‘Writing on the wall for Scottish Tories despite Ruth’s return’
The brutal truth is the party has never recovered north of the Border and has nobody it can turn to who has anything approaching the same appeal as Ms Davidson.
Support for independence is rising, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s approval ratings are dire in Scotland, and the party is losing several of its senior MSPs in 2021 – Ms Davidson being one.
Despite Mr Johnson’s protestations, another SNP majority would dramatically increase the pressure for a second independence vote, with most Scots now leaning towards Yes.
Including Don't Knows Yes is not over 50% in any poll.
Ruth Davidson is now back as interim Scottish Tory leader at Holyrood.
I think it likely Unionist parties will do a deal not to campaign or even stand against each other in Holyrood constituency seats e.g. Labour gets a free run against the SNP in Glasgow and the central belt, the Tories get a free run against the SNP in the borders and Aberdeenshire and the LDs get a free run against the SNP in the Highlands and Orkney and Shetland and the posher parts of Edinburgh.
The Unionist parties may only end up all standing on the MSP list
Really? I mean that was de facto what happened in Quebec, but I didn't think we were anywhere near that stage yet.
We passed that stage long ago. What HYUFD describes has been going on, informally, in most Scottish constituencies.
The danger for Unionists is if this practice becomes widespread general knowledge. Keep up the good work! 😆
I was something of a boris cheerleader from last summer onwards. I’d now vote for whoever promises to sack the entire Covid response top table and start again.
Life comes with risk. Covid isn’t flu but it’s not Disease X either. High time to crack on with living. Don’t often say it but I think Trump had it right the first time. The sacrifices being made by the young on behalf of the old will stretch social unity beyond breaking point if this continues. Destroyed employment prospects, interrupted education, forced ever further into the black hole of social media rather than real social interaction, yet more QE to inflate assets beyond the reach of their ever debased incomes.
Much more of this and I’ll happily join the barricade to stand up for the rights of the young.
Trouble is there doesn’t seem to be a mainstream politician or party in the UK spelling all this out. Something of a gap in the market for someone somewhere to exploit.
That would have been a better point three months ago when we knew nothing about long term effects on survivors. We now know that surviving this, at any age, may not be a lot more fun than surviving polio. "sacrifices being made by the young on behalf of the old" is outdated thinking.
This is typical catastrophising hyperbole. By the governments own admission millions in the UK have contracted this virus. How many of those millions are left with long term effects less fun than surviving polio?
I do not deny this can be a very nasty virus. But people should be free to make their own decisions on whether to hug their grandchild or feast at religious festivals.
Your logic is a pretty good match for your manners.
Thought experiment: "Before a vaccine was introduced in the 1950s, epidemics would result in up to 7760 cases of paralytic polio in the UK each year, with up to 750 deaths." (https://vk.ovg.ox.ac.uk/vk/polio (Anything with ox.ac. in the url must be good science.) Say we suddenly discover by applying modern diagnostic techniques to pre 1950s samples that there were actually up to 776,000 cases a year, the vast majority of them asymptomatic. Does that discovery mean that the situation was worse than we thought, better than we thought, or make no practical difference one way or the other?
Ok, where is your evidence that we will have over 10k young people a year (adjusted for population expansion since 1950) left with a disability as debilitating as partial paralysis?
Do you suppose the social and economic restrictions imposed come with no long term (or acute) health consequences? I’m likely to lose a family friend who hasn’t received cancer treatment since March. I’m sure someone as well educated and well mannered as yourself can find the data that indicates this is no mere anecdote.
There you go again. For long term evidence of long term effects, you need a long term. Until then the precautionary principle is your friend. You are like someone furiously demanding that the Wright brothers produce multi year data proving the safety of powered flight on 18 December 1903.
Edit: and you miss the point anyway. What bearing do millions of survivors have on the severity of the situation? They just don't logically affect the argument one iota, any more than you can minimise anything - say, police brutality, racism, child abuse - by saying Yes, but look at the millions of people who aren't affected by it. So why do you refer to them?
So my reading glasses have been 'lost' since Tuesday. I've just found them. In plain sight on my desk.
To be fair, when the laptop lid was open it hid them, but still...
Time for a lie down. Night all. Cooler tomoz.
Do we need to strategise this? Probably common on PB :-)
My glasses strategy is nearly the best variowotsit, and identical frames - one pair with tints (for outside), and a clear identical one (for inside).
Green case for the case for the outside glasses (same colour as car), and international orange for the inside pair so I can find them.
And a vague feeling of OUCH every time I sign a bill at Specsavers (value the local service), even though I get most of it back via BHSF and a cash grant.
Impressed with the growth of the local Specsavers. When I approached them for a gym membership scheme they turned out to have about 40 staff.
Who else remembers the Professor Branestawm books? He had I think five pairs of glasses, one of which was for finding the others when he lost them.
I thought the idea was hilarious when I was nine. I now find myself wondering if Specsavers would give a discount on them.
Typically at Specsavers you get something like a second pair free and some relatively minor lens-thing for nothing (eg antiscratch, antiglare etc). But a bill reduction from a notional £560 to say £400 is still a bit ouch .
But, being at risk at all kinds of things due to D Type I, I value the service.
‘Writing on the wall for Scottish Tories despite Ruth’s return’
The brutal truth is the party has never recovered north of the Border and has nobody it can turn to who has anything approaching the same appeal as Ms Davidson.
Support for independence is rising, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s approval ratings are dire in Scotland, and the party is losing several of its senior MSPs in 2021 – Ms Davidson being one.
Despite Mr Johnson’s protestations, another SNP majority would dramatically increase the pressure for a second independence vote, with most Scots now leaning towards Yes.
Newsflash - it isn’t possible. Or at least, it makes everything so much more difficult as to render any actual education a lucky bonus.
Depends what you are teaching: Newton’s Laws using water rockets goes pretty well, as does the speed of sound and modelling the size of the solar system.
Our history department re-enacts the Battle of Hastings using water balloons and Y7...
Well, I’m always happy to hear somebody is killing off Year 7, but what I meant was a serious lesson.
How, for example, can I teach about the Five Year Plans without a whiteboard?
Moreover, even as a trained vocalist it’s hard to project my voice far enough to be heard when I am explaining something.
Finally, all too few of our schools have outside spaces now.
So I really don’t think ‘whenever possible’ covers many scenarios.
I see your point.
We do actually have a couple of outside whiteboards, used by the PE Department, but they are only really big enough to say which group goes in which changing room, so unless you can summarise your notes more effectively than any other teacher I know that will probably not help.
As to the voice, I hadn’t thought about that, but I’m a bass...
I get the occasional complaint from teachers in next door labs that I’m basically teaching their class as well. I’m not shouting at anybody (I find getting quieter is a much more effective technique when I want to get tell someone off), but I think I do sometimes get over enthusiastic.
‘Writing on the wall for Scottish Tories despite Ruth’s return’
The brutal truth is the party has never recovered north of the Border and has nobody it can turn to who has anything approaching the same appeal as Ms Davidson.
Support for independence is rising, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s approval ratings are dire in Scotland, and the party is losing several of its senior MSPs in 2021 – Ms Davidson being one.
Despite Mr Johnson’s protestations, another SNP majority would dramatically increase the pressure for a second independence vote, with most Scots now leaning towards Yes.
Including Don't Knows Yes is not over 50% in any poll.
Ruth Davidson is now back as interim Scottish Tory leader at Holyrood.
I think it likely Unionist parties will do a deal not to campaign or even stand against each other in Holyrood constituency seats e.g. Labour gets a free run against the SNP in Glasgow and the central belt, the Tories get a free run against the SNP in the borders and Aberdeenshire and the LDs get a free run against the SNP in the Highlands and Orkney and Shetland and the posher parts of Edinburgh.
The Unionist parties may only end up all standing on the MSP list
That would certainly defuse any accusations of new Indy parties 'gaming the system' by only contesting list seats.
Newsflash - it isn’t possible. Or at least, it makes everything so much more difficult as to render any actual education a lucky bonus.
Depends what you are teaching: Newton’s Laws using water rockets goes pretty well, as does the speed of sound and modelling the size of the solar system.
Our history department re-enacts the Battle of Hastings using water balloons and Y7...
Well, I’m always happy to hear somebody is killing off Year 7, but what I meant was a serious lesson.
How, for example, can I teach about the Five Year Plans without a whiteboard?
Moreover, even as a trained vocalist it’s hard to project my voice far enough to be heard when I am explaining something.
Finally, all too few of our schools have outside spaces now.
So I really don’t think ‘whenever possible’ covers many scenarios.
Julie Andrews seemed to manage. And all she had was a guitar.
I was something of a boris cheerleader from last summer onwards. I’d now vote for whoever promises to sack the entire Covid response top table and start again.
Life comes with risk. Covid isn’t flu but it’s not Disease X either. High time to crack on with living. Don’t often say it but I think Trump had it right the first time. The sacrifices being made by the young on behalf of the old will stretch social unity beyond breaking point if this continues. Destroyed employment prospects, interrupted education, forced ever further into the black hole of social media rather than real social interaction, yet more QE to inflate assets beyond the reach of their ever debased incomes.
Much more of this and I’ll happily join the barricade to stand up for the rights of the young.
Trouble is there doesn’t seem to be a mainstream politician or party in the UK spelling all this out. Something of a gap in the market for someone somewhere to exploit.
That would have been a better point three months ago when we knew nothing about long term effects on survivors. We now know that surviving this, at any age, may not be a lot more fun than surviving polio. "sacrifices being made by the young on behalf of the old" is outdated thinking.
This is typical catastrophising hyperbole. By the governments own admission millions in the UK have contracted this virus. How many of those millions are left with long term effects less fun than surviving polio?
I do not deny this can be a very nasty virus. But people should be free to make their own decisions on whether to hug their grandchild or feast at religious festivals.
Your logic is a pretty good match for your manners.
Thought experiment: "Before a vaccine was introduced in the 1950s, epidemics would result in up to 7760 cases of paralytic polio in the UK each year, with up to 750 deaths." (https://vk.ovg.ox.ac.uk/vk/polio (Anything with ox.ac. in the url must be good science.) Say we suddenly discover by applying modern diagnostic techniques to pre 1950s samples that there were actually up to 776,000 cases a year, the vast majority of them asymptomatic. Does that discovery mean that the situation was worse than we thought, better than we thought, or make no practical difference one way or the other?
Ok, where is your evidence that we will have over 10k young people a year (adjusted for population expansion since 1950) left with a disability as debilitating as partial paralysis?
Do you suppose the social and economic restrictions imposed come with no long term (or acute) health consequences? I’m likely to lose a family friend who hasn’t received cancer treatment since March. I’m sure someone as well educated and well mannered as yourself can find the data that indicates this is no mere anecdote.
There you go again. For long term evidence of long term effects, you need a long term. Until then the precautionary principle is your friend. You are like someone furiously demanding that the Wright brothers produce multi year data proving the safety of powered flight on 18 December 1903.
You are guilty of the same error made by this country’s Covid committee with your “precautionary principle”. Ignoring all other impacts on health, social and economic policy and focusing only on the covid monster.
If we are playing the silly metaphor game...What if in 1980 we had said it was illegal to have unprotected intercourse in every circumstance, just in case husbands might catch HIV from their Saturday haircut and pass it on to their unsuspecting wives in the bedroom? We’d better keep this policy in place until there’s “long term data”, just as a precaution you understand.
There is risk in life. We should endeavour to enhance our understanding of risk and mitigate it as best as possible. But the mitigation should be kept in balance with innumerable other factors. Somewhere along the way society has lost this understanding.
Newsflash - it isn’t possible. Or at least, it makes everything so much more difficult as to render any actual education a lucky bonus.
Depends what you are teaching: Newton’s Laws using water rockets goes pretty well, as does the speed of sound and modelling the size of the solar system.
Our history department re-enacts the Battle of Hastings using water balloons and Y7...
Well, I’m always happy to hear somebody is killing off Year 7, but what I meant was a serious lesson.
How, for example, can I teach about the Five Year Plans without a whiteboard?
Moreover, even as a trained vocalist it’s hard to project my voice far enough to be heard when I am explaining something.
Finally, all too few of our schools have outside spaces now.
So I really don’t think ‘whenever possible’ covers many scenarios.
Julie Andrews seemed to manage. And all she had was a guitar.
Newsflash - it isn’t possible. Or at least, it makes everything so much more difficult as to render any actual education a lucky bonus.
Depends what you are teaching: Newton’s Laws using water rockets goes pretty well, as does the speed of sound and modelling the size of the solar system.
Our history department re-enacts the Battle of Hastings using water balloons and Y7...
Well, I’m always happy to hear somebody is killing off Year 7, but what I meant was a serious lesson.
How, for example, can I teach about the Five Year Plans without a whiteboard?
Moreover, even as a trained vocalist it’s hard to project my voice far enough to be heard when I am explaining something.
Finally, all too few of our schools have outside spaces now.
So I really don’t think ‘whenever possible’ covers many scenarios.
I see your point.
We do actually have a couple of outside whiteboards, used by the PE Department, but they are only really big enough to say which group goes in which changing room, so unless you can summarise your notes more effectively than any other teacher I know that will probably not help.
As to the voice, I hadn’t thought about that, but I’m a bass...
I get the occasional complaint from teachers in next door labs that I’m basically teaching their class as well. I’m not shouting at anybody (I find getting quieter is a much more effective technique when I want to get tell someone off), but I think I do sometimes get over enthusiastic.
Last year I was teaching in a room next door to where the Principal was taking English lessons.
It was a very sore trial, because not only did the thin walls mean I could hear every word, but that also meant I realised his lessons were utter shite. Quite hard work not to put my head in my hands at some of the stupid things he did.
Edit - I'm assuming that part about shite lessons wouldn't apply to you!
Newsflash - it isn’t possible. Or at least, it makes everything so much more difficult as to render any actual education a lucky bonus.
Depends what you are teaching: Newton’s Laws using water rockets goes pretty well, as does the speed of sound and modelling the size of the solar system.
Our history department re-enacts the Battle of Hastings using water balloons and Y7...
Well, I’m always happy to hear somebody is killing off Year 7, but what I meant was a serious lesson.
How, for example, can I teach about the Five Year Plans without a whiteboard?
Moreover, even as a trained vocalist it’s hard to project my voice far enough to be heard when I am explaining something.
Finally, all too few of our schools have outside spaces now.
So I really don’t think ‘whenever possible’ covers many scenarios.
Julie Andrews seemed to manage. And all she had was a guitar.
I'm assuming that remark was ironic?
You never saw her insightful analysis of the Third Five Year Plan and its effectiveness at preparing the Soviet Union for war, set to the tune of “My Favourite Things”? It’s probably on YouTube somewhere.
Absolutely amazing, my mum gave me a call this morning, an auntie in Leicester is hosting a 60th birthday party for the uncle. Is it in a big garden, a park, a pub? No, it's in their tiny 2 bedroom retirement bungalow. If I'm invited the guest list must be gigantic.
Newsflash - it isn’t possible. Or at least, it makes everything so much more difficult as to render any actual education a lucky bonus.
Depends what you are teaching: Newton’s Laws using water rockets goes pretty well, as does the speed of sound and modelling the size of the solar system.
Our history department re-enacts the Battle of Hastings using water balloons and Y7...
Well, I’m always happy to hear somebody is killing off Year 7, but what I meant was a serious lesson.
How, for example, can I teach about the Five Year Plans without a whiteboard?
Moreover, even as a trained vocalist it’s hard to project my voice far enough to be heard when I am explaining something.
Finally, all too few of our schools have outside spaces now.
So I really don’t think ‘whenever possible’ covers many scenarios.
Julie Andrews seemed to manage. And all she had was a guitar.
I'm assuming that remark was ironic?
Potentially.
Though to some degree (please forgive an outsider's view of teaching) I think that teaching (education of any kind) should be based on delivering simple, and few, concepts, and having them stick. It's all very well the teacher conveying the depth, breadth and subtlety of their knowledge, but unless the pupil afterwards can do the same, it hasn't worked. Learning by wrote, chanting and calling etc. could all be done outside.
Newsflash - it isn’t possible. Or at least, it makes everything so much more difficult as to render any actual education a lucky bonus.
Depends what you are teaching: Newton’s Laws using water rockets goes pretty well, as does the speed of sound and modelling the size of the solar system.
Our history department re-enacts the Battle of Hastings using water balloons and Y7...
Well, I’m always happy to hear somebody is killing off Year 7, but what I meant was a serious lesson.
How, for example, can I teach about the Five Year Plans without a whiteboard?
Moreover, even as a trained vocalist it’s hard to project my voice far enough to be heard when I am explaining something.
Finally, all too few of our schools have outside spaces now.
So I really don’t think ‘whenever possible’ covers many scenarios.
Julie Andrews seemed to manage. And all she had was a guitar.
I'm assuming that remark was ironic?
You never saw her insightful analysis of the Third Five Year Plan and its effectiveness at preparing the Soviet Union for war, set to the tune of “My Favourite Things”? It’s probably on YouTube somewhere.
Newsflash - it isn’t possible. Or at least, it makes everything so much more difficult as to render any actual education a lucky bonus.
Depends what you are teaching: Newton’s Laws using water rockets goes pretty well, as does the speed of sound and modelling the size of the solar system.
Our history department re-enacts the Battle of Hastings using water balloons and Y7...
Well, I’m always happy to hear somebody is killing off Year 7, but what I meant was a serious lesson.
How, for example, can I teach about the Five Year Plans without a whiteboard?
Moreover, even as a trained vocalist it’s hard to project my voice far enough to be heard when I am explaining something.
Finally, all too few of our schools have outside spaces now.
So I really don’t think ‘whenever possible’ covers many scenarios.
I see your point.
We do actually have a couple of outside whiteboards, used by the PE Department, but they are only really big enough to say which group goes in which changing room, so unless you can summarise your notes more effectively than any other teacher I know that will probably not help.
As to the voice, I hadn’t thought about that, but I’m a bass...
I get the occasional complaint from teachers in next door labs that I’m basically teaching their class as well. I’m not shouting at anybody (I find getting quieter is a much more effective technique when I want to get tell someone off), but I think I do sometimes get over enthusiastic.
Last year I was teaching in a room next door to where the Principal was taking English lessons.
It was a very sore trial, because not only did the thin walls mean I could hear every word, but that also meant I realised his lessons were utter shite. Quite hard work not to put my head in my hands at some of the stupid things he did.
Edit - I'm assuming that part about shite lessons wouldn't apply to you!
Letting the Head teach is normally something to be avoided. If nothing else they have so many other commitments that their lessons end up being taken by cover teachers more often than not.
Edit: I hope not and I think my colleagues would tell me if they thought they were.
Newsflash - it isn’t possible. Or at least, it makes everything so much more difficult as to render any actual education a lucky bonus.
Depends what you are teaching: Newton’s Laws using water rockets goes pretty well, as does the speed of sound and modelling the size of the solar system.
Our history department re-enacts the Battle of Hastings using water balloons and Y7...
Well, I’m always happy to hear somebody is killing off Year 7, but what I meant was a serious lesson.
How, for example, can I teach about the Five Year Plans without a whiteboard?
Moreover, even as a trained vocalist it’s hard to project my voice far enough to be heard when I am explaining something.
Finally, all too few of our schools have outside spaces now.
So I really don’t think ‘whenever possible’ covers many scenarios.
Julie Andrews seemed to manage. And all she had was a guitar.
I'm assuming that remark was ironic?
Potentially.
Though to some degree (please forgive an outsider's view of teaching) I think that teaching (education of any kind) should be based on delivering simple, and few, concepts, and having them stick. It's all very well the teacher conveying the depth, breadth and subtlety of their knowledge, but unless the pupil afterwards can do the same, it hasn't worked. Learning by wrote, chanting and calling etc. could all be done outside.
It would be much harder than you think, partly because the sheer complexity of modern exam subjects pretty much rules that approach out.
But also, learning by chanting, or writing, or calling, is also pretty hard outside where you have no acoustic. Why do you think PA systems are popular?
I can make my voice heard in every corner of Gloucester cathedral, but I struggle to be heard across a 1/4 acre field.
Newsflash - it isn’t possible. Or at least, it makes everything so much more difficult as to render any actual education a lucky bonus.
Depends what you are teaching: Newton’s Laws using water rockets goes pretty well, as does the speed of sound and modelling the size of the solar system.
Our history department re-enacts the Battle of Hastings using water balloons and Y7...
Well, I’m always happy to hear somebody is killing off Year 7, but what I meant was a serious lesson.
How, for example, can I teach about the Five Year Plans without a whiteboard?
Moreover, even as a trained vocalist it’s hard to project my voice far enough to be heard when I am explaining something.
Finally, all too few of our schools have outside spaces now.
So I really don’t think ‘whenever possible’ covers many scenarios.
I see your point.
We do actually have a couple of outside whiteboards, used by the PE Department, but they are only really big enough to say which group goes in which changing room, so unless you can summarise your notes more effectively than any other teacher I know that will probably not help.
As to the voice, I hadn’t thought about that, but I’m a bass...
I get the occasional complaint from teachers in next door labs that I’m basically teaching their class as well. I’m not shouting at anybody (I find getting quieter is a much more effective technique when I want to get tell someone off), but I think I do sometimes get over enthusiastic.
Last year I was teaching in a room next door to where the Principal was taking English lessons.
It was a very sore trial, because not only did the thin walls mean I could hear every word, but that also meant I realised his lessons were utter shite. Quite hard work not to put my head in my hands at some of the stupid things he did.
Edit - I'm assuming that part about shite lessons wouldn't apply to you!
Letting the Head teach is normally something to be avoided. If nothing else they have so many other commitments that their lessons end up being taken by cover teachers more often than not.
Edit: I hope not and I think my colleagues would tell me if they thought they were.
Our headmaster used to teach physics at sixth form level. Very good at it too, helped me get an A!
Newsflash - it isn’t possible. Or at least, it makes everything so much more difficult as to render any actual education a lucky bonus.
Depends what you are teaching: Newton’s Laws using water rockets goes pretty well, as does the speed of sound and modelling the size of the solar system.
Our history department re-enacts the Battle of Hastings using water balloons and Y7...
Well, I’m always happy to hear somebody is killing off Year 7, but what I meant was a serious lesson.
How, for example, can I teach about the Five Year Plans without a whiteboard?
Moreover, even as a trained vocalist it’s hard to project my voice far enough to be heard when I am explaining something.
Finally, all too few of our schools have outside spaces now.
So I really don’t think ‘whenever possible’ covers many scenarios.
Julie Andrews seemed to manage. And all she had was a guitar.
I'm assuming that remark was ironic?
Potentially.
Though to some degree (please forgive an outsider's view of teaching) I think that teaching (education of any kind) should be based on delivering simple, and few, concepts, and having them stick. It's all very well the teacher conveying the depth, breadth and subtlety of their knowledge, but unless the pupil afterwards can do the same, it hasn't worked. Learning by wrote, chanting and calling etc. could all be done outside.
Depends, does it not, on both age group and subject. Eldest Grandson teaches primary..... possibly, some of the time. His wife teaches A level...... highly unlikely to be either possible or desirable.
I know I'm a collectivist in an individualist age, but bear with me - after all, Johnson seems willing to pick and mix from any variety of belief. This situation calls for looking at society as a whole, helping the sectors that are most important, and compensating those that are least important and helping them adjust.
As David H says, education is crucial for direct and indirect reasons. In my opinion, cafes and restaurants in city centres are not. Sports arenas are not. Eyebrow-threading specialists and tattooists are not. People may disagree, but the Government should make some choices and stick with them. Having made the choices, they should recognise that the sectors being deliberately neglected in the national interest are suffering through no fault of their own, and they should get substantial, prolonged assistance to get through the crisis if we think if it temporary or completely remodel themselves if it's long-term.
Say you own a city centre cafe. The outlook doesn't look good. Should the Government urge people to go back to work so as to rescue you? Or should they merely point you at Universal Credit - sorry about your business, good luck getting a job stacking shelves? No, they should help you relocate your business to a suburb where most people live and, increasingly, work.
Sacrifices in times of crisis are inevitable, but unevenly distributed. Some of us are having no problem, personally. Tax us more and use the money to help those who are suffering for the sake of all of us.
Newsflash - it isn’t possible. Or at least, it makes everything so much more difficult as to render any actual education a lucky bonus.
Depends what you are teaching: Newton’s Laws using water rockets goes pretty well, as does the speed of sound and modelling the size of the solar system.
Our history department re-enacts the Battle of Hastings using water balloons and Y7...
Well, I’m always happy to hear somebody is killing off Year 7, but what I meant was a serious lesson.
How, for example, can I teach about the Five Year Plans without a whiteboard?
Moreover, even as a trained vocalist it’s hard to project my voice far enough to be heard when I am explaining something.
Finally, all too few of our schools have outside spaces now.
So I really don’t think ‘whenever possible’ covers many scenarios.
Julie Andrews seemed to manage. And all she had was a guitar.
I'm assuming that remark was ironic?
Potentially.
Though to some degree (please forgive an outsider's view of teaching) I think that teaching (education of any kind) should be based on delivering simple, and few, concepts, and having them stick. It's all very well the teacher conveying the depth, breadth and subtlety of their knowledge, but unless the pupil afterwards can do the same, it hasn't worked. Learning by wrote, chanting and calling etc. could all be done outside.
"Learning by wrote". Very good! A colleague once declared that he needed to learn about the calculus of variations, so would write a book about it. This he did though it was never published.
I was something of a boris cheerleader from last summer onwards. I’d now vote for whoever promises to sack the entire Covid response top table and start again.
Life comes with risk. Covid isn’t flu but it’s not Disease X either. High time to crack on with living. Don’t often say it but I think Trump had it right the first time. The sacrifices being made by the young on behalf of the old will stretch social unity beyond breaking point if this continues. Destroyed employment prospects, interrupted education, forced ever further into the black hole of social media rather than real social interaction, yet more QE to inflate assets beyond the reach of their ever debased incomes.
Much more of this and I’ll happily join the barricade to stand up for the rights of the young.
Trouble is there doesn’t seem to be a mainstream politician or party in the UK spelling all this out. Something of a gap in the market for someone somewhere to exploit.
That would have been a better point three months ago when we knew nothing about long term effects on survivors. We now know that surviving this, at any age, may not be a lot more fun than surviving polio. "sacrifices being made by the young on behalf of the old" is outdated thinking.
Shush. You’re spoiling the narrative. Remember: it has no effect on the young and those like me (ignore the hospitalisation rates and ICU rates, gloss over the aftereffects, and focus solely on actual deaths). And while we can’t compare the UK’s death toll with other countries due to our higher population density and interlocked international economy, we can pretend that we could have followed Sweden’s option with identical outcomes (once again, gloss over the several-times-higher death rate than its comparable neighbouring countries for a cost of - oops, a worse economic hit than them).
Because if we take those into account, there might not be a simple “fuck someone else, there’s a route for ME to be unaffected” answer after all.
Although, to be fair, I think there’s also an element of sheer fear-whistling-in-the-dark there from them as well.
You know nothing about me. If I caught this disease I’d potentially be in some trouble. Financially I’ve done brilliantly out of the economic lockdown and anti-young monetary policies, boosting my savings by several years’ worth.
It’s not fear whistling in the dark. This is a real disease that kills people. People like me. But the cure so far has been ineffective and quite possibly counter productive.
So why are you glossing over those factors?
It DOES affect the young and healthy - they just have a far better chance of surviving (albeit with possibly painful and protracted hospital stays and even ICU)
It DOES have lingering and debilitating aftereffects in far too many.
Lockdowns/social distancing have heavily slowed the spread wherever they have been used. If a few million Brits getting it have resulted in 60,000 deaths, I think that extrapolating that if fifty to sixty million Brits got it (especially in earlier days when we had less understanding of what treatments worked and what didn’t), hundreds of thousands would have died is extremely plausible. Factor of ten in the input and a factor of ten in the output.
Countries that have tried to avoid such lockdowns haven’t saved their economies over countries that followed them. Check the Swedish economic impact against the Danish and Norwegian ones.
The lockdowns and restrictions are explicitly to buy time. We’ve already hugely improved treatments, and the vaccines are coming along amazingly well. I’d be surprised if there wasn’t at least one working safe vaccine approved by this winter.
"SAGE expert warns pubs could have to shut in trade-off to let schools reopen next month - as it's revealed police have warned the ARMY might have to be called in to quell social unrest over local lock-downs
Professor Graham Medley said watering holes may need to close in order to get children back to classes"
Newsflash - it isn’t possible. Or at least, it makes everything so much more difficult as to render any actual education a lucky bonus.
Depends what you are teaching: Newton’s Laws using water rockets goes pretty well, as does the speed of sound and modelling the size of the solar system.
Our history department re-enacts the Battle of Hastings using water balloons and Y7...
Well, I’m always happy to hear somebody is killing off Year 7, but what I meant was a serious lesson.
How, for example, can I teach about the Five Year Plans without a whiteboard?
Moreover, even as a trained vocalist it’s hard to project my voice far enough to be heard when I am explaining something.
Finally, all too few of our schools have outside spaces now.
So I really don’t think ‘whenever possible’ covers many scenarios.
Julie Andrews seemed to manage. And all she had was a guitar.
I'm assuming that remark was ironic?
Potentially.
Though to some degree (please forgive an outsider's view of teaching) I think that teaching (education of any kind) should be based on delivering simple, and few, concepts, and having them stick. It's all very well the teacher conveying the depth, breadth and subtlety of their knowledge, but unless the pupil afterwards can do the same, it hasn't worked. Learning by wrote, chanting and calling etc. could all be done outside.
More sticks than you might think. Besides, what I am teaching is not so much the facts as the methods used. The best lessons learned at school are the ones about how to learn and how to find the information you need quickly and from a reliable source.
You would also be surprised how well we remember stories. I often find that years later an ex pupil will remember some anecdote that I threw in, although they couldn’t tell me the main point of the lesson the next day.
Oh, and it’s rote, not wrote. (Apologies for that, but it’s a teacher thing).
I know I'm a collectivist in an individualist age, but bear with me - after all, Johnson seems willing to pick and mix from any variety of belief. This situation calls for looking at society as a whole, helping the sectors that are most important, and compensating those that are least important and helping them adjust.
As David H says, education is crucial for direct and indirect reasons. In my opinion, cafes and restaurants in city centres are not. Sports arenas are not. Eyebrow-threading specialists and tattooists are not. People may disagree, but the Government should make some choices and stick with them. Having made the choices, they should recognise that the sectors being deliberately neglected in the national interest are suffering through no fault of their own, and they should get substantial, prolonged assistance to get through the crisis if we think if it temporary or completely remodel themselves if it's long-term.
Say you own a city centre cafe. The outlook doesn't look good. Should the Government urge people to go back to work so as to rescue you? Or should they merely point you at Universal Credit - sorry about your business, good luck getting a job stacking shelves? No, they should help you relocate your business to a suburb where most people live and, increasingly, work.
Sacrifices in times of crisis are inevitable, but unevenly distributed. Some of us are having no problem, personally. Tax us more and use the money to help those who are suffering for the sake of all of us.
I think this sounds like reasonable comment. Tough choices already have been unavoidable and that will continue, I don't envy those making the calls and some of those calls will be wrong, others will debatable and seen as wrong by plenty of people and right by others, but they still need to be made. And I think they are or will be in fairness, but Boris is probably unprepared for the political costs of those choices.
Newsflash - it isn’t possible. Or at least, it makes everything so much more difficult as to render any actual education a lucky bonus.
Depends what you are teaching: Newton’s Laws using water rockets goes pretty well, as does the speed of sound and modelling the size of the solar system.
Our history department re-enacts the Battle of Hastings using water balloons and Y7...
Well, I’m always happy to hear somebody is killing off Year 7, but what I meant was a serious lesson.
How, for example, can I teach about the Five Year Plans without a whiteboard?
Moreover, even as a trained vocalist it’s hard to project my voice far enough to be heard when I am explaining something.
Finally, all too few of our schools have outside spaces now.
So I really don’t think ‘whenever possible’ covers many scenarios.
Julie Andrews seemed to manage. And all she had was a guitar.
I'm assuming that remark was ironic?
Potentially.
Though to some degree (please forgive an outsider's view of teaching) I think that teaching (education of any kind) should be based on delivering simple, and few, concepts, and having them stick. It's all very well the teacher conveying the depth, breadth and subtlety of their knowledge, but unless the pupil afterwards can do the same, it hasn't worked. Learning by wrote, chanting and calling etc. could all be done outside.
I was something of a boris cheerleader from last summer onwards. I’d now vote for whoever promises to sack the entire Covid response top table and start again.
Life comes with risk. Covid isn’t flu but it’s not Disease X either. High time to crack on with living. Don’t often say it but I think Trump had it right the first time. The sacrifices being made by the young on behalf of the old will stretch social unity beyond breaking point if this continues. Destroyed employment prospects, interrupted education, forced ever further into the black hole of social media rather than real social interaction, yet more QE to inflate assets beyond the reach of their ever debased incomes.
Much more of this and I’ll happily join the barricade to stand up for the rights of the young.
Trouble is there doesn’t seem to be a mainstream politician or party in the UK spelling all this out. Something of a gap in the market for someone somewhere to exploit.
There's a good reason that you won't find a single UK party willing to follow that strategy, even if one were led by Nigel Farage. Trump has been doing exactly what you suggest, and is on course to lose every branch of government to the Democrats - if the election were held today, he would do so in a landslide.
The world is in a shitty situation with no good options, but sacrificing the lives or the long-term health of hundreds of thousands of people will win a minority following, at best. To pay that price now when several vaccines are on the horizon would be insane.
And what if the vaccine cavalry turn out to be carrying wooden swords? The early signs are that none is a silver bullet. It might be they don’t provoke an insufficient immune response in the old while only being effective in the young. How long do we wait for, all the while printing money to support the triple lock state pension, inflating stock and property markets and devaluing the diminished net incomes of the young?
Of course the vaccines may fail, in which case we'll have no choice but to learn to live with the virus. But the first Western approvals may be only a few months away - the Russians, with their typical sangfroid, will start injecting front-line medics with their vaccine this month, in advance of Phase III trials - and somehow I have faith that the world's best medical minds will manage to crack this thing, one way or another.
I was something of a boris cheerleader from last summer onwards. I’d now vote for whoever promises to sack the entire Covid response top table and start again.
Life comes with risk. Covid isn’t flu but it’s not Disease X either. High time to crack on with living. Don’t often say it but I think Trump had it right the first time. The sacrifices being made by the young on behalf of the old will stretch social unity beyond breaking point if this continues. Destroyed employment prospects, interrupted education, forced ever further into the black hole of social media rather than real social interaction, yet more QE to inflate assets beyond the reach of their ever debased incomes.
Much more of this and I’ll happily join the barricade to stand up for the rights of the young.
Trouble is there doesn’t seem to be a mainstream politician or party in the UK spelling all this out. Something of a gap in the market for someone somewhere to exploit.
When the alternative to lockdown was half a million to a million UK dead by conservative estimates, your analysis falls at the first moral hurdle. Maybe not a problem if one can avoid being touched buy the unnecessary death of a loved one.
I can't bear Johnson, but on this issue, by and large, he is on the money. And holding Trump as a beacon to how it should have been done is verging on the insane.
The now discredited number from Imperial was 500k if 80% of the public caught it. So your analysis falls at the first empirical hurdle.
We do not have a counter factual of how many would die in the Uk without hard lockdowns and a reliance on common sense. But there are clues from elsewhere and good reason to believe that when the statistics wash through over a three year period that the excess death number would be substantially below that.
In March this was the virus that was supposed to collapse the Iranian regime, cause global deaths in the tens of millions. It’s clear it’s not that virus. Since then medics have learnt much more effective treatment options for the critically sick, we have a much better idea of what vulnerabilities make you most at risk and the public has been well educated on hygiene. And there are clues that portions of the population have some level of background immunity.
This was about flattening the curve, squashing the sombrero, “protecting the NHS”. It was not about eliminating all health risk from the virus to the almost sole benefit of the gerontocracy to the detriment of the young, whilst quite incredibly running a monetary and fiscal policy that further widens the asset gap between the old and the young.
Discredit the figure all you want. I am content to extrapolate half a million plus on the basis of 60,000 excess deaths even after a three month lockdown.
As I have posted before, it’s hard to come up with policies better designed to cause maximum death than followed by this government. More than half of all care homes had outbreaks. Care homes were quite obviously the fucking front line in this fight from the start. Yet it was deemed more important to focus on stopping teenagers from sitting in exam halls than keeping infected patients from returning to care homes. This was obvious stuff even at the time.
It could very well be the case that the clumsy policies of the government have had no significant impact on deaths from Covid, while drastically increasing the death rate from other causes.
I seeth with rage and am embarrassed I ever supported this government.
I again reiterate, if on lockdown alone history will be on Johnson's side.
It will not. I am confident the overall policy response from January onwards will be judged as either ineffective or counter productive.
The obvious stuff was either done too late or not at all if your goal was to prevent spread. Where were the closed borders? Where is the central quarantine facility for both new arrivals and those infected by community transmission? Why in March was my immune compromised mother sitting in a gp waiting room for a blood pressure test, surrounded by coughing patients, none of whom had their temperatures taken, were asked to sanitise or were wearing masks? Why did the Nightingales lie empty rather than take infected patients so that care could continue for other diseases, and the infected would not be let loose to infect their own families and/or care home residents? Why call up the army and still have roving care home workers still serving multiple facilities? Why did Cheltenham go ahead? Etc etc etc...
These were all obvious errors AT THE TIME if your goal was to halt the spread but certainly so if your goal was to prevent the most vulnerable from being infected.
Why even now are infected people told to isolate at home, where it’s nearly impossible not to pass onto family members, when the country’s hotels lie empty and on the verge of bankruptcy?
I say without any hint of arrogance that if I’d been on the covid committee I would have saved tens of thousands of lives, by asking the obvious questions early and avoiding doing the stupid stuff.
That is wholly different premise to your earlier point. Initially you claimed lockdown itself to be a faulty notion. I would argue the idea of lockdown was correct, your argument now that its delivery was faulty, I couldn't argue with.
Newsflash - it isn’t possible. Or at least, it makes everything so much more difficult as to render any actual education a lucky bonus.
Depends what you are teaching: Newton’s Laws using water rockets goes pretty well, as does the speed of sound and modelling the size of the solar system.
Our history department re-enacts the Battle of Hastings using water balloons and Y7...
Well, I’m always happy to hear somebody is killing off Year 7, but what I meant was a serious lesson.
How, for example, can I teach about the Five Year Plans without a whiteboard?
Moreover, even as a trained vocalist it’s hard to project my voice far enough to be heard when I am explaining something.
Finally, all too few of our schools have outside spaces now.
So I really don’t think ‘whenever possible’ covers many scenarios.
Julie Andrews seemed to manage. And all she had was a guitar.
I'm assuming that remark was ironic?
Potentially.
Though to some degree (please forgive an outsider's view of teaching) I think that teaching (education of any kind) should be based on delivering simple, and few, concepts, and having them stick. It's all very well the teacher conveying the depth, breadth and subtlety of their knowledge, but unless the pupil afterwards can do the same, it hasn't worked. Learning by wrote, chanting and calling etc. could all be done outside.
More sticks than you might think. Besides, what I am teaching is not so much the facts as the methods used. The best lessons learned at school are the ones about how to learn and how to find the information you need quickly and from a reliable source.
You would also be surprised how well we remember stories. I often find that years later an ex pupil will remember some anecdote that I threw in, although they couldn’t tell me the main point of the lesson the next day.
Oh, and it’s rote, not wrote. (Apologies for that, but it’s a teacher thing).
No problem, glad to be corrected.
When I'm speaking to people within my profession, I have no more than 3 key things I want them to end up with at the end, and (hopefully) never forget. I think more just goes over the head. Your point about the story indicates this is true - it's nice that they remembered that, but would have been better if they'd remembered the main theme.
Newsflash - it isn’t possible. Or at least, it makes everything so much more difficult as to render any actual education a lucky bonus.
Depends what you are teaching: Newton’s Laws using water rockets goes pretty well, as does the speed of sound and modelling the size of the solar system.
Our history department re-enacts the Battle of Hastings using water balloons and Y7...
Well, I’m always happy to hear somebody is killing off Year 7, but what I meant was a serious lesson.
How, for example, can I teach about the Five Year Plans without a whiteboard?
Moreover, even as a trained vocalist it’s hard to project my voice far enough to be heard when I am explaining something.
Finally, all too few of our schools have outside spaces now.
So I really don’t think ‘whenever possible’ covers many scenarios.
Julie Andrews seemed to manage. And all she had was a guitar.
I'm assuming that remark was ironic?
Potentially.
Though to some degree (please forgive an outsider's view of teaching) I think that teaching (education of any kind) should be based on delivering simple, and few, concepts, and having them stick. It's all very well the teacher conveying the depth, breadth and subtlety of their knowledge, but unless the pupil afterwards can do the same, it hasn't worked. Learning by wrote, chanting and calling etc. could all be done outside.
Depends, does it not, on both age group and subject. Eldest Grandson teaches primary..... possibly, some of the time. His wife teaches A level...... highly unlikely to be either possible or desirable.
I have always felt somewhat deprived because I skipped having Mrs. Killingbeck at primary school, and she taught the kids their times table by *rote*. I never had that, and (though I could of course teach myself if I had a mind) have always found arithmetic far more difficult as a result.
On the central thesis of there being an R budget of 1 and certain actions having different values then education needs to be in that, even including university. If that means we've used 0.8 of the budget before anything else then we'll have to live with that situation until there's a vaccine. Education is priority one and I'll be happy to give up going to the pub if that's what it takes to get the kids back in schools and the universities open again.
I'd also suggest that the R budget is quite a bit higher than 1 and the NHS can handle it now, the government needs to move on from the "protect the NHS" stance and tolerate a higher base level of infection now even if it means opening up those empty Nightingale hospitals.
‘Writing on the wall for Scottish Tories despite Ruth’s return’
The brutal truth is the party has never recovered north of the Border and has nobody it can turn to who has anything approaching the same appeal as Ms Davidson.
Support for independence is rising, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s approval ratings are dire in Scotland, and the party is losing several of its senior MSPs in 2021 – Ms Davidson being one.
Despite Mr Johnson’s protestations, another SNP majority would dramatically increase the pressure for a second independence vote, with most Scots now leaning towards Yes.
Including Don't Knows Yes is not over 50% in any poll.
Ruth Davidson is now back as interim Scottish Tory leader at Holyrood.
I think it likely Unionist parties will do a deal not to campaign or even stand against each other in Holyrood constituency seats e.g. Labour gets a free run against the SNP in Glasgow and the central belt, the Tories get a free run against the SNP in the borders and Aberdeenshire and the LDs get a free run against the SNP in the Highlands and Orkney and Shetland and the posher parts of Edinburgh.
The Unionist parties may only end up all standing on the MSP list
Really? I mean that was de facto what happened in Quebec, but I didn't think we were anywhere near that stage yet.
The troughers will get massacred so better they are on the losers list to ensure they get shot at troughing it. Almost guaranteed that SNP will win all but a couple of seats at best. Unionists are bricking it that new independence list parties are forming which is likely to mean they don't get as many list seats and so less room at trough.
Newsflash - it isn’t possible. Or at least, it makes everything so much more difficult as to render any actual education a lucky bonus.
Depends what you are teaching: Newton’s Laws using water rockets goes pretty well, as does the speed of sound and modelling the size of the solar system.
Our history department re-enacts the Battle of Hastings using water balloons and Y7...
Well, I’m always happy to hear somebody is killing off Year 7, but what I meant was a serious lesson.
How, for example, can I teach about the Five Year Plans without a whiteboard?
Moreover, even as a trained vocalist it’s hard to project my voice far enough to be heard when I am explaining something.
Finally, all too few of our schools have outside spaces now.
So I really don’t think ‘whenever possible’ covers many scenarios.
I see your point.
We do actually have a couple of outside whiteboards, used by the PE Department, but they are only really big enough to say which group goes in which changing room, so unless you can summarise your notes more effectively than any other teacher I know that will probably not help.
As to the voice, I hadn’t thought about that, but I’m a bass...
I get the occasional complaint from teachers in next door labs that I’m basically teaching their class as well. I’m not shouting at anybody (I find getting quieter is a much more effective technique when I want to get tell someone off), but I think I do sometimes get over enthusiastic.
Last year I was teaching in a room next door to where the Principal was taking English lessons.
It was a very sore trial, because not only did the thin walls mean I could hear every word, but that also meant I realised his lessons were utter shite. Quite hard work not to put my head in my hands at some of the stupid things he did.
Edit - I'm assuming that part about shite lessons wouldn't apply to you!
Letting the Head teach is normally something to be avoided. If nothing else they have so many other commitments that their lessons end up being taken by cover teachers more often than not.
Edit: I hope not and I think my colleagues would tell me if they thought they were.
Our headmaster used to teach physics at sixth form level. Very good at it too, helped me get an A!
I wouldn’t say anything against my own Head’s teaching ability (as I don’t know if he reads PB), and yes, some heads and deputies are a serious loss to the actual task of teaching. In part that may be because they have so few classes they can devote more time per lesson for planning etc. than a more typical teacher can.
"SAGE expert warns pubs could have to shut in trade-off to let schools reopen next month - as it's revealed police have warned the ARMY might have to be called in to quell social unrest over local lock-downs
Professor Graham Medley said watering holes may need to close in order to get children back to classes"
I think with Boris you have to feel 'in on the joke'. English people know he's a bit of a buffoon, but he's 'our' bit of a buffoon.
A good equivalent would be Salmond. Not saying that Salmond doesn't have greater political talents than Boris - he probably does. But he's incredibly popular in many quarters in Scotland, so much so that he's still 'the Prince over the water' even when he's just got through a rape trial where his own counsel described him as a slimeball.
The ROUK sees Salmond as the thoroughly dislikeable corpulent toad that he is. Scotland doesn't see it, because he's 'their' corpulent toad.
@Luckyguy1983 Seen some bollox on here but that takes the biscuit, you unionists are really shit scared of Salmond even when he is out of politics.
I'll take that as a compliment.
And if you think Unionists are scared of the return of Salmond, I suggest you make every effort to depose Sturgeon in favour of him. And see what happens.
I was something of a boris cheerleader from last summer onwards. I’d now vote for whoever promises to sack the entire Covid response top table and start again.
Life comes with risk. Covid isn’t flu but it’s not Disease X either. High time to crack on with living. Don’t often say it but I think Trump had it right the first time. The sacrifices being made by the young on behalf of the old will stretch social unity beyond breaking point if this continues. Destroyed employment prospects, interrupted education, forced ever further into the black hole of social media rather than real social interaction, yet more QE to inflate assets beyond the reach of their ever debased incomes.
Much more of this and I’ll happily join the barricade to stand up for the rights of the young.
Trouble is there doesn’t seem to be a mainstream politician or party in the UK spelling all this out. Something of a gap in the market for someone somewhere to exploit.
There's a good reason that you won't find a single UK party willing to follow that strategy, even if one were led by Nigel Farage. Trump has been doing exactly what you suggest, and is on course to lose every branch of government to the Democrats - if the election were held today, he would do so in a landslide.
The world is in a shitty situation with no good options, but sacrificing the lives or the long-term health of hundreds of thousands of people will win a minority following, at best. To pay that price now when several vaccines are on the horizon would be insane.
And what if the vaccine cavalry turn out to be carrying wooden swords? The early signs are that none is a silver bullet. It might be they don’t provoke an insufficient immune response in the old while only being effective in the young. How long do we wait for, all the while printing money to support the triple lock state pension, inflating stock and property markets and devaluing the diminished net incomes of the young?
Of course the vaccines may fail, in which case we'll have no choice but to learn to live with the virus. But the first Western approvals may be only a few months away - the Russians, with their typical sangfroid, will start injecting front-line medics with their vaccine this month, in advance of Phase III trials - and somehow I have faith that the world's best medical minds will manage to crack this thing, one way or another.
The motto should be 'hope for the best but prepare for the worst'. At the moment a vaccine is a pig in a poke, though governments are competitively bidding for them with staggering sums of money.
Newsflash - it isn’t possible. Or at least, it makes everything so much more difficult as to render any actual education a lucky bonus.
Depends what you are teaching: Newton’s Laws using water rockets goes pretty well, as does the speed of sound and modelling the size of the solar system.
Our history department re-enacts the Battle of Hastings using water balloons and Y7...
Well, I’m always happy to hear somebody is killing off Year 7, but what I meant was a serious lesson.
How, for example, can I teach about the Five Year Plans without a whiteboard?
Moreover, even as a trained vocalist it’s hard to project my voice far enough to be heard when I am explaining something.
Finally, all too few of our schools have outside spaces now.
So I really don’t think ‘whenever possible’ covers many scenarios.
Julie Andrews seemed to manage. And all she had was a guitar.
I'm assuming that remark was ironic?
Potentially.
Though to some degree (please forgive an outsider's view of teaching) I think that teaching (education of any kind) should be based on delivering simple, and few, concepts, and having them stick. It's all very well the teacher conveying the depth, breadth and subtlety of their knowledge, but unless the pupil afterwards can do the same, it hasn't worked. Learning by wrote, chanting and calling etc. could all be done outside.
Learning by wrote?
Repeat after me: R O T E R O T E R O T E...
Except for the times tables "learning" by rote seems something of an oxymoron.
‘Writing on the wall for Scottish Tories despite Ruth’s return’
The brutal truth is the party has never recovered north of the Border and has nobody it can turn to who has anything approaching the same appeal as Ms Davidson.
Support for independence is rising, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s approval ratings are dire in Scotland, and the party is losing several of its senior MSPs in 2021 – Ms Davidson being one.
Despite Mr Johnson’s protestations, another SNP majority would dramatically increase the pressure for a second independence vote, with most Scots now leaning towards Yes.
Including Don't Knows Yes is not over 50% in any poll.
Ruth Davidson is now back as interim Scottish Tory leader at Holyrood.
I think it likely Unionist parties will do a deal not to campaign or even stand against each other in Holyrood constituency seats e.g. Labour gets a free run against the SNP in Glasgow and the central belt, the Tories get a free run against the SNP in the borders and Aberdeenshire and the LDs get a free run against the SNP in the Highlands and Orkney and Shetland and the posher parts of Edinburgh.
The Unionist parties may only end up all standing on the MSP list
I was something of a boris cheerleader from last summer onwards. I’d now vote for whoever promises to sack the entire Covid response top table and start again.
Life comes with risk. Covid isn’t flu but it’s not Disease X either. High time to crack on with living. Don’t often say it but I think Trump had it right the first time. The sacrifices being made by the young on behalf of the old will stretch social unity beyond breaking point if this continues. Destroyed employment prospects, interrupted education, forced ever further into the black hole of social media rather than real social interaction, yet more QE to inflate assets beyond the reach of their ever debased incomes.
Much more of this and I’ll happily join the barricade to stand up for the rights of the young.
Trouble is there doesn’t seem to be a mainstream politician or party in the UK spelling all this out. Something of a gap in the market for someone somewhere to exploit.
That would have been a better point three months ago when we knew nothing about long term effects on survivors. We now know that surviving this, at any age, may not be a lot more fun than surviving polio. "sacrifices being made by the young on behalf of the old" is outdated thinking.
Shush. You’re spoiling the narrative. Remember: it has no effect on the young and those like me (ignore the hospitalisation rates and ICU rates, gloss over the aftereffects, and focus solely on actual deaths). And while we can’t compare the UK’s death toll with other countries due to our higher population density and interlocked international economy, we can pretend that we could have followed Sweden’s option with identical outcomes (once again, gloss over the several-times-higher death rate than its comparable neighbouring countries for a cost of - oops, a worse economic hit than them).
Because if we take those into account, there might not be a simple “fuck someone else, there’s a route for ME to be unaffected” answer after all.
Although, to be fair, I think there’s also an element of sheer fear-whistling-in-the-dark there from them as well.
You know nothing about me. If I caught this disease I’d potentially be in some trouble. Financially I’ve done brilliantly out of the economic lockdown and anti-young monetary policies, boosting my savings by several years’ worth.
It’s not fear whistling in the dark. This is a real disease that kills people. People like me. But the cure so far has been ineffective and quite possibly counter productive.
So why are you glossing over those factors?
It DOES affect the young and healthy - they just have a far better chance of surviving (albeit with possibly painful and protracted hospital stays and even ICU)
It DOES have lingering and debilitating aftereffects in far too many.
Lockdowns/social distancing have heavily slowed the spread wherever they have been used. If a few million Brits getting it have resulted in 60,000 deaths, I think that extrapolating that if fifty to sixty million Brits got it (especially in earlier days when we had less understanding of what treatments worked and what didn’t), hundreds of thousands would have died is extremely plausible. Factor of ten in the input and a factor of ten in the output.
Countries that have tried to avoid such lockdowns haven’t saved their economies over countries that followed them. Check the Swedish economic impact against the Danish and Norwegian ones.
The lockdowns and restrictions are explicitly to buy time. We’ve already hugely improved treatments, and the vaccines are coming along amazingly well. I’d be surprised if there wasn’t at least one working safe vaccine approved by this winter.
Lockdown was sensible when little was known and there was the real fear this might be Disease X. But the government bodged it with the many stupid decisions taken in between late Jan and mid March. That so many senior govt figures caught it should in itself be a national embarrassment. “Hi everyone here I am the covid ward, shaking hands is just great isn’t it, because I know the words to happy birthday”.
New lockdowns now (and no doubt a full national lockdown some time before Xmas) are not sensible because of what we now know. As I have already said, I do not believe you can extrapolate deaths so far to the whole population, because the government quite magically succeeded in shielding the generally fit and healthy and directing the infection towards those more likely to succumb by orders of magnitude.
The trade off should not be between education and pubs it should be between living life and being obsessive about covid 19 to the point where people are fretting over 40 deaths a day when the UK has always had 1600 deaths a day from other stuff. People need to start seeing the big picture (to use a recruitment phrase)_
If the only two things allowed in the Autumn are education and presumably Black Lives matter protests (nobody on the close everything down left seems to mind these for some reason) then it will be a miserable place and deaths from other things will be more than from covid 19
Newsflash - it isn’t possible. Or at least, it makes everything so much more difficult as to render any actual education a lucky bonus.
Depends what you are teaching: Newton’s Laws using water rockets goes pretty well, as does the speed of sound and modelling the size of the solar system.
Our history department re-enacts the Battle of Hastings using water balloons and Y7...
Well, I’m always happy to hear somebody is killing off Year 7, but what I meant was a serious lesson.
How, for example, can I teach about the Five Year Plans without a whiteboard?
Moreover, even as a trained vocalist it’s hard to project my voice far enough to be heard when I am explaining something.
Finally, all too few of our schools have outside spaces now.
So I really don’t think ‘whenever possible’ covers many scenarios.
Julie Andrews seemed to manage. And all she had was a guitar.
I'm assuming that remark was ironic?
Potentially.
Though to some degree (please forgive an outsider's view of teaching) I think that teaching (education of any kind) should be based on delivering simple, and few, concepts, and having them stick. It's all very well the teacher conveying the depth, breadth and subtlety of their knowledge, but unless the pupil afterwards can do the same, it hasn't worked. Learning by wrote, chanting and calling etc. could all be done outside.
Learning by wrote?
Repeat after me: R O T E R O T E R O T E...
It's a fair cop.
I think karma has just bitten me in the arse for taking the mickey out of DavidL's 'copywrite' yesterday.
Newsflash - it isn’t possible. Or at least, it makes everything so much more difficult as to render any actual education a lucky bonus.
Depends what you are teaching: Newton’s Laws using water rockets goes pretty well, as does the speed of sound and modelling the size of the solar system.
Our history department re-enacts the Battle of Hastings using water balloons and Y7...
Well, I’m always happy to hear somebody is killing off Year 7, but what I meant was a serious lesson.
How, for example, can I teach about the Five Year Plans without a whiteboard?
Moreover, even as a trained vocalist it’s hard to project my voice far enough to be heard when I am explaining something.
Finally, all too few of our schools have outside spaces now.
So I really don’t think ‘whenever possible’ covers many scenarios.
Julie Andrews seemed to manage. And all she had was a guitar.
I'm assuming that remark was ironic?
Potentially.
Though to some degree (please forgive an outsider's view of teaching) I think that teaching (education of any kind) should be based on delivering simple, and few, concepts, and having them stick. It's all very well the teacher conveying the depth, breadth and subtlety of their knowledge, but unless the pupil afterwards can do the same, it hasn't worked. Learning by wrote, chanting and calling etc. could all be done outside.
More sticks than you might think. Besides, what I am teaching is not so much the facts as the methods used. The best lessons learned at school are the ones about how to learn and how to find the information you need quickly and from a reliable source.
You would also be surprised how well we remember stories. I often find that years later an ex pupil will remember some anecdote that I threw in, although they couldn’t tell me the main point of the lesson the next day.
Oh, and it’s rote, not wrote. (Apologies for that, but it’s a teacher thing).
No problem, glad to be corrected.
When I'm speaking to people within my profession, I have no more than 3 key things I want them to end up with at the end, and (hopefully) never forget. I think more just goes over the head. Your point about the story indicates this is true - it's nice that they remembered that, but would have been better if they'd remembered the main theme.
Three key points in a lesson is usually two more than I’m going for to be honest, although there may be several examples that make it look like I’m trying to do more.
One thing I learned early on in teaching is that simple is not the same as easy to understand.
The trade off should not be between education and pubs it should be between living life and being obsessive about covid 19 to the point where people are fretting over 40 deaths a day when the UK has always had 1600 deaths a day from other stuff
Newsflash - it isn’t possible. Or at least, it makes everything so much more difficult as to render any actual education a lucky bonus.
Depends what you are teaching: Newton’s Laws using water rockets goes pretty well, as does the speed of sound and modelling the size of the solar system.
Our history department re-enacts the Battle of Hastings using water balloons and Y7...
Well, I’m always happy to hear somebody is killing off Year 7, but what I meant was a serious lesson.
How, for example, can I teach about the Five Year Plans without a whiteboard?
Moreover, even as a trained vocalist it’s hard to project my voice far enough to be heard when I am explaining something.
Finally, all too few of our schools have outside spaces now.
So I really don’t think ‘whenever possible’ covers many scenarios.
I see your point.
We do actually have a couple of outside whiteboards, used by the PE Department, but they are only really big enough to say which group goes in which changing room, so unless you can summarise your notes more effectively than any other teacher I know that will probably not help.
As to the voice, I hadn’t thought about that, but I’m a bass...
I get the occasional complaint from teachers in next door labs that I’m basically teaching their class as well. I’m not shouting at anybody (I find getting quieter is a much more effective technique when I want to get tell someone off), but I think I do sometimes get over enthusiastic.
Last year I was teaching in a room next door to where the Principal was taking English lessons.
It was a very sore trial, because not only did the thin walls mean I could hear every word, but that also meant I realised his lessons were utter shite. Quite hard work not to put my head in my hands at some of the stupid things he did.
Edit - I'm assuming that part about shite lessons wouldn't apply to you!
Letting the Head teach is normally something to be avoided. If nothing else they have so many other commitments that their lessons end up being taken by cover teachers more often than not.
Edit: I hope not and I think my colleagues would tell me if they thought they were.
Our headmaster used to teach physics at sixth form level. Very good at it too, helped me get an A!
I wouldn’t say anything against my own Head’s teaching ability (as I don’t know if he reads PB), and yes, some heads and deputies are a serious loss to the actual task of teaching. In part that may be because they have so few classes they can devote more time per lesson for planning etc. than a more typical teacher can.
I think that's why he only did sixth form, he was one of three who taught physics, my class just got lucky to get him, though the other two were also excellent, one was an aeronautical engineer in a previous life and the other did his postgraduate studies at CalTech. I'm honestly not sure how the school managed to recruit them as well as other teachers who had similarly illustrious prior careers.
Newsflash - it isn’t possible. Or at least, it makes everything so much more difficult as to render any actual education a lucky bonus.
Depends what you are teaching: Newton’s Laws using water rockets goes pretty well, as does the speed of sound and modelling the size of the solar system.
Our history department re-enacts the Battle of Hastings using water balloons and Y7...
Well, I’m always happy to hear somebody is killing off Year 7, but what I meant was a serious lesson.
How, for example, can I teach about the Five Year Plans without a whiteboard?
Moreover, even as a trained vocalist it’s hard to project my voice far enough to be heard when I am explaining something.
Finally, all too few of our schools have outside spaces now.
So I really don’t think ‘whenever possible’ covers many scenarios.
Julie Andrews seemed to manage. And all she had was a guitar.
I'm assuming that remark was ironic?
Potentially.
Though to some degree (please forgive an outsider's view of teaching) I think that teaching (education of any kind) should be based on delivering simple, and few, concepts, and having them stick. It's all very well the teacher conveying the depth, breadth and subtlety of their knowledge, but unless the pupil afterwards can do the same, it hasn't worked. Learning by wrote, chanting and calling etc. could all be done outside.
Learning by wrote?
Repeat after me: R O T E R O T E R O T E...
It's a fair cop.
I think karma has just bitten me in the arse for taking the mickey out of DavidL's 'copywrite' yesterday.
I’m impressed you didn’t just say it was a typo. That’s watt I do on the rare occasion that I make a mistake...
I was something of a boris cheerleader from last summer onwards. I’d now vote for whoever promises to sack the entire Covid response top table and start again.
Life comes with risk. Covid isn’t flu but it’s not Disease X either. High time to crack on with living. Don’t often say it but I think Trump had it right the first time. The sacrifices being made by the young on behalf of the old will stretch social unity beyond breaking point if this continues. Destroyed employment prospects, interrupted education, forced ever further into the black hole of social media rather than real social interaction, yet more QE to inflate assets beyond the reach of their ever debased incomes.
Much more of this and I’ll happily join the barricade to stand up for the rights of the young.
Trouble is there doesn’t seem to be a mainstream politician or party in the UK spelling all this out. Something of a gap in the market for someone somewhere to exploit.
When the alternative to lockdown was half a million to a million UK dead by conservative estimates, your analysis falls at the first moral hurdle. Maybe not a problem if one can avoid being touched buy the unnecessary death of a loved one.
I can't bear Johnson, but on this issue, by and large, he is on the money. And holding Trump as a beacon to how it should have been done is verging on the insane.
The now discredited number from Imperial was 500k if 80% of the public caught it. So your analysis falls at the first empirical hurdle.
We do not have a counter factual of how many would die in the Uk without hard lockdowns and a reliance on common sense. But there are clues from elsewhere and good reason to believe that when the statistics wash through over a three year period that the excess death number would be substantially below that.
In March this was the virus that was supposed to collapse the Iranian regime, cause global deaths in the tens of millions. It’s clear it’s not that virus. Since then medics have learnt much more effective treatment options for the critically sick, we have a much better idea of what vulnerabilities make you most at risk and the public has been well educated on hygiene. And there are clues that portions of the population have some level of background immunity.
This was about flattening the curve, squashing the sombrero, “protecting the NHS”. It was not about eliminating all health risk from the virus to the almost sole benefit of the gerontocracy to the detriment of the young, whilst quite incredibly running a monetary and fiscal policy that further widens the asset gap between the old and the young.
Discredit the figure all you want. I am content to extrapolate half a million plus on the basis of 60,000 excess deaths even after a three month lockdown.
As I have posted before, it’s hard to come up with policies better designed to cause maximum death than followed by this government. More than half of all care homes had outbreaks. Care homes were quite obviously the fucking front line in this fight from the start. Yet it was deemed more important to focus on stopping teenagers from sitting in exam halls than keeping infected patients from returning to care homes. This was obvious stuff even at the time.
It could very well be the case that the clumsy policies of the government have had no significant impact on deaths from Covid, while drastically increasing the death rate from other causes.
I seeth with rage and am embarrassed I ever supported this government.
I again reiterate, if on lockdown alone history will be on Johnson's side.
It will not. I am confident the overall policy response from January onwards will be judged as either ineffective or counter productive.
The obvious stuff was either done too late or not at all if your goal was to prevent spread. Where were the closed borders? Where is the central quarantine facility for both new arrivals and those infected by community transmission? Why in March was my immune compromised mother sitting in a gp waiting room for a blood pressure test, surrounded by coughing patients, none of whom had their temperatures taken, were asked to sanitise or were wearing masks? Why did the Nightingales lie empty rather than take infected patients so that care could continue for other diseases, and the infected would not be let loose to infect their own families and/or care home residents? Why call up the army and still have roving care home workers still serving multiple facilities? Why did Cheltenham go ahead? Etc etc etc...
These were all obvious errors AT THE TIME if your goal was to halt the spread but certainly so if your goal was to prevent the most vulnerable from being infected.
Why even now are infected people told to isolate at home, where it’s nearly impossible not to pass onto family members, when the country’s hotels lie empty and on the verge of bankruptcy?
I say without any hint of arrogance that if I’d been on the covid committee I would have saved tens of thousands of lives, by asking the obvious questions early and avoiding doing the stupid stuff.
That is wholly different premise to your earlier point. Initially you claimed lockdown itself to be a faulty notion. I would argue the idea of lockdown was correct, your argument now that its delivery was faulty, I couldn't argue with.
Perhaps I have miss communicated. Lockdown in March had merits for “buying time”. Time has been bought. Lockdowns now are self defeating because rather than living with a tolerable level of Covid, they attempt to eliminate it at the expense of all else that matters.
Stick with the social distancing, the mask wearing, the tele commuting. That combined with the quite simple medical advances made so far will ensure we avoid the scenes of uncovered corpses piling up in hospitals as seen elsewhere at the start of the year.
But cancelling Eid with only hours notice? Stupid decision without any thought to the social consequence. Telling pubs and shops they can reopen, so they stock up inventory and rehire and then closing them again? Economic sadism.
I think with Boris you have to feel 'in on the joke'. English people know he's a bit of a buffoon, but he's 'our' bit of a buffoon.
A good equivalent would be Salmond. Not saying that Salmond doesn't have greater political talents than Boris - he probably does. But he's incredibly popular in many quarters in Scotland, so much so that he's still 'the Prince over the water' even when he's just got through a rape trial where his own counsel described him as a slimeball.
The ROUK sees Salmond as the thoroughly dislikeable corpulent toad that he is. Scotland doesn't see it, because he's 'their' corpulent toad.
@Luckyguy1983 Seen some bollox on here but that takes the biscuit, you unionists are really shit scared of Salmond even when he is out of politics.
I'll take that as a compliment.
And if you think Unionists are scared of the return of Salmond, I suggest you make every effort to depose Sturgeon in favour of him. And see what happens.
Newsflash - it isn’t possible. Or at least, it makes everything so much more difficult as to render any actual education a lucky bonus.
Depends what you are teaching: Newton’s Laws using water rockets goes pretty well, as does the speed of sound and modelling the size of the solar system.
Our history department re-enacts the Battle of Hastings using water balloons and Y7...
Well, I’m always happy to hear somebody is killing off Year 7, but what I meant was a serious lesson.
How, for example, can I teach about the Five Year Plans without a whiteboard?
Moreover, even as a trained vocalist it’s hard to project my voice far enough to be heard when I am explaining something.
Finally, all too few of our schools have outside spaces now.
So I really don’t think ‘whenever possible’ covers many scenarios.
Julie Andrews seemed to manage. And all she had was a guitar.
I'm assuming that remark was ironic?
Potentially.
Though to some degree (please forgive an outsider's view of teaching) I think that teaching (education of any kind) should be based on delivering simple, and few, concepts, and having them stick. It's all very well the teacher conveying the depth, breadth and subtlety of their knowledge, but unless the pupil afterwards can do the same, it hasn't worked. Learning by wrote, chanting and calling etc. could all be done outside.
Learning by wrote?
Repeat after me: R O T E R O T E R O T E...
It's a fair cop.
I think karma has just bitten me in the arse for taking the mickey out of DavidL's 'copywrite' yesterday.
Made me smile at least; I have made plenty of worse slip-ups.
Newsflash - it isn’t possible. Or at least, it makes everything so much more difficult as to render any actual education a lucky bonus.
Depends what you are teaching: Newton’s Laws using water rockets goes pretty well, as does the speed of sound and modelling the size of the solar system.
Our history department re-enacts the Battle of Hastings using water balloons and Y7...
Well, I’m always happy to hear somebody is killing off Year 7, but what I meant was a serious lesson.
How, for example, can I teach about the Five Year Plans without a whiteboard?
Moreover, even as a trained vocalist it’s hard to project my voice far enough to be heard when I am explaining something.
Finally, all too few of our schools have outside spaces now.
So I really don’t think ‘whenever possible’ covers many scenarios.
I see your point.
We do actually have a couple of outside whiteboards, used by the PE Department, but they are only really big enough to say which group goes in which changing room, so unless you can summarise your notes more effectively than any other teacher I know that will probably not help.
As to the voice, I hadn’t thought about that, but I’m a bass...
I get the occasional complaint from teachers in next door labs that I’m basically teaching their class as well. I’m not shouting at anybody (I find getting quieter is a much more effective technique when I want to get tell someone off), but I think I do sometimes get over enthusiastic.
Last year I was teaching in a room next door to where the Principal was taking English lessons.
It was a very sore trial, because not only did the thin walls mean I could hear every word, but that also meant I realised his lessons were utter shite. Quite hard work not to put my head in my hands at some of the stupid things he did.
Edit - I'm assuming that part about shite lessons wouldn't apply to you!
Letting the Head teach is normally something to be avoided. If nothing else they have so many other commitments that their lessons end up being taken by cover teachers more often than not.
Edit: I hope not and I think my colleagues would tell me if they thought they were.
Our headmaster used to teach physics at sixth form level. Very good at it too, helped me get an A!
I wouldn’t say anything against my own Head’s teaching ability (as I don’t know if he reads PB), and yes, some heads and deputies are a serious loss to the actual task of teaching. In part that may be because they have so few classes they can devote more time per lesson for planning etc. than a more typical teacher can.
I think that's why he only did sixth form, he was one of three who taught physics, my class just got lucky to get him, though the other two were also excellent, one was an aeronautical engineer in a previous life and the other did his postgraduate studies at CalTech. I'm honestly not sure how the school managed to recruit them as well as other teachers who had similarly illustrious prior careers.
I knew one Physics teacher at a school near me that was an ex-professor from an American university. He had some problems getting his QTS as he didn’t have GCSE maths: for some reason his PhD in Physics wasn’t good enough.
The trade off should not be between education and pubs it should be bhttps://politicalbetting.vanillacommunity.com/profile/state_go_awayetween living life and being obsessive about covid 19 to the point where people are fretting over 40 deaths a day when the UK has always had 1600 deaths a day from other stuff
We are well below 40 deaths.
It might well be - given up looking as so statistically insignificant to a population of 60million and a natural death rate of 1600 a day pre covid
The trade off should not be between education and pubs it should be between living life and being obsessive about covid 19 to the point where people are fretting over 40 deaths a day when the UK has always had 1600 deaths a day from other stuff. People need to start seeing the big picture (to use a recruitment phrase)_
If the only two things allowed in the Autumn are education and presumably Black Lives matter protests (nobody on the close everything down left seems to mind these for some reason) then it will be a miserable place and deaths from other things will be more than from covid 19
We are now down to levels of deaths from covid 19 that match road accidents . We seem to have built a weird groupthink that we must get it to zero by banning all risk . The equivalent with road deaths would be to ban cars or at least get a bloke with a red flag walking in front of any car- and we have all ridiculed that for over a century
I was something of a boris cheerleader from last summer onwards. I’d now vote for whoever promises to sack the entire Covid response top table and start again.
Life comes with risk. Covid isn’t flu but it’s not Disease X either. High time to crack on with living. Don’t often say it but I think Trump had it right the first time. The sacrifices being made by the young on behalf of the old will stretch social unity beyond breaking point if this continues. Destroyed employment prospects, interrupted education, forced ever further into the black hole of social media rather than real social interaction, yet more QE to inflate assets beyond the reach of their ever debased incomes.
Much more of this and I’ll happily join the barricade to stand up for the rights of the young.
Trouble is there doesn’t seem to be a mainstream politician or party in the UK spelling all this out. Something of a gap in the market for someone somewhere to exploit.
When the alternative to lockdown was half a million to a million UK dead by conservative estimates, your analysis falls at the first moral hurdle. Maybe not a problem if one can avoid being touched buy the unnecessary death of a loved one.
I can't bear Johnson, but on this issue, by and large, he is on the money. And holding Trump as a beacon to how it should have been done is verging on the insane.
The now discredited number from Imperial was 500k if 80% of the public caught it. So your analysis falls at the first empirical hurdle.
We do not have a counter factual of how many would die in the Uk without hard lockdowns and a reliance on common sense. But there are clues from elsewhere and good reason to believe that when the statistics wash through over a three year period that the excess death number would be substantially below that.
In March this was the virus that was supposed to collapse the Iranian regime, cause global deaths in the tens of millions. It’s clear it’s not that virus. Since then medics have learnt much more effective treatment options for the critically sick, we have a much better idea of what vulnerabilities make you most at risk and the public has been well educated on hygiene. And there are clues that portions of the population have some level of background immunity.
This was about flattening the curve, squashing the sombrero, “protecting the NHS”. It was not about eliminating all health risk from the virus to the almost sole benefit of the gerontocracy to the detriment of the young, whilst quite incredibly running a monetary and fiscal policy that further widens the asset gap between the old and the young.
Discredit the figure all you want. I am content to extrapolate half a million plus on the basis of 60,000 excess deaths even after a three month lockdown.
As I have posted before, it’s hard to come up with policies better designed to cause maximum death than followed by this government. More than half of all care homes had outbreaks. Care homes were quite obviously the fucking front line in this fight from the start. Yet it was deemed more important to focus on stopping teenagers from sitting in exam halls than keeping infected patients from returning to care homes. This was obvious stuff even at the time.
It could very well be the case that the clumsy policies of the government have had no significant impact on deaths from Covid, while drastically increasing the death rate from other causes.
I seeth with rage and am embarrassed I ever supported this government.
I again reiterate, if on lockdown alone history will be on Johnson's side.
It will not. I am confident the overall policy response from January onwards will be judged as either ineffective or counter productive.
The obvious stuff was either done too late or not at all if your goal was to prevent spread. Where were the closed borders? Where is the central quarantine facility for both new arrivals and those infected by community transmission? Why in March was my immune compromised mother sitting in a gp waiting room for a blood pressure test, surrounded by coughing patients, none of whom had their temperatures taken, were asked to sanitise or were wearing masks? Why did the Nightingales lie empty rather than take infected patients so that care could continue for other diseases, and the infected would not be let loose to infect their own families and/or care home residents? Why call up the army and still have roving care home workers still serving multiple facilities? Why did Cheltenham go ahead? Etc etc etc...
These were all obvious errors AT THE TIME if your goal was to halt the spread but certainly so if your goal was to prevent the most vulnerable from being infected.
Why even now are infected people told to isolate at home, where it’s nearly impossible not to pass onto family members, when the country’s hotels lie empty and on the verge of bankruptcy?
I say without any hint of arrogance that if I’d been on the covid committee I would have saved tens of thousands of lives, by asking the obvious questions early and avoiding doing the stupid stuff.
That is wholly different premise to your earlier point. Initially you claimed lockdown itself to be a faulty notion. I would argue the idea of lockdown was correct, your argument now that its delivery was faulty, I couldn't argue with.
Perhaps I have miss communicated. Lockdown in March had merits for “buying time”. Time has been bought. Lockdowns now are self defeating because rather than living with a tolerable level of Covid, they attempt to eliminate it at the expense of all else that matters.
Stick with the social distancing, the mask wearing, the tele commuting. That combined with the quite simple medical advances made so far will ensure we avoid the scenes of uncovered corpses piling up in hospitals as seen elsewhere at the start of the year.
But cancelling Eid with only hours notice? Stupid decision without any thought to the social consequence. Telling pubs and shops they can reopen, so they stock up inventory and rehire and then closing them again? Economic sadism.
It was made clear to us yesterday that we can only have so much freedom. Now, and in the future.
By an unelected official with no platform, scrutiny or sanction.
Whilst another member of the SAGE politburo he leads at the same time threatened us with the army. With tanks on the streets if we don;t do as we're told.
We are now down to levels of deaths from covid 19 that match road accidents . We seem to have built a weird groupthink that we must get it to zero by banning all risk . The equivalent with road deaths would be to ban cars or at least get a bloke with a red flag walking in front of any car- and we have all ridiculed that for over a century
Road accidents are not infectious with a capacity to grow exponentially.
At present it looks horribly as if October = April + schools, the surviving non-essential retailers, perhaps hairdressers and nail bars, and masks absolutely everywhere.
Apart from primary schools, where sticking young children in masks is impractical, everything that can't be done without them is liable to be chucked on the bonfire to compensate for the disease spreading superpowers of kiddies, and that includes the gyms as well as the entire hospitality sector, save for takeaway restaurants.
Trying to operate any kind of obesity strategy, even if the Government actually had one in the first place, is entirely pointless given circumstances that are custom-made to promote sitting at home on our arses whilst getting more and more bored and depressed. I confidently predict that - even allowing for the impending Fatty Holocaust this Winter - the mean waist measurement of what's left of the population next year will be a good couple of inches bigger than it was in February. Accompanied, of course, by a rapidly building tidal wave of alcoholism, especially come December when it becomes apparent that family Christmas now means sticking on a paper crown and effecting forced, synthetic jollity on a Zoom call (whilst trying not to talk about the fact that several of the participants aren't there because they died of Covid-19, and some of the remainder face long-term unemployment and may very well end up sleeping under bridges by the Spring.)
Myself, I intend to take advantage of the gym and going out for meals as much as possible whilst those options still exist, and I think I've a reasonable chance of getting my September parental visits done before the hotels shut down and "non-essential" travel results in the levying of £100 fines. But Winter is going to be epically shit, complete with God alone knows how many millions out of work and a great tsunami of suicides.
@moonshine might be right and the consequences of fighting the virus may turn out in some ways to be worse than everyone carrying on as normal. I wonder if our government's slow response was partly because COVID-19 wasn't seen as being bad enough to shutdown society. The problem, of course, is that what really matters is how people, businesses and the media react.
As David says, people and businesses were altering their behaviour before the government mandated it. An interesting academic exercise would be to work out what the tipping point is - if the death rate had been half of what it has been, would that have been shrugged off? I suspect it might need to have been between a tenth and a fifth of what it has been for it to have not led to mass lockdowns.
Government should provide leadership to the country, but it has to do so within certain constraints. Simply saying "we need to get back to normal and simply aim to stop the NHS falling over" isn't an option because a fair number of people want to protect themselves and the people around them. The home working revolution isn't going away any time soon. So the government needs to work with the world as it is not as they think it should be.
We are now down to levels of deaths from covid 19 that match road accidents . We seem to have built a weird groupthink that we must get it to zero by banning all risk . The equivalent with road deaths would be to ban cars or at least get a bloke with a red flag walking in front of any car- and we have all ridiculed that for over a century
Road accidents are not infectious with a capacity to grow exponentially.
yes and that would mean the NHS would get busy again and we would get deaths like a typical bad flu year (it has a mortality rate of less than 0.5%)- Sad but not worth destroying the country for
We are now down to levels of deaths from covid 19 that match road accidents . We seem to have built a weird groupthink that we must get it to zero by banning all risk . The equivalent with road deaths would be to ban cars or at least get a bloke with a red flag walking in front of any car- and we have all ridiculed that for over a century
Road accidents are not infectious with a capacity to grow exponentially.
Some real idiots on here, should not be allowed out without supervision.
We are now down to levels of deaths from covid 19 that match road accidents . We seem to have built a weird groupthink that we must get it to zero by banning all risk . The equivalent with road deaths would be to ban cars or at least get a bloke with a red flag walking in front of any car- and we have all ridiculed that for over a century
Road accidents are not infectious with a capacity to grow exponentially.
We are now down to levels of deaths from covid 19 that match road accidents . We seem to have built a weird groupthink that we must get it to zero by banning all risk . The equivalent with road deaths would be to ban cars or at least get a bloke with a red flag walking in front of any car- and we have all ridiculed that for over a century
Road accidents are not infectious with a capacity to grow exponentially.
Some real idiots on here, should not be allowed out without supervision.</blockquot
We are now down to levels of deaths from covid 19 that match road accidents . We seem to have built a weird groupthink that we must get it to zero by banning all risk . The equivalent with road deaths would be to ban cars or at least get a bloke with a red flag walking in front of any car- and we have all ridiculed that for over a century
Road accidents are not infectious with a capacity to grow exponentially.
Some real idiots on here, should not be allowed out without supervision.
Was that directed at me, or were you agreeing?
Not that I’m saying I should be allowed out without supervision of course...
We are now down to levels of deaths from covid 19 that match road accidents . We seem to have built a weird groupthink that we must get it to zero by banning all risk . The equivalent with road deaths would be to ban cars or at least get a bloke with a red flag walking in front of any car- and we have all ridiculed that for over a century
The difference is that one has the potential to grow exponentially, and the other doesn't.
Lockdown got the death rate down from a thousand a day to a few tens a day, and the infection rate from probably 100 k a day to a few thousand a day. That was done at substantial cost in money and happiness.
And it's true that the treatment options are better now than in March, but if the controls are relaxed to the extent that R goes consistently above 1, the infection rate and death rate are likely to go up exponentially again.
We are now down to levels of deaths from covid 19 that match road accidents . We seem to have built a weird groupthink that we must get it to zero by banning all risk . The equivalent with road deaths would be to ban cars or at least get a bloke with a red flag walking in front of any car- and we have all ridiculed that for over a century
Road accidents are not infectious with a capacity to grow exponentially.
Some real idiots on here, should not be allowed out without supervision.
Was that directed at me, or were you agreeing?
Not that I’m saying I should be allowed out without supervision of course...
I think it was directed at me in Malcolm's juvenile way that he has
We are now down to levels of deaths from covid 19 that match road accidents . We seem to have built a weird groupthink that we must get it to zero by banning all risk . The equivalent with road deaths would be to ban cars or at least get a bloke with a red flag walking in front of any car- and we have all ridiculed that for over a century
Road accidents are not infectious with a capacity to grow exponentially.
Some real idiots on here, should not be allowed out without supervision.
At present it looks horribly as if October = April + schools, the surviving non-essential retailers, perhaps hairdressers and nail bars, and masks absolutely everywhere.
Apart from primary schools, where sticking young children in masks is impractical, everything that can't be done without them is liable to be chucked on the bonfire to compensate for the disease spreading superpowers of kiddies, and that includes the gyms as well as the entire hospitality sector, save for takeaway restaurants.
Trying to operate any kind of obesity strategy, even if the Government actually had one in the first place, is entirely pointless given circumstances that are custom-made to promote sitting at home on our arses whilst getting more and more bored and depressed. I confidently predict that - even allowing for the impending Fatty Holocaust this Winter - the mean waist measurement of what's left of the population next year will be a good couple of inches bigger than it was in February. Accompanied, of course, by a rapidly building tidal wave of alcoholism, especially come December when it becomes apparent that family Christmas now means sticking on a paper crown and effecting forced, synthetic jollity on a Zoom call (whilst trying not to talk about the fact that several of the participants aren't there because they died of Covid-19, and some of the remainder face long-term unemployment and may very well end up sleeping under bridges by the Spring.)
Myself, I intend to take advantage of the gym and going out for meals as much as possible whilst those options still exist, and I think I've a reasonable chance of getting my September parental visits done before the hotels shut down and "non-essential" travel results in the levying of £100 fines. But Winter is going to be epically shit, complete with God alone knows how many millions out of work and a great tsunami of suicides.
Apart from that everything's peachy.
The silver lining of economic ruin is that it may come to the rescue. People will simply decide that its worth the risk to stop living like this.
My hero is Andrew Bailey. It very much looks like he will not bankroll Rishi's spending any more. If the government wants to raise more debt it is on its own.
Earlier I said that simple does not mean easy to understand. Exponential growth is a good example of this.
And this is epidemiology which has to take into account far more variables than any nice simple Physics example (most of which are exponential decay tbh).
We are now down to levels of deaths from covid 19 that match road accidents . We seem to have built a weird groupthink that we must get it to zero by banning all risk . The equivalent with road deaths would be to ban cars or at least get a bloke with a red flag walking in front of any car- and we have all ridiculed that for over a century
The difference is that one has the potential to grow exponentially, and the other doesn't.
Lockdown got the death rate down from a thousand a day to a few tens a day, and the infection rate from probably 100 k a day to a few thousand a day. That was done at substantial cost in money and happiness.
And it's true that the treatment options are better now than in March, but if the controls are relaxed to the extent that R goes consistently above 1, the infection rate and death rate are likely to go up exponentially again.
At present it looks horribly as if October = April + schools, the surviving non-essential retailers, perhaps hairdressers and nail bars, and masks absolutely everywhere.
Apart from primary schools, where sticking young children in masks is impractical, everything that can't be done without them is liable to be chucked on the bonfire to compensate for the disease spreading superpowers of kiddies, and that includes the gyms as well as the entire hospitality sector, save for takeaway restaurants.
Trying to operate any kind of obesity strategy, even if the Government actually had one in the first place, is entirely pointless given circumstances that are custom-made to promote sitting at home on our arses whilst getting more and more bored and depressed. I confidently predict that - even allowing for the impending Fatty Holocaust this Winter - the mean waist measurement of what's left of the population next year will be a good couple of inches bigger than it was in February. Accompanied, of course, by a rapidly building tidal wave of alcoholism, especially come December when it becomes apparent that family Christmas now means sticking on a paper crown and effecting forced, synthetic jollity on a Zoom call (whilst trying not to talk about the fact that several of the participants aren't there because they died of Covid-19, and some of the remainder face long-term unemployment and may very well end up sleeping under bridges by the Spring.)
Myself, I intend to take advantage of the gym and going out for meals as much as possible whilst those options still exist, and I think I've a reasonable chance of getting my September parental visits done before the hotels shut down and "non-essential" travel results in the levying of £100 fines. But Winter is going to be epically shit, complete with God alone knows how many millions out of work and a great tsunami of suicides.
Apart from that everything's peachy.
The silver lining of economic ruin is that it may come to the rescue. People will simply decide that its worth the risk to stop living like this.
My hero is Andrew Bailey. It very much looks like he will not bankroll Rishi's spending any more. If the government wants to raise more debt it is on its own.
Do you have a source for that comment about Bailey? He gave an interview to Sky News a few weeks ago and I didn't get the sense that he viewed the QE as a one off.
We are now down to levels of deaths from covid 19 that match road accidents . We seem to have built a weird groupthink that we must get it to zero by banning all risk . The equivalent with road deaths would be to ban cars or at least get a bloke with a red flag walking in front of any car- and we have all ridiculed that for over a century
The difference is that one has the potential to grow exponentially, and the other doesn't.
Lockdown got the death rate down from a thousand a day to a few tens a day, and the infection rate from probably 100 k a day to a few thousand a day. That was done at substantial cost in money and happiness.
And it's true that the treatment options are better now than in March, but if the controls are relaxed to the extent that R goes consistently above 1, the infection rate and death rate are likely to go up exponentially again.
Indeed, the choice is not between "returning to normal" and "controlling the virus".
The only way to return to normal, is to control the virus. If people are scared witless of the virus then they won't go out, they won't go shopping and businesses will collapse even without any state mandated restrictions.
We are now down to levels of deaths from covid 19 that match road accidents . We seem to have built a weird groupthink that we must get it to zero by banning all risk . The equivalent with road deaths would be to ban cars or at least get a bloke with a red flag walking in front of any car- and we have all ridiculed that for over a century
Road accidents are not infectious with a capacity to grow exponentially.
(Thinks...) Well, if the cars crashed into broke into fast-moving pieces, each of which went on to crash into other cars, a bit like a nuclear chain reaction, that could work...
We are now down to levels of deaths from covid 19 that match road accidents . We seem to have built a weird groupthink that we must get it to zero by banning all risk . The equivalent with road deaths would be to ban cars or at least get a bloke with a red flag walking in front of any car- and we have all ridiculed that for over a century
Road accidents are not infectious with a capacity to grow exponentially.
Some real idiots on here, should not be allowed out without supervision.
Was that directed at me, or were you agreeing?
Not that I’m saying I should be allowed out without supervision of course...
Not at all, it was directed at the selfish poster with his "I am all right Jack" attitude and he then has the temerity to say I am juvenile, proving me correct.
We are now down to levels of deaths from covid 19 that match road accidents . We seem to have built a weird groupthink that we must get it to zero by banning all risk . The equivalent with road deaths would be to ban cars or at least get a bloke with a red flag walking in front of any car- and we have all ridiculed that for over a century
Road accidents are not infectious with a capacity to grow exponentially.
Some real idiots on here, should not be allowed out without supervision.
Was that directed at me, or were you agreeing?
Not that I’m saying I should be allowed out without supervision of course...
We are now down to levels of deaths from covid 19 that match road accidents . We seem to have built a weird groupthink that we must get it to zero by banning all risk . The equivalent with road deaths would be to ban cars or at least get a bloke with a red flag walking in front of any car- and we have all ridiculed that for over a century
The difference is that one has the potential to grow exponentially, and the other doesn't.
Lockdown got the death rate down from a thousand a day to a few tens a day, and the infection rate from probably 100 k a day to a few thousand a day. That was done at substantial cost in money and happiness.
And it's true that the treatment options are better now than in March, but if the controls are relaxed to the extent that R goes consistently above 1, the infection rate and death rate are likely to go up exponentially again.
Wrong.
Evidence?
Sweden.
Sweden is not the UK. The population density of Sweden is nothing like the UK.
My favourite remark about Sweden is that when people were told to stand 2 metres apart there, the response was "why do we need to be closer together than normal"?
But then you know that already. This point has been raised with you time and again already but you just wilfully ignore it. That makes me think you're trolling and not serious because nobody could be that silly as to ignore that.
We are now down to levels of deaths from covid 19 that match road accidents . We seem to have built a weird groupthink that we must get it to zero by banning all risk . The equivalent with road deaths would be to ban cars or at least get a bloke with a red flag walking in front of any car- and we have all ridiculed that for over a century
Road accidents are not infectious with a capacity to grow exponentially.
Some real idiots on here, should not be allowed out without supervision.
Was that directed at me, or were you agreeing?
Not that I’m saying I should be allowed out without supervision of course...
I read it as a directionless truism.
It was indeed, with some direction towards some of the selfish oiks on here who are only interested in themselves
Since last night, Susan Rice has retaken second favouritism from Karen Bass. In the last hour or so, Val Demings and Tammy Duckworth have shortened on Betfair. Joe Biden has said he will name his running mate in the first week in August; today, of course, is 1st August.
I'm still expecting Harris (and I'm OK with that) but if this were a feelgood blockbuster movie there's only one suitable ending. Michelle Obama.
Betting-wise, I'm neutral. From a political point of view, has Joe Biden overdone the teasing? His intention in naming the shortlist was to raise the profile of the women involved but the risk is building up expectations too high amongst supporters of the different candidates that Biden ends up disappointing too many.
Question on testing statistics if anyone knows the answer please: If someone tests positive who has already tested positive in the past, do they count as a positive test on that days statistics?
EG the Care Home my wife works at is testing all residents and all staff every week now. This week 3 residents tested positive, all 3 had been positive the previous week, so no3 positives but no new infections.
For the daily statistics would that count as 3 testing positive? Or none?
We are now down to levels of deaths from covid 19 that match road accidents . We seem to have built a weird groupthink that we must get it to zero by banning all risk . The equivalent with road deaths would be to ban cars or at least get a bloke with a red flag walking in front of any car- and we have all ridiculed that for over a century
Road accidents are not infectious with a capacity to grow exponentially.
Some real idiots on here, should not be allowed out without supervision.
Was that directed at me, or were you agreeing?
Not that I’m saying I should be allowed out without supervision of course...
Not at all, it was directed at the selfish poster with his "I am all right Jack" attitude and he then has the temerity to say I am juvenile, proving me correct.
The selfish are the ones who post about closing down pubs etc whilst still drawing their same guaranteed salary month on month or benefits whilst not considering the job losses for others that this madness is doing
We are now down to levels of deaths from covid 19 that match road accidents . We seem to have built a weird groupthink that we must get it to zero by banning all risk . The equivalent with road deaths would be to ban cars or at least get a bloke with a red flag walking in front of any car- and we have all ridiculed that for over a century
The difference is that one has the potential to grow exponentially, and the other doesn't.
Lockdown got the death rate down from a thousand a day to a few tens a day, and the infection rate from probably 100 k a day to a few thousand a day. That was done at substantial cost in money and happiness.
And it's true that the treatment options are better now than in March, but if the controls are relaxed to the extent that R goes consistently above 1, the infection rate and death rate are likely to go up exponentially again.
Wrong.
Evidence?
Sweden.
Sweden is not the UK. The population density of Sweden is nothing like the UK.
My favourite remark about Sweden is that when people were told to stand 2 metres apart there, the response was "why do we need to be closer together than normal"?
But then you know that already. This point has been raised with you time and again already but you just wilfully ignore it. That makes me think you're trolling and not serious because nobody could be that silly as to ignore that.
Its not a relevant point given the nature of Corona.
Are you seriously arguing that a pub or theatre full of Swedes would jnfect each other less than a pub full of Britons because Sweden is more spaced out than Britain is??
Look at Japan. A hundred and thirty million people squashed into to a group of mountainous islands. Corona?
Your excuses are just as spurious now as they always have been.
At present it looks horribly as if October = April + schools, the surviving non-essential retailers, perhaps hairdressers and nail bars, and masks absolutely everywhere.
Apart from primary schools, where sticking young children in masks is impractical, everything that can't be done without them is liable to be chucked on the bonfire to compensate for the disease spreading superpowers of kiddies, and that includes the gyms as well as the entire hospitality sector, save for takeaway restaurants.
Trying to operate any kind of obesity strategy, even if the Government actually had one in the first place, is entirely pointless given circumstances that are custom-made to promote sitting at home on our arses whilst getting more and more bored and depressed. I confidently predict that - even allowing for the impending Fatty Holocaust this Winter - the mean waist measurement of what's left of the population next year will be a good couple of inches bigger than it was in February. Accompanied, of course, by a rapidly building tidal wave of alcoholism, especially come December when it becomes apparent that family Christmas now means sticking on a paper crown and effecting forced, synthetic jollity on a Zoom call (whilst trying not to talk about the fact that several of the participants aren't there because they died of Covid-19, and some of the remainder face long-term unemployment and may very well end up sleeping under bridges by the Spring.)
Myself, I intend to take advantage of the gym and going out for meals as much as possible whilst those options still exist, and I think I've a reasonable chance of getting my September parental visits done before the hotels shut down and "non-essential" travel results in the levying of £100 fines. But Winter is going to be epically shit, complete with God alone knows how many millions out of work and a great tsunami of suicides.
Apart from that everything's peachy.
The silver lining of economic ruin is that it may come to the rescue. People will simply decide that its worth the risk to stop living like this.
My hero is Andrew Bailey. It very much looks like he will not bankroll Rishi's spending any more. If the government wants to raise more debt it is on its own.
yes Andrew Bailey has definitely told Sunak and Boris that the can cannot be kicked down the road (generations ) anymore. Good on him - Might inject the much needed backbone to get things back to normality
Bit like Labour party , they are exactly the same, they have been closing it down for 100 years but the scramble to get in is incredible.
If the Lords was 'elected' on a party list system based on GE vote-share, the SNP would be entitled to peerages, and their opposition to the HOL would not stand, because it wouldn't be 'an affront to democracy'. If that were the case, should they take them? Arise Baron Salmond of Banff and Buchan?
Question on testing statistics if anyone knows the answer please: If someone tests positive who has already tested positive in the past, do they count as a positive test on that days statistics?
EG the Care Home my wife works at is testing all residents and all staff every week now. This week 3 residents tested positive, all 3 had been positive the previous week, so no3 positives but no new infections.
For the daily statistics would that count as 3 testing positive? Or none?
To be honest Philip the Govt has made such a shambles of collecting the numbers and analysing the data that I don't think anyone can answer that question for you. It is a good question though and common sense says it should only be counted once. I would only count it twice if they had subsequently tested negative.
It would also be interesting in knowing the number of people being tested as there will be a large number of people who will be receiving multi tests like your wife. A nurse I know has now been tested more times than she can count including an an antibody test. This can't be uncommon and necessary.
At present it looks horribly as if October = April + schools, the surviving non-essential retailers, perhaps hairdressers and nail bars, and masks absolutely everywhere.
Apart from primary schools, where sticking young children in masks is impractical, everything that can't be done without them is liable to be chucked on the bonfire to compensate for the disease spreading superpowers of kiddies, and that includes the gyms as well as the entire hospitality sector, save for takeaway restaurants.
Trying to operate any kind of obesity strategy, even if the Government actually had one in the first place, is entirely pointless given circumstances that are custom-made to promote sitting at home on our arses whilst getting more and more bored and depressed. I confidently predict that - even allowing for the impending Fatty Holocaust this Winter - the mean waist measurement of what's left of the population next year will be a good couple of inches bigger than it was in February. Accompanied, of course, by a rapidly building tidal wave of alcoholism, especially come December when it becomes apparent that family Christmas now means sticking on a paper crown and effecting forced, synthetic jollity on a Zoom call (whilst trying not to talk about the fact that several of the participants aren't there because they died of Covid-19, and some of the remainder face long-term unemployment and may very well end up sleeping under bridges by the Spring.)
Myself, I intend to take advantage of the gym and going out for meals as much as possible whilst those options still exist, and I think I've a reasonable chance of getting my September parental visits done before the hotels shut down and "non-essential" travel results in the levying of £100 fines. But Winter is going to be epically shit, complete with God alone knows how many millions out of work and a great tsunami of suicides.
Apart from that everything's peachy.
The silver lining of economic ruin is that it may come to the rescue. People will simply decide that its worth the risk to stop living like this.
My hero is Andrew Bailey. It very much looks like he will not bankroll Rishi's spending any more. If the government wants to raise more debt it is on its own.
yes Andrew Bailey has definitely told Sunak and Boris that the can cannot be kicked down the road (generations ) anymore. Good on him - Might inject the much needed backbone to get things back to normality
Without this I am sure Sunak would be extending furlough yet again this very day. I cannot think of a reason why he wouldn't.
At present it looks horribly as if October = April + schools, the surviving non-essential retailers, perhaps hairdressers and nail bars, and masks absolutely everywhere.
Apart from primary schools, where sticking young children in masks is impractical, everything that can't be done without them is liable to be chucked on the bonfire to compensate for the disease spreading superpowers of kiddies, and that includes the gyms as well as the entire hospitality sector, save for takeaway restaurants.
Trying to operate any kind of obesity strategy, even if the Government actually had one in the first place, is entirely pointless given circumstances that are custom-made to promote sitting at home on our arses whilst getting more and more bored and depressed. I confidently predict that - even allowing for the impending Fatty Holocaust this Winter - the mean waist measurement of what's left of the population next year will be a good couple of inches bigger than it was in February. Accompanied, of course, by a rapidly building tidal wave of alcoholism, especially come December when it becomes apparent that family Christmas now means sticking on a paper crown and effecting forced, synthetic jollity on a Zoom call (whilst trying not to talk about the fact that several of the participants aren't there because they died of Covid-19, and some of the remainder face long-term unemployment and may very well end up sleeping under bridges by the Spring.)
Myself, I intend to take advantage of the gym and going out for meals as much as possible whilst those options still exist, and I think I've a reasonable chance of getting my September parental visits done before the hotels shut down and "non-essential" travel results in the levying of £100 fines. But Winter is going to be epically shit, complete with God alone knows how many millions out of work and a great tsunami of suicides.
Apart from that everything's peachy.
The silver lining of economic ruin is that it may come to the rescue. People will simply decide that its worth the risk to stop living like this.
My hero is Andrew Bailey. It very much looks like he will not bankroll Rishi's spending any more. If the government wants to raise more debt it is on its own.
yes Andrew Bailey has definitely told Sunak and Boris that the can cannot be kicked down the road (generations ) anymore. Good on him - Might inject the much needed backbone to get things back to normality
Without this I am sure Sunak would be extending furlough yet again this very day. I cannot think of a reason why he wouldn't.
Yes for a Conservative government it feels like we are in a highly controlled state run economy at the moment. Maybe why the left love lockdown so much and cant wait to argue pubs and anything fun should be shutting up again for the winter.
We are now down to levels of deaths from covid 19 that match road accidents . We seem to have built a weird groupthink that we must get it to zero by banning all risk . The equivalent with road deaths would be to ban cars or at least get a bloke with a red flag walking in front of any car- and we have all ridiculed that for over a century
Road accidents are not infectious with a capacity to grow exponentially.
Some real idiots on here, should not be allowed out without supervision.
Was that directed at me, or were you agreeing?
Not that I’m saying I should be allowed out without supervision of course...
Not at all, it was directed at the selfish poster with his "I am all right Jack" attitude and he then has the temerity to say I am juvenile, proving me correct.
The selfish are the ones who post about closing down pubs etc whilst still drawing their same guaranteed salary month on month or benefits whilst not considering the job losses for others that this madness is doing
Government are making a pig's ear of it for sure , I am not going to pub as my wife is shielding so not concerned there either. It needs some honest clever people to manage it and so that will never be the case whilst Tories are in power. Pretending it is nothing and going back to normal is NOT an option , we see already in England the rise from 800 a day to 4000 a day and if NHS gets overwhelmed it would be a complete disaster and not only for old codgers.
Bit like Labour party , they are exactly the same, they have been closing it down for 100 years but the scramble to get in is incredible.
If the Lords was 'elected' on a party list system based on GE vote-share, the SNP would be entitled to peerages, and their opposition to the HOL would not stand, because it wouldn't be 'an affront to democracy'. If that were the case, should they take them? Arise Baron Salmond of Banff and Buchan?
They have always said it was wrong and would never accept, only principled party in the UK. The greedy troughers not so much.
We are now down to levels of deaths from covid 19 that match road accidents . We seem to have built a weird groupthink that we must get it to zero by banning all risk . The equivalent with road deaths would be to ban cars or at least get a bloke with a red flag walking in front of any car- and we have all ridiculed that for over a century
The difference is that one has the potential to grow exponentially, and the other doesn't.
Lockdown got the death rate down from a thousand a day to a few tens a day, and the infection rate from probably 100 k a day to a few thousand a day. That was done at substantial cost in money and happiness.
And it's true that the treatment options are better now than in March, but if the controls are relaxed to the extent that R goes consistently above 1, the infection rate and death rate are likely to go up exponentially again.
Wrong.
Evidence?
Sweden.
The country that banned flights, gatherings over 50 people and closed down bars that broken social distancing rules?
Bit like Labour party , they are exactly the same, they have been closing it down for 100 years but the scramble to get in is incredible.
If the Lords was 'elected' on a party list system based on GE vote-share, the SNP would be entitled to peerages, and their opposition to the HOL would not stand, because it wouldn't be 'an affront to democracy'. If that were the case, should they take them? Arise Baron Salmond of Banff and Buchan?
The SNP has always had a position of not taking seats in the HoL (on whatever basis), if that changed my membership would certainly be finished.
Of course Salmond is not currently a member of the SNP..
At present it looks horribly as if October = April + schools, the surviving non-essential retailers, perhaps hairdressers and nail bars, and masks absolutely everywhere.
Apart from primary schools, where sticking young children in masks is impractical, everything that can't be done without them is liable to be chucked on the bonfire to compensate for the disease spreading superpowers of kiddies, and that includes the gyms as well as the entire hospitality sector, save for takeaway restaurants.
Trying to operate any kind of obesity strategy, even if the Government actually had one in the first place, is entirely pointless given circumstances that are custom-made to promote sitting at home on our arses whilst getting more and more bored and depressed. I confidently predict that - even allowing for the impending Fatty Holocaust this Winter - the mean waist measurement of what's left of the population next year will be a good couple of inches bigger than it was in February. Accompanied, of course, by a rapidly building tidal wave of alcoholism, especially come December when it becomes apparent that family Christmas now means sticking on a paper crown and effecting forced, synthetic jollity on a Zoom call (whilst trying not to talk about the fact that several of the participants aren't there because they died of Covid-19, and some of the remainder face long-term unemployment and may very well end up sleeping under bridges by the Spring.)
Myself, I intend to take advantage of the gym and going out for meals as much as possible whilst those options still exist, and I think I've a reasonable chance of getting my September parental visits done before the hotels shut down and "non-essential" travel results in the levying of £100 fines. But Winter is going to be epically shit, complete with God alone knows how many millions out of work and a great tsunami of suicides.
Apart from that everything's peachy.
The silver lining of economic ruin is that it may come to the rescue. People will simply decide that its worth the risk to stop living like this.
My hero is Andrew Bailey. It very much looks like he will not bankroll Rishi's spending any more. If the government wants to raise more debt it is on its own.
yes Andrew Bailey has definitely told Sunak and Boris that the can cannot be kicked down the road (generations ) anymore. Good on him - Might inject the much needed backbone to get things back to normality
Without this I am sure Sunak would be extending furlough yet again this very day. I cannot think of a reason why he wouldn't.
The idiots running the country have no clue, useless tw**s , and will always just take the easy option or use whatever they pluck out of their erse. I would not trust any of them to run a bath.
Bit like Labour party , they are exactly the same, they have been closing it down for 100 years but the scramble to get in is incredible.
If the Lords was 'elected' on a party list system based on GE vote-share, the SNP would be entitled to peerages, and their opposition to the HOL would not stand, because it wouldn't be 'an affront to democracy'. If that were the case, should they take them? Arise Baron Salmond of Banff and Buchan?
They have always said it was wrong and would never accept, only principled party in the UK. The greedy troughers not so much.
But they've said it was wrong on the basis that it is an affront to democracy to have an appointed upper house. If the upper house is elected, it's no longer an affront to democracy, and they would effectively be refusing to take their seats, Gerry Adams style, with the 'spare places' that would leave given to other parties. Should they not take them? Appreciate it's just hypothetical.
Bit like Labour party , they are exactly the same, they have been closing it down for 100 years but the scramble to get in is incredible.
If the Lords was 'elected' on a party list system based on GE vote-share, the SNP would be entitled to peerages, and their opposition to the HOL would not stand, because it wouldn't be 'an affront to democracy'. If that were the case, should they take them? Arise Baron Salmond of Banff and Buchan?
They have always said it was wrong and would never accept, only principled party in the UK. The greedy troughers not so much.
But they've said it was wrong on the basis that it is an affront to democracy to have an appointed upper house. If the upper house is elected, it's no longer an affront to democracy, and they would effectively be refusing to take their seats, Gerry Adams style, with the 'spare places' that would leave given to other parties. Should they not take them? Appreciate it's just hypothetical.
If the HOL was elected by the public similar to MP's then that is a different story. Currently it is a trough for chums of useless politicians and themselves on retirement to ensure they keep up their lifestyles of living entirely on the massive expenses they get so used to. Heaven forbid they had to dip into salaries or pensions and buy anything themselves. PS: they will never change it as they are desperate to get the free 300 a day plus expenses themselves just for turning up for subsidised food and drinks.
Since last night, Susan Rice has retaken second favouritism from Karen Bass. In the last hour or so, Val Demings and Tammy Duckworth have shortened on Betfair. Joe Biden has said he will name his running mate in the first week in August; today, of course, is 1st August.
I'm still expecting Harris (and I'm OK with that) but if this were a feelgood blockbuster movie there's only one suitable ending. Michelle Obama.
Betting-wise, I'm neutral. From a political point of view, has Joe Biden overdone the teasing? His intention in naming the shortlist was to raise the profile of the women involved but the risk is building up expectations too high amongst supporters of the different candidates that Biden ends up disappointing too many.
And we are not now going to find out who has been chosen till the week before the convention.
There's a powerful piece in the Washington Post on why Biden should NOT choose Rice
Bit like Labour party , they are exactly the same, they have been closing it down for 100 years but the scramble to get in is incredible.
If the Lords was 'elected' on a party list system based on GE vote-share, the SNP would be entitled to peerages, and their opposition to the HOL would not stand, because it wouldn't be 'an affront to democracy'. If that were the case, should they take them? Arise Baron Salmond of Banff and Buchan?
The SNP has always had a position of not taking seats in the HoL (on whatever basis), if that changed my membership would certainly be finished.
Of course Salmond is not currently a member of the SNP..
I did think that might be some SNP supporters' view, but it's surely just a visceral response to all the trappings, rather than a valid objection? The HOL is a revising chamber in a bicameral parliamentary system. Refusing to take seats would be disadvantageous (very marginally I grant you) to the causes of the SNP.
I am also not sure Salmond not being a member of the SNP would preclude his being on the SNP's list - but of course this is all theory. The system was devised by Ydoethur.
I know I'm a collectivist in an individualist age, but bear with me - after all, Johnson seems willing to pick and mix from any variety of belief. This situation calls for looking at society as a whole, helping the sectors that are most important, and compensating those that are least important and helping them adjust.
As David H says, education is crucial for direct and indirect reasons. In my opinion, cafes and restaurants in city centres are not. Sports arenas are not. Eyebrow-threading specialists and tattooists are not. People may disagree, but the Government should make some choices and stick with them. Having made the choices, they should recognise that the sectors being deliberately neglected in the national interest are suffering through no fault of their own, and they should get substantial, prolonged assistance to get through the crisis if we think if it temporary or completely remodel themselves if it's long-term.
Say you own a city centre cafe. The outlook doesn't look good. Should the Government urge people to go back to work so as to rescue you? Or should they merely point you at Universal Credit - sorry about your business, good luck getting a job stacking shelves? No, they should help you relocate your business to a suburb where most people live and, increasingly, work.
Sacrifices in times of crisis are inevitable, but unevenly distributed. Some of us are having no problem, personally. Tax us more and use the money to help those who are suffering for the sake of all of us.
All very sensible but this is precisely what the government is not doing. It is now withdrawing assistance to those sectors most badly affected. And if it closes down - again - those businesses which have reopened, without any further substantial and prolonged assistance then it is condemning millions to hopelessness and poverty. That is simply untenable, especially if those businesses have been operating without causing any increase in the virus in their areas.
If there have to be further lockdowns - whether temporary or by sector or geography - there simply has to be proper support for those affected for as long as it takes.
All the harms @David mentions will occur if people become unemployed and lose hope.
Comments
The danger for Unionists is if this practice becomes widespread general knowledge. Keep up the good work! 😆
Edit: and you miss the point anyway. What bearing do millions of survivors have on the severity of the situation? They just don't logically affect the argument one iota, any more than you can minimise anything - say, police brutality, racism, child abuse - by saying Yes, but look at the millions of people who aren't affected by it. So why do you refer to them?
But, being at risk at all kinds of things due to D Type I, I value the service.
We do actually have a couple of outside whiteboards, used by the PE Department, but they are only really big enough to say which group goes in which changing room, so unless you can summarise your notes more effectively than any other teacher I know that will probably not help.
As to the voice, I hadn’t thought about that, but I’m a bass...
I get the occasional complaint from teachers in next door labs that I’m basically teaching their class as well. I’m not shouting at anybody (I find getting quieter is a much more effective technique when I want to get tell someone off), but I think I do sometimes get over enthusiastic.
If we are playing the silly metaphor game...What if in 1980 we had said it was illegal to have unprotected intercourse in every circumstance, just in case husbands might catch HIV from their Saturday haircut and pass it on to their unsuspecting wives in the bedroom? We’d better keep this policy in place until there’s “long term data”, just as a precaution you understand.
There is risk in life. We should endeavour to enhance our understanding of risk and mitigate it as best as possible. But the mitigation should be kept in balance with innumerable other factors. Somewhere along the way society has lost this understanding.
It was a very sore trial, because not only did the thin walls mean I could hear every word, but that also meant I realised his lessons were utter shite. Quite hard work not to put my head in my hands at some of the stupid things he did.
Edit - I'm assuming that part about shite lessons wouldn't apply to you!
Though to some degree (please forgive an outsider's view of teaching) I think that teaching (education of any kind) should be based on delivering simple, and few, concepts, and having them stick. It's all very well the teacher conveying the depth, breadth and subtlety of their knowledge, but unless the pupil afterwards can do the same, it hasn't worked. Learning by wrote, chanting and calling etc. could all be done outside.
I have to go. Have a good morning.
Edit: I hope not and I think my colleagues would tell me if they thought they were.
But also, learning by chanting, or writing, or calling, is also pretty hard outside where you have no acoustic. Why do you think PA systems are popular?
I can make my voice heard in every corner of Gloucester cathedral, but I struggle to be heard across a 1/4 acre field.
TTFN.
As David H says, education is crucial for direct and indirect reasons. In my opinion, cafes and restaurants in city centres are not. Sports arenas are not. Eyebrow-threading specialists and tattooists are not. People may disagree, but the Government should make some choices and stick with them. Having made the choices, they should recognise that the sectors being deliberately neglected in the national interest are suffering through no fault of their own, and they should get substantial, prolonged assistance to get through the crisis if we think if it temporary or completely remodel themselves if it's long-term.
Say you own a city centre cafe. The outlook doesn't look good. Should the Government urge people to go back to work so as to rescue you? Or should they merely point you at Universal Credit - sorry about your business, good luck getting a job stacking shelves? No, they should help you relocate your business to a suburb where most people live and, increasingly, work.
Sacrifices in times of crisis are inevitable, but unevenly distributed. Some of us are having no problem, personally. Tax us more and use the money to help those who are suffering for the sake of all of us.
It DOES affect the young and healthy - they just have a far better chance of surviving (albeit with possibly painful and protracted hospital stays and even ICU)
It DOES have lingering and debilitating aftereffects in far too many.
Lockdowns/social distancing have heavily slowed the spread wherever they have been used. If a few million Brits getting it have resulted in 60,000 deaths, I think that extrapolating that if fifty to sixty million Brits got it (especially in earlier days when we had less understanding of what treatments worked and what didn’t), hundreds of thousands would have died is extremely plausible. Factor of ten in the input and a factor of ten in the output.
Countries that have tried to avoid such lockdowns haven’t saved their economies over countries that followed them. Check the Swedish economic impact against the Danish and Norwegian ones.
The lockdowns and restrictions are explicitly to buy time. We’ve already hugely improved treatments, and the vaccines are coming along amazingly well. I’d be surprised if there wasn’t at least one working safe vaccine approved by this winter.
Professor Graham Medley said watering holes may need to close in order to get children back to classes"
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8582925/SAGE-expert-warns-interventions-needed-schools-open-month.html
You would also be surprised how well we remember stories. I often find that years later an ex pupil will remember some anecdote that I threw in, although they couldn’t tell me the main point of the lesson the next day.
Oh, and it’s rote, not wrote. (Apologies for that, but it’s a teacher thing).
Repeat after me:
R O T E
R O T E
R O T E...
When I'm speaking to people within my profession, I have no more than 3 key things I want them to end up with at the end, and (hopefully) never forget. I think more just goes over the head. Your point about the story indicates this is true - it's nice that they remembered that, but would have been better if they'd remembered the main theme.
I'd also suggest that the R budget is quite a bit higher than 1 and the NHS can handle it now, the government needs to move on from the "protect the NHS" stance and tolerate a higher base level of infection now even if it means opening up those empty Nightingale hospitals.
And if you think Unionists are scared of the return of Salmond, I suggest you make every effort to depose Sturgeon in favour of him. And see what happens.
New lockdowns now (and no doubt a full national lockdown some time before Xmas) are not sensible because of what we now know. As I have already said, I do not believe you can extrapolate deaths so far to the whole population, because the government quite magically succeeded in shielding the generally fit and healthy and directing the infection towards those more likely to succumb by orders of magnitude.
If the only two things allowed in the Autumn are education and presumably Black Lives matter protests (nobody on the close everything down left seems to mind these for some reason) then it will be a miserable place and deaths from other things will be more than from covid 19
I think karma has just bitten me in the arse for taking the mickey out of DavidL's 'copywrite' yesterday.
One thing I learned early on in teaching is that simple is not the same as easy to understand.
Stick with the social distancing, the mask wearing, the tele commuting. That combined with the quite simple medical advances made so far will ensure we avoid the scenes of uncovered corpses piling up in hospitals as seen elsewhere at the start of the year.
But cancelling Eid with only hours notice? Stupid decision without any thought to the social consequence. Telling pubs and shops they can reopen, so they stock up inventory and rehire and then closing them again? Economic sadism.
By an unelected official with no platform, scrutiny or sanction.
Whilst another member of the SAGE politburo he leads at the same time threatened us with the army. With tanks on the streets if we don;t do as we're told.
That is where we are.
Apart from primary schools, where sticking young children in masks is impractical, everything that can't be done without them is liable to be chucked on the bonfire to compensate for the disease spreading superpowers of kiddies, and that includes the gyms as well as the entire hospitality sector, save for takeaway restaurants.
Trying to operate any kind of obesity strategy, even if the Government actually had one in the first place, is entirely pointless given circumstances that are custom-made to promote sitting at home on our arses whilst getting more and more bored and depressed. I confidently predict that - even allowing for the impending Fatty Holocaust this Winter - the mean waist measurement of what's left of the population next year will be a good couple of inches bigger than it was in February. Accompanied, of course, by a rapidly building tidal wave of alcoholism, especially come December when it becomes apparent that family Christmas now means sticking on a paper crown and effecting forced, synthetic jollity on a Zoom call (whilst trying not to talk about the fact that several of the participants aren't there because they died of Covid-19, and some of the remainder face long-term unemployment and may very well end up sleeping under bridges by the Spring.)
Myself, I intend to take advantage of the gym and going out for meals as much as possible whilst those options still exist, and I think I've a reasonable chance of getting my September parental visits done before the hotels shut down and "non-essential" travel results in the levying of £100 fines. But Winter is going to be epically shit, complete with God alone knows how many millions out of work and a great tsunami of suicides.
Apart from that everything's peachy.
As David says, people and businesses were altering their behaviour before the government mandated it. An interesting academic exercise would be to work out what the tipping point is - if the death rate had been half of what it has been, would that have been shrugged off? I suspect it might need to have been between a tenth and a fifth of what it has been for it to have not led to mass lockdowns.
Government should provide leadership to the country, but it has to do so within certain constraints. Simply saying "we need to get back to normal and simply aim to stop the NHS falling over" isn't an option because a fair number of people want to protect themselves and the people around them. The home working revolution isn't going away any time soon. So the government needs to work with the world as it is not as they think it should be.
Not that I’m saying I should be allowed out without supervision of course...
Lockdown got the death rate down from a thousand a day to a few tens a day, and the infection rate from probably 100 k a day to a few thousand a day. That was done at substantial cost in money and happiness.
And it's true that the treatment options are better now than in March, but if the controls are relaxed to the extent that R goes consistently above 1, the infection rate and death rate are likely to go up exponentially again.
My hero is Andrew Bailey. It very much looks like he will not bankroll Rishi's spending any more. If the government wants to raise more debt it is on its own.
And this is epidemiology which has to take into account far more variables than any nice simple Physics example (most of which are exponential decay tbh).
Evidence?
Sweden.
The only way to return to normal, is to control the virus. If people are scared witless of the virus then they won't go out, they won't go shopping and businesses will collapse even without any state mandated restrictions.
I'll get my lab coat.
My favourite remark about Sweden is that when people were told to stand 2 metres apart there, the response was "why do we need to be closer together than normal"?
But then you know that already. This point has been raised with you time and again already but you just wilfully ignore it. That makes me think you're trolling and not serious because nobody could be that silly as to ignore that.
https://twitter.com/Otto_English/status/1289213067562061824?s=20
EG the Care Home my wife works at is testing all residents and all staff every week now. This week 3 residents tested positive, all 3 had been positive the previous week, so no3 positives but no new infections.
For the daily statistics would that count as 3 testing positive? Or none?
Are you seriously arguing that a pub or theatre full of Swedes would jnfect each other less than a pub full of Britons because Sweden is more spaced out than Britain is??
Look at Japan. A hundred and thirty million people squashed into to a group of mountainous islands. Corona?
Your excuses are just as spurious now as they always have been.
https://www.warringtonguardian.co.uk/news/18621693.warrington-mp-hits-claire-fox-gets-house-lords-seat/
It would also be interesting in knowing the number of people being tested as there will be a large number of people who will be receiving multi tests like your wife. A nurse I know has now been tested more times than she can count including an an antibody test. This can't be uncommon and necessary.
Pretending it is nothing and going back to normal is NOT an option , we see already in England the rise from 800 a day to 4000 a day and if NHS gets overwhelmed it would be a complete disaster and not only for old codgers.
(That karma's really piling up...)
Of course Salmond is not currently a member of the SNP..
Interesting article.
PS: they will never change it as they are desperate to get the free 300 a day plus expenses themselves just for turning up for subsidised food and drinks.
Lead does seem to have dropped
There's a powerful piece in the Washington Post on why Biden should NOT choose Rice
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/31/why-would-biden-pick-human-lightning-rod-vp/
I am also not sure Salmond not being a member of the SNP would preclude his being on the SNP's list - but of course this is all theory. The system was devised by Ydoethur.
If there have to be further lockdowns - whether temporary or by sector or geography - there simply has to be proper support for those affected for as long as it takes.
All the harms @David mentions will occur if people become unemployed and lose hope.