Bob The Badger

10 hours ago, G STAR RAM said:

Didnt see the the post that you had removed but can imagine if is frustrating when political posts with no relevance to Covid are allowed to stay put...

 

The post explained that there are 115 million registered voters in the US so that is how they know pretty accurately that the people who are dying from COVID are overwhelmingly Republican voters.

We all want an end to this pandemic and the quickest way to that In my opinion and that of most experts) is via the vaccine. Sadly, that has become highly politicised so it's difficult to separate the two and have a meaningful debate. 

2 minutes ago, Archied said:

I take it you think children should be vaccinated then?

Dunno, I don't have a strong opinion. I can see both sides.

I certainly don't think it should be mandated, it should be a parents choice after they have been informed of the risks.

2 hours ago, Stive Pesley said:

Absolutely - we're either all in it together or we're not. No qualms about paying an NI increase ring-fenced for NHS/Social Care if there was any evidence that the people (and their donors) making these decisions on our behalf weren't actively avoiding it

We can all accept that more taxation is needed to fund these public services, but imagine if there was a referendum tomorrow

Two options on the ballot

1. The NI increase as planned
or
2. The NI increase as planned PLUS a % windfall tax on anyone who has seen their personal wealth increase between March 2020 and July 2021 as a direct result of the pandemic

I think it might be a just a bit more a landslide than the last referendum we had

 

Count me in for number 2.

1 hour ago, Archied said:

Ok so nobody working for Miami dade who is vaccinated has died , then leave the unvaccinated to make their choice they clearly are no threat to the vaccinated who are as you clearly use in your argument well protected , kind of does your idea of non vaccinated not being allowed to work with children who are at no threat from covid 

That's some high quality conclusion jumping there.

There are gradients between death and being well.

Vaccinated people have got sick and had a miserable time without actually dying. 

And as has been said numerous times the vaccines aren't 100% effective so people will still die. 

Call me an old softie, but no matter what I think of their decision making when it comes to not getting the jab, I still don't want kids taking it from one unvaccinated person at school to another at home.

Apart from the fact I don't want people getting needlessly sick, the more it gets transmitted the more opportunity it has to mutate.

And further mutations may be able to bypass the current vaccines and drag the whole thing on ad infinitum.

Also, it's not correct to say kids are at no risk, a handful have died and some have had other issues. The risk is probably no greater than taking the vaccine, but I accept that the vaccine like any drug carries a certain level of risk.

14 minutes ago, Anon said:

I posted many moons ago about how I expected those screaming for the economy to be shut down due to the pandemic would greet the inevitable tax hike with their usual level headed stoicism.

If you opposed the lockdowns, have at it. If you supported them, this is quite literally what you asked for.

Do show me the posts where people in favour of lockdown said there'd be no tax hikes to pay for Covid related issues.

Having said that according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies we did spend more on the military than any other country in the world other than the US, China and India in 2020 - even more than Russia.

So maybe we could move some of that into a Covid budget and top it up with a Covid tax on the super-wealthy and corporations who are directly profiting from it like Amazon.

Amazon usually hit their affiliates when this kind of things happen so they'll be ok and Jeff will remain able to feed himself.

I actually like the idea of a Covid tax because everybody will understand why it's needed.

And also, the tax rises aren't just because of the lockdown, I hear track and trace cost a few bob too.

Rather bizarrely my wife got her new NI codes yesterday when this was being discussed.

So presumably they'll have to reissue them now. Not entirely sure how that works.

53 minutes ago, maxjam said:

The article suggests a link.  More than half that caught it are bus drivers that surely interact with thousands of people throughout the day?  It also mentions nothing any health/weight issues etc - bus drivers tend not to be the fittest of people for example!

We know the fatality rate now and who is at the most risk, if people don't want the jab imho its up to them - everyone has surely had the opportunity by now.  Mandating vaccines (or vaccine passports) will lead to a lot of resentment, job losses (inc services not being delivered) and potentially violence.

My point and that of the article is really twofold.

1. That nobody working for Miami-Dade who has been vaccinated has died.

2. That this is the easiest way for the virus to spread when unvaccinated employees who come into contact with hundreds of kids, pass it on to some who then pass it to parents or guardians.

The school bus system is entirely different in the US. School start times tend to be staggered and the buses are only used for the schools as such the drivers are employed by the school districts not some random bus company that is contracted out.

I'm sure you have seen the yellow ones I'm talking about. They are purpose fitted with things like the arms that come out to say stop when they are dropping kids off - it's actually illegal to pass a stopped school bus even if you are on the other side of the road unless there's a central reservation.

So, I'm sure a few drivers will moonlight, but the vast majority won't and will only come into contact with kids. And in any case, bus driving is not in big demand in most areas of the US because the public transport system sucks outside of places like New York and finding a job that you can get to and work between 10 and 3 would be problematic.

43 minutes ago, maxjam said:

Unless it leads to staffing shortages ? 

https://news.sky.com/story/draconian-mandatory-jabs-for-care-home-staff-rule-must-be-repealed-unison-says-amid-fast-approaching-deadline-12398418

Doctors and nurses have to have Hep B, TB, MMRI, Covid and there's another one that slips my mind now, but is that the reason we are short of nurses?

Or is it that the pay and working conditions are utter crap?

The health care sector get even worse pay and worse conditions to work in.

So there is that.

13 minutes ago, maxjam said:

 

Sorry, ignore that - I shouldn't post until my morning coffee has kicked in ? 

I read it as a school, it would seem its the entire school district including 7 bus drivers;

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/571214-13-miami-area-school-staffers-die-of-covid-19-since-start-of-new

So I would imagine that the fatality rate is broadly in line with the data and in the cases of the bus drivers at least, very difficult to absolutely pin on the school system.  

I wasn't pinning it on the school system, I was just suggesting that I think people who are in contact with kids should be vaccinated because that is how it will most likely spread this autumn.

25 minutes ago, maxjam said:

Unless the school has hundreds and hundreds of teachers, that seems like an abnormally high fatality rate?

It's the Miami-Dade metro area and included bus drivers, caterers etc. Basically it was people who could come into contact with kids. 

It's frustrating when you take the time to lay out facts and they get deleted but the comment that prompted me to do so gets left there as the last word.

Anyway, on another note, 13 people who worked for the Miami-Dade School District have died from Covid in the last 3 or 4 weeks. None were vaccinated.

Unless you're a full on anti-vaxxer I think we can all agree that unvaccinated people should not be working with kids.

On 05/09/2021 at 08:22, TigerTedd said:

Are we still paying for Blackman?

Not sure, but fortunately we only have two more instalments left on Derek Hales.

2 minutes ago, Stive Pesley said:

He did actually clarify how he worked it out - not scientific, it's based on polling data.

 

 

There's no need to even use polls, most people register their affiliations. It's caught out plenty of politicians who then switched later in life and were accused of flip-flopping. 

It's a similar story for people who donate to Parties. Their name, occupation, city of residency and amount they donated is all public record. Not many people know it is when they donate and it has made a few celebs look silly when it was shown they donated to a Party they criticised. 

It's also caught out some big corporations who said one thing in public and then did another thing with their wallet. Such as calling out climate change and then donating to the GOP.

12 hours ago, G STAR RAM said:

No I 100% could not prove or disprove it because it is extremely unlikely that the information would exist.

It 100% does exist.

And it is 100% provable to anybody who wants to look up the information.

The US isn't like the UK with this kind of thing which is what I've spent a couple of days trying to explain.

Their freedom of information is way different to ours, there's very little anonymity within politics outside of QAnon. 

On a side note, Tyson is one of the most respected cosmologists in the world, he even supported Trump's idea of a Space Force for very interesting reasons, he's not a BS spreader. 

Edit: I'm not 100% sure a member of public can pull this info, but political parties and journalists can so I'd be highly surprised if that was the case.

For those of you who haven't seen it, he was as good in the outstanding The Night Of as he was in The Wire. 

Brilliant actor and very sad news. 

2 hours ago, BucksRam said:

To be fair to them @Bob The Badger, officially your wife was in the wrong, but I would still appeal on the basis of good faith, i.e. she did pay via the app and made a genuine error, (the app shows your car as in Truro at a given time therefore evidence it must have been a mistake otherwise how would she have got a ticket somewhere else? Her car can't have been in two places at once).  You then have to hope they have morals and are customer-centric, but where parking fines are concerned this is usually pretty rare as it's all about the take. 

As an aside, I used to use a parking app but have stopped doing so as they often charge an "admin" fee on top of the parking amount.  Most parking machines are contactless these days anyway so I just use my phone.  I'd only use the app as a last resort.  But then in principle I don't like to pay more than I should. 

I tend to use a card but they stopped taking them in some places around here (notably Perranporth) for a few months so she started using the app and uses them a lot more than me.

I must confess I had no clue they charged a usage fee. Makes sense I guess, but thanks for the heads up.

57 minutes ago, Boycie said:

Council car parks are un contestable 

It actually gives instructions on how to contest, but it's not council owned, I don't think.

3 hours ago, Beetroot said:

Appeal it. It's not just about the £50 it's about winning. I appealed one last year - and won, got it cancelled. Felt amazing. I did document the process on here somewhere if you want to copy my work.

I like the cut of your jib (gib?) and I'm equally shallow so I may just do it!

The wife got a ticket drop through the post yesterday.

She was pizzed because she said she paid it on the app.

On further investigation she had paid at the exact time it had here there for two hours (she was only parked for 50 mins).

However, she paid for the wrong car park in Truro.

She has been using the app since we moved to Cornwall last year and thought it used GPS to pay for the right car park.

It's £50, but would anybody bother appealing it or is it a lost cause. I'm tempted to just pay it so I have more time to argue in the Covid thread, but not really sure.

1 hour ago, Norman said:

Oh dear. Those spouting facts obviously haven't watched the Trump speech when he urged supporters to get vaccinated at a rally. He was booed. And he said 'I support your freedom of choice' amid the boos. 

And the same people go on about cognitive bias. Lolololololololololololololololololol. 

That was last month, we were talking about the run up to the November election last year. I know I dive into threads half way through and don't really know what is going on sometimes so I feel your pain and there's no need to apologise.

Is laugh out loud out loud out loud out loud out loud out loud out loud out loud out loud out loud out loud out loud something you do very often?

It sounds tricky to pull off. You should start a YouTube channel showing how you do it and explaining what it even means.

23 minutes ago, ariotofmyown said:

The full tweet probably included "fired" on the end!

In fairness, it didn't. But he did manage to bury it in a Tweet about the stock market. 

1 hour ago, G STAR RAM said:

I'd say having people putting the deaths of 700,000 at your door (regardless of how uneducated the guess was), because of biased, poor, reporting is anything other than deserved.

By all means criticise his am a person, by all means criticise him as a person, by all means pick apart his record as President, but making lazy, baseless, accusations will do nothing more than empower him and his supporters even more.

Well, I don't know who those people are. I stepped in to correct a post that said ity was much higher than it is.

I've not seen any major news source blame Trump for 700k deaths, but feel free to link to one you have seen and I'll be as irritated with it as you are.

A handful of people here and there making that claim is no more representative of reality any more than the people claiming Fauci developed the virus himself and took it to China.

1 hour ago, maxjam said:

FWIW, I am not defending/supporting either Biden or Trump just pointing out that politics, especially in the US where things are so polar opposite, have contributed to the death count.

No doubt about that.

But the conversation when I got involved was about the handling of the pandemic by Trump and the suggestion that it was politicised by Biden.

Trump didn't attempt to keep people safe prior to the election and Biden did, and still is.

At any point in time Trump could have gone on every major news programme and told people to get vaccinated.

If he'd have called for a national Presidential broadcast, or even a simple press conference after the vaccine was cleared he'd look like a hero now and a lot less people who would be dead.

That's the confusing thing to me.

I can only imagine that he didn't go balls to the wall urging people to get the jab because the Democrats were and there isn't a bi-partisan bone in his body.

He'd be in power now if he'd told people to mask up and then kept his mouth shut prior to the election, no doubt about it. 

I said that Cuomo is culpable but we were talking about the other two.

What he did with the nursing homes was disgusting, but he did back down and go on TV and be vaccinated.

He's still a tool though.

1 minute ago, maxjam said:

@G STAR RAMis probably quoting an article similar to this that the BBC published in March;

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-56424614

For Trumps comments re. the vaccine some can be found below;  Maybe some political bias or the news channels you watch in the US play into your bias against Trump?

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/mar/04/rachel-maddow/what-trump-said-encourage-covid-19-vaccine-use/

 

Whilst I was never convinced about Trumps suitability to be President, they was he was treated whilst in Office was eye-opening.  as noted in the article linked above, Trumps preferred method of communication was Twitter - from which he was banned before the election.  He had already tweeted out 'get your shots' before he was banned but then obviously switched to moaning about election bias/stolen election instead.

Furthermore whilst Trump may have presided over the most covid deaths, surely thats been the same virtually everywhere - the first wave has been the most devastating.  And lets not forget that a lot of those early deaths came in Democrat strongholds such as New York.  Having previously been commended for his approach to covid and profiting from it with his 'Leadership Lessons' book NY Mayor Andrew Cuomo's policies ultimately led to the death of a lot of people, so many in fact that he tried to cover a few up...

https://www.nytimes.com/article/andrew-cuomo-nursing-home-deaths.html

https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-new-york-adds-12-000-coronavirus-deaths-after-andrew-cuomo-stands-down-as-governor-12390625

 

Trump was banned from Twitter 2-months AFTER the election because of Jan 6th insurrection that he was encouraging on Twitter.

I was gutted he was banned because I loved reading his rants.

I read at much Breitbart (still do read it every day) as I watched CNN.

And on the radio when out and about I'd rotate between Fox News and CNN.

Nobody is defending Cuomo, that's another goalpost move.

I'm defending Biden and saying he did what he could.

Cuomo is culpable and may end up in court in some way shape or form.

And Trump was treated badly by the media, I've never said otherwise. But he deserved most of it.

29 minutes ago, Anon said:

Well, that was like squeezing blood from a stone. Don't worry, there's no shame in admitting that you were completely wrong.

Fabulous retort.