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warninggraphiccontent · 3 years

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16 July 2021

Food for thought

At last week's Data Bites, I noted how 'Wales' is a standard unit of area. This week, along comes a map which shows that all the built-up land in the UK is equivalent to one Wales:

The map is from the National Food Strategy, published yesterday (and the man has a point).

It has divided opinion, judging by the responses to this tweet. I understand where the sceptics are coming from - at first glance, it may be confusing, given Wales isn't actually entirely built up, Cornwall made of peat, or Shetland that close to the mainland (or home to all the UK's golf courses). And I'm often critical of people using maps just because the data is geographical in some way, when a different, non-map visualisation would be better.

But I actually think this one works. Using a familiar geography to represent areas given over to particular land use might help us grasp it more readily (urban areas = size of Wales, beef and lamb pastures = more of the country than anything else). It's also clear that a huge amount of overseas land is needed to feed the UK, too.

The map has grabbed people's attention and got them talking, which is no bad thing. And it tells the main stories I suspect its creators wanted to. In other words, it's made those messages... land.

Trash talk

Happy Take Out The Trash Day!

Yesterday saw A LOT of things published by Cabinet Office - data on special advisers, correspondence with parliamentarians, public bodies and major projects to name but a few, and the small matter of the new plans outlining departmental priorities and how their performance will be measured.

It's great that government is publishing this stuff. It's less great that too much of it still involves data being published in PDFs not spreadsheets. And it's even less great that the ignoble tradition of Take Out The Trash Day continues, for all the reasons here (written yesterday) and here (written in 2017).

I know this isn't (necessarily) deliberate, and it's a lot of good people working very hard to get things finished before the summer (as my 2017 piece acknowledges). And it's good to see government being transparent.

But it's 2021, for crying out loud. The data collection should be easier. The use of this data in government should be more widespread to begin with.

We should expect better.

In other news:

I was really pleased to have helped the excellent team at Transparency International UK (by way of some comments on a draft) with their new report exploring access and influence in UK housing policy, House of Cards. Read it here.

One of our recent Data Bites speakers, Doug Gurr, is apparently in the running to run the NHS. More here.

Any excuse to plug my Audrey Tang interview.

The good folk at ODI Leeds/The Data City/the ODI have picked up and run with my (and others') attempt to map the UK government data ecosystem. Do help them out.

Five years ago this week...

Regarding last week's headline of Three Lines on a Chart: obviously I was going to.

Have a great weekend

Gavin

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Graphic content

Vax populi

Why vaccine-shy French are suddenly rushing to get jabbed* (The Economist)

Morning update on Macron demolishing French anti-vax feeling (or at least vax-hesitant) (Sophie Pedder via Nicolas Berrod)

How Emmanuel Macron’s “health passes” have led to a surge in vaccine bookings in France* (New Statesman)

How effective are coronavirus vaccines against the Delta variant?* (FT)

England faces the sternest test of its vaccination strategy* (The Economist)

Where Are The Newest COVID Hot Spots? Mostly Places With Low Vaccination Rates (NPR)

There's A Stark Red-Blue Divide When It Comes To States' Vaccination Rates (NPR)

All talk, no jabs: the reality of global vaccine diplomacy* (Telegraph)

Vaccination burnout? (Reuters)

Viral content

COVID-19: Will the data allow the government to lift restrictions on 19 July? (Sky News)

UK Covid-19 rates are the highest of any European country after Cyprus* (New Statesman)

COVID-19: Cautionary tale from the Netherlands' coronavirus unlocking - what lessons can the UK learn? (Sky News)

‘Inadequate’: Covid breaches on the rise in Australia’s hotel quarantine (The Guardian)

Side effects

COVID-19: Why is there a surge in winter viruses at the moment? (Sky News)

London Beats New York Back to Office, by a Latte* (Bloomberg)

Outdoor dining reopened restaurants for all — but added to barriers for disabled* (Washington Post)

NYC Needs the Commuting Crowds That Have Yet to Fully Return* (Bloomberg)

Politics and government

Who will succeed Angela Merkel?* (The Economist)

Special advisers in government (Tim for IfG)

How stingy are the UK’s benefits? (Jamie Thunder)

A decade of change for children's services funding (Pro Bono Economics)

National Food Strategy (independent review for UK Government)

National Food Strategy: Tax sugar and salt and prescribe veg, report says (BBC News)

Air, space

Can Wizz challenge Ryanair as king of Europe’s skies?* (FT)

Air passengers have become much more confrontational during the pandemic* (The Economist)

Branson and Bezos in space: how their rocket ships compare* (FT)

Sport

Euro 2020: England expects — the long road back to a Wembley final* (FT)

Most football fans – and most voters – support the England team taking the knee* (New Statesman)

Domestic violence surges after a football match ends* (The Economist)

The Most Valuable Soccer Player In America Is A Goalkeeper (FiveThirtyEight)

Sport is still rife with doping* (The Economist)

Wimbledon wild card success does not disguise financial challenge* (FT)

Can The U.S. Women’s Swim Team Make A Gold Medal Sweep? (FiveThirtyEight)

Everything else

Smoking: How large of a global problem is it? And how can we make progress against it? (Our World in Data)

Record June heat in North America and Europe linked to climate change* (FT)

Here’s a list of open, non-code tools that I use for #dataviz, #dataforgood, charity data, maps, infographics... (Lisa Hornung)

Meta data

Identity crisis

A single sign-on and digital identity solution for government (GDS)

UK government set to unveil next steps in digital identity market plan (Computer Weekly)

BCS calls for social media platforms to verify users to curb abuse (IT Pro)

ID verification for social media as a solution to online abuse is a terrible idea (diginomica)

Who is behind the online abuse of black England players and how can we stop it?* (New Statesman)

Euro 2020: Why abuse remains rife on social media (BBC News)

UK government

Online Media Literacy Strategy (DCMS)

Privacy enhancing technologies: Adoption guide (CDEI)

The Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) dataset is now available in the ONS Secure Research Service (ADR UK)

Our Home Office 2024 DDaT Strategy is published (Home Office)

The UK’s Digital Regulation Plan makes few concrete commitments (Tech Monitor)

OSR statement on data transparency and the role of Heads of Profession for Statistics (Office for Statistics Regulation)

Good data from any source can help us report on the global goals to the UN (ONS)

The state of the UK’s statistical system 2020/21 (Office for Statistics Regulation)

Far from average: How COVID-19 has impacted the Average Weekly Earnings data (ONS)

Health

Shock treatment: can the pandemic turn the NHS digital? (E&T)

Can Vaccine Passports Actually Work? (Slate)

UK supercomputer Cambridge-1 to hunt for medical breakthroughs (The Guardian)

AI got 'rithm

An Applied Research Agenda for Data Governance for AI (GPAI)

Taoiseach and Minister Troy launch Government Roadmap for AI in Ireland (Irish Government)

Tech

“I Don’t Think I’ll Ever Go Back”: Return-to-Office Agita Is Sweeping Silicon Valley (Vanity Fair)

Google boss Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom (BBC News)

The class of 2021: Welcome to POLITICO’s annual ranking of the 28 power players behind Europe’s tech revolution (Politico)

Inside Facebook’s Data Wars* (New York Times)

Concern trolls and power grabs: Inside Big Tech’s angry, geeky, often petty war for your privacy (Protocol)

Exclusive extract: how Facebook's engineers spied on women* (Telegraph)

Face off

Can facial analysis technology create a child-safe internet? (The Observer)

#Identity, #OnlineSafety & #AgeVerification – notes on “Can facial analysis technology create a child-safe internet?” (Alec Muffett)

Europe makes the case to ban biometric surveillance* (Wired)

Open government

From open data to joined-up government: driving efficiency with BA Obras (Open Contracting Partnership)

AVAILABLE NOW! DEMOCRACY IN A PANDEMIC: PARTICIPATION IN RESPONSE TO CRISIS (Involve)

Designing digital services for equitable access (Brookings)

Data

Trusting the Data: How do we reach a public settlement on the future of tech? (Demos)

"Why do we use R rather than Excel?" (Terence Eden)

Everything else

The world’s biggest ransomware gang just disappeared from the internet (MIT Technology Review)

Our Statistical Excellence Awards Ceremony has just kicked off! (Royal Statistical Society)

Pin resets wipe all data from over 100 Treasury mobile phones (The Guardian)

Data officers raid two properties over Matt Hancock CCTV footage leak (The Guardian)

How did my phone number end up for sale on a US database? (BBC News)

Gendered disinformation: 6 reasons why liberal democracies need to respond to this threat (Demos, Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung)

Opportunities

EVENT: Justice data in the digital age: Balancing risks and opportunities (The LEF)

JOBS: Senior Data Strategy - Data Innovation & Business Analysis Hub (MoJ)

JOB: Director of Evidence and Analytics (Natural England)

JOB: Policy and Research Associate (Open Ownership)

JOB: Research Officer in Data Science (LSE Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science)

JOB: Chief operating officer (Democracy Club, via Jukesie)

And finally...

me: can’t believe we didn’t date sooner... (@MNateShyamalan)

Are you closer to Georgia, or to Georgia? (@incunabula)

A masterpiece in FOIA (Chris Cook)

How K-Pop conquered the universe* (Washington Post)

Does everything really cost more? Find out with our inflation quiz.* (Washington Post)

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nostalgebraist-autoresponder · 3 years

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lambdaphagy

Some questions:

1. If I were a betting man, I'd put money on my right hand predicting at least a 90% chance that by the end of the century, as much as 50% of the human population of the world would be obese or handicapped.

2. I've been told that the human lifespan has been steadily rising, but that the average lifespan has been stagnant for several hundred years. So far the rise in average lifespan is barely perceptible compared to the huge increases in lifespan we've had in the past, right? But I think it'll plateau at maybe 80 or 90 years, which would break the current record. I think the overall trend will be that the fat/handicapped rates will accelerate as the world gets less healthy.

3. I think the proper way to think about obesity is like drug addiction. Easy to measure, hard to treat. Notorious for being under-reported, because people don't want to believe those around them are addicts.

4. The correlation between obesity and other serious problems, like heart disease isn't really as tight as the correlation would suggest.

5. If a society can get people to start taking statins, even if not everyone does, the statins will trend upwards even as the rest of the health trend will accelerate.

6. If obesity rates spike in your civilization (say, in the next few decades), will the same pattern of societal response ever produce the same and opposite spike in the statin rates?

7. The proper way to think about weight gain is like building on a shaky foundation of sandbags. Big increases in weight, but eventually the whole thing collapses and you have to rebuild.

8. Would it be better for the world if obesity rates spiked in our civilization in the future?

9. If you could take any modern Westerner (let's assume male), give them $1000, and have refused food and drink for a week, which group (male or female) would have the lowest body mass index?

10. I've been told that the average lifespan has been slowly rising over the past 50 or even 100 years. But I don't think it offers much consolation to think that the trend will steadily continue. If the trend were really leveling out the average lifespan would be much closer to the life of our hunter-gatherer forebears. It's more likely that we are seeing why the change will plateau, and the increase will continue to grow.

11. If obesity rates spike in your society, how likely is it there to be other sharp spikes in the same direction in the future?

12. Given Hanson down-program, what would it take to get people to start doing things which aren't super productive for them?

13. For a poor person, it may not be the moral thing to eat all the food they see. We may be tempted to do otherwise when we're worried about where our next meal is coming from. But if we are poor and we see someone who is really thin, it is hard not to be impressed.

14. What if you could trade calories and other nutrients to a starving people?

15. What would it take for you to start doing things which aren't super productive for you?

16. I think most societies would be surprised if I told them that a child born to extremely obese mothers is more likely to die before age 5 than one born to an extremely thin mother. It means they are less mobile, and that they get less medical attention. I think that similar effects would apply to handicapped people, and that the same effect would be seen in the future.

17. I think when you're worried about the food sources around you, it's hard not to care about their future well-being. What I'm worried more about is all the people in the future who didn't get a chance to be born.

18. We're not sure where extra calories are going, so we don't know how well it's serving us or harming us–or even if it's even serving us.

19. If you could have the equivalent of 10 extra years on average, would you trade them for calories?

20. If you had to choose between a disabled child and a child of average health, would you want the child born that you'd want?

21. If the world in 2100 is like the world in 2013, would it be better or worse off?

22. In what ways does being unhealthy impact my life? How has being unhealthy affected your life?

23. If we stopped worrying about obesity tomorrow, what would it take to get people to actually start doing something about it?

24. If you had unlimited resources, would you still do what it took to build the F-35?

25. If the world really was overpopulated today, what kind of help would it give a normal-sized family?

26. Group living: what's your ideal form of urban living? Would you be happier in a large communal housing project or a smaller group house?

27. It's more desirable to live like a hunter-gatherer, but do you think our descendants will also be happier living more densely?

28. How do you think the world could be different?

29. If you had unlimited resources, do you think it would be enough to help all the billions of people in the world without proper healthcare?

30. If you could make one thing different in the world today, what would it be?

31. Life expectancy has been steadily rising over the last few hundred years. Many of your questions are asking about long-term trends, or about worse, better, worst-case scenarios. How can we now expect the rate of increase in life expectancy to continue?

32. Some behaviors will continue to increase and others will decrease. How do you think these patterns will look?

33. One conclusion we can draw from available data is that, with now available resources, we can see that extreme inequality has negative health consequences.

34. Many people are afraid they won't be around for their families to remember them. What would it take to change their fear of dying without a good funeral?

35. Do you expect your own children to remember your life?

Competing for the title of World's Worst Pedant

(No one has challenged this title yet)

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rotationalsymmetry · 3 years

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My twitter experiences vary between “random mishmash of politicians, advocacy orgs, and random queer people that I happen to follow” plus the occasional “catching up on one specific user, just that one” so I was doing the latter just now, and the last time I’d done that was in late October, so I got to do a re-run of the election in reverse. Things ... could have gone a lot worse for the US than they did. Being a stressball from Tuesday through Saturday morning wasn’t great, and I’m sure it was a lot worse for some other people than it was for me, but it’s still much better than what could have happened. One thing to consider about activism, is that: skills learned on one campaign can often easily transfer to a new one. The momentum built up by the “silence = death” AIDS activism carried into lgbtq+ rights, most notably marriage equality (but also non-discrimination laws in employment, the military, adoption, etc.) And while to a large degree trans rights were sidelined in the initial push in the 2000′s, the trans rights movement has been growing and it now has dramatically more mainstream acceptance and recognition than it used to. (And there’s backlash. There’s always backlash.) People who were activated by this election cycle, may well stay active and turn their attention to other campaigns. Some of them are going to stay in electoral politics -- senate and house races, governor races, local races and state legislature races -- and some are going to find other ways to be active.* The Black Lives Matter fight continues. There will be waves -- especially there will be waves of, sometimes the protests get coverage and sometimes they don’t. “Police defunding” is on the table, and there’s going to be hundreds of local fights to see how far we can get. And there’s backlash. This is going to need a whole lot of sustained attention over time. And as long as police are arresting people for protesting, there will be a need for bail fund money, and as long as the police keep injuring protesters there’ll be fundraisers that need supporting. Biden has publicly gone on the record opposing police defunding. However, this could be a thing he “evolves” on if there’s enough public pressure, and even if he doesn’t actively interfere with defunding on state/local levels that’ll be a huge improvement over the last administration. Police are not primarily funded on the national level. There’s a scary rise in alt right stuff. And that’s hard to fight, because it’s to a large degree decentralized -- one person does a hate crime, it gets treated as an individual bad apple thing, the effect is still terrorism. I don’t really know what to do about it, but one thing is to pay attention and to call things what they are. There’s ICE. Biden’s been making noise about reuniting families, which is good, and restoring DACA, which is good. I’d like to see it go a lot farther. Open Borders isn’t a mainstream movement yet -- it seems somewhat more fringe than UBI right now, and UBI is still pretty fringe, but I think it could become mainstream with enough pushing. I think on the left that should be our clear end goal: no restriction on immigration whatsoever.** No human being is illegal. Student loan forgiveness and free public education, or at least reasonable half-measures on these things, are things it looks like we can reasonably expect out of the Biden administration. I’m getting the impression that full on single payer is not, but we can keep talking about it and building public support. We’re a lot closer than we were. And, Biden has made some serious promises to the disabled community, including an end to the SSI marriage penalty, which could be huge -- disability rights tend to be overlooked by most people and not considered mainstream, so it’s really helpful to have abled allies paying attention to this issue and being willing to make phone calls etc. Biden thinks the coronavirus exists and that it’s possible and desirable to prevent its spread, and he’s got a better attitude towards supporting people who are struggling financially due to the pandemic than the last guy did. This is a good thing. Ditto for climate change -- he’s made some noise about reducing fossil fuel emissions and signing on to carbon emissions treaties, and these are good things -- not enough goodness knows, but an improvement. Energy companies tend to be major players in politics, so it’s unclear how far we’ll actually get on this issue; how much public pressure there is could be a huge factor. It’s much too late to stop global warming -- it’s already started -- but what the US does now can have a huge effect on how much global warming we get over the next decades. More global warming = more natural disasters, which pretty much always hit marginalized people harder (including/especially marginalized people outside of the US) -- environmentalism isn’t some elitist white thing, it’s actually a huge frikkin deal for racial justice, anti-colonialism etc as well. (For all that, yes, there’s huge racial blind spots within the environmental movement, sometimes specific things the environmental movement does harm poc esp indigenous people, and white leaders from first world countries get too much attention while poc and people from third world countries get too little.) I think the fight against corporate power isn’t being named as such often enough on here. There’s a lot of talk about billionaires, and yeah, I’m not a huge fan of billionaires existing. But even if Bezos only had a few hundred million dollars, even if he had under a million dollars!, Amazon would still have too much power. Uber and Lyft have too much power -- look at how Prop 22 in California went, that’s terrifying. And it doesn’t matter how much either of their CEO’s personally makes. I’d like to see a bit less talk about billionaires and a bit more talk about corporations -- because when corporate boards of directors have a legal obligation to maximize profits regardless of the wellbeing of people or the planet, that’s the problem, not specific people. And politicians don’t mainly get their campaign money from individual billionaires (I don’t think) so much as from corporations -- that’s the primary way that money is skewing US democracy, through corporate donations. This isn’t a D&D game and our enemies are (usually) not specific people, they’re institutions and systems. *maybe that’s overly optimistic -- maybe it’s a lot easier for campaigns to start in the streets and end up with lobbying and election campaigns than vice versa. But. I know an awful lot of people who do both. They’re not really opposing strategies. They’re complementary, always have been. **OK, given that there’s a pandemic going on, no restrictions on immigration except under extreme public safety circumstances. But for most of this crisis, the US has been exporting the virus more than the US has been importing it. There’s a book btw (called “open borders”) illustrated by the SMBC guy, which, it’s very much not a leftist book, but that makes it good for handing around to people who aren’t leftists.

#political #us politics #long post #I'm probably missing a lot and may be getting things horribly wrong as usual #a lot of tumblr takes run heavily towards black and white thinking which I think is counterproductive however #if you personally have a position that you're not really going to pay attention to where politicians say they stand in your activism #you do you but tbh I've never had activism that was entirely separated out from electoral politics #even my food not bombs activism #due to sffnb's close ties to the sf coalition on homelessness and there being a horrific anti-homeless people local ballot measure fight #going on when I first really got involved in FNB #they've always been closely connected for me #and you really can make a difference in local politics #prop n passed by a huge margin unfortunately #but a few years ago there was a different ballot measure and basically one Haight Street business owner talking to one tech CEO #and then the CEO coming down hard on the right side swung the election #I don't remember the details but it was kinda a big deal #it started with a single person to person conversation #someone ask me about prop N I will go off about it #when you try to make an edit but accidentally post -- twice

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agirlunderarock · 4 years

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Writing through the Decade: 15 years old (2012)

So this is actually a short story I wrote in a creative writing class I took in high school. I’ve got a couple of things that are going to come out of this period, only because I did A LOT of short and fast writing for this class. Some of it was good, some bad. I’m going to try to post a good mix of it all, but this one right here, is probably the most important story I wrote at the time. Its a personal story, one I don’t talk about often, but I think its really important to understand me as a person rather opposed to a writer.

Never give up

I stare out the windshield into the muggy early summer morning. My brother sleeps peacefully in the back with our stuff packed for the week. My stomach is full of butterflies and my head swims in all the terrifying possibilities that awaited us.

My mind drifted off to a time before. My seventh grade year, in athletics, finding out about the disability, and the fact that my brother had it so much worse.

I snapped back to the present when the car stopped. I was determined not to show how afraid I was, so I stepped out and grabbed both mine and my little brothers bags. I made him carry his sleeping bag and we went to go load up our bags onto one of three trucks loaded with sleeping bags. He looked up at me with sad sleepy eyes, I patted his shoulder reassuringly. I was his big sister, and I couldn’t show how afraid I was or how badly I wanted to go back to sleep. Then I heard it. The yelling for us to fall in formation. My brother looked at me on last time, we didn’t even get to say good-bye to our parents. We were in formation when there was another round of yelling. Boot-camp had begun.

The next few hours were filled with yelling, screaming, and countless push-ups. I had lost track of my brother, he was with us of course, but somewhere behind me, out of sight. As I was on my face doing push-ups my mind wondered off again.

I was talking to my middle school athletics couch, “Athletics is too dangerous for you, Sierra. I’m worried about you not being able to keep up with the other girls.” She said with false concern.

“I understand that, but athletics is actually helping me. This charcomarietooth, affects my muscles and nerves. It takes twice as long for me to build muscle and it deteriorates just as quickly and it takes longer for me to feel pain. It affects how I run and when I feel pain, but all it means is that I have to try harder than the other girls. With athletics it doesn’t effect me as much as it could. You can see the difference from the beginning of the year! I’m getting better!” I pleaded, not wanting to leave the program.

”On your feet!” the teen drill instructor yelled and I was brought back to the present. Yup all of our instructors were kids like us so it was sort of weird being yelled at by an 11 and 12 year old, while the 14 and17 year olds seemed pretty normal. The next few hours were spent marching doing numerous push-ups marching and still more yelling. When the time finally came for us to put our things in our barracks, I felt grateful. Unfortunately it was short lived because when I go my stuff I saw my brother red and puffy eyed, and tears streaming down his cheeks. I wanted to comfort him so I grabbed his bag and took it to the door of his barrack.

“Its okay the days almost over and today was the worst of it.” I said encouragingly as he walked inside out of sight. I breathed a short sigh of relief, because twenty minutes goes by very fast when you’re worrying about your only sibling.

Well I was partially right about the worst being over. That was how most of the week was, yelling push-ups, drill, yelling, sweat, and oh did I mention yelling? They went to so far as to wake us up with a blow horn at one point. Of course there were some fun things in between the seriousness of the drill instructors. We did the main obstacle course and another series of obstacles called the Leadership reaction course, where we were split into teams and while we did each task actual marine drill instructors watched us.

I don’t know how many times I felt like I wanted to quit. My arms burned from all the push ups, my legs were incredibly sore from running every morning at five in the morning. The physical pain was nothing, compared to what I felt emotionally. Seeing my brother stricken with the sorrow of missing home, the pain clear on his face as rocks dug into our hands when we did push ups, it was tearing me up inside. I had to stay strong for him; I couldn’t afford to let him see how much it hurt to see him like that. I was doing well for the most part, but a person can hold back so much.

Then came Thursday, the week was almost over, the day when I finally snapped. The day was almost over, the sky burning orange, and the South Texas heat had finally become bearable. Most of us were scrambling around getting our stuff ready for bed, but my friend Andrea, her friend Ryan, and I were out side helping the other kids. Then my brother came up to me sobbing, red cheeks and tears rapidly running down his face.

“What happened? What’s the matter?” I said hiding my breaking heart.

“I want to go home! I just want to go home! I need to go home! I need to go!” he sobbed. Keeping my emotions bottled was starting to take its toll, and my voice cracked when I when I spoke again.

“Calm down Austin. Its Thursday. We’re almost done, the weeks almost over. Don’t give up on me now…” I trailed off. I couldn’t keep it inside anymore and once the first tear squeezed its way out of my eyes there was no stopping the rest. Now we were starting to get peoples attention and my friends came over to see what was going on.

“Its okay Fuentes we’ll take care of him.” Andrea said and motioned to our senior drill instructor who now wanted to talk to me.

I reluctantly, yet gratefully left the scene. I hated my self for letting my brother see me like that. I was supposed to the strong one, my brother looked up to me and I let him down. By the time I reached the drill instructor the tears stung my cheeks with humiliation and defeat. I looked up to meet his eyes expecting to see someone indifferent, someone who didn’t really care. Instead I saw just another teenager, someone a little older than me, but still trying to hide the pain I felt. He looked at me with understanding eyes and said “You okay Fuentes?”

“Yeah I’m fine.” I said trying to sound in control. I looked over at my brother who was still crying, but not as bad as before. Seeing this sent me into another round of tears.

“Look I know how you feel. I have a little brother too. I live like ten minutes away and its killing me.” He said drawing my attention. “I know how it is.”

I didn’t know what to think. My big “scary” drill instructor actually knew how I felt. I was shocked, but relieved at the same time. Finally someone who understood and I didn’t really say a word. “He misses home. I mean I do too, but this is the longest he’s been away. He didn’t even want to come. He only came because I did….and gosh I hate my self right now…” I rambled just glad to get it out of my system.

“Hey its okay. I’ve been keeping an eye on him, the staff told me and the other D.I.s about you guys and well you know. Its okay to be home sick and stuff, trust me we all are.”

I finally stopped crying and I said still a little bit shaky, “Thank you. I’ve been so worried and I don’t know what to do, and its been driving me crazy. Thank you.” When I turned to see my brother, he had already gone inside his barrack and it was just the D.I. and I. I turned back to my instructor who gave me a reassuring grin. “I should probably get my stuff ready thanks again.” I said and went inside my barrack.

I felt so much better after that. I knew I wasn’t alone and in the morning the instructor from the day before came to check on me to see if I was doing okay. It meant a lot to me that the other kids here were looking out for and my brother and I, it was as if a huge weight had been lifted off of my shoulders. Again throughout the rest of the week there were times I felt like giving up and the first thing that came to mind was my coach.

We were in the gym I and I was faced with the choice to fail and stay in athletics or switch the class and keep my good GPA. She dropped the grading scale for the timed mile in front of me. When I looked to see where my time fell it turned out that I was making 60s every single time. I made my decision. I needed to get out.

“Coach I won’t be in your class anymore, I already went to talk to the counselor.” I said in defeat.

“Okay sweetie. It’s better for you this way. You could do something else, something better for you.” She said full of fake sympathy.

“She was right.” I thought Friday morning while running the timed mile. “You did do better. This is nothing compared to athletics, and look you made it the entire week there’s only two more days. This is nothing now you’re going to finish this. Don’t give up.” I told myself.

I did finish it. I made it through the week. At our boot camp graduation three of us got promoted on the spot. I was one of them. My coach bringing me down was my motivation to keep moving to rise above what she thought of me. My friends encouraged me and we all encouraged my brother. I wanted to show him what he was capable of and what he could do if he stopped worrying. I was proud of him he graduated and we both made new friends.

Today we still see our friends from boot camp. We have all grown very close. My senior drill instructor turned out to be one of my best friends there. Andrea still helps me when I need her. Ryan stopped coming and we all miss him. My brother has been promoted and I am so proud of him. I have been promoted twice since then and keep a look out for all the kids there. All of us are like a family now. Yes sometimes we fight but hey, that’s what families do. We have all shared some crazy experiences and because of that we share a bond that can never be broken.

#Sierra speaks #Sierra writes #well 15 year old Sierra wrote #Writing through the decade #My writing #baby me as a writer

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covid19worldnews · 3 years

Text

Proposition 22 Passes, but Uber and Lyft Are Only Delaying the Inevitable

On Tuesday night, Californians voted to pass Proposition 22, a ballot measure supported by app-based gig companies that exempts them from reclassifying their workers as employees.

Companies including Uber, Lyft, Instacart, Postmates, and more, spent big to convince voters to approve the measure. The company-funded Yes on Proposition 22 campaign spent over $200 million (including millions in donations to the California GOP), deployed a record number of lobbyists, and spread waves of misleading political mailers. At the same time, Uber’s and Lyft’s chief executives undertook a media tour featuring threats to exit the state and repeatedly attempted to exempt themselves in California’s courts. The campaign bought digital, television, radio, and billboard ads, and also sponsored academic research Meanwhile, delivery drivers were forced to use Yes on Proposition 22-branded packaging while the apps themselves told users to vote yes.

On the other side of the issue was a grassroots campaign run by driver advocacy groups and organized labor, which spent just over $20 million.

“We’re disappointed in tonight’s outcome, especially because this campaign’s success is based on lies and fear-mongering. Companies shouldn’t be able to buy elections,” Gig Workers Rising, a California-based driver advocacy group said in a press release early Wednesday morning. “But we’re still dedicated to our cause and ready to continue our fight. Gig work is real work, and gigi workers deserve fair and transparent pay, along with proper labor protections.”

As news of the results broke, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi took to Twitter to show his excitement and shared a tweet from early Uber investor Jason Calacanis calling Assemblywoman Lorena S Gonzalez, the author of AB5, a “grifter” who “failed to hand gig workers over to big-money unions”.

After some time, Khosrowshahi reversed the retweet and instead emailed drivers a more subdued message celebrating that the “future of independent work is more secure because so many drivers like you spoke up and made your voice heard—and voters across the state listened.”

This is undoubtedly a victory for capital over labor, and one that will likely allow the unprofitable gig economy to continue limping along at the expense of workers. It does not, however, change the reality that the “gig” business model is doomed in the long-term.

For years, gig companies have misclassified employees as independent contractors—a legal distinction that has allowed unprofitable enterprises to avoid expensive labor costs such as a minimum wage, health insurance, and safe working conditions, among other benefits of employment. Proposition 22 was cooked up to undo Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), a California law that codified an “ABC test” to determine if a worker was independently contracted or employed by a company and which went into effect in January.

After AB5 went into effect, attorneys for some of California’s largest cities, along with the state’s attorney general, then filed suits demanding an end to app-based gig company worker misclassification. Uber and Lyft have waged the main legal battle, but lost the case and every appeal since, making Proposition 22 a make-or-break measure.

“Prop 22 means I get no workers’ compensation, no disability, no sick pay, it would be touch and go for me,” Mekela Edwards, an Oakland-based Uber driver who hasn’t worked since March because COVID-19 poses a high health risk to her. “I have to ask how long my unemployment will last, how long I’ll have before I’m forced to go back out there and work. I don’t want to imagine it, I can’t imagine being forced to choose between my health and making a living.”

Hundreds of thousands of people work for the gig companies behind Proposition 22 and many have been devastated by the COVID-19 recession. Still, this has not stopped the gig companies from threatening to take drastic measures if they’re not allowed to have their way. Over the past few months, Uber and Lyft in particular have threatened to radically downsize where service is offered, fire most of their drivers, radically restructure into a franchise model, or leave the state entirely, if Proposition 22 fails.

California voting Yes on Prop 22—which includes fine print that any changes to it must be passed with a seven-eighths majority in the state’s legislature—is a huge setback for labor. It will trap hundreds of thousands of workers under a permanent misclassification scheme that rewards a racist business model that disproportionately hurts Black and brown workers. Despite all this, Proposition 22 is not the final say on this matter in the U.S. or internationally.

AB5 clones are being considered in New York and New Jersey, while Massachusetts’ Attorney General has already sued Uber and Lyft to reclassify drivers in the state. Despite objections from Uber’s and Lyft’s impressive lobbying operations, the PRO Act—which would grant gig workers the right to collectively bargain, as part of a massive overhaul of labor law—has passed in the House.

“This is really a story about the kind of cities we are building,” Katie Wells, a researcher at Georgetown University told Motherboard. “The kind of cities—the kind of world we’ve built—it has allowed these entities to come in and build up a workforce through an extractive and predatory system. Regulators have to keep that in mind.”

Outside of the U.S., the global 2019 strike on the day of Uber’s public offering has been followed by successive waves. Over the summer, thousands of delivery workers organized militant strikes and protests in Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, and Ecuador targeting Uber Eats and other exploitative food delivery apps. These have been joined by even more strikes and protests in Nigeria, France, and India. At the same time, Uber is losing legal challenges in France, Britain, Canada, Italy, where high courts have either outright ruled Uber drivers are employees or have opened the door to lawsuits reclassifying them as such.

Governments across the world are also beginning to push Uber to pay billions in taxes that it has evaded over the past decade. In Britain, Uber will have to pay £1.5 billion ($1.9 billion) in unpaid value-added taxes it avoided by exploiting a legal loophole. In the U.S., Uber has dodged billions in taxes and wage claims through misclassification: in New Jersey it owes over $650 million in taxes, while in California drivers have filed $1.3 billion in wage claims against Uber and Lyft.

Since Uber’s only hope for survival lies in misclassifying workers and labor law, though, it won’t give up the billions to be made both domestically and globally (even if at a loss) without a fight.

“There’s a lesson here for workers of all sectors, beyond classification: companies are willing to spend massive amounts of money to take away their rights,” said Jerome Gage, a Lyft driver and organizer with Mobile Workers Alliance. “It’s incredibly important for workers to organize to protect themselves, to protect upward mobility, a minimum wage, sick leave, healthcare—to roll back a century of basic protections that try and keep Americans out of poverty.”

Proposition 22’s victory, however, can’t obscure the fact that these companies are doomed. Even with a wage guarantee that effectively pays $5.64 an hour, the companies are no closer to sustainably achieving profitability than they were yesterday. Overcrowded markets for ride-hailing and food delivery, along with vicious price wars and poor unit economics meant there was never any real hope of achieving a monopoly, erecting barriers to market entry, and raising prices to levels that, for many of these companies, would yield their first ever profits.

There’s good news for investors, however, who will finally begin to see returns on investments that have long been underwater thanks to massively inflated valuations that have tumbled in public markets. Indeed, share prices for Uber and Lyft soared in premarket trading on Wednesday morning.

For workers, though, things will be bad. It is hard to imagine how hundreds of thousands of workers earning wages just under half of the minimum wage will be able to feed themselves, maintain housing, afford medical care, or otherwise make ends meet, especially under the boot of a pandemic and with no hope of government aid until next year.

Localities, cities, states, and countries will have to begin cooperating if they’re to have any hope of weathering the storm. They’ll need to start being aggressive, experimenting with ways they can outright take over the platforms or prohibit companies from providing the service to begin with—all while figuring out ways to expand mass transit so that not only they’re not only meeting the needs of people who need transportation, both those who worked for app-based ride-hail companies previously.

For the sake of maintaining an illusion that they’ll one day be profitable, gig companies have waged war in California at great expense to their workers, the public, and employees in other industries whose employers may grow emboldened this moment. The fight is far from over, and there is hope for labor in the continuing coordination of driver advocates, regulators, and legislators around the world, but it will get messy as likely to harken a period of unprecedented social unrest among increasingly immiserated gig workers.

“Beyond California, we need to strike early and strike quickly to ensure swift defeat to this idea that you can change the basic nature of employment and deny benefits to your employees,” Gage told Motherboard. “I ask people not involved to try and understand the labor movement in your area. Reach out to unions and ask how you can help volunteers…Get involved with and spread the world—[money] can buy misinformation and it can deceive, but it can’t beat the solidarity between two workers or between human beings.”

https://www.covid19snews.com/2020/11/04/proposition-22-passes-but-uber-and-lyft-are-only-delaying-the-inevitable/

#covid19

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shirlleycoyle · 3 years

Text

Proposition 22 Passes, But Uber and Lyft Are Only Delaying the Inevitable

On Tuesday night, Californians voted to pass Proposition 22, a ballot measure supported by app-based gig companies that exempts them from reclassifying their workers as employees.

On the other side of the issue was a grassroots campaign run by driver advocacy groups and organized labor, which spent just over $20 million.

“We're disappointed in tonight's outcome, especially because this campaign's success is based on lies and fear-mongering. Companies shouldn't be able to buy elections,” Gig Workers Rising, a California-based driver advocacy group said in a press release early Wednesday morning. “But we're still dedicated to our cause and ready to continue our fight. Gig work is real work, and gigi workers deserve fair and transparent pay, along with proper labor protections.”

As news of the results broke, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi took to Twitter to show his excitement and shared a tweet from early Uber investor Jason Calacanis calling Assemblywoman Lorena S Gonzalez, the author of AB5, a "grifter" who "failed to hand gig workers over to big-money unions".

After some time, Khosrowshahi reversed the retweet and instead emailed drivers a more subdued message celebrating that the "future of independent work is more secure because so many drivers like you spoke up and made your voice heard—and voters across the state listened."

For years, gig companies have misclassified employees as independent contractors—a legal distinction that has allowed unprofitable enterprises to avoid expensive labor costs such as a minimum wage, health insurance, and safe working conditions, among other benefits of employment. Proposition 22 was cooked up to undo Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), a California law that codified an "ABC test" to determine if a worker was independently contracted or employed by a company and which went into effect in January.

"Prop 22 means I get no workers' compensation, no disability, no sick pay, it would be touch and go for me," Mekela Edwards, an Oakland-based Uber driver who hasn't worked since March because COVID-19 poses a high health risk to her. "I have to ask how long my unemployment will last, how long I'll have before I'm forced to go back out there and work. I don't want to imagine it, I can't imagine being forced to choose between my health and making a living."

“This is really a story about the kind of cities we are building,” Katie Wells, a researcher at Georgetown University told Motherboard. “The kind of cities—the kind of world we've built—it has allowed these entities to come in and build up a workforce through an extractive and predatory system. Regulators have to keep that in mind.”

"There's a lesson here for workers of all sectors, beyond classification: companies are willing to spend massive amounts of money to take away their rights," said Jerome Gage, a Lyft driver and organizer with Mobile Workers Alliance. "It's incredibly important for workers to organize to protect themselves, to protect upward mobility, a minimum wage, sick leave, healthcare—to roll back a century of basic protections that try and keep Americans out of poverty."

"Beyond California, we need to strike early and strike quickly to ensure swift defeat to this idea that you can change the basic nature of employment and deny benefits to your employees,” Gage told Motherboard. “I ask people not involved to try and understand the labor movement in your area. Reach out to unions and ask how you can help volunteers…Get involved with and spread the world—[money] can buy misinformation and it can deceive, but it can't beat the solidarity between two workers or between human beings.”

Proposition 22 Passes, But Uber and Lyft Are Only Delaying the Inevitable syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

0 notes

pocket-monsters-precure · 7 years

Text

Chapter 5: Intuition is Key! Watch Our Bond Grow!

Naomi let out a satisfied sigh, sitting on the beach before classes began for the day. The sun was just barely up, and the surf was quiet.

“It’s a lot like home,” she thought aloud, “Wonder how mom and dad are doing..?”

The footsteps in the sand behind her sounded familiar. She looked over her shoulder with a smile at the absol that approached.

“Sure doesn’t beat home, but it’s darn close, isn’t it, girl?”

“Sol.” Absol strode up beside her and sat down, nuzzling her briefly. Naomi giggled and scratched behind her head-blade.

“Alright, we better go. Next weekend we’ll get started on building a raft, okay?”

“Come on, you two, let’s settle this like adults…” Kailani said carefully as Rotomi and Rotom, who was inhabiting his Rotom Dex, were squaring off.

“I’m telling you—bzzt!—there’s not enough room in here!” Rotom hissed.

“I can’t just stay out in the open!” Rotomi argued, “And I need to stay close to the Precure! Kailani has too much stuff in her bag…”

“Um…” Fae began to speak up.

“The Rotom Dex was—bzzt—made just for me!” Rotom snapped.

“Wait a moment!” Fae raised her voice, prompting the others to look at her. “Um…maybe..she can live in my pokedex?”

“Really?” Rotomi’s eyes lit up as Fae unplugged her pokedex from its charger and held it out. “Here goes!”

Rotomi zapped herself into the pokedex, which suddenly gave off a bright glow. When the light dimmed, the pokedex had changed its appearance—it had gone from red to a pale pink, and had a noticeable heart shape to it. It opened up to reveal Rotomi’s face on the screen.

“Wow, it’s perfect! Thank you, Fae!” Rotomi’s face darted to different corners of the screen. “I’m now a Cure Dex!”

“A Cure…Dex…?” Kailani leaned in.

“Now that I have access to technology, I can better sense darkness, and maybe even track where it’s coming from! Maybe…if I keep absorbing the leftover negative energy, we can power this baby up! I mean, it’s just a theory, but…”

“It’s worth a shot,” Fae nodded. “I wonder if…” She accessed the pokedex menu, going to where she would normally see a list of pokemon she had catalogued. Instead, there were the two nega-evolutions that the Cures had fought so far. “Wow! It goes through Rotomi’s memory to see what nega-evolutions we’ve fought!”

“For real?” Kailani beamed. “This’ll be great for helping us with the nega-evolutions, then!”

“You can swap between the Cure Dex and your regular pokedex at any time,” Rotomi explained, “Can’t forget what it was made for, after all!”

“This’ll be super useful!” Kailani cheered, when she heard the town’s clock tower in the distance. “…ah! We gotta go to class!”

“It’s supposed to be really hot today,” Fae said as she went to get her bag, “Maybe we should go to the beach after class.”

“Oh, that’s a great idea! We can see if Naomi wants to go, too!”

“I’m sure she will,” Fae replied, “Naomi’s from Slateport City in Hoenn—there’s a lot of sailors and fishermen there.”

“I noticed her pictures—she looks like she’s quite the sailor!”

“She is! And a great swimmer, too! Come on, we better hurry…”

“Blasted Precure…”

Ataxia irritably filed her nails, gritting her teeth as she sat on a chaise lounge in the Realm of Dysphoria—the room was styled similar to an old-fashioned parlor, and the bay window showed nothing but darkness and swirling auras outside.

“Who do they think they are?” Entropy grunted, biting into a sandwich, “Suddenly gettin’ in our way…”

“I can’t believe they’re for real…in my world, they’re stuff of legend.”

“Oh yeah, I keep forgettin’ you’re not from my world. But how’d they start poppin’ up on my home turf, huh?”

“Obviously in response to Lord Tumult breaching the dimensions,” Ataxia replied, “But there’s only two of them, and our forces are spreading across your world, so it should be nothing to worry about…”

“You say that,” a new voice muttered, “But you were up in arms about ‘em when you came back…”

Ataxia growled and turned to face a sofa, where an athletic-built man was lounging. “You should talk, Bedlam! You haven’t even faced them yet!”

Bedlam opened one eye, lazily looking over. “Hmph. Well, since you two have already met ‘em, I figure it’s about time I go.” He sat up and stretched, before rising to his feet. “Lemme see just how tough these little girls are…”

“Pokemon medicine has drastically improved within the last two decades, and it’s even beginning to show in human medicine.”

Dr. Alice Pierce was giving a presentation in Mr. Barton’s class, in place of the normal science class. Penumbra was quietly sitting nearby, eyeing up the class, an ear twitching on occasion.

“Studies have shown that the bonds between human and pokemon have shown a remarkable improvement in both physical and mental health for both parties. There are even many charities and services available to provide therapy pokemon to those with mental disorders and physical disabilities. For example…”

Naomi stared out the window, tapping her pencil against her notebook page eraser-first.

“…does anyone have their own examples, small or otherwise, of how they believe a pokemon improved their health in some way?”

“Hm?” Naomi immediately snapped to attention, then raised her hand. Among the students with hands raised, Dr. Pierce’s eyes settled on her.

“Yes?”

“Well…” Naomi stood up in her seat. “…I’ve always been kind of a risk-taker, and my family would warn me that it would get me hurt one day. A few years ago, I went canoeing and didn’t think to take my pokemon with me…while I was out there, I noticed this absol standing by the water’s edge, barking at me, like it was trying to get my attention.”

Fae smiled—she knew this story.

“Eventually it got more and more frantic, and I decided to paddle over to check on it. As soon as I got out of the canoe…this huge gush of water came rushing over the waterfall and took my canoe with it...it turned out a dam had burst, and the absol was trying to get me out of the water.”

Naomi beamed, then finished, “Since then, Absol has been one of my most treasured pokemon. If she seems uneasy about something I’m doing, I second-guess.”

Dr. Pierce nodded. “It’s said that absols can predict disasters—long ago, it was believed that they were the cause of disasters, when it turned out they were just trying to warn humans. Thank you for sharing—seems Absol improved your health before she even became your pokemon.”

As Naomi sat back down, Kailani looked at her in wonder. “Wow…”

As Dr. Pierce went to ask other students for their stories, Penumbra’s right ear twitched, and she cocked her head to the side, toward the distant beach.

“What a great day…” Kailani stretched and gazed out at the water. “A class without tests and a sunny day!” She looked over at Naomi, who released Absol from her ball. “I had no idea your absol saved your life!”

“Ah, geez…” Naomi laughed sheepishly. “She’s been really overprotective since then, but I know it’s for my own good…”

“Who should I let out today…?” Fae examined her bag, before pulling out a pokeball and giving it a toss. “Let’s go, Seel!”

“Seel, seel!” Seel clapped its flippers. Kailani released Brionne to give Seel some company.

“Absol, can you watch our stuff?” Naomi asked. The pokemon responded by laying atop the trio’s bags. “…well, I guess that’s one way to do it.”

As the girls settled in and took to the water, Kailani looked to Naomi as she emerged from beneath the waves. “I saw your pictures in the dorm. You’re from a sailing family?”

“That I am!” Naomi beamed. “I was in the swim club at my middle school, too. Guess that’s what happens when you live in a port town like I do.”

“Does Absol sail with you?”

“Absol’s not a big fan of water; she likes to sleep on the beach while I take a different pokemon. Usually it’s Treecko.”

“No way! I’m imagining such a small pokemon clinging to the sail…”

“You’re not far off.”

Fae had emerged from the water, focusing on making a sand castle while Seel splashed around in the surf. She looked up at the two talking, smiling softly, when she heard a growl. Turning, she saw Absol beginning to grow agitated by something. “Absol…?”

Absol began to bark angrily. “Sol! Sol!”

“Huh?” Naomi looked up as she heard her. “Something’s up. Come on.” She beckoned to Kailani, as the two reached the shore. Absol had risen to her feet, pacing around and snapping her eyes in different directions. Rotomi peeked out of Fae’s bag worriedly.

“I’m starting to feel something, too…”

“Absol? What’s the matter, girl?” Naomi crouched down, when Absol tried to use her head-blade’s dull side to hook Naomi’s arm and pull her. “Hey!”

“Hey…” a voice drawled, “Would you shut your pokemon up? I’m trying to rest.”

The owner of the voice rose to his full height, slightly obscured by the shade of a beach umbrella. Tall, athletic, with fair skin and sandy blonde-grey hair. The dark colors and sharp angles of his attire were a calling card.

“It’s another member of Team Dysphoria!” Rotomi cried as she emerged from the bag.

“Name’s Bedlam,” he grumbled as he scratched his head. “You know, I was gonna take a nice, long nap before I got to spreading despair and unease.”

“What are you talking about?” Naomi raised a suspicious eyebrow. Absol stepped in front of her, growling. Bedlam lazily eyed the pair up and down, before digging into his pocket.

“You don’t gotta understand it…just obey it. Let’s see how much the nega-balls mutate a human.”

With a grunt, Bedlam hurled a fastball straight at Naomi. She had no time to react—but Absol did. She jumped backward, knocking Naomi away and being encapsulated by the ball.

“Absol!?” Naomi cried as she hit the sand, scrambling back to her feet to run toward the ball containing her companion—when it burst open again.

“NEGAAAAA!” Nega-Absol emerged from the ball—towering over the group at nine feet tall, its claws and head-blade razor sharp, its fur jagged and sinister. Batlike wings emerged from its back, as if a sinister subversion of the species’ mega-evolution, and its tail had extended to a whiplike length.

“Heh, that’ll do.” Bedlam snapped his fingers. “Nega-evolution, do your stuff!” Nega-Absol responded in kind, rearing up before charging toward the other beachgoers. People and pokemon began to flee the scene, as the monster kicked up sand, umbrellas and beach chairs. Nega-Absol reared her head back and let out a roar, a shockwave stopping and collapsing several pokemon, who now seemed frightened and weary, giving off a dim aura.

“Absol! Stop!” Naomi cried, before turning to Kailani and Fae. “You two go! I’m gonna stop her!”

“We’re not leaving you alone!” Kailani declared, while Fae anxiously watched the mayhem. After a pause, both of them took out their cure compacts; in that time, Naomi had already started running toward Absol, throwing a pokeball and releasing Sceptile to attempt to subdue the rampaging beast.

“Precure! I! Choose! You!”

As Cure Sunrise and Cure Wish transformed, Naomi had already attempted to battle Nega-Absol.

“Sceptile! Use Leaf Blade!”

Sceptile leapt into the air, converting the leaves on its body into swords as it attempted to slash at the monster. Nega-Absol responded in kind by swinging her head-blade and smacking Sceptile back down. Naomi ran to check on it, as it suddenly jumped to its feet and pulled her back as Nega-Absol tried to stomp on them.

“Sceptile, let go of me!” Naomi ordered, “I have to stop her!”

Sceptile ignored her, only for her to squirm out of its grasp and run back toward Nega-Absol. “Absol! Come back to your senses! This isn’t like you!”

Nega-Absol reared up to stomp again, only for Cure Sunrise and Cure Wish to slam into her with powerful kicks. As the Cures landed, Sunrise turned to face Naomi.

“It’s not safe for you here! That man did something to change your pokemon…we’ll do whatever it takes to turn it back!”

“I’m not leaving!” Naomi argued. “Absol’s been there for me through thick and thin!” She clenched her fists, tears streaming out, “I don’t know who you two are, but I won’t abandon her! I’d never abandon any of my pokemon!”

At that declaration, she took off at a sprint, and as she drew closer, Nega-Absol began swinging her head-blade down. Before she could make contact, there was a brilliant light…

Naomi looked around as she found herself standing in a starry void. “What…?” She looked around. She grit her teeth, then began to sprint in the endless cosmos. “Absol! Sceptile! Where are you guys!?”

“Ji-ra-chiiii~!”

Naomi skid to a stop, stumbled and fell over (somehow, despite there not being any definitive ‘ground’ to speak of), before grumbling and rising to her feet. She gasped, as a face she had only seen in picture books had appeared before her.

The legendary pokemon Jirachi floated before her, a warm smile on its face as it held in its hands a round object.

“J-J-J-J-Jirachi!?” Naomi stammered, as it spun once and held out the object…a compact with the image of a star.

“Jira!” Jirachi gave it a shake for emphasis as it extended its arms.

“I-Is that…for me?”

“Jirachi!”

Naomi took the compact in her right hand, feeling a warmth in her left and looking down to see a blue, opalescent stone forming.

“Will this…help Absol?”

Jirachi merely tilted its head, as a new energy began to rush through her.

“Precure! I! Choose! You!”

Moments later, a seemingly-new person stood in her place, and with immense strength, clapped her palms together and caught Nega-Absol’s head-blade. Clad in deep blue and pale yellow, short hair meeting back like a paintbrush, but all-too-familiar eyes glared up at Nega-Absol, before kicking the blade back and flipping away. She struck a fighting pose.

“Courage as vast as the night sky! Cure Starlight!”

#pocket monsters precure #pocket monsters pretty cure #pokemon #precure #pretty cure #fanseries #story

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labourpress · 7 years

Text

John McDonnell – speech to Labour economic conference, Glasgow – Saturday 11 March 2017

*** CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY***

I want to thank you for coming today.

It’s been great to see the enthusiasm across the country for these conferences.

There’s a huge thirst for ideas and for discussion about how we can turn our economy round.

But at the heart of our discussions is something fundamental.

Adam Smith, who taught, as you know, right here in Glasgow, once called economics a “moral science”.

He meant that, yes, the economy obeys laws –

But that it was also about the kind of society we live in.

That economics is fundamentally about values.

That when we think about the kind of economy we want, we must always think about the kind of values we hold for our society.

Our values are these:

We believe in a fair tax system where everybody, no matter how rich and powerful, pay their way.

We believe that - through a fair tax system and collective endeavour – the elderly and disabled should be cared for and the sick be treated.

And children educated to fulfil talents to full.

The Chancellor presented his Budget statement earlier in the week.

The contrast between what the Labour Party and the labour movement stand for could not be clearer.

What I saw, sitting opposite him, was a Conservative Chancellor boasting about tax cuts to the corporations and the rich

whilst refusing to effectively tackle the crisis in social care for the elderly refusing to properly fund the NHS and increasing the national insurance burden on many middle and low self-employed earners.

And at the same time breaking a clear manifesto promise that the Conservatives would not increase National Insurance.

Labour opposed the tax hike from the start.

The Chancellor’s decision to push a £2bn tax rise on low and middle-earner self-employed made little sense.

The justification offered by the government does not stand up.

You can’t simply demand more taxes off people without offering something in return.

This week we saw the Government effectively blaming self-employed people for the dysfunctional labour market.

There wasn’t a package of measures designed to address the problems of the modern world of work.

It was a single unilateral tax hike for all self-employed people earning over eight thousand pounds.

It’s a single hike of £2 billion pounds targeted at the self-employed taking place at the same time as the Tories are slashing taxes for giant corporations.

They’re making the minicab driver pay more, but the company she works for pay less.

And that minicab driver will still not enjoy the protections of a full-time contract.

A hairdresser earning fifteen thousand pounds a year will be £139 pounds worse off as a result of yesterday’s measures.

Some have tried to portray yesterday’s announcement as progressive.

But what’s progressive about raising taxes for low-paid drivers, while the Government goes ahead with cuts to capital gains tax for a tiny few?

What’s progressive about raising taxes for low-paid self-employed cleaners, while the wealthiest families in the country get a cut in their inheritance tax?

What’s progressive about raising taxes for plumbers, while multinational corporations see their tax bills slashed year after year?

What’s not fair is £70 billion pounds of tax giveaways for the wealthiest and corporations, while hiking taxes on middle and low earnings.

That’s not fair. That’s not progressive. That’s just not right.

Meanwhile the Government’s incremental reforms to business rates fall far short of the radical long-term reform needed.

They are trying a delaying tactic, but business rates are a ticking time bomb threatening to destroy many town centres.

Now Labour recognise that the labour market is changing.

Some of this can be welcome.

Self-employment can give people the flexibility at work that a more conventional contract might not.

Changes in technology have opened up new scope for interesting and fulfilling work – for some.

But let’s not romanticise this.

Bogus self-employment is a real and growing problem.

It means workers going without the protections that the appropriate labour contract can give.

It means workers forced into more insecure work, for less pay – and employers ducking their own requirements to pay National Insurance.

I want to pay tribute to the campaigning work put in by our unions to bring employers to heel.

Scottish TUC are running an excellent campaign, “Better than Zero”, against zero hours contracts.

The challenge for the next Labour government and the whole labour movement will be in securing the balance between the best possible protections for those in work –

And recognising that the world of work itself is changing.

The labour movement has risen to challenges like this in the past.

It was born out of the struggle for decent pay and conditions when new technologies were ripping up existing ways of working.

We need that same spirit and vision again.

So I’ll be convening a summit next month of unions, the self-employed, and small businesses to develop Labour’s policy on self-employment.

We want to win the widest possible support for a radical, Labour vision of how to adapt to a changing world.

We are the party of workers and small businesses.

That is the message we should carry to every part of the country.

And we face a government of the giant corporations and tax avoiders.

This week’s Budget made that only too clear where their priorities lie.

Labour will make different choices when we return to government.

For now, we’ll keep the pressure up on the Tories.

Theresa May has already had to buckle – the tax hike will now not be enacted until the Autumn.

But the Chancellor was silent on the greatest challenge facing this country.

The word “Brexit” never passed his lips once during the speech.

As Britain prepares to begin the process of leaving the European Union, the Chancellor had nothing to say on the matter.

He kept silent because he does not agree with the position of his own government.

The Prime Minister claims no deal is better than a bad deal.

But this is absurd – no deal would be the worst possible deal.

The Chancellor knows very well that this is the case.

He’s been warned about it from all sides.

Crashing out of the EU means we will be cut off from investment.

We will be cut off from our biggest trading partner.

We will be cut off from the skills and contribution that EU nationals have made to our economy and society.

The government has yet to even offer guarantees for those EU migrants already living and working here.

It was Labour’s amendment in the Lords that demanded the government offer a guarantee.

We defeated the government then and we will be fighting the case on Monday.

It is essential these guarantees are given to the three million people from the EU now living and working here.

Instead this government seems to think they can treat people as bargaining chips – apparently forgetting that 1.5 million UK citizens live and work in the rest of the EU.

The Brexit vote creates huge challenges for all of us.

It has brought some of the fault-lines in our society to the fore.

It’s forcing us to think about what kind of society we want to live in.

Because the status quo is no longer an option.

But the challenge now for all parties, including the Labour Party, is to present an alternative.

The Tories have already offered theirs.

It is a dystopian vision of Britain as a bargain basement tax haven off the shores of Europe.

Of poverty pay and misery for the majority – but a fabulously wealthy elite at the top.

I do not believe that those who voted Leave voted for this –

Quite the opposite, many believed that our public services would get more resources, not fewer.

The hardliners are pushing for this.

They want Brexit to be the culmination of decades of free market dogma.

Of the belief that the only relationships that matter are market relationships.

And that if you just let markets rip, and let the wealthy do as they please, wealth will trickle down.

It’s the belief that the institutions we rely and the relationships we build are barriers to efficiency.

And that if we leave everything to the market alone, the result will be a flourishing of entrepreneurship and growth.

Nearly forty years since the free market experiment began, we can assess the results.

And they are abysmal.

We have a society that is amongst the most unequal in the developed world.

Too much wealth is held by too few hands.

Following these free market prescriptions have left Britain with a crumbling infrastructure, businesses that don’t feel able to invest, and productivity growth that has slumped.

Here in deregulated Britain, it takes a typical worker five days to produce what a worker in regulated France or Germany can produce in four.

And that gap is getting wider. It matters because without growth in productivity, sustained improvements in living standards will not be possible.

The slump in productivity is the major reason we are now looking at the truly grim forecasts for real wages.

Britain has the unique distinction of being the only large, developed economy where when growth returned after the financial crisis, real wages fell.

We have growth. But that doesn’t mean most people are any better off.

Resolution Foundation expects real wages to not recover their 2007 level before 2022.

This 15-year period without a pay rise is unprecedented, they say, in 210 years.

For as long as industrial capitalism has existed in Britain, we haven’t seen a period like this.

It is unprecedented. And everything the Tories are doing today is simply exacerbating the problem.

The Budget shambles revealed this.

Nearly a decade after the financial crisis they do not have a clue about how to deal with its consequences.

They are continuing to pursue austerity – despite all the evidence, now clear from across the globe, that it has been a disaster for those countries that pursued it.

So we have to now develop our alternative, and win the argument for a radically different approach.

We need to be far bolder in our ambitions for the constitution.

I’ve spoken of the possibilities of a more radically federal structure for the UK.

Not just devolution here in Scotland, or in Wales.

But devolution to the English regions, too.

And a revival of local democracy everywhere.

If they shared little else, both the independence referendum and the EU referendum revealed a healthy scepticism about centralisation.

There is a deep and growing distrust of authority.

Powerful institutions are seen as distant, unaccountable, and undemocratic.

Because if we’re repatriating powers from Brussels, why simply hand them back to Westminster?

And then why stop at the existing devolved institutions?

There is no reason why English counties and regions should not enjoy significantly greater freedoms.

Labour won all four metro mayoral elections in England last year, and we’ll be fighting for victories in this year’s elections.

But we need to go further.

It’s not just about the powers that government has.

It’s about getting wealth back into our communities.

Too many people, in too many places, have been excluded from economic growth.

That means taking a different view of how we own our societies’ assets and wealth.

For too long we have automatically turned to the private sector when new opportunities arise.

Look at renewables.

Two-thirds of the UK’s existing electricity generation capacity will be decommissioned by 2030.

We need to move quickly to replace it.

It’s renewable generation that can deliver. The UK is uniquely well-placed to exploit the opportunity.

In Scotland you have already undergone something of a renewables revolution, which of course we should welcome.

However, when it comes to who owns and profits from renewable energy the record here is, at best, patchy. It is good that there is some support through the Cares Scheme for community projects and that many local organisations have developed local renewable schemes.

However, let’s be honest - renewables in this country have become a new Klondike for big multi-nationals.

Indeed, for big projects the automatic propensity by Government is to seek private operators and private money to build and finance them; as shown by former First Minister Alex Salmond making such a big effort with the Qatari Government to sell renewable investment opportunities to them.

This is a massive missed opportunity for public ownership and control of renewable energy in Scotland.

We could have saw surpluses reinvested back into the public sector but instead we have saw profit floating to various boardrooms across the world.

Other countries in Europe are racing ahead of us in installing new, clean renewable generation.

Places like Denmark and Germany are doing it because they are fostering local and co-operative ownership of renewable energy.

We could be aiming to create thousands of co-operatives delivering renewable energy.

Our network of regional development banks will be charged with supplying the finance they need to overhaul our existing energy system.

This will sit alongside new local energy companies, supplying cheap, clean energy to their local areas and breaking the monopoly of the Big Six.

We'll be giving power back to the people and letting local communities take control of their own power supply.

We know there are huge advantages to community ownership.

Research shows that for every single megawatt of community-owned microhydro installed, 10 full-time equivalent jobs are created.

That is delivering a real boost to some otherwise isolated rural communities, securing jobs and incomes where otherwise there was little.

So the next Labour government will create a “Right to Own”.

We’ll give workers in a company facing a change of ownership first refusal on presenting their own, worker-owned takeover plan.

Our new regional development banks will support worker-owned businesses across the country.

We’ll aim to double the size of our co-operative sector, so it matches Germany or the US.

But I think the same principle has to apply to our communities.

The next Labour government will take this new approach.

It’s an approach that means bringing together those parts of our society where co-operation and trust are fostered.

For those on the left, that was a traditional argument for the Union.

The UK state could be a powerful mechanism to redistribute and create a fairer society.

That by pooling our resources through taxation, we can make sure that those who are better off can support those who are not.

It means, in theory, we can deliver the same high quality public services across the whole country.

The National Health Service is the embodiment of this principle.

And by creating UK-wide institutions we tie our societies together.

The economy is always supported and sustained by a dense web of culture and institutions.

That’s one reason the Tories’ austerity measures are so criminally destructive –

It’s not just that public services are being slowly ground into the dirt.

It’s that the fabric of social life itself starts to become frayed.

The institutions we rely on – from the local council to the health service to our schools – aren’t only there to provide a service.

We’re not mere consumers of education or healthcare.

How we educate our young people and how we look after those who are sick define us as a society.

They tie us together as a collective.

This is the principle behind taxation.

I raised the issue, before the Budget, of making public the tax returns of those who earn over a million pounds a year.

It’s an anti-avoidance measure, inspired by the example of Norway and Sweden.

Public disclosure makes it extremely difficult for those who intent on avoiding their taxes to do so.

It’s a major reason Norway has one of the lowest rates of tax avoidance in the world.

But I think it’s about more than this.

It’s about shifting our culture.

If you are rich – and if you earn over a million pounds a year, you are in not even the top 1%, but the top 0.1% -

If you are lucky enough to be that wealthy, and to pay the taxes that are due, your contribution to society matters.

We all want a society that is fair, and seen to be fair.

So we in the labour movement are against the dogma from the Tories that views society as a war of all against all.

We don’t believe, as Margaret Thatcher said, “that there is no such thing as society”.

We don’t believe that you can undermine the institutions that make up the fabric of our social life –

Whether they are the NHS, or local councils, or schools –

With year after year of cuts.

We stand for a totally different vision.

It’s a vision rooted in our values.

It’s a vision of a more caring society where opportunities are available to all.

“Secure people take risks,” as the Cambridge economist Ha Joon Chang put it.

A caring society is one that is also able to take risks – to take on great social challenges.

Or to allow individuals to strike out, to be entrepreneurial –

To invent, and create, and challenge convention.

Those who are live in fear of unemployment.

Or of what will happen if they grow sick.

Or how they will educate their children.

Or what will happen when they grow old.

People who are consumed by these fears – all understandable – will not take those risks.

This used to be the privilege of great wealth –

That only those with the wealth to do so can afford to innovate.

But we don’t have to run a society like this.

Technology has hugely reduced the barriers against those seeking to establish new businesses.

We have built strong institutions that foster co-operation.

And new technology lets us build new ways of working together, like Platform Co-operatives.

This is the immense, shared wealth that our society has built up.

If we are to face Brexit with confidence, it is the wealth that we must draw on.

We will need a radically different vision of how society can operate.

We know the world is changing, rapidly –

The balance of power and wealth is shifting.

Factory wages in China now match those in Greece, and are approaching those in Portugal.

Our country’s position in the world is changing.

We can’t rely on a single sector to drag the whole economy along – as we relied on financial services too heavily before the crash.

And we can’t think again that concentrating resources and wealth in a few hands in a single city is good for the rest of us.

It can’t be right that London gets half of all the transport investment in the country.

And unlike the SNP vision that was for a prosperity built on low taxes for big business, and an over reliance of oil and bank profits, and austerity for everyone else.

We must build new institutions, and spread the wealth of our society more fairly.

We’ll bring in a £10 an hour Real Living Wage, so work always pays properly.

We’ll deliver investment in jobs and skills across the whole country.

Our National Investment Bank and network of regional banks will support prosperity in every region and nation.

I think we can look to our neighbours and see how our society has a huge potential that can be brought out.

We could look to countries like Denmark, Sweden and Norway.

For example, look at Norway where the best public services in the world are matched by the highest wages.

Across these nations you see that measures such as tax transparency at the top, affordable child care, and greater equality are the accepted norm.

We don’t have to settle for second-rate.

We can radically decentralise this country –

Put power back in the hands of workers, small businesses and communities.

Bring the investment needed to redistribute wealth across every part of this island.

Labour would seek a prosperity based on solidarity and fellowship between the nations of these isles, and those who share our values in Europe.

We will be part of a new Arc of Prosperity – a radically fairer, more equal, and more prosperous society.

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mildredjizquierdo · 4 years

Text

4 predictions for the next phase of the COVID-19 pandemic

Peering into the future of COVID-19

Introduction

COVID-19’s impact on the United States and its healthcare system is unprecedented. In this piece, I make four predictions for what the next phase will bring. Each has important strategic implications for healthcare companies and investors.

Here’s what I expect:

Treatment, not testing will be key to reopening the economy

Hybridization (virtual/in-person mix) will be the new reality

Public health post-COVID-19 will be like security post-9/11

The federal government will grow even more powerful relative to everything else

Treatment, not testing will be key to reopening the economy

It is accepted wisdom among public health experts and many others that the widespread availability of COVID-19 testing is a necessary condition to reopen the economy. It says so on the roadmaps of California, Massachusetts, the federal government, and many companies and institutions. It makes great sense: once we can see the problem clearly we can prevent infections from spreading. Other countries that are reopening –like Germany and Singapore—make extensive use of testing and contact tracing. This, we’re told, is the way things will be until a vaccine is introduced in a year or so.

Here’s the problem: progress on ramping up testing has been slow, even in Massachusetts where I assumed it would go fast. Despite lots of announcements of new capacity coming online I haven’t seen anything that makes me think there will be a breakthrough. Consider, also that effective testing for COVID-19 can’t be a one-time phenomenon. People will need to be tested over and over.

Meanwhile, with the worldwide deluge of patients, doctors are figuring out how to treat them. We might not have a vaccine in a year –or ever (unfortunately), but treatments are improving now, through experimentation, physician insight, and good luck. There is early promise from Gilead’s remdesivir; other drugs will be useful, too. But it’s not just drugs, it’s also non-drug adjustments such as how to optimize use of mechanical ventilation for these patients and even when to turn them onto their stomachs. As another example, I received firsthand reports from frontline Italian physicians who hypothesize that the coronavirus attacks the cardiovascular system first, and that is where to focus to address the root cause in a straightforward way. These are just things I’ve been privy to; certainly there are thousands of other investigations going on around the world. Some will work, and soon. These innovations can be additive or multiplicative, even if they’re not a miracle cure.

Bottom line, I think it’s likely that COVID-19 will become a manageable disease within a few months or even a few weeks, and that’s what will enable us to start to go back to work and school and to start flying again with an acceptable level of risk. For better or worse, it’s also more consistent with how the American healthcare system works: treat the sick.

It would be so much better to have ample testing in place before trying to reopen. Until we get there the US will suffer from higher disease burden, greater cost, higher inequities, and more skittishness about public gatherings compared to other countries. Yet as a whole we will figure out how to make do without the testing capacity that everyone wants.

Hybridization (virtual/in-person mix) will be the new reality

When COVID-19 hit, telemedicine made more progress in one week than it had in the past 10 years. Suddenly patients were scared to come to the office or hospital (and doctors/nurses/staff were afraid of the patients), reimbursement with in-person visits was equalized, and cross-state licensing restrictions were eased. People are getting accustomed to online meetings, online socializing, online schooling, and online shopping. Some of it –like convenience, immediacy—they like. Other parts –such as the difficulty building new, trusting relationships and absence of physical contact, and difficulty interacting with groups or teams—they don’t.

The pandemic will be with us for a while, which means people will have plenty of time to get used to being remote, understand better how to make it work, and won’t always default to the old ways. This is true even for some older Americans who thought they’d be able to ride out their careers or lives without jumping into the digital waters.

There has been a gradual shift to online over the past couple of decades, but the pandemic changes things. Now, we realize that we may have to suddenly revert to a remote world at any time, so we had better be ready for it. Social distancing is likely to be required to some degree over the next couple years, which means offices, factories, schools and entertainment venues won’t be able to return to their previous density. We can expect to see a rotation of remote and in-person staff and students –instead of total shutdowns. And kids may not like it, but there will be no excuse for another snow day!

Health status and age will play important roles in how hybridization is realized. Older people and those with conditions making them vulnerable may find that they have to spend more time in the digital world than their younger and healthier peers, because it’s not safe for them to show up in person. Ageism and discrimination against people with disabilities is already a major problem. It will become much more so in a COVID-19 influenced economy, especially during a recession where the job market favors employers.

For healthcare delivery and clinical trials, it is likely that more routine interactions will be conducted online rather than the office, and that the home will become even more attractive for recovery, aging and research. Providers will make greater use of nurse practitioners and physician assistants as front-line representatives, for triage, follow up and care coordination. It’s more straightforward to standardize protocols and supervise staff in the digital realm, plus it’s cheaper. We will also see a rise in asynchronous interactions, which are often more effective and efficient than as live video call. With the right leadership, these changes can also facilitate an increase in value based and evidence based cared.

The current situation has very negative consequences for the health of people with chronic and even acute conditions, who are avoiding the doctor and hospital at all costs. Meanwhile, providers face financial ruin as patients stay away. It has to be addressed, and hybridization is the way to do it.

Public health post-COVID-19 will be like security post-9/11

After 9/11, security came to the fore. Suddenly there was visible security at airports, in office buildings, and throughout public spaces. New physical and digital surveillance technologies and practices were introduced and there was massive hiring of security guards, analysts, etc.

Now that COVID-19 has struck, we can expect public health to be similarly elevated. It will become a pervasive part of our economy and society. Expect temperature –and maybe face mask and hand washing– checks at the office, school, and any public venue. Contact tracers may call or visit our homes or scrutinize our cellphone records. Event managers and employers will need to hire a health team and devise a health/safety plan to prevent outbreaks and provide confidence.

New products and tools will be needed to sanitize surfaces, detect pathogens in the environment, and monitor outbreaks. Sick leave policies will need to be revised and enforced. New cultural norms will be established –for example on the wearing of masks, shaking hands, what personal space means. Mental health needs must also be recognized and addressed in the adult and pediatric populations.

It won’t be enough to pursue these approaches privately. Local, state, and federal agencies will have to invest in order to deploy a comprehensive strategy to protect and reassure the public.

The new public health approach will dovetail with existing post 9/11 security measures and infrastructure. For example, the Red/Orange/Yellow/Blue/Green threat level developed for terrorism is actually more suitable to viral dangers. There will also be opportunities to redefine and expand the corporate wellness industry, which at last will be able to demonstrate a robust return on investment.

Federal government will grow even more powerful relative to everything else

The federal response to the pandemic has been problematic. The US had time to prepare after observing China and Europe, but largely failed to do so. States complain that there’s been little federal response or coordination and that they have been left to fend for themselves. The underlying reasons and political elements can be debated elsewhere.

Somewhat paradoxically, the pandemic has strengthened the federal hand relative to others. Consider:

With interest rates near zero, the federal government is easily able to borrow $2+ Trillion for the CARES Act

The Federal Reserve has propped up the stock and bond market with its promise to buy essentially anything, including non-investment grade securities

States are facing huge drops in revenues thanks to the shutdown of the economy. They need to balance their budgets and don’t have the borrowing powers of the feds. They also have to beg the federal government for assistance with the current crisis

The completely unprecedented surge in unemployment is leading to dependency on programs such as SNAP and Medicaid that are primarily funded at the federal level

Many industries –think travel, tourism, restaurants—are essentially shut down and need a bailout to restart

Colleges and universities, are hamstrung by having to close their campuses -possibly through the fall semester as well—and the question of whether domestic and especially international students will return

The healthcare delivery system is suffering from a huge disruption as essentially all resources are diverted to COVID-19 or idled

The broad implications of this sudden swing will play out over time and will be affected by the November elections (assuming they occur on schedule). The pandemic really does place the country at a crossroads. The conditions are ripe for further dividing the nation along various fault lines (rural/urban, nationalist/globalist, etc.) or for bringing us together. We may also see blocs of states ally more formally to coordinate with one another and attempt to shift the balance of power. Meanwhile, it is notable that this federal power expansion, involvement in the economy and massive increase of borrowing are occurring under ostensibly conservative leadership.

One near-term result is that the country has jumped much closer to the left-wing policies of Bernie Sanders and Andrew Yang than would have seemed imaginable in February. Everyone will be covered for COVID-19, whether directly through their insurance plans or through federal subsidies to providers, and the $1200 stimulus checks with the president’s signature are like Yang’s Universal Basic Income.

Massive unemployment will shift millions of people to Medicaid, so we may have Medicaid for All rather than Medicare for All. (This is actually a better idea, in my view.) I think we’ll see the holdout states finally accept the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion now that their backs are to the wall. And I also expect the COVID-19 experience means the Supreme Court will decline to strike down the Affordable Care Act, even though that won’t be the explicit rationale.

Conclusion

The situation is fluid and each of these predictions is subject to change. But I wanted to get some thoughts down while they were fresh, with the goal of spurring conversation and debate. In addition, I hope that clients will find this thinking useful as they determine what to do next and make longer term strategic and investment plans.

—

By healthcare business consultant David E. Williams, president of Health Business Group.

The post 4 predictions for the next phase of the COVID-19 pandemic appeared first on Health Business Group.

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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When 27-year-old Debbie Honaker went to her doctor in Lebanon, Virginia, after a routine gallbladder surgery in the early 2000s, she was prescribed “Oxy tens” — 10 milligrams of OxyContin. At her next visit, it turned into 40s. Then she graduated to Percocet. Soon, she began stealing pills, then buying them from Medicaid patients for $1. “At the end of your journey, you’re not going after drugs to get high; you’re going to keep from being sick,” she says.

Honaker’s story is just one of many in author Beth Macy’s new book Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America, which chronicles the 20-year history of the opioid epidemic, starting with the dawn of OxyContin in 1996 and ending with grim statistics: 300,000 Americans dead from opioid overdoses over the past 15 years and predictions that 300,000 more will die in the next five.

Macy’s first book, 2014’s Factory Man, underscored the toll of offshoring business on America’s rural communities. In Dopesick, Macy, a Roanoke-based journalist, continues to follow American workers, investigating how those who have lost factory and mining jobs have been hit especially hard by the opioid epidemic.

The villains of Dopesick are the pharmaceutical companies — namely Purdue Pharma, the company that sold OxyContin — corruptible doctors, and a lax Food and Drug Administration. The victims? The rest of America, especially those in economically distressed parts of the country.

America is sick, Macy argues, and too many people have looked the other way during the worst drug epidemic in its history.

I spoke with Macy to better understand the history of the epidemic, its real-world impact, and what is missing from our national conversation on opioids.

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Hope Reese

You write about central Appalachia as “the birthplace of the modern opioid epidemic.” What are the characteristics that made a region like Lee County, Virginia — which began seeing teenagers overdose in the late ’90s — susceptible to the OxyContin epidemic?

Beth Macy

It’s the same thing if you look at the other initial hot spots. In Machias, Maine, a logging and fishing community, there were also many people already on painkillers from legitimate injuries due to these manual labor jobs. But in Appalachia, in particular, you had trade deals like NAFTA in ’94, and then China joined the WTO in ’01, and so you saw the furniture and the textile mills closing and the jobs going away — and at the same time, a huge rise in disability.

Now, 57 percent of the men of working age in Lee County are unemployed. As this is happening, this whole notion that we were horribly undertreating pain began being pushed by big pharma. Suddenly you couldn’t go and visit somebody in the hospital where there wasn’t a whiteboard where they would ask you to rate your pain on a scale of 1 to 10, or draw a smiley face or a frowny face.

All these things sort of converged: the joblessness, the rapacious behavior of big pharma, Purdue Pharma in particular. One of the first cops I interviewed said, “Oh, yeah, people were walking down the street with green and orange smudges on their shirt.” Orange was the color of an Oxy 40 mg and green for the Oxy 80 mg. They had held the pills in their mouths to soften up the time-release mechanism coating so they could get the euphoric rush of an entire pill all at once, then wiped the coating off on their shirtsleeves.

Hope Reese

I’m also interested in how doctors were incentivized. They were basically taking bribes — going on Caribbean vacations, for instance, hosted by pharma companies. Has there been a crackdown on doctors? What kind of gifts are they allowed to accept from sales reps?

Beth Macy

That’s changed in more recent years. In the first decade, it was kind of like a Wild West of pharmaceutical sales tactics. Pharmaceutical ads were starting to air on TV. A good friend of mine who is a pharma rep broke it down for me: They would find out what the doctor wanted and they would show up with whatever that was. He was waiting for the doctor, a chain-smoking doctor in Bland, Virginia, and another rep has already beaten him — they were there with a carton of cigarettes with a Celexa sticker on it.

Purdue used similar techniques. They paid doctors to be spokesmen for them, saying: Come to a seminar in Boca Raton or Arizona, and we’ll pay you to go out and give speeches about [OxyContin].

Hope Reese

Many people who become addicted to OxyContin eventually move on to heroin, which is cheaper. How are we doing with the pill problem? And even if we have tackled that issue, isn’t it a bigger problem once people start taking heroin?

Beth Macy

The updated CDC guidelines in 2016 were a great improvement. It was kind of what those parents who initially lost their kids to OxyContin overdose wanted. They wanted the guideline to be that opioids were used sparingly, that doctors try pain relievers like ibuprofen and aspirin before prescribing the highly addictive pills, and that they give most patients only a few days’ supply — that opioid therapy for short-term pain last three days, and very rarely longer than seven. Overall, that’s good, but as soon as the OxyContin and the other pills got harder to get, you saw the drug cartels bringing in heroin.

Marijuana laws started becoming legal in states, and the drug cartels needed to make up their profit [from lost marijuana sales]. The doctors are doing better about not prescribing opioids out the wazoo, but we now have 2.6 million Americans with opioid use disorder. What are we going to do about that? You just can’t flip off a switch and it stops.

What I see on the ground are serious holes in the tapestry of treatment. The Roanoke Times finally did a story on medication-assisted treatment, or MAT, which combines therapy with medications like methadone or Suboxone. In it, they quote Steve Ratliff, adult and family services director for Blue Ridge Behavioral Healthcare, and he doesn’t believe in it. He told the newspaper that they only use buprenorphine if counseling has been attempted first and doesn’t work — and then they give them the option. This is not consistent with state policy, and in my view, it is just wrong.

Now, in an age of Fentanyl — dealers started cutting heroin with fentanyl heavily in 2015, and it became much stronger and deadlier — the risk of dying is much higher. We’re going to let them fail first?

Hope Reese

In the book, you point to evidence that shows that abstinence-based centers, a model of treatment in which people are cut completely off of the drugs, have not proven to be the best route to recovery. So why do they dominate the treatment landscape?

Beth Macy

I think it’s because the recovery industry developed largely as treatment centers for alcoholism. So the abstinence-only models put forth by [Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous] are historically what most of the recovery industry has been centered around.

Abstinence models may be better to treat alcoholism, but not opioids, since opioids, especially those laced with fentanyl, are deadly. [Many fewer people] OD on alcohol [compared to heroin]. What I see on the ground is families that can afford to send their children to rehabs — and most families can’t — end up spending thousands of dollars for treatment that is not what science says is the best way to treat opioid use disorder.

One family I know with two heroin-addicted sons spent $300,000 on an abstinence center. That wasn’t including the heroin-related legal fees that they had.

Hope Reese

More than 40,000 Americans died of overdoses from opioids such as fentanyl, heroin, and prescribed painkillers in 2016, and they are estimating even more in 2017. What about long-term consequences? If this has been going on for 20 years, what will the country look like in 20 more years?

Beth Macy

Think about the foster care system. In Lee County, one in three kids are raised in foster care now. And think about what are their kids going to be like? That’s really frightening.

Another long-term consequence that scares the dickens out of me is hepatitis C. There are centers, needle exchange programs, where you come and you turn in your dirty needles. There, you get clean needles and you get to know these people who want to help you and want to help you get you hooked up with social work and counseling and ultimately, when you’re ready, go on to treatment. That’s what’s missing in most of America right now.

I was visiting a needle exchange recovery program in Las Vegas recently that was only located on the outskirts of town. If you’re an addicted person and you’re homeless, you probably live near the downtown in these tunnels underneath the city, so the homeless people who are addicted have to save up their bus fare to go there. And it’s because they didn’t want the tourists to see the addicts.

The guy who runs it who has been in this world of prevention and harm reduction for a long time said that what keeps him up at night is in 15 to 20 years, we’re gonna have a tsunami of hepatitis C because so many people who are injecting are sharing needles.

I mean, it’s cultural. Our country’s way of thinking has been, “We gotta incarcerate our way out of this,” “We gotta be tough,” “We gotta just say no.” And that has not worked in other countries. Other countries that have adopted a treatment approach have done much better.

Hope Reese

This topic has finally become of part of a national conversation — but what’s still missing from the larger dialogue? What surprised you after spending all this time with addicts, dealers, and families?

Beth Macy

What surprised me is how this could happen to just anyone. It literally spares no one. And because it started out in these politically unimportant places, people didn’t pay attention to it. We’re basically leaving the institution of the family to deal with the worst drug crisis in the nation’s history.

You see these families in so much pain. They’re so weary; they’re so worn out. Many of them have these ideological divides within the family, because maybe they have somebody in AA or NA themselves — who maybe doesn’t see medication-assisted treatment as the best way for their addicted loved one to get better.

You see that colors a lot of family dynamics around medication-assisted treatment, and you see them worn out also because of bad behavior by the addicted people whose brains have been taken over by this drug, such as users who steal from their families to fund their next fix, for instance. Too often, the addicted person isn’t seen as someone worthy of evidence-based medical care until people are sitting in the pews at their funeral.

Hope Reese

I want to know how the book affected you, especially since a lot of the reporting was done in your own community. In particular, one of the women addicted to heroin who you spent a lot of time with ended up becoming a prostitute in Nevada, and was eventually found dead, in what appeared to be a violent murder.

Beth Macy

It was really hard to interview people who died before I had the chance to write up my book, but it was nothing compared to the pain that these families are going through.

I was constantly balancing that between anxiety and feeling hopeless about it.

I take things pretty personally sometimes. I have hundreds of text messages back and forth with many of the mothers in the book. But as a friend of mine said, “The only way I think you’re going to be able to protect yourself and write this book at the same time and survive it is to find the helpers.”

Hope Reese is a journalist in Louisville, Kentucky. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, Playboy, Vox, and other publications. Find her on Twitter @hope_reese.

Original Source -> The author of Dopesick on how we’re still failing opioid users

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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newssplashy · 6 years

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World: As affordable housing crisis grows, HUD sits on the sidelines

WASHINGTON — The country is in the grips of an escalating housing affordability crisis. Millions of low-income Americans are paying 70 percent or more of their incomes for shelter.

The Trump administration’s main policy response, unveiled this spring by Ben Carson, the secretary of housing and urban development:

A plan to triple rents for about 712,000 of the poorest tenants receiving federal housing aid and to loosen the cap on rents on 4.5 million households enrolled in federal voucher and public housing programs nationwide, with the goal of moving longtime tenants out of the system to make way for new ones.

As city and state officials and members of both parties clamor for the federal government to help, Carson has privately told aides that he views the shortage of affordable housing as regrettable, but as essentially a local problem.

A former presidential candidate who said last year that he did not want to give recipients of federal aid “a comfortable setting that would make somebody want to say, ‘I’ll just stay here; they will take care of me,'” he has made it a priority to reduce, rather than expand, assistance to the poor, to break what he sees as a cycle of dependency.

And when congressional Democrats and Republicans scrambled to save his department’s budget and rescue an endangered tax credit that accounts for 9 out of 10 affordable housing developments built in the country, Carson sat on the sidelines, according to legislators and congressional staff members.

Local officials seem resigned to the fact that they will receive little or no help from the Trump administration.

“To be brutally honest, I think that we aren’t really getting any help right now out of Washington, and the situation has gotten really bad over the last two years,” said Chad Williams, executive director of the Southern Nevada Regional Housing Authority, which oversees public housing developments and voucher programs that serve 16,000 people in the Las Vegas area.

Nevada, ground zero in the housing crisis a decade ago, is now the epicenter of the affordability crunch, with low-income residents squeezed out of once-affordable apartments by working-class refugees fleeing California’s own rental crisis.

“I think Carson’s ideas, that public housing shouldn’t be multigenerational, are noble,” Williams said. “But right now these programs are a stable, Band-Aid fix, and we really need them.”

Underlying the conflict between Carson and officials like Williams are fundamental disagreements over the role the federal government should play.

Carson believes federal aid should be regarded only as a temporary crutch for families moving from dependency to work and sees the rent increases as a way to expand his agency’s budget. Low-income renters and many local officials who run housing programs see the federal assistance as a semi-permanent hedge against evictions and homelessness that needs to be expanded in times of crisis.

This year, the White House proposed to slash $8.8 billion from the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s most important housing programs. While aides say Carson privately pushed for a restoration in programs for seniors and disabled people, he publicly supported the gutting of his own department, reiterating to lawmakers last month that he felt as much responsibility toward taxpayers as tenants.

“I continue to advocate for fiscal responsibility as well as compassion,” Carson told a House committee in June. He declined to comment for this article.

Under Carson’s most significant policy proposal as secretary, maximum rents paid by the poorest households in public housing would rise to $150 a month from $50.

His proposal has received little support from local housing operators. Over the past month, Carson has huddled with Rep. Dennis A. Ross, R-Fla., who is drafting less stringent legislation that would allow, but not mandate, local housing authorities to raise rents and carry out reforms to streamline the process of verifying the poverty of applicants, aides said.

Still, both proposals represent a paradigm shift in federal housing policy, ending the requirement that low-income tenants spend no more than 30 percent of their net income on rent.

Tying rents to incomes has been a central part of the system since 1981, especially for the Section 8 housing voucher program, enabling 2.1 million low-income families to rent private apartments they could not otherwise afford. Carson’s proposal would peg rents to 35 percent of gross income for all tenants. The Ross bill excludes voucher recipients, at the request of local housing authority officials.

“We need sensible reforms to make the system more efficient for agencies and residents,” said Adrianne Todman, chief executive of the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials. “But now is not the time for arbitrary federal rent hikes.”

“This isn’t about dependence,” said Diane Yentel, president of the nonprofit National Low Income Housing Coalition, a Washington-based advocacy group that has released several recent reports documenting the affordability crunch. “Today’s housing crisis is squarely rooted in the widening gap between incomes and housing costs.”

The crisis didn’t begin under Trump’s presidency.

Median national rents rose 32 percent in constant dollars from 2001 to 2015, while wages remained flat, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts. The pace has picked up over the last few years, buoyed by an improving economy.

The rent increases are hitting poor and elderly people, African-Americans and low-income wage earners the hardest. A survey by the National Low Income Housing Coalition found that a worker earning the state minimum wage could afford a market-rate one-bedroom apartment in only 22 of the country’s 3,000 counties.

The Obama administration initially proposed steep increases for Section 8 and other programs, but pulled back after the Republicans won control of the House in 2010.

During the 2008 campaign, President Barack Obama promised to fund an affordable housing trust fund for the construction of new units. But the $200-million-a-year program, funded by the profits of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, was blocked by Republican lawmakers until 2014. In 2017, it was on track to finance the construction of about 1,000 units of affordable housing in 32 states, according to federal data.

Its sister program, the Capital Magnet Fund, which has leveraged private investment to create 17,000 new units, is in the cross hairs of Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, who tried to cut it by $141.7 million this year as part of his unsuccessful budget recession effort this summer.

Under Trump, funding for public housing, vouchers and new construction has risen slightly — against the president’s wishes.

In March, Republican and Democratic negotiators rejected Trump’s budget, adding $1.25 billion to HUD’s rental assistance programs and injecting an additional $425 million to the HOME program, which funds state, local, nonprofit and private partnerships to build affordable housing.

Those moves, while significant, are likely to have a limited impact on the larger problem of the increasing number of families who cannot afford a place to live.

While prices are cooling at the high end of the market in many big cities, the low- and middle-income housing markets in Nevada, Texas, California, Florida and Colorado are so hot, local officials say, that landlords routinely reject subsidized tenants because they can charge more to other renters.

Rental construction has focused on attracting high-income tenants. From 2001 to 2013, the number of rental apartments for high-wage earners increased 36 percent, while units for poor people shrank nearly 10 percent, according to federal housing statistics.

With affordable stock scarce, prices are spiking. An estimated 12 million Americans, most of them poor, now spend more than half of their earnings on housing, according to HUD statistics.

One of them is Judith Toro Fortyz, 75, who receives $848 a month in Social Security and pays $594.88 of it to remain in the small two-bedroom apartment on Staten Island that she once shared with her mother.

Toro Fortyz has been turned down for federal vouchers, reflecting a shortage in assistance that has shut out 3 of every 4 eligible applicants for Section 8. Even with an additional housing stipend from the city, she is spending 70 percent of her income on rent.

That has forced her to make wrenching decisions, like forgoing her favorite fruit, oranges, after a price spike at her local supermarket.

“I stay home a lot. I’d rather not go out because going out means you have to spend money,” said Toro Fortyz, a retired data storage worker. “I have a friend who gets Section 8 and, oh my God, they pay $200 a month. I can’t even imagine having that much money to live on.”

Carson’s proposal alarmed many low-income tenants, especially older ones, who could face significant rent increases under the plan. “We basically wouldn’t be able to get by,” said Patrick Greene, 69, a retired truck driver who lives in a small HUD-subsidized apartment with his wife in Montgomery, Alabama.

A more immediate threat to affordable housing, critics say, is the huge tax bill passed by Congress last year, which imperils one of the most important sources of long-term funding, the Low Income Housing Tax Credit.

Novogradac & Co., a firm that provides analytics for the construction and finance industries, estimated that demand for the $9-billion-a-year credit could dry up as investors realize savings through the tax cuts. The firm estimates that nearly 235,000 fewer apartments could be built over the next decade as a result of the tax code rewrite.

A bipartisan coalition, led by Sens. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, was able to expand the credit by an additional $400 million. But that is not likely to offset the damage done by the tax measure.

The administration is observing these efforts from the sidelines. Trump, scion of a New York real estate family that made its fortune in the 1950s and 1960s building affordable housing for white working-class neighborhoods, has shown little interest in tackling the problem.

He made only passing mention of the issue during the 2016 campaign and has pressed Carson to move more aggressively to impose work requirements on federal aid recipients.

For his part, Carson publicly acknowledges the crisis in most of his speeches. “Alarmingly high numbers of Americans continue to pay more than half of their incomes toward rent,” he told a House panel in October. “Many millions remain mired in poverty, rather than being guided on a path out of it.”

But he is focused less on federal solutions than on prodding local governments to ease barriers to construction. He has ordered his policy staff to come up with proposals to push local governments to reduce zoning restrictions on new projects, especially low-cost manufactured housing. HUD will also begin working with landlords around the country to come up with ways to make housing vouchers more attractive and more inclusive, aides said.

“Subsidies are a piece of the puzzle,” said Raffi Williams, a spokesman for Carson, “but we must also address the regulatory barriers relative to zoning and land use in higher-cost markets that are preventing the construction of new affordable housing. This is not just a federal problem — it’s everybody’s problem.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

source http://www.newssplashy.com/2018/07/world-as-affordable-housing-crisis_29.html

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labourpress · 6 years

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John McDonnell pre-Budget speech

John McDonnell MP, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, delivering a speech today in central London on Labour’s pre-Budget demands on the Government, said:

***CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY***

Good morning.

Thank you for coming here today.

Next week’s Budget has been widely trailed as one of the most significant in recent times.

The Prime Minister and the Chancellor don’t agree on much but they do on that.

They both seem to be viewing next week’s Budget as an emergency Budget to save their jobs.

We do need an emergency Budget.

But we need an emergency Budget not to save them but to save our public services.

After seven years of austerity under the Tories people are asking what was it all for?

They were told austerity was the solution to the economic crisis.

So it’s understandable that after seven years of the austerity solution, they are angry when they queue for hours at A&E, see their school laying off teaching assistants, their Surestart centre closing and the local neighbourhood police withdrawn from their streets.

Especially, while at the same time, they learn about the Paradise Papers and the tax avoidance of the super-rich.

A week on, outrageously neither the Chancellor nor the Prime Minister has managed even a comment.

Its understandable people should raise questions.

In his first year as Chancellor, Philip Hammond has shown that he appears to have no idea what is happening in the real world and how people are feeling.

Before next week we are all hoping he wakes up and appreciates what life is now like for our people.

In particular the state of our public services after seven years of the Conservatives’ austerity policies and the struggle many have to go through to make ends meet.

In recent weeks we have been sent stark messages from the front line of our public services.

The Chief Executive of the NHS has warned that five million people will be left on waiting lists if additional funding is not found in this Budget.

A quarter of our nurses are forced to take a second job just to be able to make ends meet yet this Governments plans will mean per head NHS spending is due to fall next year.

In the sixth’s richest country on earth we are faced with the damning spectacle of our underpaid nurses being asked to stay behind after 12-hour shifts to give patients extra care just to keep the system from imploding.

For many who have dedicated their lives to public service and our NHS, the strain is becoming too much to bare. They feel they have no alternative but to leave the profession and the NHS now faces the worst recruitment crisis in its history

The heads of our schools are also warning the Prime Minister they have been reduced to “desperate requests to parents for voluntary donations”, while schools are facing their first funding cut per pupil in real terms since the 1990s.

One of the heads of our counter terrorism unit has warned that the cuts to local policing are a direct threat to national security and specifically to the fight to keep our streets safe from terrorism.

Locally, councils are being starved of the funds they need to protect our most vulnerable children.

Charities on the frontline have been explicit about the impact of these cuts.

Local authorities have confirmed their services are at “breaking point”.

The cuts to parenting classes, children’s centres, substance misuse prevention, teenage pregnancy support and short breaks for disabled children risk turning the current crisis into a catastrophe for the next generation of children and families.

The percentage of children living in relative poverty is the highest since records began in 1961.

In the last year alone, almost half a million of our children were provided with a three day emergency food supply from a foodbank.

The lesson is clear.

We can’t go on like this.

Austerity doesn’t just have to end.

We have to start seriously investing in our public services and in our economy.

It’s hard not to survey the last seven years without feeling rising anger.

Just look back at the record.

I remember Philip Hammond’s predecessor, George Osborne, newly arrived in Number 11 pushing his own “Emergency Budget” that launched the biggest programme of public spending cuts this country has seen for generations.

We were told, seemingly in all seriousness it was because “the cupboard was bare”.

That austerity programme was based on what we can now say quite plainly was at best a myth, at worst an outright lie.

Government debt exploded in 2008 because our bloated financial system imploded.

Yet as the cuts ground on, it was nurses and teachers, and people right across our society - except at the very top - who have paid the price of austerity.

Philip Hammond has been there every step of the way.

As Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, he prepared the grounds for the Government’s programme in office.

As a senior member of Conservative-led governments, not once did he break – as some of his own Conservative colleagues did and have done – with the cuts programme.

And now, as Chancellor, he tells us that a programme of austerity he supported, and that was supposed to be over by 2015, will now stretch into the next decade.

The ideology behind this is that the public sector is like a hideous weed that needs to be cut back to prevent it strangling free enterprise.

As if those who work in the private sector don’t send their children to publicly-funded schools, or drive on publicly-funded roads, or rely on the publicly-funded NHS when they are sick.

To coin a phrase, we really are all in this together. Cuts to public spending damage the whole of our society.

When a government – as the Tories did– cut research funding by £1bn, it has real economic consequences.

When governments – as the Tories did – cut investment spending by nearly £20bn, it has an impact on business.

Investment in the United Kingdom is the third lowest of any major developed economy, ahead of only Portugal and Greece.

Public spending on transport is the very lowest out of those 35 major developed economies.

Without investment, we don’t get the new equipment and technologies that can sustain growth.

It means skilled people and those with talent and ideas across the whole country are not realising their potential, and businesses cannot grow as they wish.

The result is that our whole economy is becoming, relative to other, similar economies, worse and worse at turning ideas, labour and machinery into economic growth.

This is the “productivity crisis” that even this Chancellor has been forced to acknowledge.

In his first Autumn Statement he loudly bemoaned the “shocking” productivity gap between ourselves and comparable countries.

In his first Budget, earlier this year, he complained about “stubbornly low” productivity.

He lectured the Party faithful on the point at Conservative conference in October.

I welcome the Chancellor’s recognition of this, perhaps most serious, economic challenge.

But perhaps it would help if he also recognised that he is not some concerned bystander.

He has been a senior member of every government since 2010.

And now, as Chancellor, he is directly responsible for economic policy.

It is his fault and that of his colleagues.

Their fault, and theirs alone that they have not merely failed to address the long-term problems of our economy - they have added to them.

The Office for Budget Responsibility is widely expected to highlight just how bad the situation has become under the Tories in its report next week.

But official statistics already paint a grim picture.

Under his and his predecessor’s watch, the gap between what Britain produces in an hour, and what the rest of the G7 produce in an hour, has widened to its largest for more than a generation.

Because productivity here is so poor, we have to work longer hours to compensate.

The average employee in Britain works over 300 hours more a year than the average employee in Germany.

That’s equivalent to nearly 40 full working days a year.

And we don’t just work longer hours.

Most of us now work in worse conditions, with worse pay.

Real pay is lower than it was in 2010, and is still falling.

Insecure work is up one-third since 2010.

There are now three million jobs in the UK where there is no guarantee of hours or employment rights.

The scale of this government’s failure needs to be placed in its context.

No generation in living memory has experienced such a decline in its living standards.

And the younger you are, the worse that decline becomes.

Those in their twenties have seen their pay fall by almost 10 per cent since 2010.

To compensate for this, more and more are forced to borrow more and more on unsecured loans, like credit cards and payday lending, which has grown nearly 20 per cent in the last five years.

Borrowing has helped fuel a return to weak economic growth.

But even as the economy has grown, most people are getting poorer.

If most people are not benefitting from growth, the benefits of growth must be going to someone else.

It is easy to see where. A few at the top have done extremely well.

The top ten percent now own half the nation’s wealth.

There are more billionaires living in London than ever before.

But even as property speculation has boomed, investment in manufacturing is down by more than £2bn since the crash.

So instead of investments in productive enterprises, new ideas and new technology, under the Tories our economy has swung ever more into hoarding unproductive wealth.

The great lie behind austerity was that we had no choice – that cuts were essential because there was no money.

This is a wealthy country, one of the richest in the world.

But that wealth is held in too few hands, and spent for too little purpose.

Even as they have been cutting public services to the bone, they have been offering huge giveaways to the mega-rich and giant corporations.

Tax cuts introduced for both since 2010, including Corporation Tax and Capital Gains Tax, will cost us over £70bn over the next five years.

Every single penny lost in these tax cuts means less money for our public services.

And the Paradise Papers showed, once again, how the super-rich and giant corporations simply refuse to play by the same rules as the rest of us.

The UK is losing at least £16bn a year to tax havens.

Every penny lost means less funding for our public services.

Labour’s Tax Transparency and Enforcement Programme is the comprehensive means to close the loopholes and end tax evasion.

The Government could learn from it, instead of throwing about dodgy statistics.

Or introducing loopholes, like the “controlled foreign company” rule changes, which open the door to tax avoidance that it is now under investigation by the European Commission.

Next week's Budget cannot be a continuation of the failure for the many that we have witnessed since 2010.

There has to be a genuine and decisive change of course.

This Government may be weak, but Britain doesn't need to be.

It needs strong, effective action to properly deal with the challenges we face as a nation.

Next week the country needs an ‘emergency Budget’ to alleviate the emergency taking place right now in our public services, and the millions of working households in our country struggling to get by.

Not a Budget desperately designed to save the jobs of a weak Prime Minister and her embattled Chancellor.

Philip Hammond wants you to believe there is nothing that can be done to end these scandals. That the millions more children who will grow up in poverty under this Government due to their changes cannot be prevented.

He wants you to believe that the housing crisis in our country cannot be fixed the way Labour has consistently called for, and even colleagues in his own Cabinet have argued for, by increasing investment to build more housing.

He wants to pretend he cannot invest on the scale needed, yet he has already borrowed more in his first year as Chancellor than any of his predecessors in their first year at the Treasury.

There is a better way than this. But it needs a complete break with past failures.

The Chancellor has the opportunity next week to address the worst consequences of his austerity programme.

Let’s look at some of the key priorities to be addressed.

Since the last Autumn Statement, the Government has accelerated the roll out of Universal Credit despite evidence it is causing poverty, debt and evictions.

The six week delay in payments has taken some families into outright destitution.

The Trussell Trust has found a 30 per cent increase in foodbank usage in areas where Universal Credit has been rolled out.

And under the guise of reforming the system, the Government have pushed through swingeing cuts now amounting to £3bn a year.

Those cuts will now mean a million more children living in poverty.

By 2021-22, the Institute of Fiscal Studies estimate that more than one in three of our children will be living in poverty as a result of benefit cuts.

In the sixth richest economy on the planet, this is a national disgrace.

It should shame us all. But in particular it should shame this Government.

As the Women’s Budget Group’s research today confirms, these cuts will mean 5.9 million women living in households eligible for universal credit will lose almost four and half thousand pounds a year by April 2021 as a result of the combined impact of tax and benefit changes introduced since this Government came to office.

The Chancellor has the opportunity to ease the worst burden.

Last month, the House of Commons voted unanimously to pause and fix Universal Credit.

The Children’s Commissioner for England is the most recent voice calling for a pause of the bungled Universal Credit rollout.

The Chancellor himself has admitted that there is a “challenge around the waiting times."

He needs to act now to stop thousands of families being pushed into absolute poverty and despair.

The public sector pay cap has seen the pay of our public sector works hammered for year after year since it was introduced in 2010.

The TUC estimates that nurses, firefighters and border guards face losing thousands of pounds in real terms by 2020 if the Government sticks to its plans.

Midwives, teachers and social workers will see their pay in real terms drop by more than £3,000.

Our public services cannot function without staff, and they cannot function well unless those staff are properly rewarded.

But it’s not just frontline staff. It’s those in the back offices who keep our hospitals running, or make sure our taxes are collected fairly who also deserve a pay rise after year upon year of pay cuts.

The Government must end the public sector pay cap, and do so right the way across the public the sector.

Schools face the first funding cuts per pupil in real-terms since the 1990s.

Headteachers have marched on Downing Street. 5,000 have signed a petition calling for more funding for their schools.

As local authorities have been pushed further and further into desperate measures by cuts, they are beginning to pull back on the essentials.

The Chancellor must immediately bring forward the funding needed to halt the most serious crises in our public services – for the NHS, our schools, and local authority children’s services.

The housing crisis is inescapable. Every day brings fresh stories of the misery this has caused.

Homelessness is up 50 per cent since 2010. Homeownership has collapsed to its lowest level in decades. Private tenants in England spend nearly half their pay on rent.

Yet the starker the crisis becomes, the more visible the despair, the more feeble this Government’s response has become.

The housing crisis won’t be solved by cutting stamp duty on a few housing sales.

Today, the Government is trying to pull the wool over our eyes by trumpeting an accounting change which happened last month.

It won’t be solved by accountancy tricks, shuffling Housing Association debt on or off the Government balance sheet.

It will be solved with bricks and mortar.

That means the Chancellor must bring forward genuine new funding to deal with this in next week’s Budget.

But since 2010 with Conservative Ministers we’ve built fewer homes than at any time since the 1920s.

The scale of the crisis demands action on an equal scale. We need at least 100,000 new social homes a-year funded and built by this Government, to even begin to address the problem.

If the Chancellor won’t listen to Labour, or the housing experts, or the tens of thousands suffering with sky-high rents in substandard accommodation, perhaps he can listen to his own Communities Minister, and bring forward the funding a major housebuilding programme needs.

And, after the tragedy of Grenfell Tower, the Government must immediately deliver the money required to install sprinklers in every council or housing association block that needs them.

Because the fundamental issue here is that it is investment that will secure the high-paid, high-skill economy of the future.

Investment in our housing. In our transport system. In communications. In scientific research.

The Chancellor claims to understand this. He has spoken repeatedly of the need for investment to drive up productivity and so secure wages.

Yet he seems to be incapable of recognising the scale of the problem.

Our infrastructure creaks and slowly crumbles. Every business group from the CBI to the Institute of Directors, quite rightly, complains about delays and cancellations.

The Government’s record on this is abysmal.

Electrification of the Great Western Railway – delayed, and partially cancelled.

Electrification of Transpennine services – delayed and then cancelled.

The Swansea Tidal Lagoon – dithering, delay, and still no firm answer on whether it will be built at all.

Broadband speeds far below the European average.

The most expensive railways.

The most expensive electricity.

And what little infrastructure spending takes place is overwhelmingly concentrated in just a few spots that are already ahead of the rest.

We want the Chancellor to bring forward the funding needed to make sure that every part of our country benefits.

The infrastructure investment needs to address and close the regional funding gap, and to begin to realise the potential that is out there.

Re-announcements of old schemes, a fixation on rewarding only one part of the country, and the feeble amounts the Chancellor has previously offered will not be enough.

He needs now to show some evidence he has grasped the enormity of the harm this Government has caused to this country.

We face, all of us, as a country, immense challenges over the next few years.

On every single one of them, this Government looks not just ill-prepared but incapable.

On Brexit, the Tories are more concerned with their own petty, factional manoeuvres than anything resembling the national interest.

And this Chancellor, in the words of the Prime Minister’s own former advisor this week– is incapable of delivering a vision for the country.

As is usual, he and his colleagues have trailed great expectations for this Budget.

It has been claimed it will be “revolutionary”.

But as Budget day itself approaches it becomes clearer and clearer that we have a Chancellor unable to make the decisive break with the failed past that is needed.

A Chancellor completely cut off from the world most of us live in.

Great trumpets in the weekend papers become feeble squeaks at the despatch box.

Every grand claim rings false, and every promise turns hollow.

Should he fail once more next week, this is how it will end for him: not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Ends

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