Stupidity from the Express, but the whole issue is a nonsense. Either the farms can pay more, in which case that is higher wages for people, or they can't, in which case it is low productivity work dragging down our GDP per worker numbers and we don't need it.
Wages are part of the issue. Picking veg isn't the lowest paid job out there, but as it is seasonal you can't be a full time permanent fruit-picker.
The big issue is the work itself. Repetitive. Back-breaking. Cold & wet or hot & parched depending on the weather. People don't want to do it. When there was that big push to get patriotic Brits picking last year there were nowhere near enough applicants and most didn't last very long before quitting.
Your solution is full on Brexiteer inspiration stuff. Lets abandon farming and make ourselves entirely dependent on imports. Perhaps we would look to join a local free market to make the importation of such things as easy and cheap as possible?
Or perhaps we should open ourselves up to global trade so we're not constrained to rely upon locals alone.
Indeed! Shipping short life fresh produce from the other side of the world instead of locally is bound to be viable. Cheaper too.
Just within my family whats app group there is wide scale deleting of the app and they are getting similar responses from their friends. This needs addressing Boris and now
No - its a stupid thing to have no gradation between only leaving your house once a day for exercise in lockdown and having a limit (that no one is checking or observing) on house guests, who are allowed to stay overnight etc and calling it lockdown. Yes - there are still legal restrictions on our lives that would have horrified all of us in 2019, but these are extraordinary times. No - we are not in lockdown still.
I am using lockdown as a generic term to denote those restrictions on liberty.
We are still in lockdown.
I think lockdown should not be used in that way - you do see the difference don't you? You can go to the pub or restaurant, go to work, see a movie, see a play, go to watch sport. The list goes on. This is not consistent with lockdown (see March 2020 for details).
Exactly. Lockdown was "you must stay at home". Being able to go on holiday or to the beach with your friends or on a pissed up flare in anus rampage is not "lockdown".
Bet that bloke with a rocket up his arse won't be wearing a mask in Tesco.
My chrome new page news feed keeps showing me pics of Danielle westbrook then and now. You couldn't imagine a clearer incentive to keep away from the cocaine.
The widespread use of coke seems to be something the media don't go near....acting with total shock and outrage when a pob lookalike politician is found to have tried a line or two.
Its has now transitioned from the party drug of the rich and famous to the widespread use among the plebs. It wasn't just flare yobbo off his tits on it on Sunday, you could see the telltale signs of it in lots of the snapshot videos.
Which is a shame, given that it typically makes horrible people more horrible where mdma makes them nicer (and ketamine takes them out of the picture altogether).
Its one of those correlation or causation issues. Are crackheads attracted to coke because they're dickheads, or do people become dickheads because they're on coke?
The latter. Et in Arcadia ego, to a limited extent, in 80s and 90s London, and it noticeably and consistently makes me more of a prick than I am anyway.
No - its a stupid thing to have no gradation between only leaving your house once a day for exercise in lockdown and having a limit (that no one is checking or observing) on house guests, who are allowed to stay overnight etc and calling it lockdown. Yes - there are still legal restrictions on our lives that would have horrified all of us in 2019, but these are extraordinary times. No - we are not in lockdown still.
I am using lockdown as a generic term to denote those restrictions on liberty.
We are still in lockdown.
I think lockdown should not be used in that way - you do see the difference don't you? You can go to the pub or restaurant, go to work, see a movie, see a play, go to watch sport. The list goes on. This is not consistent with lockdown (see March 2020 for details).
Exactly. Lockdown was "you must stay at home". Being able to go on holiday or to the beach with your friends or on a pissed up flare in anus rampage is not "lockdown".
Bet that bloke with a rocket up his arse won't be wearing a mask in Tesco.
My chrome new page news feed keeps showing me pics of Danielle westbrook then and now. You couldn't imagine a clearer incentive to keep away from the cocaine.
The widespread use of coke seems to be something the media don't go near....acting with total shock and outrage when a pob lookalike politician is found to have tried a line or two.
Its has now transitioned from the party drug of the rich and famous to the widespread use among the plebs. It wasn't just flare yobbo off his tits on it on Sunday, you could see the telltale signs of it in lots of the snapshot videos.
Which is a shame, given that it typically makes horrible people more horrible where mdma makes them nicer (and ketamine takes them out of the picture altogether).
Its one of those correlation or causation issues. Are crackheads attracted to coke because they're dickheads, or do people become dickheads because they're on coke?
Never known anyone no matter how nice not become a dickhead while coked, think the jury is firmly back on that one.
I have a theory, based on the Victorian term "liberated by drink" - it just lets out the inner dickhead.
The people who don't have an inner dickhead don't want coke, generally, I think. Bit like the correlation between drinking Stella and violence..... It's alot to do with the fact that people who aren't thugs inside shy away from the association.
Not sure that is necessarily true however, anecdotal but heard lots of people say similar things about various drinks. I for example like whisky.....I don't drink it though as it makes me agressive. Other spirits I am fine on for similar amounts and rum makes me I am told positively laid back and mellow.
I'm fairly convinced that drink has different effects on different people. Like you, alcohol makes me mellow - maudlin, in fact. But I had a colleague at company X who you soon learnt not to go out drinking with. He was a pleasant chap, but once he had a few drinks, he would start fights with strangers and then scarper. A sort of aggressive cowardice. And my ex had a massive alcohol tolerance - it would not affect her, until a certain level was reached, and then it hit her like a sledgehammer. She had no tipsy stage: she seemed either sober or falling-down drunk.
Stupidity from the Express, but the whole issue is a nonsense. Either the farms can pay more, in which case that is higher wages for people, or they can't, in which case it is low productivity work dragging down our GDP per worker numbers and we don't need it.
Wages are part of the issue. Picking veg isn't the lowest paid job out there, but as it is seasonal you can't be a full time permanent fruit-picker.
The big issue is the work itself. Repetitive. Back-breaking. Cold & wet or hot & parched depending on the weather. People don't want to do it. When there was that big push to get patriotic Brits picking last year there were nowhere near enough applicants and most didn't last very long before quitting.
Your solution is full on Brexiteer inspiration stuff. Lets abandon farming and make ourselves entirely dependent on imports. Perhaps we would look to join a local free market to make the importation of such things as easy and cheap as possible?
If people don't want to do the work because the hours are unreliable and the conditions are crap, then you need to pay them more to do it until it's a better option than other jobs. If even lower end employees can find better jobs elsewhere then it is no loss to the workforce.
Your abandon farming shtick is full on Remainer apocalyptism. We are an island in the Atlantic with easy transportation by boat to most of the world. Even at the height of a global world War against the entire European continent we managed to import food. When we joined the EU we had to cut off much food imports from New Zealand on the other side of the globe.
Your last sentence is even more illogical. Even if the price of importing food in some magical way became too expensive, then the domestic farmers would become preferred and have the case to pay for necessary high wages for their crappy jobs.
No - its a stupid thing to have no gradation between only leaving your house once a day for exercise in lockdown and having a limit (that no one is checking or observing) on house guests, who are allowed to stay overnight etc and calling it lockdown. Yes - there are still legal restrictions on our lives that would have horrified all of us in 2019, but these are extraordinary times. No - we are not in lockdown still.
I am using lockdown as a generic term to denote those restrictions on liberty.
We are still in lockdown.
I think lockdown should not be used in that way - you do see the difference don't you? You can go to the pub or restaurant, go to work, see a movie, see a play, go to watch sport. The list goes on. This is not consistent with lockdown (see March 2020 for details).
Exactly. Lockdown was "you must stay at home". Being able to go on holiday or to the beach with your friends or on a pissed up flare in anus rampage is not "lockdown".
Bet that bloke with a rocket up his arse won't be wearing a mask in Tesco.
My chrome new page news feed keeps showing me pics of Danielle westbrook then and now. You couldn't imagine a clearer incentive to keep away from the cocaine.
The widespread use of coke seems to be something the media don't go near....acting with total shock and outrage when a pob lookalike politician is found to have tried a line or two.
Its has now transitioned from the party drug of the rich and famous to the widespread use among the plebs. It wasn't just flare yobbo off his tits on it on Sunday, you could see the telltale signs of it in lots of the snapshot videos.
Which is a shame, given that it typically makes horrible people more horrible where mdma makes them nicer (and ketamine takes them out of the picture altogether).
Its one of those correlation or causation issues. Are crackheads attracted to coke because they're dickheads, or do people become dickheads because they're on coke?
Never known anyone no matter how nice not become a dickhead while coked, think the jury is firmly back on that one.
I have a theory, based on the Victorian term "liberated by drink" - it just lets out the inner dickhead.
The people who don't have an inner dickhead don't want coke, generally, I think. Bit like the correlation between drinking Stella and violence..... It's alot to do with the fact that people who aren't thugs inside shy away from the association.
There's an equal and opposite Victorian term "disguised in drink" which tends the other way.
I have a private bet standing that the Uk will not enter a new lockdown, as defined by pubs and restaurants closing inside again. What are my chances do you think?
I agree actually. Once all adults are double vaxxed (soon) there is simply no moral justification for it. So yes, I would be on your side of the wager.
Al adults will not be vaxxed soon. The number will top out below 90%, I believe.
Tsk, Scotland under performing again.
Scotland, like Wales, has less of the groups who are more anti-vax. If you look at localised vaccination rates, they are actually quite uniform when you are comparing similar groups.
The flip side of diversity.....
On the other hand, plenty of the 'groups' from NI (whoi presumably don't get counted in the 'diversity' stats)? That signal should appear in Scotland, too. But the level in NI isn't perhaps big enough to register anyway.
Well, are Spides diverse from the rest of us? I rather hope so....
Actually, as a complete surprise, NI has a larger number of er... hard core? Christians of the type associated with anti-vax for various spurious reasons.
Even the more er... colourful? denizens of Scotland who express an affinity for various facets of the joy joy that is the NI cultural continuum are not, in contrast, especially religious.
Scotland has secularised much more, basically.
EDIT: and that is before we get to the secular, anti-government groups in NI
I swear I am not making this up given my posts this morning...
Update from our medical practice. A member of staff has tested positive, which means almost everyone there needs to isolate.
Should these doctors and nurses (a) isolate even though I assume they are double jabbed, or (b) still operate and change my Sis-in-law's wound dressing as planned?
They should all take the gold standard PCR test and if negative (b).
Good - this is the kind of logical progression that is needed. We don't want Doctors treating patients if they have Covid. They *may* have Covid. So do we (a) delete the app and hope for the best, or (b) test them?
The problem with going back to testing is two-fold. If we still need to test then it rather highlights to people that Covid is everywhere and remains a problem - the reverse of what message the government want to convey. And our testing programme was never anything less than a disorganised shambles, so a return to sending people 200 miles for a test would be Bad.
Or - radical idea. To support the reduction in restrictions which we all want, we don't deny there is a Covid problem, we resource up the testing programme again, and we implore people to be careful. Masks and testing allows everyone to largely go about their normal lives surely.
The problem with your rhetorical flourishes is that our testing programme, in terms of capacity, is already world leading by a pretty big margin. If a million a day every day isn't enough then this isn't something testing can solve.
It is a bit like asking the government to do more on getting people vaccinated. Which is down to people not taking advantage of the myriad ways to freely get a vaccination. The reasons that people are not getting vaccinated are known. The opinion poll data matches the take up - use the MSOA data on vaccination vs the social mix in the area. The correlation is nearly perfect.....
The tests are there. Capacity well in excess of the usage.
The issue with test and trace was (and is) refusal to self isolate.
On the subject of COVID, incidentally... The admission rate per case seems to have stabilised at around 2%
I'd hope that would continue to go down as more second doses are done, but if it doesn't then we're looking at 1000 admissions a day from yesterday's cases, with potentially further increases to come before the schools close.
By way of comparison admissions reached 1000 a day in mid-October 2020 and it took a further increase to 1500 a day later that month to force Johnson to press the lockdown button.
Suggests we would need 200,000 cases a day to push daily admissions back above 4000, which they reached last winter.
At 200,000 cases a day, which is probably 400,000 infections given what we see in the ONS data, we'd have about two-thirds of the population infected over 12 weeks.
So looks like vaccinations have replaced lockdown as the tool that prevents the hospitals being overwhelmed, but just as Johnson mismanaged the previous two waves with the result of more than 100,000 avoidable deaths, it looks like we are going to see more of the same.
To think that I had previously advocated bringing forward the end of restrictions to before the start of the football tournament. Just as well I'm not in charge.
Just within my family whats app group there is wide scale deleting of the app and they are getting similar responses from their friends. This needs addressing Boris and now
Stupidity from the Express, but the whole issue is a nonsense. Either the farms can pay more, in which case that is higher wages for people, or they can't, in which case it is low productivity work dragging down our GDP per worker numbers and we don't need it.
Wages are part of the issue. Picking veg isn't the lowest paid job out there, but as it is seasonal you can't be a full time permanent fruit-picker.
The big issue is the work itself. Repetitive. Back-breaking. Cold & wet or hot & parched depending on the weather. People don't want to do it. When there was that big push to get patriotic Brits picking last year there were nowhere near enough applicants and most didn't last very long before quitting.
Your solution is full on Brexiteer inspiration stuff. Lets abandon farming and make ourselves entirely dependent on imports. Perhaps we would look to join a local free market to make the importation of such things as easy and cheap as possible?
If people don't want to do the work because the hours are unreliable and the conditions are crap, then you need to pay them more to do it until it's a better option than other jobs. If even lower end employees can find better jobs elsewhere then it is no loss to the workforce.
Your abandon farming shtick is full on Remainer apocalyptism. We are an island in the Atlantic with easy transportation by boat to most of the world. Even at the height of a global world War against the entire European continent we managed to import food. When we joined the EU we had to cut off much food imports from New Zealand on the other side of the globe.
Your last sentence is even more illogical. Even if the price of importing food in some magical way became too expensive, then the domestic farmers would become preferred and have the case to pay for necessary high wages for their crappy jobs.
Sorry Mr Aslan but "abandon farming" was what YOU said, not me. "in which case it is low productivity work dragging down our GDP per worker numbers and we don't need it"
As for the rest of it, instructive perhaps to look at the kind of foods we were importing during WWII vs now.
Odd that the Express headline isn't 'Brexit TRIUMPH as farmers GO BUST without CHEAP EU migrants'
"This is exactly what we always wanted", said Nigel Farage. "We don't need these farms, we can buy all the courgettes we want from Holland and Spain".
Is that true or a joke, please? It gets very hard to tell with Brexit sometimes.
It's as true and as much of a joke as any Express story.
I am no fan of Farage but this is a case of him being criticized for being consistent and criticized for being inconsistent. He prefers good living pay and conditions for the British working class over the profits of those exploiting workers. He has also always supported free trade with Europe. Where is the joke?
Probably to be replaced with Richard Littlejohn or Jim Davidson.
If you are going to create a UK Fox News which is the main market GB News is going for you need the populist rightwing presenters to do so, Harri was too mainstream
I have a private bet standing that the Uk will not enter a new lockdown, as defined by pubs and restaurants closing inside again. What are my chances do you think?
I agree actually. Once all adults are double vaxxed (soon) there is simply no moral justification for it. So yes, I would be on your side of the wager.
Al adults will not be vaxxed soon. The number will top out below 90%, I believe.
Tsk, Scotland under performing again.
Scotland, like Wales, has less of the groups who are more anti-vax. If you look at localised vaccination rates, they are actually quite uniform when you are comparing similar groups.
The flip side of diversity.....
On the other hand, plenty of the 'groups' from NI (whoi presumably don't get counted in the 'diversity' stats)? That signal should appear in Scotland, too. But the level in NI isn't perhaps big enough to register anyway.
Well, are Spides diverse from the rest of us? I rather hope so....
Actually, as a complete surprise, NI has a larger number of er... hard core? Christians of the type associated with anti-vax for various spurious reasons.
Even the more er... colourful? denizens of Scotland who express an affinity for various facets of the joy joy that is the NI cultural continuum are not, in contrast, especially religious.
Scotland has secularised much more, basically.
Spide? *looks up on net*..
TSE was talking only the other day tabout the reasons why Glasgow - of all places - could not be considered a really leftie city.
But the difference between NI and W/S is not huge, and a small percentage of that difference ...
Even so, the Free Kirks seem to be absent from this statement (which has the main Presbyterians, Piskies, RCs and others)
Just within my family whats app group there is wide scale deleting of the app and they are getting similar responses from their friends. This needs addressing Boris and now
To do what though
Why cant vaccinated people be released from isolation on day 5 if they have two negative tests on day 3 and 5? Would that not be sufficient and it would hugely reduce the number of lost days?
Stupidity from the Express, but the whole issue is a nonsense. Either the farms can pay more, in which case that is higher wages for people, or they can't, in which case it is low productivity work dragging down our GDP per worker numbers and we don't need it.
Wages are part of the issue. Picking veg isn't the lowest paid job out there, but as it is seasonal you can't be a full time permanent fruit-picker.
The big issue is the work itself. Repetitive. Back-breaking. Cold & wet or hot & parched depending on the weather. People don't want to do it. When there was that big push to get patriotic Brits picking last year there were nowhere near enough applicants and most didn't last very long before quitting.
Your solution is full on Brexiteer inspiration stuff. Lets abandon farming and make ourselves entirely dependent on imports. Perhaps we would look to join a local free market to make the importation of such things as easy and cheap as possible?
If people don't want to do the work because the hours are unreliable and the conditions are crap, then you need to pay them more to do it until it's a better option than other jobs. If even lower end employees can find better jobs elsewhere then it is no loss to the workforce.
Your abandon farming shtick is full on Remainer apocalyptism. We are an island in the Atlantic with easy transportation by boat to most of the world. Even at the height of a global world War against the entire European continent we managed to import food. When we joined the EU we had to cut off much food imports from New Zealand on the other side of the globe.
Your last sentence is even more illogical. Even if the price of importing food in some magical way became too expensive, then the domestic farmers would become preferred and have the case to pay for necessary high wages for their crappy jobs.
Sorry Mr Aslan but "abandon farming" was what YOU said, not me. "in which case it is low productivity work dragging down our GDP per worker numbers and we don't need it"
As for the rest of it, instructive perhaps to look at the kind of foods we were importing during WWII vs now.
I have a private bet standing that the Uk will not enter a new lockdown, as defined by pubs and restaurants closing inside again. What are my chances do you think?
I agree actually. Once all adults are double vaxxed (soon) there is simply no moral justification for it. So yes, I would be on your side of the wager.
Al adults will not be vaxxed soon. The number will top out below 90%, I believe.
I have a private bet standing that the Uk will not enter a new lockdown, as defined by pubs and restaurants closing inside again. What are my chances do you think?
I agree actually. Once all adults are double vaxxed (soon) there is simply no moral justification for it. So yes, I would be on your side of the wager.
Al adults will not be vaxxed soon. The number will top out below 90%, I believe.
Tsk, Scotland under performing again.
Scotland, like Wales, has less of the groups who are more anti-vax. If you look at localised vaccination rates, they are actually quite uniform when you are comparing similar groups.
The flip side of diversity.....
On the other hand, plenty of the 'groups' from NI (whoi presumably don't get counted in the 'diversity' stats)? That signal should appear in Scotland, too. But the level in NI isn't perhaps big enough to register anyway.
Well, are Spides diverse from the rest of us? I rather hope so....
Actually, as a complete surprise, NI has a larger number of er... hard core? Christians of the type associated with anti-vax for various spurious reasons.
Even the more er... colourful? denizens of Scotland who express an affinity for various facets of the joy joy that is the NI cultural continuum are not, in contrast, especially religious.
Scotland has secularised much more, basically.
Spide? *looks up on net*..
TSE was talking only the other day tabout the reasons why Glasgow - of all places - could not be considered a really leftie city.
But the difference between NI and W/S is not huge, and a small percentage of that difference ...
Even so, the Free Kirks seem to be absent from this statement (which has the main Presbyterians, Piskies, RCs and others)
Stupidity from the Express, but the whole issue is a nonsense. Either the farms can pay more, in which case that is higher wages for people, or they can't, in which case it is low productivity work dragging down our GDP per worker numbers and we don't need it.
They can't pay more because their margins are cut to the bone usually supplying the supermarkets which cut the farm gate prices to the bone to give you and me cheap food.
Probably to be replaced with Richard Littlejohn or Jim Davidson.
If you are going to create a UK Fox News which is the main market GB News is going for you need the populist rightwing presenters to do so, Harri was too mainstream
Nick Ferrari is the sort of hire they needed if they wanted to go that route.
I don't know if it's been covered here, but the scenes from the flooding in Germany and Belgium appear almost apocalyptic.
The 'hundreds still missing' is sort of the worst bit.
It's seeing the damage to roofs of two-storey buildings. It's like the Boscastle flood of 2004, but over a much wider area. Horrific.
Can't read "large areas of Belgium" without parsing it as "the size of Belgium." Turns out there are worse things for a country than being principally a unit of measurement.
I don't know if it's been covered here, but the scenes from the flooding in Germany and Belgium appear almost apocalyptic.
Serves the germans right for burning all that coal instead of using nice clean nuclear. Sympathy with the belgians
You are relentlessly unpleasant, aren't you? Many Germans have died.
Which as I noted below I wasn't aware of. Flooding often does not mean deaths and the comment I replied to was the first time I had heard there had been flooding
Presumably he engaged in the occasional piece of pro-Boris spin, too, when he was the Mayor's chief press spokesman. A journalist engaging in spin ... well I never.
I'm inclined to thick that this Pinging story is a little overhyped.
We are told that the sky is falling in because 4.5 million may be told to self-isolate in the next 4 weeks. (BBC number). That is a max of 2 million a day out of the workforce or about 6% if they all do all of it, which they aren't - only a fraction have been obeying.
Baseline sickdays in the UK is about 6 per person per year, in a workforce of 31 million. So on a normal day 750k are out of work.
These tory MPs are Johnson's enablers. Johnson sits at their pleasure.
Do they really think tory voters will simply blame Johnson if they let him bankrupt Britain? Do think really think they will simply forgive and forget if there's a new leader?
Just within my family whats app group there is wide scale deleting of the app and they are getting similar responses from their friends. This needs addressing Boris and now
To do what though
Why cant vaccinated people be released from isolation on day 5 if they have two negative tests on day 3 and 5? Would that not be sufficient and it would hugely reduce the number of lost days?
the number of *theoretical* lost days.
Don't tell me that more than a tiny number of the 500,000 people who got pinged as reported in the papers will actually self isolate.
Stupidity from the Express, but the whole issue is a nonsense. Either the farms can pay more, in which case that is higher wages for people, or they can't, in which case it is low productivity work dragging down our GDP per worker numbers and we don't need it.
They can't pay more because their margins are cut to the bone usually supplying the supermarkets which cut the farm gate prices to the bone to give you and me cheap food.
And if the supermarkets realise they can't get the food for that price because their suppliers go out of business, they will have to start paying more.
Probably to be replaced with Richard Littlejohn or Jim Davidson.
If you are going to create a UK Fox News which is the main market GB News is going for you need the populist rightwing presenters to do so, Harri was too mainstream
Yep, perhaps playing it too safe. Why not spin the bottle and give Lozza Fox a primetime show? Music, chat, some politics, bit of fashion etc. You have to speculate to accumulate.
I don't know if it's been covered here, but the scenes from the flooding in Germany and Belgium appear almost apocalyptic.
Serves the germans right for burning all that coal instead of using nice clean nuclear. Sympathy with the belgians
You are relentlessly unpleasant, aren't you? Many Germans have died.
Which as I noted below I wasn't aware of. Flooding often does not mean deaths and the comment I replied to was the first time I had heard there had been flooding
Stupidity from the Express, but the whole issue is a nonsense. Either the farms can pay more, in which case that is higher wages for people, or they can't, in which case it is low productivity work dragging down our GDP per worker numbers and we don't need it.
They can't pay more because their margins are cut to the bone usually supplying the supermarkets which cut the farm gate prices to the bone to give you and me cheap food.
And if the supermarkets realise they can't get the food for that price because their suppliers go out of business, they will have to start paying more.
Maybe we'll have to see. I am all in favour of such market mechanisms although it might be a bit bloody.
In general it has been accepted that low prices for consumers has been more important than increased profitability for farmers. They (the supermarkets) of course have enormous pricing power and it is likely that only huge scale farms will be able to provide produce at the prices demanded.
Probably to be replaced with Richard Littlejohn or Jim Davidson.
If you are going to create a UK Fox News which is the main market GB News is going for you need the populist rightwing presenters to do so, Harri was too mainstream
Yep, perhaps playing it too safe. Why not spin the bottle and give Lozza Fox a primetime show? Music, chat, some politics, bit of fashion etc. You have to speculate to accumulate.
Thursday nights you could have the weekly UKIP leadership contests as well.
Probably to be replaced with Richard Littlejohn or Jim Davidson.
If you are going to create a UK Fox News which is the main market GB News is going for you need the populist rightwing presenters to do so, Harri was too mainstream
Nick Ferrari is the sort of hire they needed if they wanted to go that route.
But what's in it for Nick F? At the moment, he gets 1.5 million listeners a week. Even if GBN had been a success, there's little chance that he could have done better than that.
As it is, Mike and Snoo (your morning crew) on Reasonably Big City FM might well be pulling in a bigger audience than GBN. And nobody can see if they're taking the knee or not.
Probably to be replaced with Richard Littlejohn or Jim Davidson.
If you are going to create a UK Fox News which is the main market GB News is going for you need the populist rightwing presenters to do so, Harri was too mainstream
Yep, perhaps playing it too safe. Why not spin the bottle and give Lozza Fox a primetime show? Music, chat, some politics, bit of fashion etc. You have to speculate to accumulate.
Better still the Lozza and Nige show, know your audience
Probably to be replaced with Richard Littlejohn or Jim Davidson.
If you are going to create a UK Fox News which is the main market GB News is going for you need the populist rightwing presenters to do so, Harri was too mainstream
Yep, perhaps playing it too safe. Why not spin the bottle and give Lozza Fox a primetime show? Music, chat, some politics, bit of fashion etc. You have to speculate to accumulate.
I'd listen. Are you telling me there would be no listenership for a Breakfast Show with Owen?
Probably to be replaced with Richard Littlejohn or Jim Davidson.
If you are going to create a UK Fox News which is the main market GB News is going for you need the populist rightwing presenters to do so, Harri was too mainstream
Yep, perhaps playing it too safe. Why not spin the bottle and give Lozza Fox a primetime show? Music, chat, some politics, bit of fashion etc. You have to speculate to accumulate.
I'd listen. Are you telling me there would be no listenership for a Breakfast Show with Owen?
Probably to be replaced with Richard Littlejohn or Jim Davidson.
If you are going to create a UK Fox News which is the main market GB News is going for you need the populist rightwing presenters to do so, Harri was too mainstream
Nick Ferrari is the sort of hire they needed if they wanted to go that route.
But what's in it for Nick F? At the moment, he gets 1.5 million listeners a week. Even if GBN had been a success, there's little chance that he could have done better than that.
As it is, Mike and Snoo (your morning crew) on Reasonably Big City FM might well be pulling in a bigger audience than GBN. And nobody can see if they're taking the knee or not.
Well it is possible to be on more than one station at once.....he used (still does?) to do a show on Sky News. So its not an either / or situation.
But I have long said I didn't understand the business case for GB News.
These tory MPs are Johnson's enablers. Johnson sits at their pleasure.
Do they really think tory voters will simply blame Johnson if they let him bankrupt Britain? Do think really think they will simply forgive and forget if there's a new leader?
Think again, children.
I have thought for a while that Starmer's odds on becoming next PM are too long because the shit could truly hit the fan economically pretty quickly for the Tories.
Probably to be replaced with Richard Littlejohn or Jim Davidson.
If you are going to create a UK Fox News which is the main market GB News is going for you need the populist rightwing presenters to do so, Harri was too mainstream
Yep, perhaps playing it too safe. Why not spin the bottle and give Lozza Fox a primetime show? Music, chat, some politics, bit of fashion etc. You have to speculate to accumulate.
I'd listen. Are you telling me there would be no listenership for a Breakfast Show with Owen?
Surely Owen would be on The Daily Trot?
Well I think LBC is great because Nick F is followed by JOB. That is a great approach to shock jocks, such as they are. Lawrence and Owen co-hosting a show or following each other with their own would be radio gold.
I don't know if it's been covered here, but the scenes from the flooding in Germany and Belgium appear almost apocalyptic.
Serves the germans right for burning all that coal instead of using nice clean nuclear. Sympathy with the belgians
You are relentlessly unpleasant, aren't you? Many Germans have died.
Which as I noted below I wasn't aware of. Flooding often does not mean deaths and the comment I replied to was the first time I had heard there had been flooding
It's been all over the BBC.
I dont have a tv or licence, your point?
That you've managed to miss the biggest news story of the last 48 hours. Which I totally believe you have btw. Not implying any funny business.
A possible downside of opting out of mainstream media?
Probably to be replaced with Richard Littlejohn or Jim Davidson.
If you are going to create a UK Fox News which is the main market GB News is going for you need the populist rightwing presenters to do so, Harri was too mainstream
Yep, perhaps playing it too safe. Why not spin the bottle and give Lozza Fox a primetime show? Music, chat, some politics, bit of fashion etc. You have to speculate to accumulate.
Better still the Lozza and Nige show, know your audience
Farage of course used to do LBC and I think that show did ok. It was his comments over BLM that got him the heave ho from there.
There are quite a lot of posts from around June 14th that have aged abysmally when it comes to calling peak Covid and what the cases/hospital numbers can or cannot possibly do.
All spoken with the confidence of Vince Cable predicting the next recession.
Indeed. I tried to snag someone on here into a bet that there would be no significant rise in hospitalizations in June but alas couldn't agree terms. Looking back I was too timid predicting a 4x growth in hospitalizations from the trough...
Probably to be replaced with Richard Littlejohn or Jim Davidson.
If you are going to create a UK Fox News which is the main market GB News is going for you need the populist rightwing presenters to do so, Harri was too mainstream
Yep, perhaps playing it too safe. Why not spin the bottle and give Lozza Fox a primetime show? Music, chat, some politics, bit of fashion etc. You have to speculate to accumulate.
I'd listen. Are you telling me there would be no listenership for a Breakfast Show with Owen?
Surely Owen would be on The Daily Trot?
Well his YouTube channel doesn't exactly do great numbers (lots of videos in the low 10ks, which is piss poor for YouTube and only just over 100k subs, again very poor, especially for somebody with big social media following), so he pops up on the likes of Novara Media a lot to try and build cross channel momentum.
Seems like even lefties don't want to listen to him.
I don't know if it's been covered here, but the scenes from the flooding in Germany and Belgium appear almost apocalyptic.
Serves the germans right for burning all that coal instead of using nice clean nuclear. Sympathy with the belgians
You are relentlessly unpleasant, aren't you? Many Germans have died.
Which as I noted below I wasn't aware of. Flooding often does not mean deaths and the comment I replied to was the first time I had heard there had been flooding
It's been all over the BBC.
I dont have a tv or licence, your point?
That you've managed to miss the biggest news story of the last 48 hours. Which I totally believe you have btw. Not implying any funny business.
A possible downside of opting out of mainstream media?
It happens from time to time but not as often as you think.
The graphic we should all be looking has nothing to do with Covid. It's Fraser Nelson's cheat sheet of the UK's gilt maturity profile
Holy f8ck. Its far more weighted to the front end than I realised and has a stack of maturity rollovers in coming few years.
If the DMO is refinancing those in a rising interest rate environment, URGH.
Brexit Covid Debt Clown
Quadruple whammy.
The solicitor general says a new lockdown in the autumn is certainly on the cards if Johnson sh8ts his rompers again.
If that happens, then a really really bad economic situation doesn't just look possible. It looks likely.
Sunak is clearly briefing the sh8t out of his position, but at some juncture he needs to go further. He needs to threaten to resign. If he hasn't already.
These tory MPs are Johnson's enablers. Johnson sits at their pleasure.
Do they really think tory voters will simply blame Johnson if they let him bankrupt Britain? Do think really think they will simply forgive and forget if there's a new leader?
Think again, children.
I have thought for a while that Starmer's odds on becoming next PM are too long because the shit could truly hit the fan economically pretty quickly for the Tories.
That is not good for Starmer being next PM! It would mean a Tory replacing Bozo.
The problem for Starmer being next PM betting is the Tories have to think Boris will win, but Labour actually end up winning, overturning an 80 seat majority, and Starmer has to stay leader all that time.
I swear I am not making this up given my posts this morning...
Update from our medical practice. A member of staff has tested positive, which means almost everyone there needs to isolate.
Should these doctors and nurses (a) isolate even though I assume they are double jabbed, or (b) still operate and change my Sis-in-law's wound dressing as planned?
They should all take the gold standard PCR test and if negative (b).
Good - this is the kind of logical progression that is needed. We don't want Doctors treating patients if they have Covid. They *may* have Covid. So do we (a) delete the app and hope for the best, or (b) test them?
The problem with going back to testing is two-fold. If we still need to test then it rather highlights to people that Covid is everywhere and remains a problem - the reverse of what message the government want to convey. And our testing programme was never anything less than a disorganised shambles, so a return to sending people 200 miles for a test would be Bad.
Or - radical idea. To support the reduction in restrictions which we all want, we don't deny there is a Covid problem, we resource up the testing programme again, and we implore people to be careful. Masks and testing allows everyone to largely go about their normal lives surely.
The problem with your rhetorical flourishes is that our testing programme, in terms of capacity, is already world leading by a pretty big margin. If a million a day every day isn't enough then this isn't something testing can solve.
It is a bit like asking the government to do more on getting people vaccinated. Which is down to people not taking advantage of the myriad ways to freely get a vaccination. The reasons that people are not getting vaccinated are known. The opinion poll data matches the take up - use the MSOA data on vaccination vs the social mix in the area. The correlation is nearly perfect.....
The tests are there. Capacity well in excess of the usage.
The issue with test and trace was (and is) refusal to self isolate.
On the subject of COVID, incidentally... The admission rate per case seems to have stabilised at around 2%
I'd hope that would continue to go down as more second doses are done, but if it doesn't then we're looking at 1000 admissions a day from yesterday's cases, with potentially further increases to come before the schools close.
By way of comparison admissions reached 1000 a day in mid-October 2020 and it took a further increase to 1500 a day later that month to force Johnson to press the lockdown button.
Suggests we would need 200,000 cases a day to push daily admissions back above 4000, which they reached last winter.
At 200,000 cases a day, which is probably 400,000 infections given what we see in the ONS data, we'd have about two-thirds of the population infected over 12 weeks.
So looks like vaccinations have replaced lockdown as the tool that prevents the hospitals being overwhelmed, but just as Johnson mismanaged the previous two waves with the result of more than 100,000 avoidable deaths, it looks like we are going to see more of the same.
To think that I had previously advocated bringing forward the end of restrictions to before the start of the football tournament. Just as well I'm not in charge.
Death rates are now 0.85% per case, so they will be nothing like the pervious waves.
These tory MPs are Johnson's enablers. Johnson sits at their pleasure.
Do they really think tory voters will simply blame Johnson if they let him bankrupt Britain? Do think really think they will simply forgive and forget if there's a new leader?
Think again, children.
I have thought for a while that Starmer's odds on becoming next PM are too long because the shit could truly hit the fan economically pretty quickly for the Tories.
I mean, obviously she is not impartial but Petronella Wyatt's dismantling of Johnson's character is quite interesting.
These tory MPs are Johnson's enablers. Johnson sits at their pleasure.
Do they really think tory voters will simply blame Johnson if they let him bankrupt Britain? Do think really think they will simply forgive and forget if there's a new leader?
Think again, children.
I have thought for a while that Starmer's odds on becoming next PM are too long because the shit could truly hit the fan economically pretty quickly for the Tories.
Though in that case, Johnson will either be pushed or run away crying like Billy Bunter did when he was caught out. Yarooh and all that.
Then Sunak takes over, is fiscally orthodox and loses the next election because the public wants cake, dammit, and they only voted for Boris because he promised them cake.
The distinction to make is between Starmer as a future PM (more likely than some think) and as the next PM (I just don't see how the choreography works).
Probably to be replaced with Richard Littlejohn or Jim Davidson.
If you are going to create a UK Fox News which is the main market GB News is going for you need the populist rightwing presenters to do so, Harri was too mainstream
Yep, perhaps playing it too safe. Why not spin the bottle and give Lozza Fox a primetime show? Music, chat, some politics, bit of fashion etc. You have to speculate to accumulate.
I'd listen. Are you telling me there would be no listenership for a Breakfast Show with Owen?
He'd pull a decent niche audience, I'd say. Course he does Jeremy Vine. That's his tabloid TV platform.
Probably to be replaced with Richard Littlejohn or Jim Davidson.
If you are going to create a UK Fox News which is the main market GB News is going for you need the populist rightwing presenters to do so, Harri was too mainstream
Yep, perhaps playing it too safe. Why not spin the bottle and give Lozza Fox a primetime show? Music, chat, some politics, bit of fashion etc. You have to speculate to accumulate.
I'd listen. Are you telling me there would be no listenership for a Breakfast Show with Owen?
He'd pull a decent niche audience, I'd say. Course he does Jeremy Vine. That's his tabloid TV platform.
I swear I am not making this up given my posts this morning...
Update from our medical practice. A member of staff has tested positive, which means almost everyone there needs to isolate.
Should these doctors and nurses (a) isolate even though I assume they are double jabbed, or (b) still operate and change my Sis-in-law's wound dressing as planned?
They should all take the gold standard PCR test and if negative (b).
Good - this is the kind of logical progression that is needed. We don't want Doctors treating patients if they have Covid. They *may* have Covid. So do we (a) delete the app and hope for the best, or (b) test them?
The problem with going back to testing is two-fold. If we still need to test then it rather highlights to people that Covid is everywhere and remains a problem - the reverse of what message the government want to convey. And our testing programme was never anything less than a disorganised shambles, so a return to sending people 200 miles for a test would be Bad.
Or - radical idea. To support the reduction in restrictions which we all want, we don't deny there is a Covid problem, we resource up the testing programme again, and we implore people to be careful. Masks and testing allows everyone to largely go about their normal lives surely.
The problem with your rhetorical flourishes is that our testing programme, in terms of capacity, is already world leading by a pretty big margin. If a million a day every day isn't enough then this isn't something testing can solve.
It is a bit like asking the government to do more on getting people vaccinated. Which is down to people not taking advantage of the myriad ways to freely get a vaccination. The reasons that people are not getting vaccinated are known. The opinion poll data matches the take up - use the MSOA data on vaccination vs the social mix in the area. The correlation is nearly perfect.....
The tests are there. Capacity well in excess of the usage.
The issue with test and trace was (and is) refusal to self isolate.
On the subject of COVID, incidentally... The admission rate per case seems to have stabilised at around 2%
I'd hope that would continue to go down as more second doses are done, but if it doesn't then we're looking at 1000 admissions a day from yesterday's cases, with potentially further increases to come before the schools close.
By way of comparison admissions reached 1000 a day in mid-October 2020 and it took a further increase to 1500 a day later that month to force Johnson to press the lockdown button.
Suggests we would need 200,000 cases a day to push daily admissions back above 4000, which they reached last winter.
At 200,000 cases a day, which is probably 400,000 infections given what we see in the ONS data, we'd have about two-thirds of the population infected over 12 weeks.
So looks like vaccinations have replaced lockdown as the tool that prevents the hospitals being overwhelmed, but just as Johnson mismanaged the previous two waves with the result of more than 100,000 avoidable deaths, it looks like we are going to see more of the same.
To think that I had previously advocated bringing forward the end of restrictions to before the start of the football tournament. Just as well I'm not in charge.
Death rates are now 0.85% per case, so they will be nothing like the pervious waves.
I hope you mean 0.*0*85% per case as otherwise we're going to see a lot of dead people very soon!
These tory MPs are Johnson's enablers. Johnson sits at their pleasure.
Do they really think tory voters will simply blame Johnson if they let him bankrupt Britain? Do think really think they will simply forgive and forget if there's a new leader?
Think again, children.
I have thought for a while that Starmer's odds on becoming next PM are too long because the shit could truly hit the fan economically pretty quickly for the Tories.
Though in that case, Johnson will either be pushed or run away crying like Billy Bunter did when he was caught out. Yarooh and all that.
Then Sunak takes over, is fiscally orthodox and loses the next election because the public wants cake, dammit, and they only voted for Boris because he promised them cake.
The distinction to make is between Starmer as a future PM (more likely than some think) and as the next PM (I just don't see how the choreography works).
You presume the Tories will revert to old style Tories. Sunak has been happy to hose around money, he could easily follow the US stated approach which is don't worry, keep borrowing, we will sort this out in 10-15 years time.
Probably to be replaced with Richard Littlejohn or Jim Davidson.
If you are going to create a UK Fox News which is the main market GB News is going for you need the populist rightwing presenters to do so, Harri was too mainstream
Yep, perhaps playing it too safe. Why not spin the bottle and give Lozza Fox a primetime show? Music, chat, some politics, bit of fashion etc. You have to speculate to accumulate.
I'd listen. Are you telling me there would be no listenership for a Breakfast Show with Owen?
He'd pull a decent niche audience, I'd say. Course he does Jeremy Vine. That's his tabloid TV platform.
His YouTube channel suggests otherwise.
Big clickbait video on Tories vs England team.....12k views for that video. In terms of YouTube, that is the equivalent of GB News rated as having no viewers by BARB.
There are quite a lot of posts from around June 14th that have aged abysmally when it comes to calling peak Covid and what the cases/hospital numbers can or cannot possibly do.
All spoken with the confidence of Vince Cable predicting the next recession.
Indeed. I tried to snag someone on here into a bet that there would be no significant rise in hospitalizations in June but alas couldn't agree terms. Looking back I was too timid predicting a 4x growth in hospitalizations from the trough...
The virus is like Barry Gardiner. It keeps getting underestimated.
I think much of this is down to the (very understandable) desire of people to see the back of the wretched thing.
With new first doses down to around 60k per day, we've reached a crossover of sorts. Infection is now doing most of the work to create antibodies in the population.
There are quite a lot of posts from around June 14th that have aged abysmally when it comes to calling peak Covid and what the cases/hospital numbers can or cannot possibly do.
All spoken with the confidence of Vince Cable predicting the next recession.
Indeed. I tried to snag someone on here into a bet that there would be no significant rise in hospitalizations in June but alas couldn't agree terms. Looking back I was too timid predicting a 4x growth in hospitalizations from the trough...
Indeed. It's a terrible weakness not to accept uncertainty. If there's one thing the much-derided models show is that, from here, it could go either way. Far too many posters can't accept that, perhaps because it's more comfortable to fantasize a future and assume it to be certain.
I remember itching to challenge certain people to a bet last autumn, but in the end I realized that I didn't want to wager on humans dying.
There are quite a lot of posts from around June 14th that have aged abysmally when it comes to calling peak Covid and what the cases/hospital numbers can or cannot possibly do.
All spoken with the confidence of Vince Cable predicting the next recession.
Indeed. I tried to snag someone on here into a bet that there would be no significant rise in hospitalizations in June but alas couldn't agree terms. Looking back I was too timid predicting a 4x growth in hospitalizations from the trough...
The virus is like Barry Gardiner. It keeps getting underestimated.
I think much of this is down to the (very understandable) desire of people to see the back of the wretched thing.
Eldest has job contract deep cleaning Halls of Residence. Have gone for UK students on youth minimum wage. Was meant to be team of 10. 4 recruited. 3 have quit after 3 weeks. The supervisor has walked as no time for training whatsoever was given. And no new recruits appeared as repeatedly promised. He told them before they started they needed to pay much, much more. At least they have been paid. They are trying to get an "international" team in now. Meanwhile Halls remain mostly uncleaned.
These tory MPs are Johnson's enablers. Johnson sits at their pleasure.
Do they really think tory voters will simply blame Johnson if they let him bankrupt Britain? Do think really think they will simply forgive and forget if there's a new leader?
Think again, children.
I have thought for a while that Starmer's odds on becoming next PM are too long because the shit could truly hit the fan economically pretty quickly for the Tories.
Though in that case, Johnson will either be pushed or run away crying like Billy Bunter did when he was caught out. Yarooh and all that.
Then Sunak takes over, is fiscally orthodox and loses the next election because the public wants cake, dammit, and they only voted for Boris because he promised them cake.
The distinction to make is between Starmer as a future PM (more likely than some think) and as the next PM (I just don't see how the choreography works).
Unless the Tories fall behind in the polls, which is what did for Thatcher in 1990 giving Major his chance to take No 10, Boris is staying regardless anyway.
The problem for Sunak is he could then find he is the Tory David Miliband or Michael Portillo 2, the heir apparent but at the fag end of the party in government.
He could then find he ends up challenging for the leadership in opposition and ends up losing to someone like Priti Patel or Rees Mogg as David Miliband lost to Ed Miliband and Portillo lost to IDS as the membership looks for an ideologue over a pragmatist, even if the pragmatist looks more like a PM
The graphic we should all be looking has nothing to do with Covid. It's Fraser Nelson's cheat sheet of the UK's gilt maturity profile
Holy f8ck. Its far more weighted to the front end than I realised and has a stack of maturity rollovers in coming few years.
If the DMO is refinancing those in a rising interest rate environment, URGH.
Brexit Covid Debt Clown
Quadruple whammy.
The solicitor general says a new lockdown in the autumn is certainly on the cards if Johnson sh8ts his rompers again.
If that happens, then a really really bad economic situation doesn't just look possible. It looks likely.
Sunak is clearly briefing the sh8t out of his position, but at some juncture he needs to go further. He needs to threaten to resign. If he hasn't already.
At some point, the electorate is going to wake up. The Clown deals well with approval, and unusually poorly with disapproval. His rise was remarkable. His fall is going to be just as stunning.
With new first doses down to around 60k per day, we've reached a crossover of sorts. Infection is now doing most of the work to create antibodies in the population.
What do you think our vaccination ceiling will be for the adult population? 90%?
I swear I am not making this up given my posts this morning...
Update from our medical practice. A member of staff has tested positive, which means almost everyone there needs to isolate.
Should these doctors and nurses (a) isolate even though I assume they are double jabbed, or (b) still operate and change my Sis-in-law's wound dressing as planned?
They should all take the gold standard PCR test and if negative (b).
Good - this is the kind of logical progression that is needed. We don't want Doctors treating patients if they have Covid. They *may* have Covid. So do we (a) delete the app and hope for the best, or (b) test them?
The problem with going back to testing is two-fold. If we still need to test then it rather highlights to people that Covid is everywhere and remains a problem - the reverse of what message the government want to convey. And our testing programme was never anything less than a disorganised shambles, so a return to sending people 200 miles for a test would be Bad.
Or - radical idea. To support the reduction in restrictions which we all want, we don't deny there is a Covid problem, we resource up the testing programme again, and we implore people to be careful. Masks and testing allows everyone to largely go about their normal lives surely.
The problem with your rhetorical flourishes is that our testing programme, in terms of capacity, is already world leading by a pretty big margin. If a million a day every day isn't enough then this isn't something testing can solve.
It is a bit like asking the government to do more on getting people vaccinated. Which is down to people not taking advantage of the myriad ways to freely get a vaccination. The reasons that people are not getting vaccinated are known. The opinion poll data matches the take up - use the MSOA data on vaccination vs the social mix in the area. The correlation is nearly perfect.....
The tests are there. Capacity well in excess of the usage.
The issue with test and trace was (and is) refusal to self isolate.
On the subject of COVID, incidentally... The admission rate per case seems to have stabilised at around 2%
I'd hope that would continue to go down as more second doses are done, but if it doesn't then we're looking at 1000 admissions a day from yesterday's cases, with potentially further increases to come before the schools close.
By way of comparison admissions reached 1000 a day in mid-October 2020 and it took a further increase to 1500 a day later that month to force Johnson to press the lockdown button.
Suggests we would need 200,000 cases a day to push daily admissions back above 4000, which they reached last winter.
At 200,000 cases a day, which is probably 400,000 infections given what we see in the ONS data, we'd have about two-thirds of the population infected over 12 weeks.
So looks like vaccinations have replaced lockdown as the tool that prevents the hospitals being overwhelmed, but just as Johnson mismanaged the previous two waves with the result of more than 100,000 avoidable deaths, it looks like we are going to see more of the same.
To think that I had previously advocated bringing forward the end of restrictions to before the start of the football tournament. Just as well I'm not in charge.
Death rates are now 0.85% per case, so they will be nothing like the pervious waves.
I hope you mean 0.*0*85% per case as otherwise we're going to see a lot of dead people very soon!
Probably to be replaced with Richard Littlejohn or Jim Davidson.
If you are going to create a UK Fox News which is the main market GB News is going for you need the populist rightwing presenters to do so, Harri was too mainstream
Yep, perhaps playing it too safe. Why not spin the bottle and give Lozza Fox a primetime show? Music, chat, some politics, bit of fashion etc. You have to speculate to accumulate.
I'd listen. Are you telling me there would be no listenership for a Breakfast Show with Owen?
He'd pull a decent niche audience, I'd say. Course he does Jeremy Vine. That's his tabloid TV platform.
His YouTube channel suggests otherwise.
Big clickbait video on Tories vs England team.....12k views for that video. In terms of YouTube, that is the equivalent of GB News rated as having no viewers by BARB.
His podcast is rocking the numbers and the critics. Or so he tells me anyway.
It is good tbf. The range, the tone, the guests, it all works pretty well.
With new first doses down to around 60k per day, we've reached a crossover of sorts. Infection is now doing most of the work to create antibodies in the population.
What do you think our vaccination ceiling will be for the adult population? 90%?
Probably around that level. We just need another 2.5% to reach it but at this rate it will take a while.
There are quite a lot of posts from around June 14th that have aged abysmally when it comes to calling peak Covid and what the cases/hospital numbers can or cannot possibly do.
All spoken with the confidence of Vince Cable predicting the next recession.
Indeed. I tried to snag someone on here into a bet that there would be no significant rise in hospitalizations in June but alas couldn't agree terms. Looking back I was too timid predicting a 4x growth in hospitalizations from the trough...
Indeed. It's a terrible weakness not to accept uncertainty. If there's one thing the much-derided models show is that, from here, it could go either way. Far too many posters can't accept that, perhaps because it's more comfortable to fantasize a future and assume it to be certain.
I remember itching to challenge certain people to a bet last autumn, but in the end I realized that I didn't want to wager on humans dying.
--AS
No the criticism is that the uncertainty levels that many of these models have spat out are ridiculous. The "firebreak for two weeks one" a particular example. They predicted somewhere between 600 and 106k lives SAVED in 3 months following a 2 week firebreak.
Firstly that confidence interval is just ludicrous to be useful in practice and at the high end 106k hadn't died over the course a 6 months, in fact 12 months. The thought 2 weeks lockdown could SAVE in that order of magnitude of lives over the course of the proceeding12 weeks is just not credible.
Is the downside of massive government borrowing likely to be less if every government is borrowing at high rates simultaneously? Is there also a potential for internationally agreed "make the debt disappear" mechanisms?
These tory MPs are Johnson's enablers. Johnson sits at their pleasure.
Do they really think tory voters will simply blame Johnson if they let him bankrupt Britain? Do think really think they will simply forgive and forget if there's a new leader?
Think again, children.
I have thought for a while that Starmer's odds on becoming next PM are too long because the shit could truly hit the fan economically pretty quickly for the Tories.
Though in that case, Johnson will either be pushed or run away crying like Billy Bunter did when he was caught out. Yarooh and all that.
Then Sunak takes over, is fiscally orthodox and loses the next election because the public wants cake, dammit, and they only voted for Boris because he promised them cake.
The distinction to make is between Starmer as a future PM (more likely than some think) and as the next PM (I just don't see how the choreography works).
You presume the Tories will revert to old style Tories. Sunak has been happy to hose around money, he could easily follow the US stated approach which is don't worry, keep borrowing, we will sort this out in 10-15 years time.
There are quite a lot of posts from around June 14th that have aged abysmally when it comes to calling peak Covid and what the cases/hospital numbers can or cannot possibly do.
All spoken with the confidence of Vince Cable predicting the next recession.
Indeed. I tried to snag someone on here into a bet that there would be no significant rise in hospitalizations in June but alas couldn't agree terms. Looking back I was too timid predicting a 4x growth in hospitalizations from the trough...
Indeed. It's a terrible weakness not to accept uncertainty. If there's one thing the much-derided models show is that, from here, it could go either way. Far too many posters can't accept that, perhaps because it's more comfortable to fantasize a future and assume it to be certain.
I remember itching to challenge certain people to a bet last autumn, but in the end I realized that I didn't want to wager on humans dying.
--AS
No the criticism is that the uncertainty levels that many of these models have spat out are ridiculous. The "firebreak for two weeks one" a particular example. They predicted somewhere between 600 and 106k lives SAVED in 3 months following a 2 week firebreak.
Firstly that confidence interval is just ludicrous to be useful in practice and at the high end 106k hadn't died over the course a 6 months, in fact 12 months. The thought 2 weeks lockdown could SAVE in that order of magnitude of lives over the course of the proceeding12 weeks is just not credible.
I agree that the particular model output you cite was useless. The more recent SPI-M outputs have actually been quite reasonable (i.e. not stupidly wide), and can pin down the key variables that most affect the range of outcomes.
Also beware that the "credible interval" that modelers like to cite is not a confidence interval. It's not even a prediction interval. This is an area in which the modelers' statistical theory is lacking.
Just within my family whats app group there is wide scale deleting of the app and they are getting similar responses from their friends. This needs addressing Boris and now
To do what though
Why cant vaccinated people be released from isolation on day 5 if they have two negative tests on day 3 and 5? Would that not be sufficient and it would hugely reduce the number of lost days?
Why should anyone go in to self - isolation at all? I still find it a bizarre idea, and it should not be normalised. It is like going in to a form of house arrest. It is only potentially justified where you have actually determined that you are infectious; but right now the severity of the illness is not significant, it doesn't justify it. It was only ever justified when we didn't have enough ventilators to treat people with COVID. If the illness is treatable, then the focus should be on boosting the NHS to treat it, not changing behaviour (with vast social, human and economic harm) to prevent it. This is an aspiring totalitarian biosurveillance state, and it has gone on for far too long; it should be rejected.
I don't actually know anyone who has ever gone in to self isolation, for the whole of the pandemic. None of my neighbours. None of the guys I play football with have called off to say that they are in self isolation. I believe that there is one part of the population who are just covid obsessed, and another that tries to ignore and work around what is going on, doesn't take tests, just ignores any suspect symptoms, and carries on with life. This instinct is reinforced by the voluntary nature of the rules, we are never compelled to take tests, or download the app, and a lot of people don't. Life only potentially becomes a problem for you if you know that you have got the virus. The streetwise thing to do is to reject the whole thing, or just pretend that you are following the rules. And that is undoubtedly what a lot of people are doing.
Is the downside of massive government borrowing likely to be less if every government is borrowing at high rates simultaneously? Is there also a potential for internationally agreed "make the debt disappear" mechanisms?
Probably to be replaced with Richard Littlejohn or Jim Davidson.
If you are going to create a UK Fox News which is the main market GB News is going for you need the populist rightwing presenters to do so, Harri was too mainstream
Yep, perhaps playing it too safe. Why not spin the bottle and give Lozza Fox a primetime show? Music, chat, some politics, bit of fashion etc. You have to speculate to accumulate.
I'd listen. Are you telling me there would be no listenership for a Breakfast Show with Owen?
He'd pull a decent niche audience, I'd say. Course he does Jeremy Vine. That's his tabloid TV platform.
His YouTube channel suggests otherwise.
Big clickbait video on Tories vs England team.....12k views for that video. In terms of YouTube, that is the equivalent of GB News rated as having no viewers by BARB.
His podcast is rocking the numbers and the critics. Or so he tells me anyway.
It is good tbf. The range, the tone, the guests, it all works pretty well.
Well according to chartable, he isn't in the top 200 on iTunes or Spotify in the UK...They only report the first 200.
Youtube figures aren't the whole story for someone in Owen Jones' position, though.
I'm not really into political news via Youtube, but I know in other spheres there are alternative measures that can count at least as much if not more. Someone doing a livestream with a small but dedicated (and profligate) fanbase can receive plenty in terms of super chats. If someone has 10k Youtube subs that doesn't look great, but if an unusually large proportion go on to sign up to Patreon or Subscribestar that can be a pretty handy thing.
I'm not attacking/defending Jones, just saying that views are not the only relevant thing. And, often, they're far from the most important. It's like Guardian sales figures. They punch above their weight because a lot of copies end up in BBC hands.
Stupidity from the Express, but the whole issue is a nonsense. Either the farms can pay more, in which case that is higher wages for people, or they can't, in which case it is low productivity work dragging down our GDP per worker numbers and we don't need it.
They can't pay more because their margins are cut to the bone usually supplying the supermarkets which cut the farm gate prices to the bone to give you and me cheap food.
And if the supermarkets realise they can't get the food for that price because their suppliers go out of business, they will have to start paying more.
Maybe we'll have to see. I am all in favour of such market mechanisms although it might be a bit bloody.
In general it has been accepted that low prices for consumers has been more important than increased profitability for farmers. They (the supermarkets) of course have enormous pricing power and it is likely that only huge scale farms will be able to provide produce at the prices demanded.
The single market didn't help - I have seen root vegetables sourced from eastern Europe because after shipping they were a few pence cheaper than the UK sourced version. Pennies count because nobody is making decent money selling produce at supermarket prices.
"Just put the prices up". Yes, you don't think that wouldn't already have happened if it was feasible? The supermarket net profit margins are tiny, with product areas like produce effectively losing money. They'd like higher costs to cover their overheads. As would the farmers who struggle even with low wagers for pickers.
The crux is that consumers won't pay the going rate. Same with milk - try to pass on the actual costs plus a modest profit margin and you look way out of line with competitors willing to make a loss.
The solution is to go back to a resale price maintenance set-up, which is about as anti-competitive as it gets. Or, all the supermarkets collectively act as a cartel and conspire to put up prices - illegal.
Just within my family whats app group there is wide scale deleting of the app and they are getting similar responses from their friends. This needs addressing Boris and now
To do what though
Why cant vaccinated people be released from isolation on day 5 if they have two negative tests on day 3 and 5? Would that not be sufficient and it would hugely reduce the number of lost days?
the number of *theoretical* lost days.
Don't tell me that more than a tiny number of the 500,000 people who got pinged as reported in the papers will actually self isolate.
Only we know that the numbers locking themselves up are more than a tiny fraction, because of the sheer volume of reports of businesses starting to struggle because of self-isolating workers.
The Government has fashioned a rod for its own back with this app, and seems determined to beat itself with increasing frequency. We were told that they wanted to dial down the sensitivity off the app to try to solve the problem of mass self-isolation, then we were told it would take weeks to make the necessary adjustments, and now, if what Sky have just been reporting is accurate, they've decided not to bother at all.
And it gets worse. The double-jabbed aren't, according to the plan that apparently exists during the current five-minute period, to be excused mandatory self-isolation for another month. But isn't even that contingent on their using daily tests instead to prove that they're negative? The testing infrastructure is, surprise surprise, starting to buckle already under the weight of demand, so Lord alone knows what kind of a state it will be in by the time another four weeks have passed.
It is very difficult to discern through all of this what, if anything, ministers are actually thinking. Is it that they somehow don't comprehend the havoc that is going to be caused by the app? Do they not care? Or have they, perhaps, decided to rely on the public to switch the app off when the burden of millions and millions of pings a week becomes too much for their livelihoods and their sanity to bear?
I don't think they have a clue what they're doing, and without a functioning plan that they can implement and have some faith in, ministers are left entirely at the mercy of events. Which probably means that, as soon as Covid hospital admissions breach a thousand per day, they'll mess their kecks and start slamming everything into reverse again. I wouldn't even be particularly surprised if we ended up with a blind panic "firebreak" lockdown for two or three weeks before the schools come back.
There are quite a lot of posts from around June 14th that have aged abysmally when it comes to calling peak Covid and what the cases/hospital numbers can or cannot possibly do.
All spoken with the confidence of Vince Cable predicting the next recession.
Indeed. I tried to snag someone on here into a bet that there would be no significant rise in hospitalizations in June but alas couldn't agree terms. Looking back I was too timid predicting a 4x growth in hospitalizations from the trough...
Indeed. It's a terrible weakness not to accept uncertainty. If there's one thing the much-derided models show is that, from here, it could go either way. Far too many posters can't accept that, perhaps because it's more comfortable to fantasize a future and assume it to be certain.
I remember itching to challenge certain people to a bet last autumn, but in the end I realized that I didn't want to wager on humans dying.
--AS
No the criticism is that the uncertainty levels that many of these models have spat out are ridiculous. The "firebreak for two weeks one" a particular example. They predicted somewhere between 600 and 106k lives SAVED in 3 months following a 2 week firebreak.
Firstly that confidence interval is just ludicrous to be useful in practice and at the high end 106k hadn't died over the course a 6 months, in fact 12 months. The thought 2 weeks lockdown could SAVE in that order of magnitude of lives over the course of the proceeding12 weeks is just not credible.
I agree that the particular model output you cite was useless. The more recent SPI-M outputs have actually been quite reasonable (i.e. not stupidly wide), and can pin down the key variables that most affect the range of outcomes.
Also beware that the "credible interval" that modelers like to cite is not a confidence interval. It's not even a prediction interval. This is an area in which the modelers' statistical theory is lacking.
--AS
There is a technical aspect in regards to these models that I take issue with in regards to upper and lower bounds / credible / confidence...but it is way behind the scope of this forum.
Reverse view. A serious failure of risk assessment for that sand quarry!
Presumably they thought the river would never get high enough to flood through the village, but once the flow had established it was always going to cut quickly through such soft terrain.
We have a large sand quarry here (one of many) which got very close to filling from the River Idle during the 2019 floods. Fortunately there is a road at the high point which prevented the initiation of erosion and allowed sandbags to be placed.
Here we have the ECJ overriding national law despite it not being an eu competency.
We also have something for all those liberal types that don't think headscarves should be banned but tend euphile
Yes it is. Religious discrimination is covered by Council Directive 2000/78/EC of 27 November 2000 establishing a general framework for equal treatment in employment and occupation. We introduced it by way of regulation and now the Equality Act. I got an update about it this morning as the Tribunals here will take notice of it as a result.
There are quite a lot of posts from around June 14th that have aged abysmally when it comes to calling peak Covid and what the cases/hospital numbers can or cannot possibly do.
All spoken with the confidence of Vince Cable predicting the next recession.
Indeed. I tried to snag someone on here into a bet that there would be no significant rise in hospitalizations in June but alas couldn't agree terms. Looking back I was too timid predicting a 4x growth in hospitalizations from the trough...
Indeed. It's a terrible weakness not to accept uncertainty. If there's one thing the much-derided models show is that, from here, it could go either way. Far too many posters can't accept that, perhaps because it's more comfortable to fantasize a future and assume it to be certain.
I remember itching to challenge certain people to a bet last autumn, but in the end I realized that I didn't want to wager on humans dying.
--AS
Agree - and I would add that in the absence of models, I also would have been confident that cases/hospitalizations couldn't rise much. Genuinely I'm one of people who had their mind changed on this.
It was only fact that these models existed and were created by people I respected that made me realize things could still get pretty/very bad even with 50%/60% of people having had a vaccination.
And fair point on it being icky/perhaps even morally wrong to bet on this. It's a tricky one, but ultimately think I still subscribe to betters' oath.
Comments
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-57856616
https://twitter.com/PoliticsForAlI/status/1416001074629074946?s=20
Your abandon farming shtick is full on Remainer apocalyptism. We are an island in the Atlantic with easy transportation by boat to most of the world. Even at the height of a global world War against the entire European continent we managed to import food. When we joined the EU we had to cut off much food imports from New Zealand on the other side of the globe.
Your last sentence is even more illogical. Even if the price of importing food in some magical way became too expensive, then the domestic farmers would become preferred and have the case to pay for necessary high wages for their crappy jobs.
Holy f8ck. Its far more weighted to the front end than I realised and has a stack of maturity rollovers in coming few years.
If the DMO is refinancing those in a rising interest rate environment, URGH.
Actually, as a complete surprise, NI has a larger number of er... hard core? Christians of the type associated with anti-vax for various spurious reasons.
Even the more er... colourful? denizens of Scotland who express an affinity for various facets of the joy joy that is the NI cultural continuum are not, in contrast, especially religious.
Scotland has secularised much more, basically.
EDIT: and that is before we get to the secular, anti-government groups in NI
By way of comparison admissions reached 1000 a day in mid-October 2020 and it took a further increase to 1500 a day later that month to force Johnson to press the lockdown button.
Suggests we would need 200,000 cases a day to push daily admissions back above 4000, which they reached last winter.
At 200,000 cases a day, which is probably 400,000 infections given what we see in the ONS data, we'd have about two-thirds of the population infected over 12 weeks.
So looks like vaccinations have replaced lockdown as the tool that prevents the hospitals being overwhelmed, but just as Johnson mismanaged the previous two waves with the result of more than 100,000 avoidable deaths, it looks like we are going to see more of the same.
To think that I had previously advocated bringing forward the end of restrictions to before the start of the football tournament. Just as well I'm not in charge.
As for the rest of it, instructive perhaps to look at the kind of foods we were importing during WWII vs now.
If you are going to create a UK Fox News which is the main market GB News is going for you need the populist rightwing presenters to do so, Harri was too mainstream
TSE was talking only the other day tabout the reasons why Glasgow - of all places - could not be considered a really leftie city.
But the difference between NI and W/S is not huge, and a small percentage of that difference ...
Even so, the Free Kirks seem to be absent from this statement (which has the main Presbyterians, Piskies, RCs and others)
https://www.churchofscotland.org.uk/news-and-events/news/2021/articles/faith-leaders-urge-people-to-get-covid-19-vaccine
So no idea what the FCS, FCS(C) etc actually think.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4723884.stm
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/15/britains-ticking-debt-bomb-now-governments-greatest-threat/
We are told that the sky is falling in because 4.5 million may be told to self-isolate in the next 4 weeks. (BBC number). That is a max of 2 million a day out of the workforce or about 6% if they all do all of it, which they aren't - only a fraction have been obeying.
Baseline sickdays in the UK is about 6 per person per year, in a workforce of 31 million. So on a normal day 750k are out of work.
So not that much more than normal sickness.
These tory MPs are Johnson's enablers. Johnson sits at their pleasure.
Do they really think tory voters will simply blame Johnson if they let him bankrupt Britain? Do think really think they will simply forgive and forget if there's a new leader?
Think again, children.
Don't tell me that more than a tiny number of the 500,000 people who got pinged as reported in the papers will actually self isolate.
In general it has been accepted that low prices for consumers has been more important than increased profitability for farmers. They (the supermarkets) of course have enormous pricing power and it is likely that only huge scale farms will be able to provide produce at the prices demanded.
Ask @Rochdale.
As it is, Mike and Snoo (your morning crew) on Reasonably Big City FM might well be pulling in a bigger audience than GBN. And nobody can see if they're taking the knee or not.
Covid
Debt
Clown
Quadruple whammy.
But I have long said I didn't understand the business case for GB News.
A possible downside of opting out of mainstream media?
Seems like even lefties don't want to listen to him.
If that happens, then a really really bad economic situation doesn't just look possible. It looks likely.
Sunak is clearly briefing the sh8t out of his position, but at some juncture he needs to go further. He needs to threaten to resign. If he hasn't already.
The problem for Starmer being next PM betting is the Tories have to think Boris will win, but Labour actually end up winning, overturning an 80 seat majority, and Starmer has to stay leader all that time.
Then Sunak takes over, is fiscally orthodox and loses the next election because the public wants cake, dammit, and they only voted for Boris because he promised them cake.
The distinction to make is between Starmer as a future PM (more likely than some think) and as the next PM (I just don't see how the choreography works).
Extraordinary picture of Erfstadt earth slip.
Big clickbait video on Tories vs England team.....12k views for that video. In terms of YouTube, that is the equivalent of GB News rated as having no viewers by BARB.
I think much of this is down to the (very understandable) desire of people to see the back of the wretched thing.
I remember itching to challenge certain people to a bet last autumn, but in the end I realized that I didn't want to wager on humans dying.
--AS
They are trying to get an "international" team in now.
Meanwhile Halls remain mostly uncleaned.
The problem for Sunak is he could then find he is the Tory David Miliband or Michael Portillo 2, the heir apparent but at the fag end of the party in government.
He could then find he ends up challenging for the leadership in opposition and ends up losing to someone like Priti Patel or Rees Mogg as David Miliband lost to Ed Miliband and Portillo lost to IDS as the membership looks for an ideologue over a pragmatist, even if the pragmatist looks more like a PM
--AS
It is good tbf. The range, the tone, the guests, it all works pretty well.
Firstly that confidence interval is just ludicrous to be useful in practice and at the high end 106k hadn't died over the course a 6 months, in fact 12 months. The thought 2 weeks lockdown could SAVE in that order of magnitude of lives over the course of the proceeding12 weeks is just not credible.
Also beware that the "credible interval" that modelers like to cite is not a confidence interval. It's not even a prediction interval. This is an area in which the modelers' statistical theory is lacking.
--AS
I don't actually know anyone who has ever gone in to self isolation, for the whole of the pandemic. None of my neighbours. None of the guys I play football with have called off to say that they are in self isolation. I believe that there is one part of the population who are just covid obsessed, and another that tries to ignore and work around what is going on, doesn't take tests, just ignores any suspect symptoms, and carries on with life. This instinct is reinforced by the voluntary nature of the rules, we are never compelled to take tests, or download the app, and a lot of people don't. Life only potentially becomes a problem for you if you know that you have got the virus. The streetwise thing to do is to reject the whole thing, or just pretend that you are following the rules. And that is undoubtedly what a lot of people are doing.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/15/european-ruling-headscarves-discrimination-humanists-religious-identity
Here we have the ECJ overriding national law despite it not being an eu competency.
We also have something for all those liberal types that don't think headscarves should be banned but tend euphile
I'm not really into political news via Youtube, but I know in other spheres there are alternative measures that can count at least as much if not more. Someone doing a livestream with a small but dedicated (and profligate) fanbase can receive plenty in terms of super chats. If someone has 10k Youtube subs that doesn't look great, but if an unusually large proportion go on to sign up to Patreon or Subscribestar that can be a pretty handy thing.
I'm not attacking/defending Jones, just saying that views are not the only relevant thing. And, often, they're far from the most important. It's like Guardian sales figures. They punch above their weight because a lot of copies end up in BBC hands.
"Just put the prices up". Yes, you don't think that wouldn't already have happened if it was feasible? The supermarket net profit margins are tiny, with product areas like produce effectively losing money. They'd like higher costs to cover their overheads. As would the farmers who struggle even with low wagers for pickers.
The crux is that consumers won't pay the going rate. Same with milk - try to pass on the actual costs plus a modest profit margin and you look way out of line with competitors willing to make a loss.
The solution is to go back to a resale price maintenance set-up, which is about as anti-competitive as it gets. Or, all the supermarkets collectively act as a cartel and conspire to put up prices - illegal.
The Government has fashioned a rod for its own back with this app, and seems determined to beat itself with increasing frequency. We were told that they wanted to dial down the sensitivity off the app to try to solve the problem of mass self-isolation, then we were told it would take weeks to make the necessary adjustments, and now, if what Sky have just been reporting is accurate, they've decided not to bother at all.
And it gets worse. The double-jabbed aren't, according to the plan that apparently exists during the current five-minute period, to be excused mandatory self-isolation for another month. But isn't even that contingent on their using daily tests instead to prove that they're negative? The testing infrastructure is, surprise surprise, starting to buckle already under the weight of demand, so Lord alone knows what kind of a state it will be in by the time another four weeks have passed.
It is very difficult to discern through all of this what, if anything, ministers are actually thinking. Is it that they somehow don't comprehend the havoc that is going to be caused by the app? Do they not care? Or have they, perhaps, decided to rely on the public to switch the app off when the burden of millions and millions of pings a week becomes too much for their livelihoods and their sanity to bear?
I don't think they have a clue what they're doing, and without a functioning plan that they can implement and have some faith in, ministers are left entirely at the mercy of events. Which probably means that, as soon as Covid hospital admissions breach a thousand per day, they'll mess their kecks and start slamming everything into reverse again. I wouldn't even be particularly surprised if we ended up with a blind panic "firebreak" lockdown for two or three weeks before the schools come back.
Reverse view. A serious failure of risk assessment for that sand quarry!
Presumably they thought the river would never get high enough to flood through the village, but once the flow had established it was always going to cut quickly through such soft terrain.
We have a large sand quarry here (one of many) which got very close to filling from the River Idle during the 2019 floods. Fortunately there is a road at the high point which prevented the initiation of erosion and allowed sandbags to be placed.
It was only fact that these models existed and were created by people I respected that made me realize things could still get pretty/very bad even with 50%/60% of people having had a vaccination.
And fair point on it being icky/perhaps even morally wrong to bet on this. It's a tricky one, but ultimately think I still subscribe to betters' oath.