The other thing that scared me from tonight's discussion.
Boris Johnson won't sack Gavin Williamson, he cannot afford to have on the backbenches a disaffected former Chief Whip and campaign manager of the winners of the last two Conservative Party leadership elections.
So move Williamson somewhere where he can do less damage, perhaps Gavin Williamson the new Northern Ireland Secretary.
You are kidding right? NI is in a very febrile state thanks to Johnson's 'oven ready' Brexit.
Last place we want Williamson.
Yes I'm kidding, but there's not many other jobs in the cabinet for Johnson to move Williamson to.
Make him Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and get him to man-mark Andy Burnham
The other thing that scared me from tonight's discussion.
Boris Johnson won't sack Gavin Williamson, he cannot afford to have on the backbenches a disaffected former Chief Whip and campaign manager of the winners of the last two Conservative Party leadership elections.
So move Williamson somewhere where he can do less damage, perhaps Gavin Williamson the new Northern Ireland Secretary.
You are kidding right? NI is in a very febrile state thanks to Johnson's 'oven ready' Brexit.
Last place we want Williamson.
Yes I'm kidding, but there's not many other jobs in the cabinet for Johnson to move Williamson to.
Make him Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and get him to man-mark Andy Burnham
“I think this idea of my right not to be offended, my right to have a safe space, is one that’s crept up in the last five years,” he said. If you mention John Stuart Mill’s arguments on free speech to “a bright 19-year-old in Oxford, they look at you a bit blankly. When you say, ‘Isn’t the best response to speech, more speech?’ it’s a new idea to them.”
Rusbridger understands the urge many young people may have to belong and feel safe in their identity. The question is what that urge requires: to belong, do you need to ostracise others who think differently? At Oxford, Rusbridger has debated with students “whose first instinctive position is, ‘But we want this to be a safe space, I feel threatened. Your job is to protect me.’”
His response is well-worn: there are no safe spaces in the world. You are supposedly the brightest of your generation – if you can’t defeat those you disagree with in an argument, who can? “It’s a bad thing,” he explained, “if the right not to feel offended overshadows the call of reason.”
There is much misunderstanding of "Safe Spaces", some of it deliberate and certainly amongst students and faculty.
The point of SS is not to suppress free speech but rather to enable it, by establishing ground rules to allow those historically marginalised to speak and explore ideas freely. This is especially important with widened access to university etc.
I think of it more similar to good chairing of a committee. The issue is mostly in small group teaching where the facilitator enables everyone to explore the topic, and give their perspective, rather than have the seminar dominated by a few loudmouths. SS is neutral in terms of politics and cultural narrative, just a clear structure of acceptable behaviour to allow free discussion.
Of course there is the critical issue of power dynamics as to who gets to set and enforce the rules, as well established by Foucault and others.
BEIJING, July 26 (Reuters) - Antibodies triggered by Sinovac Biotech's (SVA.O) COVID-19 vaccine decline below a key threshold from around six months after a second dose for most recipients, although a third shot could have a strong boosting effect, according to a lab study.
BEIJING, July 26 (Reuters) - Antibodies triggered by Sinovac Biotech's (SVA.O) COVID-19 vaccine decline below a key threshold from around six months after a second dose for most recipients, although a third shot could have a strong boosting effect, according to a lab study.
I think it's increasingly clear that current vaccines efficacy fades rather more quickly than we'd like.
Fortunately, newer better vaccines are available, and adding Novavax or Pfizer or Moderna to an existing two-dose Astra-Zeneca patient is going to be highly beneficial.
The other thing that scared me from tonight's discussion.
Boris Johnson won't sack Gavin Williamson, he cannot afford to have on the backbenches a disaffected former Chief Whip and campaign manager of the winners of the last two Conservative Party leadership elections.
So move Williamson somewhere where he can do less damage, perhaps Gavin Williamson the new Northern Ireland Secretary.
You are kidding right? NI is in a very febrile state thanks to Johnson's 'oven ready' Brexit.
Last place we want Williamson.
Yes I'm kidding, but there's not many other jobs in the cabinet for Johnson to move Williamson to.
Make him Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and get him to man-mark Andy Burnham
Draw a salary at the taxpayers' expense to fulfill a purely party-political purpose you mean? Or has Shadow Mayor of Greater Manchester become an official position?
Just been reading that one. It’s totally nuts, and no-one appeared to notice that the guys involved have a long history of involvement in less-than-ethical companies.
The whole crypto market is about to come crashing to the ground, Tether clearly don’t have a fraction of the assets they have been claiming, which means tens of billions of real dollars from investors have simply disappeared into their unregulated ‘market’.
Regarding the Triple Lock, I don't get it. UK Pensions are shit. This idea that pensioners are living the high life is laughable - our state pension is a pittance in comparison to most western European countries, as are our unemployment, sickness and maternity payments.
If it is a race to the bottom then yes, scrap the triple lock and say we can't afford it. Or - radical idea - give people a bit of dignity in their old age, when unemployed, chronically sick, on maternity.
Now, here's something interesting. This morning's Telegraph is alleging that over half of all Covid hospitalisations in England are of people who tested positive *after* they were admitted.
The details are hidden behind the paywall, but a cut 'n' paste job on the Sun website suggests that only 44% of the recent admissions to English hospitals recorded as being Covid patients had actually had a positive test result by the time they were wheeled in.
How many of the remaining 56% were admitted due to Covid symptoms, and how many were asymptomatic cases admitted for reasons entirely unrelated to the virus, is unknown. But there is at least the possibility that the number of people becoming sick enough with Covid to need hospital treatment is being significantly overstated in the Government statistics. More information required.
I cannot read the article because of the paywall, but the 56% are composed of two groups:
1) Those who had covid causing their symptoms but not diagnosed until after their admission.
2) Those who were admitted with a different condition and caught it in hospital.
Certainly 2) is true of some, and hospital acquired disease has been an issue throughout. It doesn't necessarily mean minor disease. The risk of death from anaesthesia is greatly increased by covid, even if asymptomatic.
"6/ When we looked at elective / planned surgery, the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 was very low (0.1% or 1 in 1000 cases). However, the risk of death was 25x greater among patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection." @BJAJournalshttps://t.co/Tq8hl9ugwvhttps://t.co/7916s7lxsN
Are the patients catching it from other patients? Or from staff? Or visitors? We often don't know, but it shows why hospitals need to maintain strict infection control policies still. Isolation of contacts, or work and daily testing, probably needs further evidence particularly in a health and social care setting as to safety.
There is a good thread on current NHS pressures here, from the CEO of NHS Providers. Well worth a read:
Amongst other things he points out that 15 000 beds are inactive at present for infection control reasons.
Why is that? Why can't the NHS make their hospitals infection free?
When I had an elective major op some years ago I chose a hospital that "had never had a case of infection". A private hospital, natch.
Is it money? Or something else?
I would be quite sceptical of such claims. It is an old surgical adage that the only way to have no complications is to never operate.
Private hospitals have lower infection rates for a number of reasons:
1) Single rooms. These are universal in private hospitals, and in many other countries, but only about 20% of NHS beds. Most NHS wards are in bays of 6 patients, and this is a site of cross infection. Fixing this would increase the staffing required, and also require major architectural work at nearly every hospital site.
2) Different case mix. Private hospitals do not take emergency admissions, nor do they take in patients with complex mixed pathologies. Indeed, if a private hospital patient becomes significantly unwell post op (nearly all PP admissions are surgical) they are transferred to the local NHS. While there are some things I would have done privately, there are others that are unsafe without full hospital back up including ICU etc.
MRSA is virtually extinct in my Trust, as indeed across the NHS. CRO is the current multi-drug resistant pathogen of concern, with strict control measures. The current Infection Control measures have driven down rates of other hospital acquired diseases, but the problem of Delta is that it is bloody contagious, and spreads by air rather than surfaces.
And we should never forget: some staff who do not care enough for patients to follow moral, yet alone official, procedures.
A massive problem in the NHS IMO, and a very hard one to fix.
The problem is not unique to the NHS. Cases of neglectful uncaring staff are found in private sector units too, particularly in social care, and private providers of long term care such as learning disability.
The problem in Stafford was a hospital management that was determined on Foundation status, and set up a culture of very bad care in order to meet narrow targets. That percolated down and permitted some very bad frontline care.
It is often a matter of local leadership. It is often the case that wards in the same hospital can have superb ground level care with high standards of nursing and medical care, and in the same block have a ward or unit where neglect occurs, process disregarded, staff poorly supervised and demoralised, staff retention is poor and outcomes worse.
To put in context: Tether is currently a situation where many people are "picking up nickels in front of the bulldozer".
Tether is supposed to be worth $1. So people looking to make a consistent return buy it at $0.985 and then they sell it at $0.995 (or even sometimes as high as $1.01). They think it's fundamentally safe because (a) every knows Tether is worth $1, and (b) in the event of dissolution there are assets worth $64bn to back up distribute.
Now, I'm not one of these loons who thinks there are no assets. But I don't believe there is $64bn in the bank. Not least because Tether claims a large chunk of the $64bn is invested in commercial paper. And there's no way way Tether owns 10% of the commercial paper market.
When all the "nickels in front of the bulldozer" guys go away, Tether will drop 30-40% in a day.
Which will be very exciting. Especially for those people foolish enough to own Tether.
Regarding the Triple Lock, I don't get it. UK Pensions are shit. This idea that pensioners are living the high life is laughable - our state pension is a pittance in comparison to most western European countries, as are our unemployment, sickness and maternity payments.
If it is a race to the bottom then yes, scrap the triple lock and say we can't afford it. Or - radical idea - give people a bit of dignity in their old age, when unemployed, chronically sick, on maternity.
So presumably Labour will support giving such an uplift to pensioners - rather than comparing it unfavourably to pay rises given to public sector workers?
Regarding the Triple Lock, I don't get it. UK Pensions are shit. This idea that pensioners are living the high life is laughable - our state pension is a pittance in comparison to most western European countries, as are our unemployment, sickness and maternity payments.
If it is a race to the bottom then yes, scrap the triple lock and say we can't afford it. Or - radical idea - give people a bit of dignity in their old age, when unemployed, chronically sick, on maternity.
The ratio of retirees to workers is worsening.
This means that the proportion of tax revenues used to pay pensions is increasing.
Now imagine a situation where the amount of money being paid to each retiree is rising faster than the wages of those in work.
Just been reading that one. It’s totally nuts, and no-one appeared to notice that the guys involved have a long history of involvement in less-than-ethical companies.
The whole crypto market is about to come crashing to the ground, Tether clearly don’t have a fraction of the assets they have been claiming, which means tens of billions of real dollars from investors have simply disappeared into their unregulated ‘market’.
I wonder what happens if/when the treasury introduce Britcoin pegged to GBP? Doesn't everyone who is in crypto for speculation rather than to hide illegal doings just cash in their Tether positions?
Now, here's something interesting. This morning's Telegraph is alleging that over half of all Covid hospitalisations in England are of people who tested positive *after* they were admitted.
The details are hidden behind the paywall, but a cut 'n' paste job on the Sun website suggests that only 44% of the recent admissions to English hospitals recorded as being Covid patients had actually had a positive test result by the time they were wheeled in.
How many of the remaining 56% were admitted due to Covid symptoms, and how many were asymptomatic cases admitted for reasons entirely unrelated to the virus, is unknown. But there is at least the possibility that the number of people becoming sick enough with Covid to need hospital treatment is being significantly overstated in the Government statistics. More information required.
I did say this a couple of weeks ago, if you are admitted to Hospital with a broken leg and you test positive for Covid, even if you have no symptoms you are counted as a Covid patient.
Just been reading that one. It’s totally nuts, and no-one appeared to notice that the guys involved have a long history of involvement in less-than-ethical companies.
The whole crypto market is about to come crashing to the ground, Tether clearly don’t have a fraction of the assets they have been claiming, which means tens of billions of real dollars from investors have simply disappeared into their unregulated ‘market’.
Exactly three cryptocurrencies will survive the great late 2021 shakeout:
Bitcoin Monero Ethereum
Everything else is worth zero. (And Bitcoin, Monero and Ethereum are all worth less than their current prices.)
Regarding the Triple Lock, I don't get it. UK Pensions are shit. This idea that pensioners are living the high life is laughable - our state pension is a pittance in comparison to most western European countries, as are our unemployment, sickness and maternity payments.
If it is a race to the bottom then yes, scrap the triple lock and say we can't afford it. Or - radical idea - give people a bit of dignity in their old age, when unemployed, chronically sick, on maternity.
So presumably Labour will support giving such an uplift to pensioners - rather than comparing it unfavourably to pay rises given to public sector workers?
What Labour choose to do is their own business - other parties are available. Better pensions and a modern fit for purpose social security system is LibDem policy.
Top 10 in Europe: (global rank) Oxford (2) Cambridge (3) Imperial (7) ETH Zurich (=8) UCL London (=8) Lausanne (14) Edinburgh (16) Manchester (=27) Kings College (35) Paris Science & Lettres (44)
Regarding the Triple Lock, I don't get it. UK Pensions are shit. This idea that pensioners are living the high life is laughable - our state pension is a pittance in comparison to most western European countries, as are our unemployment, sickness and maternity payments.
If it is a race to the bottom then yes, scrap the triple lock and say we can't afford it. Or - radical idea - give people a bit of dignity in their old age, when unemployed, chronically sick, on maternity.
The ratio of retirees to workers is worsening.
This means that the proportion of tax revenues used to pay pensions is increasing.
Now imagine a situation where the amount of money being paid to each retiree is rising faster than the wages of those in work.
That's the triple lock.
Fewer people of working age and a population increasingly of retirees? So you're saying that we need a progressive migration policy to (as an example) allow in workers from other countries to come and do the jobs we don't want to do and pay the taxes to pay our pensions?
I wonder how many opinion polls Neil Kinnock's Labour led in between 1983 and 1992 when he was leader. Probably the equivalent of more than 100 in today's terms, although there were of course far fewer polls in those days so the actual number may have been lower.
Worth remembering though that the a Thatcher governments were extraordinarily unpopular midterm because they were making significant and disruptive and painful changes to the whole structure of the economy. I don't think any other government since then has been so transformative and courted the same degree of midterm unpopularity.* * Brexit is a big change obviously, but while the Thatcher reforms tended to start off unpopular and become more popular over time, Brexit I suspect will go the other way.
Mr. 1000, don't know much about cryptostuff, but wondering why you assert that?
I remember reading, only vaguely though, that Ethereum's trying something a bit different. Fuzzy on the detail (it was a while ago and I'm still sleepy) but I think it was some weird difference to halving or suchlike.
Just been reading that one. It’s totally nuts, and no-one appeared to notice that the guys involved have a long history of involvement in less-than-ethical companies.
The whole crypto market is about to come crashing to the ground, Tether clearly don’t have a fraction of the assets they have been claiming, which means tens of billions of real dollars from investors have simply disappeared into their unregulated ‘market’.
I wonder what happens if/when the treasury introduce Britcoin pegged to GBP? Doesn't everyone who is in crypto for speculation rather than to hide illegal doings just cash in their Tether positions?
Highly likely, which also means there’s a huge first-mover advantage for a major Western regulated central bank to get in on this - it becomes the ‘out’ for a lot of the genuine money, leaving only the black cash in the crypto ecosystem.
BEIJING, July 26 (Reuters) - Antibodies triggered by Sinovac Biotech's (SVA.O) COVID-19 vaccine decline below a key threshold from around six months after a second dose for most recipients, although a third shot could have a strong boosting effect, according to a lab study.
I think it's increasingly clear that current vaccines efficacy fades rather more quickly than we'd like.
Fortunately, newer better vaccines are available, and adding Novavax or Pfizer or Moderna to an existing two-dose Astra-Zeneca patient is going to be highly beneficial.
Antibodies decline - yes. But how much research has been done on the T cell effects, in this case? - when infected, the immune system "remembers" what to do....
They should just get it over with and tax the state pension. People already raking in the money from their final salary pensions don't need the extra pittance from the government.
It is taxed already. If you have no other income your personal allowance covers it so you don't pay tax, but it's counted in together with whatever else you're getting.
I was more thinking with a taper.
If someone has a 6k income from private pension plus the circa 9k from state pension how much more income tax are you propsosing they pay than someone earning 15k?
The worker on default tax codes according to a tax calculator pays Income Tax £484 National Insurance £652 Employers NI £850 Total tax: £1986
Just been reading that one. It’s totally nuts, and no-one appeared to notice that the guys involved have a long history of involvement in less-than-ethical companies.
The whole crypto market is about to come crashing to the ground, Tether clearly don’t have a fraction of the assets they have been claiming, which means tens of billions of real dollars from investors have simply disappeared into their unregulated ‘market’.
The crypto space ignored it because numbers go up and money printer goes brrrrrrrrrrrrr.
What's amazing is the idiots who try and short Tether on the very exchange run by Tether!
They get obliterated time and time again.
There appears to be an unlimited supply of people who think they can win against the house.
Circle and USD Coin (and by extension Coinbase) is now almost as dodgy as Tether. Massive coin issuance combined with a change in the attestation standards and now and admission that they are not fully backed with dollars.
Just been reading that one. It’s totally nuts, and no-one appeared to notice that the guys involved have a long history of involvement in less-than-ethical companies.
The whole crypto market is about to come crashing to the ground, Tether clearly don’t have a fraction of the assets they have been claiming, which means tens of billions of real dollars from investors have simply disappeared into their unregulated ‘market’.
I wonder what happens if/when the treasury introduce Britcoin pegged to GBP? Doesn't everyone who is in crypto for speculation rather than to hide illegal doings just cash in their Tether positions?
A Britcoin pegged to the £ at a fixed rate wouldn't make any sense. A freely convertible (instant spot price) digital currency, that doesn't consume X% of a countries electricity generation capacity, might be of interest....
Top 10 in Europe: (global rank) Oxford (2) Cambridge (3) Imperial (7) ETH Zurich (=8) UCL London (=8) Lausanne (14) Edinburgh (16) Manchester (=27) Kings College (35) Paris Science & Lettres (44)
And the EU thought they should charge us a premium to participate in Erasmus.....
Oxford top of the list?
Indeed, the idea that two of the top three global universities are Oxford and Cambridge is ridiculous. Now, sure, they both have their strengths: Cambridge is genuinely excellent for pure mathematics, and their English department is unrivalled, while Oxford has a nice deer park at Magdalen. But they aren't two of the top three academic institutions in the world.
If we're talking applied science, Stanford, Caltech, and MIT would all be at the absolute top of the list. While Cambridge and Imperial would hope to make it into the top 10. On a good day.
(a) when you are young you are invincible, and will never die (b) too much messaging in the pandemic about mostly mild, and protecting the vulnerable (c) a genuine appreciation of the risks for a 20 year old.
If we are honest, the main reason most of us want 18-25 year olds to have the vaccine is to help suppress the virus, not out of concern for their health. Tbh same argument for 12-18 too.
And we should never forget: some staff who do not care enough for patients to follow moral, yet alone official, procedures.
A massive problem in the NHS IMO, and a very hard one to fix.
The problem is not unique to the NHS. Cases of neglectful uncaring staff are found in private sector units too, particularly in social care, and private providers of long term care such as learning disability.
The problem in Stafford was a hospital management that was determined on Foundation status, and set up a culture of very bad care in order to meet narrow targets. That percolated down and permitted some very bad frontline care.
It is often a matter of local leadership. It is often the case that wards in the same hospital can have superb ground level care with high standards of nursing and medical care, and in the same block have a ward or unit where neglect occurs, process disregarded, staff poorly supervised and demoralised, staff retention is poor and outcomes worse.
Indeed. I have a rule of thumb: 1% of people are angels. 9% are good. 9% are bad, and 1% are devils. Most of us are in the middle 80%, generally doing good but occasionally dipping down into the bad. I.e. normal people, with normal problems and temptations.
You do not want the 1% of devils in your organisation (and I do think it is that high), and preferably not the 9% bad. But you cannot necessarily tell in advance who they are (*), and they can be very good at hiding their behaviour. Therefore you need really strong but fair controls about behaviour in any organisation. Weed out the evil 1%. Curb the bad 9%. Help the 80% side with their good, not bad, sides.
The problem is the fetishisation of the NHS, where we like to think of everybody working in it is an angel. A few will be, but there will also be some devils.
And the problem with Stafford was not just management: it was the reaction to the whistlebblowing, where whistleblowers got lots of mud thrown at them in public. It was hideous. And the root cause was the same: uncaring, nasty staff.
(*) Although sometimes when there are strong indicators, as happened recently in the Met Police, they still admit them.
“I think this idea of my right not to be offended, my right to have a safe space, is one that’s crept up in the last five years,” he said. If you mention John Stuart Mill’s arguments on free speech to “a bright 19-year-old in Oxford, they look at you a bit blankly. When you say, ‘Isn’t the best response to speech, more speech?’ it’s a new idea to them.”
Rusbridger understands the urge many young people may have to belong and feel safe in their identity. The question is what that urge requires: to belong, do you need to ostracise others who think differently? At Oxford, Rusbridger has debated with students “whose first instinctive position is, ‘But we want this to be a safe space, I feel threatened. Your job is to protect me.’”
His response is well-worn: there are no safe spaces in the world. You are supposedly the brightest of your generation – if you can’t defeat those you disagree with in an argument, who can? “It’s a bad thing,” he explained, “if the right not to feel offended overshadows the call of reason.”
There is much misunderstanding of "Safe Spaces", some of it deliberate and certainly amongst students and faculty.
The point of SS is not to suppress free speech but rather to enable it, by establishing ground rules to allow those historically marginalised to speak and explore ideas freely. This is especially important with widened access to university etc.
I think of it more similar to good chairing of a committee. The issue is mostly in small group teaching where the facilitator enables everyone to explore the topic, and give their perspective, rather than have the seminar dominated by a few loudmouths. SS is neutral in terms of politics and cultural narrative, just a clear structure of acceptable behaviour to allow free discussion.
Of course there is the critical issue of power dynamics as to who gets to set and enforce the rules, as well established by Foucault and others.
The problem is that, humans being human*, a set of guidelines like that gets turned into the latest fascism** in about 5 minutes.
"SS is neutral in terms of politics and cultural narrative" - I like the idea that at your age, you can still have optimism on this scale.
*Humans have an appalling track record of behaving like humans. **In the sense that PJ O'Rourke meant when he commented "The beauty of a well designed fascism, is that it gives every pissant an anthill, to piss from."
Regarding the Triple Lock, I don't get it. UK Pensions are shit. This idea that pensioners are living the high life is laughable - our state pension is a pittance in comparison to most western European countries, as are our unemployment, sickness and maternity payments.
If it is a race to the bottom then yes, scrap the triple lock and say we can't afford it. Or - radical idea - give people a bit of dignity in their old age, when unemployed, chronically sick, on maternity.
The ratio of retirees to workers is worsening.
This means that the proportion of tax revenues used to pay pensions is increasing.
Now imagine a situation where the amount of money being paid to each retiree is rising faster than the wages of those in work.
That's the triple lock.
Fewer people of working age and a population increasingly of retirees? So you're saying that we need a progressive migration policy to (as an example) allow in workers from other countries to come and do the jobs we don't want to do and pay the taxes to pay our pensions?
And now we have left the EU, we can implement one.
Top 10 in Europe: (global rank) Oxford (2) Cambridge (3) Imperial (7) ETH Zurich (=8) UCL London (=8) Lausanne (14) Edinburgh (16) Manchester (=27) Kings College (35) Paris Science & Lettres (44)
And the EU thought they should charge us a premium to participate in Erasmus.....
Oxford top of the list?
Indeed, the idea that two of the top three global universities are Oxford and Cambridge is ridiculous. Now, sure, they both have their strengths: Cambridge is genuinely excellent for pure mathematics, and their English department is unrivalled, while Oxford has a nice deer park at Magdalen. But they aren't two of the top three academic institutions in the world.
If we're talking applied science, Stanford, Caltech, and MIT would all be at the absolute top of the list. While Cambridge and Imperial would hope to make it into the top 10. On a good day.
Regarding the Triple Lock, I don't get it. UK Pensions are shit. This idea that pensioners are living the high life is laughable - our state pension is a pittance in comparison to most western European countries, as are our unemployment, sickness and maternity payments.
If it is a race to the bottom then yes, scrap the triple lock and say we can't afford it. Or - radical idea - give people a bit of dignity in their old age, when unemployed, chronically sick, on maternity.
The ratio of retirees to workers is worsening.
This means that the proportion of tax revenues used to pay pensions is increasing.
Now imagine a situation where the amount of money being paid to each retiree is rising faster than the wages of those in work.
That's the triple lock.
Fewer people of working age and a population increasingly of retirees? So you're saying that we need a progressive migration policy to (as an example) allow in workers from other countries to come and do the jobs we don't want to do and pay the taxes to pay our pensions?
Let me put it a different way:
If you combine a fertility rate below 2, rising life expectancy, and minimal migration, then you will have trouble.
(a) when you are young you are invincible, and will never die (b) too much messaging in the pandemic about mostly mild, and protecting the vulnerable (c) a genuine appreciation of the risks for a 20 year old.
If we are honest, the main reason most of us want 18-25 year olds to have the vaccine is to help suppress the virus, not out of concern for their health. Tbh same argument for 12-18 too.
Well, I am personally acquainted with several 18-25 year olds (not in the @Leon sense) and a few 12-17 and I'd rather like them but to get the virus for their own health. And also for population immunity. They go hand in hand.
Just been reading that one. It’s totally nuts, and no-one appeared to notice that the guys involved have a long history of involvement in less-than-ethical companies.
The whole crypto market is about to come crashing to the ground, Tether clearly don’t have a fraction of the assets they have been claiming, which means tens of billions of real dollars from investors have simply disappeared into their unregulated ‘market’.
The crypto space ignored it because numbers go up and money printer goes brrrrrrrrrrrrr.
What's amazing is the idiots who try and short Tether on the very exchange run by Tether!
They get obliterated time and time again.
There appears to be an unlimited supply of people who think they can win against the house.
Circle and USD Coin (and by extension Coinbase) is now almost as dodgy as Tether. Massive coin issuance combined with a change in the attestation standards and now and admission that they are not fully backed with dollars.
Coinbase’s IPO, at a valuation higher than NYSE and LSE combined, should have set off some alarm bells somewhere…
Top 10 in Europe: (global rank) Oxford (2) Cambridge (3) Imperial (7) ETH Zurich (=8) UCL London (=8) Lausanne (14) Edinburgh (16) Manchester (=27) Kings College (35) Paris Science & Lettres (44)
And the EU thought they should charge us a premium to participate in Erasmus.....
The methodology used to determine these rankings is a bit opaque. The main criterion is "academic reputation", which apparently "collates the expert opinions of over 130,000 individuals in the higher education space". Who are these individuals? Are they a fully representative sample? Who knows?
Just had a text from my doctor. Boosters are happening it seems
Clinics for the Covid booster vaccine at XXX from Sept are currently being prepared. Our Flu vaccine clinics will be held at the Surgery from early Sept. We will confirm shortly when both clinics are available to pre-book. Please do not contact us yet.
(a) when you are young you are invincible, and will never die (b) too much messaging in the pandemic about mostly mild, and protecting the vulnerable (c) a genuine appreciation of the risks for a 20 year old.
If we are honest, the main reason most of us want 18-25 year olds to have the vaccine is to help suppress the virus, not out of concern for their health. Tbh same argument for 12-18 too.
Well, I am personally acquainted with several 18-25 year olds (not in the @Leon sense) and a few 12-17 and I'd rather like them but to get the virus for their own health. And also for population immunity. They go hand in hand.
I accept that but note I did say main reason. And yes for those we know and care about the motivation will be their health.
How much extra do we think the Government will need to raise in taxes in the autumn to be serious about bringing the finances back under a measure of control?
My punt would be perhaps £25-30bn per annum.
Do you expect it to happen?
I expect lots of fiscal drag, the triple lock becoming the double lock, and some obscure things that only turn up when you read p 537 of the Red Book.
Put it another way - how confident are you that we have a serious government?
3 - Remove some of the tax subsidy from the free money made by owner occupiers on house values. Keeping about 80% of unearned gains is ample. That's probably a long-term project .
When and how do you propose to do this? My house has gone from being worth £90k ten years ago to about £135k. Some of that reflects increasing property prices, some of it the fact that it was a tatty wreck I had gutted to a shell and turned into a nice house.
It's actually cost me about £125k in total, so the uplift is only about £10k. Obviously, that £10k is pretty much fantasy money unless I sell, so it's no good trying to tax it out of me now. If I do sell, I'll need to buy another house which will have undergone a similar uplift in value (if not more) so you can't sensibly tax it out of me then either, otherwise I can't afford to move house (and that's really bad for the economy - you don't want to make the labour market more immobile). The only time it can possibly be extracted is from my estate after death - but if you try that on, canny pensioners will just sell their houses to their relatives and rent them back to dodge it.
I would just apply CGT.
Given that a CGT regime is already in place for a couple of million of personally owned rental properties it is clearly possible either at the same rate or a lower one, or stepping it up so the tax break is phased out - as happened to tax relief on mortgages in the 1980s/1990s.
I'm actually selling my first for a number of years to buy family out of the house I live in.
The way I think it works is I bought it in 2017 for 90k + approx £2200 Stamp Duty (3% over normal rate thanks to George Osborne). Spent £40-45k or so doing it up to basically newbuild performance.
It is now valued (I am told) at £170k, which is a good 30% jump after costs for this area, but not very much compared to the way they even averages were moving in some areas in the noughties.
I think the way it works is I sell, claim all the capital investment receipts I have against the gain (eg rewire, 2G, roof, CH and so on), then use my CGT allowance, and pay CGT on the rest.
There are quite well established rules for what counts against CGT.
At present there is no indexation allowance afaik.
So I think it is quite possible, set up similarly to that or differently as appropriate. No capital gain, no CGT.
The "need to buy a similar house" is the tricky one, as we are conditioned to unusually (for eg Europe) rising house prices as a high return money making scheme. That currently we are on a period of stable prices suggests that
My argument is that it is about removing distortions from the market and it needs to adjust over a period. We managed that with the mortgage interest tax relief distortion, and I think we can manage it here.
I think that the CGT tax relief is currently the biggest distortion of all. I make the amount spent on it is not much less than all the rent spent on all the rental houses in the whole Private Rental Sector.
(a) when you are young you are invincible, and will never die (b) too much messaging in the pandemic about mostly mild, and protecting the vulnerable (c) a genuine appreciation of the risks for a 20 year old.
If we are honest, the main reason most of us want 18-25 year olds to have the vaccine is to help suppress the virus, not out of concern for their health. Tbh same argument for 12-18 too.
Well, I am personally acquainted with several 18-25 year olds (not in the @Leon sense) and a few 12-17 and I'd rather like them but to get the virus for their own health. And also for population immunity. They go hand in hand.
There’s an analogy somewhere, between deaths from vaccines and deaths from seatbelts.
Top 10 in Europe: (global rank) Oxford (2) Cambridge (3) Imperial (7) ETH Zurich (=8) UCL London (=8) Lausanne (14) Edinburgh (16) Manchester (=27) Kings College (35) Paris Science & Lettres (44)
And the EU thought they should charge us a premium to participate in Erasmus.....
The methodology used to determine these rankings is a bit opaque. The main criterion is "academic reputation", which apparently "collates the expert opinions of over 130,000 individuals in the higher education space". Who are these individuals? Are they a fully representative sample? Who knows?
I have MAs from the top two even though I didn't study in either. Wonderful system.
Top 10 in Europe: (global rank) Oxford (2) Cambridge (3) Imperial (7) ETH Zurich (=8) UCL London (=8) Lausanne (14) Edinburgh (16) Manchester (=27) Kings College (35) Paris Science & Lettres (44)
And the EU thought they should charge us a premium to participate in Erasmus.....
The methodology used to determine these rankings is a bit opaque. The main criterion is "academic reputation", which apparently "collates the expert opinions of over 130,000 individuals in the higher education space". Who are these individuals? Are they a fully representative sample? Who knows?
The whole thing is a bit of a joke.
The University of Western Australia above UPenn? I mean, really?
UWA would struggle next to Oxford Brookes (except in earth sciences, where it's top class). The University of Pennsylvania might be embarrassed to have graduated members of the Trump family, but it's a serious research and teaching institution.
John Burn-Murdoch @jburnmurdoch 18m Correcting an important misconception (this is my chart, but misleading commentary): •There were thousands more cases among young men than women after football matches, showing impact of Euros on transmission •But not due to attending matches. It was indoor gatherings to watch games
Whllst on university rankings - these were the last (before pandamic) BUCS (British university Colleges and Sport ) points tables for inter university sport competition
Loughborough (won it for the last 40 (forty) years! Nottingham Durham Edinburgh Exeter Bath Birmingham Bristol NEwcastle Northumbria
Top 10 in Europe: (global rank) Oxford (2) Cambridge (3) Imperial (7) ETH Zurich (=8) UCL London (=8) Lausanne (14) Edinburgh (16) Manchester (=27) Kings College (35) Paris Science & Lettres (44)
And the EU thought they should charge us a premium to participate in Erasmus.....
The methodology used to determine these rankings is a bit opaque. The main criterion is "academic reputation", which apparently "collates the expert opinions of over 130,000 individuals in the higher education space". Who are these individuals? Are they a fully representative sample? Who knows?
I have MAs from the top two even though I didn't study in either. Wonderful system.
Now, here's something interesting. This morning's Telegraph is alleging that over half of all Covid hospitalisations in England are of people who tested positive *after* they were admitted.
The details are hidden behind the paywall, but a cut 'n' paste job on the Sun website suggests that only 44% of the recent admissions to English hospitals recorded as being Covid patients had actually had a positive test result by the time they were wheeled in.
How many of the remaining 56% were admitted due to Covid symptoms, and how many were asymptomatic cases admitted for reasons entirely unrelated to the virus, is unknown. But there is at least the possibility that the number of people becoming sick enough with Covid to need hospital treatment is being significantly overstated in the Government statistics. More information required.
I cannot read the article because of the paywall, but the 56% are composed of two groups:
1) Those who had covid causing their symptoms but not diagnosed until after their admission.
2) Those who were admitted with a different condition and caught it in hospital.
Isn't there a third group, those who caught it outside but were asymptomatic and it does not (apparently) contribute to the condition for which they were admitted? Or is this group very small?
Whllst on university rankings - these were the last (before pandamic) BUCS (British university Colleges and Sport ) points tables for inter university sport competition
loughborough (won it for the last 40 (forty) years! Nottingham Durham Edinburgh Exeter Bath Birmingham Bristol NEwcastle Northumbria
Oxford are 12th and Cambridge 20th .
Amazing domination by Loughborough
There is a great standard in most competitions as well given about 100 athletes at Tokyo compete in BUCS and still students
Prof Neil Fergusson on R4 "too early to tell effect of unlocking from current figures - will probably take several more weeks to see full effects of unlocking".
Top 10 in Europe: (global rank) Oxford (2) Cambridge (3) Imperial (7) ETH Zurich (=8) UCL London (=8) Lausanne (14) Edinburgh (16) Manchester (=27) Kings College (35) Paris Science & Lettres (44)
And the EU thought they should charge us a premium to participate in Erasmus.....
The methodology used to determine these rankings is a bit opaque. The main criterion is "academic reputation", which apparently "collates the expert opinions of over 130,000 individuals in the higher education space". Who are these individuals? Are they a fully representative sample? Who knows?
The whole thing is a bit of a joke.
The University of Western Australia above UPenn? I mean, really?
UWA would struggle next to Oxford Brookes (except in earth sciences, where it's top class). The University of Pennsylvania might be embarrassed to have graduated members of the Trump family, but it's a serious research and teaching institution.
Oxford Brookes is actually a damn good Uni in several subjects. It’s got a better History department than Oxford, although the gap is less noticeable than it was.
One thing to note is that the forecast is currently 35C on Saturday, cooler on Sunday. If that shifts a bit the temperatures may affect some teams more than others (can't recall if Mercedes are particularly nerfed by such things as in years past).
Prof Jason Leitch - football effect - went from 1:1 Male to Female to 9:1 Male to Female, now back to 1:1. About 3% of new cases end up in hospital, but younger & fitter so spending less time in hospital, even though some still go on to die.
Rushbridger knows his oh-so-receptive audience though, and it ain’t children/young people.
I think this looks less cynical than that. I think this is just a classic case of "Person who thinks they have right-on progressive views doesn't update them as time progresses and gets told a view they hold is now considered offensive and rather than re-examining themselves they decide it's the Other who are wrong"
John Burn-Murdoch @jburnmurdoch 18m Correcting an important misconception (this is my chart, but misleading commentary): •There were thousands more cases among young men than women after football matches, showing impact of Euros on transmission •But not due to attending matches. It was indoor gatherings to watch games
The other thing that scared me from tonight's discussion.
Boris Johnson won't sack Gavin Williamson, he cannot afford to have on the backbenches a disaffected former Chief Whip and campaign manager of the winners of the last two Conservative Party leadership elections.
So move Williamson somewhere where he can do less damage, perhaps Gavin Williamson the new Northern Ireland Secretary.
You are kidding right? NI is in a very febrile state thanks to Johnson's 'oven ready' Brexit.
Last place we want Williamson.
Yes I'm kidding, but there's not many other jobs in the cabinet for Johnson to move Williamson to.
Make him Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and get him to man-mark Andy Burnham
Draw a salary at the taxpayers' expense to fulfill a purely party-political purpose you mean? Or has Shadow Mayor of Greater Manchester become an official position?
Not at all. The Chancellor has some functions but they are largely administrative. Someone needs to do it (the Queen is a bit busy)
I was working on the basis that finding a role where he can do least harm
Prof Neil Fergusson on R4 "too early to tell effect of unlocking from current figures - will probably take several more weeks to see full effects of unlocking".
(a) when you are young you are invincible, and will never die (b) too much messaging in the pandemic about mostly mild, and protecting the vulnerable (c) a genuine appreciation of the risks for a 20 year old.
If we are honest, the main reason most of us want 18-25 year olds to have the vaccine is to help suppress the virus, not out of concern for their health. Tbh same argument for 12-18 too.
Well, I am personally acquainted with several 18-25 year olds (not in the @Leon sense) and a few 12-17 and I'd rather like them but to get the virus for their own health. And also for population immunity. They go hand in hand.
There’s an analogy somewhere, between deaths from vaccines and deaths from seatbelts.
Whoops! Massive typo. VACCINE! Not virus. Good grief. That was an error.
Prof Neil Fergusson on R4 "too early to tell effect of unlocking from current figures - will probably take several more weeks to see full effects of unlocking".
R is currently likely around 1.
Not on this weeks data alone it wouldn’t be.
I missed the interview unfortunately. Did anyone ask him why once again it looks like his modelling will be out by an order of magnitude?
(a) when you are young you are invincible, and will never die (b) too much messaging in the pandemic about mostly mild, and protecting the vulnerable (c) a genuine appreciation of the risks for a 20 year old.
If we are honest, the main reason most of us want 18-25 year olds to have the vaccine is to help suppress the virus, not out of concern for their health. Tbh same argument for 12-18 too.
Well, I am personally acquainted with several 18-25 year olds (not in the @Leon sense) and a few 12-17 and I'd rather like them but to get the virus for their own health. And also for population immunity. They go hand in hand.
I accept that but note I did say main reason. And yes for those we know and care about the motivation will be their health.
(And also, I meant vaccine. But we're past the editing stage. I'm looking forward to that being used to prove I was an anti-vaxxer in the GREAT RECKONING.)
(a) when you are young you are invincible, and will never die (b) too much messaging in the pandemic about mostly mild, and protecting the vulnerable (c) a genuine appreciation of the risks for a 20 year old.
If we are honest, the main reason most of us want 18-25 year olds to have the vaccine is to help suppress the virus, not out of concern for their health. Tbh same argument for 12-18 too.
Well, I am personally acquainted with several 18-25 year olds (not in the @Leon sense) and a few 12-17 and I'd rather like them but to get the virus for their own health. And also for population immunity. They go hand in hand.
There’s an analogy somewhere, between deaths from vaccines and deaths from seatbelts.
Jochen Rindt was infamously killed by his seat belt.
Of course if he’d been wearing it correctly it wouldn’t have killed him...
How much extra do we think the Government will need to raise in taxes in the autumn to be serious about bringing the finances back under a measure of control?
My punt would be perhaps £25-30bn per annum.
Do you expect it to happen?
I expect lots of fiscal drag, the triple lock becoming the double lock, and some obscure things that only turn up when you read p 537 of the Red Book.
Put it another way - how confident are you that we have a serious government?
3 - Remove some of the tax subsidy from the free money made by owner occupiers on house values. Keeping about 80% of unearned gains is ample. That's probably a long-term project .
When and how do you propose to do this? My house has gone from being worth £90k ten years ago to about £135k. Some of that reflects increasing property prices, some of it the fact that it was a tatty wreck I had gutted to a shell and turned into a nice house.
It's actually cost me about £125k in total, so the uplift is only about £10k. Obviously, that £10k is pretty much fantasy money unless I sell, so it's no good trying to tax it out of me now. If I do sell, I'll need to buy another house which will have undergone a similar uplift in value (if not more) so you can't sensibly tax it out of me then either, otherwise I can't afford to move house (and that's really bad for the economy - you don't want to make the labour market more immobile). The only time it can possibly be extracted is from my estate after death - but if you try that on, canny pensioners will just sell their houses to their relatives and rent them back to dodge it.
I would just apply CGT.
Given that a CGT regime is already in place for a couple of million of personally owned rental properties it is clearly possible either at the same rate or a lower one, or stepping it up so the tax break is phased out - as happened to tax relief on mortgages in the 1980s/1990s.
I'm actually selling my first for a number of years to buy family out of the house I live in.
The way I think it works is I bought it in 2017 for 90k + approx £2200 Stamp Duty (3% over normal rate thanks to George Osborne). Spent £40-45k or so doing it up to basically newbuild performance.
It is now valued (I am told) at £170k, which is a good 30% jump after costs for this area, but not very much compared to the way they even averages were moving in some areas in the noughties.
I think the way it works is I sell, claim all the capital investment receipts I have against the gain (eg rewire, 2G, roof, CH and so on), then use my CGT allowance, and pay CGT on the rest.
There are quite well established rules for what counts against CGT.
At present there is no indexation allowance afaik.
So I think it is quite possible, set up similarly to that or differently as appropriate. No capital gain, no CGT.
The "need to buy a similar house" is the tricky one, as we are conditioned to unusually (for eg Europe) rising house prices as a high return money making scheme. That currently we are on a period of stable prices suggests that
My argument is that it is about removing distortions from the market and it needs to adjust over a period. We managed that with the mortgage interest tax relief distortion, and I think we can manage it here.
I think that the CGT tax relief is currently the biggest distortion of all. I make the amount spent on it is not much less than all the rent spent on all the rental houses in the whole Private Rental Sector.
Just add in rollover relief
And once you do that the actual revenue generated from it won't be worth enough to make it worthwhile.
Is I've commented on here more than once before the fix is to replace Council tax with a land value tax (with some transition rules and the right to rule it up till death).
Top 10 in Europe: (global rank) Oxford (2) Cambridge (3) Imperial (7) ETH Zurich (=8) UCL London (=8) Lausanne (14) Edinburgh (16) Manchester (=27) Kings College (35) Paris Science & Lettres (44)
And the EU thought they should charge us a premium to participate in Erasmus.....
The methodology used to determine these rankings is a bit opaque. The main criterion is "academic reputation", which apparently "collates the expert opinions of over 130,000 individuals in the higher education space". Who are these individuals? Are they a fully representative sample? Who knows?
The whole thing is a bit of a joke.
The University of Western Australia above UPenn? I mean, really?
UWA would struggle next to Oxford Brookes (except in earth sciences, where it's top class). The University of Pennsylvania might be embarrassed to have graduated members of the Trump family, but it's a serious research and teaching institution.
These rankings are not quite a joke but it is important to see what they rank, and a lot of that, as @FeersumEnjineeya notes and as can be seen on their web page, is reputation, and Oxford and Cambridge do have that in spades. And in a sense there is a positive feedback loop because their reputation is based partly on evaluations of their reputation.
Ongoing discussion about declining vaccine efficacy and other ongoing protection against serious illness (T-cells etc). “Memory of what to do” was how one person put it. A question however - are the “other forms” dependent on having come into contact with the virus? Or will having received the vaccine be enough? In simple terms - do we undermine the long terms benefits of the vaccination programme by actively continuing anti-Covid measures among a largely vaccinated society?
(a) when you are young you are invincible, and will never die (b) too much messaging in the pandemic about mostly mild, and protecting the vulnerable (c) a genuine appreciation of the risks for a 20 year old.
If we are honest, the main reason most of us want 18-25 year olds to have the vaccine is to help suppress the virus, not out of concern for their health. Tbh same argument for 12-18 too.
Well, I am personally acquainted with several 18-25 year olds (not in the @Leon sense) and a few 12-17 and I'd rather like them but to get the virus for their own health. And also for population immunity. They go hand in hand.
Maybe this is what happened in Government.
"We need to give everyone the virus."
"Are you sure Prime Minister?"
"Of course I'm bloody sure. I'm the Prime Minister. And I've got to get back to my model buses, I don't have time for this."
"Are you sure you didn't mean vaccine?"
PM stops dead in his tracks and thinks. Decides to double down.
Now, here's something interesting. This morning's Telegraph is alleging that over half of all Covid hospitalisations in England are of people who tested positive *after* they were admitted.
The details are hidden behind the paywall, but a cut 'n' paste job on the Sun website suggests that only 44% of the recent admissions to English hospitals recorded as being Covid patients had actually had a positive test result by the time they were wheeled in.
How many of the remaining 56% were admitted due to Covid symptoms, and how many were asymptomatic cases admitted for reasons entirely unrelated to the virus, is unknown. But there is at least the possibility that the number of people becoming sick enough with Covid to need hospital treatment is being significantly overstated in the Government statistics. More information required.
I cannot read the article because of the paywall, but the 56% are composed of two groups:
1) Those who had covid causing their symptoms but not diagnosed until after their admission.
2) Those who were admitted with a different condition and caught it in hospital.
Isn't there a third group, those who caught it outside but were asymptomatic and it does not (apparently) contribute to the condition for which they were admitted? Or is this group very small?
Yes. I think.
"Crucially, this group does not distinguish between those admitted because of severe illness, later found to be caused by the virus, and those in hospital for different reasons who might otherwise never have known that they had picked it up." - from the article.
Now, here's something interesting. This morning's Telegraph is alleging that over half of all Covid hospitalisations in England are of people who tested positive *after* they were admitted.
The details are hidden behind the paywall, but a cut 'n' paste job on the Sun website suggests that only 44% of the recent admissions to English hospitals recorded as being Covid patients had actually had a positive test result by the time they were wheeled in.
How many of the remaining 56% were admitted due to Covid symptoms, and how many were asymptomatic cases admitted for reasons entirely unrelated to the virus, is unknown. But there is at least the possibility that the number of people becoming sick enough with Covid to need hospital treatment is being significantly overstated in the Government statistics. More information required.
I did say this a couple of weeks ago, if you are admitted to Hospital with a broken leg and you test positive for Covid, even if you have no symptoms you are counted as a Covid patient.
People with asymptomatic Covid and a broken leg do not end up on a ventilator, so you can estimate the size of this effect by comparing the ratio of Covid patients in hospital to those receiving mechanical ventilation.
They should just get it over with and tax the state pension. People already raking in the money from their final salary pensions don't need the extra pittance from the government.
It is taxed already. If you have no other income your personal allowance covers it so you don't pay tax, but it's counted in together with whatever else you're getting.
I was more thinking with a taper.
If someone has a 6k income from private pension plus the circa 9k from state pension how much more income tax are you propsosing they pay than someone earning 15k?
The worker on default tax codes according to a tax calculator pays Income Tax £484 National Insurance £652 Employers NI £850 Total tax: £1986
The pensioner pays £484
But an employer employing someone beyond their pension age does continue to pay that Employer NI...
Prof Neil Fergusson on R4 "too early to tell effect of unlocking from current figures - will probably take several more weeks to see full effects of unlocking".
R is currently likely around 1.
Not on this weeks data alone it wouldn’t be.
I missed the interview unfortunately. Did anyone ask him why once again it looks like his modelling will be out by an order of magnitude?
That’s what the interview opened with “too soon to say but I’ll be happy to be wrong if it’s a lot lower”.
Current decline attributed to end of football effect and schools breaking up - July 19 effect yet to be seen.
Ongoing discussion about declining vaccine efficacy and other ongoing protection against serious illness (T-cells etc). “Memory of what to do” was how one person put it. A question however - are the “other forms” dependent on having come into contact with the virus? Or will having received the vaccine be enough? In simple terms - do we undermine the long terms benefits of the vaccination programme by actively continuing anti-Covid measures among a largely vaccinated society?
The various T-cell effects from the vaccine have been studied in depth
Whllst on university rankings - these were the last (before pandamic) BUCS (British university Colleges and Sport ) points tables for inter university sport competition
Loughborough (won it for the last 40 (forty) years! Nottingham Durham Edinburgh Exeter Bath Birmingham Bristol NEwcastle Northumbria
Oxford are 12th and Cambridge 20th .
Amazing domination by Loughborough
There is only one university classification that matters.
(a) when you are young you are invincible, and will never die (b) too much messaging in the pandemic about mostly mild, and protecting the vulnerable (c) a genuine appreciation of the risks for a 20 year old.
If we are honest, the main reason most of us want 18-25 year olds to have the vaccine is to help suppress the virus, not out of concern for their health. Tbh same argument for 12-18 too.
Well, I am personally acquainted with several 18-25 year olds (not in the @Leon sense) and a few 12-17 and I'd rather like them but to get the virus for their own health. And also for population immunity. They go hand in hand.
There’s an analogy somewhere, between deaths from vaccines and deaths from seatbelts.
Whoops! Massive typo. VACCINE! Not virus. Good grief. That was an error.
Top 10 in Europe: (global rank) Oxford (2) Cambridge (3) Imperial (7) ETH Zurich (=8) UCL London (=8) Lausanne (14) Edinburgh (16) Manchester (=27) Kings College (35) Paris Science & Lettres (44)
And the EU thought they should charge us a premium to participate in Erasmus.....
The methodology used to determine these rankings is a bit opaque. The main criterion is "academic reputation", which apparently "collates the expert opinions of over 130,000 individuals in the higher education space". Who are these individuals? Are they a fully representative sample? Who knows?
The whole thing is a bit of a joke.
The University of Western Australia above UPenn? I mean, really?
UWA would struggle next to Oxford Brookes (except in earth sciences, where it's top class). The University of Pennsylvania might be embarrassed to have graduated members of the Trump family, but it's a serious research and teaching institution.
These rankings are not quite a joke but it is important to see what they rank, and a lot of that, as @FeersumEnjineeya notes and as can be seen on their web page, is reputation, and Oxford and Cambridge do have that in spades. And in a sense there is a positive feedback loop because their reputation is based partly on evaluations of their reputation.
Although any uni that gave a DPhil to Naomi Wolfe and refused to withdraw it even when her fraud came to light ought to be vying with the University of Cumbria for the title of Shittiest University in Europe.
BEIJING, July 26 (Reuters) - Antibodies triggered by Sinovac Biotech's (SVA.O) COVID-19 vaccine decline below a key threshold from around six months after a second dose for most recipients, although a third shot could have a strong boosting effect, according to a lab study.
I think it's increasingly clear that current vaccines efficacy fades rather more quickly than we'd like.
Fortunately, newer better vaccines are available, and adding Novavax or Pfizer or Moderna to an existing two-dose Astra-Zeneca patient is going to be highly beneficial.
So, you’re saying that Novavax, Pfizer and Moderna are “better vaccines” than Oxford/AstraZeneca? Fascinating.
Prof Neil Fergusson on R4 "too early to tell effect of unlocking from current figures - will probably take several more weeks to see full effects of unlocking".
R is currently likely around 1.
Not on this weeks data alone it wouldn’t be.
Yes, if the fall is following the Scottish curve on Friday (say), I think that would be quite definite.
First National Security Law trial in Hong Kong has led to conviction. Sentencing later this week. Charge was driving motorbike into police carrying banner saying “Liberate Hong Kong” - this is now terrorism. Over 100 currently under arrest under this law.
“I think this idea of my right not to be offended, my right to have a safe space, is one that’s crept up in the last five years,” he said. If you mention John Stuart Mill’s arguments on free speech to “a bright 19-year-old in Oxford, they look at you a bit blankly. When you say, ‘Isn’t the best response to speech, more speech?’ it’s a new idea to them.”
Rusbridger understands the urge many young people may have to belong and feel safe in their identity. The question is what that urge requires: to belong, do you need to ostracise others who think differently? At Oxford, Rusbridger has debated with students “whose first instinctive position is, ‘But we want this to be a safe space, I feel threatened. Your job is to protect me.’”
His response is well-worn: there are no safe spaces in the world. You are supposedly the brightest of your generation – if you can’t defeat those you disagree with in an argument, who can? “It’s a bad thing,” he explained, “if the right not to feel offended overshadows the call of reason.”
My 18 year old about to go to Oxford is a fan of JS Mill's on Liberty but prefers Rawls' development of the ideas. Like all generalities this is not entirely true.
Prof Neil Fergusson on R4 "too early to tell effect of unlocking from current figures - will probably take several more weeks to see full effects of unlocking".
R is currently likely around 1.
The R is below 1, we're seeing a reduction in cases. It won't take weeks, it will take a week or so for the weekend figures to result in new infections. We've seen it every time we've unlocked, I don't see why this time would be different and we'd need to wait for weeks.
And we should never forget: some staff who do not care enough for patients to follow moral, yet alone official, procedures.
A massive problem in the NHS IMO, and a very hard one to fix.
The problem is not unique to the NHS. Cases of neglectful uncaring staff are found in private sector units too, particularly in social care, and private providers of long term care such as learning disability.
The problem in Stafford was a hospital management that was determined on Foundation status, and set up a culture of very bad care in order to meet narrow targets. That percolated down and permitted some very bad frontline care.
It is often a matter of local leadership. It is often the case that wards in the same hospital can have superb ground level care with high standards of nursing and medical care, and in the same block have a ward or unit where neglect occurs, process disregarded, staff poorly supervised and demoralised, staff retention is poor and outcomes worse.
Indeed. I have a rule of thumb: 1% of people are angels. 9% are good. 9% are bad, and 1% are devils. Most of us are in the middle 80%, generally doing good but occasionally dipping down into the bad. I.e. normal people, with normal problems and temptations.
You do not want the 1% of devils in your organisation (and I do think it is that high), and preferably not the 9% bad. But you cannot necessarily tell in advance who they are (*), and they can be very good at hiding their behaviour. Therefore you need really strong but fair controls about behaviour in any organisation. Weed out the evil 1%. Curb the bad 9%. Help the 80% side with their good, not bad, sides.
The problem is the fetishisation of the NHS, where we like to think of everybody working in it is an angel. A few will be, but there will also be some devils.
And the problem with Stafford was not just management: it was the reaction to the whistlebblowing, where whistleblowers got lots of mud thrown at them in public. It was hideous. And the root cause was the same: uncaring, nasty staff.
(*) Although sometimes when there are strong indicators, as happened recently in the Met Police, they still admit them.
I agree with your broad %s, and reluctance to disbelieve people in admired institutions (NHS, Met,etc.) is an issue. The main one, though, is unfettered power over people with low social status. Dementia patients. Prisoners. Refugees. Young WWC. Minorities. Most of the scandals in recent years have been about a locally powerful group (mental health nurses, prison wardens, etc.) feeling they can get away with anything. That brings out the worst in your 10% who are bad.
First National Security Law trial in Hong Kong has led to conviction. Sentencing later this week. Charge was driving motorbike into police carrying banner saying “Liberate Hong Kong” - this is now terrorism. Over 100 currently under arrest under this law.
I take it the motorbike rider was carrying the banner, not the police?
Prof Jason Leitch - football effect - went from 1:1 Male to Female to 9:1 Male to Female, now back to 1:1. About 3% of new cases end up in hospital, but younger & fitter so spending less time in hospital, even though some still go on to die.
hmm he said "still too many deaths" (this is on Today, right?). He specifically didn't say "deaths of young people".
Listening to him and Ferguson although there was mention of the vaccine, the debate otherwise was on people being in contact as the main control mechanism of Covid spreading (Ferguson more than Leitch).
Well of course once you take out the vaccine as a control method we are back in Lockdown in the autumn.
Good to see British universities scoring highly. And reassuring to note that PB’s ‘knowledge’ of Oxford and Cambridge remains as idiosyncratic as ever!
Just been reading that one. It’s totally nuts, and no-one appeared to notice that the guys involved have a long history of involvement in less-than-ethical companies.
The whole crypto market is about to come crashing to the ground, Tether clearly don’t have a fraction of the assets they have been claiming, which means tens of billions of real dollars from investors have simply disappeared into their unregulated ‘market’.
The crypto space ignored it because numbers go up and money printer goes brrrrrrrrrrrrr.
What's amazing is the idiots who try and short Tether on the very exchange run by Tether!
They get obliterated time and time again.
There appears to be an unlimited supply of people who think they can win against the house.
Circle and USD Coin (and by extension Coinbase) is now almost as dodgy as Tether. Massive coin issuance combined with a change in the attestation standards and now and admission that they are not fully backed with dollars.
Bennett Tomlin has done a lot of data science on Tether - which is very much continual "Oh Boy" and "How do they think they could get away with that"
How much extra do we think the Government will need to raise in taxes in the autumn to be serious about bringing the finances back under a measure of control?
My punt would be perhaps £25-30bn per annum.
Do you expect it to happen?
I expect lots of fiscal drag, the triple lock becoming the double lock, and some obscure things that only turn up when you read p 537 of the Red Book.
Put it another way - how confident are you that we have a serious government?
3 - Remove some of the tax subsidy from the free money made by owner occupiers on house values. Keeping about 80% of unearned gains is ample. That's probably a long-term project .
When and how do you propose to do this? My house has gone from being worth £90k ten years ago to about £135k. Some of that reflects increasing property prices, some of it the fact that it was a tatty wreck I had gutted to a shell and turned into a nice house.
It's actually cost me about £125k in total, so the uplift is only about £10k. Obviously, that £10k is pretty much fantasy money unless I sell, so it's no good trying to tax it out of me now. If I do sell, I'll need to buy another house which will have undergone a similar uplift in value (if not more) so you can't sensibly tax it out of me then either, otherwise I can't afford to move house (and that's really bad for the economy - you don't want to make the labour market more immobile). The only time it can possibly be extracted is from my estate after death - but if you try that on, canny pensioners will just sell their houses to their relatives and rent them back to dodge it.
I would just apply CGT.
Given that a CGT regime is already in place for a couple of million of personally owned rental properties it is clearly possible either at the same rate or a lower one, or stepping it up so the tax break is phased out - as happened to tax relief on mortgages in the 1980s/1990s.
I'm actually selling my first for a number of years to buy family out of the house I live in.
The way I think it works is I bought it in 2017 for 90k + approx £2200 Stamp Duty (3% over normal rate thanks to George Osborne). Spent £40-45k or so doing it up to basically newbuild performance.
It is now valued (I am told) at £170k, which is a good 30% jump after costs for this area, but not very much compared to the way they even averages were moving in some areas in the noughties.
I think the way it works is I sell, claim all the capital investment receipts I have against the gain (eg rewire, 2G, roof, CH and so on), then use my CGT allowance, and pay CGT on the rest.
There are quite well established rules for what counts against CGT.
At present there is no indexation allowance afaik.
So I think it is quite possible, set up similarly to that or differently as appropriate. No capital gain, no CGT.
The "need to buy a similar house" is the tricky one, as we are conditioned to unusually (for eg Europe) rising house prices as a high return money making scheme. That currently we are on a period of stable prices suggests that
My argument is that it is about removing distortions from the market and it needs to adjust over a period. We managed that with the mortgage interest tax relief distortion, and I think we can manage it here.
I think that the CGT tax relief is currently the biggest distortion of all. I make the amount spent on it is not much less than all the rent spent on all the rental houses in the whole Private Rental Sector.
Just add in rollover relief
And once you do that the actual revenue generated from it won't be worth enough to make it worthwhile.
Is I've commented on here more than once before the fix is to replace Council tax with a land value tax (with some transition rules and the right to rule it up till death).
I do think it is worthwhile though as it eliminates a distortion
Fundamentally it means the only people who will be paying are those who are (a) downsizing in retirement (b) moving to a cheaper area and (c) selling an inheritance
In all cases they are cashing in on capital gains made and therefore the property has moved from being a residence to being an investment and should be treated as such
And we should never forget: some staff who do not care enough for patients to follow moral, yet alone official, procedures.
A massive problem in the NHS IMO, and a very hard one to fix.
The problem is not unique to the NHS. Cases of neglectful uncaring staff are found in private sector units too, particularly in social care, and private providers of long term care such as learning disability.
The problem in Stafford was a hospital management that was determined on Foundation status, and set up a culture of very bad care in order to meet narrow targets. That percolated down and permitted some very bad frontline care.
It is often a matter of local leadership. It is often the case that wards in the same hospital can have superb ground level care with high standards of nursing and medical care, and in the same block have a ward or unit where neglect occurs, process disregarded, staff poorly supervised and demoralised, staff retention is poor and outcomes worse.
Indeed. I have a rule of thumb: 1% of people are angels. 9% are good. 9% are bad, and 1% are devils. Most of us are in the middle 80%, generally doing good but occasionally dipping down into the bad. I.e. normal people, with normal problems and temptations.
You do not want the 1% of devils in your organisation (and I do think it is that high), and preferably not the 9% bad. But you cannot necessarily tell in advance who they are (*), and they can be very good at hiding their behaviour. Therefore you need really strong but fair controls about behaviour in any organisation. Weed out the evil 1%. Curb the bad 9%. Help the 80% side with their good, not bad, sides.
The problem is the fetishisation of the NHS, where we like to think of everybody working in it is an angel. A few will be, but there will also be some devils.
And the problem with Stafford was not just management: it was the reaction to the whistlebblowing, where whistleblowers got lots of mud thrown at them in public. It was hideous. And the root cause was the same: uncaring, nasty staff.
(*) Although sometimes when there are strong indicators, as happened recently in the Met Police, they still admit them.
I agree with your broad %s, and reluctance to disbelieve people in admired institutions (NHS, Met,etc.) is an issue. The main one, though, is unfettered power over people with low social status. Dementia patients. Prisoners. Refugees. Young WWC. Minorities. Most of the scandals in recent years have been about a locally powerful group (mental health nurses, prison wardens, etc.) feeling they can get away with anything. That brings out the worst in your 10% who are bad.
Very good point and relatedly, my heart sank when I heard that the police (another group with power over others, in fact over everyone) will be given stronger stop and search powers.
One problem is that once someone takes any money from a private pension pot, they lose tax concessions on any future contributions if they return to work (£4k limit). Perhaps this is intended to stop the self-employed washing their salaries through the pension scheme but in practice it must limit the appeal of a return to work.
Is that right? I thought that if you took £X out of a pot, you got 25% tax free and paid your current marginal rate on the rest, and could do that repeatedly. Not the case?
Comments
The point of SS is not to suppress free speech but rather to enable it, by establishing ground rules to allow those historically marginalised to speak and explore ideas freely. This is especially important with widened access to university etc.
I think of it more similar to good chairing of a committee. The issue is mostly in small group teaching where the facilitator enables everyone to explore the topic, and give their perspective, rather than have the seminar dominated by a few loudmouths. SS is neutral in terms of politics and cultural narrative, just a clear structure of acceptable behaviour to allow free discussion.
Of course there is the critical issue of power dynamics as to who gets to set and enforce the rules, as well established by Foucault and others.
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/antibodies-sinovacs-covid-19-shot-fade-after-about-6-months-booster-helps-study-2021-07-26/
https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/26/22594699/tether-cryptocurrency-stablecoin-bitfinex-investigation
Fortunately, newer better vaccines are available, and adding Novavax or Pfizer or Moderna to an existing two-dose Astra-Zeneca patient is going to be highly beneficial.
The whole crypto market is about to come crashing to the ground, Tether clearly don’t have a fraction of the assets they have been claiming, which means tens of billions of real dollars from investors have simply disappeared into their unregulated ‘market’.
If it is a race to the bottom then yes, scrap the triple lock and say we can't afford it. Or - radical idea - give people a bit of dignity in their old age, when unemployed, chronically sick, on maternity.
The problem in Stafford was a hospital management that was determined on Foundation status, and set up a culture of very bad care in order to meet narrow targets. That percolated down and permitted some very bad frontline care.
It is often a matter of local leadership. It is often the case that wards in the same hospital can have superb ground level care with high standards of nursing and medical care, and in the same block have a ward or unit where neglect occurs, process disregarded, staff poorly supervised and demoralised, staff retention is poor and outcomes worse.
Tether is supposed to be worth $1. So people looking to make a consistent return buy it at $0.985 and then they sell it at $0.995 (or even sometimes as high as $1.01). They think it's fundamentally safe because (a) every knows Tether is worth $1, and (b) in the event of dissolution there are assets worth $64bn to back up distribute.
Now, I'm not one of these loons who thinks there are no assets. But I don't believe there is $64bn in the bank. Not least because Tether claims a large chunk of the $64bn is invested in commercial paper. And there's no way way Tether owns 10% of the commercial paper market.
When all the "nickels in front of the bulldozer" guys go away, Tether will drop 30-40% in a day.
Which will be very exciting. Especially for those people foolish enough to own Tether.
This means that the proportion of tax revenues used to pay pensions is increasing.
Now imagine a situation where the amount of money being paid to each retiree is rising faster than the wages of those in work.
That's the triple lock.
Bitcoin
Monero
Ethereum
Everything else is worth zero. (And Bitcoin, Monero and Ethereum are all worth less than their current prices.)
Top 10 in Europe: (global rank)
Oxford (2)
Cambridge (3)
Imperial (7)
ETH Zurich (=8)
UCL London (=8)
Lausanne (14)
Edinburgh (16)
Manchester (=27)
Kings College (35)
Paris Science & Lettres (44)
https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2022
And the EU thought they should charge us a premium to participate in Erasmus.....
* Brexit is a big change obviously, but while the Thatcher reforms tended to start off unpopular and become more popular over time, Brexit I suspect will go the other way.
Mr. 1000, don't know much about cryptostuff, but wondering why you assert that?
I remember reading, only vaguely though, that Ethereum's trying something a bit different. Fuzzy on the detail (it was a while ago and I'm still sleepy) but I think it was some weird difference to halving or suchlike.
Income Tax £484
National Insurance £652
Employers NI £850
Total tax: £1986
The pensioner pays £484
What's amazing is the idiots who try and short Tether on the very exchange run by Tether!
They get obliterated time and time again.
There appears to be an unlimited supply of people who think they can win against the house.
Circle and USD Coin (and by extension Coinbase) is now almost as dodgy as Tether. Massive coin issuance combined with a change in the attestation standards and now and admission that they are not fully backed with dollars.
Indeed, the idea that two of the top three global universities are Oxford and Cambridge is ridiculous. Now, sure, they both have their strengths: Cambridge is genuinely excellent for pure mathematics, and their English department is unrivalled, while Oxford has a nice deer park at Magdalen. But they aren't two of the top three academic institutions in the world.
If we're talking applied science, Stanford, Caltech, and MIT would all be at the absolute top of the list. While Cambridge and Imperial would hope to make it into the top 10. On a good day.
(b) too much messaging in the pandemic about mostly mild, and protecting the vulnerable
(c) a genuine appreciation of the risks for a 20 year old.
If we are honest, the main reason most of us want 18-25 year olds to have the vaccine is to help suppress the virus, not out of concern for their health. Tbh same argument for 12-18 too.
You do not want the 1% of devils in your organisation (and I do think it is that high), and preferably not the 9% bad. But you cannot necessarily tell in advance who they are (*), and they can be very good at hiding their behaviour. Therefore you need really strong but fair controls about behaviour in any organisation. Weed out the evil 1%. Curb the bad 9%. Help the 80% side with their good, not bad, sides.
The problem is the fetishisation of the NHS, where we like to think of everybody working in it is an angel. A few will be, but there will also be some devils.
And the problem with Stafford was not just management: it was the reaction to the whistlebblowing, where whistleblowers got lots of mud thrown at them in public. It was hideous. And the root cause was the same: uncaring, nasty staff.
(*) Although sometimes when there are strong indicators, as happened recently in the Met Police, they still admit them.
"SS is neutral in terms of politics and cultural narrative" - I like the idea that at your age, you can still have optimism on this scale.
*Humans have an appalling track record of behaving like humans.
**In the sense that PJ O'Rourke meant when he commented "The beauty of a well designed fascism, is that it gives every pissant an anthill, to piss from."
If you combine a fertility rate below 2, rising life expectancy, and minimal migration, then you will have trouble.
Clinics for the Covid booster vaccine at XXX from Sept are currently being prepared. Our Flu vaccine clinics will be held at the Surgery from early Sept. We will confirm shortly when both clinics are available to pre-book. Please do not contact us yet.
The University of Western Australia above UPenn? I mean, really?
UWA would struggle next to Oxford Brookes (except in earth sciences, where it's top class). The University of Pennsylvania might be embarrassed to have graduated members of the Trump family, but it's a serious research and teaching institution.
Correcting an important misconception (this is my chart, but misleading commentary):
•There were thousands more cases among young men than women after football matches, showing impact of Euros on transmission
•But not due to attending matches. It was indoor gatherings to watch games
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1419912847795146760?s=20
Loughborough (won it for the last 40 (forty) years!
Nottingham
Durham
Edinburgh
Exeter
Bath
Birmingham
Bristol
NEwcastle
Northumbria
Oxford are 12th and Cambridge 20th .
Amazing domination by Loughborough
R is currently likely around 1.
One thing to note is that the forecast is currently 35C on Saturday, cooler on Sunday. If that shifts a bit the temperatures may affect some teams more than others (can't recall if Mercedes are particularly nerfed by such things as in years past).
I was working on the basis that finding a role where he can do least harm
https://twitter.com/LarrySabato/status/1419818227744616466
GOP establishment never, ever, learn.
Of course if he’d been wearing it correctly it wouldn’t have killed him...
Is I've commented on here more than once before the fix is to replace Council tax with a land value tax (with some transition rules and the right to rule it up till death).
"We need to give everyone the virus."
"Are you sure Prime Minister?"
"Of course I'm bloody sure. I'm the Prime Minister. And I've got to get back to my model buses, I don't have time for this."
"Are you sure you didn't mean vaccine?"
PM stops dead in his tracks and thinks. Decides to double down.
"Of course not, you moron.V I R U S. Virus."
"Crucially, this group does not distinguish between those admitted because of severe illness, later found to be caused by the virus, and those in hospital for different reasons who might otherwise never have known that they had picked it up." - from the article.
Current decline attributed to end of football effect and schools breaking up - July 19 effect yet to be seen.
https://www.pitch-study.org/PITCH_Dosing_Interval_23072021.pdf
https://www.pitch-study.org/Figures_Appendix_PITCH_Dosing_interval_23072021.pdf
for example.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norrington_Table
My alma mater is top, naturally
Either that or you just need more coffee.
Listening to him and Ferguson although there was mention of the vaccine, the debate otherwise was on people being in contact as the main control mechanism of Covid spreading (Ferguson more than Leitch).
Well of course once you take out the vaccine as a control method we are back in Lockdown in the autumn.
https://bennettftomlin.com/2021/07/26/the-available-evidence-that-tether-and-bitfinex-committed-bank-fraud/ is his latest article but there are heaps of others including a podcast with Grant Williams that covers the basics that I've posted a few times before.
https://www.grant-williams.com/podcast/the-grant-williams-podcast-bennett-tomlin-george-noble/
Fundamentally it means the only people who will be paying are those who are (a) downsizing in retirement (b) moving to a cheaper area and (c) selling an inheritance
In all cases they are cashing in on capital gains made and therefore the property has moved from being a residence to being an investment and should be treated as such
Boris really is retreating into his base.