LAB still has clear lead in the 40 “Red Wall” seats – politicalbetting.com

System · August 2022

LAB still has clear lead in the 40 “Red Wall” seats – politicalbetting.com

Of the 40 seats that R&K include in the poll the Tories gained 39 at GE2019. The other seat polled, Hartlepool, was picked up by ‘Johnson’s party in the by-election last year.

Read the full story here

IshmaelZ · August 2022

THIRST

NickPalmer · August 2022

It's interesting that the jump in Labour support seen in the national polls after the energy proposal isn't seen here - just a polling vagary of a genuine regional difference?

rcs1000 · August 2022

FPT:

Luckyguy1983 said:

Stuartinromford said:

IshmaelZ said:

eek said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

rcs1000 said:

MoonRabbit said:

Daveyboy1961 said:

BartholomewRoberts said:
Truss may have played a blinder here. After people have been ramping up talk of £3k, £4k or £6k bills or higher, if this suggested proposal goes ahead and bills are frozen then that's possibly going to seek quite a significant step taken.

Oh and if it's a loan, then possibly not a handout either.

But the devil will be in the details of course. What's going to happen with SMEs will be as important as what happens with consumer bills and that doesn't seem to be getting discussed much yet if at all.
Barty loves Lizzy still

Barty doesn’t do the politics very well. You could never hire him to spin. In the round this proposal is the most expensive of all the options so far though, as longer paybacks tend to be? And You can imagine opponents exploiting this angle, not just immediately but for a long time to come

“Is it not clear Mr Speaker, they have mortgaged our futures to afford their tax cuts today”

“Don’t the tax payers of this country know it well, Mr Speaker, When they were last in power, rather than windfall tax the excessive profits of the energy barons, instead they saddled future generations with debt, and then gave tax hand outs to the rich whilst everyone else starved! Is it no surprise the country has not voted Tory since?”

Shame on ex chancellor Rishi Sunak for not being more open and honest what he would do.
Here's the thing: if you windfall tax the energy companies, they might choose to invest in production somewhere else.
They are already doing so. The UK is not an attractive place for Oil and Gas exploration because of its ever changing tax and regulatory regime. All the more so now with the prospect of an expansion of the windfall tax.
Bit this is now going to change, so YAY for the energy crisis.
Nope. It is getting worse. Bear in mind there is probably 7 or 8 years between identifying a possible new development and actually getting the hydrocarbons out of he ground. The uncertainty over the UK regulatory and tax regime is getting worse not better so companies with a finite Exploration and Appraisal budget will chose countries with a history of stable regulation and tax even if the tax rates are a bit higher. and this is hitting development drilling as well where there is already a deferment of drilling into the middle of the decade when they hope they will have a better idea if what the long term tax regime will be.
It may be 'getting' worse, but I have faith it's going to be sorted. First the low hanging fruit, then the hard stuff.
Fool us once we'll remember it but accept it as a one off issue
Fool us twice and we'll go elsewhere never to return..

And that's what has happened here - there are easier more consistent countries to invest in so the investment goes there....
They just don't have the oil. It's like robbing banks, you do it because that's where the money is.
Not just that, they have to have hydrocarbons that are cheap and easy to get.

What banjaxed the remains of British coal, and caused British shale gas to be stillborn, was that geology made them difficult and expensive to extract.

Just because they're there doesn't mean it's in our interests to extract them.
I trust Richard Tyndall more when he says otherwise.

Richard is very knowledgeable on the oil and gas industry, as he's worked in it for many years. I am also pretty knowledgeable, having managed a billion dollar energy fund for many years (and which, I would note, performed extremely well). I have also written cover articles for Platts and S&P regarding various parts of the energy industry, and produced a nice YouTube video explaining unconvential oil production which is well worth watching: https://youtu.be/xHo82501394

But that doesn't mean that - right now - UK unconventional resources are economic. Because they're not.

All the well data from the hydraulically fracked onshore tight gas formations in the UK has been very disappointing. Even before the ban on fracking, the shares of iGas and others had fallen 90%.

Now, it doesn't mean there isn't a way forward. But the problem is that right now costs are probably around $100/mmcf, with a path (if things go well) to get it down to $20.

Costs, by contrast, for new projects are $6-7 on the North West Shelf of Australia, sub $4 for Qatar, and well under $10 for Israel and LNG. And these are fully loaded figures, including the cost of LNG liquification plants.

Mexicanpete · August 2022

NickPalmer said:
It's interesting that the jump in Labour support seen in the national polls after the energy proposal isn't seen here - just a polling vagary of a genuine regional difference?

I am not convinced Johnny Voter pays as much attention to political proclamations from any party as we do When he becomes tangibly poorer he blames the government and if he is tangibly richer he rewards them. Only at election times and budgets does he pay attention to projections. If one party is projected to make him richer they get his vote and if it's for the poorer they don't.

Luckyguy1983 · August 2022

rcs1000 said:
FPT:

Luckyguy1983 said:

Stuartinromford said:

IshmaelZ said:

eek said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

rcs1000 said:

MoonRabbit said:

Daveyboy1961 said:

BartholomewRoberts said:
Truss may have played a blinder here. After people have been ramping up talk of £3k, £4k or £6k bills or higher, if this suggested proposal goes ahead and bills are frozen then that's possibly going to seek quite a significant step taken.

Oh and if it's a loan, then possibly not a handout either.

But the devil will be in the details of course. What's going to happen with SMEs will be as important as what happens with consumer bills and that doesn't seem to be getting discussed much yet if at all.
Barty loves Lizzy still

Barty doesn’t do the politics very well. You could never hire him to spin. In the round this proposal is the most expensive of all the options so far though, as longer paybacks tend to be? And You can imagine opponents exploiting this angle, not just immediately but for a long time to come

“Is it not clear Mr Speaker, they have mortgaged our futures to afford their tax cuts today”

“Don’t the tax payers of this country know it well, Mr Speaker, When they were last in power, rather than windfall tax the excessive profits of the energy barons, instead they saddled future generations with debt, and then gave tax hand outs to the rich whilst everyone else starved! Is it no surprise the country has not voted Tory since?”

Shame on ex chancellor Rishi Sunak for not being more open and honest what he would do.
Here's the thing: if you windfall tax the energy companies, they might choose to invest in production somewhere else.
They are already doing so. The UK is not an attractive place for Oil and Gas exploration because of its ever changing tax and regulatory regime. All the more so now with the prospect of an expansion of the windfall tax.
Bit this is now going to change, so YAY for the energy crisis.
Nope. It is getting worse. Bear in mind there is probably 7 or 8 years between identifying a possible new development and actually getting the hydrocarbons out of he ground. The uncertainty over the UK regulatory and tax regime is getting worse not better so companies with a finite Exploration and Appraisal budget will chose countries with a history of stable regulation and tax even if the tax rates are a bit higher. and this is hitting development drilling as well where there is already a deferment of drilling into the middle of the decade when they hope they will have a better idea if what the long term tax regime will be.
It may be 'getting' worse, but I have faith it's going to be sorted. First the low hanging fruit, then the hard stuff.
Fool us once we'll remember it but accept it as a one off issue
Fool us twice and we'll go elsewhere never to return..

And that's what has happened here - there are easier more consistent countries to invest in so the investment goes there....
They just don't have the oil. It's like robbing banks, you do it because that's where the money is.
Not just that, they have to have hydrocarbons that are cheap and easy to get.

What banjaxed the remains of British coal, and caused British shale gas to be stillborn, was that geology made them difficult and expensive to extract.

Just because they're there doesn't mean it's in our interests to extract them.
I trust Richard Tyndall more when he says otherwise.
Richard is very knowledgeable on the oil and gas industry, as he's worked in it for many years. I am also pretty knowledgeable, having managed a billion dollar energy fund for many years (and which, I would note, performed extremely well). I have also written cover articles for Platts and S&P regarding various parts of the energy industry, and produced a nice YouTube video explaining unconvential oil production which is well worth watching: https://youtu.be/xHo82501394

But that doesn't mean that - right now - UK unconventional resources are economic. Because they're not.

All the well data from the hydraulically fracked onshore tight gas formations in the UK has been very disappointing. Even before the ban on fracking, the shares of iGas and others had fallen 90%.

Now, it doesn't mean there isn't a way forward. But the problem is that right now costs are probably around $100/mmcf, with a path (if things go well) to get it down to $20.

Costs, by contrast, for new projects are $6-7 on the North West Shelf of Australia, sub $4 for Qatar, and well under $10 for Israel and LNG. And these are fully loaded figures, including the cost of LNG liquification plants.

I have never disputed your knowledge on this issue. Thanks for the video.

Stuartinromford · August 2022

Mexicanpete said:

NickPalmer said:
It's interesting that the jump in Labour support seen in the national polls after the energy proposal isn't seen here - just a polling vagary of a genuine regional difference?
I am not convinced Johnny Voter pays as much attention to political proclamations from any party as we do When he becomes tangibly poorer he blames the government and if he is tangibly richer he rewards them. Only at election times and budgets does he pay attention to projections. If one party is projected to make him richer they get his vote and if it's for the poorer they don't.

One important caveat. Politicians who predict riches and deliver the opposite end up in a very special circle of Hell. Even if it's not particularly their fault, which it often isn't.

stodge · August 2022

We are already starting to see the "selling" of Liz Truss in the supportive Conservative media and this will, I imagine, intensify after the Bank Holiday and we approach Trussday September 5th (you heard it first here !).

It would have been easier had the result been announced on a Thursday.

For the most part, Truss has been speaking to the Conservative membership and the invective used is of course music to the average member's ears but out in the real world it's not going to win her as many friends.

Like many new leaders, she may feel she needs to be tough and stamp her authority on the party before trying to do the same to the country and with only a third of MPs having supported her in the ballots, she might be forgiven for having some "doubts" about her colleagues and no doubt she will be choosing the loyalist of MPs to the Whips Office to ensure the slightest sign of rebellion is suppressed.

None of this makes her sound like a unifier, a conciliator or a re-builder. It's quite clear there will be a new "war" against the Unions which might work in some instances but won't against the nurses or other health workers. As to the rest of us, I'll offer an early prediction based on a few hunches - in contrast to this summer, this winter is going to be very wet and questions about flooding and flood prevention will dominate by February.

MISTY · August 2022

rcs1000 said:
FPT:

Luckyguy1983 said:

Stuartinromford said:

IshmaelZ said:

eek said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

rcs1000 said:

MoonRabbit said:

Daveyboy1961 said:

BartholomewRoberts said:
Truss may have played a blinder here. After people have been ramping up talk of £3k, £4k or £6k bills or higher, if this suggested proposal goes ahead and bills are frozen then that's possibly going to seek quite a significant step taken.

Oh and if it's a loan, then possibly not a handout either.

But the devil will be in the details of course. What's going to happen with SMEs will be as important as what happens with consumer bills and that doesn't seem to be getting discussed much yet if at all.
Barty loves Lizzy still

Barty doesn’t do the politics very well. You could never hire him to spin. In the round this proposal is the most expensive of all the options so far though, as longer paybacks tend to be? And You can imagine opponents exploiting this angle, not just immediately but for a long time to come

“Is it not clear Mr Speaker, they have mortgaged our futures to afford their tax cuts today”

“Don’t the tax payers of this country know it well, Mr Speaker, When they were last in power, rather than windfall tax the excessive profits of the energy barons, instead they saddled future generations with debt, and then gave tax hand outs to the rich whilst everyone else starved! Is it no surprise the country has not voted Tory since?”

Shame on ex chancellor Rishi Sunak for not being more open and honest what he would do.
Here's the thing: if you windfall tax the energy companies, they might choose to invest in production somewhere else.
They are already doing so. The UK is not an attractive place for Oil and Gas exploration because of its ever changing tax and regulatory regime. All the more so now with the prospect of an expansion of the windfall tax.
Bit this is now going to change, so YAY for the energy crisis.
Nope. It is getting worse. Bear in mind there is probably 7 or 8 years between identifying a possible new development and actually getting the hydrocarbons out of he ground. The uncertainty over the UK regulatory and tax regime is getting worse not better so companies with a finite Exploration and Appraisal budget will chose countries with a history of stable regulation and tax even if the tax rates are a bit higher. and this is hitting development drilling as well where there is already a deferment of drilling into the middle of the decade when they hope they will have a better idea if what the long term tax regime will be.
It may be 'getting' worse, but I have faith it's going to be sorted. First the low hanging fruit, then the hard stuff.
Fool us once we'll remember it but accept it as a one off issue
Fool us twice and we'll go elsewhere never to return..

And that's what has happened here - there are easier more consistent countries to invest in so the investment goes there....
They just don't have the oil. It's like robbing banks, you do it because that's where the money is.
Not just that, they have to have hydrocarbons that are cheap and easy to get.

What banjaxed the remains of British coal, and caused British shale gas to be stillborn, was that geology made them difficult and expensive to extract.

Just because they're there doesn't mean it's in our interests to extract them.
I trust Richard Tyndall more when he says otherwise.
Richard is very knowledgeable on the oil and gas industry, as he's worked in it for many years. I am also pretty knowledgeable, having managed a billion dollar energy fund for many years (and which, I would note, performed extremely well). I have also written cover articles for Platts and S&P regarding various parts of the energy industry, and produced a nice YouTube video explaining unconvential oil production which is well worth watching: https://youtu.be/xHo82501394

But that doesn't mean that - right now - UK unconventional resources are economic. Because they're not.

All the well data from the hydraulically fracked onshore tight gas formations in the UK has been very disappointing. Even before the ban on fracking, the shares of iGas and others had fallen 90%.

Now, it doesn't mean there isn't a way forward. But the problem is that right now costs are probably around $100/mmcf, with a path (if things go well) to get it down to $20.

Costs, by contrast, for new projects are $6-7 on the North West Shelf of Australia, sub $4 for Qatar, and well under $10 for Israel and LNG. And these are fully loaded figures, including the cost of LNG liquification plants.

I'm not questioning your argument, but it does seem strange to me that iGas and Cuadrilla are even bothering with all the lobbying if the resources are not commercial.

The government has nothing to lose by announcing the UK resources are a mirage, I don't see why they don't.

Fishing · August 2022

stodge said:

None of this makes her sound like a unifier, a conciliator or a re-builder. It's quite clear there will be a new "war" against the Unions which might work in some instances but won't against the nurses or other health workers. As to the rest of us, I'll offer an early prediction based on a few hunches - in contrast to this summer, this winter is going to be very wet and questions about flooding and flood prevention will dominate by February.

Do you think so? Even if the winter is wet, I can't see anything dominating beyond energy bills unless there is a quite unexpected development. After all, even the worst floods only seriously affect a few tens of thousands, while these damned bills will affect tens of millions.

Carnyx · August 2022

MISTY said:

rcs1000 said:
FPT:

Luckyguy1983 said:

Stuartinromford said:

IshmaelZ said:

eek said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

rcs1000 said:

MoonRabbit said:

Daveyboy1961 said:

BartholomewRoberts said:
Truss may have played a blinder here. After people have been ramping up talk of £3k, £4k or £6k bills or higher, if this suggested proposal goes ahead and bills are frozen then that's possibly going to seek quite a significant step taken.

Oh and if it's a loan, then possibly not a handout either.

But the devil will be in the details of course. What's going to happen with SMEs will be as important as what happens with consumer bills and that doesn't seem to be getting discussed much yet if at all.
Barty loves Lizzy still

Barty doesn’t do the politics very well. You could never hire him to spin. In the round this proposal is the most expensive of all the options so far though, as longer paybacks tend to be? And You can imagine opponents exploiting this angle, not just immediately but for a long time to come

“Is it not clear Mr Speaker, they have mortgaged our futures to afford their tax cuts today”

“Don’t the tax payers of this country know it well, Mr Speaker, When they were last in power, rather than windfall tax the excessive profits of the energy barons, instead they saddled future generations with debt, and then gave tax hand outs to the rich whilst everyone else starved! Is it no surprise the country has not voted Tory since?”

Shame on ex chancellor Rishi Sunak for not being more open and honest what he would do.
Here's the thing: if you windfall tax the energy companies, they might choose to invest in production somewhere else.
They are already doing so. The UK is not an attractive place for Oil and Gas exploration because of its ever changing tax and regulatory regime. All the more so now with the prospect of an expansion of the windfall tax.
Bit this is now going to change, so YAY for the energy crisis.
Nope. It is getting worse. Bear in mind there is probably 7 or 8 years between identifying a possible new development and actually getting the hydrocarbons out of he ground. The uncertainty over the UK regulatory and tax regime is getting worse not better so companies with a finite Exploration and Appraisal budget will chose countries with a history of stable regulation and tax even if the tax rates are a bit higher. and this is hitting development drilling as well where there is already a deferment of drilling into the middle of the decade when they hope they will have a better idea if what the long term tax regime will be.
It may be 'getting' worse, but I have faith it's going to be sorted. First the low hanging fruit, then the hard stuff.
Fool us once we'll remember it but accept it as a one off issue
Fool us twice and we'll go elsewhere never to return..

And that's what has happened here - there are easier more consistent countries to invest in so the investment goes there....
They just don't have the oil. It's like robbing banks, you do it because that's where the money is.
Not just that, they have to have hydrocarbons that are cheap and easy to get.

What banjaxed the remains of British coal, and caused British shale gas to be stillborn, was that geology made them difficult and expensive to extract.

Just because they're there doesn't mean it's in our interests to extract them.
I trust Richard Tyndall more when he says otherwise.
Richard is very knowledgeable on the oil and gas industry, as he's worked in it for many years. I am also pretty knowledgeable, having managed a billion dollar energy fund for many years (and which, I would note, performed extremely well). I have also written cover articles for Platts and S&P regarding various parts of the energy industry, and produced a nice YouTube video explaining unconvential oil production which is well worth watching: https://youtu.be/xHo82501394

But that doesn't mean that - right now - UK unconventional resources are economic. Because they're not.

All the well data from the hydraulically fracked onshore tight gas formations in the UK has been very disappointing. Even before the ban on fracking, the shares of iGas and others had fallen 90%.

Now, it doesn't mean there isn't a way forward. But the problem is that right now costs are probably around $100/mmcf, with a path (if things go well) to get it down to $20.

Costs, by contrast, for new projects are $6-7 on the North West Shelf of Australia, sub $4 for Qatar, and well under $10 for Israel and LNG. And these are fully loaded figures, including the cost of LNG liquification plants.
I'm not questioning your argument, but it does seem strange to me that iGas and Cuadrilla are even bothering with all the lobbying if the resources are not commercial.

The government has nothing to lose by announcing the UK resources are a mirage, I don't see why they don't.

At least one Tory party leadership candidate seems keen to spout on about fracking as a solution. I don't understand why, other than short-term fibbing to win the vote.

BartholomewRoberts · August 2022

Andy_Cooke said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

FeersumEnjineeya said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

kinabalu said:

MISTY said:

kinabalu said:

Driver said:

kinabalu said:

Driver said:

bondegezou said:

TOPPING said:
1. Diseases will always kill us and if they don't then I have bad news about life in any case.
2. I can totally understand that the government, looking as we all did at those pictures from Italy of people dying in the corridors, had to do something and lockdowns was it.
3. The whole point of society is a balance. Tragically it is not to keep every Archie alive at the expense of others who would benefit from those resources.

Once the NHS was in no danger of "collapsing" as in real collapse, not the collapse that the Graun and the various health unions call every other week, then there should absolutely have been no more lockdowns.

There should have been compensation for pubs if they wanted to close and teachers if they wanted to stay home but no mandate.

Our freedoms are so precious and the great and good of PB dismiss them instantly and soil themselves at the first real test of freedom that we in the UK have had for 80 years. Doesn't bode well for the future.
Which is a greater threat to Freedom: a temporary measure in the face of a novel pandemic, or a sustained campaign by government to restrict political protest and dissent? Is the collapse of the Court system due to chronic neglect perhaps a more pernicious threat? Is the drive to ban freedom of speech under the guise of Fighting Wokery more problematic? Are restrictions on the right to strike actually more consequential? I think one can debate whether temporary lockdowns were really the "first real test of freedom that we in the UK have had for 80 years".

But, sure, lockdowns should be avoided. The way to avoid lockdowns is with better public health measures. We can look at a country like Japan that never had a national lockdown and had far fewer COVID cases. A better Test & Trace system, with more support for people self-isolating, would have been a huge help in the UK. A better funded primary health care system would have helped.

This ain't rocket science. If you don't want lockdowns, do public health better.
No, it isn't rocket science. If you don't want lockdowns, don't implement lockdowns.
How would you have hampered the spread of the virus at those critical times then?

It spread via close contact between people remember - not by black magic.
Strong advice, not legislation. And this would have included strong advice to organisations and companies to stop doing counterproductive things, like supermarkets cutting their hours, which merely ensured that the average number of people in their shops at any given time was higher than it needed to be.
Ok so Muscly goes "You MUST stay at home etc etc" but no laws are changed.

Why is that so much better iyo?

And what happens if people don't respond to the extent necessary to ward off a public health catastrophe?
It isn't warding off anything, its just changing the emphasis of risk. You assume these measures, even short term, are risk free, but they aren't.

Every kind of restriction is a swings and roundabouts calculation. Not how it was presented at the time (it was 'saving lives'), but we now know that is true.

At best lockdown was sacrificing some lives to save others. At best. What's the balance? who knows?
I never assumed the NPIs were cost free. However there was a train about to run us over and it had to be slowed down. The idea of somebody configuring and running a super-complex, multi-level cost/benefit model and trying to incorporate and quantify things like impact on mental health before we did anything is for the birds. We were too late acting as it is and found it hard enough just to model the spread of the virus and hospitalisations and deaths.
You're absolutely right that there wasn't a time to analyse it in advance, but there is time to do so in hindsight and in hindsight lockdown was a mistake.

It was certainly not "too late".
In hindsight paying my home insurance last year was a mistake. My house didn't burn down after all. What a waste of money!

(That's only one argument, of course. It is not at all clear, even in hindsight, that not locking down would have had lower social and economic costs than locking down did.)
If your home insurance only cost a few quid then it was probably worthwhile to have. If your home insurance cost more than your home and required your children to be out of school for months etc then it probably wasn't.
The risk at the time of the first lockdown was that the hospitals would be overwhelmed and that tens of thousands of people would die unnecessarily. Giving the kids a couple on months off school and paying an economic cost was indeed the equivalent of a few quid when compared to the horrifying possible alternative.

The case for the later lockdowns is not quite so clear, but in general locking down more quickly would have meant locking down for a shorter time.
Tens of thousands dying doesn't justify millions losing their education.

Would you sacrifice 100 people's education to prolong a single person's life? If not, why sacrifice millions for tens of thousands?

The only way to justify millions losing education, is if millions were going to die.
Telling outright lies - particularly when they are so easily refuted - doesn't help your argument at all.

There were not 'millions losing their education' There was a small scale disruption for a few months.

Your hyperbole does you no credit.
There was large scale disruption for months on end for millions of people. That is millions losing their education, that time was valuable and won't be returned to them.

Yes some will cope with it, but that doesn't make it OK. The law treats education as so serious that you can be fined for taking kids out of school for a few days for a vacation during term time, but you consider shutting down schools for months on end to be no biggy because you sold your soul to Covid death league tables being the only metric that matters to the exclusion of absolutely everything else.
What about 9 weeks disruption to save half a million lives? Including many parents?

EDIT: tried to fix a blockquote issue
If only we had 9 weeks disruption instead of two years of it. And Sweden etc didn't have proportionately half a million more deaths than us, or their neighbours.

But doing the maths, 9 weeks (we had more) disruption is approximately quarter of a year's disruption. Which is approximately 2.5 million years worth of education lost nationwide. Which valuing education at only 1:1 with an adults lifespan and using the fallacious claim of ten years per death would be equivalent to 250k deaths.

Since I consider a year of a child's education as more valuable than a year of life for an adult, your figures would be approaching a break even point if only education were affected and if your figures were accurate.

But your figures aren't accurate and there was more than just education at stake, so no is my answer. Not worthwhile.
Schools were not closed in Lockdown two. They were closed in Lockdown three for nine weeks.
Have you forgotten lockdown one?

So lockdown 3 was the equivalent of 250k extra deaths valuing education as only 1:1 with an adults lifespan (I'd value education more) only from lockdown three. But you forgot lockdown 1, which was from memory another 8 weeks.

So there's half a million death equivalents right there. Just from education lost at just a 1:1 ratio. Without considering a single other factor at all.

So no, not worthwhile.
You literally said ages ago that we didn’t know what was happening at Lockdown one, but never mind.

And your claim that fifty children losing a week of school equates to one adult dying a year earlier is your own equation.

And if we HAD hurried everyone through covid, we’d certainly have seen well in excess of half a million more deaths plus a totally collapsed health service (seeing yet more deaths).

And those deaths would have trended younger than they did, of course, by loss of healthcare.

Tell me, if you asked a child whether they’d trade several weeks of education for their dead parent back, what would they say, do you think?

How much in the way of weeks of disruption are 50,000-100,000 or more parents of schoolchildren worth? Or even more than that (given, you know, no chance of saving the more saveable age groups by hospital treatment)
Yes I've said that we had no idea of knowing at the time what was happening at lockdown one, but I also said that lockdown one was a mistake "in hindsight".

Lockdown three was a mistake at the time, not just in hindsight. Lockdown one was a mistake in hindsight.

Yes saying 50 people losing a week's education is equivalent to one person losing a years life is my own equation but that's as I said at a 1:1 ratio. As I've said I'd value education that children need for the next 60-70 years plus of their lives as MORE valuable than a week's life at the end of an adults lifespan, but I used 1:1 for simplicity. You can say yourself what you value education to be worth if you'd prefer then we could look using your own numbers. What ratio would you give it if not 1:1, how highly do you value education?

Would you sacrifice a year of a child's education for an extra years life expectancy? Where do you draw the line?

If we say 100k extra deaths = 1 million aggregate life years lost, then considering I'd value a child's education as possibly say 2:1 over an adults span at the end of their life then that would be 0.5 million school years lost across the country. Which divided by ten million school age pupils, is 5% of a school year per pupil. So 2 weeks, if education were the only factor.
So, for clarity, you’d sacrifice 30,000 lives to avoid school ending one week early?
Forced choice would I sacrifice a week of education, unscheduled so unplanned, for ten million or have 30k die from natural causes?

Yes I'd side with the children. You're doing the usual damned lies statistics trick of trying to minimise one number by dividing it by many, while trying to make another sound impressive by not doing so. It's not one week, it's one week for ten million people.

Let's turn the question around and see how you ratio it: Devil comes to you with a Faustian pact, you can sacrifice any amount of your children's education that you choose, from a month to all of it. For every month of their education you take from them you will get a month longer at the end of your life.

How much of their education would you take off them? A few months, or years worth? Or all of it or none?
Avoidable deaths = natural causes…
When I was a kid, we used to have a games day on the last day of school term, and I understand this was pretty much universal.

Little did we know that this was the equivalent of 6,000 avoidable deaths.
A games day is part of the school term, a valuable part of it in fact.

It was something that ten million children sacrificed, twice, in order to prevent some of the natural causes deaths that were prevented.

Yes many natural causes deaths can be avoided, if we sacrifice the rest of society including education to avoid just that one type of death.

You didn't answer my Faustian question. Without dividing it between ten million people in order to minimise the supposed impact on education, from one child to you how much at a 1:1 ratio would you take from your child's education in order to prolong the end of your life by that same amount of time?
Because it’s a stupid bloody contrived attempt to handwave over the issue. No-one was losing one-to-one, it literally was divided by ten million people.
AS YOUR OWN DERIVATION HAD IT.
Before you accused me of being misleading by using your derivation.
Except I made the point from the original comment onwards that this was ten million children being affected, that was the whole point. You say 9 weeks it doesn't sound much, but it was 9 weeks multiplied by ten million children so yes it was a hell of a long time being lost, it wasn't 9 weeks for one child, it was 9 weeks for ten million children.

But you dropped the part of ten million children from the comment.

It wasn't 9 weeks of education being lost, my comment multiplied it out and said that was 2.5 million years of education being lost. You dropped the multiplication out though and dropped it down to "one week" without caveat.
I rather thought that we’d established it was for everyone.
Unless you thought I was adding a silent “Oh, for only one pupil” on to the end of “…school ending one week early?”

Okay, for clarity, I was talking about school across the country, as we’d been discussing, not for just one specific pupil.

And, for clarity, lockdown was also for everyone, not just one person, in case that’s also been lost along the way.

Precisely it was for everyone, not just pupils, and we're only discussing the cost on education alone.

Going on the supposed claim of ten years per death then 30k deaths = 300k life years from the end of people's lives lost on aggregate, on your "30k for 1 week" figure.

10mn losing 1/40th of a year's education each is 250k education years lost.

Since I think a year's childhood and education is worth more than a year at the end of people's lives, yes I would 100% say the cost on education is too much. Even without non-education costs.

How many life years do you think 250k education years is worth?

Carnyx · August 2022

Fishing said:

stodge said:

None of this makes her sound like a unifier, a conciliator or a re-builder. It's quite clear there will be a new "war" against the Unions which might work in some instances but won't against the nurses or other health workers. As to the rest of us, I'll offer an early prediction based on a few hunches - in contrast to this summer, this winter is going to be very wet and questions about flooding and flood prevention will dominate by February.
Do you think so? Even if the winter is wet, I can't see anything dominating beyond energy bills unless there is a quite unexpected development. After all, even the worst floods only seriously affect a few tens of thousands, while these damned bills will affect tens of millions.

Depends where the floods are. Thames Valley = thousands of times more important to London-based media than, say, Swaledale.

Fishing · August 2022

Carnyx said:

Fishing said:

stodge said:

None of this makes her sound like a unifier, a conciliator or a re-builder. It's quite clear there will be a new "war" against the Unions which might work in some instances but won't against the nurses or other health workers. As to the rest of us, I'll offer an early prediction based on a few hunches - in contrast to this summer, this winter is going to be very wet and questions about flooding and flood prevention will dominate by February.
Do you think so? Even if the winter is wet, I can't see anything dominating beyond energy bills unless there is a quite unexpected development. After all, even the worst floods only seriously affect a few tens of thousands, while these damned bills will affect tens of millions.
Depends where the floods are. Thames Valley = thousands of times more important to London-based media than, say, Swaledale.

Yes but the Thames Flood Barrier means major floods in London are very unlikely.

DecrepiterJohnL · August 2022

Betfair next prime minister
1.08 Liz Truss 93%
13.5 Rishi Sunak 7%

Next Conservative leader
1.07 Liz Truss 93%
14 Rishi Sunak 7%

Carnyx · August 2022

Fishing said:

Carnyx said:

Fishing said:

stodge said:

None of this makes her sound like a unifier, a conciliator or a re-builder. It's quite clear there will be a new "war" against the Unions which might work in some instances but won't against the nurses or other health workers. As to the rest of us, I'll offer an early prediction based on a few hunches - in contrast to this summer, this winter is going to be very wet and questions about flooding and flood prevention will dominate by February.
Do you think so? Even if the winter is wet, I can't see anything dominating beyond energy bills unless there is a quite unexpected development. After all, even the worst floods only seriously affect a few tens of thousands, while these damned bills will affect tens of millions.
Depends where the floods are. Thames Valley = thousands of times more important to London-based media than, say, Swaledale.
Yes but the Thames Flood Barrier means major floods in London are very unlikely.

I did say Thames Valley. There is plenty of other river. (The TFB is also being challenged by unexpected flooding over and above the design expectation, and having to be closed more often, though I'm not sure if any work is being done on its replacement, given the long lead time.)

Andy_Cooke · August 2022

You still seem to be operating on the assumption that the only people at risk of death were the very aged.

Tell you what. I’ll break it down to a clear Faustian bargain that’s pretty accurate on numbers.

The father of a school child is magically struck by a fatal curse. He’s 44 years old.
The curse will be lifted if the secondary school his child is at (average size for the UK) shifts to two weeks of distance learning.

Should they do it?
And no, there’s no third option, no concern about capitulating to threats or encouraging the dark magician. It’s also one school only.

It’s a straight equation - one parent will lose forty years of life, or one thousand pupils have two weeks or distance learning.

Even under your numbers, if 75,000 people lose an average of 10 years of life at 10% infected, how many will die at 100% infected?

Now adjust for the fact that the vast majority of 2 million severely ill to the point of needing hospitalisation (including hundreds of thousands under fifty years old) will not get any hospital assistance. No CPAP, no fluids, no steroids, no care, just aiming to drink chicken soup at home. How many more on top out of those now non-hospitalised will die?

Even with your figures, and even with a magical expanded healthcare system by a factor of ten or more, it still weighs positive.

Pulpstar · August 2022

No chance the Tories have a majority if they lose Bassetlaw and Hartlepool.

Stuartinromford · August 2022

Carnyx said:

MISTY said:

rcs1000 said:
FPT:

Luckyguy1983 said:

Stuartinromford said:

IshmaelZ said:

eek said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

rcs1000 said:

MoonRabbit said:

Daveyboy1961 said:

BartholomewRoberts said:
Truss may have played a blinder here. After people have been ramping up talk of £3k, £4k or £6k bills or higher, if this suggested proposal goes ahead and bills are frozen then that's possibly going to seek quite a significant step taken.

Oh and if it's a loan, then possibly not a handout either.

But the devil will be in the details of course. What's going to happen with SMEs will be as important as what happens with consumer bills and that doesn't seem to be getting discussed much yet if at all.
Barty loves Lizzy still

Barty doesn’t do the politics very well. You could never hire him to spin. In the round this proposal is the most expensive of all the options so far though, as longer paybacks tend to be? And You can imagine opponents exploiting this angle, not just immediately but for a long time to come

“Is it not clear Mr Speaker, they have mortgaged our futures to afford their tax cuts today”

“Don’t the tax payers of this country know it well, Mr Speaker, When they were last in power, rather than windfall tax the excessive profits of the energy barons, instead they saddled future generations with debt, and then gave tax hand outs to the rich whilst everyone else starved! Is it no surprise the country has not voted Tory since?”

Shame on ex chancellor Rishi Sunak for not being more open and honest what he would do.
Here's the thing: if you windfall tax the energy companies, they might choose to invest in production somewhere else.
They are already doing so. The UK is not an attractive place for Oil and Gas exploration because of its ever changing tax and regulatory regime. All the more so now with the prospect of an expansion of the windfall tax.
Bit this is now going to change, so YAY for the energy crisis.
Nope. It is getting worse. Bear in mind there is probably 7 or 8 years between identifying a possible new development and actually getting the hydrocarbons out of he ground. The uncertainty over the UK regulatory and tax regime is getting worse not better so companies with a finite Exploration and Appraisal budget will chose countries with a history of stable regulation and tax even if the tax rates are a bit higher. and this is hitting development drilling as well where there is already a deferment of drilling into the middle of the decade when they hope they will have a better idea if what the long term tax regime will be.
It may be 'getting' worse, but I have faith it's going to be sorted. First the low hanging fruit, then the hard stuff.
Fool us once we'll remember it but accept it as a one off issue
Fool us twice and we'll go elsewhere never to return..

And that's what has happened here - there are easier more consistent countries to invest in so the investment goes there....
They just don't have the oil. It's like robbing banks, you do it because that's where the money is.
Not just that, they have to have hydrocarbons that are cheap and easy to get.

What banjaxed the remains of British coal, and caused British shale gas to be stillborn, was that geology made them difficult and expensive to extract.

Just because they're there doesn't mean it's in our interests to extract them.
I trust Richard Tyndall more when he says otherwise.
Richard is very knowledgeable on the oil and gas industry, as he's worked in it for many years. I am also pretty knowledgeable, having managed a billion dollar energy fund for many years (and which, I would note, performed extremely well). I have also written cover articles for Platts and S&P regarding various parts of the energy industry, and produced a nice YouTube video explaining unconvential oil production which is well worth watching: https://youtu.be/xHo82501394

But that doesn't mean that - right now - UK unconventional resources are economic. Because they're not.

All the well data from the hydraulically fracked onshore tight gas formations in the UK has been very disappointing. Even before the ban on fracking, the shares of iGas and others had fallen 90%.

Now, it doesn't mean there isn't a way forward. But the problem is that right now costs are probably around $100/mmcf, with a path (if things go well) to get it down to $20.

Costs, by contrast, for new projects are $6-7 on the North West Shelf of Australia, sub $4 for Qatar, and well under $10 for Israel and LNG. And these are fully loaded figures, including the cost of LNG liquification plants.
I'm not questioning your argument, but it does seem strange to me that iGas and Cuadrilla are even bothering with all the lobbying if the resources are not commercial.

The government has nothing to lose by announcing the UK resources are a mirage, I don't see why they don't.
At least one Tory party leadership candidate seems keen to spout on about fracking as a solution. I don't understand why, other than short-term fibbing to win the vote.

It might (I'm guessing here, based on knowledge of no more than human sin) be that people have been fibbing to themselves, and that's the hardest sort of fib to ditch.

There's a chunk of thought-space that has been going on about fracking for a while. That it's the solution to our problems and the fault of Greens that we haven't done it. If it's not economic in the UK right now, that's a problem for that belief system. Hard to 'fess up to being not right, even if for innocent reasons.

It would be awfully nice if we could flick a switch and get cheap gas in the UK tomorrow.

TimS · August 2022

Carnyx said:

Fishing said:

Carnyx said:

Fishing said:

stodge said:

None of this makes her sound like a unifier, a conciliator or a re-builder. It's quite clear there will be a new "war" against the Unions which might work in some instances but won't against the nurses or other health workers. As to the rest of us, I'll offer an early prediction based on a few hunches - in contrast to this summer, this winter is going to be very wet and questions about flooding and flood prevention will dominate by February.
Do you think so? Even if the winter is wet, I can't see anything dominating beyond energy bills unless there is a quite unexpected development. After all, even the worst floods only seriously affect a few tens of thousands, while these damned bills will affect tens of millions.
Depends where the floods are. Thames Valley = thousands of times more important to London-based media than, say, Swaledale.
Yes but the Thames Flood Barrier means major floods in London are very unlikely.
I did say Thames Valley. There is plenty of other river. (The TFB is also being challenged by unexpected flooding over and above the design expectation, and having to be closed more often, though I'm not sure if any work is being done on its replacement, given the long
lead time.)

I think the Thames valley is probably safe this winter unless we get something completely biblical. It’s groundwater fed so flooding only happens when the aquifers have filled to brimming and the water table breaches the surface. It’s so low currently it would take months of heavy rain to recharge it fully.

But we’re in a period of strong positive Northern Hemisphere Westerlies (North Atlantic / Arctic Oscillation) so one of those atmospheric rivers chucking hundreds of mm on Cumbria or North Wales within a day of two might well be a possibility, while the Thames Valley enjoys springlike mild weather.

Theuniondivvie · August 2022

Stuartinromford said:

Carnyx said:

MISTY said:

rcs1000 said:
FPT:

Luckyguy1983 said:

Stuartinromford said:

IshmaelZ said:

eek said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

rcs1000 said:

MoonRabbit said:

Daveyboy1961 said:

BartholomewRoberts said:
Truss may have played a blinder here. After people have been ramping up talk of £3k, £4k or £6k bills or higher, if this suggested proposal goes ahead and bills are frozen then that's possibly going to seek quite a significant step taken.

Oh and if it's a loan, then possibly not a handout either.

But the devil will be in the details of course. What's going to happen with SMEs will be as important as what happens with consumer bills and that doesn't seem to be getting discussed much yet if at all.
Barty loves Lizzy still

Barty doesn’t do the politics very well. You could never hire him to spin. In the round this proposal is the most expensive of all the options so far though, as longer paybacks tend to be? And You can imagine opponents exploiting this angle, not just immediately but for a long time to come

“Is it not clear Mr Speaker, they have mortgaged our futures to afford their tax cuts today”

“Don’t the tax payers of this country know it well, Mr Speaker, When they were last in power, rather than windfall tax the excessive profits of the energy barons, instead they saddled future generations with debt, and then gave tax hand outs to the rich whilst everyone else starved! Is it no surprise the country has not voted Tory since?”

Shame on ex chancellor Rishi Sunak for not being more open and honest what he would do.
Here's the thing: if you windfall tax the energy companies, they might choose to invest in production somewhere else.
They are already doing so. The UK is not an attractive place for Oil and Gas exploration because of its ever changing tax and regulatory regime. All the more so now with the prospect of an expansion of the windfall tax.
Bit this is now going to change, so YAY for the energy crisis.
Nope. It is getting worse. Bear in mind there is probably 7 or 8 years between identifying a possible new development and actually getting the hydrocarbons out of he ground. The uncertainty over the UK regulatory and tax regime is getting worse not better so companies with a finite Exploration and Appraisal budget will chose countries with a history of stable regulation and tax even if the tax rates are a bit higher. and this is hitting development drilling as well where there is already a deferment of drilling into the middle of the decade when they hope they will have a better idea if what the long term tax regime will be.
It may be 'getting' worse, but I have faith it's going to be sorted. First the low hanging fruit, then the hard stuff.
Fool us once we'll remember it but accept it as a one off issue
Fool us twice and we'll go elsewhere never to return..

And that's what has happened here - there are easier more consistent countries to invest in so the investment goes there....
They just don't have the oil. It's like robbing banks, you do it because that's where the money is.
Not just that, they have to have hydrocarbons that are cheap and easy to get.

What banjaxed the remains of British coal, and caused British shale gas to be stillborn, was that geology made them difficult and expensive to extract.

Just because they're there doesn't mean it's in our interests to extract them.
I trust Richard Tyndall more when he says otherwise.
Richard is very knowledgeable on the oil and gas industry, as he's worked in it for many years. I am also pretty knowledgeable, having managed a billion dollar energy fund for many years (and which, I would note, performed extremely well). I have also written cover articles for Platts and S&P regarding various parts of the energy industry, and produced a nice YouTube video explaining unconvential oil production which is well worth watching: https://youtu.be/xHo82501394

But that doesn't mean that - right now - UK unconventional resources are economic. Because they're not.

All the well data from the hydraulically fracked onshore tight gas formations in the UK has been very disappointing. Even before the ban on fracking, the shares of iGas and others had fallen 90%.

Now, it doesn't mean there isn't a way forward. But the problem is that right now costs are probably around $100/mmcf, with a path (if things go well) to get it down to $20.

Costs, by contrast, for new projects are $6-7 on the North West Shelf of Australia, sub $4 for Qatar, and well under $10 for Israel and LNG. And these are fully loaded figures, including the cost of LNG liquification plants.
I'm not questioning your argument, but it does seem strange to me that iGas and Cuadrilla are even bothering with all the lobbying if the resources are not commercial.

The government has nothing to lose by announcing the UK resources are a mirage, I don't see why they don't.
At least one Tory party leadership candidate seems keen to spout on about fracking as a solution. I don't understand why, other than short-term fibbing to win the vote.
It might (I'm guessing here, based on knowledge of no more than human sin) be that people have been fibbing to themselves, and that's the hardest sort of fib to ditch.

There's a chunk of thought-space that has been going on about fracking for a while. That it's the solution to our problems and the fault of Greens that we haven't done it. If it's not economic in the UK right now, that's a problem for that belief system. Hard to 'fess up to being not right, even if for innocent reasons.

It would be awfully nice if we could flick a switch and get cheap gas in the UK tomorrow.

A micro version of Brexit will solve all, and probably as difficult to retreat from.

YBarddCwsc · August 2022

Mexicanpete said:

NickPalmer said:
It's interesting that the jump in Labour support seen in the national polls after the energy proposal isn't seen here - just a polling vagary of a genuine regional difference?
I am not convinced Johnny Voter pays as much attention to political proclamations from any party as we do When he becomes tangibly poorer he blames the government and if he is tangibly richer he rewards them. Only at election times and budgets does he pay attention to projections. If one party is projected to make him richer they get his vote and if it's for the poorer they don't.

"If one party is projected to make him richer they get his vote and if it's for the poorer they don't."

It is worth considering whether this statement is actually true.

I think it is not true. In fact, I think you could make an argument for the converse.

Let's take the US, for example.

The poor states all vote Republican. The rich states all vote Democrat.

Yet, if Johnny Voter behaved as you suggest, the converse would be true.

Many people actually do vote against their own self-interest.

MoonRabbit · August 2022

NickPalmer said:
It's interesting that the jump in Labour support seen in the national polls after the energy proposal isn't seen here - just a polling vagary of a genuine regional difference?

Was my first observation too Nick, where other polls have clearly moved in this period this one is static über MOE stuff.

But on second glance, it’s been very similar gap and ratings for a very long time, none of the “events” indicators seem to gain much reaction, in fact as you mention the energy proposal Labour just lower after it.

My thoughts are, electorates are made up of all different groupings, age, income, education etc, firstly it could be this particular subset - Brexit voters who have waited for levelling up for generations - love Boris, Brexit and levelling up so much, they should be a tough win for Starmer’s Labour, but secondly they clearly have moved from the last election, low hanging fruit for Labour at least, so we should watch this particular piece of polling for likely signs of drift back now if they are stubbornly not moving anywhere right now.

murali_s · August 2022

stodge said:
We are already starting to see the "selling" of Liz Truss in the supportive Conservative media and this will, I imagine, intensify after the Bank Holiday and we approach Trussday September 5th (you heard it first here !).

It would have been easier had the result been announced on a Thursday.

For the most part, Truss has been speaking to the Conservative membership and the invective used is of course music to the average member's ears but out in the real world it's not going to win her as many friends.

Like many new leaders, she may feel she needs to be tough and stamp her authority on the party before trying to do the same to the country and with only a third of MPs having supported her in the ballots, she might be forgiven for having some "doubts" about her colleagues and no doubt she will be choosing the loyalist of MPs to the Whips Office to ensure the slightest sign of rebellion is suppressed.

None of this makes her sound like a unifier, a conciliator or a re-builder. It's quite clear there will be a new "war" against the Unions which might work in some instances but won't against the nurses or other health workers. As to the rest of us, I'll offer an early prediction based on a few hunches - in contrast to this summer, this winter is going to be very wet and questions about flooding and flood prevention will dominate by February.

Truss will wage pointless divide and conquer conflict. The right wing press will love it but the further slide into the latrine will continue.

Weatherwise, a brave call. Most seasonal models suggest a lot of dry weather over the winter months.

NorthCadboll · August 2022

Just remember the next election may be fought on completely different boundaries, never mind events dear chaps, events.

murali_s · August 2022

Pulpstar said:
No chance the Tories have a majority if they lose Bassetlaw and Hartlepool.

Let’s hope this happen then for the sake of our country.

Benpointer · August 2022

Fishing said:

stodge said:

None of this makes her sound like a unifier, a conciliator or a re-builder. It's quite clear there will be a new "war" against the Unions which might work in some instances but won't against the nurses or other health workers. As to the rest of us, I'll offer an early prediction based on a few hunches - in contrast to this summer, this winter is going to be very wet and questions about flooding and flood prevention will dominate by February.
Do you think so? Even if the winter is wet, I can't see anything dominating beyond energy bills unless there is a quite unexpected development. After all, even the worst floods only seriously affect a few tens of thousands, while these damned bills will affect tens of millions.

Agreed.

Now, if we happen to have a cold winter, in the 1947 or 1963 league, that would dominate.

nico679 · August 2022

YBarddCwsc said:

Mexicanpete said:

NickPalmer said:
It's interesting that the jump in Labour support seen in the national polls after the energy proposal isn't seen here - just a polling vagary of a genuine regional difference?
I am not convinced Johnny Voter pays as much attention to political proclamations from any party as we do When he becomes tangibly poorer he blames the government and if he is tangibly richer he rewards them. Only at election times and budgets does he pay attention to projections. If one party is projected to make him richer they get his vote and if it's for the poorer they don't.
"If one party is projected to make him richer they get his vote and if it's for the poorer they don't."

It is worth considering whether this statement is actually true.

I think it is not true. In fact, I think you could make an argument for the converse.

Let's take the US, for example.

The poor states all vote Republican. The rich states all vote Democrat.

Yet, if Johnny Voter behaved as you suggest, the converse would be true.

Many people actually do vote against their own self-interest.

The situation is much worse in the US in terms of people voting against their own self-interest . Religion , guns , social issues keep poorer GOP voters continuing to act like the main course for Thanksgiving!

BartholomewRoberts · August 2022

Andy_Cooke said:
You still seem to be operating on the assumption that the only people at risk of death were the very aged.

Tell you what. I’ll break it down to a clear Faustian bargain that’s pretty accurate on numbers.

The father of a school child is magically struck by a fatal curse. He’s 44 years old.
The curse will be lifted if the secondary school his child is at (average size for the UK) shifts to two weeks of distance learning.

Should they do it?
And no, there’s no third option, no concern about capitulating to threats or encouraging the dark magician. It’s also one school only.

It’s a straight equation - one parent will lose forty years of life, or one thousand pupils have two weeks or distance learning.

Even under your numbers, if 75,000 people lose an average of 10 years of life at 10% infected, how many will die at 100% infected?

Now adjust for the fact that the vast majority of 2 million severely ill to the point of needing hospitalisation (including hundreds of thousands under fifty years old) will not get any hospital assistance. No CPAP, no fluids, no steroids, no care, just aiming to drink chicken soup at home. How many more on top out of those now non-hospitalised will die?

Even with your figures, and even with a magical expanded healthcare system by a factor of ten or more, it still weighs positive.

Should they do it? No, of course they should not. Sacrificing 2000 weeks of education, is not an acceptable price to pay for 2000 weeks of life.

Again the only way you make it seem even considered appropriate is dividing 1000 people's lost education over 1 person's life. Lying with statistics.

Try dividing it the other way to see how preposterous your proposal is, would you expel 8 children at random at age 10 and ban them from having any secondary schooling at all despite having done nothing wrong if that would give just a solitary extra day to each of every other child's parents?

londonpubman · August 2022

Benpointer said:

Fishing said:

stodge said:

None of this makes her sound like a unifier, a conciliator or a re-builder. It's quite clear there will be a new "war" against the Unions which might work in some instances but won't against the nurses or other health workers. As to the rest of us, I'll offer an early prediction based on a few hunches - in contrast to this summer, this winter is going to be very wet and questions about flooding and flood prevention will dominate by February.
Do you think so? Even if the winter is wet, I can't see anything dominating beyond energy bills unless there is a quite unexpected development. After all, even the worst floods only seriously affect a few tens of thousands, while these damned bills will affect tens of millions.
Agreed.

Now, if we happen to have a cold winter, in the 1947 or 1963 league, that would dominate.

If we have a cold winter 1963 style or even 1979 then we are all f........

MoonRabbit · August 2022

ON TOPIC. This seems to be the latest in your series of U-TURN or DEATH headers Mike - and you are quite right to keep flagging up the rhetoric from Team Truss on the campaign trail, doesn’t match the reality of limited support in the electorate overall, so political bettors should consider there will be either some screeching u-turns, or trouble.

The Trouble could take many forms. If the contest didn’t go to members then Liz and her supporters and policies have been soundly beaten by Sunak. If you look at Liz % of final MPs vote, could she have trouble whipping her policies through parliament? The electorate could come to take a dislike to her policies and her performance, with % polling stubbornly going nowhere.

It’s not going to be quiet political period is it?

MoonRabbit · August 2022

londonpubman said:

Benpointer said:

Fishing said:

stodge said:

None of this makes her sound like a unifier, a conciliator or a re-builder. It's quite clear there will be a new "war" against the Unions which might work in some instances but won't against the nurses or other health workers. As to the rest of us, I'll offer an early prediction based on a few hunches - in contrast to this summer, this winter is going to be very wet and questions about flooding and flood prevention will dominate by February.
Do you think so? Even if the winter is wet, I can't see anything dominating beyond energy bills unless there is a quite unexpected development. After all, even the worst floods only seriously affect a few tens of thousands, while these damned bills will affect tens of millions.
Agreed.

Now, if we happen to have a cold winter, in the 1947 or 1963 league, that would dominate.
If we have a cold winter 1963 style or even 1979 then we are all f........

Do cold winters tend to follow hot summers?

BartholomewRoberts · August 2022

kinabalu said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

FeersumEnjineeya said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

kinabalu said:

MISTY said:

kinabalu said:

Driver said:

kinabalu said:

Driver said:

bondegezou said:

TOPPING said:
1. Diseases will always kill us and if they don't then I have bad news about life in any case.
2. I can totally understand that the government, looking as we all did at those pictures from Italy of people dying in the corridors, had to do something and lockdowns was it.
3. The whole point of society is a balance. Tragically it is not to keep every Archie alive at the expense of others who would benefit from those resources.

Once the NHS was in no danger of "collapsing" as in real collapse, not the collapse that the Graun and the various health unions call every other week, then there should absolutely have been no more lockdowns.

There should have been compensation for pubs if they wanted to close and teachers if they wanted to stay home but no mandate.

Our freedoms are so precious and the great and good of PB dismiss them instantly and soil themselves at the first real test of freedom that we in the UK have had for 80 years. Doesn't bode well for the future.
Which is a greater threat to Freedom: a temporary measure in the face of a novel pandemic, or a sustained campaign by government to restrict political protest and dissent? Is the collapse of the Court system due to chronic neglect perhaps a more pernicious threat? Is the drive to ban freedom of speech under the guise of Fighting Wokery more problematic? Are restrictions on the right to strike actually more consequential? I think one can debate whether temporary lockdowns were really the "first real test of freedom that we in the UK have had for 80 years".

But, sure, lockdowns should be avoided. The way to avoid lockdowns is with better public health measures. We can look at a country like Japan that never had a national lockdown and had far fewer COVID cases. A better Test & Trace system, with more support for people self-isolating, would have been a huge help in the UK. A better funded primary health care system would have helped.

This ain't rocket science. If you don't want lockdowns, do public health better.
No, it isn't rocket science. If you don't want lockdowns, don't implement lockdowns.
How would you have hampered the spread of the virus at those critical times then?

It spread via close contact between people remember - not by black magic.
Strong advice, not legislation. And this would have included strong advice to organisations and companies to stop doing counterproductive things, like supermarkets cutting their hours, which merely ensured that the average number of people in their shops at any given time was higher than it needed to be.
Ok so Muscly goes "You MUST stay at home etc etc" but no laws are changed.

Why is that so much better iyo?

And what happens if people don't respond to the extent necessary to ward off a public health catastrophe?
It isn't warding off anything, its just changing the emphasis of risk. You assume these measures, even short term, are risk free, but they aren't.

Every kind of restriction is a swings and roundabouts calculation. Not how it was presented at the time (it was 'saving lives'), but we now know that is true.

At best lockdown was sacrificing some lives to save others. At best. What's the balance? who knows?
I never assumed the NPIs were cost free. However there was a train about to run us over and it had to be slowed down. The idea of somebody configuring and running a super-complex, multi-level cost/benefit model and trying to incorporate and quantify things like impact on mental health before we did anything is for the birds. We were too late acting as it is and found it hard enough just to model the spread of the virus and hospitalisations and deaths.
You're absolutely right that there wasn't a time to analyse it in advance, but there is time to do so in hindsight and in hindsight lockdown was a mistake.

It was certainly not "too late".
In hindsight paying my home insurance last year was a mistake. My house didn't burn down after all. What a waste of money!

(That's only one argument, of course. It is not at all clear, even in hindsight, that not locking down would have had lower social and economic costs than locking down did.)
If your home insurance only cost a few quid then it was probably worthwhile to have. If your home insurance cost more than your home and required your children to be out of school for months etc then it probably wasn't.
The risk at the time of the first lockdown was that the hospitals would be overwhelmed and that tens of thousands of people would die unnecessarily. Giving the kids a couple on months off school and paying an economic cost was indeed the equivalent of a few quid when compared to the horrifying possible alternative.

The case for the later lockdowns is not quite so clear, but in general locking down more quickly would have meant locking down for a shorter time.
Tens of thousands dying doesn't justify millions losing their education.

Would you sacrifice 100 people's education to prolong a single person's life? If not, why sacrifice millions for tens of thousands?

The only way to justify millions losing education, is if millions were going to die.
Telling outright lies - particularly when they are so easily refuted - doesn't help your argument at all.

There were not 'millions losing their education' There was a small scale disruption for a few months.

Your hyperbole does you no credit.
There was large scale disruption for months on end for millions of people. That is millions losing their education, that time was valuable and won't be returned to them.

Yes some will cope with it, but that doesn't make it OK. The law treats education as so serious that you can be fined for taking kids out of school for a few days for a vacation during term time, but you consider shutting down schools for months on end to be no biggy because you sold your soul to Covid death league tables being the only metric that matters to the exclusion of absolutely everything else.
What about 9 weeks disruption to save half a million lives? Including many parents?

EDIT: tried to fix a blockquote issue
If only we had 9 weeks disruption instead of two years of it. And Sweden etc didn't have proportionately half a million more deaths than us, or their neighbours.

But doing the maths, 9 weeks (we had more) disruption is approximately quarter of a year's disruption. Which is approximately 2.5 million years worth of education lost nationwide. Which valuing education at only 1:1 with an adults lifespan and using the fallacious claim of ten years per death would be equivalent to 250k deaths.

Since I consider a year of a child's education as more valuable than a year of life for an adult, your figures would be approaching a break even point if only education were affected and if your figures were accurate.

But your figures aren't accurate and there was more than just education at stake, so no is my answer. Not worthwhile.
Schools were not closed in Lockdown two. They were closed in Lockdown three for nine weeks.
Have you forgotten lockdown one?

So lockdown 3 was the equivalent of 250k extra deaths valuing education as only 1:1 with an adults lifespan (I'd value education more) only from lockdown three. But you forgot lockdown 1, which was from memory another 8 weeks.

So there's half a million death equivalents right there. Just from education lost at just a 1:1 ratio. Without considering a single other factor at all.

So no, not worthwhile.
You literally said ages ago that we didn’t know what was happening at Lockdown one, but never mind.

And your claim that fifty children losing a week of school equates to one adult dying a year earlier is your own equation.

And if we HAD hurried everyone through covid, we’d certainly have seen well in excess of half a million more deaths plus a totally collapsed health service (seeing yet more deaths).

And those deaths would have trended younger than they did, of course, by loss of healthcare.

Tell me, if you asked a child whether they’d trade several weeks of education for their dead parent back, what would they say, do you think?

How much in the way of weeks of disruption are 50,000-100,000 or more parents of schoolchildren worth? Or even more than that (given, you know, no chance of saving the more saveable age groups by hospital treatment)
Yes I've said that we had no idea of knowing at the time what was happening at lockdown one, but I also said that lockdown one was a mistake "in hindsight".

Lockdown three was a mistake at the time, not just in hindsight. Lockdown one was a mistake in hindsight.

Yes saying 50 people losing a week's education is equivalent to one person losing a years life is my own equation but that's as I said at a 1:1 ratio. As I've said I'd value education that children need for the next 60-70 years plus of their lives as MORE valuable than a week's life at the end of an adults lifespan, but I used 1:1 for simplicity. You can say yourself what you value education to be worth if you'd prefer then we could look using your own numbers. What ratio would you give it if not 1:1, how highly do you value education?

Would you sacrifice a year of a child's education for an extra years life expectancy? Where do you draw the line?

If we say 100k extra deaths = 1 million aggregate life years lost, then considering I'd value a child's education as possibly say 2:1 over an adults span at the end of their life then that would be 0.5 million school years lost across the country. Which divided by ten million school age pupils, is 5% of a school year per pupil. So 2 weeks, if education were the only factor.
So, for clarity, you’d sacrifice 30,000 lives to avoid school ending one week early?
Forced choice would I sacrifice a week of education, unscheduled so unplanned, for ten million or have 30k die from natural causes?

Yes I'd side with the children. You're doing the usual damned lies statistics trick of trying to minimise one number by dividing it by many, while trying to make another sound impressive by not doing so. It's not one week, it's one week for ten million people.

Let's turn the question around and see how you ratio it: Devil comes to you with a Faustian pact, you can sacrifice any amount of your children's education that you choose, from a month to all of it. For every month of their education you take from them you will get a month longer at the end of your life.

How much of their education would you take off them? A few months, or years worth? Or all of it or none?
More realistically, say the swap is 1 week off their education for an extra year of life for me.

I'd go with 10. They miss a term, I get an extra decade.

In which I'd learn to play the flute.

Well I was willing to go with 1 week of education being equivalent of 1 week of life (despite not thinking that's appropriate), but you've decided to value it as 1 week of education is 1 year of life. So lets run the numbers for you.

10 million people lost 17 weeks of education each. So 17 million weeks of education were lost. You have deemed 1 week = 1 year, so that's 17 million years. Going off the ballpark figure of 1 death = 10 years (I dispute this, but lets be generous), then using your "realistically" figures you've deemed the lockdown we did for education as "realistically" the equivalent of 1.7 million deaths.

londonpubman · August 2022

MoonRabbit said:

londonpubman said:

Benpointer said:

Fishing said:

stodge said:

None of this makes her sound like a unifier, a conciliator or a re-builder. It's quite clear there will be a new "war" against the Unions which might work in some instances but won't against the nurses or other health workers. As to the rest of us, I'll offer an early prediction based on a few hunches - in contrast to this summer, this winter is going to be very wet and questions about flooding and flood prevention will dominate by February.
Do you think so? Even if the winter is wet, I can't see anything dominating beyond energy bills unless there is a quite unexpected development. After all, even the worst floods only seriously affect a few tens of thousands, while these damned bills will affect tens of millions.
Agreed.

Now, if we happen to have a cold winter, in the 1947 or 1963 league, that would dominate.
If we have a cold winter 1963 style or even 1979 then we are all f........
Do cold winters tend to follow hot summers?

Not necessarily. I don't recall 1978 summer being especially hot. More recently 2010/2011 was a cold winter and again 2010 summer wasn't particularly hot.

HYUFD · August 2022

In terms of the leadership candidates though Truss does better in the redwall seats. She trails Starmer 39% to 35% in the redwall as preferred PM while Sunak trails Starmer 41% to 34%

https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1562110191218425857?s=20&t=CbrHZOXdYPN5r2lRRNHqiQ

IshmaelZ · August 2022

BartholomewRoberts said:

kinabalu said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

FeersumEnjineeya said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

kinabalu said:

MISTY said:

kinabalu said:

Driver said:

kinabalu said:

Driver said:

bondegezou said:

TOPPING said:
1. Diseases will always kill us and if they don't then I have bad news about life in any case.
2. I can totally understand that the government, looking as we all did at those pictures from Italy of people dying in the corridors, had to do something and lockdowns was it.
3. The whole point of society is a balance. Tragically it is not to keep every Archie alive at the expense of others who would benefit from those resources.

Once the NHS was in no danger of "collapsing" as in real collapse, not the collapse that the Graun and the various health unions call every other week, then there should absolutely have been no more lockdowns.

There should have been compensation for pubs if they wanted to close and teachers if they wanted to stay home but no mandate.

Our freedoms are so precious and the great and good of PB dismiss them instantly and soil themselves at the first real test of freedom that we in the UK have had for 80 years. Doesn't bode well for the future.
Which is a greater threat to Freedom: a temporary measure in the face of a novel pandemic, or a sustained campaign by government to restrict political protest and dissent? Is the collapse of the Court system due to chronic neglect perhaps a more pernicious threat? Is the drive to ban freedom of speech under the guise of Fighting Wokery more problematic? Are restrictions on the right to strike actually more consequential? I think one can debate whether temporary lockdowns were really the "first real test of freedom that we in the UK have had for 80 years".

But, sure, lockdowns should be avoided. The way to avoid lockdowns is with better public health measures. We can look at a country like Japan that never had a national lockdown and had far fewer COVID cases. A better Test & Trace system, with more support for people self-isolating, would have been a huge help in the UK. A better funded primary health care system would have helped.

This ain't rocket science. If you don't want lockdowns, do public health better.
No, it isn't rocket science. If you don't want lockdowns, don't implement lockdowns.
How would you have hampered the spread of the virus at those critical times then?

It spread via close contact between people remember - not by black magic.
Strong advice, not legislation. And this would have included strong advice to organisations and companies to stop doing counterproductive things, like supermarkets cutting their hours, which merely ensured that the average number of people in their shops at any given time was higher than it needed to be.
Ok so Muscly goes "You MUST stay at home etc etc" but no laws are changed.

Why is that so much better iyo?

And what happens if people don't respond to the extent necessary to ward off a public health catastrophe?
It isn't warding off anything, its just changing the emphasis of risk. You assume these measures, even short term, are risk free, but they aren't.

Every kind of restriction is a swings and roundabouts calculation. Not how it was presented at the time (it was 'saving lives'), but we now know that is true.

At best lockdown was sacrificing some lives to save others. At best. What's the balance? who knows?
I never assumed the NPIs were cost free. However there was a train about to run us over and it had to be slowed down. The idea of somebody configuring and running a super-complex, multi-level cost/benefit model and trying to incorporate and quantify things like impact on mental health before we did anything is for the birds. We were too late acting as it is and found it hard enough just to model the spread of the virus and hospitalisations and deaths.
You're absolutely right that there wasn't a time to analyse it in advance, but there is time to do so in hindsight and in hindsight lockdown was a mistake.

It was certainly not "too late".
In hindsight paying my home insurance last year was a mistake. My house didn't burn down after all. What a waste of money!

(That's only one argument, of course. It is not at all clear, even in hindsight, that not locking down would have had lower social and economic costs than locking down did.)
If your home insurance only cost a few quid then it was probably worthwhile to have. If your home insurance cost more than your home and required your children to be out of school for months etc then it probably wasn't.
The risk at the time of the first lockdown was that the hospitals would be overwhelmed and that tens of thousands of people would die unnecessarily. Giving the kids a couple on months off school and paying an economic cost was indeed the equivalent of a few quid when compared to the horrifying possible alternative.

The case for the later lockdowns is not quite so clear, but in general locking down more quickly would have meant locking down for a shorter time.
Tens of thousands dying doesn't justify millions losing their education.

Would you sacrifice 100 people's education to prolong a single person's life? If not, why sacrifice millions for tens of thousands?

The only way to justify millions losing education, is if millions were going to die.
Telling outright lies - particularly when they are so easily refuted - doesn't help your argument at all.

There were not 'millions losing their education' There was a small scale disruption for a few months.

Your hyperbole does you no credit.
There was large scale disruption for months on end for millions of people. That is millions losing their education, that time was valuable and won't be returned to them.

Yes some will cope with it, but that doesn't make it OK. The law treats education as so serious that you can be fined for taking kids out of school for a few days for a vacation during term time, but you consider shutting down schools for months on end to be no biggy because you sold your soul to Covid death league tables being the only metric that matters to the exclusion of absolutely everything else.
What about 9 weeks disruption to save half a million lives? Including many parents?

EDIT: tried to fix a blockquote issue
If only we had 9 weeks disruption instead of two years of it. And Sweden etc didn't have proportionately half a million more deaths than us, or their neighbours.

But doing the maths, 9 weeks (we had more) disruption is approximately quarter of a year's disruption. Which is approximately 2.5 million years worth of education lost nationwide. Which valuing education at only 1:1 with an adults lifespan and using the fallacious claim of ten years per death would be equivalent to 250k deaths.

Since I consider a year of a child's education as more valuable than a year of life for an adult, your figures would be approaching a break even point if only education were affected and if your figures were accurate.

But your figures aren't accurate and there was more than just education at stake, so no is my answer. Not worthwhile.
Schools were not closed in Lockdown two. They were closed in Lockdown three for nine weeks.
Have you forgotten lockdown one?

So lockdown 3 was the equivalent of 250k extra deaths valuing education as only 1:1 with an adults lifespan (I'd value education more) only from lockdown three. But you forgot lockdown 1, which was from memory another 8 weeks.

So there's half a million death equivalents right there. Just from education lost at just a 1:1 ratio. Without considering a single other factor at all.

So no, not worthwhile.
You literally said ages ago that we didn’t know what was happening at Lockdown one, but never mind.

And your claim that fifty children losing a week of school equates to one adult dying a year earlier is your own equation.

And if we HAD hurried everyone through covid, we’d certainly have seen well in excess of half a million more deaths plus a totally collapsed health service (seeing yet more deaths).

And those deaths would have trended younger than they did, of course, by loss of healthcare.

Tell me, if you asked a child whether they’d trade several weeks of education for their dead parent back, what would they say, do you think?

How much in the way of weeks of disruption are 50,000-100,000 or more parents of schoolchildren worth? Or even more than that (given, you know, no chance of saving the more saveable age groups by hospital treatment)
Yes I've said that we had no idea of knowing at the time what was happening at lockdown one, but I also said that lockdown one was a mistake "in hindsight".

Lockdown three was a mistake at the time, not just in hindsight. Lockdown one was a mistake in hindsight.

Yes saying 50 people losing a week's education is equivalent to one person losing a years life is my own equation but that's as I said at a 1:1 ratio. As I've said I'd value education that children need for the next 60-70 years plus of their lives as MORE valuable than a week's life at the end of an adults lifespan, but I used 1:1 for simplicity. You can say yourself what you value education to be worth if you'd prefer then we could look using your own numbers. What ratio would you give it if not 1:1, how highly do you value education?

Would you sacrifice a year of a child's education for an extra years life expectancy? Where do you draw the line?

If we say 100k extra deaths = 1 million aggregate life years lost, then considering I'd value a child's education as possibly say 2:1 over an adults span at the end of their life then that would be 0.5 million school years lost across the country. Which divided by ten million school age pupils, is 5% of a school year per pupil. So 2 weeks, if education were the only factor.
So, for clarity, you’d sacrifice 30,000 lives to avoid school ending one week early?
Forced choice would I sacrifice a week of education, unscheduled so unplanned, for ten million or have 30k die from natural causes?

Yes I'd side with the children. You're doing the usual damned lies statistics trick of trying to minimise one number by dividing it by many, while trying to make another sound impressive by not doing so. It's not one week, it's one week for ten million people.

Let's turn the question around and see how you ratio it: Devil comes to you with a Faustian pact, you can sacrifice any amount of your children's education that you choose, from a month to all of it. For every month of their education you take from them you will get a month longer at the end of your life.

How much of their education would you take off them? A few months, or years worth? Or all of it or none?
More realistically, say the swap is 1 week off their education for an extra year of life for me.

I'd go with 10. They miss a term, I get an extra decade.

In which I'd learn to play the flute.
Well I was willing to go with 1 week of education being equivalent of 1 week of life (despite not thinking that's appropriate), but you've decided to value it as 1 week of education is 1 year of life. So lets run the numbers for you.

10 million people lost 17 weeks of education each. So 17 million weeks of education were lost. You have deemed 1 week = 1 year, so that's 17 million years. Going off the ballpark figure of 1 death = 10 years (I dispute this, but lets be generous), then using your "realistically" figures you've deemed the lockdown we did for education as "realistically" the equivalent of 1.7 million deaths.

Fuck em, Barty. Hypothetically poor people so who gives an actual toss?

TimS · August 2022

MoonRabbit said:

londonpubman said:

Benpointer said:

Fishing said:

stodge said:

None of this makes her sound like a unifier, a conciliator or a re-builder. It's quite clear there will be a new "war" against the Unions which might work in some instances but won't against the nurses or other health workers. As to the rest of us, I'll offer an early prediction based on a few hunches - in contrast to this summer, this winter is going to be very wet and questions about flooding and flood prevention will dominate by February.
Do you think so? Even if the winter is wet, I can't see anything dominating beyond energy bills unless there is a quite unexpected development. After all, even the worst floods only seriously affect a few tens of thousands, while these damned bills will affect tens of millions.
Agreed.

Now, if we happen to have a cold winter, in the 1947 or 1963 league, that would dominate.
If we have a cold winter 1963 style or even 1979 then we are all f........
Do cold winters tend to follow hot summers?

The stats suggest the opposite - cool summer, cold winter. Though there are some exceptions, notably 1995.

HYUFD · August 2022

nico679 said:

YBarddCwsc said:

Mexicanpete said:

NickPalmer said:
It's interesting that the jump in Labour support seen in the national polls after the energy proposal isn't seen here - just a polling vagary of a genuine regional difference?
I am not convinced Johnny Voter pays as much attention to political proclamations from any party as we do When he becomes tangibly poorer he blames the government and if he is tangibly richer he rewards them. Only at election times and budgets does he pay attention to projections. If one party is projected to make him richer they get his vote and if it's for the poorer they don't.
"If one party is projected to make him richer they get his vote and if it's for the poorer they don't."

It is worth considering whether this statement is actually true.

I think it is not true. In fact, I think you could make an argument for the converse.

Let's take the US, for example.

The poor states all vote Republican. The rich states all vote Democrat.

Yet, if Johnny Voter behaved as you suggest, the converse would be true.

Many people actually do vote against their own self-interest.
The situation is much worse in the US in terms of people voting against their own self-interest . Religion , guns , social issues keep poorer GOP voters continuing to act like the main course for Thanksgiving!

Biden actually won voters earning under $30,000 54% to 46% for Trump in 2020. So the poor overall across all races still vote Democrat even if Trump overwhelmingly won white voters without a college degree 67% to 32% for Biden
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election#Electoral_results

BartholomewRoberts · August 2022

IshmaelZ said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

kinabalu said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

FeersumEnjineeya said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

kinabalu said:

MISTY said:

kinabalu said:

Driver said:

kinabalu said:

Driver said:

bondegezou said:

TOPPING said:
1. Diseases will always kill us and if they don't then I have bad news about life in any case.
2. I can totally understand that the government, looking as we all did at those pictures from Italy of people dying in the corridors, had to do something and lockdowns was it.
3. The whole point of society is a balance. Tragically it is not to keep every Archie alive at the expense of others who would benefit from those resources.

Once the NHS was in no danger of "collapsing" as in real collapse, not the collapse that the Graun and the various health unions call every other week, then there should absolutely have been no more lockdowns.

There should have been compensation for pubs if they wanted to close and teachers if they wanted to stay home but no mandate.

Our freedoms are so precious and the great and good of PB dismiss them instantly and soil themselves at the first real test of freedom that we in the UK have had for 80 years. Doesn't bode well for the future.
Which is a greater threat to Freedom: a temporary measure in the face of a novel pandemic, or a sustained campaign by government to restrict political protest and dissent? Is the collapse of the Court system due to chronic neglect perhaps a more pernicious threat? Is the drive to ban freedom of speech under the guise of Fighting Wokery more problematic? Are restrictions on the right to strike actually more consequential? I think one can debate whether temporary lockdowns were really the "first real test of freedom that we in the UK have had for 80 years".

But, sure, lockdowns should be avoided. The way to avoid lockdowns is with better public health measures. We can look at a country like Japan that never had a national lockdown and had far fewer COVID cases. A better Test & Trace system, with more support for people self-isolating, would have been a huge help in the UK. A better funded primary health care system would have helped.

This ain't rocket science. If you don't want lockdowns, do public health better.
No, it isn't rocket science. If you don't want lockdowns, don't implement lockdowns.
How would you have hampered the spread of the virus at those critical times then?

It spread via close contact between people remember - not by black magic.
Strong advice, not legislation. And this would have included strong advice to organisations and companies to stop doing counterproductive things, like supermarkets cutting their hours, which merely ensured that the average number of people in their shops at any given time was higher than it needed to be.
Ok so Muscly goes "You MUST stay at home etc etc" but no laws are changed.

Why is that so much better iyo?

And what happens if people don't respond to the extent necessary to ward off a public health catastrophe?
It isn't warding off anything, its just changing the emphasis of risk. You assume these measures, even short term, are risk free, but they aren't.

Every kind of restriction is a swings and roundabouts calculation. Not how it was presented at the time (it was 'saving lives'), but we now know that is true.

At best lockdown was sacrificing some lives to save others. At best. What's the balance? who knows?
I never assumed the NPIs were cost free. However there was a train about to run us over and it had to be slowed down. The idea of somebody configuring and running a super-complex, multi-level cost/benefit model and trying to incorporate and quantify things like impact on mental health before we did anything is for the birds. We were too late acting as it is and found it hard enough just to model the spread of the virus and hospitalisations and deaths.
You're absolutely right that there wasn't a time to analyse it in advance, but there is time to do so in hindsight and in hindsight lockdown was a mistake.

It was certainly not "too late".
In hindsight paying my home insurance last year was a mistake. My house didn't burn down after all. What a waste of money!

(That's only one argument, of course. It is not at all clear, even in hindsight, that not locking down would have had lower social and economic costs than locking down did.)
If your home insurance only cost a few quid then it was probably worthwhile to have. If your home insurance cost more than your home and required your children to be out of school for months etc then it probably wasn't.
The risk at the time of the first lockdown was that the hospitals would be overwhelmed and that tens of thousands of people would die unnecessarily. Giving the kids a couple on months off school and paying an economic cost was indeed the equivalent of a few quid when compared to the horrifying possible alternative.

The case for the later lockdowns is not quite so clear, but in general locking down more quickly would have meant locking down for a shorter time.
Tens of thousands dying doesn't justify millions losing their education.

Would you sacrifice 100 people's education to prolong a single person's life? If not, why sacrifice millions for tens of thousands?

The only way to justify millions losing education, is if millions were going to die.
Telling outright lies - particularly when they are so easily refuted - doesn't help your argument at all.

There were not 'millions losing their education' There was a small scale disruption for a few months.

Your hyperbole does you no credit.
There was large scale disruption for months on end for millions of people. That is millions losing their education, that time was valuable and won't be returned to them.

Yes some will cope with it, but that doesn't make it OK. The law treats education as so serious that you can be fined for taking kids out of school for a few days for a vacation during term time, but you consider shutting down schools for months on end to be no biggy because you sold your soul to Covid death league tables being the only metric that matters to the exclusion of absolutely everything else.
What about 9 weeks disruption to save half a million lives? Including many parents?

EDIT: tried to fix a blockquote issue
If only we had 9 weeks disruption instead of two years of it. And Sweden etc didn't have proportionately half a million more deaths than us, or their neighbours.

But doing the maths, 9 weeks (we had more) disruption is approximately quarter of a year's disruption. Which is approximately 2.5 million years worth of education lost nationwide. Which valuing education at only 1:1 with an adults lifespan and using the fallacious claim of ten years per death would be equivalent to 250k deaths.

Since I consider a year of a child's education as more valuable than a year of life for an adult, your figures would be approaching a break even point if only education were affected and if your figures were accurate.

But your figures aren't accurate and there was more than just education at stake, so no is my answer. Not worthwhile.
Schools were not closed in Lockdown two. They were closed in Lockdown three for nine weeks.
Have you forgotten lockdown one?

So lockdown 3 was the equivalent of 250k extra deaths valuing education as only 1:1 with an adults lifespan (I'd value education more) only from lockdown three. But you forgot lockdown 1, which was from memory another 8 weeks.

So there's half a million death equivalents right there. Just from education lost at just a 1:1 ratio. Without considering a single other factor at all.

So no, not worthwhile.
You literally said ages ago that we didn’t know what was happening at Lockdown one, but never mind.

And your claim that fifty children losing a week of school equates to one adult dying a year earlier is your own equation.

And if we HAD hurried everyone through covid, we’d certainly have seen well in excess of half a million more deaths plus a totally collapsed health service (seeing yet more deaths).

And those deaths would have trended younger than they did, of course, by loss of healthcare.

Tell me, if you asked a child whether they’d trade several weeks of education for their dead parent back, what would they say, do you think?

How much in the way of weeks of disruption are 50,000-100,000 or more parents of schoolchildren worth? Or even more than that (given, you know, no chance of saving the more saveable age groups by hospital treatment)
Yes I've said that we had no idea of knowing at the time what was happening at lockdown one, but I also said that lockdown one was a mistake "in hindsight".

Lockdown three was a mistake at the time, not just in hindsight. Lockdown one was a mistake in hindsight.

Yes saying 50 people losing a week's education is equivalent to one person losing a years life is my own equation but that's as I said at a 1:1 ratio. As I've said I'd value education that children need for the next 60-70 years plus of their lives as MORE valuable than a week's life at the end of an adults lifespan, but I used 1:1 for simplicity. You can say yourself what you value education to be worth if you'd prefer then we could look using your own numbers. What ratio would you give it if not 1:1, how highly do you value education?

Would you sacrifice a year of a child's education for an extra years life expectancy? Where do you draw the line?

If we say 100k extra deaths = 1 million aggregate life years lost, then considering I'd value a child's education as possibly say 2:1 over an adults span at the end of their life then that would be 0.5 million school years lost across the country. Which divided by ten million school age pupils, is 5% of a school year per pupil. So 2 weeks, if education were the only factor.
So, for clarity, you’d sacrifice 30,000 lives to avoid school ending one week early?
Forced choice would I sacrifice a week of education, unscheduled so unplanned, for ten million or have 30k die from natural causes?

Yes I'd side with the children. You're doing the usual damned lies statistics trick of trying to minimise one number by dividing it by many, while trying to make another sound impressive by not doing so. It's not one week, it's one week for ten million people.

Let's turn the question around and see how you ratio it: Devil comes to you with a Faustian pact, you can sacrifice any amount of your children's education that you choose, from a month to all of it. For every month of their education you take from them you will get a month longer at the end of your life.

How much of their education would you take off them? A few months, or years worth? Or all of it or none?
More realistically, say the swap is 1 week off their education for an extra year of life for me.

I'd go with 10. They miss a term, I get an extra decade.

In which I'd learn to play the flute.
Well I was willing to go with 1 week of education being equivalent of 1 week of life (despite not thinking that's appropriate), but you've decided to value it as 1 week of education is 1 year of life. So lets run the numbers for you.

10 million people lost 17 weeks of education each. So 17 million weeks of education were lost. You have deemed 1 week = 1 year, so that's 17 million years. Going off the ballpark figure of 1 death = 10 years (I dispute this, but lets be generous), then using your "realistically" figures you've deemed the lockdown we did for education as "realistically" the equivalent of 1.7 million deaths.
Fuck em, Barty. Hypothetically poor people so who gives an actual toss?

I give a toss, clearly, that's the whole point.

The irony is that the only way that the trade off looks remotely sensible is its stealing from the many, to give to the few.

Its like saying if the 99% give just a bit extra each, then the 1% can afford an extra Porsche.

Seeing people like Kinabalu wanting to take from the many to give to the few is quite amusing.

TheScreamingEagles · August 2022

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:
You still seem to be operating on the assumption that the only people at risk of death were the very aged.

Tell you what. I’ll break it down to a clear Faustian bargain that’s pretty accurate on numbers.

The father of a school child is magically struck by a fatal curse. He’s 44 years old.
The curse will be lifted if the secondary school his child is at (average size for the UK) shifts to two weeks of distance learning.

Should they do it?
And no, there’s no third option, no concern about capitulating to threats or encouraging the dark magician. It’s also one school only.

It’s a straight equation - one parent will lose forty years of life, or one thousand pupils have two weeks or distance learning.

Even under your numbers, if 75,000 people lose an average of 10 years of life at 10% infected, how many will die at 100% infected?

Now adjust for the fact that the vast majority of 2 million severely ill to the point of needing hospitalisation (including hundreds of thousands under fifty years old) will not get any hospital assistance. No CPAP, no fluids, no steroids, no care, just aiming to drink chicken soup at home. How many more on top out of those now non-hospitalised will die?

Even with your figures, and even with a magical expanded healthcare system by a factor of ten or more, it still weighs positive.
Should they do it? No, of course they should not. Sacrificing 2000 weeks of education, is not an acceptable price to pay for 2000 weeks of life.

Again the only way you make it seem even considered appropriate is dividing 1000 people's lost education over 1 person's life. Lying with statistics.

Try dividing it the other way to see how preposterous your proposal is, would you expel 8 children at random at age 10 and ban them from having any secondary schooling at all despite having done nothing wrong if that would give just a solitary extra day to each of every other child's parents?

I didn't think you could outdo the embarrassing shite you posted when you said Owen Paterson had no appellate process but congratulations.

SandyRentool · August 2022

rcs1000 said:
FPT:

Luckyguy1983 said:

Stuartinromford said:

IshmaelZ said:

eek said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

rcs1000 said:

MoonRabbit said:

Daveyboy1961 said:

BartholomewRoberts said:
Truss may have played a blinder here. After people have been ramping up talk of £3k, £4k or £6k bills or higher, if this suggested proposal goes ahead and bills are frozen then that's possibly going to seek quite a significant step taken.

Oh and if it's a loan, then possibly not a handout either.

But the devil will be in the details of course. What's going to happen with SMEs will be as important as what happens with consumer bills and that doesn't seem to be getting discussed much yet if at all.
Barty loves Lizzy still

Barty doesn’t do the politics very well. You could never hire him to spin. In the round this proposal is the most expensive of all the options so far though, as longer paybacks tend to be? And You can imagine opponents exploiting this angle, not just immediately but for a long time to come

“Is it not clear Mr Speaker, they have mortgaged our futures to afford their tax cuts today”

“Don’t the tax payers of this country know it well, Mr Speaker, When they were last in power, rather than windfall tax the excessive profits of the energy barons, instead they saddled future generations with debt, and then gave tax hand outs to the rich whilst everyone else starved! Is it no surprise the country has not voted Tory since?”

Shame on ex chancellor Rishi Sunak for not being more open and honest what he would do.
Here's the thing: if you windfall tax the energy companies, they might choose to invest in production somewhere else.
They are already doing so. The UK is not an attractive place for Oil and Gas exploration because of its ever changing tax and regulatory regime. All the more so now with the prospect of an expansion of the windfall tax.
Bit this is now going to change, so YAY for the energy crisis.
Nope. It is getting worse. Bear in mind there is probably 7 or 8 years between identifying a possible new development and actually getting the hydrocarbons out of he ground. The uncertainty over the UK regulatory and tax regime is getting worse not better so companies with a finite Exploration and Appraisal budget will chose countries with a history of stable regulation and tax even if the tax rates are a bit higher. and this is hitting development drilling as well where there is already a deferment of drilling into the middle of the decade when they hope they will have a better idea if what the long term tax regime will be.
It may be 'getting' worse, but I have faith it's going to be sorted. First the low hanging fruit, then the hard stuff.
Fool us once we'll remember it but accept it as a one off issue
Fool us twice and we'll go elsewhere never to return..

And that's what has happened here - there are easier more consistent countries to invest in so the investment goes there....
They just don't have the oil. It's like robbing banks, you do it because that's where the money is.
Not just that, they have to have hydrocarbons that are cheap and easy to get.

What banjaxed the remains of British coal, and caused British shale gas to be stillborn, was that geology made them difficult and expensive to extract.

Just because they're there doesn't mean it's in our interests to extract them.
I trust Richard Tyndall more when he says otherwise.
Richard is very knowledgeable on the oil and gas industry, as he's worked in it for many years. I am also pretty knowledgeable, having managed a billion dollar energy fund for many years (and which, I would note, performed extremely well). I have also written cover articles for Platts and S&P regarding various parts of the energy industry, and produced a nice YouTube video explaining unconvential oil production which is well worth watching: https://youtu.be/xHo82501394

But that doesn't mean that - right now - UK unconventional resources are economic. Because they're not.

All the well data from the hydraulically fracked onshore tight gas formations in the UK has been very disappointing. Even before the ban on fracking, the shares of iGas and others had fallen 90%.

Now, it doesn't mean there isn't a way forward. But the problem is that right now costs are probably around $100/mmcf, with a path (if things go well) to get it down to $20.

Costs, by contrast, for new projects are $6-7 on the North West Shelf of Australia, sub $4 for Qatar, and well under $10 for Israel and LNG. And these are fully loaded figures, including the cost of LNG liquification plants.

I'll repeat the quote from a fracking conference some years ago: "The cheapest shale gas in the UK will be LNG from the USA."

So far, he's correct.

BartholomewRoberts · August 2022

TheScreamingEagles said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:
You still seem to be operating on the assumption that the only people at risk of death were the very aged.

Tell you what. I’ll break it down to a clear Faustian bargain that’s pretty accurate on numbers.

The father of a school child is magically struck by a fatal curse. He’s 44 years old.
The curse will be lifted if the secondary school his child is at (average size for the UK) shifts to two weeks of distance learning.

Should they do it?
And no, there’s no third option, no concern about capitulating to threats or encouraging the dark magician. It’s also one school only.

It’s a straight equation - one parent will lose forty years of life, or one thousand pupils have two weeks or distance learning.

Even under your numbers, if 75,000 people lose an average of 10 years of life at 10% infected, how many will die at 100% infected?

Now adjust for the fact that the vast majority of 2 million severely ill to the point of needing hospitalisation (including hundreds of thousands under fifty years old) will not get any hospital assistance. No CPAP, no fluids, no steroids, no care, just aiming to drink chicken soup at home. How many more on top out of those now non-hospitalised will die?

Even with your figures, and even with a magical expanded healthcare system by a factor of ten or more, it still weighs positive.
Should they do it? No, of course they should not. Sacrificing 2000 weeks of education, is not an acceptable price to pay for 2000 weeks of life.

Again the only way you make it seem even considered appropriate is dividing 1000 people's lost education over 1 person's life. Lying with statistics.

Try dividing it the other way to see how preposterous your proposal is, would you expel 8 children at random at age 10 and ban them from having any secondary schooling at all despite having done nothing wrong if that would give just a solitary extra day to each of every other child's parents?
I didn't think you could outdo the embarrassing shite you posted when you said Owen Paterson had no appellate process but congratulations.

So you would tell 8 kids at random that they can't have any secondary schooling, anywhere at all, if that would give 1 bonus day to 1000 other kids parents? 🤔

That's no different to telling 1000 kids they need to lose their education in order to protect 1 adult, its the exact same principle but the other way around.

HYUFD · August 2022

Asked how she would feel if she had to press the nuclear button and usher in global annihilation, Liz Truss replies that "I think it's an important duty of the Prime Minister. I'm ready to do it."
https://twitter.com/AdamBienkov/status/1562157820828684288?s=20&t=CbrHZOXdYPN5r2lRRNHqiQ

BartholomewRoberts · August 2022

HYUFD said:
Asked how she would feel if she had to press the nuclear button and usher in global annihilation, Liz Truss replies that "I think it's an important duty of the Prime Minister. I'm ready to do it."
https://twitter.com/AdamBienkov/status/1562157820828684288?s=20&t=CbrHZOXdYPN5r2lRRNHqiQ

Absolutely the only right answer to the question. 👍

Anyone who wouldn't be ready to do it, isn't fit to be PM.

IshmaelZ · August 2022

BartholomewRoberts said:

IshmaelZ said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

kinabalu said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

FeersumEnjineeya said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

kinabalu said:

MISTY said:

kinabalu said:

Driver said:

kinabalu said:

Driver said:

bondegezou said:

TOPPING said:
1. Diseases will always kill us and if they don't then I have bad news about life in any case.
2. I can totally understand that the government, looking as we all did at those pictures from Italy of people dying in the corridors, had to do something and lockdowns was it.
3. The whole point of society is a balance. Tragically it is not to keep every Archie alive at the expense of others who would benefit from those resources.

Once the NHS was in no danger of "collapsing" as in real collapse, not the collapse that the Graun and the various health unions call every other week, then there should absolutely have been no more lockdowns.

There should have been compensation for pubs if they wanted to close and teachers if they wanted to stay home but no mandate.

Our freedoms are so precious and the great and good of PB dismiss them instantly and soil themselves at the first real test of freedom that we in the UK have had for 80 years. Doesn't bode well for the future.
Which is a greater threat to Freedom: a temporary measure in the face of a novel pandemic, or a sustained campaign by government to restrict political protest and dissent? Is the collapse of the Court system due to chronic neglect perhaps a more pernicious threat? Is the drive to ban freedom of speech under the guise of Fighting Wokery more problematic? Are restrictions on the right to strike actually more consequential? I think one can debate whether temporary lockdowns were really the "first real test of freedom that we in the UK have had for 80 years".

But, sure, lockdowns should be avoided. The way to avoid lockdowns is with better public health measures. We can look at a country like Japan that never had a national lockdown and had far fewer COVID cases. A better Test & Trace system, with more support for people self-isolating, would have been a huge help in the UK. A better funded primary health care system would have helped.

This ain't rocket science. If you don't want lockdowns, do public health better.
No, it isn't rocket science. If you don't want lockdowns, don't implement lockdowns.
How would you have hampered the spread of the virus at those critical times then?

It spread via close contact between people remember - not by black magic.
Strong advice, not legislation. And this would have included strong advice to organisations and companies to stop doing counterproductive things, like supermarkets cutting their hours, which merely ensured that the average number of people in their shops at any given time was higher than it needed to be.
Ok so Muscly goes "You MUST stay at home etc etc" but no laws are changed.

Why is that so much better iyo?

And what happens if people don't respond to the extent necessary to ward off a public health catastrophe?
It isn't warding off anything, its just changing the emphasis of risk. You assume these measures, even short term, are risk free, but they aren't.

Every kind of restriction is a swings and roundabouts calculation. Not how it was presented at the time (it was 'saving lives'), but we now know that is true.

At best lockdown was sacrificing some lives to save others. At best. What's the balance? who knows?
I never assumed the NPIs were cost free. However there was a train about to run us over and it had to be slowed down. The idea of somebody configuring and running a super-complex, multi-level cost/benefit model and trying to incorporate and quantify things like impact on mental health before we did anything is for the birds. We were too late acting as it is and found it hard enough just to model the spread of the virus and hospitalisations and deaths.
You're absolutely right that there wasn't a time to analyse it in advance, but there is time to do so in hindsight and in hindsight lockdown was a mistake.

It was certainly not "too late".
In hindsight paying my home insurance last year was a mistake. My house didn't burn down after all. What a waste of money!

(That's only one argument, of course. It is not at all clear, even in hindsight, that not locking down would have had lower social and economic costs than locking down did.)
If your home insurance only cost a few quid then it was probably worthwhile to have. If your home insurance cost more than your home and required your children to be out of school for months etc then it probably wasn't.
The risk at the time of the first lockdown was that the hospitals would be overwhelmed and that tens of thousands of people would die unnecessarily. Giving the kids a couple on months off school and paying an economic cost was indeed the equivalent of a few quid when compared to the horrifying possible alternative.

The case for the later lockdowns is not quite so clear, but in general locking down more quickly would have meant locking down for a shorter time.
Tens of thousands dying doesn't justify millions losing their education.

Would you sacrifice 100 people's education to prolong a single person's life? If not, why sacrifice millions for tens of thousands?

The only way to justify millions losing education, is if millions were going to die.
Telling outright lies - particularly when they are so easily refuted - doesn't help your argument at all.

There were not 'millions losing their education' There was a small scale disruption for a few months.

Your hyperbole does you no credit.
There was large scale disruption for months on end for millions of people. That is millions losing their education, that time was valuable and won't be returned to them.

Yes some will cope with it, but that doesn't make it OK. The law treats education as so serious that you can be fined for taking kids out of school for a few days for a vacation during term time, but you consider shutting down schools for months on end to be no biggy because you sold your soul to Covid death league tables being the only metric that matters to the exclusion of absolutely everything else.
What about 9 weeks disruption to save half a million lives? Including many parents?

EDIT: tried to fix a blockquote issue
If only we had 9 weeks disruption instead of two years of it. And Sweden etc didn't have proportionately half a million more deaths than us, or their neighbours.

But doing the maths, 9 weeks (we had more) disruption is approximately quarter of a year's disruption. Which is approximately 2.5 million years worth of education lost nationwide. Which valuing education at only 1:1 with an adults lifespan and using the fallacious claim of ten years per death would be equivalent to 250k deaths.

Since I consider a year of a child's education as more valuable than a year of life for an adult, your figures would be approaching a break even point if only education were affected and if your figures were accurate.

But your figures aren't accurate and there was more than just education at stake, so no is my answer. Not worthwhile.
Schools were not closed in Lockdown two. They were closed in Lockdown three for nine weeks.
Have you forgotten lockdown one?

So lockdown 3 was the equivalent of 250k extra deaths valuing education as only 1:1 with an adults lifespan (I'd value education more) only from lockdown three. But you forgot lockdown 1, which was from memory another 8 weeks.

So there's half a million death equivalents right there. Just from education lost at just a 1:1 ratio. Without considering a single other factor at all.

So no, not worthwhile.
You literally said ages ago that we didn’t know what was happening at Lockdown one, but never mind.

And your claim that fifty children losing a week of school equates to one adult dying a year earlier is your own equation.

And if we HAD hurried everyone through covid, we’d certainly have seen well in excess of half a million more deaths plus a totally collapsed health service (seeing yet more deaths).

And those deaths would have trended younger than they did, of course, by loss of healthcare.

Tell me, if you asked a child whether they’d trade several weeks of education for their dead parent back, what would they say, do you think?

How much in the way of weeks of disruption are 50,000-100,000 or more parents of schoolchildren worth? Or even more than that (given, you know, no chance of saving the more saveable age groups by hospital treatment)
Yes I've said that we had no idea of knowing at the time what was happening at lockdown one, but I also said that lockdown one was a mistake "in hindsight".

Lockdown three was a mistake at the time, not just in hindsight. Lockdown one was a mistake in hindsight.

Yes saying 50 people losing a week's education is equivalent to one person losing a years life is my own equation but that's as I said at a 1:1 ratio. As I've said I'd value education that children need for the next 60-70 years plus of their lives as MORE valuable than a week's life at the end of an adults lifespan, but I used 1:1 for simplicity. You can say yourself what you value education to be worth if you'd prefer then we could look using your own numbers. What ratio would you give it if not 1:1, how highly do you value education?

Would you sacrifice a year of a child's education for an extra years life expectancy? Where do you draw the line?

If we say 100k extra deaths = 1 million aggregate life years lost, then considering I'd value a child's education as possibly say 2:1 over an adults span at the end of their life then that would be 0.5 million school years lost across the country. Which divided by ten million school age pupils, is 5% of a school year per pupil. So 2 weeks, if education were the only factor.
So, for clarity, you’d sacrifice 30,000 lives to avoid school ending one week early?
Forced choice would I sacrifice a week of education, unscheduled so unplanned, for ten million or have 30k die from natural causes?

Yes I'd side with the children. You're doing the usual damned lies statistics trick of trying to minimise one number by dividing it by many, while trying to make another sound impressive by not doing so. It's not one week, it's one week for ten million people.

Let's turn the question around and see how you ratio it: Devil comes to you with a Faustian pact, you can sacrifice any amount of your children's education that you choose, from a month to all of it. For every month of their education you take from them you will get a month longer at the end of your life.

How much of their education would you take off them? A few months, or years worth? Or all of it or none?
More realistically, say the swap is 1 week off their education for an extra year of life for me.

I'd go with 10. They miss a term, I get an extra decade.

In which I'd learn to play the flute.
Well I was willing to go with 1 week of education being equivalent of 1 week of life (despite not thinking that's appropriate), but you've decided to value it as 1 week of education is 1 year of life. So lets run the numbers for you.

10 million people lost 17 weeks of education each. So 17 million weeks of education were lost. You have deemed 1 week = 1 year, so that's 17 million years. Going off the ballpark figure of 1 death = 10 years (I dispute this, but lets be generous), then using your "realistically" figures you've deemed the lockdown we did for education as "realistically" the equivalent of 1.7 million deaths.
Fuck em, Barty. Hypothetically poor people so who gives an actual toss?
I give a toss, clearly, that's the whole point.

The irony is that the only way that the trade off looks remotely sensible is its stealing from the many, to give to the few.

Its like saying if the 99% give just a bit extra each, then the 1% can afford an extra Porsche.

Seeing people like Kinabalu wanting to take from the many to give to the few is quite amusing.

But Bart everything after "in hindsight" is worthless. In hindsight I could have backed every derby winner for a century. You were definitely wrong at the time and it's virtually certain you still are

TheScreamingEagles · August 2022

Our business intelligence unit's financial outlook for the next 12 months, has scared me.

One of the minor things that also leads to civil unrest.

Most mobile phone and broadband companies have a clause in their terms of condition that say every April they can increase your bills based on December's CPI + 3.9%.

So it won't be uncommon to see people's BB and mobile bills go up close to 20% next April and that's going to lead to disconnections for non payment.

TheScreamingEagles · August 2022

BartholomewRoberts said:

TheScreamingEagles said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:
You still seem to be operating on the assumption that the only people at risk of death were the very aged.

Tell you what. I’ll break it down to a clear Faustian bargain that’s pretty accurate on numbers.

The father of a school child is magically struck by a fatal curse. He’s 44 years old.
The curse will be lifted if the secondary school his child is at (average size for the UK) shifts to two weeks of distance learning.

Should they do it?
And no, there’s no third option, no concern about capitulating to threats or encouraging the dark magician. It’s also one school only.

It’s a straight equation - one parent will lose forty years of life, or one thousand pupils have two weeks or distance learning.

Even under your numbers, if 75,000 people lose an average of 10 years of life at 10% infected, how many will die at 100% infected?

Now adjust for the fact that the vast majority of 2 million severely ill to the point of needing hospitalisation (including hundreds of thousands under fifty years old) will not get any hospital assistance. No CPAP, no fluids, no steroids, no care, just aiming to drink chicken soup at home. How many more on top out of those now non-hospitalised will die?

Even with your figures, and even with a magical expanded healthcare system by a factor of ten or more, it still weighs positive.
Should they do it? No, of course they should not. Sacrificing 2000 weeks of education, is not an acceptable price to pay for 2000 weeks of life.

Again the only way you make it seem even considered appropriate is dividing 1000 people's lost education over 1 person's life. Lying with statistics.

Try dividing it the other way to see how preposterous your proposal is, would you expel 8 children at random at age 10 and ban them from having any secondary schooling at all despite having done nothing wrong if that would give just a solitary extra day to each of every other child's parents?
I didn't think you could outdo the embarrassing shite you posted when you said Owen Paterson had no appellate process but congratulations.
So you would tell 8 kids at random that they can't have any secondary schooling, anywhere at all, if that would give 1 bonus day to 1000 other kids parents? 🤔

That's no different to telling 1000 kids they need to lose their education in order to protect 1 adult, its the exact same principle but the other way around.

Your figures are a fantasy, Andy Cooke has repeatedly rebutted them.

BartholomewRoberts · August 2022

IshmaelZ said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

IshmaelZ said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

kinabalu said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Richard_Tyndall said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

FeersumEnjineeya said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

kinabalu said:

MISTY said:

kinabalu said:

Driver said:

kinabalu said:

Driver said:

bondegezou said:

TOPPING said:
1. Diseases will always kill us and if they don't then I have bad news about life in any case.
2. I can totally understand that the government, looking as we all did at those pictures from Italy of people dying in the corridors, had to do something and lockdowns was it.
3. The whole point of society is a balance. Tragically it is not to keep every Archie alive at the expense of others who would benefit from those resources.

Once the NHS was in no danger of "collapsing" as in real collapse, not the collapse that the Graun and the various health unions call every other week, then there should absolutely have been no more lockdowns.

There should have been compensation for pubs if they wanted to close and teachers if they wanted to stay home but no mandate.

Our freedoms are so precious and the great and good of PB dismiss them instantly and soil themselves at the first real test of freedom that we in the UK have had for 80 years. Doesn't bode well for the future.
Which is a greater threat to Freedom: a temporary measure in the face of a novel pandemic, or a sustained campaign by government to restrict political protest and dissent? Is the collapse of the Court system due to chronic neglect perhaps a more pernicious threat? Is the drive to ban freedom of speech under the guise of Fighting Wokery more problematic? Are restrictions on the right to strike actually more consequential? I think one can debate whether temporary lockdowns were really the "first real test of freedom that we in the UK have had for 80 years".

But, sure, lockdowns should be avoided. The way to avoid lockdowns is with better public health measures. We can look at a country like Japan that never had a national lockdown and had far fewer COVID cases. A better Test & Trace system, with more support for people self-isolating, would have been a huge help in the UK. A better funded primary health care system would have helped.

This ain't rocket science. If you don't want lockdowns, do public health better.
No, it isn't rocket science. If you don't want lockdowns, don't implement lockdowns.
How would you have hampered the spread of the virus at those critical times then?

It spread via close contact between people remember - not by black magic.
Strong advice, not legislation. And this would have included strong advice to organisations and companies to stop doing counterproductive things, like supermarkets cutting their hours, which merely ensured that the average number of people in their shops at any given time was higher than it needed to be.
Ok so Muscly goes "You MUST stay at home etc etc" but no laws are changed.

Why is that so much better iyo?

And what happens if people don't respond to the extent necessary to ward off a public health catastrophe?
It isn't warding off anything, its just changing the emphasis of risk. You assume these measures, even short term, are risk free, but they aren't.

Every kind of restriction is a swings and roundabouts calculation. Not how it was presented at the time (it was 'saving lives'), but we now know that is true.

At best lockdown was sacrificing some lives to save others. At best. What's the balance? who knows?
I never assumed the NPIs were cost free. However there was a train about to run us over and it had to be slowed down. The idea of somebody configuring and running a super-complex, multi-level cost/benefit model and trying to incorporate and quantify things like impact on mental health before we did anything is for the birds. We were too late acting as it is and found it hard enough just to model the spread of the virus and hospitalisations and deaths.
You're absolutely right that there wasn't a time to analyse it in advance, but there is time to do so in hindsight and in hindsight lockdown was a mistake.

It was certainly not "too late".
In hindsight paying my home insurance last year was a mistake. My house didn't burn down after all. What a waste of money!

(That's only one argument, of course. It is not at all clear, even in hindsight, that not locking down would have had lower social and economic costs than locking down did.)
If your home insurance only cost a few quid then it was probably worthwhile to have. If your home insurance cost more than your home and required your children to be out of school for months etc then it probably wasn't.
The risk at the time of the first lockdown was that the hospitals would be overwhelmed and that tens of thousands of people would die unnecessarily. Giving the kids a couple on months off school and paying an economic cost was indeed the equivalent of a few quid when compared to the horrifying possible alternative.

The case for the later lockdowns is not quite so clear, but in general locking down more quickly would have meant locking down for a shorter time.
Tens of thousands dying doesn't justify millions losing their education.

Would you sacrifice 100 people's education to prolong a single person's life? If not, why sacrifice millions for tens of thousands?

The only way to justify millions losing education, is if millions were going to die.
Telling outright lies - particularly when they are so easily refuted - doesn't help your argument at all.

There were not 'millions losing their education' There was a small scale disruption for a few months.

Your hyperbole does you no credit.
There was large scale disruption for months on end for millions of people. That is millions losing their education, that time was valuable and won't be returned to them.

Yes some will cope with it, but that doesn't make it OK. The law treats education as so serious that you can be fined for taking kids out of school for a few days for a vacation during term time, but you consider shutting down schools for months on end to be no biggy because you sold your soul to Covid death league tables being the only metric that matters to the exclusion of absolutely everything else.
What about 9 weeks disruption to save half a million lives? Including many parents?

EDIT: tried to fix a blockquote issue
If only we had 9 weeks disruption instead of two years of it. And Sweden etc didn't have proportionately half a million more deaths than us, or their neighbours.

But doing the maths, 9 weeks (we had more) disruption is approximately quarter of a year's disruption. Which is approximately 2.5 million years worth of education lost nationwide. Which valuing education at only 1:1 with an adults lifespan and using the fallacious claim of ten years per death would be equivalent to 250k deaths.

Since I consider a year of a child's education as more valuable than a year of life for an adult, your figures would be approaching a break even point if only education were affected and if your figures were accurate.

But your figures aren't accurate and there was more than just education at stake, so no is my answer. Not worthwhile.
Schools were not closed in Lockdown two. They were closed in Lockdown three for nine weeks.
Have you forgotten lockdown one?

So lockdown 3 was the equivalent of 250k extra deaths valuing education as only 1:1 with an adults lifespan (I'd value education more) only from lockdown three. But you forgot lockdown 1, which was from memory another 8 weeks.

So there's half a million death equivalents right there. Just from education lost at just a 1:1 ratio. Without considering a single other factor at all.

So no, not worthwhile.
You literally said ages ago that we didn’t know what was happening at Lockdown one, but never mind.

And your claim that fifty children losing a week of school equates to one adult dying a year earlier is your own equation.

And if we HAD hurried everyone through covid, we’d certainly have seen well in excess of half a million more deaths plus a totally collapsed health service (seeing yet more deaths).

And those deaths would have trended younger than they did, of course, by loss of healthcare.

Tell me, if you asked a child whether they’d trade several weeks of education for their dead parent back, what would they say, do you think?

How much in the way of weeks of disruption are 50,000-100,000 or more parents of schoolchildren worth? Or even more than that (given, you know, no chance of saving the more saveable age groups by hospital treatment)
Yes I've said that we had no idea of knowing at the time what was happening at lockdown one, but I also said that lockdown one was a mistake "in hindsight".

Lockdown three was a mistake at the time, not just in hindsight. Lockdown one was a mistake in hindsight.

Yes saying 50 people losing a week's education is equivalent to one person losing a years life is my own equation but that's as I said at a 1:1 ratio. As I've said I'd value education that children need for the next 60-70 years plus of their lives as MORE valuable than a week's life at the end of an adults lifespan, but I used 1:1 for simplicity. You can say yourself what you value education to be worth if you'd prefer then we could look using your own numbers. What ratio would you give it if not 1:1, how highly do you value education?

Would you sacrifice a year of a child's education for an extra years life expectancy? Where do you draw the line?

If we say 100k extra deaths = 1 million aggregate life years lost, then considering I'd value a child's education as possibly say 2:1 over an adults span at the end of their life then that would be 0.5 million school years lost across the country. Which divided by ten million school age pupils, is 5% of a school year per pupil. So 2 weeks, if education were the only factor.
So, for clarity, you’d sacrifice 30,000 lives to avoid school ending one week early?
Forced choice would I sacrifice a week of education, unscheduled so unplanned, for ten million or have 30k die from natural causes?

Yes I'd side with the children. You're doing the usual damned lies statistics trick of trying to minimise one number by dividing it by many, while trying to make another sound impressive by not doing so. It's not one week, it's one week for ten million people.

Let's turn the question around and see how you ratio it: Devil comes to you with a Faustian pact, you can sacrifice any amount of your children's education that you choose, from a month to all of it. For every month of their education you take from them you will get a month longer at the end of your life.

How much of their education would you take off them? A few months, or years worth? Or all of it or none?
More realistically, say the swap is 1 week off their education for an extra year of life for me.

I'd go with 10. They miss a term, I get an extra decade.

In which I'd learn to play the flute.
Well I was willing to go with 1 week of education being equivalent of 1 week of life (despite not thinking that's appropriate), but you've decided to value it as 1 week of education is 1 year of life. So lets run the numbers for you.

10 million people lost 17 weeks of education each. So 17 million weeks of education were lost. You have deemed 1 week = 1 year, so that's 17 million years. Going off the ballpark figure of 1 death = 10 years (I dispute this, but lets be generous), then using your "realistically" figures you've deemed the lockdown we did for education as "realistically" the equivalent of 1.7 million deaths.
Fuck em, Barty. Hypothetically poor people so who gives an actual toss?
I give a toss, clearly, that's the whole point.

The irony is that the only way that the trade off looks remotely sensible is its stealing from the many, to give to the few.

Its like saying if the 99% give just a bit extra each, then the 1% can afford an extra Porsche.

Seeing people like Kinabalu wanting to take from the many to give to the few is quite amusing.
But Bart everything after "in hindsight" is worthless. In hindsight I could have backed every derby winner for a century. You were definitely wrong at the time and it's virtually certain you still are

Yes I was wrong at the time, I admit that.

I think its important to acknowledge when you've made mistakes. Its how we learn, those who refuse to do so, don't learn from them.

ydoethur · August 2022

BartholomewRoberts said:

HYUFD said:
Asked how she would feel if she had to press the nuclear button and usher in global annihilation, Liz Truss replies that "I think it's an important duty of the Prime Minister. I'm ready to do it."
https://twitter.com/AdamBienkov/status/1562157820828684288?s=20&t=CbrHZOXdYPN5r2lRRNHqiQ
Absolutely the only right answer to the question. 👍

Anyone who wouldn't be ready to do it, isn't fit to be PM.

Not really. 'I would do it if I have to' would be better, as 'I'm ready to do it' could imply she's about to!

IshmaelZ · August 2022

TheScreamingEagles said:
Our business intelligence unit's financial outlook for the next 12 months, has scared me.

One of the minor things that also leads to civil unrest.

Most mobile phone and broadband companies have a clause in their terms of condition that say every April they can increase your bills based on December's CPI + 3.9%.

So it won't be uncommon to see people's BB and mobile bills go up close to 20% next April and that's going to lead to disconnections for non payment.

Balls deep in physical gold

Bring it on

ydoethur · August 2022

IshmaelZ said:

TheScreamingEagles said:
Our business intelligence unit's financial outlook for the next 12 months, has scared me.

One of the minor things that also leads to civil unrest.

Most mobile phone and broadband companies have a clause in their terms of condition that say every April they can increase your bills based on December's CPI + 3.9%.

So it won't be uncommon to see people's BB and mobile bills go up close to 20% next April and that's going to lead to disconnections for non payment.
Balls deep in physical gold

Bring it on

Sounds painful!

BartholomewRoberts · August 2022

TheScreamingEagles said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

TheScreamingEagles said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:
You still seem to be operating on the assumption that the only people at risk of death were the very aged.

Tell you what. I’ll break it down to a clear Faustian bargain that’s pretty accurate on numbers.

The father of a school child is magically struck by a fatal curse. He’s 44 years old.
The curse will be lifted if the secondary school his child is at (average size for the UK) shifts to two weeks of distance learning.

Should they do it?
And no, there’s no third option, no concern about capitulating to threats or encouraging the dark magician. It’s also one school only.

It’s a straight equation - one parent will lose forty years of life, or one thousand pupils have two weeks or distance learning.

Even under your numbers, if 75,000 people lose an average of 10 years of life at 10% infected, how many will die at 100% infected?

Now adjust for the fact that the vast majority of 2 million severely ill to the point of needing hospitalisation (including hundreds of thousands under fifty years old) will not get any hospital assistance. No CPAP, no fluids, no steroids, no care, just aiming to drink chicken soup at home. How many more on top out of those now non-hospitalised will die?

Even with your figures, and even with a magical expanded healthcare system by a factor of ten or more, it still weighs positive.
Should they do it? No, of course they should not. Sacrificing 2000 weeks of education, is not an acceptable price to pay for 2000 weeks of life.

Again the only way you make it seem even considered appropriate is dividing 1000 people's lost education over 1 person's life. Lying with statistics.

Try dividing it the other way to see how preposterous your proposal is, would you expel 8 children at random at age 10 and ban them from having any secondary schooling at all despite having done nothing wrong if that would give just a solitary extra day to each of every other child's parents?
I didn't think you could outdo the embarrassing shite you posted when you said Owen Paterson had no appellate process but congratulations.
So you would tell 8 kids at random that they can't have any secondary schooling, anywhere at all, if that would give 1 bonus day to 1000 other kids parents? 🤔

That's no different to telling 1000 kids they need to lose their education in order to protect 1 adult, its the exact same principle but the other way around.
Your figures are a fantasy, Andy Cooke has repeatedly rebutted them.

Except they're Andy's figures. I said I don't agree with them, but I was willing to use his figures despite that, because I was so confident on my point even with his figures.

Luckyguy1983 · August 2022

ydoethur said:

IshmaelZ said:

TheScreamingEagles said:
Our business intelligence unit's financial outlook for the next 12 months, has scared me.

One of the minor things that also leads to civil unrest.

Most mobile phone and broadband companies have a clause in their terms of condition that say every April they can increase your bills based on December's CPI + 3.9%.

So it won't be uncommon to see people's BB and mobile bills go up close to 20% next April and that's going to lead to disconnections for non payment.
Balls deep in physical gold

Bring it on
Sounds painful!

Is there not a famous Egyptian punishment entailing something similar?

TheScreamingEagles · August 2022

Sounds like a typical night out in Glasgow.

William Wallace was dragged naked to Smithfield today in 1305. He was strangled, castrated, disembowled & his insides burnt. Then beheaded & quartered. His crime, according to Edward I, High Treason. His retort: "I could not be a traitor to Edward, for I was never his subject.”

https://twitter.com/thehistoryguy/status/1562172071236575236

dixiedean · August 2022

TheScreamingEagles said:
Our business intelligence unit's financial outlook for the next 12 months, has scared me.

One of the minor things that also leads to civil unrest.

Most mobile phone and broadband companies have a clause in their terms of condition that say every April they can increase your bills based on December's CPI + 3.9%.

So it won't be uncommon to see people's BB and mobile bills go up close to 20% next April and that's going to lead to disconnections for non payment.

There's quite a list developing of stuff that will be going up by an eye watering amount.

Luckyguy1983 · August 2022

ydoethur said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

HYUFD said:
Asked how she would feel if she had to press the nuclear button and usher in global annihilation, Liz Truss replies that "I think it's an important duty of the Prime Minister. I'm ready to do it."
https://twitter.com/AdamBienkov/status/1562157820828684288?s=20&t=CbrHZOXdYPN5r2lRRNHqiQ
Absolutely the only right answer to the question. 👍

Anyone who wouldn't be ready to do it, isn't fit to be PM.
Not really. 'I would do it if I have to' would be better, as 'I'm ready to do it' could imply she's about to!

Not great finesse in terms of the words chosen but that's our Liz.

TheScreamingEagles · August 2022

IshmaelZ said:

TheScreamingEagles said:
Our business intelligence unit's financial outlook for the next 12 months, has scared me.

One of the minor things that also leads to civil unrest.

Most mobile phone and broadband companies have a clause in their terms of condition that say every April they can increase your bills based on December's CPI + 3.9%.

So it won't be uncommon to see people's BB and mobile bills go up close to 20% next April and that's going to lead to disconnections for non payment.
Balls deep in physical gold

Bring it on

Never have I been so glad my mother raised me as a saver and that debt (apart from a mortgage) is the eighth deadliest sin.

Andy_Cooke · August 2022

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:
You still seem to be operating on the assumption that the only people at risk of death were the very aged.

Tell you what. I’ll break it down to a clear Faustian bargain that’s pretty accurate on numbers.

The father of a school child is magically struck by a fatal curse. He’s 44 years old.
The curse will be lifted if the secondary school his child is at (average size for the UK) shifts to two weeks of distance learning.

Should they do it?
And no, there’s no third option, no concern about capitulating to threats or encouraging the dark magician. It’s also one school only.

It’s a straight equation - one parent will lose forty years of life, or one thousand pupils have two weeks or distance learning.

Even under your numbers, if 75,000 people lose an average of 10 years of life at 10% infected, how many will die at 100% infected?

Now adjust for the fact that the vast majority of 2 million severely ill to the point of needing hospitalisation (including hundreds of thousands under fifty years old) will not get any hospital assistance. No CPAP, no fluids, no steroids, no care, just aiming to drink chicken soup at home. How many more on top out of those now non-hospitalised will die?

Even with your figures, and even with a magical expanded healthcare system by a factor of ten or more, it still weighs positive.
Should they do it? No, of course they should not. Sacrificing 2000 weeks of education, is not an acceptable price to pay for 2000 weeks of life.

Again the only way you make it seem even considered appropriate is dividing 1000 people's lost education over 1 person's life. Lying with statistics.

Try dividing it the other way to see how preposterous your proposal is, would you expel 8 children at random at age 10 and ban them from having any secondary schooling at all despite having done nothing wrong if that would give just a solitary extra day to each of every other child's parents?

Jesus wept, I’m trying to make it directly relevant and as fair as possible. Making it clear as crystal what the cost is, the number of weeks and people, and the number of years of life to one person. You still insist this is some kind of misleading with statistics.

I also, as it happens, do not believe that it’s remotely a linear equation. Four weeks lost per pupil is more than four times as bad as one week lost.
A full term lost is more than twice as bad as a half-term lost. And a school year lost per pupil is more than three times as bad as one term lost per pupil.
And the entirety of five school years of secondary school lost per pupil is more than fifteen times as bad as one term lost per pupil.

Because there’s less and less chance to catch up, and the loss builds upon itself.

Anyway, you’ve ignored the fact that your own equation leaves it worthwhile to avoid half a million deaths with the closures we had.

TheScreamingEagles · August 2022

On topic, the Blue Wall is crumbling, the Red Wall is revolting, and rural England is revolting, just exactly where are the safe Tory seats?

Luckyguy1983 · August 2022

TheScreamingEagles said:
On topic, the Blue Wall is crumbling, the Red Wall is revolting, and rural England is revolting, just exactly where are the safe Tory seats?

Horsham.

SandyRentool · August 2022

TheScreamingEagles said:
On topic, the Blue Wall is crumbling, the Red Wall is revolting, and rural England is revolting, just exactly where are the safe Tory seats?

House of Lords?

SandyRentool · August 2022

A few years ago, in the comments section below just about every article in "The Engineer", some obsessive would feel compelled to say that the solution to whatever issue was being discussed was Thorium Reactor Technology.

So, with the current energy crisis, do we finally have a question to which he has the answer?

Carnyx · August 2022

TheScreamingEagles said:
Our business intelligence unit's financial outlook for the next 12 months, has scared me.

One of the minor things that also leads to civil unrest.

Most mobile phone and broadband companies have a clause in their terms of condition that say every April they can increase your bills based on December's CPI + 3.9%.

So it won't be uncommon to see people's BB and mobile bills go up close to 20% next April and that's going to lead to disconnections for non payment.

Interesting, given how dependent even the poorest people - especially the poorest people - are on mobeys, e.g. for UC, and unemployment payments etc. You lose your mobey, you're completely screwed.

Is there any scheme like that for water whereby the company isn't allowed to disconnect?

Stuartinromford · August 2022

BartholomewRoberts said:

TheScreamingEagles said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

TheScreamingEagles said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:
You still seem to be operating on the assumption that the only people at risk of death were the very aged.

Tell you what. I’ll break it down to a clear Faustian bargain that’s pretty accurate on numbers.

The father of a school child is magically struck by a fatal curse. He’s 44 years old.
The curse will be lifted if the secondary school his child is at (average size for the UK) shifts to two weeks of distance learning.

Should they do it?
And no, there’s no third option, no concern about capitulating to threats or encouraging the dark magician. It’s also one school only.

It’s a straight equation - one parent will lose forty years of life, or one thousand pupils have two weeks or distance learning.

Even under your numbers, if 75,000 people lose an average of 10 years of life at 10% infected, how many will die at 100% infected?

Now adjust for the fact that the vast majority of 2 million severely ill to the point of needing hospitalisation (including hundreds of thousands under fifty years old) will not get any hospital assistance. No CPAP, no fluids, no steroids, no care, just aiming to drink chicken soup at home. How many more on top out of those now non-hospitalised will die?

Even with your figures, and even with a magical expanded healthcare system by a factor of ten or more, it still weighs positive.
Should they do it? No, of course they should not. Sacrificing 2000 weeks of education, is not an acceptable price to pay for 2000 weeks of life.

Again the only way you make it seem even considered appropriate is dividing 1000 people's lost education over 1 person's life. Lying with statistics.

Try dividing it the other way to see how preposterous your proposal is, would you expel 8 children at random at age 10 and ban them from having any secondary schooling at all despite having done nothing wrong if that would give just a solitary extra day to each of every other child's parents?
I didn't think you could outdo the embarrassing shite you posted when you said Owen Paterson had no appellate process but congratulations.
So you would tell 8 kids at random that they can't have any secondary schooling, anywhere at all, if that would give 1 bonus day to 1000 other kids parents? 🤔

That's no different to telling 1000 kids they need to lose their education in order to protect 1 adult, its the exact same principle but the other way around.
Your figures are a fantasy, Andy Cooke has repeatedly rebutted them.
Except they're Andy's figures. I said I don't agree with them, but I was willing to use his figures despite that, because I was so confident on my point even with his figures.

Ballpark figures. Through 2020, about 1 percent of people who caught covid died. Not exactly 1 percent, but neither 0.1 percent or 10 percent.

So to let it wash over 70 million people in a controlled way will lead to about 700 000 deaths. We'll leave aside the possibility that classic Coivd didn't give perfect immunity to variants, so the washing over wouldn't have been the end of the matter.

Now 0.7 million is less than 1.7 million, though not massively so. But the key phrase is "in a controlled way". The reason "squash the sombrero" was ditched because it turned out there was simply no way of making 70 million people poorly, 7(ish) million hospitalised and 0.7 million dead over a season without society falling over. The numbers didn't remotely work. Had we tried, the 1 percent would have pretty quickly grown to a much bigger number... thank goodness we never did the experiment to find out what. Compared with what was needed for herd immunity by infection, the sombrero had to be squashed to a beret. Which is what we did.

And yes, it sucked. Please let it be the worst thing that happens to our generations. But it was (by the time we got to those infection levels) the least bad thing. To take the US Declaration of Indepdendence, Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. You don't have much liberty and can't persue happiness from the grave.

Sunil_Prasannan · August 2022

HYUFD said:

nico679 said:

YBarddCwsc said:

Mexicanpete said:

NickPalmer said:
It's interesting that the jump in Labour support seen in the national polls after the energy proposal isn't seen here - just a polling vagary of a genuine regional difference?
I am not convinced Johnny Voter pays as much attention to political proclamations from any party as we do When he becomes tangibly poorer he blames the government and if he is tangibly richer he rewards them. Only at election times and budgets does he pay attention to projections. If one party is projected to make him richer they get his vote and if it's for the poorer they don't.
"If one party is projected to make him richer they get his vote and if it's for the poorer they don't."

It is worth considering whether this statement is actually true.

I think it is not true. In fact, I think you could make an argument for the converse.

Let's take the US, for example.

The poor states all vote Republican. The rich states all vote Democrat.

Yet, if Johnny Voter behaved as you suggest, the converse would be true.

Many people actually do vote against their own self-interest.
The situation is much worse in the US in terms of people voting against their own self-interest . Religion , guns , social issues keep poorer GOP voters continuing to act like the main course for Thanksgiving!
Biden actually won voters earning under $30,000 54% to 46% for Trump in 2020. So the poor overall across all races still vote Democrat even if Trump overwhelmingly won white voters without a college degree 67% to 32% for Biden
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election#Electoral_results

Biden 81 million votes
Trump 74 million votes

SandyRentool · August 2022

Carnyx said:

TheScreamingEagles said:
Our business intelligence unit's financial outlook for the next 12 months, has scared me.

One of the minor things that also leads to civil unrest.

Most mobile phone and broadband companies have a clause in their terms of condition that say every April they can increase your bills based on December's CPI + 3.9%.

So it won't be uncommon to see people's BB and mobile bills go up close to 20% next April and that's going to lead to disconnections for non payment.
Interesting, given how dependent even the poorest people - especially the poorest people - are on mobeys, e.g. for UC, and unemployment payments etc. You lose your mobey, you're completely screwed.

Is there any scheme like that for water whereby the company isn't allowed to disconnect?

Mobey???

What new version of hell is this?

SeaShantyIrish2 · August 2022

stodge said:
We are already starting to see the "selling" of Liz Truss in the supportive Conservative media and this will, I imagine, intensify after the Bank Holiday and we approach Trussday September 5th (you heard it first here !).

It would have been easier had the result been announced on a Thursday.

For the most part, Truss has been speaking to the Conservative membership and the invective used is of course music to the average member's ears but out in the real world it's not going to win her as many friends.

Like many new leaders, she may feel she needs to be tough and stamp her authority on the party before trying to do the same to the country and with only a third of MPs having supported her in the ballots, she might be forgiven for having some "doubts" about her colleagues and no doubt she will be choosing the loyalist of MPs to the Whips Office to ensure the slightest sign of rebellion is suppressed.

None of this makes her sound like a unifier, a conciliator or a re-builder. It's quite clear there will be a new "war" against the Unions which might work in some instances but won't against the nurses or other health workers. As to the rest of us, I'll offer an early prediction based on a few hunches - in contrast to this summer, this winter is going to be very wet and questions about flooding and flood prevention will dominate by February.

"Like many new leaders, she may feel she needs to be tough . . ."

So Madame Whiplash will give CUP and UK more than a bit of stick?

Stuartinromford · August 2022

Luckyguy1983 said:

TheScreamingEagles said:
On topic, the Blue Wall is crumbling, the Red Wall is revolting, and rural England is revolting, just exactly where are the safe Tory seats?
Horsham.

Bit close to Surrey commuter belt. The Lib Dems will be nibbling soon.

If I had to guess, Linconshire.

Carnyx · August 2022

SandyRentool said:

Carnyx said:

TheScreamingEagles said:
Our business intelligence unit's financial outlook for the next 12 months, has scared me.

One of the minor things that also leads to civil unrest.

Most mobile phone and broadband companies have a clause in their terms of condition that say every April they can increase your bills based on December's CPI + 3.9%.

So it won't be uncommon to see people's BB and mobile bills go up close to 20% next April and that's going to lead to disconnections for non payment.
Interesting, given how dependent even the poorest people - especially the poorest people - are on mobeys, e.g. for UC, and unemployment payments etc. You lose your mobey, you're completely screwed.

Is there any scheme like that for water whereby the company isn't allowed to disconnect?
Mobey???

What new version of hell is this?

Good enough for Scrabble, ergo good enough for you, I trust.

TheScreamingEagles · August 2022

Carnyx said:

TheScreamingEagles said:
Our business intelligence unit's financial outlook for the next 12 months, has scared me.

One of the minor things that also leads to civil unrest.

Most mobile phone and broadband companies have a clause in their terms of condition that say every April they can increase your bills based on December's CPI + 3.9%.

So it won't be uncommon to see people's BB and mobile bills go up close to 20% next April and that's going to lead to disconnections for non payment.
Interesting, given how dependent even the poorest people - especially the poorest people - are on mobeys, e.g. for UC, and unemployment payments etc. You lose your mobey, you're completely screwed.

Is there any scheme like that for water whereby the company isn't allowed to disconnect?

It gets even more complicated.

o2, Vodafone, Tesco Mobile, Sky Mobile, and soon EE have contracts where the contract is split the handset cost and the airtime plan, the handset is done via a CCA, so miss payments/default on that and that's your credit score ruined for six years.

The fear is people cannot do mobile banking which leads to even more financial problems.

Gardenwalker · August 2022

What’s this about a new Liz Truss pledge to keep the pending NI rise after all?

TheScreamingEagles · August 2022

SandyRentool said:

Carnyx said:

TheScreamingEagles said:
Our business intelligence unit's financial outlook for the next 12 months, has scared me.

One of the minor things that also leads to civil unrest.

Most mobile phone and broadband companies have a clause in their terms of condition that say every April they can increase your bills based on December's CPI + 3.9%.

So it won't be uncommon to see people's BB and mobile bills go up close to 20% next April and that's going to lead to disconnections for non payment.
Interesting, given how dependent even the poorest people - especially the poorest people - are on mobeys, e.g. for UC, and unemployment payments etc. You lose your mobey, you're completely screwed.

Is there any scheme like that for water whereby the company isn't allowed to disconnect?
Mobey???

What new version of hell is this?

After the grief I received for putting 'Platty jubes' into a thread header.

Scott_xP · August 2022

EXC: Brexit guru David Frost is being wooed for a major Cabinet job by Liz Truss, @TheSun can reveal.

Frontrunner understood to want the Tory peer to run the Cabinet Office...

But his pals say discussions are ongoing and no agreement has been reached.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/politics/19596630/brexit-guru-david-frost-comeback/

kyf_100 · August 2022

TheScreamingEagles said:

IshmaelZ said:

TheScreamingEagles said:
Our business intelligence unit's financial outlook for the next 12 months, has scared me.

One of the minor things that also leads to civil unrest.

Most mobile phone and broadband companies have a clause in their terms of condition that say every April they can increase your bills based on December's CPI + 3.9%.

So it won't be uncommon to see people's BB and mobile bills go up close to 20% next April and that's going to lead to disconnections for non payment.
Balls deep in physical gold

Bring it on
Never have I been so glad my mother raised me as a saver and that debt (apart from a mortgage) is the eighth deadliest sin.

But are you saving in cash or gold...

Pulpstar · August 2022

TheScreamingEagles said:

Carnyx said:

TheScreamingEagles said:
Our business intelligence unit's financial outlook for the next 12 months, has scared me.

One of the minor things that also leads to civil unrest.

Most mobile phone and broadband companies have a clause in their terms of condition that say every April they can increase your bills based on December's CPI + 3.9%.

So it won't be uncommon to see people's BB and mobile bills go up close to 20% next April and that's going to lead to disconnections for non payment.
Interesting, given how dependent even the poorest people - especially the poorest people - are on mobeys, e.g. for UC, and unemployment payments etc. You lose your mobey, you're completely screwed.

Is there any scheme like that for water whereby the company isn't allowed to disconnect?
It gets even more complicated.

o2, Vodafone, Tesco Mobile, Sky Mobile, and soon EE have contracts where the contract is split the handset cost and the airtime plan, the handset is done via a CCA, so miss payments/default on that and that's your credit score ruined for six years.

The fear is people cannot do mobile banking which leads to even more financial problems.

Switching mobile and broadband is not a problem though. So the contract goes up but when your contract ends you just get the best offer available from either sky or bt

Mexicanpete · August 2022

YBarddCwsc said:

Mexicanpete said:

NickPalmer said:
It's interesting that the jump in Labour support seen in the national polls after the energy proposal isn't seen here - just a polling vagary of a genuine regional difference?
I am not convinced Johnny Voter pays as much attention to political proclamations from any party as we do When he becomes tangibly poorer he blames the government and if he is tangibly richer he rewards them. Only at election times and budgets does he pay attention to projections. If one party is projected to make him richer they get his vote and if it's for the poorer they don't.
"If one party is projected to make him richer they get his vote and if it's for the poorer they don't."

It is worth considering whether this statement is actually true.

I think it is not true. In fact, I think you could make an argument for the converse.

Let's take the US, for example.

The poor states all vote Republican. The rich states all vote Democrat.

Yet, if Johnny Voter behaved as you suggest, the converse would be true.

Many people actually do vote against their own self-interest.

I was specifically looking at the UK, although according to Bill Clinton "it's the economy, stupid" in the US too. Clearly individuals can vote against their own self-interest and often do, but the herd follow the money.

HYUFD · August 2022

Stuartinromford said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

TheScreamingEagles said:
On topic, the Blue Wall is crumbling, the Red Wall is revolting, and rural England is revolting, just exactly where are the safe Tory seats?
Horsham.
Bit close to Surrey commuter belt. The Lib Dems will be nibbling soon.

If I had to guess, Linconshire.

Plus most of Essex, Kent, most rural areas still wherever in the UK and generally any Leave seat the Tories hold which voted over 60% Leave

TheScreamingEagles · August 2022

Scott_xP said:
EXC: Brexit guru David Frost is being wooed for a major Cabinet job by Liz Truss, @TheSun can reveal.

Frontrunner understood to want the Tory peer to run the Cabinet Office...

But his pals say discussions are ongoing and no agreement has been reached.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/politics/19596630/brexit-guru-david-frost-comeback/

I'm emigrating.

I think the shortlist is between Ireland, Canada, Sweden, and France.

Carnyx · August 2022

TheScreamingEagles said:

SandyRentool said:

Carnyx said:

TheScreamingEagles said:
Our business intelligence unit's financial outlook for the next 12 months, has scared me.

One of the minor things that also leads to civil unrest.

Most mobile phone and broadband companies have a clause in their terms of condition that say every April they can increase your bills based on December's CPI + 3.9%.

So it won't be uncommon to see people's BB and mobile bills go up close to 20% next April and that's going to lead to disconnections for non payment.
Interesting, given how dependent even the poorest people - especially the poorest people - are on mobeys, e.g. for UC, and unemployment payments etc. You lose your mobey, you're completely screwed.

Is there any scheme like that for water whereby the company isn't allowed to disconnect?
Mobey???

What new version of hell is this?
After the grief I received for putting 'Platty jubes' into a thread header.

It's not even new, mobey. Been around for two decades, something like that. At least PJ was new (unsurprisingly).

Stuartinromford · August 2022

Scott_xP said:
EXC: Brexit guru David Frost is being wooed for a major Cabinet job by Liz Truss, @TheSun can reveal.

Frontrunner understood to want the Tory peer to run the Cabinet Office...

But his pals say discussions are ongoing and no agreement has been reached.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/politics/19596630/brexit-guru-david-frost-comeback/

"Pals"?

"Pals"?!

Have we been catapulted into a 1970s edition of the Beano?

TheScreamingEagles · August 2022

kyf_100 said:

TheScreamingEagles said:

IshmaelZ said:

TheScreamingEagles said:
Our business intelligence unit's financial outlook for the next 12 months, has scared me.

One of the minor things that also leads to civil unrest.

Most mobile phone and broadband companies have a clause in their terms of condition that say every April they can increase your bills based on December's CPI + 3.9%.

So it won't be uncommon to see people's BB and mobile bills go up close to 20% next April and that's going to lead to disconnections for non payment.
Balls deep in physical gold

Bring it on
Never have I been so glad my mother raised me as a saver and that debt (apart from a mortgage) is the eighth deadliest sin.
But are you saving in cash or gold...

Both, have you ever met any Pakistani heritage women?

Carnyx · August 2022

Stuartinromford said:

Scott_xP said:
EXC: Brexit guru David Frost is being wooed for a major Cabinet job by Liz Truss, @TheSun can reveal.

Frontrunner understood to want the Tory peer to run the Cabinet Office...

But his pals say discussions are ongoing and no agreement has been reached.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/politics/19596630/brexit-guru-david-frost-comeback/
"Pals"?

"Pals"?!

Have we been catapulted into a 1970s edition of the Beano?

Lord Snooty, Fatty, Dennis the Menace ... wouldn't like to say who Plug is.

Gardenwalker · August 2022

Two big announcements from Liz Truss:

She says that she will redirect £13billion from the health and social care levy away from the NHS and into social care

She suggests that she won't appoint an independent ethics adviser. 'You can't outsource ethics,' she says.

https://twitter.com/steven_swinford/status/1562156479611904000?s=21&t=Sa5Lcxp30VsQ5vlen2X6SA

MoonRabbit · August 2022

Luckyguy1983 said:

ydoethur said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

HYUFD said:
Asked how she would feel if she had to press the nuclear button and usher in global annihilation, Liz Truss replies that "I think it's an important duty of the Prime Minister. I'm ready to do it."
https://twitter.com/AdamBienkov/status/1562157820828684288?s=20&t=CbrHZOXdYPN5r2lRRNHqiQ
Absolutely the only right answer to the question. 👍

Anyone who wouldn't be ready to do it, isn't fit to be PM.
Not really. 'I would do it if I have to' would be better, as 'I'm ready to do it' could imply she's about to!
Not great finesse in terms of the words chosen but that's our Liz.

How about “annihilation of human race would cover up the catastrophic failure of my policies trying to avoid crisis becoming annihilation of human race - what a fantastic button for any politician!” 🤭

dixiedean · August 2022

TheScreamingEagles said:

Scott_xP said:
EXC: Brexit guru David Frost is being wooed for a major Cabinet job by Liz Truss, @TheSun can reveal.

Frontrunner understood to want the Tory peer to run the Cabinet Office...

But his pals say discussions are ongoing and no agreement has been reached.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/politics/19596630/brexit-guru-david-frost-comeback/
I'm emigrating.

I think the shortlist is between Ireland, Canada, Sweden, and France.

Rwanda looks tempting to me tbh.

Gardenwalker · August 2022

Stuartinromford said:

Scott_xP said:
EXC: Brexit guru David Frost is being wooed for a major Cabinet job by Liz Truss, @TheSun can reveal.

Frontrunner understood to want the Tory peer to run the Cabinet Office...

But his pals say discussions are ongoing and no agreement has been reached.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/politics/19596630/brexit-guru-david-frost-comeback/
"Pals"?

"Pals"?!

Have we been catapulted into a 1970s edition of the Beano?

You have to ask?

Mexicanpete · August 2022

TheScreamingEagles said:
On topic, the Blue Wall is crumbling, the Red Wall is revolting, and rural England is revolting, just exactly where are the safe Tory seats?

Don't worry, the Conservative Party like a cockroach survives all manner of disasters, even Liz Truss. Replace her with Boris Johnson three months before the next election, and bingo 50 seat majority.

I only wish I were joking.

Pulpstar · August 2022

One for the nats -
Jim Murphy is apparently selling consultancy services about how to win elections.
LOL

TheScreamingEagles · August 2022

Gardenwalker said:
Two big announcements from Liz Truss:

She says that she will redirect £13billion from the health and social care levy away from the NHS and into social care

She suggests that she won't appoint an independent ethics adviser. 'You can't outsource ethics,' she says.

https://twitter.com/steven_swinford/status/1562156479611904000?s=21&t=Sa5Lcxp30VsQ5vlen2X6SA

I was hoping to apply to be the PM's ethics adviser.

I'm eminently qualified.

SandyRentool · August 2022

Carnyx said:

SandyRentool said:

Carnyx said:

TheScreamingEagles said:
Our business intelligence unit's financial outlook for the next 12 months, has scared me.

One of the minor things that also leads to civil unrest.

Most mobile phone and broadband companies have a clause in their terms of condition that say every April they can increase your bills based on December's CPI + 3.9%.

So it won't be uncommon to see people's BB and mobile bills go up close to 20% next April and that's going to lead to disconnections for non payment.
Interesting, given how dependent even the poorest people - especially the poorest people - are on mobeys, e.g. for UC, and unemployment payments etc. You lose your mobey, you're completely screwed.

Is there any scheme like that for water whereby the company isn't allowed to disconnect?
Mobey???

What new version of hell is this?
Good enough for Scrabble, ergo good enough for you, I trust.

It makes me feel Moby Dick.

Gardenwalker · August 2022

dixiedean said:

TheScreamingEagles said:

Scott_xP said:
EXC: Brexit guru David Frost is being wooed for a major Cabinet job by Liz Truss, @TheSun can reveal.

Frontrunner understood to want the Tory peer to run the Cabinet Office...

But his pals say discussions are ongoing and no agreement has been reached.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/politics/19596630/brexit-guru-david-frost-comeback/
I'm emigrating.

I think the shortlist is between Ireland, Canada, Sweden, and France.
Rwanda looks tempting to me tbh.

Go West, young man.
Canada has energy, a health service, and is climate-change-ready.

Carnyx · August 2022

Pulpstar said:
One for the nats -
Jim Murphy is apparently selling consultancy services about how to win elections.
LOL

He was remarkably accurate about how he wouldn't lose a single seat to the SNP. Any PBer would be proud of such a prediction. Albeit one that was so Delphic in its ambiguity.

Stuartinromford · August 2022

HYUFD said:

Stuartinromford said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

TheScreamingEagles said:
On topic, the Blue Wall is crumbling, the Red Wall is revolting, and rural England is revolting, just exactly where are the safe Tory seats?
Horsham.
Bit close to Surrey commuter belt. The Lib Dems will be nibbling soon.

If I had to guess, Linconshire.
Plus most of Essex, Kent, most rural areas still wherever in the UK and generally any Leave seat the Tories hold which voted over 60% Leave

Decent spots. I scrubbed Kent off the list on the basis that HNG is NBG at stopping small boats, which I can imagine going down badly.

Highlights the next threat for the Conservatives, though. If Farage decides he wants a pop, we really could be looking at a Canada scenario.

EPG · August 2022

Red Wall vote intention looking dangerously Woke.

Sunil_Prasannan · August 2022

SandyRentool said:

Carnyx said:

TheScreamingEagles said:
Our business intelligence unit's financial outlook for the next 12 months, has scared me.

One of the minor things that also leads to civil unrest.

Most mobile phone and broadband companies have a clause in their terms of condition that say every April they can increase your bills based on December's CPI + 3.9%.

So it won't be uncommon to see people's BB and mobile bills go up close to 20% next April and that's going to lead to disconnections for non payment.
Interesting, given how dependent even the poorest people - especially the poorest people - are on mobeys, e.g. for UC, and unemployment payments etc. You lose your mobey, you're completely screwed.

Is there any scheme like that for water whereby the company isn't allowed to disconnect?
Mobey???

What new version of hell is this?

Extreme ways?

dixiedean · August 2022

Gardenwalker said:

dixiedean said:

TheScreamingEagles said:

Scott_xP said:
EXC: Brexit guru David Frost is being wooed for a major Cabinet job by Liz Truss, @TheSun can reveal.

Frontrunner understood to want the Tory peer to run the Cabinet Office...

But his pals say discussions are ongoing and no agreement has been reached.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/politics/19596630/brexit-guru-david-frost-comeback/
I'm emigrating.

I think the shortlist is between Ireland, Canada, Sweden, and France.
Rwanda looks tempting to me tbh.
Go West, young man.
Canada has energy, a health service, and is climate-change-ready.

I had the opportunity. Did High School there. Could have gone to Uni there and got citizenship by residency.
I chose London for the (then) free degree.
And here I am.

Gardenwalker · August 2022

Speaking of migration.

Rishi Sunak suggests that UK “aid programmes” should be cut in countries which refuse to accept deportations of “failed asylum seekers” to Britain.

But as Sam Freedman points out, three of the biggest aid recipients are Yemen, Afghanistan and Somalia…

The Tories now inhabit an alternative reality, but even so, why is Rishi even bothering with these half-cock announcements? They merely serve to show him as Ill-fitted to run the country as Liz Truss.

Carnyx · August 2022

SandyRentool said:
A few years ago, in the comments section below just about every article in "The Engineer", some obsessive would feel compelled to say that the solution to whatever issue was being discussed was Thorium Reactor Technology.

So, with the current energy crisis, do we finally have a question to which he has the answer?

One for every home, apparently. Graun feed just now re the latest spat, sorry debate: or are those not Th?

'Sunak will “turbo charge” energy security and efficiency meaning under his leadership millions of homes would benefit from loft and cavity wall insulation, saving people up to £400 off bills. He adds that he will “create an innovative economy to create small modular reactors to power homes in a cleaner, cheaper way”.'

Mexicanpete · August 2022

TheScreamingEagles said:

Gardenwalker said:
Two big announcements from Liz Truss:

She says that she will redirect £13billion from the health and social care levy away from the NHS and into social care

She suggests that she won't appoint an independent ethics adviser. 'You can't outsource ethics,' she says.

https://twitter.com/steven_swinford/status/1562156479611904000?s=21&t=Sa5Lcxp30VsQ5vlen2X6SA
I was hoping to apply to be the PM's ethics adviser.

I'm eminently qualified.

Wow! I like your new avatar. Are you the one on the left or the right?

HYUFD · August 2022

Stuartinromford said:

HYUFD said:

Stuartinromford said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

TheScreamingEagles said:
On topic, the Blue Wall is crumbling, the Red Wall is revolting, and rural England is revolting, just exactly where are the safe Tory seats?
Horsham.
Bit close to Surrey commuter belt. The Lib Dems will be nibbling soon.

If I had to guess, Linconshire.
Plus most of Essex, Kent, most rural areas still wherever in the UK and generally any Leave seat the Tories hold which voted over 60% Leave
Decent spots. I scrubbed Kent off the list on the basis that HNG is NBG at stopping small boats, which I can imagine going down badly.

Highlights the next threat for the Conservatives, though. If Farage decides he wants a pop, we really could be looking at a Canada scenario.

Only if Truss goes back to the liberal left and dilutes Brexit, in which case the ERG would be after her even before Farage

BartholomewRoberts · August 2022

Andy_Cooke said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Andy_Cooke said:
You still seem to be operating on the assumption that the only people at risk of death were the very aged.

Tell you what. I’ll break it down to a clear Faustian bargain that’s pretty accurate on numbers.

The father of a school child is magically struck by a fatal curse. He’s 44 years old.
The curse will be lifted if the secondary school his child is at (average size for the UK) shifts to two weeks of distance learning.

Should they do it?
And no, there’s no third option, no concern about capitulating to threats or encouraging the dark magician. It’s also one school only.

It’s a straight equation - one parent will lose forty years of life, or one thousand pupils have two weeks or distance learning.

Even under your numbers, if 75,000 people lose an average of 10 years of life at 10% infected, how many will die at 100% infected?

Now adjust for the fact that the vast majority of 2 million severely ill to the point of needing hospitalisation (including hundreds of thousands under fifty years old) will not get any hospital assistance. No CPAP, no fluids, no steroids, no care, just aiming to drink chicken soup at home. How many more on top out of those now non-hospitalised will die?

Even with your figures, and even with a magical expanded healthcare system by a factor of ten or more, it still weighs positive.
Should they do it? No, of course they should not. Sacrificing 2000 weeks of education, is not an acceptable price to pay for 2000 weeks of life.

Again the only way you make it seem even considered appropriate is dividing 1000 people's lost education over 1 person's life. Lying with statistics.

Try dividing it the other way to see how preposterous your proposal is, would you expel 8 children at random at age 10 and ban them from having any secondary schooling at all despite having done nothing wrong if that would give just a solitary extra day to each of every other child's parents?
Jesus wept, I’m trying to make it directly relevant and as fair as possible. Making it clear as crystal what the cost is, the number of weeks and people, and the number of years of life to one person. You still insist this is some kind of misleading with statistics.

I also, as it happens, do not believe that it’s remotely a linear equation. Four weeks lost per pupil is more than four times as bad as one week lost.
A full term lost is more than twice as bad as a half-term lost. And a school year lost per pupil is more than three times as bad as one term lost per pupil.
And the entirety of five school years of secondary school lost per pupil is more than fifteen times as bad as one term lost per pupil.

Because there’s less and less chance to catch up, and the loss builds upon itself.

Anyway, you’ve ignored the fact that your own equation leaves it worthwhile to avoid half a million deaths with the closures we had.

I agree with you that losing more time per pupil is worse, and losing 17 weeks as we did is worse than losing a term of course.

I didn't ignore the fact, I explicitly said that I would value the time of education as worth more than time at end of life. Losing 170 million weeks of education is at a 1:1 ratio the equivalent of 425k extra excess deaths, so at a 1:1 ratio it might be worthwhile, if it was the only cost to consider, to avoid half a million extra excess deaths.

However
1: I've repeatedly said I value education as more than 1:1, so that would change the factor.
2: I don't think a Swedish-style advise but let people decide reaction to Covid would have caused half a million extra excess deaths. The excess deaths we had, we had with lockdown, so it'd have to be additional extra excess deaths on top of those we had.
3: Education wasn't the only thing that lockdown cost.

But yes, since I value education as more than 1:1, I would prefer we'd had 500k extra excess deaths and no hit to education than 17 weeks of education each sacrificed by ten million children to avoid your suggested half a million extra excess deaths.

LAB still has clear lead in the 40 “Red Wall” seats – politicalbetting.com

Comments