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Grant Shapps as our next Prime Minister? – politicalbetting.com
Grant Shapps as our next Prime Minister? – politicalbetting.com
Grant Shapps, the former transport secretary, is recording the views of Tory MPs about Liz Truss and her plans. The data is not encouraging for the PM https://t.co/d2sTXKMFpY
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The poster in question was an exceptionally stupid and unsophisticated person's idea of what a posh person is like. I am sure you would have been taken in by him.
Because it will most likely be the economy that tips the Cabinet's hand, former Chancellor Rishi Sunak, who predicted the meltdown that followed the not-budget, is Hobson's Choice.
Thanks.
Senior party figures, including ministers under Boris Johnson’s premiership and former Tory leader William Hague, have joined the National Trust, the RSPB, the Angling Trust and Wildlife Trusts in criticising what they see as environmental vandalism.
It follows concerns Truss is treating the leading nature charities as part of a so-called “anti-growth coalition” that she claims to be confronting."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/08/liz-truss-facing-rural-rebellion-over-anti-nature-growth-push
The dropped spans of the road bridge don't look beyond the capability of any army with bridging capability. (Obviously, Russians are shit at everything, etc.)
Grant Shapps
Vs
Michael Green
I’ve sold almost all of my (not very impressive) equity portfolio.
The era of cheap money has, rather abruptly, come to an end. Most people - and most of our politicians - are like the cartoon character who has run off a cliff, suspended in mid air before the inevitable fall. The value of all the inflated assets are gonna tumble. Negative equity is going to be common. Used car values etc will tumble. Any asset which derives its value from discounted future cashflow will become worth a fraction of its current value.
This is going to hurt.
And the government - of whatever colour - is not going to have the fiscal wiggle room to help.
Is there a good guide somewhere for newbies?
For example, I often see recommendations here to lay over hyped outcomes, but doesn't that expose you to a scary amount of liability?
Agree about the dropped spans (I believe I said this yesterday), but again I question the loading such a temporary bodge job could take. In some ways, building a bailey bridge over a river in a 'clean' position is easier than working with an existing structure.
The fact the bridge is steel helps them: steel often deforms elastically and then plastically before it fails, and these deformations can be measured in real time, providing warnings (excluding long-term creep). Reinforced concrete has very little elastic or plastic deformation before failure. In addition, there are good techniques to test steel structures in situ, and you can also 'mend' steel by just welding new pieces on. Reinforce concrete is much harder to 'mend'.
(hope the above is correct; I did this stuff 30 years ago so might have some details wrong...)
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/165554785804
Betfair exchange and Smarkets both allow laying of bets, and yes sometimes that involves tying up money for small returns.
The problem is it includes a large number of her backbenchers.
The best guide I ever read is an ancient book by Alan Potts. It is about horseracing and the examples are taken from twenty or more years ago but the principles are still valid and can be applied to any sport in which you have some expertise or are prepared to put in the research. It's called Against The Crowd and the title tells you the main theme:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Against-Crowd-Methods-Modern-Backer/dp/1871093929
It served me well through a career of about fifteen years of semi-professional punting.
Good luck!
Here TSE is engaging in hyperbole - laying is a 1% return at some indeterminate point in the future with a very low risk of losing. With inflation you end up losing money either way and, at present, you could lose that money less quickly in real terms in a savings account.
There are attractive lays however. I posted one a year or so back on government covid regulations that had an 11% return in two days, unless the government completely reversed its ferrets on an already announced policy (which is, of course, always a bit of a risk
On binary outcomes, the markets allow you to bet on both sides, normally odds align pretty much, but on low liquidity markets laying 'no' can give better odds than backing 'yes' or vice versa
The polls show that people want growth, but not at any price.
Like with her tax policies she'll simply sweep away all environmental protections and expect growth to magically follow, whereas in fact we'll get lots of cheapass horrible shit built in some lovely places that damages the countryside, the rivers, the air and the locality that does very little for growth whilst creating massive profits for the developer.
She is a dangerous ideologue.
Investing in such times does present challenges. The Seventies energy crisis and Barber boom are perhaps the closest to our current situation and we're followed by a bear market in equities and erosion of house prices. The not entirely dissimilar energy and inflationary crisis of 79-81 however set off one of the longest bull runs in equities, particularly in America, and a massive rise in house prices here.
I am remaining invested in equities but have reconfigured my portfolio into areas likely to do well in a high inflation and interest rate situation.
(In scare quotes because, when it’s looked at, wow)
1 - Not only is it not peer reviewed, it doesn’t even have authors attached
2 - Very strange methodology - ignores several ICD-10 codes, bypassing ischaemic heart disease, pulmonary heart disease, hypertensive diseases and the like for the category “other cardiac disease” and doesn't break that down (smells strongly of p-hacking)
3 - Based on a total of 20 events (odour of p-hacking intensifies)
4 - Ignores potential confounders (eg were any of this small number under treatment for something else? Smell of p-hacking becomes a full-on stink). To be fair to the anonymous authors, they do specify (in the small print) that “this study cannot determine the causative nature of someone’s death,” but Florida seem to be saying the opposite.
5 - Prior covid was not measured, despite covid being known to increase cardiac evens post infection/recovery.
6 - Covid-related deaths are not compared (other than a throwaway comment that covid-related mortality caused a significant increase in mortality in all groups - again, not the impression given by Lapado)
7 - This increase is only seen in Florida, not any other state or country.
8 - Florida happens to have a Surgeon General who has been anti-covid-vax since appointed in 2021. Pure coincidence, doubtless.
9 - A properly constructed study in JAMA (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2784015) with 11.8 million vaccine doses, 6.2 million participants, and carefully separated possible outcomes, predefined to exclude p-hacking, and with confounders addressed, looking at medical records rather than death certificates so as to explore causative events, found no such thing.
(See here: https://youcanknowthings.com/2022/10/09/a-critical-review-of-floridas-new-vaccine-analysis/ )
All of these will effect the time it takes to rebuild the track in different ways.
Regardless, if the defeat is very heavy then the identity of the rump party leader won't matter to any of us for at least two Parliaments.
QTWTAIN.
She forgot that her backbenchers are not.
https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1578535556061233152?t=56F3qcX--poKpYFJKpkJgw&s=19
See also: real terms benefit cuts for the working poor whilst continuing to mollycoddle pensioners. All this talk about growth is bullshit. The only thing the Conservative Party is about is redistributing finite resources to its key supporters - elderly homeowners and the very wealthy - from everybody else. This actually *IS* the anti-growth coalition. Choking off investment in skills and infrastructure whilst encouraging the concentration of an ever-increasing share of national wealth in the bank accounts of the already minted and in non-productive piles of overpriced bricks. And they're completely shameless about the whole thing.
I'm thinking Alex Carey is probably favourite. Possibly taking over as VC in the Test side as well.
He is of course the Test vice-captain. But he would also be a backward step. He might make sense if the idea is to do a holding job for 18 months until Travis Head is fully established.
I would be slightly surprised. But then I am often surprised by CA. They're even talking about Dave Warner being relieved of his ban on leadership.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/youre-right-liz-the-anti-growth-coalition-is-everywhere-q5t9tg8nb https://twitter.com/CharlotteIvers/status/1578797289682120704/photo/1
With regards to the American midtermsI am not making any substantive bets. I have done some back and lays over the last 2 years when the prices were obviously wrong (Dems were favourite to keep the House at one point!) but I'm not doing anything beyond a modest bet on the GOP failing to take the Senate.
Reasoning is fundamentally the same as 2018 where I didn't bet. The fundamentals are too disrupted - in 2018 it was the century high turnout that was very obviously going to happen that would mess up the polling. This time it's Roe plus War plus wildly swinging Gas prices/inflation plus my uncertainty over turnout.
Without those things it would be an obvious GOP sweep. With them and my 8-ball says "Situation Uncertain".
Why is it impossible to buy melons in the South of France at the moment because they are out of season when in the UK you can buy them all the year round?
Fine and bright here, if a little chilly. On topic, one does wonder about Ms Truss' final objective. Is it destruction of the country or the Conservative party?
Or both?
https://www.holyrood.com/editors-column/view,its-time-we-stopped-allowing-lobby-groups-to-drive-the-debate-on-gender
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/09/johnson-was-slow-poisoning-arsenic-for-tories-liz-truss-is-instant-cyanide
no coalition required, Liz
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/growth-growth-growth-is-hard-hard-hard-bk836m5md?shareToken=bfeecfe6566e22de95ccc211c0b9461f
https://twitter.com/PickardJE/status/1579019286722461696
No comment
Covid and energy price spikes due to foreign wars are not the fault of individuals, so it is reasonable that society, via the government, steps in to help
People losing money because asset prices fall? Well you decided to buy it… if you didn’t think through the risk that interest rates would likely go up in future that’s your fault. It’s entirely your right to blame the government for it (and many are!) but not to expect a bailout
I see the CBI Director General is a fully paid-up member of the Truss Bunker and hangs on her and Kwarteng's every word. Pity, business has a plurality of voices and I bet they don't all support the Government so slavishly.
Where Truss and her adherents have made such a monumental error is to grossly misread the public mood. It's not 1980 any more - while the notion of cutting tax for the lowest paid does have support, the notion of cutting tax for those already wealthy on the spurious argument making them even wealthier helps us all doesn't wash any more.
There's a strong notion of "fairness" and some may ridicule that as naive or even inane but the fact remains the very strong sense is you don't make the poorest a little richer by making the rich a lot richer. Indeed, the rich can and perhaps should pay even more to reduce the burden on the lowest paid and the poorest.
I'm more than happy to debate economic growth and how we achieve that - some have argued raising taxes and increasing public spending into infrastructure projects is one way of achieving growth. I certainly think we should eschew further borrowing currently and we've discussed taxing wealth rather than income as an option though I think that needs a lot more thought.
https://twitter.com/kyivindependent/status/1578963343015976960?s=21&t=XNTxEgIQU_Ok2E9oWmNVUQ
https://twitter.com/christopherjm/status/1578994181716217856?s=21&t=XNTxEgIQU_Ok2E9oWmNVUQ
Bear in mind that following the sham referendum Zaphorizhzhia is part of Russia as far as Putin is concerned. Taking care of their new citizens in the same way they took care of their Chechens in the 1990s.
As for the bridge, here’s what the railway looks like today. Not sure I’d be putting trains across it. The blown out fuel train is still there.
https://twitter.com/gerashchenko_en/status/1578781478623842305?s=21&t=XNTxEgIQU_Ok2E9oWmNVUQ