Westministenders: Reployed back to No Deal Planning

[RedToothBrush]

Now Covid-19 is over (yeah I know right) lots of civil servants who were switched from brexit no deal planning to covid-19 planning have been switched back to their original remit.

For some reason this doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.

We've also seen yet another doubling down on the EU not being flexible and how they need to make a deal. And lots of rhetoric about being serious about no transiton planning.

Remember we have something of a deadline looming at the end of next month.

So before we are even out of this crisis, the government have lost interest. Today's press conference was an eye opener - Van Tam openly said that the time taken to get test results was too long and wasn't good enough yet and meant track and trace wasnt still operational despite it being such a crucial factor in being able to go into the next phase as planned on 1st June.

Another deadline we won't make - the Manchester Nightgale still has patients and the local authorities in the NW are going mental. So the government is playing more silly buggers over blame and villianising the evil workshy teachers. Noting the government guidance for teachers on how to teacher children at home says fuck all and the guidance on reopening schools makes a Theresa May dog ate my homework style document look positively well thought out, in terms of practicality. (Not even going to touch on the question of whether its safe - the whether its workable one is more important).

I guess that means things are getting back to normal at least.

A recession looms, but workers rights are now fair game and fully in the government cross hairs - as we see from a lack of PPE for the 'heroes' and the attacks on the teachers. As well as the carers who were sold down river. That'll be the ununionised carers...

Taking back control.

Most of the UK and Irish universities we have exchanges with are saying that they will be providing limited on-campus teaching for those who can't follow online courses, but all courses will also be available remotely. Meaning students don't need to be in their town, or only very occasionally.

We are gearing up for hybrid teaching too. Given our student numbers and serious shortage of rooms, moving lectures online would not allow more than a tiny fraction of other classes to carry on. With 35-40 per group in our classes, we'd need to multiply everything (staff, rooms) by 3 or 4 to meet the requirement of around 10-15 per room, not to mention the disinfecting between classes and the issue of students gathering in narrow corridors while waiting for class.

As for online lectures, the plan here is for them to take place in lecture halls in front of a handful of students and be live streamed to those offsite. Hell will freeze over before I agree to that, for copyright and image rights reasons.

Re Cambridge, is it cynical of me to think that, yes, lots of students worldwide might well think it's worth paying to get a degree from Cambridge, especially if remote teaching means that assessment is likely to be rather less stringent than in normal circumstances?

"I know Cambridge is saying 100% online lectures next year. This has to be to preserve its international income rather than to protect its students and staff...."

That's not quite true.

The students will be returning to their accommodation and much smaller lectures are planned. Tutorials and supervisions are still going ahead.
What they won't be doing is cramming 150-odd students into one lecture theatre. They're still planning to use the lecture theatres, but not as they have been used up to now.

"Policy is that we are NOT ALLOWED TO TEST people we are not admitting to hospital
So I see lots of almost certainly COVID patients but because they don't need oxygen/ hospital admission, I send them home untested"

Squid That's disgraceful and must be so frustrating for you, not being able to test patients if your professional opinion as a doctor is that they should be tested.

"people have basically accepted england is infected as fuck and it's too late to attempt to eradicate"

Well, Spain with a similar death rate / million had only 5% infected, admittedly those blood tests were at the end of April, so has probably risen a bit since

NYC with nearly 3x deaths / million as the UK had 24% infection at latest report

Until we have national sampling in the UK, we can't assume the infection rate is even > 10%
Most non-tabloid estimates I've seen have it still in single digits

Any EU student planning on studying in the UK face a double whammy. Start next year and they will be on overseas student fees instead of domestic. This is why DS2 can't defer his move to Finland until next year.

Hoyle telling off Hancock

Lovely. I bet the Tories thought that when saw the back of Bercow that Hoyle would be a pushover and it turns out he probably won't be.

re MPs returning:

BJ and the gang seem to have mostly got themselves infected, so are probably not at risk

Yes, they'd risk the lives of MPs so that Tories can bay over Staremer when he has BJ on the ropes.

Why do BJ and the rest of the cabinet have an obsession with developing "world beating" things (today's example being contact tracing)?

How about just things/processes that work ?

Does it feel like that though RTB? I feel like it is white collar workers who are out to get teachers and who view us as either servile or , when it suits, people who should behave like Mother Teresa. It's similar. I think teachers do represent the liberal remainers, though, tis true

"world beating"
Bombastic nonsense for Fail headlines.

I'd accept "middle of the pack" wrt other European countries, as a reasonable outcome

These continual "world beating" fantasies may be part of what hinders reaching middle level

"How about just things/processes that work ?"

You forgot the initial exist phase...

I suppose at least he hasn't said "bigly" yet - probably he'd use "magnumest", though.

The Big Man speaks ...

.

Who exactly will our world-beating things beat, and what will happen to them when we've beaten them?

It's not unlike the superlativist nonsense that has infected schools, all of which must be excellent, with nobody below average.

"It's not unlike the superlativist nonsense that has infected schools, all of which must be excellent, with nobody below average."

That was Gove and his "Requires Improvement" instead of Satisfactory.

It's a good job the Government isn't inspected!!

If the UK had pulled it's head out of it's arse, stopped chasing this fantasy of being "world beaters" and used some "common" as my-laws liked to say, we would have saved so much money that could have gone into health, education and housing.

instead we pissed away countless billions because the Bufton-Tuftons of this world got perversely sexually excited at the idea of a "British" nuclear deterrent, or early warning radar system ..

(I may have given a bitter snort when the last season of "Homeland" made reference to AWACS).

Aaaaah, the British "Independent" nuclear deterrent. The one with the American missile we have to ask to borrow every time we need it.

Also possibly, they won't tell us, the one that the US satellites can, or can't, they won't tell us, switch off in mid-flight.

We could make our own missiles, to the same design as the French, at the Astrium facility in Portsmouth, but for some strange reason, we are not going to. Possibly something to do with selling the AWE to Lockheed-Martin.

squid
Speaking as somebody who has been pretty meh about the lockdown
I am disgusted that you are being put in a situation where you cannot test every patient arriving at an NHS venue

I am also disgusted that testing and track and trace
is not being prioritised for teachers and school staff.

Re Universities
Online lectures is fine for some subjects but both my DCs have done lab based courses
DD in fact finished her course 7 minutes ago .... instead of celebrating she is pulling up bindweed in the veg garden as its a TOTAL anticlimax
Why would ANY student sign up to £20,000 a year of debt for a STEM course that will not be what was advertised ?

And Halfon is right - Rees Mogg is a cynical out of touch bastard

Through another thread, I stumbled on this:

The meaning of trade is that a single human is almost incapable of making or doing anything without exchanging goods and services with other humans.

which is so pithy, succinct and true, my eyes are bleeding ...

Speaking of trade and agreements, how to ignore what was agreed and rewrite a protocol to suit your agenda. Just gloss over the tricky bits and it'll be fiiiiiiiiine.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachmentdata/file/886289/2020-05-200CommandPaperUKKsApproachhtotheeNorthernIrelandd_Protocol-gov.uk.pdf

Also possibly, they won't tell us, the one that the US satellites can, or can't, they won't tell us, switch off in mid-flight.

Clinton scrapped the selective accuracy after it was pretty much bypassed by a proto version of crowdsourcing.

By that's all 1960s GPS. We now need centimetre accuracy GPS, which involves upping our game when it comes to clock rates and computing power. And the integration of GPS into surprising areas of life mean it's become a critical part of most economies infrastructure. Hence the US, Russian, Chinese, Indian, and EU versions. Soon to be bolstered by the UK version that will be needed for all the UK military hardware that the UK insists it is going to make itself to work from.

Not the GPS in the British warhead. The American missile beneath it and its possible abort command in ascent, as used when testing on the range.

@ListeningQuietly Congratulations to your DD on finishing her course!

I don't have much to say today, except that readers of this thread might find it interesting that the National Supercomputing Service (ARCHER to its friends) and other services hosted at the same centre have been under sustained cyberattack from China since middle of last week. It affected one of the COVID projects I am working on - nothing stolen/lost thank goodness, but we were locked out for a while.

the National Supercomputing Service (ARCHER to its friends) and other services hosted at the same centre have been under sustained cyberattack from China since middle of last week.

DB once posted a picture of him standing by one of the Crays he worked on a while back. I just replied "Yeah, I had a jacket like that once". And he had a strop for a few days .

Just throwing this out there, but by the end of next week we should start to see the effects of the workers going back to work and the "lifting of restrictions" for lockdown from last week. Figures for London should be interesting at any rate.

DGR blimey...I'd forgotten about AWACS, it was the uglier brother to the 6 wheeled Tyrell.
One question with the "tracking"...how close do you have to be to trigger it? If you arrive at, say, Tesco and park in their underground car park will it be triggered by someone leaving the store before you've left your car/joined the queue? If so, there will be so many false activations that it becomes worthless.

As an aside...
DH earlier commented on the Dust Spaffer resembling some kind of 19th century superman...3 piece suit, wearing his Y fronts (white and starched by nanny) over the top... not a particularly pleasant thought, but one you may share