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WhatEvil posted:OK fair enough, I've got a few things wrong. Thanks for the correction. i think the key number is how much has already been spent on 96m tests. i'd suspect it ends up around 100 a pop to squeeze in everyone's profits even after you've already claimed all possible r&d/infrastructure costs suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 01:50 on Mar 11, 2021 |
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Mar 11, 2021 01:47
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Kinda off topic but the corruption talk reminded me of a personal crack ping moment I had a while ago: Working in academia one of the things you get pelted with spam for is fake conferences. But what I didn’t realise until a colleague told me about it was that there’s fake conferences where the attendee knows it’s fake and the whole thing is basically a tag-team scam on the academic institution to give the ‘conference’ organiser some cash and the academic an expenses-paid holiday.
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Mar 11, 2021 01:52
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TACD posted:Kinda off topic but the corruption talk reminded me of a personal crack ping moment I had a while ago: Not a fake conference story but when I was doing my PhD, each full-time doctoral student in my department was allowed funding for 1 international conference in their 3 years funding. Typically, when it was my turn the relevant conference was in ruddy Birmingham (UK not Alabama). Why couldn't I get Vietnam or one of those places where it happened more or less on alternate years? 
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Mar 11, 2021 01:57
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TACD posted:Kinda off topic but the corruption talk reminded me of a personal crack ping moment I had a while ago: Yup. There was some reporting on the issue where an investigative journalist submitted a fake paper to predatory publishers and conference organisers, and when they turned up at the conference some people admitted they needed to use up their travel budget and got a free trip to NYC out of it exactly like you say. Apparently there is an actual family business where every family member jets to a different conference venue twice a week to collect money holding this kind of """conference""". e: also everyone who showed up got a best talk in conference award, some professors' websites actually list these 
suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 02:00 on Mar 11, 2021 |
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Mar 11, 2021 01:57
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:Not a fake conference story but when I was doing my PhD, each full-time doctoral student in my department was allowed funding for 1 international conference in their 3 years funding. Typically, when it was my turn the relevant conference was in ruddy Birmingham (UK not Alabama). Why couldn't I get Vietnam or one of those places where it happened more or less on alternate years? during the previous generation of phd students in my lab everyone went to prague together. the only woman in the lab at the time picked the group accomodation and it turned out to be the upper floor of a strip club (free viewing experience and mobsters next door included)
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Mar 11, 2021 02:05
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Triple post! The Britishest of twinks and person who somehow hosed up hard enough to drop out of Cambridge Milo whatshisname is trying to relaunch his career now that everyone has hopefully forgotten that time he called pedos good, actually. His cunning plan is to demote his black muslim husband to roommate so he can go on the neonazi speaking circuit again to advertise conversion therapy. I'm finding it difficult to decide whether his career choice is better or worse than McKinsey consultant. Either way I'll be very disappointed if he titles his tour anything other than dangerous ex-human being. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 02:37 on Mar 11, 2021 |
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Mar 11, 2021 02:26
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Couldn't be happier to see anyone in the world leap to becoming a born again christian who rails against gay people for a living than him. He can team up with graham linehan it'll be great, just the most unlikeable people in the world trying to sell the worst ideas. Hope he's really miserable all the time about it too. E: Oh my god it's wonderful, I clicked through to his article and he is literally counting every day he doesn't "sin" it's amazing, definitely not thinking about it all the time and being miserable about it. E2: he does go loving lovecraftian about the concept of trans people so fair warning if you intend to follow but he also sounds like he's gone balls deep on catholic guilt and I could not be happier about it. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 03:25 on Mar 11, 2021 |
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Mar 11, 2021 03:09
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OwlFancier posted:Couldn't be happier to see anyone in the world leap to becoming a born again christian who rails against gay people for a living than him. Milo has previously said that being gay is more fun when it's illegal. There is absolutely zero chance that he is genuinely abstaining from sex - he's just found a way to monetise his kink.
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Mar 11, 2021 05:05
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He's doing a lot of probably very miserable reading to justify that if he's just doing it for a lark.
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Mar 11, 2021 05:09
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OwlFancier posted:He's doing a lot of probably very miserable reading to justify that if he's just doing it for a lark. Masochism as a kink is as masochism as a kink does, I guess.
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Mar 11, 2021 06:16
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Lungboy posted:My local pharmacy does PCR tests at £40 a pop, so i'd imagine cost to the NHS would be significantly lower. When I was still doing qPCRs like 5 years ago, the reagents would have been less than a quid per sample. And labour cost per sample is pretty low when you're preparing a 384-well plate E: https://twitter.com/gavreilly/status/1369918181809213440?s=19 Wonder if he will be depicted pre- or post-castration Failed Imagineer fucked around with this message at 09:26 on Mar 11, 2021 |
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Mar 11, 2021 08:06
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suck my woke dick posted: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. And the holidays, where they hire out some European country house or a floor of a hotel in a city for a bunch of the consultants + their partners/family, a bit culty. The amount of overhead per employee is insane.
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Mar 11, 2021 09:39
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suck my woke dick posted:
Lol what is this, amateur hour? The pro move these days is to set up a paper company to snag the contract, then when you win the contract just sub-contract out the bits that involve Any Work. Bonus points* if the sub-contractor is also a mate with a paper company sub-contracting the work out even further. Oh, and make sure your contract has an insane get-out clause so if everything goes to poo poo and the government has to exit the contract, you make bank on the exit penalties too. *the bonuses will not be measured in points.
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Mar 11, 2021 09:42
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Zeno's contract, wherein everything is subcontracted into ever decreasing profit margins until someone employs someone on workfare to do the actual job.
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Mar 11, 2021 09:51
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:Lol what is this, amateur hour? The paper company is the part where your mates from uni pocket 90% of the budget before using the remaining 10% to get some real supplier to do the job. I'm sure they will donate to your campaign generously and invite you to all expenses paid holidays and brothel visits.
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Mar 11, 2021 09:51
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suck my woke dick posted: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 You're understating the case. Causing the state to fail is the precise reason why many of the Tory ministers wanted the Brexit vote to begin with.
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Mar 11, 2021 09:53
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OwlFancier posted:Zeno's contract, wherein everything is subcontracted into ever decreasing profit margins until someone employs someone on workfare to do the actual job. This but unironically, and it also helps to provide plausible deniability and stall out legal proceedings through obfuscation (see eg Grenfell).
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Mar 11, 2021 09:55
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https://twitter.com/PaulBrandITV/status/1369917185733365761 Well, this is going well. Heres hoping there isnt some addition anti LGBT legislation in the pipeline that's causing these.
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Mar 11, 2021 10:17
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TACD posted:Kinda off topic but the corruption talk reminded me of a personal crack ping moment I had a while ago: gently caress fake conferences, a lot of 'real' conferences are this as well. Large, publicly funded research orgs are frequently a complete mess both financialy and managerially, whether they're trying to actually ddo useful work, or whether they're just there to soak up loose money from whatever department. OwlFancier posted:Zeno's contract, wherein everything is subcontracted into ever decreasing profit margins until someone employs someone on workfare to do the actual job. Zeno's contract would imly the work never actually got done by the contractees, surely? Which would probably be accurate.
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Mar 11, 2021 10:50
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WhatEvil posted:OK fair enough, I've got a few things wrong. Thanks for the correction. And also, you have to look at what the funding actually covers. If you break down the £15bn allocated initially for 2020-21, that is broken down into: 5.9bn for machines and labs, 1bn for logistics & supplies, 0.4bn for NHS staff tests, 1.5bn for community testing, 0.2bn for antibody testing, 0.8bn for prevalence testing, 2.9bn for mass testing. (and £1.3bn for trace). So even there, you can see why a simple "divide by number of tests taken" figure isn't really representative. Again, perfectly valid to be questioning how so much is being allocated towards a programme that - largely - has not met (m)any of its targets, but in doing so important to use correct figures.
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Mar 11, 2021 10:54
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thespaceinvader posted:Zeno's contract would imly the work never actually got done by the contractees, surely?
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Mar 11, 2021 11:01
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Zeno hours contract where you are always approaching, but never actually reach, enough hours to actually pay your rent with money to save for a deposit.
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Mar 11, 2021 11:02
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thespaceinvader posted:Zeno hours contract where you are always approaching, but never actually reach, enough hours to actually pay your rent with money to save for a deposit. Absolutely incredible 
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Mar 11, 2021 11:15
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thespaceinvader posted:Zeno hours contract where you are always approaching, but never actually reach, enough hours to actually pay your rent with money to save for a deposit. So what's a Zemo hours contract? When your lovely boss has a mask glued to their face?
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Mar 11, 2021 11:32
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Stormgale posted:https://twitter.com/PaulBrandITV/status/1369917185733365761 There was the proposal to invalidate unpublished deed polls... I really need to try to hurry up my GP writing the letter so I can update my passport...
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Mar 11, 2021 11:41
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Between that and criminalizing trespass and hamstringing public right of way they're really going all in on destroying the tradition of English Common Law. Party of custom and practice (unless we can gently caress some marginalized group over).
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Mar 11, 2021 11:47
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This video is wild. Labour lost in 2019 and the message the party apparently took from that is that the public do not want nurses to get a pay rise. The host basically begging the Labour Party to be the Labour Party is quite something. https://twitter.com/Sabrina_Huck/status/1369938773094580224?s=20
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Mar 11, 2021 12:06
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The basic reason public departments (but also somewhat large corporates too) are semi-staffed by contractors costing 3x as much is simply down to how budgeting works for these orgs and laziness on the part of managers. Permanent staff require pensions, expected longer term costs as well as all the relevant job protections and thus senior management require a fair amount of justification for why they need to increase headcount. The basic 'perfect sphere in a vacuum' reasoning is many tasks in these orgs are project based and require somewhat specialised knowledge/experience, therefore you want permanent staff to do continual tasks but contractors to work projects - thereby achieving the ideal balance of minimising costs to hire and get rid of staff you need for specific stuff and minimising running costs of staff to do the actual work. It also makes sense for specific projects because your regular staff have day jobs and, from my experience, it is a lot easier to get budget to hire a consulting team who are 100% focused on a change project than overloading existing staff. I'll allow this needs to be managed well or you end up with a bunch of consultants coming in, setting up some fancy new system/tools and then disappearing without anyone really noticing and then a year later you have to explain why this new fancy system isn't being used by anyone. That is a failure of the consulting team and the client's management though rather than necessarily some vampiric conspiracy run by McKinsey (further caveat that if this is happening consistently enough there might not be a functional difference) This falls down for a couple of reasons - firstly project work often tends to run into each other i.e. frequently projects are actually related and skills needed for the first project transfer over to a project capitalising on the success of that, etc. so you can end up with the same contractor or team keeping on for a few years. Secondly is management laziness (plus institutional aversion to hiring people, which makes it a massive ballache). I've got a friend who took on a departmental management role in the Civil service and he basically spent his first year in post writing business cases to hire on most of the contractors in as civil servants, which almost halved his salary costs. That was basically his whole job for the first year or so he was in though. Consultants make sense in the abstract, the problem is that institutions have gotten so phobic regarding growing internal talent or trusting their own planning to know how many people that they need that they relentlessly err on the side of just contracting out things. Government contracts are in some ways worse for this because basically the two factors are: Have you got a track record of winning these contracts and Are you the cheapest bid? The result is that work that could well be done internally by expanding and growing existing capability isn't being done because they don't want the risk of internal failure and don't want the commitment in budgets of hiring and putting in place teams to handle the work. Personally from an layman perspective, I'd have thought the best approach the government could take would be a Public/Private partnership style thing of setting up a civil service equivalent to all this crap - an internal tech/management consultancy that effectively exists to provide expertise running change and transformation projects within other government departments. gently caress, keep the same basic business model going to attract the same sort of talent (if that's important) but company 'profits' basically get returned to the Treasury. Of course that would mean not changing suppliers every 3-10 years, which obviously means that it won't be as cost efficient for *reasons*.
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Mar 11, 2021 12:07
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Guavanaut posted:Zeno hours contract is where you're always halfway towards being counted as a real employee, congratulations, kind regards, HR.  (the law is so sensitive to context that even when workers successfully sue the bosses tend to just say "ooh you were almost a worker for a moment there, shame we changed ur contract already lol" so it works on every level)
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Mar 11, 2021 12:09
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Who is looking at the Labour party now, and seeing a politcal party ready to take over from the Tories? "What we all need to do now is increase claps for nurses and the NHS 2 nights a week non stop until we are all dead."
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Mar 11, 2021 12:12
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peanut- posted:This video is wild. Labour lost in 2019 and the message the party apparently took from that is that the public do not want nurses to get a pay rise. What we all learned in 2019 is that the British people want a No Deal Brexit and less generous pay for the NHS. I mean, gently caress me, I like to think that party policies play some role in people's decisions in voting but even I'm not daft enough to look at an electoral defeat and go 'so what we need to do is the opposite of that'. I mean, loving Boris was offering the exact same policies Theresa May had done so how do you explain 'this set of policies delivered a decent increase in seats in Parliament and then delivered a large loss of seats in Parliament so what we've learned is that people vote on policy and rejected them last time round. Clearly external factors play no role it's just the British people changed their minds about these specific policies'.
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Mar 11, 2021 12:15
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Everyday I wake up and think "god this country loving sucks rear end lol" I include Scotland in that as well
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Mar 11, 2021 12:17
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Glad to see that rayner is just as much of a useless sack of poo poo as starmer tbh, seems pretty predictable.
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Mar 11, 2021 12:20
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The Saviour posted:Who is looking at the Labour party now, and seeing a politcal party ready to take over from the Tories? They are clearly very ready to take over from the tories, in that they will keep doing exactly what the tories are doing, like dutiful centrists.
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Mar 11, 2021 12:21
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thespaceinvader posted:They are clearly very ready to take over from the tories, in that they will keep doing exactly what the tories are doing, like dutiful centrists. They can't even muster enough competence and conviction to make a case for that, though.
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Mar 11, 2021 12:26
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thespaceinvader posted:They are clearly very ready to take over from the tories, in that they will keep doing exactly what the tories are doing, like dutiful centrists. Starmer is talking right now about how he'd make women safer and his plan is *checks news* more police. He really chose a great moment for that gem.
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Mar 11, 2021 12:29
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Really excited about being the party of marginal improvements.
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Mar 11, 2021 12:30
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Just want to chime in on conferencechat and say that business awards are basically the same scam: you're a CEO and you have a mate who sits on the board of an award body. Your company gets recognised for some spurious achievement (preferably something unquantifiable where you don't need to or can't show your working, like "Most Influential Female CEO") , your company pays an attendance fee, your execs get a nice expenses paid champagne dinner, you get to put a little jpeg in your company's email signature, everybody's happy. Chances are that mate is also consulting for you, or works for a company that coincidentally wins a procurement contract with your company. The phrase "award winning" generally means exactly gently caress all and you should rightfully be wary of working for companies that won't shut up about how many awards they've won, because they're just bullet points on someone's LinkedIn profile. I've worked alongside a organisation that won an award for Best New Something-or-other before the organisation even officially existed. The photo of the award ceremony is particularly funny: the organisation's second in command is accepting the award on behalf of the manager, who couldn't accept it himself because he's the guy handing out the loving award
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Mar 11, 2021 12:30
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Centrism: imagine a boot with "we are very concerned" on the sole stamping on a human face, forever.
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Mar 11, 2021 12:41
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https://twitter.com/siennamarla/status/1369972425392283653?s=21 https://twitter.com/siennamarla/status/1369976219333197824?s=21 Goddamn, that's the editor of LabourList (usually a model of interfactional neutrality) chewing Starmer out over this.
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Mar 11, 2021 12:42
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