jnty

Wikipedia seems to suggest this passage is entirely correct https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_disease_2019

"Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2),"

and it is backed up by a WHO factsheet https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...

You're misunderstanding my point. Transport subsidy funded from current income is a good idea. Spending your entire capital infrastructure budget on making it free for a few years is not. The 'lingering benefits' don't linger long if you then have to hike fares massively because you've got a big loan to repay as a result with no new assets you can exploit to service it.

It's for this reason that saying 'we could spend the money on making buses free for a N years' is meaningless. It would be more sensible to say 'we should spend the £Nbn we spend on maintaining the motorway network on free buses' because those types of spending are equivalent.

The non-schematic map is quite out of date given that the Borders Line to Galashiels and Tweedbank opened five years ago.

edit: oh, it says 2013

But it would only decrease traffic and pollution for the duration of the spend. Once it's over, those benefits stop and there is nothing left beyond the lingering effects of the intervention.

It's actually worse than that, because you've essentially taken out an unsecured loan of £100bn and spent it on something which neither increases ongoing tax revenue or asset value, so you now have to cut other spending to pay it off. Which is why governments and businesses separate capital expenditure (building things) from current expenditure (doing things) very carefully.

Nobody who says we can get 'improved rail' for the cost of HS2 had ever explained how we get that in the vicinity of London without something which looks extremely similar to HS2. We have solid proposals for 'improving rail' from the rail industry, and HS2 is the bedrock of it all. Where's the silver bullet hiding?

And after subsidising bus travel for 20 years we are left with nothing - other than, probably, an expectation to fund for the next 20 years too.

After HS2 is built we have an extrememly valuable asset which will generate returns for years to come.

Capital and current spending are very different, and it's quite unhelpful to compare the two.

Just wait until they see the Windows save symbol!

Minecraft was on the cusp of that change, and it's pretty telling how much of a hellscape the code was for years.

This was the first thing I thought of when I read this question. So often I find myself and people around me basically assuming that the folks on the other side of the phone are idiots. Well, chances are they're thinking the same. You only need 15 minutes to disagree, but it takes much more time and effort to humbly understand a stranger's worldview and motivations. However, once you do, you're much more likely to deliver something you're both happy with at the end.

I think this is a significant part of the value of face-to-face meetings - it's much easier to 'get' someone when you observe and speak to them and their colleagues. At the very least, the connection you get makes it harder to subconsciously write them off as an idiot!

Of course, occasionally you come across people who really are very unsuited for the task at hand and end up talking total rubbish. But it's still worth taking the time to be sure - it's probably not as obvious to you as it is to other people, and you'll find yourself having to justify your assessment more often than you expect, particularly to decision-makers.

The definition of niche is literally "appeals to a small, specialized section of the population" so, er, yes.

The price of a 32in TV has presumably gone down though right? And the same would surely be true of a 29in TV if you could find one. The fact that the market has moved on and you have to tweak your basket of goods is a measurement quirk, not a definition issue.

It's not very different to finding out you can buy a 12-pack for as much as a 6-pack used to cost. Also deflation.

I don't understand how the situation above is a 'quirk' and not a straightforward example of deflation. The price of a typical TV - now represented in the basket of goods as a 32in TV - has fallen.

The fact that lower prices might lead people to buy larger TVs is no more surprising than a fall in the price of meat leading people to buy more steak.

I get this for vegetables, but surely the 'strategy' for a lot of fruit is that they are tasty when ripe and get eaten so that the seed is spread?

As the article says, many metros (including the one in the article) combine automation with drivers. You only need to pay for the bit of automation that actually increases frequency and use the driver for all the fiddly bits.

So all jobs you personally dislike should be abolished?

It's a dream job for many people, and is an extremely skilled job when dealing with technical problems and emergencies is taken into account. There's a lot of worse jobs we should get rid of first.

The (poor) economics of removing drivers from existing metros just goes to show what an extremely efficient way of moving people they already are.

Do you not usually carry a rucksack or shoulder bag? If you're having to use a new plastic bag every time it seems like it might benefit you to get one - they're much more comfortable to use too.

A lot of teams would say that their output is in spite of their manager, not because of it. What if the manager's contribution is net negative?

Why would you drive into the medieval centre of a city to do a large supermarket shop if you can drive to an out-of-town one already?

Studies show that - particularly in Europe - most people are already walking to these shops everywhere. The 'weekly shop' is not really a thing that inner-city dwellers tend to do that often - they either rely on deliveries (cheap and efficient due to density) or smaller shops throughout the week (which often means less perishables waste.)

Yes this is bizarre - it's the same in the UK, where crossing the stop line on red is the offence. Often in cities traffic will continue through the amber light so you often have to turn on red to clear the junction. (Pedestrian lights are generally timed to account for this.)

What if an obstruction appears in the road - a pedestrian or a u-turning car? Are you just meant to plow into them?

surely that just drives people away from your whole market?

"Oh man, don't go to any of the restaurants on that street, they all look terrible."

Unlimited call plans in the UK often commence charges at a time limit, often one hour. You can hang up and redial to continue the conversation for free, but presumably it's to make doing stuff like this a little bit harder.

"When making experiments it is difficult to resist an impulse to imitate a largescale disaster leading to contamination of one of the urban areas spreading to the surrounding areas."

Sim City players and biology academics are basically the same then, it would seem!

No - because it doesn't give any context about what the consequences of that might be.

The next paragraph could say something like "this is perfectly normal, though, and is very unlikely to lead to an earthquake" or "this means an earthquake is nearly inevitable in the next month" and I'd be no more surprised by one that the other.

Interesting that despite the huge effort both sides put in to to fixing/exploiting vulnerabilities the biggest risk factor seems to be directly downloading random dodgy stuff.

I'd say this is a perfect example of the opposite.

The title makes this sound quite odd, but when you actually see the finished result it's fascinating and beautiful.

It's slightly unfair, but I read this as Waze deciding to route a bunch of cars down a narrow residential street to divert around a congested highway then going "whoa, that's gonna be chaos! Watch the sparks fly!"

More seriously, I hope they're using this accident data - particularly involving pedestrians - to avoid making routing decisions that increase their risk.

I don't think 'fake it till you make it' is as simple as that. The whole thing about imposter syndrome is that plenty of fully competent people 'know' they are incompetent (and conversely plenty of incompetent ones 'know' that they are the most valuable employee in the company.) Therefore, 'fake it till you make it' isn't directly about basically being a fraud, it's about presenting yourself as the competent professional you (hopefully) pretty much are.

Or, at least, the realisation that everyone else is probably faking it too.

To be fair, the affair is only the scandal because it may have caused a conflict of interest. Boris has had plenty of them in the past, to the point where nobody knows for certain how many children he has.