Current Events/News

[Rover the Top]

Hardly - you're proving my point by putting forward different interpretations and spins on the written guidance as published.

You seem to think there's some difference between "exercising" by cycling and "travelling" by cycling. If that's true, then there is no reason to leave your local area to exercise on a bike, you could do a mile long circuit 20 times to make your 20 miles, or cycle up and down your street for an hour if all you're doing is a fitness workout (incidentally, no mention of a time limit in the guidance). But going from your house to a park 7 miles away is by definition "travelling", whether you do it by car, foot, bike or teleport. There's no necessity to cycle to and back from a point 10 miles away if all you're doing is "exercising", and it would seem at odds with the instruction not to leave your area if it is permissable.

I'm not saying the PM broke the law, I'm saying it's impossible to know what the law actually is because it can be interpreted so many ways. And applying your own interpretation won't get you very far if you run into a police officer with a different one.

"

[Rover the Top]

Trump impeached again. At least there's weight to it this time. Academic for his current term, but hopefully they'll vote to bar him from standing again.

[mrblackbat]

Hardly - you're proving my point by putting forward different interpretations and spins on the written guidance as published.

You seem to think there's some difference between "exercising" by cycling and "travelling" by cycling. If that's true, then there is no reason to leave your local area to exercise on a bike, you could do a mile long circuit 20 times to make your 20 miles, or cycle up and down your street for an hour if all you're doing is a fitness workout (incidentally, no mention of a time limit in the guidance). But going from your house to a park 7 miles away is by definition "travelling", whether you do it by car, foot, bike or teleport. There's no necessity to cycle to and back from a point 10 miles away if all you're doing is "exercising", and it would seem at odds with the instruction not to leave your area if it is permissable.

I'm not saying the PM broke the law, I'm saying it's impossible to know what the law actually is because it can be interpreted so many ways. And applying your own interpretation won't get you very far if you run into a police officer with a different one.

"

Whatever. Walking one inch from your house is therefore "travelling". The whole point is there is no legal definition of "your area" or "local area". It's interpretive. I mean, our local galaxy cluster group is called exactly that: local; so anywhere there is fine, right?

You just seem to want to get irate at something again. The point about travelling has always been clear in this lockdown and the previous one: it's about travelling by car or other motorised transport.

Let's not forget that you started this with "do as we say, not as we do".

Anyway if you want to get irate, you should be calling out our mainstream media for announcing record days of deaths whilst failing to note that by their metric, there were record reductions in that rate over Sunday and Monday. Because they can't get their head around the data they're using is a meaningless stat, and there's only been a single day in the UK with more than 1000 deaths within a 28 day window to a positive test, back on the 8th April.

Perhaps we should do tier 5 on Tuesdays and tier 1 on Sundays and Mondays.....

[Rover the Top]

Whatever. Walking one inch from your house is therefore "travelling". The whole point is there is no legal definition of "your area" or "local area". It's interpretive. I mean, our local galaxy cluster group is called exactly that: local; so anywhere there is fine, right?

So you actually do get the point. It's ambiguous. The government guidance does actually define the "local area", but again breaking down that definition could still mean different things to different people. You can't just assume your own interpretation is correct and declare Boris was acting in accordance with the rules, or flaunting them. So how is anyone supposed to follow them?

The daily published stats are farcical. "Deaths within 28 days of a positive test" is doublespeak, may as well give "deaths within 28 days of having a ham sandwich". I reckon we'll see the Covid death toll revised downwards in future years when people push for the full data to analyse - it's too improbable that everyone who died after testing positive died because of Covid. There's also the other side of the coin, how many are dying of other causes that maybe could have been prevented if the NHS wasn't overwhelmed with Covid cases? Then there's the test data; we're only given the positive test numbers, they're not given in the context of total tests which also have been rising. And it's not as simple as there's more tests because more people have Covid, there was over half a million people tested negative to 40-odd thousand positive tests in the latest data - that's 200-250k more than a month ago, so why are they going for tests? Are the tests missing mass numbers of infected people? Are people going because it's one of the few places we're still allowed to go?

It's not to say there isn't cause for concern, the rising number of hospital beds in use is enough in itself.

[mrblackbat]

Whatever. Walking one inch from your house is therefore "travelling". The whole point is there is no legal definition of "your area" or "local area". It's interpretive. I mean, our local galaxy cluster group is called exactly that: local; so anywhere there is fine, right?

So you actually do get the point. It's ambiguous. The government guidance does actually define the "local area", but again breaking down that definition could still mean different things to different people. You can't just assume your own interpretation is correct and declare Boris was acting in accordance with the rules, or flaunting them. So how is anyone supposed to follow them?

The daily published stats are farcical. "Deaths within 28 days of a positive test" is doublespeak, may as well give "deaths within 28 days of having a ham sandwich". I reckon we'll see the Covid death toll revised downwards in future years when people push for the full data to analyse - it's too improbable that everyone who died after testing positive died because of Covid. There's also the other side of the coin, how many are dying of other causes that maybe could have been prevented if the NHS wasn't overwhelmed with Covid cases? Then there's the test data; we're only given the positive test numbers, they're not given in the context of total tests which also have been rising. And it's not as simple as there's more tests because more people have Covid, there was over half a million people tested negative to 40-odd thousand positive tests in the latest data - that's 200-250k more than a month ago, so why are they going for tests? Are the tests missing mass numbers of infected people? Are people going because it's one of the few places we're still allowed to go?

It's not to say there isn't cause for concern, the rising number of hospital beds in use is enough in itself.

How you could be in any doubt about me understanding the point is amazing given I led with "local area" isn't a legal definition..... and yet you're the one criticising Johnson for asking us to do what he says not what he does.... which would require the guidance to be specific....

The problem isn't there, the problem is with over zealous police (mainly in Derbyshire.... who knew Derbyshire was the police state centre of the UK).

I take it you haven't looked at what I'm really complaining about with the numbers?

Sensible, usable data to trend by here: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details ... e_of_death

Bullshit, crazy skewed data affected by delays in system processing over Christmas but that gets all the headlines here: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details ... e_reported

[Rover the Top]

How you could be in any doubt about me understanding the point is amazing given I led with "local area" isn't a legal definition..... and yet you're the one criticising Johnson for asking us to do what he says not what he does.... which would require the guidance to be specific....

I was criticising Johnson for making up rules that are contradictory and ambiguous. That is literally what I said in the first post where I posted the link to an article with accusations that he was breaking his own rules. You seem to be taking my summary of the article as my viewpoint and ignoring my actual comment on it.

I take it you haven't looked at what I'm really complaining about with the numbers?

Sensible, usable data to trend by here: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details ... e_of_death

Bullshit, crazy skewed data affected by delays in system processing over Christmas but that gets all the headlines here: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details ... e_reported

I know exactly what you were talking about, I added other farcical points about the stats that are published. Not everything is contentious. The problem with journalists is their skillset is often not related to the subject matter they report on. There's a general public mistrust of statistics - everyone knows the saying "lies, damn lies and statistics." But it's not the statistics that lie, they're cold hard facts. The problem is they're presented by journalists who regurgitate them without understanding them, and thus present them out of context. Hence why they get in a flutter about "highest deaths reported in a day" when that's a stat about admin rather than the daily mortality rate.