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Oberleutnant posted:I just cannot understand it.... how did these political heavyweights fail to win the Labour leadership election!?? Honestly, the shittest bit about the whole Corbyn era isn't the fact that he's scored a disappointing amount of own goals since taking over, it's the fact that years from now people will still be blaming him for Labour's bad poll ratings and Brexit, even though literally nobody can imagine the situation being better under Burnham or Cooper or Kendall or Eagle or Smith. It's telling that through the whole time he's been leader the centrist solution has never been "he should resign so X can take over", just "he should resign so we can have another crippling slapfight over whether socialists and union members are allowed to have a say in who leads their own party".
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May 6, 2017 17:40
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endlessmonotony posted:Y'know, most of that work goes firmly in the category of "why bother". This is bollocks. There are 152 NHS Foundation Trusts who are semi-autonomous from the DoH, and 470 trusts in total. At this point you can take even the smallest most basic workflow that exists within the NHS and you'll find 20 different ways it is implemented somewhere in the country. You're therefore completely skipping over the single biggest problem with the project, which is that you have to re-train almost every single staff member in the fifth largest employer on the planet. And the vast majority of them firstly see computers as a necessary evil that they would rather not deal with at all, and secondly are completely overworked as it is. Where do you get the time from to cover for doctors on training when there is already a 20% staff shortfall? How do doctors work in the meantime while only some of them have been trained for the new system? And it's funny because recent history points out that this is the case. The exact thing you are talking about was attempted starting in 2011, by 2013 they gave up having spent £11bn but succeeding only in creating yet another records system alongside all of the others, because they couldn't find a way to train everybody to switch to the new system without creating a patient care meltdown. endlessmonotony posted:Medical devices have a lifespan. Conform or die. Figuring them out probably isn't worth the expense in a vast majority of cases. This is also bollocks. Medical devices have a lifespan measured in decades. It's not uncommon to find that there exists only one model of device in the world to perform a particular test, in which case it is likely to be made in exactly the same way now as it was when it was first invented. So your proposal now includes in some cases funding the production of an entirely new device just so it can do the exact same job but electronically integrated (not that I would mind necessarily, my company exists to do exactly this but you're on another planet if you think this is trivial). "Conform or die" is possibly the most crass approach you could take - suppose the only device that tests for a disease which is obscure, but fatal if untreated, doesn't work with your new system. What point do you choose to decide when enough people could die that it is worth the expense? Hint: if your answer is 1 death is too many then your costs for this are somewhere along the lines of 'astronomical'. Scikar fucked around with this message at 11:15 on May 13, 2017 |
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May 13, 2017 10:59
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Cerv posted:Your random website is wrong about that. Your password illustrates the exact problem mentioned above. Although in theory there are ~20000 possible words to use in your 4 word combo, the vast majority of real life passwords will use a selection of ~100 common words. Takes a lot less than 35 thousand years to go through that. The same people who only use a small selection of words are using them in passwords already. Take a "random" word (as you say, realistically one of a fairly small number in reality), make a few substitutions (a = 4, e = 3 etc., these are almost worthless because there are only a small number of possibilities that make sense), finally add one or two "random" special characters to satisfy the system you're working with. It turns out that while each step after the random word makes the password harder to remember, it doesn't actually make it that much harder to crack. Whereas four random (or "random") words is actually in many cases higher entropy and therefore more work to crack even with a dictionary, while being easier to remember.  The closest we have to practical password management is to use a password manager so your individual passwords are as difficult to crack as possible, and then secure it with the most difficult password that you can still easily remember (and preferably a second factor too).
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May 13, 2017 11:07
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Oh and that talk about the NHS still having support for XP? That was for security patches from Microsoft, which would most likely have included this issue (the older versions of SMB are still supported in Windows 10 for backwards compatibility, so it's likely to be the same code itself, just more work to test if it breaks something else). It was £5.5 million a year for the whole of the NHS, but Cameron cancelled it and told the trusts to negotiate their own individual deals with Microsoft instead, which leads to the wonderful decision of "do we spend this money on more beds and doctors which are desperately needed and in the headlines most days, or on computers which will only be in the news if they break?"
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May 13, 2017 11:14
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Steve2911 posted:Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't £5.5m a year basically nothing to the NHS in the grander scheme of things? The cost would go up each year as MS tried to pressure people into upgrading instead, but yes it's peanuts for the NHS as a whole. Individual deals for each trust, not so much when some of them are basically bankrupt already. It's the perfect Tory move - declare a saving at national government level, transfer the larger costs to the NHS itself on top of all the other pressure, then when it blows up blame the NHS itself and use it as more ammunition to support privatisation. e: In fact I think Microsoft wouldn't even offer it to organisations below a certain size. Smaller trusts wouldn't have even had the option on their own.
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May 13, 2017 11:31
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Alchenar posted:It's not that you can't pay them enough, it's that the proposal is for the NHS to start a software infrastructure company from scratch. There is a flaw with that plan. Electronic healthcare record systems don't have decades of iteration, the majority of them haven't even been around that long. The ones that have were poo poo for most of that time which is why nobody used them. The US made it a legal requirement a few years ago and since then there has been an explosion of new systems, and yes in many cases they have been written more or less from scratch in a few years. The market was essentially untapped so it was ideal for a new developer to step in since they would have an easy time finding a buyer. The NHS is different in that designing a health record system for the US market has to be underpinned by the billing process at every stage. Different companies bill in different ways so your software has to account for as many of them as possible. That means buying an off the shelf product from the US almost certainly isn't going to work (there are several different ones in use around the NHS but as far as I'm aware there's a separation between the basic records held nationally, and the more detailed day-to-day systems which are run independently). On the other hand, having the NHS as a client would be enough to build an entire business around in the first place anyway. And that's more or less the way it ought to work - set up a government funded company/organisation with a specific goal of developing software needed for the NHS, and as a secondary goal sell and support the same software abroad to offset some of the investment costs. The first thing they would do is hire a bunch of experienced developers who have worked on US systems and then start on an NHS based one - the US market is approaching saturation point now and the different companies are going to start swallowing each other up and that means a lot of talented people are looking for job security right now. The timing is almost too good in fact. Of course any success would be undermined by the Tories selling off any such company as soon they got their hands on it.
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May 13, 2017 13:17
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Alchenar posted:There's a range of competing products at decent prices that all work. There are a range of products designed with billing as their top priority which are generally aimed at smaller institutions than the NHS and none of them are cheap. It would be less expensive for the state to commission its own solution for the NHS and then sell it on, and the result would work better for the NHS to boot. Alchenar posted:No because we know there literally was a fix and it would have cost £5.5m. You haven't been reading, because £5.5m was the cost for an extra year of security updates to Windows XP from Microsoft. That is completely different to purchasing a full EHR software package.
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May 13, 2017 14:03
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Cerv posted:the NHS should develop their own desktop OS instead of just upgrading Windows? No, they should develop their own EHR system (or at least, the state should) so that they aren't reliant on a 15 year desktop OS to run their outdated software package. Fun fact: the reason XP is still hanging around is because you have poo poo like X-Ray machines that are computer controlled, the software to operate them only works on XP, and the company that produced it went bust years ago. But the source code is proprietary so you can't fix it to work with a modern OS yourself and you have to replace the entire machine instead, even though all of the hardware is perfectly fine and you budgeted the costs for its expected 15 year lifespan. If that software is produced by the state, or commissioned by the state with a license that includes full rights to the source code, this problem doesn't happen.
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May 13, 2017 14:12
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endlessmonotony posted:See, when you make sloppy strawmen by not reading the discussion you're replying to it's easy to get outraged. I'm not invoking a strawman at all, my entire point is that it is not the technical aspect which causes NHS IT projects to fail, it's the part where you have to rapidly train all of the staff who don't have any spare time available for it. The NHS needs more doctors and nurses so that you can safely take some of their time for this training. You can make the IT budget as big as you want and the project will still fail because the clinical staff still won't have the spare capacity to transition over to using it.
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May 13, 2017 19:42
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serious gaylord posted:Some security firm/company will offer a lucrative position because of this. I think he already works for one.
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May 15, 2017 22:53
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Ewan posted:Well one argument against is that seasonal workers are willing to work for much less wages than the local population and accept shittier living conditions, in order to save up a chunk of money to send home where it is worth a lot more. I'd argue here the problem is with the employers, not with the immigrants themselves though. If you accept the (twisted) premise put forward by the current government, that unemployment is currently very low, then it follows that businesses are probably not as productive as they could be due to lack of manpower. Immigration is the fastest way to resolve that, with the added bonus that those new workers are going to spend at least part of their wages here, increasing economic activity. Reality is obviously more complicated than that, for starters as ukle points out the impact and benefits differ by region. But there is an inherent contradiction for anyone who thinks that the government is handling the economy well but we also need to reduce immigration. Either our economy is fine and therefore we don't need to worry about it, or our economy actually has serious problems which wouldn't really be fixed by just kicking foreigners out.
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May 16, 2017 11:28
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jBrereton posted:I don't disagree with you that it doesn't appear to make much sense, but it is factually inaccurate to claim that it isn't happening today. Yeah I don't see what's controversial about this. The biggest failing of Labour since the financial crisis has been to roll over and accept blame for the deficit instead of justifying their spending. As soon as Harman came out with that comment about how the public thinks Labour spend too much and you can't say voters are wrong (even when they are), it became consensus. The consensus is misleading and inaccurate, and it's perpetuated by the press repeating it over and over, but it still exists regardless.
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May 16, 2017 14:51
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Regarde Aduck posted:Don't they prop up our economy? "Prop up" would suggest they are the strength that everything else leans on, rather than the glossy paint on top that covers up the cracks. Our economy is in the poo poo which is why wages and investment are so stagnant, but as long as the housing bubble doesn't burst and nobody looks too closely at what the banks are doing there's enough to fudge the numbers with and shout "strong economy" about. Thing is, nobody has done anything to reduce the risk of another financial crisis, and the housing bubble can't last forever. I think that's the most depressing part of this election - not just that the Tories are unlikely to be ousted, but even if by some miracle Corbyn wins there's a good chance another financial crisis will come along that the Tories can then blame on Labour for another decade or two. And if that crisis hits during a Tory government instead, they'll just use it as an excuse to cut back even more cruelly than they already have.
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May 16, 2017 16:33
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ukle posted:Labour would be doing better without Corbyn that can hardly be challenged, given his approval ratings even among Labour voters is poo poo. A large reason why Corbyn has such colossal negative ratings isn't to do with the media, and stop portraying that it is. Him being the head of CND and an outspoken critic of NATO goes against the vast majority of people in the country and he would never be acceptable as leader to a significant amount of the population. Your challenge is to pick literally anyone else who could feasibly have won the leadership campaign, and demonstrate why they would be doing better now than Milliband. We get it, people who call themselves centrists think Corbyn is hard left so they don't like him. Well the left is fed up of liberals from the centre or centre-right pretending they have a progressive vision for the country, so the gradual drop in Labour vote share since '97 represents bleeding off conservatives to the right as well as traditional left-wingers who are disillusioned with New Labour. Somehow the former is all Corbyn's fault, but Labour was already failing to deal with the latter before Corbyn was anywhere near the leadership. And no, I don't blame just the media for Corbyn having abysmal ratings. I also blame idiots like John Woodcock, Hilary Benn, Ian Murray, Kezia Dugdale, Simon Danszcuk not being able to keep quiet for more than 5 minutes even at times when Corbyn has been doing OK. The only reason Abbott is in any position to make those gaffes now is because of the shadow cabinet resignations. And of course Corbyn hasn't helped himself along the way. I just think it's ridiculous that people are still acting like Corbyn is the single problem with Labour and if he was replaced the party would suddenly be gaining on the Tories in the polls, despite having no leader at all (since people who argue Corbyn has to go never seem to have a replacement to put forward).
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May 17, 2017 10:14
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Pissflaps posted:I'm sure there's one ready to go for June 9th. But not sure enough to name them.
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May 17, 2017 10:46
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I'd support mandatory voting, but it's funny how the natural inclination is to threaten people with some punishment if they don't vote. Is there anywhere that has a reward system for voting in a general election instead?
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May 18, 2017 17:12
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Looks like May's strategy isn't improving much this morning: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/may/22/conservatives-buy-dementia-tax-google-ad-as-criticism-of-policy-grows Labour have repeatedly made this mistake of failing to challenge the premises of an argument they disagree with, which leads to the public absorbing "wisdom" such as Labour overspending requiring us to have cuts to the NHS and disabled people. The majority of people who hear "dementia tax" aren't going to respond with "what's that?", they're going to think "that sounds nasty!". And I suspect that people googling it are more wondering if it is real or not rather than the fine details. Using "so-called 'dementia tax'" won't work either, the same way that ordinary folk say ISIS regardless of the specific phrasing the BBC choose.
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May 22, 2017 11:31
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MikeCrotch posted:Hmm, let's take a look at these "Labour Uncut" chaps/chapettes and see if they might have an agenda... They're a loving joke, they think they will gain 4 MPs in Scotland just 'because', and they go on to explain that the Union is the only issue in Scottish politics and all anybody cares about. Firstly that's total bollocks, and secondly the only line of attack that SLab ever use against Sturgeon is that all she talks about is independence. Talk about being tone deaf.
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May 22, 2017 13:11
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OwlFancier posted:I am beginning to feel like putting May on television talking to someone might be the worst thing you could do for her. It obviously stresses her out when she has to deal with questions that she hasn't prepared for, and considering there is nothing but bad news in the press she's going to have any spare time between now and the TV slow taken up by strategy meetings. I still think the polls have weighted too far against the younger age groups so the real numbers up until now might have been better, but what worries me about that is I think the low youth turnout in 2015 and Brexit were caused by the polls immediately before suggesting a hung parliament and a Remain win. So if the gap closes they might not bother after all (and yes I know the youth turnout for Brexit wasn't as bad as Sky initially suggested, but it was still lower than expected).
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May 22, 2017 17:08
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Jose posted:didn't brexit have really high youth turnout? i imagine a fair few people who registered to vote for that won't have had to renew https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/09/young-people-referendum-turnout-brexit-twice-as-high The youth turnout was reported by Sky at 36% initially and some people still seem to think it was around that level, in fact it was 64% but the olds turnout was 90%.
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May 22, 2017 17:32
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quote is not edit
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May 22, 2017 17:32
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Wonder how long before everything in the original version is just "fake news".
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May 22, 2017 18:07
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dispatch_async posted:There's a clip up on twitter: Yeah it's pretty much what I expected. He asks why she didn't put the cap, or the consultation on a cap, in the manifesto, she says it's in there, instead of quoting the relevant section he just moves on?
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May 22, 2017 18:41
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WMain00 posted:Saudi Arabia are second in global oil reserves, with Venezuela being first (who by the way we talk to also, despite whatever the gently caress is going on in their country). After that your options are Iran, Iraq and the UAE. The only friendly nation with large oil reserves is Canada. The United States is pretty low ranked and the North Sea doesn't even get considered at all because its reverses twindled ages ago. I didn't realise the only way to talk to Saudi Arabia is through an arms deal. Nobody is forcing us to enable the bombing of starving Yemeni kids and you're insane if you think people have made a legitimate decision to have cheaper fuel prices in exchange for an ever increasing body count in the Middle East. The topic is not discussed for the simple reason that it makes people too uncomfortable to think about it.
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May 23, 2017 10:23
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new phone who dis posted:Only if you're building the biggest straw man ever to argue with. You can acknowledge the difficulty of having those communities and still manage them in a humanitarian way. You're going to get more attacks, but it's probably better than getting too extreme. I don't think it's unreasonable to want to stop importing people from the areas of the world where this ideology is popular in the meantime, though. You don't actually have any idea how our immigration laws work, do you?
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May 23, 2017 16:54
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new phone who dis posted:Actually they're limiting their immigration. Feel free to explain how they do so in a different way to the UK, whenever you feel like making an actual argument.
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May 23, 2017 17:50
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Hey guys I have some very strong opinions about a group of people based on facts which I have assumed but can't be hosed to actually look up for myself. I know what I said is true though because I said it. No I don't know what word you could use to describe prejudice in a racial context, why do you ask?
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May 23, 2017 19:46
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bessantj posted:This election is really unhinging some people. I've just seen someone say that Corbyn has no concept of good/evil, right/wrong and just/unjust. Even if you don't like the man you can't come to a conclusion like that without leaving reality a little. https://twitter.com/pablonav1/status/868383953551577089
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May 27, 2017 14:08
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baka kaba posted:Didn't they get the same Leave.EU team that was using the Facebook demographics software to identify groups and target special ads at them? Yes, and it's very dodgy and they won't answer any questions about it: https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/868727270499692545 (check the whole thread)
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May 28, 2017 19:50
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dispatch_async posted:Does anybody else remember the video posted in here the other week of a voter saying he hated all Tory policies but he was going to vote Tory because Labour couldn't win? It's from John Harris on Anywhere But Westminster, but I can't find the actual tweet with the video. And yes it does seem like a crazy strategy, so many people in vox pops have been saying "I agree with Corbyn but I'm not going to vote for him because he can't win" so surely the Tories saying "actually, he can" would backfire massively.
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May 29, 2017 12:10
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WhiskeyWhiskers posted:There's no point in going further into nuclear with the price of wind and solar crashing down and battery technology taking off. Why make radioactive waste products if you don't need to? Should only be using reactors for medical purposes. This comes up a lot and it stems from a belief that all power is equal, regardless of its source. We get our power from base load, peak load, and intermittent sources. The base load is what you always need so the plants run full time, and are mostly coal and nuclear. The peak load can be quickly ramped up to meet demand and is mostly provided by gas, and intermittent covers all the renewables that are nice to have but can't be quickly switched on and off. The only renewable source that can contribute towards base load is hydro, and that comes with its own set of environmental problems and the potential for disaster. So if you ignore nuclear power because of worries about ATOMZ, then you have to keep burning coal (which produces its own nasty waste products, including radioactive waste that we just vent into the air!) and building hydro plants which would generally be located upstream from major population centres because we have a habit of building towns on rivers.
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May 29, 2017 13:21
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WhiskeyWhiskers posted:Nope. A paper which states itself that wind power (the majority of our renewable supply) has to be looked at separately, and suggests biofuels (what about the environment impact of industrial farming?), geothermal (limited since the UK isn't volcanic) and solar with storage (did you forget we're talking about the UK?). And then takes solar with storage out because the storage tech doesn't exist yet.
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May 29, 2017 13:34
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Zalakwe posted:This is an important point in the main but you're wrong.about renewables. They can be switched on and off very quickly. The big things holding.them back are grid infrastructure (needed to address demand flexibly) and battery technology so we can store what they generate and use it as baseload. There are people working on these problems but scalable solutions are a few years out. Energy storage tech is more than "a few years out". What do we do in the mean time? Burn coal?
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May 29, 2017 13:36
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WhiskeyWhiskers posted:tbf it's a decade old paper. I just used it as it points out that wind is not intermittent at large scale. And that nuclear suffers the same problem in that you still need systems such as gas to cover peak usage. "Large scale" in this case meaning "across Australia", which gives you just a bit more room to play with than the UK. And I never suggested that nuclear can be used a peak supply. To be honest I really don't see why this argument always comes up, it seems pretty obvious that we should maximise our usage of renewables to cut down on the amount of horrible poo poo we need to deal with, whether that's fossil fuels or radioactive waste. And then when you do look at what's left, you realise you still need something that is always on, and nuclear is a much better option than coal. Nuclear and renewables go hand in hand if you care about the environment and energy security.
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May 29, 2017 13:43
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Hoops posted:Every now and again the UKMT happens upon some specialist topic and there are like a dozen posters who seem to know everything about it, it's a weird thing to see. I get it when it's like WW2 or something, god knows I get it when it's about anime, but how do you all know this stuff about power generation? Submarine design was another one, so was different fonts. Im legally restricted from discussing my specialist subject on the internet, can someone message me when the conversation turns to snooker or early-mid period Simpsons? Is it really that weird? Climate change is going to absolutely gently caress the UK, and we're not even doing anything now to prevent it, when the time for action was decades ago. And if you want to make an informed decision on policy to deal with it, you have to understand power generation.
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May 29, 2017 13:47
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WhiskeyWhiskers posted:Don't you guys have a grid connection to the Netherlands and France? Still take your point, but it does give you a bit more room. Our nuclear plants are up for decommissioning already. Most of them are already running well past their planned service life. And we're currently in the middle of a nasty financial breakup with the Netherlands and France, probably not a good idea to rely on them for power. Scikar fucked around with this message at 13:59 on May 29, 2017 |
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May 29, 2017 13:56
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learnincurve posted:I do. https://www.tesco.com/groceries/product/browse/default.aspx?N=4294792090&Ne=4294793660 This is a problem of benefits being too stingy and landlords being bastards though, it's not a question of the price of lightbulbs themselves. I don't have to decide between light and food thankfully but I am living in a rented house with dodgy wiring where the bulbs would blow every month (and there are chandelier things everywhere so I have 36 loving bulbs to deal with), but I switched to LED ones and they seem a lot tougher since all of them are still working a year later. If there was a way to get landlords to eat the cost of replacing all the bulbs with LED ones that would go a long way.
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May 29, 2017 14:50
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learnincurve posted:Poor people should sit and eat breakfast in the dark and give a grateful prayer of thanks to the government for funding their slacker lifestyle, before heading off to a Tesco's warehouse for the valuable work experience they provide for free. An easy way to test how much difference the price of lightbulbs make here is to imagine whether this person's situation would be substantially improved if all lightbulbs of all types were provided for free.
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May 29, 2017 15:01
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I know it's standard waffling politician speak, but am I the only one who finds May's "we've been very clear on this" really condescending? It's one thing to say "let me be clear" and then avoid the question, but when she says "we've been very clear on this" the implication is that whoever is asking just isn't smart enough to understand a simple answer. It seems like she is so used to saying it to Corbyn during PMQs that she forgot it's not a very good look to deploy against voters. But she said it a lot anyway, even during audience questions, since it's her favourite stalling line.
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May 30, 2017 00:27
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Jose posted:imagine a left wing leader who hadn't had mp's constantly denigrating him in the press for 2 years . The funny thing is if his current polling is correct then they definitely get the blame for loving it all up Eh, those in the bubble of the Labour right are firmly ingrained in the habit of "everything bad is due to Corbyn, everything good is despite him", so they think that Labour would be all set for a landslide right now if Owen Smith had won.
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May 31, 2017 23:31
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