Pindar
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Posts posted by Pindar
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6 minutes ago, zugzwang said:
The Japanese govt instituted a month-long emergency shutdown, temporarily closing non-essential businesses and restricting the opening hours of bars and cafes while encouraging everyone to stay at home.
The most infected region of the country (Hokkaido) underwent a full lockdown, not once but twice.
But people on the ground are reporting that this was a "shutdown" in name only and it was not mandatory. This is not the same thing as mandatory house arrest which is effectively what a "lockdown" is. Despite the "lockdown", the reported death rate is still sky high compared to other countries. The statistics also show that cases had already started to peak when the "lockdown" was introduced and sooner than can be attributed to the "lockdown".
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15 minutes ago, Bob8 said:
Did he model Japan?
And, a model is an estimate, his is informed, yours is not.
Actually the model could be used to model any country. Garbage In Garbage Out. Whatsmore, analysis of the code revealed it to be sloppy and full of bugs. But if you believe in models to predict reality that's your prerogative. Using this flawed model from one epidemiologist and ignoring the real scientific consensus from people who know what they're talking about would have been a sane strategy but then what do you expect from that bumbling buffoon Boris wingit Johnson. I know for a fact that the burden of proof for any hypothesis - whether it's a model or a physics theory - is on the proponents of that hypothesis. Given the absence of any experimental evidence, I will continue to regard the Imperial College epidemiological modelling with the same incredulity as cold fusion or perpetual motion.
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3 minutes ago, Neapolitan said:
We will never know I’m afraid. I’m reading reports of 60k excess deaths in the UK. Sorry, but I do not buy the notion this are all COVID deaths. A&E were and are still empty. Thousands have lost their lives due to strokes and heart attacks and other reason but were too scared to go to hospitals to get checked. At some point we had the whole NHS turned into a COVID treatment room. This is a total failure, we need local councils doing hard track and trace now not a stupid NHS app that doesn’t even work plus Covid hospitals across the country. The Excel centre stood empty, this is a total scandal imo.
I'm inclined to agree since we know that death certificates in the UK can have more than one cause of death (I think it's 3?) It transpired that, like everywhere else, the majority of deaths were in people with one or more comorbidities. Even if C19 was listed on the death certificate as a secondary thing (because a test had been done), that death now counted as part of the C19 statistics. It was then reported as "died with covid-19". This bumped up the reported numbers significantly.
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19 minutes ago, Neapolitan said:
Japan saw the virus coming. They didn’t went full lockdown but they closed schools, offices and put a mask on their face when and where necessary. I think it was the island of Hokkaido going a sort of full lock down. If you’re looking at a model you have to look at Sweden. No lockdown and still less deaths per million of population than Italy, Spain and UK.
Deaths occurring in hospitals and care homes here and where the virus hit hard. US same story. Governments will never tell you, but they made a little bit of a mess with this. Poor planning and even worse execution. I wish someone will ask HMG why they put hundreds of millions in COVID hospitals just to see them left with a dozen patients to treat in total.Well yes and some will say that Sweden's neighbours have a lower death count (as comparable countries) and that this proves that lockdowns work. The thing is that herd immunity builds quite quickly, in say a month or 6 weeks for respiratory viral infections and the deaths are more compressed into a comparatively short time span. Conversely, those who locked down may now see second and more waves as people start to be exposed again. We will only know the true mortality rate after some months or even years.
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5 hours ago, Confusion of VIs said:
The model wasn't relevant to Japan.
Even ignoring that your claim is a complete logic fail. You are effectively saying that the almost all the +50,000 deaths in the UK were caused by the lockdown.
The model claimed we would have 500k deaths if we let the virus run through the population. We have had +50,000 deaths and about 7% of the population has been infected, indicating that we will have the predicted 500k deaths by the time we reach herd immunity.
Based on the data we now have the model was surprisingly accurate.
With R now very close to 1 the semi lockdown is going to continue for a lot longer than many people think. There will be no great reopening in July and the housing market will remain paralysed for at least the rest o the year.
Does this cause or prevent a HPC I am not sure. Athough I am sure there will be some bargains to be had from motivated sellers.
Where exactly can you point out that I claimed the 50,000 deaths were caused by the lockdown? Your words not mine. Why was the model not relevant in Japan? The same model was used by some other countries. You seem to be saying something that is logically fallacious. I.e. that you can somehow prove that some thing might happen if we don't do some other action. That's verging on voodoo.
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Well I guess being one order of magnitude wrong for this pandemic isn't too shabby considering his dire predictions about BSE and foot and mouth disease.
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2 minutes ago, Confusion of VIs said:
??
Population 120 million
Lockdown: none
Deaths to date from C19: 907
The point being, they did nothing, thus disproving Neil Ferguson's "model"
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39 minutes ago, Confusion of VIs said:
How is a model that predicts something will happen if you do nothing shown as flawed by what happens when you do something?
That US estimate of 120K has already been overtaken by reality.
Japan
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The blame is not on specific sections of society but rather with governments and think tanks steering society in a certain direction. Governments love taxation and once upon a time, only had tax income from mostly working males. I think the seeds of transformation were sown in WWII when the gender demographics of munitions factories required all hands on deck. Governments soon realised what a boon this was towards their cradle to grave welfare plans which would require massive taxation to pay for. The Prussian model of the state raising children while both parents are at work suits the plans for more and bigger government rather well.
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8 hours ago, MARTINX9 said:
It isn't actually going to happen but I expect a lot more Brits are attracted to moving to a large country where English is the main language (or one of the two main spoken anguages) and they drive on the correct side of the road than Slovakia or Latvia or Bulgaria. Malta is a bit limiting by comparison.
It also perhaps speaks volumes that despite freedom of movement to Australia ending for Brits in 1973 there are actually more British citizens living in Australia than in the whole of the EU where we have had FOM since 1973 (excluding Ireiand where we will keep the common travel area). Canada, the US, NZ and Australia remain the top choices for Brits to move too - if they had the chance.
As for those lovers of EU FOM - what are you still doing here? Of course if there were so many well paid job oppprtunities in the other 27 member states why would so many young Europeans be moving here!
Most Brits are happy with 90 days visa free travel for holidays - which we have with over 120 non EU nations anyway! Thats perhaps why 98 per cent haven't taken advantage of EU freedom of movement in its true sense - and moved abroad to live and work. Few will miss what they never used.
It gives metropolitan liberal elites the chance to virtual signal at dinner parties at "how lovely my Polish builders are" or how little their Bulgarian Au Pair requires in terms of employment rights, holiday and sick pay etc. Maintaining a 3 storey fully staffed town house in Islington doesn't come cheap you know.
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2 hours ago, winkie said:
Even an average paid key worker job will no longer get paid enough to rent in the private sector.......high employment of low pay........ private homes being split up into sections to home those that no longer can buy or rent a whole one........small government does not do social provision.....it sells it all off and leaves it to business to profitise from it.....they are not a charity, they are in business to gain from others misfortune, wants and needs....governments can then wash their hands of it......not their problem.?
Except I wouldn't call our government small. It's more like the government doesn't represent the interests of those who elect them, rather the interests of the corporate lobbyists. The small government can still do a lot of damage to ordinary people if its policies serve merely to enforce the riches of small, highly vocal interests.
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Can't think of anywhere worse to build a water folly. Go for a swim and then get mugged or worse on the way out.
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Rentierism is positively encouraged by the wall street/fed money printers. It's how they manage to squeeze out "returns" from an ever decreasing pool of actual work/production/innovation. Unfortunately, the only way this model can work is if you have a complete monopoly on the money supply and all those who benefit from access to that money supply. In the real world, this equates to cheap, zero interest rate money finding its way into "venture capital funds" and being lent to people who happen to be in the right place at the right time.
The slilcon valley types might argue that they are innovating and creating wealth when in reality they do nothing more than cash in on ideas that hundreds, if not thousands of other people had around the same time in other parts of the world but were not lucky enough to be recipients of all the cheap "capital" (printed money) sloshing around silicon valley. They then take unfair advantage of all this cash to market their businesses worldwide, price gouging and gaining monopoly footholds in most markets. This predatory, rigged "capitalism" then gets lauded and celebrated by the mainstream media and thereby accepted as household names in most parts of the western world. You only have to look at Theranos and the cavalcade of fraud and deception that led to its rise an subsequent demise to realise how thoroughly corrupt and rotten the whole of Silicon Valley is to its core.
AirBnB, Uber, ebay, paypal and all the other mediocre but over-hyped platforms could equally well have been created elsewhere had it not been for the fact that in other parts of the world, money has not been devalued and propped to quite the grotesque extent of the dollar.
If I had a money printing press and a bunch of willing graduates, I could also be the next "killer app". Nobody had to save that money which was subsequently lent out to these "startups" in "the bay area". It was printed and immediately made available to often inefficient an poorly run startups with no actual strategy or real products. I am pretty sure that if other countries dropped any sense of morality or integrity, they too could spawn entire industries built on nothing by air and advertising and become household names.
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12 hours ago, Nick_wacker said:
Well the house has been back on for a little while. now at 180.....
You can purchase using the "Modern Method of Auction" . go figure....
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-72553648.html
If it had a lay-by it would make a perfect greasy-spoon type cafe.
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It is the $1200 monthly charge that I can't get my head around for what is basically a dos house masquerading as something desirable. The people dumb enough to buy in to it don't seem to realise that they do have a choice and the creepy, self-congratulatory cult leader "founder" talks about it like she's doing the city a favour.
Instead of working to create real solutions it's like, here, eat this s**t sandwich and ain't it great, like there's no other choice. The fact that the Soviet Union, from whence she originated was such an unmitigated disaster ought to have at least given her some sense of the perils of facilitating this kind of degraded communal living but alas she just appears to think it's cool and enthuses over the fact that there's ramen in the fridge. Quite bizarre.
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I must admit, the commentary from Alistair Williams is hilarious, but seriously...
(Contains strong language)
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19 minutes ago, Riedquat said:
I know things seem to be heading in the direction of AI controlled cars, and I thoroughly hate the idea (I find most visions of the future rather dystopian), and regard it as having very few benefits. But the bit I'm still not seeing is the link between that and car sharing. Changing attitudes towards "my car, me alone" - sure, I can see that, although I'm sceptical about how keen people will be to regularly get in to cars with random strangers. The idea of a whole sharing scheme though, that could be done just as easily without self-driving cars. Sign up, pay a bit, get a bit back every time you give a lift, messages popping up with "accept pick up at such-and-such a place?" that's along your route... And no running around empty either.
Not that I personally would sign up for it, since it involves insinuating more high-tech and tracking into ordinary daily tasks, but it doesn't require autonomous cars.
I think for me, the link between car sharing and virtual public transport is that in a way, the public transport systems of the past that were gotten rid of post 1950s, you know, when you could go, by train, from small towns and in some cases, villages, to the nearest hub by train are likely to come back, reformed into self-driving autonomous cars which act a bit like small buses or trains. Although they aren't car-sharing per se, they will appear to be similar because of the function they perform. This is, I admit, a bit of a generalisation but I think you'll get where I'm going with it.
They will collect people from pick-up areas and drop them off somewhere else. I don't envision the kind of granularity for routes and destinations that a personal car offers but in time I think people will be forced to travel in new ways and one of these is a mass transit system that looks a bit like car sharing since its vehicles will be smaller than buses and trains but will carry more passengers than personal cars with car sharing. We've see these types of transit arrangements in dystopian sci-fi films like "Minority Report" where people literally just jump into one of the many already available "transport pods" which appear to be constantly flowing by.
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50 minutes ago, Riedquat said:
Why do you think that more people will be bothered to car share just because the driver is a computer instead of a human being?
I'm thinking that maybe, just maybe the upcoming generations of people will find it more convenient and be amenable to the whole concept of sharing resources, rather than competing for them. btw it's not just the car that will be self driving, the whole operation can be run by AI.
Whether we like it or not, these solutions will emerge and it will be considered more and more antisocial to want to have one's own car for one's own exclusive use. When you consider that the stated goals of governments everywhere are to reduce emissions and increase energy efficiency, it doesn't take a genius to work out that this is the direction we're headed.
I'm not saying I agree with it but you have to consider where everything appears to be heading.
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12 hours ago, Riedquat said:
People could car share now. Having a computer drive it instead of a person isn't going to make that more likely. And anyone doing a regular commute will work out the best route pretty quickly. No, all you've done is add the empty cars going to pick people up.
How efficiently does that work? I remember Bristol ring-road's 1+ lane being practically empty while traffic queued in the adjacent lane. If you turn cars into virtual public transport, you really can incentivise people to fill a whole car. An average car can hold 4 people and much of the commuter traffic originates from large residential areas and goes to the same small areas in city centres. The car sharing we have now doesn't work because people can't be bothered with it. It's easier to get into your own car and just drive. A real car sharing scheme can be planned and optimised by AI which in 5+ years will probably surpass a human's ability to plan such a network.
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7 hours ago, Riedquat said:
That increases, not decreases the number of cars on the road. It decreases the number parked up during the day (but they still need to almost all have some space to park up at night) but you've no net gain on used cars if they're replacing taxis (just as much running empty) and you've definitely added if you're replacing buses.
The level of cars needed to take old ladies to the supermarket is rather less than needed at rush hour, and there need to be enough to handle that peak. So you've not reduced the total that much anyway.
In any case even if it did increase utilisation, so what? The lifespan of a modern car is primarily determined by use, not age (since rust isn't anywhere near the issue it once was), so you've not reduced the level of resources needed to go in to making cars. Again, probably added to it if a chunk of those miles are now running without people.
I was referring to "rush hour". If AI can provide optimised routes and efficiently fill cars then there will be fewer cars needed on the road during the busiest periods.
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Just now, Riedquat said:
Cars will never be near 100% utilised because travel is nowhere close to evenly spread throughout the day. It may be a bit more flexible than it once was but the rush hour is still very much a thing.
But with AI and car sharing, the number of cars on the road can be substantially reduced. A car can be working while you are working, ferrying old ladies to the supermarket or people who would normally take a taxi or bus into town and elsewhere. The potential for increasing how much a car is used is much higher than we realise.
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16 minutes ago, winkie said:
All this owning your own electric car to self drive, charge yourself is hearsay and almost very unlikely for the majority of people.......most probably it will be rent a car you will never own, an automated car pre-charged to pick you up and drop you off at your destination......much more money can be made and less infrastructure spending investment required.
They don't want you to own....they want you to rent almost everything you need....a continuous flow of new money/income.
£2 a month....you wish......how much a mile?....inflation plus 1% ongoing?
Well you're right but the car manufacturers want us to buy as many cars as possible. Having a near 100% utilised car means far fewer sales for them so the chances are they'll have to come up with new and innovative ways to remain in business.
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7 hours ago, zilly said:
Probably because they haven't got hoards of wealthy investors willing to finance a loss-making business year in, year out in the forlorn hope that one day the business will obtain monopoly position so it can rack up its costs and finally make a profit..?
I think it would be great to create an open source server and framework to support this type of thing (ride and taxi hailing and management) in the community. Something akin to wordpress but for ride sharing. It could be promoted to small taxi firms, hosted on community infrastructure and advertised locally and with p2p payments and blockchain accounting.
These centralised dinosaur money extraction machines like Uber and Lyft would not be in a position to challenge such an initiative and their business model would be rendered out of existence. I resent the way these silicon valley types are basically serial creators of monopolies that become household names, for the very reasons you cite. It's time their centralised model was challenged and technology based on open source distributed to communities to empower and enrich them, not the financiers and tech slickers in California.
I appreciate that it's a distant and perhaps unattainable goal but it only takes a grassroots movement that is both tech savvy and disenfranchised to start challenging these big corporations.
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Why don't they just set up their own "app driven" taxi and ride-sharing apps and bypass the rentiers at the top? It's not rocket science.
I am not sure about HPC now
in House prices and the economy
Posted
Which shows that central planning can never work. The blunt instrument of total indiscriminate lockdown has been disastrous. We will never know what the truth is because the endemic corruption within the NHS and other government institutions in reporting and application of advice from "experts" was never scrutinised by any independent arbiter or body.