them to us first anyway because we're the EU."
French vaccine producer Valneva announced it is "deprioritizing" negotiations with the European Commission after more than six months of talks have yielded no results.
"We’ve committed significant time and effort to try to meet the needs of the central EC [European Commission] procurement process," Valneva CEO Thomas Lingelbach wrote in a press release late Tuesday. "Despite our recent clinical data, we have not made meaningful progress and have not yet secured a supply agreement."
The company said it instead would shift to negotiations with individual EU countries and interested nations outside the EU.
Don't read too much into this. Thanks to BioNTech's incredible progress and rock solid supply chain the EU's vaccine supply is now really solid already, and especially so by the time Valneva would be ready to ship any vaccines to the EU.\
I think Reuters is now behind a paywall - but it sounds like the EU argument is still "We're later in signing a deal, but you've still got to give them to us first anyway because we're the EU."
French vaccine producer Valneva announced it is "deprioritizing" negotiations with the European Commission after more than six months of talks have yielded no results.
"We’ve committed significant time and effort to try to meet the needs of the central EC [European Commission] procurement process," Valneva CEO Thomas Lingelbach wrote in a press release late Tuesday. "Despite our recent clinical data, we have not made meaningful progress and have not yet secured a supply agreement."
The company said it instead would shift to negotiations with individual EU countries and interested nations outside the EU.
Don't read too much into this. Thanks to BioNTech's incredible progress and rock solid supply chain the EU's vaccine supply is now really solid already, and especially so by the time Valneva would be ready to ship any vaccines to the EU.\
I think Reuters is now behind a paywall - but it sounds like the EU argument is still "We're later in signing a deal, but you've still got to give them to us first anyway because we're the EU."
The actual line is The Commission has also not yet completed a deal with Novavax, an American vaccine producer, due to issues with its delivery schedule.
which if the issue is that the UK has a first supply clause because we got their first is an EU (and EU speed / competency) issue more than anything else.
And if that means spare stock to go to the third world rather than the EU so be it.
The EU won't sign any more deals for vaccines now anyway. They have bet the farm on Pfizer with a 1.8bn dose order valued at $40bn. For all their penny pinching, they've now had to knuckle under and accept that these things cost money. Again, it's good because it looks like an increase the size of the pie type of deal rather than what they did the first time around. It frees up capacity of other vaccines and Pfizer are essentially saying that this deal will be fulfilled in addition to existing capacity.
Do you have a breakdown of the 1bn dose UK mufacturing capacity you mentioned?
Because they are a shower of misogynistic, demented, corrupt and deeply unpleasant fools who use innocent people as tools in their internal battles with total disregard to their welfare or because Boris said something that could have been misinterpreted more than 3 years ago now, take your pick. And if you pick the latter have a good look at yourselves.
It is down to UK keeping their money from many moons ago. It is a case of two cheeks of the same arse point scoring in their personal petty fights and poor souls are the collateral damage that neither side care about.
Vaccination programmes are proceeding swiftly in the US and UK, and the EU's target for the summer remains "a minimum of 70% of the entire adult population" receiving at least one dose.
I can't keep up with the woke stuff....the BBC describe Chloe Zhao as the first woman of colour to win best director.
Since when have people from China been described as people of colour? Or am I missing something?
About a year. People of color now means anyone who is the tiniest bit non-white (but not Jews, obvs)
The phrase “of color” has about 2 years of life left, I reckon. After that it will be seen as grossly offensive, and it will follow BAME into the lexical bin
I was genuinely presuming I didn't know something about her background, that she is actually of mixed race or something. I have honestly never heard people from Asia being described as such.
Do the wokies not realise that labelling every non-white person as such sounds very much like "othering" that genuine racists / racist countries practice e.g South Africa back in the day, describing all none 100% white European as the coloureds.
It's rather more to do with the fact that the Oscars have basically ignored anything that wasn't either from the US or the UK for most of their history.
The BBC, struggling as it does to represent the broad span of British culture, is always going to come across as muddled. It's neither woke nor reactionary - just a muddled compromise between the two.
The more notable thing about a director out of China winning the Oscar is that Chinese media has deliberately ignored it, as she is not politically acceptable to them.
I went and did a google and it isn't just the BBC, the whole entertainment media are describing it as such. That is why I presumed I was missing something about her heritage.
It's the accepted usage in the US now. Remember that the US is dealing with a spate of racially motivated violence towards Asian women at the moment, which is colouring (so to speak) the reporting of her win.
Everyone knows it doesn't matter. He's hardly the only politician who people will believe said X even if there was no definitive proof and it was denied. No doubt he has benefit from such a tendency in the past about others saying things.
French vaccine producer Valneva announced it is "deprioritizing" negotiations with the European Commission after more than six months of talks have yielded no results.
"We’ve committed significant time and effort to try to meet the needs of the central EC [European Commission] procurement process," Valneva CEO Thomas Lingelbach wrote in a press release late Tuesday. "Despite our recent clinical data, we have not made meaningful progress and have not yet secured a supply agreement."
The company said it instead would shift to negotiations with individual EU countries and interested nations outside the EU.
Don't read too much into this. Thanks to BioNTech's incredible progress and rock solid supply chain the EU's vaccine supply is now really solid already, and especially so by the time Valneva would be ready to ship any vaccines to the EU.\
I think Reuters is now behind a paywall - but it sounds like the EU argument is still "We're later in signing a deal, but you've still got to give them to us first anyway because we're the EU."
The actual line is The Commission has also not yet completed a deal with Novavax, an American vaccine producer, due to issues with its delivery schedule.
which if the issue is that the UK has a first supply clause because we got their first is an EU (and EU speed / competency) issue more than anything else.
And if that means spare stock to go to the third world rather than the EU so be it.
The EU won't sign any more deals for vaccines now anyway. They have bet the farm on Pfizer with a 1.8bn dose order valued at $40bn. For all their penny pinching, they've now had to knuckle under and accept that these things cost money. Again, it's good because it looks like an increase the size of the pie type of deal rather than what they did the first time around. It frees up capacity of other vaccines and Pfizer are essentially saying that this deal will be fulfilled in addition to existing capacity.
Is there an additional risk in having a large population in a designated area all having the same vaccine?
In the same way a monoculture is bad, be it potatoes, corn or other crops, if the virus breaches the defense of the Pfizer vaccine you have an entire population without protection.
Use of multiple vaccines may offer better protection against future variations.
What a surprise. I presume she'll be charged this time next year for crimes she'll have committed when locked up in prison.
It reminds me of the step by step erosion of democracy in Hong Kong - it doesn't fool anyone, they don't expect it to fool anyone, so I'm not entirely sure why the ones taking the actions don't just give up the pretence and just admit what they are doing and why.
I guess it is tradition to dance around the truth in such matters.
Everyone knows it doesn't matter. He's hardly the only politician who people will believe said X even if there was no definitive proof and it was denied. No doubt he has benefit from such a tendency in the past about others saying things.
I remember watching a retrospective about Spitting Image which had a segment on the sketch where Thatcher takes the Cabinet out for lunch ("And how about the vegetables?" "Oh, they'll have the same as me..."). Edwina Currie said the brilliance was that, while she could attest that Thatcher was actually much less dictatorial in Cabinet meetings than her reputation suggested, it was a brilliant sketch because the public 'knew' it was true in their own minds.
Boris Johnson asked, did you say you would let "bodies pile high in their thousands"? PM: "No, but I think the important thing that people want us to get on and do as a government is to make sure that the lockdowns work, and they have." https://twitter.com/HugoGye/status/1386645111245885444
The silence from the Boris fanbois on PB this lunchtime is deafening.
Come on chaps, which is it? "Boris will be Boris", or "it's just satire".
Comments
wouldshould trump the alleged "conflict". Of course that benefit of capitalism is lost if your only major competitors are in the same boat...Necessity having been the mother of invention, the next few years are going to be a very exciting time indeed for the advancement of medical science.
It wouldn't work - because how would you deal with constituency changes; and what would happen when a government went from 325 seats to 324 randomly one Thursday night - but it was an interesting thought exercise.
https://twitter.com/barcajim3/status/1386574938195234819?s=21
Bhavani Nelavelly, Pharma Analyst at GlobalData, said this is important because “Japan is one of the very few countries that require additional clinical trials within the country to ensure safety. With a comparatively small COVID-19 outbreak in Japan, a valid assessment in a late-stage trial in Japan will be difficult to effectively demonstrate the high efficacy of the vaccines confirmed globally. However, this may be sufficient to demonstrate safety.
As already said, nothing has changed.
Audits are a huge conflict of interest. I've sat in a final meeting with the partner. We spent two days calculating how, per accounting standards, something should be shown and expensed through the P&L. Partner explained in detail what we'd done and how it was right. We expected owner to just accept as he himself was a Chartered Accountant, but bizarelly he didn't. "I want it done this way." This way being materially wrong.
Partner folded instantly. Client was worth £100k a year in fees (we're a small firm).
Another member of staff had spent two full days calculating this. Junked in a second to keep the fee.
Auditing is a manual task and hence expensive - short cuts will be taken where possible as as absolutely everyone involved wants the job down as cheaply as possible
Also the person paying the bill is rarely someone who wants the bad news revealed.
More importantly, my caveat when we see any unusual poll is to *wait and see if other polls show a similar trend or pattern*.
In this case we don't need to - there are already other polls by Redfield&Wilton, ComRes, Survation, Opinium & YouGov that had fieldwork that overlapped.
Respectively, they showed a 10 point Tory lead, a 9 point Tory lead, a 6 point Tory lead, an 11 point Tory lead and a 10 point Tory lead.
So this one is in all likelihood just an outlier. No harm in that - but you need to look at the polls as a whole, not focus on the fun ones.
https://twitter.com/anthonyjwells/status/1386639981477830657?s=20
0-3 by the way, just excellent.
Flat refurb (but not Dyson thing) is having cut through. I didn't realise the level of dislike some on the right have for Carrie Symonds. She'e being blamed more than Johnson for what some see as lavish spending needs. People aspire to John Lewis furnishings and feel insulted that they have been dissed. £30k for a flat refurb is seen as plenty. They think flat is owned by Johnson/Symonds not a public asset.
On Brexit: not hard enough. Everyone should know that the EU is a front for German car manufacturers. Johnson "got Brexit done but only just". He should have played hardball by banning imports of German cars - full on trade war would sort them out.
I have to walk away after a while to be honest.
Labour will lead again soon, mark my words.
https://twitter.com/MissIG_Geek/status/1386636312187387914
Remember there was a £1bn reasons why the software was correct.
"So what do we call a mixed race Afro-Tibetan these days? Same as last week? I've totally lost track ... bla bla."
It's really naff. Just let it go and chill. It's not a big deal. And in any case the new game in town - and it's from your side of the fence - is that to talk about race is a sign of racism. So all you need to do is comply with your own mantra.
Personally I think the Chartists were right. Annual Parliaments. Have parties campaign on much more focused manifestos of what they will do that year, in that session of Parliament.
I can't imagine big audits are really much different. Large institutional investors may own the company but they rarely care about how its run and would never side with the auditor over management.
He needs to do something about converting those don't knows to the Labour column, or even the Lib Dem column would do.
We can be a little bit more targeted than that.
https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1385664891109838848
To extent possible, we should prioritize #SARSCoV2 vaccines that elicit polyclonal antibody neutralization to multiple co-dominant epitopes (like measles), & avoid flu-like situation where neutralization is narrowly focused and appreciably impacted by single mutations
The whole thread is worth reading. Note that the Moderna vaccine seems to elicit a broader antibody response than some of the other vaccines.
You have a cash balance sheet at a branch that doesn't quite match
And a set of recorded transactions that look 100% complete with no obvious gaps.
Those transactions match in 99.9% of all other branches for that day.
Who do you think is going to take the blame, the computer system that cost £1bn has been fully tested and has recorded 99.9999% of transactions correctly or the post master?
The truth is this was one of those awful instances where the computer system was not 100% perfect (yet seemed to be) and a company who thought they had finally identified a means of catching fraud...
https://twitter.com/aliarouzi/status/1386639997726601221
Have said before that the Tory number is key. If they score 42% they win. Under 40% it is game on.
However, I do think this is an outlier.
The BBC, struggling as it does to represent the broad span of British culture, is always going to come across as muddled. It's neither woke nor reactionary - just a muddled compromise between the two.
The more notable thing about a director out of China winning the Oscar is that Chinese media has deliberately ignored it, as she is not politically acceptable to them.
Not to worry. its 4% now, this time next year it will be 14%,
I take your point but:
1) Big outfits are audited by big and expert firms who know how to charge and have duties.
2) Auditing is about checking that details from source A match details from source B. The idea that auditing does not have a duty to check whether a computer is creating money/transactions that don't really exist is fantasy.
3) For these innocent people to the found to be criminals must have involved false accounting either by other people or by the systems other people created. Auditors exist to spot these things.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56883483
How politicians, regulators, and the media fell for an obvious financial fraud
https://newrepublic.com/article/162084/weird-extremely-german-origins-wirecard-scandal
If suspicion of a hostile outside world helped blind German authorities to the fraud at Wirecard, so did a desire to join that world. Global leadership has become an obsession in Germany, and this obsession has lent itself to a particular kind of low-grade scam: one that simulates worldly sophistication for a hometown crowd.
Der Spiegel journalist Claas Relotius published blockbuster reports about Trump’s America that were full of fabrications and screaming inaccuracies. German academics, politicians, and corporate leaders often claim to have “attended” famous global universities, when in fact they held little more than a library card there. Current European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, for example, got in some hot water in 2015 for having claimed she studied at Stanford, when in fact she appears to have sat in on a few classes. Wirecard exploited this mix of interconnectedness and provincialism. It made its “profits” in this no-man’s-land of phony globalization, and the country’s press and regulators seemed unsuited to call the company out on it, because plenty of them make their home in that same zone.
Boris Johnson asked, did you say you would let "bodies pile high in their thousands"? PM: "No, but I think the important thing that people want us to get on and do as a government is to make sure that the lockdowns work, and they have."
https://twitter.com/HugoGye/status/1386645111245885444
Interesting I think in and of itself.
It's the Labour share that is drifting downward. They've lost four points since the start of the year.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/thailand/
- Horizon says income but no cash
- Subpostmasters say income and cash
- Bank account says cash
?? Am I missing something ?
https://twitter.com/HugoGye/status/1386645889096294402?s=20
The broad outlines were publicly known and reported as far back as 2009.
The details of the previously agreed settlement are almost as disgraceful.
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252499377/Only-Government-standing-in-the-way-of-fair-compensation-for-subpostmasters
...Paul Marshall, a barrister at Cornerstone Barristers, has worked on the cases of subpostmasters who were sent to prison based on flawed evidence. He said claimants who had received criminal records were barred as part of the settlement in the High Court, with other claimants giving up some of their compensation to pay them.
“It is easy to forget that it was an express term of the settlement of the group litigation, settled in December 2019, that it was expressly agreed that claimants in that litigation with criminal convictions were not paid, as part of that settlement, anything at all by the Post Office,” he said.
“Convicted postmasters gave up all their claims in settlement of that litigation except a right to claim against the Post Office malicious prosecution – which may now be causing the Post Office concern, given what has emerged.”...
https://twitter.com/DPJHodges/status/1386646731455094787
Liar liar, BoJo on fire
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/550179-almost-half-of-republicans-say-chauvin-jury-reached-wrong-verdict-poll
Nearly half of all Republicans questioned in a new poll said that they believe former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was wrongly convicted of murdering George Floyd.
A total of 46 percent of respondents to the CBS News-YouGov poll who identified as Republican said the Hennepin County jury reached the "wrong verdict." Only 10 percent of Democrats said the same thing.
Among all respondents, 75 percent said the jury reached the right verdict, while 25 percent said it did not....
The issue was once you've got someone sat in prison, the last thing you can do is go "whoops we've made a mistake" because of XYZ.
And what we then see is a combination of backside covering / cover ups as this escalate out of control and the initial cover ups themselves need to be covered up.
Here's a political question then.
Is she the first Chinese winner?
https://twitter.com/benrileysmith/status/1386647562858422273
I must be illuminati.
What are the limits on what people consider acceptable for somebody to say? Where does this end?
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told the New York Times this should be possible as both sides have approved the same jabs.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56885196
None of those pseudo science ones.
https://www.itv.com/news/2021-04-26/robert-peston-boris-johnson-did-make-bodies-pile-high-in-their-thousands-comment
Achieved by Wales on the 24th April.
New Hampshire is probably there too.
In the same way a monoculture is bad, be it potatoes, corn or other crops, if the virus breaches the defense of the Pfizer vaccine you have an entire population without protection.
Use of multiple vaccines may offer better protection against future variations.
I guess it is tradition to dance around the truth in such matters.
Come on chaps, which is it? "Boris will be Boris", or "it's just satire".