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The projection on 5/5/22 that could end Johnson or save him – politicalbetting.com
The projection on 5/5/22 that could end Johnson or save him – politicalbetting.com
The above table is of the BBC’s Projected National Vote Shares that is computed by leading political scientists in the hours after the May local elections.
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Maybe first, maybe not - who cares?
We have the small matter of the London local elections this year - the Conservatives will be hoping to hang on to as many of their 500 Councillors in the capital as possible.
A good night for Labour will mean, in my view, taking Wandsworth, Barnet and maybe Hillingdon at a stretch. Hard to see the likes of K&C and Westminster falling, likewise Bromley and Bexley.
LDs holding on to all three of their Boroughs and getting some councillors elected will be good for them.
A good night for the Conservatives - keeping what they have and capturing either an LD or a Labour borough.
Bring on the May elections. Tory bloodbath, Lib Dems winning everywhere - ave it!
C 32
L 37
LD 18
Which will mean you'll see gains for Lab and LD, but no bloodbath.
Golob has taken the Green Actions Party and turned it into the new leading political force of the centre and centre-left in Slovenia. He has opened negotiations with four other centre-left parties to create a united front opposition bloc to run against the ruling Slovenian Democratic Party of Prime Minister Janez Jansa.
The three parties in the current governing coalition have seen their vote share fall from 46% at the last election to an estimated 33.6% now while Golob's prospective coalition would have 55.4% based on the Ninamedia poll.
Long way to go but could be a really interesting election.
"How do you know it is nonsense? Great brains have no idea so how do you?"
+++++
That's my point. It is nonsense to presume we "know", or can "know", that we are all alone, via some fucking daft "equation" with so many imponderables and variables it is almost without utility.
What we know is that life formed, and exploded, on the one planet in our solar system able to host it. And possibly on others in this solar system, maybe several times, we dunno
There are BILLIONS of planets like ours out there, in our galaxy, and there are 200 BILLION galaxies, and we may be just one universe amongst an infinite number which may interact.....
Wild wild guess: we are not alone, we are just like the Easter Islanders, staring at the vastness of a lonely Pacific ocean, and thinking, "Oh well, just us then"
And then they saw the first Dutch Indiaman, sailing over the horizon....
On paper, it ought to be attainable. The winning post in 2018 was 27 seats, the Conservatives got 25, and there's still a bit of UKIP vote to squeeze. But I don't think anyone seriously expects the Conservatives to move forward- partly becuase it would be at the expense of various shades of Residents Association.
Havering politics are bonkers.
I wonder if I should bother renewing it? It is not like it is much use these days.
*jabs fork in thigh*
However your assumption doesn't hold. It is flawed and I can explain why that is the case because that isn't such advanced maths. You have assumed that because life exists here and there are a huge number of stars and planets that it probably exists elsewhere. This is flawed probability because you are only able to have that thought because it is after the event. You don't exist on Mercury to have the opposite thought. So we could equally be unique. Even if the probability of life is so small that it probably won't happen you are at the after event where it did (probability of 1).Try this analogy: If you win the lottery jackpot one week you could easily be the only winner, but you don't think if I have won there has to be other winners do you? But that is exactly what you are doing.
Does that make sense?
The point is if you do the thing that leads to the incredibly unlikely thing enough times, you start to build up a cohort of instances where someone somewhere's beaten the odds.
I'm not really sure that that's much different with the emergence of life, with the only real limiting factor being that space is big. Really big. So even when it happens, noone else is nearby enough to see it.
As befits a knapper of flint cocks...
You can laugh heartily at me as you breeze through your Mediterranean holiday destination airport whilst I queue with the Russians at immigration.
Also you're wrong
I heard a great, concrete explanation for the Fermi Paradox the other day, from a science friend (who talks and writes articulately) who went on an anthropological expedition to the Solomon Islands
He heard a story there of the first white explorers who encountered the Solomon Islanders. When the locals got a bit punchy, in the early days, the white troops would fire muskets into the sky to scare them off. But the muskets had no effect, at all. Why? Because the locals did not hear them. The muksets were outside their comprehension. The locals maybe heard an "odd noise" a bit like thunder (as they later explained to the white men) but they looked at the sky and it was blue and cloudless so they thought, no, there is no thunder, so they totally ignored the guns no matter how much they were fired into the air, the firing guns DID NOT EXIST in their minds
That could easily be happening to us. We could be surrounded by aliens and we just don't see them. They do not compute. The mind blanks them out as too "alien" - literally - to be understood or of concern. They are de-existed
Men in Black riffed on this theme very amusingly, but there is a scientific truth here. Which may explain it all
...but it also means that the chances of us being able to detect or interact with any of that life out there is... very small.
The UK embassy phone line is down - seems a bit sus.
... that's probably for the best.
(Detection might be possible. Communication, I doubt it. Visiting... you need some kind of magic kludge to get FTL travel. Otherwise, it will take too much time.)
Okay. (L-C)
2013: 29-25
2012: 38-31
2011: 37-35
So I'm going to revise my view on 37-32 - it looks more like a solid, middle-of-the-road sort of result for Labour. Given the hole Corbyn put them in, Starmer would probably have taken it when he became leader, but would fall short of the statements on here from some that the Tories are now irrevocably dead to the electorate. You'd expect Labour to at least equal the +7 achieved under Miliband in 2012 if that were the case.
A Brexit bonus after all. So it was worth it.
On the same day, the Conservatives got big swings in two other by-elections and in July easily held a seat in the marginal Bush Hill Park ward but that was then...
Labour won 46 seats in 2018 but have just 38 now with the by-election loss to the Tories and seven quitting to form a Community First caucus consisting of 1 LD, 1 Green and 5 Independents.
This may or may not complicate matters - some of the ex-Labour Councillors sit in marginal wards which could let the Conservatives make some headway.
I can't see fewer than 36 for Labour and fewer than 9 for the Conservatives but the remaining 18 seats look up for grabs.
But statistically, which seems likelier? That we're truly special and alone in the entirety of the vast cosmos which has been around for billions of years before us? Or that us, being here, is in itself evidence that it's unlikely, sure but not wildly so, probability MUST be greater than zero even if still negligible, and the galaxy is large enough and old enough for other instances of it to happen just on sheer scale, even if it's so far away or so long ago we never see it?
My money is on the latter. The former is just too anthropocentric, I'm afraid.
🔴Priti Patel is to introduce a new law that will prevent Sadiq Khan from summarily sacking or suspending the next Metropolitan Police Commissioner. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/02/14/priti-patel-strip-power-mayors-hire-fire-police-chiefs-will/?utm_content=politics&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1644872801-2
This planet teems with it. Every available niche, nook and cranny is filled with it. The Earth might be a paradise for the Universe, and it might just be special in that regard. But I reckon life is so desperate to fill any available opportunity that you can find it reasonably easily when you can look for it.
That doesn't mean aliens, galactic empires and all that automatically, but if you can go to all these exoplanets I reckon we'll find the simple single cell stuff is considerably more ubiquitous than you'd think. And if that's the case, then the more complex stuff is probably not so rare either.
But again: scale. Scale and distance is the problem.
Without going into the rights and wrongs of the policy (SERIOUSLY. DON'T GO INTO THE RIGHTS AND WRONGS OF THE POLICY), they are the sort of mega-local, incredibly strong emotion thing that might swing a local election but probably won't.
Of course, "seeing" messages by light requires the observer to have developed the retina first...
Indeed there is some sense in this as the Met Commissioner has a far wider role than just London policing
Johnson really is Britain Trump.
As suggested on here a few days ago (nothing now to hinder) Paul Dacre for Met. Commissioner.
On a 29% turnout, the Conservative candidate won by 27 points so even with the shift in sentiment it's going to be a big ask for Labour to pick up the three council seats but they don't need to and even if some of the defectors hold their seats I think there's enough in the solid Labour seats to keep the majority though I agree it could well be reduced quite a bit.
People aged 65 and over
1993
own outright: 55.7%
own with mortgage: 5.8%
private rental sector: 6.3%
social rental sector: 32.2%
2017
own outright: 74.2%
own with mortgage: 4.4%
private rental sector: 5.6%
social rental sector: 15.8%
People aged 16 to 64
1993
own outright: 14.0%
own with mortgage: 56.2%
private rental sector: 10.8%
social rental sector: 19.0%
2017
own outright: 17.4%
own with mortgage: 40.0%
private rental sector: 25.2%
social rental sector: 17.5%
In crude terms, since the Nineties owner-occupancy amongst pensioners has risen by about 20% and social rented occupancy has correspondingly declined; owner-occupancy amongst everyone else has fallen by about 15% and renting from private landlords has correspondingly risen.
Source: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/ageing/articles/livinglonger/changesinhousingtenureovertime#:~:text=Main points,two-thirds 20 years earlier.
+ Almost three-quarters of people aged 65 years and over in England own their home outright.
+ Younger people are less likely to own their own home than in the past and more likely to be renting. Half of people in their mid-30s to mid-40s had a mortgage in 2017, compared with two-thirds 20 years earlier.
+ People in their mid-30s to mid-40s are three times more likely to rent than 20 years ago. A third of this age group were renting from a private landlord in 2017, compared with fewer than 1 in 10 in 1997.
+ Increases in the private rental sector have been seen for all age groups apart from the very oldest, with the increase particularly pronounced in mid-life. People aged 35 to 44 years were almost three and a half times more likely to be renting in 2017 than in 1993.
+ Renting from a private landlord is most common at younger ages and decreases with age as people take out mortgages and/or receive inheritances. But for any given age, people are far more likely to be renting privately today than 10 or 20 years ago. Almost a third (28%) of people aged 35 to 44 years rented from a private landlord in 2017, compared with fewer than 1 in 10 (9%) in 1997.
+ The percentage owning with a mortgage peaks in middle age, and then declines at older ages as people finish paying off their mortgages and own their homes outright. But for almost any age, it is less common to own with a mortgage than 10 or 20 years ago. Half (50%) of people aged 35 to 44 had a mortgage in 2017, compared with more than two-thirds (68%) in 1997.
An ageing population + concentration of wealth in the hands of the elderly = gerontocracy. That's the political reality of modern Britain.
Even not renewing your UK passport, you keep your dual citizenship, so can benefit from UK consular assistance if stuck in Kharkiv etc.
NATO aggression. US expansionism, Russians as victims etc etc.
Uncanny...
https://twitter.com/LauraLitvan/status/1493344689025650692?s=20&t=zDeiA-TtyBFszDhbFJ6p8g
A real Brexiteer? ✅
Cabinet experience? ✅
Defence experience? ✅
One Nation Tory? ✅
Tonight's #WaughOnPolitics is in your inbox
https://inews.co.uk/opinion/penny-mordaunt-tory-leadership-candidates-replace-boris-johnson-1459863
On the other hand, resetting the UK property market is a world of short-term pain, for both the public and the politicians in charge at the time. So it won't happen.
Couple the data above with the fact that an overall majority of the electorate (accounting for propensity to bother to turn out to vote) is over 55, and you can well appreciate why the Tory vote remains so resilient.
Her star hasn't exactly shone these last two years. But I don't thi k she's put a foot wrong either.
In stage-managed, televised meetings, the Kremlin sent its strongest signals yet that it would seek further negotiations with the West rather than launch immediate military action.
NY Times
This would result in the most colossal temper tantrum from both the elderly and their heirs - impossible for the Conservatives to contemplate and very difficult for Labour as well. So, taxes on the working age population (which will steadily shrink as more of it staggers over the finishing line to retirement, and birth rates continue to decline because the young can't afford to reproduce) will get heavier and heavier.
Two things to look out for in coming years: the health and social care levy, having now been established, won't stay at 1.25% for very long; and plans to increase the retirement age more steeply and more rapidly.
I'm currently 45 and, being fortunate enough still to have some disposable income, am saving hand over fist so I (hopefully) won't have to work until I drop down dead. I do not expect to qualify for the state pension this side of my 70th birthday.
https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/zz175#2ad2075f
Moving British Embassy staff?
Ukr MP to Newsnight.
There are very good reasons for the Home Secretary of the day to appoint the Met Commissioner
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Mordaunt
Lab 38%
Con 33%
LD 11%
Grn 6%
Ref 5%
https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1493355606467657731?s=20&t=zDeiA-TtyBFszDhbFJ6p8g