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The concerns of LAB voters compared with CON ones – politicalbetting.com
The concerns of LAB voters compared with CON ones – politicalbetting.com
I find the above chart absolutely fascinating particularly when there is a large divergence between the parties.
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Instead, just over 10% of BOTH Labour and Conservative supporters rate it as their top issue.
BTW, hope you're feeling better AND on the mend; also visa versa!
What are the precise numbers for each group?
https://redfieldandwiltonstrategies.com/latest-gb-voting-intention-2-july-2023/
According to R&W, "Britain Leaving the EU" was among top three issues mentioned by 10% of total survey; for respondents who said they voted for in GE2019 for
> Labour =12%
> Conservative = 11%
And in any event, it's a meaninglessly ambiguous metric - it's an issue for me, but only because I believe it a big mistake.
https://twitter.com/rzhongnotes/status/1675936014135619584
Meta's Twitter alternative, Threads, will be released on Thursday in the United States and on Friday for the rest of the world.
https://twitter.com/spectatorindex/status/1676017094893383680
Mr. B, I think there's definitely space and appetite for an alternative to Twitter but Meta/Facebook is the company I might least trust to do it.
I forget the specifics, but VR headset users were pissed that the promise not to require a Facebook signin for the hardware was broken.
Which might have goosed the numbers some . . . but perhaps with bit more difference between Lab and Con?
So we have Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and Instragram; all to some extents overlapping, but also with their own niches. The barrier to creating a new platform are massively high against established orgs.
Unless one of those current behemoths mucks up, and not only leaves the goal open wide, but hands you the ball and straps their goalkeeper to the uprights. Can Twitter die? Yes, if its current ownership continues as it is - though I doubt it will ever fully be switched off.
As for the alternatives: I don't trust Dorsey, and hence Bluesky. I use Facebook, but don't like the company or Zuckerberg - besides, they already own FB, Instragram and Whatsapp. Having them control a 'new' Twitter might be a little too much consolidation.
Another interesting (to me) point: Musky Baby recently appointed a new Twitter CEO. Where is she in all of this? Why is he the one announcing all this?
A year or two later, and a software update forced Facebook logins on people who’d spent four figures on hardware and either really didn’t want a Facebook login, or had been banned from the platform for wrong-think.
It’s quite spectacular really.
I’ve noticed the number of ads I see on Twitter has increased vastly over the past few days - probably threefold. I wonder if they’ve pumped up the ads/organic ratio to compensate for the reduced views.
I think that Twitter will reverse on that one though, their impressions on popular posts must be way down, and a lot of the embedding (such as used to happen on this site, before it slowed things right down) has been broken.
There was a rumour that Twitter were changing their infrastructure (away from AWS and Google Cloud, towards their own, to reduce ruinous hosting costs), this week is when the changeover happened, and their infrastructure people need time to fix scaling issues at data centres.
The Australians were right.
https://twitter.com/alexmassie/status/1675935897080983565
Good news for PBers who don't like posted Tweets...
Headline “Tory stealth tax raid to hurt 1.5m more workers than first thought”, referring to the failure of income tax bracket threasholds to increase with wage inflation.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tax/news/stealth-tax-raid-hits-million-more-workers-than-planned/
And one app will win because Twitter served a couple of purposes (quick news reporting, disaster management) where real time information is important and will drag all the audience into a single site.
Musk really did throw away $44bn because he’s an idiot,.
And I bet Twitter have got rid of the very people who know the system well enough to do this work - you know, the 'useless' ones (defined as 'useless' because they don't like Musk...).
Given their newly-found reputation for not paying bills, who would work with Twitter?
(*) Ha ha ha
Philip Banfield says health service is in state of ‘managed decline’ and may not survive next ‘five or 10 years’
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jul/04/most-doctors-think-ministers-want-to-destroy-nhs-bma-boss-says
Note the government response (the usual boilerplate) doesn't address most of his critiques at all.
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/a/2013/introducing-twitter-alerts
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/2a04905a-19ab-11ee-8198-bf96b6365670?shareToken=c059ec79c96d9e5a26d9fe6a1c025388
He might understand how to run engineering companies, and has amazing (if unappealing to me) skills in using social media. He just doesn't seem to understand how to run a social media service.
Of course, 'The Economy,' is also a bit vague. A friend of mine's son has just secured a 5 yr fixed rate having been on a 2 yr that expired.
The result? He now has to pay double the amount each month on his mortgage: literally up from £700 to £1400 pcm.
The Conservatives are beating windward with the mainsail ripped to shreds, a faulty rudder, and a holed hull.
Redesigning the infrastructure from scratch with a massive load (server load, not another Elon Musk joke!) will be horrible to work through for the developers, and is the sort of thing that indeed generates random errors all over the place. You can’t realistically QA that sort of scale either, so the only option is to try and drop as much load as possible through the changeover. Which is not good for an established service with millions of daily users.
They would probably have seen a bump in paid users this week as well, which gives them the dilemma of revenue from subscriptions vs revenue from advertisers. The new CEO lady is an advertising industry veteran, so probably wants the status quo ante with more eyeballs viewing, whereas Musk wants a more balanced revenue model.
The network effect is massive though, and if they can fix things in a week or two, it will be okay for them in the long run. It’s fun to watch an existing company go through so much change in such a short timescale,
How Microsoft managed to kill Skype, right at the time we all started to get smartphones, and then through a pandemic when everyone worked from home, still takes some beating!
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/02/the-rise-and-fall-of-skype.html
Sensible in itself - if you have work that needs doing 365 days a year, year after year, contractors are always more expensive.
I do wonder the effect that this is going to have, though. To start with, a big reduction in take home for many medics. That has the potential to cause some serious unrest.
Of course, actually achieving the staff increases is another matter
This is the Tory tax. They have broken the economy and people are having to pay ever larger penalties.
And on that happy, thought, good morning!
1) pays more
2) means you avoid a lot of the admin side of the job
the reality is the only way to reduce agency costs was/ is to make permanent pay as relatively well paid as contract work and I don't think that's possible given the pay restraints...
The "lists" function still works though, and I have created a few including "PB and Polling"* which is fairly useful. My "UK Medicine" list has quite a few followers.
* contains a few former PB posters, like Tim etc.
It’s very easy to fall for lock in features from one vendor or another.
I was quite proud that at one company, the system was up and running on a new cloud vendor (in test) in 2 hours.
I personally believe that the future of cloud computing will be high mobility, with rapid scale up/down on different vendors, depending on price.
There is also a lot to be said for going in house for the load that is always required. Ideally, your data centre should be directly competing with the cloud pricing.
Musk's takeover has added a billion a year in debt interest expenses.
The Tories can't actually deliver policies because they are written in crayon, idiotic, incompetently managed and either illegal or crushed by the markets. They can't blame the blob of lefty lawyers or the last Labour government because it's all them. They're trying to say "Labour would make it worse" but it's hard to see how it could be worse when they are managing everything this badly.
In essence: it's the economy stupid! And having been brutalized by the cost of living crisis we're now heading into the mortgage winter of discontent. "Yebbut that Sue Gray shouldn't have been allowed to talk to Starmer" isn't going to cut it...
Arguably not particularly useful redistribution, but not lost.
Add to the vendors trying to differentiate themselves with ‘exclusive’ functionality that definitely isn’t lock-in, and we end up where we end up.
Twitter was originally an SMS relay, with tiny amounts of data going through the servers. One doesn’t need to be an infrastructure architect, to understand that a service now hosting movie-length videos that get 100m hits a day, requires a somewhat different approach!
It also does not make sense in another way: they would have known the date the bill becomes due. You don't make that date the project end-date; you make it month(s) earlier so you can get work through the wrinkles.
It's quite simple: the alleged richest man in the world should pay his bills.
And sorry but it's £700 lost to local shops / businesses as the son will be cutting all expenditure to the bone... Multiple that a few times and the local shops will be closing down...
But I think it unlikely. It’s more that they’re very inept and their well-meaning but ignorant meddling has grave consequences.
1.35% from HSBC - guess where a lot of money is being moved to today...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/24/twitter-sued-by-crown-estate-alleged-unpaid-rent-london-hq
https://youtube.com/watch?v=TDkb4fdFErM
What will come of this incident, is that both teams are going to be playing to the letter of the law for the remainder of this series, and we can expect all sorts of antics that aren’t usually seen as being cricket. Will we get a few Mankad incidents at Headingly?
Other sports have rules but cricket has laws.
https://www.theifab.com/#!/laws
I once heard it said of football that rules (e.g. away goals) are local and laws (e.g. offside) are universal. So there's some logic to the terminology.
What's different about cricket is that the game is on and then off again without a clear demarcation. Michael Atherton always says you only have to be switched on for those few moments each delivery. It wasn't a lapse in concentration like a defender in football who is caught ball watching. Being able to assume that ball is no longer live is part of how the game is played. The Aussies took advantage of that. You can argue that it's fair enough, but I'm sure it's the best way to go about winning a game of cricket.
HSBC isn't the only high street bank with crap rates if you don't have a current account.
Edit: Or trying to save. Quite a high rate of withdrawals from savings accounts apparently to fund current spending, given inflation, was reported (and discussed on here) a few days back.
The votes that count in the sense of making a difference from last time are those of the switchers from 2019. This includes a fair number of PB contributors, including me.
It seems to me that very few of the switchers are doing so because of policy in any significant area; and there is almost no belief that a Labour government would be able to achieve much especially in the short term.
Nearly all the switching is about matters not in the list. Competence, honesty, moral exhaustion, decency, consistency, integrity, hope.
In a sense the table illustrates the extent to which the UK public (and pollsters?) distrust abstract nouns and theory of any description.
The election won't be won or lost on the issues in this list.
You can be in favour of freedom of speech as definied very loosely in the USA, with a handful of people policing the site, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to moderate to comply with laws elsewhere.
I do wonder if Twitter in particular, might withdraw from certain markets, or allow themselves to be banned by authorities, rather than co-operate with governments. We’ve already seen this from many companies with regard to China, and Facebook and Google have been banning newspapers from posting articles in several jurisdictions, as a result of revenue-sharing laws.
I hope the Trident subs are on their way to Australia.
More detail here:
https://theintercept.com/2023/06/01/bluesky-owner-twitter-elon-musk/
"He still has a seat on the board, but beyond that no power over it."
That means little - see the way Musk has operated in the past.
And if you want the ultimate reason not to go with Bluesky - Dorsey is backing RFK Jr. Before it has even started, BlueSky has gone over to the dark side.
Happy treason day you bunch of ungrateful colonials.
Starmer needs to focus on putting more money in the NHS to get his voters out and the economy to win the swing voters
My HSBC online bonus saver has been paying 4% for the last couple of months
The other factor is that the savings allowance in income tax is 1K and this is going to catch a lot of savers out who have been enjoying tax free savings albeit at miserable rates. Also higher rate taxpaters only get 500 allowance. Add fiscal drag and the DM readership is not happy about this hit on the hard working retirees/savers etc.
Or is the thought, he doesn't own it now but he could buy it from the people who do? Because that applies to all companies.
(I think probably the only person who will get that is @el_capitano )
These company profits that @Foxy mentions - unless it is cash spent on things in the UK, it *is* lost. An awful lot of money is being and has for a while been hoovered up by these big businesses and disappearing elsewhere. These aren't British investors benefitting, getting lots of cash to invest in UK business and lots of UK dividends. Its being taken by spivs. Which is how we end up with the likes of Thames Water, who massively overcharge consumers, massively under-invest and somehow manage to massively load the company up with dept.
All our money, taken by these spivs. Not circulating. Not providing jobs. The Tory problem is that they are a party owned by spivs, in thrall to these grifters, handing our money over to their mates increasingly in exchange for nothing.
Steven Swinford
@Steven_Swinford
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1h
Fuel retailers swallowed up the Govt’s 5p cut in fuel duty -intended to help people with cost of living - for their profit margins
Harriet Baldwin, head of Treasury select: ‘That whole £2.4bn cost to the Exchequer has gone straight to the bottom line of the retailers’
https://investor.twitterinc.com/files/doc_financials/2022/q1/Final-Q1’22-earnings-release.pdf
Yes, the price paid and the debt incurred make the job a lot harder, hence the number of redundancies, the chasing of subscription revenue, and the new CEO with an advertising background.
It wouldn’t be a surprise to see a new funding round at some point, in order to reduce the indebtedness of the company. EM has already said there’s a limit to how many Tesla shares he can dispose of, so perhaps the long-rumoured Starlink floatation happens and that gives him some more money to fund Twitter.
If you want to see good performance in the economy you have to manage it competently. If you want to action a reduction in migration you have to understand that international co-operation is key and manage it competently and legally.
The key word here is competent. Which is why so many of your voters are now former voters and you are left chasing the vote of golliwog fans.
Edit: so removing Scotland means a permanent addition to the Tory numbers, either way.
What is happening is that in a tightly contested free market for fuel the supermarket entrants, and the cheapest, are being told by Conservatives that their prices should be regulated because of the opinion that they are charging Xp a litre more than they should, and that there is something wicked and wrong about making profits - the amount of which should be for the state to decide.
No-one seems to regard this as weird. The BBC headlines it. The Overton window is all over the place.
https://labourheartlands.com/sir-keir-starmer-to-make-a-two-flag-annocement-telling-britain-it-has-a-choice-good-government-under-labour-or-failed-ideology-under-the-tories/
If you've got enough funds you could set up regular savers with various different banks, and as they cycle to maturity reuse the funds. I've got a First Direct (From whom I have borrowed money at lower rates) one and a Natwest one both on the go. The First Direct one will mature in 5 months, at which point I'll probably set it up for another go round the saving merry go round.
Of course savers are not winning from the situation. If you can keep your shirt with a mortgage it is reducing in real terms whilst interest rates are below inflation; although it won't feel like it as monthly repayments are going up. Lowering inflation will help everyone.
This crisis is looking very like 1991 to 2021 where negative equity prevailed, increased repossessions, and falling house prices
This is a deadly cocktail for the conservatives but in a wider context not good for any government but at least Starmer should receive a honeymoon period for a whiie