Posts by LucreLout

French monopoly watchdog orders Google to talk payment terms with French publishers

Re: Dear Google

Or just remove French from Google

Quite. Were Google to drop France entirely, rather than just French, they'd soon be repealling their law and begging Google to return.

Think about it for a moment, France has just as many "Javascript developers" as any other country, and they won't be able to function without Google. The productivity hit to information professionals, whose job it is to understand Google searching and how to leverage it, including SEO, would be significant enough to show up in their revenue figures. Not to mention the difficulties for the oldest and younger generations who have only ever known Google for searching would be enormous.

At best France would be handing control straight to the other big player in technology - Microsoft.

While I get the point of principle with the copyright laws, I'm genuinely struggling to see the the actual balanced upside for France in all of this, other than some half baked notion of nationality.

Re: Greed

Hopefully the french will surrender quickly too.

When did they ever not?

All your jobs are belong to us... Amazon is hiring 75,000 people but if you want US home groceries, tough luck

Stand by for a soaring stock valuation

Love them or hate them, their business model remains in ballistic growth territory, so they've never sought to pay a dividend. Given that somehow we've got ourselves into a situation where businesses that are doing perfectly well commercially are having to cancel dividends from previous successful years, it calls into question the whole idea of growth through reinvesting dividends.

Despite a PE of around 80, my thinking is if its going to be "socially unacceptable" to pay dividends, then investors will pile onto whatever stock has the best current implementation of the new universal business model. Which is probably Amazon. The obvious concern for those that don't like Amazons business practices, is that other companies follow suit and adopt the entire operating model.

The other option is going to be rampant house price inflation as people store their excess incomes in their home by buying the next wrung up the ladder - which will just increase the price of each band for everyone.

Re: I have been recently enlightened..

Being a bit longer in the tooth, I knew nothing about this meme until a few weeks ago.

I don't really get the fascination with memes, but this one I've been aware of for a very long time. As far as I'm aware it may even be the first meme. If its not, its probably something to do with the great Chuck Norris.

We lost another good one: Mathematician John Conway loses Game of Life, taken by coronavirus at 82

RIP

I've no recollection of hearing about him prior to his death, which is a disgrace really - his achievements are rather greater than the Kanye West's, Jade Goodies etc that I have heard of despite my intentional avoidance of all things celebrity.

"Society" needs to change.

WeWork sues SoftBank over 'AWOL' $3bn shares purchase – which included millions lined up for ousted CEO Neumann

surely they would notice some risks here

You have to understand the cultural and accounting differences to fully get why Japanese banks don't behave the same way as everyone else.

Marking to market, reflecting the underlying value of the assets at sale price today rather than the price paid, would create a major loss of face for executives up and down the banks management structure, so they prefer not to do it.

Regulatory reporting in Japan doesn't insist on value at fire sale prices, rather there are different provisions for the value of something, which again plays into the banks view of the risk and what we can only see as losses from this point.

Both of the above allow and reflect the taking of extremely long term views - culturally Japan considers the future in terms of generations rather than quarters as we do in the West.

Amazon says it fired a guy for breaking pandemic rules. Same guy who organized a staff protest over a lack of coronavirus protection

Re: Unions

So when the company kicks your ass you just whine in the corner and take everything they bother to pour on you?

Companies never kick my ass. As soon as an employer does anything I don't consider fair, reasonable, or above board, I walk. Just quit and go get a better job elsewhere. As my ex-finance mate says all the damn time, there's billions of companies out there and you won't have time to work for them all.

Are you stupid or what?

You'd have to be well on your way to a 170 IQ to make that possible, and your post shows no signs of it.

That's the exact reason we have unions in the first place: To stop that shit.

You have unions to blackmail your employer into paying what it can't afford or you all go on strike together. There's no noble purpose behind them. Again, that is why all the union barons are multimillionaires. And the hard of thinking just go along with it without ever realizing who it is that's really screwing them over....

Re: Unions

Unions might be a good idea if they worked as they are ideally needed, but unfortunately human nature takes over.

Yup, which is why all the union barons are multi millionaires. It's really quite immoral.

Re: Unions

Unions have their place

Yup - the history books.

but the guy leading the charge is being paid to be somewhere else, and he isn't doing what he was being paid to do, then the guy doesn't deserve a job

The guy sounds like an absolute joy to employ. Quite aside from the union stooge stuff, the things that have been said would result in dismissal from any employer I've ever worked for. The alleged actions doubly so - there will be entry & exit logs, CCTV etc so Amazon will know that he's came on site while prohibited from doing so.

A union plays no part in the decision.

Much as I love Amazon, and indeed hold their shares, and I think Chris Smalls is behaving like an utter cretin, I have to say that I don't buy this for a second in this case. Its more likely to be expressly related to the activity, and its simply worth letting a toxic employee sue to be rid of them.

Re: One Sided Reporting

Can confirm, following strict investigation. About the cats, I mean.

Can confirm following rigid investigation that the other thing is also true.

Why is ransomware still a thing? One-in-three polled netizens say they would cave to extortion demands

Easy to say

This is where we should point out that paying ransomware fees is a really bad idea. Security and law enforcement groups alike agree that keeping regular offline backups and patching your software is a far better plan than paying demands, and there is no guarantee you will even get your data back should you agree to foot the extortion fees.

Discussing what a company should have done before they got infected is all well and good, but serves no purpose to them once infected.

It i true there is no guarantee that paying up will get your business critical information back, but if it does you're only really out the cost of a bribe, and some competent staff to extricate you from the remaining tech debt. If you don't pay it you guarantee that you don't get your data back and you cease trading. A few hundred bucks, even a few thousand, in that light, would be well worth the money.

The age of respondents is curiously close to university age, so it'd be entirely forgivable that someone young has done something dumb, and now lost their dissertation which will potentially impact their whole future if they don't recover it, or perhaps just they just don't understand the situation and are worried that the videos of being ridden like Red Rum by a bunch of frat boys are at risk of being exposed rather than forever inaccessible. Who knows. If young people stop doing dumb shit then it probably just means they got older and grew up.

Who's going to pay for Britain's Aunty Beeb to carry on? Broadband users, broadcaster suggests to government

Re: April Fool

They also don't get money back from the commercial activities you're talking about, that money goes to BBC Worldwide who do not share back funding.

Yes, but that's a chosen internal structure rather than two actually separated entities that require to be separated.

I can very easily split myself into Lout (uk), Lout (my living room), Lout (bathroom inc) etc, but in reality my reasons for doing so are fictitious. BBC has a massive back catalog, which despite having been paid by us to make, it insists is a commercially separate entity and so we must pay again for box sets of things we already paid them to make.

The future of the BBC as a whole unit is purely commercial, which is how it has chosen to manifest most of its interests, simply because much of the public no longer trust it, they no longer value it, the output isn't high enough quality in many cases, and the price is disproportionate (guardian TV passes for the News at Ten, its days as the Blair Broadcasting Corporation, its 24x7 British Broadcasting Corbynism of recent years).

BBC voluntarily used to discipline Clarkson for minor transgressions such that he was on a final warning by the time he did something that should have been disciplined, and had to be sacked, thereby losing the corporation £x00M's. That's hundreds of millions I'm simply not minded to make up, so they're going to need to live on less.

Like most of the public sector, the BBC wastes money hand over fist because if they don't spend it all every year then they may not get it again the next year. There's no drive towards operational efficiency, self sufficiency, and no focus on why they exist.

Its the 3 P's. Pay -> Pensions -> Provision of services. All UK public sector entities get that backwards. You can only spend a pound once, so the focus needs to always be Provision of services -> Pay -> Pensions.

Sorry Auntie, I've got no sympathy and nor do most folks.... especially not when I can get Netflix for a lot less per year.

How many days of carefree wiping do you have left before life starts to look genuinely apocalyptic? Let's find out

I went to my local Morrisons last night and can only have four of any one alcohol product

I'm not a panic buyer, I wish to make that clear, but I have been hoarding Whiskey for the past 30 years and most likely have enough to see me out of this life at around 70ish. Or a week on Tuesday if I go for gold.

My beer & lager stores are depleting fast, but I'm a long way from being unable to shave the mutt the morning after a heavy night.

Leaving Las Vegas... for good? IT industry conference circuit won't look the same on other side of COVID-19 pandemic

Re: I disagree

all research ordered destroyed

The destruction of knowledge is the worst part of that for me.

Ok, you want your weapons program. Ok, you want your weapons program and you don't want to battle the peaceniks for it every year. Fine, pass your laws and make your choices. But to destroy the knowledge, to deliberately set back humanity from its achievements, and to deny the future any chance to reconsider your decisions made at a static point in time, is unforgivable.

ETA: I've done a bit of Googling but don't know enough to figure out specifically which reactor type you're referring too. Any chance of some pointers for a nuclear noob please?

Re: I disagree

But will all that freshly printed money have any value?

That depends. There's only 3 ways out of the fiscal problem once COVID clears.

1) Very high taxes. Well, we already have that. Taxes as a percentage of GDP are near all time highs now, and we're so far around the Laffer curve that the only way to raise additional tax revenue from here is to cut taxes.

2) Public spending cuts. They'd have to be so deep the public sector would be stripped back to core purpose only. The only workable alternative will be to dump the sky high unearned gold plated pensions and to cap earnings at a much lower level save for few very specific roles.

Both of those options lead to a lot of pain and work on a repayment basis..... which brings us to option number 3.

3) Legislate to break the link between government obligations and inflation (public sector pensions and pay would no longer rise by inflationary amounts) and inflate your way out of the numbers gradually over a couple of decades.

Option 3 is the one almost every nation will pursue, leading to something of an inflationary period.

If I'm right it'll become a great time to be young - your mortgage will get eroded quickly, your salary will shoot up, your investments will moon. It'll make you the new boomers. What it won't be so great for will be the zombies (gen z) and the actual boomers as they'll be on what will become fixed pensions.

The main takehome is that there's no need for them to be at Vegas.

Life is about so much more than need though.

There's no need to sleep with Claudia Schiffer when Sandra from the Dog & Duck is just as functional.

There's no need to fly business class when its going the same place as economy.

There's no need to drive a supercar when a Ford will do most of the same functional things.

There's no need to see Pavarotti at La Scala, when the CD sounds the same or Dave does a good rendition of Nessun Dorma at the Dog & Duck karaoke night.

There's no need to buy a Da Vinci or Van Gogh when the local art college can knock you up a nice painting.

Needs are important, but so is quality of experience, and fun. Vegas is fun, and for so many reasons beyond the surface. I'd rather go there than a conference in Lubbock Texas, or Mönchengladbach.

Re: I disagree

Once people see that life continues under COVID lockdowns with considerably less airline and car travel, it will be all the easier to accept similar restrictions long term for reduced Carbon allowances.

No it won't. Sorry, but for the next decade or two the socialist version of environmentalism (the mantra of less) is toast. People will want to fly on holidays - lots of them, they will want to treat themselves to a nicer car - and drive it, and people will absolutely have had enough of the state or anyone else telling them what they can and can't do.

The days of school children hectoring the adults have passed. If you think otherwise you're going to be in for a rude awakening the other side of this pandemic.

The capitalist environmentalism still has a chance - emissions trading, R&D to reduce harmful pollutants, innovation and technology etc etc. That version will still have legs. Tesla & other leccy cars will eventually replace large capacity V config engines, solar panels on roofs will reduce the need for coal or gas, nuclear technology will make carbon emissions slide, more efficient planes etc.

Environmentalism will change due to Covid. It has to or its already dead.

Re: I disagree

modern air travel has degenerated into an experience about as pleasant as a weekend in prison

Headphones, hand sanitizer (even before Covid), tablet device, a good book, and some tasty snacks to bring on board, and I find air travel eminently manageable.

Re: I disagree

That assumes the consumers will have any money to spend

Thanks to furloughing most employees will have money to spend. Not all, sadly, but this will be better than the great depression when most lost their income for a protracted period of time.

Re: Your company's IT director was asleep at the wheel

Most laptop keyboards however are crap for extended typing and programming but you can always plug in a quality USB one.

Yep, along with a nice comfy office chair, a monitor way larger than anything work would buy me, and my home office is better equipped than my actual office. I'm guaranteed a window seat, there is no hot desking, no queue for the traps in the gents, and dogs are allowed, even encouraged.

Re: Your company's IT director was asleep at the wheel

desktops are less likely to develop legs

My company laptop cost more than my car, and can be guaranteed not to develop legs lest I get sent a bill for replacement. Theft from me rather than by me, or drunken me leaving it on the Tube are covered by insurance. Easy really.

There's absolutely NO reason for these junkets to be held physically bar the one reason that you mention above.

And yet there are many others.

Catching up with people you haven't worked with in decades does happen at conferences when you bump into each other and does produce opportunities and connections that would otherwise not exist.

Making new connections with other attendees that you don't know over coffee that similarly wouldn't happen on a video conference.

Learning opportunities abound at conferences, over and above the scheduled talks and workshops.

That's before the free stuff, the socialising, the opportunity to strengthen weak working relationships, and the fact that people just enjoy attending.

Vegas is a s**thole of outstanding proportions

Vegas is what you make of it. Don't like the sleazy side or the gambling, fine, go see Hoover dam, the grand canyon, red rock canyon, the Vegas speedway, the various museums, etc, go shopping, hire a muscle car, eat an impressive variety of food and that's just the buffets, go clubbing, hit a bar, etc etc. Vegas is more or less whatever you want it to be.

Microsoft corrects '775 per cent cloud usage surge' claim: Big number only applied to Teams and only in Italy

Re: Really?

This is hardly news to those of us who have been around IT for more decades than we care to remember.

Whippersnapper. I've been around IT for more decades than I CAN remember.

Cops charge prankster who 'corona-coughed' on aged officer and had it filmed

Re: Idiot

assault on an emergency worker

Why is assaulting an "emergency worker" worse than assaulting your granny or your child? Its the same thing so should hold the same charges and penalties.

Re: Idiot

In the UK it appears such incidents are being treated as GBH

The problem is our piss-weak CPS will bottle it and go for section 21 rather than section 18. Meaning the scrote will be back on the streets by tea time.

Given that offense is apparently to be held in the eye of the beholder, so should intent be held in the eyes of the victim.

Re: Idiot

Through the book at him

Yes, but also recognise he is going to continue to be a danger to others, and that there is a solution to this.

He puts others at risk because he doesn't know if he has the virus or not, so lets give it to him, that way we can be fairly sure he doesn't have it again. I realize the virus may mutate, but that just means we'll have to give that one to him too.

What happens when the maintainer of a JS library downloaded 26m times a week goes to prison for killing someone with a motorbike? Core-js just found out

<iBecause morons like you keep using packages like this. You should have checked things like that before including it in your project.</i>

Most of the js devs I work with have not the first clue how to follow their dependency graph - they literally don't know, beyond the top level include, what code they're running.

The only conclusion I can come to is that they aren't capable of understanding why that is a problem, so they simply avoid thinking about it.

Whoa, someone actually texted you in 2020? Oh, nvm, it's just Boris Johnson, telling you to stay the f**k at home

Re: Visions of a lackey tapping out 50,000,000 messages on his T9 keypad

Good thing it was just a deadly virus, not a nuclear missile winging its way

Sure, because knowing I'm about to get nuked and there's nothing I can do will be very helpful.

Internet Archive opens National Emergency Library with unlimited lending of 1.4m books for stuck-at-home netizens amid virus pandemic

Re: Current copyright terms ignored... the world keeps turning

They want political favors in return.

The EXPECT political favors in return. FTFY.

Re: Out of print (wag the long tail?)

Or maybe reissued on the 50th anniversary of the author's death, or the 100th anniversary, or the 150th... (It'll still be copyrighted 'cuz Congress.)

I was just struck by a realization I have no clue how the UK treats American works of copyright after they pass our cut off date. I could probably google this and probably misinterpret whatever I find into whatever I already think. Anyone know the answer?

Are we too bound to respect the Mickey Mouse Laws? Even though our law, I believe, provides for up to 70 years after the creatives death, then its public domain?

Artificial scarcity. That's f*cked up.

Quite. Now, I'm not one for Utopian ideals, but I remember well a man named Aaron Schwartz and his view that all academic research should be available to everyone. A view you could reasonably conclude he died for.

Look at the funding we, the world, have rightly made available to handle Covid19. Could not a tiny fraction of that be found in normal times such that research, even a year old, could be made freely available to all?

The thing I miss most about my education isn't the partying (I'm too old for that anyway), it's the unlimited academic journals and papers I could read.

Capita CEO and CFO take 'voluntary' pay cut of 25% amid coronavirus outbreak

Re: "a 'voluntary' pay cut of 25 per cent"

I'm sure the "cost base" he's talking about having to reduce (i.e. the employees he's going to give the boot to) will be happy to do their bit for future profitability and executive bonuses

Oh they'll be doing more than their bit; they'll be giving their all.

Re: "a 'voluntary' pay cut of 25 per cent"

They can afford it. Hell, they can afford 75% in those conditions.

Yes, quite. If in a "normal" year my comp was measured by the million, in a time like this I'd commit to working for free - the aim, surely, would be to hang onto the job for when the good times roll again, which will happen one day.

Frankly, if my current gig wanted me to work unpaid for a few months I might be able to afford that and would prefer to hang on to my role. That's not something most people could afford, but the guys the article is about could probably afford to never work again - and that may well include their descendants too.

UK enters almost-lockdown: Brits urged to keep calm and carry on – as long as it doesn't involve leaving the house

Re: "One form of exercise a day"

let's look at the vote share of the main parties, and compare it with the seat share

Yes, and that happened because labour voted against the boundary changes to equalize constituency size precisely because they'd spent a decade rigging the ballot in favour of their Northern heartlands, on the critically flawed assumption they would always vote labour no matter what. Oops.

Scotlands votes only actually matter if labour get enough votes to need a coalition. Libs are dead and aint coming back soon. Scots are SNP or nowt. So Scotland has chosen not to matter electorally. We have to respect their choice.

Re: And use food delivery services where you can.”

I still have everything else to pay for.

Yes, and food shopping was one of those things so is already covered. Lock-down isn't a licence to put away the pans and JustEat - simply have your groceries delivered or arrange a click and collect type thing and your bill stays pretty static.

Re: clowns bulk buying flour even though they have never baked a loaf of bread in their lives.

One wonders about their arse-wiping capabilities.

I wonder that about most of the people I encounter in a typical day, as well as who is dressing all these idiots so they can go out and walk among us.

Re: And use food delivery services where you can.”

Who is going to pay for millions of home delivered meals, I wonder.

You literally have nothing else to spend money on. Home delivered food doesn't mean takeaways, it means a bag of tesco delivered spuds and some meat.

Re: "One form of exercise a day"

If people heeded the simple advice of "social distancing" in the first place, we wouldn't be in this bind.

And if nobody takes heed to the "lock down" then things can get ugly.

I was expecting to be able to count the number of people I see out of the window on a per hour basis. Nope, everyone seems to be going about their normal day. It's looking more and more likely that the military are going to end up deployed to force people to stay in doors.

Stay the fuck home, mouthbreathers. The longer you fuck about the longer this goes on for all of us and the worse it gets!

Re: "One form of exercise a day"

Johnson explains things terribly, about as bad as Trump, and with a lack of clarity that makes one wonder whatever caused the dons to rate him as high as a 2:1. How is it possible for so many apparently educated people to do such a poor job of conveying important information?

Your real problem with Johnson isn't any of this; even before the crisis he was already the best PM since Maggie. No, your real problem is you STILL think the wrong party won the election, and you know, you know that if Boris continues doing a good job of managing the crisis then he's going to be reelected again many times over.

You're frightened that your party blew its chance following a 1970s agenda in 2019, and you know what? You're right, they did.

It's time to track people's smartphones to ensure they self-isolate during this global pandemic, says WHO boffin

Re: Naomi Klein

Even the very worst case has mortality at around 1/2%.

And yet the CFR in Italy is around 7%.

The numbers you're thinking of are idealized - if you had unlimited healthcare then yes, 1 or 2%, but nowhere does, and once the ICU gets overwhelmed the death rate soars. Again, we could see the CFR rocket as soon as they ran out of beds and ventilators.

The NHS haven't prepared for this - they haven't invested in equipment or training, they've spent on pay and pensions instead. It's going to get completely overrun. As it stands last night, our CFR is around 5% and that's before the infections take off like a scalded cat because the mouthbreathers are ignoring lock-down because liberty.

The UK CFR is currently around 5%. 422 / 8077 * 100 = 5.2% And we've not ran out of ventilators yet.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/coronavirus-covid-19-information-for-the-public

Re: Naomi Klein

I think a look at history will show that spite

Biggest parliamentary majority in history, yet wait until the very dying days of their time in power to bring in a new 50% rate of tax? Spite. Nothing but spite.

The Conservatives stand for a fairer country - you keep more of what you earn and I keep more of what I earn, instead of you just expecting me to do the work for both of us.

misogyny

Look at the way labour treat its female MPs! And god help then is they're Elected While Jewish!

Look at the current "leadership" contest. I mean, its like a "youngest cotagenarian contest" really. And still, still the middle aged white man is in the lead.

Compare that to 2 female leaders. 2 female PMs. Women in the Conservative party are treated with respect.

racism

First, labour really did come for the Jews. Its only the second party in history to be investigated by the equalities commission, a commission is set up! The other was the BNP.

Compared to the Conservatives where everyone gets a fair shake - being Jewish isn't a career death sentence.

homophobia

Biggest majority in history and refused time and again to allow gay marriage.

Conservatives legalized gay marriage with a wafer thin majority in a coalition!

economic illiteracy

Every labour government in history has:

- inherited a better economy than it left

- inherited lower debt than it left

- ended in depression or a recession so big it only looks small compared to a global pandemic

Every single time the Conservatives get the job of piecing the economy back together. Every time they do, the useful idiots elect labour again and destroy the whole thing again.

And you talk of history? You've learned nothing from it.

It is time for a new centre-left party in the UK.

Yes, yes it is. But better still would be an actual centre party - left leanings but who understood economics, human nature, and enterprise.

Apologism for the shoestring state of the NHS seems almost credible until you see the comparison of resources available to the NHS compared to other major European nations health services.

And yet almost a quarter of the people who work work in the NHS and we spend almost £2500 per man, woman, and child on the NHS every single year. For clarity, the average income tax payer contributes £4800 per annum, which once the NHS is fed and watered, isn't leaving a lot for education or other departments. Obviously there's more paid than just income tax, but then children and about a third of adults don't work, and we haven't even discounted the 1 in 4 that do work work for the NHS so aren't paying the taxes that run it.

It isn't a people or resourcing problem, its an efficient spending issue - they spend too much on pensions, paperwork, and ballgazing admins & managers leaving too little for front-line staff and equipment. The NHS will need to be significantly restructured once the epidemic is over; there's simply no longer any way to avoid it.

It takes 6 years to qualify as a doctor, and then the same again to specialise fully. What sort of timescale did you have in mind for scalability?

That assumes nobody qualified ever leaves.

Military personnel can be called back to active duty at any time if they have ever served. There's probably over 100k doctors and nurses that have either retired in the last 5 years or left the profession to do something else that could be called back in this exceptional time. Yes, they'd need a refresher course, but we've had months of notice here, so while it would have been unpopular with the former staff, it should have been done.

The calc following is a bit vague because its stats not data, but given the NHS has about 6 million staff, if we assume even half of them have ever qualified as a nurse or doc, then we have 3 million active medical staff. 3 million divided by a 45 year career is 66-67k retirees per year if everyone stayed the course. That gives us a pool of roughly 350k people that could be called back into service minus those that left the NHS to work in the private sector who just got annexed. Again, assume half, so we should have 150-175k medical staff we could summon for retraining and redeployment.

Re: Maybe

Crowds are as intelligent as the least among them

The average IQ is 100, with a SD of 15, below 70 is mildly retarded, and above 130 is intelligent. For most intelligent people, every day interactions with average people is functionally the same as an average persons interaction with someone with mild learning difficulties. This is why Individuals can be intelligent, people cannot.

Re: Naomi Klein

Look at how the number increased in Italy in the last two weeks.

It genuinely astounds me how many people don't see this, or forget that Italy has a much better health service than our NHS. Even if you believe in British Exceptionalism, you're going to need to believe real hard in 12 days time when the death toll in the UK reaches the Italian peak.

I've seen nothing that indicates we're better prepared for this or that we have a significantly better strategy; after all, the point of our strategy is to sustain the lock down through the peak with the predicate that it will become unsustainable over a longer period than a few months.

We are taking a science based approach, but thus far I've seen nothing to indicate that the science is playing out the way the scientists projected.

We already know for a fact that the CFR for this soars as soon as the ICU beds or ventilator supplies run out, and Italy had double the number we started with. Our CFR can reasonably be expected to hit around the same 7% as Italy, even given recent developments regarding low tech mass producible ventilators, with a wholly possible overshoot taking us nearer to the 10% worst case scenario.

NHS staff are, on the whole, procedural thinkers (process followers) rather than goal oriented creative thinkers (outcome driven). Both are useful in different situations, but any "exceptionalism" we display will come from the latter group not the former. The NHS efforts will be valiant and possibly even heroic, but unless some reason appears for our progression to diverge on the downside from Italy, they are going to get completely overrun.

Unless something generic like HCQ is shown to work in a week, and we happen to have piles of it laying around, we are going to have a rather serious problem by next weekend.

Re: Naomi Klein

10% of the population are not going to die. Even the very worst case has mortality at around 1/2%. And yes while young people are not entirely immune they're also vastly more likely to come through an infection than older people.

WHO say 3.4%, but that's before the hospitals get overwhelmed and they start taking ventilators away from the over 65s to give to the young, which they will do because the over 65s are more likely to die form it. In doing so, of course, the death rate would soar.

That's half a million of the already oldest and weakest in society.

You say that as though it doesn't matter. Millions of grieving families. And its "oldest and/or weakest" because anyone immuno-compromised is going to be at risk.

if lockdowns continue for more than a month

They will. They will have to continue until one of three things happen :-

A) a vaccine appears, which is likely to be 12 to 18 months

B) effective treatments emerge, similar to treating but not inoculating against HIV.

C) the NHS gets itself in order and increases the number of patients it can treat simultaneously such that it doesn't get overran and a low death rate becomes politically acceptable across parliament. The lockdown won't end until labour vote for it.

None of those things is happening in a month. None of those things is likely within 3 months. You need to understand that any time you spend between now and Xmas not locked down will have been a bonus. This IS the new normal.

I suspect, and hope, we'll see a lot more rational discussion as to exactly what level of lockdowns we want to put ourselves through as a society

We will undoubtedly get such a debate, but that isn't coming any time soon and it certainly won't reach a consensus any time this year.

Re: Naomi Klein

And yet you keep voting them back into power.

As opposed to labour, the most spiteful, racist, misogynist, homophobic, ageist and economically illiterate party in the history of parliament? You're damn right I do!

Re: Naomi Klein

Government back then was saying 'we'll get 70K dead at worst, and 3k dead in a best case scenario' - this was in the UK. final stats... not even 1000 dead. SARS was identical, as was the bird flu.

And yet still a friend lost his father to bird flu - a man I held in enormous respect.

People die all the time, and they die from disease all the time, but the way the media is going on about it you'd think half the population is going to succumb to this disease... which it obviously won't....

Quite possibly 10% of us will though, unless we distance and or lock down. Uncomfortably for many of the young is the new knowledge that they may not be as immune tot his virus as they had assumed, and it won't just be the old that die. Though quite frankly I consider your temporary loss of ability to sit in the pub a price well worth paying if it keeps my folks alive (underlying conditions you see - they get this they die).

There must be many families with immunocompromised children that are living moment to moment in sheer terror, and for those people I am certainly happy to forgo a few Thursdays in the Dog & Duck, work from home, and home school my kids.

I want you to be right and this to be overblown more than you can possibly imagine, but you're not. And by the time you realise that, it would otherwise be too late for a lot of folk. So take one for the team, in good graces, or accept that there is no society and devil take the hindmost.

Re: Naomi Klein

That's strange. I thought the UK Government was following a declared strategy that involves continuous escalation, timed for maximum impact, using measures planned for weeks ago in addition to incorporating new information and taking into account resource availability. They're then supporting it with a range of economic measures never attempted before in this country.

Amazing isn't it - the amount of hard of thinking NPCs that demand we all "listen to the experts" or "follow the science" suddenly get their nickers in a twist when the science and the experts are advocating something they don't like or agree with.

The UK is following the science and has the best people in the country to make decisions stood either side of Boris at every press conference. This is the very definition of a science driven expert approach. Now, will it be seen to have been the wrong approach with the passage of time? Who knows, possibly, but based on what knowledge and data were available at any given time the experts did the best they could.

Most of the same people would be lauding the approach with just one change - Corbyn stood between the experts. That's the real source of the complaints - that labour were roundly trounced at the election and the PM of the moment is Boris rather than their preferred lame duck.

Re: Naomi Klein

I think you'll find that unlike the terrorist bogeymen, this virus is 100% real

I can assure you the terrorists are 100% real. So can millions of other ordinary people quietly going about their business on 9/11.

I find it quite amazing how many of the people who think this virus is some kind of hoax, or no big deal

Indeed. The number of people congregating in my local park at the weekend was unexpected. I mean, yes my family was there too, but unlike many others we were distancing ourselves from everyone else. My local park ain't like the ones on telly in London, there was plenty of space, just plenty of groups ignoring the whole keep your distance message.