vivweb01blog

I last published in April on the whys and wherefores of our ‘broken’ immigration system .  By that stage the government had realised that 'Stopping the Boats' was a make or break problem for them, and was just starting to get focused on more active deterrence measures. The PM is now sporting it as one of his 5 principal objectives. However, since then their increasingly fraught campaign has, perhaps predictably, come up against many obstacles and delays, mainly due to unwelcome human intervention. As the Bard might have put it, “..One barge-load does not a solution bring….”, particularly if the new 'clients' are disembarked within a week of taking up residence because of 'health concerns'.  In the absence of either of our major political parties coming up with any really effective solution, and to avoid becoming even more of a laughing stock for the people smugglers, we should perhaps consider some more off the wall suggestions. One of the more inventive one...

  As predicted, SARS-CoV-2 hasn’t finished with us yet…. After a lull in the flow of ‘Variants if Concern’, we now have another Delta to Omicron-style evolutionary jump in the form of BA.2.86. The main concern with this particular variant is that it has lots of spike protein amino-acid mutations. First, just how different is it to past and present variants ? Relative to Omicron BA.2 (its putative ancestor) the BA.2.86 Spike Protein has 34 mutations: 29 substitutions, 4 deletions, 1 insertion. Relative to Omicron XBB.1.5 (more recent strain recommended for vaccine development) it has 36 mutations: 32 substitutions, 3 deletions, 1 insertion. Relative to the early Wuhan-Hu-1, it has a whopping 58 mutations: 52 substitutions, 5 deletions, 1 insertion. The key point here is that the number of spike amino acid mutations in the BA.2.86 variant relative to BA.2 and XBB.1.5 is comparable to the number of mutations in first Omicron strains relative to Wuhan-Hu-1. Although it’s e...

There is little doubt that more and more of us are struggling to keep ourselves and our families fed at present. This unhappy situation has arisen because of a ‘perfect storm’ of adverse circumstances and events that have hit us all over the past couple of years, and which shows little sign of abating.  The pandemic is widely seen as the principal source of our recent decline in fortunes, but in reality our population demographics, Brexit, the Ukraine war, mistaken monetary policies and a decade of austerity introduced by the coalition government after the 2008 financial crisis, have all contributed. Food banks have been a lifeline for some of the least fortunate in society for many years.  Until relatively recently, however, the numbers really needing to use them were relatively small. Over the past year, however, the added financial pressure of sudden-onset and rampant inflation, and the rush by BofE  to raise interest rates in a vain attempt to restrain it, have pu...

Increasing numbers of   our ' celebs' nowadays are publishing their memoirs, sometimes quite early on in their careers.  Perhaps the most noteworthy of these recently was Prince Harry, whose book 'Spare' quickly reached the best seller list and is still going strong. While memoir writing isn't for all of us, anyone contemplating doing this at some stage in their lives needs to ensure they keep a personal diary on a regular basis. This ensures that they have an accurate and detailed record of their lives to call upon when compiling 'The Book'.  Keeping a diary does of course require quite a bit of self-discipline, but has many benefits apart from just generating a life record and is therefore well worth the effort. A couple of lines of text taking maybe 5 minutes a day will usually suffice to cover the key events for that day. It will also help cement our memories and enable us to recap usefully on what we have (or haven't !) done that day. Many of us may...

I’m asking this question as a follow-up to my recent blog on the whys and wherefores of Big Tech software upgrades, and whether they are fair to the consumer.  As a frequent blogger, I regularly check the internal Blogspot tracking system to see how frequently my blogs are being viewed. Although the internal system is useful and has always been reliable, it is by its nature only there to provide basic tracking. It doesn't therefore provide some of the more useful features available via Google Analytics, such as where viewers are located and what screens they have viewed most often. I have a Google Sites website which is connected to Analytics and this does seem to have been effectively tracked over the past couple of years. When I first opened my blogspot account, indexing on Google occurred pretty quickly (unlike the Google Sites website which took them 15 months !) and an Analytics Universal property was created automatically and did start registering some hits. However, al...

  I first put out a blog on this subject in February prior to the latest budget. The aim of this was to put forward the arguments for some radical changes in the tax system which I thought were necessary in order to remove disincentives and stimulate growth. Many of the arguments still stand.   The following is an update describing the effects of the March budget, and the likelihood (or otherwise) that they will have the desired effect. It also reflects changes over the summer. ****** There has been much argument following the recent budget about whether the pension tax changes, which were aimed primarily at retaining senior NHS medical staff, are justified at a time when many other workers and less well-off pensioners are struggling with continued and rapid cost-of-living increases. At first sight it does seem that the Chancellor might have been overly generous to well-off pensioners, and it’s easy to see why many are more sympathetic to the plight of others lower down...

Editors note: I first compiled this blog in late 2022 in the aftermath of  the ignominious fall of Trussonomics and before the 'advent' of AI. Many of the ideas are still very relevant today, so a revisit with recent developments in mind is probably appropriate.... Introduction This has been a momentous couple of weeks all told, with more than the usual quota of economic and political U-turns, and probably more to come. The ‘new’ regime’s primary task now has to be to restore some sense of stability and prevent the economic meltdown which still beckons…. I’ll take the optimistic viewpoint and assume that the new team (whoever they turn out to be) somehow manage to pull this off over the next few weeks. I sincerely hope my optimism is justified, for all our sakes. Assuming they do, what then do we need to do ‘post-crisis’ in the medium- and long-term to improve our economic and social prospects as a nation, and avoid getting ourselves into a similar mess in the future ? ...