Posts by Chinamissing 12 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Feb 2024
I mean Italy and Germany are shining examples of how wonderful PR is, decisions being made are absolutely and totally in the best interest of the country and not the minority party founded by a single issue group of people who absolutely must have their project funded at all costs.
I mean these are councils, there is no need to hire any management consultants to waste money, they can pay their chief exec an additional £x00,00 PA plus create a raft of new jobs that do little, have suitably ridiculous titles and then invest in a great property deal, I've got here....
Suspect the beloved Xi would disagree with you, he might even have a special camp for you. He is also taking his inspiration very clearly from Mao and has any number of progressive policies, including a number of education idea's that are right from central casting for communism.
The comment clearly holds water and unfortunately for us all, the election this year in the USA is very much a democratic one, votes were counted and the orange one is elected. It is also pretty free compared to most countries in the world. Is this nice? Is it great? Who knows but the fundamentals in place are some of the things that let him get in. Though he and his republicans will now subvert and potentially break it is a risk but as of today, the USA was a democratic society.
Then throw in the relative size of our economy, 'carbon outputs' and general environmental impact and you realise that unless the USA, China, India and probably one or two others do something, everything we do will move the world's health not a single % point. I am all for recycling and use public transport and do take holidays abroad, no shame there. But the constant b*llocks spewed by governments of all hue about being 'a world leader in green tech and showing the way to decarbonisation' is tiring. All it really means is we lose businesses, increase costs, cover the RnD costs of the rest of the world who watch what happens to us and even if we hit our goal, we will not have helped the world move significantly enough but will have ensured a broken economy and no 'green jobs' of any significant number. It is depressing and now that Trump is in power, we truly are in trouble. Will be interesting to see what the reaction is to US states starting to sue the UK over our ESG policies in the USA. Combine this with wars, Labour's incredible budget 1 (read the BoE amongst others) and life is not looking overly chirpy.
> Well you're a registered patient of the *practice*, not of a particular doctor...
Wow, so one of those doctors, who doesn't know you (because, as you say, you are not seen by a doctor but the practice), can decide to not input information from an outside source but another in the practice might decide it is needed. How does that work for the benefit of the patient?
And surely that point also removes pretty much every argument above your post that talks about how the GP need's to know their patient and support them in the community? If it is the practice that owns the patients then there is no personal relationship and so it is even more critical that the system can be updated or used by outside partners to ensure that a total picture is available to the patient.
Reading the BMA's stance on this it is nothing to do with workload or protecting patients but ensuring that jobs are protected because the more our systems are joined up, the more chance there is of outcomes improving, people being able to manage their own health and perhaps needing less gp's.
The BMA might once have been a respected organisation that had the interests of both the patients and the medical staff at heart but that is long past.
That is assuming your local gp is reading everything and then deciding what to input. Given they are so overworked at the moment, they surely do not have the time to do this? And at the various practices friends and family use, the gp does not read your test results or notes. In fact nothing happens unless you call up and ask where the results are, then the receptionist will say, 'oh nothing there'. Great GDPR and frankly if they can do the diagnosis, then why do we bother with GPs? And if there is something there, then we get a call from a nurse, anywhere from 2 days to 2 weeks from the first call asking what is going on.
So a GP, who is a generalist, can choose to ignore advice from a specialist and not to include it in the notes and that is a good thing? As a patient I want all related medical information on me in one place, so that a total review can occur, not just what a gp decides I need. Especially when they are impossible to get hold of, do not follow up calls and in our practice no one knows who their gp is.
I mean you can't have rich locals? And there is nothing wrong with people owning properties and renting them out, there are all sorts of reasons for people to own 2 properties. The issue is with hyper short term lets that only cannibalise hotel/BnB rooms and remove properties from the longer term rental market. I agree with the mayor's actions, even if they are not perfect, I have yet to see any other solution actually work.
And then get voted out and the rule overturned. Court cases will challenge it and people will protest and change will happen. There is a massive difference between the West (and in this instance the UK) and China. I mean, China doesn't need Rwanda when it has its own concentration camps housing millions in Xinjiang.
There is no moral equivalency here, we have a system of checks and balances, that right now feel imbalanced and imperfect but they survive and they evolve because our system has them and because we still (for how long) have the rights and the people to check government and courts. China does not have that and will never have it. Technology will keep the CCP in power forever and oppress its people forever.
Except in many ways it has, countries united to defeat Hitler, Stalin and the such like. The United Nations may well be a talking shop but it is better to talk than war even if right now China and Russia are doing their level best to initiate a global war, either by directly invading a sovereign state (Russia) or by stealing land and islands and preventing countries from landing on their own territory (China) or by breaking international rules on overflying sovereign nations (China again.)
On another scale, reparations, sharing of medicine and global conferences and laws that have had an impact on climate, on investment and the such like. Sure it is not all perfect and there are a lot of gaps but humans do collaborate and things do get better. Life expectancy? reduction in various illnesses and others.
As for not seeing China as worse or better. It is categorically worse, one party state, mass incarceration of entire regions, concentration camps, people who disagree with the party line, vanishing (anyone want to be a female tennis player in China?), total removal of right to protest (HK) and the destruction of their legal system and way of life.
I totally agree, a world where we act in the best interests of the world is a brilliant goal and people are working towards it and over time we will see significant changes and I like to think overall improvements. But to say that China and the West are equivalent is blinkered and wrong. You protest in China about your water companies polluting your river or the power/chicken farms destroying the environment and you will be shut down and possibly arrested. Certainly your social cohesion score will be impacted and so your ability to work, receive benefits reduced. None of this happens here. In fact the power of protest has forced companies and governments to change.
Or far left wankers doing the same. Whilst you sit there and proselytise and slag off the far right, you seem to ignore the far left, who range from Cornyn 'I was not at the funeral at all' to Xi 'Concentration camp' and of course the great hero of NK and his love of banning denims..
The depressing thing here is that George Carlin was right (thank you aerogems), the more abusive and screamy you are, the more people look, listen and act on. Check out self censorship in the UK and all that fun stuff.
Being a prick and loud is not limited to the far right, though you would think it was given the inability of people to acknowledge that loud, screamy behaviour is common to all extremes. The level of vitriol and abuse over what counts as a woman for pro sports is an easy example of where sense and calmness is drowned out by screams from both sides of the extreme spectrum.
And no, I find myself sitting unhappily in the middle and then floating to one side or the other depending on what the particular issue is (train strikes, break the unions... Worker rights in Amazon warehouses, pro unions.) Sitting on the fence this long is starting to hurt the nether regions.. ;-)
Not sure they blew it? Did you really expect an organisation that makes hundreds of millions and possibly billions to suddenly die? Especially given their locations and undoubted resources. I mean they are clearly not dumb and so would have a back up plan in place (the irony) but what the NCA and the FBI and all the rest have done is disrupt, assist some organisations and shown that they can be defeated (at least once.) Not sure I think the PR was so well handled but other than that, the cops did well. Made a good read after the interminable and never ending reads on organisations being hacked and ransomware etc. But to assume that one victory is the end of the war is naive at best and utter stupidity at worst.
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