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The concerns of LAB voters compared with CON ones – politicalbetting.com

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Comments

  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 54,585

    Pulpstar said:

    Pulpstar said:

    eek said:

    algarkirk said:

    eek said:

    I suspect we are going to see a fair bit about fuel prices again today

    Steven Swinford
    @Steven_Swinford
    ·
    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’

    People old enough to remember when the Tory party actually stood for a few basic philosophical principles might wonder about this.

    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.
    Supermarket margins are being squeezed so they have less money to subsidise fuel prices with. Which makes smaller filling stations more competitive and secures their future.
    If a single petrol station can sell fuel at £1.359 for diesel why can't a supermarket sell it for a similar price.

    The accusation is that the supermarkets have pocketed / stolen all the £2.4bn that the 5p cut cost the Government.
    The electronic real time data requirement upload is a good thing, as are the papers making a noise about it all. One thing, we all have a duty to seek and find and fuel at the lowest possible price - inflation will never come down if everyone just accepts higher prices. To this regard the papers creating a bit of furore should change collective behaviour.
    Will that data requirement make much difference?

    I don't normally find petrolprices.com (fake email address required) significantly out of date.
    The various retailers have been playing games with the data.

    Forcing them to provide timely, accurate data is the kind of sensible measure to regulate markets that should have been taken long ago.
    With that information being in the public domain by definition, surely the Government's role in this should be more to name and shame the profiteers using its public profile.
    Regulating accurate, clear and up to date pricing on goods has been a government responsibility since the early Middle Ages.
    It's clear the whole pricing system for fuel is far lower tech than certainly I thought previously. I assumed the prices would have been uploaded to some sort of cloud anyway. Obviously as retailers have never had to do this noone is going to start voluntarily. So the requirement to do it - and I presume get the data uploaded to the big map apps that everyone uses these days is a good idea. Hopefully the Gov't is talking to Google and Apple about this.
    Doesn't work like that.

    The requirement is to make the actual price available online. This will probably be a webpage for each location - trivial to do. A webpage is pretty much a REST call - they might expose that separately, as well, though.

    Either way, third party apps will be able to harvest the data and build the map. Given that there are several such apps already, they will probably just add the new data into the stuff they scrape from the internet.

    So apart from telling the companies to put the price & location online, the government doesn't need to do anything else.
    Surely petrol prices are online already on various price comparison or mapping apps, iirc pb from the Brexit petrol shortage? The devil must be in the detail of this new requirement.
    Getting everyone to post online timely, accurate prices. *With* location.

    As in "The price must be the price actually paid at the pump. No extras, or special offers. The price must be no more than 120 seconds old. The location must be to within 10m"

    I'll bet the current situation is a mess.
    Isn’t the difference that most of the existing sources are crowdsourced by the public, rather than by the retailers themselves. This is telling the retailers to do it, in a standardised manner that could be picked up by your navigation app.
  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 41,956

    viewcode said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    viewcode said:

    eek said:

    Cookie said:

    viewcode said:

    Nigelb said:

    Not a fan of Meta, but this will be interesting 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

    @Nigelb, I pointed this out via a Mastodon tweet last night https://mstdn.social/@YourAnonRiots/110652924710786409
    "Threads"? Really? You would have thought that word would have negative connotations for anything futuristic.
    The fact it has a problem in the UK won't have been picked up elsewhere....
    Wasn't there an American finance guy who wanted to call his product "nonces" and got quite surprised at the comments section?
    The USN LPD USS Ponce also experienced mysterious outbreaks of mirth from alliance partners until its regretful decommissioning in 2016.
    HMS Pansy, HMS Spanker, HMS Virile, HMS Teaser, HMS Tickler, HMS Thruster, HMS Thrasher, HMS Fairy, HMS Flirt, HMS Cockchafer...
    Cockchafer (aka Melolontha melolontha) is an annoying insect pest and a perfectly good name. No worse than Mosquito.

    Honest.
    Otoh RFA Knobcheese...
  • DecrepiterJohnLDecrepiterJohnL Posts: 27,892

    Not just an unctuous, greasy pole climbing ****, also an evil ****. He'll go far.


    That is 100% pure evil. I'm sorry but Angela Rayner called these people right.
    It is hardly "pure evil" but is certainly damn stupid because it casts the government and the minister in a bad light and for what? It is not like the wall art can be seen across the Channel or wherever these asylum seekers start their journeys.

    But then, this particular minister does have a track record of, let us say, poor judgement.
  • Simon_PeachSimon_Peach Posts: 424

    Not just an unctuous, greasy pole climbing ****, also an evil ****. He'll go far.


    That is 100% pure evil. I'm sorry but Angela Rayner called these people right.
    It is hardly "pure evil" but is certainly damn stupid because it casts the government and the minister in a bad light and for what? It is not like the wall art can be seen across the Channel or wherever these asylum seekers start their journeys.

    But then, this particular minister does have a track record of, let us say, poor judgement.
    There is also the question as to why on earth is a Minister interfering in operational matters.
  • DecrepiterJohnLDecrepiterJohnL Posts: 27,892
    Sandpit said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Pulpstar said:

    eek said:

    algarkirk said:

    eek said:

    I suspect we are going to see a fair bit about fuel prices again today

    Steven Swinford
    @Steven_Swinford
    ·
    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’

    People old enough to remember when the Tory party actually stood for a few basic philosophical principles might wonder about this.

    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.
    Supermarket margins are being squeezed so they have less money to subsidise fuel prices with. Which makes smaller filling stations more competitive and secures their future.
    If a single petrol station can sell fuel at £1.359 for diesel why can't a supermarket sell it for a similar price.

    The accusation is that the supermarkets have pocketed / stolen all the £2.4bn that the 5p cut cost the Government.
    The electronic real time data requirement upload is a good thing, as are the papers making a noise about it all. One thing, we all have a duty to seek and find and fuel at the lowest possible price - inflation will never come down if everyone just accepts higher prices. To this regard the papers creating a bit of furore should change collective behaviour.
    Will that data requirement make much difference?

    I don't normally find petrolprices.com (fake email address required) significantly out of date.
    The various retailers have been playing games with the data.

    Forcing them to provide timely, accurate data is the kind of sensible measure to regulate markets that should have been taken long ago.
    With that information being in the public domain by definition, surely the Government's role in this should be more to name and shame the profiteers using its public profile.
    Regulating accurate, clear and up to date pricing on goods has been a government responsibility since the early Middle Ages.
    It's clear the whole pricing system for fuel is far lower tech than certainly I thought previously. I assumed the prices would have been uploaded to some sort of cloud anyway. Obviously as retailers have never had to do this noone is going to start voluntarily. So the requirement to do it - and I presume get the data uploaded to the big map apps that everyone uses these days is a good idea. Hopefully the Gov't is talking to Google and Apple about this.
    Doesn't work like that.

    The requirement is to make the actual price available online. This will probably be a webpage for each location - trivial to do. A webpage is pretty much a REST call - they might expose that separately, as well, though.

    Either way, third party apps will be able to harvest the data and build the map. Given that there are several such apps already, they will probably just add the new data into the stuff they scrape from the internet.

    So apart from telling the companies to put the price & location online, the government doesn't need to do anything else.
    Surely petrol prices are online already on various price comparison or mapping apps, iirc pb from the Brexit petrol shortage? The devil must be in the detail of this new requirement.
    Getting everyone to post online timely, accurate prices. *With* location.

    As in "The price must be the price actually paid at the pump. No extras, or special offers. The price must be no more than 120 seconds old. The location must be to within 10m"

    I'll bet the current situation is a mess.
    Isn’t the difference that most of the existing sources are crowdsourced by the public, rather than by the retailers themselves. This is telling the retailers to do it, in a standardised manner that could be picked up by your navigation app.
    Is this something that is really worth doing, if crowdsourced prices are already easily available? Can the government even receive and then display petrol price data without first chucking another million pound contract at Capita or similar to devise data structures and APIs, and then to outsource hosting?
  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 15,779

    These people are cracked.




    Birbalsingh is one of the more interesting people on the right whose views on education are worth listening to, but perhaps she's cracked. The British right seems to be losing its collective marbles right now, it feels like voters need to make an intervention.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,835

    viewcode said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    viewcode said:

    eek said:

    Cookie said:

    viewcode said:

    Nigelb said:

    Not a fan of Meta, but this will be interesting 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

    @Nigelb, I pointed this out via a Mastodon tweet last night https://mstdn.social/@YourAnonRiots/110652924710786409
    "Threads"? Really? You would have thought that word would have negative connotations for anything futuristic.
    The fact it has a problem in the UK won't have been picked up elsewhere....
    Wasn't there an American finance guy who wanted to call his product "nonces" and got quite surprised at the comments section?
    The USN LPD USS Ponce also experienced mysterious outbreaks of mirth from alliance partners until its regretful decommissioning in 2016.
    HMS Pansy, HMS Spanker, HMS Virile, HMS Teaser, HMS Tickler, HMS Thruster, HMS Thrasher, HMS Fairy, HMS Flirt, HMS Cockchafer...
    Cockchafer (aka Melolontha melolontha) is an annoying insect pest and a perfectly good name. No worse than Mosquito.

    Honest.
    Otoh RFA Knobcheese...
    And yet Cromwell was banned.
  • viewcode said:

    eek said:

    Cookie said:

    viewcode said:

    Nigelb said:

    Not a fan of Meta, but this will be interesting 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

    @Nigelb, I pointed this out via a Mastodon tweet last night https://mstdn.social/@YourAnonRiots/110652924710786409
    "Threads"? Really? You would have thought that word would have negative connotations for anything futuristic.
    The fact it has a problem in the UK won't have been picked up elsewhere....
    Wasn't there an American finance guy who wanted to call his product "nonces" and got quite surprised at the comments section?
    You're not thinking of a cryptographic nonce, are you? As in a number used only one?
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,835

    These people are cracked.




    I don't know. Wisdom is wisdom whencesoever it comes, and remember the parable of the Prodigal Son, or rather Daughter in this case.
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 35,990
    Rishi Sunak’s Tory approval rating negative for first time as PM

    Conservative Home’s poll also placed eight other cabinet ministers including Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove and Thérèse Coffey below zero

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/rishi-sunaks-tory-approval-rating-negative-for-first-time-as-pm-7lddvdbkw
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 54,585

    Sandpit said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Pulpstar said:

    eek said:

    algarkirk said:

    eek said:

    I suspect we are going to see a fair bit about fuel prices again today

    Steven Swinford
    @Steven_Swinford
    ·
    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’

    People old enough to remember when the Tory party actually stood for a few basic philosophical principles might wonder about this.

    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.
    Supermarket margins are being squeezed so they have less money to subsidise fuel prices with. Which makes smaller filling stations more competitive and secures their future.
    If a single petrol station can sell fuel at £1.359 for diesel why can't a supermarket sell it for a similar price.

    The accusation is that the supermarkets have pocketed / stolen all the £2.4bn that the 5p cut cost the Government.
    The electronic real time data requirement upload is a good thing, as are the papers making a noise about it all. One thing, we all have a duty to seek and find and fuel at the lowest possible price - inflation will never come down if everyone just accepts higher prices. To this regard the papers creating a bit of furore should change collective behaviour.
    Will that data requirement make much difference?

    I don't normally find petrolprices.com (fake email address required) significantly out of date.
    The various retailers have been playing games with the data.

    Forcing them to provide timely, accurate data is the kind of sensible measure to regulate markets that should have been taken long ago.
    With that information being in the public domain by definition, surely the Government's role in this should be more to name and shame the profiteers using its public profile.
    Regulating accurate, clear and up to date pricing on goods has been a government responsibility since the early Middle Ages.
    It's clear the whole pricing system for fuel is far lower tech than certainly I thought previously. I assumed the prices would have been uploaded to some sort of cloud anyway. Obviously as retailers have never had to do this noone is going to start voluntarily. So the requirement to do it - and I presume get the data uploaded to the big map apps that everyone uses these days is a good idea. Hopefully the Gov't is talking to Google and Apple about this.
    Doesn't work like that.

    The requirement is to make the actual price available online. This will probably be a webpage for each location - trivial to do. A webpage is pretty much a REST call - they might expose that separately, as well, though.

    Either way, third party apps will be able to harvest the data and build the map. Given that there are several such apps already, they will probably just add the new data into the stuff they scrape from the internet.

    So apart from telling the companies to put the price & location online, the government doesn't need to do anything else.
    Surely petrol prices are online already on various price comparison or mapping apps, iirc pb from the Brexit petrol shortage? The devil must be in the detail of this new requirement.
    Getting everyone to post online timely, accurate prices. *With* location.

    As in "The price must be the price actually paid at the pump. No extras, or special offers. The price must be no more than 120 seconds old. The location must be to within 10m"

    I'll bet the current situation is a mess.
    Isn’t the difference that most of the existing sources are crowdsourced by the public, rather than by the retailers themselves. This is telling the retailers to do it, in a standardised manner that could be picked up by your navigation app.
    Is this something that is really worth doing, if crowdsourced prices are already easily available? Can the government even receive and then display petrol price data without first chucking another million pound contract at Capita or similar to devise data structures and APIs, and then to outsource hosting?
    I believe the costs of this are falling on the retailers, rather than the government, who as you say have a bad habit of doing things in an expensive and needlessly bureaucratic manner.

    I know he’s a divisive character, but it’s one thing that Dominic Cummings was correct about - the requirement for accurate and timely data everywhere.
  • Richard_TyndallRichard_Tyndall Posts: 32,522

    viewcode said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    viewcode said:

    eek said:

    Cookie said:

    viewcode said:

    Nigelb said:

    Not a fan of Meta, but this will be interesting 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

    @Nigelb, I pointed this out via a Mastodon tweet last night https://mstdn.social/@YourAnonRiots/110652924710786409
    "Threads"? Really? You would have thought that word would have negative connotations for anything futuristic.
    The fact it has a problem in the UK won't have been picked up elsewhere....
    Wasn't there an American finance guy who wanted to call his product "nonces" and got quite surprised at the comments section?
    The USN LPD USS Ponce also experienced mysterious outbreaks of mirth from alliance partners until its regretful decommissioning in 2016.
    HMS Pansy, HMS Spanker, HMS Virile, HMS Teaser, HMS Tickler, HMS Thruster, HMS Thrasher, HMS Fairy, HMS Flirt, HMS Cockchafer...
    Cockchafer (aka Melolontha melolontha) is an annoying insect pest and a perfectly good name. No worse than Mosquito.

    Honest.
    I like cockchafers (or May Bugs) . The grubs provide food for many birds - particularly rooks - and the adults are eaten by hedgehogs, martens and boar amongst others.

    The damage they do is limited unless you are one of the perfect lawn freaks and they are great to see blundering about on warm spring nights.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,421
    Scott_xP said:

    Rishi Sunak’s Tory approval rating negative for first time as PM

    Conservative Home’s poll also placed eight other cabinet ministers including Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove and Thérèse Coffey below zero

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/rishi-sunaks-tory-approval-rating-negative-for-first-time-as-pm-7lddvdbkw

    Not long for this world.

    Penny should try and get shoehorned in - she stands a lot more chance now than in another full leadership contest.
  • PeckPeck Posts: 517
    edited July 2023
    I don't find charts of this kind fascinating at all. They're a load of cobblers. Most people are rubbish at determining their reasons for intending to vote this way or the other in accordance with a half-arsed list of options that's eerily reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges's Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, which categorises all animals as belonging to one of the following groups:

    those belonging to the Emperor
    embalmed ones
    trained ones
    suckling pigs
    mermaids (or sirens)
    fabled ones
    stray dogs
    those included in this classification
    those that tremble as if they were mad
    innumerable ones
    those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush
    et cetera
    those that have just broken the vase
    those that from afar look like flies

    I mean seriously do Tory voters put "the environment" at almost the same level of importance as pensions, whereas Labour voters class it as more important? Must make sure Tesco's don't supply free plastic bags even if this means screw my pension!

    The election will be immigration versus health, possibly with a stirred-in dollop of a mixture of English nationalism with the Scottish question. But primarily immigration versus health. This kind of election is always about crowd psychology, which is always about emotion not intellect. Many people have given up hope for achieving non-"waiting" status where medical attention is concerned (whatever their mouths may say), but a lot of them remain racist and they get an emotional kick out of racism almost every day. That's the main difference between the two issues.

    So the Tories will probably be the largest party, indeed they will probably win a majority, and the interesting volatility won't be near a red wall or a blue wall (what old-fashioned talk that is) - it will be in Scotland, and, since the Tories can't openly say "Vote SNP" or even "If you don't want to vote Tory, then vote SNP because SNP are better than Labour", they're going to have to push English nationalism in my opinion. And yes they may well drop Sunak. He's rubbish at campaigning, he hasn't got the common touch even to the extent that e.g. Cameron or TMay or JMajor had it, he has little charisma, and if the Tories are going to lose (which they aren't) they might as well lose under someone else because only a nutter would believe that Sunak who married so much money is cut out for a job as LOTO.

    As for Rwanda, a friend opined to me that the Tories are leaving it very late, but I disagree entirely. That the Supreme Court will decide on the government's appeal only in several months' time plays nicely for the Tories. That's when the "European" side to this will also be publicised. (It hasn't been much, yet, for most of the population anyway.) In the winter and spring it will be brought home to the electorate very forcefully that Europe, together with judges who care so much about "human rights", are knifing Britain in the back: this is the far right nationalist message of our time.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,385
    Sane move - put Bairstow at 3 and recall Foakes.

    Likely move - keep Bairstow as keeper and play Lawrence at 3.
  • DecrepiterJohnLDecrepiterJohnL Posts: 27,892
    New thread.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,835

    viewcode said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    viewcode said:

    eek said:

    Cookie said:

    viewcode said:

    Nigelb said:

    Not a fan of Meta, but this will be interesting 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

    @Nigelb, I pointed this out via a Mastodon tweet last night https://mstdn.social/@YourAnonRiots/110652924710786409
    "Threads"? Really? You would have thought that word would have negative connotations for anything futuristic.
    The fact it has a problem in the UK won't have been picked up elsewhere....
    Wasn't there an American finance guy who wanted to call his product "nonces" and got quite surprised at the comments section?
    The USN LPD USS Ponce also experienced mysterious outbreaks of mirth from alliance partners until its regretful decommissioning in 2016.
    HMS Pansy, HMS Spanker, HMS Virile, HMS Teaser, HMS Tickler, HMS Thruster, HMS Thrasher, HMS Fairy, HMS Flirt, HMS Cockchafer...
    Cockchafer (aka Melolontha melolontha) is an annoying insect pest and a perfectly good name. No worse than Mosquito.

    Honest.
    I like cockchafers (or May Bugs) . The grubs provide food for many birds - particularly rooks - and the adults are eaten by hedgehogs, martens and boar amongst others.

    The damage they do is limited unless you are one of the perfect lawn freaks and they are great to see blundering about on warm spring nights.
    Hear hear. We don't even *have* a lawn - Mrs C has planted flowers everywhere, apart from the paths, so the bees and other insects get fed from spring through to the beginning of autumn.
  • viewcodeviewcode Posts: 22,075
    edited July 2023

    viewcode said:

    eek said:

    Cookie said:

    viewcode said:

    Nigelb said:

    Not a fan of Meta, but this will be interesting 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

    @Nigelb, I pointed this out via a Mastodon tweet last night https://mstdn.social/@YourAnonRiots/110652924710786409
    "Threads"? Really? You would have thought that word would have negative connotations for anything futuristic.
    The fact it has a problem in the UK won't have been picked up elsewhere....
    Wasn't there an American finance guy who wanted to call his product "nonces" and got quite surprised at the comments section?
    You're not thinking of a cryptographic nonce, are you? As in a number used only one?
    I don't know, although it seems plausible, hence my use of vague terms like "finance guy" and "product". He had never encountered the term other than his own rarified discipline and went thru quite an interesting learning process when it widened to the wider public: first he thought people were pulling his leg, then he was baffled, then angry, then he had to sullenly give up because you can't sell a finance product named after child-molesters. His beautiful dream ran into reality and blew up on the pad. I assume a career in government awaits... :)
  • eekeek Posts: 28,370
    Peck said:

    I don't find charts of this kind fascinating at all. They're a load of cobblers. Most people are rubbish at determining their reasons for intending to vote this way or the other in accordance with a half-arsed list of options that's eerily reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges's Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, which categorises all animals as belonging to one of the following groups:

    those belonging to the Emperor
    embalmed ones
    trained ones
    suckling pigs
    mermaids (or sirens)
    fabled ones
    stray dogs
    those included in this classification
    those that tremble as if they were mad
    innumerable ones
    those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush
    et cetera
    those that have just broken the vase
    those that from afar look like flies

    I mean seriously do Tory voters put "the environment" at almost the same level of importance as pensions, whereas Labour voters class it as more important? Must make sure Tesco's don't supply free plastic bags even if this means screw my pension!

    The election will be immigration versus health, possibly with a stirred-in dollop of a mixture of English nationalism with the Scottish question. But primarily immigration versus health. This kind of election is always about crowd psychology, which is always about emotion not intellect. Many people have given up hope for achieving non-"waiting" status where medical attention is concerned (whatever their mouths may say), but a lot of them remain racist and they get an emotional kick out of racism almost every day. That's the main difference between the two issues.

    So the Tories will probably be the largest party, indeed they will probably win a majority, and the interesting volatility won't be near a red wall or a blue wall (what old-fashioned talk that is) - it will be in Scotland, and, since the Tories can't openly say "Vote SNP" or even "If you don't want to vote Tory, then vote SNP because SNP are better than Labour", they're going to have to push English nationalism in my opinion. And yes they may well drop Sunak. He's rubbish at campaigning, he hasn't got the common touch even to the extent that e.g. Cameron or TMay or JMajor had it, he has little charisma, and if the Tories are going to lose (which they aren't) they might as well lose under someone else because only a nutter would believe that Sunak who married so much money is cut out for a job as LOTO.

    As for Rwanda, a friend opined to me that the Tories are leaving it very late, but I disagree entirely. That the Supreme Court will decide on the government's appeal only in several months' time plays nicely for the Tories. That's when the "European" side to this will also be publicised. (It hasn't been much, yet, for most of the population anyway.) In the winter and spring it will be brought home to the electorate very forcefully that Europe, together with judges who care so much about "human rights", are knifing Britain in the back: this is the far right nationalist message of our time.

    That would be the Human rights Court created by Winston Churchill...

    Can't see it going down that well when the last bit is continually mentioned....
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 78,191
    The Daily Mail are calling Pope being out a 'huge blow' but with an average of 22.5 - joint lowest with Labuschagne amongst all non bowlers so far this series at number 3, is it really a 'huge blow' ?
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,385
    Pulpstar said:

    The Daily Mail are calling Pope being out a 'huge blow' but with an average of 22.5 - joint lowest with Labuschagne amongst all non bowlers so far this series at number 3, is it really a 'huge blow' ?

    Undoubtedly. I gather Cummins is really upset about it.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 50,251

    Sandpit said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Pulpstar said:

    eek said:

    algarkirk said:

    eek said:

    I suspect we are going to see a fair bit about fuel prices again today

    Steven Swinford
    @Steven_Swinford
    ·
    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’

    People old enough to remember when the Tory party actually stood for a few basic philosophical principles might wonder about this.

    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.
    Supermarket margins are being squeezed so they have less money to subsidise fuel prices with. Which makes smaller filling stations more competitive and secures their future.
    If a single petrol station can sell fuel at £1.359 for diesel why can't a supermarket sell it for a similar price.

    The accusation is that the supermarkets have pocketed / stolen all the £2.4bn that the 5p cut cost the Government.
    The electronic real time data requirement upload is a good thing, as are the papers making a noise about it all. One thing, we all have a duty to seek and find and fuel at the lowest possible price - inflation will never come down if everyone just accepts higher prices. To this regard the papers creating a bit of furore should change collective behaviour.
    Will that data requirement make much difference?

    I don't normally find petrolprices.com (fake email address required) significantly out of date.
    The various retailers have been playing games with the data.

    Forcing them to provide timely, accurate data is the kind of sensible measure to regulate markets that should have been taken long ago.
    With that information being in the public domain by definition, surely the Government's role in this should be more to name and shame the profiteers using its public profile.
    Regulating accurate, clear and up to date pricing on goods has been a government responsibility since the early Middle Ages.
    It's clear the whole pricing system for fuel is far lower tech than certainly I thought previously. I assumed the prices would have been uploaded to some sort of cloud anyway. Obviously as retailers have never had to do this noone is going to start voluntarily. So the requirement to do it - and I presume get the data uploaded to the big map apps that everyone uses these days is a good idea. Hopefully the Gov't is talking to Google and Apple about this.
    Doesn't work like that.

    The requirement is to make the actual price available online. This will probably be a webpage for each location - trivial to do. A webpage is pretty much a REST call - they might expose that separately, as well, though.

    Either way, third party apps will be able to harvest the data and build the map. Given that there are several such apps already, they will probably just add the new data into the stuff they scrape from the internet.

    So apart from telling the companies to put the price & location online, the government doesn't need to do anything else.
    Surely petrol prices are online already on various price comparison or mapping apps, iirc pb from the Brexit petrol shortage? The devil must be in the detail of this new requirement.
    Getting everyone to post online timely, accurate prices. *With* location.

    As in "The price must be the price actually paid at the pump. No extras, or special offers. The price must be no more than 120 seconds old. The location must be to within 10m"

    I'll bet the current situation is a mess.
    Isn’t the difference that most of the existing sources are crowdsourced by the public, rather than by the retailers themselves. This is telling the retailers to do it, in a standardised manner that could be picked up by your navigation app.
    Is this something that is really worth doing, if crowdsourced prices are already easily available? Can the government even receive and then display petrol price data without first chucking another million pound contract at Capita or similar to devise data structures and APIs, and then to outsource hosting?
    Sigh. They don't need to. All they need to do is to make the retailers display on a web page, on their various websites, the accurate, up to date price per location.

    Once that is done, a host of apps will scrape the data. No need for the government to do anything else.
  • tlg86 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    tlg86 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    tlg86 said:

    FF43 said:

    Scott_xP said:
    One interesting fact from that excellent article is that WC Grace did exactly the same thing in 1882. His response to complaints, "I taught the lad a lesson". Which sounds right for Bairstow too.
    Didn't take long to find the first mistake:

    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.
    Bairstow didn't even look behind to Carey (Unlike Balbirnie's dismissal to Foakes though)
    Having watched the Balbirnie wicket:

    https://www.skysports.com/watch/video/sports/cricket/11710581/quick-thinking-foakes-stumps-balbirnie

    I think there are a number of differences. Firstly, the batsman reached out of his crease to gain an advantage. I think the wicket keeper is entitled to wait and see if the batsman loses his balance. I think this case is more akin to Starc grounding that catch. Obviously, Starc could have caught it cleanly. And Balbirnie could have made sure he didn't lift his foot. But they didn't and I'm not sure what the opposition is supposed to do. You say that Balbirnie looked. Well he should have seen that Foakes was waiting to see if he was going to lift his foot.

    Carey was looking to take advantage of an opponent believing that the ball was dead. The two cases are not comparable.
    He threw the ball whilst Bairstow was in his crease !
    Only because Bairstow had taken the time to mark his spot to indicate he considered it to be dead ball. The umpires were on the move too.

    Balbirnie wasn't in his crease, which is kind of the point of a stumping.

    The biggest crime is that Cameron Green got a wicket from it.
    The Keeper throws the ball instantly, it never settled, which means it was never dead. The batsman can't consider the ball dead while it's still moving.

    Bairstow screwed up.
    Absolutely. It happens quickly in real time, and the keeper's job is to be alert to the opportunity to stump the batsman. Pro sports players do things instinctively and Carey probably threw it before he even thought about it and Bairstow is an arse for wandering about. Is it against the spirit of the game? Dunno, but full credit to Carey for being alert to the potential. We lost because over the 5 days, the Aussies did more than we did. No drama.
  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 41,956
    Carnyx said:

    viewcode said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    viewcode said:

    eek said:

    Cookie said:

    viewcode said:

    Nigelb said:

    Not a fan of Meta, but this will be interesting 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

    @Nigelb, I pointed this out via a Mastodon tweet last night https://mstdn.social/@YourAnonRiots/110652924710786409
    "Threads"? Really? You would have thought that word would have negative connotations for anything futuristic.
    The fact it has a problem in the UK won't have been picked up elsewhere....
    Wasn't there an American finance guy who wanted to call his product "nonces" and got quite surprised at the comments section?
    The USN LPD USS Ponce also experienced mysterious outbreaks of mirth from alliance partners until its regretful decommissioning in 2016.
    HMS Pansy, HMS Spanker, HMS Virile, HMS Teaser, HMS Tickler, HMS Thruster, HMS Thrasher, HMS Fairy, HMS Flirt, HMS Cockchafer...
    Cockchafer (aka Melolontha melolontha) is an annoying insect pest and a perfectly good name. No worse than Mosquito.

    Honest.
    I like cockchafers (or May Bugs) . The grubs provide food for many birds - particularly rooks - and the adults are eaten by hedgehogs, martens and boar amongst others.

    The damage they do is limited unless you are one of the perfect lawn freaks and they are great to see blundering about on warm spring nights.
    Hear hear. We don't even *have* a lawn - Mrs C has planted flowers everywhere, apart from the paths, so the bees and other insects get fed from spring through to the beginning of autumn.
    From my dim & distant memories of reading All Quiet on the Western Front, wasn’t there a WWI German regiment called The Cockchafers?
This discussion has been closed.