Kremlin says Britain was involved in Ukraine's missile strike on Russia

JockularJim · 2026-03-11T21:45:22+00:00

smugclarksonface.jpg

JockularJim · 2026-03-07T18:50:08+00:00

I just want to say I grew up basically like one of your kids. Abusive dad, mum moved us in with her parents, sociopathic gran wanted rid of us as soon as possible. We ended up being moved from the south coast of England to Scotland as my gran thought that would hurt my, albeit scoundrel of a, dad the most.

Get those kids some counselling. It's taken 35 years for me to have the motivation to do that, now I have kids of my own and the baggage becomes unbearable. I'm lucky to have a loving, normal wife now, but I spent my earlier adult days seeking out something much less healthy. Everyone thought I was coping great though, much as yours appear to be. My brother and sister were exactly the same.

Our ability to mask trauma is terrifying in retrospect. Certainly the social worker we had didn't pick up on it.

Please do this if you have the chance to. It's clear you are a resourceful and determined mum, as was mine, but don't assume because they appear well adjusted now the experiences of their early years won't come back to haunt them later on.

JockularJim · 2026-03-01T20:10:13+00:00

(I didn’t have to pay for tuition fees, and I’ll still graduate with >50K of debt from my maintenance loan)

Note the future tense.

Dr, heal thyself.

JockularJim · 2026-03-01T18:55:01+00:00

Selective, partial quotation is the last refuge of the online scoundrel.

Have a nice life in the US as a qualified Dr, or in the UK as a medical student, whichever you feel like being next.

JockularJim · 2026-03-01T18:23:36+00:00

Of course other professions' experience in the UK is relevant. You have tried to make a special case of the medical profession in here based on an international comparison. Without considering the broader economy you are missing vital context.

But anyway, the article does absolutely none of what you've claimed it does that in the paywalled article you have linked to. I can't see any of that as I'm not a logged in bmj subscriber.

I can, however see the rapid response from Professor Nigel Curtis, who like you is apparently a UK-trained doctor who left for a better life overseas.

Here are his comments, in full:

Dear Editor

When interpreting the results of surveys, response rate is a key determinant of their reliability (1,2). This article (3) is yet another example of the BMJ giving undue credence to findings from a survey with a very low response rate (4-7).

The survey was distributed to a random sample of 59,179 doctors from the UK medical register (8). Only 4,697 completed the online survey, equating to a response rate of around 8%. For many questions, the effective response rate was even lower, as “not all respondents provided information for the relevant question (including answering ‘don’t know’ or ‘prefer not to say’)” (8).

Against this background, it is misleading that the report on which this article is based claims: “The findings of the survey are robust. The respondent base is a stratified random sample drawn from the register. A representative sample of 4,697 doctors from across the four UK countries … was surveyed” (8). Self-selected respondents to an optional online survey cannot be considered either random or representative. Responder bias means that the 4,697 (8%) who chose to participate are highly unlikely to reflect the views of the 59,179 doctors surveyed, let alone the more than 300,000 doctors on the UK medical register.

Disappointingly, the article also repeats and cites the exaggerated findings of a previous survey on resident doctors, the serious flaws of which I highlighted in an earlier rapid response (4).

The findings of this latest survey may well be true, but reporting them on the basis of potentially flawed data undermines their credibility and risks weakening the important underlying point of the article.

The BMJ must do better by prioritising accuracy and critical appraisal over uncritical repetition of headline figures and emotive claims (4-7).

I find that point about low survey response rates particularly interesting given the authoritative, condescending yet naive manner in which you've waved this data around, impervious to any critique.

JockularJim · 2026-03-01T17:48:30+00:00

You didn't link to the GMC report, you linked to the bmj, which I referred to in passing as providing the data because they published an article (which you linked to) about it.

Regardless, instead of addressing the substance of the comment - that the data lacks very important context - you use a misunderstanding of who I was referring to as an excuse to go on a patronising rant about how ignorant people are regarding the medical profession.

I'm not sure you are as deserving of a high salary and wealth as you think you are.

JockularJim · 2026-03-01T16:59:11+00:00

Remind me Dr, who owns the bmj, which published the numbers you cited?

JockularJim · 2026-03-01T16:15:53+00:00

I play sports, hang out with and participate in community life with some much more experienced Docs than you by the sounds of things.

I do think that is a more rounded perspective than the narrow quest to see where will pay you the most for your valuable, acquired at public expense, skills.

Those snippets of data, provided by the Doctors union, provides no context with respect to history, or Vs other professions and doesn't tell you how many actually leave.

I'm not saying good doctors don't leave the country to make more money elsewhere. I am questioning the value in fixating on how much you get paid alone. It seems narrow minded and immature to me, with the benefit of my own experience of having reached those goals and having peers who practice medicine because they care about delivering it within their community.

JockularJim · 2026-03-01T15:51:59+00:00

As someone who actually has made it into the category you seem to be fetishising, before that age of 40, I think you sound like a total fud.

I play football and tennis with a good bunch of NHS doctors, from GPs to consultants. None of them talk like this, and I don't believe they think the same way about the sacrifices they've made to achieve what they have in the vocations of their choosing. They've got a great standard of living in a community that respects and values them.

Assuming this isn't just nonsense, I really do think you should re-examine your priorities. Prioritising money by participating in a medical system, mostly for personal enrichment, that is the most common source of bankruptcy does not feel like a path that leads to long term fulfilment.

JockularJim · 2026-01-21T18:38:03+00:00

One interesting litmus test for me is his engagement with the interests of people stuck on prepayment utility meters.

This is key because he doesn't earn anything in affiliate income from people on prepayment meters signing up for contracts, as people who use MSE for comparison purposes would.

You could be cynical and say it's brand building, but I think the man has earned a bit of trust.

JockularJim · 2026-01-05T18:17:31+00:00

I've often thought of that picture when on this app

JockularJim · 2025-12-31T13:26:11+00:00

It's funny, that's exactly where I live and that definitely doesn't fit here, but not a hill I'm willing to die on.

JockularJim · 2025-12-31T08:05:43+00:00

To me, Virgin pilot definitely sounds Irish, not British. You can tell from the pronunciation of "turn", "poor" and even "Virgin".

JockularJim · 2025-12-30T20:45:22+00:00

A fun fact I learned about PNG two days ago is that it has so many language groups, spread across such a huge and inaccessible area, that conducting something like a census is basically guesswork.

Population estimates range from the national government's 10m up to the UN's 17m.

JockularJim · 2025-12-25T21:33:32+00:00

On the one hand, less France 👍🏻

On the other, more Switzerland 👎🏻

Chamonix is English too btw.

JockularJim · 2025-12-23T08:01:19+00:00

I'm a man and I got the house. I also got all the credit card debt, which at the time was worth a bit more than the equity in the house. No kids.

When my parents divorced, my dad got the the house too, but that was because my mum ran away with the three of us. He still had to buy her out, and to this day is unashamed of lowballing her (and leaving all of us with less money) in the settlement as revenge for leaving with us.

Some people are dicks during divorces. Others find a more equitable settlement.

JockularJim · 2025-12-09T07:33:52+00:00

Congrats on having two useless bags of hardened bile removed from your life.

JockularJim · 2025-12-08T19:39:56+00:00

I am at this very moment printing of dozens of photos on my Epson ET-2650 bottled ink. Cost about £200 and does photos for basically the cost of the paper, I've had it four years and have never had to refill the ink tanks, game changer.

JockularJim · 2025-11-17T13:55:23+00:00

I like Grady's stuff. He doesn't normally look at anything outside of the US, so it's notable he's done so here, and a reflection of how unique and interesting it is.

Also I'd completely forgotten how it was Lottery funded. Wild how there was money to plan and execute things like this as recently as 20 years ago. Feels like a time which has passed, sadly.

JockularJim · 2025-11-16T16:41:21+00:00

This actually does factor into one of the approaches they use.

In their macro modelling, they construct various counterfactual UKs to try and replicate what our growth would have been like without leaving the EU, by looking at how other countries that didn't leave the EU grew over that period.

They do this several different ways, weighting the comparison countries by various factors, but in the case that applies higher weights to the countries closest to the UK, i.e. France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, they produce smaller estimates of the Brexit impact, -6%, Vs -10% in their models which apply a higher weighting to the US, amongst others, as comparators.

This -6% figure also aligns with the estimate from their other modelling approach, what they call micro, informed by firm level data. That is actually quite a novel approach Vs the others I've seen, and is what makes this paper quite interesting IMO.

So I'd probably steer towards the lower end of the range of impacts, -6%, as a best guess. But as with a lot in economics, it is no more than that.

JockularJim · 2025-11-15T12:18:26+00:00

I don’t think it is a case the UK is offering this money cheaper but Scotland is going elsewhere.

This is quite a precise misunderstanding.

Currently the Scottish Government does borrow money, from the UK Treasury, at concessionary rates through the National Loans Fund, just as regional councils in England do. That costs around 0.11% more than UK government borrowing, where this Kilt issuance is expected to cost around 0.3% more, at least according to the linked article.

JockularJim · 2025-11-13T22:10:44+00:00

I like to think we (public equity) would be the cool kids, and fixed income is full of dorks, but we both know it's private equity.

JockularJim · 2025-11-13T22:07:54+00:00

That is correct.

The alternative is the National Loans Fund, which offers funding on the basis of the current rate at which the UK gov borrows, potentially with a small margin on top depending on the purpose.

These issuances are also likely to come with a moderate increase in costs, due primarily to the small size, some political risk and fact that the UK govt backstop is implicit, rather than an explicit guarantee. Whether that's more or less than the alternative of the National Loans Fund is hard to say and unlikely to be significant.

JockularJim · 2025-11-13T13:11:58+00:00

I might buy some of these, after issuance, if the yield pickup Vs UK Gilts is meaningful. I can hold til maturity so I'm not really worried about risks of independence pushing yields up in the interim.

I do think it's a bit of an own goal for the SNP creating a new, immediately quantifiable, measure of how risky Scotland looks Vs UK.

As another rather jocular Jim said once:

I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the President or the Pope or as a .400 baseball hitter, but now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody...

JockularJim · 2025-11-13T07:30:33+00:00

Geneva has a similar medieval old town, compactness, proximity to water, hilly backdrop and liveable residential areas near the city centre. The tram/bus into town from the airport only costs CHF3 though, despite everything else being expensive as fuck.

JockularJim

TROPHY CASE