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The developing empty shelves narrative could really damage Johnson and his government – politicalbet
The developing empty shelves narrative could really damage Johnson and his government – politicalbetting.com
The Mail’s front page reflects a growing narrative that of itself could trigger panic buying and add to a developing sense of crisis. Pics of empty shelves are becoming an increasing feature of late sparked off not just by the so called pingdemic, but the shortage of drivers and Brexit itself.
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The government and me.
a) people were thereby nudged away from hoarding food (flour and pasta were short and in many supermarkets they were on ration when available, not to mention the fact that the army had been sent to many supermarkets), and
b) it's about bums and therefore sells newspapers.
Each will wave it away as whichever suits their prejudices.
Boris is a lucky, lucky boy yet again.
Eldest home after Uni, and youngest finished school has really shifted a comfortable dynamic off its axis.
Too many adults at home all day in too small a house.
https://twitter.com/gillianmckeith/status/1417883955462823944
At one point my Remainer mate was ranting about Brexit, to the extent of yelling the words "the Tory Nazis". It was a bit embarrassing TBH. His partner intervened and calmed him down
I've no doubt he is angry about Brexit - he always has been - but this was a new level of unhinged fury. Notably, he had been talking about the Delta Variant quite a lot, just before
I reckon the pandemic is now pushing a lot of people to the brink - and the idea that it might go on for many months more is basically intolerable
Turns out to be a nutter you say?
Though the decision of 2 of the 4 adults to purchase a drum machine without any consultation or usual channels hasn't helped.
At fucking all.
Wow, north London feels edgy, sketchy and often deserted. It feels like it did in the early 1980s. Scruffy, sooty, silent, noisy, very un-chic, it is like 40 years of gentrification have been reversed in one and a half years of plague
The one upside is the sense of youthfulness. You only see young people, apart from a few old school drinkers in the pubs
The government have to accept that a large proportion of people are gaming the pingdemic to their own advantage. Either you are self employed or a business owner, in which case you avoid taking tests, downloading the app, or anything that might lead to the risk of being required to self isolate; or you have a menial job which you hate, in which case you get a free paid holiday every time you get pinged so you would have no objection to the app. The only people who can truly afford to take this seriously are a certain limited category of corporate office worker, who can actually work from home; and the conscientious elderly.
Though most aren't awakened by a fucking drum machine!!!!
eg derelict areas like Docklands, Kings X, Spitalfields, South Bank, Wapping - and on and on - which were only inhabited by old tramps and old drunks and old people who never moved out - were suddenly flush with young people looking for cheap property in quite central areas with fab period buildings
I believe we are now at the beginning of a long downswing for London, God knows how many years it will take for recovery to kick in. 5 years. 15. 50? The last major decline from 1930 took half a century to switch to renaissance
But already you can see how one day it might recover. The young
As "civilisation" depends entirely on functional cities - by definition - that is extremely bad news for everyone. Even those now feeling smug in their garden suburbs, market towns and leafy villages, depend on big cities to keep the money turning and society thinking
Fewer offices. But more entertainment.
All that infrastructure - whether the tube, the apartments, the shopping centers, the hospitals, etc - will be used. The only question is what for, and who will pay for it.
It's all very well to airily make these predictions, but the ramifications are tremendous, and ominous - as these epochal and accelerated changes will be repeated in big cities across the world, esp in America and Europe
My sense of London is that it is at the beginning of a chain reaction of terrible decline, as one business failure feeds into another, as one departed rich person leads to another round of debt, and the tax take falls, and the services are withdrawn, so more people leave, like New York in the 70s but on steroids
Christ, I hope I am wrong, I fear I am right. And, as I say, I believe this is the fate of all the great cities
We need the virus to fuck off very very quickly to avoid these things
These are arguably more optimistic scenarios now. Just another secular decline, and then recovery, it happens, fair enough
The extreme worst case scenarios point to Detroit. Or Rome in 400AD
I guess that the pre pandmic London isn't coming back. Some parts will disappear, like the millions of commuters coming in to the City every day. Other parts might stay. It is too early to tell.
From around 2002 to 2010 London just became overcrowded. It would surely benefit from some depopulation to become more liveable.
My guess is that it is the dormitory suburbs which will go downhill fast. Their only asset was proximity to central London, which is now substantially diminished in value.
https://twitter.com/BNODesk/status/1418002144737828865
You might be very willing to put yourself in a crowded situation (a concert) for something you really enjoy. But not for something that can be done just as well from home.
I'm seeing young people coming back to the office already. We had no 20-somethings in our office in April/May. Now, all but one are back (sample size five people).
Because (a) they're allowed, (b) home working isn't as much fun when you don't leave your bedroom all day, (c) they're sociable types who like hanging out with others, and (d) bars and restaurants are now open, so why not come into the centre?
But it is worth remembering that it wasn't cities in general that were declining in those periods, but specific cities.
Is this a generalised death of the city? Or will it merely be a shake out?
I'm glad I don't own really expensive real estate in London and Los Angeles. Oh wait...
For a liverpool / detroit process to occur there needs to be massive depopulation. I can't see that happening in the case of London - purely because the demand for housing is so great, due to the constrained supply that currently exists. People have to live somewhere.
I think the issue you are describing could get bad in the suburbs, rather than the centre. Central London is massively desirable, the suburbs much less so.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/jul/21/tokyo-2020-olympics-social-media-teams-banned-from-showing-athletes-taking-the-knee
It wouldn’t surprise me to find that the UK government has been lobbying behind the scenes.
Two countries that both have 60% of the population vaccinated will have very different outcomes if one of them includes almost everyone over 50 and the other is evenly spread across all ages.
People now want homes that are big enough to have a home office. This means the overall volume of residential property people want to have grows. Or to put it another way, the total number of square footage in homes needs to rise.
And young people, by and large, don't want to work from home. They don't have apartments of their own. They are in shared places. They want to be back in the office and not worryign about their dirty boxers shorts being in shot on a Zoom call. Plus, they want to catch the eye of their manager, and they need to learn.
So, while there may not be so many oldies coming in, and there'll be more hybrid. Do we really think that the value of spending time with other human beings for work reasons has gone to zero?
I think DeSantis's removal of the rights of cities and towns to set their own rules will go down as a major unforced error.
Edit: stopping the publication of data, that is.
backlog of 1.4 million cases at DVLA
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57916619.amp
It's currently 22 degrees in Bristol. Must be close to a record for a night time temperature.
‘Mayo Clinic expert warns delta variant will infect everyone who is not immune hill.cm/v3VDvcY’
https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1418010927325138945?s=21
In retrospect the Euros should have been cancelled too, and the formula one, and the Tour de France and many other events. The coming football season is bound to be a superspreader opportunity.
As a frightening new strain of the plague sweeps the world, WTAF?
Edit: And Thailand.
Covid19 has just proved once again that the human race can be incredibly stupid and we never learn from our mistakes. God help us if a *proper* nasty disease ever hits: it’ll knock us back to the Middle Ages. Covid19 could come to be seen as a little cuddly beast in comparison.
Nobody would be happy with that, the sports, the sponsors, etc.
In a global pandemic you have to make tough choices. Too many decision-makers have abrogated their responsibilities.
The international sporting calendar (and along with all the money) is set around Olympics every 4 years, World Cup and loads of other major sports events in the even years between. Remember for lots of sports as well the only way they survive is Olympics and their own world championships.
All the pressure is in one direction.
Its why the Euros had to be this year (or they wouldn't have happened).
Why is one political statement lauded whereas the other is censored? The irony is that both are campaigning for the same end: racial equality.
"Supermarkets struggle to stock shelves as ‘pingdemic’ havoc spreads
Ministers urged to include retail staff and lorry drivers in exemption as self-isolating workers causes shortages"
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/jul/21/iceland-aim-to-recruit-2000-staff-due-to-pingdemic-absences
Experience tells us that the folk that run international sporting bodies are even more incompetent and crooked than the folk running governments. Human failure is normal, and boy are we getting that message loud and clear right now!
The IOC are making a mistake in censoring taking the knee. And I’ll bet behind the scenes the UK government have been pulling strings. The IOC specifically named the GB women’s soccer team. Very suspicious. This is why the men’s federations doing touch the Olympics with a shitty stick.
I think Mike's tip about a Labour poll lead this year is another brilliant one.
I now seriously doubt if those carefree days will return in our lifetimes.
Carlotta's hope that it will just be a couple of years is wildly optimistic. I don't think we will ever return to how things were.
Those days are irretrievably gone, and not just for me.
Kobayashi: “…I understand that my stupid choice of words at that time was wrong, and I regret it.” https://twitter.com/rumireports/status/1418077592226197505/photo/1
Suddenly there was a future.
And I remember, much more recently the day after I retired from work. Walked down to the restaurant in the centre of our small town for lunch. Like being on holiday, but at home, and this was what it was going to be like.
So, cheer up. Something or other happens to all generations.
Somehow we’ve struggled on.
Next year I would hope we have the capacity to vaccinate at least half the planet - and the rest of it the following year.
But by then you may be reminiscing about the “carefree days” before mortgage and kids!
https://gidmk.medium.com/is-ivermectin-for-covid-19-based-on-fraudulent-research-5cc079278602
And another decent sized study demonstrating its ineffectiveness against Covid:
https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12879-021-06348-5
Johnson won't act on all these critical staff shortages until it is way, way too late. This Government seems incapable of getting anything right by design. I'm coming to regard the relative success of the vaccination drive as an exemplar of the stopped clock principle.
Well 100 cases and still in lockdown for 5 weeks. It’s as if zero covid isn’t an exit strategy after all.
https://twitter.com/thatryanchap/status/1415191448400637952?s=21
Indeed wasn't the TARDIS set for the chocolate box world of the 1950s? Red telephone boxes, and half-timbered cars. Well mission accomplished, it looks like we could well have rationing on the horizon by the end of the week.
Anyone care for a Woodbine?
I. Double jabbed
Ii. Can not work from home
Iii. Are not living with a covid + contact
Iv. Were classified as a key worker
They should lft daily when pinged and continue to work.
Key workers should be able to double jab quicker than 8 weeks too.
He insists list will come “very soon”… but refuses to say if that means today or even by the end of the week
https://twitter.com/johnestevens/status/1418093592116178950
That exemption list in full:
"Boris Johnson".
https://twitter.com/DPJHodges/status/1418094174340014080