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Hello! This is SimonBlog. Can’t promise to be anything like as informative, clever, eloquent or professional as BenBlog but I will hopefully not be useless.

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Lacuna

In Gwent, we are told to only go to the Emergency Department for "life-threatening conditions", and yet the tier below is only for "minor injuries". So where do we go for things that threaten limb but not life? Or for more minor things that need checking out, e.g. recently I had a collapse at the supermarket checkout. (I did feel unsteady at best for a few minutes before the collapse and brief unconsciousness.) This seems to be a lacuna in the guidelines. Of course, when I did go there I was pushed from pillar to post. And the test that was in the end actually revealing, the blood test, wasn't done until after 10-12 hours. The nurse was very surprised it hadn't been done, then did it alarmingly quickly. The CT scan was normal (they did say it wasn't the best CT scanner but would find the big stuff). Still, a full work-up is I guess useful, and under the NHS it only cost me about £20 (a taxi home plus vending machine stuff).
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In defence of train guards and ticket offices

Part of the current industrial dispute between the RMT in particular and the railway companies is the apparent insistence that, in the name of “modernisation”, that ticket offices and train guards need to remain. I am not going to comment on the whys and wherefores of the other aspects of the dispute (pay, hours, rostering, compulsory Sundays etc). But I must defend the need to retain both ticket offices and train guards. Train guards of course play a safety critical role the way flight attendants and ferry staff do (and no-one is proposing eliminating them), particularly in terms of assisting with emergency evacuation and in ensuring that all doors are closed (DOO is inadequate for this as the driver’s view is very limited, as Diamond Geezer pointed out:  https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2022/12/yet-more-london-transport-news.html ). But there is also the customer service role. Lots of people don’t feel comfortable with buying tickets from machines or online, and there are lots ...
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Repeating because it's so good

I'm repeating this because I love it. And adding a link. https://compactmag.com/.../why-anne-applebaum-shot-down.../ Why did Anne Applebaum declare something “not interesting” after previously publishing a rebuttal, and why was the session summarily ended? This is the relevant rebuttal, which makes me so disappointed that what Anne wrote a long essay about became "not interesting". Is it rather "this is embarassing me and I don't want to talk about it"? https://www.theatlantic.com/.../smears-against.../616824/ Why was first year student Daniel Schmidt so good at embarrassing the pros? And the same goes for his friend Chris Phillips. https://thechicagothinker.com/thinkers-christopher.../ How are these two right-wing students able to embarrass the rest? Dan made the point that "keeping your head down" helps in recruitment for elite firms, if I were recruiting I'd look for people like Chris and Dan. https://collegedissident.com/conservatives-aband...
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