Bob The Badger

9 hours ago, uttoxram75 said:

I know two people who died within days of having a jab, they had long standing illnesses but not immediately life threatening. One was late 40's one mid 50's. Their families believe the jab killed them. I don't know, I have no clue and no way of knowing. 

I know two others who very nearly died after a jab, blood clots, but were young and fit and managed to pull through. 

These are not anecdotal, these are people I know, worked with, live near, know their mums, dads, brothers, sisters, cousins etc.

That is actually the very definition of anecdotal evidence - personal stories.

I run Facebook groups with about 10k people in them and I have maybe another 10k people follow me on social media and I literally don't know anybody who had a severe problem. I'm not saying that means they don't exist, I'm sure they do, but I'd say your experience is incredibly unusual. If we ll knew a couple of people who'd died and two more who almost did nobody would be having the vaccine, especially not doctors who know that it poses that level of danger.

I know my wife thinks all NHS staff should be vaccinated and so do her immediate colleagues. It was the same in the US before we moved back. She's never met a medical professional who isn't in favour of that. Although that's anecdotal and I'm sure there are some.

My wife already has to have 5 vaccinations to be able to work in the NHS, so I'm not sure why adding another is any different.

Can you explain that?

It seems to get swept under the carpet by people lashing out at this.

She had a patient last month who has colorectal cancer and needed some procedure or other. He not only refused to be vaccinated but wouldn't let them test him. Their guidelines are not to treat people like that, but they did. They cleared the area at a huge amount of time that then wasn't spent with other patients, removed all nonessential staff and treated the selfish ducker because they recognise their duty of care and they're professionals.

Things like that that are happening get missed by people because they're not really that newsworthy, but it's that kind of collateral damage that is seriously hurting the NHS and is born out of selfishness. There were no clinical grounds for the man not having the jab or at least being tested.

I'm against making vaccines mandatory through society, but if somebody wants to work with highly vulnerable people then grow up and get vaccinated.

Or storm off in a huff.

3 minutes ago, QuitYourJibbaJivin said:

How many jabs and how long do you want this experiment to last for? The vast majority did exactly what you suggested above and it still hasn’t ended. 

I dunno  if I had a vote I'd like it to end tomorrow,

My mum and dad didn't get a vote on how long WWII went on for, they just managed a situation that was crappy for everyone.  

If only they'd been asked it could have ended sooner. 

34 minutes ago, Archied said:

Have politicians banned smoking and drinking?

has boris mandated being thin with fines and restrictions on the lives of fat people 

has sugar been banned 

im all for information, recommendations, guidance,,,,,, NOT where this is going and yes even less so if it’s being driven by people who clearly don’t feel the need to follow the rules they make for others , if you genuinely believe in stuff you live that way NATURALLY yourself

No, just like they haven't banned Covid .

They have banned smoking in public places to slow the spread of people killing themselves and others though. 

And they banned drink driving for similar reasons. 

You'd last sentence would suggest nobody who smokes knows it's bad for them to make any sense. 

?

2 minutes ago, Archied said:

Paranoid???? , just got in from walking the dog ,,, bloke across the road walking in a mask with hardly a soul around ,,, now that’s paranoid

It's probably fear and/or ignorance.

And who cares if you have seen an extreme example?

That is so utterly meaningless.

It's like me saying I saw a guy shouting and swearing at the security guy in Tesco's that it's all fake before storming (which I did about 5 or 6 weeks ago and still have part of on camera), so what?

I doubt if you'd seen 20 people without masks going about there business that you would be sharing that nugget of information. 

I walked my dogs this morning and it didn't rain even though I put my waterproofs on.

It never rains in Cornwall, clearly.

4 minutes ago, Andicis said:

Funny that, the government is so worried about this huge problem that they're having parties! 

Didn't Neil Ferguson get caught out shagging his mistress in the first lockdown?

These terrified politicians and scientists don't exactly act in a way that would indicate it to be a serious problem, maybe that's why people doubt their sincerity? 

Part of me wished I could type faster and more accurately, but then part of me thinks that would just give you more to ignore.

Do politicians deny smoking and drinking are unhealthy because they may partake in either, or both.

Is Boris saying " there's nothing unhealthy about being fat, look at me, I'm fat and I'm not dead'?

Do you know anybody terrified of sugar even though it kills millions of people every year?

This isn't a case of being terrified, this is a case of putting public health first.

I can't stand Johnson and I can see he is in a no-win situation with half his Party hating him. So I kinda think he maybe realises we're in a hole here.

I dread to think what the right would be saying of we had a labour PM. The country would be in civil war.

1 minute ago, Andicis said:

Funny that, the government is so worried about this huge problem that they're having parties! 

Didn't Neil Ferguson get caught out shagging his mistress in the first lockdown?

These terrified politicians and scientists don't exactly act in a way that would indicate it to be a serious problem, maybe that's why people doubt their sincerity? 

Good grief, I've drifted into a junior school debating competition. 

There are people in this thread who think we should all get doubled jabbed, boosted and wear masks in public.

If we're wrong  and it's not necessary, you have a slightly achy arm and a you have to enunciate more clearly when talking in a public space.

If those of you that think it's unnecessary are wrong, hundreds or thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people die (potentially you) and this drags on forever.

This is such a ridiculous argument to me.

Get vaccinated, wear a mask and then if this is all a waste of time, mock the duck out of us afterwards for you being slightly inconvenienced as opposed to being dead.

14 minutes ago, maxjam said:

It certainly seems that way.

We've done what we were told for the past couple of years.  We have the vaccines, we have social distancing, we have masks - non of those things I have a problem with.  But mandating vaccines or introducing vaccine passports is a scary path to go down.  I'd rather make a noise now and help prevent them from happening than look back in the future at the freedoms we've lost.

The problem, or rather one of them, with the virus is that it's invisible and not easy to quantify, understand or predict.

During WWII people banded together because they could see and understand a common enemy. It made sense, it was obvious what they wanted and how they were going to get it. Sticking together made sense.

At the moment governments across all ideological boundaries are banding together in their insiatsnce that this is really serious, but the people they govern don't quite understand it so many aren't supporting them.

They cannot see the enemy and they flat our don't understand the science, so they are rebelling.

That isn't to suggest that scientists fully understand the science because it's very early, just that those studying it are aware of the potential implications if we bat on regardless.

To think this is a conspiracy is anywhere on the spectrum of flat out moronic to being paranoid, to simply not understanding how many people can keep a secret.

Fauci said right at the beginning of this  (and I paraphrase) that he's rather be considered a fraud for over exaggerating and nothing happens, than negligent because he said nothing.

Pretty much every government and serious scientist on the face of the planet is saying 'seriously, we could have a huge problem on our hands here and it may get a lot worse' but still some people with zero scientific background and with no relevant information that contracdicts that other than a hunch or two are effectively saying....

21 minutes ago, maxjam said:

Yep I'm happy to assert that the media are complicit in the scaremongering the Govt puts out. 

In the last week alone the media have been called out numerous times for er, lets just say 'misinformation'.  Misinformation that doesn't get corrected (despite 1000s complaints to Ofcom), instead it gets repeated.  Regularly.

 

The media?

Do you even know what the media is?

It's literally thousands of outlets and you just lumped them all together.

This isn't 1955, or even 1995, you know.

All you did with that response is shout from the rooftops that you have no clue how people get their news anymore and presume everybody is like you.

Newsflash: They're not. In FACT, most people don't consume their news in the way you're whining about.

Welcome to 2021.

BTW @Carl Sagan my wife's best friend left Romania during the Ceausescu regime (although in fairness she was very young, it was her parents who left and took her and her sister to the US), my Grandfather left Poland when the Nazis invaded and the enlisted in the Navy, and I have a client who left China after being targeted as a dangerous individual (because she was a women who wanted to be climber and scale peaks over seas) and they all say 'thank duck we weren't born in Wales' .

41 minutes ago, maxjam said:

 

Brilliant example of when you have nailed your colours to the mast and nothing will change.

I despise this government and I am, at best, ambivalent about our media, but this is a kippers dick short of QAnon.

59 minutes ago, Carl Sagan said:

I don't tend come on this thread so I'm struggling to get me head round the last few pages. I think the country has split into two, and half the people are very anxious and tend to stay home and want to wear masks while the other half are fully vaxxed and just want to get busy living again. I'm in that second batch so go out most nights now in a desperate attempt to keep the economy going (which we need if we're going to pay for healthcare).

I work with people on the government SAGE and SPIM (modelling) committees who are trying to work out what's going on. The modellers tell me they haven't a clue. That not a single one of the mathematical models they've created predicted the plateau we've had over the last few months, so they don't know what's coming next.

Across Great Britain we have far left authoritarian governments  in Scotland and Wales who are keen on fierce state-mandated restrictions because it's their nature to want to control the population anyway. And then we have a libertarian on Downing St who would normally say live and let live, and have people make their own choices. Yet we see pretty much identical Covid patterns across GB, which make clear the restrictions don't make any difference. Diddly squat. So they're being introduced in England as a distraction from the appalling governance we see generally, as by scaring the people you tend to have them fall into line behind you. Note Boris has clearly been desperately rooting around to find someone ill from this omicron variant and claimed yesterday that "one person has died with omicron". But he didn't say from Omicron. It's almost certain that this was someone who died from something else and just happened to also test positive. 

Scotland and Wales have far-left authoritarian governments, do they?

Uh-huh.

And we fall into two groups of people like you who are vaxxed and trying to help the economy (you're such a trooper) by going out and people who are fearful who are sting at home, do we?

Uh-huh.

And the scientists don't know what's coming next in a new pandemic?

Uh-huh.

No, Wales and Scotland are not far left authoritarian governments. Are you even being serious with that, or taking the pee?

No, we don't fall into two groups, why would somebody claiming to be scientific make such a claim?

Seriously man, that's ludicrous.  I for one am double vaxxed and have had my booster and I go out as and when needed.

And you claim to be scientific?

Could it be that scientists don't know what to expect in the same way that they never know what to expect with something brand new.

Isn't the advancement of science based around not knowing what to expect?

I though modeling, testing, looking at data that you will sometimes get wrong to begin with, because ya know, it's early days,and then adapting  is/was the bedrock of science.

Isn't science a way of thinking?

Most disappointing comment I have ever read on this forum...literally. 

And I mean literally in the old sense when literal meant literal and not metaphorical.

You lost me way earlier than you lost @GboroRam.

2 hours ago, TexasRam said:

Kudos to your wife, I’d love to do a PHD, I imagine the personal commitment and sacrifice was massive over those years.

However on the data scientists, regardless of what level they work on, not very accurate where they. 

Well tbf, it was me who went out and bought her a brand new laptop to work on.

So I think I deserve at leats half of the kudos.

After 10 months of Sky I'm thinking other than the odd Derby game and the NFL, I'd not miss it at all. Pretty much everything we watch other than sport is on iPlayer, Netflix or occasionally Amazon.

I obviously incorrectly thought they had the Ashes, but even that's not the case.

I highly doubt I'll renew next summer. Way overpriced for what it is, and that will become more so as things get more and more fragmented. 

1 hour ago, TexasRam said:

 

FWIW and I not sure you why you want to know, I’m a supply chain Director for a multi National linked to the steel industry, so forecasting global sales, global demand and supply, production rates, capacity projections, projects, financials, import, export globally etc etc in a ever changing and extremely unpredictable environment is my daily work. And if I was as wide of the mark as our “data scientists” then tiny Tim and Tina wouldn’t be getting any Christmas presents this year. 

Just for the craic @Stive Pesley I’m a six sigma black belt (I’m guessing you won’t know what that means re data analysis) have PGDip/Cert in business  strategic and management an MBA so not a data scientist you’re correct, however not to shabby I think ?. 
 

Shame people judge people without knowing the 1st bit about them, make people look a bit silly sometimes?

I wanted to know because I wanted to know if your opinion on data scientists was any more relevant than that of anybody else in here.

IOW, if you were a trained data scientist, then your opinion would carry a lot more weight.

My wife took her Masters in around 2013 and her Doctorate in 2017 (I think). 

She nearly quit her doctoral studies because of one thing, statistics.

She'd had no problem with it during her Masters, but it was at a whole different level for her Doctorate and we had to hire a private tutor.

I found out that this is surprisingly common and it's often recognised at that level to be the hardest element.

I'm familiar with Six Sigma, but only because it was implemented in a company I worked for and we all whined about the process of implementing it.

I do know that it's very technical and I'm pretty sure it's hard getting the black belt level and you have to be pretty smart.

But the data scientists doing the kind of work we're talking about are at a whole other level.

So, nice one for being a Six Sigma black belt and all that, but your opinion is no more valid than mine and probably less valid than my wife's. Just sayin'.

7 hours ago, TexasRam said:

@Bob The Badger and @Stive Pesley defence of the wayward modelling in picture form

Unless that's meant to be you saying the barrier is on the wrong side, when I'm guessing it's from overseas, I've no clue what you mean. 

I am looking on my phone though, so I could be missing some subtle visual nuance. 

12 hours ago, TexasRam said:

But if on reflection and reviewing the accuracy of the scenarios they are constantly wrong and constantly wrong by some bias, then you have to question the people putting them together. If my forecast accuracy at work as so outrageously wrong, especially using the data to make huge strategic decisions like the government have to make, then I would be out of a job by now. 

What do you do and what data do you rely on to make your forecasting?

Without knowing that your statement is utterly pointless and means nothing to anybody other than you and people who already agree with you and don't want to think it through. 

4 hours ago, Ramarena said:

Your finally question is basically, how do we stop confirmation bias. Not sure how you can deal with that.

Funny thing at the the moment is- watching people who’ve spent the last year or so slagging off scientists, doctors, experts and their data/modeling, now going full circle and hailing any that say the initial data points to Omnicrom being “mild”.

I've been looking everywhere to find proof that we need to stop confirmation bias and all I could find was a report from Luxemburg from 1979 that says that we do in fact need to do that.

Good enough for me.

If you agree with me, we're good to go. if you don't, then there is little point sharing the link.

1 hour ago, Stive Pesley said:

But they aren't "wrong". You are misunderstanding how this works, based on being manipulated by a Spectator article!

1. The scenarios say - "Based on current data and if these variables remain unchanged then this is what will happen"

2. The government then make decisions to change the variables in order to AVOID the scenario

3. The changes have an impact and the scenario does not come to pass

4. Click bait media publish graphs that show how the reality therefore does not match the scenario and makes impressionable people lose trust in experts

rinse and repeat

 

 

 

You're absolutely right. models are merely predictions based upon known data. They are mathematical calculations, not people guessing, and guessing badly, as @TexasRam seems to believe.

You don't stop modeling because you don't nail it every time anymore than you stop forecasting the weather when you get it horribly wrong.

I don't know this for a fact, but I'd be totally stunned if every model has been horribly wrong every time.

My *guess* is a good proportion will have been fairly accurate but who wants to point to a fairly accurate model from 6 months ago any more than than people want to talk about meteorologist getting it right. Where's the fun in that?

As an aside, I was just listening to the Nicky Campbell phone in whilst I was out with the hounds. They had a virology professor on who was saying that the booster jab gives more protection than actually catching Covid does. And that whereas it's not unique, it is very unusual. Normally, catching the virus you're immunising against provides the highest level of defence.

23 minutes ago, WestKentRam said:

Exactly my position. I was sucked in by the hype and thought I'd give it another go after decades of non-watching what to me had become a tedious procession. I thought it would be great to watch a sporting finale unencumbered by having to worry about contrived rules, legal small print and drawn out appeals etc that supporting Derby had become...

The FIA may have shot themselves in the foot here, as in trying to make it a more exciting spectacle by bizarrely suddenly changing the rules during the crucial part of a race, they've turned people off like me as World of Sport wrestling on ITV Saturday afternoons with Dickie Davies feels less fixed (one for the kids, there).

Dickie Davies is still alive!

Sorry if Dickie is reading this, but I just checked to see when he died and he hasn't.

Well done Dickie!

I used to love F1 in the 70s' and 80s' and then got a bit bored with it tbh.

I decided to watch today just because I have have SS and had nothing going on and got sucked in by the hype.

I didn't really care who won. It would be nice to have a Brit win 8 times, but I also have a soft spot for the Dutch and their rabid supporters so I thought it would be cool for them to have a world champ.

What an utter embarrassing cluster for the entire sport and now I realise why I drifted away from it.

Hamilton was cruising when one accident allowed MV back in.

He then started cruising to a win again when another accident let MV back in.

Then he has a 13 second lead wiped out and he has to start level to a man on new soft tyres with one lap left.

Who an earth can think any of that made any sense or was fair and when did Mel Morris take over F1?

On 04/12/2021 at 19:36, RoyMac5 said:

How would a team prepare for the Championship in the Prem? How does a team prepare for League 1?

Good question.

My initial response was 'yes' but I have no idea how.

So maybe I should be saying 'no'

Or 'maybe'

I have do ducking clue.

Holy ducking wow!

10 hours ago, Rev said:

Just back from Gary Delaney. 

His first couple of minutes after the interval were mildly amusing.

The rest of the show was piss your pants funny, I always think it's the sign of a good show that you can't remember the gags, because you're so caught up in enjoying yourself you don't mentally jog them down to repeat later.

A truly great night.

 

Gary in Punderland (the book) if just brilliant

Just bought tickets to see Russell Brand with a certain sense of trepidation it has to be said

1 hour ago, QuitYourJibbaJivin said:

Lucky for you the police don’t investigate historical crimes ?

Isn't every crime historical....literally

Can it even be a crime if it has't happened yet?

Even conspiracy is people planning a crime.

Or were you being super smart?