The crucial question is hospital admissions, because the ratio of deaths to hospital admissions is currently lower than in previous waves. Allowing for a time-lag, these are still running at about 3% of positive cases, while deaths are running at about one tenth of that. (I hope everyone has now given up on the fantasy that hospital admissions and deaths are no longer going to be proportional to positive test results - over the last few weeks, proportionality between them has been rock-solid, though of course with lower constants of proportionality than previously, because of vaccination.)
In January, there was concern about whether the NHS would be able to cope with the rate of hospital admissions, and the narrative centred on whether the lockdown would control them soon enough to avoid people dying without adequate care being available. In the event, there was a peak of around 4000 admissions a day.
With the current growth rate of positive tests, and the current hospitalisation rate, the corresponding rate of positive tests (133k a day) will be reached in - on the basis of today's figures - precisely 4 weeks. Of course, the current rate doesn't allow for any acceleration as a result of dropping restrictions on Monday, or any reduction in self-isolation requirements, which are clearly becoming untenable given the infection rate.
Of course, there is no assurance that - in the absence of any attempt to control the situation - the rate of infection is going to stop at any particular point (and if anyone were stupid enough to bet on the precise accuracy of the modelling, they would deserve to lose every penny). And another very valid point is that whereas past peaks were very short-lived because they were terminated rapidly by a strict lockdown, whatever the peak is in the current "going for broke" scenario, it is going to be sustained over a longer period.
The biggest mystery to me is why some scientific opinion (though clearly not the majority) seems to have backed the "Big Bang" approach. Given the comments reported today from Whitty, he has his doubts.
LOL! 😂😂😂
The hospitalisation to case ratio is still going down and its only going to continue to go down as more second jabs are done.
Do you understand any of the several ways in which that plot isn't what I was talking about?
The trouble with the Internet is that people confuse the ability to cut and paste with the ability to understand the first thing about anything.
But in a way I'd almost be disappointed to encounter anything but mind-numbing stupidity here.
You're desperately pretending that hospitalisations are going up with cases.
But the numbers in hospital are not going up with cases, unlike in January or before, because we progressively have better protection. So as time goes on fewer people are being admitted and those who are, are being discharged quicker, so no the in hospital scenario is nothing like January and is not going to be.
Are you really too stupid to understand that - whatever effect the vaccines have, whatever effect medical care has, and all the rest of it - OTHER THINGS BEING EQUAL, IF CASE NUMBERS DOUBLE, THEN SO WILL HOSPITALISATIONS?
Are you really too stupid to read and understand what I say when I write "though of course with lower constants of proportionality than previously, because of vaccination"? I wrote that specifically to help the terminally thick, and still you can't grasp it! (Would it help if I put it into a different colour for you?)
But what you seem to be unable to get through your thick skull is that all things are not equal. Because we have the vaccines. So again your comment is stupid and meaningless.
2nd jabs are being done in a cohort now that by and large avoids hospitalisation - the under 40s, so the cases to hospitalizations will level out as per Malmesbury graph. Once you hit this point, and it looks like we are there, then hospitalizations will rise (And eventually fall) with cases
But equally once you hit this point there ceases to be much more you can do so need to let nature take its course. So even if cases doubling doubles hospitalisations, if there's little you can do extra to reduce the hospitalisation rate then you simply have to cope with that as well as you can - and better to do that in the summer than the winter.
While we're talking about modelling, the climate scientists want a (much) bigger computer.
The Met Office only recently signed a billion quid deal with Microsoft for a very big supercomputer and two mid-life upgrades which will futher triple the performance. The new system (60 PFLOPS) starts at over 1,000 times as powerful as the Earth Simulator (40 TFLOPS) that Japan commisioned about two decades ago, at a cost of about $1 billion, to solve the same sort of climate model problems.
If enormous speed-ups haven't produced significantly better results that surely points to problems with the models not the amount of compute available.
The problem is chaos. Literally. The famous butterfly effect. Forecasting becomes harder, the further into the future you look at exponential rates.
So to make marginally better forecasts, requires massively more powerful computers.
This is because of reality.
Global warming, though, is a boundary value problem, rather than an initial value problem. In this case what they want the models to be able to do is to reproduce the changed statistics of extreme weather in a warmer world scenario. Chaos doesn't make that difficult. Not being able to resolve the key physical processes - such as convection - is what is making it difficult.
If we are using single-day figures, I'll go for 54000 on 20 July.
A Tuesday? Well, if you insists.
Way too soon, even allowing for the speediness of Delta. The peak will be when all the football fans and "Freedom Day" boozers have spread it to their families. Wed 28th at the earliest.
While we're talking about modelling, the climate scientists want a (much) bigger computer.
The Met Office only recently signed a billion quid deal with Microsoft for a very big supercomputer and two mid-life upgrades which will futher triple the performance. The new system (60 PFLOPS) starts at over 1,000 times as powerful as the Earth Simulator (40 TFLOPS) that Japan commisioned about two decades ago, at a cost of about $1 billion, to solve the same sort of climate model problems.
If enormous speed-ups haven't produced significantly better results that surely points to problems with the models not the amount of compute available.
The problem is chaos. Literally. The famous butterfly effect. Forecasting becomes harder, the further into the future you look at exponential rates.
So to make marginally better forecasts, requires massively more powerful computers.
This is because of reality.
Yes they will always need more powerful computers. The aim of climate models that can accurately predict the future in any sort of useful detail is a seductive trap unless there is a qualitative breakthrough in technique and/or computer technology. The current ones are of course not making predictions except they are treated as making predictions by everyone. All that expense and all that effort and the uncertainty ranges are not shrinking and what they mean is a deep question. "All models are wrong but some models are useful".
Also can we please lay off @Chris (myself included).
He is putting forward a perfectly valid hypothesis which may or may not transpire.
He is comically arrogant but he's probably young or drunk or insecure that's fine we get worse on here from all of us.
In fact I'm guessing that whatever he does IRL he doesn't dare mouth off in the way he does here (who does?) so this is a vital lockdown outlet for him.
Boris Johnson's Scotland adviser claims £6k expenses for speaking six times in Lords last year
EXCLUSIVE: Lord McInnes will soon become a Special Advisor to Boris Johnson and is likely to play a key role in the Tories' plan to strengthen the Union.
While we're talking about modelling, the climate scientists want a (much) bigger computer.
The Met Office only recently signed a billion quid deal with Microsoft for a very big supercomputer and two mid-life upgrades which will futher triple the performance. The new system (60 PFLOPS) starts at over 1,000 times as powerful as the Earth Simulator (40 TFLOPS) that Japan commisioned about two decades ago, at a cost of about $1 billion, to solve the same sort of climate model problems.
If enormous speed-ups haven't produced significantly better results that surely points to problems with the models not the amount of compute available.
The problem is chaos. Literally. The famous butterfly effect. Forecasting becomes harder, the further into the future you look at exponential rates.
So to make marginally better forecasts, requires massively more powerful computers.
This is because of reality.
Global warming, though, is a boundary value problem, rather than an initial value problem. In this case what they want the models to be able to do is to reproduce the changed statistics of extreme weather in a warmer world scenario. Chaos doesn't make that difficult. Not being able to resolve the key physical processes - such as convection - is what is making it difficult.
In a way - but modelling the initial state in enough detail to make the forward projection actually have any relevance brings us back to....
Suffice it to say that there is no amount of compute power that is "enough" - the question is really "How much are you prepared to pay for information on the problem?"
The referee’s full-time whistle brings the semi-final to a close and confirms England’s place in their first big tournament final for 55 years. For thousands of England fans only one thing matters now: making sure they are inside Wembley stadium for Sunday’s match — with or without a ticket.
Some of the stewards at Wembley are allegedly already plotting their own money-making venture, according to fans at the Denmark game. One fan, Chris Tucker, says that “at the Denmark game, stewards were telling us they’d let us in for the final for £1,500 each”.
On social media, fans begin exchanging tips on circumventing security to get into the ground. They know that if they can make it in illicitly — known as jibbing — there will be thousands of empty seats because Covid restrictions mean capacity has been capped at 75 per cent. Several hundred join a group on the confidential messaging app Telegram called “The Wembley Jib”, where plans are made for groups to rush barriers and checkpoints manned by stewards."
There needs to be a serious investigation into this. There was clearly failure by the police and alleged corruption by staff.
It could have easily turned into an even bigger disaster.
We certainly don't deserve to host any football tournaments in the future.
Unless the Times report is totally wrong, it looks like stewards were accepting bribes to let people without tickets and possibly also without Covid tests into the stadium.
When I first worked with chip designers 25 or so years ago, I was surprised to find that the computers they needed to design and simulate their chips were rather powerful. Us software guys had fast computers, but where we might have 8 MB of memory they might have a GB RAM on a shared Sun system (from memory).
So you'd think that nowadays they could run their sims on a phone? No; for as chips have improved in power, so have the requirements to simulate them.
As an example, Mrs J needs 16-32 cores to run a simulation; it produces few gig of output data for analysis, and requires many gigs of memory. Simulations can take 12-24 hours to run. And she is not working on cutting-edge process nodes.
Sure I fully understand that the problems scale-up as well. My skepticism is due to the idea that "if we just had a faster computer we could solve it", all kinds of things were meant to be solved by previous generations of supercomputers but were not.
Christ alive, when Sky News don't have non-independent SAGE on, i turn it on and it is Dr Philip Lee, introduced as simply a GP having a rant about the government needing to grow up....yes it the same Dr Philip Lee ex-mp who of course had a meltdown over Brexit.
Every time they talk of "Independent Sage" I hear the words of Lord Trenchard, when he was told of the formation of the "Independent Striking Force" at the end of WWI, to bomb Germany.
"Independent of whom? God?"
What is the purpose of independent Sage anyway ?
The very name independent seems to imply the other SAGE is not independent in thought.
They plan to reinvent themselves post COVID to,tackle,the gravy train that is climate change.
While we're talking about modelling, the climate scientists want a (much) bigger computer.
The Met Office only recently signed a billion quid deal with Microsoft for a very big supercomputer and two mid-life upgrades which will futher triple the performance. The new system (60 PFLOPS) starts at over 1,000 times as powerful as the Earth Simulator (40 TFLOPS) that Japan commisioned about two decades ago, at a cost of about $1 billion, to solve the same sort of climate model problems.
If enormous speed-ups haven't produced significantly better results that surely points to problems with the models not the amount of compute available.
The problem is chaos. Literally. The famous butterfly effect. Forecasting becomes harder, the further into the future you look at exponential rates.
So to make marginally better forecasts, requires massively more powerful computers.
This is because of reality.
Global warming, though, is a boundary value problem, rather than an initial value problem. In this case what they want the models to be able to do is to reproduce the changed statistics of extreme weather in a warmer world scenario. Chaos doesn't make that difficult. Not being able to resolve the key physical processes - such as convection - is what is making it difficult.
In a way - but modelling the initial state in enough detail to make the forward projection actually have any relevance brings us back to....
Suffice it to say that there is no amount of compute power that is "enough" - the question is really "How much are you prepared to pay for information on the problem?"
The referee’s full-time whistle brings the semi-final to a close and confirms England’s place in their first big tournament final for 55 years. For thousands of England fans only one thing matters now: making sure they are inside Wembley stadium for Sunday’s match — with or without a ticket.
Some of the stewards at Wembley are allegedly already plotting their own money-making venture, according to fans at the Denmark game. One fan, Chris Tucker, says that “at the Denmark game, stewards were telling us they’d let us in for the final for £1,500 each”.
On social media, fans begin exchanging tips on circumventing security to get into the ground. They know that if they can make it in illicitly — known as jibbing — there will be thousands of empty seats because Covid restrictions mean capacity has been capped at 75 per cent. Several hundred join a group on the confidential messaging app Telegram called “The Wembley Jib”, where plans are made for groups to rush barriers and checkpoints manned by stewards."
Sat in the garden, reading PB and watching a family of young long tailed tips coming and going at the feeders. A young great spotted woodpecker and nuthatch too.
Very pleasant.
I'll go for 70001 (a fugly number) next Friday as the peak.
French National Health Authority says it should be considered whether COVID-19 vaccines should be made mandatory for the entire population
Yellow vests washed....To the burning cars....allez allez....
A yellow vest would stand out to spotters. And the bare arms would greatly aid the snipers with the blowdarts. Could be the ideal way to get them vaxxed.
The referee’s full-time whistle brings the semi-final to a close and confirms England’s place in their first big tournament final for 55 years. For thousands of England fans only one thing matters now: making sure they are inside Wembley stadium for Sunday’s match — with or without a ticket.
Some of the stewards at Wembley are allegedly already plotting their own money-making venture, according to fans at the Denmark game. One fan, Chris Tucker, says that “at the Denmark game, stewards were telling us they’d let us in for the final for £1,500 each”.
On social media, fans begin exchanging tips on circumventing security to get into the ground. They know that if they can make it in illicitly — known as jibbing — there will be thousands of empty seats because Covid restrictions mean capacity has been capped at 75 per cent. Several hundred join a group on the confidential messaging app Telegram called “The Wembley Jib”, where plans are made for groups to rush barriers and checkpoints manned by stewards."
There needs to be a serious investigation into this. There was clearly failure by the police and alleged corruption by staff.
It could have easily turned into an even bigger disaster.
We certainly don't deserve to host any football tournaments in the future.
Unless the Times report is totally wrong, it looks like stewards were accepting bribes to let people without tickets and possibly also without Covid tests into the stadium.
I was disgusted - £1,500? You can rent* policemen/women for less than that.....
Christ alive, when Sky News don't have non-independent SAGE on, i turn it on and it is Dr Philip Lee, introduced as simply a GP having a rant about the government needing to grow up....yes it the same Dr Philip Lee ex-mp who of course had a meltdown over Brexit.
Every time they talk of "Independent Sage" I hear the words of Lord Trenchard, when he was told of the formation of the "Independent Striking Force" at the end of WWI, to bomb Germany.
"Independent of whom? God?"
What is the purpose of independent Sage anyway ?
The very name independent seems to imply the other SAGE is not independent in thought.
They plan to reinvent themselves post COVID to,tackle,the gravy train that is climate change.
Ostensibly, it was because Cummings was attending the meetings of SAGE so they were no longer politically independent.
But if that was the case, it’s hard to understand why the members of SAGE didn’t simply resign.
It’s hard to escape the sense that it was actually a useful echo chamber for those pushing for harder domestic restrictions, rather than anything practical.
Christ alive, when Sky News don't have non-independent SAGE on, i turn it on and it is Dr Philip Lee, introduced as simply a GP having a rant about the government needing to grow up....yes it the same Dr Philip Lee ex-mp who of course had a meltdown over Brexit.
Every time they talk of "Independent Sage" I hear the words of Lord Trenchard, when he was told of the formation of the "Independent Striking Force" at the end of WWI, to bomb Germany.
"Independent of whom? God?"
What is the purpose of independent Sage anyway ?
The very name independent seems to imply the other SAGE is not independent in thought.
They plan to reinvent themselves post COVID to,tackle,the gravy train that is climate change.
Ostensibly, it was because Cummings was attending the meetings of SAGE so they were no longer politically independent.
But if that was the case, it’s hard to understand why the members of SAGE didn’t simply resign.
It’s hard to escape the sense that it was actually a useful echo chamber for those pushing for harder domestic restrictions, rather than anything practical.
Also, Cummings claims to be one of the most pro lockdown people in government at the time, so why would iSage be formed as he'd likely be on that side?
When I first worked with chip designers 25 or so years ago, I was surprised to find that the computers they needed to design and simulate their chips were rather powerful. Us software guys had fast computers, but where we might have 8 MB of memory they might have a GB RAM on a shared Sun system (from memory).
So you'd think that nowadays they could run their sims on a phone? No; for as chips have improved in power, so have the requirements to simulate them.
As an example, Mrs J needs 16-32 cores to run a simulation; it produces few gig of output data for analysis, and requires many gigs of memory. Simulations can take 12-24 hours to run. And she is not working on cutting-edge process nodes.
Sure I fully understand that the problems scale-up as well. My skepticism is due to the idea that "if we just had a faster computer we could solve it", all kinds of things were meant to be solved by previous generations of supercomputers but were not.
Others on here know much more about this than I do, but I guess it's not a case of 'solving' it. It's a case of getting more accurate predictions, and being able to run many different scenarios with small initial differences (perhaps monte carlo simulations?) to understand how small differences effect outcomes.
Probably wrong, though.
What we really need is a new cryptocurrency where the mining runs climate simulation data...
While we're talking about modelling, the climate scientists want a (much) bigger computer.
The Met Office only recently signed a billion quid deal with Microsoft for a very big supercomputer and two mid-life upgrades which will futher triple the performance. The new system (60 PFLOPS) starts at over 1,000 times as powerful as the Earth Simulator (40 TFLOPS) that Japan commisioned about two decades ago, at a cost of about $1 billion, to solve the same sort of climate model problems.
If enormous speed-ups haven't produced significantly better results that surely points to problems with the models not the amount of compute available.
The problem is chaos. Literally. The famous butterfly effect. Forecasting becomes harder, the further into the future you look at exponential rates.
So to make marginally better forecasts, requires massively more powerful computers.
This is because of reality.
Global warming, though, is a boundary value problem, rather than an initial value problem. In this case what they want the models to be able to do is to reproduce the changed statistics of extreme weather in a warmer world scenario. Chaos doesn't make that difficult. Not being able to resolve the key physical processes - such as convection - is what is making it difficult.
In a way - but modelling the initial state in enough detail to make the forward projection actually have any relevance brings us back to....
Suffice it to say that there is no amount of compute power that is "enough" - the question is really "How much are you prepared to pay for information on the problem?"
While we're talking about modelling, the climate scientists want a (much) bigger computer.
The Met Office only recently signed a billion quid deal with Microsoft for a very big supercomputer and two mid-life upgrades which will futher triple the performance. The new system (60 PFLOPS) starts at over 1,000 times as powerful as the Earth Simulator (40 TFLOPS) that Japan commisioned about two decades ago, at a cost of about $1 billion, to solve the same sort of climate model problems.
If enormous speed-ups haven't produced significantly better results that surely points to problems with the models not the amount of compute available.
When I first worked with chip designers 25 or so years ago, I was surprised to find that the computers they needed to design and simulate their chips were rather powerful. Us software guys had fast computers, but where we might have 8 MB of memory they might have a GB RAM on a shared Sun system (from memory).
So you'd think that nowadays they could run their sims on a phone? No; for as chips have improved in power, so have the requirements to simulate them.
As an example, Mrs J needs 16-32 cores to run a simulation; it produces few gig of output data for analysis, and requires many gigs of memory. Simulations can take 12-24 hours to run. And she is not working on cutting-edge process nodes.
In 2003 the Met Office relocated from Bracknell to Exeter. They'd planned to install a new supercomputer into the new building in Exeter, but the procurement of that was delayed, so they had to move the existing supercomputer down the motorway, which was an enormous project. It was done very impressively, and since it already came in two (big) boxes they were able to keep running the forecasts on one while they moved the other, and nothing went too wrong, so the forecasts were uninterrupted.
The A14 chip in an iPhone 12 is as powerful as that supercomputer.
My online banking wanted updated information including occupation type, and included 'government minister' as an option - a sign Boris is planning a VERY wide reshuffle?
The crucial question is hospital admissions, because the ratio of deaths to hospital admissions is currently lower than in previous waves. Allowing for a time-lag, these are still running at about 3% of positive cases, while deaths are running at about one tenth of that. (I hope everyone has now given up on the fantasy that hospital admissions and deaths are no longer going to be proportional to positive test results - over the last few weeks, proportionality between them has been rock-solid, though of course with lower constants of proportionality than previously, because of vaccination.)
In January, there was concern about whether the NHS would be able to cope with the rate of hospital admissions, and the narrative centred on whether the lockdown would control them soon enough to avoid people dying without adequate care being available. In the event, there was a peak of around 4000 admissions a day.
With the current growth rate of positive tests, and the current hospitalisation rate, the corresponding rate of positive tests (133k a day) will be reached in - on the basis of today's figures - precisely 4 weeks. Of course, the current rate doesn't allow for any acceleration as a result of dropping restrictions on Monday, or any reduction in self-isolation requirements, which are clearly becoming untenable given the infection rate.
Of course, there is no assurance that - in the absence of any attempt to control the situation - the rate of infection is going to stop at any particular point (and if anyone were stupid enough to bet on the precise accuracy of the modelling, they would deserve to lose every penny). And another very valid point is that whereas past peaks were very short-lived because they were terminated rapidly by a strict lockdown, whatever the peak is in the current "going for broke" scenario, it is going to be sustained over a longer period.
The biggest mystery to me is why some scientific opinion (though clearly not the majority) seems to have backed the "Big Bang" approach. Given the comments reported today from Whitty, he has his doubts.
Just to be clear you are extrapolating to infinity, ignoring any vaccine ceiling, coming up with a big number and saying it looks bad?
The referee’s full-time whistle brings the semi-final to a close and confirms England’s place in their first big tournament final for 55 years. For thousands of England fans only one thing matters now: making sure they are inside Wembley stadium for Sunday’s match — with or without a ticket.
Some of the stewards at Wembley are allegedly already plotting their own money-making venture, according to fans at the Denmark game. One fan, Chris Tucker, says that “at the Denmark game, stewards were telling us they’d let us in for the final for £1,500 each”.
On social media, fans begin exchanging tips on circumventing security to get into the ground. They know that if they can make it in illicitly — known as jibbing — there will be thousands of empty seats because Covid restrictions mean capacity has been capped at 75 per cent. Several hundred join a group on the confidential messaging app Telegram called “The Wembley Jib”, where plans are made for groups to rush barriers and checkpoints manned by stewards."
There needs to be a serious investigation into this. There was clearly failure by the police and alleged corruption by staff.
It could have easily turned into an even bigger disaster.
We certainly don't deserve to host any football tournaments in the future.
Unless the Times report is totally wrong, it looks like stewards were accepting bribes to let people without tickets and possibly also without Covid tests into the stadium.
The security perimeter around that stadium was clearly grossly deficient. That's partly the fault of the hopeless Met (though Cressida Dick's forcefield shields officers from censure for almost anything,) and partly, I would imagine, the fault of the FA. It would be fascinating to know if there was a large cohort of well paid and properly trained stewards to try to deal with the crowds (invited and uninvited) or, just maybe, a small band of badly outnumbered, zero hours contract grunts, for whom any bribes offered would've been worth considerably more than their paltry wages. Hmmmm, I wonder...?
Sat in the garden, reading PB and watching a family of young long tailed tips coming and going at the feeders. A young great spotted woodpecker and nuthatch too.
Very pleasant.
I'll go for 70001 (a fugly number) next Friday as the peak.
When I first worked with chip designers 25 or so years ago, I was surprised to find that the computers they needed to design and simulate their chips were rather powerful. Us software guys had fast computers, but where we might have 8 MB of memory they might have a GB RAM on a shared Sun system (from memory).
So you'd think that nowadays they could run their sims on a phone? No; for as chips have improved in power, so have the requirements to simulate them.
As an example, Mrs J needs 16-32 cores to run a simulation; it produces few gig of output data for analysis, and requires many gigs of memory. Simulations can take 12-24 hours to run. And she is not working on cutting-edge process nodes.
Sure I fully understand that the problems scale-up as well. My skepticism is due to the idea that "if we just had a faster computer we could solve it", all kinds of things were meant to be solved by previous generations of supercomputers but were not.
Others on here know much more about this than I do, but I guess it's not a case of 'solving' it. It's a case of getting more accurate predictions, and being able to run many different scenarios with small initial differences (perhaps monte carlo simulations?) to understand how small differences effect outcomes.
Probably wrong, though.
What we really need is a new cryptocurrency where the mining runs climate simulation data...
The Ethereum blockchain is (incredibly inefficiently) Turing complete - so you could use that to model climate change.
I'm also taking a book on the first time someone posts "there was no way the effect of the Euro 2020 games could have been predicted"
The primary effect of Euro 2020 is some much needed enjoyment across the nation and a lot of much needed trade for the hospitality sector.
Absobloodylutely.
What s night the Denmark game was. Ram-packed pub people singing, bouncers patrolling with big smiles on their faces beer being flung all over the place.
Fantastic.
Like my first dinner last summer with a friend out after months of lockdown.
Absolutely vital for the nation.
Less of a celebration for the poor sods who have to clean the pub afterwards.
Christ alive, when Sky News don't have non-independent SAGE on, i turn it on and it is Dr Philip Lee, introduced as simply a GP having a rant about the government needing to grow up....yes it the same Dr Philip Lee ex-mp who of course had a meltdown over Brexit.
Every time they talk of "Independent Sage" I hear the words of Lord Trenchard, when he was told of the formation of the "Independent Striking Force" at the end of WWI, to bomb Germany.
"Independent of whom? God?"
What is the purpose of independent Sage anyway ?
The very name independent seems to imply the other SAGE is not independent in thought.
They plan to reinvent themselves post COVID to,tackle,the gravy train that is climate change.
Ostensibly, it was because Cummings was attending the meetings of SAGE so they were no longer politically independent.
But if that was the case, it’s hard to understand why the members of SAGE didn’t simply resign.
It’s hard to escape the sense that it was actually a useful echo chamber for those pushing for harder domestic restrictions, rather than anything practical.
Also, Cummings claims to be one of the most pro lockdown people in government at the time, so why would iSage be formed as he'd likely be on that side?
Yes, he now claims to have been pro lockdown.
He also claims to have been the driving force behind academy chains, the man who single-handedly defeated the North East Assembly and to have foreseen the pandemic.
None of those are true either.
Early reports in fact indicate he was pressing SAGE to change their advice so there wouldn’t be lockdowns as he believed the system the Swedes ultimately tried would be better.
While I hate Indie Sage and think they all deserve life sentences and to be stripped of their degrees, I can see how that would undoubtedly compromise their independence.
A more pertinent issue is that since lots of their advice has turned out to be wrong anyway - the advice not to quarantine travel from abroad springs to mind - and their current behaviour borders on the hysterical, they clearly aren’t much good.
I incline to the view, subject to no new and unexpected vaccine-resistant variants, we won't go back to where we were or indeed where we are.
It may well be personal risk aversion will be about for a fair while and I hope the health measures taken on for example tube and train carriages continue and it wouldn't do any of us any harm to wash our hands more frequently and be more aware of our personal responsibility not to knowingly spread any virus (corona, noro or whatever).
Changed attitudes to personal and public health may yet be a positive from this experience.
I'm anticipating a round of booster vaccinations this autumn certainly for the over-50s and perhaps for anyone and everyone else. For those who have gained protection via having the virus itself, it remains to be seen how long that protection will last.
349 first doses in Newham yesterday, 823 second doses so it's 56.2% for first doses and 36% for second doses.
If, as has been claimed, the wave of cases in January has given a degree of protection to large numbers in Newham, this may not matter in the short term but if the take up of booster vaccinations in the autumn is as modest as the current vaccination programme, I fear, to quote the song "there may be trouble ahead".
I'm also taking a book on the first time someone posts "there was no way the effect of the Euro 2020 games could have been predicted"
The primary effect of Euro 2020 is some much needed enjoyment across the nation and a lot of much needed trade for the hospitality sector.
Absobloodylutely.
What s night the Denmark game was. Ram-packed pub people singing, bouncers patrolling with big smiles on their faces beer being flung all over the place.
Fantastic.
Like my first dinner last summer with a friend out after months of lockdown.
Absolutely vital for the nation.
Less of a celebration for the poor sods who have to clean the pub afterwards.
The staff were having a cracking time also.
I'm sure cleaning pubs is cleaning pubs. If they didn't like it they could find a job now not done be an EU national.
My online banking wanted updated information including occupation type, and included 'government minister' as an option - a sign Boris is planning a VERY wide reshuffle?
AIUI, there are certain occupations/identities which trigger special warnings, and politicians are one category, so this may be why.
For the most part they're not fully protected before they've refused the vaccine.
I give up. Even when faced with incontrovertible proof that this is false, you persist in repeating it because you are desperate for it to be true.
lol. It wasn't that long ago that Philip kept insisting we had reached "herd immunity", which we all wish were true, but anyone with the slightest modicum of scientific understanding knew to be nonsense.
We have, in over 90% of adults there are antibodies.
That's not to say there can't be any cases and as I said at the time the virus needs to fill in the gaps with antivaxxers naturally now. It is doing that exactly as I said.
Whilst defending you on the other argument I have to agree with Nigel on this. There is no evidence we have yet reached herd immunity. I wish it were the case but once has to be realistic.
The presence of antivodies is nothing to do with near-guaranteed protection (I do think that double vaccination is a reasonable assurance). A colleague in her 30s with one vaccination weeks ago and no underlying conditions is very seriously ill.
My online banking wanted updated information including occupation type, and included 'government minister' as an option - a sign Boris is planning a VERY wide reshuffle?
My online banking wanted updated information including occupation type, and included 'government minister' as an option - a sign Boris is planning a VERY wide reshuffle?
AIUI, there are certain occupations/identities which trigger special warnings, and politicians are one category, so this may be why.
A "potentially connected" person, IIRC. All contacts to be reported to compliance etc...
While we're talking about modelling, the climate scientists want a (much) bigger computer.
The Met Office only recently signed a billion quid deal with Microsoft for a very big supercomputer and two mid-life upgrades which will futher triple the performance. The new system (60 PFLOPS) starts at over 1,000 times as powerful as the Earth Simulator (40 TFLOPS) that Japan commisioned about two decades ago, at a cost of about $1 billion, to solve the same sort of climate model problems.
If enormous speed-ups haven't produced significantly better results that surely points to problems with the models not the amount of compute available.
The problem is chaos. Literally. The famous butterfly effect. Forecasting becomes harder, the further into the future you look at exponential rates.
So to make marginally better forecasts, requires massively more powerful computers.
This is because of reality.
Global warming, though, is a boundary value problem, rather than an initial value problem. In this case what they want the models to be able to do is to reproduce the changed statistics of extreme weather in a warmer world scenario. Chaos doesn't make that difficult. Not being able to resolve the key physical processes - such as convection - is what is making it difficult.
In a way - but modelling the initial state in enough detail to make the forward projection actually have any relevance brings us back to....
Suffice it to say that there is no amount of compute power that is "enough" - the question is really "How much are you prepared to pay for information on the problem?"
Fundamentally they are not trying to predict the exact weather in 40 years time, only the statistics of it. Conceptually the starting conditions shouldn't matter at all.
What they normally do for a climate model projection is to have a long spin-up model run, that is run with pre-industrial boundary conditions. This is run for long enough that the ocean reaches an equilibrium (this is the spin-up referred to) and then you take starting conditions from this spin-up run at different points in time to start an ensemble of historical runs (than then become future runs) with different starting conditions.
It's very different to a weather forecast where a greater proportion of the computer resource has been put into creating a better synthesis of the observations, and relatively less on the calculations projecting that forward. That's where the initial conditions are the majority of the problem. It was one rejected aircraft observation that did for the Met Office in 1987, for example.
Sat in the garden, reading PB and watching a family of young long tailed tips coming and going at the feeders. A young great spotted woodpecker and nuthatch too.
Very pleasant.
I'll go for 70001 (a fugly number) next Friday as the peak.
French National Health Authority says it should be considered whether COVID-19 vaccines should be made mandatory for the entire population
Yellow vests washed....To the burning cars....allez allez....
Thought experiment: French authoritarianism works, the lives of all the malcontents are made so bloody difficult that they give in, and Macron crushes the Plague. British permissiveness doesn't and the anti-vaxxers and unjabbed kiddies precipitate another lockdown in Winter (because our clapped out healthcare system can't cope with Covid on top of flu.)
How will the British public react?
(a) We praise our Government for upholding liberal values and the right to choose! (b) Make the jab mandatory. Arrest any adult who won't have it, tie them down and inject them by force. Make all the kids have it. If the parents won't consent then take their kids into care and inject them anyway.
I’m old enough to remember when Big G would post a breathless daily countdown to its launch.
If I were involved it’s what I would be pretending at this point
For a couple of weeks I would tune in every day to GB News. At the beginning, its technical flaws – sound and vision out of sync being the most obvious – dominated but a cynic might wonder if this was deliberate – the broadcast equivalent of shitposting – in order to generate interest.
Now it is just dull.
Maybe the problem is that while there could be a market for a daily news review show along the lines of Newsnight, or a daily news discussion show where four or people sit round a desk and talk, like The Pledge on Sky News, that is not to say there is an appetite for the same programmes around the clock. Liberace used to say he played classical music with the boring parts taken out. GB News is The One Show with the interesting bits missing.
Oh and some bloke got sacked for taking the knee, from a channel that claimed to champion free speech.
I’m old enough to remember when Big G would post a breathless daily countdown to its launch.
If I were involved it’s what I would be pretending at this point
For a couple of weeks I would tune in every day to GB News. At the beginning, its technical flaws – sound and vision out of sync being the most obvious – dominated but a cynic might wonder if this was deliberate – the broadcast equivalent of shitposting – in order to generate interest.
Now it is just dull.
Maybe the problem is that while there could be a market for a daily news review show along the lines of Newsnight, or a daily news discussion show where four or people sit round a desk and talk, like The Pledge on Sky News, that is not to say there is an appetite for the same programmes around the clock. Liberace used to say he played classical music with the boring parts taken out. GB News is The One Show with the interesting bits missing.
Oh and some bloke got sacked for taking the knee, from a channel that claimed to champion free speech.
Did they have subtitles for the deaf? Often a very good sign of how professional some organization is these days, esp. as they are mandated to a significant proportion of programmes AIUI.
Models should always be treated with scepticism and challenge. But if you are going to base decisions today on future events in an empirical way, models are the way you do it. Rejecting all models because they can be inaccurate is innumerate; rejecting a particular model because it doesn't fit your prejudice is simply ignorant.
There has been contempt on these pages for the so-called Warwick Model, with people wanting to punish the scientists for dangerously exaggerating the number of cases and hospitalisations, but rather foolishly calling them out before the outcome is known.
So how has the Warwick Model done? On hospitalisations it has to date underestimated the curve. To return to my point, challenge the model on its assumptions, not its conclusions
French National Health Authority says it should be considered whether COVID-19 vaccines should be made mandatory for the entire population
Yellow vests washed....To the burning cars....allez allez....
Thought experiment: French authoritarianism works, the lives of all the malcontents are made so bloody difficult that they give in, and Macron crushes the Plague. British permissiveness doesn't and the anti-vaxxers and unjabbed kiddies precipitate another lockdown in Winter (because our clapped out healthcare system can't cope with Covid on top of flu.)
How will the British public react?
(a) We praise our Government for upholding liberal values and the right to choose! (b) Make the jab mandatory. Arrest any adult who won't have it, tie them down and inject them by force. Make all the kids have it. If the parents won't consent then take their kids into care and inject them anyway.
Well, what do we all think?
Well, the Guardian Comment Is Free section would explode in a firestorm, so that's a plus.
Given who a major chunk of the groups you are going to force vaccinate is......
I’m old enough to remember when Big G would post a breathless daily countdown to its launch.
If I were involved it’s what I would be pretending at this point
For a couple of weeks I would tune in every day to GB News. At the beginning, its technical flaws – sound and vision out of sync being the most obvious – dominated but a cynic might wonder if this was deliberate – the broadcast equivalent of shitposting – in order to generate interest.
Now it is just dull.
Maybe the problem is that while there could be a market for a daily news review show along the lines of Newsnight, or a daily news discussion show where four or people sit round a desk and talk, like The Pledge on Sky News, that is not to say there is an appetite for the same programmes around the clock. Liberace used to say he played classical music with the boring parts taken out. GB News is The One Show with the interesting bits missing.
Oh and some bloke got sacked for taking the knee, from a channel that claimed to champion free speech.
That's very well said.
The way Andrew Neil was describing it before it launched it would be a series of news-related programmes through the day rather than round the clock news, like Ian King Live on Sky as a business-specific show rather than just reporting the news for that hour.
But instead every single show seems to be nothing basically talk and that's it. Boooorrrinnggg.
My online banking wanted updated information including occupation type, and included 'government minister' as an option - a sign Boris is planning a VERY wide reshuffle?
When I first worked with chip designers 25 or so years ago, I was surprised to find that the computers they needed to design and simulate their chips were rather powerful. Us software guys had fast computers, but where we might have 8 MB of memory they might have a GB RAM on a shared Sun system (from memory).
So you'd think that nowadays they could run their sims on a phone? No; for as chips have improved in power, so have the requirements to simulate them.
As an example, Mrs J needs 16-32 cores to run a simulation; it produces few gig of output data for analysis, and requires many gigs of memory. Simulations can take 12-24 hours to run. And she is not working on cutting-edge process nodes.
Sure I fully understand that the problems scale-up as well. My skepticism is due to the idea that "if we just had a faster computer we could solve it", all kinds of things were meant to be solved by previous generations of supercomputers but were not.
Others on here know much more about this than I do, but I guess it's not a case of 'solving' it. It's a case of getting more accurate predictions, and being able to run many different scenarios with small initial differences (perhaps monte carlo simulations?) to understand how small differences effect outcomes.
Probably wrong, though.
What we really need is a new cryptocurrency where the mining runs climate simulation data...
The Ethereum blockchain is (incredibly inefficiently) Turing complete - so you could use that to model climate change.
I'm amazed no-one's done it, given one of the significant concerns about power consumption with crypto mining.
Many years ago, I 'repurposed' (with permission) our stack of build machines to run distributed.net's RC5-64 cracker.
I've just checked, and am surprised to see they're still going - although on RC5-72 now ...
Just had one of the most extraordinary drinks of my life. Under a tree in Green Park
One of my oldest friends, dating back almost 4 decades, who nearly died of Covid last year, revealed that his fairly unexceptional Chelsea* life - married young, then got ill, and got disability benefit to support his wife and kids - has been a total lie, and all this time he has been a drug dealer to the stars. Class A, supermodels, etc
God bless my friends, who can still turn tricks like this, THEY ROCK
*I have changed details
Lock him up.
Indeed!
In Gothenburg (pop. about 580,000) the police have recently identified and charged 745 buyers of cocaine, with a further 660 under investigation. Most of these people are well-off, white middle class family folk. They are going to prison, and social services will be getting involved in their children’s’ lives. In other words a shocking tragedy for thousands of affected people.
Imagine if the London police were similarly proactive. Several government ministers would be dragged off to court, and tens of thousands of middle class families devastated.
It is easy to blame the dealers, but the real evil bastards are the smug shits buying the stuff and getting off scot-free.
In full agreement with Stuart Dickson for once! Wonders will never cease.
What scummy people, thinking they are alright because they are well off.
I met this culture in a couple of city banks back in the day.
The druggies did not even give a thought to the abuse, rape, and murder implicit in the supply chain they chose to help maintain to get their white powder.
And some of them want to lecture others about clothing supply chains and similar. Duh.
I incline to the view, subject to no new and unexpected vaccine-resistant variants, we won't go back to where we were or indeed where we are.
It may well be personal risk aversion will be about for a fair while and I hope the health measures taken on for example tube and train carriages continue and it wouldn't do any of us any harm to wash our hands more frequently and be more aware of our personal responsibility not to knowingly spread any virus (corona, noro or whatever).
Changed attitudes to personal and public health may yet be a positive from this experience.
I'm anticipating a round of booster vaccinations this autumn certainly for the over-50s and perhaps for anyone and everyone else. For those who have gained protection via having the virus itself, it remains to be seen how long that protection will last.
349 first doses in Newham yesterday, 823 second doses so it's 56.2% for first doses and 36% for second doses.
If, as has been claimed, the wave of cases in January has given a degree of protection to large numbers in Newham, this may not matter in the short term but if the take up of booster vaccinations in the autumn is as modest as the current vaccination programme, I fear, to quote the song "there may be trouble ahead".
On the boosters - that's pretty much nailed on now. The Government has said they are planning for them....
The crucial question is hospital admissions, because the ratio of deaths to hospital admissions is currently lower than in previous waves. Allowing for a time-lag, these are still running at about 3% of positive cases, while deaths are running at about one tenth of that. (I hope everyone has now given up on the fantasy that hospital admissions and deaths are no longer going to be proportional to positive test results - over the last few weeks, proportionality between them has been rock-solid, though of course with lower constants of proportionality than previously, because of vaccination.)
In January, there was concern about whether the NHS would be able to cope with the rate of hospital admissions, and the narrative centred on whether the lockdown would control them soon enough to avoid people dying without adequate care being available. In the event, there was a peak of around 4000 admissions a day.
With the current growth rate of positive tests, and the current hospitalisation rate, the corresponding rate of positive tests (133k a day) will be reached in - on the basis of today's figures - precisely 4 weeks. Of course, the current rate doesn't allow for any acceleration as a result of dropping restrictions on Monday, or any reduction in self-isolation requirements, which are clearly becoming untenable given the infection rate.
Of course, there is no assurance that - in the absence of any attempt to control the situation - the rate of infection is going to stop at any particular point (and if anyone were stupid enough to bet on the precise accuracy of the modelling, they would deserve to lose every penny). And another very valid point is that whereas past peaks were very short-lived because they were terminated rapidly by a strict lockdown, whatever the peak is in the current "going for broke" scenario, it is going to be sustained over a longer period.
The biggest mystery to me is why some scientific opinion (though clearly not the majority) seems to have backed the "Big Bang" approach. Given the comments reported today from Whitty, he has his doubts.
LOL! 😂😂😂
The hospitalisation to case ratio is still going down and its only going to continue to go down as more second jabs are done.
Do you understand any of the several ways in which that plot isn't what I was talking about?
The trouble with the Internet is that people confuse the ability to cut and paste with the ability to understand the first thing about anything.
But in a way I'd almost be disappointed to encounter anything but mind-numbing stupidity here.
You're desperately pretending that hospitalisations are going up with cases.
But the numbers in hospital are not going up with cases, unlike in January or before, because we progressively have better protection. So as time goes on fewer people are being admitted and those who are, are being discharged quicker, so no the in hospital scenario is nothing like January and is not going to be.
Are you really too stupid to understand that - whatever effect the vaccines have, whatever effect medical care has, and all the rest of it - OTHER THINGS BEING EQUAL, IF CASE NUMBERS DOUBLE, THEN SO WILL HOSPITALISATIONS?
Are you really too stupid to read and understand what I say when I write "though of course with lower constants of proportionality than previously, because of vaccination"? I wrote that specifically to help the terminally thick, and still you can't grasp it! (Would it help if I put it into a different colour for you?)
Surely only if the pool of unvaccinated remains the same. Although the vaccine is available to anyone >18 it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect that a higher proportion of older individuals get jabbed.
To the extent the pool skews to a lower median age over time it’s plausible that hospitalisation rates will decline over time
French National Health Authority says it should be considered whether COVID-19 vaccines should be made mandatory for the entire population
Yellow vests washed....To the burning cars....allez allez....
Thought experiment: French authoritarianism works, the lives of all the malcontents are made so bloody difficult that they give in, and Macron crushes the Plague. British permissiveness doesn't and the anti-vaxxers and unjabbed kiddies precipitate another lockdown in Winter (because our clapped out healthcare system can't cope with Covid on top of flu.)
How will the British public react?
(a) We praise our Government for upholding liberal values and the right to choose! (b) Make the jab mandatory. Arrest any adult who won't have it, tie them down and inject them by force. Make all the kids have it. If the parents won't consent then take their kids into care and inject them anyway.
Well, what do we all think?
Well, the Guardian Comment Is Free section would explode in a firestorm, so that's a plus.
Given who a major chunk of the groups you are going to force vaccinate is......
Less of the "you" thanks, I'm not actually advocating any such thing!
I'm still hoping that this wave is (a) the last major one we're going to get and (b) that it will burn itself out before either the hospitals collapse under the weight of patients or (far more likely) Boris Johnson wets himself because of the rising admissions before they've had the chance to peak, and slams unlocking into reverse.
There are some grounds for cautious optimism. OTOH we know that this Government is rudderless, clueless, and does so many u-turns that it has long since forgotten in which direction it's facing at any given time. So, we shall see.
For the most part they're not fully protected before they've refused the vaccine.
I give up. Even when faced with incontrovertible proof that this is false, you persist in repeating it because you are desperate for it to be true.
lol. It wasn't that long ago that Philip kept insisting we had reached "herd immunity", which we all wish were true, but anyone with the slightest modicum of scientific understanding knew to be nonsense.
We have, in over 90% of adults there are antibodies.
That's not to say there can't be any cases and as I said at the time the virus needs to fill in the gaps with antivaxxers naturally now. It is doing that exactly as I said.
Whilst defending you on the other argument I have to agree with Nigel on this. There is no evidence we have yet reached herd immunity. I wish it were the case but once has to be realistic.
The presence of antivodies is nothing to do with near-guaranteed protection (I do think that double vaccination is a reasonable assurance). A colleague in her 30s with one vaccination weeks ago and no underlying conditions is very seriously ill.
My daughter has had one jab and contracted the virus 10 days ago. Even given her age (20), fitness (good) and lack of underlying conditions it was still enough to make her pretty unwell although thankfully not enough for hospitalisation.
I'm also taking a book on the first time someone posts "there was no way the effect of the Euro 2020 games could have been predicted"
The primary effect of Euro 2020 is some much needed enjoyment across the nation and a lot of much needed trade for the hospitality sector.
Absobloodylutely.
What s night the Denmark game was. Ram-packed pub people singing, bouncers patrolling with big smiles on their faces beer being flung all over the place.
Fantastic.
Like my first dinner last summer with a friend out after months of lockdown.
Absolutely vital for the nation.
Less of a celebration for the poor sods who have to clean the pub afterwards.
The staff were having a cracking time also.
I'm sure cleaning pubs is cleaning pubs. If they didn't like it they could find a job now not done be an EU national.
Well I thoroughly enjoyed the empty supermarkets while the matches were on. My only regret is that the obviously superior Vindaloo seems to have lost out to Three Lions in the national consciousness.
Just had one of the most extraordinary drinks of my life. Under a tree in Green Park
One of my oldest friends, dating back almost 4 decades, who nearly died of Covid last year, revealed that his fairly unexceptional Chelsea* life - married young, then got ill, and got disability benefit to support his wife and kids - has been a total lie, and all this time he has been a drug dealer to the stars. Class A, supermodels, etc
God bless my friends, who can still turn tricks like this, THEY ROCK
*I have changed details
Lock him up.
Indeed!
In Gothenburg (pop. about 580,000) the police have recently identified and charged 745 buyers of cocaine, with a further 660 under investigation. Most of these people are well-off, white middle class family folk. They are going to prison, and social services will be getting involved in their children’s’ lives. In other words a shocking tragedy for thousands of affected people.
Imagine if the London police were similarly proactive. Several government ministers would be dragged off to court, and tens of thousands of middle class families devastated.
It is easy to blame the dealers, but the real evil bastards are the smug shits buying the stuff and getting off scot-free.
In full agreement with Stuart Dickson for once! Wonders will never cease.
What scummy people, thinking they are alright because they are well off.
I met this culture in a couple of city banks back in the day.
The druggies did not even give a thought to the abuse, rape, and murder implicit in the supply chain they chose to help maintain to get their white powder.
And some of them want to lecture others about clothing supply chains and similar. Duh.
Ethically sourced cocaine, I’ve seen it, it’s the future.
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.
Only because Fraser Nelson has sort of misrepresented the maturity profile and you have misunderstood it.
The QE gilts are theoretically needing to be rolled over but the QE gilts are owned by the Bank of England. So it's a case of rolling over debts that are already owed to the UK. The Treasury doesn't pay any interest on these debts so realistically the BoE can just roll them over indefinitely with the Treasury never paying interest on these.
If you look at the gilts that matter, the ones we actually pay interest on, they have a mean fifteen year, median eleven year, maturity.
The Bank may want or need to use the open market to refinance at some juncture, as you well know.
Yes - selling the bonds on the open market (and then reducing the BoE balance sheet by, in effect, “destroying” the cash received) is the way the BoE reverses Quantitative Easing. My understanding is that the Treasury does pay interest, it has just been using accounting trickery to bank them once paid. The ongoing interest is still outstanding.
If the bonds were actually owned by the Treasury then the SNP argument in 2014 that they were an asset to be divided post independence would actually have merit...
The Bank of England returns to the Government any interest it recieves on QE debt, so it has no impact on the deficit.
As I posed in a think piece (back in the old days when I was a fund manager): if you don't pay interst on it, and you will never be asked to repay the principle, is it really debt?
It is until they admit they are really just printing money
Just had one of the most extraordinary drinks of my life. Under a tree in Green Park
One of my oldest friends, dating back almost 4 decades, who nearly died of Covid last year, revealed that his fairly unexceptional Chelsea* life - married young, then got ill, and got disability benefit to support his wife and kids - has been a total lie, and all this time he has been a drug dealer to the stars. Class A, supermodels, etc
God bless my friends, who can still turn tricks like this, THEY ROCK
*I have changed details
Lock him up.
Indeed!
In Gothenburg (pop. about 580,000) the police have recently identified and charged 745 buyers of cocaine, with a further 660 under investigation. Most of these people are well-off, white middle class family folk. They are going to prison, and social services will be getting involved in their children’s’ lives. In other words a shocking tragedy for thousands of affected people.
Imagine if the London police were similarly proactive. Several government ministers would be dragged off to court, and tens of thousands of middle class families devastated.
It is easy to blame the dealers, but the real evil bastards are the smug shits buying the stuff and getting off scot-free.
In full agreement with Stuart Dickson for once! Wonders will never cease.
What scummy people, thinking they are alright because they are well off.
I met this culture in a couple of city banks back in the day.
The druggies did not even give a thought to the abuse, rape, and murder implicit in the supply chain they chose to help maintain to get their white powder.
And some of them want to lecture others about clothing supply chains and similar. Duh.
Nah, the real,blame lies with various govts that criminalise it.
Blaming the users but giving a free pass to the dealers is as bad as blaming the dealers and giving a free pass to the users.
People will take cocaine. People will supply cocaine.
For the most part they're not fully protected before they've refused the vaccine.
I give up. Even when faced with incontrovertible proof that this is false, you persist in repeating it because you are desperate for it to be true.
lol. It wasn't that long ago that Philip kept insisting we had reached "herd immunity", which we all wish were true, but anyone with the slightest modicum of scientific understanding knew to be nonsense.
We have, in over 90% of adults there are antibodies.
That's not to say there can't be any cases and as I said at the time the virus needs to fill in the gaps with antivaxxers naturally now. It is doing that exactly as I said.
Whilst defending you on the other argument I have to agree with Nigel on this. There is no evidence we have yet reached herd immunity. I wish it were the case but once has to be realistic.
The presence of antivodies is nothing to do with near-guaranteed protection (I do think that double vaccination is a reasonable assurance). A colleague in her 30s with one vaccination weeks ago and no underlying conditions is very seriously ill.
I'm also taking a book on the first time someone posts "there was no way the effect of the Euro 2020 games could have been predicted"
The primary effect of Euro 2020 is some much needed enjoyment across the nation and a lot of much needed trade for the hospitality sector.
Absobloodylutely.
What s night the Denmark game was. Ram-packed pub people singing, bouncers patrolling with big smiles on their faces beer being flung all over the place.
Fantastic.
Like my first dinner last summer with a friend out after months of lockdown.
Absolutely vital for the nation.
Less of a celebration for the poor sods who have to clean the pub afterwards.
The staff were having a cracking time also.
I'm sure cleaning pubs is cleaning pubs. If they didn't like it they could find a job now not done be an EU national.
Well I thoroughly enjoyed the empty supermarkets while the matches were on. My only regret is that the obviously superior Vindaloo seems to have lost out to Three Lions in the national consciousness.
For the most part they're not fully protected before they've refused the vaccine.
I give up. Even when faced with incontrovertible proof that this is false, you persist in repeating it because you are desperate for it to be true.
lol. It wasn't that long ago that Philip kept insisting we had reached "herd immunity", which we all wish were true, but anyone with the slightest modicum of scientific understanding knew to be nonsense.
We have, in over 90% of adults there are antibodies.
That's not to say there can't be any cases and as I said at the time the virus needs to fill in the gaps with antivaxxers naturally now. It is doing that exactly as I said.
Whilst defending you on the other argument I have to agree with Nigel on this. There is no evidence we have yet reached herd immunity. I wish it were the case but once has to be realistic.
The presence of antivodies is nothing to do with near-guaranteed protection (I do think that double vaccination is a reasonable assurance). A colleague in her 30s with one vaccination weeks ago and no underlying conditions is very seriously ill.
My daughter has had one jab and contracted the virus 10 days ago. Even given her age (20), fitness (good) and lack of underlying conditions it was still enough to make her pretty unwell although thankfully not enough for hospitalisation.
One of the issues about communication has been that Covid is a pretty nasty illness. The whole ‘mostly mild’ has done a lot of harm. I think too many people assume vaccination means not getting it at all, so when they do get it, and have a bad few days, it’s a shock. We shouldn’t forget that even a heavy cold can be pretty grim. My one lifetime experience of flu is not one I’d ever want to repeat. It’s harsh, but getting it after vaccination is unlucky, but in the long run will give your immune system a booster.
I’m old enough to remember when Big G would post a breathless daily countdown to its launch.
If I were involved it’s what I would be pretending at this point
For a couple of weeks I would tune in every day to GB News. At the beginning, its technical flaws – sound and vision out of sync being the most obvious – dominated but a cynic might wonder if this was deliberate – the broadcast equivalent of shitposting – in order to generate interest.
Now it is just dull.
Maybe the problem is that while there could be a market for a daily news review show along the lines of Newsnight, or a daily news discussion show where four or people sit round a desk and talk, like The Pledge on Sky News, that is not to say there is an appetite for the same programmes around the clock. Liberace used to say he played classical music with the boring parts taken out. GB News is The One Show with the interesting bits missing.
Oh and some bloke got sacked for taking the knee, from a channel that claimed to champion free speech.
Sorry I am stunned by this news.... The One Show has interesting bits???
Models should always be treated with scepticism and challenge. But if you are going to base decisions today on future events in an empirical way, models are the way you do it. Rejecting all models because they can be inaccurate is innumerate; rejecting a particular model because it doesn't fit your prejudice is simply ignorant.
There has been contempt on these pages for the so-called Warwick Model, with people wanting to punish the scientists for dangerously exaggerating the number of cases and hospitalisations, but rather foolishly calling them out before the outcome is known.
So how has the Warwick Model done? On hospitalisations it has to date underestimated the curve. To return to my point, challenge the model on its assumptions, not its conclusions
Reading the UK headlines today, it seems like the government is descending into an absolute shambles.
Ministers suggesting that France is going "Red" despite having a fraction of the out of control numbers in Britain, which is still theoretically planning to abandon all restrictions. Could anything infuriate a very large number of Tory voters more? Its almost as if Johnson wants to screw things up for his own party... Lib Dems gaining Guildford looks nailed on.
More to the point, Labour gaining Uxbridge and South Ruislip...
Seriously though, it really does seem like the Tories have lost the will to live, every day more spectacularly stupid decisions, from Covid to Sleaze and the corrosive acid of the Hard Brexit desolving more and more of the economy and indeed the very fabric of the Union.
Anyone quoting odds on whether Johnson will hold his own seat? If this tsumani gets going then 1997 could end up looking like a walk in the park...
And yet they lead the polls by a large amount. I know.
My take on the big picture numbers is that three moves have happened since December 2019.
1 Most of the residual BXP vote has moved into the Conservative column (see Hartlepool). So C +2 say
2 A chunk of the Conservative 2019 vote has moved elsewhere, Lib or Lab (see Batley and Spen and Chesham and Amersham). C-4 Lab +4 say.
3 A chunk of the Labour 2019 vote has peeled off to explicit lefty parties (Hartlepool and Batley) or Greens (elsewhere) possibly because they're pining for Jez. Lab -4, Green +4.
The first of those effects looks pretty set in stone now. The second is the one that moves over time, according to perceived government competence.
The third is the interesting one. What's driving it, and can Labour do anything about it?
Somewhat disappointingly from my point of view as a Unionist you also need to have a movement from Scottish Labour to the SNP worth something like -2 across the UK as well. SLAB are not in a good place.
And SLab are the last bastion of the Union. Once they irreversibly fall, the Union falls.
Would SCon renaming themselves the Unionist Party have any discernible impact?
Er, no need. Cosnervative and Unionist Party already.
but everyone thinks of them as the Tories
I was thinking about explicitly renaming plus possibly splitting from the UK party. Aiming to hoover up slab votes from the other side
Models should always be treated with scepticism and challenge. But if you are going to base decisions today on future events in an empirical way, models are the way you do it. Rejecting all models because they can be inaccurate is innumerate; rejecting a particular model because it doesn't fit your prejudice is simply ignorant.
There has been contempt on these pages for the so-called Warwick Model, with people wanting to punish the scientists for dangerously exaggerating the number of cases and hospitalisations, but rather foolishly calling them out before the outcome is known.
So how has the Warwick Model done? On hospitalisations it has to date underestimated the curve. To return to my point, challenge the model on its assumptions, not its conclusions
Just had one of the most extraordinary drinks of my life. Under a tree in Green Park
One of my oldest friends, dating back almost 4 decades, who nearly died of Covid last year, revealed that his fairly unexceptional Chelsea* life - married young, then got ill, and got disability benefit to support his wife and kids - has been a total lie, and all this time he has been a drug dealer to the stars. Class A, supermodels, etc
God bless my friends, who can still turn tricks like this, THEY ROCK
*I have changed details
Lock him up.
Indeed!
In Gothenburg (pop. about 580,000) the police have recently identified and charged 745 buyers of cocaine, with a further 660 under investigation. Most of these people are well-off, white middle class family folk. They are going to prison, and social services will be getting involved in their children’s’ lives. In other words a shocking tragedy for thousands of affected people.
Imagine if the London police were similarly proactive. Several government ministers would be dragged off to court, and tens of thousands of middle class families devastated.
It is easy to blame the dealers, but the real evil bastards are the smug shits buying the stuff and getting off scot-free.
In full agreement with Stuart Dickson for once! Wonders will never cease.
What scummy people, thinking they are alright because they are well off.
I met this culture in a couple of city banks back in the day.
The druggies did not even give a thought to the abuse, rape, and murder implicit in the supply chain they chose to help maintain to get their white powder.
And some of them want to lecture others about clothing supply chains and similar. Duh.
Ethically sourced cocaine, I’ve seen it, it’s the future.
I'd rather a firm like Diageo sources it than drug dealers.
I'm also taking a book on the first time someone posts "there was no way the effect of the Euro 2020 games could have been predicted"
The primary effect of Euro 2020 is some much needed enjoyment across the nation and a lot of much needed trade for the hospitality sector.
Absobloodylutely.
What s night the Denmark game was. Ram-packed pub people singing, bouncers patrolling with big smiles on their faces beer being flung all over the place.
Fantastic.
Like my first dinner last summer with a friend out after months of lockdown.
Absolutely vital for the nation.
Less of a celebration for the poor sods who have to clean the pub afterwards.
The staff were having a cracking time also.
I'm sure cleaning pubs is cleaning pubs. If they didn't like it they could find a job now not done be an EU national.
Well I thoroughly enjoyed the empty supermarkets while the matches were on. My only regret is that the obviously superior Vindaloo seems to have lost out to Three Lions in the national consciousness.
World in Motion mate.
I usually hate the contrary sods who, when someone posts a post like yours feel the need to contradict, but I just want to put on my pads and go into bat for ‘Back Home’. It’s ace.
For the most part they're not fully protected before they've refused the vaccine.
I give up. Even when faced with incontrovertible proof that this is false, you persist in repeating it because you are desperate for it to be true.
lol. It wasn't that long ago that Philip kept insisting we had reached "herd immunity", which we all wish were true, but anyone with the slightest modicum of scientific understanding knew to be nonsense.
We have, in over 90% of adults there are antibodies.
That's not to say there can't be any cases and as I said at the time the virus needs to fill in the gaps with antivaxxers naturally now. It is doing that exactly as I said.
Whilst defending you on the other argument I have to agree with Nigel on this. There is no evidence we have yet reached herd immunity. I wish it were the case but once has to be realistic.
The presence of antivodies is nothing to do with near-guaranteed protection (I do think that double vaccination is a reasonable assurance). A colleague in her 30s with one vaccination weeks ago and no underlying conditions is very seriously ill.
Nick, I’m really sorry to hear of your friends plight. One vaccination a few weeks ago will have given her precious little,immunity. It takes a while to build up
Models should always be treated with scepticism and challenge. But if you are going to base decisions today on future events in an empirical way, models are the way you do it. Rejecting all models because they can be inaccurate is innumerate; rejecting a particular model because it doesn't fit your prejudice is simply ignorant.
There has been contempt on these pages for the so-called Warwick Model, with people wanting to punish the scientists for dangerously exaggerating the number of cases and hospitalisations, but rather foolishly calling them out before the outcome is known.
So how has the Warwick Model done? On hospitalisations it has to date underestimated the curve. To return to my point, challenge the model on its assumptions, not its conclusions
Are you really too stupid to understand that - whatever effect the vaccines have, whatever effect medical care has, and all the rest of it - OTHER THINGS BEING EQUAL, IF CASE NUMBERS DOUBLE, THEN SO WILL HOSPITALISATIONS?
Are you really too stupid to read and understand what I say when I write "though of course with lower constants of proportionality than previously, because of vaccination"? I wrote that specifically to help the terminally thick, and still you can't grasp it! (Would it help if I put it into a different colour for you?)
Surely only if the pool of unvaccinated remains the same. Although the vaccine is available to anyone >18 it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect that a higher proportion of older individuals get jabbed.
To the extent the pool skews to a lower median age over time it’s plausible that hospitalisation rates will decline over time
Despite the unnecessary shouting, you're not actually saying very different things. Chris says that, other things being equal, more cases means more hopsitalisations. Charles doesn't disagree - he suggests that other things are not equal because the pool of unvaccinated will change, and the proprtion who are hospitalised will decline over time.
Quite possibly both things are true. At present, both cases and hospitalisations are rising by about 30% per week, while deaths are rising faster but from a low base. The effect Charles suggests sounds quite long term, so may not help in the next few weeks.
Boris Johnson's Scotland adviser claims £6k expenses for speaking six times in Lords last year
EXCLUSIVE: Lord McInnes will soon become a Special Advisor to Boris Johnson and is likely to play a key role in the Tories' plan to strengthen the Union.
Just had one of the most extraordinary drinks of my life. Under a tree in Green Park
One of my oldest friends, dating back almost 4 decades, who nearly died of Covid last year, revealed that his fairly unexceptional Chelsea* life - married young, then got ill, and got disability benefit to support his wife and kids - has been a total lie, and all this time he has been a drug dealer to the stars. Class A, supermodels, etc
God bless my friends, who can still turn tricks like this, THEY ROCK
*I have changed details
Lock him up.
Indeed!
In Gothenburg (pop. about 580,000) the police have recently identified and charged 745 buyers of cocaine, with a further 660 under investigation. Most of these people are well-off, white middle class family folk. They are going to prison, and social services will be getting involved in their children’s’ lives. In other words a shocking tragedy for thousands of affected people.
Imagine if the London police were similarly proactive. Several government ministers would be dragged off to court, and tens of thousands of middle class families devastated.
It is easy to blame the dealers, but the real evil bastards are the smug shits buying the stuff and getting off scot-free.
In full agreement with Stuart Dickson for once! Wonders will never cease.
What scummy people, thinking they are alright because they are well off.
I met this culture in a couple of city banks back in the day.
The druggies did not even give a thought to the abuse, rape, and murder implicit in the supply chain they chose to help maintain to get their white powder.
And some of them want to lecture others about clothing supply chains and similar. Duh.
Ethically sourced cocaine, I’ve seen it, it’s the future.
As long as it is certified organic. And available from Waitrose.
I'm also taking a book on the first time someone posts "there was no way the effect of the Euro 2020 games could have been predicted"
The primary effect of Euro 2020 is some much needed enjoyment across the nation and a lot of much needed trade for the hospitality sector.
Absobloodylutely.
What s night the Denmark game was. Ram-packed pub people singing, bouncers patrolling with big smiles on their faces beer being flung all over the place.
Fantastic.
Like my first dinner last summer with a friend out after months of lockdown.
Absolutely vital for the nation.
Less of a celebration for the poor sods who have to clean the pub afterwards.
The staff were having a cracking time also.
I'm sure cleaning pubs is cleaning pubs. If they didn't like it they could find a job now not done be an EU national.
Well I thoroughly enjoyed the empty supermarkets while the matches were on. My only regret is that the obviously superior Vindaloo seems to have lost out to Three Lions in the national consciousness.
For the most part they're not fully protected before they've refused the vaccine.
I give up. Even when faced with incontrovertible proof that this is false, you persist in repeating it because you are desperate for it to be true.
lol. It wasn't that long ago that Philip kept insisting we had reached "herd immunity", which we all wish were true, but anyone with the slightest modicum of scientific understanding knew to be nonsense.
We have, in over 90% of adults there are antibodies.
That's not to say there can't be any cases and as I said at the time the virus needs to fill in the gaps with antivaxxers naturally now. It is doing that exactly as I said.
Whilst defending you on the other argument I have to agree with Nigel on this. There is no evidence we have yet reached herd immunity. I wish it were the case but once has to be realistic.
The presence of antivodies is nothing to do with near-guaranteed protection (I do think that double vaccination is a reasonable assurance). A colleague in her 30s with one vaccination weeks ago and no underlying conditions is very seriously ill.
My daughter has had one jab and contracted the virus 10 days ago. Even given her age (20), fitness (good) and lack of underlying conditions it was still enough to make her pretty unwell although thankfully not enough for hospitalisation.
Sorry to hear that Richard.
Plenty of friends' children about that age have had it and it's been horrible but after 10 days it seems to have blown over.
Reading the UK headlines today, it seems like the government is descending into an absolute shambles.
Ministers suggesting that France is going "Red" despite having a fraction of the out of control numbers in Britain, which is still theoretically planning to abandon all restrictions. Could anything infuriate a very large number of Tory voters more? Its almost as if Johnson wants to screw things up for his own party... Lib Dems gaining Guildford looks nailed on.
More to the point, Labour gaining Uxbridge and South Ruislip...
Seriously though, it really does seem like the Tories have lost the will to live, every day more spectacularly stupid decisions, from Covid to Sleaze and the corrosive acid of the Hard Brexit desolving more and more of the economy and indeed the very fabric of the Union.
Anyone quoting odds on whether Johnson will hold his own seat? If this tsumani gets going then 1997 could end up looking like a walk in the park...
And yet they lead the polls by a large amount. I know.
My take on the big picture numbers is that three moves have happened since December 2019.
1 Most of the residual BXP vote has moved into the Conservative column (see Hartlepool). So C +2 say
2 A chunk of the Conservative 2019 vote has moved elsewhere, Lib or Lab (see Batley and Spen and Chesham and Amersham). C-4 Lab +4 say.
3 A chunk of the Labour 2019 vote has peeled off to explicit lefty parties (Hartlepool and Batley) or Greens (elsewhere) possibly because they're pining for Jez. Lab -4, Green +4.
The first of those effects looks pretty set in stone now. The second is the one that moves over time, according to perceived government competence.
The third is the interesting one. What's driving it, and can Labour do anything about it?
Somewhat disappointingly from my point of view as a Unionist you also need to have a movement from Scottish Labour to the SNP worth something like -2 across the UK as well. SLAB are not in a good place.
And SLab are the last bastion of the Union. Once they irreversibly fall, the Union falls.
Would SCon renaming themselves the Unionist Party have any discernible impact?
Er, no need. Cosnervative and Unionist Party already.
but everyone thinks of them as the Tories
I was thinking about explicitly renaming plus possibly splitting from the UK party. Aiming to hoover up slab votes from the other side
Hmm. If I were a SCUP MP and they threatened to split I'd get an English constituency asap. Or think about independence. Only way to get the top post, either way. It didn't go well the last time that idea was tried, which is why Baroness-at-last Davidson got the leadership.
Also I wonder if you are possibly overlooking the presence of the [Ulster] Unionist movement - the point being that 'Unionist' is an ambiguous and slippery word in Scotland, above all in the Labour-voter-rich West Central Belt. Not much point in exchanging an image of lairdy tweeds for bowler hats and Ian Paisley's comrades.
Just had one of the most extraordinary drinks of my life. Under a tree in Green Park
One of my oldest friends, dating back almost 4 decades, who nearly died of Covid last year, revealed that his fairly unexceptional Chelsea* life - married young, then got ill, and got disability benefit to support his wife and kids - has been a total lie, and all this time he has been a drug dealer to the stars. Class A, supermodels, etc
God bless my friends, who can still turn tricks like this, THEY ROCK
*I have changed details
Lock him up.
Indeed!
In Gothenburg (pop. about 580,000) the police have recently identified and charged 745 buyers of cocaine, with a further 660 under investigation. Most of these people are well-off, white middle class family folk. They are going to prison, and social services will be getting involved in their children’s’ lives. In other words a shocking tragedy for thousands of affected people.
Imagine if the London police were similarly proactive. Several government ministers would be dragged off to court, and tens of thousands of middle class families devastated.
It is easy to blame the dealers, but the real evil bastards are the smug shits buying the stuff and getting off scot-free.
In full agreement with Stuart Dickson for once! Wonders will never cease.
What scummy people, thinking they are alright because they are well off.
I met this culture in a couple of city banks back in the day.
The druggies did not even give a thought to the abuse, rape, and murder implicit in the supply chain they chose to help maintain to get their white powder.
And some of them want to lecture others about clothing supply chains and similar. Duh.
Nah, the real,blame lies with various govts that criminalise it.
Blaming the users but giving a free pass to the dealers is as bad as blaming the dealers and giving a free pass to the users.
People will take cocaine. People will supply cocaine.
The war on drugs is a joke. Legalise it.
Yep, one way or the other. The middle way clearly doesn’t work.
Either go down the Bangkok/Dubai/Singapore route of throwing the keys away, else legalise it and make tax money.
I’m impressed at the knowledge of weather and climate modelling on this site. I think of myself as a pretty knowledgeable climatology enthusiast of long standing who typically despairs of the misapprehensions rife in the climate debate, yet here on a political betting site we’re getting informed discussion of the difference between equilibrium climate modelling and short term weather modelling at a level several steps above the crap you see even from the science correspondents of the major media outlets. Bravo. PB is truly a place of renaissance people.
Given over 50% of us have now been double vaccinated and we should all have been offered both jabs by the end of September, the only reason I could see further restrictions in the winter is if the virus mutates again in such a way as to stop the vaccine providing immunity or because a booster jab is needed and while that is taking place
I think what our innumerate media are having trouble coming to terms with is that even if being double vaxxed gives you 95% protection against serious illness 5% of 54m adults is still a hell of a lot of people becoming seriously ill. Roughly 2.7m people over the pandemic although many have already been ill, died or recovered. And when you add in a higher proportion of those not vaxxed for whatever reason we have a rough path ahead of us. The next 6 months are going to be hard for the population and hard for the NHS. Those claiming this is over are mistaken.
But another lockdown would be humiliating and Boris will do his level best to avoid it.
Your maths is wrong. 95% is the protection versus if you were unvaccinated, so 5% isn't your risk of being seriously ill since you didn't have a 100% chance of being seriously ill if you got infected in the first place. If 5% of people originally got seriously ill, and the vaccines have 95% protection, then that means you now have a 0.25% of becoming seriously ill post-vaccines.
Its not over but its as over as its going to be.
Now we need to let nature take its course. If some antivaxxers die then that's their choice. If some vaccinated people do that's a shame but it will be at very low risk.
The way I’m thinking it through is that a bit under half a million needed to be hospitalised when about a third of us were infected pre-vax.
Assume 1.5 million for the whole population, so we’d expect 75,000 or so hospitalisations in a fully vaxxed population.
Add some unvaxxed (c. 10,000 under 18s and maybe 10% of older people unvaxxed, which would be c. 150,000 if it was evenly distributed by age, but given recent stats on the infection-to-hosp rate in the far-younger-skewed unvaxxed population recently, I’d expect maybe a fifth of that.
And, of course, downweight the vaxxed hospitalisations by 10% because the denominator is down.
So: 68,000 vaxxed adults plus 30,000 unvaxxed adults plus 10,000 unvaxxed under-18s would be 108,000 maximum total. We won’t have 100% penetration, even with Delta, so about 100,000 grand total.
If the average stay in hospital is c. 7 days, then we need to spread that over 10 weeks to keep occupancy below 10,000.
For the most part they're not fully protected before they've refused the vaccine.
I give up. Even when faced with incontrovertible proof that this is false, you persist in repeating it because you are desperate for it to be true.
lol. It wasn't that long ago that Philip kept insisting we had reached "herd immunity", which we all wish were true, but anyone with the slightest modicum of scientific understanding knew to be nonsense.
We have, in over 90% of adults there are antibodies.
That's not to say there can't be any cases and as I said at the time the virus needs to fill in the gaps with antivaxxers naturally now. It is doing that exactly as I said.
Whilst defending you on the other argument I have to agree with Nigel on this. There is no evidence we have yet reached herd immunity. I wish it were the case but once has to be realistic.
The presence of antivodies is nothing to do with near-guaranteed protection (I do think that double vaccination is a reasonable assurance). A colleague in her 30s with one vaccination weeks ago and no underlying conditions is very seriously ill.
My daughter has had one jab and contracted the virus 10 days ago. Even given her age (20), fitness (good) and lack of underlying conditions it was still enough to make her pretty unwell although thankfully not enough for hospitalisation.
Comments
Staffing provided by Josias Jessop's Scientist Emporium.
We are Independently Independent of Independent Sage. We are so Independent that we make Alex Salmon look like a member of the DUP.
Just nearly got phished, for the first time.
It was a purported charge from the Royal Mail for a parcel, with email and web and phone.
Spotted the questionable url on the transactions screen and a minor typo - "Rozal Mail".
Not sure why my normal 'don't open a suspect mail' tendency failed on this one; perhaps because I was focused on paying various online accounts.
Interesting that one card provider made me *still* go through several minutes of messages beore getting to the human being who could block it.
He is putting forward a perfectly valid hypothesis which may or may not transpire.
He is comically arrogant but he's probably young or drunk or insecure that's fine we get worse on here from all of us.
In fact I'm guessing that whatever he does IRL he doesn't dare mouth off in the way he does here (who does?) so this is a vital lockdown outlet for him.
You go Chris!
Suffice it to say that there is no amount of compute power that is "enough" - the question is really "How much are you prepared to pay for information on the problem?"
"A bulk order sir? Of course. I'll give you ten for the price of twelve, and throw in a free slot on GB News..."
Splitter.....
Unless the Times report is totally wrong, it looks like stewards were accepting bribes to let people without tickets and possibly also without Covid tests into the stadium.
https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jul/16/pregnant-man-and-multiracial-handshake-emojis-approved-for-launch?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=twt_gu&utm_medium=&utm_source=Twitter&__twitter_impression=true
Yellow vests washed....To the burning cars....allez allez....
The very name independent seems to imply the other SAGE is not independent in thought.
They plan to reinvent themselves post COVID to,tackle,the gravy train that is climate change.
Very pleasant.
I'll go for 70001 (a fugly number) next Friday as the peak.
And the bare arms would greatly aid the snipers with the blowdarts.
Could be the ideal way to get them vaxxed.
25th July.
But if that was the case, it’s hard to understand why the members of SAGE didn’t simply resign.
It’s hard to escape the sense that it was actually a useful echo chamber for those pushing for harder domestic restrictions, rather than anything practical.
Pregnant man 😂😂😂😂
112 852. On August 2nd.
Probably wrong, though.
What we really need is a new cryptocurrency where the mining runs climate simulation data...
"It hasn't gone away, you know!"
The A14 chip in an iPhone 12 is as powerful as that supercomputer.
Just want to be clear.
He also claims to have been the driving force behind academy chains, the man who single-handedly defeated the North East Assembly and to have foreseen the pandemic.
None of those are true either.
Early reports in fact indicate he was pressing SAGE to change their advice so there wouldn’t be lockdowns as he believed the system the Swedes ultimately tried would be better.
While I hate Indie Sage and think they all deserve life sentences and to be stripped of their degrees, I can see how that would undoubtedly compromise their independence.
A more pertinent issue is that since lots of their advice has turned out to be wrong anyway - the advice not to quarantine travel from abroad springs to mind - and their current behaviour borders on the hysterical, they clearly aren’t much good.
I incline to the view, subject to no new and unexpected vaccine-resistant variants, we won't go back to where we were or indeed where we are.
It may well be personal risk aversion will be about for a fair while and I hope the health measures taken on for example tube and train carriages continue and it wouldn't do any of us any harm to wash our hands more frequently and be more aware of our personal responsibility not to knowingly spread any virus (corona, noro or whatever).
Changed attitudes to personal and public health may yet be a positive from this experience.
I'm anticipating a round of booster vaccinations this autumn certainly for the over-50s and perhaps for anyone and everyone else. For those who have gained protection via having the virus itself, it remains to be seen how long that protection will last.
349 first doses in Newham yesterday, 823 second doses so it's 56.2% for first doses and 36% for second doses.
If, as has been claimed, the wave of cases in January has given a degree of protection to large numbers in Newham, this may not matter in the short term but if the take up of booster vaccinations in the autumn is as modest as the current vaccination programme, I fear, to quote the song "there may be trouble ahead".
I'm sure cleaning pubs is cleaning pubs. If they didn't like it they could find a job now not done be an EU national.
My entry:
69,973 on 23/07 by date reported.
What they normally do for a climate model projection is to have a long spin-up model run, that is run with pre-industrial boundary conditions. This is run for long enough that the ocean reaches an equilibrium (this is the spin-up referred to) and then you take starting conditions from this spin-up run at different points in time to start an ensemble of historical runs (than then become future runs) with different starting conditions.
It's very different to a weather forecast where a greater proportion of the computer resource has been put into creating a better synthesis of the observations, and relatively less on the calculations projecting that forward. That's where the initial conditions are the majority of the problem. It was one rejected aircraft observation that did for the Met Office in 1987, for example.
How will the British public react?
(a) We praise our Government for upholding liberal values and the right to choose!
(b) Make the jab mandatory. Arrest any adult who won't have it, tie them down and inject them by force. Make all the kids have it. If the parents won't consent then take their kids into care and inject them anyway.
Well, what do we all think?
Now it is just dull.
Maybe the problem is that while there could be a market for a daily news review show along the lines of Newsnight, or a daily news discussion show where four or people sit round a desk and talk, like The Pledge on Sky News, that is not to say there is an appetite for the same programmes around the clock. Liberace used to say he played classical music with the boring parts taken out. GB News is The One Show with the interesting bits missing.
Oh and some bloke got sacked for taking the knee, from a channel that claimed to champion free speech.
Models should always be treated with scepticism and challenge. But if you are going to base decisions today on future events in an empirical way, models are the way you do it. Rejecting all models because they can be inaccurate is innumerate; rejecting a particular model because it doesn't fit your prejudice is simply ignorant.
There has been contempt on these pages for the so-called Warwick Model, with people wanting to punish the scientists for dangerously exaggerating the number of cases and hospitalisations, but rather foolishly calling them out before the outcome is known.
So how has the Warwick Model done? On hospitalisations it has to date underestimated the curve. To return to my point, challenge the model on its assumptions, not its conclusions
Source: https://twitter.com/PaulMainwood/status/1415774164795994123
Given who a major chunk of the groups you are going to force vaccinate is......
The way Andrew Neil was describing it before it launched it would be a series of news-related programmes through the day rather than round the clock news, like Ian King Live on Sky as a business-specific show rather than just reporting the news for that hour.
But instead every single show seems to be nothing basically talk and that's it. Boooorrrinnggg.
Many years ago, I 'repurposed' (with permission) our stack of build machines to run distributed.net's RC5-64 cracker.
I've just checked, and am surprised to see they're still going - although on RC5-72 now ...
What scummy people, thinking they are alright because they are well off.
I met this culture in a couple of city banks back in the day.
The druggies did not even give a thought to the abuse, rape, and murder implicit in the supply chain they chose to help maintain to get their white powder.
And some of them want to lecture others about clothing supply chains and similar. Duh.
To the extent the pool skews to a lower median age over time it’s plausible that hospitalisation rates will decline over time
I'm still hoping that this wave is (a) the last major one we're going to get and (b) that it will burn itself out before either the hospitals collapse under the weight of patients or (far more likely) Boris Johnson wets himself because of the rising admissions before they've had the chance to peak, and slams unlocking into reverse.
There are some grounds for cautious optimism. OTOH we know that this Government is rudderless, clueless, and does so many u-turns that it has long since forgotten in which direction it's facing at any given time. So, we shall see.
Blaming the users but giving a free pass to the dealers is as bad as blaming the dealers and giving a free pass to the users.
People will take cocaine. People will supply cocaine.
The war on drugs is a joke. Legalise it.
https://twitter.com/RP131/status/1404748268979081217
By this date they were forecasting 2,300 daily admissions.
I was thinking about explicitly renaming plus possibly splitting from the UK party. Aiming to hoover up slab votes from the other side
Quite possibly both things are true. At present, both cases and hospitalisations are rising by about 30% per week, while deaths are rising faster but from a low base. The effect Charles suggests sounds quite long term, so may not help in the next few weeks.
Quite a good system in the Lords; only pay people when they are actually working.
I wonder if they could do that at Holyrood?
Plenty of friends' children about that age have had it and it's been horrible but after 10 days it seems to have blown over.
Also I wonder if you are possibly overlooking the presence of the [Ulster] Unionist movement - the point being that 'Unionist' is an ambiguous and slippery word in Scotland, above all in the Labour-voter-rich West Central Belt. Not much point in exchanging an image of lairdy tweeds for bowler hats and Ian Paisley's comrades.
Either go down the Bangkok/Dubai/Singapore route of throwing the keys away, else legalise it and make tax money.
Assume 1.5 million for the whole population, so we’d expect 75,000 or so hospitalisations in a fully vaxxed population.
Add some unvaxxed (c. 10,000 under 18s and maybe 10% of older people unvaxxed, which would be c. 150,000 if it was evenly distributed by age, but given recent stats on the infection-to-hosp rate in the far-younger-skewed unvaxxed population recently, I’d expect maybe a fifth of that.
And, of course, downweight the vaxxed hospitalisations by 10% because the denominator is down.
So: 68,000 vaxxed adults plus 30,000 unvaxxed adults plus 10,000 unvaxxed under-18s would be 108,000 maximum total. We won’t have 100% penetration, even with Delta, so about 100,000 grand total.
If the average stay in hospital is c. 7 days, then we need to spread that over 10 weeks to keep occupancy below 10,000.
Will be interesting to watch the experiment sprint race tomorrow.