No I think this is entirely sensible. After all, unlike the rest of the workforce, they demonstrably do little that's useful, sensible or productive, so no point in going to the Commons.
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Brexit, for once some facts.
- Thread starter flecc
- Start date
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I expect this move will actually undermine any vaccination program. There is already much distrust of the government, the health system in every way, and vaccination in particular. An abbreviated approval process might well ensure that those already not happy will dig in harder. And those who might be on the edge will move towards not accepting it. Even those who might now be minded to agree to vaccination could waver if the approval appears to have been rushed and not subject to proper testing.
I am also concerned what pressures will be brought to bear on anyone who is not willing to have the vaccination under these circumstances. For example, withdraw any support for those who are isolating or shielding, refusal to allow school attendance (though that remaining mandatory), etc.
If someone catches the virus and like most people who get it make a complete recovery the evidence seems to suggest (one or two exceptions are starting to emerge) that they have some immunity. I have always assumed that this then would indicate that a vaccine would also have a good chance of providing some immunity.
I would have thought if lots of people keep getting re-infected (which does not seem to be happening) then the chances of finding a successful vaccine would be extremely low. I am quite hopeful that a vaccine (probably more than one) will be found, we will probably need to be vaccinated on a regular basis say once a year or every couple of years.
The anti vaxers out there aren't going to like it, but if they don't want the vaccine then fair enough, that's up to them.
The problem is though is that it's a moving target, and why we've always failed to produce a vaccine against the common cold despite huge international effort.
Our human immunities are much better than vaccines at dealing witn moving targets, just look at all the things we catch and easily survive but which killed entire races in the Americas when we first went there, showing how lethal they really are to those without natural immunity.
I don't think there's any certainty of a single treatment vaccine against Covid-19. Worse still is if we have to settle for a vaccine like the influenza one, the vaccine having to be altered and re-applied every year but still often not entirely effective. Over the whole world population that would be an expensive nightmare with limited effectiveness.
Evolutionary immunity at the cost of a small increase in deaths of the elderly like myself meanwhile would be a far better solution.
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What is ridiculous is commuting. People spending many hours each week. The costs of transport (pollution, monetary, land usage, and so on).
In my view, it would be far, far better for people to work reasonably near their homes, if not in them. Although it isn't always easy or even possible.
Imagine you live in a town and lots of the inhabitants commute to a city. Instead, have a building in the town set up for office work. The big companies in the city could rent anything from an occasional desk space through to whole floors and let their people who live in the town work there rather than the city offices. Individuals could rent desk space as needed.
Of course, changing from mass commuting to any other approach is not without difficulties. Long term it has so many possible advantages.
Don't you need to leave work outside your home?
Anyway, you can't really take the parts home and assemble your bike in your garage.
Even if you can do that all by yourself, your productivity will suffer.
The main reason for team work is the quality of the end product.
People tend to make the same mistakes. If a bike is assembled by one person, you'll find typically 3 times more faults at quality control stage than a team of 3 people working on the same bike.
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Fully agree, but there is another way.
Long, long ago Harold Wilson as PM was promoting it:
Forge ahead with mechanisation and automation in what he called the "White hot heat of technology", with the aim of creating his "age of leisure" by the elimination of most of the work for subsistence. Thoroughly sensible.
We have the potential but instead we do stupid things with it like self drive cars, so instead of commuting in our cars, we will be commuted by our cars, bored stiff by having the time occupying driving and the pleasure we get from it removed. Stupid things like automating the trains that take us on those socially damaging commuting journeys, instead of eliminating the need for them. Spending trillions on space research efforts when we don't yet have the slightest idea what we have in total in our own planet.
As Harold did, we need to spend more time thinking about what we do with our undoubted abilities, instead of chasing progress only for progresses sake with disregard for what is best for us and the planet.
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I was listening to a phone in about working from home on LBC the other morning. A chap phoned in who had been told he was likely to lose his job. He was an office manager, his office based in outer London. The entire company had been working from home since lockdown. The bosses had informed him that they had not seen any reduction in efficiency since home working started. They also told him that the cost of renting office space was £18k a month (in central London it can be around 2 to 3 times this much) for the size of company he worked for.
If this kind of thing is fairly typical, then I think a lot of companies are going to carry on working from home, or perhaps bringing in staff one or two days a week, and hence needing much less office space. I think CV should be seen as an opportunity for the government and others to completely re think how we work in this country and what our large town and city centers should be used for.
If this kind of thing is fairly typical, then I think a lot of companies are going to carry on working from home, or perhaps bringing in staff one or two days a week, and hence needing much less office space. I think CV should be seen as an opportunity for the government and others to completely re think how we work in this country and what our large town and city centers should be used for.
I think you are missing the point about evolutionary immunity ... It only works on the young requires sexual, and multiple generations . Now any disease which affects primarily older people does not get corrected by evolution..if anything it tends to proliferate.
I was reading an article the other day on Uber, who have never made any profit. Their business plan is based on predatory pricing and so force out most other competitors and then switch over to driverless cars and make a fortune. Unfortunately for them, driverless cars have taken far longer than they initially expected and for town and city journeys could be still many years away.
I agree, but before consumer/worker rights become the priority in society in this way (as in the eu)we have to prize big business' (& its finger puppits our elected representatives) sweaty claws from the controls (for whom we are consumers/money generators). For the sake of Starbucks and phillip green's bottom line we're going to be shoehorned back onto overcrowded tube trains and into Macdonald's for a second spike instead.
For several of the recent years, I was working in a shared office space. The company based many miles away.
I would get up, go to the office space, work, come home.
I'd have all the advantages of separating work and home but be close enough for it to only take a few minutes whether I cycled or drove.
I'd have many of the advantages of a workplace such as other people being around.
And as much of my work was already based on remote access to customers, that side didn't really change.
Yes, there are downsides. Lack of sufficient contact with colleagues. Though much of that depends on how well the company manages things.
No - it would be total rubbish for bicycle assembly.
Not so, the infection does have effects in any age group, albeit to varying degrees, so does have an evolutionary effect. And as I posted, a long term policy.
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you will be proven wrong in your lifetime!
when I started, paper tapes were still in use, silicon hard drive was thought possible but not soon. Some 40 years later, SSDs are as cheap as chips. Computers rule our lives for sometime now. Best get used to it.
All the driverless cars need are:
1. legal insurance
2. a barcode or transceiver on each moving vehicle to help with identification
3. a transceiver buried under the road surface to help with positioning
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Sorry flecc, and since you are interested in biology, I would have assumed you knew. . Evolution is a very crude mechanism. Unless a disease renders an individual less capable of reproduction, or reduces fertility, it has no effect. This is why for instance Cancers of the elderly are not controlled , and in fact can increase. Whereas diseases such as CF, with which I am familiar, are held very strictly under control
plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. Our brave new infrastructure remain about primates watching (much higher quality) pornography and tele shopping and voting for boris and trump.