When will this shit end?

[Mr.Tease]

10 hours ago, dotdash79 said:

The next stage, these property owners are scared

What an annoying read that article is. Bunch of sociopaths- basically  "we're going to try lie and and scare and threaten people and their bosses into pressuring them to return to workplaces (that will end up getting closed down again when things flare up as a response to it)", trying to tell bosses "oh, they're not working as hard as you think they are!" and workers "oh, well you know if you're not seen at work, they'll fire you first!" as if there aren't employment laws.

This working from home thing can help solve a lot of problems we were facing (ridiculous price of commuting, time wasted commuting, loss of family time, overcrowded roads and trains, high rents, environmental damage, child care, etc etc)- yes it brings up new problems, but rather than focus on those and see what can be done, they just want to try and go back to the way things were (newsflash: they're not going to!). So we're just going to waste months doing some half-arsed threats rather than pro actively trying to adapt things and take advantage of the opportunities..

[zahidf]

 

[Mr.Tease]

1 hour ago, Quark said:

And as if by magic, up pops another turd in the waterpipe. This is lifted from the BBC website as there's no way I'm paying the Times' firewall:

"The Times' columnist, Iain Martin, thinks a lack of after-work socialising may be what draws people back to the office - something he thinks might benefit "ambitious, young, white-collar Britons" - who go on to "prove themselves much keener" than the over-40s "wittering on about work-life balance"."

Wittering on about work life balance indeed. Get back into the office you plebs and work for your masters, stop being selfish and worrying about your own wellbeing.

c**ts.

 

They're all shameless government stenographers- if the government was insisting people need to work from home to stop the spread of the virus, they would be knocking out an articles attacking the under 40s for being selfish and wanting to put their socialising and parties ahead of people lives (like they were pumping out at the start of lockdown to cover up for the governments atrocious handling of the situation), we have a completely corrupt print media.

[Mr.Tease]

1 hour ago, Zoo Music Girl said:

The more I see this kind of shit, the less it makes me want to go back to an office. In fact it makes me want to double down just to spite them. So from that point of view it feels counterproductive!

 

Ha, me too! 

[mcmenace]

I work in the Public Sector and our HR team recently carried out an audit on who is desperate to return to the office, who would be happy to continue working from home and attend the office on occasions, and those who wish to continue WFH full time because of personal circumstances etc. Out of almost 700 employees less than 10 said they want to get back to the office. The company are in no way forcing us back either. They're happy for us to continue WFH for the foreseeable future as there's no way they can have the whole workforce in and stick to social distancing. It's all that dynamic working/hot desking crap anyway which nobody in their right mind would want to do right now! 

[Fuzzy Afro]

1 hour ago, zahidf said:

 

 

Old twats should mind their own business

Christ. Instead of fearing a second wave, us youngsters should be praying for one. 

[efcfanwirral]

These two lines from the Mail article are shocking. What does home working have to do with furlough? 

And if you want rid of furlough, you have to remove restrictions.

[Fuzzy Afro]

5 minutes ago, efcfanwirral said:

These two lines from the Mail article are shocking. What does home working have to do with furlough? 

And if you want rid of furlough, you have to remove restrictions.

 

To be fair, I’m pretty open with my employer that it’s not fear of covid that’s preventing me going back to the office. I just don’t see any value in spending £150 a month on a season ticket to attend an office that would mean:

 

- Having to wear a face covering when not at my desk

 

- Social distancing in the office

 

- No face to face meetings, which is the benefit of working in an office

 

- An extra hour at either end of my day 

 

 

I’d hope everyone else in my boat is saying this. It’s hypocritical to claim you’re too scared of the virus to go back to the office but then be going down the pub every week etc. I will happily tell my employer I have very little fear of the virus, just have realised the office is more trouble than it’s worth 

[Quark]

1 minute ago, Fuzzy Afro said:

 

To be fair, I’m pretty open with my employer that it’s not fear of covid that’s preventing me going back to the office. I just don’t see any value in spending £150 a month on a season ticket to attend an office that would mean:

 

- Having to wear a face covering when not at my desk

 

- Social distancing in the office

 

- No face to face meetings, which is the benefit of working in an office

 

- An extra hour at either end of my day 

 

 

I’d hope everyone else in my boat is saying this. It’s hypocritical to claim you’re too scared of the virus to go back to the office but then be going down the pub every week etc. I will happily tell my employer I have very little fear of the virus, just have realised the office is more trouble than it’s worth 

I'm in both camps.  I'm not 'scared' of the virus given my own state of health and probability of how it would affect me, but I certainly don't want to be a transmission vector that could infect those I care about who aren't as robust, and by extension keep the bastard thing hanging around for any longer than it has to.

Equally I've got a massive chunk of my life back that was previously spent getting up at 05:30 and home at about 19:00, and travelling to an office I don't really need to be at in order to do my job effectively, and I'm pretty open about that with my bosses (as are they!).  I take my own food to work so apart from the occasional lunch from M&S I'm not spending anything.

[DeanoL]

 

2 hours ago, steviewevie said:

I don't know...maybe for some younger people this is true...and maybe these people will more likely be back in the office. Won't be everyone though.

I think that's the one down-side - even if they did, the more senior people won't be able to see it, so it'll be harder to make that impact. While I'm massively in favour of home working, it will require some thought from companies on how to effectively emulate some of the stuff you learn just from seeing other people work, cross team communications from discussions around the kettle, etc.

[DeanoL]

With the whole "Christmas is cancelled" thing - I don't think it's going to be as clear cut as "same as usual" versus "stay in your homes, don't travel".

I think we'll see revised guidelines limiting gathering in homes to a maximum of 6 or 8 people, or 2/3 households. There will be huge fuss about from people with huge families who always meet up at Christmas and have dinner with 14 people, but reality will be they will be in a minority, and can just split into smaller groups, no-one has to be eating dinner on their own.

What's going to be the bigger issue is restaurants losing the Christmas party trade - it's going to be near impossible for the government to encourage people to mix different households for restaurant trips in December while telling people they can't see their familes.

[squirrelarmy]

21 minutes ago, Fuzzy Afro said:

To be fair, I’m pretty open with my employer that it’s not fear of covid that’s preventing me going back to the office. I just don’t see any value in spending £150 a month on a season ticket to attend an office that would mean:

 

- Having to wear a face covering when not at my desk

 

- Social distancing in the office

 

- No face to face meetings, which is the benefit of working in an office

 

- An extra hour at either end of my day 

I have the same guidelines at my work. I can only do part of my job at home, I need to be on site building prototypes and programming cutting machines as well. 
 

I also don’t have to worry about transport costs due to my free bus pass. 

[steviewevie]

Ian Dunt in his weekly review email that I subscribe to...

It was only a matter of time really. The right wing press has an anger quota, like Stalin demanding a set amount of grain regardless of what has happened with the harvest. That anger quota must be fulfilled in the same way, regardless of whether there is any reason to feel it. The current excuse is working from home.

"You can hear them every single day on radio phone-ins, boasting smugly about their exciting new 'work/life balance' and the amount of money they are saving on their railway season tickets," the rage-merchant Richard Littlejohn wrote in the Mail last night, shortly before admitted that he himself writes and files from home and has done for 30 years. 

The Telegraph bolstered the growing campaign with the front page headline: "Go back to work or risk losing your job". A government source told the newspaper: "We need workers to be alert to what decisions their bosses may take in the weeks ahead. If they are only seeing workers once a fortnight then that could prove problematic for some employees in the future." A Cabinet minister added: "Companies will realise some people weren't working as hard as they thought".

At the moment, the government isn't quite jumping on that message - it prefers a more upbeat approach to getting people back to work. But there is clearly a strong contingent in the administration wanting to throw red meat to the growing press campaign. 

It's a grim sight. People who don't feel safe should not be forced to go to work. Journalists and ministers should not be legitimising the most pernicious practices of the worst employers. We are still in a pandemic, with cases on the rise and schools about to go back. This is not the time to frighten people into going back to the office.

But quite aside from the covid-related aspects, something else is playing out underneath the debate. It is about the commute, and where we live, and the things that make a good life. 

It's been about six months since the Great Change happened. The losses have been gargantuan and trivial - from life itself to a friend's embrace. Whole industries are tottering on the edge of oblivion.

But there has been an upside. There's no point denying it, just because it was motivated by something terrible. Many people have found that their quality of life, much as Littlejohn might like to disparage the notion, has greatly improved. 

The commute is a word we once used without thinking. Now, from this vantage point, it seems an act of life-harming lunacy. Some of us are lucky, enjoying a trip into work of just 45 minutes or so. But even there, you have lost an hour and a half of every day, on crammed public transport. Many are not so lucky. They commute into the nearest city, on run down and unreliable trains, shelling out impossible amounts of money for something which brings no pleasure. Many will undergo a one and a half hour, or even two hour commute - that's three to four hours a day gone, every day, for the rest of your working life. 

Freed from the commute, many people have found that they work more and spend more time with their family, or on the things that bring them joy. Even if a day has been stressful, the eradication of the commute means you don't have that last tedious journey home, sucking up more precious time. You're more likely to cook than grab a ready meal, more likely to chat to a friend rather than plonk down and vegetate in front of the TV. 

Remote working has had an interesting effect on the assumptions of businesses. For a long time, the assessment of whether someone was working well was based on how they behaved rather than their results. This was one of the great tyrannies of the open office, a kind of white-collar panopticon, where you could always be seen and therefore had to always look busy, even if in reality an effective working day is made up of bursts of activity, rather than a sustained level of it. People stay late to be seen to be staying late, rather than because it is required.

With everyone working off-site, employees are instead being judged on what they produce, on whether they do the work required of them. That's more profound than just a management technique. It's about respect for autonomy rather than imitation - of workers who can go about their tasks however they like, whenever they like, as long as they achieve them. It values self-starting and personal motivation over a superficial copy-and-paste assessment of performance - one which agitates against quality of life.

That Cabinet minister's comment speaks volumes. They simply assume people aren't working hard from home. That's because those who constantly demand proof of work, rather than evidence of it, are motivated by a bleak assessment of humanity. And so they set up tests to catch people. And that in itself creates a culture in which people are constantly trying to dodge the rules, because they are not treated with dignity. You respond to the system imposed on you. If it's trying to catch you out, you try to catch it out. If it respects you, you try to live up to it. 

This change isn't for everyone. Many people thrive on the social element of the office. Others, especially people in their 20s and 30s, make friends there, go for drinks after work, meet the people they love there. 

There are also painful economic costs, which we are experiencing right now, especially to the shops and infrastructure which service office workers. Pret A Manger, for instance, announced nearly 3,000 job losses yesterday. Transport networks, including the London Tube, will be battered. And those of us who love the hustle and bustle of the city, that sense of charged dynamism, have to face up to the fact that it'll go into partial decline if this continues. Cities will become quieter places, more mellow, and investment will instead go to the suburbs and even the countryside.

These are big changes. And there are costs - steep ones. But you can now, if you look clearly enough, see a different, better way of life being presented to us by the pandemic. Not one in which everyone always works from home, but one in which the office becomes a place you go to sometimes, for specific reasons, rather than all the time. One in which, to use that dreaded but important phrase, there is a better work/life balance. One in which people are rated on the job they do rather than how they look when they do it, when autonomy and effectiveness are praised more highly than mimicry.

The temptation now, in parts of the press and government, is to stamp on this before it can grow. But in truth, people have glimpsed a better life. And, with a bit of luck, this could be the moment in which we grasp it.

[steviewevie]

STATS!

 

[steviewevie]

 

[Chapple12345]

1 minute ago, steviewevie said:

STATS!

 

It mentions underneath that the increase is related to the heatwave we had and that Covid remains relatively flat which is slightly more positive news  

[steviewevie]

Trafford about to be released from the local lockdown thing. I wonder if they'll let me in.

[FestivalJamie]

ECDC puts UK at a 14 day rate per 100,000 of 23.2.

https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/cases-2019-ncov-eueea

[Leyrulion]

3 minutes ago, FestivalJamie said:

ECDC puts UK at a 14 day rate per 100,000 of 23.2.

https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/cases-2019-ncov-eueea

Which puts the UK at about 18th out of the 30 countries they're reporting on. 

Nice to be thoroughly mid table in a stat for once.

[FestivalJamie]

2 minutes ago, Leyrulion said:

Which puts the UK at about 18th out of the 30 countries they're reporting on. 

Nice to be thoroughly mid table in a stat for once.

What I find strange is that Portugal has been released from quarantine yet sits on a rate of over 30 per 100,000.

Sweden sits at 31.9 and remains under quarantine.

When adding countries like France/Austria etc the rates were about 27-29 per 100,000, so I find it surprising that Portugal was removed. Is it possible for the gov to do another u turn and add them to quarantine again in a couple of weeks?

[Fuzzy Afro]

Just now, FestivalJamie said:

What I find strange is that Portugal has been released from quarantine yet sits on a rate of over 30 per 100,000.

Sweden sits at 31.9 and remains under quarantine.

When adding countries like France/Austria etc the rates were about 27-29 per 100,000, so I find it surprising that Portugal was removed. Is it possible for the gov to do another u turn and add them to quarantine again in a couple of weeks?

The guy on reddit that collates the stats has had Portugal on the “watchlist” since like 2 days after they came off the list. Basically cases started to rise straight away once the air bridge was open. They met the threshold to go back on yesterday with Switzerland, Jamaica and Czech Republic, but it’s believed they didn’t go on because the government wanted to give them an extra week to avoid an embarrassing u-turn. They might well go back on the list soon. 

[FestivalJamie]

20 minutes ago, Fuzzy Afro said:

The guy on reddit that collates the stats has had Portugal on the “watchlist” since like 2 days after they came off the list. Basically cases started to rise straight away once the air bridge was open. They met the threshold to go back on yesterday with Switzerland, Jamaica and Czech Republic, but it’s believed they didn’t go on because the government wanted to give them an extra week to avoid an embarrassing u-turn. They might well go back on the list soon. 

Do you have a link to the watchlist? I find it interesting to keep updated.

I reckon Portugal will be added again next week!

[steviewevie]

A bluffer’s guide to surviving Covid-19

https://www.ft.com/content/176b9bbe-56cf-4428-a0cd-070db2d8e6ff

[steviewevie]

1 minute ago, steviewevie said:

A bluffer’s guide to surviving Covid-19

https://www.ft.com/content/176b9bbe-56cf-4428-a0cd-070db2d8e6ff

The typical English resident has a 44 in a million chance each day of being infected.

[steviewevie]

2 minutes ago, steviewevie said:

A bluffer’s guide to surviving Covid-19

https://www.ft.com/content/176b9bbe-56cf-4428-a0cd-070db2d8e6ff

Covid-19 currently presents a background risk of a one in a million chance of death or lasting harm, every day. The risk of death alone is one in 2 million.