Off Topic The "Discuss Anything Else" Thread

He should be OK Swanny; he's Cyclonic

 

May I say Reebs, you are dealing with it admirably

 

Hi reebs , glad to hear from you , how is your health bearing up ? Bring on the vaccine !!!

 

Back to reading what you want to read rather than what was actually written...

The doctors and nurses (my mother used to be one) are doing all that they can; however, the fact that the management have failed to evolve practises with the changing circumstances should be criticised. That is nothing to do with the government – it does not run the NHS day to day. If there is a shortage of nurses in busy Hospital A because so many are off sick, they could just draft in nurses from Hospital B that is half empty. Only the sensationalist media are reporting the unreality of every hospital in the land bursting to overflowing with plague victims.

I see that you have changed your view on lockdowns once again just to suit your argument. You have spent months moaning that lockdowns have been too late, not long enough and not severe enough. Then when it suited your argument it seems that the only reason for doing lockdowns was to save the NHS from being overwhelmed, which means, therefore, that the two previous lockdowns were totally successful (despite your complaints) and the third one will also be totally successful if the NHS is not overwhelmed. I am sure that we are all waiting with baited breath for your next report from the Road to Damascus.

Arrivals at UK airports have been tested since December. Prior to that arrivals at airports were required to do mandatory self isolation, although I expect that was widely flouted.

The police have no chance of enforcing lockdowns and never have done. If they want to issue me with a ticket for walking down the street, I will happily tear it up right in front of them.

 

Glad that you are able to get your treatment on the NHS on a Sunday as it would seem logical for a healthcare provider to operate seven days a week as people do get ill without consideration on the Sabbath.

Public Health England are a separate organisation, an executive agency of the Department of Health and Social Care. So it will be a bunch of civil servants doing Monday to Friday 9-5, holding meetings and generating paperwork. Everyone else is supposed to show some urgency but the Establishment are exempt. This may be Matt’s view of PHE:

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According to an Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) study in 2018, spending on the NHS was 3.5 per cent of national income in 1949-50 and 7.3 per cent of it in 2016-17. We spend twice as much on health today as we did twenty years ago (inflation adjusted). Nearly a fifth of all government spending is on health.

Spending grew by an annual average of 6.0 per cent between 1996-97 and 2009-10 but much of this was done through long term private sector debt arrangements (mostly PFI) that have to be serviced for the foreseeable future (PFI costs peak in 2030 and decline to 2050).

Naturally the limitless spending of 2020 (more public debt) has totally thrown forecast spending for the next decade out of the window.

The IFS predicted that in the next 15 years the number of people in the 64-84 age bracket will increase by 29 per cent and the number of people 85 and over will increase by 67 per cent, so the real health spending per capita (which stood at around £2,250 in 2015-16) will be inadequate.

In terms of spending as a percentage of national income, spending was a very gradual incline between 1979 and 2017. The IFS estimated that tax revenues will have to increase by an average £1,200 per household by 2033/34 from their baseline date of 2018/19 to meet future demands.

Whilst the moralising Left continue to promulgate the myth that the NHS is sacred, more and more people are waking up to the fact that it is not fit for purpose (and has not been for a long time). It was such a wonderful idea that no other country has created such a centralised behemoth and allowed it to stagnate in the face of change. It needs wholesale reform and a new funding model. If people want top class healthcare systems then they need to accept that they cost money: there is no such thing as ‘free’.

 

-2 thats positively tropical. Was -6 when I got into the car to go to work yesterday (I'm a key worker and can't work from home in case anyone wonders)

 

Pussies

When I lived in England and we were living in a mobile home in the garden while we demolished the bungalow we bought and replaced it with a house (well I demolished most it whilst we still lived in it - just left the bathroom standing until we could move in to the upstairs of the new house), it was -15 and I had to go out to the stand pipe with a kettle of boiling water to unfreeze the thing in order to top up our water supply for the day (the water supply pipe from the mains was solid); I can see me now trudging through deep snow in my dressing gown and wellies. Then it was down to the paddock with a sledge hammer to break up the ice in the water tub and let the ponies out the stables. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrr, wouldn't fancy that now

 

Yep, that's cold alright! I do remember -13°C. recorded here not that many years ago. During my years in Alberta it went down to -43° one night, BUT it was a very dry cold. Around -25° those Edmontonian friends of mine used to say "bit cool today". Canadians often feel damn cold when visiting the UK in Winter, as it is usually so damp as well. The Edmonton city police are the only ones in the country who don full buffalo coats and hats when temps reach these extremes.

So, Mr. Ron, enough of this 'pussy' stuff! Say, Michael Caine told me once () that Fahrenheit and Celsius are exactly the same at -40°. "Not many people know that" he said.

 

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Sunday, December 6th, 1981. I’d just married and was living in a mobile home on the other side of town. For my birthday, my wife and I visited my parents in Lancashire and snow was starting to come up from the south.
On the Sunday night I didn’t think I would get home as snow was falling fast in the midlands and it was freezing. Arriving home , the Parkray solid fuel boiler was split in two. The stop cock had sheered and a foot long icicle was stuck out of it. There were 23 holes in the frozen radiators and the fruit was covered in ice.
The Monday morning paper headline was..
27 degrees C below in Oswestry and Marston Jabbett, Nuneaton (our location).
I was the only national sales guy stupid enough to hit the road on the Monday and, in Stoke, I pulled a guy off a fork truck whose face had turned purple and helped him into the office to thaw out. I honestly believe he may have died if no one had attended him.
Happy days!

 

your comment about moving nurses from hospital to hospital is I'm afraid extremely naïve.
I am sure that any London hospital at the moment would love to be half empty - the fact is that they are all running at capacity, and are about to be overwhelmed in days. And what is happening in London at the moment should be a warning to the rest of the country - hospitals everywhere will be filling up by the end of next week. Couple of reasons for this - 1. winter pressures and 2. patients with COVID are younger this time round and are therefore dying less quickly in hospitals

I have constantly said that lockdowns are successful because it has meant that the NHS is not overwhelmed.
I am less confident this time that the NHS will not be overwhelmed - the new mutation is almost like dealing with a different virus.
Doctors that I know up until now that have been quite laid back are now very frightened about the new strain because it is so contagious.
London and most of the south east has now been in tier 4 for over 2 weeks but the infection rate continues to climb - the new lockdown measures are not tough enough.

I understand that people arriving from abroad will need to test negative from next week.
This is not something that happens at this moment in time.

 

It is almost impossible to imagine such an extreme temperature in the UK, what with its generally high humidity compared with, say, Alberta. Do remember in my dad's pub just outside Kingston-on-Thames, we often had trouble with a burst pipe outside the main cellar window. However much it was wrapped-up, the damn thing always burst when it got really cold, which seemed to be often in those Winter days. You certainly did save that fork truck driver's life; he was a very lucky guy!

 

Oddy: Wife and I got letters from the Dept. of Health telling us that we had not been forgotten, and that we will be told very soon when to get the first jab of vaccine. Very polite, very friendly, with a half-a-dozen translations from Deutsch in the bulky envelopes, with apologies for the delay, etc. Impressive, from this government authority down here.

(Second one three weeks after)

 

Gosh, that's scary, Oddy. We get our 'real' meat (e.g. steaks in general especially stewing steaks, liver, lamb, etc.) delivered by an out-of-town butcher with an excellent name. Don't order that frequently but to get meat for a stew or goulash from the 'usual suspects' is more often than not a toss-up as to its quality.

 

Do explain why it is extremely naïve. They all work for the same employer. If I can work on different sites for my employer as needs require, so can anybody else. Would you like a debate about employment law?

Facts not in evidence – surely if they are overwhelmed then lockdown has failed. Two out of three ain’t bad.

Who cares about London? These are the stupid people that voted Red Ken Livingstone as Mayor twice (congestion charges, bendy buses), Boris as Mayor twice (possibly for hiring others to do a half decent job) and now have loser Sadiq Khan wasting their taxes on New Year’s Eve support for the anarchists at BLM whilst his administration runs up massive debts across the city.

They are probably paying the price for all the partying and the illegal raves. You should have no sympathy: they have not paid heed to your repeated warnings on here for the last nine months.

 

Thought this was an excellent article. Author did not let his own employer, CNN, get away scot-free either, as its parent company, AT&T, were not entirely innocent!

TV providers should not escape scrutiny for distributing disinformation.

Analysis by Oliver Darcy, CNN Business. Updated 1219 GMT (2019 HKT) January 8, 2021.

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/08/media/tv-providers-disinfo-reliable-sources/index.html