Yes that makes sense. I'd certainly never give up the day job, but you're right being used to (and working with) statistics is certainly an advantage. Being able to do some statistical analysis in your head really helps with rapid decision making and its something a lot of players won't have (and if they're using anything to aid with statistical analysis that is cheating and banned). Again whether that's an 'edge' or not is hard to tell. I know some people that would struggle to add up in real life who give them some cards suddenly would seem like MENSA in the way they can think.
The problem trying to actually make any money from playing as opposed to just doing it for fun is the site takes quite a high rake. 9% of the entrance fee is rake so instantly just to be breaking even, without counting for variance, you need an ~10% edge just to get past the rake.
Winning your own share of the pot on average still leaves you down. On the other hand when I was playing it was clear some people were not sensible players and had more money than sense, pushing in with duff hands then rebuying a new ticket during the rebuy period as soon as they were eliminated. In general I'm not keen on the idea of rebuys, when I've played in the past when you're out, you're out, but on the other hand if these people buying multiple tickets because they've got more money than sense are inflating the pot then that counters the rake so there's that at least.
Yes, time is a factor too. I'll sometimes have a free evening for poker and then rather than just play one $16 game (about my preferred limit for an evening) and perhaps get eliminated in 20 minutes, I'll play a $2.20 rebuy and rebuy several times if I'm knocked out. I realise I'm falling behind with each rebuy, but it gives me the evening's experience at the same cost.
I did have one holiday including a few days in Las Vegas, where the rake is really shocking after being used to Pokerstars' 10% - typically seemed to be 25-30%. Good fun all the same, but strictly for laughs if you're not really good. I had one cash game with a seriously drunk opponent - I had JJ, and very uncharacteristically went all in with £200 when J52 appeared. He called with 10 7, and the dealer played out 9 8, giving him the straight. "Haha," he slurred. "You are such a, such a... crap player, man." Grrr!
Ouch! Such is life though, it was a good play most of the time. You had 96% equity, but there's not much you can do when fortune goes with the dud.
I've never played cash games (except for pennies for a few minutes) that scares me. A tournament your losses are fixed as soon as you enter but cash games, especially if you go chasing losses, are a different matter.
I get what you mean about rebuys if you're just enjoying an evening though, that's not a bad attitude. Again if you're viewing it as entertainment its all healthy, its when non-pros think "I'll make money from this" that alarm bells should ring.
That's rather less "rake" than an established furniture auction.
How would the Macron treatment have worked any better in the UK than in France? I wouldn't want to swap places with them right now, even leaving aside that the French response to coersion seems to have been much more favourable than in Scotland or Wales which suggests we'd have had an even worse trajectory than them.
It's worked extremely well in France, overcoming vaccine resistance very effectively.
As for swapping places, well their cumulative deaths per million are substantially lower than ours, although of course most of that is accounted for by the Boris disaster of last winter. Their vax stats are such that they shouldn't do too badly in this winter.
I think you're significantly overestimating their vaccination programme. It's been good at overcoming the inertia based won't vaccinate cohort but not at overcoming the "natural immunity is best" cohort, which is a big number. Additionally, their spread of vaccination is poorer than ours, they've done a bunch of vaccines for under 18s and under 30s, more than we have for sure, but that won't really change the picture for hospitalisations. In the crucial over 60s cohorts they are quite far below our vaccination rates and far, far below our triple jab rate.
Additionally, they haven't got the wall of natural immunity among big sections of the won't vaccinate cohort that we have.
As I said, you've completely missed why the UK strategy was preferable to what the French have done. I wouldn't trade our position for their one going into winter this year.
Yes, I agree that the age distribution of vaccination is better here in the UK - as I said earlier, it's one of the things we got right. Still, France is better than most on that measure, and Macron has done well to overcome vaccine resistance which a year ago was amongst the worst in Europe (although I did say at the time that I thought they'd fall in line eventually).
Sure, but vaccination isn't enough to get to the herd immunity threshold, at least not 68% or 75%. Portugal at 88% will get there assuming they do third doses for all 88%. That's the endgame for the virus and heading into the winter the UK is at the cusp of herd immunity, our infection rate is fairly stable and hospitalisations are falling as well as numbers in hospital. France is millions and millions of infections or new vaccines away from herd immunity. They've probably reached the limit of who will get jabbed at 75% which means there are a very large number of people who are completely virus vulnerable without any antibodies.
The reason the UK strategy of having no NPIs is correct is that our cohort of completely virus vulnerable people is now extremely low and our cohort of people with waning immunity is shrinking by ~2.5m per week. It was the right strategy in July and it leaves us one of just a handful of countries not heading into Xmas looking at lockdowns.
The figure that needs looking at is what proportion of people are 'naive' to the virus. What proportion of people are neither vaccinated, nor recovered from infection. If you suppress infections then you're not reducing your proportion of people without immunity.
It does seem like the best way to maximise immunity is vaccinated plus infected which both minimises symptoms while infected and provides a good level of protection going forwards - and the UK has a high proportion of that.
Completely off topic but I've just started playing online poker as a hobby - I used to play each week in a pub tournament for a few years before the pandemic but I haven't played since before the pandemic began until recently. I like tournaments where you get potentially a couple of hours play from a small buy-in and are capped at losing your entry fee and that's that . . . the way I've always viewed it is I'd pay a comparable fee to go eg bowling or to a movie etc so I'm paying for the entertainment with that amount and any small amount won back is a bonus.
I had a morning off this morning so I thought I'd give it a go and bought a $4.40 satellite ticket to a $33 buy-in tournament. Managed to win a seat to the main event from the satellite. Even getting 6th (the lowest prize) would be my biggest ever poker win and I certainly wasn't expecting that, but I actually managed to win the whole tournament. First place prize $432.20 from a $33 ticket I'd won for a $4.40 buy-in.
Over the moon with that, but I wanted to mention it here not to show off but because the one thing I don't want is to get intoxicated from that victory and develop a problem habit; so I thought I'd mention it to a group of people here many of whom probably gamble overall more than I do. I'm happy but want to keep my feet firmly on the ground.
Which company? I tried a few back in the day and the weirdest one was Betfair. The number of times you'd see three players in a single deal get pocket Qs, Ks, and As was astounding. It made me feel that there was an algorithm dealing people powerful hands to encourage looser play and so knocking people out faster. I can't prove anything of course, but it felt a bit deliberate.
888
I doubt there's any funny business but the thing to remember with Hold Em is that you'll disproportionately see good cards when it comes to a showdown. Since crap gets mucked those with QQ, KK or AA will end up showing those hands while all the 72 that got dealt to other players you'll almost never see.
One of the best lessons I learnt from the good player I mentioned before is too be very wary of an Ace with a poor kicker. I used to go in almost any time I had an Ace [and lots of poor players do] but as he said to me the problem is even if you hit your Ace, you'll never know if someone else is in the hand with an Ace and a better kicker.
Thus today I quite often folded hands like A4 or A6 that when I first started playing I'd have gone in with - then seeing something like AQ at showdown and I'd have lost that hand had I gone in with my Ace.
I'm trying to do a calculation to work out on an 8-player table the chances that there are is a pocket A pair, a pocket K pair, and a pocket Q pair out there in a single deal. It "feels" like a 1000/1 shot, but I can't work out the odds.
Its extremely unlikely, sure probably even less likely than that. Though I doubt it actually happened many times and false recall will merge people showing AA versus KK with another time someone showed KK versus QQ and that's not that unusual.
One factor to bear in mind with the difference between online and real-life poker is how fast online poker is. In a pub, house or even a casino people play much slower, the cards get physically shuffled then dealt, conversations are had, people play in turn etc . . . online there's no interruption, no shuffling, the cards are shown almost instantaneously and people can queue the fact they're folding so everyone who's folding is out of the hand instantly.
As a result in online poker you'll face many, many more hands per hour than you will in physical poker. Which means that 'rare' hands can and will come up from time to time.
According to my software since I started playing earlier this month, I've been in over ten thousand hands already.
If you play ten thousand hands then you're going to see a few 1000/1 shots in those hands.
@Farooq - define the precise conditions - how many packs of cards etc, and I'll have a stab at working it out for you. I'm not familiar with poker terms, so you'll have to specify those too.
Already been done elsewhere, about 1 in 25,000 if it was an 8 handed table.
Brilliant! Now, considering I saw this happen a good dozen times at least, I'm back to thinking there was something fishy going on.
I'll see if I can check through the maths but it's making my head hurt looking at it, so I might program a Monte Carlo simulation this evening and run it a few million times to see whether I get something in the same ball park. There's no way I should have seen this happen more than about three times. I doubt I've ever played even 25,000 hands of poker, let alone 300,000.
Remember to account for the hundreds of thousands (estimate) of players as well. If none of them were seeing this more often than normal then it would be fixed. Others might have seen an unusual amount of AA v AA hands, or AK v AK v QQ hands etc which they remember.
That's a fair point, but it hasn't helped my headache.
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Chill. The allegation that this was deliberately engineered by the Home Sec to satisfy "ghouls" who exist and say stuff in your head is off-the-scale batshit, up there with your attack on @TimT for saying the diametrical opposite of what he actually said. Good lunch?
No no. Where did I say this was engineered? This was an accident. I said that the various plans she had to repel them such as tow backs would swamp boats and cause some people to drown. Whats more the Home Office know that as they wanted to criminalise the RNLI volunteers who would be dragging them out of the water.
You seem not to know very much about boats. We know a fair amount about how to tow boats without swamping them. Similarly "Dinghy" can mean a lot of things, and there's all sorts of scenarios where you could quite happily and safely send your children across the Channel in one.
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Chill. The allegation that this was deliberately engineered by the Home Sec to satisfy "ghouls" who exist and say stuff in your head is off-the-scale batshit, up there with your attack on @TimT for saying the diametrical opposite of what he actually said. Good lunch?
It is an utterly disgraceful comment and is beyond excuse
For a Home Secretary who has said she wants to bring back hanging 'and if occasionally they get the wrong person it's unfortunate' there is little anyone can say about her that could be described as 'disgraceful'
Completely off topic but I've just started playing online poker as a hobby - I used to play each week in a pub tournament for a few years before the pandemic but I haven't played since before the pandemic began until recently. I like tournaments where you get potentially a couple of hours play from a small buy-in and are capped at losing your entry fee and that's that . . . the way I've always viewed it is I'd pay a comparable fee to go eg bowling or to a movie etc so I'm paying for the entertainment with that amount and any small amount won back is a bonus.
I had a morning off this morning so I thought I'd give it a go and bought a $4.40 satellite ticket to a $33 buy-in tournament. Managed to win a seat to the main event from the satellite. Even getting 6th (the lowest prize) would be my biggest ever poker win and I certainly wasn't expecting that, but I actually managed to win the whole tournament. First place prize $432.20 from a $33 ticket I'd won for a $4.40 buy-in.
Over the moon with that, but I wanted to mention it here not to show off but because the one thing I don't want is to get intoxicated from that victory and develop a problem habit; so I thought I'd mention it to a group of people here many of whom probably gamble overall more than I do. I'm happy but want to keep my feet firmly on the ground.
Which company? I tried a few back in the day and the weirdest one was Betfair. The number of times you'd see three players in a single deal get pocket Qs, Ks, and As was astounding. It made me feel that there was an algorithm dealing people powerful hands to encourage looser play and so knocking people out faster. I can't prove anything of course, but it felt a bit deliberate.
888
I doubt there's any funny business but the thing to remember with Hold Em is that you'll disproportionately see good cards when it comes to a showdown. Since crap gets mucked those with QQ, KK or AA will end up showing those hands while all the 72 that got dealt to other players you'll almost never see.
One of the best lessons I learnt from the good player I mentioned before is too be very wary of an Ace with a poor kicker. I used to go in almost any time I had an Ace [and lots of poor players do] but as he said to me the problem is even if you hit your Ace, you'll never know if someone else is in the hand with an Ace and a better kicker.
Thus today I quite often folded hands like A4 or A6 that when I first started playing I'd have gone in with - then seeing something like AQ at showdown and I'd have lost that hand had I gone in with my Ace.
I'm trying to do a calculation to work out on an 8-player table the chances that there are is a pocket A pair, a pocket K pair, and a pocket Q pair out there in a single deal. It "feels" like a 1000/1 shot, but I can't work out the odds.
Its extremely unlikely, sure probably even less likely than that. Though I doubt it actually happened many times and false recall will merge people showing AA versus KK with another time someone showed KK versus QQ and that's not that unusual.
One factor to bear in mind with the difference between online and real-life poker is how fast online poker is. In a pub, house or even a casino people play much slower, the cards get physically shuffled then dealt, conversations are had, people play in turn etc . . . online there's no interruption, no shuffling, the cards are shown almost instantaneously and people can queue the fact they're folding so everyone who's folding is out of the hand instantly.
As a result in online poker you'll face many, many more hands per hour than you will in physical poker. Which means that 'rare' hands can and will come up from time to time.
According to my software since I started playing earlier this month, I've been in over ten thousand hands already.
If you play ten thousand hands then you're going to see a few 1000/1 shots in those hands.
@Farooq - define the precise conditions - how many packs of cards etc, and I'll have a stab at working it out for you. I'm not familiar with poker terms, so you'll have to specify those too.
Already been done elsewhere, about 1 in 25,000 if it was an 8 handed table.
Brilliant! Now, considering I saw this happen a good dozen times at least, I'm back to thinking there was something fishy going on.
I'll see if I can check through the maths but it's making my head hurt looking at it, so I might program a Monte Carlo simulation this evening and run it a few million times to see whether I get something in the same ball park. There's no way I should have seen this happen more than about three times. I doubt I've ever played even 25,000 hands of poker, let alone 300,000.
Remember to account for the hundreds of thousands (estimate) of players as well. If none of them were seeing this more often than normal then it would be fixed. Others might have seen an unusual amount of AA v AA hands, or AK v AK v QQ hands etc which they remember.
How would the Macron treatment have worked any better in the UK than in France? I wouldn't want to swap places with them right now, even leaving aside that the French response to coersion seems to have been much more favourable than in Scotland or Wales which suggests we'd have had an even worse trajectory than them.
It's worked extremely well in France, overcoming vaccine resistance very effectively.
As for swapping places, well their cumulative deaths per million are substantially lower than ours, although of course most of that is accounted for by the Boris disaster of last winter. Their vax stats are such that they shouldn't do too badly in this winter.
I think you're significantly overestimating their vaccination programme. It's been good at overcoming the inertia based won't vaccinate cohort but not at overcoming the "natural immunity is best" cohort, which is a big number. Additionally, their spread of vaccination is poorer than ours, they've done a bunch of vaccines for under 18s and under 30s, more than we have for sure, but that won't really change the picture for hospitalisations. In the crucial over 60s cohorts they are quite far below our vaccination rates and far, far below our triple jab rate.
Additionally, they haven't got the wall of natural immunity among big sections of the won't vaccinate cohort that we have.
As I said, you've completely missed why the UK strategy was preferable to what the French have done. I wouldn't trade our position for their one going into winter this year.
Yes, I agree that the age distribution of vaccination is better here in the UK - as I said earlier, it's one of the things we got right. Still, France is better than most on that measure, and Macron has done well to overcome vaccine resistance which a year ago was amongst the worst in Europe (although I did say at the time that I thought they'd fall in line eventually).
Sure, but vaccination isn't enough to get to the herd immunity threshold, at least not 68% or 75%. Portugal at 88% will get there assuming they do third doses for all 88%. That's the endgame for the virus and heading into the winter the UK is at the cusp of herd immunity, our infection rate is fairly stable and hospitalisations are falling as well as numbers in hospital. France is millions and millions of infections or new vaccines away from herd immunity. They've probably reached the limit of who will get jabbed at 75% which means there are a very large number of people who are completely virus vulnerable without any antibodies.
The reason the UK strategy of having no NPIs is correct is that our cohort of completely virus vulnerable people is now extremely low and our cohort of people with waning immunity is shrinking by ~2.5m per week. It was the right strategy in July and it leaves us one of just a handful of countries not heading into Xmas looking at lockdowns.
The figure that needs looking at is what proportion of people are 'naive' to the virus. What proportion of people are neither vaccinated, nor recovered from infection. If you suppress infections then you're not reducing your proportion of people without immunity.
It does seem like the best way to maximise immunity is vaccinated plus infected which both minimises symptoms while infected and provides a good level of protection going forwards - and the UK has a high proportion of that.
Eventually every country will end up with a situation with almost no naive hosts in the vulnerable age ranges. Everyone will catch covid as a child and then several times as an adult, which will act like a natural immunisation programme.
The UK is already very close to this endemic phase but other countries, even those with apparently successful handling so far, will struggle to transition without facing up to some difficult decisions.
A showjumper with a spinal defect is suing her mother’s doctor for millions of pounds in a landmark legal case, arguing that she should never have been born.
Evie Toombes, 20, was born with spina bifida and sometimes spends 24 hours a day connected to treatment tubes.
However, she has become a prominent showjumper who aims to compete in the paralympics.
In a unique “wrongful conception” damages claim, Toombes, of Skegness, Lincolnshire, is suing Dr Philip Mitchell over his alleged failure to advise that her mother take vital supplements before getting pregnant.
The athlete has claimed in court that had the doctor advised Caroline Toombes to take folic acid supplements to minimise the risk of spina bifida in her baby, she would have put off getting pregnant until she had done so.
As a result the Evie Toombes would never have been born.
More than a whiff of misogyny is in the air. It is striking that there is no comparably zealous campaign to abandon the word “men” in favour of “prostate-havers”, “ejaculators” or “bodies with testicles”. It is almost always women who are being ordered to dispense with a useful word they have used all their lives.
Whilst I agree with them on most of the trans debate questions, the conversation is usually about women because of campaign success in marketing women as eternally oppressed victims with limited agency, and men/boys who suffer abuse etc tend to be silenced.
The phrases "violence against women and girls" and "Women and Equalities Committee" capture the predominant attitude of the contemporary debate perfectly.
I'm sorry Robert, the virus isn't sentient. [snip]
The virus isn't sentient, but people get complacent, which is why it looks as though it's punishing hubris.
Which is fine, but I don't think the UK is being complacent, the scale and breadth of the third dose/booster programme is very good evidence of the opposite. I'd suggest that it was European countries from July to now that have been extremely complacent, they almost uniformly assumed that if they went into winter with a few thousand cases per day and NPIs it would protect them from the kind of take off in infections they've seen over the last two weeks. The UK approach of building natural immunity and taking the unvaccinated exit wave in the summer/autumn was simply dismissed as a "dangerous experiment" by far, far too many scientists and officials across the continent. There was, and still is, a lot of sound reasoning and science behind that decision to fully unlockdown in July, it was a calculated risk that we wouldn't have this under control by Xmas so lets move to endemicity from day 0 of being fully reopen.
Once again, and I know you aren't defending the European approach here, I'd like to ask the question - NPIs simply displace infections into the future, what's the use of having them when the available PIs aren't going to change very much in said future? There was never a scenario of having a miracle pill that makes everyone immune to COVID forever being developed from July to now, so why delay?
It's a little misleading to say that NPIs simply displace infections into the future.
Imagine a disease with an R of 2 in a population with 32 people.
It will go 1, 2, 3.8, 7.4, 14.2, 23-ish. Almost everyone gets it.
On the other hand if you impose NPIs such that R is 1, then it will go:
You can then remove NPIs, and because R is 2 and half of people have previously been infected, you won't get sustained outbreaks. In other words the NPIs allow you to settle at the level of herd immunity without blasting through it.
Except that's not what's happened. Those countries with NPIs post-summer unlockdown have managed to control infections to a degree that it's meant unvaccinated people have got no reservoir of natural immunity as they have here.
In the theoretical model you're right, but the real world data is that the UK has had virtually no mandatory NPIs since the middle of July and the R value has hovered between 0.7 and 1.5 until now, it's probably already sitting at about 1 again after hitting the heady heights of 1.1 in the last couple of weeks. The degree of NPIs across Europe acted to displace infections into the future and, sadly for a lot of people, that future has arrived. I'm actually really upset at the lack of medium term thinking among the governments of Europe, they seemed to only think about tomorrow's headline rate of COVID infections rather than what the situation would be like in the winter with waning immunity, transmission advantages for respiratory viruses that come with cold weather and generally higher use of healthcare in the winter.
As I've said, Europe seemed to almost revel in calling the UK a plague island and our strategy "backfiring" despite it working almost exactly as intended, to build up a wall of natural immunity in the summer and autumn among those people who we knew wouldn't get vaccinated. I take no pleasure from watching their NPI strategy backfire, it's frustrating that supposedly smart people across the continent have been blinded by the politics of Brexit and simply dismissed what UK government scientists were saying about displacing infections to winter being a bad idea and probably a net negative for deaths/hospitalisations. Now ordinary people in Europe will pay for that. Worse still it doesn't feel like any European nation will learn this lesson and they will doggedly cling to their NPIs in March/April when it comes time for them to unlockdown.
Oh, I agree with you that given the complexities of waning immunity, booster shots, and large unvaccinated cohorts, there is a massive amount of variability, and hence the dramatic increases in rates in much of Europe.
But from a straight mathematical perspective, NPIs suppress R temporarily and mean that you will settle at a lower number of people infected than would otherwise be the case. That remains so.
I actually don't think that holds with Delta unless the NPIs become permanent, which is definitely a major worry of mine for most of Europe. The R value of Delta is so high that any relaxation will cause an exit wave that eventually infects everyone without immunity through prior infection of three doses of vaccine. That was the key change in thinking within SAGE that led to our unlockdown decision in July, that everyone in the country would now get COVID regardless of anything we tried to suppress it so lets take the exit wave in the summer rather than have a guaranteed one in the winter.
I'm sorry Max, but the maths is the maths whether R0 is 9 or 1.9. Now, I grant you that the benefits of NPIs to get you a softer curve to herd immunity are smaller when the R is greater, but nevertheless if you artificially lower R to get to the mathematical limit, you will avoid blowing through it.
The question is whether the costs of that are worth the benefit.
Does that analysis not depend on (effectively) zero covid after reaching herd immunity though?
You will overshoot the required immunity during the current wave with a higher R, yes, but even if you don't will there not in practice always be external seeding, and thus continuing exposure in the long term anyway?
There'll always be external seeding, but so long as R is below 1, it'll run out pretty quickly. If R is 0.9, the majority of people who bring Covid into the UK won't infect a single person.
True, although as that's a mean value there would still be outbreaks as you have to suspect anti-vaxxers probably congregate with other anti-vaxxers. Limited in spread, perhaps, but with at least some length of chain.
I do wonder if after 3 doses it might be a good idea to try your hardest to catch it. Just as further insurance against some kind of doomsday variant.
Completely off topic but I've just started playing online poker as a hobby - I used to play each week in a pub tournament for a few years before the pandemic but I haven't played since before the pandemic began until recently. I like tournaments where you get potentially a couple of hours play from a small buy-in and are capped at losing your entry fee and that's that . . . the way I've always viewed it is I'd pay a comparable fee to go eg bowling or to a movie etc so I'm paying for the entertainment with that amount and any small amount won back is a bonus.
I had a morning off this morning so I thought I'd give it a go and bought a $4.40 satellite ticket to a $33 buy-in tournament. Managed to win a seat to the main event from the satellite. Even getting 6th (the lowest prize) would be my biggest ever poker win and I certainly wasn't expecting that, but I actually managed to win the whole tournament. First place prize $432.20 from a $33 ticket I'd won for a $4.40 buy-in.
Over the moon with that, but I wanted to mention it here not to show off but because the one thing I don't want is to get intoxicated from that victory and develop a problem habit; so I thought I'd mention it to a group of people here many of whom probably gamble overall more than I do. I'm happy but want to keep my feet firmly on the ground.
Which company? I tried a few back in the day and the weirdest one was Betfair. The number of times you'd see three players in a single deal get pocket Qs, Ks, and As was astounding. It made me feel that there was an algorithm dealing people powerful hands to encourage looser play and so knocking people out faster. I can't prove anything of course, but it felt a bit deliberate.
888
I doubt there's any funny business but the thing to remember with Hold Em is that you'll disproportionately see good cards when it comes to a showdown. Since crap gets mucked those with QQ, KK or AA will end up showing those hands while all the 72 that got dealt to other players you'll almost never see.
One of the best lessons I learnt from the good player I mentioned before is too be very wary of an Ace with a poor kicker. I used to go in almost any time I had an Ace [and lots of poor players do] but as he said to me the problem is even if you hit your Ace, you'll never know if someone else is in the hand with an Ace and a better kicker.
Thus today I quite often folded hands like A4 or A6 that when I first started playing I'd have gone in with - then seeing something like AQ at showdown and I'd have lost that hand had I gone in with my Ace.
I'm trying to do a calculation to work out on an 8-player table the chances that there are is a pocket A pair, a pocket K pair, and a pocket Q pair out there in a single deal. It "feels" like a 1000/1 shot, but I can't work out the odds.
Its extremely unlikely, sure probably even less likely than that. Though I doubt it actually happened many times and false recall will merge people showing AA versus KK with another time someone showed KK versus QQ and that's not that unusual.
One factor to bear in mind with the difference between online and real-life poker is how fast online poker is. In a pub, house or even a casino people play much slower, the cards get physically shuffled then dealt, conversations are had, people play in turn etc . . . online there's no interruption, no shuffling, the cards are shown almost instantaneously and people can queue the fact they're folding so everyone who's folding is out of the hand instantly.
As a result in online poker you'll face many, many more hands per hour than you will in physical poker. Which means that 'rare' hands can and will come up from time to time.
According to my software since I started playing earlier this month, I've been in over ten thousand hands already.
If you play ten thousand hands then you're going to see a few 1000/1 shots in those hands.
@Farooq - define the precise conditions - how many packs of cards etc, and I'll have a stab at working it out for you. I'm not familiar with poker terms, so you'll have to specify those too.
Already been done elsewhere, about 1 in 25,000 if it was an 8 handed table.
Brilliant! Now, considering I saw this happen a good dozen times at least, I'm back to thinking there was something fishy going on.
I'll see if I can check through the maths but it's making my head hurt looking at it, so I might program a Monte Carlo simulation this evening and run it a few million times to see whether I get something in the same ball park. There's no way I should have seen this happen more than about three times. I doubt I've ever played even 25,000 hands of poker, let alone 300,000.
Remember to account for the hundreds of thousands (estimate) of players as well. If none of them were seeing this more often than normal then it would be fixed. Others might have seen an unusual amount of AA v AA hands, or AK v AK v QQ hands etc which they remember.
That's a fair point, but it hasn't helped my headache.
The online player community found (and proved beyond reasonable doubt) some very obscure cases of cheating going on. If a major site was doing as you say, it would have been known about.
More than a whiff of misogyny is in the air. It is striking that there is no comparably zealous campaign to abandon the word “men” in favour of “prostate-havers”, “ejaculators” or “bodies with testicles”. It is almost always women who are being ordered to dispense with a useful word they have used all their lives.
ejaculators! I’m sure Eagles is waiting with a handy something that can mop up what you are saying there.
It’s probably all to do with which university you went to?
Holmes and Watson did a lot of ejaculations.
In each other if you believe the BBC reimagining of it.
That pretentious crap written by Moffat and Gatiss ?
That's the one.
It was all very much ‘look at us, we’re being clever’, just like the self serving interviews Moffat did when he was doing an average job with Dr Who. Still Una Stubbs was pretty good.
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Chill. The allegation that this was deliberately engineered by the Home Sec to satisfy "ghouls" who exist and say stuff in your head is off-the-scale batshit, up there with your attack on @TimT for saying the diametrical opposite of what he actually said. Good lunch?
It is an utterly disgraceful comment and is beyond excuse
For a Home Secretary who has said she wants to bring back hanging 'and if occasionally they get the wrong person it's unfortunate' there is little anyone can say about her that could be described as 'disgraceful'
Problem here is that there are no easy solutions - although on the upside the person who has to deal with it deserves to have an impossible job that is totally her responsibility with all blame points at her.
COUNCIL chiefs have launched a probe after a pro-indy campaign hub was handed a £10,000 Covid grant designed to support businesses impacted by pandemic curbs.
Inverclyde Council confirmed the public cash was paid to Yes Inverclyde after the organisation applied on the grounds it was promoting a “philosophical position” rather than being “party political”.
It is binary, either you live with no NPIs and people who refused the vaccine get sick and die, or you have them and they don't get sick and don't die until you get rid of the NPIs or the viral R value overwhelms your NPIs (see Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium etc...). These are the options, Chris Whitty laid them out very well at the end of June when the government went ahead with the full reopening in July. An infection displaced isn't an infection prevented.
You would be right, if there had been zero vaccinations happening between July and now. However, not only have there been lots of vaccinations in that period, but I'm also arguing that with better government management there could have been substantially more, and that the NPIs could have been better targeted.
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Chill. The allegation that this was deliberately engineered by the Home Sec to satisfy "ghouls" who exist and say stuff in your head is off-the-scale batshit, up there with your attack on @TimT for saying the diametrical opposite of what he actually said. Good lunch?
It is an utterly disgraceful comment and is beyond excuse
Which bit was disgraceful. That Farage-supporters are out there actively calling for asylum seekers to be drowned? Thats out there on Twitter. That the Home Secretary is pandering to those voters? She is according to HYUFD, thats the remaining core Tory vote after northerners are driven away. That tow backs and interventions with large boats will cause small dinghys to sink? Thats obvious surely. That they tried to criminalise the RNLI? Thats long since been covered and corrected by the government.
So again, where is it disgraceful. We can't stop these boats, we can't intercept the people getting off the ones who land here successfully which is almost all of them. So if we want it to stop we need to work with the rest of Europe. Might help if we actually had a channel to accept a reasonable number of asylum seekers rather than the trickle who come here vs the much larger numbers in France etc etc.
Your comments are unacceptable and your reference to twitter to try to justify your comments says it all
You are driven by an all encompassing hatred of this government and do not add to a very serious debate
More than a whiff of misogyny is in the air. It is striking that there is no comparably zealous campaign to abandon the word “men” in favour of “prostate-havers”, “ejaculators” or “bodies with testicles”. It is almost always women who are being ordered to dispense with a useful word they have used all their lives.
Whilst I agree with them on most of the trans debate questions, the conversation is usually about women because of campaign success in marketing women as eternally oppressed victims with limited agency, and men/boys who suffer abuse etc tend to be silenced.
The phrases "violence against women and girls" and "Women and Equalities Committee" capture the predominant attitude of the contemporary debate perfectly.
+ this.
A rather prominent charity used to have a website that, if you claimed to be a woman, went to help services about abuse. If you claimed to be a man, went to a 'you are an abuser, you evil scum. Here's how you can get help.' page.
It was a women's charity, but it was well-known and its name was non-gendered. Any man wanting to go there for help would be treated as a perpetrator, not a victim. And 1/3 of all victims of abuse are male.
I sent them a strongly-worded email, and it changed - with a link to a charity helping men. I'd like to think that was down to me, but who knows ...
Completely off topic but I've just started playing online poker as a hobby - I used to play each week in a pub tournament for a few years before the pandemic but I haven't played since before the pandemic began until recently. I like tournaments where you get potentially a couple of hours play from a small buy-in and are capped at losing your entry fee and that's that . . . the way I've always viewed it is I'd pay a comparable fee to go eg bowling or to a movie etc so I'm paying for the entertainment with that amount and any small amount won back is a bonus.
I had a morning off this morning so I thought I'd give it a go and bought a $4.40 satellite ticket to a $33 buy-in tournament. Managed to win a seat to the main event from the satellite. Even getting 6th (the lowest prize) would be my biggest ever poker win and I certainly wasn't expecting that, but I actually managed to win the whole tournament. First place prize $432.20 from a $33 ticket I'd won for a $4.40 buy-in.
Over the moon with that, but I wanted to mention it here not to show off but because the one thing I don't want is to get intoxicated from that victory and develop a problem habit; so I thought I'd mention it to a group of people here many of whom probably gamble overall more than I do. I'm happy but want to keep my feet firmly on the ground.
Which company? I tried a few back in the day and the weirdest one was Betfair. The number of times you'd see three players in a single deal get pocket Qs, Ks, and As was astounding. It made me feel that there was an algorithm dealing people powerful hands to encourage looser play and so knocking people out faster. I can't prove anything of course, but it felt a bit deliberate.
888
I doubt there's any funny business but the thing to remember with Hold Em is that you'll disproportionately see good cards when it comes to a showdown. Since crap gets mucked those with QQ, KK or AA will end up showing those hands while all the 72 that got dealt to other players you'll almost never see.
One of the best lessons I learnt from the good player I mentioned before is too be very wary of an Ace with a poor kicker. I used to go in almost any time I had an Ace [and lots of poor players do] but as he said to me the problem is even if you hit your Ace, you'll never know if someone else is in the hand with an Ace and a better kicker.
Thus today I quite often folded hands like A4 or A6 that when I first started playing I'd have gone in with - then seeing something like AQ at showdown and I'd have lost that hand had I gone in with my Ace.
I'm trying to do a calculation to work out on an 8-player table the chances that there are is a pocket A pair, a pocket K pair, and a pocket Q pair out there in a single deal. It "feels" like a 1000/1 shot, but I can't work out the odds.
Its extremely unlikely, sure probably even less likely than that. Though I doubt it actually happened many times and false recall will merge people showing AA versus KK with another time someone showed KK versus QQ and that's not that unusual.
One factor to bear in mind with the difference between online and real-life poker is how fast online poker is. In a pub, house or even a casino people play much slower, the cards get physically shuffled then dealt, conversations are had, people play in turn etc . . . online there's no interruption, no shuffling, the cards are shown almost instantaneously and people can queue the fact they're folding so everyone who's folding is out of the hand instantly.
As a result in online poker you'll face many, many more hands per hour than you will in physical poker. Which means that 'rare' hands can and will come up from time to time.
According to my software since I started playing earlier this month, I've been in over ten thousand hands already.
If you play ten thousand hands then you're going to see a few 1000/1 shots in those hands.
@Farooq - define the precise conditions - how many packs of cards etc, and I'll have a stab at working it out for you. I'm not familiar with poker terms, so you'll have to specify those too.
Already been done elsewhere, about 1 in 25,000 if it was an 8 handed table.
Brilliant! Now, considering I saw this happen a good dozen times at least, I'm back to thinking there was something fishy going on.
I'll see if I can check through the maths but it's making my head hurt looking at it, so I might program a Monte Carlo simulation this evening and run it a few million times to see whether I get something in the same ball park. There's no way I should have seen this happen more than about three times. I doubt I've ever played even 25,000 hands of poker, let alone 300,000.
Remember to account for the hundreds of thousands (estimate) of players as well. If none of them were seeing this more often than normal then it would be fixed. Others might have seen an unusual amount of AA v AA hands, or AK v AK v QQ hands etc which they remember.
That's a fair point, but it hasn't helped my headache.
The online player community found (and proved beyond reasonable doubt) some very obscure cases of cheating going on. If a major site was doing as you say, it would have been known about.
The thing is with games of chance online is that you're pretty close to the "infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters" scenario.
Almost any odd thing you can think of has probably happened to someone, somewhere, at some time. If it hadn't, that'd be an issue!
COUNCIL chiefs have launched a probe after a pro-indy campaign hub was handed a £10,000 Covid grant designed to support businesses impacted by pandemic curbs.
Inverclyde Council confirmed the public cash was paid to Yes Inverclyde after the organisation applied on the grounds it was promoting a “philosophical position” rather than being “party political”.
[Edit] There was a key legal case, actually in that airt, recently, which established that a belief in Scottish independence is indeed a philosophical rather than political matter.
It is binary, either you live with no NPIs and people who refused the vaccine get sick and die, or you have them and they don't get sick and don't die until you get rid of the NPIs or the viral R value overwhelms your NPIs (see Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium etc...). These are the options, Chris Whitty laid them out very well at the end of June when the government went ahead with the full reopening in July. An infection displaced isn't an infection prevented.
You would be right, if there had been zero vaccinations happening between July and now. However, not only have there been lots of vaccinations in that period, but I'm also arguing that with better government management there could have been substantially more, and that the NPIs could have been better targeted.
Those who want to be vaccinated have been by and large. Only the JCVIs prevarication stalled childhood ones and even those are well underway now.
The question is how to get everyone else covered and the only answer is to drop NPIs and let nature take its course.
You're completely missing the wood for the trees. Even in France they've hit what? 75% of the population with two doses? We're at ~68%. There are simply far, far too many people who will decide the vaccine isn't for them, I think only Portugal has got double vax rates high enough to avoid a severe enough exit wave to cause a lockdown, they're at 88%. The chances of the UK getting to 88% double vaxxed are literally zero, we don't even give 12-15 year olds two doses yet!
Again, your strategy would have had us entering the winter with maybe 75% double jabbed rather than 68% but it would also have meant 8-9m fewer infections from July to December. How would the 25% get any immunity heading into the winter months? We'd be facing the same bloody situation as most of Europe, surging infection rates and not enough hospital capacity to handle it.
It's not binary. Yes, opening up was the correct decision (in fact I argued for a slightly earlier re-opening). That doesn't mean that the execution of that decision was optimal.
It is binary, either you live with no NPIs and people who refused the vaccine get sick and die, or you have them and they don't get sick and don't die until you get rid of the NPIs or the viral R value overwhelms your NPIs (see Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium etc...). These are the options, Chris Whitty laid them out very well at the end of June when the government went ahead with the full reopening in July. An infection displaced isn't an infection prevented.
You would be right, if there had been zero vaccinations happening between July and now. However, not only have there been lots of vaccinations in that period, but I'm also arguing that with better government management there could have been substantially more.
Once again, you're missing the point of the strategy. Vaccine passports would act to reduce the infection rate, not because people get vaccinated (I mean the French vaccination rate isn't substantially better than here like Portugal) but because they won't go out in the first place. That's what the main effect of NPIs is, to reduce interaction between people so that the infection rate goes down. In your scenario the UK implemented the same or similar NPIs to the rest of Europe, we lorded it over plague states in the US and then shat ourselves this week.
Completely off topic but I've just started playing online poker as a hobby - I used to play each week in a pub tournament for a few years before the pandemic but I haven't played since before the pandemic began until recently. I like tournaments where you get potentially a couple of hours play from a small buy-in and are capped at losing your entry fee and that's that . . . the way I've always viewed it is I'd pay a comparable fee to go eg bowling or to a movie etc so I'm paying for the entertainment with that amount and any small amount won back is a bonus.
I had a morning off this morning so I thought I'd give it a go and bought a $4.40 satellite ticket to a $33 buy-in tournament. Managed to win a seat to the main event from the satellite. Even getting 6th (the lowest prize) would be my biggest ever poker win and I certainly wasn't expecting that, but I actually managed to win the whole tournament. First place prize $432.20 from a $33 ticket I'd won for a $4.40 buy-in.
Over the moon with that, but I wanted to mention it here not to show off but because the one thing I don't want is to get intoxicated from that victory and develop a problem habit; so I thought I'd mention it to a group of people here many of whom probably gamble overall more than I do. I'm happy but want to keep my feet firmly on the ground.
Which company? I tried a few back in the day and the weirdest one was Betfair. The number of times you'd see three players in a single deal get pocket Qs, Ks, and As was astounding. It made me feel that there was an algorithm dealing people powerful hands to encourage looser play and so knocking people out faster. I can't prove anything of course, but it felt a bit deliberate.
888
I doubt there's any funny business but the thing to remember with Hold Em is that you'll disproportionately see good cards when it comes to a showdown. Since crap gets mucked those with QQ, KK or AA will end up showing those hands while all the 72 that got dealt to other players you'll almost never see.
One of the best lessons I learnt from the good player I mentioned before is too be very wary of an Ace with a poor kicker. I used to go in almost any time I had an Ace [and lots of poor players do] but as he said to me the problem is even if you hit your Ace, you'll never know if someone else is in the hand with an Ace and a better kicker.
Thus today I quite often folded hands like A4 or A6 that when I first started playing I'd have gone in with - then seeing something like AQ at showdown and I'd have lost that hand had I gone in with my Ace.
I'm trying to do a calculation to work out on an 8-player table the chances that there are is a pocket A pair, a pocket K pair, and a pocket Q pair out there in a single deal. It "feels" like a 1000/1 shot, but I can't work out the odds.
Its extremely unlikely, sure probably even less likely than that. Though I doubt it actually happened many times and false recall will merge people showing AA versus KK with another time someone showed KK versus QQ and that's not that unusual.
One factor to bear in mind with the difference between online and real-life poker is how fast online poker is. In a pub, house or even a casino people play much slower, the cards get physically shuffled then dealt, conversations are had, people play in turn etc . . . online there's no interruption, no shuffling, the cards are shown almost instantaneously and people can queue the fact they're folding so everyone who's folding is out of the hand instantly.
As a result in online poker you'll face many, many more hands per hour than you will in physical poker. Which means that 'rare' hands can and will come up from time to time.
According to my software since I started playing earlier this month, I've been in over ten thousand hands already.
If you play ten thousand hands then you're going to see a few 1000/1 shots in those hands.
@Farooq - define the precise conditions - how many packs of cards etc, and I'll have a stab at working it out for you. I'm not familiar with poker terms, so you'll have to specify those too.
Already been done elsewhere, about 1 in 25,000 if it was an 8 handed table.
Brilliant! Now, considering I saw this happen a good dozen times at least, I'm back to thinking there was something fishy going on.
I'll see if I can check through the maths but it's making my head hurt looking at it, so I might program a Monte Carlo simulation this evening and run it a few million times to see whether I get something in the same ball park. There's no way I should have seen this happen more than about three times. I doubt I've ever played even 25,000 hands of poker, let alone 300,000.
Remember to account for the hundreds of thousands (estimate) of players as well. If none of them were seeing this more often than normal then it would be fixed. Others might have seen an unusual amount of AA v AA hands, or AK v AK v QQ hands etc which they remember.
That's a fair point, but it hasn't helped my headache.
The online player community found (and proved beyond reasonable doubt) some very obscure cases of cheating going on. If a major site was doing as you say, it would have been known about.
The thing is with games of chance online is that you're pretty close to the "infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters" scenario.
Almost any odd thing you can think of has probably happened to someone, somewhere, at some time. If it hadn't, that'd be an issue!
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Chill. The allegation that this was deliberately engineered by the Home Sec to satisfy "ghouls" who exist and say stuff in your head is off-the-scale batshit, up there with your attack on @TimT for saying the diametrical opposite of what he actually said. Good lunch?
It is an utterly disgraceful comment and is beyond excuse
Which bit was disgraceful. That Farage-supporters are out there actively calling for asylum seekers to be drowned? Thats out there on Twitter. That the Home Secretary is pandering to those voters? She is according to HYUFD, thats the remaining core Tory vote after northerners are driven away. That tow backs and interventions with large boats will cause small dinghys to sink? Thats obvious surely. That they tried to criminalise the RNLI? Thats long since been covered and corrected by the government.
So again, where is it disgraceful. We can't stop these boats, we can't intercept the people getting off the ones who land here successfully which is almost all of them. So if we want it to stop we need to work with the rest of Europe. Might help if we actually had a channel to accept a reasonable number of asylum seekers rather than the trickle who come here vs the much larger numbers in France etc etc.
Your comments are unacceptable and your reference to twitter to try to justify your comments says it all
You are driven by an all encompassing hatred of this government and do not add to a very serious debate
You aren't saying how they are unacceptable.
It is a fact that ghouls are on Farage's twitter feed right now saying awful things. It is a declared risk that her proposed solutions to the boats would sink some. It is a fact that by accident or design a bill would have had the RNLI criminalised for picking people out of the water after having their boat sunk.
When you stop thinking rationally and go back to blind loyalty to the government you start going on about my "all-encompassing hatred of this government". You miss my pro-Sunak and pro-furlough comments which I make a lot.
My views aren't the issue, nor do they somehow change the facts on hand.
As for not adding to serious debate I have made a very serious proposal. We can't stop the boats. We can't detain the people who get off the boats. So if we want to process asylum seekers off-shore the simple solution is offer them a plane ride from Calais airport to Albania or wherever.
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Chill. The allegation that this was deliberately engineered by the Home Sec to satisfy "ghouls" who exist and say stuff in your head is off-the-scale batshit, up there with your attack on @TimT for saying the diametrical opposite of what he actually said. Good lunch?
It is an utterly disgraceful comment and is beyond excuse
For a Home Secretary who has said she wants to bring back hanging 'and if occasionally they get the wrong person it's unfortunate' there is little anyone can say about her that could be described as 'disgraceful'
Problem here is that there are no easy solutions - although on the upside the person who has to deal with it deserves to have an impossible job that is totally her responsibility with all blame points at her.
Indeed. What is so great about a whole life tariff for someone about whom an unrectifiable mistake has been made? Anti-hanging people might want to describe that too as unfortunate? And would they be mocked in the same way for doing so? No easy solutions.
How would the Macron treatment have worked any better in the UK than in France? I wouldn't want to swap places with them right now, even leaving aside that the French response to coersion seems to have been much more favourable than in Scotland or Wales which suggests we'd have had an even worse trajectory than them.
It's worked extremely well in France, overcoming vaccine resistance very effectively.
As for swapping places, well their cumulative deaths per million are substantially lower than ours, although of course most of that is accounted for by the Boris disaster of last winter. Their vax stats are such that they shouldn't do too badly in this winter.
I think you're significantly overestimating their vaccination programme. It's been good at overcoming the inertia based won't vaccinate cohort but not at overcoming the "natural immunity is best" cohort, which is a big number. Additionally, their spread of vaccination is poorer than ours, they've done a bunch of vaccines for under 18s and under 30s, more than we have for sure, but that won't really change the picture for hospitalisations. In the crucial over 60s cohorts they are quite far below our vaccination rates and far, far below our triple jab rate.
Additionally, they haven't got the wall of natural immunity among big sections of the won't vaccinate cohort that we have.
As I said, you've completely missed why the UK strategy was preferable to what the French have done. I wouldn't trade our position for their one going into winter this year.
Yes, I agree that the age distribution of vaccination is better here in the UK - as I said earlier, it's one of the things we got right. Still, France is better than most on that measure, and Macron has done well to overcome vaccine resistance which a year ago was amongst the worst in Europe (although I did say at the time that I thought they'd fall in line eventually).
Sure, but vaccination isn't enough to get to the herd immunity threshold, at least not 68% or 75%. Portugal at 88% will get there assuming they do third doses for all 88%. That's the endgame for the virus and heading into the winter the UK is at the cusp of herd immunity, our infection rate is fairly stable and hospitalisations are falling as well as numbers in hospital. France is millions and millions of infections or new vaccines away from herd immunity. They've probably reached the limit of who will get jabbed at 75% which means there are a very large number of people who are completely virus vulnerable without any antibodies.
The reason the UK strategy of having no NPIs is correct is that our cohort of completely virus vulnerable people is now extremely low and our cohort of people with waning immunity is shrinking by ~2.5m per week. It was the right strategy in July and it leaves us one of just a handful of countries not heading into Xmas looking at lockdowns.
The figure that needs looking at is what proportion of people are 'naive' to the virus. What proportion of people are neither vaccinated, nor recovered from infection. If you suppress infections then you're not reducing your proportion of people without immunity.
It does seem like the best way to maximise immunity is vaccinated plus infected which both minimises symptoms while infected and provides a good level of protection going forwards - and the UK has a high proportion of that.
Eventually every country will end up with a situation with almost no naive hosts in the vulnerable age ranges. Everyone will catch covid as a child and then several times as an adult, which will act like a natural immunisation programme.
The UK is already very close to this endemic phase but other countries, even those with apparently successful handling so far, will struggle to transition without facing up to some difficult decisions.
I'm really worried that they won't, even after winter lockdowns they will try and push their exit wave into the future for some unknown reason or benefit. European countries seem to have adopted can kicking as a national strategy. I fear that in the summer of next year most European countries will still be enforcing mask wearing, social distancing and vaccine passports.
It is binary, either you live with no NPIs and people who refused the vaccine get sick and die, or you have them and they don't get sick and don't die until you get rid of the NPIs or the viral R value overwhelms your NPIs (see Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium etc...). These are the options, Chris Whitty laid them out very well at the end of June when the government went ahead with the full reopening in July. An infection displaced isn't an infection prevented.
You would be right, if there had been zero vaccinations happening between July and now. However, not only have there been lots of vaccinations in that period, but I'm also arguing that with better government management there could have been substantially more, and that the NPIs could have been better targeted.
Those who want to be vaccinated have been by and large. Only the JCVIs prevarication stalled childhood ones and even those are well underway now.
The question is how to get everyone else covered and the only answer is to drop NPIs and let nature take its course.
Well, the fact of the matter is that the UK's proportion of the unjabbed is higher than some other comparable countries, despite the fact that the UK has less anti-vax sentiment than most countries, Yes, we did a very good job reaching the most vulnerable cohorts, but there is absolutely no getting away from the fact that we've done a poor job of reaching the under 50s and especially under 40s, We have been paying the price in deaths and hospitalisations.
Yes, of course it is their 'own fault', but the situation was undoubtedly made worse by government complacency, mixed messaging, and failure to take measures to nudge people into getting jabbed. Even France has done better than us in those cohorts, and Portugal and Ireland much better. The fact that we got off to a very good start with the vaccination programme doesn't excuse losing the plot in the later stages.
Completely off topic but I've just started playing online poker as a hobby - I used to play each week in a pub tournament for a few years before the pandemic but I haven't played since before the pandemic began until recently. I like tournaments where you get potentially a couple of hours play from a small buy-in and are capped at losing your entry fee and that's that . . . the way I've always viewed it is I'd pay a comparable fee to go eg bowling or to a movie etc so I'm paying for the entertainment with that amount and any small amount won back is a bonus.
I had a morning off this morning so I thought I'd give it a go and bought a $4.40 satellite ticket to a $33 buy-in tournament. Managed to win a seat to the main event from the satellite. Even getting 6th (the lowest prize) would be my biggest ever poker win and I certainly wasn't expecting that, but I actually managed to win the whole tournament. First place prize $432.20 from a $33 ticket I'd won for a $4.40 buy-in.
Over the moon with that, but I wanted to mention it here not to show off but because the one thing I don't want is to get intoxicated from that victory and develop a problem habit; so I thought I'd mention it to a group of people here many of whom probably gamble overall more than I do. I'm happy but want to keep my feet firmly on the ground.
Which company? I tried a few back in the day and the weirdest one was Betfair. The number of times you'd see three players in a single deal get pocket Qs, Ks, and As was astounding. It made me feel that there was an algorithm dealing people powerful hands to encourage looser play and so knocking people out faster. I can't prove anything of course, but it felt a bit deliberate.
888
I doubt there's any funny business but the thing to remember with Hold Em is that you'll disproportionately see good cards when it comes to a showdown. Since crap gets mucked those with QQ, KK or AA will end up showing those hands while all the 72 that got dealt to other players you'll almost never see.
One of the best lessons I learnt from the good player I mentioned before is too be very wary of an Ace with a poor kicker. I used to go in almost any time I had an Ace [and lots of poor players do] but as he said to me the problem is even if you hit your Ace, you'll never know if someone else is in the hand with an Ace and a better kicker.
Thus today I quite often folded hands like A4 or A6 that when I first started playing I'd have gone in with - then seeing something like AQ at showdown and I'd have lost that hand had I gone in with my Ace.
I'm trying to do a calculation to work out on an 8-player table the chances that there are is a pocket A pair, a pocket K pair, and a pocket Q pair out there in a single deal. It "feels" like a 1000/1 shot, but I can't work out the odds.
Its extremely unlikely, sure probably even less likely than that. Though I doubt it actually happened many times and false recall will merge people showing AA versus KK with another time someone showed KK versus QQ and that's not that unusual.
One factor to bear in mind with the difference between online and real-life poker is how fast online poker is. In a pub, house or even a casino people play much slower, the cards get physically shuffled then dealt, conversations are had, people play in turn etc . . . online there's no interruption, no shuffling, the cards are shown almost instantaneously and people can queue the fact they're folding so everyone who's folding is out of the hand instantly.
As a result in online poker you'll face many, many more hands per hour than you will in physical poker. Which means that 'rare' hands can and will come up from time to time.
According to my software since I started playing earlier this month, I've been in over ten thousand hands already.
If you play ten thousand hands then you're going to see a few 1000/1 shots in those hands.
@Farooq - define the precise conditions - how many packs of cards etc, and I'll have a stab at working it out for you. I'm not familiar with poker terms, so you'll have to specify those too.
Already been done elsewhere, about 1 in 25,000 if it was an 8 handed table.
Brilliant! Now, considering I saw this happen a good dozen times at least, I'm back to thinking there was something fishy going on.
I'll see if I can check through the maths but it's making my head hurt looking at it, so I might program a Monte Carlo simulation this evening and run it a few million times to see whether I get something in the same ball park. There's no way I should have seen this happen more than about three times. I doubt I've ever played even 25,000 hands of poker, let alone 300,000.
Remember to account for the hundreds of thousands (estimate) of players as well. If none of them were seeing this more often than normal then it would be fixed. Others might have seen an unusual amount of AA v AA hands, or AK v AK v QQ hands etc which they remember.
That's a fair point, but it hasn't helped my headache.
The online player community found (and proved beyond reasonable doubt) some very obscure cases of cheating going on. If a major site was doing as you say, it would have been known about.
The thing is with games of chance online is that you're pretty close to the "infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters" scenario.
Almost any odd thing you can think of has probably happened to someone, somewhere, at some time. If it hadn't, that'd be an issue!
Exactly. The classic case is that poor woman who found herself in court accused of child murder, because two of her babies had suffered cot deaths. A key witness was a statistician who argued that the chances of her having had two cot deaths were infinitesimal. Whereas the right question to ask was, what is the chance that any mother would suffer two cot deaths (particularly given the correlation of such sad occurrences with various environmental factors) and then find herself suspected of foul play.
It is binary, either you live with no NPIs and people who refused the vaccine get sick and die, or you have them and they don't get sick and don't die until you get rid of the NPIs or the viral R value overwhelms your NPIs (see Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium etc...). These are the options, Chris Whitty laid them out very well at the end of June when the government went ahead with the full reopening in July. An infection displaced isn't an infection prevented.
You would be right, if there had been zero vaccinations happening between July and now. However, not only have there been lots of vaccinations in that period, but I'm also arguing that with better government management there could have been substantially more, and that the NPIs could have been better targeted.
Those who want to be vaccinated have been by and large. Only the JCVIs prevarication stalled childhood ones and even those are well underway now.
The question is how to get everyone else covered and the only answer is to drop NPIs and let nature take its course.
Yup - all the polling and other data is that take up is above the apparent willingness thresholds in various groups in the UK.
Sweden's first ever female prime minister has resigned just hours after she was appointed.
Magdalena Andersson, was announced as leader on Wednesday but resigned after her coalition partner quit the government and her budget failed to pass...
Ms Andersson was elected as prime minister earlier on Wednesday because under Swedish law, she only needed a majority of MPs not to vote against her...Of the 349 members of the Riksdag, 174 voted against her. But on top of the 117 MPs who backed Ms Andersson, a further 57 abstained, giving her victory by a single vote.
More than a whiff of misogyny is in the air. It is striking that there is no comparably zealous campaign to abandon the word “men” in favour of “prostate-havers”, “ejaculators” or “bodies with testicles”. It is almost always women who are being ordered to dispense with a useful word they have used all their lives.
Whilst I agree with them on most of the trans debate questions, the conversation is usually about women because of campaign success in marketing women as eternally oppressed victims with limited agency, and men/boys who suffer abuse etc tend to be silenced.
The phrases "violence against women and girls" and "Women and Equalities Committee" capture the predominant attitude of the contemporary debate perfectly.
+ this.
A rather prominent charity used to have a website that, if you claimed to be a woman, went to help services about abuse. If you claimed to be a man, went to a 'you are an abuser, you evil scum. Here's how you can get help.' page.
It was a women's charity, but it was well-known and its name was non-gendered. Any man wanting to go there for help would be treated as a perpetrator, not a victim. And 1/3 of all victims of abuse are male.
I sent them a strongly-worded email, and it changed - with a link to a charity helping men. I'd like to think that was down to me, but who knows ...
I seem to recall probably apocryphal tales of police policies of when there was a call out re domestic abuse to automatically arrest the man, regardless of who made the call and what it was about.
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Chill. The allegation that this was deliberately engineered by the Home Sec to satisfy "ghouls" who exist and say stuff in your head is off-the-scale batshit, up there with your attack on @TimT for saying the diametrical opposite of what he actually said. Good lunch?
It is an utterly disgraceful comment and is beyond excuse
Which bit was disgraceful. That Farage-supporters are out there actively calling for asylum seekers to be drowned? Thats out there on Twitter. That the Home Secretary is pandering to those voters? She is according to HYUFD, thats the remaining core Tory vote after northerners are driven away. That tow backs and interventions with large boats will cause small dinghys to sink? Thats obvious surely. That they tried to criminalise the RNLI? Thats long since been covered and corrected by the government.
So again, where is it disgraceful. We can't stop these boats, we can't intercept the people getting off the ones who land here successfully which is almost all of them. So if we want it to stop we need to work with the rest of Europe. Might help if we actually had a channel to accept a reasonable number of asylum seekers rather than the trickle who come here vs the much larger numbers in France etc etc.
Your comments are unacceptable and your reference to twitter to try to justify your comments says it all
You are driven by an all encompassing hatred of this government and do not add to a very serious debate
You aren't saying how they are unacceptable.
It is a fact that ghouls are on Farage's twitter feed right now saying awful things. It is a declared risk that her proposed solutions to the boats would sink some. It is a fact that by accident or design a bill would have had the RNLI criminalised for picking people out of the water after having their boat sunk.
When you stop thinking rationally and go back to blind loyalty to the government you start going on about my "all-encompassing hatred of this government". You miss my pro-Sunak and pro-furlough comments which I make a lot.
My views aren't the issue, nor do they somehow change the facts on hand.
As for not adding to serious debate I have made a very serious proposal. We can't stop the boats. We can't detain the people who get off the boats. So if we want to process asylum seekers off-shore the simple solution is offer them a plane ride from Calais airport to Albania or wherever.
Your repetitive comments about the criminalising the RNLI are pure political spin and as my son who is RNLI crew has just said their operational requirements are not affected by any legislation proposed or otherwise
I am sure you can find ghouls on twitter but David Cameron's comments about twitter are succinct
Even by your own admission you know nothing about boats and your motivation is purely anti HMG propaganda
We can stop or certainly reduce the number of boats crossing and sadly today's tragedy will concentrate minds across the EU-France-EU to take concerted action
Your idea of Albania or anywhere else is rejected by Labour who when asked raised the issue of human rights
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Chill. The allegation that this was deliberately engineered by the Home Sec to satisfy "ghouls" who exist and say stuff in your head is off-the-scale batshit, up there with your attack on @TimT for saying the diametrical opposite of what he actually said. Good lunch?
It is an utterly disgraceful comment and is beyond excuse
Which bit was disgraceful. That Farage-supporters are out there actively calling for asylum seekers to be drowned? Thats out there on Twitter. That the Home Secretary is pandering to those voters? She is according to HYUFD, thats the remaining core Tory vote after northerners are driven away. That tow backs and interventions with large boats will cause small dinghys to sink? Thats obvious surely. That they tried to criminalise the RNLI? Thats long since been covered and corrected by the government.
So again, where is it disgraceful. We can't stop these boats, we can't intercept the people getting off the ones who land here successfully which is almost all of them. So if we want it to stop we need to work with the rest of Europe. Might help if we actually had a channel to accept a reasonable number of asylum seekers rather than the trickle who come here vs the much larger numbers in France etc etc.
Your comments are unacceptable and your reference to twitter to try to justify your comments says it all
You are driven by an all encompassing hatred of this government and do not add to a very serious debate
Please, someone make Big G moderator and give him absolute power to remove posts he finds unacceptable!
It is binary, either you live with no NPIs and people who refused the vaccine get sick and die, or you have them and they don't get sick and don't die until you get rid of the NPIs or the viral R value overwhelms your NPIs (see Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium etc...). These are the options, Chris Whitty laid them out very well at the end of June when the government went ahead with the full reopening in July. An infection displaced isn't an infection prevented.
You would be right, if there had been zero vaccinations happening between July and now. However, not only have there been lots of vaccinations in that period, but I'm also arguing that with better government management there could have been substantially more, and that the NPIs could have been better targeted.
Those who want to be vaccinated have been by and large. Only the JCVIs prevarication stalled childhood ones and even those are well underway now.
The question is how to get everyone else covered and the only answer is to drop NPIs and let nature take its course.
Well, the fact of the matter is that the UK's proportion of the unjabbed is higher than some other comparable countries, despite the fact that the UK has less anti-vax sentiment than most countries, Yes, we did a very good job reaching the most vulnerable cohorts, but there is absolutely no getting away from the fact that we've done a poor job of reaching the under 50s and especially under 40s, We have been paying the price in deaths and hospitalisations.
Yes, of course it is their 'own fault', but the situation was undoubtedly made worse by government complacency, mixed messaging, and failure to take measures to nudge people into getting jabbed. Even France has done better than us in those cohorts, and Portugal and Ireland much better. The fact that we got off to a very good start with the vaccination programme doesn't excuse losing the plot in the later stages.
Again, those nudges in France are to the exclusion of building up significant natural immunity. Yes, some won't vaccinate people died in the UK, we also have 8-9m of people into the immunity funnel that wouldn't otherwise have it. In France they got an extra 2-3m into their vaccine immunity funnel (compared to the UK on an adjusted basis) yet have missed out natural immunity because they chose to stay indoors rather than vaccinate to socialise.
France is lacking that wall of natural immunity heading into the winter months. Sure it would have been nice if people chose to vaccinate at the same rate as Portugal, but they didn't and the only way they would get immunity before winter was naturally.
The shift from centre-right to centre-left government in Germany is a welcome straw in the wind, after a decade of failure from centre-left politicians.
More than a whiff of misogyny is in the air. It is striking that there is no comparably zealous campaign to abandon the word “men” in favour of “prostate-havers”, “ejaculators” or “bodies with testicles”. It is almost always women who are being ordered to dispense with a useful word they have used all their lives.
Whilst I agree with them on most of the trans debate questions, the conversation is usually about women because of campaign success in marketing women as eternally oppressed victims with limited agency, and men/boys who suffer abuse etc tend to be silenced.
The phrases "violence against women and girls" and "Women and Equalities Committee" capture the predominant attitude of the contemporary debate perfectly.
+ this.
A rather prominent charity used to have a website that, if you claimed to be a woman, went to help services about abuse. If you claimed to be a man, went to a 'you are an abuser, you evil scum. Here's how you can get help.' page.
It was a women's charity, but it was well-known and its name was non-gendered. Any man wanting to go there for help would be treated as a perpetrator, not a victim. And 1/3 of all victims of abuse are male.
I sent them a strongly-worded email, and it changed - with a link to a charity helping men. I'd like to think that was down to me, but who knows ...
I seem to recall probably apocryphal tales of police policies of when there was a call out re domestic abuse to automatically arrest the man, regardless of who made the call and what it was about.
Um, frankly, there's worse rules of thumb. I'd love to know where this 1/3 stat comes from.
Completely off topic but I've just started playing online poker as a hobby - I used to play each week in a pub tournament for a few years before the pandemic but I haven't played since before the pandemic began until recently. I like tournaments where you get potentially a couple of hours play from a small buy-in and are capped at losing your entry fee and that's that . . . the way I've always viewed it is I'd pay a comparable fee to go eg bowling or to a movie etc so I'm paying for the entertainment with that amount and any small amount won back is a bonus.
I had a morning off this morning so I thought I'd give it a go and bought a $4.40 satellite ticket to a $33 buy-in tournament. Managed to win a seat to the main event from the satellite. Even getting 6th (the lowest prize) would be my biggest ever poker win and I certainly wasn't expecting that, but I actually managed to win the whole tournament. First place prize $432.20 from a $33 ticket I'd won for a $4.40 buy-in.
Over the moon with that, but I wanted to mention it here not to show off but because the one thing I don't want is to get intoxicated from that victory and develop a problem habit; so I thought I'd mention it to a group of people here many of whom probably gamble overall more than I do. I'm happy but want to keep my feet firmly on the ground.
Which company? I tried a few back in the day and the weirdest one was Betfair. The number of times you'd see three players in a single deal get pocket Qs, Ks, and As was astounding. It made me feel that there was an algorithm dealing people powerful hands to encourage looser play and so knocking people out faster. I can't prove anything of course, but it felt a bit deliberate.
888
I doubt there's any funny business but the thing to remember with Hold Em is that you'll disproportionately see good cards when it comes to a showdown. Since crap gets mucked those with QQ, KK or AA will end up showing those hands while all the 72 that got dealt to other players you'll almost never see.
One of the best lessons I learnt from the good player I mentioned before is too be very wary of an Ace with a poor kicker. I used to go in almost any time I had an Ace [and lots of poor players do] but as he said to me the problem is even if you hit your Ace, you'll never know if someone else is in the hand with an Ace and a better kicker.
Thus today I quite often folded hands like A4 or A6 that when I first started playing I'd have gone in with - then seeing something like AQ at showdown and I'd have lost that hand had I gone in with my Ace.
I'm trying to do a calculation to work out on an 8-player table the chances that there are is a pocket A pair, a pocket K pair, and a pocket Q pair out there in a single deal. It "feels" like a 1000/1 shot, but I can't work out the odds.
Its extremely unlikely, sure probably even less likely than that. Though I doubt it actually happened many times and false recall will merge people showing AA versus KK with another time someone showed KK versus QQ and that's not that unusual.
One factor to bear in mind with the difference between online and real-life poker is how fast online poker is. In a pub, house or even a casino people play much slower, the cards get physically shuffled then dealt, conversations are had, people play in turn etc . . . online there's no interruption, no shuffling, the cards are shown almost instantaneously and people can queue the fact they're folding so everyone who's folding is out of the hand instantly.
As a result in online poker you'll face many, many more hands per hour than you will in physical poker. Which means that 'rare' hands can and will come up from time to time.
According to my software since I started playing earlier this month, I've been in over ten thousand hands already.
If you play ten thousand hands then you're going to see a few 1000/1 shots in those hands.
@Farooq - define the precise conditions - how many packs of cards etc, and I'll have a stab at working it out for you. I'm not familiar with poker terms, so you'll have to specify those too.
Already been done elsewhere, about 1 in 25,000 if it was an 8 handed table.
Brilliant! Now, considering I saw this happen a good dozen times at least, I'm back to thinking there was something fishy going on.
I'll see if I can check through the maths but it's making my head hurt looking at it, so I might program a Monte Carlo simulation this evening and run it a few million times to see whether I get something in the same ball park. There's no way I should have seen this happen more than about three times. I doubt I've ever played even 25,000 hands of poker, let alone 300,000.
Remember to account for the hundreds of thousands (estimate) of players as well. If none of them were seeing this more often than normal then it would be fixed. Others might have seen an unusual amount of AA v AA hands, or AK v AK v QQ hands etc which they remember.
That's a fair point, but it hasn't helped my headache.
The online player community found (and proved beyond reasonable doubt) some very obscure cases of cheating going on. If a major site was doing as you say, it would have been known about.
The thing is with games of chance online is that you're pretty close to the "infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters" scenario.
Almost any odd thing you can think of has probably happened to someone, somewhere, at some time. If it hadn't, that'd be an issue!
Exactly. The classic case is that poor woman who found herself in court accused of child murder, because two of her babies had suffered cot deaths. A key witness was a statistician who argued that the chances of her having had two cot deaths were infinitesimal. Whereas the right question to ask was, what is the chance that any mother would suffer two cot deaths (particularly given the correlation of such sad occurrences with various environmental factors) and then find herself suspected of foul play.
On point of order - the infamous 1 in 73 million figure witness was a paediatrician, not a statistician. He didn't understand statistics or probability and simply multiplied two figures together to get that one.
Name of Roy Meadow, knighted for services as an expert witness, almost all of which testimony turned out to be at the very least wrong.
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Chill. The allegation that this was deliberately engineered by the Home Sec to satisfy "ghouls" who exist and say stuff in your head is off-the-scale batshit, up there with your attack on @TimT for saying the diametrical opposite of what he actually said. Good lunch?
It is an utterly disgraceful comment and is beyond excuse
Which bit was disgraceful. That Farage-supporters are out there actively calling for asylum seekers to be drowned? Thats out there on Twitter. That the Home Secretary is pandering to those voters? She is according to HYUFD, thats the remaining core Tory vote after northerners are driven away. That tow backs and interventions with large boats will cause small dinghys to sink? Thats obvious surely. That they tried to criminalise the RNLI? Thats long since been covered and corrected by the government.
So again, where is it disgraceful. We can't stop these boats, we can't intercept the people getting off the ones who land here successfully which is almost all of them. So if we want it to stop we need to work with the rest of Europe. Might help if we actually had a channel to accept a reasonable number of asylum seekers rather than the trickle who come here vs the much larger numbers in France etc etc.
Your comments are unacceptable and your reference to twitter to try to justify your comments says it all
You are driven by an all encompassing hatred of this government and do not add to a very serious debate
Please, someone make Big G moderator and give him absolute power to remove posts he finds unacceptable!
Why on earth would anyone do that
We can disagree and call out comments we feel are unacceptable and argue the case
It is binary, either you live with no NPIs and people who refused the vaccine get sick and die, or you have them and they don't get sick and don't die until you get rid of the NPIs or the viral R value overwhelms your NPIs (see Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium etc...). These are the options, Chris Whitty laid them out very well at the end of June when the government went ahead with the full reopening in July. An infection displaced isn't an infection prevented.
You would be right, if there had been zero vaccinations happening between July and now. However, not only have there been lots of vaccinations in that period, but I'm also arguing that with better government management there could have been substantially more, and that the NPIs could have been better targeted.
Those who want to be vaccinated have been by and large. Only the JCVIs prevarication stalled childhood ones and even those are well underway now.
The question is how to get everyone else covered and the only answer is to drop NPIs and let nature take its course.
Drop Narcissistic Personality Inventories? How would that help?
I would suggest serious consideration of arming the NHS with hypodermic darts for self defence.
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Chill. The allegation that this was deliberately engineered by the Home Sec to satisfy "ghouls" who exist and say stuff in your head is off-the-scale batshit, up there with your attack on @TimT for saying the diametrical opposite of what he actually said. Good lunch?
It is an utterly disgraceful comment and is beyond excuse
Which bit was disgraceful. That Farage-supporters are out there actively calling for asylum seekers to be drowned? Thats out there on Twitter. That the Home Secretary is pandering to those voters? She is according to HYUFD, thats the remaining core Tory vote after northerners are driven away. That tow backs and interventions with large boats will cause small dinghys to sink? Thats obvious surely. That they tried to criminalise the RNLI? Thats long since been covered and corrected by the government.
So again, where is it disgraceful. We can't stop these boats, we can't intercept the people getting off the ones who land here successfully which is almost all of them. So if we want it to stop we need to work with the rest of Europe. Might help if we actually had a channel to accept a reasonable number of asylum seekers rather than the trickle who come here vs the much larger numbers in France etc etc.
Your comments are unacceptable and your reference to twitter to try to justify your comments says it all
You are driven by an all encompassing hatred of this government and do not add to a very serious debate
You aren't saying how they are unacceptable.
It is a fact that ghouls are on Farage's twitter feed right now saying awful things. It is a declared risk that her proposed solutions to the boats would sink some. It is a fact that by accident or design a bill would have had the RNLI criminalised for picking people out of the water after having their boat sunk.
When you stop thinking rationally and go back to blind loyalty to the government you start going on about my "all-encompassing hatred of this government". You miss my pro-Sunak and pro-furlough comments which I make a lot.
My views aren't the issue, nor do they somehow change the facts on hand.
As for not adding to serious debate I have made a very serious proposal. We can't stop the boats. We can't detain the people who get off the boats. So if we want to process asylum seekers off-shore the simple solution is offer them a plane ride from Calais airport to Albania or wherever.
Your repetitive comments about the criminalising the RNLI are pure political spin and as my son who is RNLI crew has just said their operational requirements are not affected by any legislation proposed or otherwise
I am sure you can find ghouls on twitter but David Cameron's comments about twitter are succinct
Even by your own admission you know nothing about boats and your motivation is purely anti HMG propaganda
We can stop or certainly reduce the number of boats crossing and sadly today's tragedy will concentrate minds across the EU-France-EU to take concerted action
Your idea of Albania or anywhere else is rejected by Labour who when asked raised the issue of human rights
The criminalisation of the RNLI was still in the bill a couple of days ago. Not sure if it has been removed yet.
That's been in the bill an awfully long time, right in print in a proposed set of new laws, for something that you dismiss as political spin.
Completely off topic but I've just started playing online poker as a hobby - I used to play each week in a pub tournament for a few years before the pandemic but I haven't played since before the pandemic began until recently. I like tournaments where you get potentially a couple of hours play from a small buy-in and are capped at losing your entry fee and that's that . . . the way I've always viewed it is I'd pay a comparable fee to go eg bowling or to a movie etc so I'm paying for the entertainment with that amount and any small amount won back is a bonus.
I had a morning off this morning so I thought I'd give it a go and bought a $4.40 satellite ticket to a $33 buy-in tournament. Managed to win a seat to the main event from the satellite. Even getting 6th (the lowest prize) would be my biggest ever poker win and I certainly wasn't expecting that, but I actually managed to win the whole tournament. First place prize $432.20 from a $33 ticket I'd won for a $4.40 buy-in.
Over the moon with that, but I wanted to mention it here not to show off but because the one thing I don't want is to get intoxicated from that victory and develop a problem habit; so I thought I'd mention it to a group of people here many of whom probably gamble overall more than I do. I'm happy but want to keep my feet firmly on the ground.
Which company? I tried a few back in the day and the weirdest one was Betfair. The number of times you'd see three players in a single deal get pocket Qs, Ks, and As was astounding. It made me feel that there was an algorithm dealing people powerful hands to encourage looser play and so knocking people out faster. I can't prove anything of course, but it felt a bit deliberate.
888
I doubt there's any funny business but the thing to remember with Hold Em is that you'll disproportionately see good cards when it comes to a showdown. Since crap gets mucked those with QQ, KK or AA will end up showing those hands while all the 72 that got dealt to other players you'll almost never see.
One of the best lessons I learnt from the good player I mentioned before is too be very wary of an Ace with a poor kicker. I used to go in almost any time I had an Ace [and lots of poor players do] but as he said to me the problem is even if you hit your Ace, you'll never know if someone else is in the hand with an Ace and a better kicker.
Thus today I quite often folded hands like A4 or A6 that when I first started playing I'd have gone in with - then seeing something like AQ at showdown and I'd have lost that hand had I gone in with my Ace.
I'm trying to do a calculation to work out on an 8-player table the chances that there are is a pocket A pair, a pocket K pair, and a pocket Q pair out there in a single deal. It "feels" like a 1000/1 shot, but I can't work out the odds.
Its extremely unlikely, sure probably even less likely than that. Though I doubt it actually happened many times and false recall will merge people showing AA versus KK with another time someone showed KK versus QQ and that's not that unusual.
One factor to bear in mind with the difference between online and real-life poker is how fast online poker is. In a pub, house or even a casino people play much slower, the cards get physically shuffled then dealt, conversations are had, people play in turn etc . . . online there's no interruption, no shuffling, the cards are shown almost instantaneously and people can queue the fact they're folding so everyone who's folding is out of the hand instantly.
As a result in online poker you'll face many, many more hands per hour than you will in physical poker. Which means that 'rare' hands can and will come up from time to time.
According to my software since I started playing earlier this month, I've been in over ten thousand hands already.
If you play ten thousand hands then you're going to see a few 1000/1 shots in those hands.
@Farooq - define the precise conditions - how many packs of cards etc, and I'll have a stab at working it out for you. I'm not familiar with poker terms, so you'll have to specify those too.
Already been done elsewhere, about 1 in 25,000 if it was an 8 handed table.
Brilliant! Now, considering I saw this happen a good dozen times at least, I'm back to thinking there was something fishy going on.
I'll see if I can check through the maths but it's making my head hurt looking at it, so I might program a Monte Carlo simulation this evening and run it a few million times to see whether I get something in the same ball park. There's no way I should have seen this happen more than about three times. I doubt I've ever played even 25,000 hands of poker, let alone 300,000.
Remember to account for the hundreds of thousands (estimate) of players as well. If none of them were seeing this more often than normal then it would be fixed. Others might have seen an unusual amount of AA v AA hands, or AK v AK v QQ hands etc which they remember.
That's a fair point, but it hasn't helped my headache.
The online player community found (and proved beyond reasonable doubt) some very obscure cases of cheating going on. If a major site was doing as you say, it would have been known about.
The thing is with games of chance online is that you're pretty close to the "infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters" scenario.
Almost any odd thing you can think of has probably happened to someone, somewhere, at some time. If it hadn't, that'd be an issue!
Exactly. The classic case is that poor woman who found herself in court accused of child murder, because two of her babies had suffered cot deaths. A key witness was a statistician who argued that the chances of her having had two cot deaths were infinitesimal. Whereas the right question to ask was, what is the chance that any mother would suffer two cot deaths (particularly given the correlation of such sad occurrences with various environmental factors) and then find herself suspected of foul play.
On point of order - the infamous 1 in 73 million figure witness was a paediatrician, not a statistician. He didn't understand statistics or probability and simply multiplied two figures together to get that one.
Name of Roy Meadow, knighted for services as an expert witness, almost all of which testimony turned out to be at the very least wrong.
Kudos to you. I was working from vague recollection, clearly.
Nevertheless the general lesson - that analysing statistical probability in relation to a single already-happened event, is fraught with danger, remains valid.
Like those people who argue that the chance of the circumstances for intelligent life to have evolved are so unlikely that some Santa-for-adults-in-the-sky must have arranged it all. Yet in the other xx% of cases there is no-one to ask the question.
How would the Macron treatment have worked any better in the UK than in France? I wouldn't want to swap places with them right now, even leaving aside that the French response to coersion seems to have been much more favourable than in Scotland or Wales which suggests we'd have had an even worse trajectory than them.
It's worked extremely well in France, overcoming vaccine resistance very effectively.
As for swapping places, well their cumulative deaths per million are substantially lower than ours, although of course most of that is accounted for by the Boris disaster of last winter. Their vax stats are such that they shouldn't do too badly in this winter.
I think you're significantly overestimating their vaccination programme. It's been good at overcoming the inertia based won't vaccinate cohort but not at overcoming the "natural immunity is best" cohort, which is a big number. Additionally, their spread of vaccination is poorer than ours, they've done a bunch of vaccines for under 18s and under 30s, more than we have for sure, but that won't really change the picture for hospitalisations. In the crucial over 60s cohorts they are quite far below our vaccination rates and far, far below our triple jab rate.
Additionally, they haven't got the wall of natural immunity among big sections of the won't vaccinate cohort that we have.
As I said, you've completely missed why the UK strategy was preferable to what the French have done. I wouldn't trade our position for their one going into winter this year.
Yes, I agree that the age distribution of vaccination is better here in the UK - as I said earlier, it's one of the things we got right. Still, France is better than most on that measure, and Macron has done well to overcome vaccine resistance which a year ago was amongst the worst in Europe (although I did say at the time that I thought they'd fall in line eventually).
Sure, but vaccination isn't enough to get to the herd immunity threshold, at least not 68% or 75%. Portugal at 88% will get there assuming they do third doses for all 88%. That's the endgame for the virus and heading into the winter the UK is at the cusp of herd immunity, our infection rate is fairly stable and hospitalisations are falling as well as numbers in hospital. France is millions and millions of infections or new vaccines away from herd immunity. They've probably reached the limit of who will get jabbed at 75% which means there are a very large number of people who are completely virus vulnerable without any antibodies.
The reason the UK strategy of having no NPIs is correct is that our cohort of completely virus vulnerable people is now extremely low and our cohort of people with waning immunity is shrinking by ~2.5m per week. It was the right strategy in July and it leaves us one of just a handful of countries not heading into Xmas looking at lockdowns.
The figure that needs looking at is what proportion of people are 'naive' to the virus. What proportion of people are neither vaccinated, nor recovered from infection. If you suppress infections then you're not reducing your proportion of people without immunity.
It does seem like the best way to maximise immunity is vaccinated plus infected which both minimises symptoms while infected and provides a good level of protection going forwards - and the UK has a high proportion of that.
Eventually every country will end up with a situation with almost no naive hosts in the vulnerable age ranges. Everyone will catch covid as a child and then several times as an adult, which will act like a natural immunisation programme.
The UK is already very close to this endemic phase but other countries, even those with apparently successful handling so far, will struggle to transition without facing up to some difficult decisions.
I'm really worried that they won't, even after winter lockdowns they will try and push their exit wave into the future for some unknown reason or benefit. European countries seem to have adopted can kicking as a national strategy. I fear that in the summer of next year most European countries will still be enforcing mask wearing, social distancing and vaccine passports.
Give it time. I was sceptical as to whether or not Australia, and especially New Zealand, would ever be able to let go of their fortress mentalities, but they are doing it piece by piece.
If various European states find themselves replaying enormously long Winter lockdowns again (and I note reports of yet more restrictions on the way in France and the Netherlands, with the head of the Dutch ICU doctor's association already screaming for everything to be shut down including the schools,) then I think that people will start to give their governments a good kicking. Especially if their TV news correspondents in London are sending back nightly pictures of festive parties, packed pubs and restaurants, and (happily mask-free) kids trooping through school gates, whilst the people back home are still under house arrest as if the vaccines didn't exist.
This pandemic sometimes feels like it might go on forever, but it will end. They always do.
Sweden's first ever female prime minister has resigned just hours after she was appointed.
Magdalena Andersson, was announced as leader on Wednesday but resigned after her coalition partner quit the government and her budget failed to pass...
Ms Andersson was elected as prime minister earlier on Wednesday because under Swedish law, she only needed a majority of MPs not to vote against her...Of the 349 members of the Riksdag, 174 voted against her. But on top of the 117 MPs who backed Ms Andersson, a further 57 abstained, giving her victory by a single vote.
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Chill. The allegation that this was deliberately engineered by the Home Sec to satisfy "ghouls" who exist and say stuff in your head is off-the-scale batshit, up there with your attack on @TimT for saying the diametrical opposite of what he actually said. Good lunch?
It is an utterly disgraceful comment and is beyond excuse
Which bit was disgraceful. That Farage-supporters are out there actively calling for asylum seekers to be drowned? Thats out there on Twitter. That the Home Secretary is pandering to those voters? She is according to HYUFD, thats the remaining core Tory vote after northerners are driven away. That tow backs and interventions with large boats will cause small dinghys to sink? Thats obvious surely. That they tried to criminalise the RNLI? Thats long since been covered and corrected by the government.
So again, where is it disgraceful. We can't stop these boats, we can't intercept the people getting off the ones who land here successfully which is almost all of them. So if we want it to stop we need to work with the rest of Europe. Might help if we actually had a channel to accept a reasonable number of asylum seekers rather than the trickle who come here vs the much larger numbers in France etc etc.
Your comments are unacceptable and your reference to twitter to try to justify your comments says it all
You are driven by an all encompassing hatred of this government and do not add to a very serious debate
You aren't saying how they are unacceptable.
It is a fact that ghouls are on Farage's twitter feed right now saying awful things. It is a declared risk that her proposed solutions to the boats would sink some. It is a fact that by accident or design a bill would have had the RNLI criminalised for picking people out of the water after having their boat sunk.
When you stop thinking rationally and go back to blind loyalty to the government you start going on about my "all-encompassing hatred of this government". You miss my pro-Sunak and pro-furlough comments which I make a lot.
My views aren't the issue, nor do they somehow change the facts on hand.
As for not adding to serious debate I have made a very serious proposal. We can't stop the boats. We can't detain the people who get off the boats. So if we want to process asylum seekers off-shore the simple solution is offer them a plane ride from Calais airport to Albania or wherever.
Your repetitive comments about the criminalising the RNLI are pure political spin and as my son who is RNLI crew has just said their operational requirements are not affected by any legislation proposed or otherwise
I am sure you can find ghouls on twitter but David Cameron's comments about twitter are succinct
Even by your own admission you know nothing about boats and your motivation is purely anti HMG propaganda
We can stop or certainly reduce the number of boats crossing and sadly today's tragedy will concentrate minds across the EU-France-EU to take concerted action
Your idea of Albania or anywhere else is rejected by Labour who when asked raised the issue of human rights
The criminalisation of the RNLI was still in the bill a couple of days ago. Not sure if it has been removed yet.
That's been in the bill an awfully long time, right in print in a proposed set of new laws, for something that you dismiss as political spin.
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Chill. The allegation that this was deliberately engineered by the Home Sec to satisfy "ghouls" who exist and say stuff in your head is off-the-scale batshit, up there with your attack on @TimT for saying the diametrical opposite of what he actually said. Good lunch?
It is an utterly disgraceful comment and is beyond excuse
Which bit was disgraceful. That Farage-supporters are out there actively calling for asylum seekers to be drowned? Thats out there on Twitter. That the Home Secretary is pandering to those voters? She is according to HYUFD, thats the remaining core Tory vote after northerners are driven away. That tow backs and interventions with large boats will cause small dinghys to sink? Thats obvious surely. That they tried to criminalise the RNLI? Thats long since been covered and corrected by the government.
So again, where is it disgraceful. We can't stop these boats, we can't intercept the people getting off the ones who land here successfully which is almost all of them. So if we want it to stop we need to work with the rest of Europe. Might help if we actually had a channel to accept a reasonable number of asylum seekers rather than the trickle who come here vs the much larger numbers in France etc etc.
Your comments are unacceptable and your reference to twitter to try to justify your comments says it all
You are driven by an all encompassing hatred of this government and do not add to a very serious debate
Please, someone make Big G moderator and give him absolute power to remove posts he finds unacceptable!
Why on earth would anyone do that
We can disagree and call out comments we feel are unacceptable and argue the case
It is binary, either you live with no NPIs and people who refused the vaccine get sick and die, or you have them and they don't get sick and don't die until you get rid of the NPIs or the viral R value overwhelms your NPIs (see Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium etc...). These are the options, Chris Whitty laid them out very well at the end of June when the government went ahead with the full reopening in July. An infection displaced isn't an infection prevented.
You would be right, if there had been zero vaccinations happening between July and now. However, not only have there been lots of vaccinations in that period, but I'm also arguing that with better government management there could have been substantially more, and that the NPIs could have been better targeted.
Those who want to be vaccinated have been by and large. Only the JCVIs prevarication stalled childhood ones and even those are well underway now.
The question is how to get everyone else covered and the only answer is to drop NPIs and let nature take its course.
Well, the fact of the matter is that the UK's proportion of the unjabbed is higher than some other comparable countries, despite the fact that the UK has less anti-vax sentiment than most countries, Yes, we did a very good job reaching the most vulnerable cohorts, but there is absolutely no getting away from the fact that we've done a poor job of reaching the under 50s and especially under 40s, We have been paying the price in deaths and hospitalisations.
Yes, of course it is their 'own fault', but the situation was undoubtedly made worse by government complacency, mixed messaging, and failure to take measures to nudge people into getting jabbed. Even France has done better than us in those cohorts, and Portugal and Ireland much better. The fact that we got off to a very good start with the vaccination programme doesn't excuse losing the plot in the later stages.
My definition of losing the plot on the vaccination programme would be congratulating yourself for making up the numbers by vaccinating teenagers.
Germany's death rate is currently higher than the UK's has been at any time since March and their winter wave is only just beginning.
Completely off topic but I've just started playing online poker as a hobby - I used to play each week in a pub tournament for a few years before the pandemic but I haven't played since before the pandemic began until recently. I like tournaments where you get potentially a couple of hours play from a small buy-in and are capped at losing your entry fee and that's that . . . the way I've always viewed it is I'd pay a comparable fee to go eg bowling or to a movie etc so I'm paying for the entertainment with that amount and any small amount won back is a bonus.
I had a morning off this morning so I thought I'd give it a go and bought a $4.40 satellite ticket to a $33 buy-in tournament. Managed to win a seat to the main event from the satellite. Even getting 6th (the lowest prize) would be my biggest ever poker win and I certainly wasn't expecting that, but I actually managed to win the whole tournament. First place prize $432.20 from a $33 ticket I'd won for a $4.40 buy-in.
Over the moon with that, but I wanted to mention it here not to show off but because the one thing I don't want is to get intoxicated from that victory and develop a problem habit; so I thought I'd mention it to a group of people here many of whom probably gamble overall more than I do. I'm happy but want to keep my feet firmly on the ground.
Which company? I tried a few back in the day and the weirdest one was Betfair. The number of times you'd see three players in a single deal get pocket Qs, Ks, and As was astounding. It made me feel that there was an algorithm dealing people powerful hands to encourage looser play and so knocking people out faster. I can't prove anything of course, but it felt a bit deliberate.
888
I doubt there's any funny business but the thing to remember with Hold Em is that you'll disproportionately see good cards when it comes to a showdown. Since crap gets mucked those with QQ, KK or AA will end up showing those hands while all the 72 that got dealt to other players you'll almost never see.
One of the best lessons I learnt from the good player I mentioned before is too be very wary of an Ace with a poor kicker. I used to go in almost any time I had an Ace [and lots of poor players do] but as he said to me the problem is even if you hit your Ace, you'll never know if someone else is in the hand with an Ace and a better kicker.
Thus today I quite often folded hands like A4 or A6 that when I first started playing I'd have gone in with - then seeing something like AQ at showdown and I'd have lost that hand had I gone in with my Ace.
I'm trying to do a calculation to work out on an 8-player table the chances that there are is a pocket A pair, a pocket K pair, and a pocket Q pair out there in a single deal. It "feels" like a 1000/1 shot, but I can't work out the odds.
Its extremely unlikely, sure probably even less likely than that. Though I doubt it actually happened many times and false recall will merge people showing AA versus KK with another time someone showed KK versus QQ and that's not that unusual.
One factor to bear in mind with the difference between online and real-life poker is how fast online poker is. In a pub, house or even a casino people play much slower, the cards get physically shuffled then dealt, conversations are had, people play in turn etc . . . online there's no interruption, no shuffling, the cards are shown almost instantaneously and people can queue the fact they're folding so everyone who's folding is out of the hand instantly.
As a result in online poker you'll face many, many more hands per hour than you will in physical poker. Which means that 'rare' hands can and will come up from time to time.
According to my software since I started playing earlier this month, I've been in over ten thousand hands already.
If you play ten thousand hands then you're going to see a few 1000/1 shots in those hands.
@Farooq - define the precise conditions - how many packs of cards etc, and I'll have a stab at working it out for you. I'm not familiar with poker terms, so you'll have to specify those too.
Already been done elsewhere, about 1 in 25,000 if it was an 8 handed table.
Brilliant! Now, considering I saw this happen a good dozen times at least, I'm back to thinking there was something fishy going on.
I'll see if I can check through the maths but it's making my head hurt looking at it, so I might program a Monte Carlo simulation this evening and run it a few million times to see whether I get something in the same ball park. There's no way I should have seen this happen more than about three times. I doubt I've ever played even 25,000 hands of poker, let alone 300,000.
Remember to account for the hundreds of thousands (estimate) of players as well. If none of them were seeing this more often than normal then it would be fixed. Others might have seen an unusual amount of AA v AA hands, or AK v AK v QQ hands etc which they remember.
That's a fair point, but it hasn't helped my headache.
The online player community found (and proved beyond reasonable doubt) some very obscure cases of cheating going on. If a major site was doing as you say, it would have been known about.
The thing is with games of chance online is that you're pretty close to the "infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters" scenario.
Almost any odd thing you can think of has probably happened to someone, somewhere, at some time. If it hadn't, that'd be an issue!
Exactly. The classic case is that poor woman who found herself in court accused of child murder, because two of her babies had suffered cot deaths. A key witness was a statistician who argued that the chances of her having had two cot deaths were infinitesimal. Whereas the right question to ask was, what is the chance that any mother would suffer two cot deaths (particularly given the correlation of such sad occurrences with various environmental factors) and then find herself suspected of foul play.
On point of order - the infamous 1 in 73 million figure witness was a paediatrician, not a statistician. He didn't understand statistics or probability and simply multiplied two figures together to get that one.
Name of Roy Meadow, knighted for services as an expert witness, almost all of which testimony turned out to be at the very least wrong.
And had a massive case of James Jesus Angleton's disease.
Sweden's first ever female prime minister has resigned just hours after she was appointed.
Magdalena Andersson, was announced as leader on Wednesday but resigned after her coalition partner quit the government and her budget failed to pass...
Ms Andersson was elected as prime minister earlier on Wednesday because under Swedish law, she only needed a majority of MPs not to vote against her...Of the 349 members of the Riksdag, 174 voted against her. But on top of the 117 MPs who backed Ms Andersson, a further 57 abstained, giving her victory by a single vote.
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Chill. The allegation that this was deliberately engineered by the Home Sec to satisfy "ghouls" who exist and say stuff in your head is off-the-scale batshit, up there with your attack on @TimT for saying the diametrical opposite of what he actually said. Good lunch?
It is an utterly disgraceful comment and is beyond excuse
Which bit was disgraceful. That Farage-supporters are out there actively calling for asylum seekers to be drowned? Thats out there on Twitter. That the Home Secretary is pandering to those voters? She is according to HYUFD, thats the remaining core Tory vote after northerners are driven away. That tow backs and interventions with large boats will cause small dinghys to sink? Thats obvious surely. That they tried to criminalise the RNLI? Thats long since been covered and corrected by the government.
So again, where is it disgraceful. We can't stop these boats, we can't intercept the people getting off the ones who land here successfully which is almost all of them. So if we want it to stop we need to work with the rest of Europe. Might help if we actually had a channel to accept a reasonable number of asylum seekers rather than the trickle who come here vs the much larger numbers in France etc etc.
Your comments are unacceptable and your reference to twitter to try to justify your comments says it all
You are driven by an all encompassing hatred of this government and do not add to a very serious debate
You aren't saying how they are unacceptable.
It is a fact that ghouls are on Farage's twitter feed right now saying awful things. It is a declared risk that her proposed solutions to the boats would sink some. It is a fact that by accident or design a bill would have had the RNLI criminalised for picking people out of the water after having their boat sunk.
When you stop thinking rationally and go back to blind loyalty to the government you start going on about my "all-encompassing hatred of this government". You miss my pro-Sunak and pro-furlough comments which I make a lot.
My views aren't the issue, nor do they somehow change the facts on hand.
As for not adding to serious debate I have made a very serious proposal. We can't stop the boats. We can't detain the people who get off the boats. So if we want to process asylum seekers off-shore the simple solution is offer them a plane ride from Calais airport to Albania or wherever.
Your repetitive comments about the criminalising the RNLI are pure political spin and as my son who is RNLI crew has just said their operational requirements are not affected by any legislation proposed or otherwise
I am sure you can find ghouls on twitter but David Cameron's comments about twitter are succinct
Even by your own admission you know nothing about boats and your motivation is purely anti HMG propaganda
We can stop or certainly reduce the number of boats crossing and sadly today's tragedy will concentrate minds across the EU-France-EU to take concerted action
Your idea of Albania or anywhere else is rejected by Labour who when asked raised the issue of human rights
The criminalisation of the RNLI was still in the bill a couple of days ago. Not sure if it has been removed yet.
That's been in the bill an awfully long time, right in print in a proposed set of new laws, for something that you dismiss as political spin.
It is not passed into law neither will it be
How do you know? Have you got a crystal ball?
Putting it in a Bill in Parliament certainly runs the risk of it being passed, wouldn't you say?
Is HMG doing it for fun? Or because they can't be bothered to delete it?
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Chill. The allegation that this was deliberately engineered by the Home Sec to satisfy "ghouls" who exist and say stuff in your head is off-the-scale batshit, up there with your attack on @TimT for saying the diametrical opposite of what he actually said. Good lunch?
It is an utterly disgraceful comment and is beyond excuse
Which bit was disgraceful. That Farage-supporters are out there actively calling for asylum seekers to be drowned? Thats out there on Twitter. That the Home Secretary is pandering to those voters? She is according to HYUFD, thats the remaining core Tory vote after northerners are driven away. That tow backs and interventions with large boats will cause small dinghys to sink? Thats obvious surely. That they tried to criminalise the RNLI? Thats long since been covered and corrected by the government.
So again, where is it disgraceful. We can't stop these boats, we can't intercept the people getting off the ones who land here successfully which is almost all of them. So if we want it to stop we need to work with the rest of Europe. Might help if we actually had a channel to accept a reasonable number of asylum seekers rather than the trickle who come here vs the much larger numbers in France etc etc.
Your comments are unacceptable and your reference to twitter to try to justify your comments says it all
You are driven by an all encompassing hatred of this government and do not add to a very serious debate
You aren't saying how they are unacceptable.
It is a fact that ghouls are on Farage's twitter feed right now saying awful things. It is a declared risk that her proposed solutions to the boats would sink some. It is a fact that by accident or design a bill would have had the RNLI criminalised for picking people out of the water after having their boat sunk.
When you stop thinking rationally and go back to blind loyalty to the government you start going on about my "all-encompassing hatred of this government". You miss my pro-Sunak and pro-furlough comments which I make a lot.
My views aren't the issue, nor do they somehow change the facts on hand.
As for not adding to serious debate I have made a very serious proposal. We can't stop the boats. We can't detain the people who get off the boats. So if we want to process asylum seekers off-shore the simple solution is offer them a plane ride from Calais airport to Albania or wherever.
Your repetitive comments about the criminalising the RNLI are pure political spin and as my son who is RNLI crew has just said their operational requirements are not affected by any legislation proposed or otherwise
I am sure you can find ghouls on twitter but David Cameron's comments about twitter are succinct
Even by your own admission you know nothing about boats and your motivation is purely anti HMG propaganda
We can stop or certainly reduce the number of boats crossing and sadly today's tragedy will concentrate minds across the EU-France-EU to take concerted action
Your idea of Albania or anywhere else is rejected by Labour who when asked raised the issue of human rights
A couple of responses then lets drop it: 1. I didn't raise the illegality proposed with regards to the RNLI. Others more learned did. Including the RNLI themselves. Its repetitive because its a statement of fact that the RNLI would have been criminalised and you refused to accept it thinking we were attacking your brave son. The reverse is true, its called out to protect him and his comrades risking their lives. 2. I know nothing about boats so defer to the opinions of people who do. 3. "Anti-government propaganda". You're still defending them despite saying that you don't support them any more. What does Labour have to do with anything? Not my party, not my views and I have said repeatedly that I expect the Tories to win the next election with a new leader fit for office.
The shift from centre-right to centre-left government in Germany is a welcome straw in the wind, after a decade of failure from centre-left politicians.
Discuss.
The first item on the agenda for the next German government is going to be locking everybody back up again because Plague. The red and green elements will have no problem with that. The yellow one might be a different kettle of fish. Fun and games.
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Chill. The allegation that this was deliberately engineered by the Home Sec to satisfy "ghouls" who exist and say stuff in your head is off-the-scale batshit, up there with your attack on @TimT for saying the diametrical opposite of what he actually said. Good lunch?
It is an utterly disgraceful comment and is beyond excuse
Which bit was disgraceful. That Farage-supporters are out there actively calling for asylum seekers to be drowned? Thats out there on Twitter. That the Home Secretary is pandering to those voters? She is according to HYUFD, thats the remaining core Tory vote after northerners are driven away. That tow backs and interventions with large boats will cause small dinghys to sink? Thats obvious surely. That they tried to criminalise the RNLI? Thats long since been covered and corrected by the government.
So again, where is it disgraceful. We can't stop these boats, we can't intercept the people getting off the ones who land here successfully which is almost all of them. So if we want it to stop we need to work with the rest of Europe. Might help if we actually had a channel to accept a reasonable number of asylum seekers rather than the trickle who come here vs the much larger numbers in France etc etc.
Your comments are unacceptable and your reference to twitter to try to justify your comments says it all
You are driven by an all encompassing hatred of this government and do not add to a very serious debate
Please, someone make Big G moderator and give him absolute power to remove posts he finds unacceptable!
Why on earth would anyone do that
We can disagree and call out comments we feel are unacceptable and argue the case
More than a whiff of misogyny is in the air. It is striking that there is no comparably zealous campaign to abandon the word “men” in favour of “prostate-havers”, “ejaculators” or “bodies with testicles”. It is almost always women who are being ordered to dispense with a useful word they have used all their lives.
Whilst I agree with them on most of the trans debate questions, the conversation is usually about women because of campaign success in marketing women as eternally oppressed victims with limited agency, and men/boys who suffer abuse etc tend to be silenced.
The phrases "violence against women and girls" and "Women and Equalities Committee" capture the predominant attitude of the contemporary debate perfectly.
+ this.
A rather prominent charity used to have a website that, if you claimed to be a woman, went to help services about abuse. If you claimed to be a man, went to a 'you are an abuser, you evil scum. Here's how you can get help.' page.
It was a women's charity, but it was well-known and its name was non-gendered. Any man wanting to go there for help would be treated as a perpetrator, not a victim. And 1/3 of all victims of abuse are male.
I sent them a strongly-worded email, and it changed - with a link to a charity helping men. I'd like to think that was down to me, but who knows ...
I seem to recall probably apocryphal tales of police policies of when there was a call out re domestic abuse to automatically arrest the man, regardless of who made the call and what it was about.
Um, frankly, there's worse rules of thumb. I'd love to know where this 1/3 stat comes from.
I didn't comment on whether it was a good policy or not, if it was real, but stats wise it would probably work out most times, but it still wouldn't make sense as an automatic action, since to take an extreme example if you show up to a scene and one person is battered and bloodied and the other without a scratch, and the bloodied person made the call, it would hardly make sense to arrest the injured person on the basis that usually their gender is the one doing the abusing.
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Chill. The allegation that this was deliberately engineered by the Home Sec to satisfy "ghouls" who exist and say stuff in your head is off-the-scale batshit, up there with your attack on @TimT for saying the diametrical opposite of what he actually said. Good lunch?
It is an utterly disgraceful comment and is beyond excuse
Which bit was disgraceful. That Farage-supporters are out there actively calling for asylum seekers to be drowned? Thats out there on Twitter. That the Home Secretary is pandering to those voters? She is according to HYUFD, thats the remaining core Tory vote after northerners are driven away. That tow backs and interventions with large boats will cause small dinghys to sink? Thats obvious surely. That they tried to criminalise the RNLI? Thats long since been covered and corrected by the government.
So again, where is it disgraceful. We can't stop these boats, we can't intercept the people getting off the ones who land here successfully which is almost all of them. So if we want it to stop we need to work with the rest of Europe. Might help if we actually had a channel to accept a reasonable number of asylum seekers rather than the trickle who come here vs the much larger numbers in France etc etc.
Your comments are unacceptable and your reference to twitter to try to justify your comments says it all
You are driven by an all encompassing hatred of this government and do not add to a very serious debate
You aren't saying how they are unacceptable.
It is a fact that ghouls are on Farage's twitter feed right now saying awful things. It is a declared risk that her proposed solutions to the boats would sink some. It is a fact that by accident or design a bill would have had the RNLI criminalised for picking people out of the water after having their boat sunk.
When you stop thinking rationally and go back to blind loyalty to the government you start going on about my "all-encompassing hatred of this government". You miss my pro-Sunak and pro-furlough comments which I make a lot.
My views aren't the issue, nor do they somehow change the facts on hand.
As for not adding to serious debate I have made a very serious proposal. We can't stop the boats. We can't detain the people who get off the boats. So if we want to process asylum seekers off-shore the simple solution is offer them a plane ride from Calais airport to Albania or wherever.
Your repetitive comments about the criminalising the RNLI are pure political spin and as my son who is RNLI crew has just said their operational requirements are not affected by any legislation proposed or otherwise
I am sure you can find ghouls on twitter but David Cameron's comments about twitter are succinct
Even by your own admission you know nothing about boats and your motivation is purely anti HMG propaganda
We can stop or certainly reduce the number of boats crossing and sadly today's tragedy will concentrate minds across the EU-France-EU to take concerted action
Your idea of Albania or anywhere else is rejected by Labour who when asked raised the issue of human rights
The criminalisation of the RNLI was still in the bill a couple of days ago. Not sure if it has been removed yet.
That's been in the bill an awfully long time, right in print in a proposed set of new laws, for something that you dismiss as political spin.
It is not passed into law neither will it be
It will be unless the bill is amended or the clause is withdrawn. The only way that happens - to protect your son - is for people like me to upset you by calling out what the government are doing. You don't like the proposal and neither do I, so I don't understand why it is such a fractious issue between us.
It is binary, either you live with no NPIs and people who refused the vaccine get sick and die, or you have them and they don't get sick and don't die until you get rid of the NPIs or the viral R value overwhelms your NPIs (see Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium etc...). These are the options, Chris Whitty laid them out very well at the end of June when the government went ahead with the full reopening in July. An infection displaced isn't an infection prevented.
You would be right, if there had been zero vaccinations happening between July and now. However, not only have there been lots of vaccinations in that period, but I'm also arguing that with better government management there could have been substantially more, and that the NPIs could have been better targeted.
Those who want to be vaccinated have been by and large. Only the JCVIs prevarication stalled childhood ones and even those are well underway now.
The question is how to get everyone else covered and the only answer is to drop NPIs and let nature take its course.
Well, the fact of the matter is that the UK's proportion of the unjabbed is higher than some other comparable countries, despite the fact that the UK has less anti-vax sentiment than most countries, Yes, we did a very good job reaching the most vulnerable cohorts, but there is absolutely no getting away from the fact that we've done a poor job of reaching the under 50s and especially under 40s, We have been paying the price in deaths and hospitalisations.
Yes, of course it is their 'own fault', but the situation was undoubtedly made worse by government complacency, mixed messaging, and failure to take measures to nudge people into getting jabbed. Even France has done better than us in those cohorts, and Portugal and Ireland much better. The fact that we got off to a very good start with the vaccination programme doesn't excuse losing the plot in the later stages.
My definition of losing the plot on the vaccination programme would be congratulating yourself for making up the numbers by vaccinating teenagers.
Germany's death rate is currently higher than the UK's has been at any time since March and their winter wave is only just beginning.
England vaccination numbers (1st) - against ONS mid 2020 population numbers.
42.76% 12 to 15 64.80% 16 to 17 76.60% 18 to 24 78.20% 25 to 29 85.21% 30 to 34 87.62% 35 to 39 92.76% 40 to 44 89.91% 45 to 49 94.75% 50 to 54 97.34% 55 to 59 99.46% 60 to 64 96.90% 65 to 69 96.12% 70 to 74 102.61% 75 to 79 (yes, I know, investigating this one) 95.06% 80 to 84 96.00% 85 to 89 90.75% 90 upwards
This will turn international rugby into Graham Henry era Wales when if you ate a sheep you were eligible to play for Wales, land not quite of my fathers.
World Rugby amends rule and allows players to switch national teams
World Rugby will let players switch countries from January
Tonga, Fiji and Samoa stand to gain from the amendment
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Chill. The allegation that this was deliberately engineered by the Home Sec to satisfy "ghouls" who exist and say stuff in your head is off-the-scale batshit, up there with your attack on @TimT for saying the diametrical opposite of what he actually said. Good lunch?
It is an utterly disgraceful comment and is beyond excuse
Which bit was disgraceful. That Farage-supporters are out there actively calling for asylum seekers to be drowned? Thats out there on Twitter. That the Home Secretary is pandering to those voters? She is according to HYUFD, thats the remaining core Tory vote after northerners are driven away. That tow backs and interventions with large boats will cause small dinghys to sink? Thats obvious surely. That they tried to criminalise the RNLI? Thats long since been covered and corrected by the government.
So again, where is it disgraceful. We can't stop these boats, we can't intercept the people getting off the ones who land here successfully which is almost all of them. So if we want it to stop we need to work with the rest of Europe. Might help if we actually had a channel to accept a reasonable number of asylum seekers rather than the trickle who come here vs the much larger numbers in France etc etc.
Your comments are unacceptable and your reference to twitter to try to justify your comments says it all
You are driven by an all encompassing hatred of this government and do not add to a very serious debate
Please, someone make Big G moderator and give him absolute power to remove posts he finds unacceptable!
Why on earth would anyone do that
We can disagree and call out comments we feel are unacceptable and argue the case
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Chill. The allegation that this was deliberately engineered by the Home Sec to satisfy "ghouls" who exist and say stuff in your head is off-the-scale batshit, up there with your attack on @TimT for saying the diametrical opposite of what he actually said. Good lunch?
It is an utterly disgraceful comment and is beyond excuse
Which bit was disgraceful. That Farage-supporters are out there actively calling for asylum seekers to be drowned? Thats out there on Twitter. That the Home Secretary is pandering to those voters? She is according to HYUFD, thats the remaining core Tory vote after northerners are driven away. That tow backs and interventions with large boats will cause small dinghys to sink? Thats obvious surely. That they tried to criminalise the RNLI? Thats long since been covered and corrected by the government.
So again, where is it disgraceful. We can't stop these boats, we can't intercept the people getting off the ones who land here successfully which is almost all of them. So if we want it to stop we need to work with the rest of Europe. Might help if we actually had a channel to accept a reasonable number of asylum seekers rather than the trickle who come here vs the much larger numbers in France etc etc.
Your comments are unacceptable and your reference to twitter to try to justify your comments says it all
You are driven by an all encompassing hatred of this government and do not add to a very serious debate
You aren't saying how they are unacceptable.
It is a fact that ghouls are on Farage's twitter feed right now saying awful things. It is a declared risk that her proposed solutions to the boats would sink some. It is a fact that by accident or design a bill would have had the RNLI criminalised for picking people out of the water after having their boat sunk.
When you stop thinking rationally and go back to blind loyalty to the government you start going on about my "all-encompassing hatred of this government". You miss my pro-Sunak and pro-furlough comments which I make a lot.
My views aren't the issue, nor do they somehow change the facts on hand.
As for not adding to serious debate I have made a very serious proposal. We can't stop the boats. We can't detain the people who get off the boats. So if we want to process asylum seekers off-shore the simple solution is offer them a plane ride from Calais airport to Albania or wherever.
Your repetitive comments about the criminalising the RNLI are pure political spin and as my son who is RNLI crew has just said their operational requirements are not affected by any legislation proposed or otherwise
I am sure you can find ghouls on twitter but David Cameron's comments about twitter are succinct
Even by your own admission you know nothing about boats and your motivation is purely anti HMG propaganda
We can stop or certainly reduce the number of boats crossing and sadly today's tragedy will concentrate minds across the EU-France-EU to take concerted action
Your idea of Albania or anywhere else is rejected by Labour who when asked raised the issue of human rights
The criminalisation of the RNLI was still in the bill a couple of days ago. Not sure if it has been removed yet.
That's been in the bill an awfully long time, right in print in a proposed set of new laws, for something that you dismiss as political spin.
It is not passed into law neither will it be
It will be unless the bill is amended or the clause is withdrawn. The only way that happens - to protect your son - is for people like me to upset you by calling out what the government are doing. You don't like the proposal and neither do I, so I don't understand why it is such a fractious issue between us.
The bill will be amended and in view of today's tragedy with 31 drowning confirmed by France, it is time to take the politics out of this and support the UK-France -EU to come together and take action
How would the Macron treatment have worked any better in the UK than in France? I wouldn't want to swap places with them right now, even leaving aside that the French response to coersion seems to have been much more favourable than in Scotland or Wales which suggests we'd have had an even worse trajectory than them.
It's worked extremely well in France, overcoming vaccine resistance very effectively.
As for swapping places, well their cumulative deaths per million are substantially lower than ours, although of course most of that is accounted for by the Boris disaster of last winter. Their vax stats are such that they shouldn't do too badly in this winter.
I think you're significantly overestimating their vaccination programme. It's been good at overcoming the inertia based won't vaccinate cohort but not at overcoming the "natural immunity is best" cohort, which is a big number. Additionally, their spread of vaccination is poorer than ours, they've done a bunch of vaccines for under 18s and under 30s, more than we have for sure, but that won't really change the picture for hospitalisations. In the crucial over 60s cohorts they are quite far below our vaccination rates and far, far below our triple jab rate.
Additionally, they haven't got the wall of natural immunity among big sections of the won't vaccinate cohort that we have.
As I said, you've completely missed why the UK strategy was preferable to what the French have done. I wouldn't trade our position for their one going into winter this year.
Yes, I agree that the age distribution of vaccination is better here in the UK - as I said earlier, it's one of the things we got right. Still, France is better than most on that measure, and Macron has done well to overcome vaccine resistance which a year ago was amongst the worst in Europe (although I did say at the time that I thought they'd fall in line eventually).
Sure, but vaccination isn't enough to get to the herd immunity threshold, at least not 68% or 75%. Portugal at 88% will get there assuming they do third doses for all 88%. That's the endgame for the virus and heading into the winter the UK is at the cusp of herd immunity, our infection rate is fairly stable and hospitalisations are falling as well as numbers in hospital. France is millions and millions of infections or new vaccines away from herd immunity. They've probably reached the limit of who will get jabbed at 75% which means there are a very large number of people who are completely virus vulnerable without any antibodies.
The reason the UK strategy of having no NPIs is correct is that our cohort of completely virus vulnerable people is now extremely low and our cohort of people with waning immunity is shrinking by ~2.5m per week. It was the right strategy in July and it leaves us one of just a handful of countries not heading into Xmas looking at lockdowns.
The figure that needs looking at is what proportion of people are 'naive' to the virus. What proportion of people are neither vaccinated, nor recovered from infection. If you suppress infections then you're not reducing your proportion of people without immunity.
It does seem like the best way to maximise immunity is vaccinated plus infected which both minimises symptoms while infected and provides a good level of protection going forwards - and the UK has a high proportion of that.
Eventually every country will end up with a situation with almost no naive hosts in the vulnerable age ranges. Everyone will catch covid as a child and then several times as an adult, which will act like a natural immunisation programme.
The UK is already very close to this endemic phase but other countries, even those with apparently successful handling so far, will struggle to transition without facing up to some difficult decisions.
I'm really worried that they won't, even after winter lockdowns they will try and push their exit wave into the future for some unknown reason or benefit. European countries seem to have adopted can kicking as a national strategy. I fear that in the summer of next year most European countries will still be enforcing mask wearing, social distancing and vaccine passports.
Give it time. I was sceptical as to whether or not Australia, and especially New Zealand, would ever be able to let go of their fortress mentalities, but they are doing it piece by piece.
If various European states find themselves replaying enormously long Winter lockdowns again (and I note reports of yet more restrictions on the way in France and the Netherlands, with the head of the Dutch ICU doctor's association already screaming for everything to be shut down including the schools,) then I think that people will start to give their governments a good kicking. Especially if their TV news correspondents in London are sending back nightly pictures of festive parties, packed pubs and restaurants, and (happily mask-free) kids trooping through school gates, whilst the people back home are still under house arrest as if the vaccines didn't exist.
This pandemic sometimes feels like it might go on forever, but it will end. They always do.
The worrying thing for that is that much of the opposition to lockdowns seems to come from the far-right end of the spectrum (as far as I can, I admit I haven't looked into it in huge detail), so backlash against lockdowns could well have some quite nasty political effects beyond just governments losing power.
I can sympathise, if we were going back into lockdwon at this point I'd vote for pretty much anyone that promised no more lockdowns short of actual fascists.
More than a whiff of misogyny is in the air. It is striking that there is no comparably zealous campaign to abandon the word “men” in favour of “prostate-havers”, “ejaculators” or “bodies with testicles”. It is almost always women who are being ordered to dispense with a useful word they have used all their lives.
Whilst I agree with them on most of the trans debate questions, the conversation is usually about women because of campaign success in marketing women as eternally oppressed victims with limited agency, and men/boys who suffer abuse etc tend to be silenced.
The phrases "violence against women and girls" and "Women and Equalities Committee" capture the predominant attitude of the contemporary debate perfectly.
+ this.
A rather prominent charity used to have a website that, if you claimed to be a woman, went to help services about abuse. If you claimed to be a man, went to a 'you are an abuser, you evil scum. Here's how you can get help.' page.
It was a women's charity, but it was well-known and its name was non-gendered. Any man wanting to go there for help would be treated as a perpetrator, not a victim. And 1/3 of all victims of abuse are male.
I sent them a strongly-worded email, and it changed - with a link to a charity helping men. I'd like to think that was down to me, but who knows ...
I seem to recall probably apocryphal tales of police policies of when there was a call out re domestic abuse to automatically arrest the man, regardless of who made the call and what it was about.
If you want to know, it was Refuge, back in the 2008/9 period. 'Refuge' is a non-gender specific term: men might want refuge from domestic violence. Yet their entire website - and charity - is honed towards women, and having a section 'I am an abuser' for men was a bit ... sick.
It is binary, either you live with no NPIs and people who refused the vaccine get sick and die, or you have them and they don't get sick and don't die until you get rid of the NPIs or the viral R value overwhelms your NPIs (see Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium etc...). These are the options, Chris Whitty laid them out very well at the end of June when the government went ahead with the full reopening in July. An infection displaced isn't an infection prevented.
You would be right, if there had been zero vaccinations happening between July and now. However, not only have there been lots of vaccinations in that period, but I'm also arguing that with better government management there could have been substantially more, and that the NPIs could have been better targeted.
Those who want to be vaccinated have been by and large. Only the JCVIs prevarication stalled childhood ones and even those are well underway now.
The question is how to get everyone else covered and the only answer is to drop NPIs and let nature take its course.
Well, the fact of the matter is that the UK's proportion of the unjabbed is higher than some other comparable countries, despite the fact that the UK has less anti-vax sentiment than most countries, Yes, we did a very good job reaching the most vulnerable cohorts, but there is absolutely no getting away from the fact that we've done a poor job of reaching the under 50s and especially under 40s, We have been paying the price in deaths and hospitalisations.
Yes, of course it is their 'own fault', but the situation was undoubtedly made worse by government complacency, mixed messaging, and failure to take measures to nudge people into getting jabbed. Even France has done better than us in those cohorts, and Portugal and Ireland much better. The fact that we got off to a very good start with the vaccination programme doesn't excuse losing the plot in the later stages.
My definition of losing the plot on the vaccination programme would be congratulating yourself for making up the numbers by vaccinating teenagers.
Germany's death rate is currently higher than the UK's has been at any time since March and their winter wave is only just beginning.
England vaccination numbers (1st) - against ONS mid 2020 population numbers.
42.76% 12 to 15 64.80% 16 to 17 76.60% 18 to 24 78.20% 25 to 29 85.21% 30 to 34 87.62% 35 to 39 92.76% 40 to 44 89.91% 45 to 49 94.75% 50 to 54 97.34% 55 to 59 99.46% 60 to 64 96.90% 65 to 69 96.12% 70 to 74 102.61% 75 to 79 (yes, I know, investigating this one) 95.06% 80 to 84 96.00% 85 to 89 90.75% 90 upwards
I think we should probably conclude their estimate is less than perfectly accurate.
I'm very surprised if on those figures we're only on 68% overall.
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Chill. The allegation that this was deliberately engineered by the Home Sec to satisfy "ghouls" who exist and say stuff in your head is off-the-scale batshit, up there with your attack on @TimT for saying the diametrical opposite of what he actually said. Good lunch?
It is an utterly disgraceful comment and is beyond excuse
Which bit was disgraceful. That Farage-supporters are out there actively calling for asylum seekers to be drowned? Thats out there on Twitter. That the Home Secretary is pandering to those voters? She is according to HYUFD, thats the remaining core Tory vote after northerners are driven away. That tow backs and interventions with large boats will cause small dinghys to sink? Thats obvious surely. That they tried to criminalise the RNLI? Thats long since been covered and corrected by the government.
So again, where is it disgraceful. We can't stop these boats, we can't intercept the people getting off the ones who land here successfully which is almost all of them. So if we want it to stop we need to work with the rest of Europe. Might help if we actually had a channel to accept a reasonable number of asylum seekers rather than the trickle who come here vs the much larger numbers in France etc etc.
Your comments are unacceptable and your reference to twitter to try to justify your comments says it all
You are driven by an all encompassing hatred of this government and do not add to a very serious debate
You aren't saying how they are unacceptable.
It is a fact that ghouls are on Farage's twitter feed right now saying awful things. It is a declared risk that her proposed solutions to the boats would sink some. It is a fact that by accident or design a bill would have had the RNLI criminalised for picking people out of the water after having their boat sunk.
When you stop thinking rationally and go back to blind loyalty to the government you start going on about my "all-encompassing hatred of this government". You miss my pro-Sunak and pro-furlough comments which I make a lot.
My views aren't the issue, nor do they somehow change the facts on hand.
As for not adding to serious debate I have made a very serious proposal. We can't stop the boats. We can't detain the people who get off the boats. So if we want to process asylum seekers off-shore the simple solution is offer them a plane ride from Calais airport to Albania or wherever.
Your repetitive comments about the criminalising the RNLI are pure political spin and as my son who is RNLI crew has just said their operational requirements are not affected by any legislation proposed or otherwise
I am sure you can find ghouls on twitter but David Cameron's comments about twitter are succinct
Even by your own admission you know nothing about boats and your motivation is purely anti HMG propaganda
We can stop or certainly reduce the number of boats crossing and sadly today's tragedy will concentrate minds across the EU-France-EU to take concerted action
Your idea of Albania or anywhere else is rejected by Labour who when asked raised the issue of human rights
A couple of responses then lets drop it: 1. I didn't raise the illegality proposed with regards to the RNLI. Others more learned did. Including the RNLI themselves. Its repetitive because its a statement of fact that the RNLI would have been criminalised and you refused to accept it thinking we were attacking your brave son. The reverse is true, its called out to protect him and his comrades risking their lives. 2. I know nothing about boats so defer to the opinions of people who do. 3. "Anti-government propaganda". You're still defending them despite saying that you don't support them any more. What does Labour have to do with anything? Not my party, not my views and I have said repeatedly that I expect the Tories to win the next election with a new leader fit for office.
We have our disagreements, and also agreements, but I just do not think we should sensationalise our comments and of course my families thoughts and many others are with the RNLI crews out tonight with the French rescuing lives at sea and recovering those who have perished and the pain in recovering the lost children
It is binary, either you live with no NPIs and people who refused the vaccine get sick and die, or you have them and they don't get sick and don't die until you get rid of the NPIs or the viral R value overwhelms your NPIs (see Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium etc...). These are the options, Chris Whitty laid them out very well at the end of June when the government went ahead with the full reopening in July. An infection displaced isn't an infection prevented.
You would be right, if there had been zero vaccinations happening between July and now. However, not only have there been lots of vaccinations in that period, but I'm also arguing that with better government management there could have been substantially more, and that the NPIs could have been better targeted.
Those who want to be vaccinated have been by and large. Only the JCVIs prevarication stalled childhood ones and even those are well underway now.
The question is how to get everyone else covered and the only answer is to drop NPIs and let nature take its course.
Well, the fact of the matter is that the UK's proportion of the unjabbed is higher than some other comparable countries, despite the fact that the UK has less anti-vax sentiment than most countries, Yes, we did a very good job reaching the most vulnerable cohorts, but there is absolutely no getting away from the fact that we've done a poor job of reaching the under 50s and especially under 40s, We have been paying the price in deaths and hospitalisations.
Yes, of course it is their 'own fault', but the situation was undoubtedly made worse by government complacency, mixed messaging, and failure to take measures to nudge people into getting jabbed. Even France has done better than us in those cohorts, and Portugal and Ireland much better. The fact that we got off to a very good start with the vaccination programme doesn't excuse losing the plot in the later stages.
My definition of losing the plot on the vaccination programme would be congratulating yourself for making up the numbers by vaccinating teenagers.
Germany's death rate is currently higher than the UK's has been at any time since March and their winter wave is only just beginning.
England vaccination numbers (1st) - against ONS mid 2020 population numbers.
42.76% 12 to 15 64.80% 16 to 17 76.60% 18 to 24 78.20% 25 to 29 85.21% 30 to 34 87.62% 35 to 39 92.76% 40 to 44 89.91% 45 to 49 94.75% 50 to 54 97.34% 55 to 59 99.46% 60 to 64 96.90% 65 to 69 96.12% 70 to 74 102.61% 75 to 79 (yes, I know, investigating this one) 95.06% 80 to 84 96.00% 85 to 89 90.75% 90 upwards
I think we should probably conclude their estimate is less than perfectly accurate.
I'm very surprised if on those figures we're only on 68% overall.
That's first doses, were at ~75% for those. The UK is one of those few countries that has a big gap between first and second doses, we didn't really get across that one dose isn't enough.
The shift from centre-right to centre-left government in Germany is a welcome straw in the wind, after a decade of failure from centre-left politicians.
Discuss.
Well the SPD have held many of the key posts in the Coalition under Merkel, just now they have the Chancellorship too. The Greens joining the government will be somewhat moderated by the pro business FDP also joining it, clearly it took a while to get them to agree a platform they could jointly support.
The Union will now move right I expect in Opposition, with Soder trying to set himself up as de facto leader of the Opposition from his Bavaria powerbase
Completely off topic but I've just started playing online poker as a hobby - I used to play each week in a pub tournament for a few years before the pandemic but I haven't played since before the pandemic began until recently. I like tournaments where you get potentially a couple of hours play from a small buy-in and are capped at losing your entry fee and that's that . . . the way I've always viewed it is I'd pay a comparable fee to go eg bowling or to a movie etc so I'm paying for the entertainment with that amount and any small amount won back is a bonus.
I had a morning off this morning so I thought I'd give it a go and bought a $4.40 satellite ticket to a $33 buy-in tournament. Managed to win a seat to the main event from the satellite. Even getting 6th (the lowest prize) would be my biggest ever poker win and I certainly wasn't expecting that, but I actually managed to win the whole tournament. First place prize $432.20 from a $33 ticket I'd won for a $4.40 buy-in.
Over the moon with that, but I wanted to mention it here not to show off but because the one thing I don't want is to get intoxicated from that victory and develop a problem habit; so I thought I'd mention it to a group of people here many of whom probably gamble overall more than I do. I'm happy but want to keep my feet firmly on the ground.
Which company? I tried a few back in the day and the weirdest one was Betfair. The number of times you'd see three players in a single deal get pocket Qs, Ks, and As was astounding. It made me feel that there was an algorithm dealing people powerful hands to encourage looser play and so knocking people out faster. I can't prove anything of course, but it felt a bit deliberate.
888
I doubt there's any funny business but the thing to remember with Hold Em is that you'll disproportionately see good cards when it comes to a showdown. Since crap gets mucked those with QQ, KK or AA will end up showing those hands while all the 72 that got dealt to other players you'll almost never see.
One of the best lessons I learnt from the good player I mentioned before is too be very wary of an Ace with a poor kicker. I used to go in almost any time I had an Ace [and lots of poor players do] but as he said to me the problem is even if you hit your Ace, you'll never know if someone else is in the hand with an Ace and a better kicker.
Thus today I quite often folded hands like A4 or A6 that when I first started playing I'd have gone in with - then seeing something like AQ at showdown and I'd have lost that hand had I gone in with my Ace.
I'm trying to do a calculation to work out on an 8-player table the chances that there are is a pocket A pair, a pocket K pair, and a pocket Q pair out there in a single deal. It "feels" like a 1000/1 shot, but I can't work out the odds.
Its extremely unlikely, sure probably even less likely than that. Though I doubt it actually happened many times and false recall will merge people showing AA versus KK with another time someone showed KK versus QQ and that's not that unusual.
One factor to bear in mind with the difference between online and real-life poker is how fast online poker is. In a pub, house or even a casino people play much slower, the cards get physically shuffled then dealt, conversations are had, people play in turn etc . . . online there's no interruption, no shuffling, the cards are shown almost instantaneously and people can queue the fact they're folding so everyone who's folding is out of the hand instantly.
As a result in online poker you'll face many, many more hands per hour than you will in physical poker. Which means that 'rare' hands can and will come up from time to time.
According to my software since I started playing earlier this month, I've been in over ten thousand hands already.
If you play ten thousand hands then you're going to see a few 1000/1 shots in those hands.
@Farooq - define the precise conditions - how many packs of cards etc, and I'll have a stab at working it out for you. I'm not familiar with poker terms, so you'll have to specify those too.
Already been done elsewhere, about 1 in 25,000 if it was an 8 handed table.
Brilliant! Now, considering I saw this happen a good dozen times at least, I'm back to thinking there was something fishy going on.
I'll see if I can check through the maths but it's making my head hurt looking at it, so I might program a Monte Carlo simulation this evening and run it a few million times to see whether I get something in the same ball park. There's no way I should have seen this happen more than about three times. I doubt I've ever played even 25,000 hands of poker, let alone 300,000.
Remember to account for the hundreds of thousands (estimate) of players as well. If none of them were seeing this more often than normal then it would be fixed. Others might have seen an unusual amount of AA v AA hands, or AK v AK v QQ hands etc which they remember.
That's a fair point, but it hasn't helped my headache.
The online player community found (and proved beyond reasonable doubt) some very obscure cases of cheating going on. If a major site was doing as you say, it would have been known about.
The thing is with games of chance online is that you're pretty close to the "infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters" scenario.
Almost any odd thing you can think of has probably happened to someone, somewhere, at some time. If it hadn't, that'd be an issue!
Exactly. The classic case is that poor woman who found herself in court accused of child murder, because two of her babies had suffered cot deaths. A key witness was a statistician who argued that the chances of her having had two cot deaths were infinitesimal. Whereas the right question to ask was, what is the chance that any mother would suffer two cot deaths (particularly given the correlation of such sad occurrences with various environmental factors) and then find herself suspected of foul play.
On point of order - the infamous 1 in 73 million figure witness was a paediatrician, not a statistician. He didn't understand statistics or probability and simply multiplied two figures together to get that one.
Name of Roy Meadow, knighted for services as an expert witness, almost all of which testimony turned out to be at the very least wrong.
To be fair, this was in court, so there were the defence team including solicitors, barristers and experts, who should have attacked the claim and didn't. and thye judge, and the jury.
The simplest rebuttal was: well, probably more than one mother in 73 million murders their children, but it's still statistically pretty abnormal, so let's leave statistics out of it altogether.
It is binary, either you live with no NPIs and people who refused the vaccine get sick and die, or you have them and they don't get sick and don't die until you get rid of the NPIs or the viral R value overwhelms your NPIs (see Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium etc...). These are the options, Chris Whitty laid them out very well at the end of June when the government went ahead with the full reopening in July. An infection displaced isn't an infection prevented.
You would be right, if there had been zero vaccinations happening between July and now. However, not only have there been lots of vaccinations in that period, but I'm also arguing that with better government management there could have been substantially more, and that the NPIs could have been better targeted.
Those who want to be vaccinated have been by and large. Only the JCVIs prevarication stalled childhood ones and even those are well underway now.
The question is how to get everyone else covered and the only answer is to drop NPIs and let nature take its course.
Well, the fact of the matter is that the UK's proportion of the unjabbed is higher than some other comparable countries, despite the fact that the UK has less anti-vax sentiment than most countries, Yes, we did a very good job reaching the most vulnerable cohorts, but there is absolutely no getting away from the fact that we've done a poor job of reaching the under 50s and especially under 40s, We have been paying the price in deaths and hospitalisations.
Yes, of course it is their 'own fault', but the situation was undoubtedly made worse by government complacency, mixed messaging, and failure to take measures to nudge people into getting jabbed. Even France has done better than us in those cohorts, and Portugal and Ireland much better. The fact that we got off to a very good start with the vaccination programme doesn't excuse losing the plot in the later stages.
My definition of losing the plot on the vaccination programme would be congratulating yourself for making up the numbers by vaccinating teenagers.
Germany's death rate is currently higher than the UK's has been at any time since March and their winter wave is only just beginning.
England vaccination numbers (1st) - against ONS mid 2020 population numbers.
42.76% 12 to 15 64.80% 16 to 17 76.60% 18 to 24 78.20% 25 to 29 85.21% 30 to 34 87.62% 35 to 39 92.76% 40 to 44 89.91% 45 to 49 94.75% 50 to 54 97.34% 55 to 59 99.46% 60 to 64 96.90% 65 to 69 96.12% 70 to 74 102.61% 75 to 79 (yes, I know, investigating this one) 95.06% 80 to 84 96.00% 85 to 89 90.75% 90 upwards
I think we should probably conclude their estimate is less than perfectly accurate.
I'm very surprised if on those figures we're only on 68% overall.
That's first doses, were at ~75% for those. The UK is one of those few countries that has a big gap between first and second doses, we didn't really get across that one dose isn't enough.
Ah, I see. Thanks.
Equally, if the drop off in dosing is proportionate to the age groups, that still suggests very high levels of protection among the over 40s, who would appear to be the group most at risk.
More than a whiff of misogyny is in the air. It is striking that there is no comparably zealous campaign to abandon the word “men” in favour of “prostate-havers”, “ejaculators” or “bodies with testicles”. It is almost always women who are being ordered to dispense with a useful word they have used all their lives.
Whilst I agree with them on most of the trans debate questions, the conversation is usually about women because of campaign success in marketing women as eternally oppressed victims with limited agency, and men/boys who suffer abuse etc tend to be silenced.
The phrases "violence against women and girls" and "Women and Equalities Committee" capture the predominant attitude of the contemporary debate perfectly.
+ this.
A rather prominent charity used to have a website that, if you claimed to be a woman, went to help services about abuse. If you claimed to be a man, went to a 'you are an abuser, you evil scum. Here's how you can get help.' page.
It was a women's charity, but it was well-known and its name was non-gendered. Any man wanting to go there for help would be treated as a perpetrator, not a victim. And 1/3 of all victims of abuse are male.
I sent them a strongly-worded email, and it changed - with a link to a charity helping men. I'd like to think that was down to me, but who knows ...
I seem to recall probably apocryphal tales of police policies of when there was a call out re domestic abuse to automatically arrest the man, regardless of who made the call and what it was about.
Um, frankly, there's worse rules of thumb. I'd love to know where this 1/3 stat comes from.
Ask and ye shall receive (even after a few whiskies):
"the Crime Survey for England and Wales showed that an estimated 2.3 million adults aged 16 to 74 years experienced domestic abuse in the last year (1.6 million women and 757,000 men), a slight but non-significant decrease from the previous year"
It is binary, either you live with no NPIs and people who refused the vaccine get sick and die, or you have them and they don't get sick and don't die until you get rid of the NPIs or the viral R value overwhelms your NPIs (see Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium etc...). These are the options, Chris Whitty laid them out very well at the end of June when the government went ahead with the full reopening in July. An infection displaced isn't an infection prevented.
You would be right, if there had been zero vaccinations happening between July and now. However, not only have there been lots of vaccinations in that period, but I'm also arguing that with better government management there could have been substantially more, and that the NPIs could have been better targeted.
Those who want to be vaccinated have been by and large. Only the JCVIs prevarication stalled childhood ones and even those are well underway now.
The question is how to get everyone else covered and the only answer is to drop NPIs and let nature take its course.
Well, the fact of the matter is that the UK's proportion of the unjabbed is higher than some other comparable countries, despite the fact that the UK has less anti-vax sentiment than most countries, Yes, we did a very good job reaching the most vulnerable cohorts, but there is absolutely no getting away from the fact that we've done a poor job of reaching the under 50s and especially under 40s, We have been paying the price in deaths and hospitalisations.
Yes, of course it is their 'own fault', but the situation was undoubtedly made worse by government complacency, mixed messaging, and failure to take measures to nudge people into getting jabbed. Even France has done better than us in those cohorts, and Portugal and Ireland much better. The fact that we got off to a very good start with the vaccination programme doesn't excuse losing the plot in the later stages.
My definition of losing the plot on the vaccination programme would be congratulating yourself for making up the numbers by vaccinating teenagers.
Germany's death rate is currently higher than the UK's has been at any time since March and their winter wave is only just beginning.
England vaccination numbers (1st) - against ONS mid 2020 population numbers.
42.76% 12 to 15 64.80% 16 to 17 76.60% 18 to 24 78.20% 25 to 29 85.21% 30 to 34 87.62% 35 to 39 92.76% 40 to 44 89.91% 45 to 49 94.75% 50 to 54 97.34% 55 to 59 99.46% 60 to 64 96.90% 65 to 69 96.12% 70 to 74 102.61% 75 to 79 (yes, I know, investigating this one) 95.06% 80 to 84 96.00% 85 to 89 90.75% 90 upwards
I think we should probably conclude their estimate is less than perfectly accurate.
I'm very surprised if on those figures we're only on 68% overall.
The one-dose-only total is 74% of the whole population. Given that first doses appear to be sub-80% for all cohorts under 30, and practically zero in children aged 0-11, that overall value seems plausible.
Completely off topic but I've just started playing online poker as a hobby - I used to play each week in a pub tournament for a few years before the pandemic but I haven't played since before the pandemic began until recently. I like tournaments where you get potentially a couple of hours play from a small buy-in and are capped at losing your entry fee and that's that . . . the way I've always viewed it is I'd pay a comparable fee to go eg bowling or to a movie etc so I'm paying for the entertainment with that amount and any small amount won back is a bonus.
I had a morning off this morning so I thought I'd give it a go and bought a $4.40 satellite ticket to a $33 buy-in tournament. Managed to win a seat to the main event from the satellite. Even getting 6th (the lowest prize) would be my biggest ever poker win and I certainly wasn't expecting that, but I actually managed to win the whole tournament. First place prize $432.20 from a $33 ticket I'd won for a $4.40 buy-in.
Over the moon with that, but I wanted to mention it here not to show off but because the one thing I don't want is to get intoxicated from that victory and develop a problem habit; so I thought I'd mention it to a group of people here many of whom probably gamble overall more than I do. I'm happy but want to keep my feet firmly on the ground.
Which company? I tried a few back in the day and the weirdest one was Betfair. The number of times you'd see three players in a single deal get pocket Qs, Ks, and As was astounding. It made me feel that there was an algorithm dealing people powerful hands to encourage looser play and so knocking people out faster. I can't prove anything of course, but it felt a bit deliberate.
888
I doubt there's any funny business but the thing to remember with Hold Em is that you'll disproportionately see good cards when it comes to a showdown. Since crap gets mucked those with QQ, KK or AA will end up showing those hands while all the 72 that got dealt to other players you'll almost never see.
One of the best lessons I learnt from the good player I mentioned before is too be very wary of an Ace with a poor kicker. I used to go in almost any time I had an Ace [and lots of poor players do] but as he said to me the problem is even if you hit your Ace, you'll never know if someone else is in the hand with an Ace and a better kicker.
Thus today I quite often folded hands like A4 or A6 that when I first started playing I'd have gone in with - then seeing something like AQ at showdown and I'd have lost that hand had I gone in with my Ace.
I'm trying to do a calculation to work out on an 8-player table the chances that there are is a pocket A pair, a pocket K pair, and a pocket Q pair out there in a single deal. It "feels" like a 1000/1 shot, but I can't work out the odds.
Its extremely unlikely, sure probably even less likely than that. Though I doubt it actually happened many times and false recall will merge people showing AA versus KK with another time someone showed KK versus QQ and that's not that unusual.
One factor to bear in mind with the difference between online and real-life poker is how fast online poker is. In a pub, house or even a casino people play much slower, the cards get physically shuffled then dealt, conversations are had, people play in turn etc . . . online there's no interruption, no shuffling, the cards are shown almost instantaneously and people can queue the fact they're folding so everyone who's folding is out of the hand instantly.
As a result in online poker you'll face many, many more hands per hour than you will in physical poker. Which means that 'rare' hands can and will come up from time to time.
According to my software since I started playing earlier this month, I've been in over ten thousand hands already.
If you play ten thousand hands then you're going to see a few 1000/1 shots in those hands.
@Farooq - define the precise conditions - how many packs of cards etc, and I'll have a stab at working it out for you. I'm not familiar with poker terms, so you'll have to specify those too.
Already been done elsewhere, about 1 in 25,000 if it was an 8 handed table.
Brilliant! Now, considering I saw this happen a good dozen times at least, I'm back to thinking there was something fishy going on.
I'll see if I can check through the maths but it's making my head hurt looking at it, so I might program a Monte Carlo simulation this evening and run it a few million times to see whether I get something in the same ball park. There's no way I should have seen this happen more than about three times. I doubt I've ever played even 25,000 hands of poker, let alone 300,000.
Remember to account for the hundreds of thousands (estimate) of players as well. If none of them were seeing this more often than normal then it would be fixed. Others might have seen an unusual amount of AA v AA hands, or AK v AK v QQ hands etc which they remember.
That's a fair point, but it hasn't helped my headache.
The online player community found (and proved beyond reasonable doubt) some very obscure cases of cheating going on. If a major site was doing as you say, it would have been known about.
The thing is with games of chance online is that you're pretty close to the "infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters" scenario.
Almost any odd thing you can think of has probably happened to someone, somewhere, at some time. If it hadn't, that'd be an issue!
Exactly. The classic case is that poor woman who found herself in court accused of child murder, because two of her babies had suffered cot deaths. A key witness was a statistician who argued that the chances of her having had two cot deaths were infinitesimal. Whereas the right question to ask was, what is the chance that any mother would suffer two cot deaths (particularly given the correlation of such sad occurrences with various environmental factors) and then find herself suspected of foul play.
On point of order - the infamous 1 in 73 million figure witness was a paediatrician, not a statistician. He didn't understand statistics or probability and simply multiplied two figures together to get that one.
Name of Roy Meadow, knighted for services as an expert witness, almost all of which testimony turned out to be at the very least wrong.
To be fair, this was in court, so there were the defence team including solicitors, barristers and experts, who should have attacked the claim and didn't. and thye judge, and the jury.
The simplest rebuttal was: well, probably more than one mother in 73 million murders their children, but it's still statistically pretty abnormal, so let's leave statistics out of it altogether.
One of the more bizarre things about child protection cases has been that not enough get to court, but when they do, they are pretty well never actually defended whatever the facts of the matter. Lots of barristers turn up, take the money, go through the motions and then watch as their clients are marched off.
That's not quite as bizarre as the High Court saying that the GMC shouldn't strike somebody off the medical register merely for repeatedly lying in court for reasons that appear to have been primarily self-aggrandisement. But you wonder if they're linked.
It is binary, either you live with no NPIs and people who refused the vaccine get sick and die, or you have them and they don't get sick and don't die until you get rid of the NPIs or the viral R value overwhelms your NPIs (see Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium etc...). These are the options, Chris Whitty laid them out very well at the end of June when the government went ahead with the full reopening in July. An infection displaced isn't an infection prevented.
You would be right, if there had been zero vaccinations happening between July and now. However, not only have there been lots of vaccinations in that period, but I'm also arguing that with better government management there could have been substantially more, and that the NPIs could have been better targeted.
Those who want to be vaccinated have been by and large. Only the JCVIs prevarication stalled childhood ones and even those are well underway now.
The question is how to get everyone else covered and the only answer is to drop NPIs and let nature take its course.
Well, the fact of the matter is that the UK's proportion of the unjabbed is higher than some other comparable countries, despite the fact that the UK has less anti-vax sentiment than most countries, Yes, we did a very good job reaching the most vulnerable cohorts, but there is absolutely no getting away from the fact that we've done a poor job of reaching the under 50s and especially under 40s, We have been paying the price in deaths and hospitalisations.
Yes, of course it is their 'own fault', but the situation was undoubtedly made worse by government complacency, mixed messaging, and failure to take measures to nudge people into getting jabbed. Even France has done better than us in those cohorts, and Portugal and Ireland much better. The fact that we got off to a very good start with the vaccination programme doesn't excuse losing the plot in the later stages.
My definition of losing the plot on the vaccination programme would be congratulating yourself for making up the numbers by vaccinating teenagers.
Germany's death rate is currently higher than the UK's has been at any time since March and their winter wave is only just beginning.
England vaccination numbers (1st) - against ONS mid 2020 population numbers.
42.76% 12 to 15 64.80% 16 to 17 76.60% 18 to 24 78.20% 25 to 29 85.21% 30 to 34 87.62% 35 to 39 92.76% 40 to 44 89.91% 45 to 49 94.75% 50 to 54 97.34% 55 to 59 99.46% 60 to 64 96.90% 65 to 69 96.12% 70 to 74 102.61% 75 to 79 (yes, I know, investigating this one) 95.06% 80 to 84 96.00% 85 to 89 90.75% 90 upwards
I think we should probably conclude their estimate is less than perfectly accurate.
I'm very surprised if on those figures we're only on 68% overall.
That's first doses, were at ~75% for those. The UK is one of those few countries that has a big gap between first and second doses, we didn't really get across that one dose isn't enough.
Ah, I see. Thanks.
Equally, if the drop off in dosing is proportionate to the age groups, that still suggests very high levels of protection among the over 40s, who would appear to be the group most at risk.
The Dashboard is still using NIMS data for their percentages. I am using ONS population survey numbers - which are smaller, but probably closer to the truth.
The number of vaccinations is not in doubt - it is the number of people in existence, in the UK, that is the issue.
It is binary, either you live with no NPIs and people who refused the vaccine get sick and die, or you have them and they don't get sick and don't die until you get rid of the NPIs or the viral R value overwhelms your NPIs (see Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium etc...). These are the options, Chris Whitty laid them out very well at the end of June when the government went ahead with the full reopening in July. An infection displaced isn't an infection prevented.
You would be right, if there had been zero vaccinations happening between July and now. However, not only have there been lots of vaccinations in that period, but I'm also arguing that with better government management there could have been substantially more, and that the NPIs could have been better targeted.
Those who want to be vaccinated have been by and large. Only the JCVIs prevarication stalled childhood ones and even those are well underway now.
The question is how to get everyone else covered and the only answer is to drop NPIs and let nature take its course.
Well, the fact of the matter is that the UK's proportion of the unjabbed is higher than some other comparable countries, despite the fact that the UK has less anti-vax sentiment than most countries, Yes, we did a very good job reaching the most vulnerable cohorts, but there is absolutely no getting away from the fact that we've done a poor job of reaching the under 50s and especially under 40s, We have been paying the price in deaths and hospitalisations.
Yes, of course it is their 'own fault', but the situation was undoubtedly made worse by government complacency, mixed messaging, and failure to take measures to nudge people into getting jabbed. Even France has done better than us in those cohorts, and Portugal and Ireland much better. The fact that we got off to a very good start with the vaccination programme doesn't excuse losing the plot in the later stages.
My definition of losing the plot on the vaccination programme would be congratulating yourself for making up the numbers by vaccinating teenagers.
Germany's death rate is currently higher than the UK's has been at any time since March and their winter wave is only just beginning.
England vaccination numbers (1st) - against ONS mid 2020 population numbers.
42.76% 12 to 15 64.80% 16 to 17 76.60% 18 to 24 78.20% 25 to 29 85.21% 30 to 34 87.62% 35 to 39 92.76% 40 to 44 89.91% 45 to 49 94.75% 50 to 54 97.34% 55 to 59 99.46% 60 to 64 96.90% 65 to 69 96.12% 70 to 74 102.61% 75 to 79 (yes, I know, investigating this one) 95.06% 80 to 84 96.00% 85 to 89 90.75% 90 upwards
I think we should probably conclude their estimate is less than perfectly accurate.
I'm very surprised if on those figures we're only on 68% overall.
That's first doses, were at ~75% for those. The UK is one of those few countries that has a big gap between first and second doses, we didn't really get across that one dose isn't enough.
Ah, I see. Thanks.
Equally, if the drop off in dosing is proportionate to the age groups, that still suggests very high levels of protection among the over 40s, who would appear to be the group most at risk.
The Dashboard is still using NIMS data for their percentages. I am using ONS population survey numbers - which are smaller, but probably closer to the truth.
The number of vaccinations is not in doubt - it is the number of people in existence, in the UK, that is the issue.
That's why I suggested the estimate might be less than perfectly accurate
It is binary, either you live with no NPIs and people who refused the vaccine get sick and die, or you have them and they don't get sick and don't die until you get rid of the NPIs or the viral R value overwhelms your NPIs (see Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium etc...). These are the options, Chris Whitty laid them out very well at the end of June when the government went ahead with the full reopening in July. An infection displaced isn't an infection prevented.
You would be right, if there had been zero vaccinations happening between July and now. However, not only have there been lots of vaccinations in that period, but I'm also arguing that with better government management there could have been substantially more, and that the NPIs could have been better targeted.
Those who want to be vaccinated have been by and large. Only the JCVIs prevarication stalled childhood ones and even those are well underway now.
The question is how to get everyone else covered and the only answer is to drop NPIs and let nature take its course.
Well, the fact of the matter is that the UK's proportion of the unjabbed is higher than some other comparable countries, despite the fact that the UK has less anti-vax sentiment than most countries, Yes, we did a very good job reaching the most vulnerable cohorts, but there is absolutely no getting away from the fact that we've done a poor job of reaching the under 50s and especially under 40s, We have been paying the price in deaths and hospitalisations.
Yes, of course it is their 'own fault', but the situation was undoubtedly made worse by government complacency, mixed messaging, and failure to take measures to nudge people into getting jabbed. Even France has done better than us in those cohorts, and Portugal and Ireland much better. The fact that we got off to a very good start with the vaccination programme doesn't excuse losing the plot in the later stages.
My definition of losing the plot on the vaccination programme would be congratulating yourself for making up the numbers by vaccinating teenagers.
Germany's death rate is currently higher than the UK's has been at any time since March and their winter wave is only just beginning.
England vaccination numbers (1st) - against ONS mid 2020 population numbers.
42.76% 12 to 15 64.80% 16 to 17 76.60% 18 to 24 78.20% 25 to 29 85.21% 30 to 34 87.62% 35 to 39 92.76% 40 to 44 89.91% 45 to 49 94.75% 50 to 54 97.34% 55 to 59 99.46% 60 to 64 96.90% 65 to 69 96.12% 70 to 74 102.61% 75 to 79 (yes, I know, investigating this one) 95.06% 80 to 84 96.00% 85 to 89 90.75% 90 upwards
I think we should probably conclude their estimate is less than perfectly accurate.
I'm very surprised if on those figures we're only on 68% overall.
That's first doses, were at ~75% for those. The UK is one of those few countries that has a big gap between first and second doses, we didn't really get across that one dose isn't enough.
I'm not sure to what extent that is true though. The figures on today's dashboard (and therefore expressed as a proportion of all persons aged 12 and over) are 88.4% for first doses and 80.4% for second doses, and a decent fraction of that gap must be accounted for by children who are either ineligible or not yet eligible for the second dose.
Certainly enthusiasm for boosters appears strong (already at 27.8% and climbing steadily) and anyone who's after those will already have long since snapped up dose 2. I certainly want mine, counting down the days until computer says yes.
It is binary, either you live with no NPIs and people who refused the vaccine get sick and die, or you have them and they don't get sick and don't die until you get rid of the NPIs or the viral R value overwhelms your NPIs (see Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium etc...). These are the options, Chris Whitty laid them out very well at the end of June when the government went ahead with the full reopening in July. An infection displaced isn't an infection prevented.
You would be right, if there had been zero vaccinations happening between July and now. However, not only have there been lots of vaccinations in that period, but I'm also arguing that with better government management there could have been substantially more, and that the NPIs could have been better targeted.
Those who want to be vaccinated have been by and large. Only the JCVIs prevarication stalled childhood ones and even those are well underway now.
The question is how to get everyone else covered and the only answer is to drop NPIs and let nature take its course.
Well, the fact of the matter is that the UK's proportion of the unjabbed is higher than some other comparable countries, despite the fact that the UK has less anti-vax sentiment than most countries, Yes, we did a very good job reaching the most vulnerable cohorts, but there is absolutely no getting away from the fact that we've done a poor job of reaching the under 50s and especially under 40s, We have been paying the price in deaths and hospitalisations.
Yes, of course it is their 'own fault', but the situation was undoubtedly made worse by government complacency, mixed messaging, and failure to take measures to nudge people into getting jabbed. Even France has done better than us in those cohorts, and Portugal and Ireland much better. The fact that we got off to a very good start with the vaccination programme doesn't excuse losing the plot in the later stages.
My definition of losing the plot on the vaccination programme would be congratulating yourself for making up the numbers by vaccinating teenagers.
Germany's death rate is currently higher than the UK's has been at any time since March and their winter wave is only just beginning.
England vaccination numbers (1st) - against ONS mid 2020 population numbers.
42.76% 12 to 15 64.80% 16 to 17 76.60% 18 to 24 78.20% 25 to 29 85.21% 30 to 34 87.62% 35 to 39 92.76% 40 to 44 89.91% 45 to 49 94.75% 50 to 54 97.34% 55 to 59 99.46% 60 to 64 96.90% 65 to 69 96.12% 70 to 74 102.61% 75 to 79 (yes, I know, investigating this one) 95.06% 80 to 84 96.00% 85 to 89 90.75% 90 upwards
Thanks for posting that, the quirk in the 75-79 Year olds is, AIUI, why they don't use the ONS population estimate on the COVID dashboard, the problem being in stead they use the MJDI numbers, which overstates the population by about 4.5 million and there for give an inaccurate bad appearance.
More than a whiff of misogyny is in the air. It is striking that there is no comparably zealous campaign to abandon the word “men” in favour of “prostate-havers”, “ejaculators” or “bodies with testicles”. It is almost always women who are being ordered to dispense with a useful word they have used all their lives.
Whilst I agree with them on most of the trans debate questions, the conversation is usually about women because of campaign success in marketing women as eternally oppressed victims with limited agency, and men/boys who suffer abuse etc tend to be silenced.
The phrases "violence against women and girls" and "Women and Equalities Committee" capture the predominant attitude of the contemporary debate perfectly.
+ this.
A rather prominent charity used to have a website that, if you claimed to be a woman, went to help services about abuse. If you claimed to be a man, went to a 'you are an abuser, you evil scum. Here's how you can get help.' page.
It was a women's charity, but it was well-known and its name was non-gendered. Any man wanting to go there for help would be treated as a perpetrator, not a victim. And 1/3 of all victims of abuse are male.
I sent them a strongly-worded email, and it changed - with a link to a charity helping men. I'd like to think that was down to me, but who knows ...
I seem to recall probably apocryphal tales of police policies of when there was a call out re domestic abuse to automatically arrest the man, regardless of who made the call and what it was about.
Um, frankly, there's worse rules of thumb. I'd love to know where this 1/3 stat comes from.
Ask and ye shall receive (even after a few whiskies):
"the Crime Survey for England and Wales showed that an estimated 2.3 million adults aged 16 to 74 years experienced domestic abuse in the last year (1.6 million women and 757,000 men), a slight but non-significant decrease from the previous year"
It's a ratio that, as far as I can see, has been stable for a long time.
Domestic abuse is a hidden scandal. The chances are that most of us will know someone who has suffered domestic abuse - male and/or female.
Refuge's website hasn't actually changed much. It still describes itself as 'support for women and children' and only the section on men has a button for 'I am an abuser,' not the one for women. Moreover the section for men is well down the list and has a binary choice: 'I am abused' and 'I am an abuser.'
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Chill. The allegation that this was deliberately engineered by the Home Sec to satisfy "ghouls" who exist and say stuff in your head is off-the-scale batshit, up there with your attack on @TimT for saying the diametrical opposite of what he actually said. Good lunch?
It is an utterly disgraceful comment and is beyond excuse
Which bit was disgraceful. That Farage-supporters are out there actively calling for asylum seekers to be drowned? Thats out there on Twitter. That the Home Secretary is pandering to those voters? She is according to HYUFD, thats the remaining core Tory vote after northerners are driven away. That tow backs and interventions with large boats will cause small dinghys to sink? Thats obvious surely. That they tried to criminalise the RNLI? Thats long since been covered and corrected by the government.
So again, where is it disgraceful. We can't stop these boats, we can't intercept the people getting off the ones who land here successfully which is almost all of them. So if we want it to stop we need to work with the rest of Europe. Might help if we actually had a channel to accept a reasonable number of asylum seekers rather than the trickle who come here vs the much larger numbers in France etc etc.
Your comments are unacceptable and your reference to twitter to try to justify your comments says it all
You are driven by an all encompassing hatred of this government and do not add to a very serious debate
You aren't saying how they are unacceptable.
It is a fact that ghouls are on Farage's twitter feed right now saying awful things. It is a declared risk that her proposed solutions to the boats would sink some. It is a fact that by accident or design a bill would have had the RNLI criminalised for picking people out of the water after having their boat sunk.
When you stop thinking rationally and go back to blind loyalty to the government you start going on about my "all-encompassing hatred of this government". You miss my pro-Sunak and pro-furlough comments which I make a lot.
My views aren't the issue, nor do they somehow change the facts on hand.
As for not adding to serious debate I have made a very serious proposal. We can't stop the boats. We can't detain the people who get off the boats. So if we want to process asylum seekers off-shore the simple solution is offer them a plane ride from Calais airport to Albania or wherever.
Your repetitive comments about the criminalising the RNLI are pure political spin and as my son who is RNLI crew has just said their operational requirements are not affected by any legislation proposed or otherwise
I am sure you can find ghouls on twitter but David Cameron's comments about twitter are succinct
Even by your own admission you know nothing about boats and your motivation is purely anti HMG propaganda
We can stop or certainly reduce the number of boats crossing and sadly today's tragedy will concentrate minds across the EU-France-EU to take concerted action
Your idea of Albania or anywhere else is rejected by Labour who when asked raised the issue of human rights
The criminalisation of the RNLI was still in the bill a couple of days ago. Not sure if it has been removed yet.
That's been in the bill an awfully long time, right in print in a proposed set of new laws, for something that you dismiss as political spin.
It is not passed into law neither will it be
It will be unless the bill is amended or the clause is withdrawn. The only way that happens - to protect your son - is for people like me to upset you by calling out what the government are doing. You don't like the proposal and neither do I, so I don't understand why it is such a fractious issue between us.
The bill will be amended and in view of today's tragedy with 31 drowning confirmed by France, it is time to take the politics out of this and support the UK-France -EU to come together and take action
I am glad we are in agreement that this clause needs to be taken out of the bill - not "pure political spin" at all.
I am less optimistic about prospects for a UK - France deal. We take very few asylum seekers comparative to other countries but think they are swamping us. Hard to find solutions when we refuse to accept the status quo.
Just caught up with the BBCR4 PM edit of PMQs. I have to say contrary to what I read on here Johnson smashed Starmer out of the park.
Funny how that can happen. In 1960 Kennedy won the election partly because Nixon did poorly in a TV debate. He was ill at the time, sweating heavily and hadn't shaved.
But radio listeners thought he gave Kennedy an absolute mauling.
Crossing the channel in a dinghy has an effective mortality rate of about 0.1%
Time to stop living in fear etc etc and let people have the freedom to etc etc
If you are trying to be funny, it’s not really very funny today though isn’t it.
Maybe I should stop commenting now I am tipsy before I say something very out of place. I was banned from a site a few weeks ago for calling someone a poisonous rock fish, but despite looking rather funny they are very poisonous.
No, satire isn't always meant to be funny. In this case it's meant to reflect the irony of people saying we can live with Covid deaths whilst saying we can't live with migrants dying in the sea. If I was trying to be funny I would accuse them of racism against white people, but I'm not so I won't.
Sorry. It’s just right now I want to see TV pictures of the gang members and gang bosses in a French or UK court. The BBC news just said the gangs make as much as two hundred and fifty million from each dingy and there’s been 25,000 making it over this year.
Get the gangs and their bosses! How difficult can that be?
Looks like the NZ National Party leader Judith Collins might get ousted tonight.
She’s realised her rival, former leader Simon Bridges (Oxon), has the numbers to depose her so she suddenly stripped him of his portfolio for a five-year-old offence of making a sexist remark to a colleague.
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Chill. The allegation that this was deliberately engineered by the Home Sec to satisfy "ghouls" who exist and say stuff in your head is off-the-scale batshit, up there with your attack on @TimT for saying the diametrical opposite of what he actually said. Good lunch?
It is an utterly disgraceful comment and is beyond excuse
Which bit was disgraceful. That Farage-supporters are out there actively calling for asylum seekers to be drowned? Thats out there on Twitter. That the Home Secretary is pandering to those voters? She is according to HYUFD, thats the remaining core Tory vote after northerners are driven away. That tow backs and interventions with large boats will cause small dinghys to sink? Thats obvious surely. That they tried to criminalise the RNLI? Thats long since been covered and corrected by the government.
So again, where is it disgraceful. We can't stop these boats, we can't intercept the people getting off the ones who land here successfully which is almost all of them. So if we want it to stop we need to work with the rest of Europe. Might help if we actually had a channel to accept a reasonable number of asylum seekers rather than the trickle who come here vs the much larger numbers in France etc etc.
Your comments are unacceptable and your reference to twitter to try to justify your comments says it all
You are driven by an all encompassing hatred of this government and do not add to a very serious debate
You aren't saying how they are unacceptable.
It is a fact that ghouls are on Farage's twitter feed right now saying awful things. It is a declared risk that her proposed solutions to the boats would sink some. It is a fact that by accident or design a bill would have had the RNLI criminalised for picking people out of the water after having their boat sunk.
When you stop thinking rationally and go back to blind loyalty to the government you start going on about my "all-encompassing hatred of this government". You miss my pro-Sunak and pro-furlough comments which I make a lot.
My views aren't the issue, nor do they somehow change the facts on hand.
As for not adding to serious debate I have made a very serious proposal. We can't stop the boats. We can't detain the people who get off the boats. So if we want to process asylum seekers off-shore the simple solution is offer them a plane ride from Calais airport to Albania or wherever.
Your repetitive comments about the criminalising the RNLI are pure political spin and as my son who is RNLI crew has just said their operational requirements are not affected by any legislation proposed or otherwise
I am sure you can find ghouls on twitter but David Cameron's comments about twitter are succinct
Even by your own admission you know nothing about boats and your motivation is purely anti HMG propaganda
We can stop or certainly reduce the number of boats crossing and sadly today's tragedy will concentrate minds across the EU-France-EU to take concerted action
Your idea of Albania or anywhere else is rejected by Labour who when asked raised the issue of human rights
The criminalisation of the RNLI was still in the bill a couple of days ago. Not sure if it has been removed yet.
That's been in the bill an awfully long time, right in print in a proposed set of new laws, for something that you dismiss as political spin.
It is not passed into law neither will it be
Generally governments propose laws in order to enact them into law.
Completely off topic but I've just started playing online poker as a hobby - I used to play each week in a pub tournament for a few years before the pandemic but I haven't played since before the pandemic began until recently. I like tournaments where you get potentially a couple of hours play from a small buy-in and are capped at losing your entry fee and that's that . . . the way I've always viewed it is I'd pay a comparable fee to go eg bowling or to a movie etc so I'm paying for the entertainment with that amount and any small amount won back is a bonus.
I had a morning off this morning so I thought I'd give it a go and bought a $4.40 satellite ticket to a $33 buy-in tournament. Managed to win a seat to the main event from the satellite. Even getting 6th (the lowest prize) would be my biggest ever poker win and I certainly wasn't expecting that, but I actually managed to win the whole tournament. First place prize $432.20 from a $33 ticket I'd won for a $4.40 buy-in.
Over the moon with that, but I wanted to mention it here not to show off but because the one thing I don't want is to get intoxicated from that victory and develop a problem habit; so I thought I'd mention it to a group of people here many of whom probably gamble overall more than I do. I'm happy but want to keep my feet firmly on the ground.
Which company? I tried a few back in the day and the weirdest one was Betfair. The number of times you'd see three players in a single deal get pocket Qs, Ks, and As was astounding. It made me feel that there was an algorithm dealing people powerful hands to encourage looser play and so knocking people out faster. I can't prove anything of course, but it felt a bit deliberate.
888
I doubt there's any funny business but the thing to remember with Hold Em is that you'll disproportionately see good cards when it comes to a showdown. Since crap gets mucked those with QQ, KK or AA will end up showing those hands while all the 72 that got dealt to other players you'll almost never see.
One of the best lessons I learnt from the good player I mentioned before is too be very wary of an Ace with a poor kicker. I used to go in almost any time I had an Ace [and lots of poor players do] but as he said to me the problem is even if you hit your Ace, you'll never know if someone else is in the hand with an Ace and a better kicker.
Thus today I quite often folded hands like A4 or A6 that when I first started playing I'd have gone in with - then seeing something like AQ at showdown and I'd have lost that hand had I gone in with my Ace.
I'm trying to do a calculation to work out on an 8-player table the chances that there are is a pocket A pair, a pocket K pair, and a pocket Q pair out there in a single deal. It "feels" like a 1000/1 shot, but I can't work out the odds.
Its extremely unlikely, sure probably even less likely than that. Though I doubt it actually happened many times and false recall will merge people showing AA versus KK with another time someone showed KK versus QQ and that's not that unusual.
One factor to bear in mind with the difference between online and real-life poker is how fast online poker is. In a pub, house or even a casino people play much slower, the cards get physically shuffled then dealt, conversations are had, people play in turn etc . . . online there's no interruption, no shuffling, the cards are shown almost instantaneously and people can queue the fact they're folding so everyone who's folding is out of the hand instantly.
As a result in online poker you'll face many, many more hands per hour than you will in physical poker. Which means that 'rare' hands can and will come up from time to time.
According to my software since I started playing earlier this month, I've been in over ten thousand hands already.
If you play ten thousand hands then you're going to see a few 1000/1 shots in those hands.
@Farooq - define the precise conditions - how many packs of cards etc, and I'll have a stab at working it out for you. I'm not familiar with poker terms, so you'll have to specify those too.
Already been done elsewhere, about 1 in 25,000 if it was an 8 handed table.
Brilliant! Now, considering I saw this happen a good dozen times at least, I'm back to thinking there was something fishy going on.
I'll see if I can check through the maths but it's making my head hurt looking at it, so I might program a Monte Carlo simulation this evening and run it a few million times to see whether I get something in the same ball park. There's no way I should have seen this happen more than about three times. I doubt I've ever played even 25,000 hands of poker, let alone 300,000.
Remember to account for the hundreds of thousands (estimate) of players as well. If none of them were seeing this more often than normal then it would be fixed. Others might have seen an unusual amount of AA v AA hands, or AK v AK v QQ hands etc which they remember.
That's a fair point, but it hasn't helped my headache.
The online player community found (and proved beyond reasonable doubt) some very obscure cases of cheating going on. If a major site was doing as you say, it would have been known about.
The thing is with games of chance online is that you're pretty close to the "infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters" scenario.
Almost any odd thing you can think of has probably happened to someone, somewhere, at some time. If it hadn't, that'd be an issue!
Exactly. The classic case is that poor woman who found herself in court accused of child murder, because two of her babies had suffered cot deaths. A key witness was a statistician who argued that the chances of her having had two cot deaths were infinitesimal. Whereas the right question to ask was, what is the chance that any mother would suffer two cot deaths (particularly given the correlation of such sad occurrences with various environmental factors) and then find herself suspected of foul play.
On point of order - the infamous 1 in 73 million figure witness was a paediatrician, not a statistician. He didn't understand statistics or probability and simply multiplied two figures together to get that one.
Name of Roy Meadow, knighted for services as an expert witness, almost all of which testimony turned out to be at the very least wrong.
More than a whiff of misogyny is in the air. It is striking that there is no comparably zealous campaign to abandon the word “men” in favour of “prostate-havers”, “ejaculators” or “bodies with testicles”. It is almost always women who are being ordered to dispense with a useful word they have used all their lives.
Whilst I agree with them on most of the trans debate questions, the conversation is usually about women because of campaign success in marketing women as eternally oppressed victims with limited agency, and men/boys who suffer abuse etc tend to be silenced.
The phrases "violence against women and girls" and "Women and Equalities Committee" capture the predominant attitude of the contemporary debate perfectly.
+ this.
A rather prominent charity used to have a website that, if you claimed to be a woman, went to help services about abuse. If you claimed to be a man, went to a 'you are an abuser, you evil scum. Here's how you can get help.' page.
It was a women's charity, but it was well-known and its name was non-gendered. Any man wanting to go there for help would be treated as a perpetrator, not a victim. And 1/3 of all victims of abuse are male.
I sent them a strongly-worded email, and it changed - with a link to a charity helping men. I'd like to think that was down to me, but who knows ...
I seem to recall probably apocryphal tales of police policies of when there was a call out re domestic abuse to automatically arrest the man, regardless of who made the call and what it was about.
Um, frankly, there's worse rules of thumb. I'd love to know where this 1/3 stat comes from.
Ask and ye shall receive (even after a few whiskies):
"the Crime Survey for England and Wales showed that an estimated 2.3 million adults aged 16 to 74 years experienced domestic abuse in the last year (1.6 million women and 757,000 men), a slight but non-significant decrease from the previous year"
It's a ratio that, as far as I can see, has been stable for a long time.
Domestic abuse is a hidden scandal. The chances are that most of us will know someone who has suffered domestic abuse - male and/or female.
Refuge's website hasn't actually changed much. It still describes itself as 'support for women and children' and only the section on men has a button for 'I am an abuser,' not the one for women. Moreover the section for men is well down the list and has a binary choice: 'I am abused' and 'I am an abuser.'
Thanks for that. From memory, the bu**ers have somewhat regressed it.
I have got really angry/frustrated over this in the past. 1/3 (sorry, Ishmael) of domestic abuse victims are male. That's a vast number of victims per year - but too many people treat them as perpetrators. And when it is charities, it makes it even worse.
Crossing the channel in a dinghy has an effective mortality rate of about 0.1%
Time to stop living in fear etc etc and let people have the freedom to etc etc
If you are trying to be funny, it’s not really very funny today though isn’t it.
Maybe I should stop commenting now I am tipsy before I say something very out of place. I was banned from a site a few weeks ago for calling someone a poisonous rock fish, but despite looking rather funny they are very poisonous.
No, satire isn't always meant to be funny. In this case it's meant to reflect the irony of people saying we can live with Covid deaths whilst saying we can't live with migrants dying in the sea. If I was trying to be funny I would accuse them of racism against white people, but I'm not so I won't.
Sorry. It’s just right now I want to see TV pictures of the gang members and gang bosses in a French or UK court. The BBC news just said the gangs make as much as two hundred and fifty million from each dingy and there’s been 25,000 making it over this year.
Get the gangs and their bosses! How difficult can that be?
250m whats? Don't be bloody ridiculous. These guys don't pay in advance, they don't have the dosh, the deal is structured so the migrants send money home to their families who pay off the debt to the people smugglers. So whatever it costs, it is repayable out of the amount of money a penniless immigrant can send home to Africa each month. Two hundred and fifty millionths of a million dollars sounds about right.
It is binary, either you live with no NPIs and people who refused the vaccine get sick and die, or you have them and they don't get sick and don't die until you get rid of the NPIs or the viral R value overwhelms your NPIs (see Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium etc...). These are the options, Chris Whitty laid them out very well at the end of June when the government went ahead with the full reopening in July. An infection displaced isn't an infection prevented.
You would be right, if there had been zero vaccinations happening between July and now. However, not only have there been lots of vaccinations in that period, but I'm also arguing that with better government management there could have been substantially more, and that the NPIs could have been better targeted.
Those who want to be vaccinated have been by and large. Only the JCVIs prevarication stalled childhood ones and even those are well underway now.
The question is how to get everyone else covered and the only answer is to drop NPIs and let nature take its course.
Well, the fact of the matter is that the UK's proportion of the unjabbed is higher than some other comparable countries, despite the fact that the UK has less anti-vax sentiment than most countries, Yes, we did a very good job reaching the most vulnerable cohorts, but there is absolutely no getting away from the fact that we've done a poor job of reaching the under 50s and especially under 40s, We have been paying the price in deaths and hospitalisations.
Yes, of course it is their 'own fault', but the situation was undoubtedly made worse by government complacency, mixed messaging, and failure to take measures to nudge people into getting jabbed. Even France has done better than us in those cohorts, and Portugal and Ireland much better. The fact that we got off to a very good start with the vaccination programme doesn't excuse losing the plot in the later stages.
My definition of losing the plot on the vaccination programme would be congratulating yourself for making up the numbers by vaccinating teenagers.
Germany's death rate is currently higher than the UK's has been at any time since March and their winter wave is only just beginning.
England vaccination numbers (1st) - against ONS mid 2020 population numbers.
42.76% 12 to 15 64.80% 16 to 17 76.60% 18 to 24 78.20% 25 to 29 85.21% 30 to 34 87.62% 35 to 39 92.76% 40 to 44 89.91% 45 to 49 94.75% 50 to 54 97.34% 55 to 59 99.46% 60 to 64 96.90% 65 to 69 96.12% 70 to 74 102.61% 75 to 79 (yes, I know, investigating this one) 95.06% 80 to 84 96.00% 85 to 89 90.75% 90 upwards
I think we should probably conclude their estimate is less than perfectly accurate.
I'm very surprised if on those figures we're only on 68% overall.
That's first doses, were at ~75% for those. The UK is one of those few countries that has a big gap between first and second doses, we didn't really get across that one dose isn't enough.
Ah, I see. Thanks.
Equally, if the drop off in dosing is proportionate to the age groups, that still suggests very high levels of protection among the over 40s, who would appear to be the group most at risk.
The Dashboard is still using NIMS data for their percentages. I am using ONS population survey numbers - which are smaller, but probably closer to the truth.
The number of vaccinations is not in doubt - it is the number of people in existence, in the UK, that is the issue.
That's why I suggested the estimate might be less than perfectly accurate
Double counting people using medical records is just silly, when you have the ONS population survey available.
Given current energy prices and the price cap, energy companies are going to lose an average of £400 between now and April and that depends on prices staying at current levels.
I'm locked in at 4.08p/kwh for gas and 20.58p for leccy till Sep 2023, with £396 of standing charges till then.
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Chill. The allegation that this was deliberately engineered by the Home Sec to satisfy "ghouls" who exist and say stuff in your head is off-the-scale batshit, up there with your attack on @TimT for saying the diametrical opposite of what he actually said. Good lunch?
It is an utterly disgraceful comment and is beyond excuse
Which bit was disgraceful. That Farage-supporters are out there actively calling for asylum seekers to be drowned? Thats out there on Twitter. That the Home Secretary is pandering to those voters? She is according to HYUFD, thats the remaining core Tory vote after northerners are driven away. That tow backs and interventions with large boats will cause small dinghys to sink? Thats obvious surely. That they tried to criminalise the RNLI? Thats long since been covered and corrected by the government.
So again, where is it disgraceful. We can't stop these boats, we can't intercept the people getting off the ones who land here successfully which is almost all of them. So if we want it to stop we need to work with the rest of Europe. Might help if we actually had a channel to accept a reasonable number of asylum seekers rather than the trickle who come here vs the much larger numbers in France etc etc.
Your comments are unacceptable and your reference to twitter to try to justify your comments says it all
You are driven by an all encompassing hatred of this government and do not add to a very serious debate
You aren't saying how they are unacceptable.
It is a fact that ghouls are on Farage's twitter feed right now saying awful things. It is a declared risk that her proposed solutions to the boats would sink some. It is a fact that by accident or design a bill would have had the RNLI criminalised for picking people out of the water after having their boat sunk.
When you stop thinking rationally and go back to blind loyalty to the government you start going on about my "all-encompassing hatred of this government". You miss my pro-Sunak and pro-furlough comments which I make a lot.
My views aren't the issue, nor do they somehow change the facts on hand.
As for not adding to serious debate I have made a very serious proposal. We can't stop the boats. We can't detain the people who get off the boats. So if we want to process asylum seekers off-shore the simple solution is offer them a plane ride from Calais airport to Albania or wherever.
Your repetitive comments about the criminalising the RNLI are pure political spin and as my son who is RNLI crew has just said their operational requirements are not affected by any legislation proposed or otherwise
I am sure you can find ghouls on twitter but David Cameron's comments about twitter are succinct
Even by your own admission you know nothing about boats and your motivation is purely anti HMG propaganda
We can stop or certainly reduce the number of boats crossing and sadly today's tragedy will concentrate minds across the EU-France-EU to take concerted action
Your idea of Albania or anywhere else is rejected by Labour who when asked raised the issue of human rights
The criminalisation of the RNLI was still in the bill a couple of days ago. Not sure if it has been removed yet.
That's been in the bill an awfully long time, right in print in a proposed set of new laws, for something that you dismiss as political spin.
It is not passed into law neither will it be
Generally governments propose laws in order to enact them into law.
OR is HMG is just playing politics re: lifeboats?
Either way rather less than defensible.
This particular government it is a mix of too stupid to realise the consequences, too lazy to take it out, too stubborn to take it out as much as playing politics. And most ridiculous of all, somehow BigG expects us all to be comfortable trusting this governments word!
If you are saying immigration was key part of Brexit - Farages asylum seeking poster (disavowed by Gove) helped leave campaign. And 60% of Salop North is leave vote. What is the ongoing impact of the channel migrant story on the coming by elections?
The Telegraph the other day said it’s the most damaging issue for the Conservatives at the moment?
If Boris himself is really frustrated at Patel for not making progress, what are voters in constituency’s thinking and saying?
Or, this may be a political betting site, but is this completely the wrong evening to think like this and discuss it?
Just caught up with the BBCR4 PM edit of PMQs. I have to say contrary to what I read on here Johnson smashed Starmer out of the park.
Funny how that can happen. In 1960 Kennedy won the election partly because Nixon did poorly in a TV debate. He was ill at the time, sweating heavily and hadn't shaved.
But radio listeners thought he gave Kennedy an absolute mauling.
Yes, I remember the debate from The Politics of the Mass Media module at University. I wasn't aware of the radio perception, so thanks for that. The TV image of Nixon being shifty and untrustworthy was often attributed to JFK's victory, that, alongside the Kennedy clan (particularly Joe, I seem to recall) cheating like demons.
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Chill. The allegation that this was deliberately engineered by the Home Sec to satisfy "ghouls" who exist and say stuff in your head is off-the-scale batshit, up there with your attack on @TimT for saying the diametrical opposite of what he actually said. Good lunch?
It is an utterly disgraceful comment and is beyond excuse
Which bit was disgraceful. That Farage-supporters are out there actively calling for asylum seekers to be drowned? Thats out there on Twitter. That the Home Secretary is pandering to those voters? She is according to HYUFD, thats the remaining core Tory vote after northerners are driven away. That tow backs and interventions with large boats will cause small dinghys to sink? Thats obvious surely. That they tried to criminalise the RNLI? Thats long since been covered and corrected by the government.
So again, where is it disgraceful. We can't stop these boats, we can't intercept the people getting off the ones who land here successfully which is almost all of them. So if we want it to stop we need to work with the rest of Europe. Might help if we actually had a channel to accept a reasonable number of asylum seekers rather than the trickle who come here vs the much larger numbers in France etc etc.
Your comments are unacceptable and your reference to twitter to try to justify your comments says it all
You are driven by an all encompassing hatred of this government and do not add to a very serious debate
You aren't saying how they are unacceptable.
It is a fact that ghouls are on Farage's twitter feed right now saying awful things. It is a declared risk that her proposed solutions to the boats would sink some. It is a fact that by accident or design a bill would have had the RNLI criminalised for picking people out of the water after having their boat sunk.
When you stop thinking rationally and go back to blind loyalty to the government you start going on about my "all-encompassing hatred of this government". You miss my pro-Sunak and pro-furlough comments which I make a lot.
My views aren't the issue, nor do they somehow change the facts on hand.
As for not adding to serious debate I have made a very serious proposal. We can't stop the boats. We can't detain the people who get off the boats. So if we want to process asylum seekers off-shore the simple solution is offer them a plane ride from Calais airport to Albania or wherever.
Your repetitive comments about the criminalising the RNLI are pure political spin and as my son who is RNLI crew has just said their operational requirements are not affected by any legislation proposed or otherwise
I am sure you can find ghouls on twitter but David Cameron's comments about twitter are succinct
Even by your own admission you know nothing about boats and your motivation is purely anti HMG propaganda
We can stop or certainly reduce the number of boats crossing and sadly today's tragedy will concentrate minds across the EU-France-EU to take concerted action
Your idea of Albania or anywhere else is rejected by Labour who when asked raised the issue of human rights
The criminalisation of the RNLI was still in the bill a couple of days ago. Not sure if it has been removed yet.
That's been in the bill an awfully long time, right in print in a proposed set of new laws, for something that you dismiss as political spin.
It is not passed into law neither will it be
It will be unless the bill is amended or the clause is withdrawn. The only way that happens - to protect your son - is for people like me to upset you by calling out what the government are doing. You don't like the proposal and neither do I, so I don't understand why it is such a fractious issue between us.
The bill will be amended and in view of today's tragedy with 31 drowning confirmed by France, it is time to take the politics out of this and support the UK-France -EU to come together and take action
Are you just hoping that it will be amended, or has it been officially stated, please? if the latter then good, though disgracefully late, news.
More than a whiff of misogyny is in the air. It is striking that there is no comparably zealous campaign to abandon the word “men” in favour of “prostate-havers”, “ejaculators” or “bodies with testicles”. It is almost always women who are being ordered to dispense with a useful word they have used all their lives.
Whilst I agree with them on most of the trans debate questions, the conversation is usually about women because of campaign success in marketing women as eternally oppressed victims with limited agency, and men/boys who suffer abuse etc tend to be silenced.
The phrases "violence against women and girls" and "Women and Equalities Committee" capture the predominant attitude of the contemporary debate perfectly.
+ this.
A rather prominent charity used to have a website that, if you claimed to be a woman, went to help services about abuse. If you claimed to be a man, went to a 'you are an abuser, you evil scum. Here's how you can get help.' page.
It was a women's charity, but it was well-known and its name was non-gendered. Any man wanting to go there for help would be treated as a perpetrator, not a victim. And 1/3 of all victims of abuse are male.
I sent them a strongly-worded email, and it changed - with a link to a charity helping men. I'd like to think that was down to me, but who knows ...
I seem to recall probably apocryphal tales of police policies of when there was a call out re domestic abuse to automatically arrest the man, regardless of who made the call and what it was about.
Um, frankly, there's worse rules of thumb. I'd love to know where this 1/3 stat comes from.
Ask and ye shall receive (even after a few whiskies):
"the Crime Survey for England and Wales showed that an estimated 2.3 million adults aged 16 to 74 years experienced domestic abuse in the last year (1.6 million women and 757,000 men), a slight but non-significant decrease from the previous year"
It's a ratio that, as far as I can see, has been stable for a long time.
Domestic abuse is a hidden scandal. The chances are that most of us will know someone who has suffered domestic abuse - male and/or female.
Refuge's website hasn't actually changed much. It still describes itself as 'support for women and children' and only the section on men has a button for 'I am an abuser,' not the one for women. Moreover the section for men is well down the list and has a binary choice: 'I am abused' and 'I am an abuser.'
Thanks for that. From memory, the bu**ers have somewhat regressed it.
I have got really angry/frustrated over this in the past. 1/3 (sorry, Ishmael) of domestic abuse victims are male. That's a vast number of victims per year - but too many people treat them as perpetrators. And when it is charities, it makes it even worse.
When your statistic is challenged, you can a. justify it or b. apologise. a. is more convincing than b.
The depressing thing is that ghouls will be practically celebrating this. "Their own fault", "shouldn't be coming here" etc etc.
I hope this gets picked up by the media in their origin countries and deters the next generation of migrants.
These people are fundamentally miscalculating the risk they’re taking. And the reward is far less than they imagine.
RIP. This was avoidable.
I think you miss the point. Many flee because their lives are shit. Some are already in genuine fear for their lives. Others know that war and poverty and disease are all they can look forward to.
This kind of tragedy is what the Home Secretary was hoping for. "Accidentally" drown the buggers with a wave machine or a tow back or swamping them. That'll show them and if it doesn't at least the ghouls will be satisfied for 5 minutes.
There is a simple solution. We (a) can't stop the boats and (b) can't catch the people who make it across. So if we are serious about an off-shore processing centre simply collect them up onto a plane in France...
Chill. The allegation that this was deliberately engineered by the Home Sec to satisfy "ghouls" who exist and say stuff in your head is off-the-scale batshit, up there with your attack on @TimT for saying the diametrical opposite of what he actually said. Good lunch?
It is an utterly disgraceful comment and is beyond excuse
Which bit was disgraceful. That Farage-supporters are out there actively calling for asylum seekers to be drowned? Thats out there on Twitter. That the Home Secretary is pandering to those voters? She is according to HYUFD, thats the remaining core Tory vote after northerners are driven away. That tow backs and interventions with large boats will cause small dinghys to sink? Thats obvious surely. That they tried to criminalise the RNLI? Thats long since been covered and corrected by the government.
So again, where is it disgraceful. We can't stop these boats, we can't intercept the people getting off the ones who land here successfully which is almost all of them. So if we want it to stop we need to work with the rest of Europe. Might help if we actually had a channel to accept a reasonable number of asylum seekers rather than the trickle who come here vs the much larger numbers in France etc etc.
Your comments are unacceptable and your reference to twitter to try to justify your comments says it all
You are driven by an all encompassing hatred of this government and do not add to a very serious debate
You aren't saying how they are unacceptable.
It is a fact that ghouls are on Farage's twitter feed right now saying awful things. It is a declared risk that her proposed solutions to the boats would sink some. It is a fact that by accident or design a bill would have had the RNLI criminalised for picking people out of the water after having their boat sunk.
When you stop thinking rationally and go back to blind loyalty to the government you start going on about my "all-encompassing hatred of this government". You miss my pro-Sunak and pro-furlough comments which I make a lot.
My views aren't the issue, nor do they somehow change the facts on hand.
As for not adding to serious debate I have made a very serious proposal. We can't stop the boats. We can't detain the people who get off the boats. So if we want to process asylum seekers off-shore the simple solution is offer them a plane ride from Calais airport to Albania or wherever.
Your repetitive comments about the criminalising the RNLI are pure political spin and as my son who is RNLI crew has just said their operational requirements are not affected by any legislation proposed or otherwise
I am sure you can find ghouls on twitter but David Cameron's comments about twitter are succinct
Even by your own admission you know nothing about boats and your motivation is purely anti HMG propaganda
We can stop or certainly reduce the number of boats crossing and sadly today's tragedy will concentrate minds across the EU-France-EU to take concerted action
Your idea of Albania or anywhere else is rejected by Labour who when asked raised the issue of human rights
The criminalisation of the RNLI was still in the bill a couple of days ago. Not sure if it has been removed yet.
That's been in the bill an awfully long time, right in print in a proposed set of new laws, for something that you dismiss as political spin.
It is not passed into law neither will it be
It will be unless the bill is amended or the clause is withdrawn. The only way that happens - to protect your son - is for people like me to upset you by calling out what the government are doing. You don't like the proposal and neither do I, so I don't understand why it is such a fractious issue between us.
The bill will be amended and in view of today's tragedy with 31 drowning confirmed by France, it is time to take the politics out of this and support the UK-France -EU to come together and take action
I am glad we are in agreement that this clause needs to be taken out of the bill - not "pure political spin" at all.
I am less optimistic about prospects for a UK - France deal. We take very few asylum seekers comparative to other countries but think they are swamping us. Hard to find solutions when we refuse to accept the status quo.
If there is one thing that is so sad and sobering is that it often takes a tragedy of this enormity to concentrate politicians minds, and I expect there will be a lot of pressure within France to deal with this serious issue as it has happened in French waters and equally in the UK and the EU
My son did say tonight that should we ever forget the picture of the three year old Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, who drowned in the Med in 2015 in that iconic picture and yet again we have drowned innocent children; it has to be the moment for politics to make way for compassion
Given current energy prices and the price cap, energy companies are going to lose an average of £400 between now and April and that depends on prices staying at current levels.
I'm locked in at 4.08p/kwh for gas and 20.58p for leccy till Sep 2023, with £396 of standing charges till then.
Given the dates that looks a good deal. I managed to get 3.09 and 16.86, but it's only fixed until June. Low standing charge though, only £68 to pay on that.
More than a whiff of misogyny is in the air. It is striking that there is no comparably zealous campaign to abandon the word “men” in favour of “prostate-havers”, “ejaculators” or “bodies with testicles”. It is almost always women who are being ordered to dispense with a useful word they have used all their lives.
Whilst I agree with them on most of the trans debate questions, the conversation is usually about women because of campaign success in marketing women as eternally oppressed victims with limited agency, and men/boys who suffer abuse etc tend to be silenced.
The phrases "violence against women and girls" and "Women and Equalities Committee" capture the predominant attitude of the contemporary debate perfectly.
+ this.
A rather prominent charity used to have a website that, if you claimed to be a woman, went to help services about abuse. If you claimed to be a man, went to a 'you are an abuser, you evil scum. Here's how you can get help.' page.
It was a women's charity, but it was well-known and its name was non-gendered. Any man wanting to go there for help would be treated as a perpetrator, not a victim. And 1/3 of all victims of abuse are male.
I sent them a strongly-worded email, and it changed - with a link to a charity helping men. I'd like to think that was down to me, but who knows ...
I seem to recall probably apocryphal tales of police policies of when there was a call out re domestic abuse to automatically arrest the man, regardless of who made the call and what it was about.
Um, frankly, there's worse rules of thumb. I'd love to know where this 1/3 stat comes from.
Ask and ye shall receive (even after a few whiskies):
"the Crime Survey for England and Wales showed that an estimated 2.3 million adults aged 16 to 74 years experienced domestic abuse in the last year (1.6 million women and 757,000 men), a slight but non-significant decrease from the previous year"
It's a ratio that, as far as I can see, has been stable for a long time.
Domestic abuse is a hidden scandal. The chances are that most of us will know someone who has suffered domestic abuse - male and/or female.
Refuge's website hasn't actually changed much. It still describes itself as 'support for women and children' and only the section on men has a button for 'I am an abuser,' not the one for women. Moreover the section for men is well down the list and has a binary choice: 'I am abused' and 'I am an abuser.'
Thanks for that. From memory, the bu**ers have somewhat regressed it.
I have got really angry/frustrated over this in the past. 1/3 (sorry, Ishmael) of domestic abuse victims are male. That's a vast number of victims per year - but too many people treat them as perpetrators. And when it is charities, it makes it even worse.
When your statistic is challenged, you can a. justify it or b. apologise. a. is more convincing than b.
There is believed to be fairly major under-reporting, IIRC. Societal pressure, not being believed, risk of arrest.....
More than a whiff of misogyny is in the air. It is striking that there is no comparably zealous campaign to abandon the word “men” in favour of “prostate-havers”, “ejaculators” or “bodies with testicles”. It is almost always women who are being ordered to dispense with a useful word they have used all their lives.
Whilst I agree with them on most of the trans debate questions, the conversation is usually about women because of campaign success in marketing women as eternally oppressed victims with limited agency, and men/boys who suffer abuse etc tend to be silenced.
The phrases "violence against women and girls" and "Women and Equalities Committee" capture the predominant attitude of the contemporary debate perfectly.
+ this.
A rather prominent charity used to have a website that, if you claimed to be a woman, went to help services about abuse. If you claimed to be a man, went to a 'you are an abuser, you evil scum. Here's how you can get help.' page.
It was a women's charity, but it was well-known and its name was non-gendered. Any man wanting to go there for help would be treated as a perpetrator, not a victim. And 1/3 of all victims of abuse are male.
I sent them a strongly-worded email, and it changed - with a link to a charity helping men. I'd like to think that was down to me, but who knows ...
I seem to recall probably apocryphal tales of police policies of when there was a call out re domestic abuse to automatically arrest the man, regardless of who made the call and what it was about.
Um, frankly, there's worse rules of thumb. I'd love to know where this 1/3 stat comes from.
Ask and ye shall receive (even after a few whiskies):
"the Crime Survey for England and Wales showed that an estimated 2.3 million adults aged 16 to 74 years experienced domestic abuse in the last year (1.6 million women and 757,000 men), a slight but non-significant decrease from the previous year"
It's a ratio that, as far as I can see, has been stable for a long time.
Domestic abuse is a hidden scandal. The chances are that most of us will know someone who has suffered domestic abuse - male and/or female.
Refuge's website hasn't actually changed much. It still describes itself as 'support for women and children' and only the section on men has a button for 'I am an abuser,' not the one for women. Moreover the section for men is well down the list and has a binary choice: 'I am abused' and 'I am an abuser.'
Thanks for that. From memory, the bu**ers have somewhat regressed it.
I have got really angry/frustrated over this in the past. 1/3 (sorry, Ishmael) of domestic abuse victims are male. That's a vast number of victims per year - but too many people treat them as perpetrators. And when it is charities, it makes it even worse.
When your statistic is challenged, you can a. justify it or b. apologise. a. is more convincing than b.
????
I justified it. I gave you figures - and ones I have posted (from various years) on here many times before.
One of the interesting (and sad) things is that some statistics seem to remain stable for years, whatever political interventions occur. This is one of them.
Completely off topic but I've just started playing online poker as a hobby - I used to play each week in a pub tournament for a few years before the pandemic but I haven't played since before the pandemic began until recently. I like tournaments where you get potentially a couple of hours play from a small buy-in and are capped at losing your entry fee and that's that . . . the way I've always viewed it is I'd pay a comparable fee to go eg bowling or to a movie etc so I'm paying for the entertainment with that amount and any small amount won back is a bonus.
I had a morning off this morning so I thought I'd give it a go and bought a $4.40 satellite ticket to a $33 buy-in tournament. Managed to win a seat to the main event from the satellite. Even getting 6th (the lowest prize) would be my biggest ever poker win and I certainly wasn't expecting that, but I actually managed to win the whole tournament. First place prize $432.20 from a $33 ticket I'd won for a $4.40 buy-in.
Over the moon with that, but I wanted to mention it here not to show off but because the one thing I don't want is to get intoxicated from that victory and develop a problem habit; so I thought I'd mention it to a group of people here many of whom probably gamble overall more than I do. I'm happy but want to keep my feet firmly on the ground.
Which company? I tried a few back in the day and the weirdest one was Betfair. The number of times you'd see three players in a single deal get pocket Qs, Ks, and As was astounding. It made me feel that there was an algorithm dealing people powerful hands to encourage looser play and so knocking people out faster. I can't prove anything of course, but it felt a bit deliberate.
888
I doubt there's any funny business but the thing to remember with Hold Em is that you'll disproportionately see good cards when it comes to a showdown. Since crap gets mucked those with QQ, KK or AA will end up showing those hands while all the 72 that got dealt to other players you'll almost never see.
One of the best lessons I learnt from the good player I mentioned before is too be very wary of an Ace with a poor kicker. I used to go in almost any time I had an Ace [and lots of poor players do] but as he said to me the problem is even if you hit your Ace, you'll never know if someone else is in the hand with an Ace and a better kicker.
Thus today I quite often folded hands like A4 or A6 that when I first started playing I'd have gone in with - then seeing something like AQ at showdown and I'd have lost that hand had I gone in with my Ace.
I'm trying to do a calculation to work out on an 8-player table the chances that there are is a pocket A pair, a pocket K pair, and a pocket Q pair out there in a single deal. It "feels" like a 1000/1 shot, but I can't work out the odds.
Its extremely unlikely, sure probably even less likely than that. Though I doubt it actually happened many times and false recall will merge people showing AA versus KK with another time someone showed KK versus QQ and that's not that unusual.
One factor to bear in mind with the difference between online and real-life poker is how fast online poker is. In a pub, house or even a casino people play much slower, the cards get physically shuffled then dealt, conversations are had, people play in turn etc . . . online there's no interruption, no shuffling, the cards are shown almost instantaneously and people can queue the fact they're folding so everyone who's folding is out of the hand instantly.
As a result in online poker you'll face many, many more hands per hour than you will in physical poker. Which means that 'rare' hands can and will come up from time to time.
According to my software since I started playing earlier this month, I've been in over ten thousand hands already.
If you play ten thousand hands then you're going to see a few 1000/1 shots in those hands.
@Farooq - define the precise conditions - how many packs of cards etc, and I'll have a stab at working it out for you. I'm not familiar with poker terms, so you'll have to specify those too.
Already been done elsewhere, about 1 in 25,000 if it was an 8 handed table.
Brilliant! Now, considering I saw this happen a good dozen times at least, I'm back to thinking there was something fishy going on.
I'll see if I can check through the maths but it's making my head hurt looking at it, so I might program a Monte Carlo simulation this evening and run it a few million times to see whether I get something in the same ball park. There's no way I should have seen this happen more than about three times. I doubt I've ever played even 25,000 hands of poker, let alone 300,000.
Remember to account for the hundreds of thousands (estimate) of players as well. If none of them were seeing this more often than normal then it would be fixed. Others might have seen an unusual amount of AA v AA hands, or AK v AK v QQ hands etc which they remember.
That's a fair point, but it hasn't helped my headache.
The online player community found (and proved beyond reasonable doubt) some very obscure cases of cheating going on. If a major site was doing as you say, it would have been known about.
The thing is with games of chance online is that you're pretty close to the "infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters" scenario.
Almost any odd thing you can think of has probably happened to someone, somewhere, at some time. If it hadn't, that'd be an issue!
Exactly. The classic case is that poor woman who found herself in court accused of child murder, because two of her babies had suffered cot deaths. A key witness was a statistician who argued that the chances of her having had two cot deaths were infinitesimal. Whereas the right question to ask was, what is the chance that any mother would suffer two cot deaths (particularly given the correlation of such sad occurrences with various environmental factors) and then find herself suspected of foul play.
On point of order - the infamous 1 in 73 million figure witness was a paediatrician, not a statistician. He didn't understand statistics or probability and simply multiplied two figures together to get that one.
Name of Roy Meadow, knighted for services as an expert witness, almost all of which testimony turned out to be at the very least wrong.
On top the way they facilitated antivaxx scares, its worth noting that the Lancet was a big defender and proponent of Roy Meadow too.
The three white men who chased and killed Ahmaud Arbery have been found guilty of murder, following his 2020 shooting death in south Georgia, which led to a wave of racial justice protest and a resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the US.
Travis McMicheal, his father Greg McMichael and their neighbour William “Roddie” Bryan were each convicted for murdering Arbery, who was unarmed, after pursuing him in February last year and claiming, without evidence, he had been involved in a spate of burglaries in their neighborhood.
The verdict was announced after two weeks of testimony and evidence in the closely watched trial, during which the McMichaels had claimed the shooting was an act of self-defense and that they had attempted to enact a citizen’s arrest.
Crossing the channel in a dinghy has an effective mortality rate of about 0.1%
Time to stop living in fear etc etc and let people have the freedom to etc etc
If you are trying to be funny, it’s not really very funny today though isn’t it.
Maybe I should stop commenting now I am tipsy before I say something very out of place. I was banned from a site a few weeks ago for calling someone a poisonous rock fish, but despite looking rather funny they are very poisonous.
No, satire isn't always meant to be funny. In this case it's meant to reflect the irony of people saying we can live with Covid deaths whilst saying we can't live with migrants dying in the sea. If I was trying to be funny I would accuse them of racism against white people, but I'm not so I won't.
Sorry. It’s just right now I want to see TV pictures of the gang members and gang bosses in a French or UK court. The BBC news just said the gangs make as much as two hundred and fifty million from each dingy and there’s been 25,000 making it over this year.
Get the gangs and their bosses! How difficult can that be?
250m whats? Don't be bloody ridiculous. These guys don't pay in advance, they don't have the dosh, the deal is structured so the migrants send money home to their families who pay off the debt to the people smugglers. So whatever it costs, it is repayable out of the amount of money a penniless immigrant can send home to Africa each month. Two hundred and fifty millionths of a million dollars sounds about right.
Everything I’ve read suggests most of them get charged cash up front. Either way, they cannot possibly be making 250million per dinghy - 250million per year all in I could certainly believe though.
More than a whiff of misogyny is in the air. It is striking that there is no comparably zealous campaign to abandon the word “men” in favour of “prostate-havers”, “ejaculators” or “bodies with testicles”. It is almost always women who are being ordered to dispense with a useful word they have used all their lives.
Whilst I agree with them on most of the trans debate questions, the conversation is usually about women because of campaign success in marketing women as eternally oppressed victims with limited agency, and men/boys who suffer abuse etc tend to be silenced.
The phrases "violence against women and girls" and "Women and Equalities Committee" capture the predominant attitude of the contemporary debate perfectly.
+ this.
A rather prominent charity used to have a website that, if you claimed to be a woman, went to help services about abuse. If you claimed to be a man, went to a 'you are an abuser, you evil scum. Here's how you can get help.' page.
It was a women's charity, but it was well-known and its name was non-gendered. Any man wanting to go there for help would be treated as a perpetrator, not a victim. And 1/3 of all victims of abuse are male.
I sent them a strongly-worded email, and it changed - with a link to a charity helping men. I'd like to think that was down to me, but who knows ...
I seem to recall probably apocryphal tales of police policies of when there was a call out re domestic abuse to automatically arrest the man, regardless of who made the call and what it was about.
Um, frankly, there's worse rules of thumb. I'd love to know where this 1/3 stat comes from.
Ask and ye shall receive (even after a few whiskies):
"the Crime Survey for England and Wales showed that an estimated 2.3 million adults aged 16 to 74 years experienced domestic abuse in the last year (1.6 million women and 757,000 men), a slight but non-significant decrease from the previous year"
It's a ratio that, as far as I can see, has been stable for a long time.
Domestic abuse is a hidden scandal. The chances are that most of us will know someone who has suffered domestic abuse - male and/or female.
Refuge's website hasn't actually changed much. It still describes itself as 'support for women and children' and only the section on men has a button for 'I am an abuser,' not the one for women. Moreover the section for men is well down the list and has a binary choice: 'I am abused' and 'I am an abuser.'
Thanks for that. From memory, the bu**ers have somewhat regressed it.
I have got really angry/frustrated over this in the past. 1/3 (sorry, Ishmael) of domestic abuse victims are male. That's a vast number of victims per year - but too many people treat them as perpetrators. And when it is charities, it makes it even worse.
When your statistic is challenged, you can a. justify it or b. apologise. a. is more convincing than b.
????
I justified it. I gave you figures - and ones I have posted (from various years) on here many times before.
One of the interesting (and sad) things is that some statistics seem to remain stable for years, whatever political interventions occur. This is one of them.
On this occasion you seem to me to have done both. You have justified it, and apologised for the upset you believe that will cause.
We do need to find some workable ideas for this crisis that are based on reality. We don't take remotely the number of asylum seekers that people are told (by the government and their friends in the media) and we treat those that claim it badly. But in truth the issue are all those who land and disappear into the black economy.
As we're not keeping track of these boats nor able to detain the people who run off all the talk about off-shore processing is just posturing. You can't render asylum seekers abroad if you haven't detained them.
So we need to actually engage with the EU and the French government about a joint effort to stop this, not just shout abuse at them. The simple truth is that whether it be language or other family already here they don't want to be in France, they want to be here. They're on these dinghies because we have closed their legal options. And if the French close the camps as they have done before, new camps spring up.
So the bulk of this is on us. We can't stop people coming. The French can't stop people coming. So we need to let them come legally and control the traffic. If that means building a UK overseas processing facility then ok - Falklands or Cyprus though not a gulag in Albania. But let them come safely, process them, welcome the genuine, return the chancers.
Comments
Commission plus buyers premium plus VAT on both.
With your expenses on top.
It does seem like the best way to maximise immunity is vaccinated plus infected which both minimises symptoms while infected and provides a good level of protection going forwards - and the UK has a high proportion of that.
The UK is already very close to this endemic phase but other countries, even those with apparently successful handling so far, will struggle to transition without facing up to some difficult decisions.
The phrases "violence against women and girls" and "Women and Equalities Committee" capture the predominant attitude of the contemporary debate perfectly.
I do wonder if after 3 doses it might be a good idea to try your hardest to catch it. Just as further insurance against some kind of doomsday variant.
Inverclyde Council confirmed the public cash was paid to Yes Inverclyde after the organisation applied on the grounds it was promoting a “philosophical position” rather than being “party political”.
https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/news/8053207/pro-indy-inverclyde-covid-grant/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sharebarweb
You are driven by an all encompassing hatred of this government and do not add to a very serious debate
A rather prominent charity used to have a website that, if you claimed to be a woman, went to help services about abuse. If you claimed to be a man, went to a 'you are an abuser, you evil scum. Here's how you can get help.' page.
It was a women's charity, but it was well-known and its name was non-gendered. Any man wanting to go there for help would be treated as a perpetrator, not a victim. And 1/3 of all victims of abuse are male.
I sent them a strongly-worded email, and it changed - with a link to a charity helping men. I'd like to think that was down to me, but who knows ...
Almost any odd thing you can think of has probably happened to someone, somewhere, at some time. If it hadn't, that'd be an issue!
[Edit] There was a key legal case, actually in that airt, recently, which established that a belief in Scottish independence is indeed a philosophical rather than political matter.
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/16399052.tribunal-judge-independence-philosophical-belief-similar-religion/
https://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/16399050.andrew-tickell-chris-mceleny-waited-long-justice/
The question is how to get everyone else covered and the only answer is to drop NPIs and let nature take its course.
It is a fact that ghouls are on Farage's twitter feed right now saying awful things.
It is a declared risk that her proposed solutions to the boats would sink some.
It is a fact that by accident or design a bill would have had the RNLI criminalised for picking people out of the water after having their boat sunk.
When you stop thinking rationally and go back to blind loyalty to the government you start going on about my "all-encompassing hatred of this government". You miss my pro-Sunak and pro-furlough comments which I make a lot.
My views aren't the issue, nor do they somehow change the facts on hand.
As for not adding to serious debate I have made a very serious proposal. We can't stop the boats. We can't detain the people who get off the boats. So if we want to process asylum seekers off-shore the simple solution is offer them a plane ride from Calais airport to Albania or wherever.
Yes, of course it is their 'own fault', but the situation was undoubtedly made worse by government complacency, mixed messaging, and failure to take measures to nudge people into getting jabbed. Even France has done better than us in those cohorts, and Portugal and Ireland much better. The fact that we got off to a very good start with the vaccination programme doesn't excuse losing the plot in the later stages.
Sweden's first ever female prime minister has resigned just hours after she was appointed.
Magdalena Andersson, was announced as leader on Wednesday but resigned after her coalition partner quit the government and her budget failed to pass...
Ms Andersson was elected as prime minister earlier on Wednesday because under Swedish law, she only needed a majority of MPs not to vote against her...Of the 349 members of the Riksdag, 174 voted against her. But on top of the 117 MPs who backed Ms Andersson, a further 57 abstained, giving her victory by a single vote.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-59400539
I am sure you can find ghouls on twitter but David Cameron's comments about twitter are succinct
Even by your own admission you know nothing about boats and your motivation is purely anti HMG propaganda
We can stop or certainly reduce the number of boats crossing and sadly today's tragedy will concentrate minds across the EU-France-EU to take concerted action
Your idea of Albania or anywhere else is rejected by Labour who when asked raised the issue of human rights
France is lacking that wall of natural immunity heading into the winter months. Sure it would have been nice if people chose to vaccinate at the same rate as Portugal, but they didn't and the only way they would get immunity before winter was naturally.
Discuss.
Name of Roy Meadow, knighted for services as an expert witness, almost all of which testimony turned out to be at the very least wrong.
We can disagree and call out comments we feel are unacceptable and argue the case
Unless of course you concur with @RochdalePioneers comments
I would suggest serious consideration of arming the NHS with hypodermic darts for self defence.
That's been in the bill an awfully long time, right in print in a proposed set of new laws, for something that you dismiss as political spin.
Nevertheless the general lesson - that analysing statistical probability in relation to a single already-happened event, is fraught with danger, remains valid.
Like those people who argue that the chance of the circumstances for intelligent life to have evolved are so unlikely that some Santa-for-adults-in-the-sky must have arranged it all. Yet in the other xx% of cases there is no-one to ask the question.
If various European states find themselves replaying enormously long Winter lockdowns again (and I note reports of yet more restrictions on the way in France and the Netherlands, with the head of the Dutch ICU doctor's association already screaming for everything to be shut down including the schools,) then I think that people will start to give their governments a good kicking. Especially if their TV news correspondents in London are sending back nightly pictures of festive parties, packed pubs and restaurants, and (happily mask-free) kids trooping through school gates, whilst the people back home are still under house arrest as if the vaccines didn't exist.
This pandemic sometimes feels like it might go on forever, but it will end. They always do.
Germany's death rate is currently higher than the UK's has been at any time since March and their winter wave is only just beginning.
It's not the first cabinet to come from Sweden that has fallen apart in hours.
Putting it in a Bill in Parliament certainly runs the risk of it being passed, wouldn't you say?
Is HMG doing it for fun? Or because they can't be bothered to delete it?
1. I didn't raise the illegality proposed with regards to the RNLI. Others more learned did. Including the RNLI themselves. Its repetitive because its a statement of fact that the RNLI would have been criminalised and you refused to accept it thinking we were attacking your brave son. The reverse is true, its called out to protect him and his comrades risking their lives.
2. I know nothing about boats so defer to the opinions of people who do.
3. "Anti-government propaganda". You're still defending them despite saying that you don't support them any more. What does Labour have to do with anything? Not my party, not my views and I have said repeatedly that I expect the Tories to win the next election with a new leader fit for office.
Of course you concur with the comments
42.76% 12 to 15
64.80% 16 to 17
76.60% 18 to 24
78.20% 25 to 29
85.21% 30 to 34
87.62% 35 to 39
92.76% 40 to 44
89.91% 45 to 49
94.75% 50 to 54
97.34% 55 to 59
99.46% 60 to 64
96.90% 65 to 69
96.12% 70 to 74
102.61% 75 to 79 (yes, I know, investigating this one)
95.06% 80 to 84
96.00% 85 to 89
90.75% 90 upwards
World Rugby amends rule and allows players to switch national teams
World Rugby will let players switch countries from January
Tonga, Fiji and Samoa stand to gain from the amendment
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/nov/24/world-rugby-amends-rule-and-allows-players-to-switch-national-teams
I can sympathise, if we were going back into lockdwon at this point I'd vote for pretty much anyone that promised no more lockdowns short of actual fascists.
I'm very surprised if on those figures we're only on 68% overall.
The Union will now move right I expect in Opposition, with Soder trying to set himself up as de facto leader of the Opposition from his Bavaria powerbase
The simplest rebuttal was: well, probably more than one mother in 73 million murders their children, but it's still statistically pretty abnormal, so let's leave statistics out of it altogether.
Equally, if the drop off in dosing is proportionate to the age groups, that still suggests very high levels of protection among the over 40s, who would appear to be the group most at risk.
"the Crime Survey for England and Wales showed that an estimated 2.3 million adults aged 16 to 74 years experienced domestic abuse in the last year (1.6 million women and 757,000 men), a slight but non-significant decrease from the previous year"
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/bulletins/domesticabuseinenglandandwalesoverview/november2020
It's a ratio that, as far as I can see, has been stable for a long time.
Domestic abuse is a hidden scandal. The chances are that most of us will know someone who has suffered domestic abuse - male and/or female.
That's not quite as bizarre as the High Court saying that the GMC shouldn't strike somebody off the medical register merely for repeatedly lying in court for reasons that appear to have been primarily self-aggrandisement. But you wonder if they're linked.
The number of vaccinations is not in doubt - it is the number of people in existence, in the UK, that is the issue.
Certainly enthusiasm for boosters appears strong (already at 27.8% and climbing steadily) and anyone who's after those will already have long since snapped up dose 2. I certainly want mine, counting down the days until computer says yes.
I am less optimistic about prospects for a UK - France deal. We take very few asylum seekers comparative to other countries but think they are swamping us. Hard to find solutions when we refuse to accept the status quo.
But radio listeners thought he gave Kennedy an absolute mauling.
Get the gangs and their bosses! How difficult can that be?
She’s realised her rival, former leader Simon Bridges (Oxon), has the numbers to depose her so she suddenly stripped him of his portfolio for a five-year-old offence of making a sexist remark to a colleague.
OR is HMG is just playing politics re: lifeboats?
Either way rather less than defensible.
I have got really angry/frustrated over this in the past. 1/3 (sorry, Ishmael) of domestic abuse victims are male. That's a vast number of victims per year - but too many people treat them as perpetrators. And when it is charities, it makes it even worse.
The Telegraph the other day said it’s the most damaging issue for the Conservatives at the moment?
If Boris himself is really frustrated at Patel for not making progress, what are voters in constituency’s thinking and saying?
Or, this may be a political betting site, but is this completely the wrong evening to think like this and discuss it?
My son did say tonight that should we ever forget the picture of the three year old Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, who drowned in the Med in 2015 in that iconic picture and yet again we have drowned innocent children; it has to be the moment for politics to make way for compassion
I justified it. I gave you figures - and ones I have posted (from various years) on here many times before.
One of the interesting (and sad) things is that some statistics seem to remain stable for years, whatever political interventions occur. This is one of them.
Travis McMicheal, his father Greg McMichael and their neighbour William “Roddie” Bryan were each convicted for murdering Arbery, who was unarmed, after pursuing him in February last year and claiming, without evidence, he had been involved in a spate of burglaries in their neighborhood.
The verdict was announced after two weeks of testimony and evidence in the closely watched trial, during which the McMichaels had claimed the shooting was an act of self-defense and that they had attempted to enact a citizen’s arrest.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/24/ahmaud-arbery-verdict-guilty
As we're not keeping track of these boats nor able to detain the people who run off all the talk about off-shore processing is just posturing. You can't render asylum seekers abroad if you haven't detained them.
So we need to actually engage with the EU and the French government about a joint effort to stop this, not just shout abuse at them. The simple truth is that whether it be language or other family already here they don't want to be in France, they want to be here. They're on these dinghies because we have closed their legal options. And if the French close the camps as they have done before, new camps spring up.
So the bulk of this is on us. We can't stop people coming. The French can't stop people coming. So we need to let them come legally and control the traffic. If that means building a UK overseas processing facility then ok - Falklands or Cyprus though not a gulag in Albania. But let them come safely, process them, welcome the genuine, return the chancers.