Charlemagne – Southern Europe’s millennials suffer two huge crises by their mid-30s | Europe | The Economist

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, analysts were quick to split the world into the winners and losers of globalisation. On the one side were those furnished with education, open horizons and language skills, who were supposed to thrive in the new order. On the other were those with no such luck, stuck in careers set to be overtaken by innovation. A third category containing southern Europe’s young must be added: globalisation’s pyrrhic victors. These people fulfilled the requirements of the winners’ club, armed with both the mindset and means—even possessing a passport from the EU, the institution that most embodies 21st-century globalisation. Yet thanks to repeated economic shocks, they have singularly failed to reap the expected benefits.

(“Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift – look out out kid, they keep it all hid”, Bob Dylan)

Covid-19

I want to come out of this better than when I started.

A cliché, but one of the best guides to living through covid-19. From the Cortex podcast with Myke Hurley and CGP Grey.

(If you use Overcast, the direct link is here).

Fifty years ago, Cardiff Arms Park.

The Breakdown | Protests, politics and a bus hijack: the rugby tour that gave Mandela hope | Sport | The Guardian

Personal memories of the tour are disappointment that Cardiff were overwhelmed by players who were far bigger than the usual opponents at the Arms Park. The politics went over the head of [this] /a young boy whose questions were to find answers later….[emphasis added].

 

Those protesting in 1969-70 – the Stop the Seventy Tour was chaired by Peter Hain and one of the organisers in Scotland was Gordon Brown – were written off by the rugby media here as idealists and do-gooders, irritants who did not understand rugby union’s fraternity.

Interesting article from a final-year PhD student in Bristol. She writes:

Around one week before lockdown, Public Health England sent a message to UK universities; it needed their help to find PhD students, postdocs and other researchers to carry out diagnostic testing in London.

Despite the urgency of the call, the email didn’t mention pay or whether researchers should have permission from their grant funders to up and leave lab projects. It also omitted any details on accommodation or travel support for those of us living outside the capital…Then, on 2 April, we received another email, apparently from Public Health England (PHE), which was circulated to everyone in our faculty calling on us to join a “scientific reserve to support regional Covid-19 testing operations”.

The email cautioned that the work would be hard, and would require ‘five or seven day on/off shift patterns with long shifts’. No mention again of whether funders approved. Are the companies that provide testing or the reagents for testing getting paid, I wonder? She speculates as to  whether the government will be generous to her and others like her in the coming economic crisis.

My assumption is probably not: it will ask us to get ourselves in debt to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds to get the skills the country needs, but not pay us to work once we have them.

Well said.

 That wording has been negotiated to the point of strangulation

There is something either falling in the gaps between the sentences or being cloaked by the definitions (eg Scheme) used, but that is not the natural way for a civil servant to make such a “clarification”

That wording has been negotiated to the point of strangulation

— David Allen Green (@davidallengreen) April 21, 2020

Reminds me of JBS Haldane’s comment that God must have been inordinately fond of beetles (because of the large number of beetle species).

This study is in line with work done specifically on coronaviruses by Tracey Goldstein of University of California, Davis. In 2017 she and her colleagues published a piece of research in which they had tested for coronaviruses in bats, rodents and primates (including people) in 20 countries in Africa, South America and Asia. Individual bat species normally had between one and five types of coronavirus. (For comparison, human beings have seven, including the newly emerged sars-cov-2.) Scale that up for the 1,400 different species of the animals and it means there are potentially more than 3,000 coronaviruses circulating in bats [emphasis added]. This certainly increases the odds that bats will be responsible for generating a coronavirus dangerous to people. But only because there are lots of them.

The Economist | Not so guilty

Please, no…

Feel in need of a “mental health day” right now (or what we used to call “a break”)? We certainly do.

FT Moral money 8 April 2020

Still sounds very familiar.

During the Napoleonic Wars, newspapers were allowed to read and reprint naval and military dispatches in return for carrying ‘paragraphs agreeable to the Ministry’. Today, as Norton-Taylor reminds us, Whitehall departments still run their own gentlemanly lobbies in which selected hacks are allowed to see confidential papers and hear civil servants’ unexpurgated thoughts on policy, but only so long as the journalists ‘play by the rules’ and write only what their host-official permits. The lobby system, with the Number Ten lobby at its apex, smoothly controls and shapes the outflow of official information to the public. Opposition leaders are frequently gagged by briefings given on Privy Council terms.

Neal Ascherson · Secrets are like sex: Whitehall Spookery · LRB 21 March 2020

Neal Ascherson · Secrets are like sex: Whitehall Spookery · LRB 21 March 2020

3500 https://t.co/ahzmTy5Mlj

Looks pretty Orwellian. pic.twitter.com/cMgkL14i4s

— jonathan rees (@reestheskin) April 16, 2020

Yes, I am playing around with my rediscovered Twitter account.

The woman who discovered the first coronavirus https://t.co/1ZLpwb1WQy

A nice coronavirus story (sort of). pic.twitter.com/yZ9Cg3NaBg

— jonathan rees (@reestheskin) April 17, 2020