ChezGiven

The power of the still image, innit. That's why photo journalism is important because words dont always have the power to move people. I agree with the sentiment but its even worse than taking a dead child to wash up on the shore for people to take notice. Its takes an image of a dead child to wash up on the shore for people to take notice. Yesterday morning on the radio some presenter went into a massive rant calling people arseholes because they only responded to the story with the image. Well durhh.

If you open the tin and put the tin itself directly on a gas heat, you can get a beautiful charring on the wrapper up the sides. The heinz green looks exquisite next to the charred black.

Too close to Balls I imagine her kneeling down sniffing a pair for some reason.

The new Dam Funk album - Invite the Light. Funky.

Sounds lovely Trooper. Cant believe how up their own arse's people are on here.

On that note, what do people think about Yvette Cooper? Been impressed with her over the last week or so.

I do like to take the piss out of myself but i would be quite happy to be accused of being up my own arse. There are much worse places to be. I would personally hand it to another poster who lives within a certain geographic area and has been known to post on here using his left hand only.

Love the bus. Well loved, doubt I'll be back soon.

Timing The Angie Stone track.

Topical. Were you at the Carnival? That's a Norman Jay / Good Times Bus anthem. Well it was anyway.

That's tomorrow.

I'd really like one for running but as it doesnt have a GPS it doesnt map your run, just counts distance. Apparently if you use it with the phone GPS then run with it without, it measures your distance accurately from the motion sensor. I still wouldnt have a map of all my runs. You can download music to it so you dont need the phone strapped to your arm. I also like the boarding card thing as this is something that annoys me when am listening to music on the phone when boarding. When it has GPS am in, the top Garmins are about 300 euros anyway.

Is he having a wank?

Spoiler alert, you're going to pipe down.

Do you have any family pets?

Looks great. Inglorious Bastards meets Last of the Summer Wine.

Or his lack of ligaments.

Anyone into insane underground german techno, the new Berghain album is free to download off Soundcloud. Darker than Monkey Fist's c drive. https://soundcloud.com/ostgutton-official/berghain-07-function

Production on the new album is very good. The drone / shoe-gaze vibe on Sparks is done really well. Enjoying it much more than i thought i would. Definitely a highlight of the year.

The article is in part gibberish. A National Health Service is defined like this: funded through taxation, free at the point of use, equity in access according to need. However, the introduction of private companies into the provision of healthcare is a concern but in theory should not be. After the healthcare reforms of the early 90s, the role of the purchaser of healthcare services and the provider of the services was split. There were many competing concerns at the time, and a very influential and politically connected Economics Prof (Le Grand) from the LSE articulated the concerns best using Organisational Economic theory from the Chicago school (Williamson 1975 iirc). The basic analysis was about whether large complex organisations should be split up for efficiency reasons and the conclusions were clear. When an organisation like the NHS is split as per the reforms (the structure is still there today ans drives the current debate), the purchasers of services need to design complex contracts with the purchasers. The theory stated that when you have certain conditions (like we know exist in healthcare), the contracting process becomes v complex and to monitor them creates 'transaction costs'. These costs can be modeled and the eminent prof predicted that the transaction costs (admin, managers, finance directors - sound familiar?) of the Purchaser/Provider split would outweigh the benefits. I think the feeling remains within the NHS that this is the case but no one (to the best of my knowledge) has ever undertaken the analysis. How they would do that now is not that clear either. Now we have come to accept the split and the structure. What this means is that we have purchasing groups making contracts with any providers based on historical contracts. So putting aside the potentially higher transactions costs of the new structure, i cant see how the financial and economic make-up of the provider organisation should impact the services purchased in the context of the contracts. Its good to use an example. A provider supplies hip replacements (hypothetical). The purchaser (the CCGs who replaced the PCTs) has a population it looks after and last year they purchased 1000 hip replacements. The HRG Tariff for hip replacement is £1000 which gives the provider a 1m revenue. The purchaser has to monitor and maintain quality, so there are performance measures included in the contract which are based on outcomes, time spent recovering etc. They also need to account for the uncertain 'demand' for services, so there will a block clause (1000 ops) and an additional clause for less or more. Now if the purchaser gets 1000 ops for 1m with a guarantee of quality - here is the controversial bit - then what is the cost to society? A privately run provider comes along and offers to do the same 1000 operations with the same performance measures, the same penalties, the same outcomes as measured contractually. However, they win the contract because they offer to do it for 950 per operation and to collect data to analyse long term trends in outcomes to understand how to improve performance. This is a better deal for the purchaser and patients. The purchasers (who are NOT private ever in the new structure) are not going to accept worse conditions from private companies when they have incumbent suppliers. The private entrants have to compete with public incumbents and are upheld to the same contracts. The arguments against this happening are not based in economics or social political analysis, they are based on the notion that because an actor in the system made money privately, its not an NHS. See first sentence.

Foals are shit. Kaputt is the best album of the decade. Or one of them. New one is v good. Times Square is lovely.

Really enjoyed the first episode. 2 small annoyances, the voice over was used a bit too much but that actually ended up being ok for me as we had to choose to have the Spanish in French or English subtitles. She won, obviously.

Dinotrux. It's basically about dinosaurs but the twist is they are trucks too. Not sure about how realistic it is but it's got some canny dinosaurs who just want to get along and then this massive radge packet T Rex / Scandia who is always out to get them. They get help from these small reptile lizards who can fix the Dinotrux. They are called Reptools and are quite cute. It's fucking mint, season 1 is a bit slow but it gets canny after that.

Going to start watching Narcos on Netflix tonight. Any good?