Saying this is a 'radical' movement of the youth or a cult gets things backwards. Like BLM this is just the under-40s taking at face value a moral imperative they've been inculcated with throughout their education and that' is endorsed by all institutions and authority figures

https://twitter.com/JustStop_Oil/status/1590253868658851841

Older generations tend to view ubiquitous claims that climate change Threatens the Future of Life on Earth as acceptable hyperbole in a good cause or figures of speech; hard to blame the younger generation for taking these statements literally

Cannot prove this (yet) but feel like computerisation may well have reduced productivity and accuracy in many lower-IQ clerical settings Having an in-tray and out-tray and serially processing forms between them is ultimately easier than having to lash together 4 different legacy systems that do not communicate with each other while being distracted by 20 emails an hour and Facebook

It's a bit awkward but almost all the good Shostakovich music (e.g. symphonies 5 and 7) was written to kowtow to the regime, whereas everything written in its defiance (e.g. 4 and 8) is dreary mulch of now lasting value You might say: what about the 10th? Yes the first two movements are great. But the authenticity of DS's statements that Stalin is depicted is heavily disputed & even if true, I think is retconning. It was a popular success at its premiere, Composer's Union eventually supported

Doubling Oxford and Cambridge populations and lab space via new town extensions would have immaterial political blowback at national level for either party and would result in innumerable good news stories by the end of a parliament. E.g. Tories might reduce their chance of taking Oxford West & Abingdon from 5% to 1%. So what?

THREAD on herd immunity, pandemic myths & the SAGE papers with some pop Kuhnianism thrown in. Stay for the 🔥 Keynes quote

There’s a lot of confusion over What Happened last March in Britain. I think the best way to make sense of it is as a true paradigm shift in public health… In classic Kuhnian style, the new scientific consensus on pandemic control is “incommensurable” with that from before the crisis; the latter now seems bizarre, even callous.

To cope with this cognitive dissonance, the Discourse has generated a number of myths...

Short catalogue of varieties of Herd Immunity Strategy denialism:

1. DANIELISM
It's not Herd Immunity if you take any measures whatsoever to slow the pandemic. 2. JOHNISM
It's not Herd Immunity if you didn't actively want people to be infected and die.

A short thread with more on the CDC's vaccination modelling.

The CDC found that prioritising the elderly for vaccination saves the most lives but not by enough to cancel out diversity and fairness considerations.

I suspect they are understating the benefit of this strategy. See the below slide pack (not to be confused with the one from two weeks later that formally recommended prioritising 'essential workers').

Important: the numbers do not match up because they were later updated from 70% to 90% vaccine effectiveness.

cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/…

The US CDC is going to recommend that 'essential workers' are vaccinated before the over-65s, despite their *own modelling* showing this will result in more deaths.

Why? They say it is unethical to prioritise the elderly because they are not racially diverse enough. THREAD. This is based on the slide pack below.

This takes for granted that healthcare workers will be first-in-line. The question is whether the next group should be other essential workers, the over-65s or adults with high-risk conditions.

cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/…