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OwlFancier posted:Ash going on the telly and killing gammony old men through horny/rage induced heart attacks is praxis. I'm pretty sure if she and AOC ever did something together the angry racist boners generated would cause the Terran mantle to implode.
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Mar 10, 2021 23:31
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WhatEvil posted:[Numbers fuckery]
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Mar 10, 2021 23:39
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Yeah WhatEvil that breakdown of the insane amount of money laundering going on is fantastic work. Is this what the cleaner Canadian air does to you?
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Mar 10, 2021 23:42
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I am starting to wonder if this government is just trying to squeeze as much money out of the country as possible before it implodes, and becomes a failed state.
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Mar 10, 2021 23:44
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The Donut posted:I am starting to wonder if this government is just trying to squeeze as much money out of the country as possible before it implodes, and becomes a failed state. ...you're only just starting to wonder this?
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Mar 10, 2021 23:45
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At the top end estimate of about 1Bn/hospital in extremis, T&T has cost as much as it would have cost to build, brand new well over the 40 hospitals the floppy fuckhole promised.
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Mar 10, 2021 23:46
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£37bn was ~70% of our pre-covid national deficit.
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Mar 10, 2021 23:53
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So on the ADHD stuff. This thread convinced me to go for a test. So I paid 500 for a private diagnosis. Next steps are tests which I managed to get booked through the NHS due to having another health issue that overlapped and gave justification for full blood work and an ECG. My question is... What next? It's 250 per follow up appt. privately and yeah I can start meds but I'm going to have to pay 50 to 100 per month for the meds and to adjust and manage it it's 250 again each time I need to do that. From what people say this is going to require constant management but the wait time is 18 months minimum to get on the NHS. Am I basically stuck paying out of pocket til the wait list is over?
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Mar 10, 2021 23:56
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Was the £37 billion just for the contact tracing, or was it the cost of the testing as well?
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Mar 10, 2021 23:58
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To strengthen that argument, should it gather steam, you'd need to consider what parts are trace vs what parts are test - how much of that went on developing the tests in the first place? You'd also have to consider storage requirements for the trace part. That report on the number of fatalities caused by the excel error might have some info on it.
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Mar 11, 2021 00:00
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Bobby Deluxe posted:congratulations you have done more journalism in one post than the entire british media has done in an entire loving year Tesseraction posted:Yeah WhatEvil that breakdown of the insane amount of money laundering going on is fantastic work. Is this what the cleaner Canadian air does to you? Thanks peeps. Very timely, I've just also seen this tweet: https://twitter.com/jon_trickett/status/1369557856815620096?s=20 And again it's easy to think "Oh wow they're spending a lot of money on consultants!" but again 715m is less than a fiftieth of the total spent on it all. So even listing something as insane-sounding as that, doesn't even begin to scratch the surface.
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Mar 11, 2021 00:00
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Tesseraction posted:I'm pretty sure if she and AOC ever did something together the angry racist boners generated would cause the Terran mantle to implode. She's already joined streams with breadtubers so it's not outside the realm of possibility. Do UK racists care about her though? I don't really hear her talked about outside of the information superhighway.
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Mar 11, 2021 00:02
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The Donut posted:I am starting to wonder if this government is just trying to squeeze as much money out of the country as possible before it implodes, and becomes a failed state. Welcome to, oh, nine or ten years ago? Everything the Tories have done over the last decade has been the act of a party that was sure it would never be elected again. They just managed to push exactly the right buttons in exactly the right way to ensure that the stupid and the bigoted keep voting for them in large enough numbers.
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Mar 11, 2021 00:05
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WhatEvil posted:Oh yeah. On the 37 Billion quid thing. 1) wasting 37 billion pounds to make a phone app that barely works, staff a call centre, and forward some test kits through the mail is the sort of performance that gets you set up for life with a neverending stream of sinecures and board memberships 2) if the whole thing is as stupid as we suspect then in addition to a bunch of minimum wage people doing the actual work you subcontract anything not nailed down to your mates from uni. for example if I were responsible for buying PCs for the workers I'd make sure to ask them to come up with some custom system specially designed for the hard task of typing numbers into spreadsheets (actually just whatever they could bulk buy on the cheap from like Viglen or Dell or whatever, with the sole customisation being they clicked the 500GB HDD option instead of the 120GB SSD), price that system at 30k with an added support contract (picking the thing up and sending it to the original supplier for repair) for another 10k/year. Buy two for each employee to make sure nobody ever sits idle because of technical difficulties. 3) for the actual testing being done i'm sure you can tack on some absolutely outrageous costs and claim it's unavoidable r&d/infrastructure spending 4) don't forget salaries and bonuses about 10x higher than a normal person would think they should be for anyone in upper management to ensure the enterprise attracts top talent (top talents somehow turns out to be the rest of your mates from uni) suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 00:11 on Mar 11, 2021 |
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Mar 11, 2021 00:09
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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OwlFancier posted:What it suggests it that heredity is not a necessary requirement to be a monarchy. Linguistically, nothing is a necessary requirement for anything to be anything. Language simply doesn’t work that way. Even the most defining feature of monarchy, rule by one person, is not actually necessary. Sparta had a weird (and incredibly bad) system of two Kings. No doubt you could draw up one of those alignment chart memes with the Lion King at top left, and the Tiger King at bottom right. Nevertheless, the world remains organized in the way it is. Hereditary and elective monarchies are different political systems. When simulated by Crusader Kings, different code runs. In the real world, different things tend to happen. They would remain functionally useful categories even if this discussion were taking place in a language that didn’t even have words for those things.
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Mar 11, 2021 00:11
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marktheando posted:Was the £37 billion just for the contact tracing, or was it the cost of the testing as well? £10bn was for testing, as per here: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-56340831 (article from today) quote:Some £10bn has been set aside for rapid testing, which is currently being used in schools in England as well as being sent to employers. And that's the first time I've been able to find how many people are employed in contact tracing. So 12k. So if you take the remaining £27bn, take off £715m for those sodding consultants, and divide the rest by 12000 people, you get £2.19m per person. It's insane. Whatever you add in the numbers are still like 50 times too big. It's not even like "Well it should only be half as much really!" it's many many multiples off what any sane person could justify.
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Mar 11, 2021 00:13
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Bobby Deluxe posted:congratulations you have done more journalism in one post than the entire british media has done in an entire loving year yeah but that's dangerous because it'd suggest the government is, in fact, a bunch of useless corrupt fucks. we can't undermine public confidence like that
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Mar 11, 2021 00:13
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radmonger posted:Linguistically, I'm gonna swirlie you in a fuckin toilet
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Mar 11, 2021 00:14
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The Donut posted:I am starting to wonder if this government is just trying to squeeze as much money out of the country as possible before it implodes, and becomes a failed state. if i were a tory minister that's what i would've been doing from the day of the brexit vote at the very least
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Mar 11, 2021 00:18
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suck my woke dick posted:
Before the millenium {{doodly do doodly do}} and I was working at Railtrack. This guy suddenly appeared at a desk near mine who looked about 12 years old - fresh new graduate taken on as a 'consultant'. He kept going on about how he had been headhunted for millenium bug work. He didn't even know how to format a column width in Excel and used to keep asking me how to do things! I didn't want to know about how much he was being paid. Another time I was working in the NHS and sharing an office with a woman in charge of monitoring huge capital budgets - she used to type numbers into excel, add them up on her calculator (or whatever calculation was required) and then type that number in. No idea how to use formulae. So everytime a number changed she had to add up all these numbers again. We had a big row once (so loud the boss' boss said to my boss "I didn't know whether to intervene or barricade myself in my office and hide under the desk") and my boss said 'she works so hard' and I said 'do you know what she does? It takes her 4 hours to do what I could do with a single half an hour to set up the formulae and a minute or two work every time a number changes.'. Jaeluni Asjil fucked around with this message at 00:21 on Mar 11, 2021 |
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Mar 11, 2021 00:18
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radmonger posted:Linguistically, nothing is a necessary requirement for anything to be anything. Language simply doesn’t work that way. Even the most defining feature of monarchy, rule by one person, is not actually necessary. Sparta had a weird (and incredibly bad) system of two Kings. From my cursory knowledge of history, most monarchy seems to pass down by who manages to murder who first.
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Mar 11, 2021 00:20
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:Before the millenium {{doodly do doodly do}} and I was working at Railtrack. quote:Another time I was working in the NHS and sharing an office with a woman in charge of monitoring huge capital budgets - she used to type numbers into excel, add them up on her calculator (or whatever calculation was required) and then type that number in. No idea how to use formulae. So everytime a number changed she had to add up all these numbers again. We had a big row once (so loud the boss' boss said to my boss "I didn't know whether to intervene or barricade myself in my office and hide under the desk") and my boss said 'she works so hard' and I said 'do you know what she does? It takes her 4 hours to do what I could do with a single half an hour to set up the formulae and a minute or two work every time a number changes.'. See also: Graeber, D (2018): Bullshit Jobs. Simon & Schuster, New York, USA.
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Mar 11, 2021 00:29
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:Before the millenium {{doodly do doodly do}} and I was working at Railtrack. There seems to be this absolute expectation in corporate environments that money can and should be spent on expensive consultants and contractors who don't do anything and vanish moments before it turns out the project they've been delivering or overseeing doesn't work at all, and all the lower level staff know it's bullshit and that these people usually add nothing. I have no idea if it's because when you get to a certain level of seniority, you just start buying into all that bullshit; if it's headcount fuckery to avoid adding permanent staff to the pension scheme at all costs; or if it's because senior people spend their time going to networking events and get bought drinks by people who run consultancy firms and source contractors for them. The large corporate I work at, we've had repeated situations where following restructuring and redundancies for permanent staff, key systems have been left maintained by expensive contractors who then walk at the end of their contract (because they know they can just walk into a new job paying more, that's why they contract) meaning we've had to rush around finding even more expensive contractors to replace them, but somehow we still don't bother trying to find permanent staff even though they're systems we can't function without.
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Mar 11, 2021 00:29
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Mebh posted:So on the ADHD stuff. This thread convinced me to go for a test. So I paid 500 for a private diagnosis. Next steps are tests which I managed to get booked through the NHS due to having another health issue that overlapped and gave justification for full blood work and an ECG. Once you have your diagnosis and your meds have been appropriately adjusted (which will take a couple of follow-up appointments most likely) you can just take the prescription to your GP and, assuming they are cool with it which they mostly will be, get the drugs on the NHS.
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Mar 11, 2021 00:30
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The only difference between a monarchy and a mafia is that the former used far more violence to take control to begin with.
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Mar 11, 2021 00:30
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Mar 11, 2021 00:50
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Maugrim posted:Once you have your diagnosis and your meds have been appropriately adjusted (which will take a couple of follow-up appointments most likely) you can just take the prescription to your GP and, assuming they are cool with it which they mostly will be, get the drugs on the NHS. Ah that's good. Even my doctor was scratching his head trying to work out how best to proceed. In the end he just said gently caress it and ordered all the tests. He's been SUPER helpful and trying to sort it out. I've got the diagnosis at least from private. Combined type, moderate. I've saved enough to pay for a few rounds of adjusting so here's hoping for no complications. This thread and you lot are all amazing by the by.
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Mar 11, 2021 00:50
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Danger - Octopus! posted:There seems to be this absolute expectation in corporate environments that money can and should be spent on expensive consultants and contractors who don't do anything and vanish moments before it turns out the project they've been delivering or overseeing doesn't work at all, and all the lower level staff know it's bullshit and that these people usually add nothing. having been on the junior (potential hirees for extremely pointless expensive consulting work) side of careers and networking events where the sort of people involved in this poo poo turn up, i can assure you it's all of the above. if you're the graduate with a 2:1 or 1 oxbridge degree but no clue about how to do anything with your degree then you think you're hot poo poo and can solve any problem by applying your 1337 essay writing skillz to it (maybe throw in an incorrectly chosen maths method for the question if you did econ or physics). if you're a senior person you're probably a former clueless 2:1 or 1 oxbridge degree holder who is now a clueless 2:1 or 1 oxbridge degree holder with 10 more years worth of ego under your belt, so chances are you're going to hire people who are similar to you, perpetuating the cycle. if you're a manager at the client organisation, you're probably also a former clueless 2:1 or 1 oxbridge degree holder who is now a clueless 2:1 or 1 oxbridge degree holder with 15 more years worth of ego under your belt, so you'll get along just fine with whoever the consultancy sends but can't relate to any concerns from your underlings like "actually the consultant has dumb ideas" and "here are some specific ways poo poo is getting run into the ground". also the consultants will write a report that says mission accomplished with some pretty charts in it before they gently caress off, obviously it's your incompetent underlings' fault when everything goes to poo poo three weeks later. note: due to updated hiring practices some of the clueless elites at various levels may now have degrees from a third tier institution such as every university that's not oxbridge or durham/st andrews/imperial, but they'll probably be just as loving useless due to the general state of uk higher education very anecdotally, a friend of mine was too black and sane to do top tier uk based consultant work so she got hired to do something vaguely useful sounding in nigeria. it sounded like she was going to be an upper middle management type/project coordinator for some development aid thingy but it turned out to be run by some western funder that's actually a disorganised mess on the inside. they put her in charge of a preexisting team of people who were neither actually qualified to do the jobs they were hired for nor willing to follow either general or step by step instructions, eventually she broke down and started doing all their work for them 
suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 00:56 on Mar 11, 2021 |
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Mar 11, 2021 00:53
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also expect extra comedy if your organisation hires mckinsey. the consultants mckinsey sends will act like smug assholes, but that's not just because they're actually smug assholes, it's because mckinsey does branding by making sure anyone in a client facing role acts like the exact same kind of smug rear end in a top hat
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Mar 11, 2021 01:04
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You ever feel like perhaps business people are all just really weird dom/sub fetishists or something?
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Mar 11, 2021 01:06
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OwlFancier posted:You ever feel like perhaps business people are all just really weird dom/sub fetishists or something? yes but we didn't consent to participate in their kink
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Mar 11, 2021 01:07
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OwlFancier posted:You ever feel like perhaps business people are all just really weird dom/sub fetishists or something? 
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Mar 11, 2021 01:10
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suck my woke dick posted:also expect extra comedy if your organisation hires mckinsey. the consultants mckinsey sends will act like smug assholes, but that's not just because they're actually smug assholes, it's because mckinsey does branding by making sure anyone in a client facing role acts like the exact same kind of smug rear end in a top hat Oh god they got them in one place I worked. At the time I was wondering what to do for a career (was just finishing off writing up my PhD) and I thought their work looked interesting. Anyway, then they had a documentary on tv following them about and one of their upper echelons said "We don't hire people over 38 years old because they are inflexible." As someone of 41 years of age at the time who had chucked in a reasonably high paying job to go back to uni to do my PhD, I thought - who is the 'inflexible' one here?
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Mar 11, 2021 01:13
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OwlFancier posted:You ever feel like perhaps business people are all just really weird dom/sub fetishists or something? I was amazed to discover years ago after being sent out by my job to talk to other companies as a publisher that most CEOs are career CEOs. They had money from parents out of uni and just started businesses as a career repeatedly. They never held real jobs outside of maybe a paper round as a teen. CTOs and CFOs seem to be the ones that work their way up more often but are often hired for far less than the CEOs to fix their lovely business choices before they mysteriously exit the business with a massive dividend. It really is a huge loving scam. They have no skills other than usually a commanding presence and they earn an ungodly amount for basically loving everything up.
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Mar 11, 2021 01:14
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WhatEvil posted:£10bn was for testing, as per here: £37bn is an insane amount of money but worth keeping discussions over figures factual here. Trying to divvie up £37bn (or even £27bn) as if that has been spent on trace is not really right. It is allocated funding covering a two year period. The vast majority is allocated towards testing and only a small amount has actually been spent. The allocations have been in three stages: initially, £15bn was allocated for 2020-21. The spending review added £7bn to bring it to £22bn, and then then the latest budget committed a further £15bn for 2021-22 bringing the total budget allocated to £37bn covering 2020-2022. Because the data does not exist for expenditure since end of the year, the caveat is that we have to use the December 2020 expenditure data. But it still gives you an idea of how that £37bn will be allocated. Of the £15bn initial allocation, only £1.3bn (less than 10%) was allocated to trace (and about £730m of that was for the call handler contracts (where you got your 12,000 figure)). The rest was pretty much all for testing. The further £7bn in the SR was, likewise, predominantly for testing. And it's worth noting that as of the Dec 2020 data, despite having a £22bn 2020-21 budget at this stage, it had only actually signed contracts for £7bn with the rest to come later (noting it has to do so before end of FY so no idea if on track or not). I'm not disputing that £37bn is a ridiculous amount of money, nor am I making any comment on how good or not test & trace has or hasn't been. But, if you want to dig in and be critical of how the government is spending money you at least need to be using the right facts and figures. As amusing as it is to claim they are spending £2.19 million per tracing consultant, it's also just plain false and doesn't help have proper debate over where the system has failed. If you use similar proportions as per 2020-21 budget allocations (so let's say 10-15% of the £36bn ends up going to trace) then that ends up being approx. £1.5-2bn per yr. This gets us firmly into "lots of overpaid consultants and some very pricey public procurements contracts" territory rather than "we are 50 orders of magnitude out here and billions have been secretly funnelled away in some corrupt conspiracy. My sources here are the National Audit Office report on Test & Trace (Dec 2020) and the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee report (March 2021). Ewan fucked around with this message at 01:27 on Mar 11, 2021 |
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Mar 11, 2021 01:15
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Maugrim posted:Once you have your diagnosis and your meds have been appropriately adjusted (which will take a couple of follow-up appointments most likely) you can just take the prescription to your GP and, assuming they are cool with it which they mostly will be, get the drugs on the NHS. There’s a big ‘if’ there though. I’m prescribed Ritalin for ADHD and Buproprion as an off-label anti depressant. Together these come to about £90 a month with a private prescription. Some of you may remember me posting about the troubles I had with my London GP this time last year, where they ended up cutting me off and leaving me with zero reserves for reasons that they never bothered to explain. However today I finally plucked up the nerve to call the lovely GP in the next village over to see what could be done. Got a call-back from the Doctor himself in less than an hour, and was told ‘we need to figure out how to make this work, but we will. Have a month’s supply to be going on with.’ I don’t know if it’s possible, but if you do have issues getting prescriptions then changing GP can work wonders.
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Mar 11, 2021 01:23
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one of the main reasons anglo business and increasingly public service is so loving weird and stupid is the generalisation of professional managerial culture to ever more levels of management. the general assumption is that everything going on in your widget manufacturing operation or insert service type tertiary sector entity can be reduced to a flowchart with some numbers on the arrows and an excel graph that pops up if you click on the arrows, meaning that someone with an MBA and the right connections is the absolute best person for the job in all circumstances. sure it helps to have a general overview so you can take a step back and confirm there are no obvious red flags for your overall business, but i'm sure i don't need to explain itt why just wanting to tweak the numbers on the arrows without understanding the actual work represented by the arrows can lead to dumb results. once you have top tier managers with this mindset they'll prefer to hire mid tier managers with this mindset etc. until you hit a barrier somewhere around the actual line managers who actually need to know enough to be able to assign work to the proles. your top and mid tier managers will then be tempted to hire consultants whenever they aren't happy with key performance indicators or need to solve an actual problem that wasn't explained during their mba (or they were extremely hungover during the relevant lecture due to networking very hard the night before), and those consultants better be extremely smart and qualified (have a 2:1 or 1 oxbridge degree in almost any subject + work for a consultancy that sounds impressive enough for the magnitude of the task). contrast this to small and medium enterprises in german manufacturing, and even some larger companies. there, it's expected to have at least a few people with actual working, physics or engineering backgrounds at the uppermost management level, ensuring that in every board meeting that there's someone present who can say "no actually that's stupid poo poo and will bankrupt us". obviously many tertiary sector companies and government departments in germany are now run by PMC damaged idiots so you could even make the same comparison within the country there. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 01:41 on Mar 11, 2021 |
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Mar 11, 2021 01:26
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Ewan posted:£37bn is an insane amount of money but worth keeping discussions over figures factual here. Trying to divvie up £37bn (or even £27bn) as if that has been spent on trace is not really right. It is allocated funding covering a two year period. The vast majority is allocated towards testing and only a small amount has actually been spent. OK fair enough, I've got a few things wrong. Thanks for the correction. Still though, if you say that £33bn has been spent or allocated on testing, well there have been 96m tests in the UK so far... that's £343 per test. I can't find the figures for what the tests are costing the UK but the Ontario government has said that each test has cost them $48CAD which is £27. We're still an order of magnitude off. E: And I believe that $48CAD is the *total cost* for each test, too, including staffing, premises, the actual physical cost of components (swabs, chemicals, PPE and stuff), etc. WhatEvil fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Mar 11, 2021 |
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Mar 11, 2021 01:27
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:Oh god they got them in one place I worked. At the time I was wondering what to do for a career (was just finishing off writing up my PhD) and I thought their work looked interesting. Anyway, then they had a documentary on tv following them about and one of their upper echelons said "We don't hire people over 38 years old because they are inflexible." i'd bet money that the origin of that policy is extremely stupid. something along the lines of an idiot reading about the typical age of fields medalists, switching on his big brain and thinking that yes, 99% of the people mckinsey hire will be of the caliber of a fields medalist and also all problems mckinsey solve are comparable to mathematical proofs. the standard career path suggested to graduates looking to sell out is: get hired at mckinsey (impressive looking degree certificate + culture fit + good score in maths/logic/reading comprehension test that's not that hard but under extreme time pressure) suffer through 70h work weeks for 3 years either quit to some cozier job or get a mckinsey subsidised further degree with obligation to come back for i think 1-2 years at a minimum (they give you a budget for a 1 year mba or a 3 year phd) work the mandatory 1-2 years either quit to some cozier job or work some more years and fall further up the ladder if you're an extreme masochist get placed in a sinecure for the rest of your life (mckinsey actually hires people who can find you one) because after over a decade in mckinsey world you're a broken person
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Mar 11, 2021 01:34
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WhatEvil posted:OK fair enough, I've got a few things wrong. Thanks for the correction. My local pharmacy does PCR tests at £40 a pop, so i'd imagine cost to the NHS would be significantly lower.
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Mar 11, 2021 01:36
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