Network Rail bets on mindfulness (and err...Greggs) to lure commuters back

[birchesgreen]

1 meeting a month, wow. Not sure I'd like that. As much as I don't love Teams calls I'd rather see people's faces and hear their voices a bit more than that.

Well we are all different, 1 too many as as i am concerned...

 

[andystock22]

Most important thing is that train operators go back to full weekday timetables and not these Sunday Style timetables.

Significant overcrowding on peak time Great Northern Moorgate and Greater Anglia suburban services today

 

[DelayRepay]

If a kid is ill enough to be sent home from school in normal times they are not going to be running around making a racket, or they need parcelling straight back to school!

This, though, needs to be offset against the benefit that a day's work needn't be lost if a kid needs to be picked up in an emergency. Certainly a bonus for single parents.

My department has always had the ability for most staff to work from home, although before the pandemic most people only did it occasionally. But, even then, sick children was quite a common reason for working from home. It makes sense - avoids the employee taking leave at short notice if they don't have anyone else to care for the child.

I do think providing childcare during working hours during school holidays is a bit much though (for young children, not older ones who can be left to fend for themselves).

 

[yorksrob]

All a load of crap while they're putting the fares up. Means nothing.

 

[Goldfish62]

All a load of crap while they're putting the fares up. Means nothing.

Very succinctly put.

 

[Horizon22]

Most important thing is that train operators go back to full weekday timetables and not these Sunday Style timetables.

Significant overcrowding on peak time Great Northern Moorgate and Greater Anglia suburban services today

Out of interest what do you consider as "significant"? Personally I know that what I'd consider "very busy" has altered a bit in the last two years.

 

[Deltic1961]

All a load of crap while they're putting the fares up. Means nothing.

Don't fancy writing the Sue Gray report, do you?

You've obviously got skillz in that field.

 

[yorksrob]

Very succinctly put.

Don't fancy writing the Sue Gray report, do you?

You've obviously got skillz in that field.

I'm afraid the industry's rather got my dander up today.

 

[jayah]

I'm sure you are right. But we don't just need to rethink transport patterns; housing and planning are equally important. In theory working from home might be ideal; in practice, unless you've got a house with plenty of space, this can be difficult. Especially in London where such space is beyond the dreams of many workers on average incomes. Even outside of London, even in 'cheap' property regions, the rent or mortgage payment on a house or flat with room for a home office can be much more than half a wage. In London that would be the stuff of dreams: one room in a shared house isn't going to leave you much if any change from £1k monthly.

And why the faith in neoliberalism? It's what's got us into the mess we are in now.

The mess is relative. Forty years ago billions lived in adject poverty, West and East were on the brink of nuclear war and in the UK central heating was a luxury.

Now our biggest worries are having too much to eat and the sins of our ancestors.

 

[Goldfish62]

The mess is relative. Forty years ago billions lived in adject poverty, West and East were on the brink of nuclear war and in the UK central heating was a luxury.

When I was a kid in the early 70s I assumed we would be consumed in nuclear armagedon sometime between then and the late 1980s. Scary times.

 

[urbophile]

Now our biggest worries are having too much to eat and the sins of our ancestors.

I'm not sure what you mean by the latter phrase, but try telling the hundreds who come to our local foodbank every week that they have 'too much to eat'.

 

[Freightmaster]

The mess is relative. Forty years ago billions lived in abject poverty, West and East were on the brink of nuclear war and in the UK central heating was a luxury.

...whereas from this April, having the central heating on will be a luxury for millions in this country.






MARK

 

[kristiang85]

When I was a kid in the early 70s I assumed we would be consumed in nuclear armagedon sometime between then and the late 1980s. Scary times.

Imagine if social media had existed in the cold war... Ugh.

 

[jayah]

...whereas from this April, having the central heating on will be a luxury for millions in this country.






MARK

Ironically this has come about because policy is now driven by a swollen chattering class who have so much time and money on their hands they can find no further contribution to be made to the human condition than agitating about the of impending end of human civilisation.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 4 Feb 2022 ==

I'm not sure what you mean by the latter phrase, but try telling the hundreds who come to our local foodbank every week that they have 'too much to eat'.

Governments of all persuasions think that obesity is one of the main public health crises of our age. Policy is actively directed to making food more expensive and something like a third of it goes into the bin without being eaten.

It is possible to provide a hearty, nourishing breakfast for literally pence, a tiny fraction of the hourly minimum wage. If people are unable to do that, the cause lies elsewhere e.g. housing, energy and in both cases the root cause again is government policy making these essentials more expensive.

Fifty years ago you could measure a childs wealth with a tape measure and weighing scales. Nowadays poor children are more likely to be overweight than ones from wealthy families.

 

[greyman42]

Imagine if social media had existed in the cold war... Ugh.

Never mind social media, what if we had had a mainstream media then like the one that we have now.

 

[kristiang85]

Never mind social media, what if we had had a mainstream media then like the one that we have now.

Right on cue, The spectator has this article...

What the media gets wrong about Putin and Ukraine

Western warnings of an ‘imminent’ Russian invasion of Ukraine have grown more insistent in recent weeks with different voices, from the media to politicians, needlessly stoking the fires of war with their aggressive and inaccurate rhetoric. Time and again, Putin’s words have been twisted or...

www.spectator.co.uk

Western warnings of an ‘imminent’ Russian invasion of Ukraine have grown more insistent in recent weeks with different voices, from the media to politicians, needlessly stoking the fires of war with their aggressive and inaccurate rhetoric.

Part of the reason for this is because the grainy satellite images of Russian troops poised on Ukraine’s border, just waiting for their orders to attack, conformed so well to every western stereotype: an aggressive Russia under a dictatorial leader, ready to bully, if not annihilate, poor little – well, actually not so little – Ukraine and snuff out its entirely legitimate aspirations to join the western world. You did not need to know anything about Russia or even to have a very good idea of where Ukraine is, let alone its history, or what it looks and feels like, to speak pretty confidently about Russia’s malign intentions.

If the media were amplifiers, those talking up the danger, at the start at least, have chiefly been US and UK politicians. President Biden might have seemed at times unclear about whether an invasion really was a prospect – and if it was, whether it would really be that big a deal – but his Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, was in no doubt, and did his best to keep him on the straight and narrow.

In the UK, the Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, wildly inflated both the number of Russian troops on the border – ‘hundreds of thousands’ she told the BBC Today programme, when the very highest estimate at the time was 125,000. She also gave the impression, deliberately or not, that Russia had already tried to replace the elected government in Kyiv and mounted ‘false flag’ attempts to tempt Ukraine into war – when US intelligence reports at the time suggested such heinous deeds were only a prospect. Interestingly, the ‘false flag’ plot claim was reheated and reoffered to the media ten days later to greater effect.

Tom Tugendhat (chair of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee) was also equally certain of Russia’s intentions. Tugendhat told Sky News, that ‘invading Ukraine is something he [the Russian President, Vladimir Putin] has been wanting to do for some time.’ As someone who follows Putin quite closely, I have seen no evidence to support this whatever. Nor, while I am on the subject, have I seen any evidence for Putin’s supposed, and oft-repeated, refusal to accept today’s Ukraine as an independent state. On the contrary, I have actually heard him, live and in person, say that he does. (But then, of course, the riposte comes back: whoever would believe Vladimir Putin?)
From specialist think-tankers and, yes, journalists, came other questionable versions of the truth. There was a claim that Russia had not only invaded the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine in 2014, but ‘taken’ it – which it certainly has not done, because there has been a simmering, and unresolved, war there for the past eight years.

Such common factual errors have been used during the Ukraine crisis to support the idea of a scurrilous Russian ‘pattern of behaviour’ into which Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea – and a 2022 invasion of Ukraine, of course – neatly fit. A favourite has been the assertion that Russia started the 2008 Georgia war by invading. In fact, Russia’s invasion was in response to a Georgian attack on one of Russia’s protectorates inside Georgia’s borders – as an EU report later that year found.

Another reason this false sequence has resurfaced now is the seductive parallel that can be drawn. The Georgia war began on the eve of the Beijing Olympics, and Putin, then Russian Prime Minister, was in China – as he is now for the Winter Olympics. Russia, so the fabrication goes, contrived to trigger the 2008 war under cover of the Beijing games and could do something similar again – even though the truth is that, if anyone was using the 2008 Olympics as a diversion, it was Georgia’s hothead President (and western protege), Mikheil Saakashvili.

But it is not just facts that have been flouted in this western view of Russia’s intentions towards Ukraine. Some of Putin’s more famous utterances have been grievously misconstrued.
One that has played a starring role in this western-Russia stand-off so far is a collection of quotations from an essay that appeared under Putin’s name on the Kremlin website back in July, discussing the history of Russian-Ukrainian relations. This has been a staple of the West’s misreading of Russian intentions, to the point where it was dignified with a riposte from the UK Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace, last month.

The single point commonly taken from Putin’s essay is his assertion that Russians are Ukrainians are ‘one people’ – a better translation might be ‘kin’. Yet however you translate it, there is nothing in his essay that would imply Russia’s right to a landgrab for Ukraine. Indeed, towards the end, Putin says that sometimes ‘a part of a people decide to take another course’, and that decision, he says, needs to be treated with ‘respect’. This paragraph, though, is either ignored or dismissed (as it was by Wallace). This western ‘set text’ should have been corrected months ago. Still, it remains chapter and verse.
Perhaps the most commonly cited and misconstrued Putin quotation is his description of the collapse of the Soviet Union as being ‘the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century’. There can be quibbles about the precise translation, but however it is translated, it does not mean – as it is invariably interpreted – that Putin wants to recreate the Soviet Union and/or the Russian Empire. He is on the record as saying that he was referring to the domestic dislocation that resulted, not Russia’s loss of territory or power.
But that has done nothing to dislodge the original misreading, even though there is another Putin quotation, equally pithy, that might better sum up his view. ‘He who does not regret the passing of USSR has no heart; he who wants to restore it has no head.’ The common western idea that Putin sees his mission as resurrecting the Soviet Union is simply wrong.

Another Putin saying, directly relevant to the Ukraine situation, has suffered a similar fate. ‘I can take Kyiv in two weeks if I want to’, Putin is quoted as saying after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. What he actually said would be better translated as ‘I could take Kyiv in two weeks if I wanted to’, meaning ‘I could, but I don’t want to’. In other words, it is a disavowal, not a confirmation, of an intention to take Kyiv.
Time and again, Putin’s words have been twisted or misconstrued – sometimes, it seems, because confirmation bias skews the translation – in a way that fits and reinforces western preconceptions. And the Ukraine crisis has offered one of the most glaring examples of how most of the western media has been content to pick up and run with the errors, apparently unaware or unconcerned about the distorted picture that results.

It is not only the media that is at fault here, of course. Politicians and others habitually blame journalists for their woes, but they don’t by and large invent stuff. They may though pander to what they anticipate their readers want and expect, and partly because of this they can all too easily be ‘spun’. The Iraq ‘dodgy dossier’ was an extreme example.

A bigger fault, though, is a reluctance to challenge what we are fed by officials and pressure groups, especially when it chimes with widely shared preconceptions. This is a particular problem, it seems to me, when a story, such as the Ukraine crisis, escapes from specialists and reporters on the ground and becomes a major international news story, with the Westminster lobby or the White House press corps particular weak points. (Why do you think, I just offer as an aside, didn’t we learn of No. 10 parties from any lobby correspondents the mornings after?)
The Ukraine crisis has allowed the US and UK governments to use a compliant and often poorly informed media to magnify the Russia scare, foster Nato solidarity and present themselves as noble protectors of Ukraine. Far from fending off a war, this hype recklessly brought the prospect of war closer – thankfully, not yet to the point of no return.

 

[Annetts key]

Um, a few points and questions…

First, in the (potential) lead up, let alone during, a war, the truth is the first casualty.. So it’s not really a surprise that we are in an information/phoney/propaganda ‘war’…

Secondly, if a country arranges for a very large military presence and military exercises near the border of another country that is wary of their neighbour, is it really surprising that people start talking and speculating what may happen and the possible intentions?

Only Putin knows what he wants. The stated items that he wants “the West” to agree to, do appear to be unreasonable.

if Russia wants to de-escalate the situation, all they have to do is to start withdrawing their military forces from the area near the border. Russia/Putin darn well knows that NATO / “the West” will not send a military force into Russian territory (without agreement).

I don’t think Putin will invade any new areas of Ukraine. But we don’t know that for certain. Hence it is very likely that this is all a big show. Especially for the Russian people: ‘Russia under Putin will strongly defend itself from the aggressive NATO’ or similar.

In any event, it is quite right and proper for ‘the West’ to make a big fuss about it. And to send some extra forces to nearby NATO member states. If only to remind Putin that ‘the West’ is serious about the situation.

The alternative is to let Putin bully not only Ukraine, but all NATO member states.

Oh, and please remind me how democratic the last set of elections were in Russia on a scale of one to ten in terms of being free and fair, without bribes and intimidation.

 

[Mag_seven]

Struggling to see what all this stuff about Russia / Ukraine has got to do with Network Rail and mindfulness / Greggs so I suggest this thread has now run its course.

Discussion on the Ukraine situation can be continued in this thread if required:

China vs Taiwan and other potential invasions/conflicts of concern (previously included Russia & Ukraine)

This issue has been flaring up all over the place, not just in the news thanks to recent attempts at diplomacy and/or threats, but also on this forum, particular about how our heavy covid focus is taking our eye off the ball with what these hostile powers might be up to. As a result I think it...

www.railforums.co.uk

thanks all

 

[Mojo]

Just going through my junk mail box to see that this service was axed as of 30th August.

 

[yorksrob]

I guess with passenger levels at around 80% of pre-pandemic usage, commuters are back as much as they're going to be for the timebeing.

Winter might bring a few more in though.