Newsletter

Hello and welcome to this month’s newsletter.

The summer is almost over and so is the Spanish economy! Well, I might be exaggerating slightly, but the outlook here is grim. This is also the outlook for most other countries too, although probably not for Sweden. I always knew the Swedish were very intelligent (well, they invented Ikea) but they approached covid differently to virtually everyone else, have had almost no restrictions and still have an economy.

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Everywhere else, the people supposedly in charge appear to be totally clueless and just seem to copy other countries actions to try and ‘contain’ the virus. There is far too much emphasis on the number of people infected. If you are testing 10 times as many people a day now than you were in March, and you are deliberately targeting your testing in known covid ‘hotspot’ areas,  it should come as no surprise that you will detect more infections. I don’t think we need Sherlock Holmes to investigate that, it’s just obvious.

We need to stop listening to these boffin professors and their worst case-scenarios (based on no scientific evidence whatsoever) and be focusing on how many people are in hospital with covid symptoms, and how many people are actually dying from it. To put things into perspective, at the peak in Spain there were 950 people a day dying from covid. Right now the average is around 65. The UK is currently averaging around 35 covid deaths per day. Typically around 450 people die of cancer in the UK every day. In fact, when you look at the current top ten list of deaths in the UK, covid isn’t even in it. It is in fact 24th on the list. The normal flu is killing more people than covid. I invite you to watch this short video which tells you the real facts of covid deaths in the UK. This is data from the official ONS (office of national statistics) website. It’s not made up numbers or conspiracy theory nonsense, it’s real facts. They won’t tell you this on BBC news, or any other new channel for that matter. I can’t imagine why.

Lock downs are not the answer, and neither are face masks. We have been wearing these things in public in Spain, by law, for months now and they have made no difference. There are no scientific studies that prove they make any difference, as far as I can tell. If you social distance, stop it with the hugging and kissing everyone you meet (pay attention Spain!), and wash your hands with soap and water frequently, that’s enough really. Enough of all this covid hysteria. This virus isn’t going away, so it’s time to live with the virus and get on with life. Ahem, like Sweden…

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The ERTE and furlough schemes will be ramping down (paying people less money to sit at home and not work) so spare a thought for your local shops, businesses and tradesmen (or should that be tradespersons?). It has been a tough six months for them, and it looks like the winter is going to be even worse. If your fridge freezer or washing machine is on it’s last legs, think about buying a new one from your local independent shop. It might cost you 20€ more than from Carrefour, but you know they will deliver and install it for you, and take the old one away for recycling, and in the unlikely event anything goes wrong they will be only to happy to help (unlike Carrefour). Get your air conditioning serviced by your local aircon company if you haven’t had it done for a while (years). If your living room is in need to a lick of paint, get your local painter and decorator in to do it for you. All your local shops and traders really need your support.

With that in mind, if your computer is getting rather old and slow, let me turbo charge it for you with an SSD upgrade. It will give your computer a new lease of life and is much cheaper than buying a new one. To give you a little incentive I will knock 20€ off the price, but for this month only. I would also suggest you do this sooner rather than later. The PM Pedro Sanchez went on tv and said there would never be a full country lock down again, but he is quite capable of changing his mind at the drop of a hat, particularly if the numbers keep going up. Obviously I can’t work if we go into lock down again. So, help me to help you and get in touch.

A quick reminder about local portrait artist Gillian Vandersyde. Loads of people contacted me when I wrote about Gill in one of my newsletters, and it was the most clicked newsletter link so far this year. If you were thinking about getting a portrait from Gill for someone this Christmas, now is the time to act. She’s only got one pair of hands you know! All the details you need are here.

Microsoft will be releasing the next update for Windows 10 later this month. This is a minor update really, and if you are currently running the latest version of Windows 10 (20H1 / 2004) it will install in around 20 minutes. If you are running an older version it does the whole Windows 10 upgrade thing which may take hours. You can find out more about the changes, and watch a video showing you the changes, in this article from Windows Central.

Finally a quick reminder that the clocks go back an hour on Sunday 25 October. It seems that next year will be the last year we will be putting the clocks forward and back, well in the EU anyway. Apparently the EU voted to scrap it, as reported here.

Well that’s it for this month. Keep well, and have a great month.

Thursday 1st October 2020

Neal Walker Computer Services     

663713811