They’re coming for our pets next. I am actually wondering why my supermarket own-brand catfood shows sugar as an ingredient on the label.
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Ours are hyper enough without sugar in their food 
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I’m not sure about cat food but there are vegetables and fruit in some dog foods. Fructose is a natural sugar that would be a listed ingredients, not necessarily an added sugar. Listed ingredients are in order of quantity. I certainly hope sugar is nowhere near the first in that list!
The big drawback for dog foods offered at supermarkets is that apart from not being grain free, they have a huge content of rice. This would be refined, white rice. A bulk filler with no nutritional value for dogs.
One problem, as a friend of mine is fond of pointing out, is that the late boomers and early generation X is about to hit retirement age - so this “bulge” in the population
means that for the next several more years there will be an excess of retirements across the whole of the population because there aren’t nearly enough youngsters about to start their working careers.
That is a problem for all governments who need to fund pensions, no matter how much us late boomers dislike the idea we’re either going to have to retire later, take smaller pensions or allow immigration to take up the slack.
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I agree - I’m just waiting for a politician to be straight with the UK pensioners that voted for brexit and are worked up by ‘stop the boats’ - and tell them that the country needs immigrants to pay for pensions.
But it’s interesting that your reply on NHS staff leaving intervenes in discussion of the UK’s health problems, especially in view of the fact that people seem to be stopping work way before retiring age:
A lot of them - I’m guessing - are those with chronic health issues themselves (possibly due to work pressures) - or those having to care for parents deserted by the broken social care system.
Quite probably, there’s also a lot of long Covid around according to some estimates.
Quite.
Interesting BBC article on Japan which is suffering from a lack of “new blood” and traditions too welded to worship of what has gone before.
A good article I feel, and fair. There is so much to admire in Japan and retaining its heritage is a large part. But the warning is spot on
If you want to see what happens to a country that rejects immigration as a solution to falling fertility, Japan is a good place to start.
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Not just that. There’s a reluctance of an awful lot of employers to hire people from early 40’s onwards - and over 50 very considerably more so. I am quite sure many older people, and even not so old, are trying to work, but employers simply won’t consider them despite jobs going unfilled.
Quite. Seems that a substantially reduced salary is the only incentive to many employers. So sad, and so short sighted. Older folk often have a wealth of experience that can be invaluable, not only for company performance but also in training the next generation. Why as a society that now lives healthier and longer lives are we not appreciating this?
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The cynic in me thinks the answer is simple: younger people, trapped under excessive rents or mortgage commitments, fearful for their ability to put food on the table for their small children, will put up with any shit. Older people, mortgages substantially paid down, empty nests, are more likely to tell bad employers where to stick it.
As the figures demonstrate?
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The dilemma of a finite, and decreasing amount of jobs for not only young people but a growing amount of older people who used to be considered retireable. The chart you posted lists ‘economically active’ as only up to 54 years. That is no longer considered old. UK retirement age is now 67, and rising. What about those folk aged 55-67?
Apart from older, still fit and able folk wanting to keep actively employed, should we not consider a social reality that older people still need to keep working because economics are leaving them short? It is quite a sad thing if you are older but needing to work for income but finding employer after employer saying no thank you, often without a reason.
I’m not so sure it is just that older people are grumpy. Not all are! Indeed, some have greater patience and a non threatening manner that can certainly provide excellent service.
How to fix the ‘competition’ for jobs between youth and age? How to fix the population problem of a growing number of elderly relying on a decreasing number of young? I haven’t an answer 
People like me doing their jobs and looking at retirement as a very theoretical event somewhere over the horizon.
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Thats assuming you don’t lose your job and spend the rest of the time on RSA because noone will hire you , which in turn leads to reduced pension because of those years not counting
toward your pension 
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And luckily for any fonctionnaire in France or UK, this is less likely.
In the private sector employees are much more vulnerable.
A glaring IT failure is being revealed from the trial of a doctor whose botched treatment over decades ruined 1,000 of lives.
One (of many) major thing that went wrong was not upgrading IT and people to monitor it.
"We’re talking about people here, we’re not talking about parts on a piece of equipment.
"For them to have a gaping hole in their database and not interrogate their systems is absolutely appalling.”
Doesn’t excuse the other medical practice culture failings but does highlight something that can and must be changed immediately.
I am wondering if ChatGPT can help? Clearly, not for diagnosis but for recording and flagging patient symptoms?
To be fair I think the issue with Patterson was not (just) that operations were “botched” but that he quite deliberately over treated people so that he got more income from carrying out the procedures.
Going that far back it’s not a question of monitoring - those systems will simply not have been in use and patients likely to have been discharged from his care.
Any further back and they will be manually looking at paper records I would think.
Chat GPT can be useful in many spheres but it is not a database of patient symptoms, nor is it (for all that it actually “passed” some US board medical exams 
) a doctor.
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Now that smoking tobacco is so reduced, it’s diet rather than exercise that is doing the damage.
My plans to move to France two years before state retirement age have highlighted lots of things - first of all my great luck to have a well-pensioned job as a university technician for 40 years that allowed me to retire at 60 - and in excellent health thanks to lucky genes, lucky choice of diet at 21, and thanks to a not very physically demanding job that allowed me to cycle there and back on rural and suburban paths for 30 years - and when at work I got to walk across a leafy campus during the day …
From here I wonder if I will “need” to pay for a mutuelle in France … though with the S1 restored, I will at least have the money to pay for it.
If anything, as an outlier I have had to resist OVER-diagnosis on the NHS… I see chronically sick people everywhere when I go for my walk - maybe they want to keep testing me as some sort of datum.
And effectively killed someone I knew. The mother of a close friend had breast cancer and was told by Paterson that she didn’t need a mastectomy because he had a ‘new technique’ that could eradicate the cancer without having a mastectomy. She believed and trusted him. The cancer returned 4 years later in a very aggressive form having spread to other parts of her body, and it killed her. Her story is part of the official report into what happened and why.
In this case, it was not over treatment, but the use of an unauthorised and inappropriate treatment that he had supposedly developed himself, which just didn’t work. His extreme hubris made him believe that he could work miracles.
I know a local breast surgeon - his view is that Patterson was completely rogue and did stuff without any evidence base, as you say, both unnecessary procedures and ones which probably increased the chance of the cancer returning.
Given that “15years behind bars” really means 7 or 8, and I don’t think he was made to repay monies earned for his “work” - but victims were paid compensation by the NHS I can’t help thinking he had the last laugh in some ways.
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