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I think we're underestimating what we need to do with testing and what the consequences are going to be. To control coronavirus we need everyone tested repeatedly to stop aymptomatic people causing outbreaks, until we reach herd immunity. Right now we're begging, borrowing and stealing supplies and labs and reagents to get up to the hundreds of thousands of tests we need to do each day. You can write off that capacity for the foreseeable future, and write off every diagnosis those labs and testing machines used to support too.
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Apr 1, 2020 19:41
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peanut- posted:Completely anecdotal observation: been out for a run every day since quarantine started. People have been pretty good until tonight, when there was probably 3x as many people out, and most pretence of distancing was abandoned. Noticeably more traffic on the road too. I noticed the same thing, both number of people walking along the river bank and cars on the road. The UK death rate is the equivalent of two big plane crashes every day but has nothing like the same presence in people's minds. I think we're going to get another Boris Bollocking as soon as he's well enough not to cough blood on the camera. Partly to remind people it's still real and the partly to deflect news coverage that's turning a bit unsympathetic. The spiking death rates now are the infections from the last few days before lockdown. It should turn a corner by the weekend but if everyone decides to go out on Sunday we'll just get another uptick in two weeks time.
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Apr 2, 2020 21:22
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Gonzo McFee posted:https://twitter.com/MetroUK/status/1245752934324936704 Wait...What? So those years and years of hardship, rationing care, sick kids sleeping on the corridor floor, mentally ill people doing laps of casualty because there's no specialist help. All because our own government had the NHS in a 13 billion pound armlock and it's suddenly...just let it go?
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Apr 3, 2020 20:39
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namesake posted:It's slightly more complicated than that. The NHS is actually a series of subcontractors - Clinical Commissioning groups and specialist networks like cancers and dental surgery or the military all hold budgets which they then contract out service provision to Trusts and other approved bodies (which is where private services can bid and win contracts). Once within a contract if a service performs operations they can charge the commissioning bodies a certain value for each procedure and if a condition of the contract isn't fulfilled then the commissioners can charge the service provider penalties. This means there's a circulating internal health economy which means there can be a lot of debt banking up over time as it's essentially fictional money until it needs to be paid outside of this relationship to staff or suppliers or shareholders and so it allows an internal market to exist and drive capitalist logic 'efficiencies' within the various sectors but without healthcare providers actually going bust except the private ones which can get hosed. So like if someone has a beautiful fish tank and instead of feeding all the fish together, they just give food flakes to the neon tetras. The plecostomii clean algae off the walls which they should get flakes for, but the tetras say that they don't deserve any because the walls aren't quite clean enough. Rather than let the plecs starve which would ruin everything, the tetras generously lend them the food instead. Time goes by, the plecs get more in debt to the tetras, but nobody cares because fundamentally someone still puts in enough flakes for all the fish to eat and the walls are fairly clean. Then the owner decides that the plecs are being feckless, so they throw away the bubbly treasure chest as punishment and oh by the way boys, flake ration's halved. You'll just have to eat each other. Then the owner suddenly gets motor neurone disease and starts throwing in flakes by the fistful to try and repair the neglect. As immobility tightens its grip their final days are spent before the murky green tank, within which two listless fish eyeball each other across the filth strewn wastes of what was once magnificent. I'm not really sure what point I'm trying to make, except that it's loving bananas.
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Apr 3, 2020 22:53
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Wachter posted:Stolen from the the Cursed Images thread Nice. 5G has a range of only a few hundred metres or so which means the base stations are mostly going to be innocuous lumps on the side of buildings in town centres, not masts out in the countryside where they'd provide superfast data rates to a handful of sheep and not much else. Burning down masts will get the 4G and 3G transmitters though. These bands are useful for communications in more remote areas and we do use them for quite a lot of telemetry on boring, important things like oil interceptors, rising mains and water pumps. We did, anyway.
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Apr 3, 2020 23:17
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:Been a while since I've posted The Chart Some poor intern graphic designer got the job of updating the graph and decided this was their big break. While the sub-editors dropped like flies and the newsroom lights clicked out, our lonely hero worked on. The counts come in around the clock. Beijing. Baton Rouge. Brussels. No time to sleep or eat, just a few of those really speedy diet pills washed down with Monster Energy. Then back to the graphs. Beijing again. Baton Rouge. Brussels. The phone rings. It's morning again, from the colour of the sky. Chief editor on the line. What is it this time? More little stars on each data series representing the first day of lockdown? Floating comment boxes with asinine summaries? Half a dozen more countries in different colours and shades broadly representing half baked racial preconceptions? "Hi, er, pal. Great job with the graph! On the conference call yesterday everyone was really impressed with how you've taken charge of it. Listen, we really really like the logarithmic scale. It's so scientific-y. When Mark from finance explained how it would look on a normal graph we really were terrified! But we also found it confusing. You really have to sort of, almost read it to understand it. Like sit down and think like it's a novel or something. Nobody wants that. Soooooo... Is there a way to make it keep the lines nice and calm and straight, but at the same time also sort of not do the logarithmic anymore? And I've got an idea for when America starts poking out the top..." I think they talked her down from the roof eventually.
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Apr 4, 2020 01:23
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quote:This attack is accomplished by making you feel that your very existence is inimical to the Movement and that nothing can change this short of ceasing to exist. These feelings are reinforced when you are isolated from your friends as they become convinced that their association with-you is similarly inimical to the Movement and to themselves. Any support of you will taint them. Eventually all your colleagues join in a chorus of condemnation which cannot be silenced, and you are reduced to a mere parody of your previous self. https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/trashing.htm Whatever the tories think about Starmer as leader of the opposition, I'm sure they are quaking in their boots at the idea of every left winger in the UK turning on each other in a giant bloodbath of ideological purity until, like a crap Communist Highlander, only one remains. They absolutely, definitely want us to piece ourselves together after the years of real and manufactured schisms that have beset our party, seek common ground and make the best of what we've got. So that's the last thing we should do.
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Apr 4, 2020 12:38
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I'm going to hang on and see. Starmer might turn out to be a floppy Milliband 2.0. He might turn out to be the dull, boring suit wearing rock of a competent politician that everyone wants to hear amid the chaos. He might take a move from Boris' playbook- "say what they want, and do what you want". The next election will be in a completely different world to the last. Desperate conservatives are flat out implementing a Labour manifesto. We're off the loving map. There are plenty of people ITT pretending that they were only pretending to care about Labour right now, and I understand the disappointment. There was a sense, for a while, that we were winning. In the face of such a defeat, the instinct is to disown the lot, run and hide. Live in a cave off grid. But the Labour party are still the biggest political party in Europe. Its left wing is in finer fettle than it's been for decades. We're battle hardened. We've got connections. We've learned from the Labour right how to play the underdog game. This party isn't over until the last one of us stops dancing.
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Apr 4, 2020 13:50
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Politicians are untrustworthy, so unless they sign pledges I don't trust them. Politicians are untrustworthy, so when they sign pledges I don't trust them.
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Apr 4, 2020 15:28
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I hereby formally issue this pledge to the denizens of the thread. Anyone who does not sign it is an anti-semite. https://www.bod.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Labour-l0-pledges.pdf
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Apr 4, 2020 15:40
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Stormgale posted:So what's it like being a massive transphobe? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjMPJVmXxV8&t=1448s
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Apr 4, 2020 16:23
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OwlFancier posted:Apparently BOC do have oxygen tankers but that requires you have a giant high pressure/liquid oxygen tank somewhere on the site, which is... probably going to require a bit of clearance. One of the things they were planning to train the army to do was drive oxygen tankers around, and I remember a clip from the building of NHS Nightingale where they were lifting in a very battered containerised oxygen tank. I can see companies like ICI getting leaned on to donate their oxygen storage or production capacity fairly soon. Reagent grade might only be 99.99% pure, but times are hard. Starmer asking for an exit strategy from the pandemic is quite a good stance because it's a) a question on everyone's mind and b) unanswerable.
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Apr 5, 2020 09:37
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We all just have to accept that during these troubled times for the economy, the airlines and ferry companies need the money more.
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Apr 5, 2020 15:11
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When this outbreak broke there was a lot of talk about how many Extra Corporeal Membrane Oygenators China had, like half a dozen on each coronavirus ward. Then it all went quiet about ECMOs. Probably because it turns out that Britain only has 30, and unlike ventilators there's no chance of James Dyson bodging one together in his shed over the weekend. I wonder if they'll find one for Boris when his lungs fill up?
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Apr 5, 2020 21:51
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kecske posted:Dyson is hogging too much airtime with his ventilators imo. It's time for the Henry crew to step into the limelight and slap something cheap but functional together out of sheet metal offcuts and paint a face on it. We're going to be running people's blood through soda streams by the end of this, mark my words. The death rate in Wuhan for victims who require hospitalisation as 1 in 5, incidentally. Not great odds for Bojo.
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Apr 5, 2020 22:12
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I hear he's in good spirits. Like Nelson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucking_the_monkey
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Apr 9, 2020 19:01
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We just had a full length performance of "you'll never walk alone" from a neighbour. And sparklers.
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Apr 9, 2020 20:10
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:Do you think though that this report has been leaked now specifically to 'encourage' a lot of lefties to leave the party in disgust? It's hard not to reach for the tinfoil hat, looking at what's just happened. I guess the most constructive angle we can take is that Labour were within a bee's dick of winning in 2017 despite all this. The policies and excitement and er, momentum that carried us to that high water mark would have succeeded. The platform of muscular left wing policies put forth in 2017 was a winner, and can be again, if the party leadership hardens itself against sabotage and cynical attempts to make a tar pit of the antisemitism investigation.
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Apr 12, 2020 18:58
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Al-Saqr posted:It’s really incredible how evil and malignant blairite labour people were and how they completely made up the antisemitism thing against corbyn. Liberals are evil man. The report posted:This report thoroughly disproves any suggestion that antisemitism is not a problem in the Party, or that it is all a “smear” or a “witch-hunt” Look, we can't lose sight of the fact that the antisemitism problem wasn't made up, some complaints were valid, and some of these were poorly dealt with. If Ian Austin and pals wants to dismiss the whole report as a whitewash, he needs to explain why it says contrary to that on the first page of the summary and goes into great detail on some valid complaints. If he wants to engage with it, he needs to explain why the complaints process was used to selectively target left wing members of the party. We cheapen ourselves if we cherry pick the bits that suit us and ignore the rest. We can afford to swallow it whole. This report is the moral high ground served up on a plate. It's an opportunity to clean the house of antisemites and wreckers. The point of staying in the party is that we can force Starmer to go after both.
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Apr 12, 2020 22:18
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TACD posted:Yea, this is why I don't have any faith in the 'stay in Labour to change it!' philosophy. What's the case study for anything like this being successful that we should be working from? Because if there isn't then it feels as useless as online petitions or boycotts. Tony Blair managed to drag the party to the right? It seems that when faced with the same circumstances, we lefties would rather schism ourselves off into balkanised echo chambers, whereas the right wing digs in, pretends to go along with it and spreads like Japanese knotweed. Minority viewpoints can become majority ones. You just need to have 25% of your group agree on the position to convince the other 75%. Then scale up your group size. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/how-minority-viewpoints-become-majority-ones The most meaningful thing we can do right now is push our MPs and CLPs and colleagues in the movement to demand that the report is submitted to the ECHR. Only sunlight can disinfect labour, to paraphrase Tom Watson.
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Apr 13, 2020 12:18
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This is something that we can coalesce around- we're victims. Everyone from Diane Abbott, Andy "too left wing" Burnham, the doorstep campaigners from 2017, Jewish members whose concerns were silenced because they didn't fit the trot hunt. There's an incredibly broad caucus forming within the party, and we all want to make sure that a handful of saboteurs are never able to cost us an election again. We're big enough to change Labour for the better. This is the worst moment to walk away.
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Apr 13, 2020 13:59
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Coohoolin posted:Lmao Starmer's decision to focus on the exit strategy as a criticism is not going down well with literally anyone, in any of the groups I'm in How come? I'd expect it would go down quite well with people stuck inside with an abusive partner, or a homophobic parent, or kids that are sick of the PS4. He's articulating the sort of question that anyone asks when they're told to stay indoors until notified otherwise. What he is missing is a couple of wingers to start kicking up a ruckus on his behalf, while being somewhat deniable. Making more of the fact that bin bags aren't acceptable PPE, or that 300,000 tests is a rounding error against what the number should be. Like, the conservatives have always had Liam Fox or IDS around say something execrable for the cameras so their actual position seems tame by comparison. Labour doesn't seem to be able to do that.
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Apr 15, 2020 19:08
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How much is in the solidarity fund? Can we buy it?
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Apr 17, 2020 18:35
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Guavanaut posted:This, however, is 100% real. Behold, sinners, the demon of a thousand ragged arseholes.
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Apr 17, 2020 20:59
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OwlFancier posted:I do hope that this is going to cause some long term disruption to at least the idea of an office job where you have to go the the building and sit in it and work there for no real good reason (I have never worked in an office but I gather this is what they are like) and perhaps get more non essential work done from home. Fewer people commuting etc, reduced costs for people who would have to commute, maybe they can work fewer hours. It's got to, at least in the knowledge based industries. I've got colleagues who have an extra 2 hours leisure in each day now they're not commuting, and thousands in their pocket each year that isn't being spent on train tickets or petrol. We're recording COVID related disruption and it's costing us about 5% of our total working time. That's a flimsy statistic because we never really tracked office related disruption, so we have nothing to compare it to, but would I take a 5% pay cut to keep those freedoms? Hell yeah. Any office job that doesn't sustain these liberties is going to haemorrhage workers to a firm that does. Changing employer now involves nothing more than closing one laptop and opening another. Employers that can trust their staff (or at least measure their output) would be moronic not to see the benefits too. Working from home means no office bills, no staff getting stuck in traffic, no seasonal flu circulating round your team, no loving about trying to fit in more desks when you want to expand, no commute limitations on who you can recruit.
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Apr 18, 2020 13:35
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Prism Mirror Lens posted:Sorry, but “you won’t do x? Fired!” is just not how conversations go currently in the tech industry. They already can’t hire enough good people, despite massive efforts to get everyone coding to flood the market... namesake posted:Okay it's good that you can see the potential need for worker resistance in the future but then why not do the organising now? Building a union isn't going to get done overnight and even just sounding people out now will make any steps you have to do to respond to a rapid change much easier. You might even get to a point where you don't have to build programs that you can see as blatently unethical. Engineering design is similar to Prism Mirror Lens' situation. We have job vacancies open for months at a time. If you did an Alan Sugar you'd empty the office. If sustaining WFH gives any kind of recruitment edge then people will jump to the first company that offers it. Everyone else will have to match that or go extinct. I can see that there will be offices as a focal point and for those who choose or need to work that way, but the cult of "presenteeism" is going to die. Another evolution that's happened is the paperless office. We've been going on about it for about a decade. We've achieved it in a week.
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Apr 18, 2020 17:03
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namesake posted:And this is still 'why do I need to put a roof on my house? The sun is shining brightly.' level of thinking. By definition working remotely allows for recruitment across a wider geography, perhaps even globally. Are the labour shortages a global problem? No people in the USA, China or India willing to take on a role for a foreign company? It's not like a physical interview would be possible during a lock down anyway so what's the harm in trialling people from across the planet after a remote interview? Oh and now that your project lead and many coworkers are 8 hours behind you you're going to have to do lots of evening working so you can all call in together, sorry that's just how it is now. Yes and no, respectively. The work isn't something that takes a lot of verbal back-and-forth either, so working with a colleague on the opposite side of the globe takes fairly little extra effort. My point was that in my knowledge based industry where the balance of power already lies with the employee, the experience of a lockdown is going to open opportunities for a change in the relationship between employer and employee which further goes in favour of many employees. Having been a union member during market conditions that were dire enough for that relationship to briefly invert, the scale of the crisis was so great that the union's collective bargaining power was moot. I'm not down t' pit wi' t' lads, so a traditional marxist reading of the situation doesn't yield useful conclusions. Postcapitalism is an interesting book which tries to explore how it can, incidentally. To torture that metaphor of yours, it's not a house without a roof so much as a hotel without a roof. You keep your bags packed, you nick the towels, you make sure you have an umbrella and a good idea how to build at least a shack of your own. In the event of a downpour that makes all that preparation useless, even buildings with roofs are hosed.
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Apr 18, 2020 18:53
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Bloodly posted:Cliches become cliches because they keep being used. They keep being used because there's truth there. Have you seen in many movies and cartoons and books that the government and companies and such is/are always ill-prepared, complacent, doesn't care, doesn't want to care, always has other concern than the 'blatantly obvious one'? This is our Chernobyl. Its scale is such that it's easier psychologically for people to categorise it as a natural disaster than to recognise it as a result of choices by individuals, because those individuals would be guilty of a hideous crime. It was politically expedient at the time to ignore the results of exercise cygnus, to bleed dry the NHS and local authorities, to cut strategic stockpiles of equipment, to prioritise the economy over wellbeing, to doubt the epidemiologists, to postpone preparations, to austeritise our society, to annihilate community cohesion and to consolidate decision making in one person in Downing Street. You can ask people who elected those politicians what they think of that and the answer will be "Yeah...can we call it the China virus?"
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Apr 19, 2020 10:52
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Jippa posted:Was this posted: It's a hilarious read. Lots of non-rebuttals in grumpy language. It's going to get taken to pieces. This is the UK goverment trying to do a journalism-right-back-at-ya like Trump did when he played his home video at a press conference the other day. Except Trump's stunt was smart enough to reach at the audience through the media's own platforms. Rather than use the beeb or drop this in a press conference, our government has launched it on a website with a readership of probably...15?
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Apr 19, 2020 16:11
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Cooking, and bread making most recently, are things in our culture which were once ubiquitous but are now performed by conspicuous experts. Usually male ones. As if the message is that to cook you need a hundred personalised knives and face like a crumpled paper bag, and nothing less than a king's banquet is acceptable. To bake bread the expectation is that you'll have read a 2500 page reference book, built your own granary and if you're not doing some sort of sourdough megabaguette gluten-free wonderleaven then basically why are you even trying? I don't have a problem with cooking or baking bread because I see them as food experiments rather than a solemn ritual. Even the fuckups are usually edible. Singing, on the other hand, was also once ubiquitous but you will never catch me "experimenting" with karaoke.
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Apr 20, 2020 19:41
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Lord Ludikrous posted:RE Travel chat - If you want to have a relatively inexpensive holiday I strongly recommend taking a road trip to the Alps. You avoid all the stereotypical rowdy Brit tourists, get to immerse yourself in the local culture, and you’ll get to see some of the most gorgeous places in this part of the world. This is something I do most summers because the alps are awesome. I usually get the last eurotunnel of the night across, then drive a couple of hours into France along the autoroute and doss in an aire. The ferry is cheaper but the longer crossing means less night to sleep in. The aires nearest Calais are closed because of dogging and mugging, but further down the road you can usually find a nice quiet one that's a bit away from the highway with a grassy picnic area that you can sleep in. You can get to Chamonix in about eight hours of easy driving from Calais. The road tolls are about £35 for this leg. If you cross over into Switzerland you'll need to pay about £60 for a road tax voucher that lasts a whole year, so make sure you don't just accidentally pop over the border. If you want to go wander into the lovely lovely mountains, continental walking trails are for the most part really well marked with signs and splotches of paint on rocks or trees along the way. There are often routes that will take you to a mountain hut or refreshment shack. Be a bit cautious with the route times marked on signs. Swiss maps are all available through a free smartphone app.
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Apr 28, 2020 19:47
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Quieter here this week too. Probably the rain though. Last week was like a two minute cray-cray, like it's no longer about the NHS so much as making a loving racket for a while to let off steam. Next door had a toy horn, the one down had tambourines. Across the court someone was beating the gently caress out of a tin watering can.
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Apr 30, 2020 20:12
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