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hanozon UK: Excess deaths in 2022 among worst in 50 years

That's only the case for the NHS in England.

hanozon UK: Excess deaths in 2022 among worst in 50 years

It may be relevant and of interest to readers around the world to learn how we in Britain access the NHS, our envy-of-the-world National Health Service.

The main way is via your allocated General Practitioner (GP). To see a GP you need to telephone the GP's place of work, known as a surgery, and to have any chance of getting a same day appointment you need to call at 8am precisely. Don't call at 7.59 because you won't be connected, and don't leave it until 8.01 because it will be far too late. Call within the first few seconds after 8am and you'll be informed that you're in a queue, behind several dozen earlier callers.

After an hour of waiting you'll get through to a non-medical receptionist who will ask you about your symptoms, and make a judgement about whether or not you or your child is worthy of one of the few remaining appointments for that day. If you're a very pushy mother, or someone who really enjoys talking with GPs' receptionists (which most people don't) then you may have some success in this. If you're just a chilled out guy who doesn't like to fuss, you've got no chance.

You'll then be informed that to make an appointment for a later date you need to try again for a same-day appointment the next day by repeating the process above the following morning. It is not possible to arrange an appointment for any time further in the future no matter how long you are prepared to wait.

The only other means of accessing the NHS is by rocking up at the Accident and Emergency (A&E) department of your nearest large enough hospital. Unsurprisingly given the above, these are rather busy and you may be waiting for a day or so before you get seen. To avoid adding to this delay you should make you own way to A&E because ambulances routinely take several hours to reach you for the most urgent cases (heart attacks, stokes etc) or up to a few days for, say, a fallen elderly person, and on reaching the hospital you wont be able to leave the ambulance and enter the A&E department for up to another day.

However, once you're in the system and being seen by a specialist then by all accounts you do get fairly well looked after, so putting in the hours at A&E or regularly playing the GP telephone lottery may well prove worth your while if you wish to make use of our envy of the world NHS.

hanozon Tell HN: I just received my Equifax breach settlement check

Well for starters you could voluntarily submit your repayment history to one of a pool of competitive good-for-the-money record keepers, rather than it being involuntarily hoovered up by a state sponsored oligopoly.

hanozon Men Without Work (2016)

Young men always did fend for themselves, but I don't think it's right say they were left to. More like they were let to do the fending that came naturally to them, fending for themselves and their families, and generally being the apex of human potential in terms of physical and mental ability. The difference now is that they are actively stifled and suppressed by society, and from a young age, much to the detriment of all concerned.

hanozon A new treatment for arthritis: Vagus-nerve stimulation

Indeed. And with rheumatoid it can come a lot younger than your snowboarding years.

hanozon Meta employee buys 12-year lease on cruise ship to see the world while working

Though they feel like they arrive at the same rate.

hanozon FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried to be released on $250M bail

It would matter if they were willing to lose the money to avoid a trial, for starters.

hanozon Talk = GPT-2 and Whisper and WASM

What are some good things to try? I can't get any sense out of it at all so far.

hanozon It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

Wow. So now that I know that mass sociogenic illness is a thing, where do I draw the line in applying that label?

hanozon The clever reason scammers can’t spell (2019)

This is bollocks. Speaking for Britain, and I think I can, there are hoards of would be victims to this kind of scam, particular of the current retirees generation, who are extremely vulnerable to having the wool pulled over their eyes about technical and internet security best practice matters, but for whom just so much as a poor turn of phrase or some unusually laid out punctuation is an absolute dead giveaway. If the scammers got their act together on this front they'd be mopping up huge swathes of these people, but they don't, because at the end of the day they don't speak English very well and don't have access to anyone who can.

hanozon China state CCTV avoids crowd close ups at the World Cup

What is going on with China's continuing zero-covid policy? Either it's the most expensive face saving exercise the world has ever seen, or they know something about it that we don't.

hanozon Top 200 Most Common Passwords

This list doesn't ring true to me, the entries don't seem at all naturally distributed. Why on earth would col123456 be the 9th most popular password in the world, yet not appear in the top 200 of any of the country specific lists, nor any other col1 prefixed variation?

hanozon Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information

What sort of folder do you use? Is it something you can lean on when writing?

hanozon Snowdon to be known by it's Welsh name Yr Wyddfa

It's a question of approach. Ramming it down people's throats is not Championing. Making it compulsory up to the age of 16, to the detriment of other subjects, so that it's almost universally resented in my children's school, for example, is not the way to go about it.

hanozon Snowdon to be known by it's Welsh name Yr Wyddfa

Unfortunately the 20% who speak Welsh dominate the institutions of power in Wales, in gross disproportion to thier number, and moves like this are more about power than making any kind of practical sense. See also the recently announced plans for the Welsh football team to be known as Cymru, even when referred to in English. This sort of parochial nonsense goes on at every level and really holds Wales back.

hanozon Mom handcuffed, jailed for 8-year-old son walking half a mile

Right in the middle of a similar sized European city, very built up, loads of traffic - the children have to walk to school, from aged 6. Parents are actually not allowed to take them in.

hanozon The Kopp-Etchells Effect (2012)

Pity the article has been getting Kopp's name wrong without correction for the last 10 years though, despite containing several other changes suggested by the photographer.

hanozon Octopuses caught on camera throwing things at each other

> ...whereas "fishes" is the correct way to refer to multiple species of fish.

What about the fishes of bread and fishes fame?

hanozon US annual inflation declines to 7.7% in October vs. 7.9% expected

That this month's rate is smaller than expected is a completely different thing to it being smaller than last month's rate.

hanozon Energy crisis: How living in a cold home affects your health

> (10€/mo)

I have to pay about double that per month (in £) for electricity, even if I don't use any electricity at all! And the electricity I do use costs nearly that much per day, and that's without having to use any of it for heating or hot water, which is all on gas and costs about as much again.

hanozon UK Government scans all web servers hosted in the UK for vulnerabilities

Now there's a sentence I never thought I would read.

hanozon Eleven Magic Words

Thank you! I was having a very frustrating time trying to parse the titular sentence, after all that build up.

Username checks out by the way.

hanozon Robinhood cuts losses after transaction revenue drops

I daren't think of the number of stocks I've held which have gone all the way to zero over the years.

hanozon Bank of England expects UK to fall into longest ever recession

> mostly self inflicted

...by the Bank of England stoking a multi decade house price bubble.

hanozon Should we be messing with asteroid orbits?

I'm not sure Betteridge really works directly in this case, because the headline is kind of implicitly Should we avoid messing with asteroid orbits.

hanozon Re-using the heat in bathwater in Britain

It occurred to me to try this for the first time last week and the extra cleaning thing swung it for me too, which is a pity as there's a good 40 pence worth of heat in that water at current prices. Not sure the wife was going to be too pleased with my used bathwater hanging around all day anyway. Also, probably not a very good idea for anyone with young children in the house.

hanozon Swiss firm claims longest passenger train record with 1.2-mile-long locomotive

Touché. Although I don't think that's quite what the questioner was getting at.

hanozon Swiss firm claims longest passenger train record with 1.2-mile-long locomotive

I'm not sure about your terminology, and I'm probably not about to do much better, but yes the first coupling must bear the load of the full train, how could it be otherwise? In fact it's worse that that, the first cross section of atoms in the first coupling must bear the full load, but some atoms are pretty good at that sort of thing.

hanozon The mysticism of Alan Watts (2018)

* >Buddhism and Christianity make it sound like you have to be perfectly clean and disciplined to be “enlightened”*

I'm my no means a scholar of such matters but I don't get than impression of Christianity at all. From the concept of original sin, to the tale of Jesus kicking off in the temple, the embracement of man's flaws seem to me to be one of Christianity's biggest selling points.

hanozon Reflections on Robert Pirsig and Quality

Always nice to see it get a mention, it made quite an impact on me at a formative age in the late 80s. As a bonus it then got me on to Thoreau, as he talks about reading Walden to his son in the book.

Oddly, I distinctly remember what in turn got me on to that then 15 year book in the the first place, a brief flash of the intriguing lotus-wrench cover in an episode of Inspector Morse, of all things.

Odd to think how a such a minor passing reference set me off so far down a road I probably would never have traveled otherwise.