UKC

As a new user of UKC, being responded to in an aggressive manner by an existing user has made me look through some of the various threads on Covid. It seems that most of these threads seem to be full of doom and gloom. A negative feedback loop of fear such that some people seem so scared by Covid that they have lost the capacity for a rational assessment of the risks. I was quite surprised and it seems such a shame.

So I thought that to counter this, then it might be nice to spread some positive news and data for a change. Firstly I would like to congratulate the vaccination programme which has now seen the most vulnerable groups all offered their second jab. So thankfully 99% of the population most at risk of hospitalisation and death are now well protected.

Secondly I would like to help us all to keep things in perspective and not be unduly scared or worried by Covid. So I will start by posting a link to those who are actually at risk from Covid. No-one who is healthy and under the age of 60 (ish) should be overly worried for their own personal safety, such is the small level of risk if you are under this age bracket. Many will be surprised by how clear-cut the official data is. See here:

https://i.redd.it/syhdrqk1zzp61.jpg

If anyone else has any positive, not negative Covid news to add then please go ahead as I am sure we would all benefit from some perspective.

In reply to Barmatt:

UKC is a heady mix of good solid scientific analysis combined with the effects of the social conditioning that leads to a certain level of hysteria at times, especially if you appear to have any angle mildly outside the mainstream view..

The concept of just reporting 'good news' is bollocks though. Objectivity is the name of the game surely?

In reply to Barmatt:

‘If anyone else has any positive, not negative Covid news to add then please go ahead as I am sure we would all benefit from some perspective.’

as an occasional contributor on the covid plotting threads I find this somewhat disturbing. You’re asking people to give a completely biased view which you predefined. Ok, well I guess you may get what you want.. but how does it help?

we need robust analysis and debate, with a note of caution, which is what certain people have made a Herculean effort to provide (for free). In a pandemic which has killed over 150k people in the uk, and broken through defences is a dramatic way several times I would expect, on balance, quite a bit of bad news. It’s arguably ignoring that which has cost us so dearly personally, socially and economically. So while I am all for a bit of positivity to balance things (when justified), be careful what you wish for.

In reply to Barmatt:

Oh good, another new user telling us there's nothing to worry about. Congratulations on avoiding linking a 2 hour YouTube video, mentioning invermectin or vitamin D supplements.

Hang on while I get some popcorn

In reply to Barmatt:

I will continue to be blunt with people who sign up for new accounts (not necessarily new users), and who significantly misrepresent the risks and nature of the situation.

I have never sought to encourage people to be directly afraid of the virus, but to explain how it has the potential to disrupt most of society by disrupting universal healthcare if not controlled. 

I see you are keen on misrepresenting the risk of the virus as only immediate and direct.  Many of us have not sought to limit the risk primarily out of immediate and personal concerns, but because we understand the importance of anyone being able to go to hospital and receive care when they need too.  Also because I didn’t want to see a million people go through hospital in 4 months, one third of them aged under 65.  

In reply to Barmatt:

Also, on your point about personal risk, a healthy close friend of 35 spent 4 weeks in ICU last April. Stats are stats, but in stochastic systems things happen sometimes. Anyway more importantly this is an incredibly selfish and small minded way of thinking. Don’t kill granny.. Thankyou

In reply to Andy Hardy:

Don’t worry, we’re already here. ;-p

In reply to Barmatt:

Absolutely, and I'd agree that, so far, there's no evidence of any escape mutants against which the current vaccines wouldn't be effective.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/

Note how the UK incidence of new cases is stubbornly plateaued at about 2000 a day.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-57094274

What's very clear is that there are isolated pockets where there is currently rapid exponential growth (doubling time <1 week) of the Indian B1.617.2 strain.  I think this is reminiscent of the pattern seen when the Kent variant emerged, although we now have a far higher rate of vaccination.  I still think it would be a massive mistake to relax restrictions nationally next week.  Unfortunately, I think these isolated areas need locking down (and I mean with travel restrictions), with surge testing and surge vaccination if we have the stocks. 

In reply to minimike:

Yes in balance to the other threads I have read which are biased towards the doom and gloom of the situation. It helps because some perspective and context is needed and once they have perspective and context, hopefully those who have been scared by this will feel much more positive about resuming normal life without undue anxiety. For example whenever daily death numbers in the UK are mentioned, then saying that X number of people died always sound scary, but never ever are the daily death numbers put into context by stating that 1,600 people die each and every day here in the UK from a whole multitude of reasons regardless of Covid. 

In reply to Barmatt: We are hopefully, touch wood, coming out of this.

However, this is a silly thread and after reading your comments here

https://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/off_belay/hugging-734764?v=1#x9461792

it's clear you've been a bit daft about all of this and I have no wish to indulge you.

In reply to wintertree:

Can you stay out of this one please. You have your own threads here I see for your doom mongering.

In reply to Barmatt:

You seem incapable of rational assessment of risk. Covid is incredibly virulent and transmitted primarily through close social contact. You decided you knew better and continued close social contact. People pointed out how this was irresponsible at which point you got all "How very dare you!"

This isn't countering how serious covid is. It's acknowledging that the completely unprecedented pandemic control methods have been successful in reducing the overall impact to merely horrendous rather than catastrophic.

No-one? How about all the people that found themselves in daily contact with covid patients throughout the spikes? I personally know 5 people in this category, aged 32 to 58 who all ended up in ITU

How about acknowledging that without the social contact controls (that you ignored) case numbers would have rocketed along with deaths?

The amount of covid denier crap on social media seems to be reducing. That's good.

In reply to Dave Garnett:

Can we stick to the positive news here Dave, that the vulnerable here in the UK have been fully vaccinated and that the vaccines have already been shown to provide a decent level of protection against the Indian strain. So number of cases should not really matter in this context.

In reply to Mike Stretford:

Fine, so why even post this? There are plenty of threads here for negative news. This thread is to provide folk some relief and rest-bite from the doom mongers.

In reply to Barmatt:

Why not do a jokes thread instead?

In reply to Barmatt:

It doesn't really work like that.  If you only want replies from people who agree with you (about anything!) then UKC probably isn't the best the forum to be posting in.  Perhaps you should try writing a blog.

In reply to Barmatt:

You tagged me in in your OP.  

Why do you call my threads "Doom mongering"?  Are you deficient at reading?

#11 - "Another happy update with little changed in terms of what's happening from last week's update.  Cases, hospital admissions, hospital occupancy and deaths all continue to fall in England.  The last few days of the cases curve in particular on plot 9e are provisional as always.  Before that, it looks like cases have been halving every 15 to 20 days.  https://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/off_belay/friday_night_covid_plotting_11-...

#12  - "The decay on all measures (Plots 6e, 7e, 8e) is slower in absolute terms - i.e. shallower gradients - than last week but that’s the nature of exponential decay and does not indicate a failure of lockdown, it's what we expect to see.  The time it takes for cases to halve is remaining about the same, indicating that lockdown continues to work well as well as before in terms of reducing infections and everything that follows." - Here I explain that whilst the decay is getting less aggressive, in the terms that really matter (R if you like) it's still decaying just fine.  No doom in that.  https://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/off_belay/friday_night_covid_plotting_plo...

#14 - Lockdown nearly failed in cases in the data, but I made the case that I thought this was a temporary feature of the weather and that actually decay would return and all was good - but let's wait and see https://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/off_belay/friday_night_covid_plotting_14-...

#15 - "After the slowdown of decay around the unusually cold period in February around Feb 16th, decay resumed with renewed vigour, and as discussed towards the end of plotting #14, we've seen some stand out rates exponentially speaking." - Here, I note that we're seeing some of the best decay yet in cases.

#16 - Here I spend some time making and explaining a new plot to make the case to people that whilst the data is going up, I think that in terms that matter (symptomatic PCR testing vs also including asymptotic LFD testing), the important numbers are still going down.  https://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/off_belay/friday_night_covid_plotting_16-...

#17 - "Now, we have the effects of the vaccines significantly reducing the hospitalisation rate; this is fantastic although it does make it harder to understand the trends in cases and how they related to infections - but it also reduces the importance of understanding them somewhat." Here I seek to find and communicate from the data likely effects of the vaccines making things better, and I also make the case that some of the data is becoming less important in ways that matter.

#19 - "So, it seems that PCR cases, indicative mostly of symptomatic infections, are still falling - but we won't always see falling cases in future plots as the LFD data is lumped in." Again, I'm making the point that even if headline case numbers go up, actually things are still good and infection is likely still falling.

I could go on extensively over more than a dozen other threads.  What I'm doing here is explaining what I see in the data, and I note both the many positives signals, and the blips that are concerning - qualifying them often as nothing certain and noting the need to wait for more data before judging what they mean.

It seems to me that your claims of doom mongering are utter unfounded bollocks.  But then, you knew that already, didn't you?

Funny isn't it, within a day or two of the headline news breaking over a potential problem with a new Covid variant, and political discussion turning to additional control measures, that we have yet another new account signing up with a somewhat libertarian/personal risk approach.  

Been reading them for long under your previous account(s)?

In reply to Barmatt:

You are new to UKC aren't you!?

In reply to Barmatt:

FTFY.

In reply to mondite:

I tried that on Facebook a few months ago and got no takers.

Knock Knock
Whose There?
E484K

In reply to Dave Garnett:

As I said elsewhere I'm hoping the specific factors at play mean these are going to be relatively self-contained, self-limiting "flash in the pan" events.  I even called back to some earlier phenomenological observations made where the fastest doubling times rapidly limit apparently in response to rising local infection rather than reactive control measures, and used this to qualify why I am not as concerned as might otherwise seem wise over the sub-week doubling time of the strain. 

I really need to up my doom mongering game and stop giving what insight I feel is somewhat supported but data past and present in to why I don't think the numbers are as catastrophic as they seem to some people.

Yes, without hard geographic borders, it's not going to work.  I just can't see the government doing that.

 > I still think it would be a massive mistake to relax restrictions nationally next week. 

Indeed.  On the positive news side, SAGE are going to have a lot of longitudinal data on what happens when unvaccinated people infected with B1.617.2 rub shoulders with partially and fully vaccinated people in large numbers.  I'm hoping that this data turns out to be as good as we have reasons to expect it will be.

In reply to Barmatt:

Some more positive news. Excess deaths in all European countries are within normal ranges and many are far lower than the seasonal averages.

Here in the UK we have been below the average level of deaths now since Week 8. Or in other words since the end of Febuary deaths have been lower than average. Again guys look at the positive data, not those who seek to continue the fear:

https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/#excess-mortality

In reply to Barmatt:

I’m afraid if you want to talk about Covid-19 but not mentioning any of the inconvenient facts, you might not like this forum, frequented as it is by a number of professionals in the relevant specialisms, who have freely given hours of their time on here analysing and interpreting the figures with nuance and balance.

In reply to Barmatt:

We're all going to die horribly within a few days, can't be stopped 

In addition Yellowstone is blowing up this weekend, followed by a 30-year cessation of sunlight and crop failure 

Also unfortunately, a massive earthquake is going to devastate the UK at the end of May 

But it's not all bad news 

In reply to Barmatt:

If the positive data outweighs the bad why do you want to suppress the bad data?

Facts should speak for themselves.

In reply to rsc:

From what I have seen from reading through a few of the recent threads is a select few posters bullying and jumping on anyone who disagrees with their opinion whilst at the same time dismissing anyone who questions the huge harm caused directly by the Covid suppression policies that they support. One poster seems paranoid in the extreme that anyone expressing a different view must be some sort of bot or a troll. Utterly paranoid, a total crank! If they are professionals then it certainly does not come across that way and you could not tell from the nature of their posts.

Anyway this thread I started as a discussion on some positive news, to break away from the doom-laiden posts of the other threads I read. Sadly it has also become invaded by the doom -mongers who have piled in, but hopefully we can break through this with some positivity, some perspective and some context. All based on the data of course.

In reply to Barmatt:

Yeah, I think I see your problem here, you don't understand Cause and Effect. The social contact controls that you don't think apply to you have absolutely hammered communicable disease rates plus the fact that covid has already killed a large number of our most clinically vulnerable. Net result: slightly lower than average death rates. Go figure.

In reply to Barmatt:

Awww, look at you.  

I've stood firm in my views from last March, and have noticed certain trends to the legion of new accounts that sign up and immediately start posting on Covid.  

I don't think there's one other poster I agree with entirelyon what is the best way forwards, yet I respect their opinions and reasons even when we have signifiant difference.  Likewise, very few other posters agree with each other either to any great alignment either.

There has been an awful lot of productive disagreement in the discussion taking place over the least year, and I think more, not less, of someone who can have a different view to me if they can actually substantiate their view in any way.   

You haven't actually evidenced your claims of doom mongering against me.  You'll note I gave an extensive list of examples of me looking to explain why I was not concerned by various worrying bits of data, or to hi-light good and promising signals in the data as they emerged.  

I have never questioned that there is harm associated with measures to control the spread of Covid.  I have however managed to achieve the nuanced understanding that we had a choice between more control measures or more direct effects from Covid, and I understand the lesser of two evils.  I wouldn't even defend all control measures we have had as "optimal", but then when you have organised campaigning against any form of control measure it creates an environment toxic to public health.

In reply to Andy Hardy:

I tried, but my message got deleted.  Perhaps using an actual kind of toilet related death as an example of how most causes of death don't spread exponentially was a step too far. 

In reply to Barmatt:

I think you are very much confusing "opinion" with "reported facts and data".  constructive input into discussions around the later have always been very much welcomed here (and indeed what I hoped to see when I clicked on this thread) imagine my disappoint when I saw it was yet more made up and misrepresented 'wot I have watched on YouTube' bullshit.

In reply to wintertree:

Covid does not spread exponentially. It peaks and then it falls again. It does this frequently independently of any controls put in place to stop it as can be seen if you look outside of the UK. If you look through history, pandemics tend to last around two years before naturally petering out. Luckily with this one we have a vaccine to speed things along.

And the positive news with this one is that despite our initial thoughts last year, this one was not even a proper pandemic by the old definition of the term. The IFR has now been shown to be 0.23, and massively skewed towards people who were at the end of their lives in any case. A pandemic so deadly that the average age of death from it at 83 is above the average age of all cause mortality. We could have leveraged this to our advantage to protect the elderly and vulnerable but instead we chose not to by spreading our resources too thin.

In reply to Barmatt:

Top tip: Refusing to engage with anything that doesn’t fit your narrative and resorting to personal insults so quickly doesn’t really inspire confidence in what you have to say. 

In reply to Barmatt:

I'm 65 in a few days and I am due my second jab in a window commencing 23rd inst.

I have not after 9 weeks of trying managed to obtain a vaccination in the town close to where I live.  Of those 9 weeks there has been a Mass vaccination centre operating in that town.  I have been turned away by the vaccination team at the local hospital, by the MVC people and have tried NHSWATCH Cumbria and the North Cumbria CCG as well as the GP practice.

119 and 111 were no help, nor PHE or the NHS Vaccine Management organisation when I called.

Tell me the good news

better still tell me how I get the vaccine in this area?

In reply to Barmatt:

Some more positive news. In spite of the most 'deadly' pandemic in living memory occurring in 2020, the worlds population increased in by 81,330,639 people in the same year. It's all about context:

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-population-by-year/

In reply to Stuart Williams:

You noticed too. It's like we've been time warped back 6 months on here to when covid bullshit bingo was rife. Now he's come out with (paraphrase) "lock downs don't work" FFS

In reply to Barmatt:

😂

In reply to Barmatt:

There we have it.  

Despite your faux naivety, your faux outrage and your faux concern, you are actually here to pedal un-evidenced, un-substantiated nonsense which, if believed, is a danger to public health.

In reply to Barmatt:

I like your thinking. So instead of lockdowns etc we should have just sabotaged all the birth control options? As long as the overall numbers remain the same or higher its a win right?

In reply to Barmatt:

They matter if they are occurring in local populations of the vulnerable and unvaccinated, which they are.  You can enjoy the happy news that you are apparently not one of them.  Probably. 

There's lots of positive news, as I admitted.  It's just that, compared to even a week ago, there's a significant fly in the ointment just now.  Believe me, I'm desperate for the restrictions to be relaxed on international travel, campsites, huts and being able to have a pint without freezing to death.  As a family, some very long-standing travel and work plans are about to be screwed up, again, and perhaps permanently.  However, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory by ignoring the current risk would be to betray all the very real sacrifices we've all made over the last year, for the sake of meeting a politically convenient but arbitrary deadline.  

I can appreciate the progress we've made and look forward to some sort of normality fairly soon, let's be cheerful, but wanting it all to be resolved doesn't make it so.   

In reply to Barmatt:

Why is that good news?

In reply to Stichtplate:

We must be nearing a full house. I think I’m only missing a generic plea for ’Freedom!’ 

In reply to Barmatt:

They're not biased towards 'doom and gloom'. They're biased towards reality.

If you don't like reality, well, it has a nasty habit of coming and biting you.

In reply to Barmatt:

It literally does.

Say what you mean, let it rip.

In reply to Barmatt:

You are either incredibly stupid or deliberately misrepresenting stuff.

In reply to wintertree:

No takers? I heard it had gone viral.

In reply to Barmatt:

a select few posters bullying

You’ll have noticed that they’re very widely agreed with and supported, based on their track record of honesty and rigour.

Bullying though? Really?

In reply to Barmatt:

Heart disease, cancer, road and other accidents don't grow exponentially through transmission.

You're late to the party, but all these arguments have been gone over plenty of times before on UKC.

In reply to rsc:

I have been incredibly blunt since I spotted the pattern.  Several of the “pop up” posters who appear and then immediately start pushing misinformation over covid have complained of bullying or the bullying tone.

I am not the one to judge, and I welcome feedback from anyone concerned by my tone via PM or to the site owners.

But I haven’t called anyone “paranoid in the extreme” or a “crank”.  I did call them a twit, but it was deleted I presume due to some other colourful content around toilet related deaths that don’t spread exponentially.

In reply to mondite:

This isn't a joke thread...?

In reply to captain paranoia:

To be fair to this thread its actually cheered up my dull Friday afternoon somewhat. Winertree's toilet analogy made me chuckle and chris_r's viral joke was pretty good. Still waiting for that covid good news though....

In reply to captain paranoia:

This posting identity may well be recent, it seems unlikely that the actual person typing the letters is not aware of the epidemiological differences between cancer, heart attacks, etc and CV-19

In reply to Barmatt:

I agree with you in some ways regarding viewing things in context, but I don't see anything positive about there being another 81 million + people on this planet.  

In reply to captain paranoia:

You cant say that! Which part of this not being a bad news thread for doom mongers did you miss?

In reply to Andy Hardy:

You think they're knowingly spreading disinformation...?

In reply to Andy Hardy:

I know, I know, but it's nice pretending I'm intellectually superior to someone for a bit.

In reply to wercat:

I guess it's good news that you have already had one dose of vaccine. I must have had my first about a fortnight after you. When I booked, it booked both appointments. Did your booking not do that? I used the 'NHS' online booking service.

In reply to captain paranoia:

I get the feeling that a lot of posters who pop up, and spray CV-19 'disinformation' are simply lacking the degree of empathy. their posts are typically like this OP which is essentially saying if you're under 60 you'll be fine. I assume the OP is under 60 and feels like there is no significant risk to himself, and hence cannot process the reasons why his liberty should be curtailed in any way at all.

I'm pretty sure this lack of empathy is why there's such an overlap between climate change deniers and covid sceptics (and voting Tory   )

In reply to Barmatt:

Yes, this is a common response to people shouting bollox.

Global pandemics killing and hospitalising millions isn't exactly cheerful stuff.

Despite what they'd like to believe, most people are not qualified to make rational risk assessments in a pandemic.  They tend to look at perceived personal risk based on a poor grasp of statistics or the knock on consequence of their (and their cohort's) actions.

In reply to deepsoup:

Or start a religion.

In reply to minimike:

I'm not disagreeing that we need to be vigilant - I'm a bit concerned we're moving too fast in the US with the latest CDC announcement on masks.

However, a friend of mine, a healthy very fit runner, under 40 ended up on life support from the flu, it got into his heart muscle I think and would have killed a less fit person. He recovered but n = 1 stories always happen. 

I think we need to be sensible. Not panic about breakthroughs too much and look at the bigger picture. There is currently the story about 8 Yankees players testing positive after getting the J&J vaccine. But looking at their franchise 78% of those vaccinated didn't get it. And the J&J has a reported 72% efficacy. I keep seeing stories about thousands testing positive after being vaccinated as though the vaccine is failing, but as Fauci was saying this morning 'look at the denominator'. We expect thousands to still be vulnerable to mild covid if we vaccinate 10's of millions of people. These are actually examples of the vaccines working, not failing.

In reply to Barmatt:

Oh I absolutely agree.  Covid has been fantastic.  Lets genetically engineer the next one so we don't have to wait over 100 years for it.  I think (at least) one per decade would be ace.

I do hope no-one disagrees with me, the aggression of it might make me burst into tears.

In reply to Dave Garnett:

You'd think they'd start to really ramp up vaccinations in all such areas now. I see Glasgow has started vaccinating anyone 18 and up.

They don't have the stock piles just to run mass vaccination sites in these areas and just get as many as possible vaccinated?

In reply to Barmatt:

Covid denialist drivel. You are a disgrace.

Edit to add - I like the new UKC misinformation flagging. 

In reply to Barmatt:

We're doomed! Doomed I tell you!

Sorry - that wasn't the idea was it.

In reply to off-duty:

It's good isn't it.  Point of correction however...

and we don't think the discussion is damaging.

It's damaged my plans to go for an afternoon walk in lieu of my lunch break, to see what the clipboard wielding types are doing in the field down the road.  That'll have to wait until next week now.

In reply to Barmatt:

That's fine then. Who gives a shit about millions of people needlessly dying so long as the global population went up...

How is this good news again?

In reply to Big Bruva:

Ummm.... not sure how to break this to you but have you actually seen the news recently? 80000 excess deaths and all that?

In reply to Big Bruva:

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water...

You do realise that this is close to outright bollocks, don't you?

The average age of deaths in a time of great excess deaths was close to the pre-covid life expectancy.  If you understood any mathematics or statistics, you'd understand that this means a lot more than the last year of life was taken from most people.

If you weren't being spectacularly dishonest (either with yourself, or with others), you'd understand the consequences of fully one thirds of the people going in to hospitals and intensive care being working aged adults, let alone that happening when the spread of the virus was highly curtailed by control measures and hospitals were close to being overwhelmed. 

Also quite a lot of young people will die or will suffer serious medical consequences.  Fully one third of the people to go in to intensive care have been under 65 years of age.

The messages I have had from various posters are not saying "your analysis makes me scared" - they're saying things like "your explanations of the data help me feel reassured, by helping me understand what's going on in this fearful time".  

I for one can't wait for it to be behind us all.  I hope that in helping some other people to understand the nature of the risks - which are by no means only the personal and the immediate - and by helping some people understand the situation around them better, that I have helped contribute to putting this all behind us sooner rather than later.  There are a couple of posts on the plotting threads that my outputs have contributed to planning in the wider response, and I am aware of other places they have ended up.  

I think suggesting anyone here wants this to go on a day longer than necessary to give them a sense of "purpose" is one of the most blinkered, ideologically motivated and frankly idiotic things I've read.  The only people I can see who might want this to go on are those who might in some way profit from it, and far from trying to help people understand the situation, they might for example seek to misrepresent the true nature of the risks.

In reply to Big Bruva:

Yeah. Things are just peachy in India right now. No-one is being denied treatment (for any condition) by overwhelmed medical services. No-one is gasping for breath because there isn't enough bottled oxygen to meet demand.

But for the measures we took, that would have been us. We were a few weeks away from it in January. Even with those measures, we have still run up a huge backlog of untreated illnesses.

In reply to wintertree:

I say leave them to it WT. they won’t be convinced and your afternoon walk sounds much more beneficial to the world!

In reply to minimike:

Yeah, you can never be sure with these clipboard wielding types standing around in the middle of a field. A good, long suspicious glance from the distance should sort them out.

In reply to captain paranoia:

yes but I realised it would be harder to get that far away for the second dose so when the website said I could cancel and book closer later on (given the local news was full of a centre opening only 7 miles away at the time) I was fule enough to believe it.  I'm still holding out as it will be quite difficult to make a 60 mile round trip if I have to give up getting one round here.  There are no buses and anyway it it would be a prohibitively expensive way of getting a vaccine that would take up a full day by the time I've walked to a bus stop (there is one in the village for the once weekly bus service - it's easier to cycle the 7 miles into town)

I guess if I miss my window then it might open more availability to me outside the window.  What a system!  Kafka could have designed it with no human responsibility that can't be redirected to someone else and no way of making contact at a higher level (My email to No 10 obviously won't get me anywhere)

In reply to Barmatt:

Are you serious!

According to you. WHO not so keen on the theory.

We could have leveraged this to our advantage to protect the elderly and vulnerable but instead we chose not to by spreading our resources too thin.

we’ve heard this time and time again from Covid deniers with no detail about how this would be achieved. If the infection runs rampant it will get in anywhere and everywhere. Your average mortality age of 83 would drop like a stone. How do you propose to keep the vulnerable safe?

I did have some sympathy with your good news post. However, you have shown yourself to be uncaring, ignorant and frankly dangerous.

In reply to Darron:

Since their now deleted second thread, I have more sympathy with them.  They're clearly in need of help, and I hope they can access it despite the barriers thrown up by this situation.  No person well in themselves wishes untreated cancer on others.

In reply to Barmatt:

🤣 

If you're still reading this, OP, not sure if you've seen the latest research on vaccines. Turns out vaccinated people can shed spike protein and cause the effect to spread to those around them. You can protect yourself from the danger of inadvertently being vaccinated by wearing a face covering and keeping your distance from others.

In reply to captain paranoia:

A very stark story on the BBC this morning - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-57154564 - it's really difficult to square this off against the scale and ambition of their space program, their active nuclear weapons program, their pursuit of in-atmosphere hypersonics.  

In reply to wintertree:

When it comes to India's priorities, my bewilderment long predates covid

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swach_Vidyalaya

In reply to Barmatt:

It's scary because it spreads and grows fast, its management is enormously expensive, most other killers we live with don't behave like this. It takes a special kind of blinkered idiocy to not consider that 'scary'.

You assume (or claim) you're providing context to people panicking but you're not, you're asking us to ignore much of the context.

jk

In reply to Robert Durran:

It seems odd that the apparent best way to spread misinformation person-person is through this naive but confident style. It makes Dunning-Kruger cranks very difficult to differentiate from the deliberate cranks and the assholes, especially so where identities are hidden with burner profiles.

jk

In reply to wintertree:

Why would we expect today's developing nations to follow a different path to the one that we followed in the past?

In reply to jkarran:

That style has come up time and again in posts on UKC (a howler in Off Belay from August 2020 re: France) and tends to garner a lot of likes very quickly - I think it must appeal to people’s strong wish for this to all be better, and a tendency to take someone who sounds confident as being correct.

Indeed; in one recent case, a perusal of an unrelated thread over bolting in Majorca and guidebooks suggests in their case it’s D-K combined with a bizarre combination of a terribly blinkered viewpoint combined with a belief they’re the only objective person about.   Easy pray for conversion by the deliberate misinformation machine.

The whole burner profile thing is beyond a joke.  Perhaps I only noticed when «you know who» jumped the shark.  There’ve been several prominent posters who’ve got banned over some bizarre outbursts recently; none of them apparently apologising and returning or obviously coming back with a different identity.  Did they all walk away, or were they all different personas of the same troll/manipulator?

In reply to timjones:

Are you suggesting that India’s situation today in any way resembles that or say the UK back when we had our early nuclear weapons program and an active space program?

I recall relatives telling me about their outhouses and the move to indoor plumbing around then.  All their schools had indoor toilets though, I don’t remember any of them telling me about problems like hundreds of decomposing bodies washing up on the river banks to be eaten by wild dogs and crows.

They’re clearly following a very different path, despite much of the technology adopted by us to improve live 50 years ago being new, scarce and expensive then and now being commonplace and much cheaper.

In reply to wercat:

If I'm understanding this right, you live deep in the countryside without a car and can't get a local town appointment for your second jab?

Firstly I hear from friends that have had and resolved this issue (no local appointments) it's worth repeatedly trying re-booking over a few days, appointments get added as and staff are rostered and or doses become available, they're not all added in one big block. Yes, that's annoying and in my case it resulted in a long-ish drive for my first dose because I didn't get lucky with my doorstep centre but then I didn't have a couple of weeks to keep trying as I guess you might, I wanted it on a specific day.

Failing that, have you called your GP and explained your situation,? They might be able to point you to a better option (a local GP or pharmacist perhaps), you won't be the only one with mobility issues.

jk

In reply to wintertree:

I'm suggesting that there may be  paralels between their space  and nuclear weopons programs and some of our land and sea based exploration and military operations in the past.

Is it realistic to expect today's developing nations to jump straight to our own curent imperfect state or does human nature mean that they will ineveitably follow a similar path to our own  from their current state to one that may match our own stage of development at some point in the future?

In reply to timjones:

Well, let’s put it this way.  If you found yourself wrapping a relatives body in cloth, weighting it down with rocks and dropping it in the river, hoping it doesn’t get eaten by wild dogs and crows, what would you think?

That wasn’t very clear from your previous post and I’m afraid, and TBH it’s not very clear now...

In reply to timjones:

You seem to be deliberately missing the point that we by and large dealt with the sewage, starvation and the disposal of corpses before the ICBM. The failure to do so elsewhere is jarring.

jk

In reply to jkarran:

Hi,

thanks for your reply - I have been trying the website several times (including varying input to try to trick it into responding differently) a day since March.   It is very hard to access the GP service for anything at all and when I did finally get through they said they couldn't help.  The CCG didn't offer much in the way of help apart from "keep trying" and obviously emailing No 10 didn't work, nor did NHSWATCH Cumbria from which I got no reply.  111, 119 couldn't help, Public Health England gave me a number for the local massvacc but it turned out to be the auction mart office where they operate but not the number for the vaccination people.  Turning up there I was told to use the GP or local hospital vaccination service, who simply said "rural people can go to Kendal etc....".

Struck Gold yesterday by contacting Public Health Cumbria (The County Council) who took it up and made a lot of calls and got in touch with the CCG staff in Penrith.  Don't know whether they did anything but this morning the text and layout of the website altered and the Penrith vaccine centre appeared FOR THE FIRST TIME in 100s of attempts!

So I'm sorted at last but it has taken a huge effort and time!  It is incredibly dispiriting to be getting no where in a Kafkaesque maze that has no obvious way to contact anyone.

If I had been designing the system  ( I have done some work at Cumberland Infirmary in the past, pre PFI rebuild) I would have had a facility for people to know the top 3 or 4 closest centres to them and then to register interest with their NHS number etc in an appointment at their convenient centre.  Plus a facility to see whether they are moving up the queue/progressing  and someone local to contact if there is a problem. Without this you've just got a blank wall, the equivalent of an old original  Apple Mac just giving an error message like "Something is wrong" and having no way of knowing what you can do.  The system was designed without any thought for what happens if anything goes wrong and empowering victims of this to have anything done about it.  In short it is total crap and has cost me many hours of effort and worry.

In reply to wercat:

Given that 55 million vaccinations have been administered in a few months, I think saying the system is "total crap" is, err, total crap.  You are either in a very small minority in terms of location and travel options, or exaggerating your experience.

In reply to jkarran:

We had a powerful navy before we got on top of those issues, do you think that we wouldn't have chosen to prioritise the ICBM if that had been the technology of war in that era?

However jarring we may find it we cannot expect other nations to be just like us and it seems strange that so many people expect it.

In reply to wintertree:

I would hprobably think that they had died, if I didn't it would seem irresponsible to drop them in the river!

What is it that you are struggling to understand, why do you expect the rest of the world tobe just like us?

In reply to timjones:

Sanitation is a solved problem now with well documented benefits to health and prosperity. Its technology is cheap and available on the international market. Space programmes are not.

The difference in cost between competitive military technology and a flushing bog is significant. It may have been less clear cut when neither had been invented, but they don't now need to invent the chod bin to prevent the easily preventable diseases that using one is known to prevent.

In reply to wercat:

Is your local system different to ours?

We are contacted when our 2nd jab is due, booked in and  jabbed in a very short timespan, it is a textbook example of a system that is working very well with no need for worry or to spend hours trying to book ourselves in.

 

In reply to timjones:

I don't think anyone does.  But it is regardless a bit odd that nuclear weapons are prioritised over basic sanitation.  Or, based on my experiences of India, simply driving on one side of the road to avoid dying  in car crashes.  Up to them, I guess.

In reply to Longsufferingropeholder:

The technology may be available but it can take several generations for a society to evolve to the point where it widely accepted.

Less than a lifetime ago there were still members of  our own society who would not embrace the concept of a WC in the house.

How can we impose our own technology onto other societies without resorting to the use of force?


 

In reply to timjones:

Similar here. Very easy to book on the national site. I had to get off my arse and make some effort to get to the place where a legion of unpaid volunteers gave me a potentially life-saving drug for free months before billions of other people could hope to see it, but it was no further than I go to use any of the other amenities you'd find in a major population centre.

In reply to timjones:

Offer it for sale at a cost that's insignificant to any comparable economy and point out how shitting in the street isn't very good for public health? 

We've tried that.

In reply to MG:

Maybe we need to remember that we were just as "odd" in very recent history

At that point we were probably trying to impose our own religion on some of the nations that we now consider to be backward. Change requires time and we haven't always done our best to help.

In reply to Longsufferingropeholder:

Maybe we should try a little patience too?

In reply to timjones:

Since when is “having sufficient capacity to dispose hygienically of bodies” considered “our technology”?  Not 20 miles from here, there’s a flushing toilet that’s 2,000 years old, basic sanitation is hardly “our technology” either.

You seem to be struggling to understand considerably more than me.  I’ve said I find it odd they prioritise a space program (moon, Mars and Venus missions, no mean feat) over the basic welfare of their people.  How you equate that to saying they (let alone the rest of the world) should be “just like us” I have no bloody idea. 

In reply to timjones:

How long do you reckon we should give it? You think 163 years would be enough?

In reply to wintertree:

At what point did our society reach the pont where we put the basic welfare of our people above exploration and the machines of war?
 

In reply to timjones:

A long time before we had a space programme.

In reply to timjones:

I think your attempt to put modern India into equivalence with historic Britain is not in any way meaningful.  Space exploration in no way has equivalence to the oceanic exploration of bygone colonial eras, and won’t for quite some time in terms of mass migration or return of new material wealth.  

For better or for worse in terms of global effects, the British activities you parallel to brought material wealth and gain to the country, and in so doing accelerated a lot of change that improved lives across the board.  The means for that change is at India’s disposal and has been for decades; a space program doesn’t accelerate that, there’s no technology transfer / trickle down from a designing, building and flying a modern staged rocket to putting toilets in schools.

In reply to timjones:

You know what, never mind, maybe you're right and there's nothing unusual about being one of the few nations to fly in space and one of the world's biggest economies while still having regular outbreaks of easily preventable diseases that don't affect any developed nation any more because sanitation is still on the to do list.

In reply to MG:

zero exaggeration - I've left some of my efforts and contact attempts out to avoid boring people.

plus I have actual evidence (not hearsay) of people from the Penrith area having to go quite far afield

exaggeration is quite insulting. 

In reply to Longsufferingropeholder:

Not aimed at you in particular - yours is merely the last relevant post on the thread.

I don't know if people have seen the reporting on the US, below:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/11/catherine-flowers-environme...

I have no interest in getting involved in the argument more widely but the comments triggered the memory of seeing the original reporting of this, and I thought those who hadn't seen it might be interested. I found it fairly eye opening, in that whilst I'd assumed/known that there was some pretty severe deprivation/inequality in America my (perhaps overly sheltered?) mind had never really extended that to the level of "puddles of effluent in the back garden". 

In reply to timjones:

I don't know but that has not been my experience.  Perhaps it is because I was fool enough to use the website in the first place rather than wait to be contacted by the GPs - it does seem that local organisation has worked much better and allows people some contact. 

I several times was told by my GP practice that if I had had a jab through the website they could not do anything for me and the same was said to me by the people at the local hospital vaccination site in Penrith - twice.  The hospital team told me they would have no access to my data if I'd used the website already.  That is total crap as a system.  I refer to the fact that once it has gone wrong it has taken a lot of effort loads of phone calls hundreds of visits to the website and loads of attempted email contacts to make any progress as the system seems to lock you out.  I used a problem reporting facility with the NHS booking system to report the difficulty and got no response.  Likewise from NHSWatch Cumbria.  The CCG were good enough to contact me but politely told me just to keep trying.  Staff at the massvacc centre told m I could have no access without an appointment and they would not make appointments (you're only supposed to go there and park if you have one but I broke the rules) and that the GP or hospital "Would Help".  They didn't when I tried again afterwards.  In fact the GP surgery is really hard to contact now and involves lengthy phone queuing.  It can take half an hour to get through to 111 or 119 to have them tell you the same as the website and that they have no manager you can ask to speak to.  I did when offered leave a complaint as a way of making a contact but there was no complaint reference issued or any follow up from my problem report to 119.

I have faith in local facilities but they and all contact with them seem to have been disabled once you are trusting/naive enough to use the website.

Who would have thought the first actual contact attempt after a couple of months of trying loads of avenues would have been Public Health Cumbria (the county council's responsibility?)

I suppose it isn't surprising given that the head of public health for cumbria was several times interviewed about what was coming next for cumbria during regional lockdowns and could only say the he had heard nothing and was waiting for public announcemements from No 10. despite this being his business.

I have taken the trouble to reply to you and let you know a little of the difficulty I have had.  Be good enough to take it in...

In reply to wercat:

As you (and Ridge on another thread) have said, locally it has been very inconsistent. I (50 cockermouth) have been contacted directly from my surgery and had my second jab a month ago. I have a number of friends in the Eden Valley in their 50's who have had their second jab via our surgery, but others in their 60/70's are travelling to Morecombe in a couple of weeks time. I was as surprised as Ridge yesterday to hear of 20 year olds (mainly key workers to be fair) walking in and getting a jab without an appointment 

In reply to wintertree:

You could level that accusation at Russia, China and even the US as well.

In reply to RobAJones:

Thanks - one of the things said to me by PH Cumbria was that I might have told them about an underlying issue. 

In reply to timjones:

Does your question presuppose that we have in fact reached that point?

Here's a little juxto..

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/tory-austerity-deaths-study-repor...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/trident-replacement-cost-nuc...

In reply to AJM:

Some of the worst inequality I’ve seen has been in the USA, and the level of real hard poverty there is just so hard to comprehend in the context of being a purportedly democratic superpower.

If you didn’t follow the “Flint Water Crisis” it’s worth a read.

In reply to GrahamD:

I don’t think my word is important enough that me finding something odd to form an accusation.  However I feel India stands strongly apart from the others, but the differences are interesting, with some notable regressions elsewhere.  

In reply to wintertree:

Hmmm. I came home from a school with an outside toilet (only running cold water which was a problem in winter) to listen to Sputnik on my fathers ham radio and that was four years after the UK had developed it's own hydrogen bomb.

In reply to jimtitt:

yes, St Margaret's in Durham which I attended till 1964 had outdoor toilets.  We still had outdoor toilets at the school I was at till 1974 but those were optional as we had indoor ones too.

In reply to jimtitt:bt 

It’s 47 years since India first tested a nuclear weapon and 46 years since their first orbital launch.  They were only 4 years later to orbit than the UK.  We dropped our space program and don’t have schools with only outdoor toilets any more.  I assume you mean an outhouse and not an actual toilet under open skies...?  So a flushing toilet in an enclosure with a connection to a sewer.  That, then, was far ahead of where some Indian schools are now.  I think the situation has improved a lot in the last decade but they’re still failing to get the most basics in place to all schools - running water and any kind of toilet.  Beyond that specific area, there’s a lot of other aspects that to me make the prominence of their space program stand out.
 

In reply to elliot.baker:

I had a gnawing feeling that was wrong.............

In reply to wintertree:

Yes, that's a good point - obviously I saw that on the news, although never dug into it particularly deeply. For some reason, the sewage end of the process stuck more in my head - I don't really know why

In reply to Barmatt:

+1 UKC tackling misinformation!  Happy days!  Big banner at the top was excellent .. caught my eye immediately.

QQ:  UKC Admins.  More of personal interest ... the narrative is always (not UKC specific) "we can't police the forums .. it too intensive ... impossible to win on who is right and who is wrong".  What's the thinking admin side after this thread?  Looks like a very success intervention from where I'm standing.  How long did you have to monitor before stepping in?  Did you have to have someone eye balling the thread all day?  Was there a specific post that was the trigger where you said "enough - you're out?".  Do you track browser finger prints  .. i.e. do you know what other users are linked to this user - did you tackle them at the same time?

Just interested on your thoughts on how this went down.

Thank you for taking care of it!!

In reply to AJM:

Sewage is a much more obvious and immediate problem, but that also reduces the impact as people can see it and act accordingly.  

With Flint, I wonder how much worse the final consequences would have been if the only problem had been elevated lead in the affected domestic water supplies, and there hadn’t been other problems that flagged up the quality issues - problems like the discolouration, the water dissolving engine blocks at the engine factory, and the legionella outbreak.  

In reply to wintertree:

Sewer? They installed those when I was about 30.

The school toilet was actually brand new with a septic tank when I started school, built over the summer by the parents to replace the wooden shed with a bucket. The building itself was an unlined chalk-walled hovel with an exposed thatched roof (we could watch the sparrows flying around while we coloured our union jacks) and "heated" by a Tortoise stove which in the winter was used to thaw out the morning break milk.  And two years intake controlled by one teacher and a sixteen year old village girl (a teaching assistant they were called). And slates to write on in the third year.

All this in the soft underbelly of England, not Yorkshire but south Wiltshire. If we'd had a river we' d have probably chucked the dead in it as well!

It's all relative.

In reply to Barmatt:

Some good new to cheer you up!

Covid-19: More confidence vaccines work on all variants - PM

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57172139

In reply to jimtitt:

I think a septic tank counts as a sewer - just a local one.  I lived with one until 2001 and other than having it pumped out every few years it worked just like a sewer.  Both are a world apart from a school without any form of sanitary waste removal.

It is; India and the UK started their space programs at similar times.  We disbanded ours; India continues to have problems with basic sanitation and sanitary disposal of bodies whilst pursuing a heavy lift launch vehicle and multiple planetary missions.   Different priorities, different fundamental value on human life.  We’re by no means perfect in the UK and the absolute (as in not relative) poverty we have is shameful when you look at the resources we have and where they go, and our trajectory is not great.  But still, the situation in India I linked in the article above is worlds apart.

In reply to elsewhere:

Today I read that the really low temperature cold chain might not be needed for the Pfizer vaccine and that the thawed vaccine could be OK for 31 and not 5 days.  Good news for the wider distribution to less developed countries if that is the case.

In reply to wintertree:

I sort of agree that's what should happen, although the report I linked to suggested the campaigner in question hadn't made enormous progress since the first reports into it a few years previously!

In reply to wintertree:

Which was a great shame...

I can't think where jimtitt grew up; Swindon, by the sound of it...

In reply to captain paranoia:

I sort of agree - quote conflicted on it really - but then I think the whole sale wrecking of our military aviation capability did far more damage in many ways.  What happened to TSR2 - destroying the plans and airframes - seems almost treasonous.  So many fantastic projects that were world leading abandone.  Perhaps Mustard and HOTOL could have seen us leading space ahead of the Soviets and Americans; certainly the Americans are all over the derivatives of the later now Alan Bond has retired, and the reentry profiles for HOTOL in particular seem to have been way ahead of the shuttle program and better suited to the materials technology of the time.  

But if I could watch reusable space planes flying overhead whilst Jr was having to toilet in a field outside school, I think I'd feel differently. 

In reply to AJM:

The problem there seems more that "acting accordingly" is to try and punish people for being poor.  By making them poorer.

I saw a similar shanty town in central Florida in the 1990s.  One of the more surreal moments I've had in the USA was when I was working in Berkeley for a couple of weeks.  They'd recently passed a proposition banning homeless people from sleeping on the streets after dusk.  I was going for an evening walk through the woods that rise up the hill behind the university stadium.  A giant building with a row of over a hundred portaloos lined up outside for some big event I suppose.  There was a brightly coloured marching band of students going down the hill playing loudly away as part of "pledge week", whilst a band of drab homeless people trudged up the path in to the hills with their drab bags of belongings, to sleep for the night out of sight and out of mind.  The two passed each other like that scene in the Poseidon adventure.  What surprised me was watching the interaction of the Berkeley police with the homeless - incredible patience, calmness and kindness.  The contrast with those in central SF was unbelievable, where we saw behaviour that would be inappropriate for a zoo keeper let alone against vulnerable people.  My last visit was to San Diego - 15 years since I'd been there - and there'd been an explosive increase in the number of people sleeping rough on a patch of grass where the aircraft carrier museum ship (USS Midway) would grant them some shade in the mornings.  At the time there were two Nimitz class carriers moored up on the other side.  I suspect that many posters on UKC could, if born in America and subject to bad luck and illness, could end up somewhere like that.  I wonder what they think when they look at the ships across the bay?

It worries me greatly that the UK is not heading away from such inequality and absolute poverty, and that too many seem to see it as somehow just.  The future is going to look very dystopian if we don't put human dignity and basic well being front and centre of the coming changes.

In reply to captain paranoia:

Swindon is reputedly a dump in North Wiltshire that I've never been to. I come from a nice city in the south!

In reply to wintertree:

I saw TSR-2 drawings at BAe Weybridge in 1987!  Someone had his private file!

In reply to wintertree:

To kill a launcher programme just as it succeeded, and not long before such things became a commercial proposition, was just crazy short-sightedness.

TSR2 was innovative, but there have been plenty of innovative military aircraft prototypes that never went anywhere. But as an engineer, it pains me to see the destruction of remarkable engineered artefacts; TSR2 was far from the only such story.

It's interesting to read the story of the air intake design for the MRCA Tornado, and how and why it never managed to learn tricks from Concorde...

In reply to captain paranoia:

TSR2 was just one example; there was something of a chaotic bit perhaps systematic dismantling of a highly successful and world leading industry around aviation.  Some rotten luck being a leader learning hard lessons, a lot of politics of both colours bowing to pressures east and west.  

I found out last year that NASA fly several licence built Canberra bombers as sensor platforms - particularly chase plane and storm system science roles.  One of the first jet aircraft and they prefer it to anything built since, to the point they pulled one out of a boneyard after decades of abandonment.   Imagine being employed by NASA to spend your days flying that, the pilot still has original instrumentation although the “bombardier” / instrumentation operator has glass.
 

In reply to wintertree:

Absolutely. I cannot for the life of me understand why our government sold all our Harrier jump jets to the USMC - who are still using them, and then we have to lease American fighters to make sure our "world beating" new aircraft carrier actually has some aircraft on board....

In reply to captain paranoia:

those air intakes were a figure of fun among the "Hawker" engineers where I worked - they preferred fish like biological curves on the Harrier and Hawk

In reply to Gordonbp:

My take is that for the last 50 years, US policy has been to use political pressure and arms deals that turn out too good to be true to undermine foreign (to them) expertise and capacity in aviation.  The UK has fallen for this badly and I’d argue that Japan has atrophied significant capacity in this way as well.

Almost 25 years ago I visited the USS Intrepid museum ship in Manhattan.  That had a McDonnell Douglas AV-8B on show, the info plaque was full of typical ra ra USA stuff about how wonderful it was.  There was an almost illegibly tiny footnote about how it was licence built from a British design, and no mention of the changes needed to *cough* optimise the flight controls for the USMC.

Then there’s the Whittle W1.X; I saw that at the Smithsonian in DC.  I went to the Udvar-Hazy centre out at Dulles as well; they have a whole display cabinet full of mock ups of early British space plane concepts including the pyramidal configuration of the BAC Mustard.  I wonder how and when they became American property.  There’s more artefacts of British space planes on show there than at any one place in the UK I think.  (The items in the science museum are larger and closer to flight, but smaller in number).  I do wonder where their space program would have been without all the British IP; then again their pork barrel politics and management-over-expertise culture made such a monumental disaster out of reusable space planes with STS that it probably set them back 30 years.  It’s just tragic now to watch the shuttle engines being refurbished at great expense to be used once and expended in to the ocean by the SLS.

In reply to wintertree:

A friend of mine tells the story of how in the RAF he got a "lift" to Malta in a Canberra to do a bit of emergency electonic repair in the 1950s.  He later worked at Spadeadam on telemetry/instrumentation for Blue Streak

In reply to wercat:

I expect both the Americans than the Russians keep a backup as well.  The one I really want to see fly is the Avro 730.  Slightly balmy design ahead of it’s time - landing by periscope! - but just phenomenal.

In reply to wercat:

Wintertree Sr had a particularly interesting “lift” back to the UK for my birth.  Some people have all the fun.

One of the less proud British inventions languishes full of water at Spadeadam - the first underground ICBM silo; something else where we handed the design over to the Americans.  One of these days I must go on the occasional tour they run.  

In reply to wercat:

Both of which are subsonic so do not need to hold a shockwave across the mouth of inlet.

jk

In reply to wintertree:

Coincidentally, 'Cold War, Hot Jets' started on BBC4 this evening...

In reply to jkarran:

I'm sure the engineers knew that - it was a standing joke made at some multi divisional meetings I attended.  That was interesting, as the sites all represented the cultures of the old manufacturing companies that were now called BAe so often came with completely separate understandings and attitudes to the subject in hand. 

In reply to wintertree:

It's probably every bit as meaningful as your attempt to put moodern India into equivalence with modern Britain.

> Space exploration in no way has equivalence to the oceanic exploration of bygone colonial eras, and won’t for quite some time in terms of mass migration or return of new material wealth.  

Surely there must have been a point where oceanic exploration was at the same stage as current day space exploration.

I believe that it was you that highlighted the fact that flush toilets existed hundreds of years ago. If our society could ignore that techology for many years why does it seem odd that other societies can do the same thing today?

In reply to deepsoup:

My question was intended to highlight the fact that we have not reached that point.

So why would we consider it odd  that other nations have also not got there yet?

In reply to Longsufferingropeholder:

It could be argued that we still haven't reached that point!

In reply to timjones:

Thousands of years ago - but as I understand it, the technology was lost with the fall of the Roman Empire along with many others, it wasn't mass produced on a global scale and there wasn't a choice between a space program and a toilet.

I don't think so, no.  People have been travelling around the world since before they were even people.  

In reply to timjones:

Ah, fair enough then.  In that case I agree.

In reply to timjones:

Because now their cost is trivial, literally buttons, compared to the affordability of a nation that can launch an orbital rocket. And their benefits are very, very well known.

In reply to Longsufferingropeholder:

Sadly people are odd and the societies and nations that we form can be even odder.

Throw in a good dose of politics and it is hardly surprising that odd stuff happens.

In reply to timjones:

That is a reason, not an excuse.

In reply to timjones:

Yes, spacecraft but no toilets is odd. That's .... That's what we started with. What's going on here?

In reply to timjones:

I am not sure. In Europe at least most of the oceanic exploration was to try and "discover" places and then profit from those people who are surprised their ancestral home has only just been discovered.

In reply to Longsufferingropeholder:

But not as odd as a spacecraft with no toilets.  Unless you’ve got matter beaming or displacement technology.  “Beam it out, Scotty”.  

In reply to wintertree:

Thanks. Now I'm going to fall asleep and dream of a fresh turd slowly tumbling past, accompanied by the blue danube.

In reply to wintertree:

I'll return the favour. Tonight's browser tab mountain starts here:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/m.huffpost.com/us/entry/3054324/amp

You are welcome.

In reply to Longsufferingropeholder:

In the summer of 1975 (was that Apollo Soyuz?) I was trying out my new tent and Black's good companion sleeping bag plus primus, wandering round Teesdale and then over the top into Weardale by St John's Chapel.

On the last day somewhere up there between Eastgate and Stanhope, coming along the road I stopped at a cottage as I needed a drink and my water was finished and I still had a few miles to tramp home.   I knocked an a very old lady answered the door and was happy to give me a drink.  She fetched the water in a jug from  a spring as she had no running water in the house.  It tasted very good.

In reply to Longsufferingropeholder:

The benefits of the crapper are as nothing compared with the benefits of the shit farm, which is a bit more pricey (although less than a space program)