Anti-Dementor Alliance Thread - learn how to produce your patronus here

[Tappering]

New thread!

Reading is also keeping me sane (ish) wishing chair, I downloaded some books on to my kindle...and yes deleting Facebook is good too.

A nice app I have is called Elefriends from Mind for depression / anxiety it is lovely. No nastiness and well moderated, met some lovely people on there. It is changing to being called Side by Side soon.

The Times has been fairly positive recently also going on about sex toy lessons for women online taking off in lockdown for example I have a free trial of that atm

I have just ordered an antibody test online for the virus as I think we had it after half term as we went to France and were ill after that. I haven;t told the rest of the family but interested to know. I hope am able to draw blood though as tried a similar test for something else a while back and it wasn't that easy to get enough.

@heroku the government (well actually Ferguson) has finally released the model on which all the numbers, stress, cancelled appointments, trashed economy are based on.

In short: its not good. Even after Microsoft spent a month trying to fix it.

lockdownsceptics.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/

Obviously treat the source with caution (should be obvious from the title of the site) but even if the article is 70% bullshit Ferguson has some serious questions to answer.

Which one orangeblossom, you need to be careful, I'm not sure anyone has a great deal of confidence in them yet?

Yes I was seriously alarmed when I read about Ferguson's model. He sounds like one of these people who bluffs their way through life on account of everyone thinking they're a genius. It's extremely dangerous. He predicted far higher deaths for Sweden than they have had by now without lockdown and it puzzles me people aren't questioning that more. It will be fascinating looking back in 10 years time and being able to see all the errors that were made. But sad, too of course.

my poor boy is not going to get the end of his primary school or to see his friends. It's just too shit

@Mascotte I hear you. I have a P7 boy too and he is devastated by missing all the fun and end of year stuff which his older siblings had. It's not the parties and the bowling trips - it's the rite of passage stuff like their "memories assembly" when they all stand up in front of the parents and tell a wee story about their time at Primary. It's being done online but it's not the same.

Can I join the thread? Just had a WhatsApp chat with some friends and they are ALL of the "Oh, we must stay safe; nothing else matters apart from the virus; Boris has made the right decision, yada yada yada; stay safe."

When I mentioned the economic cost, the toll on young people and mental health...well, I might just have well have said that I was just popping out to stab some people.

These women are all educated women! I am so tired and frustrated of so much fear and panic about just one thing, and never mind all the other ways in which we are paying so dearly.

Hello fellow murderers!

I am so pleased I found these threads, I was really starting to despair at the utter lack of rational thinking out there.

I think I may have to find new friends when this is over as it appears all mine are dementors, lots of whom I previously considered to be intelligent rational people.

It is so heartening to see that there are some sane folks out there, this thread has massively cheered me up!

Fb dementor this morning wants the army patrolling the borders to Wales.

I am sure Ferguson is a good epidemiologist. (although obvs not as good as Sandra on FB)

I find it difficult to believe that he is a good enough software coder as well though.

www.businessinsider.com/neil-ferguson-transformed-uk-covid-response-oxford-challenge-imperial-model-2020-4?r=US&IR=T

Not long ago there were articles like the above being written. What stood out to me is the 'willing to roll up his sleeves and still code and run models'. While this is presented as a good thing I am not sure it is.

I work in a similar field (not that similar, but I apply huge statistical models to real world problems) leading teams. If I have to get involved then either something has gone craptastically wrong or the models are going weird. 99.8% of the time I can just let my colleagues get on with it with advice, guidance etc. Continually jumping in to work like that is a massive red flag.

Hello fellow murderers, I give you www.germdefence.org aka Dementors Paradise!

(It’s a University of Southampton link in case anyone is worried)

Theruler, I am muting people with gay abandon because long term I want to stay friends and it will be easier if I don't see the crap they post
Right at the moment being sensible about covid seems to matter. But in a year it won't. So if I step back now I will have more friends in future, I think.

Bloody hell that write up of the Imperial model is shocking. I'm a trained software developer and my jaw dropped at "15,000 lines of code in a single file that had been worked on for a decade". Add to that no unit testing and this is about as shoddy as it gets. No serious private sector programmer would last a week writing code like that!

Please could someone explain the code thing to a modelling numpty? I don't understand

@PineappleDanish yes.. and now there's a problem even with the bloody leavers' hoodies... it's just so crap.

Perhaps I'm turning into something of a dementor myself but I'm going to scream if I see one more post stating that it's only a year or two or three out of people's lives and that they're willing to spend all that time apart from their loved ones knowing that they'll get to hold them in their arms at the end of it. As though there's any guarantee of that. As though if you avoid getting Covid-19 and you gain immortality. All of those myriad of other things that can kill you are still around. You could spend a year or two hiding away only to die before you get to spend time with your loved ones or do any of the other things that make your life meaningful and enjoyable.

I've had a lot of family members die suddenly so this idea that the world was a safe place before CV is so strange to me. It's just one more risk in a world full of risks, which is why I'm not going to spend all of my time worrying myself into a grave over the thread of Covid-19 or any of the other things out there that could kill me. I want to enjoy life while I can and I've already lost too much time and quality of life to severe anxiety.

Okay, I was enjoying this thread when it was about the “ooooh you’ll never go to the pub until 2038! Bodies in the streets!” types in the first threads.

But now it seems to be ‘dementors’ are anyone who doesn’t think the lockdown lifted immediately? And us sensible people should be out protesting in the streets? In which case things have changed a bit.

@Mascotte - the very short answer is that the code that is informing statements like "a reasonable worst case scenario would be half a million deaths" is very badly written. It has lots of bugs which means it is giving different answers each time it's run. You're supposed to write unit tests on your code which check each individual section is working properly but they haven't written any tests so it's impossible to know where the bugs are. Normally there is a log kept of all the changes made to the code but this has been deleted which Imperial are claiming was an accident but suggests it may be because the code was even worse before and they're frantically trying to fix it.

This is assuming that this person's write up of it is accurate (I have no idea if it is or not).

I keep seeing this and also "the schools should go back when Westminster goes back" posts (so a few weeks ago with social distancing measures).

I can't even begin to dismantle the stupidity.

@heroku thank you. I see now. It's interesting to know how things work 😊

Good morning all.

Wrote my letter this morning to leave my teaching union.

Currently laughing at the dementors on facebook going mental because the local a road is suddenly really busy.....erm, that will be all the people going back to work morons!

I had another relative die very suddenly in February, before things really kicked off. He was in his 50s and spent a long time in hospital receiving treatment for an illness and he came out on top, only to die a month later of something unrelated. I'm so grateful that he got to spend his last month enjoying life and doing all of those little things he loved, like going to the pub and talking with his friends, or going to the bakery to get something for his lunch, things that so many on MN scoff at people longing to do. If he'd spent his last month at home under lockdown then died suddenly then I think his death would have been even more traumatic.

Sorry for the long ramble.

And @GoldenOmber I'd like some of lockdown lifted now as it's unsustainable the way it is now. And Because I'm in Scotland the vibe is very much that this will go on the same for a very long time which I'm finding extremely difficult. Not do I understand the thinking behind it.

I’m in Scotland too and deeply hating this, although I think it’s the least worst option. Not looking to argue about it, though. Like I said, it was fun when this was about the doom-and-gloom merchants, but if it’s changed enough that I’m now classed as a dementor now myself I should probably step out at this point!