On topic, I still think, on balance, Trump won't run in 2024 but I am less confident than before. One, because of the possible charges which he may try to drag out with the hope he becomes President and then is immune for 4 years. Two, because I suspect he is looking at Biden and Harris, and thinking he can take both on and win - the former because his physical and mental state looks increasingly frail and the latter because she is a poor candidate but, being Black and female, she will get a free run at the nomination if Biden steps down. Three, because especially if the Chinese lab theory is proven to be true, Trump will be able to say "I told you so" and use it to discredit the Media and the Tech giants who pushed back against the theory, and then use that to claim that the Media / Tech was lying about all their other claims. And, fourth, because the Democrats' own behaviour on the cultural / social / economic fronts is more radical than many Republican-turned-Democrat voters would have thought, which may lead to gains.
Personally, I think Harris is the presumptive favourite to be the nominee next time around because - despite being a terrible candidate - she's the Vice President, and has to be a better than 50% chance of being the actual President come the time that the Dems are choosing their nominee for 2024. And that would be true whether she was black, white or indigo.
Harris might be a terrible candidate, but she might be a very lucky one. Because the one Republican she can beat, is Donald Trump.
While 60% of Trump voters support (in the broadest sense) the actions of the Jan 6 rioters, another 30% were horrified. Trump owns 60% of the Republican Party, but he only rented the other 40%, and I don't think there's any evidence the rest have come to love in him in the six months since the election.
If Trump is the nominee (and I suspect it is probably his for the taking). And if Trump is embroiled in scandal and lawsuits, and is a weakened and older nominee, then I can't see anything other than a landslide for Harris.
Another question on the subject of the US Republican nomination: the best Republican Trumpian candidates are young: DeSantis is just 42, Josh Hawley is 41, Tom Cotton is 44 and Nikki Haley is 49. They can all wait if Trump decides to run in 2024. Indeed, the temptation for them is to be first to endorse Trump for 2024 so as to improve their chance of getting his nod in 2028.
And if Trump starts getting nomination for 2024, it's hard to see him deciding not to run.
Really hope you are right about Harris thrashing Trump. But I fear that is not what will happen.
The question is will none-Trump Republicans turn out and vote for Trump - it's the complete unknown but they seem less likely to.
Well, we'll see (if Trump is the nominee), but my guess is that:
(a) Trump will be older, and mentally less sharp than in 2020 or 2016 (b) Trump will have endured some pretty miserable press, and it will be easy to paint his run as "Trump only wants to be President to avoid jail" (c) There will be a minority of Republicans for whom the Capitol riots were beyond the pale, and who will be disinclined to vote for him (d) Trump won't get the nomination unchallenged next time around - and it's entirely possible that the nomination process will be an extremely bruising one
Put those together, and the fact that the Biden administration (while not particularly competent) is going to be hard to paint as Marxist, and I think Trump will face an uphill struggle against Harris in 2024.
DeSantis or Hawley, on the other hand, would wipe the floor with her.
I also take the opposite view on DeSantis and Hawley, support for Trumpism is not as strong without Trump leading it, much with Boris part of his support is a personal vote for him as a strong and charismatic leader even if somewhat chaotic.
DeSantis and Hawley would be weaker candidates than Trump
Well, we'll see.
But I think Trump becomes a weaker candidate with every day that passes.
Yes. Time will do its work here and in this case its work will be benign.
Aberdeenshire moves to level 1 at the weekend, which doesn't seem to make that big a difference to the relative freedom we already have. And then a scan down at Level 0 - nightclubs and "adult entertainment" still can't reopen even at 0.
Question - if people want to frequent nightclubs or gentlemens clubs or saunas or whatever, at what level of restriction do we have to get to before they are allowed? -2? I know this may be a peculiar Scottish thing, but are we to see the same south of the border once you get to 21st June? FREEDOM - except for this list of banned activities...
God alone knows. You'd have to ask the Scottish Government about their plans for nightclubs. Perhaps they've decided that nightclubs aren't something we want to have in Scotland anymore, so they're never going to let them reopen?
Down here they're meant to come back under Step 4, but whether that happens is obviously highly debatable at the moment.
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
But to where would you emigrate? Most of the LGBT-hostile places aren't exactly countries I think most of us would like to live in. I mean, I've visited St Petersburg and would happily live in that wonderful city for itself, but not while a regime that doesn't believe in the rule-of-law is running the place. (And apologies to my Russian friends, but I don't see much prospect of that changing even if Putin were to be ousted.)
In my case there is no correlation between being concerned about the woke, and 'LGBT hostile'
Right, but I'd still be interested to know where you're interested in emigrating to.
Almost every company, bank, utility and media account in my Twitter and LinkedIn feed has turned their corporate icon to a trans/rainbow flag today, and Facebook have gone even further with a "love is love" animé.
Does anyone else not think this is OTT?
Quite frankly, it makes me want to vomit - together with others tweeting it and liking it all so they can be seen to be achingly right-on. Of course, those that object - in any form - are reactionary bigots.
The ubiquitous preachiness and self-absorption gets to me, together with the way it's framed as with us or against us, and means I both feel immensely irritated by it and a sort of contempt for it.
Don't be such a snowflake getting triggered by everything. Next you'll be wanting this cancelled.
The LBTQI+ community have faced so much bigotry, including in our lifetimes.
Just remember you and I have lived in a period where homosexuality wasn't decriminalised in Scotland and Norn Iron until the early 80s.
It is a reminder of the progress made and not to take things for granted.
Missing the point. Predictable. So so predictable from you. Disappointing.
We now have a LGBT+ history month in February and a whole month (in fact, it was over 6 weeks last year) - something like a sixth of the whole year.
There are absolutely no boundaries to it (and nor can there be, for the reasons you describe) so it just goes on and on until it's utterly omnipresent and meaningless but also preached at to you every night and day.
Pride should be confined to a weekend, as it used to be, which would make it more powerful, meaningful and fun. Hell, I'd even join in.
But as things are now? No. This relentless Wokery needs to end.
You're transforming into Laurence Fox.
No, because I've also criticised the equivalent on Poppies and Captain Tom. And I'm not an anti-vaxxer either.
I might not be with the bandwagon spirit of the age - and I'm happy to be laughed at and ridiculed as a result - but my point of view is a reasonable and coherent one.
I think I'm the sane one.
A sane person would not be close to vomiting by a social media campaign about pride month.
A sane person would recognise that every single company in the country changing their corporate logos and preaching it about it for over a full month (four times longer than it used to be) after the equality battle was won meant that something wasn't quite right.
It's like we were pulling into the station, because we'd arrived, and then threw the throttle to full and raced straight through it.
We've come a long way from "some people are gay, get over it":
No, because I've also criticised the equivalent on Poppies and Captain Tom. And I'm not an anti-vaxxer either.
I might not be with the bandwagon spirit of the age - and I'm happy to be laughed at and ridiculed as a result - but my point of view is a reasonable and coherent one.
I think I'm the sane one.
Well they do say in the land of the insane, the sane man will be king.
I found this fascinating from New Zealand if you want an interesting approach to cultural issues
FWIW I have no issue at all with firms celebrating pride month if they believe it is a key issue to celebrate/campaign for, but my issue is when they selectively celebrate it, because then it's just cynical exploitation.
Compare and contrast how strongly this firm, which under a century ago was enthusiastically running unethical human trials and facilitating the holocaust, support LGBT rights.
Sends out a strong vibe of 'we'll support you until it becomes more profitable to go back to running human experiments on you like back in the good old days'. If a firm makes a statement for LGBT rights it must be unconditional in its' reach.
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
But to where would you emigrate? Most of the LGBT-hostile places aren't exactly countries I think most of us would like to live in. I mean, I've visited St Petersburg and would happily live in that wonderful city for itself, but not while a regime that doesn't believe in the rule-of-law is running the place. (And apologies to my Russian friends, but I don't see much prospect of that changing even if Putin were to be ousted.)
In my case there is no correlation between being concerned about the woke, and 'LGBT hostile'
Right, but I'd still be interested to know where you're interested in emigrating to.
Presumably somewhere that allows him to work remotely that hasn't suffered the "civilisation ending woke revolution". Russia?
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
Welcome 'darkage'. Sounds like you have a great life. Just out of curiosity, how has this "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution" had such an impact on that good life that you're considering emigrating?
Some people see the 'woke' as the reinvention of western civilisation, I see it as the end of western civilisation. As I said, it is a personal opinion and I am not mad about it in the way that some people are. We will have to see who is right.
I think it could end there, yes, because we might bring the whole house down on ourselves through reductionist identity politics and year-zeroism. I even wrote a thread header on it once.
But, I don't think there's anywhere to "go". I think the battle needs to be won here and at least we have a Government in office here that sees that.
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
Welcome 'darkage'. Sounds like you have a great life. Just out of curiosity, how has this "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution" had such an impact on that good life that you're considering emigrating?
Some people see the 'woke' as the reinvention of western civilisation, I see it as the end of western civilisation. As I said, it is a personal opinion and I am not mad about it in the way that some people are. We will have to see who is right.
I think it could end there, yes, because we might bring the whole house down on ourselves through reductionist identity politics and year-zeroism. I even wrote a thread header on it once.
But, I don't think there's anywhere to "go". I think the battle needs to be won here and at least we have a Government in office here that sees that.
Surely there is a basic problem here. As there is no "woke" threat and therefore no battle to fight, even this government can only disappoint you by dispensing platitudes in your direction whilst taking you and your vote for granted.
Evening Standard reporting Carrie hired her wedding dress for £45
It showed.
That's just nasty. Give the girl a break. It was her wedding day..
My gf, like almost all my mates not on twitter, saw the abuse under the photo of their wedding pics and just said “Why do people have to be so nasty? Haven’t they got anything better to do?”
Twitter, and politics related social media, is so detached from the real world
The demented level abuse is how they prove they are good people - to themselves.
Except when it’s Diane Abbott because it barely exists and is all about her counting abilities anyway.
Yep. The jokes and memes about "stupid" Diane from white, middle aged blokes who haven't got a racist or sexist bone in their body are because of all the stupid things she says. 🆗
You never told us whether you stand by your earlier contention that she gets "by far the most (and the most visceral and personal) abuse of any MP in the country".
Why should I say things twice?
You shouldn't even have said it once, given that the only evidence you were able to provide said "This article was amended on 20 November 2018. The headline and some text references in an earlier version said that Diane Abbott received more abuse than any other MP. The data involved were from a study of female MPs only". Sensible move to shut up about it for five hours; foolish one to reopen it again.
Ok you spock away trying to argue that Diane does not get a shitload of racist sexist abuse. That the grief she gets is mainly cos she's stupid.
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
But to where would you emigrate? Most of the LGBT-hostile places aren't exactly countries I think most of us would like to live in. I mean, I've visited St Petersburg and would happily live in that wonderful city for itself, but not while a regime that doesn't believe in the rule-of-law is running the place. (And apologies to my Russian friends, but I don't see much prospect of that changing even if Putin were to be ousted.)
In my case there is no correlation between being concerned about the woke, and 'LGBT hostile'
Right, but I'd still be interested to know where you're interested in emigrating to.
Somewhere with stronger institutions, a higher level of basic education, more social and economic equality - there is likely to be a greater degree of cultural resilience to this type of stuff.
Almost every company, bank, utility and media account in my Twitter and LinkedIn feed has turned their corporate icon to a trans/rainbow flag today, and Facebook have gone even further with a "love is love" animé.
Does anyone else not think this is OTT?
Quite frankly, it makes me want to vomit - together with others tweeting it and liking it all so they can be seen to be achingly right-on. Of course, those that object - in any form - are reactionary bigots.
The ubiquitous preachiness and self-absorption gets to me, together with the way it's framed as with us or against us, and means I both feel immensely irritated by it and a sort of contempt for it.
Don't be such a snowflake getting triggered by everything. Next you'll be wanting this cancelled.
The LBTQI+ community have faced so much bigotry, including in our lifetimes.
Just remember you and I have lived in a period where homosexuality wasn't decriminalised in Scotland and Norn Iron until the early 80s.
It is a reminder of the progress made and not to take things for granted.
Missing the point. Predictable. So so predictable from you. Disappointing.
We now have a LGBT+ history month in February and a whole month (in fact, it was over 6 weeks last year) - something like a sixth of the whole year.
There are absolutely no boundaries to it (and nor can there be, for the reasons you describe) so it just goes on and on until it's utterly omnipresent and meaningless but also preached at to you every night and day.
Pride should be confined to a weekend, as it used to be, which would make it more powerful, meaningful and fun. Hell, I'd even join in.
But as things are now? No. This relentless Wokery needs to end.
You're transforming into Laurence Fox.
No, because I've also criticised the equivalent on Poppies and Captain Tom. And I'm not an anti-vaxxer either.
I might not be with the bandwagon spirit of the age - and I'm happy to be laughed at and ridiculed as a result - but my point of view is a reasonable and coherent one.
I think I'm the sane one.
A sane person would not be close to vomiting by a social media campaign about pride month.
A sane person would recognise that every single company in the country changing their corporate logos and preaching it about it for over a full month (four times longer than it used to be) after the equality battle was won meant that something wasn't quite right.
It's like we were pulling into the station, because we'd arrived, and then threw the throttle to full and raced straight through it.
We've come a long way from "some people are gay, get over it":
The truth is somewhat more complicated. Things are a great deal better than they were, but try as a gay couple walking down a busy street holding hands, and in most of the country you'd do well to get from one end to the other without being pointed at and have the piss taken by foul-mouthed youths. You might even count yourself lucky if that was the worst that happened.
OTOH I do think that Pride has turned into a bit of a corporate panjandrum. It doesn't offend me particularly, but I have some sympathy with those who think that some of it is a bit overdone. And I'm not all that fond of the ubiquitous usage of LGBT, and the other alphabet soup acronyms that it has spawned, either.
I'd love someone to explain to me what represents a "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution".
I'm not quite sure we're at the stage of groups of people marching round the streets with someone's thoughts picking people up at random and ordering them to undergo self-denunciation before compulsory re-education somewhere or other = that may be what's happening in Surrey but not in Newham.
As for civilisation ending, that's a pandemic with 95% infection rate and a 90% mortality rate or a nuclear strike - it isn't someone taking down a few statues, really, it isn't.
In a sense, "culture" is always in a sense of evolution or revolution with different interpretations of the past and different and evolving perceptions of identity.
Look at the Karl du Fresne blog post I attached to @Casino_Royale - it's a wonderful dismantling and exposition of the cultural issues in New Zealand currently.
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
Welcome 'darkage'. Sounds like you have a great life. Just out of curiosity, how has this "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution" had such an impact on that good life that you're considering emigrating?
Some people see the 'woke' as the reinvention of western civilisation, I see it as the end of western civilisation. As I said, it is a personal opinion and I am not mad about it in the way that some people are. We will have to see who is right.
I think it could end there, yes, because we might bring the whole house down on ourselves through reductionist identity politics and year-zeroism. I even wrote a thread header on it once.
But, I don't think there's anywhere to "go". I think the battle needs to be won here and at least we have a Government in office here that sees that.
Surely there is a basic problem here. As there is no "woke" threat and therefore no battle to fight, even this government can only disappoint you by dispensing platitudes in your direction whilst taking you and your vote for granted.
No, I think on iconoclasm, gender clinics for children, CRT, free speech at universities, unconscious bias training and other forms of Wokery this Government is pushing back. And I'm delighted to see it.
Almost every company, bank, utility and media account in my Twitter and LinkedIn feed has turned their corporate icon to a trans/rainbow flag today, and Facebook have gone even further with a "love is love" animé.
Does anyone else not think this is OTT?
Quite frankly, it makes me want to vomit - together with others tweeting it and liking it all so they can be seen to be achingly right-on. Of course, those that object - in any form - are reactionary bigots.
The ubiquitous preachiness and self-absorption gets to me, together with the way it's framed as with us or against us, and means I both feel immensely irritated by it and a sort of contempt for it.
Don't be such a snowflake getting triggered by everything. Next you'll be wanting this cancelled.
The LBTQI+ community have faced so much bigotry, including in our lifetimes.
Just remember you and I have lived in a period where homosexuality wasn't decriminalised in Scotland and Norn Iron until the early 80s.
It is a reminder of the progress made and not to take things for granted.
Missing the point. Predictable. So so predictable from you. Disappointing.
We now have a LGBT+ history month in February and a whole month (in fact, it was over 6 weeks last year) - something like a sixth of the whole year.
There are absolutely no boundaries to it (and nor can there be, for the reasons you describe) so it just goes on and on until it's utterly omnipresent and meaningless but also preached at to you every night and day.
Pride should be confined to a weekend, as it used to be, which would make it more powerful, meaningful and fun. Hell, I'd even join in.
But as things are now? No. This relentless Wokery needs to end.
You're transforming into Laurence Fox.
No, because I've also criticised the equivalent on Poppies and Captain Tom. And I'm not an anti-vaxxer either.
I might not be with the bandwagon spirit of the age - and I'm happy to be laughed at and ridiculed as a result - but my point of view is a reasonable and coherent one.
I think I'm the sane one.
A sane person would not be close to vomiting by a social media campaign about pride month.
A sane person would recognise that every single company in the country changing their corporate logos and preaching it about it for over a full month (four times longer than it used to be) after the equality battle was won meant that something wasn't quite right.
It's like we were pulling into the station, because we'd arrived, and then threw the throttle to full and raced straight through it.
We've come a long way from "some people are gay, get over it":
The truth is somewhat more complicated. Things are a great deal better than they were, but try as a gay couple walking down a busy street holding hands, and in most of the country you'd do well to get from one end to the other without being pointed at and have the piss taken by foul-mouthed youths. You might even count yourself lucky if that was the worst that happened.
OTOH I do think that Pride has turned into a bit of a corporate panjandrum. It doesn't offend me particularly, but I have some sympathy with those who think that some of it is a bit overdone. And I'm not all that fond of the ubiquitous usage of LGBT, and the other alphabet soup acronyms that it has spawned, either.
That's a fair post, and there's a lot of truth in it.
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
But to where would you emigrate? Most of the LGBT-hostile places aren't exactly countries I think most of us would like to live in. I mean, I've visited St Petersburg and would happily live in that wonderful city for itself, but not while a regime that doesn't believe in the rule-of-law is running the place. (And apologies to my Russian friends, but I don't see much prospect of that changing even if Putin were to be ousted.)
In my case there is no correlation between being concerned about the woke, and 'LGBT hostile'
Right, but I'd still be interested to know where you're interested in emigrating to.
Somewhere with stronger institutions, a higher level of basic education, more social and economic equality - there is likely to be a greater degree of cultural resilience to this type of stuff.
Right, that sounds wonderful. Now, perhaps you could give us some examples of places that you think meet those criteria?
(And if the answer is that you haven't researched that yet, I have a teensy feeling that you may end up being disappointed at what the set of places that meet those criteria but don't have much truck with "woke" turns out to be.)
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
But to where would you emigrate? Most of the LGBT-hostile places aren't exactly countries I think most of us would like to live in. I mean, I've visited St Petersburg and would happily live in that wonderful city for itself, but not while a regime that doesn't believe in the rule-of-law is running the place. (And apologies to my Russian friends, but I don't see much prospect of that changing even if Putin were to be ousted.)
In my case there is no correlation between being concerned about the woke, and 'LGBT hostile'
Right, but I'd still be interested to know where you're interested in emigrating to.
Somewhere with stronger institutions, a higher level of basic education, more social and economic equality - there is likely to be a greater degree of cultural resilience to this type of stuff.
Somewhere in the EU would probably fit the bill, though my advice would be to avoid Hungary or Poland for now.
FWIW I have no issue at all with firms celebrating pride month if they believe it is a key issue to celebrate/campaign for, but my issue is when they selectively celebrate it, because then it's just cynical exploitation.
Compare and contrast how strongly this firm, which under a century ago was enthusiastically running unethical human trials and facilitating the holocaust, support LGBT rights.
Sends out a strong vibe of 'we'll support you until it becomes more profitable to go back to running human experiments on you like back in the good old days'. If a firm makes a statement for LGBT rights it must be unconditional in its' reach.
Yes. My primary feeling is not that it is OTT, but that it is superficial and fake.
Almost every company, bank, utility and media account in my Twitter and LinkedIn feed has turned their corporate icon to a trans/rainbow flag today, and Facebook have gone even further with a "love is love" animé.
Does anyone else not think this is OTT?
Quite frankly, it makes me want to vomit - together with others tweeting it and liking it all so they can be seen to be achingly right-on. Of course, those that object - in any form - are reactionary bigots.
The ubiquitous preachiness and self-absorption gets to me, together with the way it's framed as with us or against us, and means I both feel immensely irritated by it and a sort of contempt for it.
Don't be such a snowflake getting triggered by everything. Next you'll be wanting this cancelled.
The LBTQI+ community have faced so much bigotry, including in our lifetimes.
Just remember you and I have lived in a period where homosexuality wasn't decriminalised in Scotland and Norn Iron until the early 80s.
It is a reminder of the progress made and not to take things for granted.
Missing the point. Predictable. So so predictable from you. Disappointing.
We now have a LGBT+ history month in February and a whole month (in fact, it was over 6 weeks last year) - something like a sixth of the whole year.
There are absolutely no boundaries to it (and nor can there be, for the reasons you describe) so it just goes on and on until it's utterly omnipresent and meaningless but also preached at to you every night and day.
Pride should be confined to a weekend, as it used to be, which would make it more powerful, meaningful and fun. Hell, I'd even join in.
But as things are now? No. This relentless Wokery needs to end.
You're transforming into Laurence Fox.
No, because I've also criticised the equivalent on Poppies and Captain Tom. And I'm not an anti-vaxxer either.
I might not be with the bandwagon spirit of the age - and I'm happy to be laughed at and ridiculed as a result - but my point of view is a reasonable and coherent one.
I think I'm the sane one.
A sane person would not be close to vomiting by a social media campaign about pride month.
A sane person would recognise that every single company in the country changing their corporate logos and preaching it about it for over a full month (four times longer than it used to be) after the equality battle was won meant that something wasn't quite right.
It's like we were pulling into the station, because we'd arrived, and then threw the throttle to full and raced straight through it.
We've come a long way from "some people are gay, get over it":
The truth is somewhat more complicated. Things are a great deal better than they were, but try as a gay couple walking down a busy street holding hands, and in most of the country you'd do well to get from one end to the other without being pointed at and have the piss taken by foul-mouthed youths. You might even count yourself lucky if that was the worst that happened.
OTOH I do think that Pride has turned into a bit of a corporate panjandrum. It doesn't offend me particularly, but I have some sympathy with those who think that some of it is a bit overdone. And I'm not all that fond of the ubiquitous usage of LGBT, and the other alphabet soup acronyms that it has spawned, either.
Among gay friends of my generation (50+) I do get the sense when it comes to Pride a feeling of ‘Could we have it back when you’re finished with it?’
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
Welcome 'darkage'. Sounds like you have a great life. Just out of curiosity, how has this "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution" had such an impact on that good life that you're considering emigrating?
Some people see the 'woke' as the reinvention of western civilisation, I see it as the end of western civilisation. As I said, it is a personal opinion and I am not mad about it in the way that some people are. We will have to see who is right.
Won't we need to live beyond the grave to see who's right? Or are you thinking it'll be over by next Tuesday?
Seems sensible for Tories to do that to me. Should consider 2022 too.
With a comfortable majority already little to gain and everything to lose, at least May had the excuse in 2017 she did not have much of a majority to start with
Thatcher and Blair had those too, were they wrong to like 4 years? Not being boxed in de risks it, in case some pops up you need more time to deal with,
The Tories will have been in power 12 years in 2022 and 13 in 2023 ie closer to 1992 or 2010 than 1983, 1987, 2001 or 2005.
On the historical precedent they will see their majority cut at least even if they hold onto power
Which is one reason why Johnson will want to wait for the new boundaries. Especially since middle-class flight from the cities is likely to consolidate in lots of lovely rural and semi-urban seats firming up their drift Torywards.
The new boundaries will not be in operation before July 2023 which possibly means that Autumn that year is the earliest likely election date. Others though have made the point that the effect of any realignment via the Red Wall etc will leave the Tories with more smaller constituencies than in the past and,therefore, will derive less benefit from boundary changes than in earlier reviews.To the extent that is true, their implementation may be less important re-timing than many currently assume.
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
Welcome 'darkage'. Sounds like you have a great life. Just out of curiosity, how has this "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution" had such an impact on that good life that you're considering emigrating?
Some people see the 'woke' as the reinvention of western civilisation, I see it as the end of western civilisation. As I said, it is a personal opinion and I am not mad about it in the way that some people are. We will have to see who is right.
I think it could end there, yes, because we might bring the whole house down on ourselves through reductionist identity politics and year-zeroism. I even wrote a thread header on it once.
But, I don't think there's anywhere to "go". I think the battle needs to be won here and at least we have a Government in office here that sees that.
Surely there is a basic problem here. As there is no "woke" threat and therefore no battle to fight, even this government can only disappoint you by dispensing platitudes in your direction whilst taking you and your vote for granted.
No, I think on iconoclasm, gender clinics for children, CRT, free speech at universities, unconscious bias training and other forms of Wokery this Government is pushing back. And I'm delighted to see it.
I'd like to see it go further though.
Honestly don't even know what half of those are supposed to be. CRT? "It's Political Correctness Gone Mad!" was the cry 30 years ago. It wasn't then, it isn't now. The government isn't pushing back, they're virtue signalling to you so that you'll keep voting for them even when "the woke" prove harder to push away than they claimed.
FWIW I have no issue at all with firms celebrating pride month if they believe it is a key issue to celebrate/campaign for, but my issue is when they selectively celebrate it, because then it's just cynical exploitation.
Compare and contrast how strongly this firm, which under a century ago was enthusiastically running unethical human trials and facilitating the holocaust, support LGBT rights.
Sends out a strong vibe of 'we'll support you until it becomes more profitable to go back to running human experiments on you like back in the good old days'. If a firm makes a statement for LGBT rights it must be unconditional in its' reach.
Frankly, I applaud companies that think first of their shareholders.
For the perusal of @rcs1000 and other lovers of Tether fraud - today I learnt there are a whole pile of unregulated Forex markets that use Tether as their on/off ramp
Tether may very well go down as the greatest fraud in history.
(It's a fascinating shell game: the goal of Tether management is to get other people to hold Tether at 1:1 with the USD, by buying when it falls below 99.5cents, and therefore earning a tiny profit. But, of course, these people are picking up pennies in front of a bulldozer, as Tether is being robbed blind. I suspect that at least $20bn of the $62bn has been looted from it already, and at some point it will come crashing down, when people realise there isn't $60bn sitting on the books.)
Oh, everyone already know the money isn't there. Fully half of Tether's attested to holdings are "Commercial Paper". According to their general council it is A-2 or above.
That means, if Tether and their general council is being truthful, Tether owns 3% of the entire US Commercial Paper market with two full percentage points purchased in the last 3 months. Let that sink in.
No one actually believes this but everyone knows that without Tether the Bitcoin price goes down and to the right not up and to the right.
So what happens when Tether collapses? Does it bring Bitcoin down with it? Is it damaging to the wider economy?
Given Bitcoin’s carbon footprint is something like 0.25% of the US’s (i.e. huge) the sooner it crashes the better.
The latest estimate of Bitcoin electricity usage was 129TWh/year, which is more than 85% of countries.
The crash is going to be spectacular to watch from a distance.
When would it be likely ?
I invest, a small amount, via SIPP and S&S ISA but avoid stuff like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple and the rest. I just don’t get them and when my Facebook and twitter feed was regularly full of scams concerning them it just made me incredibly wary. I like to invest in stuff I understand. I don’t understand these and I don’t understand NFTs
Most of the points raised above are refuted, or at the very least, countered, at https://endthefud.org/
The energy stuff is a complete nonsense, bitcoin actually incentivises clean energy usage because clean energy produces too much energy when demand is low and not enough when it's high. Since most of that energy can't be stored, it's wasted - raising overall unit cost. As Bitcoin is on 24/7, bitcoin creates a market for that surplus clean energy, thus incentivising more production of clean energy as there is an increased market for it.
As far as tether goes, people have been saying it's going to collapse for years - surprise surprise, it hasn't. And even if it did, it represents about 4% of the total crypto market cap, scammier coins like bitconnect have collapsed without crashing the entire crypto market.
(1) BTC is (mostly) mined in China using coal. Indeed, it is often the owners of the coal plants themselves who have a side business BTC mining. It's quite efficient for them to have a sideline in BTC because during off peak periods in China electricity, they move over to BTC mining. That being said, it's still coal being being used for mining.
(2) Tether is a scam. It's not complicated. They have printed more Tether (by far) than they have in assets. Just because it hasn't collapsed yet, doesn't mean it won't.
(3) When Tether collapses, there will be ripples. I'm not a "all crypto is doomed" kind of guy, but there will be consequences.
Bitcoin ultimately wants cheap energy - surplus energy from renewable sources that would otherwise be wasted will eventually become cheaper than coal. Imagine having a solar panel on your house. On a really bright day, or when you're not at home, much of that energy is wasted. It could be converted to bitcoin mining at no cost to you, or sold to bitcoin miners at rock bottom prices rather than being wasted. Imagine that transformation taking place on a global scale. That is likely where we are headed within the next decade, even if we aren't there now.
Bitcoin creates a market for renewable energy that would otherwise be wasted, making construction of more renewable energy sources more economically viable.
But. Even if it didn't. Not all energy use is bad - indeed, what is wasteful about using electricity to verify sound money? It has a cost, in terms of energy usage and pollution, but so do christmas lights - which serve no purpose - and people don't want to ban them. Gold mining has a huge impact on the environment, nobody complains about it. And the US dollar is backed by bombs and aircraft carriers.
In terms of tether, it represents 60 bn of a 1.62 tn crypto market - so it wouldn't be fatal if it collapsed. But I'm inclined to agree with you, it's scammy and it would cause lasting damage to the crypto ecosystem that would take a long time to recover from. Having said that, the US dollar is a fractional reserve and that's still chugging along...
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
Welcome 'darkage'. Sounds like you have a great life. Just out of curiosity, how has this "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution" had such an impact on that good life that you're considering emigrating?
Some people see the 'woke' as the reinvention of western civilisation, I see it as the end of western civilisation. As I said, it is a personal opinion and I am not mad about it in the way that some people are. We will have to see who is right.
I think it could end there, yes, because we might bring the whole house down on ourselves through reductionist identity politics and year-zeroism. I even wrote a thread header on it once.
But, I don't think there's anywhere to "go". I think the battle needs to be won here and at least we have a Government in office here that sees that.
The problem is not really with the government. The problem is with the English. The government doesn't have popular support for its war on woke. It is all a bit half hearted and viewed as a fringe issue, when it is actually an existential threat to civilisation. You have to look at what happened last year with the desecration of the centopah and conclude it is basically game over, the generation that cared about these things has died out.
I don't know what the answer is; emigration in my case is an option due to family connections; I am simply trying to pursue a viable alternative when I can see everything here falling apart, despite my apparent middle class status and affluence.
Seems sensible for Tories to do that to me. Should consider 2022 too.
With a comfortable majority already little to gain and everything to lose, at least May had the excuse in 2017 she did not have much of a majority to start with
Thatcher and Blair had those too, were they wrong to like 4 years? Not being boxed in de risks it, in case some pops up you need more time to deal with,
The Tories will have been in power 12 years in 2022 and 13 in 2023 ie closer to 1992 or 2010 than 1983, 1987, 2001 or 2005.
On the historical precedent they will see their majority cut at least even if they hold onto power
Which is one reason why Johnson will want to wait for the new boundaries. Especially since middle-class flight from the cities is likely to consolidate in lots of lovely rural and semi-urban seats firming up their drift Torywards.
The new boundaries will not be in operation before July 2023 which possibly means that Autumn that year is the earliest likely election date. Others though have made the point that the effect of any realignment via the Red Wall etc will leave the Tories with more smaller constituencies than in the past and,therefore, will derive less benefit from boundary changes than in earlier reviews.To the extent that is true, their implementation may be less important re-timing than many currently assume.
Given the effect may have been overplayed anyway, all the more important as far as I'm concerned to wait until it is done - there's no rush for a GE, and the damn things really do need to be updated already.
Evening Standard reporting Carrie hired her wedding dress for £45
It showed.
That's just nasty. Give the girl a break. It was her wedding day..
My gf, like almost all my mates not on twitter, saw the abuse under the photo of their wedding pics and just said “Why do people have to be so nasty? Haven’t they got anything better to do?”
Twitter, and politics related social media, is so detached from the real world
The demented level abuse is how they prove they are good people - to themselves.
Except when it’s Diane Abbott because it barely exists and is all about her counting abilities anyway.
Yep. The jokes and memes about "stupid" Diane from white, middle aged blokes who haven't got a racist or sexist bone in their body are because of all the stupid things she says. 🆗
You never told us whether you stand by your earlier contention that she gets "by far the most (and the most visceral and personal) abuse of any MP in the country".
Why should I say things twice?
You shouldn't even have said it once, given that the only evidence you were able to provide said "This article was amended on 20 November 2018. The headline and some text references in an earlier version said that Diane Abbott received more abuse than any other MP. The data involved were from a study of female MPs only". Sensible move to shut up about it for five hours; foolish one to reopen it again.
Ok you spock away trying to argue that Diane does not get a shitload of racist sexist abuse. That the grief she gets is mainly cos she's stupid.
And I'll draw the obvious and correct conclusion.
If you can't even accurately conclude who owns Chatsworth House, perhaps you should hold off on impugning the motives of fellow posters whose only crime is to have a secondary school ability to decipher statistics - or to read to the bottom of an article before posting it.
FWIW I have no issue at all with firms celebrating pride month if they believe it is a key issue to celebrate/campaign for, but my issue is when they selectively celebrate it, because then it's just cynical exploitation.
Compare and contrast how strongly this firm, which under a century ago was enthusiastically running unethical human trials and facilitating the holocaust, support LGBT rights.
Sends out a strong vibe of 'we'll support you until it becomes more profitable to go back to running human experiments on you like back in the good old days'. If a firm makes a statement for LGBT rights it must be unconditional in its' reach.
It's dead easy to put out some press releases, change your branding for a few weeks, and make some modest donations. Most companies can manage that, but not many will forego doing business with some of the world's worst and wealthiest regimes.
So I've renewed my Arsenal season ticket. I don't care if they win or not, but I think it's important that I get back out and start seeing friends again.
Also, I want to let the players know what I think of their wokery. PJW nails it:
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
But to where would you emigrate? Most of the LGBT-hostile places aren't exactly countries I think most of us would like to live in. I mean, I've visited St Petersburg and would happily live in that wonderful city for itself, but not while a regime that doesn't believe in the rule-of-law is running the place. (And apologies to my Russian friends, but I don't see much prospect of that changing even if Putin were to be ousted.)
In my case there is no correlation between being concerned about the woke, and 'LGBT hostile'
Right, but I'd still be interested to know where you're interested in emigrating to.
Somewhere with stronger institutions, a higher level of basic education, more social and economic equality - there is likely to be a greater degree of cultural resilience to this type of stuff.
Right, that sounds wonderful. Now, perhaps you could give us some examples of places that you think meet those criteria?
(And if the answer is that you haven't researched that yet, I have a teensy feeling that you may end up being disappointed at what the set of places that meet those criteria but don't have much truck with "woke" turns out to be.)
I've explained that in my other posts that in my case there are family connections. But essentially, despite not being a great fan of the EU (I was a reluctant remainer turned reluctant Brexiteer), my recent conclusions are to the effect that it has a greater chance of preserving what is valuable about western civilisation, and for longer, than post Brexit UK.
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
Welcome 'darkage'. Sounds like you have a great life. Just out of curiosity, how has this "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution" had such an impact on that good life that you're considering emigrating?
Some people see the 'woke' as the reinvention of western civilisation, I see it as the end of western civilisation. As I said, it is a personal opinion and I am not mad about it in the way that some people are. We will have to see who is right.
I think it could end there, yes, because we might bring the whole house down on ourselves through reductionist identity politics and year-zeroism. I even wrote a thread header on it once.
But, I don't think there's anywhere to "go". I think the battle needs to be won here and at least we have a Government in office here that sees that.
The problem is not really with the government. The problem is with the English. The government doesn't have popular support for its war on woke. It is all a bit half hearted and viewed as a fringe issue, when it is actually an existential threat to civilisation. You have to look at what happened last year with the desecration of the centopah and conclude it is basically game over, the generation that cared about these things has died out.
I don't know what the answer is; emigration in my case is an option due to family connections; I am simply trying to pursue a viable alternative when I can see everything here falling apart, despite my apparent middle class status and affluence.
I agree with "the problem is with the English" and that emigration is an option. But I left for Scotland for the opposite reason you mention. I grew sick of the culturally backwards knuckle draggers so moved somewhere that better suited me. I warmly encourage you to do the same albeit from the opposite side of the same debate.
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
Welcome 'darkage'. Sounds like you have a great life. Just out of curiosity, how has this "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution" had such an impact on that good life that you're considering emigrating?
Some people see the 'woke' as the reinvention of western civilisation, I see it as the end of western civilisation. As I said, it is a personal opinion and I am not mad about it in the way that some people are. We will have to see who is right.
I think it could end there, yes, because we might bring the whole house down on ourselves through reductionist identity politics and year-zeroism. I even wrote a thread header on it once.
But, I don't think there's anywhere to "go". I think the battle needs to be won here and at least we have a Government in office here that sees that.
Surely there is a basic problem here. As there is no "woke" threat and therefore no battle to fight, even this government can only disappoint you by dispensing platitudes in your direction whilst taking you and your vote for granted.
No, I think on iconoclasm, gender clinics for children, CRT, free speech at universities, unconscious bias training and other forms of Wokery this Government is pushing back. And I'm delighted to see it.
However, there was no option of "just continue as we were." As @rcs1000 has pointed out, even in states or countries where that was tried, the effects of restrictions were applied unofficially. Mobility cratered, people stayed at home, restaurants and pubs had footfall plunge (in states in the US where there was no lockdown, the level of decrease of footfall over the year 2020 was greater than it was in the UK!). One key difference has been furlough, which was justified because the Government were mandating closure. Otherwise it would have been business closures and jobs lost.
(And don't forget that the 1.3 million years left was with the measures to reduce it. Would have been dramatically higher without it. In addition, those bereaved have had a certain quality of life reduction. And those with Long Covid (especially those with demonstrated organ damage, which is a significant number) have also had a level of quality of life reduction, and this would also have been multiplied in such a counterfactual.
In essence, there were no good outcomes and no timelines where we didn't have a really really shit year. I think that's one thing the Toby Youngs and followers have been unable to internalise)
I disagree, I think that if we had not had the first lockdown, or had ended it after 3 weeks, then we would have had less deaths overall, that is not provable, and it may be wrong, but I don't think three is a credible sinario where there would have been significantly more deaths.
I could look at examples of places that have not lockdown, Sweden being the best example, but there are more, in the US South Dakota did not lock down ever and while it eventually had a lot of deaths, its not near the peek of New York or New Jersey. Georgia and Florida, reopened at the start and midal of May of last year, to endless criticisms, but both have close to the average number of deaths in the US Florida below average, despite is very old population.
In south America, Argentina had the longest lockdown in the would, where as Brazil had no lockdown, a couple of months ago Argentina had more total deaths than Brazil, and yes brazil now has more deaths, probably because of a new strain they have had, but not that many compared to Argentina, and at the moment Argentina is catching up.
Why might the lockdowns be so ineffective? well they can delay some infections and therefor some deaths, but not as many as people think. According to ONS data over a 1/3 of the UK population have had the virus, far moor than the 4 million on government website, but mostly this was asymptomatic and milled conditions. achily its probably more than its, they did not start collecting data till end of March 2021, and stopped for a week at the peek over Christmas.
by delaying people getting the original COVID, more where susceptible to get the newer extra strength Kent variety, which was not good and they also got it over winter, when health outcomes are worse for all conditions.
By mandating people stay in there houses and flats, people got less sunlight witch meant less Vitamin D, also many put wait and it it was good for nobody's mental health. all of theses will have affected the quality of the health outcomes, including hospitalisations and deaths.
We know that nobody know how may will have died in such a sinario, yes it could have been more, but credibly how much 10,000? I think 20,000 is the highest amount of extra deaths that is credible. meanwhile we have barrowed, 400 Billion, some extra borings was inevitable, but not on this scale. lets say half that.
20,000 deaths for 200 Billion, that's 10,000,000 a death, I'm sure if it was my mum I would want the would spend the would on her, but as a nation this is not a manageable amount. and that's before you tally up the loss to our children's education the delayed operations the damage to mental heath and the Lost year in general.
I'm probably not making friends with this, and it is too late now, but this was all a massive mistake.
I'm not sure you can compare South Dakota (capital Pierre, population 13,000) with the UK.
I'd also point out that Florida had plenty of restrictions - they were just at the City level, not at the State.
Final point: the Swedes don't think they did well.
It's also worth noting that restrictions are far from the only thing that matters. If you normalise for then, the biggest determinant of if you did well or badly is a combination of:
(1) Demographics - in particular the number of single person households (lots = good), and the number of intergenerational households (lots = bad). (2) Population density and mobility - do people move around a lot, and spend a lot of time in contact with other people. Places that are very reliant on public transport do badly, and places where the car is king do much better.
The UK was always going to perform quite poorly given (2), and is mid-table for (1).
I'd add third point - health - the UK has got one of the worst obesity rates in the world and obesity is always a huge factor in respiratory diseases.
And we've had no public health campaign pointing that out.
There should have an anti-obesity campaign to match the anti-smoking and AIDS awareness campaign of the past.
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
Welcome 'darkage'. Sounds like you have a great life. Just out of curiosity, how has this "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution" had such an impact on that good life that you're considering emigrating?
Some people see the 'woke' as the reinvention of western civilisation, I see it as the end of western civilisation. As I said, it is a personal opinion and I am not mad about it in the way that some people are. We will have to see who is right.
I think it could end there, yes, because we might bring the whole house down on ourselves through reductionist identity politics and year-zeroism. I even wrote a thread header on it once.
But, I don't think there's anywhere to "go". I think the battle needs to be won here and at least we have a Government in office here that sees that.
Surely there is a basic problem here. As there is no "woke" threat and therefore no battle to fight, even this government can only disappoint you by dispensing platitudes in your direction whilst taking you and your vote for granted.
No, I think on iconoclasm, gender clinics for children, CRT, free speech at universities, unconscious bias training and other forms of Wokery this Government is pushing back. And I'm delighted to see it.
For the perusal of @rcs1000 and other lovers of Tether fraud - today I learnt there are a whole pile of unregulated Forex markets that use Tether as their on/off ramp
Tether may very well go down as the greatest fraud in history.
(It's a fascinating shell game: the goal of Tether management is to get other people to hold Tether at 1:1 with the USD, by buying when it falls below 99.5cents, and therefore earning a tiny profit. But, of course, these people are picking up pennies in front of a bulldozer, as Tether is being robbed blind. I suspect that at least $20bn of the $62bn has been looted from it already, and at some point it will come crashing down, when people realise there isn't $60bn sitting on the books.)
Oh, everyone already know the money isn't there. Fully half of Tether's attested to holdings are "Commercial Paper". According to their general council it is A-2 or above.
That means, if Tether and their general council is being truthful, Tether owns 3% of the entire US Commercial Paper market with two full percentage points purchased in the last 3 months. Let that sink in.
No one actually believes this but everyone knows that without Tether the Bitcoin price goes down and to the right not up and to the right.
So what happens when Tether collapses? Does it bring Bitcoin down with it? Is it damaging to the wider economy?
Given Bitcoin’s carbon footprint is something like 0.25% of the US’s (i.e. huge) the sooner it crashes the better.
The latest estimate of Bitcoin electricity usage was 129TWh/year, which is more than 85% of countries.
The crash is going to be spectacular to watch from a distance.
When would it be likely ?
I invest, a small amount, via SIPP and S&S ISA but avoid stuff like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple and the rest. I just don’t get them and when my Facebook and twitter feed was regularly full of scams concerning them it just made me incredibly wary. I like to invest in stuff I understand. I don’t understand these and I don’t understand NFTs
Most of the points raised above are refuted, or at the very least, countered, at https://endthefud.org/
The energy stuff is a complete nonsense, bitcoin actually incentivises clean energy usage because clean energy produces too much energy when demand is low and not enough when it's high. Since most of that energy can't be stored, it's wasted - raising overall unit cost. As Bitcoin is on 24/7, bitcoin creates a market for that surplus clean energy, thus incentivising more production of clean energy as there is an increased market for it.
As far as tether goes, people have been saying it's going to collapse for years - surprise surprise, it hasn't. And even if it did, it represents about 4% of the total crypto market cap, scammier coins like bitconnect have collapsed without crashing the entire crypto market.
(1) BTC is (mostly) mined in China using coal. Indeed, it is often the owners of the coal plants themselves who have a side business BTC mining. It's quite efficient for them to have a sideline in BTC because during off peak periods in China electricity, they move over to BTC mining. That being said, it's still coal being being used for mining.
(2) Tether is a scam. It's not complicated. They have printed more Tether (by far) than they have in assets. Just because it hasn't collapsed yet, doesn't mean it won't.
(3) When Tether collapses, there will be ripples. I'm not a "all crypto is doomed" kind of guy, but there will be consequences.
Bitcoin ultimately wants cheap energy - surplus energy from renewable sources that would otherwise be wasted will eventually become cheaper than coal. Imagine having a solar panel on your house. On a really bright day, or when you're not at home, much of that energy is wasted. It could be converted to bitcoin mining at no cost to you, or sold to bitcoin miners at rock bottom prices rather than being wasted. Imagine that transformation taking place on a global scale. That is likely where we are headed within the next decade, even if we aren't there now.
Bitcoin creates a market for renewable energy that would otherwise be wasted, making construction of more renewable energy sources more economically viable.
But. Even if it didn't. Not all energy use is bad - indeed, what is wasteful about using electricity to verify sound money? It has a cost, in terms of energy usage and pollution, but so do christmas lights - which serve no purpose - and people don't want to ban them. Gold mining has a huge impact on the environment, nobody complains about it. And the US dollar is backed by bombs and aircraft carriers.
In terms of tether, it represents 60 bn of a 1.62 tn crypto market - so it wouldn't be fatal if it collapsed. But I'm inclined to agree with you, it's scammy and it would cause lasting damage to the crypto ecosystem that would take a long time to recover from. Having said that, the US dollar is a fractional reserve and that's still chugging along...
Tether is being used by Asian companies to bypass the banking system as it quicker and cheaper.
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
Welcome 'darkage'. Sounds like you have a great life. Just out of curiosity, how has this "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution" had such an impact on that good life that you're considering emigrating?
Some people see the 'woke' as the reinvention of western civilisation, I see it as the end of western civilisation. As I said, it is a personal opinion and I am not mad about it in the way that some people are. We will have to see who is right.
I think it could end there, yes, because we might bring the whole house down on ourselves through reductionist identity politics and year-zeroism. I even wrote a thread header on it once.
But, I don't think there's anywhere to "go". I think the battle needs to be won here and at least we have a Government in office here that sees that.
The problem is not really with the government. The problem is with the English. The government doesn't have popular support for its war on woke. It is all a bit half hearted and viewed as a fringe issue, when it is actually an existential threat to civilisation. You have to look at what happened last year with the desecration of the centopah and conclude it is basically game over, the generation that cared about these things has died out.
I don't know what the answer is; emigration in my case is an option due to family connections; I am simply trying to pursue a viable alternative when I can see everything here falling apart, despite my apparent middle class status and affluence.
I agree with "the problem is with the English" and that emigration is an option. But I left for Scotland for the opposite reason you mention. I grew sick of the culturally backwards knuckle draggers so moved somewhere that better suited me. I warmly encourage you to do the same albeit from the opposite side of the same debate.
I've got a friend who has been on the same journey. She got to the point where she joined the SNP and voted for independence before she worked out the problem.
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
Welcome 'darkage'. Sounds like you have a great life. Just out of curiosity, how has this "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution" had such an impact on that good life that you're considering emigrating?
Some people see the 'woke' as the reinvention of western civilisation, I see it as the end of western civilisation. As I said, it is a personal opinion and I am not mad about it in the way that some people are. We will have to see who is right.
I think it could end there, yes, because we might bring the whole house down on ourselves through reductionist identity politics and year-zeroism. I even wrote a thread header on it once.
But, I don't think there's anywhere to "go". I think the battle needs to be won here and at least we have a Government in office here that sees that.
The problem is not really with the government. The problem is with the English. The government doesn't have popular support for its war on woke. It is all a bit half hearted and viewed as a fringe issue, when it is actually an existential threat to civilisation. You have to look at what happened last year with the desecration of the centopah and conclude it is basically game over, the generation that cared about these things has died out.
I don't know what the answer is; emigration in my case is an option due to family connections; I am simply trying to pursue a viable alternative when I can see everything here falling apart, despite my apparent middle class status and affluence.
So where are you moving to, given most of the Western world is going through the same Woke clashes and in the US the problem is even more pronounced than here? Eastern Europe or Singapore?
For the perusal of @rcs1000 and other lovers of Tether fraud - today I learnt there are a whole pile of unregulated Forex markets that use Tether as their on/off ramp
Tether may very well go down as the greatest fraud in history.
(It's a fascinating shell game: the goal of Tether management is to get other people to hold Tether at 1:1 with the USD, by buying when it falls below 99.5cents, and therefore earning a tiny profit. But, of course, these people are picking up pennies in front of a bulldozer, as Tether is being robbed blind. I suspect that at least $20bn of the $62bn has been looted from it already, and at some point it will come crashing down, when people realise there isn't $60bn sitting on the books.)
Oh, everyone already know the money isn't there. Fully half of Tether's attested to holdings are "Commercial Paper". According to their general council it is A-2 or above.
That means, if Tether and their general council is being truthful, Tether owns 3% of the entire US Commercial Paper market with two full percentage points purchased in the last 3 months. Let that sink in.
No one actually believes this but everyone knows that without Tether the Bitcoin price goes down and to the right not up and to the right.
So what happens when Tether collapses? Does it bring Bitcoin down with it? Is it damaging to the wider economy?
Given Bitcoin’s carbon footprint is something like 0.25% of the US’s (i.e. huge) the sooner it crashes the better.
The latest estimate of Bitcoin electricity usage was 129TWh/year, which is more than 85% of countries.
The crash is going to be spectacular to watch from a distance.
When would it be likely ?
I invest, a small amount, via SIPP and S&S ISA but avoid stuff like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple and the rest. I just don’t get them and when my Facebook and twitter feed was regularly full of scams concerning them it just made me incredibly wary. I like to invest in stuff I understand. I don’t understand these and I don’t understand NFTs
Most of the points raised above are refuted, or at the very least, countered, at https://endthefud.org/
The energy stuff is a complete nonsense, bitcoin actually incentivises clean energy usage because clean energy produces too much energy when demand is low and not enough when it's high. Since most of that energy can't be stored, it's wasted - raising overall unit cost. As Bitcoin is on 24/7, bitcoin creates a market for that surplus clean energy, thus incentivising more production of clean energy as there is an increased market for it.
As far as tether goes, people have been saying it's going to collapse for years - surprise surprise, it hasn't. And even if it did, it represents about 4% of the total crypto market cap, scammier coins like bitconnect have collapsed without crashing the entire crypto market.
(1) BTC is (mostly) mined in China using coal. Indeed, it is often the owners of the coal plants themselves who have a side business BTC mining. It's quite efficient for them to have a sideline in BTC because during off peak periods in China electricity, they move over to BTC mining. That being said, it's still coal being being used for mining.
(2) Tether is a scam. It's not complicated. They have printed more Tether (by far) than they have in assets. Just because it hasn't collapsed yet, doesn't mean it won't.
(3) When Tether collapses, there will be ripples. I'm not a "all crypto is doomed" kind of guy, but there will be consequences.
Bitcoin ultimately wants cheap energy - surplus energy from renewable sources that would otherwise be wasted will eventually become cheaper than coal. Imagine having a solar panel on your house. On a really bright day, or when you're not at home, much of that energy is wasted. It could be converted to bitcoin mining at no cost to you, or sold to bitcoin miners at rock bottom prices rather than being wasted. Imagine that transformation taking place on a global scale. That is likely where we are headed within the next decade, even if we aren't there now.
Bitcoin creates a market for renewable energy that would otherwise be wasted, making construction of more renewable energy sources more economically viable.
But. Even if it didn't. Not all energy use is bad - indeed, what is wasteful about using electricity to verify sound money? It has a cost, in terms of energy usage and pollution, but so do christmas lights - which serve no purpose - and people don't want to ban them. Gold mining has a huge impact on the environment, nobody complains about it. And the US dollar is backed by bombs and aircraft carriers.
In terms of tether, it represents 60 bn of a 1.62 tn crypto market - so it wouldn't be fatal if it collapsed. But I'm inclined to agree with you, it's scammy and it would cause lasting damage to the crypto ecosystem that would take a long time to recover from. Having said that, the US dollar is a fractional reserve and that's still chugging along...
Tether is being used by Asian companies to bypass the banking system as it quicker and cheaper.
Money is energy. If the gold price goes up then cash is borrowed and more energy is used to expand production. The Pentagon use 4.6 billion gallons of fuel a year to protect the US petro trading empire. That is accepted and not discussed. You expend energy working for yourself, a capitalist or the state to earn money
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
Welcome 'darkage'. Sounds like you have a great life. Just out of curiosity, how has this "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution" had such an impact on that good life that you're considering emigrating?
Some people see the 'woke' as the reinvention of western civilisation, I see it as the end of western civilisation. As I said, it is a personal opinion and I am not mad about it in the way that some people are. We will have to see who is right.
I think it could end there, yes, because we might bring the whole house down on ourselves through reductionist identity politics and year-zeroism. I even wrote a thread header on it once.
But, I don't think there's anywhere to "go". I think the battle needs to be won here and at least we have a Government in office here that sees that.
The problem is not really with the government. The problem is with the English. The government doesn't have popular support for its war on woke. It is all a bit half hearted and viewed as a fringe issue, when it is actually an existential threat to civilisation. You have to look at what happened last year with the desecration of the centopah and conclude it is basically game over, the generation that cared about these things has died out.
I don't know what the answer is; emigration in my case is an option due to family connections; I am simply trying to pursue a viable alternative when I can see everything here falling apart, despite my apparent middle class status and affluence.
I agree with "the problem is with the English" and that emigration is an option. But I left for Scotland for the opposite reason you mention. I grew sick of the culturally backwards knuckle draggers so moved somewhere that better suited me. I warmly encourage you to do the same albeit from the opposite side of the same debate.
I've got a friend who has been on the same journey. She got to the point where she joined the SNP and voted for independence before she worked out the problem.
I'm not doing the latter! But I am much happier living up here and not "woking" up England with my displeasure of flag twattery and exceptionalism. If my former compatriates are also happy me having left then its win win!
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
Welcome 'darkage'. Sounds like you have a great life. Just out of curiosity, how has this "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution" had such an impact on that good life that you're considering emigrating?
Some people see the 'woke' as the reinvention of western civilisation, I see it as the end of western civilisation. As I said, it is a personal opinion and I am not mad about it in the way that some people are. We will have to see who is right.
I think it could end there, yes, because we might bring the whole house down on ourselves through reductionist identity politics and year-zeroism. I even wrote a thread header on it once.
But, I don't think there's anywhere to "go". I think the battle needs to be won here and at least we have a Government in office here that sees that.
The problem is not really with the government. The problem is with the English. The government doesn't have popular support for its war on woke. It is all a bit half hearted and viewed as a fringe issue, when it is actually an existential threat to civilisation. You have to look at what happened last year with the desecration of the centopah and conclude it is basically game over, the generation that cared about these things has died out.
I don't know what the answer is; emigration in my case is an option due to family connections; I am simply trying to pursue a viable alternative when I can see everything here falling apart, despite my apparent middle class status and affluence.
So where are you moving too, given most of the Western world is going through the same Woke clashes and in the US the problem is even more pronounced than here? Eastern Europe or Singapore?
It is actually a fairly uniquely anglo american issue.
For the perusal of @rcs1000 and other lovers of Tether fraud - today I learnt there are a whole pile of unregulated Forex markets that use Tether as their on/off ramp
Tether may very well go down as the greatest fraud in history.
(It's a fascinating shell game: the goal of Tether management is to get other people to hold Tether at 1:1 with the USD, by buying when it falls below 99.5cents, and therefore earning a tiny profit. But, of course, these people are picking up pennies in front of a bulldozer, as Tether is being robbed blind. I suspect that at least $20bn of the $62bn has been looted from it already, and at some point it will come crashing down, when people realise there isn't $60bn sitting on the books.)
Oh, everyone already know the money isn't there. Fully half of Tether's attested to holdings are "Commercial Paper". According to their general council it is A-2 or above.
That means, if Tether and their general council is being truthful, Tether owns 3% of the entire US Commercial Paper market with two full percentage points purchased in the last 3 months. Let that sink in.
No one actually believes this but everyone knows that without Tether the Bitcoin price goes down and to the right not up and to the right.
So what happens when Tether collapses? Does it bring Bitcoin down with it? Is it damaging to the wider economy?
Given Bitcoin’s carbon footprint is something like 0.25% of the US’s (i.e. huge) the sooner it crashes the better.
The latest estimate of Bitcoin electricity usage was 129TWh/year, which is more than 85% of countries.
The crash is going to be spectacular to watch from a distance.
When would it be likely ?
I invest, a small amount, via SIPP and S&S ISA but avoid stuff like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple and the rest. I just don’t get them and when my Facebook and twitter feed was regularly full of scams concerning them it just made me incredibly wary. I like to invest in stuff I understand. I don’t understand these and I don’t understand NFTs
Most of the points raised above are refuted, or at the very least, countered, at https://endthefud.org/
The energy stuff is a complete nonsense, bitcoin actually incentivises clean energy usage because clean energy produces too much energy when demand is low and not enough when it's high. Since most of that energy can't be stored, it's wasted - raising overall unit cost. As Bitcoin is on 24/7, bitcoin creates a market for that surplus clean energy, thus incentivising more production of clean energy as there is an increased market for it.
As far as tether goes, people have been saying it's going to collapse for years - surprise surprise, it hasn't. And even if it did, it represents about 4% of the total crypto market cap, scammier coins like bitconnect have collapsed without crashing the entire crypto market.
(1) BTC is (mostly) mined in China using coal. Indeed, it is often the owners of the coal plants themselves who have a side business BTC mining. It's quite efficient for them to have a sideline in BTC because during off peak periods in China electricity, they move over to BTC mining. That being said, it's still coal being being used for mining.
(2) Tether is a scam. It's not complicated. They have printed more Tether (by far) than they have in assets. Just because it hasn't collapsed yet, doesn't mean it won't.
(3) When Tether collapses, there will be ripples. I'm not a "all crypto is doomed" kind of guy, but there will be consequences.
Bitcoin ultimately wants cheap energy - surplus energy from renewable sources that would otherwise be wasted will eventually become cheaper than coal. Imagine having a solar panel on your house. On a really bright day, or when you're not at home, much of that energy is wasted. It could be converted to bitcoin mining at no cost to you, or sold to bitcoin miners at rock bottom prices rather than being wasted. Imagine that transformation taking place on a global scale. That is likely where we are headed within the next decade, even if we aren't there now.
Bitcoin creates a market for renewable energy that would otherwise be wasted, making construction of more renewable energy sources more economically viable.
But. Even if it didn't. Not all energy use is bad - indeed, what is wasteful about using electricity to verify sound money? It has a cost, in terms of energy usage and pollution, but so do christmas lights - which serve no purpose - and people don't want to ban them. Gold mining has a huge impact on the environment, nobody complains about it. And the US dollar is backed by bombs and aircraft carriers.
In terms of tether, it represents 60 bn of a 1.62 tn crypto market - so it wouldn't be fatal if it collapsed. But I'm inclined to agree with you, it's scammy and it would cause lasting damage to the crypto ecosystem that would take a long time to recover from. Having said that, the US dollar is a fractional reserve and that's still chugging along...
Tether is being used by Asian companies to bypass the banking system as it quicker and cheaper.
Corruption is easier to get away with as well. Isn’t crime facilitation (whether tax evasion or wider)the key support for Bitcoin?
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
Welcome 'darkage'. Sounds like you have a great life. Just out of curiosity, how has this "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution" had such an impact on that good life that you're considering emigrating?
Some people see the 'woke' as the reinvention of western civilisation, I see it as the end of western civilisation. As I said, it is a personal opinion and I am not mad about it in the way that some people are. We will have to see who is right.
I think it could end there, yes, because we might bring the whole house down on ourselves through reductionist identity politics and year-zeroism. I even wrote a thread header on it once.
But, I don't think there's anywhere to "go". I think the battle needs to be won here and at least we have a Government in office here that sees that.
The problem is not really with the government. The problem is with the English. The government doesn't have popular support for its war on woke. It is all a bit half hearted and viewed as a fringe issue, when it is actually an existential threat to civilisation. You have to look at what happened last year with the desecration of the centopah and conclude it is basically game over, the generation that cared about these things has died out.
I don't know what the answer is; emigration in my case is an option due to family connections; I am simply trying to pursue a viable alternative when I can see everything here falling apart, despite my apparent middle class status and affluence.
I agree with "the problem is with the English" and that emigration is an option. But I left for Scotland for the opposite reason you mention. I grew sick of the culturally backwards knuckle draggers so moved somewhere that better suited me. I warmly encourage you to do the same albeit from the opposite side of the same debate.
I've got a friend who has been on the same journey. She got to the point where she joined the SNP and voted for independence before she worked out the problem.
I'm not doing the latter! But I am much happier living up here and not "woking" up England with my displeasure of flag twattery and exceptionalism. If my former compatriates are also happy me having left then its win win!
You are totally relaxed about the recent legislative interventions on hate speech etc?
For the perusal of @rcs1000 and other lovers of Tether fraud - today I learnt there are a whole pile of unregulated Forex markets that use Tether as their on/off ramp
Tether may very well go down as the greatest fraud in history.
(It's a fascinating shell game: the goal of Tether management is to get other people to hold Tether at 1:1 with the USD, by buying when it falls below 99.5cents, and therefore earning a tiny profit. But, of course, these people are picking up pennies in front of a bulldozer, as Tether is being robbed blind. I suspect that at least $20bn of the $62bn has been looted from it already, and at some point it will come crashing down, when people realise there isn't $60bn sitting on the books.)
Oh, everyone already know the money isn't there. Fully half of Tether's attested to holdings are "Commercial Paper". According to their general council it is A-2 or above.
That means, if Tether and their general council is being truthful, Tether owns 3% of the entire US Commercial Paper market with two full percentage points purchased in the last 3 months. Let that sink in.
No one actually believes this but everyone knows that without Tether the Bitcoin price goes down and to the right not up and to the right.
So what happens when Tether collapses? Does it bring Bitcoin down with it? Is it damaging to the wider economy?
Given Bitcoin’s carbon footprint is something like 0.25% of the US’s (i.e. huge) the sooner it crashes the better.
The latest estimate of Bitcoin electricity usage was 129TWh/year, which is more than 85% of countries.
The crash is going to be spectacular to watch from a distance.
When would it be likely ?
I invest, a small amount, via SIPP and S&S ISA but avoid stuff like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple and the rest. I just don’t get them and when my Facebook and twitter feed was regularly full of scams concerning them it just made me incredibly wary. I like to invest in stuff I understand. I don’t understand these and I don’t understand NFTs
Most of the points raised above are refuted, or at the very least, countered, at https://endthefud.org/
The energy stuff is a complete nonsense, bitcoin actually incentivises clean energy usage because clean energy produces too much energy when demand is low and not enough when it's high. Since most of that energy can't be stored, it's wasted - raising overall unit cost. As Bitcoin is on 24/7, bitcoin creates a market for that surplus clean energy, thus incentivising more production of clean energy as there is an increased market for it.
As far as tether goes, people have been saying it's going to collapse for years - surprise surprise, it hasn't. And even if it did, it represents about 4% of the total crypto market cap, scammier coins like bitconnect have collapsed without crashing the entire crypto market.
(1) BTC is (mostly) mined in China using coal. Indeed, it is often the owners of the coal plants themselves who have a side business BTC mining. It's quite efficient for them to have a sideline in BTC because during off peak periods in China electricity, they move over to BTC mining. That being said, it's still coal being being used for mining.
(2) Tether is a scam. It's not complicated. They have printed more Tether (by far) than they have in assets. Just because it hasn't collapsed yet, doesn't mean it won't.
(3) When Tether collapses, there will be ripples. I'm not a "all crypto is doomed" kind of guy, but there will be consequences.
Bitcoin ultimately wants cheap energy - surplus energy from renewable sources that would otherwise be wasted will eventually become cheaper than coal. Imagine having a solar panel on your house. On a really bright day, or when you're not at home, much of that energy is wasted. It could be converted to bitcoin mining at no cost to you, or sold to bitcoin miners at rock bottom prices rather than being wasted. Imagine that transformation taking place on a global scale. That is likely where we are headed within the next decade, even if we aren't there now.
Bitcoin creates a market for renewable energy that would otherwise be wasted, making construction of more renewable energy sources more economically viable.
But. Even if it didn't. Not all energy use is bad - indeed, what is wasteful about using electricity to verify sound money? It has a cost, in terms of energy usage and pollution, but so do christmas lights - which serve no purpose - and people don't want to ban them. Gold mining has a huge impact on the environment, nobody complains about it. And the US dollar is backed by bombs and aircraft carriers.
In terms of tether, it represents 60 bn of a 1.62 tn crypto market - so it wouldn't be fatal if it collapsed. But I'm inclined to agree with you, it's scammy and it would cause lasting damage to the crypto ecosystem that would take a long time to recover from. Having said that, the US dollar is a fractional reserve and that's still chugging along...
Tether is being used by Asian companies to bypass the banking system as it quicker and cheaper.
The fundamental idea behind Tether is sound.
You have an entity that controls the Tether blockchain, and makes a market in the coin. And it works like an ETF - if the price goes up to $1.01, then they sell a Tether, and if it falls to $0.99 then they buy one. There is therefore a small profit that is made by the controllers of Tether that is then boosted by investing the dollars received from the sale of Tether in short dated government bonds and the money markets.
And because they would be backed 1:1 with actual dollars in the bank, they could always be the buyer of last resort.
Done right, $60bn of Tether generates $300m or so of profits for the owners of Tether.
There's only one minor problem.
The owners of Tether were not sensible. Instead of seeing this as a long-term, good return type business they saw there was more money to be made by simply printing Tether, using it to buy Bitcoin, and then selling the Bitcoin for US Dollars.
Even if you believe the controllers of Tether, they only have assets for 71 cents in the dollar. And I suspect the real number is less than half.
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
Welcome 'darkage'. Sounds like you have a great life. Just out of curiosity, how has this "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution" had such an impact on that good life that you're considering emigrating?
Some people see the 'woke' as the reinvention of western civilisation, I see it as the end of western civilisation. As I said, it is a personal opinion and I am not mad about it in the way that some people are. We will have to see who is right.
I think it could end there, yes, because we might bring the whole house down on ourselves through reductionist identity politics and year-zeroism. I even wrote a thread header on it once.
But, I don't think there's anywhere to "go". I think the battle needs to be won here and at least we have a Government in office here that sees that.
The problem is not really with the government. The problem is with the English. The government doesn't have popular support for its war on woke. It is all a bit half hearted and viewed as a fringe issue, when it is actually an existential threat to civilisation. You have to look at what happened last year with the desecration of the centopah and conclude it is basically game over, the generation that cared about these things has died out.
I don't know what the answer is; emigration in my case is an option due to family connections; I am simply trying to pursue a viable alternative when I can see everything here falling apart, despite my apparent middle class status and affluence.
So where are you moving too, given most of the Western world is going through the same Woke clashes and in the US the problem is even more pronounced than here? Eastern Europe or Singapore?
It is actually a fairly uniquely anglo american issue.
It is most pronounced in the Anglosphere but France has also seen statues toppled and Merkel's Germany is full of self flagellation about its past. Russia, Poland, Israel, the Far East and at a push Spain and Italy are your best bets to stay Woke free
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
Welcome 'darkage'. Sounds like you have a great life. Just out of curiosity, how has this "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution" had such an impact on that good life that you're considering emigrating?
Some people see the 'woke' as the reinvention of western civilisation, I see it as the end of western civilisation. As I said, it is a personal opinion and I am not mad about it in the way that some people are. We will have to see who is right.
I think it could end there, yes, because we might bring the whole house down on ourselves through reductionist identity politics and year-zeroism. I even wrote a thread header on it once.
But, I don't think there's anywhere to "go". I think the battle needs to be won here and at least we have a Government in office here that sees that.
The problem is not really with the government. The problem is with the English. The government doesn't have popular support for its war on woke. It is all a bit half hearted and viewed as a fringe issue, when it is actually an existential threat to civilisation. You have to look at what happened last year with the desecration of the centopah and conclude it is basically game over, the generation that cared about these things has died out.
I don't know what the answer is; emigration in my case is an option due to family connections; I am simply trying to pursue a viable alternative when I can see everything here falling apart, despite my apparent middle class status and affluence.
I agree with "the problem is with the English" and that emigration is an option. But I left for Scotland for the opposite reason you mention. I grew sick of the culturally backwards knuckle draggers so moved somewhere that better suited me. I warmly encourage you to do the same albeit from the opposite side of the same debate.
I've got a friend who has been on the same journey. She got to the point where she joined the SNP and voted for independence before she worked out the problem.
I'm not doing the latter! But I am much happier living up here and not "woking" up England with my displeasure of flag twattery and exceptionalism. If my former compatriates are also happy me having left then its win win!
The SNP seem quite keen on wrapping themselves in the flag and claiming that they are better, more moral people. Clearly the right sort of flags and right sort of morality.
For the perusal of @rcs1000 and other lovers of Tether fraud - today I learnt there are a whole pile of unregulated Forex markets that use Tether as their on/off ramp
Tether may very well go down as the greatest fraud in history.
(It's a fascinating shell game: the goal of Tether management is to get other people to hold Tether at 1:1 with the USD, by buying when it falls below 99.5cents, and therefore earning a tiny profit. But, of course, these people are picking up pennies in front of a bulldozer, as Tether is being robbed blind. I suspect that at least $20bn of the $62bn has been looted from it already, and at some point it will come crashing down, when people realise there isn't $60bn sitting on the books.)
Oh, everyone already know the money isn't there. Fully half of Tether's attested to holdings are "Commercial Paper". According to their general council it is A-2 or above.
That means, if Tether and their general council is being truthful, Tether owns 3% of the entire US Commercial Paper market with two full percentage points purchased in the last 3 months. Let that sink in.
No one actually believes this but everyone knows that without Tether the Bitcoin price goes down and to the right not up and to the right.
So what happens when Tether collapses? Does it bring Bitcoin down with it? Is it damaging to the wider economy?
Given Bitcoin’s carbon footprint is something like 0.25% of the US’s (i.e. huge) the sooner it crashes the better.
The latest estimate of Bitcoin electricity usage was 129TWh/year, which is more than 85% of countries.
The crash is going to be spectacular to watch from a distance.
When would it be likely ?
I invest, a small amount, via SIPP and S&S ISA but avoid stuff like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple and the rest. I just don’t get them and when my Facebook and twitter feed was regularly full of scams concerning them it just made me incredibly wary. I like to invest in stuff I understand. I don’t understand these and I don’t understand NFTs
Most of the points raised above are refuted, or at the very least, countered, at https://endthefud.org/
The energy stuff is a complete nonsense, bitcoin actually incentivises clean energy usage because clean energy produces too much energy when demand is low and not enough when it's high. Since most of that energy can't be stored, it's wasted - raising overall unit cost. As Bitcoin is on 24/7, bitcoin creates a market for that surplus clean energy, thus incentivising more production of clean energy as there is an increased market for it.
As far as tether goes, people have been saying it's going to collapse for years - surprise surprise, it hasn't. And even if it did, it represents about 4% of the total crypto market cap, scammier coins like bitconnect have collapsed without crashing the entire crypto market.
(1) BTC is (mostly) mined in China using coal. Indeed, it is often the owners of the coal plants themselves who have a side business BTC mining. It's quite efficient for them to have a sideline in BTC because during off peak periods in China electricity, they move over to BTC mining. That being said, it's still coal being being used for mining.
(2) Tether is a scam. It's not complicated. They have printed more Tether (by far) than they have in assets. Just because it hasn't collapsed yet, doesn't mean it won't.
(3) When Tether collapses, there will be ripples. I'm not a "all crypto is doomed" kind of guy, but there will be consequences.
Bitcoin ultimately wants cheap energy - surplus energy from renewable sources that would otherwise be wasted will eventually become cheaper than coal. Imagine having a solar panel on your house. On a really bright day, or when you're not at home, much of that energy is wasted. It could be converted to bitcoin mining at no cost to you, or sold to bitcoin miners at rock bottom prices rather than being wasted. Imagine that transformation taking place on a global scale. That is likely where we are headed within the next decade, even if we aren't there now.
Bitcoin creates a market for renewable energy that would otherwise be wasted, making construction of more renewable energy sources more economically viable.
But. Even if it didn't. Not all energy use is bad - indeed, what is wasteful about using electricity to verify sound money? It has a cost, in terms of energy usage and pollution, but so do christmas lights - which serve no purpose - and people don't want to ban them. Gold mining has a huge impact on the environment, nobody complains about it. And the US dollar is backed by bombs and aircraft carriers.
In terms of tether, it represents 60 bn of a 1.62 tn crypto market - so it wouldn't be fatal if it collapsed. But I'm inclined to agree with you, it's scammy and it would cause lasting damage to the crypto ecosystem that would take a long time to recover from. Having said that, the US dollar is a fractional reserve and that's still chugging along...
Tether is being used by Asian companies to bypass the banking system as it quicker and cheaper.
Money is energy. If the gold price goes up then cash is borrowed and more energy is used to expand production. The Pentagon use 4.6 billion gallons of fuel a year to protect the US petro trading empire. That is accepted and not discussed. You expend energy working for yourself, a capitalist or the state to earn money
Evening Standard reporting Carrie hired her wedding dress for £45
It showed.
That's just nasty. Give the girl a break. It was her wedding day..
My gf, like almost all my mates not on twitter, saw the abuse under the photo of their wedding pics and just said “Why do people have to be so nasty? Haven’t they got anything better to do?”
Twitter, and politics related social media, is so detached from the real world
The demented level abuse is how they prove they are good people - to themselves.
Except when it’s Diane Abbott because it barely exists and is all about her counting abilities anyway.
Yep. The jokes and memes about "stupid" Diane from white, middle aged blokes who haven't got a racist or sexist bone in their body are because of all the stupid things she says. 🆗
You never told us whether you stand by your earlier contention that she gets "by far the most (and the most visceral and personal) abuse of any MP in the country".
Why should I say things twice?
You shouldn't even have said it once, given that the only evidence you were able to provide said "This article was amended on 20 November 2018. The headline and some text references in an earlier version said that Diane Abbott received more abuse than any other MP. The data involved were from a study of female MPs only". Sensible move to shut up about it for five hours; foolish one to reopen it again.
Ok you spock away trying to argue that Diane does not get a shitload of racist sexist abuse. That the grief she gets is mainly cos she's stupid.
And I'll draw the obvious and correct conclusion.
If you can't even accurately conclude who owns Chatsworth House, perhaps you should hold off on impugning the motives of fellow posters whose only crime is to have a secondary school ability to decipher statistics - or read to the bottom of an article before posting it.
Look, you don't truly believe the racist sexist abuse Diane Abbott gets is driven mainly by her being an idiot rather than being a prominent left wing black woman, do you?
Because in order to communicate there has to be a shared common reality. The basics have to be agreed.
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
Welcome 'darkage'. Sounds like you have a great life. Just out of curiosity, how has this "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution" had such an impact on that good life that you're considering emigrating?
Some people see the 'woke' as the reinvention of western civilisation, I see it as the end of western civilisation. As I said, it is a personal opinion and I am not mad about it in the way that some people are. We will have to see who is right.
I think it could end there, yes, because we might bring the whole house down on ourselves through reductionist identity politics and year-zeroism. I even wrote a thread header on it once.
But, I don't think there's anywhere to "go". I think the battle needs to be won here and at least we have a Government in office here that sees that.
Surely there is a basic problem here. As there is no "woke" threat and therefore no battle to fight, even this government can only disappoint you by dispensing platitudes in your direction whilst taking you and your vote for granted.
No, I think on iconoclasm, gender clinics for children, CRT, free speech at universities, unconscious bias training and other forms of Wokery this Government is pushing back. And I'm delighted to see it.
I'd like to see it go further though.
Honestly don't even know what half of those are supposed to be. CRT? "It's Political Correctness Gone Mad!" was the cry 30 years ago. It wasn't then, it isn't now. The government isn't pushing back, they're virtue signalling to you so that you'll keep voting for them even when "the woke" prove harder to push away than they claimed.
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
Welcome 'darkage'. Sounds like you have a great life. Just out of curiosity, how has this "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution" had such an impact on that good life that you're considering emigrating?
Some people see the 'woke' as the reinvention of western civilisation, I see it as the end of western civilisation. As I said, it is a personal opinion and I am not mad about it in the way that some people are. We will have to see who is right.
I think it could end there, yes, because we might bring the whole house down on ourselves through reductionist identity politics and year-zeroism. I even wrote a thread header on it once.
But, I don't think there's anywhere to "go". I think the battle needs to be won here and at least we have a Government in office here that sees that.
The problem is not really with the government. The problem is with the English. The government doesn't have popular support for its war on woke. It is all a bit half hearted and viewed as a fringe issue, when it is actually an existential threat to civilisation. You have to look at what happened last year with the desecration of the centopah and conclude it is basically game over, the generation that cared about these things has died out.
I don't know what the answer is; emigration in my case is an option due to family connections; I am simply trying to pursue a viable alternative when I can see everything here falling apart, despite my apparent middle class status and affluence.
So where are you moving too, given most of the Western world is going through the same Woke clashes and in the US the problem is even more pronounced than here? Eastern Europe or Singapore?
It is actually a fairly uniquely anglo american issue.
It is most pronounced in the Anglosphere but France has also seen statues toppled and Merkel's Germany is full of self flagellation about its past. Russia, Poland, Israel, the Far East and at a push Spain and Italy are your best bets to stay Woke free
More specifically on that poll he is popular with voters from Les Republicains, the Far Left and Le Pen's Party, he is unpopular with voters from Macron's Party and the Socialist Party
Almost every company, bank, utility and media account in my Twitter and LinkedIn feed has turned their corporate icon to a trans/rainbow flag today, and Facebook have gone even further with a "love is love" animé.
Does anyone else not think this is OTT?
Quite frankly, it makes me want to vomit - together with others tweeting it and liking it all so they can be seen to be achingly right-on. Of course, those that object - in any form - are reactionary bigots.
The ubiquitous preachiness and self-absorption gets to me, together with the way it's framed as with us or against us, and means I both feel immensely irritated by it and a sort of contempt for it.
Don't be such a snowflake getting triggered by everything. Next you'll be wanting this cancelled.
The LBTQI+ community have faced so much bigotry, including in our lifetimes.
Just remember you and I have lived in a period where homosexuality wasn't decriminalised in Scotland and Norn Iron until the early 80s.
It is a reminder of the progress made and not to take things for granted.
Missing the point. Predictable. So so predictable from you. Disappointing.
We now have a LGBT+ history month in February and a whole month (in fact, it was over 6 weeks last year) - something like a sixth of the whole year.
There are absolutely no boundaries to it (and nor can there be, for the reasons you describe) so it just goes on and on until it's utterly omnipresent and meaningless but also preached at to you every night and day.
Pride should be confined to a weekend, as it used to be, which would make it more powerful, meaningful and fun. Hell, I'd even join in.
But as things are now? No. This relentless Wokery needs to end.
Yeah, but notice how they gave LGBT+ February - i.e. the shortest month.
That's discrimination that is, making it clear that they think LGBT+ don't deserve a proper 31 day month.
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
Welcome 'darkage'. Sounds like you have a great life. Just out of curiosity, how has this "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution" had such an impact on that good life that you're considering emigrating?
Some people see the 'woke' as the reinvention of western civilisation, I see it as the end of western civilisation. As I said, it is a personal opinion and I am not mad about it in the way that some people are. We will have to see who is right.
I think it could end there, yes, because we might bring the whole house down on ourselves through reductionist identity politics and year-zeroism. I even wrote a thread header on it once.
But, I don't think there's anywhere to "go". I think the battle needs to be won here and at least we have a Government in office here that sees that.
The problem is not really with the government. The problem is with the English. The government doesn't have popular support for its war on woke. It is all a bit half hearted and viewed as a fringe issue, when it is actually an existential threat to civilisation. You have to look at what happened last year with the desecration of the centopah and conclude it is basically game over, the generation that cared about these things has died out.
I don't know what the answer is; emigration in my case is an option due to family connections; I am simply trying to pursue a viable alternative when I can see everything here falling apart, despite my apparent middle class status and affluence.
So where are you moving too, given most of the Western world is going through the same Woke clashes and in the US the problem is even more pronounced than here? Eastern Europe or Singapore?
It is actually a fairly uniquely anglo american issue.
It is most pronounced in the Anglosphere but France has also seen statues toppled and Merkel's Germany is full of self flagellation about its past. Russia, Poland, Israel, the Far East and at a push Spain and Italy are your best bets to stay Woke free
FWIW I have no issue at all with firms celebrating pride month if they believe it is a key issue to celebrate/campaign for, but my issue is when they selectively celebrate it, because then it's just cynical exploitation.
Compare and contrast how strongly this firm, which under a century ago was enthusiastically running unethical human trials and facilitating the holocaust, support LGBT rights.
Sends out a strong vibe of 'we'll support you until it becomes more profitable to go back to running human experiments on you like back in the good old days'. If a firm makes a statement for LGBT rights it must be unconditional in its' reach.
It's dead easy to put out some press releases, change your branding for a few weeks, and make some modest donations. Most companies can manage that, but not many will forego doing business with some of the world's worst and wealthiest regimes.
It's worse than that: they know that doing so will innoculate themselves from criticism because the younger generation, those most likely to be activists, will forgive almost anything if you're achingly on trend - so it's deeply cynical on one side and highly superficial and self-indulgent on the other.
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
Welcome 'darkage'. Sounds like you have a great life. Just out of curiosity, how has this "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution" had such an impact on that good life that you're considering emigrating?
Some people see the 'woke' as the reinvention of western civilisation, I see it as the end of western civilisation. As I said, it is a personal opinion and I am not mad about it in the way that some people are. We will have to see who is right.
I think it could end there, yes, because we might bring the whole house down on ourselves through reductionist identity politics and year-zeroism. I even wrote a thread header on it once.
But, I don't think there's anywhere to "go". I think the battle needs to be won here and at least we have a Government in office here that sees that.
Surely there is a basic problem here. As there is no "woke" threat and therefore no battle to fight, even this government can only disappoint you by dispensing platitudes in your direction whilst taking you and your vote for granted.
No, I think on iconoclasm, gender clinics for children, CRT, free speech at universities, unconscious bias training and other forms of Wokery this Government is pushing back. And I'm delighted to see it.
I'd like to see it go further though.
Honestly don't even know what half of those are supposed to be. CRT? "It's Political Correctness Gone Mad!" was the cry 30 years ago. It wasn't then, it isn't now. The government isn't pushing back, they're virtue signalling to you so that you'll keep voting for them even when "the woke" prove harder to push away than they claimed.
Ah, you're too dumb to get it.
I understand.
Aren't you glad I left your country and took my ignorance with me? Like I said its win win. You get to harrumph in indignation about whatever it is you're upset about, and I don't have to care as its no longer my business.
Evening Standard reporting Carrie hired her wedding dress for £45
It showed.
That's just nasty. Give the girl a break. It was her wedding day..
My gf, like almost all my mates not on twitter, saw the abuse under the photo of their wedding pics and just said “Why do people have to be so nasty? Haven’t they got anything better to do?”
Twitter, and politics related social media, is so detached from the real world
The demented level abuse is how they prove they are good people - to themselves.
Except when it’s Diane Abbott because it barely exists and is all about her counting abilities anyway.
Yep. The jokes and memes about "stupid" Diane from white, middle aged blokes who haven't got a racist or sexist bone in their body are because of all the stupid things she says. 🆗
The Burgon Test should apply to this.
If they make the same jokes and memes about both Diane and Burgon then that's neither racist nor sexist. If they make the jokes and memes about Diane but give Burgon a pass then its probably racist and/or sexist.
I don't think Burgon's ever been called a fat black c**t, has he? Whereas Diane frequently has. And it's not really jokes or memes that are the problem, it's abuse.
It’s an interesting question of language.
I’m not convinced that calling someone a “fat black c**t” is racism. It’s just vulgar abuse - the “black” is purely descriptive rather than an active part of the sentence. It’s entirely equivalent to calling someone a “fat ginger c**t”
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
Welcome 'darkage'. Sounds like you have a great life. Just out of curiosity, how has this "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution" had such an impact on that good life that you're considering emigrating?
Some people see the 'woke' as the reinvention of western civilisation, I see it as the end of western civilisation. As I said, it is a personal opinion and I am not mad about it in the way that some people are. We will have to see who is right.
I think it could end there, yes, because we might bring the whole house down on ourselves through reductionist identity politics and year-zeroism. I even wrote a thread header on it once.
But, I don't think there's anywhere to "go". I think the battle needs to be won here and at least we have a Government in office here that sees that.
The problem is not really with the government. The problem is with the English. The government doesn't have popular support for its war on woke. It is all a bit half hearted and viewed as a fringe issue, when it is actually an existential threat to civilisation. You have to look at what happened last year with the desecration of the centopah and conclude it is basically game over, the generation that cared about these things has died out.
I don't know what the answer is; emigration in my case is an option due to family connections; I am simply trying to pursue a viable alternative when I can see everything here falling apart, despite my apparent middle class status and affluence.
So where are you moving too, given most of the Western world is going through the same Woke clashes and in the US the problem is even more pronounced than here? Eastern Europe or Singapore?
It is actually a fairly uniquely anglo american issue.
It is most pronounced in the Anglosphere but France has also seen statues toppled and Merkel's Germany is full of self flagellation about its past. Russia, Poland, Israel, the Far East and at a push Spain and Italy are your best bets to stay Woke free
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
Welcome 'darkage'. Sounds like you have a great life. Just out of curiosity, how has this "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution" had such an impact on that good life that you're considering emigrating?
Some people see the 'woke' as the reinvention of western civilisation, I see it as the end of western civilisation. As I said, it is a personal opinion and I am not mad about it in the way that some people are. We will have to see who is right.
I think it could end there, yes, because we might bring the whole house down on ourselves through reductionist identity politics and year-zeroism. I even wrote a thread header on it once.
But, I don't think there's anywhere to "go". I think the battle needs to be won here and at least we have a Government in office here that sees that.
The problem is not really with the government. The problem is with the English. The government doesn't have popular support for its war on woke. It is all a bit half hearted and viewed as a fringe issue, when it is actually an existential threat to civilisation. You have to look at what happened last year with the desecration of the centopah and conclude it is basically game over, the generation that cared about these things has died out.
I don't know what the answer is; emigration in my case is an option due to family connections; I am simply trying to pursue a viable alternative when I can see everything here falling apart, despite my apparent middle class status and affluence.
I agree with "the problem is with the English" and that emigration is an option. But I left for Scotland for the opposite reason you mention. I grew sick of the culturally backwards knuckle draggers so moved somewhere that better suited me. I warmly encourage you to do the same albeit from the opposite side of the same debate.
I've got a friend who has been on the same journey. She got to the point where she joined the SNP and voted for independence before she worked out the problem.
I'm not doing the latter! But I am much happier living up here and not "woking" up England with my displeasure of flag twattery and exceptionalism. If my former compatriates are also happy me having left then its win win!
The SNP seem quite keen on wrapping themselves in the flag and claiming that they are better, more moral people. Clearly the right sort of flags and right sort of morality.
I've pointed out on here recently the remarkably different reactions from the [edit] relevant government and folk generally to statue vandalism as regards [edit] statues of Churchill W. and Bruce, R. the.
Evening Standard reporting Carrie hired her wedding dress for £45
It showed.
That's just nasty. Give the girl a break. It was her wedding day..
My gf, like almost all my mates not on twitter, saw the abuse under the photo of their wedding pics and just said “Why do people have to be so nasty? Haven’t they got anything better to do?”
Twitter, and politics related social media, is so detached from the real world
The demented level abuse is how they prove they are good people - to themselves.
Except when it’s Diane Abbott because it barely exists and is all about her counting abilities anyway.
Yep. The jokes and memes about "stupid" Diane from white, middle aged blokes who haven't got a racist or sexist bone in their body are because of all the stupid things she says. 🆗
You never told us whether you stand by your earlier contention that she gets "by far the most (and the most visceral and personal) abuse of any MP in the country".
Why should I say things twice?
You shouldn't even have said it once, given that the only evidence you were able to provide said "This article was amended on 20 November 2018. The headline and some text references in an earlier version said that Diane Abbott received more abuse than any other MP. The data involved were from a study of female MPs only". Sensible move to shut up about it for five hours; foolish one to reopen it again.
Ok you spock away trying to argue that Diane does not get a shitload of racist sexist abuse. That the grief she gets is mainly cos she's stupid.
And I'll draw the obvious and correct conclusion.
If you can't even accurately conclude who owns Chatsworth House, perhaps you should hold off on impugning the motives of fellow posters whose only crime is to have a secondary school ability to decipher statistics - or read to the bottom of an article before posting it.
Look, you don't truly believe the racist sexist abuse Diane Abbott gets is driven mainly by her being an idiot rather than being a prominent left wing black woman, do you?
Because in order to communicate there has to be a shared common reality. The basics have to be agreed.
Abbott isn't really a good totem for either side in this argument. I have read a lot of abuse thrown at her for specific things she has said - abuse because she is a Shit Politician. There is also a whole load of other abuse thrown at her because she is a prominent woman who knows her own mind and black to boot which properly winds up the pig ignorant racist misogynist types.
Almost every company, bank, utility and media account in my Twitter and LinkedIn feed has turned their corporate icon to a trans/rainbow flag today, and Facebook have gone even further with a "love is love" animé.
Does anyone else not think this is OTT?
Quite frankly, it makes me want to vomit - together with others tweeting it and liking it all so they can be seen to be achingly right-on. Of course, those that object - in any form - are reactionary bigots.
The ubiquitous preachiness and self-absorption gets to me, together with the way it's framed as with us or against us, and means I both feel immensely irritated by it and a sort of contempt for it.
Don't be such a snowflake getting triggered by everything. Next you'll be wanting this cancelled.
The LBTQI+ community have faced so much bigotry, including in our lifetimes.
Just remember you and I have lived in a period where homosexuality wasn't decriminalised in Scotland and Norn Iron until the early 80s.
It is a reminder of the progress made and not to take things for granted.
Missing the point. Predictable. So so predictable from you. Disappointing.
We now have a LGBT+ history month in February and a whole month (in fact, it was over 6 weeks last year) - something like a sixth of the whole year.
There are absolutely no boundaries to it (and nor can there be, for the reasons you describe) so it just goes on and on until it's utterly omnipresent and meaningless but also preached at to you every night and day.
Pride should be confined to a weekend, as it used to be, which would make it more powerful, meaningful and fun. Hell, I'd even join in.
But as things are now? No. This relentless Wokery needs to end.
Yeah, but notice how they gave LGBT+ February - i.e. the shortest month.
That's discrimination that is, making it clear that they think LGBT+ don't deserve a proper 31 day month.
(For the avoidance of doubt, this is a joke.)
Only LGBT++ gets 31. LGBT+ is 30 and LGBT just 28
LGBTQIA+ gets two months and LGBTQQIP2SAAA gets a whole Martian year.
It's worse than that: they know that doing so will innoculate themselves from criticism because the younger generation, those most likely to be activists, will forgive almost anything if you're achingly on trend - so it's deeply cynical on one side and highly superficial and self-indulgent on the other.
That's what makes me vomit.
I don't feel very strongly about it, because it looks just like greenwashing, which is another thing a lot of companies do. I expect this sort of cynical behaviour from businesses. It's bloody rare for a large business to take a stand on an issue that costs them serious money.
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
Welcome 'darkage'. Sounds like you have a great life. Just out of curiosity, how has this "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution" had such an impact on that good life that you're considering emigrating?
Some people see the 'woke' as the reinvention of western civilisation, I see it as the end of western civilisation. As I said, it is a personal opinion and I am not mad about it in the way that some people are. We will have to see who is right.
I think it could end there, yes, because we might bring the whole house down on ourselves through reductionist identity politics and year-zeroism. I even wrote a thread header on it once.
But, I don't think there's anywhere to "go". I think the battle needs to be won here and at least we have a Government in office here that sees that.
The problem is not really with the government. The problem is with the English. The government doesn't have popular support for its war on woke. It is all a bit half hearted and viewed as a fringe issue, when it is actually an existential threat to civilisation. You have to look at what happened last year with the desecration of the centopah and conclude it is basically game over, the generation that cared about these things has died out.
I don't know what the answer is; emigration in my case is an option due to family connections; I am simply trying to pursue a viable alternative when I can see everything here falling apart, despite my apparent middle class status and affluence.
I agree with "the problem is with the English" and that emigration is an option. But I left for Scotland for the opposite reason you mention. I grew sick of the culturally backwards knuckle draggers so moved somewhere that better suited me. I warmly encourage you to do the same albeit from the opposite side of the same debate.
I've got a friend who has been on the same journey. She got to the point where she joined the SNP and voted for independence before she worked out the problem.
I'm not doing the latter! But I am much happier living up here and not "woking" up England with my displeasure of flag twattery and exceptionalism. If my former compatriates are also happy me having left then its win win!
The SNP seem quite keen on wrapping themselves in the flag and claiming that they are better, more moral people. Clearly the right sort of flags and right sort of morality.
I've pointed out on here recently the remarkably different reactions from the [edit] relevant government and folk generally to statue vandalism as regards [edit] statues of Churchill W. and Bruce, R. the.
Nationalists just tell English Telegraph readers to sod off out of Scotland and stay in England instead
I was unable to reply yesterday to the comment from David L that current polls did not include the effect of 'swing back'. The point needs to be made ,I suspect, that 'swingback'only tends to occur when the governing party has endured an extended period of unpopularity and fallen well behind in the polls. I am not aware of an example of a governing party already well ahead in polling terms enjoying a further bounce as a GE draws close.To take the 1983 example, Thatcher's winning margin in June that year - 15.2% - was actually smaller than implied by pollsters a year earlier when the Tory lead was circa 20%. There was no 'swing back' - indeed slightly the reverse. Similarly , the Tory winning margin in 1992 - 7.6% - was well below what the party enjoyed in most of 1988 and early 1989. The same applies to the Blair governments elected in 1997 and 2001 - in that Labour's winning margin in both 2001 and 2005 fell well below what had been indicated by polls earlier in those Pariaments. Going further back , there was no 'swing back' to the Tories in 1964 when compared with 1960 and 1961 - though there was certainly a significant recovery relative to 1962 and 1963. In terms of where we are today, has there not already been significant 'swing back' to the Tories when compared with Autumn 2020?Personally I suspect that the circumstances of the last 15 months have been so exceptional that the polls are telling us much less than in previous Parliaments , and that the precedents themselves offer us less in the way of guidance and perspective.
FWIW I have no issue at all with firms celebrating pride month if they believe it is a key issue to celebrate/campaign for, but my issue is when they selectively celebrate it, because then it's just cynical exploitation.
Compare and contrast how strongly this firm, which under a century ago was enthusiastically running unethical human trials and facilitating the holocaust, support LGBT rights.
Sends out a strong vibe of 'we'll support you until it becomes more profitable to go back to running human experiments on you like back in the good old days'. If a firm makes a statement for LGBT rights it must be unconditional in its' reach.
Frankly, I applaud companies that think first of their shareholders.
They shouldn’t be. That’s at the root of what is wrong with the Goldman Sachs mentality.
Companies have stakeholders. Shareholders are merely the owners of the residual interest.
Evening Standard reporting Carrie hired her wedding dress for £45
It showed.
That's just nasty. Give the girl a break. It was her wedding day..
My gf, like almost all my mates not on twitter, saw the abuse under the photo of their wedding pics and just said “Why do people have to be so nasty? Haven’t they got anything better to do?”
Twitter, and politics related social media, is so detached from the real world
The demented level abuse is how they prove they are good people - to themselves.
Except when it’s Diane Abbott because it barely exists and is all about her counting abilities anyway.
Yep. The jokes and memes about "stupid" Diane from white, middle aged blokes who haven't got a racist or sexist bone in their body are because of all the stupid things she says. 🆗
You never told us whether you stand by your earlier contention that she gets "by far the most (and the most visceral and personal) abuse of any MP in the country".
Why should I say things twice?
You shouldn't even have said it once, given that the only evidence you were able to provide said "This article was amended on 20 November 2018. The headline and some text references in an earlier version said that Diane Abbott received more abuse than any other MP. The data involved were from a study of female MPs only". Sensible move to shut up about it for five hours; foolish one to reopen it again.
Ok you spock away trying to argue that Diane does not get a shitload of racist sexist abuse. That the grief she gets is mainly cos she's stupid.
And I'll draw the obvious and correct conclusion.
If you can't even accurately conclude who owns Chatsworth House, perhaps you should hold off on impugning the motives of fellow posters whose only crime is to have a secondary school ability to decipher statistics - or read to the bottom of an article before posting it.
in order to communicate there has to be a shared common reality. The basics have to be agreed.
Indeed they do. However, you have demonstrated yourself unwilling to admit that Diane Abbott does not, in fact, get "by far the most (and the most visceral and personal) abuse of any MP in the country," or even that the Guardian article you posted in support of that claim had in fact to be revised to remove that very assertion. If we can't get you to admit something that basic, why would we even try to get you to confront the reason you felt you had to invent those claims in the first place?
FWIW I have no issue at all with firms celebrating pride month if they believe it is a key issue to celebrate/campaign for, but my issue is when they selectively celebrate it, because then it's just cynical exploitation.
Compare and contrast how strongly this firm, which under a century ago was enthusiastically running unethical human trials and facilitating the holocaust, support LGBT rights.
Sends out a strong vibe of 'we'll support you until it becomes more profitable to go back to running human experiments on you like back in the good old days'. If a firm makes a statement for LGBT rights it must be unconditional in its' reach.
Frankly, I applaud companies that think first of their shareholders.
They shouldn’t be. That’s at the root of what is wrong with the Goldman Sachs mentality.
Companies have stakeholders. Shareholders are merely the owners of the residual interest.
I hate that word so much. It makes me think of vampire hunters.
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
Welcome 'darkage'. Sounds like you have a great life. Just out of curiosity, how has this "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution" had such an impact on that good life that you're considering emigrating?
Some people see the 'woke' as the reinvention of western civilisation, I see it as the end of western civilisation. As I said, it is a personal opinion and I am not mad about it in the way that some people are. We will have to see who is right.
I think it could end there, yes, because we might bring the whole house down on ourselves through reductionist identity politics and year-zeroism. I even wrote a thread header on it once.
But, I don't think there's anywhere to "go". I think the battle needs to be won here and at least we have a Government in office here that sees that.
The problem is not really with the government. The problem is with the English. The government doesn't have popular support for its war on woke. It is all a bit half hearted and viewed as a fringe issue, when it is actually an existential threat to civilisation. You have to look at what happened last year with the desecration of the centopah and conclude it is basically game over, the generation that cared about these things has died out.
I don't know what the answer is; emigration in my case is an option due to family connections; I am simply trying to pursue a viable alternative when I can see everything here falling apart, despite my apparent middle class status and affluence.
I agree with "the problem is with the English" and that emigration is an option. But I left for Scotland for the opposite reason you mention. I grew sick of the culturally backwards knuckle draggers so moved somewhere that better suited me. I warmly encourage you to do the same albeit from the opposite side of the same debate.
I've got a friend who has been on the same journey. She got to the point where she joined the SNP and voted for independence before she worked out the problem.
I'm not doing the latter! But I am much happier living up here and not "woking" up England with my displeasure of flag twattery and exceptionalism. If my former compatriates are also happy me having left then its win win!
The SNP seem quite keen on wrapping themselves in the flag and claiming that they are better, more moral people. Clearly the right sort of flags and right sort of morality.
I've pointed out on here recently the remarkably different reactions from the [edit] relevant government and folk generally to statue vandalism as regards [edit] statues of Churchill W. and Bruce, R. the.
Nationalists just tell English Telegraph readers to sod off out of Scotland and stay in England instead
You're fibbing. It was just Telegraph readers. You show me where it said English. There are a lot of DT readers in Scotland (and Wales and NI).
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
Welcome 'darkage'. Sounds like you have a great life. Just out of curiosity, how has this "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution" had such an impact on that good life that you're considering emigrating?
Some people see the 'woke' as the reinvention of western civilisation, I see it as the end of western civilisation. As I said, it is a personal opinion and I am not mad about it in the way that some people are. We will have to see who is right.
I think it could end there, yes, because we might bring the whole house down on ourselves through reductionist identity politics and year-zeroism. I even wrote a thread header on it once.
But, I don't think there's anywhere to "go". I think the battle needs to be won here and at least we have a Government in office here that sees that.
The problem is not really with the government. The problem is with the English. The government doesn't have popular support for its war on woke. It is all a bit half hearted and viewed as a fringe issue, when it is actually an existential threat to civilisation. You have to look at what happened last year with the desecration of the centopah and conclude it is basically game over, the generation that cared about these things has died out.
I don't know what the answer is; emigration in my case is an option due to family connections; I am simply trying to pursue a viable alternative when I can see everything here falling apart, despite my apparent middle class status and affluence.
So where are you moving too, given most of the Western world is going through the same Woke clashes and in the US the problem is even more pronounced than here? Eastern Europe or Singapore?
It is actually a fairly uniquely anglo american issue.
It is most pronounced in the Anglosphere but France has also seen statues toppled and Merkel's Germany is full of self flagellation about its past. Russia, Poland, Israel, the Far East and at a push Spain and Italy are your best bets to stay Woke free
If the only criteria was to find a stable and successful non woke country the best option would be China
Provided you can accept the risk of jail or firing squad if you criticise the state, Israel and Singapore are wealthier per head than China, more democratic and also largely woke free
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
Welcome 'darkage'. Sounds like you have a great life. Just out of curiosity, how has this "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution" had such an impact on that good life that you're considering emigrating?
Some people see the 'woke' as the reinvention of western civilisation, I see it as the end of western civilisation. As I said, it is a personal opinion and I am not mad about it in the way that some people are. We will have to see who is right.
I think it could end there, yes, because we might bring the whole house down on ourselves through reductionist identity politics and year-zeroism. I even wrote a thread header on it once.
But, I don't think there's anywhere to "go". I think the battle needs to be won here and at least we have a Government in office here that sees that.
The problem is not really with the government. The problem is with the English. The government doesn't have popular support for its war on woke. It is all a bit half hearted and viewed as a fringe issue, when it is actually an existential threat to civilisation. You have to look at what happened last year with the desecration of the centopah and conclude it is basically game over, the generation that cared about these things has died out.
I don't know what the answer is; emigration in my case is an option due to family connections; I am simply trying to pursue a viable alternative when I can see everything here falling apart, despite my apparent middle class status and affluence.
I agree with "the problem is with the English" and that emigration is an option. But I left for Scotland for the opposite reason you mention. I grew sick of the culturally backwards knuckle draggers so moved somewhere that better suited me. I warmly encourage you to do the same albeit from the opposite side of the same debate.
I've got a friend who has been on the same journey. She got to the point where she joined the SNP and voted for independence before she worked out the problem.
I'm not doing the latter! But I am much happier living up here and not "woking" up England with my displeasure of flag twattery and exceptionalism. If my former compatriates are also happy me having left then its win win!
The SNP seem quite keen on wrapping themselves in the flag and claiming that they are better, more moral people. Clearly the right sort of flags and right sort of morality.
I've pointed out on here recently the remarkably different reactions from the [edit] relevant government and folk generally to statue vandalism as regards [edit] statues of Churchill W. and Bruce, R. the.
Nationalists just tell English Telegraph readers to sod off out of Scotland and stay in England instead
And you can't even engage with the basic point that what reduces one govertnment and commentariat and one side on PB to utter screaming hysteria is dismissed as 'meh- bloody neds, better get out the stone and statue conservators' in the other polity. Does that not hint at something different?
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
Welcome 'darkage'. Sounds like you have a great life. Just out of curiosity, how has this "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution" had such an impact on that good life that you're considering emigrating?
Some people see the 'woke' as the reinvention of western civilisation, I see it as the end of western civilisation. As I said, it is a personal opinion and I am not mad about it in the way that some people are. We will have to see who is right.
I think it could end there, yes, because we might bring the whole house down on ourselves through reductionist identity politics and year-zeroism. I even wrote a thread header on it once.
But, I don't think there's anywhere to "go". I think the battle needs to be won here and at least we have a Government in office here that sees that.
Surely there is a basic problem here. As there is no "woke" threat and therefore no battle to fight, even this government can only disappoint you by dispensing platitudes in your direction whilst taking you and your vote for granted.
No, I think on iconoclasm, gender clinics for children, CRT, free speech at universities, unconscious bias training and other forms of Wokery this Government is pushing back. And I'm delighted to see it.
I'd like to see it go further though.
Honestly don't even know what half of those are supposed to be. CRT? "It's Political Correctness Gone Mad!" was the cry 30 years ago. It wasn't then, it isn't now. The government isn't pushing back, they're virtue signalling to you so that you'll keep voting for them even when "the woke" prove harder to push away than they claimed.
Ah, you're too dumb to get it.
I understand.
Aren't you glad I left your country and took my ignorance with me? Like I said its win win. You get to harrumph in indignation about whatever it is you're upset about, and I don't have to care as its no longer my business.
Some people are in complete agreement with critical race theory and are willing subjects to government controls on private thoughts, I am genuinely interested to hear how it goes, as to me it all sounds like a bad idea.
Almost every company, bank, utility and media account in my Twitter and LinkedIn feed has turned their corporate icon to a trans/rainbow flag today, and Facebook have gone even further with a "love is love" animé.
Does anyone else not think this is OTT?
Quite frankly, it makes me want to vomit - together with others tweeting it and liking it all so they can be seen to be achingly right-on. Of course, those that object - in any form - are reactionary bigots.
The ubiquitous preachiness and self-absorption gets to me, together with the way it's framed as with us or against us, and means I both feel immensely irritated by it and a sort of contempt for it.
Don't be such a snowflake getting triggered by everything. Next you'll be wanting this cancelled.
The LBTQI+ community have faced so much bigotry, including in our lifetimes.
Just remember you and I have lived in a period where homosexuality wasn't decriminalised in Scotland and Norn Iron until the early 80s.
It is a reminder of the progress made and not to take things for granted.
Missing the point. Predictable. So so predictable from you. Disappointing.
We now have a LGBT+ history month in February and a whole month (in fact, it was over 6 weeks last year) - something like a sixth of the whole year.
There are absolutely no boundaries to it (and nor can there be, for the reasons you describe) so it just goes on and on until it's utterly omnipresent and meaningless but also preached at to you every night and day.
Pride should be confined to a weekend, as it used to be, which would make it more powerful, meaningful and fun. Hell, I'd even join in.
But as things are now? No. This relentless Wokery needs to end.
Yeah, but notice how they gave LGBT+ February - i.e. the shortest month.
That's discrimination that is, making it clear that they think LGBT+ don't deserve a proper 31 day month.
(For the avoidance of doubt, this is a joke.)
Only LGBT++ gets 31. LGBT+ is 30 and LGBT just 28
LGBTQIA+ gets two months and LGBTQQIP2SAAA gets a whole Martian year.
The three places within Bolton which were the epicentre are now falling fast:
Lever Edge 172 in the seven days to 20/05/21 down to 53 in the seven days to 27/05/21 Rumworth North 142 down to 67 Rumworth South 115 down to 55
But what is also happening is that the adjacent neighbourhoods which had the increase in cases later are all peaking at much lower levels.
And similar in Bedford and Blackburn.
At a local level there really isn't any exponential growth.
It'll also be interesting to see what the hospital patient numbers are for Blackburn when the local trust finally reports up-to-date figures.
Cases have been skyrocketing in Blackburn since about May 10th, yet at the most recent reporting date (May 25th) there were still only 15 Covid patients in the East Lancs Hospitals Trust. That compares with about 300 at the peak in early January. There has also been a grand total of one Covid fatality in the whole local authority area in the last week, and that figure is actually current.
The cases are still climbing there at the moment, but all the same it doesn't look like a catastrophe in the making - especially given what we know of the trajectory that Bolton has already taken.
The U.K. hotspots clearly tell the story . The Delta variant has taken a hold of these areas but numbers are around 4000 per day and is not taking hold more widely. Virtually all cases are aged under 50 or unvaccinated - so vaccines work. Thanks for your vital logging with ZOE
Note the Zero COVID obsessives (Deepti Gurdasani and Pagel) on the attack in the replies because it doesn't fit with their panic laden doom mongering.
Indeed Gurdasani post a picture of % that is b.1.617.2, and not how many cases. I am sure it is widespread, but it is not taking off in most places.
Yes that is a misleading chart there. If deaths are the most important number, followed by hospitalisation, illness, then cases, the last thing we ought to care about is which strain is the most common. We are not trying to eliminate a particular strain, we are trying to limit the harm.
One start way of looking at this is to look at the ranking site wouldmeater:
Not the only or even the best tracking site, I know but its able to rank nations so im using it for this.
If you listed the nations by deaths per million averaged over the last week, how many places are doing worse than the UK?
119
Yes 119 nations are doing worse than the UK, and many of the better are really small places like the Vatican on 0. or places where the numbers may not be reliable.
I'm slightly wary of worldometers (not least because it's owned by the Chinese). But it does source its data. It doesn't appear, yet, to have included the update to the Peru data which elevates them to the top of the mortality rate table.
I did not relies it was owned by the Chinese, I might start to quote it less often now,
who owns 'OurWouldInDate'? or are there other places I should look at?
The problem is that their data is not particularly user friendly. I think that they try to do too much. The Worldometer presentation is much better in that regard.
But neither site is particularly accurate. Every time I've double checked something from either site it has been way wrong. Admittedly, I only checked things that I found "surprising" so maybe most of it is OK, but you just can't trust the data on either site.
The population estimate for the UK on ourworldindata is 67,886,004. According to worldometers it is 68,211,789
ONS : In mid-2019, the population of the UK reached an estimated 66.8 million. The UK population's growth rate from mid-2018 to mid-2019, at 0.5%, was slower than any year since mid-2004.
It's worse than that: they know that doing so will innoculate themselves from criticism because the younger generation, those most likely to be activists, will forgive almost anything if you're achingly on trend - so it's deeply cynical on one side and highly superficial and self-indulgent on the other.
That's what makes me vomit.
I don't feel very strongly about it, because it looks just like greenwashing, which is another thing a lot of companies do. I expect this sort of cynical behaviour from businesses. It's bloody rare for a large business to take a stand on an issue that costs them serious money.
Yebbut, on greenwashing they don't call you a bigot for objecting to their BS.
The U.K. hotspots clearly tell the story . The Delta variant has taken a hold of these areas but numbers are around 4000 per day and is not taking hold more widely. Virtually all cases are aged under 50 or unvaccinated - so vaccines work. Thanks for your vital logging with ZOE
Note the Zero COVID obsessives (Deepti Gurdasani and Pagel) on the attack in the replies because it doesn't fit with their panic laden doom mongering.
Indeed Gurdasani post a picture of % that is b.1.617.2, and not how many cases. I am sure it is widespread, but it is not taking off in most places.
Yes that is a misleading chart there. If deaths are the most important number, followed by hospitalisation, illness, then cases, the last thing we ought to care about is which strain is the most common. We are not trying to eliminate a particular strain, we are trying to limit the harm.
One start way of looking at this is to look at the ranking site wouldmeater:
Not the only or even the best tracking site, I know but its able to rank nations so im using it for this.
If you listed the nations by deaths per million averaged over the last week, how many places are doing worse than the UK?
119
Yes 119 nations are doing worse than the UK, and many of the better are really small places like the Vatican on 0. or places where the numbers may not be reliable.
I'm slightly wary of worldometers (not least because it's owned by the Chinese). But it does source its data. It doesn't appear, yet, to have included the update to the Peru data which elevates them to the top of the mortality rate table.
I did not relies it was owned by the Chinese, I might start to quote it less often now,
who owns 'OurWouldInDate'? or are there other places I should look at?
The problem is that their data is not particularly user friendly. I think that they try to do too much. The Worldometer presentation is much better in that regard.
But neither site is particularly accurate. Every time I've double checked something from either site it has been way wrong. Admittedly, I only checked things that I found "surprising" so maybe most of it is OK, but you just can't trust the data on either site.
The population estimate for the UK on ourworldindata is 67,886,004. According to worldometers it is 68,211,789
ONS : In mid-2019, the population of the UK reached an estimated 66.8 million. The UK population's growth rate from mid-2018 to mid-2019, at 0.5%, was slower than any year since mid-2004.
It's worse than that: they know that doing so will innoculate themselves from criticism because the younger generation, those most likely to be activists, will forgive almost anything if you're achingly on trend - so it's deeply cynical on one side and highly superficial and self-indulgent on the other.
That's what makes me vomit.
I don't feel very strongly about it, because it looks just like greenwashing, which is another thing a lot of companies do. I expect this sort of cynical behaviour from businesses. It's bloody rare for a large business to take a stand on an issue that costs them serious money.
Yebbut, on greenwashing they don't call you a bigot for objecting to their BS.
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
Welcome 'darkage'. Sounds like you have a great life. Just out of curiosity, how has this "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution" had such an impact on that good life that you're considering emigrating?
Some people see the 'woke' as the reinvention of western civilisation, I see it as the end of western civilisation. As I said, it is a personal opinion and I am not mad about it in the way that some people are. We will have to see who is right.
I think it could end there, yes, because we might bring the whole house down on ourselves through reductionist identity politics and year-zeroism. I even wrote a thread header on it once.
But, I don't think there's anywhere to "go". I think the battle needs to be won here and at least we have a Government in office here that sees that.
The problem is not really with the government. The problem is with the English. The government doesn't have popular support for its war on woke. It is all a bit half hearted and viewed as a fringe issue, when it is actually an existential threat to civilisation. You have to look at what happened last year with the desecration of the centopah and conclude it is basically game over, the generation that cared about these things has died out.
I don't know what the answer is; emigration in my case is an option due to family connections; I am simply trying to pursue a viable alternative when I can see everything here falling apart, despite my apparent middle class status and affluence.
So where are you moving too, given most of the Western world is going through the same Woke clashes and in the US the problem is even more pronounced than here? Eastern Europe or Singapore?
It is actually a fairly uniquely anglo american issue.
It is most pronounced in the Anglosphere but France has also seen statues toppled and Merkel's Germany is full of self flagellation about its past. Russia, Poland, Israel, the Far East and at a push Spain and Italy are your best bets to stay Woke free
If the only criteria was to find a stable and successful non woke country the best option would be China
Provided you can accept the risk of jail or firing squad if you criticise the state, Israel and Singapore are wealthier per head than China, more democratic and also largely woke free
But - that is what the woke revolution is: capture of the state (either de facto or actual), whereby any criticism of it leads to terrible personal consequences. That is what I see that we are moving towards, and what seems to have happened in Scotland. Other countries have a more liberal and tolerant idea of the state, which is what I suppose I am looking for.
The U.K. hotspots clearly tell the story . The Delta variant has taken a hold of these areas but numbers are around 4000 per day and is not taking hold more widely. Virtually all cases are aged under 50 or unvaccinated - so vaccines work. Thanks for your vital logging with ZOE
Note the Zero COVID obsessives (Deepti Gurdasani and Pagel) on the attack in the replies because it doesn't fit with their panic laden doom mongering.
Indeed Gurdasani post a picture of % that is b.1.617.2, and not how many cases. I am sure it is widespread, but it is not taking off in most places.
Yes that is a misleading chart there. If deaths are the most important number, followed by hospitalisation, illness, then cases, the last thing we ought to care about is which strain is the most common. We are not trying to eliminate a particular strain, we are trying to limit the harm.
One start way of looking at this is to look at the ranking site wouldmeater:
Not the only or even the best tracking site, I know but its able to rank nations so im using it for this.
If you listed the nations by deaths per million averaged over the last week, how many places are doing worse than the UK?
119
Yes 119 nations are doing worse than the UK, and many of the better are really small places like the Vatican on 0. or places where the numbers may not be reliable.
I'm slightly wary of worldometers (not least because it's owned by the Chinese). But it does source its data. It doesn't appear, yet, to have included the update to the Peru data which elevates them to the top of the mortality rate table.
I did not relies it was owned by the Chinese, I might start to quote it less often now,
who owns 'OurWouldInDate'? or are there other places I should look at?
The problem is that their data is not particularly user friendly. I think that they try to do too much. The Worldometer presentation is much better in that regard.
But neither site is particularly accurate. Every time I've double checked something from either site it has been way wrong. Admittedly, I only checked things that I found "surprising" so maybe most of it is OK, but you just can't trust the data on either site.
The population estimate for the UK on ourworldindata is 67,886,004. According to worldometers it is 68,211,789
ONS : In mid-2019, the population of the UK reached an estimated 66.8 million. The UK population's growth rate from mid-2018 to mid-2019, at 0.5%, was slower than any year since mid-2004.
Halfway through, a bunch of kids, age about 16-18 - of ALL races - white, Muslim, girls in hijabs, black kids, white skateboarders, everyone - had a water fight. As you would in this heat and sun
They were careful to say Sorry we don't want to upset you, they maneuvered around us, they had ecstatic fun. Then they stopped, and they politely retreated to their deckchairs, where they laughed, drank and gossiped, then cleared up their litter and went home.
It was encouraging in a wonderful way. London at its best. And, at its best, London can be brilliant and optimistic, a glimpse of a multiracial future where the kids don't see race, and just rub along, in a manner that was denied to me. And I believe they don't see race. It comes naturally to them
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
Welcome 'darkage'. Sounds like you have a great life. Just out of curiosity, how has this "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution" had such an impact on that good life that you're considering emigrating?
Some people see the 'woke' as the reinvention of western civilisation, I see it as the end of western civilisation. As I said, it is a personal opinion and I am not mad about it in the way that some people are. We will have to see who is right.
I think it could end there, yes, because we might bring the whole house down on ourselves through reductionist identity politics and year-zeroism. I even wrote a thread header on it once.
But, I don't think there's anywhere to "go". I think the battle needs to be won here and at least we have a Government in office here that sees that.
The problem is not really with the government. The problem is with the English. The government doesn't have popular support for its war on woke. It is all a bit half hearted and viewed as a fringe issue, when it is actually an existential threat to civilisation. You have to look at what happened last year with the desecration of the centopah and conclude it is basically game over, the generation that cared about these things has died out.
I don't know what the answer is; emigration in my case is an option due to family connections; I am simply trying to pursue a viable alternative when I can see everything here falling apart, despite my apparent middle class status and affluence.
I agree with "the problem is with the English" and that emigration is an option. But I left for Scotland for the opposite reason you mention. I grew sick of the culturally backwards knuckle draggers so moved somewhere that better suited me. I warmly encourage you to do the same albeit from the opposite side of the same debate.
To be fair, Teesside is not representative of England as a whole.
The U.K. hotspots clearly tell the story . The Delta variant has taken a hold of these areas but numbers are around 4000 per day and is not taking hold more widely. Virtually all cases are aged under 50 or unvaccinated - so vaccines work. Thanks for your vital logging with ZOE
Note the Zero COVID obsessives (Deepti Gurdasani and Pagel) on the attack in the replies because it doesn't fit with their panic laden doom mongering.
Indeed Gurdasani post a picture of % that is b.1.617.2, and not how many cases. I am sure it is widespread, but it is not taking off in most places.
Yes that is a misleading chart there. If deaths are the most important number, followed by hospitalisation, illness, then cases, the last thing we ought to care about is which strain is the most common. We are not trying to eliminate a particular strain, we are trying to limit the harm.
One start way of looking at this is to look at the ranking site wouldmeater:
Not the only or even the best tracking site, I know but its able to rank nations so im using it for this.
If you listed the nations by deaths per million averaged over the last week, how many places are doing worse than the UK?
119
Yes 119 nations are doing worse than the UK, and many of the better are really small places like the Vatican on 0. or places where the numbers may not be reliable.
I'm slightly wary of worldometers (not least because it's owned by the Chinese). But it does source its data. It doesn't appear, yet, to have included the update to the Peru data which elevates them to the top of the mortality rate table.
I did not relies it was owned by the Chinese, I might start to quote it less often now,
who owns 'OurWouldInDate'? or are there other places I should look at?
The problem is that their data is not particularly user friendly. I think that they try to do too much. The Worldometer presentation is much better in that regard.
But neither site is particularly accurate. Every time I've double checked something from either site it has been way wrong. Admittedly, I only checked things that I found "surprising" so maybe most of it is OK, but you just can't trust the data on either site.
The population estimate for the UK on ourworldindata is 67,886,004. According to worldometers it is 68,211,789
ONS : In mid-2019, the population of the UK reached an estimated 66.8 million. The UK population's growth rate from mid-2018 to mid-2019, at 0.5%, was slower than any year since mid-2004.
I've heard people say that 1 million EU nationals have left the UK since the start of the pandemic as jobs disaperd. I have no idea if this is correct, but it would affect both the deaths per million and the vaccinations per million.
We may get a better idea when they finish counting the census, shory that can't be too long as it was mostly done online?
Hmm, bartenders are not commonly thought of as the elite employees wanted from all over the world, and certainly not paid enough to meet HMG targets for being allowed to remain.
Do you think Mr Wetherspoon is after a special exemption?
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
Welcome 'darkage'. Sounds like you have a great life. Just out of curiosity, how has this "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution" had such an impact on that good life that you're considering emigrating?
Some people see the 'woke' as the reinvention of western civilisation, I see it as the end of western civilisation. As I said, it is a personal opinion and I am not mad about it in the way that some people are. We will have to see who is right.
I think it could end there, yes, because we might bring the whole house down on ourselves through reductionist identity politics and year-zeroism. I even wrote a thread header on it once.
But, I don't think there's anywhere to "go". I think the battle needs to be won here and at least we have a Government in office here that sees that.
The problem is not really with the government. The problem is with the English. The government doesn't have popular support for its war on woke. It is all a bit half hearted and viewed as a fringe issue, when it is actually an existential threat to civilisation. You have to look at what happened last year with the desecration of the centopah and conclude it is basically game over, the generation that cared about these things has died out.
I don't know what the answer is; emigration in my case is an option due to family connections; I am simply trying to pursue a viable alternative when I can see everything here falling apart, despite my apparent middle class status and affluence.
So where are you moving too, given most of the Western world is going through the same Woke clashes and in the US the problem is even more pronounced than here? Eastern Europe or Singapore?
It is actually a fairly uniquely anglo american issue.
It is most pronounced in the Anglosphere but France has also seen statues toppled and Merkel's Germany is full of self flagellation about its past. Russia, Poland, Israel, the Far East and at a push Spain and Italy are your best bets to stay Woke free
Just rebooked my second jab Online after getting an e-mail. Super easy, and loads more choice of time and locations than the first time round. Only brought it forward by 5 days, but I don't have to traipse to Durham on a Sunday. Had every day from a week from now available and a choice of many time slots. Was a little worried about having to cancel, in case it was pushed back. My advice. Get it done.
For the perusal of @rcs1000 and other lovers of Tether fraud - today I learnt there are a whole pile of unregulated Forex markets that use Tether as their on/off ramp
Tether may very well go down as the greatest fraud in history.
(It's a fascinating shell game: the goal of Tether management is to get other people to hold Tether at 1:1 with the USD, by buying when it falls below 99.5cents, and therefore earning a tiny profit. But, of course, these people are picking up pennies in front of a bulldozer, as Tether is being robbed blind. I suspect that at least $20bn of the $62bn has been looted from it already, and at some point it will come crashing down, when people realise there isn't $60bn sitting on the books.)
Oh, everyone already know the money isn't there. Fully half of Tether's attested to holdings are "Commercial Paper". According to their general council it is A-2 or above.
That means, if Tether and their general council is being truthful, Tether owns 3% of the entire US Commercial Paper market with two full percentage points purchased in the last 3 months. Let that sink in.
No one actually believes this but everyone knows that without Tether the Bitcoin price goes down and to the right not up and to the right.
So what happens when Tether collapses? Does it bring Bitcoin down with it? Is it damaging to the wider economy?
Given Bitcoin’s carbon footprint is something like 0.25% of the US’s (i.e. huge) the sooner it crashes the better.
The latest estimate of Bitcoin electricity usage was 129TWh/year, which is more than 85% of countries.
The crash is going to be spectacular to watch from a distance.
When would it be likely ?
I invest, a small amount, via SIPP and S&S ISA but avoid stuff like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple and the rest. I just don’t get them and when my Facebook and twitter feed was regularly full of scams concerning them it just made me incredibly wary. I like to invest in stuff I understand. I don’t understand these and I don’t understand NFTs
Most of the points raised above are refuted, or at the very least, countered, at https://endthefud.org/
The energy stuff is a complete nonsense, bitcoin actually incentivises clean energy usage because clean energy produces too much energy when demand is low and not enough when it's high. Since most of that energy can't be stored, it's wasted - raising overall unit cost. As Bitcoin is on 24/7, bitcoin creates a market for that surplus clean energy, thus incentivising more production of clean energy as there is an increased market for it.
As far as tether goes, people have been saying it's going to collapse for years - surprise surprise, it hasn't. And even if it did, it represents about 4% of the total crypto market cap, scammier coins like bitconnect have collapsed without crashing the entire crypto market.
(1) BTC is (mostly) mined in China using coal. Indeed, it is often the owners of the coal plants themselves who have a side business BTC mining. It's quite efficient for them to have a sideline in BTC because during off peak periods in China electricity, they move over to BTC mining. That being said, it's still coal being being used for mining.
(2) Tether is a scam. It's not complicated. They have printed more Tether (by far) than they have in assets. Just because it hasn't collapsed yet, doesn't mean it won't.
(3) When Tether collapses, there will be ripples. I'm not a "all crypto is doomed" kind of guy, but there will be consequences.
Bitcoin ultimately wants cheap energy - surplus energy from renewable sources that would otherwise be wasted will eventually become cheaper than coal. Imagine having a solar panel on your house. On a really bright day, or when you're not at home, much of that energy is wasted. It could be converted to bitcoin mining at no cost to you, or sold to bitcoin miners at rock bottom prices rather than being wasted. Imagine that transformation taking place on a global scale. That is likely where we are headed within the next decade, even if we aren't there now.
Bitcoin creates a market for renewable energy that would otherwise be wasted, making construction of more renewable energy sources more economically viable.
But. Even if it didn't. Not all energy use is bad - indeed, what is wasteful about using electricity to verify sound money? It has a cost, in terms of energy usage and pollution, but so do christmas lights - which serve no purpose - and people don't want to ban them. Gold mining has a huge impact on the environment, nobody complains about it. And the US dollar is backed by bombs and aircraft carriers.
In terms of tether, it represents 60 bn of a 1.62 tn crypto market - so it wouldn't be fatal if it collapsed. But I'm inclined to agree with you, it's scammy and it would cause lasting damage to the crypto ecosystem that would take a long time to recover from. Having said that, the US dollar is a fractional reserve and that's still chugging along...
You have the maths of Tether all wrong. There is 60 billion issued compared to X other crypto but how much VOLUME is traded each day.
The majority of crypto "market cap" is entirely notional, a tiny fraction of any coins issuance is actually traded - their market caps illusionary. How much Tether volume happens in a day though? A hundred billion on Coindesk. Bitcoin only 33 billion.
Almost every company, bank, utility and media account in my Twitter and LinkedIn feed has turned their corporate icon to a trans/rainbow flag today, and Facebook have gone even further with a "love is love" animé.
Does anyone else not think this is OTT?
Quite frankly, it makes me want to vomit - together with others tweeting it and liking it all so they can be seen to be achingly right-on. Of course, those that object - in any form - are reactionary bigots.
The ubiquitous preachiness and self-absorption gets to me, together with the way it's framed as with us or against us, and means I both feel immensely irritated by it and a sort of contempt for it.
Don't be such a snowflake getting triggered by everything. Next you'll be wanting this cancelled.
The LBTQI+ community have faced so much bigotry, including in our lifetimes.
Just remember you and I have lived in a period where homosexuality wasn't decriminalised in Scotland and Norn Iron until the early 80s.
It is a reminder of the progress made and not to take things for granted.
Missing the point. Predictable. So so predictable from you. Disappointing.
We now have a LGBT+ history month in February and a whole month (in fact, it was over 6 weeks last year) - something like a sixth of the whole year.
There are absolutely no boundaries to it (and nor can there be, for the reasons you describe) so it just goes on and on until it's utterly omnipresent and meaningless but also preached at to you every night and day.
Pride should be confined to a weekend, as it used to be, which would make it more powerful, meaningful and fun. Hell, I'd even join in.
But as things are now? No. This relentless Wokery needs to end.
You're transforming into Laurence Fox.
No, because I've also criticised the equivalent on Poppies and Captain Tom. And I'm not an anti-vaxxer either.
I might not be with the bandwagon spirit of the age - and I'm happy to be laughed at and ridiculed as a result - but my point of view is a reasonable and coherent one.
I think I'm the sane one.
A sane person would not be close to vomiting by a social media campaign about pride month.
A sane person would recognise that every single company in the country changing their corporate logos and preaching it about it for over a full month (four times longer than it used to be) after the equality battle was won meant that something wasn't quite right.
It's like we were pulling into the station, because we'd arrived, and then threw the throttle to full and raced straight through it.
Why?
It's corporate marketing. No more, no less.
You can make a calendar of this stuff now. Pride month, Black History month, Poppies month, Christmas is nearly two months beginning just before the end of Poppies.
Having a calendar of stuff to talk about means you don't have to actually think about stuff to talk about. It makes it simultaneously prominent and meaningless.
Halfway through, a bunch of kids, age about 16-18 - of ALL races - white, Muslim, girls in hijabs, black kids, white skateboarders, everyone - had a water fight. As you would in this heat and sun
They were careful to say Sorry we don't want to upset you, they maneuvered around us, they had ecstatic fun. Then they stopped, and they politely retreated to their deckchairs, where they laughed, drank and gossiped, then cleared up their litter and went home.
It was encouraging in a wonderful way. London at its best. And, at its best, London can be brilliant and optimistic, a glimpse of a multiracial future where the kids don't see race, and just rub along, in a manner that was denied to me. And I believe they don't see race. It comes naturally to them
And zero deaths. Today is a big fat YAY
And that's both the joy and the tragedy. The joy that it's trivially obvious what the future looks like, people rubbing along and not causing offence to others because causing offence is a dickish thing to do. Post-woke without the humourless censoriousness that tends to go with woke now. We'll keep that statue, because he really was a national hero, but yeah that other guy really ought to be hidden away from the main road. And it's blatantly a better future, in the same way that hardly anyone would really want to reintroduce Section 28. We'll laugh with Julian and Sandy, not at them. Especially when they mock us.
And a tragedy that, for all sorts of reasons, that's denied to those of us above a certain age. It's at best an effort for us, at worst an unpleasant battle.
Almost every company, bank, utility and media account in my Twitter and LinkedIn feed has turned their corporate icon to a trans/rainbow flag today, and Facebook have gone even further with a "love is love" animé.
Does anyone else not think this is OTT?
Quite frankly, it makes me want to vomit - together with others tweeting it and liking it all so they can be seen to be achingly right-on. Of course, those that object - in any form - are reactionary bigots.
The ubiquitous preachiness and self-absorption gets to me, together with the way it's framed as with us or against us, and means I both feel immensely irritated by it and a sort of contempt for it.
Don't be such a snowflake getting triggered by everything. Next you'll be wanting this cancelled.
The LBTQI+ community have faced so much bigotry, including in our lifetimes.
Just remember you and I have lived in a period where homosexuality wasn't decriminalised in Scotland and Norn Iron until the early 80s.
It is a reminder of the progress made and not to take things for granted.
Missing the point. Predictable. So so predictable from you. Disappointing.
We now have a LGBT+ history month in February and a whole month (in fact, it was over 6 weeks last year) - something like a sixth of the whole year.
There are absolutely no boundaries to it (and nor can there be, for the reasons you describe) so it just goes on and on until it's utterly omnipresent and meaningless but also preached at to you every night and day.
Pride should be confined to a weekend, as it used to be, which would make it more powerful, meaningful and fun. Hell, I'd even join in.
But as things are now? No. This relentless Wokery needs to end.
Yeah, but notice how they gave LGBT+ February - i.e. the shortest month.
That's discrimination that is, making it clear that they think LGBT+ don't deserve a proper 31 day month.
(For the avoidance of doubt, this is a joke.)
Given his well know sexual inclinations it would make more sense to have the month named after Julius Caesar as LGTB history month.
If you don't have official lockdowns, you still have lockdowns. They're just unofficial ones that happen when everyone is utterly terrified to go out.
You have a series of waves that come and go, as people get scared of the virus and stay home. So the choice is not between zero years locked down and 66 million, it's between "n" and 66 million.
Plus there's the fact that without restrctions, we would probably have had higher peaks, and we might have actually seem the health service overloaded, leading to situtations like happened in New York or Milan early last year (or Manaus). And when you have those kind of peaks, you're not killing off people with just 10 years to go, you are killing off those with 20 or 30 or 40.
If you want to see just how bad excess deaths can go, look at Ecuador: they have been running at deaths 3x the normal level. Three times. We've been at 20-30% above normal levels for the last year.
Without restrictions, we would still have lost decades of peoples' lives to lockdowns, and we would have had much higher death tolls.
Now, should we have opened up much quicker? Damn right we should. But the idea that "no restrictions" is milk and honey is for the birds.
Yes to the illusion of lockdown free paradise. I'm also aware of rather a lot of people who have had quite a decent year, and some who quietly say they've really preferred it (mostly people who have seen far more of their young kids and much less commuting) but in view of the horrors that so many have experienced are shy of saying it.
Indeed I am one of those. Lockdowns has signalled the end of the office for me and allowed me the freedom to move home and actually be close to family instead of seeing the once or twice a year which has been the case for the last 33 years. You also can't, i would argue, multiply 66 million by a year to calculate lost time. A lot of those 66 million would have spent 4 or 5 nights a week sat on the sofa watching tv in any case. I doubt many but the young have 7 day a week of "Wow what a brilliant day" and for most of us many days of the week aren't much different to lockdown
Sorry to post without introduction. But I am a lockdown winner. My property has gone up by at least £100k, and these price rises show no signs of slowing. I have a whole host of new employment opportunities as the acceptance of remote working means that I can take jobs in London without the daily supercommute. We got to spend a lot of time in the garden and save a lot money. At worst the restrictions were a bit annoying. All this would be fine but for the civilisation ending woke cultural revolution that has come with it. Everyone has their own opinion on this, but in my case I am seriously looking at emigration.
Welcome 'darkage'. Sounds like you have a great life. Just out of curiosity, how has this "civilisation ending woke cultural revolution" had such an impact on that good life that you're considering emigrating?
Some people see the 'woke' as the reinvention of western civilisation, I see it as the end of western civilisation. As I said, it is a personal opinion and I am not mad about it in the way that some people are. We will have to see who is right.
I think it could end there, yes, because we might bring the whole house down on ourselves through reductionist identity politics and year-zeroism. I even wrote a thread header on it once.
But, I don't think there's anywhere to "go". I think the battle needs to be won here and at least we have a Government in office here that sees that.
The problem is not really with the government. The problem is with the English. The government doesn't have popular support for its war on woke. It is all a bit half hearted and viewed as a fringe issue, when it is actually an existential threat to civilisation. You have to look at what happened last year with the desecration of the centopah and conclude it is basically game over, the generation that cared about these things has died out.
I don't know what the answer is; emigration in my case is an option due to family connections; I am simply trying to pursue a viable alternative when I can see everything here falling apart, despite my apparent middle class status and affluence.
So where are you moving too, given most of the Western world is going through the same Woke clashes and in the US the problem is even more pronounced than here? Eastern Europe or Singapore?
It is actually a fairly uniquely anglo american issue.
It is most pronounced in the Anglosphere but France has also seen statues toppled and Merkel's Germany is full of self flagellation about its past. Russia, Poland, Israel, the Far East and at a push Spain and Italy are your best bets to stay Woke free
If the only criteria was to find a stable and successful non woke country the best option would be China
Provided you can accept the risk of jail or firing squad if you criticise the state, Israel and Singapore are wealthier per head than China, more democratic and also largely woke free
That would be the Israel that had the first Trans winner of Eurovision?
Israel has a thriving LGBT community, and some of the most reactionary obscurantism side by side.
Singapore has such a low fertility rate that without immigration it would be quickly extinct.
Of course "anti-Woke" countries tend to be very chauvinist and emigrating there puts you automatically into a suspect character group, as immigrant.
Perhaps Ulster would be a better bet, and join the TUV or DUP?
Bitcoin consumes energy 24/7 creating a permanent increase in baseload demand, which means it's good for the environment, has to be the biggest OMG WTAF moment I have ever seen here.
Next week: why Doctor Shipman was good for his patients.
Just to ram home how much of a scam Tether is. The bank at a institution called Deltec bank (coincidentally the CEO of Deltec was fired by the owners within 24 hours of Deltec taking on Tether as a client) in the Bahamas.
The Bahamas Financial Authorities publish a breakdown of how much foreign currency deposits their banks have in aggregate.
In Feb-March this year Tether issued over 10 billion Tether, total Bahamas foreign currency deposits across all banks increased by only 1.3 billion from 5.7 to 7 billion dollars.
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Down here they're meant to come back under Step 4, but whether that happens is obviously highly debatable at the moment.
https://www.stonewall.org.uk/our-work/campaigns/2007-some-people-are-gay-get-over-it-campaign-breaks-new-ground
Compare and contrast how strongly this firm, which under a century ago was enthusiastically running unethical human trials and facilitating the holocaust, support LGBT rights.
https://twitter.com/bayer
https://twitter.com/bayer4cropseu
https://twitter.com/bayermiddleeast
etc etc.
Sends out a strong vibe of 'we'll support you until it becomes more profitable to go back to running human experiments on you like back in the good old days'. If a firm makes a statement for LGBT rights it must be unconditional in its' reach.
But, I don't think there's anywhere to "go". I think the battle needs to be won here and at least we have a Government in office here that sees that.
And I'll draw the obvious and correct conclusion.
OTOH I do think that Pride has turned into a bit of a corporate panjandrum. It doesn't offend me particularly, but I have some sympathy with those who think that some of it is a bit overdone. And I'm not all that fond of the ubiquitous usage of LGBT, and the other alphabet soup acronyms that it has spawned, either.
I'm not quite sure we're at the stage of groups of people marching round the streets with someone's thoughts picking people up at random and ordering them to undergo self-denunciation before compulsory re-education somewhere or other = that may be what's happening in Surrey but not in Newham.
As for civilisation ending, that's a pandemic with 95% infection rate and a 90% mortality rate or a nuclear strike - it isn't someone taking down a few statues, really, it isn't.
In a sense, "culture" is always in a sense of evolution or revolution with different interpretations of the past and different and evolving perceptions of identity.
Look at the Karl du Fresne blog post I attached to @Casino_Royale - it's a wonderful dismantling and exposition of the cultural issues in New Zealand currently.
I'd like to see it go further though.
(And if the answer is that you haven't researched that yet, I have a teensy feeling that you may end up being disappointed at what the set of places that meet those criteria but don't have much truck with "woke" turns out to be.)
Bitcoin creates a market for renewable energy that would otherwise be wasted, making construction of more renewable energy sources more economically viable.
But. Even if it didn't. Not all energy use is bad - indeed, what is wasteful about using electricity to verify sound money? It has a cost, in terms of energy usage and pollution, but so do christmas lights - which serve no purpose - and people don't want to ban them. Gold mining has a huge impact on the environment, nobody complains about it. And the US dollar is backed by bombs and aircraft carriers.
In terms of tether, it represents 60 bn of a 1.62 tn crypto market - so it wouldn't be fatal if it collapsed. But I'm inclined to agree with you, it's scammy and it would cause lasting damage to the crypto ecosystem that would take a long time to recover from. Having said that, the US dollar is a fractional reserve and that's still chugging along...
I don't know what the answer is; emigration in my case is an option due to family connections; I am simply trying to pursue a viable alternative when I can see everything here falling apart, despite my apparent middle class status and affluence.
Also, I want to let the players know what I think of their wokery. PJW nails it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypTbsWPsSws
There should have an anti-obesity campaign to match the anti-smoking and AIDS awareness campaign of the past.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-boris-is-loved-by-the-french
https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/covid-19-hospital-activity/
A total of 605 hospital admissions for the seven days ending 30/05/21, an increase from 592 for the seven days to 23/05/21.
The highest seven day period was 616 both for the seven days to 24/03/21 and the seven days to 26/05/21.
https://youtu.be/b1JlYZQG3lI
You have an entity that controls the Tether blockchain, and makes a market in the coin. And it works like an ETF - if the price goes up to $1.01, then they sell a Tether, and if it falls to $0.99 then they buy one. There is therefore a small profit that is made by the controllers of Tether that is then boosted by investing the dollars received from the sale of Tether in short dated government bonds and the money markets.
And because they would be backed 1:1 with actual dollars in the bank, they could always be the buyer of last resort.
Done right, $60bn of Tether generates $300m or so of profits for the owners of Tether.
There's only one minor problem.
The owners of Tether were not sensible. Instead of seeing this as a long-term, good return type business they saw there was more money to be made by simply printing Tether, using it to buy Bitcoin, and then selling the Bitcoin for US Dollars.
Even if you believe the controllers of Tether, they only have assets for 71 cents in the dollar. And I suspect the real number is less than half.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/statues-colonial-daubed-paint-france-a4476446.html
Because in order to communicate there has to be a shared common reality. The basics have to be agreed.
I understand.
That's what makes me vomit.
I’m not convinced that calling someone a “fat black c**t” is racism. It’s just vulgar abuse - the “black” is purely descriptive rather than an active part of the sentence. It’s entirely equivalent to calling someone a “fat ginger c**t”
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/interactive-map
The three places within Bolton which were the epicentre are now falling fast:
Lever Edge 172 in the seven days to 20/05/21 down to 53 in the seven days to 27/05/21
Rumworth North 142 down to 67
Rumworth South 115 down to 55
But what is also happening is that the adjacent neighbourhoods which had the increase in cases later are all peaking at much lower levels.
And similar in Bedford and Blackburn.
At a local level there really isn't any exponential growth.
The point needs to be made ,I suspect, that 'swingback'only tends to occur when the governing party has endured an extended period of unpopularity and fallen well behind in the polls. I am not aware of an example of a governing party already well ahead in polling terms enjoying a further bounce as a GE draws close.To take the 1983 example, Thatcher's winning margin in June that year - 15.2% - was actually smaller than implied by pollsters a year earlier when the Tory lead was circa 20%. There was no 'swing back' - indeed slightly the reverse. Similarly , the Tory winning margin in 1992 - 7.6% - was well below what the party enjoyed in most of 1988 and early 1989. The same applies to the Blair governments elected in 1997 and 2001 - in that Labour's winning margin in both 2001 and 2005 fell well below what had been indicated by polls earlier in those Pariaments. Going further back , there was no 'swing back' to the Tories in 1964 when compared with 1960 and 1961 - though there was certainly a significant recovery relative to 1962 and 1963.
In terms of where we are today, has there not already been significant 'swing back' to the Tories when compared with Autumn 2020?Personally I suspect that the circumstances of the last 15 months have been so exceptional that the polls are telling us much less than in previous Parliaments , and that the precedents themselves offer us less in the way of guidance and perspective.
Companies have stakeholders. Shareholders are merely the owners of the residual interest.
Cases have been skyrocketing in Blackburn since about May 10th, yet at the most recent reporting date (May 25th) there were still only 15 Covid patients in the East Lancs Hospitals Trust. That compares with about 300 at the peak in early January. There has also been a grand total of one Covid fatality in the whole local authority area in the last week, and that figure is actually current.
The cases are still climbing there at the moment, but all the same it doesn't look like a catastrophe in the making - especially given what we know of the trajectory that Bolton has already taken.
ONS : In mid-2019, the population of the UK reached an estimated 66.8 million.
The UK population's growth rate from mid-2018 to mid-2019, at 0.5%, was slower than any year since mid-2004.
That's the game here. Extra cover.
Halfway through, a bunch of kids, age about 16-18 - of ALL races - white, Muslim, girls in hijabs, black kids, white skateboarders, everyone - had a water fight. As you would in this heat and sun
They were careful to say Sorry we don't want to upset you, they maneuvered around us, they had ecstatic fun. Then they stopped, and they politely retreated to their deckchairs, where they laughed, drank and gossiped, then cleared up their litter and went home.
It was encouraging in a wonderful way. London at its best. And, at its best, London can be brilliant and optimistic, a glimpse of a multiracial future where the kids don't see race, and just rub along, in a manner that was denied to me. And I believe they don't see race. It comes naturally to them
And zero deaths. Today is a big fat YAY
https://twitter.com/chrisgreybrexit/status/1399809725387182080?s=21
Via @Telegraph
https://twitter.com/PoliticsForAlI/status/1399804483731922947
We may get a better idea when they finish counting the census, shory that can't be too long as it was mostly done online?
Do you think Mr Wetherspoon is after a special exemption?
Only brought it forward by 5 days, but I don't have to traipse to Durham on a Sunday.
Had every day from a week from now available and a choice of many time slots. Was a little worried about having to cancel, in case it was pushed back.
My advice. Get it done.
The majority of crypto "market cap" is entirely notional, a tiny fraction of any coins issuance is actually traded - their market caps illusionary. How much Tether volume happens in a day though? A hundred billion on Coindesk. Bitcoin only 33 billion.
Tether IS the market.
It's corporate marketing. No more, no less.
You can make a calendar of this stuff now. Pride month, Black History month, Poppies month, Christmas is nearly two months beginning just before the end of Poppies.
Having a calendar of stuff to talk about means you don't have to actually think about stuff to talk about. It makes it simultaneously prominent and meaningless.
And a tragedy that, for all sorts of reasons, that's denied to those of us above a certain age. It's at best an effort for us, at worst an unpleasant battle.
Israel has a thriving LGBT community, and some of the most reactionary obscurantism side by side.
Singapore has such a low fertility rate that without immigration it would be quickly extinct.
Of course "anti-Woke" countries tend to be very chauvinist and emigrating there puts you automatically into a suspect character group, as immigrant.
Perhaps Ulster would be a better bet, and join the TUV or DUP?
Next week: why Doctor Shipman was good for his patients.
The Bahamas Financial Authorities publish a breakdown of how much foreign currency deposits their banks have in aggregate.
In Feb-March this year Tether issued over 10 billion Tether, total Bahamas foreign currency deposits across all banks increased by only 1.3 billion from 5.7 to 7 billion dollars.
Tether is a scam.