If someone is disturbed by you protest against his intelligence; the rozzers might arrest you; or, Nadine Dorres might cut all that public funding that ASMO received to keep the lights on in NPR !
I withdraw any comments I made about Raab being a feckin idiot and as thick as a shoe sole. Does that do it?
You're OK, we were having a work meeting.
But were you wearing a suit ?
In any case; the Police don't investigate historical events; so we're all probably good.
JM2K6 wrote: Wed Dec 15, 2021 10:11 am
I don't think it's fair to say the Sage modelling has been wrong. It provides a range of potential outcomes.
I am far from a fan of the Spectator but they've been tracking the actuals Vs range of potential outcomes for a while and it doesn't look good for Sage.
Cheers! I am far too busy today to dig into it, but just looking at the first one on that page, I see the graph they're using is predicated on a continued increase in contact patterns - I don't know if that actually happened or not! - and they also couch this bit of prediction with very strong "there's a shit-ton of uncertainty and we're not even going to bother to attempt to model anything more than the next few weeks".
It's totally possible they're just miles off regardless, but they don't just provide graphs...!
This popped up again on the Twitters, as it seems that the Spectator has been a little disingenuous here. A thread by an epimediologist:
Given Fraser Nelson's cringeworthy "gotcha" attempts where he showed a total lack of understanding about modelling in the first place recently, I'd lean heavily towards "the Specator is stuffed full of idealogues who are convinced that lockdowns are worse than Satan, scream about masks, and are generally a pack of total cunts" and wouldn't spend too much time using them as a reliable source of anything.
That isn't to say we shouldn't be critical of models when the models aren't fit for purpose, or the analysis when that's missing major factors. But a simple "they predicted X but Y happened!" is almost always going to be wrong, because they're not really predictions and the people making those accusations very rarely put it in the same context that the reports do.
"the Specator is stuffed full of idealogues who are convinced that lockdowns are worse than Satan, scream about masks, and are generally a pack of total cunts"
That was all you needed to add really.
It's amazing how the Spectator managed to completely miss the apparently weekly breaches of lockdown, by spouses of senior Spectator staff, employed by the Government; & yet feel qualified to pick over the minutiae of the epidemiological modelling; of world leading Scientists.
The smug git's all over this of course, with pretentious waffle
The MPs' standards watchdog has dismissed a complaint against senior government minister Jacob Rees-Mogg concerning his outside earnings.
The Commons standards commissioner opened an inquiry into whether he had failed to declare loans worth nearly £6m from one of his own companies.
Offering her reasoning for exonerating Mr Rees-Mogg, the standards commissioner said there were two "initial tests" that determined whether an MP needed to register a financial interest.
Firstly, she said, the rules were not meant to regulate "what MPs do in their purely private and personal lives", and, secondly, MPs should register financial interests which "might reasonably be thought by others to influence his or her actions, speeches or votes in Parliament".
Ms Stone concluded that the loans had been solely connected to Mr Rees-Mogg's private life and that they could not be considered to have influence his actions as an MP.
I am far from a fan of the Spectator but they've been tracking the actuals Vs range of potential outcomes for a while and it doesn't look good for Sage.
Cheers! I am far too busy today to dig into it, but just looking at the first one on that page, I see the graph they're using is predicated on a continued increase in contact patterns - I don't know if that actually happened or not! - and they also couch this bit of prediction with very strong "there's a shit-ton of uncertainty and we're not even going to bother to attempt to model anything more than the next few weeks".
It's totally possible they're just miles off regardless, but they don't just provide graphs...!
This popped up again on the Twitters, as it seems that the Spectator has been a little disingenuous here. A thread by an epimediologist:
Given Fraser Nelson's cringeworthy "gotcha" attempts where he showed a total lack of understanding about modelling in the first place recently, I'd lean heavily towards "the Specator is stuffed full of idealogues who are convinced that lockdowns are worse than Satan, scream about masks, and are generally a pack of total cunts" and wouldn't spend too much time using them as a reliable source of anything.
That isn't to say we shouldn't be critical of models when the models aren't fit for purpose, or the analysis when that's missing major factors. But a simple "they predicted X but Y happened!" is almost always going to be wrong, because they're not really predictions and the people making those accusations very rarely put it in the same context that the reports do.
Exactly this - the models are all predicated on a number of variables and these drive the model outcomes. They are designed to look at a number of scenarios and try and show what the range of outcome might be with noted confidence levels. They are what they are and depend upon what they have been asked to model ie what of the variant has an RO of x, what happens if we reduce social contact by y, etc. The modelling I have seen done by PHS has been pretty accurate.
Ah , The Spectator , another refuge of the right wing morons who remember Taki as being vaguely amusing ( he wasn't )
From the Full fact website regarding the article written by that well known Public Health Specialist Lionel Shriver
At least try to get some basic facts right , otherwise you might be suspected of having an agenda ....
The novelist Lionel Shriver misrepresented the evidence about Covid-19 vaccines in a column for the Spectator on 20 November 2021. One of her misleading comments was also included in a widely shared tweet from the Spectator.
Claiming that western governments are “detached from the facts”, Ms Shriver said that rates of Covid infection are higher in vaccinated people in “every age group over 30 in the UK”, and that vaccinated and unvaccinated people “pose a comparable danger to each other”.
But the claims Ms Shriver makes are themselves detached from the facts. The data she refers to from Public Health England (PHE) and the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) does not mean that vaccinated people over 30 are more likely to catch Covid-19.
She is also wrong to say that the vaccines “can’t stop Covid from spreading” and that the vaccines “won’t keep you from getting sick or even from making other people sick”. Being vaccinated does not guarantee that someone won’t catch Covid, but overall they do prevent many Covid infections from happening in the first place, and thereby also reduce the number of onward infections in other people.
What did Ms Shriver say?
Referring to one of her previous Spectator columns in which she made similar incorrect claims in August, Ms Shriver said that the Covid vaccines are not effective in preventing people from catching or spreading the virus.
She said: “In August, Public Health England released data which shows that vaccination does not appreciably guard against Covid infection and transmission and protection worked out at around 17 per cent for the over-fifties. As I observed then, this would mean the vaxxed and unvaxxed pose a comparable danger to each other.”
In the next paragraph, she claimed that more recent data continued to support her view, saying: “In every age group over 30 in the UK, the rates of Covid infection per 100,000 are now higher among the vaxxed than the unvaxxed. Indeed, in the cohorts aged between 40 and 79, infection rates among the vaccinated are more than twice as high as among the unvaccinated. PHE’s fruitlessly rechristened body, the UK Health Security Agency, frantically clarifies that the data ‘should not be used to estimate vaccine effectiveness’, a caveat which I include for the sake of accuracy. But the differences in the infection rates are drastic enough for you to draw your own conclusions.”
Ms Shriver is making a common error with this data, which is not clearly presented in the UKHSA report where it appears. We have written about this problem several times before.
Why she is wrong
The most recent UKHSA data for England on the morning of the day when Ms Shriver’s article was tweeted includes a table showing “unadjusted rates of COVID-19 infection” for different age groups. The first column shows the rate “among persons vaccinated with 2 doses”, while the second shows the rate “among persons not vaccinated”.
As Ms Shriver says, the Covid-19 case rate among fully vaccinated people is higher in all the age groups over 30, and more than double the case rate in unvaccinated people aged between 40 to 69. (Although this was not true for people in their 70s, as she claimed.)
However, any comparison that relies on the UKHSA’s unvaccinated case rate is extremely unreliable. Indeed there is reason to believe that the situation in the real world may be the opposite of what these tables show.
According to the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR), the UKHSA’s unvaccinated population estimates “almost certainly overcount the eligible population, and so lead to large systematic biases in the case rates in the unvaccinated groups”.
We’ve written about misinformation arising from this problem in several recent articles.
The UKHSA report also says on another page: “The case rates in the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations are crude rates that do not take into account underlying statistical biases in the data. There are likely to be systematic differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.”
Ms Shriver does quote one of the UKHSA’s caveats that the data “should not be used to estimate vaccine effectiveness”, but she suggests that the difference in the published case rates is large enough to be confident that vaccinated people are just as likely or more likely to catch Covid.
In reality, as our previous fact checks and the OSR have shown, this entire difference, and more, could be caused by the UKHSA’s uncertain population figures, even before you take account of other potential biases.
What about infectiousness?
Later in the article, Ms Shriver talks about vaccinated and unvaccinated people who catch Covid, and the “comparative contagiousness of each group”.
She quotes the scientific journal Nature saying: “People who become infected with the Delta variant are less likely to pass the virus to their close contacts if they have already had a Covid-19 vaccine than if they haven’t. But that protective effect is relatively small, and dwindles alarmingly at three months after the receipt of the second shot.”
From this she concludes that the vaccines “can’t stop Covid from spreading”, and suggests they “won’t keep you from getting sick or even from making other people sick”.
This isn’t true, because Ms Shriver has failed to take account of the Covid vaccines’ overall role in preventing infections in the first place. Indeed the same UKHSA report from which she took her other data estimates that more than 24 million Covid infections have been prevented by the vaccination campaign in England alone.
You can’t spread it without catching it
The Nature news article that Ms Shriver quotes reports new research into the infectiousness of vaccinated people who nevertheless became infected with Covid—so-called “breakthrough” infections.
The researchers did find that people with breakthrough infections seemed to be less contagious, but that this effect waned over time. However, the authors also say, in the first line of the Introduction: “SARS-CoV-2 vaccines have been shown in randomised controlled trials and real-world population studies to prevent infection”.
This means that many vaccinated people who would have otherwise caught Covid, don’t. And because they don’t catch it, they also don’t pass it on.
As a result, fewer people will be infected—even if a breakthrough case is just as infectious as a case in an unvaccinated person.
In short, it simply isn’t true that the vaccines don’t prevent Covid transmission, or that groups of vaccinated and unvaccinated people are equally likely to infect others.
At the time of writing, we do not yet know how effectively the current vaccines will reduce transmission of the Omicron variant.
Energy bills to soar 50% unless government intervenes, industry warns
The cost of gas on the wholesale markets - where providers buy what they need - has been rocketing in recent weeks. It has more than doubled since early November.
A swathe of suppliers has already gone out of business as a result. Ofgem can hold back the tide for vulnerable consumers for a bit with its price cap but it is just delaying the inevitable. Even capped bills will rise dramatically next year.
The problem is, the market simply wasn't designed to deal with this kind of situation. That's why calls for the government to step in are growing louder by the day.
Another crisis for this lot to mishandle incoming!
Energy bills to soar 50% unless government intervenes, industry warns
The cost of gas on the wholesale markets - where providers buy what they need - has been rocketing in recent weeks. It has more than doubled since early November.
A swathe of suppliers has already gone out of business as a result. Ofgem can hold back the tide for vulnerable consumers for a bit with its price cap but it is just delaying the inevitable. Even capped bills will rise dramatically next year.
The problem is, the market simply wasn't designed to deal with this kind of situation. That's why calls for the government to step in are growing louder by the day.
Another crisis for this lot to mishandle incoming!
Not sure what a Gov't can do about it. It can't control wholesale prices and suppliers will go under if it caps retail prices. If it subsidises them it's effectively subsidising overseas suppliers.
An increase in benefits would help some but not all.
Energy bills to soar 50% unless government intervenes, industry warns
The cost of gas on the wholesale markets - where providers buy what they need - has been rocketing in recent weeks. It has more than doubled since early November.
A swathe of suppliers has already gone out of business as a result. Ofgem can hold back the tide for vulnerable consumers for a bit with its price cap but it is just delaying the inevitable. Even capped bills will rise dramatically next year.
The problem is, the market simply wasn't designed to deal with this kind of situation. That's why calls for the government to step in are growing louder by the day.
Another crisis for this lot to mishandle incoming!
Not sure what a Gov't can do about it. It can't control wholesale prices and suppliers will go under if it caps retail prices. If it subsidises them it's effectively subsidising overseas suppliers.
An increase in benefits would help some but not all.
While that may well be true (and yes under-investment and strategic planning in the industry goes back decades), if there is a way to cock things up - or piss people off, with the present administration this government will find it
Another crisis for this lot to mishandle incoming!
Not sure what a Gov't can do about it. It can't control wholesale prices and suppliers will go under if it caps retail prices. If it subsidises them it's effectively subsidising overseas suppliers.
An increase in benefits would help some but not all.
While that may well be true (and yes under-investment and strategic planning in the industry goes back decades), if there is a way to cock things up - or piss people off, with the present administration this government will find it
Oh I agree, there's nothing that they can't make worse.
The UK also has terrible gas storage because the Tories decided to shut down plans rather than pay the OpEx for them. Not that this govt can be criticised for under spending so note sure it'll damage them politically but one for those who believed in Cameron and Gideon Osbourne's austerity politics.
I like neeps wrote: Thu Dec 23, 2021 2:23 pm
The UK also has terrible gas storage because the Tories decided to shut down plans rather than pay the OpEx for them. Not that this govt can be criticised for under spending so note sure it'll damage them politically but one for those who believed in Cameron and Gideon Osbourne's austerity politics.
Don't forget the wonderful housing stock. Even discounting historic buildings, we build shit awful, utterly inefficient houses with no regard to proper insulation etc.
I like neeps wrote: Thu Dec 23, 2021 2:23 pm
The UK also has terrible gas storage because the Tories decided to shut down plans rather than pay the OpEx for them. Not that this govt can be criticised for under spending so note sure it'll damage them politically but one for those who believed in Cameron and Gideon Osbourne's austerity politics.
They can be hammered for the last 10 years. They needed to move much faster on replacing our aging nuclear fleet, much more aggressively on insulation and building standards. The gas storage thing is hilariously inept. They've wandered around like a concussed drunk being inept on various policies surrounding energy since Brexit. Some nice dividend for shareholders though.
I like neeps wrote: Thu Dec 23, 2021 2:23 pm
The UK also has terrible gas storage because the Tories decided to shut down plans rather than pay the OpEx for them. Not that this govt can be criticised for under spending so note sure it'll damage them politically but one for those who believed in Cameron and Gideon Osbourne's austerity politics.
They can be hammered for the last 10 years. They needed to move much faster on replacing our aging nuclear fleet, much more aggressively on insulation and building standards. The gas storage thing is hilariously inept. They've wandered around like a concussed drunk being inept on various policies surrounding energy since Brexit. Some nice dividend for shareholders though.
Fuck off with your nuclear fleet. Total waste of money.
Maybe, though to date allowing uber rich individuals who partake of dubious financial arrangements to significantly and artificially lower their individual tax liabilities to run the press hasn't been without issue
Now Priti Patel is in the stripping citizenship business I assume she'll strip the citizenship of Ghislaine Maxwell. As a notorious convicted sex trafficker and friend to paedophile Jeffrey Epstein who has french and US citizenship I think Maxwell is an obvious choice to lose her british passport.
No, she won't? Interesting, very interesting. Almost as if the law is just racist, you might say.
I like neeps wrote: Thu Dec 30, 2021 2:30 pm
Now Priti Patel is in the stripping citizenship business I assume she'll strip the citizenship of Ghislaine Maxwell. As a notorious convicted sex trafficker and friend to paedophile Jeffrey Epstein who has french and US citizenship I think Maxwell is an obvious choice to lose her british passport.
No, she won't? Interesting, very interesting. Almost as if the law is just racist, you might say.
Not much point in doing it now. If she gets out in 30-something years time, they can stop her coming back home to sponge off the NHS in her 90s.
I like neeps wrote: Thu Dec 30, 2021 2:30 pm
Now Priti Patel is in the stripping citizenship business I assume she'll strip the citizenship of Ghislaine Maxwell. As a notorious convicted sex trafficker and friend to paedophile Jeffrey Epstein who has french and US citizenship I think Maxwell is an obvious choice to lose her british passport.
No, she won't? Interesting, very interesting. Almost as if the law is just racist, you might say.
Not much point in doing it now. If she gets out in 30-something years time, they can stop her coming back home to sponge off the NHS in her 90s.
Unless the US and France strip her citizenship 1st......................
I like the idea of Liz truss as Tory leader. She polls in good way with the Tory membership and public. Also less concerning to me than Priti Patel, Gove or sunak.
petej wrote: Sun Jan 02, 2022 11:09 am
I like the idea of Liz truss as Tory leader. She polls in good way with the Tory membership and public. Also less concerning to me than Priti Patel, Gove or sunak.
Hopefully just the Tory party membership. She really is her own pet vanity project. The last thing we need is another vainglorious, self important blowhard as PM.
petej wrote: Sun Jan 02, 2022 11:09 am
I like the idea of Liz truss as Tory leader. She polls in good way with the Tory membership and public. Also less concerning to me than Priti Patel, Gove or sunak.
Hopefully just the Tory party membership. She really is her own pet vanity project. The last thing we need is another vainglorious, self important blowhard as PM.
The Tory membership like her a lot, the public not so much.
I can tolerate vanity, but she really doesn't seem very bright and would be very concerned about what team she surrounds herself with, in terms of competency.
I would think Sunak could be able to brush aside negative tax implications and dump the blame on Bojo when leadership campaign comes. Very little dirt on him at the moment to be exploited.
I just can't imagine her winning a straight shoot out with him, even if a very small part of the conservative membership would vote against Sunak purely out of racism.
petej wrote: Sun Jan 02, 2022 11:09 am
I like the idea of Liz truss as Tory leader. She polls in good way with the Tory membership and public. Also less concerning to me than Priti Patel, Gove or sunak.
Hopefully just the Tory party membership. She really is her own pet vanity project. The last thing we need is another vainglorious, self important blowhard as PM.
The Tory membership like her a lot, the public not so much.
Not very surprising: Tory members love the pork markets.
Seriously concerning that most moderate/half-decent/brighter Tories were ousted in the Brexit procedures: looks like the choice of candidates will be abysmal.
(other parties aren't flooded with great options either, but let's not deflect: the Tories are looking worst by a long stretch)
petej wrote: Sun Jan 02, 2022 11:09 am
I like the idea of Liz truss as Tory leader. She polls in good way with the Tory membership and public. Also less concerning to me than Priti Patel, Gove or sunak.
Hopefully just the Tory party membership. She really is her own pet vanity project. The last thing we need is another vainglorious, self important blowhard as PM.
The Tory membership like her a lot, the public not so much.
petej wrote: Sun Jan 02, 2022 11:09 am
I like the idea of Liz truss as Tory leader. She polls in good way with the Tory membership and public. Also less concerning to me than Priti Patel, Gove or sunak.
I also like the idea, maybe she can be the one who sinks the Tory party for good
SaintK wrote: Sun Jan 02, 2022 11:50 am
Hopefully just the Tory party membership. She really is her own pet vanity project. The last thing we need is another vainglorious, self important blowhard as PM.
The Tory membership like her a lot, the public not so much.
Another masterstroke from the economical illiterates in the Tory party. You have to be lobotomy stupid to look at the current Tory party and think yeah good with money.
