Fuck off David

May 28th, 2015 § 0 comments § permalink

fuck_off _david

Pt. II

March 18th, 2015 § 0 comments § permalink

A match scrapes it’s way along the side of it’s box and flares into life. The flame settles down and passes it’s life to the wick of a dusty old oil lamp.

Ooh. Hey up. You still here? Does this thing still work, do you know?

The bonkers world of Asian Voice readers

August 8th, 2014 § 0 comments § permalink

First, world peace through the medium of yoga…

image

Presumably you can’t make war when you’re so twisted up you’re looking up your own sphincter.

Next up, acupressure is science…

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Oh, and the tips of your fingers are pressure points for your mind. So it’s not staring at a screen all day that gives me headaches, it’s banging my fingers on that infernal keyboard!

Lastly, some old duffer ponders why it takes half a day to get to Australia…

image

Yes, aeroplane people, where’s my fucking teleporter?!

300k and can’t afford childcare

March 18th, 2014 § 0 comments § permalink

David Cameron and his fag Nick Clegg want to do something nice to help hard working families with their childcare costs. The problem is, some hard working families need more help than others.

Cameron and Clegg have decided that it’d be a good idea to pay 20% of childcare costs, up to a maximum of £2,000 a year. I have to agree that that is indeed a nice idea. As usual with these two clowns, the implementation leaves a bit to be desired.

The maximum benefit under these new plans is 20% of your childcare costs, or £2,000 at the most, per child. £2,000 is 20% of £10,0000. The upper earning limit for being able to take advantage of this scheme is £300,000, or to put it another way £150,000 per parent.

Can anyone, except a fucking politician, seriously think that anyone earning £150k or a couple earning jointly earning £300k need fucking help paying for childcare?

Sure, childcare is expensive but c’mon, seriously? The wealthy, and anyone earning that kind of money is wealthy, might have an empty wallet at the end of every month just like someone on the minimum wage, but the difference is that the family on the minimum wage have to choose between eating or heating when their bank is empty.

What marks this out as the work of imbeciles is the inconsistencies with other policies, namely the changes to child benefit. Anyone earning more than £50k gets penalised with the stopping of child benefit, currently £20.30 a week for the first child. Again, if the family has two parents and they both earn, as long as neither earn more than £50k, the can still receive child benefit.

Just like the new childcare credit, a family with a single earner can earn half as much as the two income family before benefits are stopped. It doesn’t make sense, penalising the lower income household.

You’ve probably spotted the inconsistency. You earn too much to receive child benefit, but need to earn a fuck load more before the government think you’re able to pay all your own childcare costs.

Clegg has stated that they didn’t introduce various cut-off points as families told them they wanted the system to be done as simply as possible. I think Clegg misunderstood. People want the system to be as simple as possible to use. They don’t give a shit how complex it is behind the scenes, as long as it’s simple to access, and to help make things a little simpler, the cut-off should’ve been £50k, just like child benefit.

If the upper threshold for receiving this benefit was lower, the people who really need it could’ve received a bigger percentage of help.

But then, that wouldn’t have pleased their voters, would it?

The SNP are starting to shit themselves

February 13th, 2014 § 0 comments § permalink

I don’t really give a shit about Scottish independence one way or another. I don’t really know enough to know whether it’s a going to be a good or a bad thing for either Scotland or the rest of the UK, never mind how we’re going to divvy up the armed forces, the national debt and all that sort of thing.

What I do know though, is that it sounds like the SNP, who really, really, really want to move out of their parents house and live on their own.

I can tell that because they say they want independence, but then they say they want a fiscal union with the entity they’re wanting to extricate themselves from.

That is not independence. Scotland could have the same as independence with a fiscal union if they got more devolution. What sort of twats would call for complete independence and then when it’s within reach start back-pedalling and want to keep themselves tied to the very state they want to leave?

Previously it’s all been about how Scotland will be fine on their own. They can cope, flourish even. Now, for some reason, it’s not about how Scotland will do, it’s about the rest of the UK, how the rest of the UK needs Scotland.

The rest of the UK, as far as I can tell (and I am well prepared to be told I am wrong, and in fact expect it), couldn’t give a fuck and think if Scotland are to go it along then do it properly. All of a sudden though, the SNP sound rather desperate not to completely cut ties from the rest of the Union.

If the SNP aren’t careful, they’re going to fuck up their own campaign and scare the Scottish population into voting no to independence.

WDDTY – the cancer edition pt1

January 29th, 2014 § 0 comments § permalink

Those freedom fighters for medical freedom of speech, What Doctors Don’t Tell You, have released in full, for free their November issue – the cancer special.

As I’m not really up for giving WDDTY any money by subscribing and seeing all their articles in full as they’re promoters of alternative medicine, more commonly known as Woo (I’m also a tight arse), I usually only get to see the snippets they publish for free. Stuff like this.

This free copy of a publication is a good time for me to see what they’re really like. I got a link to it from they’re email newsletter and also from somewhere else I can’t remember. If you want to see it, you can download it from here.

What does it look like? Well, I’ve only got a couple of pages in and it has the look and feel of one of those womens ‘lifestyle’ or gossip magazines and starts with a long three page speech about how everyone except alt-med practitioners are in the pocket of Big Pharma and want to shut down WDDTY because they don’t accept Scientism and the alt-med practitioners are the real scientists as they have an open mind. All very predictable.

WDDTY also has a page profiling their editorial panel. I may come back to that, and the intro in another post.

For now though, I’ve only got to page 11, which sounds quite far in but isn’t once you dis-count the contents pages, editorial panel profile and the massive intro. I haven’t looked past page 11 so I don’t know what’s in store but the short articles in the Up Front section (short newsy type of articles) gives me an idea of what’s to come.

The first little snippet, on page 10, is titled “Flu Jab ‘a con’ says researcher”.

This little bit of news explains how a researcher has come to the conclusion that Big Pharma has been pushing the flu jab on everyone to boost sales. The researcher says that over the last few years the use of the flu jab has increased exponentially and is seen a ‘risk-free’ life saver whereas the vaccines aren’t particularly effective and cause more damage than good.

The thing is though, this study was conducted in the USA where there are some fundamental differences that have quite an effect.

Firstly, the researcher talks about the US market where drugs can be advertised directly to the consumer. People are encourage to go ask they’re doctors for specific drugs. In this environment more people will ask for the jab, whether they need it or not, what ever the government advice is. People, through the adverts and whether they need it or not, are encouraged to feel they need the jab. In reality though, Influenza is not a problem for a healthy person. Yes it’s unpleasant and you might think you’re dying, but if you’re healthy you will get better.

With this many more people receiving the vaccine that don’t need it, you will see a reduction in the percentage of people it will have a benefit for and there are more people to have adverse reactions to it.

The advice of the US government and the UK government is slightly different. That difference is an important one.

The US government advises

While everyone should get a flu vaccine this season, it’s especially important for some people to get vaccinated.

Everyone should get the vaccine. The UK governments’ advice is…

Even if you feel healthy, you should have the free flu
vaccination if you are:

and then reels off a similar list of vulnerable people that should be vaccinated to the list of people the US says is especially important to get the jab.

The UK says you should have the jab if you’re in a vulnerable group, the US says everyone should have the jab.

Whilst this, along with the prohibition of drugs/medicines being advertised directly to the public, means that the market for the flu jab is so much smaller in the UK that the US and the risk/benefit ratio is different. The benefits of the flu jab preventing flu turning into something really rather horrible if you’re in a vulnerable group is better than not having the flu and risking, in the very worst cases, death. If you’re categorised as vulnerable, all you’re doing is opening yourself up to the side effects with no chance of having any of the benefits the jab could bring.

The article isn’t wrong per se, but to just drop that piece in to a UK publication about American research in to what is the American flu vaccine usage without pointing out the differences between the two medical environments is misleading and wrong.

The second Up Front snippet I’m focusing on in this post is on page 11 and is not misleading, it’s just plain wrong.

‘Big farma’ law targets organic smallholdings

Commercial gardeners and farmers in Europe will soon be required to “grow, reproduce or trade” only vegetable seeds that have been approved by the EU bureaucracy. Organic, small-market gardeners and even those trying to achieve sustainable living at home will be breaking the new law if they grow unapproved plants and seeds.

It then carries on a little more, explaining how under this new law anyone, from that old chap tending his window box to the multinational company, found using, buying or selling un-registered plants and seeds with get a visit from the flower police and thrown in the gulag.

The source of this news is an online seed retailer, who’s last update on the subject on the ‘news’ page of their website is 24th December and is just an update that is asking to keep the pressure on to defeat this new law. This issue of WDDTY is November. The European Commission had already rubbished the shrill claims in September that the EU want an agency that will…

… also create a register of gardeners who will be the only ones allowed to grow and sell the approved seeds.

The European Commission states

Garden plants will in future –if the Commission’s proposal is agreed by national Ministers and the European Parliament – only need to comply with some general rules, rather than the current more detailed quality and control requirements.

Professional organisations like nurseries that produce garden plants in large quantities will have to register. But there will be no such obligation for garden centres selling to consumers.

Of course, minimum requirements for labelling and quality will remain. Such basic requirements apply to most products and already do to flowers. Without them, consumers would not be able to have confidence in what they are buying.

In addition, if a nursery is marketing its material with a variety name, it should keep a list of its varieties, including information on the description and name of the varieties.

But such garden plant varieties will not need to be registered in the way described by the Mail and Express. There is no chance whatsoever that “that the UK would not be able to comply as it doesn’t have an official plant register” or that “this could mean unregistered plants being removed from sale, with anyone selling them facing a large fine”.

More detailed registration requirements will apply to plants – notably those used for large-scale agricultural purposes – included in the “list of EU plant species”. Even then, micro-enterprises will be exempt from those registration requirements.

And, to reiterate: ornamentals – garden plants – will not be included in that list at all.

So the bottom line is existing requirements will be significantly simplified – but some important rules will be retained so that customers can be sure that what they are buying is what it says on the packet or pot.

So all those self-medicating herbalists can rest easy. The Europeans aren’t going to be storming in and stamping all over their herb beds anytime soon.

For people that have a right old moan about not having the press ask their side of things when it all kicked off about WDDTY’s cancer edition, you’d have thought they’d have at least tried to get the EU’s side of this.

So far, there’s about as much journalistic integrity in this issue as there is active ingredients in homeopathy.

I’ll try and look at more of this issue very soon.

What Doctors Don’t Tell You don’t tell you

November 21st, 2013 § 0 comments § permalink

Apparently, one of the most misused terms being hurled at What Doctors Don’t Tell You, as a rebuttal, is the term ‘science’.

We have been accused of being unscientific, of pedalling unproven and harmful alternatives, as opposed to the real thing, true ‘scientific’ medicine.

Says Lynne McTaggart. But instead of rebutting the accusations that the stuff contained in WDDTY is at best nonsense, and at worst dangerous, Lynne McTaggart goes on the attack and accuses conventional medicine of not being “remotely scientific”.

To prove her point, Lynne gives three examples of why science is not scientific…

1. Most of the science behind standard treatments is fiction. As leading members of the medical establishment have made clear in recent books, the so-called ‘proof’ of most so-called ‘proven remedies’ is data that has been invented or manipulated by drug company marketing teams.

2. Most treatments haven’t been proven to work. The British Medical Journal has concluded that only about 12 per cent of all medical treatments have adequate evidence demonstrating that they work.

3. Most treatments cause harm. Modern medicine is the third leading cause of death in the western world. Fact. Prescribed drugs and medical error kills 204,000 people every year in America alone, with only cancer and heart disease claiming more

I’m assuming reason one is a reference to Ben Goldacre and his Bad Science and Bad Pharma books. Not being within the Medical Establishment, I don’t know if he is a leading member of it or not. There is undoubtably manipulation of results by the pharmaceutical industry, it could be so much more transparent, with better publication of negative results and other stuff, but to call it all a fiction and for most medicines to not have any proof of er, proof of umm… efficacy? Science?

I’m gonna let Lynne have item number two, as I don’t have the figures to refute the ‘most’ at the beginning of that point. Thanks to a commenter on Lynnes’ post, we can see that there is more than 12% of all medical treatments can demonstrate they work. Lynne doesn’t link to anything to back up her claims. Make of that what you will.

What Lynne is referring to with the ‘12%’ is this. (We’ll not quibble over 1%, eh?)

new-chart-16102012

So, 11% of treatments reported as having beneficial effects. There’s another category, Trade-offs Between Benefits and Harms, with 7%. This one has, if the title is anything to go by, also adequate evidence the treatment works, otherwise the category would be labeled “likely to be…”. These treatments may have side effects, but they are still have benefits. Not possible benefits, but actual benefits.

So that 19% of treatments that do work.

Now, lets explore this curious category of “Unlikely to be beneficial”.

‘Unknown effectiveness’ is perhaps a hard categorisation to explain. Included within it are many treatments that come under the description of complementary medicine

‘Unknown effectiveness’ may also simply reflect difficulties in conducting RCTs [Random Controlled Trials] of an intervention…

Considering the difficulties of getting homeopathy and other alternative medicines to consistently return positive results in RCTs then it’s not surprising that they are in the ‘unknown’ category. (Why they’re not in the more negative categories is a long story and not for this post). But if this is the medicine doctors’ won’t tell you vs the medicine doctors will tell you, then you need to take out of the soup of numbers all the alternative medicines and then see what percentage of treatments are beneficial, otherwise, it’s 11% of all treatments, not just the ones proven by the so-called scientific method, which is what Lynne is stating.

Moving on to number three, that most treatments cause harm, is completely unsubstantiated. Lynne states that modern medicine is the leading cause of death of death in the western world is a ridiculous claim. Adding “Fact” after it doesn’t make it one. Apparently the leading cause of death is ischemia and not ‘modern medicine’.

I’ve no idea where Lynne got her figures from for the amount of people killed in the USA by prescribed drugs and medical errors, but the next cause down after heart disease and cancer in America is strokes, with 129,476 deaths.

Next Lynne starts talking about data from the Alliance for Natural Health. Read their views on vaccines and make your own mind up. Reading their opinion on Wakefield and MMR should tell you all you need to know.

Let’s look at so-called ‘unscientific’ natural health care, which supposedly causes so much harm.

Yes, Lynne. Lets look at some more figures.

The risk of dying from taking any herbal remedy or food supplement is around 0.01 per one million people. In other words, 100 million people would have to take a supplement or herb before there is a risk of one person dying because of it.

Compare that to the risk of pharmaceutical drugs, which kill 1000 people for every million people taking them.

So that risk is: 0.01/1 million for natural substances vs 1000/1 million for drugs. In other words, the risk of lethal harm from modern medicine is 100,000 higher than that of herbal or nutritional medicine.

Firstly, Lynne seems to think that ‘herbal remedies’, ‘food supplements’ and ‘natural substances’ seem to be interchangeable. They’re not. Food supplements are different to herbal remedies and ‘natural substances’ is such a vague term it’s meaningless. But I digress. Those figures Lynne quotes are completely meaningless without pitting them against how many people had their condition improved. How many people took drugs and got better compared to how many took drugs and didn’t get better, with the same for alternative treatments. Then you’ll see a meaningful ratio for the effectiveness and risk of the various treatments. I’d be willing to bet, a higher proportion of people may have died from conventional medicine than Complimentary Alternative Medicine (CAM), but CAM would’ve successfully treated a much lower proportion, if any at all.

This beggars the basic question: which form of medicine is the least scientific?

Even with the capitalist manipulation of results from Big Pharma etc, you’ll find CAM is.

Lyne then waffles about science becoming rigid, and closed minded, in the usual way of someone fighting against the conspiracy of Big Pharma – Science has been captured by scientism, and so on.

In this post I have shown that Lynne uses the same techniques she accuses mainstream medicine of using to prove their case. When CAM can be explained, and shown to work using proper random controlled trials and not just anecdote, conjecture and made up words, then it will be taken seriously.

Until then, I’d rather listen to what my doctor does tell me than What Doctors Don’t Tell You tell me.

Try before you hire

November 3rd, 2013 § 0 comments § permalink

DWP-try-before-you-hire

People as possessions. Not even possessions. Things to be used. Passed around. Changed if not quite right instead of invested in.

Free trial. Won’t cost a penny. It should cost company to employ someone, that person then has at least some value. If it costs to employ then an employer has more reason to get the recruitment process right.

There is already a way for employers to ‘try before your hire’. (Someone at the DWP got a massive slap on the back for that one.) It’s called Temp-to-Permanent. Someone is employed through an employment agency on a temporary basis. If after three to six months everyone is happy, the employee is transferred from the employment of the agency and becomes a full member of the client company’s staff, subject to another six months probation and 2 years of being able to be given the sack for no reason hanging over them.

Why should a company get a free input, especially when it’s someones’ labour? Especially when it’s a company that doesn’t need help paying the bills? People reduced to serving the interests of corporations, rather than the other way round.

The State, whoever running it, is not running it for us, the people. They’re running it for their mates in the board room.

A religionist not doing himself any favours

October 8th, 2013 § 0 comments § permalink

I saw a tweet by Stephen Law and became curious as to the conversation. I clicked to see the rest and after what seemed like ages, the conversation below appeared. (Read about Stephen Laws’ Evil God challenge here)

it’s quite long so if you don’t want to read all of it, it starts getting interesting/amusing on page two, where I’ve commented.

The culture of sharing (or shooting yourself in the foot)

September 21st, 2013 § 0 comments § permalink

I’m setting up a blog for work and have to balance what I need and want with what the IT department will let me install on their servers. Ths means that not only am I looking at different blogging software, but where to place the blog as well – on a subdomain or in a subfolder.

There’s advantages and disadvantages to both, it’s a case of weighing up the pros and cons and deciding what’s most important to you and your requirements.

What makes me despair is the amount of comments on SEO blogs that are from, supposedly, SEO-ers, that go “I have an n website, should I do x or y?” I’m presuming the majority of these comments are from real people as they either link to real websites, or don’t have a backlink at all (and what’s the point of comment spam without a link it?)

So are there really that many people, that are so dense as to think an SEO professional is going to give out free advice about a situation they know nothing about? But then if they’re reduced to cold-asking advice in comments then maybe that’s the level they deserve to be at – shouting into the ether “WHAT’S HAPPENING? WHY WON’T ANYONE HELP ME?!”

Which also brings me to the SEO blogs themselves. I’ve been gently reading SEO blogs for a while now and there is a lot of bullshit out there, why are these guys, that are all competing against each other, sharing all their secrets?

If You Review the SEO Tools That Give You A Competitive Advantage…
You have no competitive advantage if you tell everyone that you’re using JUMBO SEO JELLY BEANS that bring in 5 links a day, 15 organic search visitors, and improve conversions by 5%.

All those people telling you “great post!” will go sign up for those tools and use them. They will either learn that you’re an idiot who can’t tell a cheap smarmy SEO spam tool from a hair brush or they will gradually erode your market advantage by creeping into your SERPs and telling all THEIR friends and readers about how great the tool is. Either way, you lose, your clients lose, and you end up looking really damn stupid because you gave away a competitive advantage for the sake of attracting a handful of links, LIKES, TWEETS, PINS, and other ridiculously over-valued social media shares.

It’s not like a closed-shop conference where one professional is is comparing techniques with another. These are supposedly industry techniques that earn the SEO-er money. I might have a chat with a car mechanic in a pub about fixing brakes but I wouldn’t expect a car mechanic to teach me how to fix my brakes, on someone elses car, for nothing. That’s exactly what these guys are doing. For anyone that asks. Except, the more brakes I fix doesn’t diminish the mechanics ability to fix brakes. If everyone could fix their own brakes, the manufacturers aren’t going to suddenly decide that brakes need redesigning with the consequence that everyone needs to relearn how to fix brakes. But that’s what happens in SEO.

For any technique that raises a website among the SERPS, the more widely it is used there are two effects:

  1. The effect is diluted.
  2. The more unnatural the SERPS become.

The more widely used a technique is used, the less it has an effect because if everyone uses it, everyone has the same advantage. If everyone has the same advantage, there is no advantage.

The SERPS start becoming unnatural because it becomes less about the content and relevancy and more about how you can manipulate things to show your page for a keyword, regardless of the context of that keyword. That’s when the search providers have to step in and try to make the SERPS relevant again.

You might say that last bit is bullshit, you don’t want to rank for *everything* to do with a keyword, but you do. Just in case…

Let’s take chocolate. You sell chocolate bunnies. A someone searches for chocolate bears. They’re specifically searching chocolate bears, not chocolate animals, or just chocolate. Just from the search terms you know they want one thing – Chocolate. Bears.

You still want to rank high up in the SERPS. Front page at least. Above the fold is ideal, though. You shouldn’t be anywhere in the SERPS though. You’re chocolate bunnies. Completely wrong species. Or in other words, irrelevant.

But you still want to rank because what if the user hadn’t thought of chocolate bunnies…? That’s fine, you’ve made a sale. You’ve made yourself relevant. You’re an anomaly. Big deal. But if everyone does it, the SERPS are going to be a mess and no one is going to be able to find a thing. You’ve lost your magic touch even before the search providers reset they’re algorithm.

Why would you do that? Make someone re-write the rule book that you’ve only just started to understand?

Maybe the commenters aren’t so dumb after all…