Interesting Links for 14-08-2013

[andrewducker]

• Dear Daughter: I Hope You Have Awesome Sex.
  (tags: sex children parenting )
• 4 Sisters Photographed Every Year For 36 Years
  (tags: photos age )
• Google Maps Easter Egg Lets You Explore The TARDIS
  (tags: google maps drwho )
• The NHS - a stunningly cost effective supplier of high quality healthcare
  (tags: uk nhs viaJohnCoxon healthcare )
• Employer

Comments

[momentsmusicaux]

> Amazing, Revolutionary, Useless

That's often how these things start. The Apple Newton was the same. So was voice recognition (I remember using it around 1995).

[andrewducker]

Oh yes. It's entirely possible that we'll have something much better in a year or two.

[philmophlegm]

"The NHS - a stunningly cost effective supplier of high quality healthcare"

...says Richard Murphy.

[andrewducker]

Yes, although in this case using numbers he hasn't just made up - the original research looks reasonably solid to me.

[philmophlegm]

Fair enough, although I wonder if the families of the "up to 13,000 people" who "died needlessly" at the fourteen worst NHS trusts in the last eight years would agree with the use of the phrase "high quality healthcare".

[andrewducker]

That's what you get when you let hospitals run themselves. If they were all run by central fiat then they'd have to conform to ruthless best practice :->

More seriously, I agree that the places that are worst need to be improved, but I don't know how that compares with other countries with different systems. If you picked the 14 worst hospital groups in France or Germany, how would they compare?

[philmophlegm]

At the risk of looking like the bad guy, if I had paid extra to sit in business class or first class so that I could do some work on the train, or read a book in peace and quiet, I would be pretty annoyed if I was prevented from doing so by a group of noisy children.

In the article, there isn't actually any suggestion that the children were being noisy or rowdy, but I wonder if that was a detail overlooked by the journalist. After all, a bunch of children of that age (regardless of any "special needs") on a day out are probably going to be quite noisy.

[andrewducker]

On the one hand, they let _some_ kids through, and unless the disabled kids were worse behaved than the others, that feels discriminatory to me.

On the other hand, if you have a bunch of kids you're transporting from Edinburgh to Glasgow and you don't want them to be sitting on the floor, then either schedule your travel outside of peak times, or buy them tickets for business class. (Or possibly, hire a bus, if there are enough to make that cost-efficient). There's definitely some organisational failings there.

On Guns in the US - or the UK equilvalent.

[danieldwilliam]

I find the way USians view guns difficult to understand. The trade of theoretical liberty against actual deaths doesn’t seem like a good deal to me. I wonder every time I see a statistic about gun deaths in the US why they seem to have the balance between gun ownership and not being shot so out.

I think my question for myself today is - what is it about our own culture in the UK that looks really, really dumb to other cultures but which we are just unable to see?

[simont]

The trade of theoretical liberty against actual deaths doesn’t seem like a good deal to me.

I idly wonder if Franklin's principle has conditioned a large number of Americans against even trying to assess any question quantitatively based on results, as soon as they realise it can be framed as liberty vs safety.

(Granted, Franklin's actual statement contained some weasel words which more or less boil down to 'well yes but don't go way over the top when applying this', but those tend to get forgotten when it's requoted...)

[danieldwilliam]

That might well be it.

It’s a very quotable quote.

Re: On Guns in the US - or the UK equilvalent.

[naath]

Americans often seem baffled by the NHS...

[a_pawson]

I'm not going to defend what the train manager in that article may or may not have said, but is the policy of every train company I've ever travelled with not to let people sit in empty first class seats unless they have a first class ticket. I've travelled on trains where the standard class carriages were packed with people standing and they still don't let people into first class, so in that regard the train company treated the children no differently.

[andrewducker]

The key sentence being "But she moved other kids and parents, who had paid the same train fare, into those seats."

If it wasn't for that, I'd agree with you entirely.

(As someone who's sat on the floor between London and Edinburgh due to lack of space before, I know how it normally works.)

[danieldwilliam]

If you ever get the chance I recommend popping into the Jimmy Chung’s all you can eat Chinese buffet on Grindley Street (not the one on Waverely Bridge) just to read the thank-you and complaint letters. There is an absolutely cracking one from a couple complainging that their Christmas dinner had been ruined by the group of disabled kids having dinner at the same time and making a noise. It’s a masterpiece in uncharitable bigotry.

[cartesiandaemon]

It seems like we don't definitely have enough information:

- if no-one was allowed in first class, that's normal
- if the conductor actually said "people like you" in an insulting way, that's really serious wherever they were allowed to sit
- if quiet people were allowed to sit in first class, that makes sense, probably
- if the children needed somewhere to sit more than other people, they should have it -- public transport should be accessible to everyone

So it could be anywhere on the spectrum of "conductor was offensive", "everyone was upset but acted reasonably", or "teacher manufactured the whole outrage". Lots of these articles go away when you look at them closely -- but even more don't, so my guess is it happened exactly how it sounded.