Dear me, do people really think that checking a vaccine certificate requires communicating with government servers? I suppose such spectacular ignorance is because the government has stupidly not explained anything or laid the groundwork, but it's very hard to correct such nonsensical beliefs once they get around.
I suspect frankly it is you that doesn't know what you are talking about. If there are no checks with government servers there is no defense against fakes simple as that.
Dear me, do people really think that checking a vaccine certificate requires communicating with government servers? I suppose such spectacular ignorance is because the government has stupidly not explained anything or laid the groundwork, but it's very hard to correct such nonsensical beliefs once they get around.
You would need to have a secure chain API with a bring your own device front end to scan the QR code and get a response from the server saying it's legit. Otherwise why bother?
Could you not just bring your paper copy?
Maybe but surely that would also require a secondary photo ID.
It will piss even more off if they try to implement it....imagine long queues building up outside pubs. restaurants, nightclubs,gigs ...."Sorry cant let you in because cant verify your status as the servers are down"
Very forseeable so the gov't will of course ensure the server capacity is increased prior to it being a condition
You can't increase the capacity that much, botnets are cheap to hire and IoT has provide many more millions of devices to run them on. Plus when did you last see a competent government it operation
The vaccine passport is on the users phone. No need for the nightclub to have computer access, just a doorman who knows what to look for. Same when you fly etc*. So no government IT to bring down.
*One of our nurses was in Spain a couple of weeks back. No one checked either way.
If it is just on the users phones then its easily forgeable and therefore pointless. I just get a friend to take a screenshot of theirs. Same with a paper version
I believe one of the debates happening in government is about the 'easy to fraud' problem.
They can debate all they want but like most things governments dont have the brightest people working for them, the brightest in it are outside and delight in a challenge of breaking things wide open and figuring out how to
Delighting in working out how to bring an increased risk of Covid infection into a nightclub because you are unjabbed, most people are sensible and will comply
Morning all. Sorry, only just read the @Cyclefree PT header on the stubborn Tory poll lead. It's a very good helicopter piece.
"If the choice is between the Tories and an empty space, the latter is unlikely to win."
The above line jumped out at me. You read it and reflexively nod and think "too right". It's one of those.
But then - if you're me - you dwell on it a while and wonder whether it is such a slam dunk. This government (and particularly this PM) are increasingly being viewed by anybody with eyes to see and ears to listen and noses to smell and mouths to - ok ok you get the picture - as an utter shambles. No principles. No competence. 'No' as in ZERO.
They've got away with it so far (pollwise) but for how long? Brexit is shedding its potency as iconic wedge issue. Slowly, to be sure, but it is. They can poke the fires of its culture war aspect but is this enough to stay at 40%? I doubt it. Tough times lie ahead with the economy and in Fiscal Corner. Leveling Up, for example, has to move from soundbite to hard policy choices and this will piss some people off. If it doesn't it's not real and remains a soundbite. Which would also start to piss some people off, just a different bunch, those Leavers who voted for this agenda, believing it to be genuine. Because these folk are not total blithering idiots - not in the main and not all the time. Whatever, poll damage is coming either way. Ditto with Social Care. There are no votes in that. Only negative ones if you get serious about it. Ask Andy Burnham or Theresa May. So the same choice there. A solid plan and loss of popularity or a cop out and loss of popularity.
Now we have this mismanaged exit from the pandemic. Plus (the header here) further damaging reveals from Cummings - who was right there in the middle of it - about the response and attitude throughout. The PM at key moments in thrall to bizarre right-wing 'contrarians' for heaven's sake, most of them no wiser than our PB one. His focus not on preventing Covid running amok in England and killing tens of thousands but on something far more important - impressing the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator.
I could go on. The challenge is to stop. But I can do that too. I'm going out maskless in a minute. Big moment. The point is, surely all of this shit is probably going to lead within a year to the Cons polling no better than mid 30s. And then come the GE, given things can only get worse, if the choice is indeed between more of the same or a nice cool empty space fronted by a non-scary, competent, decent sounding bloke who looks like he could run a whelk stall and could manage to tell the truth every now and again, well for me that's a toss up.
I take issue with 'poke the fires of its culture war aspect'. Blaming the right for the culture war is like blaming Poland for World War Two. The right isn't trying to move back to 1953, it just doesn't want to be dragged forward to year zero. All the movement on the culture war is from the left. The right isn't trying to rewrite history. The right is, occasionally, suggesting that perhaps the left might be going a bit too far. Now you're astute, and you'll notice I'm saying 'the left' and not 'the Labour Party'. SKS is trying his hardest to avoid the loonier fringes of the culture war, though his party occasionally drag him into it. But to the electorate as a whole, that's not enough. Neil Kinnock was no culture warrior. But the culture warriors of the wider left - the ILEA, for example - lost him votes. How does SKS distance Labour from the likes of Zarah Sultana and Nadia Whittome?
EDIT - and have you read the Telegraph or the Spectator recently? If the PM has been trying to impress the Telegraph and the Spectator, he's going about it abysmally. What he's trying to do (and succeeding) is to impress the authoritarian lobby which want more laws on other people (like @gealbhan yesterday - although I wasn't sure how serious he was).
EDIT2: And good luck going maskless. Enjoy exchanging smiles with other demaskers!
As named, I’ll explain.
My point being the argument between authoritarian and libertarian is not a left right one, nor is it a case of one side being right, the other wrong. It’s a case of both should listen to the other and debate the other, to help get things right.
It shows up clearly in Covid politics, commentators in the Telegraph (Conservative in party politics, split between libertarian and authoritarian in Covid response) and the Daily Mail (Conservative till sixties, populist right since) also to a smaller degree split between authoritarian and libertarian, though tending toward libertarian in editorial.
In downing street yesterday, JVT Libertarian, open nite clubs, Vallance authoritarian, against doing it right now.
But with the success of vaccines, things have now moved on, old media and new media like this blog very slow to realise how things have moved. It’s never been, if not now then when, it was always going to be how, post vaccine.
It’s not about vaccines now, it’s about behaviours. The horse taken to water (jabbed) could say the easier equation than getting it to drink (behaviour) hence now proper debate required between authoritarian and libertarian to achieve those behaviours.
The government have already decided the road ahead and won’t u turn. My evidence? The main headline this lunchtime, government no intention to tackle pingdemic, they are determined to generate it, latest missive from Downing Street, if you are pinged then isolate.
So if you delete the app, ie show the wrong behaviour, the government won’t concede to you, they will coerce you into the behaviours in the end.
I don’t make this up, I’m just the messenger where for many the penny hasn’t dropped yet.
Marginally following this up, isn't one of Labour's problems that very few of the real choices we face are left v right. A number of left issues are over, and therefore discounted. The NHS, free education to 18, not being an imperial power, social housing, payments to those not in work, House of Lords reform, minimum wage, employment rights, high taxes on the rich, health and safety etc. The centre left has won all the battles, and the centre right occupies what would have been a centre/centre left position.
Covid, Brexit, China, Russia, Islamic extremism, free speech, debt and deficit, the state of the UK union - none of these have obvious left v right alternative solutions.
The game has changed. I think so far the Tories have been better at silently shifting. Labour members still seem to think that the very people who vote in Patel, Sunak, Kwarteng and Nadhim Zahawi are filthy racists because they don't think Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler and Zarah Sultana are outstanding politicians.
The next left/right debate is UBI (and the terms of that debate will, in part be set by the experience of furlough, and our economic path over the next 5 years or so).
I think the left is at *extreme* danger of being outflanked on this by the right, with a post-industrial market-economy argument being made (and won) for its introduction by a future Tory administration, while Labour sits it out, scared of frightening the middle-england horses.
There is no debate to be had, UBI which is enough to live on is unaffordable
UBI already exists in this country, we just don't call it that and we have an extremely high real marginal income tax on it.
A sensible UBI introduction would be to merge existing things together, sort out the tax rates so they're sensible, then call it UBI. Not introduce massive new benefits.
A bit like Osborne introducing a Living Wage, based upon the pre-existing Minimum Wage and not dramatically different.
No it really doesnt. UC to which you refer is not UBI. The clue is in the name UNIVERSAL which means every single one of us gets paid it. Most people do not get any form of UC in daily living though it is approaching half
Most people do not get any form of UC because its 100% been taxed away from them via the marginal tax rate that exists on it. Just like people can lose their tax-free allowance because its been taxed away from them.
Sure there's exemptions that apply at the minute that mean eg if you have savings then you can't get UC. That will need dealing with to make it properly universal.
Morning all. Sorry, only just read the @Cyclefree PT header on the stubborn Tory poll lead. It's a very good helicopter piece.
"If the choice is between the Tories and an empty space, the latter is unlikely to win."
The above line jumped out at me. You read it and reflexively nod and think "too right". It's one of those.
But then - if you're me - you dwell on it a while and wonder whether it is such a slam dunk. This government (and particularly this PM) are increasingly being viewed by anybody with eyes to see and ears to listen and noses to smell and mouths to - ok ok you get the picture - as an utter shambles. No principles. No competence. 'No' as in ZERO.
They've got away with it so far (pollwise) but for how long? Brexit is shedding its potency as iconic wedge issue. Slowly, to be sure, but it is. They can poke the fires of its culture war aspect but is this enough to stay at 40%? I doubt it. Tough times lie ahead with the economy and in Fiscal Corner. Leveling Up, for example, has to move from soundbite to hard policy choices and this will piss some people off. If it doesn't it's not real and remains a soundbite. Which would also start to piss some people off, just a different bunch, those Leavers who voted for this agenda, believing it to be genuine. Because these folk are not total blithering idiots - not in the main and not all the time. Whatever, poll damage is coming either way. Ditto with Social Care. There are no votes in that. Only negative ones if you get serious about it. Ask Andy Burnham or Theresa May. So the same choice there. A solid plan and loss of popularity or a cop out and loss of popularity.
Now we have this mismanaged exit from the pandemic. Plus (the header here) further damaging reveals from Cummings - who was right there in the middle of it - about the response and attitude throughout. The PM at key moments in thrall to bizarre right-wing 'contrarians' for heaven's sake, most of them no wiser than our PB one. His focus not on preventing Covid running amok in England and killing tens of thousands but on something far more important - impressing the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator.
I could go on. The challenge is to stop. But I can do that too. I'm going out maskless in a minute. Big moment. The point is, surely all of this shit is probably going to lead within a year to the Cons polling no better than mid 30s. And then come the GE, given things can only get worse, if the choice is indeed between more of the same or a nice cool empty space fronted by a non-scary, competent, decent sounding bloke who looks like he could run a whelk stall and could manage to tell the truth every now and again, well for me that's a toss up.
I take issue with 'poke the fires of its culture war aspect'. Blaming the right for the culture war is like blaming Poland for World War Two. The right isn't trying to move back to 1953, it just doesn't want to be dragged forward to year zero. All the movement on the culture war is from the left. The right isn't trying to rewrite history. The right is, occasionally, suggesting that perhaps the left might be going a bit too far. Now you're astute, and you'll notice I'm saying 'the left' and not 'the Labour Party'. SKS is trying his hardest to avoid the loonier fringes of the culture war, though his party occasionally drag him into it. But to the electorate as a whole, that's not enough. Neil Kinnock was no culture warrior. But the culture warriors of the wider left - the ILEA, for example - lost him votes. How does SKS distance Labour from the likes of Zarah Sultana and Nadia Whittome?
EDIT - and have you read the Telegraph or the Spectator recently? If the PM has been trying to impress the Telegraph and the Spectator, he's going about it abysmally. What he's trying to do (and succeeding) is to impress the authoritarian lobby which want more laws on other people (like @gealbhan yesterday - although I wasn't sure how serious he was).
EDIT2: And good luck going maskless. Enjoy exchanging smiles with other demaskers!
As named, I’ll explain.
My point being the argument between authoritarian and libertarian is not a left right one, nor is it a case of one side being right, the other wrong. It’s a case of both should listen to the other and debate the other, to help get things right.
It shows up clearly in Covid politics, commentators in the Telegraph (Conservative in party politics, split between libertarian and authoritarian in Covid response) and the Daily Mail (Conservative till sixties, populist right since) also to a smaller degree split between authoritarian and libertarian, though tending toward libertarian in editorial.
In downing street yesterday, JVT Libertarian, open nite clubs, Vallance authoritarian, against doing it right now.
But with the success of vaccines, things have now moved on, old media and new media like this blog very slow to realise how things have moved. It’s never been, if not now then when, it was always going to be how, post vaccine.
It’s not about vaccines now, it’s about behaviours. The horse taken to water (jabbed) could say the easier equation than getting it to drink (behaviour) hence now proper debate required between authoritarian and libertarian to achieve those behaviours.
The government have already decided the road ahead and won’t u turn. My evidence? The main headline this lunchtime, government no intention to tackle pingdemic, they are determined to generate it, latest missive from Downing Street, if you are pinged then isolate.
So if you delete the app, ie show the wrong behaviour, the government won’t concede to you, they will coerce you into the behaviours in the end.
I don’t make this up, I’m just the messenger where for many the penny hasn’t dropped yet.
Marginally following this up, isn't one of Labour's problems that very few of the real choices we face are left v right. A number of left issues are over, and therefore discounted. The NHS, free education to 18, not being an imperial power, social housing, payments to those not in work, House of Lords reform, minimum wage, employment rights, high taxes on the rich, health and safety etc. The centre left has won all the battles, and the centre right occupies what would have been a centre/centre left position.
Covid, Brexit, China, Russia, Islamic extremism, free speech, debt and deficit, the state of the UK union - none of these have obvious left v right alternative solutions.
The game has changed. I think so far the Tories have been better at silently shifting. Labour members still seem to think that the very people who vote in Patel, Sunak, Kwarteng and Nadhim Zahawi are filthy racists because they don't think Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler and Zarah Sultana are outstanding politicians.
The next left/right debate is UBI (and the terms of that debate will, in part be set by the experience of furlough, and our economic path over the next 5 years or so).
I think the left is at *extreme* danger of being outflanked on this by the right, with a post-industrial market-economy argument being made (and won) for its introduction by a future Tory administration, while Labour sits it out, scared of frightening the middle-england horses.
Unless AI and automation leads to mass unemployment, in which case a UBI funded by a robot tax would be inevitable, it would always be too costly for government to provide a basic income to everybody rather than just those out of work or on low incomes
Dear me, do people really think that checking a vaccine certificate requires communicating with government servers? I suppose such spectacular ignorance is because the government has stupidly not explained anything or laid the groundwork, but it's very hard to correct such nonsensical beliefs once they get around.
You would need to have a secure chain API with a bring your own device front end to scan the QR code and get a response from the server saying it's legit. Otherwise why bother?
Could you not just bring your paper copy?
The qr code would still need to be scanned and validated against a server
Dear me, do people really think that checking a vaccine certificate requires communicating with government servers? I suppose such spectacular ignorance is because the government has stupidly not explained anything or laid the groundwork, but it's very hard to correct such nonsensical beliefs once they get around.
I suspect frankly it is you that doesn't know what you are talking about. If there are no checks with government servers there is no defense against fakes simple as that.
Yeah I don't see how local auth would work, especially given the sensitive nature of what's being checked and the high likelihood of BYOD. It would be a mad security risk to give random night clubs local authorisation capability as they would essentially be able to have an offline copy of the database.
It will piss even more off if they try to implement it....imagine long queues building up outside pubs. restaurants, nightclubs,gigs ...."Sorry cant let you in because cant verify your status as the servers are down"
Very forseeable so the gov't will of course ensure the server capacity is increased prior to it being a condition
You can't increase the capacity that much, botnets are cheap to hire and IoT has provide many more millions of devices to run them on. Plus when did you last see a competent government it operation
The vaccine passport is on the users phone. No need for the nightclub to have computer access, just a doorman who knows what to look for. Same when you fly etc*. So no government IT to bring down.
*One of our nurses was in Spain a couple of weeks back. No one checked either way.
If it is just on the users phones then its easily forgeable and therefore pointless. I just get a friend to take a screenshot of theirs. Same with a paper version
I believe one of the debates happening in government is about the 'easy to fraud' problem.
They can debate all they want but like most things governments dont have the brightest people working for them, the brightest in it are outside and delight in a challenge of breaking things wide open and figuring out how to
Delighting in working out how to bring an increased risk of Covid infection into a nightclub because you are unjabbed, most people are sensible and will comply
I am not unjabbed I merely refuse to take part in your illiberal bollocks of vaxports the tories can fuck off
Morning all. Sorry, only just read the @Cyclefree PT header on the stubborn Tory poll lead. It's a very good helicopter piece.
"If the choice is between the Tories and an empty space, the latter is unlikely to win."
The above line jumped out at me. You read it and reflexively nod and think "too right". It's one of those.
But then - if you're me - you dwell on it a while and wonder whether it is such a slam dunk. This government (and particularly this PM) are increasingly being viewed by anybody with eyes to see and ears to listen and noses to smell and mouths to - ok ok you get the picture - as an utter shambles. No principles. No competence. 'No' as in ZERO.
They've got away with it so far (pollwise) but for how long? Brexit is shedding its potency as iconic wedge issue. Slowly, to be sure, but it is. They can poke the fires of its culture war aspect but is this enough to stay at 40%? I doubt it. Tough times lie ahead with the economy and in Fiscal Corner. Leveling Up, for example, has to move from soundbite to hard policy choices and this will piss some people off. If it doesn't it's not real and remains a soundbite. Which would also start to piss some people off, just a different bunch, those Leavers who voted for this agenda, believing it to be genuine. Because these folk are not total blithering idiots - not in the main and not all the time. Whatever, poll damage is coming either way. Ditto with Social Care. There are no votes in that. Only negative ones if you get serious about it. Ask Andy Burnham or Theresa May. So the same choice there. A solid plan and loss of popularity or a cop out and loss of popularity.
Now we have this mismanaged exit from the pandemic. Plus (the header here) further damaging reveals from Cummings - who was right there in the middle of it - about the response and attitude throughout. The PM at key moments in thrall to bizarre right-wing 'contrarians' for heaven's sake, most of them no wiser than our PB one. His focus not on preventing Covid running amok in England and killing tens of thousands but on something far more important - impressing the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator.
I could go on. The challenge is to stop. But I can do that too. I'm going out maskless in a minute. Big moment. The point is, surely all of this shit is probably going to lead within a year to the Cons polling no better than mid 30s. And then come the GE, given things can only get worse, if the choice is indeed between more of the same or a nice cool empty space fronted by a non-scary, competent, decent sounding bloke who looks like he could run a whelk stall and could manage to tell the truth every now and again, well for me that's a toss up.
I take issue with 'poke the fires of its culture war aspect'. Blaming the right for the culture war is like blaming Poland for World War Two. The right isn't trying to move back to 1953, it just doesn't want to be dragged forward to year zero. All the movement on the culture war is from the left. The right isn't trying to rewrite history. The right is, occasionally, suggesting that perhaps the left might be going a bit too far. Now you're astute, and you'll notice I'm saying 'the left' and not 'the Labour Party'. SKS is trying his hardest to avoid the loonier fringes of the culture war, though his party occasionally drag him into it. But to the electorate as a whole, that's not enough. Neil Kinnock was no culture warrior. But the culture warriors of the wider left - the ILEA, for example - lost him votes. How does SKS distance Labour from the likes of Zarah Sultana and Nadia Whittome?
EDIT - and have you read the Telegraph or the Spectator recently? If the PM has been trying to impress the Telegraph and the Spectator, he's going about it abysmally. What he's trying to do (and succeeding) is to impress the authoritarian lobby which want more laws on other people (like @gealbhan yesterday - although I wasn't sure how serious he was).
EDIT2: And good luck going maskless. Enjoy exchanging smiles with other demaskers!
As named, I’ll explain.
My point being the argument between authoritarian and libertarian is not a left right one, nor is it a case of one side being right, the other wrong. It’s a case of both should listen to the other and debate the other, to help get things right.
It shows up clearly in Covid politics, commentators in the Telegraph (Conservative in party politics, split between libertarian and authoritarian in Covid response) and the Daily Mail (Conservative till sixties, populist right since) also to a smaller degree split between authoritarian and libertarian, though tending toward libertarian in editorial.
In downing street yesterday, JVT Libertarian, open nite clubs, Vallance authoritarian, against doing it right now.
But with the success of vaccines, things have now moved on, old media and new media like this blog very slow to realise how things have moved. It’s never been, if not now then when, it was always going to be how, post vaccine.
It’s not about vaccines now, it’s about behaviours. The horse taken to water (jabbed) could say the easier equation than getting it to drink (behaviour) hence now proper debate required between authoritarian and libertarian to achieve those behaviours.
The government have already decided the road ahead and won’t u turn. My evidence? The main headline this lunchtime, government no intention to tackle pingdemic, they are determined to generate it, latest missive from Downing Street, if you are pinged then isolate.
So if you delete the app, ie show the wrong behaviour, the government won’t concede to you, they will coerce you into the behaviours in the end.
I don’t make this up, I’m just the messenger where for many the penny hasn’t dropped yet.
Marginally following this up, isn't one of Labour's problems that very few of the real choices we face are left v right. A number of left issues are over, and therefore discounted. The NHS, free education to 18, not being an imperial power, social housing, payments to those not in work, House of Lords reform, minimum wage, employment rights, high taxes on the rich, health and safety etc. The centre left has won all the battles, and the centre right occupies what would have been a centre/centre left position.
Covid, Brexit, China, Russia, Islamic extremism, free speech, debt and deficit, the state of the UK union - none of these have obvious left v right alternative solutions.
The game has changed. I think so far the Tories have been better at silently shifting. Labour members still seem to think that the very people who vote in Patel, Sunak, Kwarteng and Nadhim Zahawi are filthy racists because they don't think Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler and Zarah Sultana are outstanding politicians.
The next left/right debate is UBI (and the terms of that debate will, in part be set by the experience of furlough, and our economic path over the next 5 years or so).
I think the left is at *extreme* danger of being outflanked on this by the right, with a post-industrial market-economy argument being made (and won) for its introduction by a future Tory administration, while Labour sits it out, scared of frightening the middle-england horses.
There is no debate to be had, UBI which is enough to live on is unaffordable
UBI already exists in this country, we just don't call it that and we have an extremely high real marginal income tax on it.
A sensible UBI introduction would be to merge existing things together, sort out the tax rates so they're sensible, then call it UBI. Not introduce massive new benefits.
A bit like Osborne introducing a Living Wage, based upon the pre-existing Minimum Wage and not dramatically different.
UBI will not work until they sort out housing benefit, specifically in London and the south.
The current numbers require something like £1k a month for an adult, £500 for a child, and an income tax rate of 35% with no personal allowance. Then start making allowances for behavioural changes, all of which will be on the downside for the Chancellor.
A properly-implemented UBI will make behaviour changes be on the upside for the Chancellor not the downside.
Currently people feel like its not worth working as they'll "lose their benefits" which is true, marginal tax rates of over 75% and effectively 90% exist. Getting rid of that will well and truly make work pay.
As a point of principle, I find it immoral for anyone to be facing a marginal tax rate of over 50%. That to me applies equally to those earning over £100k losing their tax-free allowance, and those on minimum wage losing their UC.
It will piss even more off if they try to implement it....imagine long queues building up outside pubs. restaurants, nightclubs,gigs ...."Sorry cant let you in because cant verify your status as the servers are down"
Very forseeable so the gov't will of course ensure the server capacity is increased prior to it being a condition
You can't increase the capacity that much, botnets are cheap to hire and IoT has provide many more millions of devices to run them on. Plus when did you last see a competent government it operation
The vaccine passport is on the users phone. No need for the nightclub to have computer access, just a doorman who knows what to look for. Same when you fly etc*. So no government IT to bring down.
*One of our nurses was in Spain a couple of weeks back. No one checked either way.
If it is just on the users phones then its easily forgeable and therefore pointless. I just get a friend to take a screenshot of theirs. Same with a paper version
I believe one of the debates happening in government is about the 'easy to fraud' problem.
They can debate all they want but like most things governments dont have the brightest people working for them, the brightest in it are outside and delight in a challenge of breaking things wide open and figuring out how to
Delighting in working out how to bring an increased risk of Covid infection into a nightclub because you are unjabbed, most people are sensible and will comply
I am not unjabbed I merely refuse to take part in your illiberal bollocks of vaxports the tories can fuck off
Wait what you're going to fake an ID system that you have access to anyway... ?
It will piss even more off if they try to implement it....imagine long queues building up outside pubs. restaurants, nightclubs,gigs ...."Sorry cant let you in because cant verify your status as the servers are down"
Very forseeable so the gov't will of course ensure the server capacity is increased prior to it being a condition
You can't increase the capacity that much, botnets are cheap to hire and IoT has provide many more millions of devices to run them on. Plus when did you last see a competent government it operation
The vaccine passport is on the users phone. No need for the nightclub to have computer access, just a doorman who knows what to look for. Same when you fly etc*. So no government IT to bring down.
*One of our nurses was in Spain a couple of weeks back. No one checked either way.
If it is just on the users phones then its easily forgeable and therefore pointless. I just get a friend to take a screenshot of theirs. Same with a paper version
I believe one of the debates happening in government is about the 'easy to fraud' problem.
They can debate all they want but like most things governments dont have the brightest people working for them, the brightest in it are outside and delight in a challenge of breaking things wide open and figuring out how to
Delighting in working out how to bring an increased risk of Covid infection into a nightclub because you are unjabbed, most people are sensible and will comply
I am not unjabbed I merely refuse to take part in your illiberal bollocks of vaxports the tories can fuck off
It will piss even more off if they try to implement it....imagine long queues building up outside pubs. restaurants, nightclubs,gigs ...."Sorry cant let you in because cant verify your status as the servers are down"
Very forseeable so the gov't will of course ensure the server capacity is increased prior to it being a condition
You can't increase the capacity that much, botnets are cheap to hire and IoT has provide many more millions of devices to run them on. Plus when did you last see a competent government it operation
The vaccine passport is on the users phone. No need for the nightclub to have computer access, just a doorman who knows what to look for. Same when you fly etc*. So no government IT to bring down.
*One of our nurses was in Spain a couple of weeks back. No one checked either way.
If it is just on the users phones then its easily forgeable and therefore pointless. I just get a friend to take a screenshot of theirs. Same with a paper version
I believe one of the debates happening in government is about the 'easy to fraud' problem.
They can debate all they want but like most things governments dont have the brightest people working for them, the brightest in it are outside and delight in a challenge of breaking things wide open and figuring out how to
Delighting in working out how to bring an increased risk of Covid infection into a nightclub because you are unjabbed, most people are sensible and will comply
I am not unjabbed I merely refuse to take part in your illiberal bollocks of vaxports the tories can fuck off
Wait what you're going to fake an ID system that you have access to anyway... ?
The system if implemented needs to be brung crashing down and yes I will do what I can to assist.
At least today’s billionaires are interested in improving the state of technology. Awesome to watch.
For a glorious moment earlier when I heard the reference to Bez Lightyear, I thought by some improbable twist of events that this fella was being blasted into space:
He should be well practised – spent most of the nineties high as a kite.
It will piss even more off if they try to implement it....imagine long queues building up outside pubs. restaurants, nightclubs,gigs ...."Sorry cant let you in because cant verify your status as the servers are down"
Very forseeable so the gov't will of course ensure the server capacity is increased prior to it being a condition
You can't increase the capacity that much, botnets are cheap to hire and IoT has provide many more millions of devices to run them on. Plus when did you last see a competent government it operation
The vaccine passport is on the users phone. No need for the nightclub to have computer access, just a doorman who knows what to look for. Same when you fly etc*. So no government IT to bring down.
*One of our nurses was in Spain a couple of weeks back. No one checked either way.
If it is just on the users phones then its easily forgeable and therefore pointless. I just get a friend to take a screenshot of theirs. Same with a paper version
I believe one of the debates happening in government is about the 'easy to fraud' problem.
They can debate all they want but like most things governments dont have the brightest people working for them, the brightest in it are outside and delight in a challenge of breaking things wide open and figuring out how to
Delighting in working out how to bring an increased risk of Covid infection into a nightclub because you are unjabbed, most people are sensible and will comply
I am not unjabbed I merely refuse to take part in your illiberal bollocks of vaxports the tories can fuck off
lololol - people are already going to nightclubs you apologist loon. They're going in confidence. A vax passport n 2 months is the ultimate stable door closed late.
Dear me, do people really think that checking a vaccine certificate requires communicating with government servers? I suppose such spectacular ignorance is because the government has stupidly not explained anything or laid the groundwork, but it's very hard to correct such nonsensical beliefs once they get around.
You would need to have a secure chain API with a bring your own device front end to scan the QR code and get a response from the server saying it's legit. Otherwise why bother?
No, you just need it to be encrypted using absolutely bog-standard techniques.
It's identical to your computer checking a certificate. All you need to store in the smartphone or other device checking the QR code is a small number of public keys.
Dear me, do people really think that checking a vaccine certificate requires communicating with government servers? I suppose such spectacular ignorance is because the government has stupidly not explained anything or laid the groundwork, but it's very hard to correct such nonsensical beliefs once they get around.
I suspect frankly it is you that doesn't know what you are talking about. If there are no checks with government servers there is no defense against fakes simple as that.
Actually, since I've been working for 40 years in the software industry, I rather do know what I'm talking about.
It is an article of faith for some that we "couldn't see it coming" in Autumn and Winter despite the masses of signals that "it" was indeed coming.
Personally I think the tiers were working to an extent, right up to the point that the Kent (alpha) variant hit. Again, if we knew the vaccines were coming so soon and so good, we would have been happier to lockdown earlier and longer. We didn't, even in November, know for sure that we would be able to vaccinate everyone who wants it by end of August 2021 in the UK.
I knew this with a high degree of confidence and you will recall I posted it here more than once. So it seems did Matt Hancock but the rest of Cabinet thought him somewhere between odd and delusional for saying so. Hence the errant decision making a d messaging in the latter half of last year.
Dear me, do people really think that checking a vaccine certificate requires communicating with government servers? I suppose such spectacular ignorance is because the government has stupidly not explained anything or laid the groundwork, but it's very hard to correct such nonsensical beliefs once they get around.
You would need to have a secure chain API with a bring your own device front end to scan the QR code and get a response from the server saying it's legit. Otherwise why bother?
No, you just need it to be encrypted using absolutely bog-standard techniques.
It's identical to your computer checking a certificate. All you need to store in the smartphone or other device checking the QR code is a small number of public keys.
It's health data which means local storage on BYOD systems is not acceptable. It would need an end to end secure chain.
Dear me, do people really think that checking a vaccine certificate requires communicating with government servers? I suppose such spectacular ignorance is because the government has stupidly not explained anything or laid the groundwork, but it's very hard to correct such nonsensical beliefs once they get around.
You would need to have a secure chain API with a bring your own device front end to scan the QR code and get a response from the server saying it's legit. Otherwise why bother?
No, you just need it to be encrypted using absolutely bog-standard techniques.
It's identical to your computer checking a certificate. All you need to store in the smartphone or other device checking the QR code is a small number of public keys.
Sighs you have no clue do you, a public key will be leaked. Look how well it worked for dvds when the data was encrypted....clue it lasted days. Keys will be leaked or a weakness found in almost nothing flat.
It will piss even more off if they try to implement it....imagine long queues building up outside pubs. restaurants, nightclubs,gigs ...."Sorry cant let you in because cant verify your status as the servers are down"
Very forseeable so the gov't will of course ensure the server capacity is increased prior to it being a condition
You can't increase the capacity that much, botnets are cheap to hire and IoT has provide many more millions of devices to run them on. Plus when did you last see a competent government it operation
The vaccine passport is on the users phone. No need for the nightclub to have computer access, just a doorman who knows what to look for. Same when you fly etc*. So no government IT to bring down.
*One of our nurses was in Spain a couple of weeks back. No one checked either way.
The vaccine passport SHOWS on your phone but the backend is all gov't servers.
Yes, but you can save it as a pdf, or have an email, and it is valid for a month. There is no need for a live connection at the venue.
It will piss even more off if they try to implement it....imagine long queues building up outside pubs. restaurants, nightclubs,gigs ...."Sorry cant let you in because cant verify your status as the servers are down"
Very forseeable so the gov't will of course ensure the server capacity is increased prior to it being a condition
You can't increase the capacity that much, botnets are cheap to hire and IoT has provide many more millions of devices to run them on. Plus when did you last see a competent government it operation
The vaccine passport is on the users phone. No need for the nightclub to have computer access, just a doorman who knows what to look for. Same when you fly etc*. So no government IT to bring down.
*One of our nurses was in Spain a couple of weeks back. No one checked either way.
If it is just on the users phones then its easily forgeable and therefore pointless. I just get a friend to take a screenshot of theirs. Same with a paper version
I believe one of the debates happening in government is about the 'easy to fraud' problem.
They can debate all they want but like most things governments dont have the brightest people working for them, the brightest in it are outside and delight in a challenge of breaking things wide open and figuring out how to
Delighting in working out how to bring an increased risk of Covid infection into a nightclub because you are unjabbed, most people are sensible and will comply
I am not unjabbed I merely refuse to take part in your illiberal bollocks of vaxports the tories can fuck off
lololol - people are already going to nightclubs you apologist loon. They're going in confidence. A vax passport n 2 months is the ultimate stable door closed late.
It depends what horse in the stable you're trying to protect.
If its to prevent Covid cases spreading now, then you're right.
If its to prevent the NHS collapsing under the strain of Covid cases during winter flu season then a vax passport in 2 months time (plus the exit wave of the virus burning out in the summer) is timed to perfection.
Dear me, do people really think that checking a vaccine certificate requires communicating with government servers? I suppose such spectacular ignorance is because the government has stupidly not explained anything or laid the groundwork, but it's very hard to correct such nonsensical beliefs once they get around.
You would need to have a secure chain API with a bring your own device front end to scan the QR code and get a response from the server saying it's legit. Otherwise why bother?
No, you just need it to be encrypted using absolutely bog-standard techniques.
It's identical to your computer checking a certificate. All you need to store in the smartphone or other device checking the QR code is a small number of public keys.
It's health data which means local storage on BYOD systems is not acceptable. It would need an end to end secure chain.
Eh? What health data? The check isn't on the data, it's on the digital signature of the certifying authority.
Dear me, do people really think that checking a vaccine certificate requires communicating with government servers? I suppose such spectacular ignorance is because the government has stupidly not explained anything or laid the groundwork, but it's very hard to correct such nonsensical beliefs once they get around.
I suspect frankly it is you that doesn't know what you are talking about. If there are no checks with government servers there is no defense against fakes simple as that.
Actually, since I've been working for 40 years in the software industry, I rather do know what I'm talking about.
Well obviously not if you dont think one of those keys wont be sold off in days
Dear me, do people really think that checking a vaccine certificate requires communicating with government servers? I suppose such spectacular ignorance is because the government has stupidly not explained anything or laid the groundwork, but it's very hard to correct such nonsensical beliefs once they get around.
You would need to have a secure chain API with a bring your own device front end to scan the QR code and get a response from the server saying it's legit. Otherwise why bother?
No, you just need it to be encrypted using absolutely bog-standard techniques.
It's identical to your computer checking a certificate. All you need to store in the smartphone or other device checking the QR code is a small number of public keys.
It's health data which means local storage on BYOD systems is not acceptable. It would need an end to end secure chain.
Eh? What health data? The check isn't on the data, it's on the digital signature of the certifying authority.
It is health data because the check is someone's vaccination status. That's health data. Using an encrypted key would end in disaster.
It will piss even more off if they try to implement it....imagine long queues building up outside pubs. restaurants, nightclubs,gigs ...."Sorry cant let you in because cant verify your status as the servers are down"
Very forseeable so the gov't will of course ensure the server capacity is increased prior to it being a condition
You can't increase the capacity that much, botnets are cheap to hire and IoT has provide many more millions of devices to run them on. Plus when did you last see a competent government it operation
The vaccine passport is on the users phone. No need for the nightclub to have computer access, just a doorman who knows what to look for. Same when you fly etc*. So no government IT to bring down.
*One of our nurses was in Spain a couple of weeks back. No one checked either way.
If it is just on the users phones then its easily forgeable and therefore pointless. I just get a friend to take a screenshot of theirs. Same with a paper version
I believe one of the debates happening in government is about the 'easy to fraud' problem.
They can debate all they want but like most things governments dont have the brightest people working for them, the brightest in it are outside and delight in a challenge of breaking things wide open and figuring out how to
Delighting in working out how to bring an increased risk of Covid infection into a nightclub because you are unjabbed, most people are sensible and will comply
I am not unjabbed I merely refuse to take part in your illiberal bollocks of vaxports the tories can fuck off
lololol - people are already going to nightclubs you apologist loon. They're going in confidence. A vax passport n 2 months is the ultimate stable door closed late.
It depends what horse in the stable you're trying to protect.
If its to prevent Covid cases spreading now, then you're right.
If its to prevent the NHS collapsing under the strain of Covid cases during winter flu season then a vax passport in 2 months time (plus the exit wave of the virus burning out in the summer) is timed to perfection.
If cases are still rising by September, god help us.
Dear me, do people really think that checking a vaccine certificate requires communicating with government servers? I suppose such spectacular ignorance is because the government has stupidly not explained anything or laid the groundwork, but it's very hard to correct such nonsensical beliefs once they get around.
You would need to have a secure chain API with a bring your own device front end to scan the QR code and get a response from the server saying it's legit. Otherwise why bother?
No, you just need it to be encrypted using absolutely bog-standard techniques.
It's identical to your computer checking a certificate. All you need to store in the smartphone or other device checking the QR code is a small number of public keys.
Sighs you have no clue do you, a public key will be leaked. Look how well it worked for dvds when the data was encrypted....clue it lasted days. Keys will be leaked or a weakness found in almost nothing flat.
Well done, you've just demonstrated that the entire science of cryptography is bogus. Have you warned GCHQ?
It will piss even more off if they try to implement it....imagine long queues building up outside pubs. restaurants, nightclubs,gigs ...."Sorry cant let you in because cant verify your status as the servers are down"
Very forseeable so the gov't will of course ensure the server capacity is increased prior to it being a condition
You can't increase the capacity that much, botnets are cheap to hire and IoT has provide many more millions of devices to run them on. Plus when did you last see a competent government it operation
The vaccine passport is on the users phone. No need for the nightclub to have computer access, just a doorman who knows what to look for. Same when you fly etc*. So no government IT to bring down.
*One of our nurses was in Spain a couple of weeks back. No one checked either way.
If it is just on the users phones then its easily forgeable and therefore pointless. I just get a friend to take a screenshot of theirs. Same with a paper version
I believe one of the debates happening in government is about the 'easy to fraud' problem.
They can debate all they want but like most things governments dont have the brightest people working for them, the brightest in it are outside and delight in a challenge of breaking things wide open and figuring out how to
Delighting in working out how to bring an increased risk of Covid infection into a nightclub because you are unjabbed, most people are sensible and will comply
I am not unjabbed I merely refuse to take part in your illiberal bollocks of vaxports the tories can fuck off
lololol - people are already going to nightclubs you apologist loon. They're going in confidence. A vax passport n 2 months is the ultimate stable door closed late.
It depends what horse in the stable you're trying to protect.
If its to prevent Covid cases spreading now, then you're right.
If its to prevent the NHS collapsing under the strain of Covid cases during winter flu season then a vax passport in 2 months time (plus the exit wave of the virus burning out in the summer) is timed to perfection.
If cases are still rising by September, god help us.
Well precisely.
But I'm guessing the government is worried about Freshers Flu and what happened with the Universities restarting in September last year.
So although I'm against the vaxport in principle, being logical having the virus burnout over the summer, then a vaxport in September timed for Freshers is entirely sensible.
Dear me, do people really think that checking a vaccine certificate requires communicating with government servers? I suppose such spectacular ignorance is because the government has stupidly not explained anything or laid the groundwork, but it's very hard to correct such nonsensical beliefs once they get around.
You would need to have a secure chain API with a bring your own device front end to scan the QR code and get a response from the server saying it's legit. Otherwise why bother?
No, you just need it to be encrypted using absolutely bog-standard techniques.
It's identical to your computer checking a certificate. All you need to store in the smartphone or other device checking the QR code is a small number of public keys.
It's health data which means local storage on BYOD systems is not acceptable. It would need an end to end secure chain.
Eh? What health data? The check isn't on the data, it's on the digital signature of the certifying authority.
It is health data because the check is someone's vaccination status. That's health data. Using an encrypted key would end in disaster.
Well, take it up with the EU. Their system is up and running.
Morning all. Sorry, only just read the @Cyclefree PT header on the stubborn Tory poll lead. It's a very good helicopter piece.
"If the choice is between the Tories and an empty space, the latter is unlikely to win."
The above line jumped out at me. You read it and reflexively nod and think "too right". It's one of those.
But then - if you're me - you dwell on it a while and wonder whether it is such a slam dunk. This government (and particularly this PM) are increasingly being viewed by anybody with eyes to see and ears to listen and noses to smell and mouths to - ok ok you get the picture - as an utter shambles. No principles. No competence. 'No' as in ZERO.
They've got away with it so far (pollwise) but for how long? Brexit is shedding its potency as iconic wedge issue. Slowly, to be sure, but it is. They can poke the fires of its culture war aspect but is this enough to stay at 40%? I doubt it. Tough times lie ahead with the economy and in Fiscal Corner. Leveling Up, for example, has to move from soundbite to hard policy choices and this will piss some people off. If it doesn't it's not real and remains a soundbite. Which would also start to piss some people off, just a different bunch, those Leavers who voted for this agenda, believing it to be genuine. Because these folk are not total blithering idiots - not in the main and not all the time. Whatever, poll damage is coming either way. Ditto with Social Care. There are no votes in that. Only negative ones if you get serious about it. Ask Andy Burnham or Theresa May. So the same choice there. A solid plan and loss of popularity or a cop out and loss of popularity.
Now we have this mismanaged exit from the pandemic. Plus (the header here) further damaging reveals from Cummings - who was right there in the middle of it - about the response and attitude throughout. The PM at key moments in thrall to bizarre right-wing 'contrarians' for heaven's sake, most of them no wiser than our PB one. His focus not on preventing Covid running amok in England and killing tens of thousands but on something far more important - impressing the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator.
I could go on. The challenge is to stop. But I can do that too. I'm going out maskless in a minute. Big moment. The point is, surely all of this shit is probably going to lead within a year to the Cons polling no better than mid 30s. And then come the GE, given things can only get worse, if the choice is indeed between more of the same or a nice cool empty space fronted by a non-scary, competent, decent sounding bloke who looks like he could run a whelk stall and could manage to tell the truth every now and again, well for me that's a toss up.
I take issue with 'poke the fires of its culture war aspect'. Blaming the right for the culture war is like blaming Poland for World War Two. The right isn't trying to move back to 1953, it just doesn't want to be dragged forward to year zero. All the movement on the culture war is from the left. The right isn't trying to rewrite history. The right is, occasionally, suggesting that perhaps the left might be going a bit too far. Now you're astute, and you'll notice I'm saying 'the left' and not 'the Labour Party'. SKS is trying his hardest to avoid the loonier fringes of the culture war, though his party occasionally drag him into it. But to the electorate as a whole, that's not enough. Neil Kinnock was no culture warrior. But the culture warriors of the wider left - the ILEA, for example - lost him votes. How does SKS distance Labour from the likes of Zarah Sultana and Nadia Whittome?
EDIT - and have you read the Telegraph or the Spectator recently? If the PM has been trying to impress the Telegraph and the Spectator, he's going about it abysmally. What he's trying to do (and succeeding) is to impress the authoritarian lobby which want more laws on other people (like @gealbhan yesterday - although I wasn't sure how serious he was).
EDIT2: And good luck going maskless. Enjoy exchanging smiles with other demaskers!
As named, I’ll explain.
My point being the argument between authoritarian and libertarian is not a left right one, nor is it a case of one side being right, the other wrong. It’s a case of both should listen to the other and debate the other, to help get things right.
It shows up clearly in Covid politics, commentators in the Telegraph (Conservative in party politics, split between libertarian and authoritarian in Covid response) and the Daily Mail (Conservative till sixties, populist right since) also to a smaller degree split between authoritarian and libertarian, though tending toward libertarian in editorial.
In downing street yesterday, JVT Libertarian, open nite clubs, Vallance authoritarian, against doing it right now.
But with the success of vaccines, things have now moved on, old media and new media like this blog very slow to realise how things have moved. It’s never been, if not now then when, it was always going to be how, post vaccine.
It’s not about vaccines now, it’s about behaviours. The horse taken to water (jabbed) could say the easier equation than getting it to drink (behaviour) hence now proper debate required between authoritarian and libertarian to achieve those behaviours.
The government have already decided the road ahead and won’t u turn. My evidence? The main headline this lunchtime, government no intention to tackle pingdemic, they are determined to generate it, latest missive from Downing Street, if you are pinged then isolate.
So if you delete the app, ie show the wrong behaviour, the government won’t concede to you, they will coerce you into the behaviours in the end.
I don’t make this up, I’m just the messenger where for many the penny hasn’t dropped yet.
Marginally following this up, isn't one of Labour's problems that very few of the real choices we face are left v right. A number of left issues are over, and therefore discounted. The NHS, free education to 18, not being an imperial power, social housing, payments to those not in work, House of Lords reform, minimum wage, employment rights, high taxes on the rich, health and safety etc. The centre left has won all the battles, and the centre right occupies what would have been a centre/centre left position.
Covid, Brexit, China, Russia, Islamic extremism, free speech, debt and deficit, the state of the UK union - none of these have obvious left v right alternative solutions.
The game has changed. I think so far the Tories have been better at silently shifting. Labour members still seem to think that the very people who vote in Patel, Sunak, Kwarteng and Nadhim Zahawi are filthy racists because they don't think Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler and Zarah Sultana are outstanding politicians.
The next left/right debate is UBI (and the terms of that debate will, in part be set by the experience of furlough, and our economic path over the next 5 years or so).
I think the left is at *extreme* danger of being outflanked on this by the right, with a post-industrial market-economy argument being made (and won) for its introduction by a future Tory administration, while Labour sits it out, scared of frightening the middle-england horses.
There is no debate to be had, UBI which is enough to live on is unaffordable
UBI already exists in this country, we just don't call it that and we have an extremely high real marginal income tax on it.
A sensible UBI introduction would be to merge existing things together, sort out the tax rates so they're sensible, then call it UBI. Not introduce massive new benefits.
A bit like Osborne introducing a Living Wage, based upon the pre-existing Minimum Wage and not dramatically different.
UBI will not work until they sort out housing benefit, specifically in London and the south.
The current numbers require something like £1k a month for an adult, £500 for a child, and an income tax rate of 35% with no personal allowance. Then start making allowances for behavioural changes, all of which will be on the downside for the Chancellor.
A properly-implemented UBI will make behaviour changes be on the upside for the Chancellor not the downside.
Currently people feel like its not worth working as they'll "lose their benefits" which is true, marginal tax rates of over 75% and effectively 90% exist. Getting rid of that will well and truly make work pay.
As a point of principle, I find it immoral for anyone to be facing a marginal tax rate of over 50%. That to me applies equally to those earning over £100k losing their tax-free allowance, and those on minimum wage losing their UC.
The only ways to get the UC withdrawal under 50%, are to either reduce the payments to those at the very bottom end, or to increase income tax for everyone.
I agree that the tax and benefits system is way too complex, with perverse incentives all over the place. While UC has straightened out a lot of the problems and silly 16-hour rules that existed previously, the next change is going to result in a lot of losers though, which makes it much more difficult politically.
Dear me, do people really think that checking a vaccine certificate requires communicating with government servers? I suppose such spectacular ignorance is because the government has stupidly not explained anything or laid the groundwork, but it's very hard to correct such nonsensical beliefs once they get around.
I got my EU Vaccine certificate downloaded from The Andalucian Health authority yesterday and dumped it on Google drive. I have it available both on and offline so clearly no further connection with anything other than me. I simply do not comprehend, although I acknowledge, the degree of antipathy to such useful documents we hear so much of on here. Same with general ID cards, passports, etc digital or paper.
Glad to see so many giant Palestinian flags being flown by the various trot lunatics outside the Labour NEC meeting. It really is the only policy concern that former Labour voters in the red wall have. https://twitter.com/OzKaterji/status/1417450184762662924
As @bigjohnowls points out, the party is nearly bankrupt. If the NEC stands up to Starmer, reinstates the people with their Palestinian flags and their abuse of Jews and their sneering attacks on anyone who isn't as politically pure as they are, the party will soon have enough money to pay its staff*
*ok by "staff" I mean the QCs hired to defend the party in the high court as it gets sued to death
...but if it realises the British Trotskyist dream of perpetual powerless opposition and the prospect of Johnsonian Conservative- Governments to bellyach about and march against 'til Doomsday, surely it's a win, win.
Dear me, do people really think that checking a vaccine certificate requires communicating with government servers? I suppose such spectacular ignorance is because the government has stupidly not explained anything or laid the groundwork, but it's very hard to correct such nonsensical beliefs once they get around.
You would need to have a secure chain API with a bring your own device front end to scan the QR code and get a response from the server saying it's legit. Otherwise why bother?
No, you just need it to be encrypted using absolutely bog-standard techniques.
It's identical to your computer checking a certificate. All you need to store in the smartphone or other device checking the QR code is a small number of public keys.
Sighs you have no clue do you, a public key will be leaked. Look how well it worked for dvds when the data was encrypted....clue it lasted days. Keys will be leaked or a weakness found in almost nothing flat.
Well done, you've just demonstrated that the entire science of cryptography is bogus. Have you warned GCHQ?
There was me thinking that Public Key were ... public.
It will piss even more off if they try to implement it....imagine long queues building up outside pubs. restaurants, nightclubs,gigs ...."Sorry cant let you in because cant verify your status as the servers are down"
Very forseeable so the gov't will of course ensure the server capacity is increased prior to it being a condition
You can't increase the capacity that much, botnets are cheap to hire and IoT has provide many more millions of devices to run them on. Plus when did you last see a competent government it operation
The vaccine passport is on the users phone. No need for the nightclub to have computer access, just a doorman who knows what to look for. Same when you fly etc*. So no government IT to bring down.
*One of our nurses was in Spain a couple of weeks back. No one checked either way.
The vaccine passport SHOWS on your phone but the backend is all gov't servers.
Yes, but you can save it as a pdf, or have an email, and it is valid for a month. There is no need for a live connection at the venue.
You need to validate that the QR certificate is valid (it's why it's an easy to scan QR code).
And you don't want to do that offline as any validation algorithm stored locally will be stolen and used to generate fake QR certificates.
Dear me, do people really think that checking a vaccine certificate requires communicating with government servers? I suppose such spectacular ignorance is because the government has stupidly not explained anything or laid the groundwork, but it's very hard to correct such nonsensical beliefs once they get around.
You would need to have a secure chain API with a bring your own device front end to scan the QR code and get a response from the server saying it's legit. Otherwise why bother?
No, you just need it to be encrypted using absolutely bog-standard techniques.
It's identical to your computer checking a certificate. All you need to store in the smartphone or other device checking the QR code is a small number of public keys.
Sighs you have no clue do you, a public key will be leaked. Look how well it worked for dvds when the data was encrypted....clue it lasted days. Keys will be leaked or a weakness found in almost nothing flat.
Well done, you've just demonstrated that the entire science of cryptography is bogus. Have you warned GCHQ?
Doesn't GCHQ's entire existance depend upon the entire science of crypography being bogus?
Dear me, do people really think that checking a vaccine certificate requires communicating with government servers? I suppose such spectacular ignorance is because the government has stupidly not explained anything or laid the groundwork, but it's very hard to correct such nonsensical beliefs once they get around.
You would need to have a secure chain API with a bring your own device front end to scan the QR code and get a response from the server saying it's legit. Otherwise why bother?
No, you just need it to be encrypted using absolutely bog-standard techniques.
It's identical to your computer checking a certificate. All you need to store in the smartphone or other device checking the QR code is a small number of public keys.
Sighs you have no clue do you, a public key will be leaked. Look how well it worked for dvds when the data was encrypted....clue it lasted days. Keys will be leaked or a weakness found in almost nothing flat.
Well done, you've just demonstrated that the entire science of cryptography is bogus. Have you warned GCHQ?
Where did I claim that. What I claimed has nothing to do with cryptography. I work with cryptography. The simple fact is people. There will be multiple people with access to those keys. One of them will either find themselves in need of cash or they will be blackmailable. What has that to do with the science of cryptography? One or more keys will be available in the wild within a few days
Dear me, do people really think that checking a vaccine certificate requires communicating with government servers? I suppose such spectacular ignorance is because the government has stupidly not explained anything or laid the groundwork, but it's very hard to correct such nonsensical beliefs once they get around.
You would need to have a secure chain API with a bring your own device front end to scan the QR code and get a response from the server saying it's legit. Otherwise why bother?
No, you just need it to be encrypted using absolutely bog-standard techniques.
It's identical to your computer checking a certificate. All you need to store in the smartphone or other device checking the QR code is a small number of public keys.
Sighs you have no clue do you, a public key will be leaked. Look how well it worked for dvds when the data was encrypted....clue it lasted days. Keys will be leaked or a weakness found in almost nothing flat.
Well done, you've just demonstrated that the entire science of cryptography is bogus. Have you warned GCHQ?
There was me thinking that Public Key were ... public.
Singapore is having a discussion on what it will mean to live with endemic COVID - a conversation the UK government needs to start ASAP - this "Freedom Day" foolishness will end in tears - people just want to "get back to normal" - they need to have explained to them that the "old normal" is gone for very many years (probably most of our lifetimes) and we're going to have to get used to a "new" normal - and should have the conversation about what that's going to mean:
Sorry but Singapore has long ceased to be a model to be emulated when it comes to covid. Not just the severity but the complexity of this weeks new restrictions there defy belief.
They’ve given a first dose to more than 70% of the population but even now, the zero covid zealots are winning the argument there. I don’t know a foreigner left in the country who doesn’t feel like covid is being used as a pretext to squeeze the foreigners out the country and to needlessly strengthen the hand of authoritarianism.
Were it not for the implosion of Hong Kong, Singapore would be in quite immediate and pressing trouble. As it is, it has a slow puncture to its economy and society and it’s very hard to see how it’s going to be fixed - I gather the demographics of their vaccine hesitancy are the reverse of ours. High uptake in youth and immigrants, low uptake in the elderly citizenry. Which means the PAP are going to politically struggle to wean the country away from zero covid policies indefinitely.
It will piss even more off if they try to implement it....imagine long queues building up outside pubs. restaurants, nightclubs,gigs ...."Sorry cant let you in because cant verify your status as the servers are down"
Very forseeable so the gov't will of course ensure the server capacity is increased prior to it being a condition
You can't increase the capacity that much, botnets are cheap to hire and IoT has provide many more millions of devices to run them on. Plus when did you last see a competent government it operation
The vaccine passport is on the users phone. No need for the nightclub to have computer access, just a doorman who knows what to look for. Same when you fly etc*. So no government IT to bring down.
*One of our nurses was in Spain a couple of weeks back. No one checked either way.
No way will Mr Bill Jones' screenshotted double vaccine confirmation ever be used. A million times.
It will piss even more off if they try to implement it....imagine long queues building up outside pubs. restaurants, nightclubs,gigs ...."Sorry cant let you in because cant verify your status as the servers are down"
Very forseeable so the gov't will of course ensure the server capacity is increased prior to it being a condition
You can't increase the capacity that much, botnets are cheap to hire and IoT has provide many more millions of devices to run them on. Plus when did you last see a competent government it operation
The vaccine passport is on the users phone. No need for the nightclub to have computer access, just a doorman who knows what to look for. Same when you fly etc*. So no government IT to bring down.
*One of our nurses was in Spain a couple of weeks back. No one checked either way.
If it is just on the users phones then its easily forgeable and therefore pointless. I just get a friend to take a screenshot of theirs. Same with a paper version
I believe one of the debates happening in government is about the 'easy to fraud' problem.
They can debate all they want but like most things governments dont have the brightest people working for them, the brightest in it are outside and delight in a challenge of breaking things wide open and figuring out how to
Delighting in working out how to bring an increased risk of Covid infection into a nightclub because you are unjabbed, most people are sensible and will comply
I am not unjabbed I merely refuse to take part in your illiberal bollocks of vaxports the tories can fuck off
lololol - people are already going to nightclubs you apologist loon. They're going in confidence. A vax passport n 2 months is the ultimate stable door closed late.
Personally I would have introduced them straight away but better late than never.
Plus over a third of under 35s have not even had 1 jab yet, despite being offered one, let alone 2 so it provides an incentive for the young to get jabbed before September
Morning all. Sorry, only just read the @Cyclefree PT header on the stubborn Tory poll lead. It's a very good helicopter piece.
"If the choice is between the Tories and an empty space, the latter is unlikely to win."
The above line jumped out at me. You read it and reflexively nod and think "too right". It's one of those.
But then - if you're me - you dwell on it a while and wonder whether it is such a slam dunk. This government (and particularly this PM) are increasingly being viewed by anybody with eyes to see and ears to listen and noses to smell and mouths to - ok ok you get the picture - as an utter shambles. No principles. No competence. 'No' as in ZERO.
They've got away with it so far (pollwise) but for how long? Brexit is shedding its potency as iconic wedge issue. Slowly, to be sure, but it is. They can poke the fires of its culture war aspect but is this enough to stay at 40%? I doubt it. Tough times lie ahead with the economy and in Fiscal Corner. Leveling Up, for example, has to move from soundbite to hard policy choices and this will piss some people off. If it doesn't it's not real and remains a soundbite. Which would also start to piss some people off, just a different bunch, those Leavers who voted for this agenda, believing it to be genuine. Because these folk are not total blithering idiots - not in the main and not all the time. Whatever, poll damage is coming either way. Ditto with Social Care. There are no votes in that. Only negative ones if you get serious about it. Ask Andy Burnham or Theresa May. So the same choice there. A solid plan and loss of popularity or a cop out and loss of popularity.
Now we have this mismanaged exit from the pandemic. Plus (the header here) further damaging reveals from Cummings - who was right there in the middle of it - about the response and attitude throughout. The PM at key moments in thrall to bizarre right-wing 'contrarians' for heaven's sake, most of them no wiser than our PB one. His focus not on preventing Covid running amok in England and killing tens of thousands but on something far more important - impressing the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator.
I could go on. The challenge is to stop. But I can do that too. I'm going out maskless in a minute. Big moment. The point is, surely all of this shit is probably going to lead within a year to the Cons polling no better than mid 30s. And then come the GE, given things can only get worse, if the choice is indeed between more of the same or a nice cool empty space fronted by a non-scary, competent, decent sounding bloke who looks like he could run a whelk stall and could manage to tell the truth every now and again, well for me that's a toss up.
I take issue with 'poke the fires of its culture war aspect'. Blaming the right for the culture war is like blaming Poland for World War Two. The right isn't trying to move back to 1953, it just doesn't want to be dragged forward to year zero. All the movement on the culture war is from the left. The right isn't trying to rewrite history. The right is, occasionally, suggesting that perhaps the left might be going a bit too far. Now you're astute, and you'll notice I'm saying 'the left' and not 'the Labour Party'. SKS is trying his hardest to avoid the loonier fringes of the culture war, though his party occasionally drag him into it. But to the electorate as a whole, that's not enough. Neil Kinnock was no culture warrior. But the culture warriors of the wider left - the ILEA, for example - lost him votes. How does SKS distance Labour from the likes of Zarah Sultana and Nadia Whittome?
EDIT - and have you read the Telegraph or the Spectator recently? If the PM has been trying to impress the Telegraph and the Spectator, he's going about it abysmally. What he's trying to do (and succeeding) is to impress the authoritarian lobby which want more laws on other people (like @gealbhan yesterday - although I wasn't sure how serious he was).
EDIT2: And good luck going maskless. Enjoy exchanging smiles with other demaskers!
As named, I’ll explain.
My point being the argument between authoritarian and libertarian is not a left right one, nor is it a case of one side being right, the other wrong. It’s a case of both should listen to the other and debate the other, to help get things right.
It shows up clearly in Covid politics, commentators in the Telegraph (Conservative in party politics, split between libertarian and authoritarian in Covid response) and the Daily Mail (Conservative till sixties, populist right since) also to a smaller degree split between authoritarian and libertarian, though tending toward libertarian in editorial.
In downing street yesterday, JVT Libertarian, open nite clubs, Vallance authoritarian, against doing it right now.
But with the success of vaccines, things have now moved on, old media and new media like this blog very slow to realise how things have moved. It’s never been, if not now then when, it was always going to be how, post vaccine.
It’s not about vaccines now, it’s about behaviours. The horse taken to water (jabbed) could say the easier equation than getting it to drink (behaviour) hence now proper debate required between authoritarian and libertarian to achieve those behaviours.
The government have already decided the road ahead and won’t u turn. My evidence? The main headline this lunchtime, government no intention to tackle pingdemic, they are determined to generate it, latest missive from Downing Street, if you are pinged then isolate.
So if you delete the app, ie show the wrong behaviour, the government won’t concede to you, they will coerce you into the behaviours in the end.
I don’t make this up, I’m just the messenger where for many the penny hasn’t dropped yet.
Marginally following this up, isn't one of Labour's problems that very few of the real choices we face are left v right. A number of left issues are over, and therefore discounted. The NHS, free education to 18, not being an imperial power, social housing, payments to those not in work, House of Lords reform, minimum wage, employment rights, high taxes on the rich, health and safety etc. The centre left has won all the battles, and the centre right occupies what would have been a centre/centre left position.
Covid, Brexit, China, Russia, Islamic extremism, free speech, debt and deficit, the state of the UK union - none of these have obvious left v right alternative solutions.
The game has changed. I think so far the Tories have been better at silently shifting. Labour members still seem to think that the very people who vote in Patel, Sunak, Kwarteng and Nadhim Zahawi are filthy racists because they don't think Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler and Zarah Sultana are outstanding politicians.
The next left/right debate is UBI (and the terms of that debate will, in part be set by the experience of furlough, and our economic path over the next 5 years or so).
I think the left is at *extreme* danger of being outflanked on this by the right, with a post-industrial market-economy argument being made (and won) for its introduction by a future Tory administration, while Labour sits it out, scared of frightening the middle-england horses.
There is no debate to be had, UBI which is enough to live on is unaffordable
UBI already exists in this country, we just don't call it that and we have an extremely high real marginal income tax on it.
A sensible UBI introduction would be to merge existing things together, sort out the tax rates so they're sensible, then call it UBI. Not introduce massive new benefits.
A bit like Osborne introducing a Living Wage, based upon the pre-existing Minimum Wage and not dramatically different.
UBI will not work until they sort out housing benefit, specifically in London and the south.
The current numbers require something like £1k a month for an adult, £500 for a child, and an income tax rate of 35% with no personal allowance. Then start making allowances for behavioural changes, all of which will be on the downside for the Chancellor.
Don't like it, don't get it - handouts for sitting at home make zero sense to me. I take the 'Judge Judy' approach to welfare!
Morning all. Sorry, only just read the @Cyclefree PT header on the stubborn Tory poll lead. It's a very good helicopter piece.
"If the choice is between the Tories and an empty space, the latter is unlikely to win."
The above line jumped out at me. You read it and reflexively nod and think "too right". It's one of those.
But then - if you're me - you dwell on it a while and wonder whether it is such a slam dunk. This government (and particularly this PM) are increasingly being viewed by anybody with eyes to see and ears to listen and noses to smell and mouths to - ok ok you get the picture - as an utter shambles. No principles. No competence. 'No' as in ZERO.
They've got away with it so far (pollwise) but for how long? Brexit is shedding its potency as iconic wedge issue. Slowly, to be sure, but it is. They can poke the fires of its culture war aspect but is this enough to stay at 40%? I doubt it. Tough times lie ahead with the economy and in Fiscal Corner. Leveling Up, for example, has to move from soundbite to hard policy choices and this will piss some people off. If it doesn't it's not real and remains a soundbite. Which would also start to piss some people off, just a different bunch, those Leavers who voted for this agenda, believing it to be genuine. Because these folk are not total blithering idiots - not in the main and not all the time. Whatever, poll damage is coming either way. Ditto with Social Care. There are no votes in that. Only negative ones if you get serious about it. Ask Andy Burnham or Theresa May. So the same choice there. A solid plan and loss of popularity or a cop out and loss of popularity.
Now we have this mismanaged exit from the pandemic. Plus (the header here) further damaging reveals from Cummings - who was right there in the middle of it - about the response and attitude throughout. The PM at key moments in thrall to bizarre right-wing 'contrarians' for heaven's sake, most of them no wiser than our PB one. His focus not on preventing Covid running amok in England and killing tens of thousands but on something far more important - impressing the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator.
I could go on. The challenge is to stop. But I can do that too. I'm going out maskless in a minute. Big moment. The point is, surely all of this shit is probably going to lead within a year to the Cons polling no better than mid 30s. And then come the GE, given things can only get worse, if the choice is indeed between more of the same or a nice cool empty space fronted by a non-scary, competent, decent sounding bloke who looks like he could run a whelk stall and could manage to tell the truth every now and again, well for me that's a toss up.
I take issue with 'poke the fires of its culture war aspect'. Blaming the right for the culture war is like blaming Poland for World War Two. The right isn't trying to move back to 1953, it just doesn't want to be dragged forward to year zero. All the movement on the culture war is from the left. The right isn't trying to rewrite history. The right is, occasionally, suggesting that perhaps the left might be going a bit too far. Now you're astute, and you'll notice I'm saying 'the left' and not 'the Labour Party'. SKS is trying his hardest to avoid the loonier fringes of the culture war, though his party occasionally drag him into it. But to the electorate as a whole, that's not enough. Neil Kinnock was no culture warrior. But the culture warriors of the wider left - the ILEA, for example - lost him votes. How does SKS distance Labour from the likes of Zarah Sultana and Nadia Whittome?
EDIT - and have you read the Telegraph or the Spectator recently? If the PM has been trying to impress the Telegraph and the Spectator, he's going about it abysmally. What he's trying to do (and succeeding) is to impress the authoritarian lobby which want more laws on other people (like @gealbhan yesterday - although I wasn't sure how serious he was).
EDIT2: And good luck going maskless. Enjoy exchanging smiles with other demaskers!
As named, I’ll explain.
My point being the argument between authoritarian and libertarian is not a left right one, nor is it a case of one side being right, the other wrong. It’s a case of both should listen to the other and debate the other, to help get things right.
It shows up clearly in Covid politics, commentators in the Telegraph (Conservative in party politics, split between libertarian and authoritarian in Covid response) and the Daily Mail (Conservative till sixties, populist right since) also to a smaller degree split between authoritarian and libertarian, though tending toward libertarian in editorial.
In downing street yesterday, JVT Libertarian, open nite clubs, Vallance authoritarian, against doing it right now.
But with the success of vaccines, things have now moved on, old media and new media like this blog very slow to realise how things have moved. It’s never been, if not now then when, it was always going to be how, post vaccine.
It’s not about vaccines now, it’s about behaviours. The horse taken to water (jabbed) could say the easier equation than getting it to drink (behaviour) hence now proper debate required between authoritarian and libertarian to achieve those behaviours.
The government have already decided the road ahead and won’t u turn. My evidence? The main headline this lunchtime, government no intention to tackle pingdemic, they are determined to generate it, latest missive from Downing Street, if you are pinged then isolate.
So if you delete the app, ie show the wrong behaviour, the government won’t concede to you, they will coerce you into the behaviours in the end.
I don’t make this up, I’m just the messenger where for many the penny hasn’t dropped yet.
Marginally following this up, isn't one of Labour's problems that very few of the real choices we face are left v right. A number of left issues are over, and therefore discounted. The NHS, free education to 18, not being an imperial power, social housing, payments to those not in work, House of Lords reform, minimum wage, employment rights, high taxes on the rich, health and safety etc. The centre left has won all the battles, and the centre right occupies what would have been a centre/centre left position.
Covid, Brexit, China, Russia, Islamic extremism, free speech, debt and deficit, the state of the UK union - none of these have obvious left v right alternative solutions.
The game has changed. I think so far the Tories have been better at silently shifting. Labour members still seem to think that the very people who vote in Patel, Sunak, Kwarteng and Nadhim Zahawi are filthy racists because they don't think Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler and Zarah Sultana are outstanding politicians.
The next left/right debate is UBI (and the terms of that debate will, in part be set by the experience of furlough, and our economic path over the next 5 years or so).
I think the left is at *extreme* danger of being outflanked on this by the right, with a post-industrial market-economy argument being made (and won) for its introduction by a future Tory administration, while Labour sits it out, scared of frightening the middle-england horses.
There is no debate to be had, UBI which is enough to live on is unaffordable
UBI already exists in this country, we just don't call it that and we have an extremely high real marginal income tax on it.
A sensible UBI introduction would be to merge existing things together, sort out the tax rates so they're sensible, then call it UBI. Not introduce massive new benefits.
A bit like Osborne introducing a Living Wage, based upon the pre-existing Minimum Wage and not dramatically different.
UBI will not work until they sort out housing benefit, specifically in London and the south.
The current numbers require something like £1k a month for an adult, £500 for a child, and an income tax rate of 35% with no personal allowance. Then start making allowances for behavioural changes, all of which will be on the downside for the Chancellor.
A properly-implemented UBI will make behaviour changes be on the upside for the Chancellor not the downside.
Currently people feel like its not worth working as they'll "lose their benefits" which is true, marginal tax rates of over 75% and effectively 90% exist. Getting rid of that will well and truly make work pay.
As a point of principle, I find it immoral for anyone to be facing a marginal tax rate of over 50%. That to me applies equally to those earning over £100k losing their tax-free allowance, and those on minimum wage losing their UC.
The only ways to get the UC withdrawal under 50%, are to either reduce the payments to those at the very bottom end, or to increase income tax for everyone.
I agree that the tax and benefits system is way too complex, with perverse incentives all over the place. While UC has straightened out a lot of the problems and silly 16-hour rules that existed previously, the next change is going to result in a lot of losers though, which makes it much more difficult politically.
It may be difficult, but if some are being taxed 75% and others are being taxed 40% then I don't care if the 40% see their taxes rise marginally if it pays to lower the tax rates for those on 75%,
Long-term making work pay and having flatter, lower tax rates leads to the pie being grown and more tax receipts/lower expenditure overall.
It will piss even more off if they try to implement it....imagine long queues building up outside pubs. restaurants, nightclubs,gigs ...."Sorry cant let you in because cant verify your status as the servers are down"
Very forseeable so the gov't will of course ensure the server capacity is increased prior to it being a condition
You can't increase the capacity that much, botnets are cheap to hire and IoT has provide many more millions of devices to run them on. Plus when did you last see a competent government it operation
The vaccine passport is on the users phone. No need for the nightclub to have computer access, just a doorman who knows what to look for. Same when you fly etc*. So no government IT to bring down.
*One of our nurses was in Spain a couple of weeks back. No one checked either way.
If it is just on the users phones then its easily forgeable and therefore pointless. I just get a friend to take a screenshot of theirs. Same with a paper version
I believe one of the debates happening in government is about the 'easy to fraud' problem.
They can debate all they want but like most things governments dont have the brightest people working for them, the brightest in it are outside and delight in a challenge of breaking things wide open and figuring out how to
Delighting in working out how to bring an increased risk of Covid infection into a nightclub because you are unjabbed, most people are sensible and will comply
I am not unjabbed I merely refuse to take part in your illiberal bollocks of vaxports the tories can fuck off
lololol - people are already going to nightclubs you apologist loon. They're going in confidence. A vax passport n 2 months is the ultimate stable door closed late.
It depends what horse in the stable you're trying to protect.
If its to prevent Covid cases spreading now, then you're right.
If its to prevent the NHS collapsing under the strain of Covid cases during winter flu season then a vax passport in 2 months time (plus the exit wave of the virus burning out in the summer) is timed to perfection.
Why would Covid cause a winter collapse? Haven't you and the other Unlock Now Forever advocates told us that its all over? Come on, you aren't backing a vax passport are you?
Morning all. Sorry, only just read the @Cyclefree PT header on the stubborn Tory poll lead. It's a very good helicopter piece.
"If the choice is between the Tories and an empty space, the latter is unlikely to win."
The above line jumped out at me. You read it and reflexively nod and think "too right". It's one of those.
But then - if you're me - you dwell on it a while and wonder whether it is such a slam dunk. This government (and particularly this PM) are increasingly being viewed by anybody with eyes to see and ears to listen and noses to smell and mouths to - ok ok you get the picture - as an utter shambles. No principles. No competence. 'No' as in ZERO.
They've got away with it so far (pollwise) but for how long? Brexit is shedding its potency as iconic wedge issue. Slowly, to be sure, but it is. They can poke the fires of its culture war aspect but is this enough to stay at 40%? I doubt it. Tough times lie ahead with the economy and in Fiscal Corner. Leveling Up, for example, has to move from soundbite to hard policy choices and this will piss some people off. If it doesn't it's not real and remains a soundbite. Which would also start to piss some people off, just a different bunch, those Leavers who voted for this agenda, believing it to be genuine. Because these folk are not total blithering idiots - not in the main and not all the time. Whatever, poll damage is coming either way. Ditto with Social Care. There are no votes in that. Only negative ones if you get serious about it. Ask Andy Burnham or Theresa May. So the same choice there. A solid plan and loss of popularity or a cop out and loss of popularity.
Now we have this mismanaged exit from the pandemic. Plus (the header here) further damaging reveals from Cummings - who was right there in the middle of it - about the response and attitude throughout. The PM at key moments in thrall to bizarre right-wing 'contrarians' for heaven's sake, most of them no wiser than our PB one. His focus not on preventing Covid running amok in England and killing tens of thousands but on something far more important - impressing the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator.
I could go on. The challenge is to stop. But I can do that too. I'm going out maskless in a minute. Big moment. The point is, surely all of this shit is probably going to lead within a year to the Cons polling no better than mid 30s. And then come the GE, given things can only get worse, if the choice is indeed between more of the same or a nice cool empty space fronted by a non-scary, competent, decent sounding bloke who looks like he could run a whelk stall and could manage to tell the truth every now and again, well for me that's a toss up.
I take issue with 'poke the fires of its culture war aspect'. Blaming the right for the culture war is like blaming Poland for World War Two. The right isn't trying to move back to 1953, it just doesn't want to be dragged forward to year zero. All the movement on the culture war is from the left. The right isn't trying to rewrite history. The right is, occasionally, suggesting that perhaps the left might be going a bit too far. Now you're astute, and you'll notice I'm saying 'the left' and not 'the Labour Party'. SKS is trying his hardest to avoid the loonier fringes of the culture war, though his party occasionally drag him into it. But to the electorate as a whole, that's not enough. Neil Kinnock was no culture warrior. But the culture warriors of the wider left - the ILEA, for example - lost him votes. How does SKS distance Labour from the likes of Zarah Sultana and Nadia Whittome?
EDIT - and have you read the Telegraph or the Spectator recently? If the PM has been trying to impress the Telegraph and the Spectator, he's going about it abysmally. What he's trying to do (and succeeding) is to impress the authoritarian lobby which want more laws on other people (like @gealbhan yesterday - although I wasn't sure how serious he was).
EDIT2: And good luck going maskless. Enjoy exchanging smiles with other demaskers!
As named, I’ll explain.
My point being the argument between authoritarian and libertarian is not a left right one, nor is it a case of one side being right, the other wrong. It’s a case of both should listen to the other and debate the other, to help get things right.
It shows up clearly in Covid politics, commentators in the Telegraph (Conservative in party politics, split between libertarian and authoritarian in Covid response) and the Daily Mail (Conservative till sixties, populist right since) also to a smaller degree split between authoritarian and libertarian, though tending toward libertarian in editorial.
In downing street yesterday, JVT Libertarian, open nite clubs, Vallance authoritarian, against doing it right now.
But with the success of vaccines, things have now moved on, old media and new media like this blog very slow to realise how things have moved. It’s never been, if not now then when, it was always going to be how, post vaccine.
It’s not about vaccines now, it’s about behaviours. The horse taken to water (jabbed) could say the easier equation than getting it to drink (behaviour) hence now proper debate required between authoritarian and libertarian to achieve those behaviours.
The government have already decided the road ahead and won’t u turn. My evidence? The main headline this lunchtime, government no intention to tackle pingdemic, they are determined to generate it, latest missive from Downing Street, if you are pinged then isolate.
So if you delete the app, ie show the wrong behaviour, the government won’t concede to you, they will coerce you into the behaviours in the end.
I don’t make this up, I’m just the messenger where for many the penny hasn’t dropped yet.
Marginally following this up, isn't one of Labour's problems that very few of the real choices we face are left v right. A number of left issues are over, and therefore discounted. The NHS, free education to 18, not being an imperial power, social housing, payments to those not in work, House of Lords reform, minimum wage, employment rights, high taxes on the rich, health and safety etc. The centre left has won all the battles, and the centre right occupies what would have been a centre/centre left position.
Covid, Brexit, China, Russia, Islamic extremism, free speech, debt and deficit, the state of the UK union - none of these have obvious left v right alternative solutions.
The game has changed. I think so far the Tories have been better at silently shifting. Labour members still seem to think that the very people who vote in Patel, Sunak, Kwarteng and Nadhim Zahawi are filthy racists because they don't think Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler and Zarah Sultana are outstanding politicians.
The next left/right debate is UBI (and the terms of that debate will, in part be set by the experience of furlough, and our economic path over the next 5 years or so).
I think the left is at *extreme* danger of being outflanked on this by the right, with a post-industrial market-economy argument being made (and won) for its introduction by a future Tory administration, while Labour sits it out, scared of frightening the middle-england horses.
There is no debate to be had, UBI which is enough to live on is unaffordable
UBI already exists in this country, we just don't call it that and we have an extremely high real marginal income tax on it.
A sensible UBI introduction would be to merge existing things together, sort out the tax rates so they're sensible, then call it UBI. Not introduce massive new benefits.
A bit like Osborne introducing a Living Wage, based upon the pre-existing Minimum Wage and not dramatically different.
UBI will not work until they sort out housing benefit, specifically in London and the south.
The current numbers require something like £1k a month for an adult, £500 for a child, and an income tax rate of 35% with no personal allowance. Then start making allowances for behavioural changes, all of which will be on the downside for the Chancellor.
Don't like it, don't get it - handouts for sitting at home make zero sense to me. I take the 'Judge Judy' approach to welfare!
The entire point of a UBI, as opposed to UC/JSA etc is that its not a handout for sitting at home.
What we have today is handouts encouraging people to stay at home.
Dear me, do people really think that checking a vaccine certificate requires communicating with government servers? I suppose such spectacular ignorance is because the government has stupidly not explained anything or laid the groundwork, but it's very hard to correct such nonsensical beliefs once they get around.
You would need to have a secure chain API with a bring your own device front end to scan the QR code and get a response from the server saying it's legit. Otherwise why bother?
No, you just need it to be encrypted using absolutely bog-standard techniques.
It's identical to your computer checking a certificate. All you need to store in the smartphone or other device checking the QR code is a small number of public keys.
Sighs you have no clue do you, a public key will be leaked. Look how well it worked for dvds when the data was encrypted....clue it lasted days. Keys will be leaked or a weakness found in almost nothing flat.
How does my browser accept an SSL certificate as legit? Not via Digicert or whoever signed it.
It will piss even more off if they try to implement it....imagine long queues building up outside pubs. restaurants, nightclubs,gigs ...."Sorry cant let you in because cant verify your status as the servers are down"
Very forseeable so the gov't will of course ensure the server capacity is increased prior to it being a condition
You can't increase the capacity that much, botnets are cheap to hire and IoT has provide many more millions of devices to run them on. Plus when did you last see a competent government it operation
The vaccine passport is on the users phone. No need for the nightclub to have computer access, just a doorman who knows what to look for. Same when you fly etc*. So no government IT to bring down.
*One of our nurses was in Spain a couple of weeks back. No one checked either way.
If it is just on the users phones then its easily forgeable and therefore pointless. I just get a friend to take a screenshot of theirs. Same with a paper version
I believe one of the debates happening in government is about the 'easy to fraud' problem.
They can debate all they want but like most things governments dont have the brightest people working for them, the brightest in it are outside and delight in a challenge of breaking things wide open and figuring out how to
Delighting in working out how to bring an increased risk of Covid infection into a nightclub because you are unjabbed, most people are sensible and will comply
I am not unjabbed I merely refuse to take part in your illiberal bollocks of vaxports the tories can fuck off
lololol - people are already going to nightclubs you apologist loon. They're going in confidence. A vax passport n 2 months is the ultimate stable door closed late.
It depends what horse in the stable you're trying to protect.
If its to prevent Covid cases spreading now, then you're right.
If its to prevent the NHS collapsing under the strain of Covid cases during winter flu season then a vax passport in 2 months time (plus the exit wave of the virus burning out in the summer) is timed to perfection.
Why would Covid cause a winter collapse? Haven't you and the other Unlock Now Forever advocates told us that its all over? Come on, you aren't backing a vax passport are you?
I'm not no, but the entire logic for months from the government and the scientists is that the point of biggest risk is in the winter when people are inside and there's the winter flu season in addition to Covid.
So if you're doing a vaxport, there's little point in doing it now and suppressing the summer spread. The entirely logical time to do it, is in time for Freshers in September.
Dear me, do people really think that checking a vaccine certificate requires communicating with government servers? I suppose such spectacular ignorance is because the government has stupidly not explained anything or laid the groundwork, but it's very hard to correct such nonsensical beliefs once they get around.
You would need to have a secure chain API with a bring your own device front end to scan the QR code and get a response from the server saying it's legit. Otherwise why bother?
No, you just need it to be encrypted using absolutely bog-standard techniques.
It's identical to your computer checking a certificate. All you need to store in the smartphone or other device checking the QR code is a small number of public keys.
It's health data which means local storage on BYOD systems is not acceptable. It would need an end to end secure chain.
Eh? What health data? The check isn't on the data, it's on the digital signature of the certifying authority.
It is health data because the check is someone's vaccination status. That's health data. Using an encrypted key would end in disaster.
Well, take it up with the EU. Their system is up and running.
And it's really easy to use - took about 3 seconds to access and pdf it to my phone.
It will piss even more off if they try to implement it....imagine long queues building up outside pubs. restaurants, nightclubs,gigs ...."Sorry cant let you in because cant verify your status as the servers are down"
Very forseeable so the gov't will of course ensure the server capacity is increased prior to it being a condition
You can't increase the capacity that much, botnets are cheap to hire and IoT has provide many more millions of devices to run them on. Plus when did you last see a competent government it operation
The vaccine passport is on the users phone. No need for the nightclub to have computer access, just a doorman who knows what to look for. Same when you fly etc*. So no government IT to bring down.
*One of our nurses was in Spain a couple of weeks back. No one checked either way.
No way will Mr Bill Jones' screenshotted double vaccine confirmation ever be used. A million times.
I can advise that fake vaccine certification is already changing hands for £500 a pop.
Dear me, do people really think that checking a vaccine certificate requires communicating with government servers? I suppose such spectacular ignorance is because the government has stupidly not explained anything or laid the groundwork, but it's very hard to correct such nonsensical beliefs once they get around.
You would need to have a secure chain API with a bring your own device front end to scan the QR code and get a response from the server saying it's legit. Otherwise why bother?
No, you just need it to be encrypted using absolutely bog-standard techniques.
It's identical to your computer checking a certificate. All you need to store in the smartphone or other device checking the QR code is a small number of public keys.
Sighs you have no clue do you, a public key will be leaked. Look how well it worked for dvds when the data was encrypted....clue it lasted days. Keys will be leaked or a weakness found in almost nothing flat.
How does my browser accept an SSL certificate as legit? Not via Digicert or whoever signed it.
Your browser decrypts it with a key. Those keys get leaked too
Dear me, do people really think that checking a vaccine certificate requires communicating with government servers? I suppose such spectacular ignorance is because the government has stupidly not explained anything or laid the groundwork, but it's very hard to correct such nonsensical beliefs once they get around.
You would need to have a secure chain API with a bring your own device front end to scan the QR code and get a response from the server saying it's legit. Otherwise why bother?
No, you just need it to be encrypted using absolutely bog-standard techniques.
It's identical to your computer checking a certificate. All you need to store in the smartphone or other device checking the QR code is a small number of public keys.
Sighs you have no clue do you, a public key will be leaked. Look how well it worked for dvds when the data was encrypted....clue it lasted days. Keys will be leaked or a weakness found in almost nothing flat.
Well done, you've just demonstrated that the entire science of cryptography is bogus. Have you warned GCHQ?
Where did I claim that. What I claimed has nothing to do with cryptography. I work with cryptography. The simple fact is people. There will be multiple people with access to those keys. One of them will either find themselves in need of cash or they will be blackmailable. What has that to do with the science of cryptography? One or more keys will be available in the wild within a few days
Well, we use digital keys for all sorts of things, such as code signatures for Windows or Apple apps, where the downside of a breach of security is massively higher. Yes, I suppose there is always a tiny chance that a private key will be leaked, although almost noone (possibly precisely no-one) needs to have access to it. The risk is miniscule, but let's go with it. What's the worst that can happen? A tiny number of highly tech-savvy unvaxxed people get into a nightclub when they shouldn't have been able to. Not the end of the world, is it? It can't be a widespread fraud because if it is, then you just invalidate that key and ask people to revalidate.
It will piss even more off if they try to implement it....imagine long queues building up outside pubs. restaurants, nightclubs,gigs ...."Sorry cant let you in because cant verify your status as the servers are down"
Very forseeable so the gov't will of course ensure the server capacity is increased prior to it being a condition
You can't increase the capacity that much, botnets are cheap to hire and IoT has provide many more millions of devices to run them on. Plus when did you last see a competent government it operation
The vaccine passport is on the users phone. No need for the nightclub to have computer access, just a doorman who knows what to look for. Same when you fly etc*. So no government IT to bring down.
*One of our nurses was in Spain a couple of weeks back. No one checked either way.
No way will Mr Bill Jones' screenshotted double vaccine confirmation ever be used. A million times.
I can advise that fake vaccine certification is already changing hands for £500 a pop.
In news surprising to no one anywhere.
Perhaps Season 2 of Clarkson's Farm will feature Caleb and Gerald fighting off illegal ravers with an outdated Massey Ferguson.
It will piss even more off if they try to implement it....imagine long queues building up outside pubs. restaurants, nightclubs,gigs ...."Sorry cant let you in because cant verify your status as the servers are down"
Very forseeable so the gov't will of course ensure the server capacity is increased prior to it being a condition
You can't increase the capacity that much, botnets are cheap to hire and IoT has provide many more millions of devices to run them on. Plus when did you last see a competent government it operation
The vaccine passport is on the users phone. No need for the nightclub to have computer access, just a doorman who knows what to look for. Same when you fly etc*. So no government IT to bring down.
*One of our nurses was in Spain a couple of weeks back. No one checked either way.
If it is just on the users phones then its easily forgeable and therefore pointless. I just get a friend to take a screenshot of theirs. Same with a paper version
I believe one of the debates happening in government is about the 'easy to fraud' problem.
They can debate all they want but like most things governments dont have the brightest people working for them, the brightest in it are outside and delight in a challenge of breaking things wide open and figuring out how to
Delighting in working out how to bring an increased risk of Covid infection into a nightclub because you are unjabbed, most people are sensible and will comply
I am not unjabbed I merely refuse to take part in your illiberal bollocks of vaxports the tories can fuck off
lololol - people are already going to nightclubs you apologist loon. They're going in confidence. A vax passport n 2 months is the ultimate stable door closed late.
It depends what horse in the stable you're trying to protect.
If its to prevent Covid cases spreading now, then you're right.
If its to prevent the NHS collapsing under the strain of Covid cases during winter flu season then a vax passport in 2 months time (plus the exit wave of the virus burning out in the summer) is timed to perfection.
Why would Covid cause a winter collapse? Haven't you and the other Unlock Now Forever advocates told us that its all over? Come on, you aren't backing a vax passport are you?
I'm not no, but the entire logic for months from the government and the scientists is that the point of biggest risk is in the winter when people are inside and there's the winter flu season in addition to Covid.
So if you're doing a vaxport, there's little point in doing it now and suppressing the summer spread. The entirely logical time to do it, is in time for Freshers in September.
So the avowed strategy now is to get as many people as possible sick with Covid now?
Morning all. Sorry, only just read the @Cyclefree PT header on the stubborn Tory poll lead. It's a very good helicopter piece.
"If the choice is between the Tories and an empty space, the latter is unlikely to win."
The above line jumped out at me. You read it and reflexively nod and think "too right". It's one of those.
But then - if you're me - you dwell on it a while and wonder whether it is such a slam dunk. This government (and particularly this PM) are increasingly being viewed by anybody with eyes to see and ears to listen and noses to smell and mouths to - ok ok you get the picture - as an utter shambles. No principles. No competence. 'No' as in ZERO.
They've got away with it so far (pollwise) but for how long? Brexit is shedding its potency as iconic wedge issue. Slowly, to be sure, but it is. They can poke the fires of its culture war aspect but is this enough to stay at 40%? I doubt it. Tough times lie ahead with the economy and in Fiscal Corner. Leveling Up, for example, has to move from soundbite to hard policy choices and this will piss some people off. If it doesn't it's not real and remains a soundbite. Which would also start to piss some people off, just a different bunch, those Leavers who voted for this agenda, believing it to be genuine. Because these folk are not total blithering idiots - not in the main and not all the time. Whatever, poll damage is coming either way. Ditto with Social Care. There are no votes in that. Only negative ones if you get serious about it. Ask Andy Burnham or Theresa May. So the same choice there. A solid plan and loss of popularity or a cop out and loss of popularity.
Now we have this mismanaged exit from the pandemic. Plus (the header here) further damaging reveals from Cummings - who was right there in the middle of it - about the response and attitude throughout. The PM at key moments in thrall to bizarre right-wing 'contrarians' for heaven's sake, most of them no wiser than our PB one. His focus not on preventing Covid running amok in England and killing tens of thousands but on something far more important - impressing the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator.
I could go on. The challenge is to stop. But I can do that too. I'm going out maskless in a minute. Big moment. The point is, surely all of this shit is probably going to lead within a year to the Cons polling no better than mid 30s. And then come the GE, given things can only get worse, if the choice is indeed between more of the same or a nice cool empty space fronted by a non-scary, competent, decent sounding bloke who looks like he could run a whelk stall and could manage to tell the truth every now and again, well for me that's a toss up.
I take issue with 'poke the fires of its culture war aspect'. Blaming the right for the culture war is like blaming Poland for World War Two. The right isn't trying to move back to 1953, it just doesn't want to be dragged forward to year zero. All the movement on the culture war is from the left. The right isn't trying to rewrite history. The right is, occasionally, suggesting that perhaps the left might be going a bit too far. Now you're astute, and you'll notice I'm saying 'the left' and not 'the Labour Party'. SKS is trying his hardest to avoid the loonier fringes of the culture war, though his party occasionally drag him into it. But to the electorate as a whole, that's not enough. Neil Kinnock was no culture warrior. But the culture warriors of the wider left - the ILEA, for example - lost him votes. How does SKS distance Labour from the likes of Zarah Sultana and Nadia Whittome?
EDIT - and have you read the Telegraph or the Spectator recently? If the PM has been trying to impress the Telegraph and the Spectator, he's going about it abysmally. What he's trying to do (and succeeding) is to impress the authoritarian lobby which want more laws on other people (like @gealbhan yesterday - although I wasn't sure how serious he was).
EDIT2: And good luck going maskless. Enjoy exchanging smiles with other demaskers!
As named, I’ll explain.
My point being the argument between authoritarian and libertarian is not a left right one, nor is it a case of one side being right, the other wrong. It’s a case of both should listen to the other and debate the other, to help get things right.
It shows up clearly in Covid politics, commentators in the Telegraph (Conservative in party politics, split between libertarian and authoritarian in Covid response) and the Daily Mail (Conservative till sixties, populist right since) also to a smaller degree split between authoritarian and libertarian, though tending toward libertarian in editorial.
In downing street yesterday, JVT Libertarian, open nite clubs, Vallance authoritarian, against doing it right now.
But with the success of vaccines, things have now moved on, old media and new media like this blog very slow to realise how things have moved. It’s never been, if not now then when, it was always going to be how, post vaccine.
It’s not about vaccines now, it’s about behaviours. The horse taken to water (jabbed) could say the easier equation than getting it to drink (behaviour) hence now proper debate required between authoritarian and libertarian to achieve those behaviours.
The government have already decided the road ahead and won’t u turn. My evidence? The main headline this lunchtime, government no intention to tackle pingdemic, they are determined to generate it, latest missive from Downing Street, if you are pinged then isolate.
So if you delete the app, ie show the wrong behaviour, the government won’t concede to you, they will coerce you into the behaviours in the end.
I don’t make this up, I’m just the messenger where for many the penny hasn’t dropped yet.
Marginally following this up, isn't one of Labour's problems that very few of the real choices we face are left v right. A number of left issues are over, and therefore discounted. The NHS, free education to 18, not being an imperial power, social housing, payments to those not in work, House of Lords reform, minimum wage, employment rights, high taxes on the rich, health and safety etc. The centre left has won all the battles, and the centre right occupies what would have been a centre/centre left position.
Covid, Brexit, China, Russia, Islamic extremism, free speech, debt and deficit, the state of the UK union - none of these have obvious left v right alternative solutions.
The game has changed. I think so far the Tories have been better at silently shifting. Labour members still seem to think that the very people who vote in Patel, Sunak, Kwarteng and Nadhim Zahawi are filthy racists because they don't think Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler and Zarah Sultana are outstanding politicians.
The next left/right debate is UBI (and the terms of that debate will, in part be set by the experience of furlough, and our economic path over the next 5 years or so).
I think the left is at *extreme* danger of being outflanked on this by the right, with a post-industrial market-economy argument being made (and won) for its introduction by a future Tory administration, while Labour sits it out, scared of frightening the middle-england horses.
There is no debate to be had, UBI which is enough to live on is unaffordable
UBI already exists in this country, we just don't call it that and we have an extremely high real marginal income tax on it.
A sensible UBI introduction would be to merge existing things together, sort out the tax rates so they're sensible, then call it UBI. Not introduce massive new benefits.
A bit like Osborne introducing a Living Wage, based upon the pre-existing Minimum Wage and not dramatically different.
UBI will not work until they sort out housing benefit, specifically in London and the south.
The current numbers require something like £1k a month for an adult, £500 for a child, and an income tax rate of 35% with no personal allowance. Then start making allowances for behavioural changes, all of which will be on the downside for the Chancellor.
Don't like it, don't get it - handouts for sitting at home make zero sense to me. I take the 'Judge Judy' approach to welfare!
The entire point of a UBI, as opposed to UC/JSA etc is that its not a handout for sitting at home.
What we have today is handouts encouraging people to stay at home.
I t further weakens the notion of self-help and nurse knows best. No thanks.
Morning all. Sorry, only just read the @Cyclefree PT header on the stubborn Tory poll lead. It's a very good helicopter piece.
"If the choice is between the Tories and an empty space, the latter is unlikely to win."
The above line jumped out at me. You read it and reflexively nod and think "too right". It's one of those.
But then - if you're me - you dwell on it a while and wonder whether it is such a slam dunk. This government (and particularly this PM) are increasingly being viewed by anybody with eyes to see and ears to listen and noses to smell and mouths to - ok ok you get the picture - as an utter shambles. No principles. No competence. 'No' as in ZERO.
They've got away with it so far (pollwise) but for how long? Brexit is shedding its potency as iconic wedge issue. Slowly, to be sure, but it is. They can poke the fires of its culture war aspect but is this enough to stay at 40%? I doubt it. Tough times lie ahead with the economy and in Fiscal Corner. Leveling Up, for example, has to move from soundbite to hard policy choices and this will piss some people off. If it doesn't it's not real and remains a soundbite. Which would also start to piss some people off, just a different bunch, those Leavers who voted for this agenda, believing it to be genuine. Because these folk are not total blithering idiots - not in the main and not all the time. Whatever, poll damage is coming either way. Ditto with Social Care. There are no votes in that. Only negative ones if you get serious about it. Ask Andy Burnham or Theresa May. So the same choice there. A solid plan and loss of popularity or a cop out and loss of popularity.
Now we have this mismanaged exit from the pandemic. Plus (the header here) further damaging reveals from Cummings - who was right there in the middle of it - about the response and attitude throughout. The PM at key moments in thrall to bizarre right-wing 'contrarians' for heaven's sake, most of them no wiser than our PB one. His focus not on preventing Covid running amok in England and killing tens of thousands but on something far more important - impressing the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator.
I could go on. The challenge is to stop. But I can do that too. I'm going out maskless in a minute. Big moment. The point is, surely all of this shit is probably going to lead within a year to the Cons polling no better than mid 30s. And then come the GE, given things can only get worse, if the choice is indeed between more of the same or a nice cool empty space fronted by a non-scary, competent, decent sounding bloke who looks like he could run a whelk stall and could manage to tell the truth every now and again, well for me that's a toss up.
I take issue with 'poke the fires of its culture war aspect'. Blaming the right for the culture war is like blaming Poland for World War Two. The right isn't trying to move back to 1953, it just doesn't want to be dragged forward to year zero. All the movement on the culture war is from the left. The right isn't trying to rewrite history. The right is, occasionally, suggesting that perhaps the left might be going a bit too far. Now you're astute, and you'll notice I'm saying 'the left' and not 'the Labour Party'. SKS is trying his hardest to avoid the loonier fringes of the culture war, though his party occasionally drag him into it. But to the electorate as a whole, that's not enough. Neil Kinnock was no culture warrior. But the culture warriors of the wider left - the ILEA, for example - lost him votes. How does SKS distance Labour from the likes of Zarah Sultana and Nadia Whittome?
EDIT - and have you read the Telegraph or the Spectator recently? If the PM has been trying to impress the Telegraph and the Spectator, he's going about it abysmally. What he's trying to do (and succeeding) is to impress the authoritarian lobby which want more laws on other people (like @gealbhan yesterday - although I wasn't sure how serious he was).
EDIT2: And good luck going maskless. Enjoy exchanging smiles with other demaskers!
As named, I’ll explain.
My point being the argument between authoritarian and libertarian is not a left right one, nor is it a case of one side being right, the other wrong. It’s a case of both should listen to the other and debate the other, to help get things right.
It shows up clearly in Covid politics, commentators in the Telegraph (Conservative in party politics, split between libertarian and authoritarian in Covid response) and the Daily Mail (Conservative till sixties, populist right since) also to a smaller degree split between authoritarian and libertarian, though tending toward libertarian in editorial.
In downing street yesterday, JVT Libertarian, open nite clubs, Vallance authoritarian, against doing it right now.
But with the success of vaccines, things have now moved on, old media and new media like this blog very slow to realise how things have moved. It’s never been, if not now then when, it was always going to be how, post vaccine.
It’s not about vaccines now, it’s about behaviours. The horse taken to water (jabbed) could say the easier equation than getting it to drink (behaviour) hence now proper debate required between authoritarian and libertarian to achieve those behaviours.
The government have already decided the road ahead and won’t u turn. My evidence? The main headline this lunchtime, government no intention to tackle pingdemic, they are determined to generate it, latest missive from Downing Street, if you are pinged then isolate.
So if you delete the app, ie show the wrong behaviour, the government won’t concede to you, they will coerce you into the behaviours in the end.
I don’t make this up, I’m just the messenger where for many the penny hasn’t dropped yet.
Marginally following this up, isn't one of Labour's problems that very few of the real choices we face are left v right. A number of left issues are over, and therefore discounted. The NHS, free education to 18, not being an imperial power, social housing, payments to those not in work, House of Lords reform, minimum wage, employment rights, high taxes on the rich, health and safety etc. The centre left has won all the battles, and the centre right occupies what would have been a centre/centre left position.
Covid, Brexit, China, Russia, Islamic extremism, free speech, debt and deficit, the state of the UK union - none of these have obvious left v right alternative solutions.
The game has changed. I think so far the Tories have been better at silently shifting. Labour members still seem to think that the very people who vote in Patel, Sunak, Kwarteng and Nadhim Zahawi are filthy racists because they don't think Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler and Zarah Sultana are outstanding politicians.
The next left/right debate is UBI (and the terms of that debate will, in part be set by the experience of furlough, and our economic path over the next 5 years or so).
I think the left is at *extreme* danger of being outflanked on this by the right, with a post-industrial market-economy argument being made (and won) for its introduction by a future Tory administration, while Labour sits it out, scared of frightening the middle-england horses.
There is no debate to be had, UBI which is enough to live on is unaffordable
UBI already exists in this country, we just don't call it that and we have an extremely high real marginal income tax on it.
A sensible UBI introduction would be to merge existing things together, sort out the tax rates so they're sensible, then call it UBI. Not introduce massive new benefits.
A bit like Osborne introducing a Living Wage, based upon the pre-existing Minimum Wage and not dramatically different.
UBI will not work until they sort out housing benefit, specifically in London and the south.
The current numbers require something like £1k a month for an adult, £500 for a child, and an income tax rate of 35% with no personal allowance. Then start making allowances for behavioural changes, all of which will be on the downside for the Chancellor.
A properly-implemented UBI will make behaviour changes be on the upside for the Chancellor not the downside.
Currently people feel like its not worth working as they'll "lose their benefits" which is true, marginal tax rates of over 75% and effectively 90% exist. Getting rid of that will well and truly make work pay.
As a point of principle, I find it immoral for anyone to be facing a marginal tax rate of over 50%. That to me applies equally to those earning over £100k losing their tax-free allowance, and those on minimum wage losing their UC.
The only ways to get the UC withdrawal under 50%, are to either reduce the payments to those at the very bottom end, or to increase income tax for everyone.
I agree that the tax and benefits system is way too complex, with perverse incentives all over the place. While UC has straightened out a lot of the problems and silly 16-hour rules that existed previously, the next change is going to result in a lot of losers though, which makes it much more difficult politically.
It may be difficult, but if some are being taxed 75% and others are being taxed 40% then I don't care if the 40% see their taxes rise marginally if it pays to lower the tax rates for those on 75%,
Long-term making work pay and having flatter, lower tax rates leads to the pie being grown and more tax receipts/lower expenditure overall.
I don’t disagree with you, but good luck arguing for the 20% income tax rate rate to be changed to 25%.
Morning all. Sorry, only just read the @Cyclefree PT header on the stubborn Tory poll lead. It's a very good helicopter piece.
"If the choice is between the Tories and an empty space, the latter is unlikely to win."
The above line jumped out at me. You read it and reflexively nod and think "too right". It's one of those.
But then - if you're me - you dwell on it a while and wonder whether it is such a slam dunk. This government (and particularly this PM) are increasingly being viewed by anybody with eyes to see and ears to listen and noses to smell and mouths to - ok ok you get the picture - as an utter shambles. No principles. No competence. 'No' as in ZERO.
They've got away with it so far (pollwise) but for how long? Brexit is shedding its potency as iconic wedge issue. Slowly, to be sure, but it is. They can poke the fires of its culture war aspect but is this enough to stay at 40%? I doubt it. Tough times lie ahead with the economy and in Fiscal Corner. Leveling Up, for example, has to move from soundbite to hard policy choices and this will piss some people off. If it doesn't it's not real and remains a soundbite. Which would also start to piss some people off, just a different bunch, those Leavers who voted for this agenda, believing it to be genuine. Because these folk are not total blithering idiots - not in the main and not all the time. Whatever, poll damage is coming either way. Ditto with Social Care. There are no votes in that. Only negative ones if you get serious about it. Ask Andy Burnham or Theresa May. So the same choice there. A solid plan and loss of popularity or a cop out and loss of popularity.
Now we have this mismanaged exit from the pandemic. Plus (the header here) further damaging reveals from Cummings - who was right there in the middle of it - about the response and attitude throughout. The PM at key moments in thrall to bizarre right-wing 'contrarians' for heaven's sake, most of them no wiser than our PB one. His focus not on preventing Covid running amok in England and killing tens of thousands but on something far more important - impressing the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator.
I could go on. The challenge is to stop. But I can do that too. I'm going out maskless in a minute. Big moment. The point is, surely all of this shit is probably going to lead within a year to the Cons polling no better than mid 30s. And then come the GE, given things can only get worse, if the choice is indeed between more of the same or a nice cool empty space fronted by a non-scary, competent, decent sounding bloke who looks like he could run a whelk stall and could manage to tell the truth every now and again, well for me that's a toss up.
I take issue with 'poke the fires of its culture war aspect'. Blaming the right for the culture war is like blaming Poland for World War Two. The right isn't trying to move back to 1953, it just doesn't want to be dragged forward to year zero. All the movement on the culture war is from the left. The right isn't trying to rewrite history. The right is, occasionally, suggesting that perhaps the left might be going a bit too far. Now you're astute, and you'll notice I'm saying 'the left' and not 'the Labour Party'. SKS is trying his hardest to avoid the loonier fringes of the culture war, though his party occasionally drag him into it. But to the electorate as a whole, that's not enough. Neil Kinnock was no culture warrior. But the culture warriors of the wider left - the ILEA, for example - lost him votes. How does SKS distance Labour from the likes of Zarah Sultana and Nadia Whittome?
EDIT - and have you read the Telegraph or the Spectator recently? If the PM has been trying to impress the Telegraph and the Spectator, he's going about it abysmally. What he's trying to do (and succeeding) is to impress the authoritarian lobby which want more laws on other people (like @gealbhan yesterday - although I wasn't sure how serious he was).
EDIT2: And good luck going maskless. Enjoy exchanging smiles with other demaskers!
As named, I’ll explain.
My point being the argument between authoritarian and libertarian is not a left right one, nor is it a case of one side being right, the other wrong. It’s a case of both should listen to the other and debate the other, to help get things right.
It shows up clearly in Covid politics, commentators in the Telegraph (Conservative in party politics, split between libertarian and authoritarian in Covid response) and the Daily Mail (Conservative till sixties, populist right since) also to a smaller degree split between authoritarian and libertarian, though tending toward libertarian in editorial.
In downing street yesterday, JVT Libertarian, open nite clubs, Vallance authoritarian, against doing it right now.
But with the success of vaccines, things have now moved on, old media and new media like this blog very slow to realise how things have moved. It’s never been, if not now then when, it was always going to be how, post vaccine.
It’s not about vaccines now, it’s about behaviours. The horse taken to water (jabbed) could say the easier equation than getting it to drink (behaviour) hence now proper debate required between authoritarian and libertarian to achieve those behaviours.
The government have already decided the road ahead and won’t u turn. My evidence? The main headline this lunchtime, government no intention to tackle pingdemic, they are determined to generate it, latest missive from Downing Street, if you are pinged then isolate.
So if you delete the app, ie show the wrong behaviour, the government won’t concede to you, they will coerce you into the behaviours in the end.
I don’t make this up, I’m just the messenger where for many the penny hasn’t dropped yet.
Marginally following this up, isn't one of Labour's problems that very few of the real choices we face are left v right. A number of left issues are over, and therefore discounted. The NHS, free education to 18, not being an imperial power, social housing, payments to those not in work, House of Lords reform, minimum wage, employment rights, high taxes on the rich, health and safety etc. The centre left has won all the battles, and the centre right occupies what would have been a centre/centre left position.
Covid, Brexit, China, Russia, Islamic extremism, free speech, debt and deficit, the state of the UK union - none of these have obvious left v right alternative solutions.
The game has changed. I think so far the Tories have been better at silently shifting. Labour members still seem to think that the very people who vote in Patel, Sunak, Kwarteng and Nadhim Zahawi are filthy racists because they don't think Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler and Zarah Sultana are outstanding politicians.
The next left/right debate is UBI (and the terms of that debate will, in part be set by the experience of furlough, and our economic path over the next 5 years or so).
I think the left is at *extreme* danger of being outflanked on this by the right, with a post-industrial market-economy argument being made (and won) for its introduction by a future Tory administration, while Labour sits it out, scared of frightening the middle-england horses.
There is no debate to be had, UBI which is enough to live on is unaffordable
UBI already exists in this country, we just don't call it that and we have an extremely high real marginal income tax on it.
A sensible UBI introduction would be to merge existing things together, sort out the tax rates so they're sensible, then call it UBI. Not introduce massive new benefits.
A bit like Osborne introducing a Living Wage, based upon the pre-existing Minimum Wage and not dramatically different.
UBI will not work until they sort out housing benefit, specifically in London and the south.
The current numbers require something like £1k a month for an adult, £500 for a child, and an income tax rate of 35% with no personal allowance. Then start making allowances for behavioural changes, all of which will be on the downside for the Chancellor.
Don't like it, don't get it - handouts for sitting at home make zero sense to me. I take the 'Judge Judy' approach to welfare!
The entire point of a UBI, as opposed to UC/JSA etc is that its not a handout for sitting at home.
What we have today is handouts encouraging people to stay at home.
I t further weakens the notion of self-help and nurse knows best. No thanks.
Actually it does the complete opposite.
UC/JSA weakens the notion of self-help because it pays people to not be working. Work and "you lose your benefits". If you fail to work, you're paid for that.
UBI reinforces the notion of self-help as you get the UBI whether you work or not. Fail to work, you're not given any extra money than those who do work, so you're the one who suffers.
Dear me, do people really think that checking a vaccine certificate requires communicating with government servers? I suppose such spectacular ignorance is because the government has stupidly not explained anything or laid the groundwork, but it's very hard to correct such nonsensical beliefs once they get around.
You would need to have a secure chain API with a bring your own device front end to scan the QR code and get a response from the server saying it's legit. Otherwise why bother?
No, you just need it to be encrypted using absolutely bog-standard techniques.
It's identical to your computer checking a certificate. All you need to store in the smartphone or other device checking the QR code is a small number of public keys.
Sighs you have no clue do you, a public key will be leaked. Look how well it worked for dvds when the data was encrypted....clue it lasted days. Keys will be leaked or a weakness found in almost nothing flat.
Well done, you've just demonstrated that the entire science of cryptography is bogus. Have you warned GCHQ?
Where did I claim that. What I claimed has nothing to do with cryptography. I work with cryptography. The simple fact is people. There will be multiple people with access to those keys. One of them will either find themselves in need of cash or they will be blackmailable. What has that to do with the science of cryptography? One or more keys will be available in the wild within a few days
Well, we use digital keys for all sorts of things, such as code signatures for Windows or Apple apps, where the downside of a breach of security is massively higher. Yes, I suppose there is always a tiny chance that a private key will be leaked, although almost noone (possibly precisely no-one) needs to have access to it. The risk is miniscule, but let's go with it. What's the worst that can happen? A tiny number of highly tech-savvy unvaxxed people get into a nightclub when they shouldn't have been able to. Not the end of the world, is it? It can't be a widespread fraud because if it is, then you just invalidate that key and ask people to revalidate.
I was merely pointing out there will be forgeries and I expect a lot of criminals to make a lot of money out of it just as they did selling sky tv decryption cards. It is only one plank of resistance not the full board
Dear me, do people really think that checking a vaccine certificate requires communicating with government servers? I suppose such spectacular ignorance is because the government has stupidly not explained anything or laid the groundwork, but it's very hard to correct such nonsensical beliefs once they get around.
You would need to have a secure chain API with a bring your own device front end to scan the QR code and get a response from the server saying it's legit. Otherwise why bother?
No, you just need it to be encrypted using absolutely bog-standard techniques.
It's identical to your computer checking a certificate. All you need to store in the smartphone or other device checking the QR code is a small number of public keys.
Sighs you have no clue do you, a public key will be leaked. Look how well it worked for dvds when the data was encrypted....clue it lasted days. Keys will be leaked or a weakness found in almost nothing flat.
How does my browser accept an SSL certificate as legit? Not via Digicert or whoever signed it.
Your browser decrypts it with a key. Those keys get leaked too
Morning all. Sorry, only just read the @Cyclefree PT header on the stubborn Tory poll lead. It's a very good helicopter piece.
"If the choice is between the Tories and an empty space, the latter is unlikely to win."
The above line jumped out at me. You read it and reflexively nod and think "too right". It's one of those.
But then - if you're me - you dwell on it a while and wonder whether it is such a slam dunk. This government (and particularly this PM) are increasingly being viewed by anybody with eyes to see and ears to listen and noses to smell and mouths to - ok ok you get the picture - as an utter shambles. No principles. No competence. 'No' as in ZERO.
They've got away with it so far (pollwise) but for how long? Brexit is shedding its potency as iconic wedge issue. Slowly, to be sure, but it is. They can poke the fires of its culture war aspect but is this enough to stay at 40%? I doubt it. Tough times lie ahead with the economy and in Fiscal Corner. Leveling Up, for example, has to move from soundbite to hard policy choices and this will piss some people off. If it doesn't it's not real and remains a soundbite. Which would also start to piss some people off, just a different bunch, those Leavers who voted for this agenda, believing it to be genuine. Because these folk are not total blithering idiots - not in the main and not all the time. Whatever, poll damage is coming either way. Ditto with Social Care. There are no votes in that. Only negative ones if you get serious about it. Ask Andy Burnham or Theresa May. So the same choice there. A solid plan and loss of popularity or a cop out and loss of popularity.
Now we have this mismanaged exit from the pandemic. Plus (the header here) further damaging reveals from Cummings - who was right there in the middle of it - about the response and attitude throughout. The PM at key moments in thrall to bizarre right-wing 'contrarians' for heaven's sake, most of them no wiser than our PB one. His focus not on preventing Covid running amok in England and killing tens of thousands but on something far more important - impressing the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator.
I could go on. The challenge is to stop. But I can do that too. I'm going out maskless in a minute. Big moment. The point is, surely all of this shit is probably going to lead within a year to the Cons polling no better than mid 30s. And then come the GE, given things can only get worse, if the choice is indeed between more of the same or a nice cool empty space fronted by a non-scary, competent, decent sounding bloke who looks like he could run a whelk stall and could manage to tell the truth every now and again, well for me that's a toss up.
I take issue with 'poke the fires of its culture war aspect'. Blaming the right for the culture war is like blaming Poland for World War Two. The right isn't trying to move back to 1953, it just doesn't want to be dragged forward to year zero. All the movement on the culture war is from the left. The right isn't trying to rewrite history. The right is, occasionally, suggesting that perhaps the left might be going a bit too far. Now you're astute, and you'll notice I'm saying 'the left' and not 'the Labour Party'. SKS is trying his hardest to avoid the loonier fringes of the culture war, though his party occasionally drag him into it. But to the electorate as a whole, that's not enough. Neil Kinnock was no culture warrior. But the culture warriors of the wider left - the ILEA, for example - lost him votes. How does SKS distance Labour from the likes of Zarah Sultana and Nadia Whittome?
EDIT - and have you read the Telegraph or the Spectator recently? If the PM has been trying to impress the Telegraph and the Spectator, he's going about it abysmally. What he's trying to do (and succeeding) is to impress the authoritarian lobby which want more laws on other people (like @gealbhan yesterday - although I wasn't sure how serious he was).
EDIT2: And good luck going maskless. Enjoy exchanging smiles with other demaskers!
As named, I’ll explain.
My point being the argument between authoritarian and libertarian is not a left right one, nor is it a case of one side being right, the other wrong. It’s a case of both should listen to the other and debate the other, to help get things right.
It shows up clearly in Covid politics, commentators in the Telegraph (Conservative in party politics, split between libertarian and authoritarian in Covid response) and the Daily Mail (Conservative till sixties, populist right since) also to a smaller degree split between authoritarian and libertarian, though tending toward libertarian in editorial.
In downing street yesterday, JVT Libertarian, open nite clubs, Vallance authoritarian, against doing it right now.
But with the success of vaccines, things have now moved on, old media and new media like this blog very slow to realise how things have moved. It’s never been, if not now then when, it was always going to be how, post vaccine.
It’s not about vaccines now, it’s about behaviours. The horse taken to water (jabbed) could say the easier equation than getting it to drink (behaviour) hence now proper debate required between authoritarian and libertarian to achieve those behaviours.
The government have already decided the road ahead and won’t u turn. My evidence? The main headline this lunchtime, government no intention to tackle pingdemic, they are determined to generate it, latest missive from Downing Street, if you are pinged then isolate.
So if you delete the app, ie show the wrong behaviour, the government won’t concede to you, they will coerce you into the behaviours in the end.
I don’t make this up, I’m just the messenger where for many the penny hasn’t dropped yet.
Fair enough. I wasn't sure how genuinely supportive you were of this approach though (and I'm still not, to be honest.)
Surely sticking to 'if you are pinged then isolate' just encourages people to delete the app though?
I’m sure jabbed and some behaviours to back that up is the right way to go. I think that is also the government position. Will be interesting to see how the government decide to achieve that. At the current time, they don’t really know.
In Boris own words yesterday, TAT is his only control left, so he feels he has surrendered control and feeling uncomfortable about it? The government position is vaccinate and then behaviours, I’m okay with that sounds sensible to me, but I’m not sure they know what that means. Almost like they want us to eat Libertarian and authoritarian cake at the same time now is their less than clear position.
For example. Covid passports. What are they trying to achieve? How effective will they be at achieving it? Say we are starting with the end output you want to achieve and work backward, is that Covid safe venues without superspreading? is vaxpass what you would use to achieve that end result?
What does it prove, you are jabbed/double jabbed? You can still be a super speeder can you not? You can still go into a vaxpass venue and get Ill can you not? So what’s it actually achieving in terms of behaviours, other than a false claim you are ensuring behaviours when you are not really?
You don’t argue with security on the doors, but like Philip said, how well does it work extending to where there isn’t security?
Dear me, do people really think that checking a vaccine certificate requires communicating with government servers? I suppose such spectacular ignorance is because the government has stupidly not explained anything or laid the groundwork, but it's very hard to correct such nonsensical beliefs once they get around.
You would need to have a secure chain API with a bring your own device front end to scan the QR code and get a response from the server saying it's legit. Otherwise why bother?
No, you just need it to be encrypted using absolutely bog-standard techniques.
It's identical to your computer checking a certificate. All you need to store in the smartphone or other device checking the QR code is a small number of public keys.
Sighs you have no clue do you, a public key will be leaked. Look how well it worked for dvds when the data was encrypted....clue it lasted days. Keys will be leaked or a weakness found in almost nothing flat.
Well done, you've just demonstrated that the entire science of cryptography is bogus. Have you warned GCHQ?
Where did I claim that. What I claimed has nothing to do with cryptography. I work with cryptography. The simple fact is people. There will be multiple people with access to those keys. One of them will either find themselves in need of cash or they will be blackmailable. What has that to do with the science of cryptography? One or more keys will be available in the wild within a few days
Well, we use digital keys for all sorts of things, such as code signatures for Windows or Apple apps, where the downside of a breach of security is massively higher. Yes, I suppose there is always a tiny chance that a private key will be leaked, although almost noone (possibly precisely no-one) needs to have access to it. The risk is miniscule, but let's go with it. What's the worst that can happen? A tiny number of highly tech-savvy unvaxxed people get into a nightclub when they shouldn't have been able to. Not the end of the world, is it? It can't be a widespread fraud because if it is, then you just invalidate that key and ask people to revalidate.
I was merely pointing out there will be forgeries and I expect a lot of criminals to make a lot of money out of it just as they did selling sky tv decryption cards. It is only one plank of resistance not the full board
There will be blokes 20yds from the entrance offering screenshots of a vaccine passport/NHS app showing 2x vaxxed for £20 a pop.
It will piss even more off if they try to implement it....imagine long queues building up outside pubs. restaurants, nightclubs,gigs ...."Sorry cant let you in because cant verify your status as the servers are down"
Very forseeable so the gov't will of course ensure the server capacity is increased prior to it being a condition
You can't increase the capacity that much, botnets are cheap to hire and IoT has provide many more millions of devices to run them on. Plus when did you last see a competent government it operation
The vaccine passport is on the users phone. No need for the nightclub to have computer access, just a doorman who knows what to look for. Same when you fly etc*. So no government IT to bring down.
*One of our nurses was in Spain a couple of weeks back. No one checked either way.
If it is just on the users phones then its easily forgeable and therefore pointless. I just get a friend to take a screenshot of theirs. Same with a paper version
I believe one of the debates happening in government is about the 'easy to fraud' problem.
They can debate all they want but like most things governments dont have the brightest people working for them, the brightest in it are outside and delight in a challenge of breaking things wide open and figuring out how to
Delighting in working out how to bring an increased risk of Covid infection into a nightclub because you are unjabbed, most people are sensible and will comply
I am not unjabbed I merely refuse to take part in your illiberal bollocks of vaxports the tories can fuck off
lololol - people are already going to nightclubs you apologist loon. They're going in confidence. A vax passport n 2 months is the ultimate stable door closed late.
It depends what horse in the stable you're trying to protect.
If its to prevent Covid cases spreading now, then you're right.
If its to prevent the NHS collapsing under the strain of Covid cases during winter flu season then a vax passport in 2 months time (plus the exit wave of the virus burning out in the summer) is timed to perfection.
Why would Covid cause a winter collapse? Haven't you and the other Unlock Now Forever advocates told us that its all over? Come on, you aren't backing a vax passport are you?
I think vaxxports are the best way to encourage the laggards. It seems to be working in France. When boosters start it will be quite important.
Morning all. Sorry, only just read the @Cyclefree PT header on the stubborn Tory poll lead. It's a very good helicopter piece.
"If the choice is between the Tories and an empty space, the latter is unlikely to win."
The above line jumped out at me. You read it and reflexively nod and think "too right". It's one of those.
But then - if you're me - you dwell on it a while and wonder whether it is such a slam dunk. This government (and particularly this PM) are increasingly being viewed by anybody with eyes to see and ears to listen and noses to smell and mouths to - ok ok you get the picture - as an utter shambles. No principles. No competence. 'No' as in ZERO.
They've got away with it so far (pollwise) but for how long? Brexit is shedding its potency as iconic wedge issue. Slowly, to be sure, but it is. They can poke the fires of its culture war aspect but is this enough to stay at 40%? I doubt it. Tough times lie ahead with the economy and in Fiscal Corner. Leveling Up, for example, has to move from soundbite to hard policy choices and this will piss some people off. If it doesn't it's not real and remains a soundbite. Which would also start to piss some people off, just a different bunch, those Leavers who voted for this agenda, believing it to be genuine. Because these folk are not total blithering idiots - not in the main and not all the time. Whatever, poll damage is coming either way. Ditto with Social Care. There are no votes in that. Only negative ones if you get serious about it. Ask Andy Burnham or Theresa May. So the same choice there. A solid plan and loss of popularity or a cop out and loss of popularity.
Now we have this mismanaged exit from the pandemic. Plus (the header here) further damaging reveals from Cummings - who was right there in the middle of it - about the response and attitude throughout. The PM at key moments in thrall to bizarre right-wing 'contrarians' for heaven's sake, most of them no wiser than our PB one. His focus not on preventing Covid running amok in England and killing tens of thousands but on something far more important - impressing the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator.
I could go on. The challenge is to stop. But I can do that too. I'm going out maskless in a minute. Big moment. The point is, surely all of this shit is probably going to lead within a year to the Cons polling no better than mid 30s. And then come the GE, given things can only get worse, if the choice is indeed between more of the same or a nice cool empty space fronted by a non-scary, competent, decent sounding bloke who looks like he could run a whelk stall and could manage to tell the truth every now and again, well for me that's a toss up.
I take issue with 'poke the fires of its culture war aspect'. Blaming the right for the culture war is like blaming Poland for World War Two. The right isn't trying to move back to 1953, it just doesn't want to be dragged forward to year zero. All the movement on the culture war is from the left. The right isn't trying to rewrite history. The right is, occasionally, suggesting that perhaps the left might be going a bit too far. Now you're astute, and you'll notice I'm saying 'the left' and not 'the Labour Party'. SKS is trying his hardest to avoid the loonier fringes of the culture war, though his party occasionally drag him into it. But to the electorate as a whole, that's not enough. Neil Kinnock was no culture warrior. But the culture warriors of the wider left - the ILEA, for example - lost him votes. How does SKS distance Labour from the likes of Zarah Sultana and Nadia Whittome?
EDIT - and have you read the Telegraph or the Spectator recently? If the PM has been trying to impress the Telegraph and the Spectator, he's going about it abysmally. What he's trying to do (and succeeding) is to impress the authoritarian lobby which want more laws on other people (like @gealbhan yesterday - although I wasn't sure how serious he was).
EDIT2: And good luck going maskless. Enjoy exchanging smiles with other demaskers!
As named, I’ll explain.
My point being the argument between authoritarian and libertarian is not a left right one, nor is it a case of one side being right, the other wrong. It’s a case of both should listen to the other and debate the other, to help get things right.
It shows up clearly in Covid politics, commentators in the Telegraph (Conservative in party politics, split between libertarian and authoritarian in Covid response) and the Daily Mail (Conservative till sixties, populist right since) also to a smaller degree split between authoritarian and libertarian, though tending toward libertarian in editorial.
In downing street yesterday, JVT Libertarian, open nite clubs, Vallance authoritarian, against doing it right now.
But with the success of vaccines, things have now moved on, old media and new media like this blog very slow to realise how things have moved. It’s never been, if not now then when, it was always going to be how, post vaccine.
It’s not about vaccines now, it’s about behaviours. The horse taken to water (jabbed) could say the easier equation than getting it to drink (behaviour) hence now proper debate required between authoritarian and libertarian to achieve those behaviours.
The government have already decided the road ahead and won’t u turn. My evidence? The main headline this lunchtime, government no intention to tackle pingdemic, they are determined to generate it, latest missive from Downing Street, if you are pinged then isolate.
So if you delete the app, ie show the wrong behaviour, the government won’t concede to you, they will coerce you into the behaviours in the end.
I don’t make this up, I’m just the messenger where for many the penny hasn’t dropped yet.
Marginally following this up, isn't one of Labour's problems that very few of the real choices we face are left v right. A number of left issues are over, and therefore discounted. The NHS, free education to 18, not being an imperial power, social housing, payments to those not in work, House of Lords reform, minimum wage, employment rights, high taxes on the rich, health and safety etc. The centre left has won all the battles, and the centre right occupies what would have been a centre/centre left position.
Covid, Brexit, China, Russia, Islamic extremism, free speech, debt and deficit, the state of the UK union - none of these have obvious left v right alternative solutions.
The game has changed. I think so far the Tories have been better at silently shifting. Labour members still seem to think that the very people who vote in Patel, Sunak, Kwarteng and Nadhim Zahawi are filthy racists because they don't think Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler and Zarah Sultana are outstanding politicians.
The next left/right debate is UBI (and the terms of that debate will, in part be set by the experience of furlough, and our economic path over the next 5 years or so).
I think the left is at *extreme* danger of being outflanked on this by the right, with a post-industrial market-economy argument being made (and won) for its introduction by a future Tory administration, while Labour sits it out, scared of frightening the middle-england horses.
There is no debate to be had, UBI which is enough to live on is unaffordable
UBI already exists in this country, we just don't call it that and we have an extremely high real marginal income tax on it.
A sensible UBI introduction would be to merge existing things together, sort out the tax rates so they're sensible, then call it UBI. Not introduce massive new benefits.
A bit like Osborne introducing a Living Wage, based upon the pre-existing Minimum Wage and not dramatically different.
UBI will not work until they sort out housing benefit, specifically in London and the south.
The current numbers require something like £1k a month for an adult, £500 for a child, and an income tax rate of 35% with no personal allowance. Then start making allowances for behavioural changes, all of which will be on the downside for the Chancellor.
A properly-implemented UBI will make behaviour changes be on the upside for the Chancellor not the downside.
Currently people feel like its not worth working as they'll "lose their benefits" which is true, marginal tax rates of over 75% and effectively 90% exist. Getting rid of that will well and truly make work pay.
As a point of principle, I find it immoral for anyone to be facing a marginal tax rate of over 50%. That to me applies equally to those earning over £100k losing their tax-free allowance, and those on minimum wage losing their UC.
The only ways to get the UC withdrawal under 50%, are to either reduce the payments to those at the very bottom end, or to increase income tax for everyone.
I agree that the tax and benefits system is way too complex, with perverse incentives all over the place. While UC has straightened out a lot of the problems and silly 16-hour rules that existed previously, the next change is going to result in a lot of losers though, which makes it much more difficult politically.
It may be difficult, but if some are being taxed 75% and others are being taxed 40% then I don't care if the 40% see their taxes rise marginally if it pays to lower the tax rates for those on 75%,
Long-term making work pay and having flatter, lower tax rates leads to the pie being grown and more tax receipts/lower expenditure overall.
I don’t disagree with you, but good luck arguing for the 20% income tax rate rate to be changed to 25%.
If you're on PAYE then there's no such thing as 20% already. Even if you don't get or lose UC (which means you're on 75% plus) then you're already paying National Insurance.
Merge UC, NI and Income Tax together and get rid of the anomalies such as 75% tax for the poorest, or 60% tax if you're on £100k plus £1 and so on and so forth.
The first rule of cryptography is that the moment more than one person has a key the key is potentially compromised
I think you're confused about the nature of public and private keys. Public keys can be given to multiple users and mean that that user can encrypt the file so that only someone with the private key can decrypt it. But they won't help with decryption whatsoever.
At least today’s billionaires are interested in improving the state of technology. Awesome to watch.
The thing is Branson's technology is a dead-end. At least New Shepard is being built by a rocket company that is also building a humongous rocket (and New Glenn will be humongous; it's just that SH/SS resets the terms.)
BTW, I hate the name 'Starship'. Starship has a definition that has been used for well over 100 years: a vessel that can be used for interstellar travel. SS never will. It's another Muskian over-promise.
Excuse my ignorance, but is it a complete dead end? Could it not be fitted with more fuel, and get ever higher? Is there a limit that its design pushes against?
Dear me, do people really think that checking a vaccine certificate requires communicating with government servers? I suppose such spectacular ignorance is because the government has stupidly not explained anything or laid the groundwork, but it's very hard to correct such nonsensical beliefs once they get around.
You would need to have a secure chain API with a bring your own device front end to scan the QR code and get a response from the server saying it's legit. Otherwise why bother?
No, you just need it to be encrypted using absolutely bog-standard techniques.
It's identical to your computer checking a certificate. All you need to store in the smartphone or other device checking the QR code is a small number of public keys.
Sighs you have no clue do you, a public key will be leaked. Look how well it worked for dvds when the data was encrypted....clue it lasted days. Keys will be leaked or a weakness found in almost nothing flat.
How does my browser accept an SSL certificate as legit? Not via Digicert or whoever signed it.
Your browser decrypts it with a key. Those keys get leaked too
Yes, I understand how it works. So you think the Government's private key will be leaked?
Maybe it will, maybe it won't. Not exactly critical infrastructure though, is it? Keys can be revoked.
And then the new keys will be leaked. Revoking a key is not cost free either. You revoke a key suddenly all those vaxports using it no longer work and have to be redownloaded....the first time someone finds out is when they are trying to get in somewhere. People will soon get peeved
It will piss even more off if they try to implement it....imagine long queues building up outside pubs. restaurants, nightclubs,gigs ...."Sorry cant let you in because cant verify your status as the servers are down"
Very forseeable so the gov't will of course ensure the server capacity is increased prior to it being a condition
You can't increase the capacity that much, botnets are cheap to hire and IoT has provide many more millions of devices to run them on. Plus when did you last see a competent government it operation
The vaccine passport is on the users phone. No need for the nightclub to have computer access, just a doorman who knows what to look for. Same when you fly etc*. So no government IT to bring down.
*One of our nurses was in Spain a couple of weeks back. No one checked either way.
If it is just on the users phones then its easily forgeable and therefore pointless. I just get a friend to take a screenshot of theirs. Same with a paper version
I believe one of the debates happening in government is about the 'easy to fraud' problem.
They can debate all they want but like most things governments dont have the brightest people working for them, the brightest in it are outside and delight in a challenge of breaking things wide open and figuring out how to
Delighting in working out how to bring an increased risk of Covid infection into a nightclub because you are unjabbed, most people are sensible and will comply
I am not unjabbed I merely refuse to take part in your illiberal bollocks of vaxports the tories can fuck off
lololol - people are already going to nightclubs you apologist loon. They're going in confidence. A vax passport n 2 months is the ultimate stable door closed late.
It depends what horse in the stable you're trying to protect.
If its to prevent Covid cases spreading now, then you're right.
If its to prevent the NHS collapsing under the strain of Covid cases during winter flu season then a vax passport in 2 months time (plus the exit wave of the virus burning out in the summer) is timed to perfection.
Why would Covid cause a winter collapse? Haven't you and the other Unlock Now Forever advocates told us that its all over? Come on, you aren't backing a vax passport are you?
I'm not no, but the entire logic for months from the government and the scientists is that the point of biggest risk is in the winter when people are inside and there's the winter flu season in addition to Covid.
So if you're doing a vaxport, there's little point in doing it now and suppressing the summer spread. The entirely logical time to do it, is in time for Freshers in September.
So the avowed strategy now is to get as many people as possible sick with Covid now?
Have you not been paying attention?
Yes its literally the point that the exit wave should happen over the summer instead of the winter.
Dear me, do people really think that checking a vaccine certificate requires communicating with government servers? I suppose such spectacular ignorance is because the government has stupidly not explained anything or laid the groundwork, but it's very hard to correct such nonsensical beliefs once they get around.
You would need to have a secure chain API with a bring your own device front end to scan the QR code and get a response from the server saying it's legit. Otherwise why bother?
No, you just need it to be encrypted using absolutely bog-standard techniques.
It's identical to your computer checking a certificate. All you need to store in the smartphone or other device checking the QR code is a small number of public keys.
Sighs you have no clue do you, a public key will be leaked. Look how well it worked for dvds when the data was encrypted....clue it lasted days. Keys will be leaked or a weakness found in almost nothing flat.
How does my browser accept an SSL certificate as legit? Not via Digicert or whoever signed it.
Your browser decrypts it with a key. Those keys get leaked too
Can I ask what cryptography has to do with the issue at hand - which is how can you verify that the record presented to you (within a QR barcode) is valid.
To do that the only options are external verification (to a central server, to which you can run zero trust authentication and complete logging) or local verification....
Morning all. Sorry, only just read the @Cyclefree PT header on the stubborn Tory poll lead. It's a very good helicopter piece.
"If the choice is between the Tories and an empty space, the latter is unlikely to win."
The above line jumped out at me. You read it and reflexively nod and think "too right". It's one of those.
But then - if you're me - you dwell on it a while and wonder whether it is such a slam dunk. This government (and particularly this PM) are increasingly being viewed by anybody with eyes to see and ears to listen and noses to smell and mouths to - ok ok you get the picture - as an utter shambles. No principles. No competence. 'No' as in ZERO.
They've got away with it so far (pollwise) but for how long? Brexit is shedding its potency as iconic wedge issue. Slowly, to be sure, but it is. They can poke the fires of its culture war aspect but is this enough to stay at 40%? I doubt it. Tough times lie ahead with the economy and in Fiscal Corner. Leveling Up, for example, has to move from soundbite to hard policy choices and this will piss some people off. If it doesn't it's not real and remains a soundbite. Which would also start to piss some people off, just a different bunch, those Leavers who voted for this agenda, believing it to be genuine. Because these folk are not total blithering idiots - not in the main and not all the time. Whatever, poll damage is coming either way. Ditto with Social Care. There are no votes in that. Only negative ones if you get serious about it. Ask Andy Burnham or Theresa May. So the same choice there. A solid plan and loss of popularity or a cop out and loss of popularity.
Now we have this mismanaged exit from the pandemic. Plus (the header here) further damaging reveals from Cummings - who was right there in the middle of it - about the response and attitude throughout. The PM at key moments in thrall to bizarre right-wing 'contrarians' for heaven's sake, most of them no wiser than our PB one. His focus not on preventing Covid running amok in England and killing tens of thousands but on something far more important - impressing the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator.
I could go on. The challenge is to stop. But I can do that too. I'm going out maskless in a minute. Big moment. The point is, surely all of this shit is probably going to lead within a year to the Cons polling no better than mid 30s. And then come the GE, given things can only get worse, if the choice is indeed between more of the same or a nice cool empty space fronted by a non-scary, competent, decent sounding bloke who looks like he could run a whelk stall and could manage to tell the truth every now and again, well for me that's a toss up.
I take issue with 'poke the fires of its culture war aspect'. Blaming the right for the culture war is like blaming Poland for World War Two. The right isn't trying to move back to 1953, it just doesn't want to be dragged forward to year zero. All the movement on the culture war is from the left. The right isn't trying to rewrite history. The right is, occasionally, suggesting that perhaps the left might be going a bit too far. Now you're astute, and you'll notice I'm saying 'the left' and not 'the Labour Party'. SKS is trying his hardest to avoid the loonier fringes of the culture war, though his party occasionally drag him into it. But to the electorate as a whole, that's not enough. Neil Kinnock was no culture warrior. But the culture warriors of the wider left - the ILEA, for example - lost him votes. How does SKS distance Labour from the likes of Zarah Sultana and Nadia Whittome?
EDIT - and have you read the Telegraph or the Spectator recently? If the PM has been trying to impress the Telegraph and the Spectator, he's going about it abysmally. What he's trying to do (and succeeding) is to impress the authoritarian lobby which want more laws on other people (like @gealbhan yesterday - although I wasn't sure how serious he was).
EDIT2: And good luck going maskless. Enjoy exchanging smiles with other demaskers!
As named, I’ll explain.
My point being the argument between authoritarian and libertarian is not a left right one, nor is it a case of one side being right, the other wrong. It’s a case of both should listen to the other and debate the other, to help get things right.
It shows up clearly in Covid politics, commentators in the Telegraph (Conservative in party politics, split between libertarian and authoritarian in Covid response) and the Daily Mail (Conservative till sixties, populist right since) also to a smaller degree split between authoritarian and libertarian, though tending toward libertarian in editorial.
In downing street yesterday, JVT Libertarian, open nite clubs, Vallance authoritarian, against doing it right now.
But with the success of vaccines, things have now moved on, old media and new media like this blog very slow to realise how things have moved. It’s never been, if not now then when, it was always going to be how, post vaccine.
It’s not about vaccines now, it’s about behaviours. The horse taken to water (jabbed) could say the easier equation than getting it to drink (behaviour) hence now proper debate required between authoritarian and libertarian to achieve those behaviours.
The government have already decided the road ahead and won’t u turn. My evidence? The main headline this lunchtime, government no intention to tackle pingdemic, they are determined to generate it, latest missive from Downing Street, if you are pinged then isolate.
So if you delete the app, ie show the wrong behaviour, the government won’t concede to you, they will coerce you into the behaviours in the end.
I don’t make this up, I’m just the messenger where for many the penny hasn’t dropped yet.
Marginally following this up, isn't one of Labour's problems that very few of the real choices we face are left v right. A number of left issues are over, and therefore discounted. The NHS, free education to 18, not being an imperial power, social housing, payments to those not in work, House of Lords reform, minimum wage, employment rights, high taxes on the rich, health and safety etc. The centre left has won all the battles, and the centre right occupies what would have been a centre/centre left position.
Covid, Brexit, China, Russia, Islamic extremism, free speech, debt and deficit, the state of the UK union - none of these have obvious left v right alternative solutions.
The game has changed. I think so far the Tories have been better at silently shifting. Labour members still seem to think that the very people who vote in Patel, Sunak, Kwarteng and Nadhim Zahawi are filthy racists because they don't think Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler and Zarah Sultana are outstanding politicians.
The next left/right debate is UBI (and the terms of that debate will, in part be set by the experience of furlough, and our economic path over the next 5 years or so).
I think the left is at *extreme* danger of being outflanked on this by the right, with a post-industrial market-economy argument being made (and won) for its introduction by a future Tory administration, while Labour sits it out, scared of frightening the middle-england horses.
There is no debate to be had, UBI which is enough to live on is unaffordable
UBI already exists in this country, we just don't call it that and we have an extremely high real marginal income tax on it.
A sensible UBI introduction would be to merge existing things together, sort out the tax rates so they're sensible, then call it UBI. Not introduce massive new benefits.
A bit like Osborne introducing a Living Wage, based upon the pre-existing Minimum Wage and not dramatically different.
UBI will not work until they sort out housing benefit, specifically in London and the south.
The current numbers require something like £1k a month for an adult, £500 for a child, and an income tax rate of 35% with no personal allowance. Then start making allowances for behavioural changes, all of which will be on the downside for the Chancellor.
Don't like it, don't get it - handouts for sitting at home make zero sense to me. I take the 'Judge Judy' approach to welfare!
The entire point of a UBI, as opposed to UC/JSA etc is that its not a handout for sitting at home.
What we have today is handouts encouraging people to stay at home.
I t further weakens the notion of self-help and nurse knows best. No thanks.
Actually it does the complete opposite.
UC/JSA weakens the notion of self-help because it pays people to not be working. Work and "you lose your benefits". If you fail to work, you're paid for that.
UBI reinforces the notion of self-help as you get the UBI whether you work or not. Fail to work, you're not given any extra money than those who do work, so you're the one who suffers.
You can only claim JSA now if able bodied if you have made enough NI contributions when in work, so JSA now encourages self-help. UC means your benefits are only withdrawn gradually, so you do not lose them all if you go back to part time work after being out of work.
UBI would be paid to anyone, whether a billionaire or multimillionaire in a mansion or someone out of work in a council house.
The first rule of cryptography is that the moment more than one person has a key the key is potentially compromised
I think you're confused about the nature of public and private keys. Public keys can be given to multiple users and mean that that user can encrypt the file so that only someone with the private key can decrypt it. But they won't help with decryption whatsoever.
Not at all confused as I spent 5 years working with the system. The important key is the one on government servers. It encrypts the data sent out which creates the qr code , then when the qr code is scanned receives the data and decrypts it and checks it. The government keys will be on the darknet before you can say boo to a goose allowing people to create vaxports at will that will pass muster
It will piss even more off if they try to implement it....imagine long queues building up outside pubs. restaurants, nightclubs,gigs ...."Sorry cant let you in because cant verify your status as the servers are down"
Very forseeable so the gov't will of course ensure the server capacity is increased prior to it being a condition
You can't increase the capacity that much, botnets are cheap to hire and IoT has provide many more millions of devices to run them on. Plus when did you last see a competent government it operation
The vaccine passport is on the users phone. No need for the nightclub to have computer access, just a doorman who knows what to look for. Same when you fly etc*. So no government IT to bring down.
*One of our nurses was in Spain a couple of weeks back. No one checked either way.
If it is just on the users phones then its easily forgeable and therefore pointless. I just get a friend to take a screenshot of theirs. Same with a paper version
Come on @Pagan2, you're smarter than that. It's incredibly easy for everybody to have a "seed" and then for the barcode to change every 30 seconds.
But let's ignore that for a second.
The reality is that there are successful vaxport apps in New York, Israel and Denmark - and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. None of those systems seem to have any particular issues, as far as I can see.
That means that they are far impossible.
Now, a perfectly reasonably objection to this, is that it is the thin end of the wedge that leads to identity cards, tracking and the rest. And that's a perfectly reasonable objection.
But it's real world choices time here: is it less bad to allow those who *choose* vaccination to live a normal life again, and to allow the economy to fully reopen; or is it less bad to keep Covid as an ongoing issue to avoid the possibility that a future government uses them to introduce ID cards by the back door?
Morning all. Sorry, only just read the @Cyclefree PT header on the stubborn Tory poll lead. It's a very good helicopter piece.
"If the choice is between the Tories and an empty space, the latter is unlikely to win."
The above line jumped out at me. You read it and reflexively nod and think "too right". It's one of those.
But then - if you're me - you dwell on it a while and wonder whether it is such a slam dunk. This government (and particularly this PM) are increasingly being viewed by anybody with eyes to see and ears to listen and noses to smell and mouths to - ok ok you get the picture - as an utter shambles. No principles. No competence. 'No' as in ZERO.
They've got away with it so far (pollwise) but for how long? Brexit is shedding its potency as iconic wedge issue. Slowly, to be sure, but it is. They can poke the fires of its culture war aspect but is this enough to stay at 40%? I doubt it. Tough times lie ahead with the economy and in Fiscal Corner. Leveling Up, for example, has to move from soundbite to hard policy choices and this will piss some people off. If it doesn't it's not real and remains a soundbite. Which would also start to piss some people off, just a different bunch, those Leavers who voted for this agenda, believing it to be genuine. Because these folk are not total blithering idiots - not in the main and not all the time. Whatever, poll damage is coming either way. Ditto with Social Care. There are no votes in that. Only negative ones if you get serious about it. Ask Andy Burnham or Theresa May. So the same choice there. A solid plan and loss of popularity or a cop out and loss of popularity.
Now we have this mismanaged exit from the pandemic. Plus (the header here) further damaging reveals from Cummings - who was right there in the middle of it - about the response and attitude throughout. The PM at key moments in thrall to bizarre right-wing 'contrarians' for heaven's sake, most of them no wiser than our PB one. His focus not on preventing Covid running amok in England and killing tens of thousands but on something far more important - impressing the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator.
I could go on. The challenge is to stop. But I can do that too. I'm going out maskless in a minute. Big moment. The point is, surely all of this shit is probably going to lead within a year to the Cons polling no better than mid 30s. And then come the GE, given things can only get worse, if the choice is indeed between more of the same or a nice cool empty space fronted by a non-scary, competent, decent sounding bloke who looks like he could run a whelk stall and could manage to tell the truth every now and again, well for me that's a toss up.
I take issue with 'poke the fires of its culture war aspect'. Blaming the right for the culture war is like blaming Poland for World War Two. The right isn't trying to move back to 1953, it just doesn't want to be dragged forward to year zero. All the movement on the culture war is from the left. The right isn't trying to rewrite history. The right is, occasionally, suggesting that perhaps the left might be going a bit too far. Now you're astute, and you'll notice I'm saying 'the left' and not 'the Labour Party'. SKS is trying his hardest to avoid the loonier fringes of the culture war, though his party occasionally drag him into it. But to the electorate as a whole, that's not enough. Neil Kinnock was no culture warrior. But the culture warriors of the wider left - the ILEA, for example - lost him votes. How does SKS distance Labour from the likes of Zarah Sultana and Nadia Whittome?
EDIT - and have you read the Telegraph or the Spectator recently? If the PM has been trying to impress the Telegraph and the Spectator, he's going about it abysmally. What he's trying to do (and succeeding) is to impress the authoritarian lobby which want more laws on other people (like @gealbhan yesterday - although I wasn't sure how serious he was).
EDIT2: And good luck going maskless. Enjoy exchanging smiles with other demaskers!
As named, I’ll explain.
My point being the argument between authoritarian and libertarian is not a left right one, nor is it a case of one side being right, the other wrong. It’s a case of both should listen to the other and debate the other, to help get things right.
It shows up clearly in Covid politics, commentators in the Telegraph (Conservative in party politics, split between libertarian and authoritarian in Covid response) and the Daily Mail (Conservative till sixties, populist right since) also to a smaller degree split between authoritarian and libertarian, though tending toward libertarian in editorial.
In downing street yesterday, JVT Libertarian, open nite clubs, Vallance authoritarian, against doing it right now.
But with the success of vaccines, things have now moved on, old media and new media like this blog very slow to realise how things have moved. It’s never been, if not now then when, it was always going to be how, post vaccine.
It’s not about vaccines now, it’s about behaviours. The horse taken to water (jabbed) could say the easier equation than getting it to drink (behaviour) hence now proper debate required between authoritarian and libertarian to achieve those behaviours.
The government have already decided the road ahead and won’t u turn. My evidence? The main headline this lunchtime, government no intention to tackle pingdemic, they are determined to generate it, latest missive from Downing Street, if you are pinged then isolate.
So if you delete the app, ie show the wrong behaviour, the government won’t concede to you, they will coerce you into the behaviours in the end.
I don’t make this up, I’m just the messenger where for many the penny hasn’t dropped yet.
Marginally following this up, isn't one of Labour's problems that very few of the real choices we face are left v right. A number of left issues are over, and therefore discounted. The NHS, free education to 18, not being an imperial power, social housing, payments to those not in work, House of Lords reform, minimum wage, employment rights, high taxes on the rich, health and safety etc. The centre left has won all the battles, and the centre right occupies what would have been a centre/centre left position.
Covid, Brexit, China, Russia, Islamic extremism, free speech, debt and deficit, the state of the UK union - none of these have obvious left v right alternative solutions.
The game has changed. I think so far the Tories have been better at silently shifting. Labour members still seem to think that the very people who vote in Patel, Sunak, Kwarteng and Nadhim Zahawi are filthy racists because they don't think Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler and Zarah Sultana are outstanding politicians.
The next left/right debate is UBI (and the terms of that debate will, in part be set by the experience of furlough, and our economic path over the next 5 years or so).
I think the left is at *extreme* danger of being outflanked on this by the right, with a post-industrial market-economy argument being made (and won) for its introduction by a future Tory administration, while Labour sits it out, scared of frightening the middle-england horses.
There is no debate to be had, UBI which is enough to live on is unaffordable
UBI already exists in this country, we just don't call it that and we have an extremely high real marginal income tax on it.
A sensible UBI introduction would be to merge existing things together, sort out the tax rates so they're sensible, then call it UBI. Not introduce massive new benefits.
A bit like Osborne introducing a Living Wage, based upon the pre-existing Minimum Wage and not dramatically different.
UBI will not work until they sort out housing benefit, specifically in London and the south.
The current numbers require something like £1k a month for an adult, £500 for a child, and an income tax rate of 35% with no personal allowance. Then start making allowances for behavioural changes, all of which will be on the downside for the Chancellor.
Don't like it, don't get it - handouts for sitting at home make zero sense to me. I take the 'Judge Judy' approach to welfare!
The entire point of a UBI, as opposed to UC/JSA etc is that its not a handout for sitting at home.
What we have today is handouts encouraging people to stay at home.
I t further weakens the notion of self-help and nurse knows best. No thanks.
Actually it does the complete opposite.
UC/JSA weakens the notion of self-help because it pays people to not be working. Work and "you lose your benefits". If you fail to work, you're paid for that.
UBI reinforces the notion of self-help as you get the UBI whether you work or not. Fail to work, you're not given any extra money than those who do work, so you're the one who suffers.
You can only claim JSA now if able bodied if you have made enough NI contributions when in work, so JSA now encourages self-help.
UBI would be paid to anyone, whether a billionaire or multimillionaire in a mansion or someone out of work in a council house.
Are you sure you can't get any benefits without NI contributions? I don't think you're right.
That its paid to a millionaire or in a council house, is the entire point of universality. By paying it to everyone you get rid of the 'poverty trap' and ensure that its not worth anyone not working because if they don't work they only hurt themselves.
The millionaire getting the benefit should just see the benefit offset against the taxes they owe, no different to how the tax-free allowance always worked prior to it being written off for highest earners.
It will piss even more off if they try to implement it....imagine long queues building up outside pubs. restaurants, nightclubs,gigs ...."Sorry cant let you in because cant verify your status as the servers are down"
Very forseeable so the gov't will of course ensure the server capacity is increased prior to it being a condition
You can't increase the capacity that much, botnets are cheap to hire and IoT has provide many more millions of devices to run them on. Plus when did you last see a competent government it operation
The vaccine passport is on the users phone. No need for the nightclub to have computer access, just a doorman who knows what to look for. Same when you fly etc*. So no government IT to bring down.
*One of our nurses was in Spain a couple of weeks back. No one checked either way.
If it is just on the users phones then its easily forgeable and therefore pointless. I just get a friend to take a screenshot of theirs. Same with a paper version
I believe one of the debates happening in government is about the 'easy to fraud' problem.
They can debate all they want but like most things governments dont have the brightest people working for them, the brightest in it are outside and delight in a challenge of breaking things wide open and figuring out how to
Delighting in working out how to bring an increased risk of Covid infection into a nightclub because you are unjabbed, most people are sensible and will comply
I am not unjabbed I merely refuse to take part in your illiberal bollocks of vaxports the tories can fuck off
lololol - people are already going to nightclubs you apologist loon. They're going in confidence. A vax passport n 2 months is the ultimate stable door closed late.
It depends what horse in the stable you're trying to protect.
If its to prevent Covid cases spreading now, then you're right.
If its to prevent the NHS collapsing under the strain of Covid cases during winter flu season then a vax passport in 2 months time (plus the exit wave of the virus burning out in the summer) is timed to perfection.
Why would Covid cause a winter collapse? Haven't you and the other Unlock Now Forever advocates told us that its all over? Come on, you aren't backing a vax passport are you?
I'm not no, but the entire logic for months from the government and the scientists is that the point of biggest risk is in the winter when people are inside and there's the winter flu season in addition to Covid.
So if you're doing a vaxport, there's little point in doing it now and suppressing the summer spread. The entirely logical time to do it, is in time for Freshers in September.
So the avowed strategy now is to get as many people as possible sick with Covid now?
Have you not been paying attention?
Yes its literally the point that the exit wave should happen over the summer instead of the winter.
Have you only just figured out what that means?
Its certainly one strategy. Of course the more people we get vaccinated the less of an "exit wave" we have. But we can't possibly have that, Clown needed to make his Churchill speech. I must have missed it - how did it go?
It will piss even more off if they try to implement it....imagine long queues building up outside pubs. restaurants, nightclubs,gigs ...."Sorry cant let you in because cant verify your status as the servers are down"
Very forseeable so the gov't will of course ensure the server capacity is increased prior to it being a condition
You can't increase the capacity that much, botnets are cheap to hire and IoT has provide many more millions of devices to run them on. Plus when did you last see a competent government it operation
The vaccine passport is on the users phone. No need for the nightclub to have computer access, just a doorman who knows what to look for. Same when you fly etc*. So no government IT to bring down.
*One of our nurses was in Spain a couple of weeks back. No one checked either way.
If it is just on the users phones then its easily forgeable and therefore pointless. I just get a friend to take a screenshot of theirs. Same with a paper version
Come on @Pagan2, you're smarter than that. It's incredibly easy for everybody to have a "seed" and then for the barcode to change every 30 seconds.
But let's ignore that for a second.
The reality is that there are successful vaxport apps in New York, Israel and Denmark - and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. None of those systems seem to have any particular issues, as far as I can see.
That means that they are far impossible.
Now, a perfectly reasonably objection to this, is that it is the thin end of the wedge that leads to identity cards, tracking and the rest. And that's a perfectly reasonable objection.
But it's real world choices time here: is it less bad to allow those who *choose* vaccination to live a normal life again, and to allow the economy to fully reopen; or is it less bad to keep Covid as an ongoing issue to avoid the possibility that a future government uses them to introduce ID cards by the back door?
It is less bad to keep covid frankly, if I wanted governement tracking I would emigrate to China. My statements about crytography is debunking the "There cant be fakes" view of some. Will fakes be the majority hell no but they will be available
And then the new keys will be leaked. Revoking a key is not cost free either. You revoke a key suddenly all those vaxports using it no longer work and have to be redownloaded....the first time someone finds out is when they are trying to get in somewhere. People will soon get peeved
You have to request a new vaccine pass every 30 days anyway. So revocation isn't a huge issue. They aren't intended to be open-ended.
Morning all. Sorry, only just read the @Cyclefree PT header on the stubborn Tory poll lead. It's a very good helicopter piece.
"If the choice is between the Tories and an empty space, the latter is unlikely to win."
The above line jumped out at me. You read it and reflexively nod and think "too right". It's one of those.
But then - if you're me - you dwell on it a while and wonder whether it is such a slam dunk. This government (and particularly this PM) are increasingly being viewed by anybody with eyes to see and ears to listen and noses to smell and mouths to - ok ok you get the picture - as an utter shambles. No principles. No competence. 'No' as in ZERO.
They've got away with it so far (pollwise) but for how long? Brexit is shedding its potency as iconic wedge issue. Slowly, to be sure, but it is. They can poke the fires of its culture war aspect but is this enough to stay at 40%? I doubt it. Tough times lie ahead with the economy and in Fiscal Corner. Leveling Up, for example, has to move from soundbite to hard policy choices and this will piss some people off. If it doesn't it's not real and remains a soundbite. Which would also start to piss some people off, just a different bunch, those Leavers who voted for this agenda, believing it to be genuine. Because these folk are not total blithering idiots - not in the main and not all the time. Whatever, poll damage is coming either way. Ditto with Social Care. There are no votes in that. Only negative ones if you get serious about it. Ask Andy Burnham or Theresa May. So the same choice there. A solid plan and loss of popularity or a cop out and loss of popularity.
Now we have this mismanaged exit from the pandemic. Plus (the header here) further damaging reveals from Cummings - who was right there in the middle of it - about the response and attitude throughout. The PM at key moments in thrall to bizarre right-wing 'contrarians' for heaven's sake, most of them no wiser than our PB one. His focus not on preventing Covid running amok in England and killing tens of thousands but on something far more important - impressing the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator.
I could go on. The challenge is to stop. But I can do that too. I'm going out maskless in a minute. Big moment. The point is, surely all of this shit is probably going to lead within a year to the Cons polling no better than mid 30s. And then come the GE, given things can only get worse, if the choice is indeed between more of the same or a nice cool empty space fronted by a non-scary, competent, decent sounding bloke who looks like he could run a whelk stall and could manage to tell the truth every now and again, well for me that's a toss up.
I take issue with 'poke the fires of its culture war aspect'. Blaming the right for the culture war is like blaming Poland for World War Two. The right isn't trying to move back to 1953, it just doesn't want to be dragged forward to year zero. All the movement on the culture war is from the left. The right isn't trying to rewrite history. The right is, occasionally, suggesting that perhaps the left might be going a bit too far. Now you're astute, and you'll notice I'm saying 'the left' and not 'the Labour Party'. SKS is trying his hardest to avoid the loonier fringes of the culture war, though his party occasionally drag him into it. But to the electorate as a whole, that's not enough. Neil Kinnock was no culture warrior. But the culture warriors of the wider left - the ILEA, for example - lost him votes. How does SKS distance Labour from the likes of Zarah Sultana and Nadia Whittome?
EDIT - and have you read the Telegraph or the Spectator recently? If the PM has been trying to impress the Telegraph and the Spectator, he's going about it abysmally. What he's trying to do (and succeeding) is to impress the authoritarian lobby which want more laws on other people (like @gealbhan yesterday - although I wasn't sure how serious he was).
EDIT2: And good luck going maskless. Enjoy exchanging smiles with other demaskers!
As named, I’ll explain.
My point being the argument between authoritarian and libertarian is not a left right one, nor is it a case of one side being right, the other wrong. It’s a case of both should listen to the other and debate the other, to help get things right.
It shows up clearly in Covid politics, commentators in the Telegraph (Conservative in party politics, split between libertarian and authoritarian in Covid response) and the Daily Mail (Conservative till sixties, populist right since) also to a smaller degree split between authoritarian and libertarian, though tending toward libertarian in editorial.
In downing street yesterday, JVT Libertarian, open nite clubs, Vallance authoritarian, against doing it right now.
But with the success of vaccines, things have now moved on, old media and new media like this blog very slow to realise how things have moved. It’s never been, if not now then when, it was always going to be how, post vaccine.
It’s not about vaccines now, it’s about behaviours. The horse taken to water (jabbed) could say the easier equation than getting it to drink (behaviour) hence now proper debate required between authoritarian and libertarian to achieve those behaviours.
The government have already decided the road ahead and won’t u turn. My evidence? The main headline this lunchtime, government no intention to tackle pingdemic, they are determined to generate it, latest missive from Downing Street, if you are pinged then isolate.
So if you delete the app, ie show the wrong behaviour, the government won’t concede to you, they will coerce you into the behaviours in the end.
I don’t make this up, I’m just the messenger where for many the penny hasn’t dropped yet.
Marginally following this up, isn't one of Labour's problems that very few of the real choices we face are left v right. A number of left issues are over, and therefore discounted. The NHS, free education to 18, not being an imperial power, social housing, payments to those not in work, House of Lords reform, minimum wage, employment rights, high taxes on the rich, health and safety etc. The centre left has won all the battles, and the centre right occupies what would have been a centre/centre left position.
Covid, Brexit, China, Russia, Islamic extremism, free speech, debt and deficit, the state of the UK union - none of these have obvious left v right alternative solutions.
The game has changed. I think so far the Tories have been better at silently shifting. Labour members still seem to think that the very people who vote in Patel, Sunak, Kwarteng and Nadhim Zahawi are filthy racists because they don't think Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler and Zarah Sultana are outstanding politicians.
The next left/right debate is UBI (and the terms of that debate will, in part be set by the experience of furlough, and our economic path over the next 5 years or so).
I think the left is at *extreme* danger of being outflanked on this by the right, with a post-industrial market-economy argument being made (and won) for its introduction by a future Tory administration, while Labour sits it out, scared of frightening the middle-england horses.
There is no debate to be had, UBI which is enough to live on is unaffordable
UBI already exists in this country, we just don't call it that and we have an extremely high real marginal income tax on it.
A sensible UBI introduction would be to merge existing things together, sort out the tax rates so they're sensible, then call it UBI. Not introduce massive new benefits.
A bit like Osborne introducing a Living Wage, based upon the pre-existing Minimum Wage and not dramatically different.
UBI will not work until they sort out housing benefit, specifically in London and the south.
The current numbers require something like £1k a month for an adult, £500 for a child, and an income tax rate of 35% with no personal allowance. Then start making allowances for behavioural changes, all of which will be on the downside for the Chancellor.
Don't like it, don't get it - handouts for sitting at home make zero sense to me. I take the 'Judge Judy' approach to welfare!
The entire point of a UBI, as opposed to UC/JSA etc is that its not a handout for sitting at home.
What we have today is handouts encouraging people to stay at home.
I t further weakens the notion of self-help and nurse knows best. No thanks.
Actually it does the complete opposite.
UC/JSA weakens the notion of self-help because it pays people to not be working. Work and "you lose your benefits". If you fail to work, you're paid for that.
UBI reinforces the notion of self-help as you get the UBI whether you work or not. Fail to work, you're not given any extra money than those who do work, so you're the one who suffers.
You can only claim JSA now if able bodied if you have made enough NI contributions when in work, so JSA now encourages self-help.
UBI would be paid to anyone, whether a billionaire or multimillionaire in a mansion or someone out of work in a council house.
Are you sure you can't get any benefits without NI contributions? I don't think you're right.
That its paid to a millionaire or in a council house, is the entire point of universality. By paying it to everyone you get rid of the 'poverty trap' and ensure that its not worth anyone not working because if they don't work they only hurt themselves.
The millionaire getting the benefit should just see the benefit offset against the taxes they owe, no different to how the tax-free allowance always worked prior to it being written off for highest earners.
The first rule of cryptography is that the moment more than one person has a key the key is potentially compromised
I think you're confused about the nature of public and private keys. Public keys can be given to multiple users and mean that that user can encrypt the file so that only someone with the private key can decrypt it. But they won't help with decryption whatsoever.
Not at all confused as I spent 5 years working with the system. The important key is the one on government servers. It encrypts the data sent out which creates the qr code , then when the qr code is scanned receives the data and decrypts it and checks it. The government keys will be on the darknet before you can say boo to a goose allowing people to create vaxports at will that will pass muster
Sounds like loads of hassle. I suspect most youngsters will just get vaccinated if they want to enter a club or whatever. "I don't think I'll bother as I'm not likely to get Covid" will transform into "Meh might as well get vaccinated to head out". The ranks of principled libertarians amongst youngsters are vanishingly small compared to the ranks of the apathetic unless needing to do something.
Ultimately, I think vaccine passports won't get implemented in September. Instead the government will say 51m have done their first doses and 49m both so what's the point.
It will piss even more off if they try to implement it....imagine long queues building up outside pubs. restaurants, nightclubs,gigs ...."Sorry cant let you in because cant verify your status as the servers are down"
Very forseeable so the gov't will of course ensure the server capacity is increased prior to it being a condition
You can't increase the capacity that much, botnets are cheap to hire and IoT has provide many more millions of devices to run them on. Plus when did you last see a competent government it operation
The vaccine passport is on the users phone. No need for the nightclub to have computer access, just a doorman who knows what to look for. Same when you fly etc*. So no government IT to bring down.
*One of our nurses was in Spain a couple of weeks back. No one checked either way.
If it is just on the users phones then its easily forgeable and therefore pointless. I just get a friend to take a screenshot of theirs. Same with a paper version
I believe one of the debates happening in government is about the 'easy to fraud' problem.
They can debate all they want but like most things governments dont have the brightest people working for them, the brightest in it are outside and delight in a challenge of breaking things wide open and figuring out how to
Delighting in working out how to bring an increased risk of Covid infection into a nightclub because you are unjabbed, most people are sensible and will comply
I am not unjabbed I merely refuse to take part in your illiberal bollocks of vaxports the tories can fuck off
lololol - people are already going to nightclubs you apologist loon. They're going in confidence. A vax passport n 2 months is the ultimate stable door closed late.
It depends what horse in the stable you're trying to protect.
If its to prevent Covid cases spreading now, then you're right.
If its to prevent the NHS collapsing under the strain of Covid cases during winter flu season then a vax passport in 2 months time (plus the exit wave of the virus burning out in the summer) is timed to perfection.
Why would Covid cause a winter collapse? Haven't you and the other Unlock Now Forever advocates told us that its all over? Come on, you aren't backing a vax passport are you?
I'm not no, but the entire logic for months from the government and the scientists is that the point of biggest risk is in the winter when people are inside and there's the winter flu season in addition to Covid.
So if you're doing a vaxport, there's little point in doing it now and suppressing the summer spread. The entirely logical time to do it, is in time for Freshers in September.
So the avowed strategy now is to get as many people as possible sick with Covid now?
Have you not been paying attention?
Yes its literally the point that the exit wave should happen over the summer instead of the winter.
Have you only just figured out what that means?
Its certainly one strategy. Of course the more people we get vaccinated the less of an "exit wave" we have. But we can't possibly have that, Clown needed to make his Churchill speech. I must have missed it - how did it go?
We've done vaccinations.
What more can we gain in futher vaccinations that we won't lose by pushing the exit wave away from the summer?
It will piss even more off if they try to implement it....imagine long queues building up outside pubs. restaurants, nightclubs,gigs ...."Sorry cant let you in because cant verify your status as the servers are down"
Very forseeable so the gov't will of course ensure the server capacity is increased prior to it being a condition
You can't increase the capacity that much, botnets are cheap to hire and IoT has provide many more millions of devices to run them on. Plus when did you last see a competent government it operation
The vaccine passport is on the users phone. No need for the nightclub to have computer access, just a doorman who knows what to look for. Same when you fly etc*. So no government IT to bring down.
*One of our nurses was in Spain a couple of weeks back. No one checked either way.
No way will Mr Bill Jones' screenshotted double vaccine confirmation ever be used. A million times.
I can advise that fake vaccine certification is already changing hands for £500 a pop.
There are some idiots around, aren't there? Get vaccinated, save yourself £500.
Morning all. Sorry, only just read the @Cyclefree PT header on the stubborn Tory poll lead. It's a very good helicopter piece.
"If the choice is between the Tories and an empty space, the latter is unlikely to win."
The above line jumped out at me. You read it and reflexively nod and think "too right". It's one of those.
But then - if you're me - you dwell on it a while and wonder whether it is such a slam dunk. This government (and particularly this PM) are increasingly being viewed by anybody with eyes to see and ears to listen and noses to smell and mouths to - ok ok you get the picture - as an utter shambles. No principles. No competence. 'No' as in ZERO.
They've got away with it so far (pollwise) but for how long? Brexit is shedding its potency as iconic wedge issue. Slowly, to be sure, but it is. They can poke the fires of its culture war aspect but is this enough to stay at 40%? I doubt it. Tough times lie ahead with the economy and in Fiscal Corner. Leveling Up, for example, has to move from soundbite to hard policy choices and this will piss some people off. If it doesn't it's not real and remains a soundbite. Which would also start to piss some people off, just a different bunch, those Leavers who voted for this agenda, believing it to be genuine. Because these folk are not total blithering idiots - not in the main and not all the time. Whatever, poll damage is coming either way. Ditto with Social Care. There are no votes in that. Only negative ones if you get serious about it. Ask Andy Burnham or Theresa May. So the same choice there. A solid plan and loss of popularity or a cop out and loss of popularity.
Now we have this mismanaged exit from the pandemic. Plus (the header here) further damaging reveals from Cummings - who was right there in the middle of it - about the response and attitude throughout. The PM at key moments in thrall to bizarre right-wing 'contrarians' for heaven's sake, most of them no wiser than our PB one. His focus not on preventing Covid running amok in England and killing tens of thousands but on something far more important - impressing the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator.
I could go on. The challenge is to stop. But I can do that too. I'm going out maskless in a minute. Big moment. The point is, surely all of this shit is probably going to lead within a year to the Cons polling no better than mid 30s. And then come the GE, given things can only get worse, if the choice is indeed between more of the same or a nice cool empty space fronted by a non-scary, competent, decent sounding bloke who looks like he could run a whelk stall and could manage to tell the truth every now and again, well for me that's a toss up.
I take issue with 'poke the fires of its culture war aspect'. Blaming the right for the culture war is like blaming Poland for World War Two. The right isn't trying to move back to 1953, it just doesn't want to be dragged forward to year zero. All the movement on the culture war is from the left. The right isn't trying to rewrite history. The right is, occasionally, suggesting that perhaps the left might be going a bit too far. Now you're astute, and you'll notice I'm saying 'the left' and not 'the Labour Party'. SKS is trying his hardest to avoid the loonier fringes of the culture war, though his party occasionally drag him into it. But to the electorate as a whole, that's not enough. Neil Kinnock was no culture warrior. But the culture warriors of the wider left - the ILEA, for example - lost him votes. How does SKS distance Labour from the likes of Zarah Sultana and Nadia Whittome?
EDIT - and have you read the Telegraph or the Spectator recently? If the PM has been trying to impress the Telegraph and the Spectator, he's going about it abysmally. What he's trying to do (and succeeding) is to impress the authoritarian lobby which want more laws on other people (like @gealbhan yesterday - although I wasn't sure how serious he was).
EDIT2: And good luck going maskless. Enjoy exchanging smiles with other demaskers!
As named, I’ll explain.
My point being the argument between authoritarian and libertarian is not a left right one, nor is it a case of one side being right, the other wrong. It’s a case of both should listen to the other and debate the other, to help get things right.
It shows up clearly in Covid politics, commentators in the Telegraph (Conservative in party politics, split between libertarian and authoritarian in Covid response) and the Daily Mail (Conservative till sixties, populist right since) also to a smaller degree split between authoritarian and libertarian, though tending toward libertarian in editorial.
In downing street yesterday, JVT Libertarian, open nite clubs, Vallance authoritarian, against doing it right now.
But with the success of vaccines, things have now moved on, old media and new media like this blog very slow to realise how things have moved. It’s never been, if not now then when, it was always going to be how, post vaccine.
It’s not about vaccines now, it’s about behaviours. The horse taken to water (jabbed) could say the easier equation than getting it to drink (behaviour) hence now proper debate required between authoritarian and libertarian to achieve those behaviours.
The government have already decided the road ahead and won’t u turn. My evidence? The main headline this lunchtime, government no intention to tackle pingdemic, they are determined to generate it, latest missive from Downing Street, if you are pinged then isolate.
So if you delete the app, ie show the wrong behaviour, the government won’t concede to you, they will coerce you into the behaviours in the end.
I don’t make this up, I’m just the messenger where for many the penny hasn’t dropped yet.
Marginally following this up, isn't one of Labour's problems that very few of the real choices we face are left v right. A number of left issues are over, and therefore discounted. The NHS, free education to 18, not being an imperial power, social housing, payments to those not in work, House of Lords reform, minimum wage, employment rights, high taxes on the rich, health and safety etc. The centre left has won all the battles, and the centre right occupies what would have been a centre/centre left position.
Covid, Brexit, China, Russia, Islamic extremism, free speech, debt and deficit, the state of the UK union - none of these have obvious left v right alternative solutions.
The game has changed. I think so far the Tories have been better at silently shifting. Labour members still seem to think that the very people who vote in Patel, Sunak, Kwarteng and Nadhim Zahawi are filthy racists because they don't think Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler and Zarah Sultana are outstanding politicians.
The next left/right debate is UBI (and the terms of that debate will, in part be set by the experience of furlough, and our economic path over the next 5 years or so).
I think the left is at *extreme* danger of being outflanked on this by the right, with a post-industrial market-economy argument being made (and won) for its introduction by a future Tory administration, while Labour sits it out, scared of frightening the middle-england horses.
There is no debate to be had, UBI which is enough to live on is unaffordable
UBI already exists in this country, we just don't call it that and we have an extremely high real marginal income tax on it.
A sensible UBI introduction would be to merge existing things together, sort out the tax rates so they're sensible, then call it UBI. Not introduce massive new benefits.
A bit like Osborne introducing a Living Wage, based upon the pre-existing Minimum Wage and not dramatically different.
UBI will not work until they sort out housing benefit, specifically in London and the south.
The current numbers require something like £1k a month for an adult, £500 for a child, and an income tax rate of 35% with no personal allowance. Then start making allowances for behavioural changes, all of which will be on the downside for the Chancellor.
Don't like it, don't get it - handouts for sitting at home make zero sense to me. I take the 'Judge Judy' approach to welfare!
The entire point of a UBI, as opposed to UC/JSA etc is that its not a handout for sitting at home.
What we have today is handouts encouraging people to stay at home.
I t further weakens the notion of self-help and nurse knows best. No thanks.
Actually it does the complete opposite.
UC/JSA weakens the notion of self-help because it pays people to not be working. Work and "you lose your benefits". If you fail to work, you're paid for that.
UBI reinforces the notion of self-help as you get the UBI whether you work or not. Fail to work, you're not given any extra money than those who do work, so you're the one who suffers.
You can only claim JSA now if able bodied if you have made enough NI contributions when in work, so JSA now encourages self-help.
UBI would be paid to anyone, whether a billionaire or multimillionaire in a mansion or someone out of work in a council house.
Are you sure you can't get any benefits without NI contributions? I don't think you're right.
That its paid to a millionaire or in a council house, is the entire point of universality. By paying it to everyone you get rid of the 'poverty trap' and ensure that its not worth anyone not working because if they don't work they only hurt themselves.
The millionaire getting the benefit should just see the benefit offset against the taxes they owe, no different to how the tax-free allowance always worked prior to it being written off for highest earners.
I fail to see why the average taxpayer should fund a benefit to millionaires or why it should mean the millionaire then gets a tax cut instead.
Because you're not thinking straight.
By taxing away the benefits you're not affecting the millionaires marginal tax rate at all.
The people who have a high marginal tax rate and suffer from means testing are the poor not the rich.
The richest who are paying hundreds of thousands or millions of pounds a year in taxes getting a tiny amount back in 'universal benefits' is a rounding error for them, but its incredibly meaningful for the people not facing 75% marginal tax rates anymore.
It will piss even more off if they try to implement it....imagine long queues building up outside pubs. restaurants, nightclubs,gigs ...."Sorry cant let you in because cant verify your status as the servers are down"
Very forseeable so the gov't will of course ensure the server capacity is increased prior to it being a condition
You can't increase the capacity that much, botnets are cheap to hire and IoT has provide many more millions of devices to run them on. Plus when did you last see a competent government it operation
The vaccine passport is on the users phone. No need for the nightclub to have computer access, just a doorman who knows what to look for. Same when you fly etc*. So no government IT to bring down.
*One of our nurses was in Spain a couple of weeks back. No one checked either way.
If it is just on the users phones then its easily forgeable and therefore pointless. I just get a friend to take a screenshot of theirs. Same with a paper version
I believe one of the debates happening in government is about the 'easy to fraud' problem.
They can debate all they want but like most things governments dont have the brightest people working for them, the brightest in it are outside and delight in a challenge of breaking things wide open and figuring out how to
Delighting in working out how to bring an increased risk of Covid infection into a nightclub because you are unjabbed, most people are sensible and will comply
I am not unjabbed I merely refuse to take part in your illiberal bollocks of vaxports the tories can fuck off
lololol - people are already going to nightclubs you apologist loon. They're going in confidence. A vax passport n 2 months is the ultimate stable door closed late.
It depends what horse in the stable you're trying to protect.
If its to prevent Covid cases spreading now, then you're right.
If its to prevent the NHS collapsing under the strain of Covid cases during winter flu season then a vax passport in 2 months time (plus the exit wave of the virus burning out in the summer) is timed to perfection.
Why would Covid cause a winter collapse? Haven't you and the other Unlock Now Forever advocates told us that its all over? Come on, you aren't backing a vax passport are you?
I'm not no, but the entire logic for months from the government and the scientists is that the point of biggest risk is in the winter when people are inside and there's the winter flu season in addition to Covid.
So if you're doing a vaxport, there's little point in doing it now and suppressing the summer spread. The entirely logical time to do it, is in time for Freshers in September.
So the avowed strategy now is to get as many people as possible sick with Covid now?
Have you not been paying attention?
Yes its literally the point that the exit wave should happen over the summer instead of the winter.
Have you only just figured out what that means?
Its certainly one strategy. Of course the more people we get vaccinated the less of an "exit wave" we have. But we can't possibly have that, Clown needed to make his Churchill speech. I must have missed it - how did it go?
We've done vaccinations.
What more can we gain in futher vaccinations that we won't lose by pushing the exit wave away from the summer?
My point of view is we have to unlock the economy can't take much more
If vaccines work then we are all good and no need for vaccine passports If vaccines dont work then we still need to unlock and therefore no need for vaccine passports
Vaccine passport or -ve test is already being used at some clubs. One in Bristol, and err Slimes at electrowerkz....... (Which isn't really competing for the same market as other London nights )
The first rule of cryptography is that the moment more than one person has a key the key is potentially compromised
I think you're confused about the nature of public and private keys. Public keys can be given to multiple users and mean that that user can encrypt the file so that only someone with the private key can decrypt it. But they won't help with decryption whatsoever.
Not at all confused as I spent 5 years working with the system. The important key is the one on government servers. It encrypts the data sent out which creates the qr code , then when the qr code is scanned receives the data and decrypts it and checks it. The government keys will be on the darknet before you can say boo to a goose allowing people to create vaxports at will that will pass muster
Why would I need to decrypt the message, all I need to do is use the data available to verify that the contents match the signature and for that all I need is the public key.
There is a reason why I'm asking WTF you are on about as I've been there and got the t-shirt on a commercial software licensing project.
It will piss even more off if they try to implement it....imagine long queues building up outside pubs. restaurants, nightclubs,gigs ...."Sorry cant let you in because cant verify your status as the servers are down"
Very forseeable so the gov't will of course ensure the server capacity is increased prior to it being a condition
You can't increase the capacity that much, botnets are cheap to hire and IoT has provide many more millions of devices to run them on. Plus when did you last see a competent government it operation
The vaccine passport is on the users phone. No need for the nightclub to have computer access, just a doorman who knows what to look for. Same when you fly etc*. So no government IT to bring down.
*One of our nurses was in Spain a couple of weeks back. No one checked either way.
If it is just on the users phones then its easily forgeable and therefore pointless. I just get a friend to take a screenshot of theirs. Same with a paper version
I believe one of the debates happening in government is about the 'easy to fraud' problem.
They can debate all they want but like most things governments dont have the brightest people working for them, the brightest in it are outside and delight in a challenge of breaking things wide open and figuring out how to
Delighting in working out how to bring an increased risk of Covid infection into a nightclub because you are unjabbed, most people are sensible and will comply
I am not unjabbed I merely refuse to take part in your illiberal bollocks of vaxports the tories can fuck off
lololol - people are already going to nightclubs you apologist loon. They're going in confidence. A vax passport n 2 months is the ultimate stable door closed late.
It depends what horse in the stable you're trying to protect.
If its to prevent Covid cases spreading now, then you're right.
If its to prevent the NHS collapsing under the strain of Covid cases during winter flu season then a vax passport in 2 months time (plus the exit wave of the virus burning out in the summer) is timed to perfection.
Why would Covid cause a winter collapse? Haven't you and the other Unlock Now Forever advocates told us that its all over? Come on, you aren't backing a vax passport are you?
I'm not no, but the entire logic for months from the government and the scientists is that the point of biggest risk is in the winter when people are inside and there's the winter flu season in addition to Covid.
So if you're doing a vaxport, there's little point in doing it now and suppressing the summer spread. The entirely logical time to do it, is in time for Freshers in September.
So the avowed strategy now is to get as many people as possible sick with Covid now?
Have you not been paying attention?
Yes its literally the point that the exit wave should happen over the summer instead of the winter.
Have you only just figured out what that means?
Its certainly one strategy. Of course the more people we get vaccinated the less of an "exit wave" we have. But we can't possibly have that, Clown needed to make his Churchill speech. I must have missed it - how did it go?
We've done vaccinations.
What more can we gain in futher vaccinations that we won't lose by pushing the exit wave away from the summer?
My point of view is we have to unlock the economy can't take much more
If vaccines work then we are all good and no need for vaccine passports If vaccines dont work then we still need to unlock and therefore no need for vaccine passports
What if vaccines work but only if they're in peoples arms and not in a fridge?
In which case there could be a need for vaccine passports?
It is entirely possible that an early version of Covid, maybe one with an R of 1.1, circulated for some time. And then, as with the Delta variant, a small mutation caused a dramatic increase in R, and it took off.
I suspect if we were on chinapoliticalbetting.com, then @Shīzi* would be ranting eloquently about how this was proof that the West had invented Covid and smuggled it into China to fuck them over, and that it was practically an act of war.
Vaccine passport or -ve test is already being used at some clubs. One in Bristol, and err Slimes at electrowerkz....... (Which isn't really competing for the same market as other London nights )
Surprised it is still going I remember it as filled with some very lovely young goth ladies clad in latex
Dear me, do people really think that checking a vaccine certificate requires communicating with government servers? I suppose such spectacular ignorance is because the government has stupidly not explained anything or laid the groundwork, but it's very hard to correct such nonsensical beliefs once they get around.
You would need to have a secure chain API with a bring your own device front end to scan the QR code and get a response from the server saying it's legit. Otherwise why bother?
Could you not just bring your paper copy?
Maybe but surely that would also require a secondary photo ID.
Well... we're about to require it for voting, so fuck it, let's require it for everything.
It will piss even more off if they try to implement it....imagine long queues building up outside pubs. restaurants, nightclubs,gigs ...."Sorry cant let you in because cant verify your status as the servers are down"
Very forseeable so the gov't will of course ensure the server capacity is increased prior to it being a condition
You can't increase the capacity that much, botnets are cheap to hire and IoT has provide many more millions of devices to run them on. Plus when did you last see a competent government it operation
The vaccine passport is on the users phone. No need for the nightclub to have computer access, just a doorman who knows what to look for. Same when you fly etc*. So no government IT to bring down.
*One of our nurses was in Spain a couple of weeks back. No one checked either way.
If it is just on the users phones then its easily forgeable and therefore pointless. I just get a friend to take a screenshot of theirs. Same with a paper version
I believe one of the debates happening in government is about the 'easy to fraud' problem.
They can debate all they want but like most things governments dont have the brightest people working for them, the brightest in it are outside and delight in a challenge of breaking things wide open and figuring out how to
Delighting in working out how to bring an increased risk of Covid infection into a nightclub because you are unjabbed, most people are sensible and will comply
I am not unjabbed I merely refuse to take part in your illiberal bollocks of vaxports the tories can fuck off
lololol - people are already going to nightclubs you apologist loon. They're going in confidence. A vax passport n 2 months is the ultimate stable door closed late.
It depends what horse in the stable you're trying to protect.
If its to prevent Covid cases spreading now, then you're right.
If its to prevent the NHS collapsing under the strain of Covid cases during winter flu season then a vax passport in 2 months time (plus the exit wave of the virus burning out in the summer) is timed to perfection.
Why would Covid cause a winter collapse? Haven't you and the other Unlock Now Forever advocates told us that its all over? Come on, you aren't backing a vax passport are you?
I'm not no, but the entire logic for months from the government and the scientists is that the point of biggest risk is in the winter when people are inside and there's the winter flu season in addition to Covid.
So if you're doing a vaxport, there's little point in doing it now and suppressing the summer spread. The entirely logical time to do it, is in time for Freshers in September.
So the avowed strategy now is to get as many people as possible sick with Covid now?
Have you not been paying attention?
Yes its literally the point that the exit wave should happen over the summer instead of the winter.
Have you only just figured out what that means?
Its certainly one strategy. Of course the more people we get vaccinated the less of an "exit wave" we have. But we can't possibly have that, Clown needed to make his Churchill speech. I must have missed it - how did it go?
We've done vaccinations.
What more can we gain in futher vaccinations that we won't lose by pushing the exit wave away from the summer?
My point of view is we have to unlock the economy can't take much more
If vaccines work then we are all good and no need for vaccine passports If vaccines dont work then we still need to unlock and therefore no need for vaccine passports
Vaccines from a transmission viewpoint PARTIALLY work, which is why from a strict epidemiological perspective (Rights and so forth is another matter) they're a good idea
EDIT - and have you read the Telegraph or the Spectator recently? If the PM has been trying to impress the Telegraph and the Spectator, he's going about it abysmally. What he's trying to do (and succeeding) is to impress the authoritarian lobby which want more laws on other people (like @gealbhan yesterday - although I wasn't sure how serious he was).
EDIT2: And good luck going maskless. Enjoy exchanging smiles with other demaskers!
Sorry, missed your edits.
Johnson: I was referring to his "I don't buy all this NHS overwhelmed stuff" type thing that he was coming out with. After months of the crisis the PM had about the same grasp of the issues as Toby Young on his 4th pint. Or whatever Tobes' tipple is.
Maskless: Yep, did it, but not a great success. Waitrose was full of people still wearing. I really stood out. Got a few eyeballs along the lines of "Look at him, giving it the big John Wayne. Oh dear oh dear". So I think a compromise next time. I'll wear it, but once I've been through checkout I'll take it straight off rather than wait till I get outside the shop. A journey of 1000 miles starts with one small step ...
I wonder if masking rates vary by supermarket? With Waitrose being notoriously pretentious it probably has the highest masking rates.
I got no funny looks being unmasked at Tesco's.
Waitrose IS a 'wear a mask' type of place. For my one the acid test will be Julie Hartley Brewer. She shops there (although no sign today) and it'll be interesting to see what happens there. A case of irresistible force versus immovable object.
Anti lockdown, anti mask etc are a funny coalition from your Piers Corbyns to the likes of JHB, Isbael Oakenshot.
Yes, mainly on the Right but also crosses over. I think it's where there's that particular mix of irrationality, fetish for the individual, and distrust/dislike of THE AUTHORITIES.
You should never trust the authorities whether of left or right. They don't have your interests at heart but their's
Yes I was a bit surprised that you weren't one of the anti lockdown ultras tbf. Not quite irrational enough is my sense of why.
It will piss even more off if they try to implement it....imagine long queues building up outside pubs. restaurants, nightclubs,gigs ...."Sorry cant let you in because cant verify your status as the servers are down"
Very forseeable so the gov't will of course ensure the server capacity is increased prior to it being a condition
You can't increase the capacity that much, botnets are cheap to hire and IoT has provide many more millions of devices to run them on. Plus when did you last see a competent government it operation
The vaccine passport is on the users phone. No need for the nightclub to have computer access, just a doorman who knows what to look for. Same when you fly etc*. So no government IT to bring down.
*One of our nurses was in Spain a couple of weeks back. No one checked either way.
If it is just on the users phones then its easily forgeable and therefore pointless. I just get a friend to take a screenshot of theirs. Same with a paper version
Come on @Pagan2, you're smarter than that. It's incredibly easy for everybody to have a "seed" and then for the barcode to change every 30 seconds.
But let's ignore that for a second.
The reality is that there are successful vaxport apps in New York, Israel and Denmark - and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. None of those systems seem to have any particular issues, as far as I can see.
That means that they are far impossible.
Now, a perfectly reasonably objection to this, is that it is the thin end of the wedge that leads to identity cards, tracking and the rest. And that's a perfectly reasonable objection.
But it's real world choices time here: is it less bad to allow those who *choose* vaccination to live a normal life again, and to allow the economy to fully reopen; or is it less bad to keep Covid as an ongoing issue to avoid the possibility that a future government uses them to introduce ID cards by the back door?
It is less bad to keep covid frankly, if I wanted governement tracking I would emigrate to China. My statements about crytography is debunking the "There cant be fakes" view of some. Will fakes be the majority hell no but they will be available
"There's absolutely no point in arresting Jeffrey Epstein for being a rapist, if there are going to be other rapists wandering around" - @Pagan2, 2021.
The first rule of cryptography is that the moment more than one person has a key the key is potentially compromised
I think you're confused about the nature of public and private keys. Public keys can be given to multiple users and mean that that user can encrypt the file so that only someone with the private key can decrypt it. But they won't help with decryption whatsoever.
Not at all confused as I spent 5 years working with the system. The important key is the one on government servers. It encrypts the data sent out which creates the qr code , then when the qr code is scanned receives the data and decrypts it and checks it. The government keys will be on the darknet before you can say boo to a goose allowing people to create vaxports at will that will pass muster
Why would I need to decrypt the message, all I need to do is use the data available to verify that the contents match the signature.
You dont need to decrypt it. Government server sends you encrypted data which is used to build a qr code still the data is encrypted...you scan it, sent to government server that decrypts it to make sure its one they sent out and checks your status then sends back yes or no.....where in that did you decrypt anything?
It will piss even more off if they try to implement it....imagine long queues building up outside pubs. restaurants, nightclubs,gigs ...."Sorry cant let you in because cant verify your status as the servers are down"
Very forseeable so the gov't will of course ensure the server capacity is increased prior to it being a condition
You can't increase the capacity that much, botnets are cheap to hire and IoT has provide many more millions of devices to run them on. Plus when did you last see a competent government it operation
The vaccine passport is on the users phone. No need for the nightclub to have computer access, just a doorman who knows what to look for. Same when you fly etc*. So no government IT to bring down.
*One of our nurses was in Spain a couple of weeks back. No one checked either way.
No way will Mr Bill Jones' screenshotted double vaccine confirmation ever be used. A million times.
I can advise that fake vaccine certification is already changing hands for £500 a pop.
There are some idiots around, aren't there? Get vaccinated, save yourself £500.
Morning all. Sorry, only just read the @Cyclefree PT header on the stubborn Tory poll lead. It's a very good helicopter piece.
"If the choice is between the Tories and an empty space, the latter is unlikely to win."
The above line jumped out at me. You read it and reflexively nod and think "too right". It's one of those.
But then - if you're me - you dwell on it a while and wonder whether it is such a slam dunk. This government (and particularly this PM) are increasingly being viewed by anybody with eyes to see and ears to listen and noses to smell and mouths to - ok ok you get the picture - as an utter shambles. No principles. No competence. 'No' as in ZERO.
They've got away with it so far (pollwise) but for how long? Brexit is shedding its potency as iconic wedge issue. Slowly, to be sure, but it is. They can poke the fires of its culture war aspect but is this enough to stay at 40%? I doubt it. Tough times lie ahead with the economy and in Fiscal Corner. Leveling Up, for example, has to move from soundbite to hard policy choices and this will piss some people off. If it doesn't it's not real and remains a soundbite. Which would also start to piss some people off, just a different bunch, those Leavers who voted for this agenda, believing it to be genuine. Because these folk are not total blithering idiots - not in the main and not all the time. Whatever, poll damage is coming either way. Ditto with Social Care. There are no votes in that. Only negative ones if you get serious about it. Ask Andy Burnham or Theresa May. So the same choice there. A solid plan and loss of popularity or a cop out and loss of popularity.
Now we have this mismanaged exit from the pandemic. Plus (the header here) further damaging reveals from Cummings - who was right there in the middle of it - about the response and attitude throughout. The PM at key moments in thrall to bizarre right-wing 'contrarians' for heaven's sake, most of them no wiser than our PB one. His focus not on preventing Covid running amok in England and killing tens of thousands but on something far more important - impressing the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator.
I could go on. The challenge is to stop. But I can do that too. I'm going out maskless in a minute. Big moment. The point is, surely all of this shit is probably going to lead within a year to the Cons polling no better than mid 30s. And then come the GE, given things can only get worse, if the choice is indeed between more of the same or a nice cool empty space fronted by a non-scary, competent, decent sounding bloke who looks like he could run a whelk stall and could manage to tell the truth every now and again, well for me that's a toss up.
I take issue with 'poke the fires of its culture war aspect'. Blaming the right for the culture war is like blaming Poland for World War Two. The right isn't trying to move back to 1953, it just doesn't want to be dragged forward to year zero. All the movement on the culture war is from the left. The right isn't trying to rewrite history. The right is, occasionally, suggesting that perhaps the left might be going a bit too far. Now you're astute, and you'll notice I'm saying 'the left' and not 'the Labour Party'. SKS is trying his hardest to avoid the loonier fringes of the culture war, though his party occasionally drag him into it. But to the electorate as a whole, that's not enough. Neil Kinnock was no culture warrior. But the culture warriors of the wider left - the ILEA, for example - lost him votes. How does SKS distance Labour from the likes of Zarah Sultana and Nadia Whittome?
EDIT - and have you read the Telegraph or the Spectator recently? If the PM has been trying to impress the Telegraph and the Spectator, he's going about it abysmally. What he's trying to do (and succeeding) is to impress the authoritarian lobby which want more laws on other people (like @gealbhan yesterday - although I wasn't sure how serious he was).
EDIT2: And good luck going maskless. Enjoy exchanging smiles with other demaskers!
As named, I’ll explain.
My point being the argument between authoritarian and libertarian is not a left right one, nor is it a case of one side being right, the other wrong. It’s a case of both should listen to the other and debate the other, to help get things right.
It shows up clearly in Covid politics, commentators in the Telegraph (Conservative in party politics, split between libertarian and authoritarian in Covid response) and the Daily Mail (Conservative till sixties, populist right since) also to a smaller degree split between authoritarian and libertarian, though tending toward libertarian in editorial.
In downing street yesterday, JVT Libertarian, open nite clubs, Vallance authoritarian, against doing it right now.
But with the success of vaccines, things have now moved on, old media and new media like this blog very slow to realise how things have moved. It’s never been, if not now then when, it was always going to be how, post vaccine.
It’s not about vaccines now, it’s about behaviours. The horse taken to water (jabbed) could say the easier equation than getting it to drink (behaviour) hence now proper debate required between authoritarian and libertarian to achieve those behaviours.
The government have already decided the road ahead and won’t u turn. My evidence? The main headline this lunchtime, government no intention to tackle pingdemic, they are determined to generate it, latest missive from Downing Street, if you are pinged then isolate.
So if you delete the app, ie show the wrong behaviour, the government won’t concede to you, they will coerce you into the behaviours in the end.
I don’t make this up, I’m just the messenger where for many the penny hasn’t dropped yet.
Marginally following this up, isn't one of Labour's problems that very few of the real choices we face are left v right. A number of left issues are over, and therefore discounted. The NHS, free education to 18, not being an imperial power, social housing, payments to those not in work, House of Lords reform, minimum wage, employment rights, high taxes on the rich, health and safety etc. The centre left has won all the battles, and the centre right occupies what would have been a centre/centre left position.
Covid, Brexit, China, Russia, Islamic extremism, free speech, debt and deficit, the state of the UK union - none of these have obvious left v right alternative solutions.
The game has changed. I think so far the Tories have been better at silently shifting. Labour members still seem to think that the very people who vote in Patel, Sunak, Kwarteng and Nadhim Zahawi are filthy racists because they don't think Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler and Zarah Sultana are outstanding politicians.
The next left/right debate is UBI (and the terms of that debate will, in part be set by the experience of furlough, and our economic path over the next 5 years or so).
I think the left is at *extreme* danger of being outflanked on this by the right, with a post-industrial market-economy argument being made (and won) for its introduction by a future Tory administration, while Labour sits it out, scared of frightening the middle-england horses.
There is no debate to be had, UBI which is enough to live on is unaffordable
UBI already exists in this country, we just don't call it that and we have an extremely high real marginal income tax on it.
A sensible UBI introduction would be to merge existing things together, sort out the tax rates so they're sensible, then call it UBI. Not introduce massive new benefits.
A bit like Osborne introducing a Living Wage, based upon the pre-existing Minimum Wage and not dramatically different.
UBI will not work until they sort out housing benefit, specifically in London and the south.
The current numbers require something like £1k a month for an adult, £500 for a child, and an income tax rate of 35% with no personal allowance. Then start making allowances for behavioural changes, all of which will be on the downside for the Chancellor.
Don't like it, don't get it - handouts for sitting at home make zero sense to me. I take the 'Judge Judy' approach to welfare!
The entire point of a UBI, as opposed to UC/JSA etc is that its not a handout for sitting at home.
What we have today is handouts encouraging people to stay at home.
I t further weakens the notion of self-help and nurse knows best. No thanks.
Actually it does the complete opposite.
UC/JSA weakens the notion of self-help because it pays people to not be working. Work and "you lose your benefits". If you fail to work, you're paid for that.
UBI reinforces the notion of self-help as you get the UBI whether you work or not. Fail to work, you're not given any extra money than those who do work, so you're the one who suffers.
You can only claim JSA now if able bodied if you have made enough NI contributions when in work, so JSA now encourages self-help.
UBI would be paid to anyone, whether a billionaire or multimillionaire in a mansion or someone out of work in a council house.
Are you sure you can't get any benefits without NI contributions? I don't think you're right.
That its paid to a millionaire or in a council house, is the entire point of universality. By paying it to everyone you get rid of the 'poverty trap' and ensure that its not worth anyone not working because if they don't work they only hurt themselves.
The millionaire getting the benefit should just see the benefit offset against the taxes they owe, no different to how the tax-free allowance always worked prior to it being written off for highest earners.
I fail to see why the average taxpayer should fund a benefit to millionaires or why it should mean the millionaire then gets a tax cut instead.
Because you're not thinking straight.
By taxing away the benefits you're not affecting the millionaires marginal tax rate at all.
The people who have a high marginal tax rate and suffer from means testing are the poor not the rich.
The richest who are paying hundreds of thousands or millions of pounds a year in taxes getting a tiny amount back in 'universal benefits' is a rounding error for them, but its incredibly meaningful for the people not facing 75% marginal tax rates anymore.
UC means the poor and out of work are not facing 75% marginal tax rates anymore, as it only reduces their benefits gradually as their working hours increase and earnings up to £12,750 pay no income tax at all
Netherlands-watch - 6699 cases. Slightly down on last week. The third wave in the Netherlands appears to have peaked less than a fortnight after it started.
EDIT - and have you read the Telegraph or the Spectator recently? If the PM has been trying to impress the Telegraph and the Spectator, he's going about it abysmally. What he's trying to do (and succeeding) is to impress the authoritarian lobby which want more laws on other people (like @gealbhan yesterday - although I wasn't sure how serious he was).
EDIT2: And good luck going maskless. Enjoy exchanging smiles with other demaskers!
Sorry, missed your edits.
Johnson: I was referring to his "I don't buy all this NHS overwhelmed stuff" type thing that he was coming out with. After months of the crisis the PM had about the same grasp of the issues as Toby Young on his 4th pint. Or whatever Tobes' tipple is.
Maskless: Yep, did it, but not a great success. Waitrose was full of people still wearing. I really stood out. Got a few eyeballs along the lines of "Look at him, giving it the big John Wayne. Oh dear oh dear". So I think a compromise next time. I'll wear it, but once I've been through checkout I'll take it straight off rather than wait till I get outside the shop. A journey of 1000 miles starts with one small step ...
I wonder if masking rates vary by supermarket? With Waitrose being notoriously pretentious it probably has the highest masking rates.
I got no funny looks being unmasked at Tesco's.
Waitrose is very middle class, and I expect most to carry on wearing masks. Other stores not so much. Weirdly, I'm not so bothered about wearing one when it is voluntary, than I was when it was mandatory. I'm weird.
Not many in the Temple Fortune one a couple of days ago. Sainsbury's in Muswell Hill was 95%+ masked and tuts for staff not wearing them.
Went to Morrisons in my new car today but forgot I had not put a mask in the glove box as before. Went in without mask therefore. No comment from anyone and about half the staff were without as well
My point of view is we have to unlock the economy can't take much more
If vaccines work then we are all good and no need for vaccine passports If vaccines dont work then we still need to unlock and therefore no need for vaccine passports
Half the point, maybe more, of vaccine passports is to make the vaccine reluctant think "I'd better get a vaccine". In a way the scheme works best if it's not needed. Hell if the government were really sneaky and clever they could get away with spending basically nothing on it.
It will piss even more off if they try to implement it....imagine long queues building up outside pubs. restaurants, nightclubs,gigs ...."Sorry cant let you in because cant verify your status as the servers are down"
Very forseeable so the gov't will of course ensure the server capacity is increased prior to it being a condition
You can't increase the capacity that much, botnets are cheap to hire and IoT has provide many more millions of devices to run them on. Plus when did you last see a competent government it operation
The vaccine passport is on the users phone. No need for the nightclub to have computer access, just a doorman who knows what to look for. Same when you fly etc*. So no government IT to bring down.
*One of our nurses was in Spain a couple of weeks back. No one checked either way.
If it is just on the users phones then its easily forgeable and therefore pointless. I just get a friend to take a screenshot of theirs. Same with a paper version
Come on @Pagan2, you're smarter than that. It's incredibly easy for everybody to have a "seed" and then for the barcode to change every 30 seconds.
But let's ignore that for a second.
The reality is that there are successful vaxport apps in New York, Israel and Denmark - and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. None of those systems seem to have any particular issues, as far as I can see.
That means that they are far impossible.
Now, a perfectly reasonably objection to this, is that it is the thin end of the wedge that leads to identity cards, tracking and the rest. And that's a perfectly reasonable objection.
But it's real world choices time here: is it less bad to allow those who *choose* vaccination to live a normal life again, and to allow the economy to fully reopen; or is it less bad to keep Covid as an ongoing issue to avoid the possibility that a future government uses them to introduce ID cards by the back door?
It is less bad to keep covid frankly, if I wanted governement tracking I would emigrate to China. My statements about crytography is debunking the "There cant be fakes" view of some. Will fakes be the majority hell no but they will be available
"There's absolutely no point in arresting Jeffrey Epstein for being a rapist, if there are going to be other rapists wandering around" - @Pagan2, 2021.
Where did I say people found with fake ones wouldn't be arrested? You forget here energy. I can get a fake vaxport with a couple of clicks....I can vaccines by travelling somewhere taking up my time twice a few weeks apart. Let us remember bothering to walk a few minutes to a polling booth is to much for some people
Dear me, do people really think that checking a vaccine certificate requires communicating with government servers? I suppose such spectacular ignorance is because the government has stupidly not explained anything or laid the groundwork, but it's very hard to correct such nonsensical beliefs once they get around.
I got my EU Vaccine certificate downloaded from The Andalucian Health authority yesterday and dumped it on Google drive. I have it available both on and offline so clearly no further connection with anything other than me. I simply do not comprehend, although I acknowledge, the degree of antipathy to such useful documents we hear so much of on here. Same with general ID cards, passports, etc digital or paper.
A QR code that matches some other piece of ID is really not that complicated.
Of course, the US and most of the EU (and Israel) all have de jure or de facto ID cards, which makes things fairly easy.
I've always been a big "no ID cards" person, but if we're going to start insisting on driving licenses for things like voting, then we might as well allow them to replace a passport for foreign travel, and allow non-drivers to get them as in the US.
Dear me, do people really think that checking a vaccine certificate requires communicating with government servers? I suppose such spectacular ignorance is because the government has stupidly not explained anything or laid the groundwork, but it's very hard to correct such nonsensical beliefs once they get around.
You would need to have a secure chain API with a bring your own device front end to scan the QR code and get a response from the server saying it's legit. Otherwise why bother?
No, you just need it to be encrypted using absolutely bog-standard techniques.
It's identical to your computer checking a certificate. All you need to store in the smartphone or other device checking the QR code is a small number of public keys.
Sighs you have no clue do you, a public key will be leaked. Look how well it worked for dvds when the data was encrypted....clue it lasted days. Keys will be leaked or a weakness found in almost nothing flat.
How does my browser accept an SSL certificate as legit? Not via Digicert or whoever signed it.
Your browser decrypts it with a key. Those keys get leaked too
Can I ask what cryptography has to do with the issue at hand - which is how can you verify that the record presented to you (within a QR barcode) is valid.
To do that the only options are external verification (to a central server, to which you can run zero trust authentication and complete logging) or local verification....
I'm not an expert in the precise mathematics of it but I imagined that your QR code would be a representation of your certificate signed by the government's private key, just as an SSL certificate is signed by a trusted* authority.
The check-in app only has to check the certificate trust tree to verify that it hasn't been tampered with. The certificate itself would contain details such as your name and your vax status.
Comments
Sure there's exemptions that apply at the minute that mean eg if you have savings then you can't get UC. That will need dealing with to make it properly universal.
Currently people feel like its not worth working as they'll "lose their benefits" which is true, marginal tax rates of over 75% and effectively 90% exist. Getting rid of that will well and truly make work pay.
As a point of principle, I find it immoral for anyone to be facing a marginal tax rate of over 50%. That to me applies equally to those earning over £100k losing their tax-free allowance, and those on minimum wage losing their UC.
https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/mounting-evidence-suggests-covid-vaccines-do-reduce-transmission-how-does-work#:~:text=It found immunisation with either,people who weren't vaccinated.
It's identical to your computer checking a certificate. All you need to store in the smartphone or other device checking the QR code is a small number of public keys.
If its to prevent Covid cases spreading now, then you're right.
If its to prevent the NHS collapsing under the strain of Covid cases during winter flu season then a vax passport in 2 months time (plus the exit wave of the virus burning out in the summer) is timed to perfection.
But I'm guessing the government is worried about Freshers Flu and what happened with the Universities restarting in September last year.
So although I'm against the vaxport in principle, being logical having the virus burnout over the summer, then a vaxport in September timed for Freshers is entirely sensible.
I agree that the tax and benefits system is way too complex, with perverse incentives all over the place. While UC has straightened out a lot of the problems and silly 16-hour rules that existed previously, the next change is going to result in a lot of losers though, which makes it much more difficult politically.
And you don't want to do that offline as any validation algorithm stored locally will be stolen and used to generate fake QR certificates.
At least as far as they're concerned.
They’ve given a first dose to more than 70% of the population but even now, the zero covid zealots are winning the argument there. I don’t know a foreigner left in the country who doesn’t feel like covid is being used as a pretext to squeeze the foreigners out the country and to needlessly strengthen the hand of authoritarianism.
Were it not for the implosion of Hong Kong, Singapore would be in quite immediate and pressing trouble. As it is, it has a slow puncture to its economy and society and it’s very hard to see how it’s going to be fixed - I gather the demographics of their vaccine hesitancy are the reverse of ours. High uptake in youth and immigrants, low uptake in the elderly citizenry. Which means the PAP are going to politically struggle to wean the country away from zero covid policies indefinitely.
Plus over a third of under 35s have not even had 1 jab yet, despite being offered one, let alone 2 so it provides an incentive for the young to get jabbed before September
Long-term making work pay and having flatter, lower tax rates leads to the pie being grown and more tax receipts/lower expenditure overall.
What we have today is handouts encouraging people to stay at home.
So if you're doing a vaxport, there's little point in doing it now and suppressing the summer spread. The entirely logical time to do it, is in time for Freshers in September.
https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/private-keys-for-23000-digital-certificates-leaked-a-10689#:~:text=The emailing of the private,this a serious security issue.
Perhaps Season 2 of Clarkson's Farm will feature Caleb and Gerald fighting off illegal ravers with an outdated Massey Ferguson.
UC/JSA weakens the notion of self-help because it pays people to not be working. Work and "you lose your benefits". If you fail to work, you're paid for that.
UBI reinforces the notion of self-help as you get the UBI whether you work or not. Fail to work, you're not given any extra money than those who do work, so you're the one who suffers.
Maybe it will, maybe it won't. Not exactly critical infrastructure though, is it? Keys can be revoked.
In Boris own words yesterday, TAT is his only control left, so he feels he has surrendered control and feeling uncomfortable about it? The government position is vaccinate and then behaviours, I’m okay with that sounds sensible to me, but I’m not sure they know what that means. Almost like they want us to eat Libertarian and authoritarian cake at the same time now is their less than clear position.
For example. Covid passports. What are they trying to achieve? How effective will they be at achieving it? Say we are starting with the end output you want to achieve and work backward, is that Covid safe venues without superspreading? is vaxpass what you would use to achieve that end result?
What does it prove, you are jabbed/double jabbed? You can still be a super speeder can you not? You can still go into a vaxpass venue and get Ill can you not? So what’s it actually achieving in terms of behaviours, other than a false claim you are ensuring behaviours when you are not really?
You don’t argue with security on the doors, but like Philip said, how well does it work extending to where there isn’t security?
Covid vaxpass idea Half baked?
Merge UC, NI and Income Tax together and get rid of the anomalies such as 75% tax for the poorest, or 60% tax if you're on £100k plus £1 and so on and so forth.
Yes its literally the point that the exit wave should happen over the summer instead of the winter.
Have you only just figured out what that means?
To do that the only options are external verification (to a central server, to which you can run zero trust authentication and complete logging) or local verification....
UBI would be paid to anyone, whether a billionaire or multimillionaire in a mansion or someone out of work in a council house.
But let's ignore that for a second.
The reality is that there are successful vaxport apps in New York, Israel and Denmark - and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. None of those systems seem to have any particular issues, as far as I can see.
That means that they are far impossible.
Now, a perfectly reasonably objection to this, is that it is the thin end of the wedge that leads to identity cards, tracking and the rest. And that's a perfectly reasonable objection.
But it's real world choices time here: is it less bad to allow those who *choose* vaccination to live a normal life again, and to allow the economy to fully reopen; or is it less bad to keep Covid as an ongoing issue to avoid the possibility that a future government uses them to introduce ID cards by the back door?
That its paid to a millionaire or in a council house, is the entire point of universality. By paying it to everyone you get rid of the 'poverty trap' and ensure that its not worth anyone not working because if they don't work they only hurt themselves.
The millionaire getting the benefit should just see the benefit offset against the taxes they owe, no different to how the tax-free allowance always worked prior to it being written off for highest earners.
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-vaccine-passports-idUSL8N2M05AB
https://www.gov.uk/jobseekers-allowance/eligibility
I fail to see why the average taxpayer should fund a benefit to millionaires or why it should mean the millionaire then gets a tax cut instead.
"I don't think I'll bother as I'm not likely to get Covid" will transform into "Meh might as well get vaccinated to head out". The ranks of principled libertarians amongst youngsters are vanishingly small compared to the ranks of the apathetic unless needing to do something.
What more can we gain in futher vaccinations that we won't lose by pushing the exit wave away from the summer?
By taxing away the benefits you're not affecting the millionaires marginal tax rate at all.
The people who have a high marginal tax rate and suffer from means testing are the poor not the rich.
The richest who are paying hundreds of thousands or millions of pounds a year in taxes getting a tiny amount back in 'universal benefits' is a rounding error for them, but its incredibly meaningful for the people not facing 75% marginal tax rates anymore.
If vaccines work then we are all good and no need for vaccine passports
If vaccines dont work then we still need to unlock and therefore no need for vaccine passports
There is a reason why I'm asking WTF you are on about as I've been there and got the t-shirt on a commercial software licensing project.
In which case there could be a need for vaccine passports?
I suspect if we were on chinapoliticalbetting.com, then @Shīzi* would be ranting eloquently about how this was proof that the West had invented Covid and smuggled it into China to fuck them over, and that it was practically an act of war.
* Leon in Chinese
Of course, the US and most of the EU (and Israel) all have de jure or de facto ID cards, which makes things fairly easy.
I've always been a big "no ID cards" person, but if we're going to start insisting on driving licenses for things like voting, then we might as well allow them to replace a passport for foreign travel, and allow non-drivers to get them as in the US.
The check-in app only has to check the certificate trust tree to verify that it hasn't been tampered with. The certificate itself would contain details such as your name and your vax status.
*Yes, I know. Symantec etc etc.