This seems really weird. What made the NZ response (and ROK, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, etc) work is that they have prevented infection arriving via quarantine.

The other big UK mistake was loosening restrictions before the elimination of community transmission.
If you can get rid of community transmission then you can use test, trace and isolate to prevent it coming back from your non-community cases. Then you ensure it can't be reintroduced from other places that still have community transmission.
I should add that massive racism means we compare ourselves to NZ and Australia, but not to South Korea or Vietnam or Thailand or Taiwan (SK and Taiwan are especially good comparators, because they're well-connected densely-populated countries, like the UK).
Learning some lessons from successful East Asian democracies would be really good for the UK.

Like, South Korea has the second-cheapest railway construction in the world (after Spain). Shouldn't we learn from their innovations?
Tokyo is an enormously rich city that lots of people move to, and doesn't have a housing crisis and has lots of affordable housing. Isn't that worth learning from?
Japan has very low immigration and doesn't integrate immigrants at all and has a ton of problems as a result - that seems like a good lesson in what not to do.

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More from @po8crg

29 Jan
Having said that HS2 won't be expensive to travel on ("which isn't true, because it will have thousands of seats that will need filling"), I should explain why.

You might think that it will need to pay back its costs and therefore will need high ticket prices.
You'd be wrong.
Welcome, folks, to
The Sunk Cost Fallacy
(sing that to the tune of "Adams Administration").

The amount it cost to build HS2 has nothing to do with how much you will pay for a ticket.
If they charge more than you will pay, then you won't pay, you'll travel another way or stay at home.

So, if they want to maximise revenue, they have to lower the prices to ones people will pay.
Read 7 tweets
29 Jan
Even if you believe that HS2 will be really expensive and only rich people will use it (which isn't true, because it will have thousands of seats that will need filling), then at least that would degentrify other trains, making more room for the rest of us.
Monbiot is right that the business case is nonsense. What he misses is the reason why it is nonsense. It is nonsense because Treasury rules require it to exclude a number of actual benefits, so they massively inflated the benefist they are allowed to include.
For instance: they can't include the benefits of running new trains on the old tracks in the space freed up by HS2. Can't include congestion reduction on the motorways caused by transferring freight to rail. Can't include long-term benefits. Can't include carbon reduction.
Read 4 tweets
27 Jan
The real answer to this is much simpler. "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" (Keynes). Are these redditors irrational? Yes. Is Gamestop going to produce long-term earnings to justify its stock price? No. Does that matter? No.
People have the right to invest how the hell they like and if you lose out, that's on you. If you don't like that, don't gamble. If you want to invest in fundamentals, take ten year positions.

The exception is securities fraud. This isn't a pump-and-dump scam.

So suck it up!
Yes, you can't take long-term short positions. This is true.

Gamestop probably should be long-term short. But Melvin aren't long-term short. They're short-term short. That's gambling, not investment. And their number didn't come up.
Read 5 tweets
26 Jan
There is a bunch of nonsense being said in reply to @OwenJones84 and @AyoCaesar about "same-sex attraction".

Obviously, if you translate "homosexual attraction" literally, it means "same-sex attraction", but the word dates back to 1869, before sex and gender were distinguished.
There are lots of cases where we say "sex" when we mean what we now call "gender" and some the other way around. That's just how human language works. You can dislike that, but there isn't much you can do about it.
On top of that, there are a whole bunch of different things encompassed by "sex" and "gender" - identity, expression, phenotype, genotype, endocrinology, anatomy.
Read 18 tweets
24 Dec 17
Do you know why Christmas isn't on the Solstice?
It's a calendar thing. When Julius Caesar set up the Julian Calendar in 48BCE, the spring equinox was set as 25 March, which would usually put the winter solstice on 25 December.
Because the solstice was on the 25th, so Christmas came to be on that same date.
Read 8 tweets
8 Sep 17
I keep seeing the point made that Jacob Rees-Mogg's opinions on abortion are the orthodox Catholic view and there are 5.7m Catholics in UK.
This is an example of a common mistake, which is to take a religion's orthodox teaching and associate it with all the self-avowed adherents.
This is absolute bollocks. It's bollocks in general, but it's bollocks on stilts in a secular country with freedom of religion like the UK.
Read 27 tweets

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