Hilary

https://mastodon.me.uk/@regordane

Bad at shoes. I know a bit about #InfectiousDiseases. Occasional amateur #history and #politics. #Mazeldon #Jewish She/her

Location: London, Europe
Website: http://hilarycurtis.com/

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Last Notes

2026-03-26 18:45:16 UTC

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I think this might be better put as the unaffordability of housing has dipped, or maybe that affordability has improved

2026-03-24 12:31:11 UTC

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Erm, I don't think that's true. Median in Sweden is apparently 34400 SKR/month which is more than the UK (where I am) median of £2,586.
Comparisons between salaries and consultancy fees are highly misleading. For the same income, consultants need to charge a lot more to cover non-chargeable work (eg professional development, admin), down-time, and costs borne by employers (eg equipment, pension contributions, insurance).
https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subject-area/labour-market/wages-salaries-and-labour-costs/wage-and-salary-structures-and-employment-in-the-municipalities/pong/tables-and-graphs/average-monthly-salary-by-occupation/
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/uk/business/average-uk-salary-by-age/

2026-03-24 12:00:21 UTC

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I don't know what your line of work is, but 140€ an hour charge-out for an expert/specialist sounds ridiculously cheap to me.

2026-03-02 21:22:11 UTC

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The monks of Chartreuse actually make two different liqueurs. Green chartreuse and yellow chartreuse (the colour is from the green).
Liqueurs made by monks are a thing. Unlike chartreuse, benedictine is not actually made by monks. It's made in Fécamp, which until the revolution was ruled by Benedictines. Several decades later, an astute entrepreneur started making benedictine, claiming it was from the monks' recipe... but well, I DON'T THINK SO.
It's nice, though

2026-02-25 15:49:05 UTC

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Nah, we speak different all the time depending on the circs

2026-02-25 15:44:47 UTC

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As a British person, it reads to me like an article written by a British person. Given that you didn't know we say "maths" suggests you're not well-placed to judge.
Have to admit, I'm a bit disappointed that the "protect themselves in case of robot uprisings" data actually relates to Americans, because it reads just like the sort of daft answer we Brits love to give in response to daft questions

2026-02-24 21:57:57 UTC

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The scary bit is "exploring changes to the tax system to make payments based on households rather than individuals."
That may sound benign but it's actually a recipe for forcing abused women to disclose their finances to their abusers, thereby preventing any possibility of escape.
It is truly evil.

2026-02-20 20:25:42 UTC

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We should stop quoting the vaccinated rate and start quoting the unvaccinated rate.
As in, the proportion of children unvaccinated has nearly doubled*, from 5% to 8%! Shock horror alarm.
*In journalistic terms it's sort of ok to describe 8 as nearly twice 5.

2026-01-12 12:32:54 UTC

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It is considered true.
However, there is an issue for women of childbearing age - roseola can easily be mistaken for rubella, so a lot of people who think they have had rubella actually have not.

2025-11-17 21:28:07 UTC

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Yeah, and I missed the most important bit.
Back in our day there were proper jobs. They hired you, for a wage, and if you did ok they kept you on, and if you did better than ok they trained you, invested in you, enabled you to gain promotion.
The modern gig economy is EVIL.

2025-11-17 20:43:07 UTC

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I weep for young people today. So many odds are stacked against them

2025-11-17 20:39:15 UTC

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I think he and I are probably quite close in age.
Yeah, we were a damn lucky generation. Peace as the expected norm. National service, a thing of the past. The NHS and welfare state - intact and well.
Edit to add: free university education AND student maintenance grants (means-tested but even wealthy people got a bit). Not like the loans of today.
He and I were both privileged (in different ways) even in relation to the time. But we were also lucky with the time

2025-09-17 06:55:14 UTC

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Also, my household recently took part in a repeat of this ONS survey. The methods are very approximate and can't reliably detect extremely high wealth. This is because each person is asked for valuations of different items within categories, rather than exact estimates. So for example, I think I ticked that my pension is worth "more than 250k".
This means the household figure is aggregated from multiple estimated categories with no upper ceilings.

2025-09-17 06:41:25 UTC

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Really quite bizarre categories. Why cut the data at 1.44m? Seems to be chosen solely in order be able to say "one in seven".
And obviously, obscures much wider inequality.

2025-07-28 07:47:15 UTC

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Yes, the law exists. Statutory interest, at a punitive rate, plus debt recovery fees. The only time I ever used this was actually against a public body (I'm looking at you, London Borough of Richmond).
But I imagine many big companies routinely pay at the last possible date to avoid penalties, plus suppliers fear they'll lose future business if they resort to the law.
https://www.gov.uk/late-commercial-payments-interest-debt-recovery

2025-07-10 21:35:50 UTC

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I think it's more about trying to undermine the people-smugglers.
Not convinced it'll work, but given that the people-smugglers exploit the desperate and vulnerable in truly evil ways, I support the objective.

2025-03-21 20:38:54 UTC

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Ugh. The whole thing is vile.
But the main reason I boosted this is the picture. Performative cruelty, intentionally shown in order to humiliate and intimidate. Vile.
Most of these people are probably entirely innocent.
But this denial of respect and dignity would be an outrage even if they were convicted criminals.
Human rights are universal.

2025-03-08 23:07:26 UTC

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Is there anywhere in the UK that I can buy this stuff?

2025-02-09 17:47:23 UTC

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These are not dialects of French, but varieties of Occitan, which is a different language. Not quite sure how widely they're still spoken, but in Toulouse all the street names are bilingual. And once, when walking in the Pyrenées we met a local guy from Tarbes. He spoke French to us but used Occitan to try to persuade a cow to pose for a photo. Because obviously a Pyrenean cow can't be expected to understand French.

2025-01-22 20:41:19 UTC

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Yep. This was the reason that throughout 20 years of lucrative self-employment I did not have insurance.
I did get a quote, once. Which confirmed my decision not to be insured. I understood my business and its risks. They did not.

2025-01-20 20:29:38 UTC

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What you are describing sounds to me like AI, which has many valid uses, but not generative AI, which largely doesn't.
The rest of your rant did make me wonder for a bit whether you were an AI bot yourself.

2025-01-16 23:04:48 UTC

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Sure, obesity and maternal age may be factors. But please stop assuming that vaginal delivery is in some way "better" than CS. That's just the naturalistic fallacy.
It's true that a simple, uncomplicated vaginal delivery is cheaper than a CS. But once problems appear, as is common, intervening to attempt vaginal delivery can be much more costly as well as worse in health terms than going straight to CS. So even in NHS budget terms a high CS rate isn't necessarily a concern.

2025-01-16 21:56:50 UTC

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The reason I say "with epidural" is because international comparisons are meaningless once one takes into account the fact that in many countries CS usually involves the risks of general anaesthesia.

2025-01-16 21:48:31 UTC

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Mmmm. It may be partly due to the NHS having accepted choice as a reason for CS.
Maternal and neonatal mortality/morbidity is now (thankfullly) so low that the definition of a good obstetric outcome may very reasonably be whether the mother is still continent fifty years later. Which is not amenable to research because of the timescale.
With epidural, there is no good reason to prefer vaginal over CS delivery. And quite a lot of reason not to.

2025-01-05 22:13:56 UTC

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Um yes, no. Formulation, manufacturing, pharmokinetics, trials, regulatory compliance.
Yeah, you could call that delivery and scaling. But I think that comes across as a bit demeaning compared to what's actually involved.

2025-01-05 22:07:21 UTC

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The public sector mostly doesn't sponsor clinical trials.
Just to add, a brilliant exception is the MRC Clinical Trials Unit at UCL. They do trials that pharmcos won't, often because the drugs are already licensed, eg: Is there a better way to use this? Does it work for prevention as well as treatment? How should it be combined with other drugs?
Before I retired, I worked a lot with these folks. They're great.
https://www.mrcctu.ucl.ac.uk/

2025-01-05 21:21:25 UTC

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Nearly thirty years ago I was doing policy work around how to incentivise development of an HIV vaccine. No longer needed nor important because drugs work...
But while you're coming at this question from below, as a medical chemist, I'm coming at it from above as a policy person.
I'm a bit out of touch and out of date, but yeah, costs for clinical trials are much the same. But the public sector mostly doesn't sponsor trials...

2025-01-05 18:50:05 UTC

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Public sector research doesn't go further than possibly suggesting a pre-clinical candidate drug. All the expertise in developing from there on is in the private sector.

2024-12-16 14:37:06 UTC

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"You" is the second-person plural. The singular, "thou", has largely fallen into disuse.
Which is one of the reasons it's ridiculous to object to using "they" as singular.

2024-11-03 20:54:46 UTC

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I knew you probably knew that, but a lot of people don't. As in, they may have a gut feeling that it's wrong but not a way to explain why.
So yeah, I am happy to be nerdy about this.

2024-11-03 20:42:37 UTC

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As you probably know, government should NOT be run like a business. That's not how it works.
Governments control the currency, can print money. While doing so has consequences and isn't always wise, this means that governments are nothing like businesses or households.

2024-10-26 13:21:18 UTC

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A lot is administration, but management can achieve real health and survival benefits. Eg, it was clinicians and public health experts who worked out that concentrating stroke, cardiac, and major trauma at designated centres in London (rather than every A&E) would lead to better outcomes. But it was managers who ran bidding/site selection, re-configured buildings and staff, negotiated with ambulance services to get patients to the right place, etc etc

2024-10-11 08:26:43 UTC

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I agree about retail (my first job was in a newsagents) but it's not just that. Junior support roles have largely been eliminated by IT, but to the extent that unskilled bag-carrying and coffee-fetching is still required, that's often provided by exploiting a series of unpaid interns.

2024-10-11 06:12:54 UTC

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What is also needed is DECENT entry level jobs. Regular hours (full or part-time) and an expectation that one will develop skills through contact with co-workers (possibly also formal training), leading to opportunities for career progression. Not gig economy shit.

2024-10-06 06:17:19 UTC

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Yikes. Please don't EVER use Pepe the Frog memes. They've been thoroughly hijacked by extremists.

2024-09-14 20:58:54 UTC

I have two degrees in chemistry (the first was prize-winning).
When Theranos started, I thought, what am I missing here? Why are investors pouring money in, it can't possibly work. I wasn't wrong.
When covid happened, I thought, why are they saying this isn't airborne, have these people never done housework (dusting)? Of course it's airborne. I wasn't wrong.
Then, I didn't trust myself.
Now I do. Hydrogen as a fuel is bullshit. It's going nowhere. Forget about it.
https://mastodon.me.uk/@regordane/113136585133409795

2024-08-27 15:38:08 UTC

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It's just American for fizzy water

2024-08-26 19:36:36 UTC

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Not to mention that it's really quite expensive

2024-08-26 19:33:37 UTC

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Yeah, that too

2024-08-26 19:24:43 UTC

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When I use moisturiser, which I don't always, it's before bed. So that the nasty greasy feeling happens when I'm asleep anyway. In the morning, I wash it off.
When it's unavoidable (summer hiking holiday in the mountains) I then wear sun-block for the day and wash it off by evening. But most of the year round I avoid that with hats and/or staying in the shade in the middle of the day. Because sun-block feels so nasty.

2024-08-26 18:49:37 UTC

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Like I care, or even know what that means. So much pseudo-science in cosmetics, can't be bothered with it.
A hat is good against the sun, and keeping in the shade between 11 and 3.

2024-08-26 18:45:03 UTC

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My recommendation is, don't. Or not unless you like it. (Unlike sun-block) moisturiser has no long term benefits. In the short term, it may make your skin feel smoother and softer, so if you think that's worth it, use it.
I am in my sixties. I didn't use moisturiser at all until about my forties. Now, I do most nights but certainly not always. I look much younger than I am.

2024-08-17 20:39:24 UTC

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This is normal. Preparing the veg takes some time. Recipes routinely get this wrong - often because they're written by chefs based on an assumption that ingredients are already prepared, but even when not, by professional cooks who can do it much quicker than you or I.
This is why preparing the veg takes longer than the recipe says. I've yet to find an explanation for how quickly they claim to be able to fry onions. That's just fiction.

2024-08-07 06:09:46 UTC

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Regardless of how it's organised (and I agree rolling is better), two years is a staggeringly short time to acquire expertise in what ought to be a complex and demanding role.
Currently MPs and peers mostly learn from longer-serving colleagues and party whips. Plus many have experience from local government.
Sortition would obviously undermine the power of parties. That would be a good thing in many respects, but I don't believe it outweighs the disadvantages.

2024-08-06 21:14:56 UTC

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Parliamentary staff are excellent (according to everything I've heard or encountered). There aren't anywhere near enough of them to train an entire house every two years. And their expertise is in areas such as procedure, research and protocol. Not actual politics, which they observe but aren't allowed to do.

2024-08-06 20:21:07 UTC

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Creep is good for anything with (even remotely) sexual connotations.
The thing to remember about weird is that it means unusual out of the ordinary, strange or not mainstream.

2024-08-06 16:43:19 UTC

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I rather doubt that being an effective parliamentarian is that close to civil service training.
Frankly I think it's just plain daft to imagine that people who likely have no political experience and didn't even want the job (because sortition) would do it well with a two year term.
If we think the upper house has a serious constitutional purpose, its members should be professional, capable and committed, not conscripted. If not, abolish rather than reform.

2024-08-06 06:38:33 UTC

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Citizens' juries work well, I agree. They are also rarely used, for carefully selected issues, precisely because of the amount of time and cost involved in expert witness presentations and exploratory discussion.
To have any hope of scrutinising the executive, parliament needs to be a heck of a lot more nimble.
Oh, yeah, and "training"... who is going to set the curriculum and how?

2024-08-06 06:08:56 UTC

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I think it would be great purely for entertainment value. We'd find out who is rich, unemployable or mad enough to take two years out from their existing careers.
Also, while sortition is great for some purposes, it ignores a key issue, which is that REAL power lies with those who set the agenda. Inevitably in parliament that is largely (not entirely) the government. An untrained house, with sortition-induced churn every two years, would hand them a power grab.