domjg
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Post by domjg on Jan 9, 2022 23:58:59 GMT
Alec: More Brexit silliness - www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/09/brexit-decision-left-uk-firms-paying-10-more-than-eu-rivals-for-emissions
Because Frost demanded we were different, UK firms pay more for varbon credits.
Daft as brushes, the lost of them.While I'm all for highlighting the malign effects of brexit as they pile up, I was a bit puzzled by the Guardian story. Here's the relevant quote: "UK companies are paying more than £75 a tonne for the carbon they emit, while similar industries in the EU are paying up to about €85 a tonne. The difference has narrowed slightly in recent days, but was reaching about €8-9 a tonne of carbon in the past month, equating to a premium of about 10% being paid by UK companies.Now, I've noticed before that their environment correspondent seems on shaky ground when handling economic stories. But the figures she uses don't support the "10% extra" headline. At £1=€1.19, the UK price equals €89.25, which is just 5% more, and I presume within the usual variance to be expected between different trading systems. Frost has all the intelligence of a flea. The individual is lower than animal life, I class him as an insect. Insects are useful. Frost’s like a pesticide that doesn’t increase crop yield but kills pollinators |
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jan 10, 2022 0:01:40 GMT
Robbie
They’re not quite as bad as coyly writing “smily thing” at the end of a post. I believe it was Oscar Wilde who started that habit, adding it every time he wrote what he thought was a witty comment.
(In fact he actually used to say it out loud if people didn’t get one of his verbal jests.)
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Post by tancred on Jan 10, 2022 0:03:04 GMT
tancred. Do your own fecking reading, and stop being such a lazy git. Is this not supposed to be a forum for civilised discourse? Obviously you are not capable of it. |
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Post by tancred on Jan 10, 2022 0:04:10 GMT
Frost has all the intelligence of a flea. The individual is lower than animal life, I class him as an insect. Insects are useful. Frost’s like a pesticide that doesn’t increase crop yield but kills pollinators Yes, they are - to some people. But this particular one stings, and Boris is the target, so he had better watch out. |
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Post by pete on Jan 10, 2022 0:06:42 GMT
Mmmm Energy - we're currently paying about £1,200 per year and our tariff runs to September '22, providing our supplier stays in business. I've just been on the Which? Switch site and I can go on variable and pay the equivalent of an extra £300 a year 'til the cap gets reviewed, or a one year fix at an extra £1,300 or so, or a two year fix at £1,800 a year more than now. Presumably those fixes are the suppliers hoping to, at least, cover their costs, which means their current pricing will be pessimistic, discouraging long term commitments. If we allowed for that it looks as if our cost increase will be around £1,000 in the next year and an additional £500 next year. I can't imagine how low income households will manage with rises like that, plus general inflation, plus taxation increases. Something has to give. I pay £1600 yearly.But my one bed flat is all electric so obviously dearer than if I had gas/electric. I can tell you as a low income household those costs will be like a kick in the proverbial's. I'll need to tighten my belt like never before.This of course means cut backs in other areas (pub etc). The more interesting thing is you'd be shocked how many people haven't a clue whats around the corner regarding price increases tax rises etc. |
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Post by jib on Jan 10, 2022 0:16:35 GMT
peteA painful kick for a lot of people wrt energy costs. How a massive increase in electricity costs is meant to encourage people to heat pumps and electric cars, lord only knows. This Government is going to struggle with this, particularly as the price cap debacle and lots of firms going bust was a Tory initiative.
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Post by jib on Jan 10, 2022 0:20:11 GMT
tancred"Please!! We have to learn to live with Covid. We can't shut down the country just because there is another strain around - there may be hundreds of strains still to come. The government is done with Covid, and rightly so, because people need to take their own precautions instead of relying on the government to manage their lives for them. " It's not wholly our choice as the UK in any case. If we voluntary choose to become Disease Island, I doubt there's going to be much welcome for the afflicted on foreign shores. Particularly if they're following stricter rules!
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oldnat
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Extremist - Undermining the UK state and its institutions
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Post by oldnat on Jan 10, 2022 0:24:29 GMT
robbiealive
Irony would be "Fe"y. Sadly, there is not an emoticon for that.
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Post by robbiealive on Jan 10, 2022 0:30:23 GMT
Robbie They’re not quite as bad as coyly writing “smily thing” at the end of a post. I believe it was Oscar Wilde who started that habit, adding it every time he wrote what he thought was a witty comment. (In fact he actually used to say it out loud if people didn’t get one of his verbal jests.) "Dorian Gray drew a long breath. The colour came back to his cheeks, and a smiley played about his lips." Ok I added one letter to what is a pretty awful Wilde sentence. |
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oldnat
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Post by oldnat on Jan 10, 2022 0:35:06 GMT
tancred If you get offended by being responded to in the tone that you choose to adopt to others, better to desist yourself. IIRC, Anthony banned you from UKPR for the intemperate nature of your comments. However, since you seem to be reluctant to do other than make lazy assumptions from your own limited experience, here's a starting point for a basic understanding of the main Irish political parties - where they originated, and how they have developed. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_the_Republic_of_Ireland#Political_parties |
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Post by robbiealive on Jan 10, 2022 0:36:12 GMT
I pay £1600 yearly.But my one bed flat is all electric so obviously dearer than if I had gas/electric. I have not really clocked the various posts about how much extra people will pay, os say they will, but I doubt if any one is starting from as grim a base line as that. |
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jan 10, 2022 0:37:29 GMT
Robbie They’re not quite as bad as coyly writing “smily thing” at the end of a post. I believe it was Oscar Wilde who started that habit, adding it every time he wrote what he thought was a witty comment. (In fact he actually used to say it out loud if people didn’t get one of his verbal jests.) "Dorian Gray drew a long breath. The colour came back to his cheeks, and a smiley played about his lips." Ok I added one letter to what is a pretty awful Wilde sentence. But what an obvious improvement that one letter makes Robbie. (Smilie thing.) |
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jan 10, 2022 0:52:06 GMT
ES piece covering various issues discussed recently on UKPR2 and the Sky polling. 'Boris Johnson warned of a Covid revolt and potential leadership bid
The ex-chief whip’s intervention came after a poll of Conservative members suggested nearly half believe Rishi Sunak would make a better leader.'www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/boris-johnson-mark-harper-rishi-sunak-conservative-prime-minister-b975743.htmlIf transmission levels are still very high then a lot of folks would likely 'voluntarily' stick with Plan B (eg wear face masks and work from home if they can), however, Boris will be desperately hoping the NHS data has started to turn down later this month (IIRC the current HoC vote gives him to 26Jan). He can rely on Starmer-LAB votes if he has to and Covid is the 'wrong' reason to get rid of Boris but the warning shot comments in the press are likely to intensify to ensure Boris gets the message that we need to 'move on' and 'live with' Covid (just as every other country will have to). |
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Post by robbiealive on Jan 10, 2022 0:52:11 GMT
This is the conclusion to a study of ironical emojis. Irony is apprently conveyed by the Wink one.
"Our work is foundational in that it is the first to investigate the real-time neural correlates of emoji processing in sentence context, and link processing of irony elicited by words to irony elicited by sentence-embedded ideograms. The P600 effect elicited by ironic (wink) emojis is isomorphic to that seen in other studies of word-induced irony, suggesting a common set of processes involved in the comprehension and interpretation of irony, even in multimodal interactions. The late frontal positivity elicited by unexpected mismatching and ironic emojis also suggests that prediction mechanisms for the semantic or pragmatic content of emojis may be qualitative [Sic] similar to those seen for words in informative contexts. Additionally, the very recent rapid rise of digital communications using ideographic enhancements means that conventional uses for these icons are likely still evolving and may vary between user communities. The present study, however, constitutes an important first piece of evidence of online emoji processing in utterance comprehension."
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Post by statgeek on Jan 10, 2022 1:04:35 GMT
From my perspective and any voter similarly inclined, government did reimpose restrictions and did curtail Christmas, and there is no evidence of benefit as a result. Do you continue to stand in front of a loaded gun, or do you duck? I duck. The fact that it didn't fire yet is immaterial. It may never fire, but if it does, I want to be there afterwards. Risk awareness and management is a worthwhile discipline. Not fear. Not panic. Just sensible actions based on risk. Not judging the government one way or another, so much as your statement on "no evidence of benefit". You cannot prove a negative. If everyone locked down properly in March 2020, and no one in the UK caught Covid beyond the first few cases, you would say it was a pointless exercise, until the cases and deaths abroad started piling up. And even then, some (you?) would have argued something out of it. Here's another way of looking at it. Those who have had Covid are far more likely to call for less restrictions. They feel emboldened by it. They think it's safe. They are less risk averse. Some might say they were stupid enough to catch Covid, and are stupid enough to insist everyone else does.  |
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oldnat
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Post by oldnat on Jan 10, 2022 1:53:09 GMT
Andy Murray isn't as good a player as he once was - but he can still serve an ace.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 10, 2022 4:31:37 GMT
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neilj
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Post by neilj on Jan 10, 2022 6:41:54 GMT
More polling
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Danny
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Post by Danny on Jan 10, 2022 7:24:06 GMT
@danny - no real idea why I'm bothering responding, except to hold to the line that the truth must be heard, and lies challenged. "There is much fear of covid which has been quite deliberately whipped up by governent. They might have taken the exact opposite approach, and encouraged stoical endurance and a stiff upper lip." That's right. 170,000 deaths in the UK could just have been avoided if only those wimpy victims could have stood up for themselves and been a bit more stoical. Pathetic, and insulting. Have you no decency as a human being? Plainly you are determined to keep covid central to the main discussion thread here. I totally agree lies should be challenged, though I would not be so bold to suggest anyone here is lying, rather mistaken. Accusations of lying have no place here and no one should be making them. Obviously anyone subject to such an accusation must be allowed a right of reply. To address your point, some 600,000 peope die each year in the UK. The average age at death from covid is (or was last I heard) 82, compared to average life expectancy of 80. A huge proportion of those dying were already ill or had high risk factors for other diseases. Many people therefore dying from covid were already moribund for some other reason. It would be very different if this was 170,000 twenty year olds, or even if deaths were distributed evenly through the population. Moreover, since we know its certain groups who are at risk, then its far far easier to isolate that group. Especialy since they are generally already self isolating because they are retired or less active because of illness. There was always a good strategy avialable to us to divide the population and protect the unsafe. We didnt do that. Next point, if we had set out to spend a trillion pounds on fighting illness, we would never have spent it as we have on covid. Summer 2020 a study was published showing how poor is the health return for this expenditure. To overall save more quality life years we would have ignored covid and spent the money on other diseases. That we did not do so is hypocritical in the extreme if anyone is claiming we actually care whether people live or die. And then there is the question whether those being isolated and protected actually wanted to be isolated and protected. There has been mass suffering amongst both old and young because people have been isolated and unable to meet at critical moments. For example, as people are dying from those much more common causes of death in old age. The 170,000 total is most probably an over estimate because of the way deaths are tallied erring on the side of assigning them to covid. The excess deaths total had fallen significiantly below this last I looked, and that still included deaths caused by lockdown rather than covid. But all that is really besides the point I was making. It wasnt about how many died, but how we look upon this. WW2 was an optional cause of death. We could have chosen not to fight and saved lives. We could have chosen not to invade Iraq or Afghanistan and saved lives. Bit of a double standard here, don't you think? Most of those who have died from covid could never have been saved whatever we did. The evidence from around the world is that nothing we did made matters much better, and in fact the evidence is that countries which intervened most (short of successful total isolation) actually did worst. The UK is a case in point. So unless you can demonstrate this huge expenditure and disruption and harm to individuals from isolation had any compensating benefits, then how government expresses this is pure propaganda. Its intended to scare people into believing they have been saved from a terrible disaster, when the reality was intervention did little or no good. But thats the point. We have not moved on. I agree with you there is a perception we are invincible, but the reality is we are not. Covid has not killed many by historical standards because it was never going to kill many by historical standards. We hardly achieved any life saving with all this intervention. What we did do was tear apart the social fabric we rely upon for our survival generally. We almost certainly killed or will kill more people than have been talied as saved. But how big do you claim that tally is? 170,000 is the tally of our failure, not of success. 10,000 a year die from flu and another 10,000 from unidentified pneummonia. Covid has been here for three winters now, so you need to compare the death rate to the 60,000 which would have died from respiratory diseases anyway in that time. Probably more, because thats the background level and covid has likely displaced an outbreak of flue in one of those years which would have killed a few 10,000s more. And then theres the people which would have died from something else in the two and a half years this has been going on. Bearing in mind how old and sick covid victims are anyway. As I said, how many do you claim have been saved by intervention? No. If the infection kills the host then the host is no longer available to be reinfected in the future or to breed. If it is so successful it reaches all hosts then all die, and the pathogen dies too. A successful pathogen cannot kill all its hosts or it will die out with them. A succesfully spreading pathogen which kills its hosts must die out and over the millions of years this sort of competition has been going on, all such pathogens have already died out. The pathogens we see today are the successful survivors who have eliminated the dead end killer versions. They are adapted to their hosts not just in how they can infect by mimicking cellular receptors and biocheical processes, but in terms of being just invasive enough to get in and spread, but not so much they do severe harm. Oviously they are calibrated to the average healthy host, and thats why the weak with poor defences become especialy ill or die. Really, it isnt. Its irrlevant to the process whether viruses think and plan how to best invade a host, just as frankly it has been largely irrelevant how we have tried to plan a strategy against covid. The biochemistry dealt with everything automatically. But it doesnt gain you anything to attack an anthropomorphic presentation of the virus. Its irrelevant whether its sitting back in its armchair having a good laugh at us. No. First off, most variants will be duplicates. Most variants will be failures which cannot function but i guess they are irrelevant anyway. The total number of functional variants is a large but finite number which are repeatedly produced time after time. Whether they spread and become more numerous depends on the circumstances they face. So if variant (1) is produced at the start of an epidemic it may die out time after time after time. But if it is produced at the end, then because the initial strain can no longer spread, this particular change now becomes important because it can reinfect. At the start it was not a useful change, at the end it is. A Covid infection is not just one strain infecting each individual. A person will contain many strains. The omicron strain is really a 'cloud' of different viruses which differ just like people differ in their genetics. or any organism. All of these share a basic structure we have identified as significant and named as defining a variant, but this cloud contains many non identical viruses. They arent clones. People are infected by a swarm of different viruses which we all class as covid, and sub categorise as 'type omicron'. As conditions change then different minor changes within this cloud will come to dominate, until eventually enough change has developed that we arbitrarily classify it as a new strain. Exactly. So why are you going on about it? The process of change of the swarm is gradual but is driven by the changing situation. Plentiful hosts means no need to change. Its only when they run out that change happens. By imposing restrictions which prevent spread, then we create the conditions for a mutation to occur which is more capable in some way. Whereas had we not prevented spread, then we would each have faced infection by the less capable strain. It is entirely possble what we did was forced covid to change to be more effective, so it could infect us all anyway. To do that we isolated for two years at ruinous expense. The end result is still we get infected anyway after it has mutated to achieve this. There was a nice case study on an immune compromised covid patient, where doctors watched as his dominant strains changed, then changed back, as they tried different drug regimes. HIV does exacty the same thing. Any single virus contains the potential to produce many viable changes, and to change back and forth, just like a human changing clothes. |
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Post by barbara on Jan 10, 2022 8:00:44 GMT
Thanks oldnat . Really useful background to the deliberations which was complex and nuanced. I despair of politicians (of all persuasions, they all do this) who reach for knee jerk statements purely in order to pander to their voting base. I know they have to get elected but how different politics and our public discourse would be if politicians tried it inform and educate the electorate rather than inflame their natural prejudices. |
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steve
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Post by steve on Jan 10, 2022 8:07:02 GMT
Just one very brief point on covid comparisons.
Sweden having relied primarily on individual action and advice and trusting their population and have seen deaths at less than five a day for the last 8 months with current rates under 2.
It's entirely possible to have effective results without prescription.
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Post by barbara on Jan 10, 2022 8:13:12 GMT
See thon wee smiley face at the end of my comment? I never notice those silly yellow blobs. I did agitate against them on the old site years ago. They are the feeblest form of irony, indicative of the unconfident inexpressiveness of of the posters who use them. I think the problem arises because people can't see the face or hear the tone of voice. If one could then one would know the view was not a serious one. So the only alternatives when writing is to make the words explicit or put a smiley face at the end. Nuance is very difficult by written word. (the tone of this is friendly reply rather than challenge to your post ) |
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steve
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Post by steve on Jan 10, 2022 8:13:24 GMT
barbara Edward Colston was a philanthropist and major contributor to Bristol civic life. He was also a slave trader who regarded people as commodities. His statue should have been removed from the Bristol harbour side decades ago, his contributions to Bristol culture would have remained. I wonder if those complaining about the verdict because they consider somehow this is an example of " woke" society, would have been equally vociferous if it had been a statue of Jimmy Saville that had been chucked in the river.
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Danny
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Post by Danny on Jan 10, 2022 8:15:10 GMT
From my perspective and any voter similarly inclined, government did reimpose restrictions and did curtail Christmas, and there is no evidence of benefit as a result. Do you continue to stand in front of a loaded gun, or do you duck? I duck. The fact that it didn't fire yet is immaterial. It may never fire, but if it does, I want to be there afterwards. Risk awareness and management is a worthwhile discipline. Not fear. Not panic. Just sensible actions based on risk. I had covid in 2019. As far as I am concerned, while the evidence is circumstantial beause there were no definitive tests at that time, I had covid, it was a bad flu but I survived and am not likely to get as sick or sicker from covid until I get significantly older and therefore debilitated. Its most likely in my best interest to now be infected by omicron as a top up, which vaccines will not give because they are firstly outdated and secondly not very effective at preventing infection anyway.
The evidence is that old people are and always have been massively more at risk from covid than young. Young people are therefore likely better off to have been infected by covid from the outset. This is epsecially true when you consider the long term effects of lockdown, which was the only alternative to mass infection.
What hapened in the first wave of covid was nowhere in the world did the death rate exceed 0.1% of the population whatever was done. More intervention, no intervention, it never got worse than this. There IS evidence that it would have self limited no worse than what happened when we intervened. What we really seem to have done by intervention is mostly restrict the number of safe people being infected and thus set up conditions for covid to come back more severely. We wasted opportunities to create mass imunity fast despite the fact we had to accept the cost in deaths for those opportunities anyway.
If everyone had locked down properly in 2020 sufficient to prevent spread of covid, we would all be dead. Because society would have ground to a halt and people starved, had no water or power, no money, no law enforcement, no health care. The evidence is pretty strong a western interdependent society was incapable of the level of lockdown needed to achieve covid suppression. The waves ended after enough people were infected despite the restrictions.
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Post by jib on Jan 10, 2022 8:17:44 GMT
Just one very brief point on covid comparisons. Sweden having relied primarily on individual action and advice and trusting their population and have seen deaths at less than five a day for the last 8 months with current rates under 2. It's entirely possible to have effective results without prescription. That's simply not true. Sweden has strict rules in place, summarised here for those who can't otherwise be bothered to check facts: www.krisinformation.se/en/hazards-and-risks/disasters-and-incidents/2020/official-information-on-the-new-coronavirus/current-rules-and-recommendationsIt should also be noted that Sweden now also has a record number of cases despite being a much less crowded country than the UK. Danny"I had covid in 2019." You didn't. There was no COVID in the UK then, and you certainly didn't get it. Why you keep trolling this c**p is beyond me when you apparently even took a antibody test that was negative! |
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Post by alec on Jan 10, 2022 8:18:15 GMT
@danny - "Accusations of lying have no place here and no one should be making them."
You stop lying, and I'll stop calling you out.
It's that simple.
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Post by alec on Jan 10, 2022 8:21:23 GMT
The next wave of Brexit - www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jan/10/brexit-changes-will-add-to-soaring-costs-in-2022-warn-uk-manufacturersVirtually all exporters are either directly or indirectly reliant on imports, so this large sectors of the economy in one way or another. The simplism of 'reshoring', even though it was statistically innumerate as a policy objective, relies on the neat separating of importers from exporters, but life ain't like that. Trade barriers mean less efficient economies, which makes everything harder, and that's what we're discovering with Brexit. |
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Post by jib on Jan 10, 2022 8:22:51 GMT
@danny - "Accusations of lying have no place here and no one should be making them." You stop lying, and I'll stop calling you out. It's that simple. It's not lying to Danny. Just creative trolling. |
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Post by barbara on Jan 10, 2022 8:26:12 GMT
Andy Rosindell, the Tory MP who is demanding the BBC signs off every night with the national anthem, has form. He demanded exactly this 5 years ago in 2016. BBC newsnight's response is in the clip. How times change. I can't see the bruised, beaten and cowed BBC doing this now after 5 years of right wing culture wars. Our independent broadcaster is no more. And before posters tell me that the BBC is indescribably woke and leftie, listen to all the voices on the left, including me, who think that the current BBC is nothing but a Tory mouthpiece. In truth the BBC is between a rock and a hard place, and has lost the confidence it had before to stand up to all comers. A shadow of its former self. www.indy100.com/news/tory-national-anthem-bbc-newsnight-b1989169 |
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Danny
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Post by Danny on Jan 10, 2022 8:38:23 GMT
Are you having a laugh? Did you read the page? It says there are restrictions on entry to Sweden, vaccine requirements for indoor public venues over 500 and some distancing restrictions on smaller public venues. You can have a private party up to 50 evenn in rented premises without restriction. Otherwise all it does is give people advice, not restricions at all. For example their advice is to wear a mask on public transport..if it is crowded. Doesnt mention mask wearing anywhere else. Mostly is says be mindful to avoid crowding and keep you distance from others. SA reckon essentially everyone caught omicron. For the first year Sweden didnt even bother testing the general public. Everyone catching covid and few getting seriousy ill means its over. From time to time I list the compelling reasons why I believe this. I am happy to do so again here if you want me to? But just as a thought, did even one covid test conducted in the Uk in 2019 come back negative? How many doctors eliminated covid as the cause of death of pneumonia patients where the specific agent remained unidenified in 2019?
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