The aliens are here, third world war gets closer, Ukraine is a bust, and you guys spend five hours talking about Electronic vehicles and Welsh speed limits
There’s quirky and determinedly parochial and then there’s…. PB
Oh good Captain Crisis is here to lecture us about flying saucers
I mean you *could* argue that @Dura_Ace achieving 58mph in his souped up geek-o-matic Incel electro-scooter where he got 27.829 miles per ampere is the most important story of the day or you could look at the fact the Telegraph and Times have joined the Guardian in soberly reporting THIS story:
'Non-human spacecrafts' found by US 'for decades' Whistleblower claims spacecrafts and the bodies of ‘pilots’ have been found by the US government for decades
"Mr Grusch has not seen the alleged material himself."
“Senior officials have spoken out to vouch for Mr Grusch and his claims.
Karl Nell, a retired Army colonel who was also on the UFO task force, described him as “beyond reproach
Jonathan Grey, a generational officer of the United States Intelligence Community who currently works for the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC), said: “The non-human intelligence phenomenon is real. We are not alone,” Mr Grey added: “Retrievals of this kind are not limited to the United States. This is a global phenomenon, and yet a global solution continues to elude us.””
Whatever the explanation - madness, psyops, someone putting acid in the water across America, visiting aliens - something really really REALLY weird is happening
Bear in mind that the most important, far-reaching effects of the whole pandemic business have been psychological, behavioural, and on structures for preparedness. Corporate-state structures, to use perhaps an old-fashioned term. But what else to call the cooperation between governments and Big Pharma and between governments and infotech-advertising-surveillance companies such as Facebook and Apple and above all, the biggest boy in the garden, the company that makes the IBM of the 20th century seem like a bit part player, Google? So what's next? What will be the "new normal" after this "something really really REALLY weird" plays out a bit? Those focusing on ChatGPT and "AI" may well be looking in the wrong direction if their attention is taken away from Neuralink etc.
Indeed the coincidence of all these epochal, world changing stories is joyously compelling in itself. We are a long way from the “Ed stone”
On the contrary. That is an artefact of such mystery as to rival them all.
EDSK, an education think tank, traced back Labour’s claim the policy would raise £1.6 billion to a study published over a decade ago and found that the calculations had mistakenly included over 50,000 pupils who were being educated in state-funded schools.
A report by the think tank also said it believed that the £1.6 billion calculation included adding VAT on fees for privately educated nursery-aged children, which is not Labour’s policy.
I note in the men's tennis players born in the 1990s have currently won a grand total of two slams. They'll probably going end up as the least winning cohort ever tbh.
Too much avocado toast
Bookies reckon the winner of Alcaraz - Djokovic will go on to win it all in Paris. So looks like another miss for 90s players looming.
YouGov polling in Oxford has shown that the LTNs are liked by more than they're disliked, but reading the Oxford Mail comments section you'd believe that everyone hates them.
I've been in Oxford in rush hour. The taxi drivers absolutely hate the LTNs. Given the extraordinarily large taxi fare, I'm not a big fan myself
Yeah. So Oxford's problem is that there are basically two crossings of the Cherwell (Magdalen, Marston Ferry), three crossings of the Thames (Osney, Folly, Donnington), and everything is funnelled over those. It's unsupportable with current traffic levels and everything, including buses and taxis, gets snarled up in the resulting congestion.
The County Council's proposal is a bunch of traffic filters that will restrict private car traffic (but not taxis, buses etc.) from passing through the pinch points. It will make your taxi driver's life much easier but I can almost guarantee he hates the idea. On Planet Taxi the only solution is to build more roads, ban cyclists and publicly hang, draw and quarter the county councillors.
If existing roads don't have enough capacity, then building more roads - including more bridges if they're the pinch points - is the solution.
Not dick around trying to restrict traffic from going through the pinch points, when the traffic still needs to do so.
It's Oxford.
If you build more roads then you have to explain which college you're going to knock down.
But you claimed the issue was the pinch points, especially over the river.
Surely there's places where there's roads on either side of the river, but no bridge to connect them?
If so, build the bridge and problem solved. Unless the colleges are built on the rivers themselves, or all the banks are taken up by colleges.
The yellow routes that cross the river that cuts Oxford in half include bridges that were built back then & took a huge amount of pressure off the single crossing that had previously existed. (A clue is in the name of the northern loop - Marston Ferry Road!)
There’s space for one bridge nearer the centre that would cut across the middle & join the road from Headington with the small part of the inner ring road was built back then, but that road is already at capacity as it is at peak times so adding more feeder roads might well make things worse, plus it’s an extremely expensive bit of land to cross, both in £ and political capital terms (you’re going to have to build across Magdelen school & Christchurch meadows...)
EDSK, an education think tank, traced back Labour’s claim the policy would raise £1.6 billion to a study published over a decade ago and found that the calculations had mistakenly included over 50,000 pupils who were being educated in state-funded schools.
A report by the think tank also said it believed that the £1.6 billion calculation included adding VAT on fees for privately educated nursery-aged children, which is not Labour’s policy.
"Tom [Richmond] is the Founder and Director of EDSK.
[...]
"He subsequently spent two years as an advisor to ministers at the Department for Education, first under Michael Gove and then Nicky Morgan, where he helped to design and deliver new policies as well as improve existing ones."
All these discussions about private school fees seem to ignore the obvious extension of the argument to putting VAT on University fees. After all a selected section of the community benefit, universities are in effect a business and all the other other arguments put forward seem to apply.
University fees are overwhemingly paid for by loans. Those loans aren't likely to be paid back as it is. Adding 20% to the face value of the loans is effectively straight up borrowing.
Hardly seems logical. If school fees were paid for by loans should they be free of VAT as well? It's question of consistancy. If one form of education should be charged VAT why shouldn't another irrespective of how it is funded or current government policy on write off of loans. If you use the argument that we shouldn't charge VAT on university fees because some will be written off you can apply the same argument to university fees in total. If it's right for school fees it's right for university fees as well.
I guess you could even apply the same logic to other payments to organisations that benefit one section of society. Union subscriptions for example.
Access to University education is much broader than access to private schooling, something like 7% privately educated while 33% hold degrees (thank you Google). Many Universities are very keen on widening access further. I just don't think it's right to say, in the modern landscape of University education in the UK that a lack of VAT on tuition fees benefits one section of society.
That's before going on to the wider benefits to the country of having a highly educated population, though I'm sure others would argue the broader societal benefits of private schools are just as important.
67% might disagree.
Universities bring a range of different benefits to the country. The gains from research to the economy, to our health and to culture benefit those 67%, as does the help to the balance of payments from educating overseas students.
At present, Government and charities underpay the costs of research. Fees income subsidises research. Government policy has allowed this situation to develop. So, any impact on fees income has knock-on effects for research budgets.
True but why should working class voters and many lower middle class voters who never went to university subsidise universities VAT exemption any more than state school educated voters should subsidise private schools VAT exemption?
Because society as a whole benefits from people being university educated; it does not benefit from the privately educated (perhaps even the opposite, see Rees Mogg et al ad nauseam).
Society as a whole also benefits from people being privately educated, they get higher GCSE and A Level exam grades than average and earn more on average and are less likely to be unemployed, so will be more likely to pay more tax and be less reliant on the welfare state. Doctors for instance are also more likely to be privately educated than average as are judges and army officers, all of whom society needs. Not to forget more British Oscar winners are privately educated than average as are top rugby and cricket stars for instance as are the current PM and Labour leader
Privately educated medical students do on average slightly less well than non-privately educated medical students, controlling for other factors, at medical school exams. The effect seems to be that private school students do better at A’levels because of their school for their level of ability. Thus, when you look at medical school performance and control for A’levels performance, the privately educated do less well than you’d expect. Paper at https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1339899/
Doesn't surprise me at all. I've noticed the same - or, to be more accurate, a markedly greater heterogeneity amongst the private vs other educated colleagues in my year at uni - some of the former were absolutely brilliant, having already taken every advantage offered before they arrived, but others crashed and burned away from the teaching.
For anything real life, such as being a doctor or a manager, that doesn't depend on how many A levels one has (and what does?), then this is a real issue.
You can't normally be a doctor without decent A levels in science
Missing the point. THere is a lot more to being a doctor than being spoonfed A level grades in an expensive school.
I bought the original Tesla Roadster, and then a Model S.
More recently, I bought a Rivian.
EVs are great if:
(a) you have somewhere to charge it at home (b) you don't regularly do 300+ mile trips
If either of those things are not true, then either a straight ICE or a plug-in hybrid is perfect for you.
There's another requirement: (c) If you can afford one. EVs are still hellishly expensive compared to ICE cars - unless you go for ones with limitations, such as even more reduced range.
The cost differential is closing every day.
The crossover will come by the end of the decade, quite probably.
People will continue to grouse about the charging problem. It will be solved quickly for the wealthy, which might slow the process of solving it for everyone else.
The charging problem is rather a chicken and egg one. It isn't economic to build them until there is a market.
Range anxiety is pretty short lived when owning an EV. How often do you drive more than 250 miles without a half hour break? EV cars are also a pleasure to drive, smooth, powerful and very quick acceleration.
Lots of people do once a year, over Christmas and New Year. Just one three hour wait then (and there were plenty) is enough to spoil your whole year, especially with small children with you. Giles Coren did a piece saying he is retransitioning for this reason.
One three hour wait is enough to ruin your entire year?
I own an electric car (well truck). Over Christmas, the family got into the truck and headed up the mountains to Big Bear. Over the Christmas week, we went round the ski resorts in the area, returning to our AirBnB every night.
Aside from one 20 minute wait for a fast charger, we had no problems whatsoever with a 500 mile round trip.
If you have a driveway, don't regularly travel 300m+ a day, and can afford it, an electric car is best.
A long-range Rivian truck costs $100,000, does it not?
Yes, there are some good $100k EVs, but 99% of people don’t spend that much on a car, so it’s still very much a luxury good.
If, like most people, you have £30k to spend on a new car, you have the choice of a Leaf, or, umm, not much else. Even the cheapest electric Mini is £33k.
$79k for the Rivian with the large battery pack (350 miles). So, yes, it's a luxury product. But then again it's a self driving truck that has a 350 mile range, will handle pretty much any off road you throw at it, and does 0-60 faster than my old Porsche 911.
Late to the debate but I think you have very well encapsulated the electric car market right now. Whether this will change by 2030 who knows.
I hope it also won't become a vegan-type thing (eg how do you know if someone owns an electric car...)
At last PB can have a proper discussion with publication of a new MRP based on a mega poll. This new poll with Prof Curtice involved should bring Heathener back to reality winning elections just ain’t that easy as she makes out.
Under new boundaries it finds Labour on 35%. It finds Labour support in its lead over Tories is still “quite soft”
Under Labours worse case scenario Tory’s are boosted by taking Reform voters, or there’s no reform standing so the election result is Lab 316, leaving the Tories at 286.
And the focus group seems to like Rishi Sunak a lot.
Mid thirties is the best Labour has got in real votes this parliament, maybe we should be thinking that’s about where they will poll in a general election?
Labour on 35% is on the basis that don't knows and not voting are on 20%. If you gross up for those, this suggests that Labour is on 44%.
The MRP looks wrong, as it predicts that the Lib Dems will only get 5 seats - St Albans, Bath and the three south west London seats.
So you intend to eat your hat then if it turns out to be right!
It still gives an amazing historic more than 100 seat gain for Labour if it ends up Lab 316, leaving the Tories at 286. So it rings true as realistic in that sense?
A mistake you can make Nicky is constant comparisons with 97. Blair started off 75 seats better off, which is why the majority was so big and the result looked so spectacular. In reality gain sixty or seventy seats or more at general elections is historically a brilliant and rare result. Despite mid term polls and amazing local elections, things don’t tend to move around greatly in MPs from election to election, so this MRP work you are calling wrong still gives Labour way over 100 seat gains!
And you reckon it doesn’t sound like a realistic snapshot of where we are now 🤷♀️
I have a concern with MRPs in general.
For a standard opinion poll, you have to extrapolate from a small sample to the voting population as a whole. This requires an understanding and appropriate adjustments to ensure that the sample is representative of the voting population. As we can see with six polling companies polling on a weekly basis, with more on a fortnightly or monthly rota, the current Conservative range is 25-31%, Labour 42-47%, LDs 9-13%, Greens 3-7%, Reform 4-7%. This is more than a just a pure statisical variation arising from sampling, but reflects "house effects" resulting from the adjustments each polling company makes to try to obtain a representative sample of the voting population.
With a MRP this is replicated on a larger scale. To start you have a number of sub population groups which you have to map to each constituency. This brings in an additional level of variance and complexity. There are assumptions that each sub population have a similar voting pattern accross the country . The sub populations need to be well designed, and may well vary from election to election. Then the polling sample will need to obtain a representative sample of those sub population groups, with adjustments as necessary for each group. Each additional adjustment increases the potential variance. These then need to be extropolated to each consistuency - Peter Kellner had a recent article on proportional vs linear adjustments.
Effectively the black box of the MRP is more complex and thus more liable to systematic errors than a standard opinion poll.
MRPs can be useful, but the engineering approach needs to be taken - standing back and looking at it in general does this look approximately right.
The potential complications with the results of the MRP are Scotland - only SNP and Labour seats - low LD and conservative seats in the basic prediction.
Sounds like you are just calling it wrong because you don’t like the disappointment for Lib Dem’s and Labour in this one and how it boosts the Tories back into the game. But we are moving towards the election now Nicky, polls swinging back into Tories and we can’t have opposition just saying they choose not to believe them because you think they must have it wrong based only on you don’t like them, that’s not proper political betting commentary.
I’ll give you the bottom line Nicky, there was a whole lot of constituency polls showing Lib dems in trouble and Paddy Ashdown made the mistake of saying he’ll eat his hat if those polls were correct, and they were absolutely spot on.
Labour and opposition can’t say this MRP is wrong just because it’s disappointing for them compared to others, the work of top psephologists like Professor Curtis must be respected.
Beside which, when polls predicted labour to get as low as 35% in the locals the polls were scoffed at, yet proved brilliantly spot on.
Bakhmut and Oxford are approximately the same size. It took three months and tens of thousands of casualties for the pro-Russian forces to get from one side of the city of the other and, if the rumors are correct, may not be able to hold it.
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NEW THREAD
https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1666402722852085764?s=20
But it's the logical conclusion of VAT on private schools, how do you add VAT there but not on nurseries and Universities?
The yellow routes that cross the river that cuts Oxford in half include bridges that were built back then & took a huge amount of pressure off the single crossing that had previously existed. (A clue is in the name of the northern loop - Marston Ferry Road!)
There’s space for one bridge nearer the centre that would cut across the middle & join the road from Headington with the small part of the inner ring road was built back then, but that road is already at capacity as it is at peak times so adding more feeder roads might well make things worse, plus it’s an extremely expensive bit of land to cross, both in £ and political capital terms (you’re going to have to build across Magdelen school & Christchurch meadows...)
I hope it also won't become a vegan-type thing (eg how do you know if someone owns an electric car...)
I’ll give you the bottom line Nicky, there was a whole lot of constituency polls showing Lib dems in trouble and Paddy Ashdown made the mistake of saying he’ll eat his hat if those polls were correct, and they were absolutely spot on.
Labour and opposition can’t say this MRP is wrong just because it’s disappointing for them compared to others, the work of top psephologists like Professor Curtis must be respected.
Beside which, when polls predicted labour to get as low as 35% in the locals the polls were scoffed at, yet proved brilliantly spot on.
Бахмут 2023 - Вони не пройдуть