Categories
When the rules are the main event: Smarkets covid restrictions market – politicalbetting.com
When the rules are the main event: Smarkets covid restrictions market – politicalbetting.com
A few weeks ago I wrote about the Smarkets market on whether the government would reimpose covid restrictions before the new year. The market, put up shortly prior to the end of restrictions in July, is called ‘Any Covid restrictions to be re-introduced in England during 2021‘. The ‘subheading’ then reads ‘Will the government re-introduce any legally enforceable restrictions on social contact in England before the end of 2021?‘
0
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Otherwise, she might go away with the impression that going to see the cricket means sitting down in the ground with a newspaper and an iPad, drinking beer and chatting to friends all day…
And I agree punters should be allowed to void bets in such circumstances. But for an exchange this is more complicated as the counterparty probably wouldn't want to void their side. So Smarkets need a mechanism to take on the liability.
Someone here noted the other day, that the government had already announced legislation for care home worker vaccinations before this market was put up. If that is indeed the case, there’s an argument that Smarkets have messed this one up and are better to void the market completely.
Must say, I do quite like the Australian style points based response to the "selfish, badly educated, virtue signalling little turds"
Patrick Moore
@EcoSenseNow
Watch as Sky News Australia rips a new one for Greta. This would never happen in Canada, USA, or Europe. Three Cheers!
https://twitter.com/EcoSenseNow/status/1451597572846460928
However my main issue with this is that the rules were passed by Parliament in June and the market opened in July. But then this 'clarification' appeared in October. That is just not acceptable in my eyes, the rules existed before this market even opened.
The talk of the rules starting from November is a bit of a misnomer technically too, the rules started in July (following being passed by Parliament in June) but with a grace period that is about to end. Nothing new is being legally introduced in November - the rules were already the law before this market started.
Also, just got around to reading @Fishing ’s article from yesterday, and wanted to note my appreciation for that, too.
As far as the regulation market is concerned, I think many concluded at the time of the first article that it was a recipe for confusion.
Quincel states that the market was put up shortly prior to the end of restrictions in July. The more important thing is that I thought it was a little later than when the vaccine mandate legislation for care workers was passed, but I may be wrong.
In any case, the clarification in October created a new market in my mind. Prior punters were clearly taken by surprise. 1.46 was instantly cut to 1.09 on the announcement.
I agree that bets placed prior to the clarification should be voided.
If it was as obvious as Smarkets response to Quincel state - then why did they need to post the clarification in the first place?
Quincel says that he legislation covers visitors as well. I didn't realise this. So unvaccinated sons and daughters will be barred from seeing their parents (or at least restricted to outside only visits). My word.
In this instance, I do agree with @Quincel (and I have an indirect bet on this market with DavidL), that I don't think vaccines to enter care homes ought to count... but having read their statement, I can sort of see why they have applied letter of the rules in the way.
I'm hoping to win my bet with DavidL cleanly though through a nice broad-based reintroduction of mask mandates.
@Isam
Ah - now I see why you weren't around yesterday.
Just weighing up your "excuse".
(Congrats)
He was having a go at teenagers, Australian teenagers.
The reasons that the likes of Greta gain unpopularity, is the same reasons as for example Marcus Rashford. They’re clearly front people for larger groups pushing an agenda, and they speak from positions of privilege while trying to enforce changed behaviours or increased costs of living on the rest of us.
Re: Their statement, I must admit being a bit disappointed. It defends the rule clarification by saying 'Even if we were to ignore the market clarification [the bets would still lose]', in other words it boils down to 'The rule clarification didn't matter this time' - which doesn't seem to me to really defend their clarification at all!
Don't worry; your virtue is shining brightly through it.
'West Yorkshire (£830m): Extending the West Bradford-Cycle Superhighway and installing electric vehicle charging stations in Kirklees neighbourhoods'
That's a lot of money for a cycle path and some plug sockets. And for bus and train users? We don't have tram users since we don't have any trams.
Joshua Blake
@JoshBiostats
We're pretty certain the daily case numbers are at best half of all infections but this is nothing to do with reinfections. The lack of understanding among some very influential political journalists is pretty concerning.
https://twitter.com/JoshBiostats/status/1451812324076052484
…Twitter comes to the rescue.
https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1451673736877428742
Update: The city of LB just announced it has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations.
Thank you everybody who called the governor and the mayor to request. They got the message, you can stop now...
Full thread:
https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1451543776992845834
And no mention of driver shortages.
Congratulations to Mr and Mrs iSam on the arrival of their second son. Lovely news!
Remember when we were assured that as a sovereign nation we would be maintaining and enhancing our environmental standards?
Well, yesterday, 265 Tory MPs voted to allow water companies to dump raw untreated sewage into our rivers.
A few voted against permitting this disgusting practice.
You can see the list here - https://evolvepolitics.com/heres-a-list-of-every-mp-who-just-voted-to-allow-water-companies-to-continue-dumping-raw-sewage-in-our-rivers/.
Being green does not just mean not burning carbon. It also means having a care for the environment around us and the flora and fauna which depend on it not being turned into a cesspit.
Badly done.
COVID dog buyers pretend dogs are strays to offload them on to rescue homes.
Begs the question why the charities were not running humungous Are you sure you really want a dog? campaign throughout the COVID boom.
Modern western middle class teenagers have a very indulged and pampered lifestyle and most will struggle to maintain that when they have to fund it themselves.
Its not really their fault but rather that of their parents, who would be better advised saving money for their kids rather than spending so much on them.
In London, many of those supporting this fought a long and bitter campaign to block the Thames Tideway project - which is to expand sewer capacity to deal with this issue.
They did achieve a massive delay in the project, so there's that.
Much as the idiots complaining about the Hammersmith bridge often fight intensely against all of the options, temporary and permanent.
Or the people who fight bitterly to prevent new reservoirs being built, then complain about hosepipe bans.
Personally I would incorporate them into the.... concrete.... solutions to the various national infrastructure problems. But that's me being evil again....
EDIT: What I would have done is to present a bill ordering immediate start of remediation works. With no planning hold ups - incorporate full planning permission override into the bill. Then enjoy the screaming.
Meanwhile I have found a partial answer to my question:
"Plans to cap the cost of a day's bus travel in West Yorkshire and create a greener bus fleet have been approved by the county's combined authority.
If given the final go-ahead, the Bus Service Improvement Plan would see the daily cost of travelling on buses run by different firms limited to £5.50.
West Yorkshire Combined Authority is bidding for a share of a national £3bn bus strategy fund."
So WYCA have to hold out the begging bowl and hope it gets funded.
This is what we have come to.
Improving the A61 between Wakefield and Leeds for buses, cyclists and pedestrians, and giving buses greater priority in Wakefield
But it does seem a little for a lot of money.
Further south Barnsley is to get a 'Dutch style' roundabout.
To go with its current plan to be remodelled with a Peak District theme.
I wonder if it will amount to as much as the previous idea to reinvent Barnsley as a 'Tuscan hill village'.
No time to die: An in-depth analysis of James Bond's exposure to infectious agents
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1477893921002167
… Global travelers, whether tourists or secret agents, are exposed to a smörgåsbord of infectious agents. We hypothesized that agents pre-occupied with espionage and counterterrorism may, at their peril, fail to correctly prioritize travel medicine. To examine our hypothesis, we examined adherence to international travel advice during the 86 international journeys that James Bond was observed to undertake in feature films spanning 1962–2021. Scrutinizing these missions involved ∼3113 min of evening hours per author that could easily have been spent on more pressing societal issues. We uncovered above-average sexual activity, often without sufficient time for an exchange of sexual history, with a remarkably high mortality among Bond's sexual partners (27.1; 95% confidence interval 16.4–40.3). Given how inopportune a bout of diarrhea would be in the midst of world-saving action, it is striking that Bond is seen washing his hands on only two occasions, despite numerous exposures to foodborne pathogens...
In this case, the ONS (and other surveys) provide clear, unambiguous, non-partisan data. They tell us, with a delay of a few weeks, what the infection rates were at a given time, complete with error bars. Real science at work.
The problem for Peston & Co. is that they are used to working in politics and economics - you can take an idea, wrap a story around it and sound like a sage.
If you are wrong... well, in politics and economics it is fairly unusual to hit Absolute Truth.
In this case it was that the port couldn’t accept empties because there was no space, and there were planning rules that prevented hauliers from stacking them in their own yards - so they were stuck on trucks, which then. Couldn’t collect goods from the port. Suspending the local planning rules allows hauliers to offload their empties and start to clear the backlog from the port itself.
The 're-introduction' point is a red herring. That has a reasonable general as opposed to specific interpretation. So it's ok to settle the market as Yes for a rule which is new and wasn't seen during previous Covid restrictions. Eg the Not Happening Event of vaxports for nightclubs would, if I'm wrong and it were to happen, rightly settle as Yes.
But I would feel VERY hard done by if I'd backed No and the sole instance of 'vaxports for care home workers' settled it for Yes. The market sub-heading clearly says 'social contact' and this isn't social contact. It's professional contact - ie specifically NOT social contact. Why put the word 'social' in there unless to exclude contact which is non-social? Total balls and just plain wrong. I'd fight this one all the way to the House of Lords if necessary.
However, if the rule brought in for care homes is wider and also covers friends & family visiting residents, then this is fair dues. That's a restriction on social contact. That should settle as Yes. No argument whatsoever there.
Noes like me would have to wait 16 years for a final payout while Ayes may hope for a faster return, but there'd be plenty of trading opportunities and price volatility along the way as stars rise and fall. With the cautionary tale of Lord Archer in mind, PGCE wouldn't count.
As far as Australia’s CO2 output is concerned, this has little or nothing to do with teenagers and their mobile phone usage - indeed there is already one state (Tasmania) with 100% renewable electricity.
Being one of the world’s largest coal producers is rather more germane.
It is blimpish clickbait par excellence, and frankly embarrassing to watch.
It provides a detailed analysis.
@AntigoneJournal
4m
"Through ingenious comparative work, scholars have reconstructed in great detail features of the Proto-Indo-European language, the language from which all Indo-European languages descend, despite the fact that no written evidence of it survives."
https://antigonejournal.com/2021/07/what-did-ancient-languages-sound-like/
Once it got blown up it is a development hopportunity. With a links golf course.
On the expenses claims, perhaps he was spying on Mons. Chirac? Or collects points?
2 He is the only child of deceased parents who could afford Eton (and fettes after he was expelled).
Without watching it again didn't he make points about aircon usage and travel by cars.
A more UK or US equivalent could also mention the amount of air travel the modern lifestyle includes.
As an example, we know that prettty much all of the delegates to the COP26 conference are going to turn up on private or government planes, then tell everyone how we all need to do less flying, swap our cars for electric ones and replace boilers with heat sinks at a cost of thousands - as China and Russia don’t even bother to show up, and the USA and India won’t implement an agreement to any meaningful degree.
The problem is, that for a huge number of people in the country, the cost of transport and energy are significant. Millions of people use old cars to get to minimum-wage jobs working antisocial hours. People advocating petrol being £3 a litre and petrol cars being banned don’t appear to have any understanding of the impact of those policies on the working classes.
https://www.markiteconomics.com/Public/Home/PressRelease/291a6f7539534735b69350b6e4e0f921
https://www.markiteconomics.com/Public/Home/PressRelease/318d8368fea74e588e80760a5eb9c21f
https://www.markiteconomics.com/Public/Home/PressRelease/6c4111f9b7054ecba6a8e85eedb9ebf7
Almost identical with comments about capacity constraints, supplier issues and rising costs but also rising orders and employment.
No, it's just ignorant dyspepsia.
As it happens, I'd been looking at this. Taking the ONS prevalence counts amongst Yr7-15, assuming infection lasts for an average of 11.5 days (an assumption taken from comparing their prevalence estimates with their incidence estimates; it makes the numbers fit best and it matches reported data), counting from late August to ensure minimal shift in their own processes and maximum comparability, and using ratio of hospitalisations prior to that point (ie x hospitalisations came from y infections between August and December; assume the ratio was constant before and the proportion of infections was constant; cross-checking with the ratio of Age 6-17 hospitalisations to infections available after October)...
Further assuming that prior infection has an effective efficacy of 80% (from the ONS reinfection surveys), so some of the infections are in the previously infected (backed up by anecdotal evidence from people I've spoken with)
I get infections looking like this since the start of August in that age group:
(Central prediction and 95% ranges high and low, with dotted lines as a projection from the latest. Obviously, the rate will bend down as it approaches 100%, but this gives an indication).
Then add vaccinations. Too slow so far, but assuming those currently infected do not receive doses and doses are randomly spread between the previously infected and the not-yet-infected, and taking doses from 2 weeks prior as being "active," you get the rise of "non-immune-naive" looking like this:
Now, neither infection nor vaccination provide 100% immunity, but if you assume 80% or so from either, and 90%+ from either hybrid immunity or the reinfected-and-recovered, when the bar hits around 100%, you should have herd immunity in that group.
This does, of course, assume infections proceed as before even over half-term, but I think 2 weeks looks promising for this "engine room" to finally stall for good.
*sighs*
But so what - few of us fully match our deeds to our thoughts - and the fundamental point remains that the modern middle class teenager has a pampered, privileged lifestyle, A lifestyle, at least in the UK, they will struggle to maintain when they have to fund it themselves.
I have the same problem in my day job. There isn't much dispute that factory farming produces cheap meat and lots of suffering and environmental damage. If we just argue against it on the grounds of the damage, it runs into the perfectly legitimate "but what about the impact on poorer people?" argument. As a non-political charity, we can't say "so combine it with higher universal credit and a wealth tax", so we argue that the answer is to tax meat to reflect the indirect costs but ring-fence the proceeds to subsidise healthy non-meat alternatives and high-welfare meat, so that people on low incomes have healthy affordable options with few downsides. But say the words "meat tax" and people just switch off before you finish the sentence.
That's why Henry Dimbleby's National Food strategy advocates a 30% reduction in meat consumption over 10 years (on sustainability grounds as well as welfare) but explicitly shies away from a meat tax, instead favouring vague things like higher procurement standards, which are a Good Thing but (a) probably won't achieve the 30% cut and (b) also have indirect effects, as it's school and hospital budgets you're hitting.
It's tricky, but of course unhelpful when people like Patrick Moore just throw out random sneers.
https://twitter.com/britishsave/status/1451814958979760133?s=21
Meet the Remoaners taking over the taxpayer-funded 'Festival of Brexit'
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/10/22/meet-remoaners-taking-taxpayer-funded-festival-brexit/
Though in recent weeks we've had people raging at the possibility of higher pay for abattoir workers because it might lead to higher meat prices.
People who would, I suspect, be happy for meat prices to rise for environmental or animal welfare reasons.
Their parents and grandparents generations are indulging them at the wrong time and will exploit them at the wrong time.
The younger generation are having their current expectations raised and their future means reduced.
Those on the centre-right see improving technology as the answer, rather than higher taxes and increased state control, and will rally against those who see only increases in the cost of living as proposals put forward.
There’s also the hypocracy angle, with many of the socialist green advocates living very middle-class lifestyles, as we have seen with the road-closing protestors in recent weeks. They appear to have litttle intention to change their own behaviour, in the same way as they expect everyone else to do so. To be flippant, it won’t be long before someone writes a lengthy opinion piece in the Guardian, celebrating the fact that there’s now a much nicer crowd than there used to be on the Ryanair to Florence.
I do like the optimism, energy, lack of cynicism and slang rich manias of teenagers. They also seem way more civilised and decorous than I was at that age.
Compulsory face masks in shops/on public transport: 76%
Govt advice to work from home where possible: 69%
Vaccine passports for large events: 69%
Pubs/restaurants closed: 22%
Schools closed: 19%
https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1451830429951086592?s=20