Guilt Free Railing 13

[WouldBeGood]

Unlucky for some.. maybe lucky for us?

It just seems like they have stopped caring if things are actually useful or beneficial

Does increasingly feel like “well it MIGHT work, and the pandemic is very bad, so we should do it” is the logic for everything.

When one of the MSPs (Cole-Hamilton?) asked NS the other day about some festival somewhere in England where they used vaccine passports and 5000 people got infected anyway, her answer was that we don’t know how many more would have got infected without them. Seems like the same logic for why restrictions at the moment count as ‘working’ and ‘useful’ even when we had 7000+ cases a day - “ah, but we’d have had even more without them!”

Maybe that’s true, but
a) how could we ever know that?,

and b) it seems very circular - “we have to do this thing because it works, and our evidence for it working is that it’s helping, and when it looks like it’s not helping that’s because it actually is helping anyway because it has to be because it works.”

and c) there may have been a time for “just do whatever we can whether we know it helps or not, it’s worth a shot” back in early 2020, but we should surely be past that now?

and d) it makes it very hard to talk about negative impacts of things if the default presumption is “if someone feels like this might help fight covid then that’s all that matters”

and e) I really don’t like “difficult winter for the NHS” being used as a reason for fairly significant sweeping restrictions to people’s lives. In many ways. Remember when England loosened restrictions earlier to avoid a big winter NHS impact, and our government thought that was horribly irresponsible, so we had to keep restrictions for longer, and now we are facing a big winter NHS impact, but the lesson to take from this is that we need even more restrictions for even longer? And the NHS is great and all but it’s a service we fund and they run, so why is it proportionate to say “well it’s struggling a bit so now we’re limiting your lives more” when we wouldn’t accept that with other public services?

I worry we’re going to end up with a big backlash of distrust against the government and against any sort of public health measures, and the impact of that will be worse than any NHS stresses saved by making 19-year-olds show vaccine passports to bouncers.

The house alarm thing is nuts absolutely nuts.
Houses built over the last 30 years all have wired in smoke alarms.
There doesn't seem to be a way to add to existing wired systems without making a mess involving cutting holes, painters and plasters etc.
So reality people will opt for a battery operated radio system. Cheaper and less mess until the batteries fail.

We currently have 2 interlinked alarms which are really noisy but need something different....OK ill get they are due for replacement buy it would be much easier to have a like for like replacement.

And there's another rant,
Surely smoke detectors should be made with replacable sensor or filters or something so only that part which dates gets replaced rather than the whole thing going to landfill.

And why am I struggling to find where these things are made - I want UK or at least Europe - I'm fed up carting stuff round the planet. For it to land in a hole in the ground in a few years!

I totally agree @GoldenOmber, the knee-jerk 'must be seen to be doing something' type measures without a decent evidence base a year and a half into the pandemic just seems really amateurish. At this point, with the vaccination programme largely complete and what must be a decent level of population immunity after two largish summer waves, we should be thinking about leaving restrictions behind completely (as a lot of other countries are doing) instead of introducing new ones that probably won't work anyway There really does seem to be no impetus whatsoever from the SNP to leave restrictions behind completely, indeed there's a worrying amount of 'new normal' type talk that implies they might be here to stay. Apparently nightclubs need vaccine passports because it's 'better than closing them' - why would anyone be closing them?? It's perfectly possible to just leave them open AND ditch vaccine passports (which won't prevent infected people getting in anyway) and it will have negligible effect on the overall spread which is going to do its thing regardless.

In her latest address I believe NS noted the fall in restrictions and claimed it was due to us all playing our part. The level of restriction hasn't changed for the last six weeks, and this latest peak in cases has risen and fallen regardless! Clearly data interpretation isn't Sturgeon's strong point, but surely it is obvious that the fall was because of the wave naturally burning out (there are only so many people left to infect and it can't go on forever!) and not because of any action taken, because no action was taken!!

Yep, as I keep saying, stop trying to introduce logic into any of this. They are just trying to appeal to whatever they believe the majority is in order to keep support. The clearly believe that the amount of people wanting more restrictions (especially when it has no effect on them!) is higher than us railers.

Definitely, I come back to Rory Stewart's realisation that politicians don't build cases from the facts up and decide what they think is right, they start from what they believe most voters believe and argue that.

We no longer have politicians who go into politics having made a name elsewhere or with much expertise.

Afternoon railers.

shouldistop Thank you for the Scot rail survey link. I've filled it in.

Golden, elephant and Youcannotbeserious. Absolutely. Restrictions so that businesses can be kept open, as NS puts it is a downright abusive way to talk. It's like an abuser making their victim do something they don't want to on the basis that it that will stop the abuser abusing them.

ssd Congratulations to your son.

As an aside, I saw in Morrison’s yesterday that they have a box for recycling disposable masks, which is good

Posted at 14:51
14:51

Negative test option could undermine vaccine passports - deputy FM
The Scottish government's vaccine passport scheme could be undermined if people were able to show a negative coronavirus test result as an alternative, the Deputy First Minister says.
John Swinney says the focus of the scheme is to drive up vaccination rates as much as possible.

From BBC news website.
Well at least their admitting the sole reason for it.
Nothing to do with limiting spread of virus within nightclubs etc if a negative test isn't acceptable

Obviously a stunning tactician as Deputy FM.

The smoke alarm thing is annoying me too. Why have they not got a website with packages sold with the option to pay them up over a few months? Paying 200 odd quid for something i don't think i even need, right after xmas, just isn't happening here. Whats it all about?

sartorius ah okay so they're openly admitting it's coercion then.
In general I'm sure it wouldn't be medically ethical to administer a medication under those conditions but that's obviously a bit 2019 of me.

I can see why nightclubs are so opposed to them. The SG seem to be taking a punt on young people not caring that much either way, but I suspect that if an entire summer of 'persuasion' hasn't converted the last few people this measure won't either, and will just lose nightclubs business.

Imagine you're a young person, particularly a young man, in your late teens or twenties, and you're not keen on getting a COVID vaccine. There's a fair chance you've already had COVID at this point, you'll almost certainly know someone who has, and they were most likely fine. At the same time, you have seen all the discussion about the risks of the vaccine, particularly to young men, and you also know that the vaccine immunity wanes and won't actually stop you getting COVID. You decide (probably fairly) that the risks of the vaccine aren't worth it for you when weighed against the benefits, even more so if you've actually had COVID and therefore have some immunity anyway. The Scottish government decides that it's going to abandon decades of ethical principles and openly coerce you to have the vaccine - by barring your entry to nightclubs if you don't get one.

Do you a) suck it up and get a vaccine anyway, despite believing it's the riskier option to get it, just so that you can go to a nightclub, or

b) dig your heels in further and decide instead to go to the pub/a house party/almost any other social event, all of which you can do quite legally? Your pals aren't arseholes and don't want you to feel excluded, so they all go the house party as well, meaning even more reduced business for the nightclubs.

What do they want in terms of vaccine take up anyway? It's 77% in the age 18-29s who will be the main nightclub going population and higher in older groups and it's 71% for the 16-17 year olds trying to sneak in underage. The vast majority of cases is in 19 and younger (because obviously we couldn't have the age ranges match up!) with most in the 14 and under group.

So what exactly are they trying to achieve?

"So what exactly are they trying to achieve?"

I strongly suspect the actual aim is to 'look like we're doing something to cover up the fact that we've massively fucked up the strategy and we actually have no control over viral spread, because our popularity was higher when people thought we were handling it better than England.'

The only thing that makes me think we should get the alarms is the thought of insurance companies getting a get out of jail card.

But actually from a money POV the alarms won't reduce fires all they do is give more time to get out. But I'm not convinced they'll be any better than the linked alarms we already have.

@Y0uCann0tBeSer10us

"So what exactly are they trying to achieve?"

I strongly suspect the actual aim is to 'look like we're doing something to cover up the fact that we've massively fucked up the strategy and we actually have no control over viral spread, because our popularity was higher when people thought we were handling it better than England.'

That's a very good summary.

I am also dreading the day England if reintroduce masks only for her to finger wag 'see I told you so'

@Lockdownbear even if England does have to reintroduce restrictions (and their plan B restrictions are things like working from home, face masks...basically what we have now!), at least they'll have had a few months respite from it all. We haven't had that luxury. Personally, I don't think England will row back on much, if anything - they have backbenchers who rebel down there, and actually their cases are stubbornly refusing to spiral out of control as the doomsayers keep predicting.

It's definitely coercion with the vaccine certificates. The Herald has just published that vaccine uptake is 90% in the over 18s and currently under 18s don't need to provide a vaccine certificate - so exactly what will that achieve?

As for the smoke alarms, communications have been a shambles. MSPs openly admitted in Parliament that they struggled to walk into a shop and come out with a compliant smoke alarm. If you look online, there's a backlog on orders already. How are the public expected to comply in time? Especially when they've done so little to remind people. I read they issued flyers to local libraries - how many people do they think that'll reach?!

@ResilienceWanker - thank you!

@ElephantOfRisk - apologies! Just noticed you said the same thing! Didn't mean to be repetitive - I totally agree!

[quote Notamultitasker]@ElephantOfRisk - apologies! Just noticed you said the same thing! Didn't mean to be repetitive - I totally agree![/quote]
No worries, it's a point worth making twice!

That new app is crap, despite having the CHI number apparently I am not found. 🙄

The main question is why would anyone even bother trying to comply with the smoke alarm thing? Unless you're having a survey done to sell who on earth is going to know?

It is, however, very big business for contractors serving the public sector....

@BlameItOnTheBlackStar would it invalidate your home insurance though? If there was a fire?

@Notamultitasker my local library only re-opened a couple of weeks ago!