Quotulatiousness

October 26, 2023

“… despite all the evidence, British people still believe the NHS is the single best thing about Britain”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The picture Jess Gill paints of Britain’s National Health Service is equally true of Canada’s various provincially run socialized medical systems, and largely for the same reasons:

Not actually the official symbol of Britain’s National Health Services … probably.

It’s clear that Britain’s National Health Service is failing. 7.6 million people are on a waiting list, and 41% of them say their health has gotten worse while waiting for treatment. Compounding the problem, the UK has significantly fewer hospital beds, doctors, nurses, CT scanners, and MRI units than the OECD average. Furthemore, the UK has the second-highest rate of treatable deaths in Western Europe.

Yet despite all the evidence, British people still believe the NHS is the single best thing about Britain. From the country clapping outside their houses to “thank our NHS” during the Covid-19 pandemic, to the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition attending a mass ceremony to celebrate the NHS’s 75th anniversary, praise for this institution is everywhere.

Even though it’s self-evident the emperor has no clothes, the NHS is treated like a sacred cow. This begs the question: why are people so loyal to a system that is clearly failing them?

There is a prevalent conspiracy theory that the NHS is being intentionally underfunded by the Conservative Government so that the resulting poor outcomes will provide justification for them to privatize it and transform it into the American model of healthcare. This theory is pushed by the establishment: from senior members of the British Medical Association, journalists, and Members of Parliament.

This theory achieves two things. One, it shifts blame for poor outcomes away from the NHS as a system itself and toward the politicians in power. Two, it frames the debate with the assumption that privatization is a bad thing, causing any meaningful reform to be met with fear mongering.

This narrative has caused a massive issue for opponents of the NHS as there are multiple levels of misleading rhetoric. The fact of the matter is that the Conservatives are not privatizing or underfunding the NHS. Furthermore, whether it be a fully privatized system or even the mixed system as seen in other European countries, free-market reform would significantly help patients and doctors.

Look at Life – Draw the Fires (1963)

Filed under: Britain, History, Railways — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

PauliosVids
Published 21 Nov 2018

The railways are changing, with coal-powered steam being phased out and replaced by diesel engines by 1972. Crowds pay their respects to the Flying Scotsman‘s last departure from Kings Cross as it is replaced by a 3,300-horsepower diesel. The network is being modernised by new signalling, longer continuous track on concrete sleepers and flyovers, and controversial closures of lines.

QotD: Making steel

Filed under: History, Quotations, Science, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Let’s start with the absolute basics: what is steel? Fundamentally, steel is an alloy of iron and carbon. We can, for the most part, dispense with many modern varieties of steel that involve more complex alloys; things like stainless steel (which add chromium to the mix) were unknown to pre-modern smiths and produced only by accident. Natural alloys of this sort (particularly with manganese) might have been produced by accident where local ores had trace amounts of other metals. This may have led to the common belief among ancient and medieval writers that iron from certain areas was superior to others (steel from Noricum in the Roman period, for instance, had this reputation, note Buchwald, op. cit. for the evidence of this), though I have not seen this proved with chemical studies.

So we are going to limit ourselves here to just carbon and iron. Now in video-game logic, that means you take one “unit” of carbon and one “unit” of iron and bash them together in a fire to make steel. As we’ll see, the process is at least moderately more complicated than that. But more to the point: those proportions are totally wrong. Steel is a combination of iron and carbon, but not equal parts or anything close to it. Instead, the general division goes this way (there are several classification systems but they all have the same general grades):

Below 0.05% carbon or so, we just refer to that as iron. There is going to be some small amount of carbon in most iron objects, picked up in the smelting or forging process.
From 0.05% carbon to 0.25% carbon is mild or low carbon steel.
From about 0.3% to about 0.6%, we might call medium carbon steel, although I see this classification only infrequently.
From 0.6% to around 1.25% carbon is high-carbon steel, also known as spring steel. For most armor, weapons and tools, this is the “good stuff” (but see below on pattern welding).
From 1.25% to 2% are “ultra-high-carbon steels” which, as far as I can tell didn’t see much use in the ancient or medieval world.
Above 2%, you have cast iron or pig iron; excessive carbon makes the steel much too hard and brittle, making it unsuitable for most purposes.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Iron, How Did They Make It, Part IVa: Steel Yourself”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-10-09.

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