Rayvin

I mean, frankly, yes.

She sounds hugely unstable. She attacked her boyfriend with a lamp to the head while he was sleeping and it sounds like she may have tried to glass him as well. And then the subsequent court nonsense and media scrutiny has apparently been too much for her. He seems to have kind of stuck by her, weirdly. I don't really understand people but it sounds like she needed help and didn't get it. RIP.

I am not as sure as you are...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/15/bernie-sanders-democratic-centrists-alarm “You’re going to absolutely see significant money behind centrists, moderates, whatever, to defeat Sanders,” said Democratic strategist Andrew Feldman. “Bernie is absolutely going to see intensified scrutiny. He was never in this position of the frontrunner in the 2016 race, and you’re going to see things from a long career come out that people are gonna go after.” They're going to Corbyn him. So long Bernie... you'll be a terrorist sympathising antisemite before the year is out.

https://observer.com/2012/04/mayor-bloomberg-says-living-wage-bill-reminds-him-of-communist-russia/ Tbf to him though (and I concede I missed this first time around), this appears to have been said in 2012. So it's been dredged up now by the progressive wing to throw at him from a voting perspective. It's all over their channels. So it's not really super relevant unless he still holds those views.

On a separate point, everyone's favourite moderate Michael Bloomberg has equated the payment of a $10/hr minimum wage, applicable only in NYC, and only to companies who receive certain levels of government support - with communism. God help America, seriously. Some of these democrats really are to the right of the Tories. Not just through pragmatism, but in principle.

It's possible they might just let PSG get away with it because they're about as likely to win the CL as we are. And they're about the only serious team France has. I don't think this will stick anyway, when it goes to independent arbitration, City will come out swinging.

Apparently his relationship with Johnson has soured rapidly. Reports of him slamming the phone down on us over Huawei, along with our concerns over Iran (did we say anything remotely interesting about Iran??). Doesn't bode to well for the amazing trade deal.

The UK will probably be one option.

@Andrew Happy birthday mate

Agree. But ultimately this is the fault of the airline for trying to cram an extra row of seats in at the back.

Still voting Starmer.

You fucking agreed with me anyway

God I can almost believe that I would have said that

it helped in some ways. It did I think, 2 hours is a decent sign for an interview.

And the democratic party will be fearfully doing everything in their power to stop him I think he would have won last time but that it was his Corbyn moment. This time I'm concerned it will be his Corbyn wipeout. At some point AOC will run, and then we'll really see the whites of the Democratic party's eyes..

I've just spent several days being grumpy because of an existential crisis, a presentation I had to give for a job interview at 7.30 in the morning yesterday, and the subsequent lack of sleep that I had in the days before. I fixated on the nurses thing as a distraction. I'm just weird, basically.

Why has it changed already? I thought nothing changed until the end of the year. Also, I agree on some analysis he's being serious, but what the hell did he expect? How can any Brexiter possibly not have seen this shit coming.

I suspect this is actually, unironically, the full truth^

Definitely a Cummings move, agree on that. Also a great opportunity for Javid to save himself from the trainwreck of Brexit.

Aye, fair enough.

All of which, I acknowledge, takes us back to "why wouldn't they just say that". And come to think of it, all they said was 50,000 additional nurses. It's only when people delved into the numbers that all of a sudden this became an issue - not by the design of the Tories, but because some journalist has picked it up, misinterpreted the implications, and suddenly it was everywhere. If you're talking about how you arrived at the number of 50,000 - then explaining that part of the figure comes from retentions is just an explanatory aspect of your justification. I doubt they ever really anticipated that anyone would probe this particular issue tbh because the net result is 50,000 additional nurses. So actually, that's probably your answer as to why they didn't just say what they meant - they thought they did.

The second part of your post I agree with and at no point have I made any claims that anything they've said it remotely achievable. Believe it or not, this whole thing for me at least is based around logical consistency. I know the Tories lie, I'm not trusting them with shit, and I know they'll fail to do any of this. Literally all I'm saying is that their maths seems to have been right, and that the outcry was directed at the wrong things. I don't think the first part works though... if they lose someone and don't replace them for months, they're at a net loss of 1 until they manage it, when they're back to 0 change. What do you think is wrong with my assumption that the NHS gets a yearly influx of nurses from university training courses, some 14,000 or so apparently? Because that's where I think the net gain is - they have 14,000 who are currently all being used to replace departing staff (more or less, as the vacancies filter through the ranks) - and by holding onto people they otherwise expected to lose, some of those 14,000 no longer go straight into a replacement role, they're just a net gain - and to allow for the net gain, the Tories have allocated 18,500 of the 50,000 new posts to be for them. You said yourself that people are always replaced so there's no backfill issue to take care of - and these trainee nurses have been coming through the system for years and will be delivered to the NHS at whatever number they graduate at. So unless you think they're suddenly going to start training the surplus nurses away, they have to be going in as a net positive if the Tories manage to lower turnover to the point where less than 14,000 vacancies come up each year.

Their manifesto, and I just checked it, says that there will be 50,000 more nurses available to the NHS. To my mind, there is no possible interpretation of that other than that 50,000 new posts will be created. I guess the next question is that given that I think that number can be defended reasonably simply based on what I've set out, and that they've stuck to it, why do you think they're adding only 31,000 more nurses - something that they haven't officially conceded at any point. Johnson acknowledged that 31,000 new nurses would be recruited. That's a subcategory of 'additional', in this context. So I would argue that they have indeed unambiguously said so. At least in the manifesto and subsequent explanations. Where they've failed is in the initial announcement, presumably because some halfwit came out and said they would be "new" nurses. The only other thing I can think of is that they expected everyone to understand this point relatively easily and were a bit surprised when all hell broke loose. I'm curious what you mean about practical reasons why keeping someone on will increase the work force available. The word equivalent to me reads as if it is being used to explain what the 2% figure looks like in reality, but I can see you're reading it as some kind of euphemism for... I don't know. Maybe it's within this that the answer lies.

ewerk my friend, you're more than welcome to have digs at me, in part because you actually did make the effort, and in part because I'm aware that me accepting it is less fun for you