Lots of things should never have needed thinking about, genocide being one – humans still do those things and don’t think about what they’ve done or the individuals and societies complicity in those actions.

So whilst I get the point that it shouldn’t require thanks, I don’t agree that these questions should have never needed thinking about.

Humans are violent **** with a penchant for justifying morally abhorrent actions. The sooner we wake up to that reality the better. We’re one rung up from shit hurling chimpanzees.

The whole week has felt overwhelming and this is the final straw. How can I feel the police are there to protect me? It has certainly made me even more empathetic to the BLM movement

My wife got some of these types of comments from her white friends.

It pissed her off – in a “oh now you get it when white blondes are being dragged off from protests by the MET” kind of way.

Of course they can, but certain societies are more aware of human fallibility than others.

The key is awareness. There are fairly basic instincts and emotional triggers that can be exploited that drive violence and human conflict.

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED261949.pdf

This is kind of what I mean, we need as a society to get a broad understanding and awareness of what drives our behaviour.

But we’re humans, so good luck with that.

I think the whole of society needs to have a conversation about violence and the way in which we justify violence in general to be honest and how we were seemingly okay with turning places like Iraq into an apocalyptic nightmare.

Violence against women is apparently okay, when it’s a 2000lb JDAM that you’re dropping on a woman’s wedding party.

It’s so ingrained, I don’t see how it can be untangled without having a much broader conversation about it.

That’s all very well but but it doesn’t get to the core of the problem, why is she scared when you are the one much more at risk? Not saying she is wrong, far from it or indeed that what you suggest is the wrong thing to do but society has got this all **** up.

Evolutionary biology.

She’s hardwired not to want some randoms baby.

We’re hardwired to kill each other and compete for resources to get women.

And thus the whole human race is a clown car of absurd competing interests barrelling through space.

No one has ever ask me how brown my kids are/might be, ever.

No but I bet you will have got shit like this if you actually have mixed race kids:

“Oh they don’t look like you”

“Oh they have very Asiany eyes”

Etc

Or when it comes to the topic of your wife

“Oh, so you have an Asian fetish then”

Bang on point article in the Guardian, Meg and Harry doing what armed revolution failed to fully finish off. It confirms the way the interview was seen in the Netherlands.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/10/meghan-and-harry-racism-row-may-deepen-schisms-in-commonwealth

Hewitt, who contrasted the silence of the Queen on the Windrush scandal with how she had “spoken out” against Scottish independence.

“There are many among us who consider this sentiment to be a reflection of the broader British society and the Brexit discussions, which reveal a British preoccupation with their ‘specialness’ does not help.”

After the broadcast, the Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, cited it as another reason for the country to sever its constitutional ties to the British monarchy.

The Aussies think we’re racist :D

Owned.

Just when you think the UK couldn’t fall any further down the international popularity rank, queeny goes and **** it up as well.

2021-22 is going to make for epic gammon baiting.

I don’t think it’s bread and circuses, from outside the uk that interview seems like a damning insight into the British national psyche

Good retort there grum.

Meh. Quite like them and the bit about Meghan having her passport removed from her so she couldn’t leave made the whole interview really bleak – even if they are privileged.

Would go into battle with Harry just for getting rid of Piers Morgan.

Anyway, here in the Netherlands everyone thinks the British are really **** up in the head now after watching that interview – this shit apparently seems normal to uk families.

This is the kind of political fearmongering that drives racism.

Frankly I think in 30 years there will have been a backlash against the current populist driven racism, but I fear how far it will go before that happens.

The real war is being fought, and currently won, by the 1%ers against the majority, the nationalistic narrative is the distraction to cover it up.

No it isn’t.

It’s a reality that the west is going to become increasingly irrelevant over the next century, China, India and South East Asia were always the strongest economies in the world and western imperialism was blip in that narrative.

Now either the west can start to think about that now and interact with the newly developed world and it’s myriad of non-democratic cultures in a healthy manner or they can – as I suspect they will – resort to petty nationalism.

You guys are way too optimistic.

Just wait for backlash when the west is no longer dominant.

+1 AA

Also, I get a warm fuzzy feeling from anything that is essentially a gigantic **** you to the universe.

Science is rock n roll, it’s the ultimate rebellion against our own fate.

Again, low hanging fruit dude. That doesn’t prove that NASA/ESA/CNSA/Roscosmos aren’t having a significant input to human welfare.

1. Penicillin – 1942
Penicillin was first developed in 1928, but started to be used in 1942. As the first official antibiotic, it marked a turning point in human history and led the way in the treatment of numerous bacterial diseases. It has been calculated that the antibiotic has saved over 80 million lives and without its discovery and implementation, 75% of people today would not be alive because their ancestors would have succumbed to infection. It has been used to treat a plethora of conditions such as pneumonia and scarlet fever, as well as ear, skin and throat infections. In 2010 over 7.3bn units of penicillin were administered worldwide. However, inappropriate use of the drug has meant that the world is now facing antibiotic resistance, and bacteria are evolving to fight off the drug’s effects.

No one GAF about Penicillin anymore, it was a stop gap – we have multidrug resistant bacteria now. You can’t do that kind of cheap, easy science anymore.

Great medical research is actually done in space as well.

https://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/stem_on_station/celebrating-station-science/october/index.html

https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/nasa-inventions/nasa-breakthroughs-in-medicine.htm

Lots of interesting and useful research comes off the back of NASA work – including environmental knowledge.

You want to save money? Cut the conventional military and keep the nukes, drones and hackers.

or maybe stop wasting money on space exploration, which really dont seem to do much for humanity.

Space exploration makes all scientists bother to get up in the morning, instead of allowing us to truly believe what we suspect is true – that we’re trying to herd a bunch of halfwit cats left of boom – including those of us in healthcare research or pharmaceutical manufacturing.

She is more interested in science/technology and doesn’t see the point in studying a language as it will take away another choice and “everyone speaks English anyway” – her words not mine, but I see her point.

All the science is moving to Europe, albeit slowly – and the pay is higher over here.

She won’t be respected if she doesn’t know one of the main languages, eg German.

Your daughters age is the perfect age to learn a language and avoid becoming a typical pig ignorant Brit, science can come later.

I say that as someone in Pharma.

Consider your/ourselves lucky if you/we don’t get to see that. (referring to population)

It won’t.

Male fertility rates are plummeting, we’ll be lucky to survive as a species at this rate.

Must….not….make euphemistic joke…..in response to title.

It’ll be worse, people are already battening down the hatches and entrenching themselves in their little bubbles of people who think and look like them. 2010-2020 was the peak of anti-racism I reckon.

It will all be blaming foreigners for everything wrong with post-brexit/covid Britain and butthurt westerners fighting over a smaller share of the worlds GDP as the developing world gains more power and influence.

And it won’t just be from the far-right, it’ll be from previously woke greenies or western feminists when they encounter women with power and money who don’t necessarily think like they do

And as the line between war and peace becomes ever more blurred, where competing nations can fight war though the use of communications, financial derivatives, weaponized trading, fake news and data – the concept of who is and is not our friend or ally will become increasingly more difficult to discern – and with that people will resort to parochialist ideals in an effort to protect themselves.

Rosa Brooks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Brooks

It’s a bit nuts if you start thinking how many lives could be saved in poorer countries with the money used for one dose of that. I know it’s not as simple as that, or is it?!

Agreed when it’s giving oldies another 9 months to live in a care home.

Disagree when it’s the young, the young everywhere should be prioritized – no matter where they come from.

I recently split with my GF after nearly 5 years together. I’ve just found out she is a rabid anti-vaxxer when it comes to COVID. She is determined all the scare stories about vaccines killing people are true.

More like dodged a rocket propelled grenade there pal.

Only the gauge of the wire, you want thicker diameter wire for longer runs – but that’s it.

How many years do you envisage further lockdowns being needed TiRed?

I don’t have the quantitative modelling knowledge to say whether we will keep ahead of this one but it seems a far more challenging proposition.

Have you considered trying anyway, it’s not like either you (or TiRed) lack the aptitude to be able to teach yourself that kind of modelling? Because that’s exactly the question I want to see answered.

Otherwise, all I can see are unsubstantiated maybes and the industry/policy equivalent to winging it – then again my line of work within pharma has probably just made me an overly rabid cynic.

I’d sooner have the longer term freedom of movement to see friends and family and sit inside a cafe next winter rather than have a week in the sun this summer and end up back here again in 12 months time.

+1 I really want to see a couple of friends again, watched Interstellar last night which was a bad idea.

Only takes a few people to bring a variant across though, remember the graphical/animated models that were produced at the start of this that showed the effects of various measures – travel restrictions only delayed the virus getting into the country, it’ll be the same with the variants. I think NZ/AUS have only been successful because of their relative isolation, the UK comparatively speaking is still seeing a lot of people coming and going for work…..I mean I’m off on Friday to go and help out with a vaccine project in NL.

Pink Floyd.

Bono.

Kanye.

Vaccination centres don’t have to be sterile. The key thing is preserving the cold chain. You don’t even need to clean the skin provided it’s not visibly dirty.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7152481/

https://ec.europa.eu/health/sites/health/files/files/eudralex/vol-4/pdfs-en/2018_annex2_en.pdf

https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/documents/other/consideration-core-requirements-rmps-covid-19-vaccines_en.pdf

Aspects of the formulation and preparation of the vaccine should be discussed when they may
increase the risk of ADRs. e.g. a formulation where a diluent for reconstitution needs to be
added may affect sterility, leading to clinical reactions such as increased local reactions,
abscesses;

Yeah, it takes that long to train up a senior manufacturing technician as well – not to mention that most of them are graduates these days with 3 year degrees.

It’s not like building cars where you can buy a load of robots to work the line and stick a bunch of idiots from Sunderland on either end, even then you have some very long lead time bits of equipment if you are building a new facility or expanding one.

IMO it’s probably a lot more achievable to get more vaccine production capability up and running in a shorter timescale than magicing up new nurses. It’s ‘just’ a question of money and resource. When your situation is a shut down economy the first becomes available pretty fast and the second follows.

Still, panic now and beat the rush

I’ve been working on these projects since last August.

Sterile manufacturing requires trained and experienced clean room manufacturing technicians who are every bit as skilled as a nurse. Then there are the mountains of highly skilled support staff behind them.

That’s an awesome list of achievements there.

Well done YGH.

You’ve been building up to that comment for a few hours now with all your military disaster analogies. Now that you’ve reached the climax of your disaster fapping, please don’t use the curtain on your way out

It’s the closest thing that we have in terms of being able to predict public support and the societal effects of the kind of intervention that is occurring at the moment.

After the end of this lockdown, when we are in the summer with vaccination levels currently predicted – the public will want to see an exit strategy back to full normality relatively rapidly.

Remember how people clamored for it last summer? Now they have a vaccine and if they don’t get normality, there are going to be questions to answer and heads rolling.

I am really worried about how we settle in to long term covid vaccine manufacturing that keeps up with worldwide demand as well – as you say, we can’t sprint forever. We essentially have to recreate the capacity that we have for manufacturing flu vaccines, so we can do both on a long term basis at the same time – that’s more facilities, more equipment, more materials, more trained staff, stronger supply chains, more R&D. It’s a total mind ****. TJ mentioned a while back that it’s hard to just magic new nurses out of thin air to boost capacity, well….. it’s even harder to magic sterile injectable facilities out of thin air.

Riots by the summer and certainly next autumn. There….**** it. I’m calling it.

is still unknown for the variant. I’s say that mRNA is currently a 1-2, Oxford is towards a 2-4. Hopefully things won’t head for a 6.

Forgive me here TiRed – I have an enormous amount of respect for the work you’ve done. We both work in Pharma, your career currently eclipses mine. That said…..”hopefully things won’t head for a 6″…. isn’t good enough. This is what scares me, that’s similar to the kind of thing that the US intelligence data nerds were saying about cartpet bombing the ho chi minh trail.

“Hopefully” is what leads to…with hindsight….totally daft policy decisions.