Covid, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Shaggy's "It Wasn't Me."

Excuse the humourous comparison below, but sometimes you have to expose the nerve of the ridiculous to make sense of things

It's quite difficult to believe how close to finding a smoking gun this is getting, without cooperation from the CCP. It's far more difficult to get your head around why they aren't either; owning up to the error if one was made, or providing the information that would settle the matter?

From a humorous perspective, it's like the CCP equivalent of singing the Shaggy song "It wasn't me."

Not clearing the issue up, is going to leave the CCP in the doghouse for decades to come. What's the benefit? Why would a country/regime do that to itself? And especially when they have far-reaching commercial interests around the world and could with a little bit more openness be a force for good.

Am I naive, would there be retaliation against the CCP or China? Would the rest of the world vent their fury and exacerbate the situation? Or would everyone learn the lessons fill the cracks and make the world safer? The potential for instability in the long-term unknowns (I think), is far worse than the short-term finger-wagging ruckus that will ensue if the CCP put's its hands up and concedes it dropped the ball.

Matt Ridley's Original Blogpost

Facebook link and comments

Lyrics

It Wasn't Me

Video

Official Music Video

Algorithms and advertising

This post has been enlarged from an original comment made on Facebook related to targeted advertising related to words you have used in posts on platforms like Facebook, or searches you have made in Google. For context Neal Asher has been intermittent fasting on and off for years, to this end, he has mentioned Ketone sticks a few times in the last couple of days, the algorithms have crawled over his posts and lo-and-behold ... read on. There is a link to Neals post on Facebook below, and from there you can (if you so wish) follow the thread back to the inception of his latest ninety-hour fast.

Algorithms, a prime example of how to close the gate to keep the horse out. The further along we go, the dumber they seem, and the consensus from greater minds than mine is that the people that program them are quite often not people-people, and therefore lack the intuitive grasp of what makes people tick, which makes them react to the rearview image rather than the potential future.

The danger is (and I've said it before) the lack of humanity in programming means that well-intentioned but empathy bereft people will make abrasive and cutting software that dispenses justice to a broader swathe of the rest of the population as time goes by. We have already seen it with Amazon, and its algorithm that fires delivery people. And it is very apparent that these tools are used in the emerging work from home market. To this end, the US government recently made it illegal for companies to use algorithms to sack people. However, there are places in our world, where human concerns are less pertinent. And with some strategic offshoring, you can circumvent the metric that makes it illegal, by placing a human at the end of the chain who pulls the trigger.

On from this the whole recruitment industry which from an outsider perspective is full of chancers, lazy cunts, and bullshitters, has painted itself into a corner by dint of the liberal use of SOE and algorithms to select on keywords or phrases to find recruits, and as above, the people that put the systems together for the recruitment companies lack people skills, so companies are wholesale streaming talent away from their businesses at a time when they need to be finding thinkers and innovators.

It would be hilarious if it wasn't so dangerous for the economy.

Original Facebook post

Money ... it's a thing.

Money is an odd metric in our society. Of all the smokes and all the mirrors, it's the one that is most expediently used. Billions printed through the pandemic, and now they have to be inflated away. None of us really got richer for all that cash being injected into society, we just stood still. And yet coming out the other side that cash injection (loan to self) must be paid back or devalued, so that it doesn't become toxic or recessive, and it can all be done with sleight of hand. However, if we stood still and didn't grow, how do things end up costing more? After all the bank of England and others, just added a lot of zeros to an existing ledger and said "Now we have this much. Who wants some?"

I understand the principle of the value of things, and that we need to be able to trade time (the ultimate commodity), for goods and services and yet at the same time the value of goods and services haven't changed/increased materially. In real terms, a pork chop is still a pork chop, a litre of fuel is still a litre of fuel, but by some means, their relative value or cost has increased. How? It's entirely abstract. Though there is the possibility that I really don't get it.

Cockamamiegodbotheringfuckwits

Every day for the last twenty months or so I have had a feeling as if we have slipped through the looking glass. 

Then randomly this meme appeared in my feed on Facebook. I had to comment, not because what I have said above and below these lines in italic are dissimilar to 99% of the other comments, but because there is almost a duty on the rational people of this world to stand together and reinforce each other's belief that the worlds morons really do stand in their own puddles of existence, and that the majority while suffering from moments of incredulity, are not alone ... if it needed affirming.

FFS the world is made enough without this kind of willful attempt to subvert knowledge and pervert history to your own narrow agenda and ends.

It is funny that people this stupid and egregious exist, and can be entertaining to those that point and laugh (and rightly so), but it's also desperate that in this age of enlightenment, morons like this exist ... and can access seven billion other people with a few keystrokes.

DWP Outsourced Jobfinder services (PS: My complaint has been upheld).

Having had to deal with the DWP extensively this year due to an injury. I can say without fear of contradiction that they are a mismanaged shower with entire systems duplicated in several places. Outsourced services to independent contracting companies, with variations in those same outsourced services from region to region (Web portals, interpretations of the scheme and its implementation, methodology and management). There is a common schema they must have tendered to, but clearly, the government doesn't own the implementation process.

This means, that if you have been dropped into the Southwest silo (as I was initially), then move back to Essex. Because the outsourced agency is different for that region, you have to start all over again "Yeah we'll scrub all that and put you into our scheme." those words that order. However, at the same time, the previous outsourced unit (Serco for our purposes) isn't informed of the change (and even if they have been informed, they still carry through the process because it is in their interests for billing purposes and KPI's).

On from this, those same services just aggregate results from across the web, so as you move through lists of say, available jobs, they become less relevant (they are just an extra layer of links to elsewhere). A fair number of the people that work within these schemes have been recruited this year and last year, by the government's contractors to assist in alleviating the fallout from the pandemic (massaging the unemployment figures and are temporary in nature). More often than not, if you have had a relatively varied and successful career, you find yourself teaching the teachers, who are from the conversations I've had, people who have had one job in one place for their entire careers. They have been rushed through training and just parrot stuff from a script, before sending you a link to review their performance. Boxes ticked, responsibilities absolved, KPI's met ... moving swiftly on.

I concede that the government couldn't predict the pandemic or its fallout. But I can say that the mitigation efforts are a total clusterfuck. And of course, it's the governments favourite outsource companies carving up the pie, G4S, Serco etc. Underlying this is the DWP itself, who now after eight months and an official complaint acknowledge that I have been subject to no less than five points of official maladministration, and thirteen points of order, including, poor service, misinformation, or just wrong information.

And let's not get into how much of our money is spunked on letters, duplicates of the same letters to ensure they cover their arses, and lowest cost time of day SMS messaging and multiple thereof.

And finally, having acknowledged that the DWP have screwed up right royally, the complaint is too complex for the people in the complaints department to deal with, so now the onus is back on the end-user, Me, to escalate it to the next level. Yet again, box ticked, responsibility absolved, moving swiftly on. It truly beggars’ belief how shit the civil service is. I had a bit of a clue from working for them as a third-party contractor, but once you are in the thick of it as a user, it is mind-bendingly bad.