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Bristol and South Gloucestershire had a similar situation with Cribbs Causeway, the major shopping centre, being in Tier 3 while everything south of it was Tier 2. Now everything is back to 3 though so not to worry!
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Jan 2, 2021 10:14
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Mourning Due posted:Just had a dickhead on LinkedIn share this as "proof" that the pandemic is in fact a massive hoax and we're living in a dictatorship. There's not really a stats based rebuttal to what they're argung here because most of the time they're focusing on those limited numbers and ignoring context - so December occupancy rates might be the same but with a vastly higher % of them being more severe cases of COVID 19 requiring very limited access to incubators etc so there might hypothetically be the same number of beds around as usual but that's completely worthless if the patient you put in the bed then just drowns in their own fluids. April-June 2020 occupancy is way down from previous years because a shitload of elective operations were cancelled so people were at home rather than in hospital recovering and similarly with A&E the message the public had was 'Don't go to hospital for fucksake' so people didn't go to A&E for lots of reasons as well as all the pubs and workplaces being shut so there were less accidents happening. They disregard the excess deaths in April by flat out lying though - that respiratory death total isn't from the dataset they linked to and the ONS 'deaths in March and April from COVID 19' https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/deathsinvolvingcovid19intheuk specifically says there are 38,000 deaths involving the virus. So that last point is the major stats-based rebuttal I guess but everything about it is ignoring the context and then finding some combination of numbers that they think means something else was going on. Edit: To make it perfectly clear that they're lying my link states '5. COVID-19 defined as ICD10 codes U07.1 and U07.2' so they've lied by using the wrong ICD10 code range and claiming it contains something that it doesn't. namesake fucked around with this message at 12:25 on Jan 3, 2021 |
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Jan 3, 2021 12:19
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Remember Starmer is a rudderless Ed Milliband-esque triangulator on a good day so it doesn't matter how small the % of people wanting schools open is, it doesn't matter if they are all childless pensioners with net worth of over £500,000, it doesn't matter if it makes no loving sense at all, if that's a target group for him to 'win back' then they're going to get dollops of tough, meaningless announcements aimed at getting them to give a firm nod to.
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Jan 3, 2021 18:14
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fridge corn posted:If your workplace isnt following covid secure guidelines how and where are you supposed to report it? Each workplace is supposed to have carried out a risk assessment of the workplace and share it with staff so ask about that. Find the specifics in that which you can monitor if they're being obeyed or not, then raise the breaches with coworkers (in the spirit of 'we shouldn't have to be putting ourselves at risk like this' not 'stop putting me at risk'), organise them and go to management to get resolution and if that doesn't work then report/threaten to report them to the Health and Safety Executive.
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Jan 4, 2021 22:10
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peanut- posted:The VAT changes are good. It means Amazon, eBay etc will actually have to collect and pay VAT from their international sellers. Yeah I read the rules as having two thrusts - putting some sort of responsibility on online vendors rather than letting them continue to be a weird loophole in the globalised/nation state model of capitalism we have but also raising barriers to drive out smaller sellers and so increasing market concentration onto those same online marketplaces. One bad thing and a 'it depends' thing which isn't good with either the UK or EU state models but pretty much an inevitable step which will be taken.
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Jan 5, 2021 20:38
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Perhaps a hamster posted:Meanwhile we're business as usual, back to work next week, guess should just hope I don't get coughed at or anything Depending on what you do and your coworkers you could take a page from the NEU and refuse to work in dangerous conditions under Section 44 of the Employment Rights Act 1996. Demand to see the risk assessment, keep an eagle eye on any breaches of it and kick up a huge fuss about the whole thing, particularly if there is an alternative way of working that they just don't want to do.
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Jan 8, 2021 19:50
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Perhaps a hamster posted:We're key workers and we've already seen risk assessments (lol), so I think we might be out of luck here Hmm yeah okay the easy stalling tactics won't work then. Section 44 is based on your assessment though so if it feels unsafe or people in your role start testing positive then you've still got grounds to invoke it, but this is a power struggle so it depends how worried your coworkers are as well really and what you can do together.
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Jan 8, 2021 20:06
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When you do a population study you aren't meant to use a whole population though 
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Jan 8, 2021 20:24
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Inexplicable Humblebrag posted:Sex arses I want a film made about the struggle to get those sex arses to their destination safely. Das Butt
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Jan 9, 2021 18:36
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sebzilla posted:Is this why Kieth has farted out a handful of yay unions tweets in the past couple of days? They've obviously been kicking up a fuss about this and hopefully forcing a change in policy but the NEU organising their own poo poo against Labour positions is obviously another major shot that if there becomes a TUC platform which is different from Labour policy then Labour are really, really hosed.
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Jan 9, 2021 23:12
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Tarnop posted:I'm sure Facebook and Twitter are terrified of being subject to our legendarily strict newspaper regulations. The difference is that some parts of the internet are left wing.
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Jan 11, 2021 00:29
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Necrothatcher posted:In 'probably not a good sign' news my NHS nurse partner has just been sent an email telling her she should now start carrying a letter confirming she's a key worker with her at all times. The government is trying to turn off all forms of social interaction except those that are needed for capital accumulation so yeah it's going to be illegal to be within 2 metres of anyone unless you're exchange money in some form or outdoors unless you're going to pay something. Got to keep garden centres open though!
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Jan 11, 2021 12:18
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Pistol_Pete posted:Of course, it doesn't matter how 'strict' a lockdown is: without a strategy to eliminate Covid, lockdowns will always be ultimately pointless, as the disease will come roaring back as soon as they're relaxed. The government are already talking about restrictions persisting into next winter, which is mind-boggling when you see how many countries have completely got rid of Covid and are now back to normal. You're around Bristol aren't you? I get too busy to do anything myself but it would be good to get a local group set up.
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Jan 11, 2021 15:28
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Given the general shittiness of housing I think there's legit health and safety concerns for why a delivery driver should not be forced to drop things off at the actual front door of the person ordering unless it's street facing. It's loving awful carrying 4 crates of shopping up 4 flights of stairs but imagine if you were supposed to be doing that maybe dozens of times a day in inadequately lit, unsecured stairwells.
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Jan 11, 2021 22:32
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Part of the amazement I have with the shittiness of the packages is their lack of uniformity. Who is out there getting someone to manually slice a pepper and tossing a half into two boxes? Why the odd variety of fruit and veg? It's got all the vibes of a food bank meets a village fete packed lunch for lack of dignity and coherence and it's maddening that anyone who is supposed to be responsible for this and hopefully possessing some sort of shame thought it was okay to put out there. Absolute bastards the lot of them. Also the whole £30 price tag - £5 delivered perfectly demonstrates the dynamics of outsourcing. The whole point of any private company doing that is that they maximise the difference between what they get paid and the cost of what they deliver to the end user and whether it's as obvious as this or not, that's what's happening.
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Jan 12, 2021 20:10
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Miliband was the end of the road for the lesser of two evils, if there's two groups who are Bad of varying degrees and only those two groups can win then don't sweat about putting effort into making one wins over the other. You're faced with the evil of two lessers and the only way to win is to change the game - it's harder to get tangible results but you do actually get results.
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Jan 14, 2021 01:18
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ANYTHING YOU SOW posted:This all depends on how well the vacines prevent transmission. This is something we don't know at the moment as the big studies were all focused on whether it prevents symptoms. This is for the oxford vaccine: That's not what zero covid is based on. You stop as much activity as possible for a month or so so that the number of unseen transmission is near 0 and then you heavily and effectively monitor and trace cases when they come back again including mandatory monitored quarantines for people travelling into the UK. You'll end up with a few hundred, may be a few thousand people being in quarantine while the rest of the country can meet socially with confidence again. You don't need vaccine immunity, you just have tiny amount of case numbers which are rapidly and effectively detected and stopped.
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Jan 14, 2021 18:45
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Yeah an increase in the working week will either re-energise the unions into fighting organisations or destroy them utterly. Let's see how it goes...
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Jan 14, 2021 23:56
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Angrymog posted:What are the CWU like as a union, since they're now open the general IT, not just communications, workers? CWU are good as a union, whether to join them or not depends on if there's another union already at your work. If there's a branch or just other members of another union you can join it's better to join that as it's increasing your collective strength. If there's nothing obvious then think about whether it's more likely you could get your other workers to join a particular union or not and join the one you think you've got the best odds.
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Jan 15, 2021 13:28
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Angrymog posted:As far as I know we don't have a union at work, but how would I find out? There might be a very shaded reference on your work intranet if you have one, otherwise it's very difficult unless they're recognised by the workplace. Odds are if you're not aware of it after checking the intranet and any main noticeboards then it doesn't exist.
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Jan 15, 2021 14:32
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Guavanaut posted:The funniest thing is if they'd listened to the ECtHR instead of the Sun.... Let me stop you there.
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Jan 16, 2021 12:54
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Was anyone chitterwaggering though? The guidance seems particularly harsh on people doing that.
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Jan 18, 2021 14:02
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NotJustANumber99 posted:How will they ignore it? Because the motion is "That this House believes that the Government should stop the planned cut in Universal Credit and Working Tax Credit in April and give certainty today to the six million families for whom it is worth an extra £1,000 a year." It's not saying it has to happen, just that parliament agrees that it should.
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Jan 18, 2021 20:56
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Lungboy posted:Yeah it was an opposition day vote so doesn't have any power. Well it is an Act of Parliament it just doesn't order anything to happen. If it had been phrased in a way to force the government to do something then the government would have opposed it.
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Jan 18, 2021 21:17
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Borrovan posted:A motion isn't an Act. Yeah oopsie about motions and acts, good thing I'm not in parliament!
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Jan 18, 2021 21:34
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Jose posted:We're locking down for ages Stay locked down for at least the next 3 months only for it to shoot up again or a little longer than a month in a zero covid manner and keep it down. Your call! 114: At least how many days this lockdown will last unless we get a zero covid strategy implemented.
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Jan 19, 2021 12:45
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Nothingtoseehere posted:We need to get second doses out there for that - while 1 dose is somewhat protective, the data is clear a second dose is better, so I think those are important. But there's no need to enforce restrictions when the over 60s and vunriable have all been double dosed - while you'll still get spread and some deaths, the potential for surges like we're seeing now should be blunted. Healthcare systems may not collapse but it's still a bad idea letting a new virus which inflicts medium term health consequences (at the very least) on many sufferers and with mutations coming fast just plough through the population because it'll be sunny and people miss the pub.
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Jan 19, 2021 13:35
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Nothingtoseehere posted:It's also a bad idea to continue a restrictive lockdown that further increases wealth inequality and poverty among the young and working class while further damaging people's mental health, education, futures etc. While most of that could be mitigated by a competent or human government, we don't have one - we have to choose between a further lockdown which benefits the rich more or easing it earlier to their short term benefit and unknown medium term risk. If we can't affect the government then no we can't choose at all. If we can affect them then let's get them to do the right way out.
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Jan 19, 2021 13:52
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crispix posted:Keith is resigning
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Jan 19, 2021 15:44
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Jakabite posted:I don't think that stat about people being readmitted then dying means that we're underreporting deaths. It's within 28 days of a positive test, not within 28 days of their first positive test. Presumably these people are being re-tested on re-admission. They won't be testing positive again though, not normally. Those will be virus not antibody tests which will be negative.
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Jan 19, 2021 17:14
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Lord of the Llamas posted:The more I hear about Biden banging on about bipartisanship the more I'm convinced he has dementia because surely someone who was VP during Obama's two terms can remember exactly how bipartisan the Republican Party is. Why are centrists so loving horny for compromise? Because they see the current balance of power held by the state and the capitalists as the ultimate good and their highest political priority is to preserve that. They might get angry at corrupt political dealings but would never get rid of the corrupt party as a whole because then something unknown would replace it and that threat is more serious to their world view than letting corruption continue. Hence horseshoe theory etc - it's not the qualities offered by the two radical wings which matter, it's that they're demanding change and so are the same threat. Biden's overall objective is to keep the US government as the primary power in the USA and the world and that means making sure everyone with power gets a seat at the table rather than think a new system is required more than achieving any of the democrats supposed aims.
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Jan 21, 2021 14:30
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The issue with the £500 for those with positive tests isn't that people are going to be rushing around to get that sweet sweet cash but that it won't prevent people who are ill but waiting for their test results back to still be under financial pressure to go to work. It's a lovely individual attempt to solve the problem when a simple and effective method - increase sick pay and sick pay protections - exists but the government doesn't want to do it.
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Jan 22, 2021 10:34
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If the really good stuff smells like bananas then I would assume the really good stuff is smuggled with bananas over them inherently activating the olfactory buds which create the bananary smell.
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Jan 22, 2021 19:24
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Can I get an F in the(rmometer) chat please?
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Jan 23, 2021 17:53
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:I'm going to be Mrs Unpopular now - tories have made and continue to make a dreadful hash of covid-19 but the public must share some of the blame. Well sort of, but most of us are powerless in an overall sense so blame is super super minimal. Compliance with the rules is still high, but the rules mean nearly all socialising and recreation is banned except what can be done online or in household groups and that's extremely difficult for many people when at the same time they're required to attend their work or face poverty. Being banned from seeing your friends but required to see your boss and coworkers is a special kind of hell, and that's because the current lockdown (a comrade of mine is calling it a 'mockdown') is still very poor in terms of doing the right things and minimising the costs of doing the right things. When 99% of the blame lies with the structures we live under I really cannot get excited about the 1% of blame lying with actual individual choice and behaviour.
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Jan 23, 2021 18:01
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forkboy84 posted:If England wants a left wing government all it needs to do is vote for it. A) Scotland has less influence in the HoC in our lifetimes, with the number of Scottish seats going from 72 out of 659 in 1997 to 59 out of 650 in 2010 & beyond. The pre-assumption of this logic is that the Scottish area is different from any other group of non-Tory voting seats, like Greater Manchester and Liverpool which frequently votes uniformly one way and doesn't get that party into government. That's not to say it's not valid but it has to be valid for some other reason. Just drawing a ring around a geographical region which votes differently from the bulk of the country isn't enough to legitimise them saying that that's meaningful enough for seperatism. Edit: I'm just going to quote Lenin here actually. Calls for self determination are all well within socialist demands but there is a second question to address with it as well: "In this situation, the proletariat, of Russia is faced with a twofold or, rather, a two-sided task: to combat nationalism of every kind, above all, Great-Russian nationalism; to recognise, not only fully equal rights, for all nations in general, but also equality of rights as regards polity, i.e., the right of nations to self-determination, to secession. And at the same time, it is their task, in the interests of a successful struggle against all and every kind, of nationalism among all nations, to preserve the unity of the proletarian struggle and the proletarian organisations, amalgamating these organisations into a close-knit international association, despite bourgeois strivings for national exclusiveness. " Self-determination is something that can strengthen or weaken the working class and to have it be legitimate for socialists the argument must be made that it strengthens the struggle rather than just pretends to reflect some 'true' national boundary when class knows no nationality. namesake fucked around with this message at 00:29 on Jan 24, 2021 |
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Jan 24, 2021 00:18
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big scary monsters posted:If Greater Manchester had had a popular independence movement for the last 50 years or so and regularly elected Mancunian Independence MPs then it probably wouldn't seem so outrageous - who knows, maybe the NIP will be there in a few decades. You don't have to like the SNP - we all know ITT that they're pretty poo poo - or think that Scotland out of the UK would be a good thing overall. But the SNP's entire raison d'être is Scottish independence and they've been the largest party in the Scottish Parliament since 2007 and returned the most Scottish MPs since 2015. That's about as legitimate as our parliamentary system can really get. I don't know what more you could ask for to legitimise an independence movement, the return of the Jacobite pretender and an armed uprising? Bourgeois parliamentary systems are not particularly legitimate as they are centres for the ruling class to organise their own affairs but even in this matter it's not a real vindication. Tory parliamentary majorities in the UK are seen as signs of oppression while SNP parliamentary majorities in Scotland are seen as signs of liberation - that cannot be explained by bourgeois electoral logic and that is my point. Scotland wants to be independent, that's fine and well within their right to want and to achieve it. My issue is one of enthusiasm - what does it change for the working class and how does it strengthen the international working class movement? Yearning for a more local bourgeoisie to ignore your needs is the same logic as inspired Brexit and fails to generate any real positivity towards it in me for the same reason. forkboy84 posted:No, the assumption of this logic is that a Scottish independence movement exists in a meaningful way, with an active base in Holyrood to go from, where as a North Britain independence movement doesn't exist & can't be jumped on to get away from the Home Counties death cult. I'm not a Scottish nationalist, I just can't loving hack being part of this miserable union anymore. If there was an independence movement where every Tory UDI'd & hosed off to Sealand I would support that. But it doesn't exist so I can only work with what exists. As I said above, your desire for seperatism is legitimate and your desire for meaningful change inspiring but what is the connection between the two? The rhetoric is based around pouring deserved scorn on Westminster but then drops the ball with unspecific 'we can rule our own affairs better!'. Who is 'we' in this case? Without that being specified and meaningfully organised it'll be the SNP and Scottish capitalism and so it is hard to really see what is being achieved.
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Jan 24, 2021 01:20
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crispix posted:i know a woman at work who is one of those people who likes to be involved in things and she always works at the polls or the counts on election days. she said it's shocking the number of NI election (STV) ballots that turn up for counting with just a big X on them despite officials at the polls telling people how to vote and a big poster in front of everyone in the booths with the same information So long as it counts as a valid vote though then that's saying 'This party or I don't care who'. Not taking the time to rank a list of 5 or so when you don't really care at all isn't really a problem.
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Jan 24, 2021 12:52
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forkboy84 posted:Yes, it's a valid vote but it's also poorly understanding the electoral system. If you're the rare Irish Nationalist in Belfast East & vote Sinn Fein X you've wasted your vote. But if use your vote as intended then it'll in the end count against a 3rd DUP MLA, or a PUP MLA, whatever. I think that's showing levels of political engagement rather than about the voting system. If there's one party that's won you over or you are a tribal voter than that's what you want and putting time and thought into how less bad the others are or could be and listing that isn't how people engage with politics. The number of tactical voters has to be pretty insignificant compared to those who want to vote for the winner in any system.
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Jan 24, 2021 13:11
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Regarde Aduck posted:I can see some people wanting a war, but I can't see anyone actually fighting one. Er the history of popular revolutionary movements really really contradicts this. There's usually a militarised force raised from somewhere else that the ruling class is happy to deploy and keep redeploying new ones when they get slaughtered for geopolitical or nationalist reasoning. 'The ruling class will accept their loss of authority as legitimately grounded and so give in peacefully.' is probably non-existant throughout the entire length of human history.
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Jan 25, 2021 01:39
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