Categories Society
To those arguing winter is always like this in the NHS: you are wrong. I faced four serious winter crises as Health Sec and the situation now is off-the-scale worse than any of those.
It’s true that we often had to cancel elective care in Jan to protect emergency care but that too is under severe pressure with record trolley waits for the very sickest patients
Exclusive: Leaks reveal record waits for emergency care due to covid pressures https://t.co/CrxYPUJG7v
— Health Service Journal (@HSJnews) January 4, 2021
Even more worryingly fewer heart attack patients appear to be presenting in ICUs, perhaps because they are not dialling 999 when they need
Full credit to NHS for keeping cancer services open but in Wave 1 there was still a 2/3 drop in cancer appts: people didn’t come forward to GPs or want to go to hospitals, with many potentially avoidable cancer deaths. We hoped to avoid that this time but now looking unlikely.
Here's an overview of the major arguments at issue and what expert witnesses had to say about them:
Follow @DEAcampaign for live coverage outside the courtroom:
The moment when @StellaMoris1, @khrafnsson & @SwaziJAF arrived at court#FreeAssangeNOW #DontExtraditeAssange #PardonAssange #DefendMediaFreedom #JournalismMatters pic.twitter.com/Knj9sDZOti
— Don't Extradite Assange (@DEAcampaign) January 4, 2021
Assange Extradition Ruling: What to Expect
Follow a list of those covering #AssangeCase here
Most unions aim to deliver benefits to members, even at cost to society. The new one at Google aims to charge members to deliver benefits to society. Let's see how far that goes (via @bopinion) https://t.co/fswlwP2j28
— Bloomberg Economics (@economics) January 8, 2021
1) "There’s an easy solution to that problem — go work somewhere else" - this suggestion is akin to right wing fascists telling dissidents to just leave when we disagree w their governance. Deciding to stay and be a positive change is CRUCIAL when a company like
Google is in all of our back-pockets-- literally. If every ethicist and conscientious objector simply leaves, the gross impact of this corporation is in a much worse place for all of, something that should trouble every Google user.
2) Claiming that full-timers fear losing our jobs to "cheap contractor labor" and noting "many temp workers put in the same hours as full-time employees, but with none of the insurance, benefits or worker protections" proves one of the reasons that contractor
solidarity is so important to the tech labor movement-- no one's labor should be arbitrarily devalued. @AlphabetWorkers is committed to fighting for fair treatment of contractors bc it's the right thing to do. Implying selfish motivations with no basis is petty & divisive.
What does good leadership look like when everyone works from home?\u2013Top scientists @raffasadun and Ernst Fehr will provide you with some answers on 27 January \u2013 online and for free in our Academy of Behavioral Economics https://t.co/Di6hRqPvAA
— G. Duttweiler Inst' (@GDInstitute) January 15, 2021
Ernst Fehr is talking about evidence and challenges of work at home arrangements.
Key question: Do we have the technological capacities to work at home? And is it a trend or a sustainable transformation?
Ernst Fehr @econ_uzh #EconomicsForSociety
Will this prevail in the long-run?
Ernst Fehr @econ_uzh #EconomicsForSociety
The problem of sustaining cooperation in the long-run: How do we prevent the deterioration of collaboration?
Ernst Fehr @econ_uzh #EconomicsForSociety
The first choice was the alphabet. I wanted to use human friendly, familiar ASCII characters, but intentionally leave out potentially confusing characters. I'd previously read about "Crockford's base32" (https://t.co/xa3WREc1RQ) which tries to address this problem.
But my search led me instead to z-base32 (https://t.co/5PlTgAgyDU). The z-base32 alphabet is shuffled to try and make encoded identifiers easier to discern. I don't actually need the encoding, but I liked the idea that this shuffle makes sequential identifiers less sequential.
z-base32 takes the interesting choice of using the letters in lowercase to help identifiers form "coastlines" that aid with human recognition. The lab quickly fed back they didn't like this, so I force the alphabet back to uppercase.
With the alphabet decided, I wanted to pick a checking scheme. I learned that each algorithm catches different types of errors, so one needs some knowledge of how the identifiers will be used when making a decision.
I don't know how you look at what's happening in DC and not immediately understand white male rage as a national threat https://t.co/HKrUPhexn3
— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) January 6, 2021
And when I say "we" I mean white Christian patriarchal American culture. The same kind of martial "manhood" culture that Kristen Kobes du Mez talks about in Jesus and John Wayne.
In that book she's talking about the specifically evangelical version of the culture, but one of the things that's happened there, is that mainstream patriarchal culture is often pretty much identical to evangelical patriarchal culture with the serial numbers (slightly) filed off
But that book helped clarify what the leaders of that movement thought they were doing, and they thought they were raising warriors, men who would fight for God and Country (& the honor of pure womanhood) in the coming war.
WHAT coming war? Never mind. THE war. You know.
THE war is against communism, or against terrorists, or against Muslims, or against Foreign Devils of Unspecified Origin.
It's against Urban Violence and Liberal Traitors and Lizard People, the apocalyptic fighting in the street which is surely coming.
Did you choose tech because it pays well, or because you have a genuine interest?
— Warren Day (@warrenjday) January 2, 2021
Look, if you're not working through IT ticket queues or answering pages or shipping apps for free without any health insurance or monetary support, then you're a huge poser and lack real *passion* for tech
You know who works out of passion and not for money? Teachers.
Also, being *passionate* about something doesn't mean you're good at it! And you can be excellent at something while having other interests and motivations.
Because that's really what this is all about. When a tech person asks about passion, they think the amount of passion equals the amount of competence. And *their* passion makes them more competent than other people.
Except that's not true.