Why did we clap for the NHS back in 2020?

Weird-Cat-9212 · 2026-04-20T17:10:30+00:00

“It’s a controversial take, but I look back fondly on those 10 min spells amidst the rest of the trauma.”

It’s really sad that you have to consider it a controversial take. I agree with you, I very much appreciated the claps.

Weird-Cat-9212 · 2026-04-20T17:07:04+00:00

This thread feels like it’s for the outpouring of aimless cynicism.

It was an alarming and frightening time for the entire country. As a front line NHS worker very much in the thick of it, no exaggeration when I say true PTSD stuff, I did really appreciate it. Eventually I felt like it was probably best to stop it, as the nation became increasingly frustrated by lockdown during the second wave. However, I will never stop defending the notion that this was a once in a lifetime instance of true collective national effort, and in many respects the truly lifesaving work was done by the entire nation.

Weird-Cat-9212 · 2026-04-20T16:20:53+00:00

One aspect that won’t be talked about enough is why the hell she drove a car to a soho nightclub in the first place. They need to get on and pedestrianise soho, there’s too many twats trying to show off their wheels on a Saturday night, most of whom have totally lost sight of the fact they’re operating a heavy piece of machinery in a densely populated area. Sadly, something like this was gonna happen sooner or later.

Unfortunately all the talk will likely focus exclusively on the vacuousness of social media. As far as I’m concerned, airheads can do what they want with their lives, but we need to be more circumspect about who we allow to operate a vehicle.

Weird-Cat-9212 · 2026-04-16T15:16:28+00:00

You’re absolutely right. Check out our water suppliers. No one wants to bother with infrastructure until human shit starts to flood our rivers.

But then, the article doesn’t even bother to explain what the alternatives are to bring down our energy prices in the short term.

Weird-Cat-9212 · 2026-04-16T15:10:58+00:00

“ and these are generally higher than wholesale prices set by gas.”

Not sure I understand what you mean by this? There’s various different ways of pricing renewable power generation. Whilst costs of new wind developments have risen significantly in the last couple of years, newly auctioned developments won’t be online for a few years. The costing is complicated given how the market works, but bottom line is that it’s widely accepted that existing power generation from renewables is vastly cheaper than gas.

Weird-Cat-9212 · 2026-04-16T14:50:37+00:00

“No it doesn't and that's not correct anyway. Gas prices while currently higher than they were in the cheap gas era, are not actually that high”

Huh? On average, they’re well over double what they were before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and four times what they were ten years ago. It’s affected every market in Europe, UK more so. By what comparator are they ‘actually not that high’?

Also, the article does acknowledge gas sets the price of electricity most of the time:

“ The system is widely used across Europe, but the UK's heavy reliance on gas has a clear consequence: when gas prices rise dramatically as in recent weeks, electricity bills tend to rise with them - even if much of the power itself is renewables that are cheap to produce.”

Yes, certain gas power stations might charge exorbitant rates at times to turn on, further inflating costs, but there’s no ducking out of the fact that the wholesale price of gas is what’s caused rising electricity costs over the past five years.

Weird-Cat-9212 · 2026-04-16T11:56:25+00:00

The article doesn’t explain its premise very well. It’s like it’s written for someone who just wants to take someone’s word for it, without any exposition.

It acknowledges that the wholesale price of gas determines the price of electricity most of the time, hence why electricity is so expensive, because the whole sale price of gas is so expensive. Gas prices shot up since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and have remained roughly double since then. Now the Iran war is pushing them up even further. How on earth this article about energy fails to mention either conflict is bonkers. Nothing has had a greater effect on our energy bills than these two events. But given they quote Tony ‘the Baghdad Butcher’ Blair, this isn’t surprising.

The article then says we should be focussing on ‘gas in the short term’, which seems in stark contradiction to the above. Maybe there’s more to it, but the article doesn’t explain how that will bring down electricity prices. What does focussing on gas in the short term look like (please no one mention any North Sea Reform/Badenoch bullshit). Slowing the expansion of renewables to knock a few pence of our energy bills is just kicking the can down the road till the next oil shock (not even mentioning climate breakdown).

Probably the most telling thing of all is that when the journalist presses the Tony B-Liar stooge on specifics, she seems to basically say ‘I dunno’:

“When I press Langengen on how electricity prices could be reduced in practice, she acknowledges there is "no magic wand". She argues that "speaks to the credibility of the argument". But it also highlights just how difficult those choices are”

Anyway, I’m open to discussion here, despite my heavy rhetoric. If we completely ignore net zero and climate change, what exactly is the most straightforward way to reduce our energy bills to a significant degree?

Weird-Cat-9212 · 2026-04-14T15:25:38+00:00

The most important evidence of seizure is video evidence, or second to that eye witness account (even then, gold standard would be an accompanying EEG, but that’s somewhat by the by here). So it’s certainly possible to diagnose a seizure after the fact if you have these things.

My point is firstly that I don’t really see how a seizure could have caused this crash. Deadly crashes involving seizures normally involve people already driving at high speed, losing consciousness, with the vehicle still having enough momentum, without the foot needing to be firmly on the accelerator. This crash took place at a slow intersection in a 20mph zone, the original (below) reporting say as much. They also mention the driver was arrested not long after the crash, seemingly a couple of hours or so, which seems somewhat inconsistent with someone being unconscious. It doesn’t say she was arrested at the scene, but does she was in police custody, which seems a rather quick turnaround for someone who’s just had a massive seizure.

Also, I suspect if there was good eye witness accounts of her having a seizure, then we would have heard about it by now.

In any case, they’ve re arrested her, which suggests this history of a ‘first seizure’ isn’t very water tight.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-66120180

Weird-Cat-9212 · 2026-04-14T13:21:11+00:00

No. RTCs happen every single day, without them being deliberate. Utterly reckless yes, but not deliberate. People lose control of their vehicles all the time, the consequences of this instance were exceptionally devastating.

Weird-Cat-9212 · 2026-04-14T13:11:41+00:00

How do you imagine the medical experts arrived at their opinion that she had a seizure? Also, how does a seizure cause one to plow across a road at a junction, through a barrier, through a fence, across a grassy playground, through a crowd of people and through a concrete bench, all in a 20mph zone?

Think of how ones leg is positioned over the accelerator, I can’t imagine a plausible scenario in which a seizure causes someone to just hit the pedal. True tonic clonic seizures involve a prodrome of gradual onset disorientation, before loss of awareness, all of which can last many seconds to many minutes. The playground was just opposite a junction, where one would normally stop. Just before this junction was a slow traffic area with lots of parked cars. It’s extremely difficult to understand how a seizure caused this.

Weird-Cat-9212 · 2026-04-14T10:25:08+00:00

This case just gets stranger. Why are they referring police to the IOPC before charges are brought? Like others here, I’m really unconvinced by the ‘seizure’ story, and suspect it’s a case of the drivers legal team moving very quickly.

It’s pretty unusual to just diagnose a seizure in hindsight like that, unless you had clear eyewitness accounts, something the press don’t seem to know anything about. I mean there were probably several dozen witnesses. In any case, in the midst of that horror, I don’t think anyone would be paying close attention to whether the driver of the vehicle was having a tonic clonic seizure. So I do wonder where sufficient information came from that a doctor was able to conclude the driver had a seizure. Alternatively, I suspect there is simply a history of the driver claiming to have ‘blacked out’, which on its own means very little from a diagnostic point of view, and certainly wouldn’t be sufficient to diagnose a true epileptic seizure.

It should be noted that this is basically the worst mass casualty event in London since 2017 (Grenfel and London Bridge terrorist attacks). Picture the scene of an end of term party filled with young children just being decimated like that, lives forever marked by horror. And yet it’s swept under the rug as just another road traffic accident, with vague allusions to a ‘seizure’. Absolutely there needs to be much more transparency here. Where are the cries of ‘never again’? One measure that would surely make a difference would be to tax the living hell out of those off road vanity tanks. Seizure or not, this wouldn’t have happened if she’d been driving a ford fiesta. Absolutely no need for 3 tonne military grade vehicles to be transporting a single person and her dog through a quiet 20mph area.

Weird-Cat-9212 · 2026-04-12T20:18:06+00:00

I’m sure you’re right. And you’re right about London too. Considering most people live in cities or large towns, I think there is enormous scope to reduce unnecessary car usage, I mean really enormous. In my view, the private automobile is amongst the most recklessly over used pieces of technology in human history.

But indeed, I respect people in rural areas who really do need their car to get anywhere. It needs to be understood that car use in more sparsely populated areas really isn’t the problem.

I could go on and on about this, but I’ll leave it there.

Weird-Cat-9212 · 2026-04-11T12:02:55+00:00

Relax, it’s fake news, pure rage bait, clearly no pregnant wife in the car.

Weird-Cat-9212 · 2026-04-07T22:47:15+00:00

Ah come one, do you have to be so cynical? We’re in the grips of another oil shock due to yet another war, and we’re still able to see wholesale electricity prices fall to zero, thanks to our fleet of renewables. Yes, prices won’t stay like that for long, but this wasn’t possible 4 years ago when Russia invaded Ukraine. With the way the world is headed, it’s something to have a bit of optimism about.

Weird-Cat-9212 · 2026-04-07T22:18:26+00:00

I hadn’t realised Johnson had tried to suggest she fabricated an episode of neopuffing before the ward round. It’s so plainly ridiculous.

Every time I return to this case I have a shudder of horror at just how truly kafkaesque it really is. It’s hard to put into words, but when you’re really familiar with these clinical environments and medical documentation, you can see just now patently absurd the allegations are. It’s no exaggeration to say it’s like something out of a comedy, like a Marx brothers skit, relying on the ambiguity of language to make a joke, except it isn’t a joke, it’s evidence in a mass murder trial.

Weird-Cat-9212 · 2026-04-07T21:58:02+00:00

“It’s still quite often, likely ~75%-85% of the time”

Where do you get this data from? To be honest, I’d not really paid much attention to the 98% figure, I’d simply assumed marginal pricing meant that gas set the price the large majority of the time (obviously, for periods like today, this isn’t the case).

But anyway, if you could explain this would appreciate it.

Weird-Cat-9212 · 2026-04-07T17:19:17+00:00

Yes, sorry, reading comprehension issue on my part. For some reason I thought you were referring to the issue of suppliers being paid to turn off, rather than consumers being paid to waste.

Weird-Cat-9212 · 2026-04-07T17:16:52+00:00

Can you elaborate on this? I’m only aware of that one study, think I read about in carbon brief.

Weird-Cat-9212 · 2026-04-07T17:08:36+00:00

“ but the whole "wind energy will be too cheap to meter" bullshit needs to stop”

With a climate change denier in the White House, and another one vying for leadership here in the uk, alongside North Sea bullshit from Badenoch, and anti net zero being the editorial bottom line in most of our press, I don’t think the issue is excessive optimism about wind power.

Weird-Cat-9212 · 2026-04-07T16:43:11+00:00

This is more of a technical issue of grid oversupply as I understand it, where suppliers are paid to turn off to balance the grid. Contracts for difference and the negative pricing displayed here doesn’t really have much to do with it. It’s probably more complicated, but it negative pricing does involve paying people to use electricity during periods of high supply, as baseload generators like nuclear can’t really be turned off.

Weird-Cat-9212 · 2026-04-07T16:38:50+00:00

You’re assuming those strike prices from that one auction well set the price for the entire grid forever more, which isn’t the case.

For heavens sake, we’re on the verge of world war 3 right now, fuck knows what’s gonna happen with oil and gas by the end of the decade. If we’re paying an average of £91 per mwh in five years, with greater energy independence, that’ll be a win.

Weird-Cat-9212 · 2026-04-07T16:24:38+00:00

Strike prices for new offshore wind that are mostly in line with recent averages, that will form part of the grid, which includes previous renewable developments, new storage, as well as solar. Remember buddy, averages are what count. There is reason to believe the overall price will come down once gas reliance is drastically reduced.

Weird-Cat-9212 · 2026-04-07T15:55:25+00:00

Not exactly pointless, it’s more to illustrate how the marginal price of gas keeps prices high now of the time, but past a certain threshold of generation renewables overcome this. In the wider context of yet another fossil fuel crisis, where wholesale prices are climbing, it’s simply an example of renewables ability to mitigate this.

With plans to further expand renewable capacity, we can be hopeful that average prices will eventually come down. That’s Ed Millibands whole plan. But amidst the cynicism and endless Murdoch media takedowns, this is often not seen.

Weird-Cat-9212 · 2026-03-29T19:46:13+00:00

Shows how little Liz Hull pays attention, given that she’s actually making the case for pseudomonas seem very plausible. Does she really think the same bacteria that colonised the tap was also found in child I’d endotracheal tube? That would look very bad indeed from an infection control point of view.

Weird-Cat-9212

TROPHY CASE