I agree Peter. I have subscribed to the Economist since I was at University so that’s over 35 years of subscribing. It is complete junk these days, it turns up, sits in the kitchen and I put it in the bin still in the plastic wrapper after about a week. I used to listen to some of the audio but it’s got steadily more annoying. I don’t know why I can’t bring myself to cancel it – probably as it used to have good analysis and I have subscribed for so long. My values no longer align with it and I have not changed!
It doesn’t support free trade anymore but inward looking protectionist structures and to make matters worse it has gone fully woke and so green there is no cost benefit analysis and it would probably ban flying. I’ll finally cancel it whilst the football is on! Go woke – go broke as they say.
Peter wrote:
The problem with the Channel Islands – like most of the nicer parts of the UK, right now, due to the extreme foreign travel difficulties – is that accommodation is very hard to find. I’ve just been looking.
The Isle of Man is “one of the nicer parts of the British Isles” (and furthermore, we’ve been having much better weather this summer than the UK – for a change the Met Office’s “Except the North and West” has been dry and sunny). If you’re double vaxxed, there’s no need to take a test for arrivals that are coming from the UK.
I don’t know what the hotel situation is like, unfortunately package holidays to Spain destroyed most of our hospitality industry decades ago, so what’s left fills up fast.
If you do come send me a PM, I’d like to meet up.
This Guardian article excellently describes “hygiene theatre”, a phenomenon often observable since the pandemic started about people who excessively clean surfaces or do other things for the sake of hygiene, without actually reducing their chances of Covid-19 infection very much because they mostly disregard Covid-19 being and airborne diseases that isn’t transmitted by touching infected surfaces.
I wholeheartedly agree with the criticism of this phenomenon.
MedEwok wrote:
I wholeheartedly agree with the criticism of this phenomenon.
As for the effect I also agree. However, having seen how some workplaces have become quite inhabitable again because people feel they have to clean in order to be safer is a very nice side effect…. People actually wipe their sufraces, phones and keyboards before they leave, wash up dishes in the kitchen, empty dustbins every once in a while… stuff overdue since… ever!
I would think that quite a lot of the hygiene measures stressed in connection with the virus threat are such which should be NORMAL in every day life, but alas, people are lazy and often behave inferior to pigs. Washing hands, caughing into their ellbows, refrain from spitting wherever they can find, leaving trash behind, doing “toilet” in the wild, what not. If Covid has made some new habits out of keeping people reasonably clean, then it may have had some good effects after all…
Mooney_Driver wrote:
If Covid has made some new habits out of keeping people reasonably clean, then it may have had some good effects after all…
Maybe the first effect was practically no seasonal flu last year. We’ll see if it’s going to repeat this year as well.
Emir wrote:
Maybe the first effect was practically no seasonal flu last year. We’ll see if it’s going to repeat this year as well.
Absolutely. I guess however masks had a lot to do with that as well. And while I strongly support the notion that people who feel off or have a cold should wear them, I would not like to keep them on for ever under normal circumstances.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Absolutely. I guess however masks had a lot to do with that as well.
I don’t think so. The seasonal flu as well as the seasonal norovirus disappeared more or less instantly when Covid-19 hygiene measures were implemented i Sweden in March last year. At that time virtually no one used masks here – it was all about washing hands, cleaning surfaces and keeping a distance.
I think the disappearance of colds and flus is a combination of things. Circumstantially, I think I used to catch those things from
I reckon it is a mixture of aerosol and contact. In the classes, definitely aerosol.
All those things were dropped in March 2020…
Walking along the beach, mist, with just a slight air movement off the sea, I passed a guy was vaping.
When he exhaled, the cloud stayed at head height, expanded in a cone, and was discernable for at least 4 metres.
Maoraigh wrote:
When he exhaled, the cloud stayed at head height, expanded in a cone, and was discernable for at least 4 metres.
Great tool for visualization 
