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July 20th – the worst by-election day for the Tories ever? – politicalbetting.com
July 20th – the worst by-election day for the Tories ever? – politicalbetting.com
In Somerton and Froome the party is defending a general election margin of 29.6% while In Selby the Tory general election margin was 35.7%. Even in Johnson’s old seat of Uxbridge the general election majority was over 15%.
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Even geniuses can let things fall through the cracks when they're trying to focus on too many different things.
There is a huge incumbency "bonus" for any social media platform. There are users, and an audience, and people post there already.
It is therefore extremely hard to replace an app with something essentially identical. I mean, what's the incentive to jump, as you lose all your followers, and you can't necessarily see all the things you used to.
Now, that's not to say that changes don't happen: whatever happened to Friends Reunited? Or MySpace? Or Flickr?
But they typically happen because someone else comes up with a better, different app, and people migrate because there is some feature that is missing.
Threads fails - for now - because it doesn't really offer anything particularly new.
That said... who on here pays for Twitter?
Because right now, the site is caught in limbo. It has massive debts. It's struggling to make new monetisation work. It's become a hotbed of IP theft (best place to stream pirated movies!). And Musk is stuck in a mindset where he's trying to cut costs to reach profitability, and that's making his systems less reliable.
So, what happens?
Hard to say, but there's a reason why Twitter debt trades at 50 cents in the dollar, and Fidelity has written down the value of its stake by two thirds.
There is a Musk Derangement Syndrome, just as there is with Boris, Trump and Brexit
I can sometimes catch a flavour of the mindset when I think about Gareth Southgate. Something about Southgate winds me up way more than it should. He's a loser and not that great a manager but he makes me angrily SEETHE like Jolyon Maugham with a Brexity fox
Still think S&A will be a Tory hold.
Its got Leon banging on about something other than GPT3 for a while.
https://twitter.com/keithfrankish/status/1677034520590053377
Come on, there has to be at least one person on here.
Like, the rockets really do fly, the satellite internet really does work, but also when he suddenly decided he was going to put his website behind a login wall and restrict the number of queries, the website really did stop.
The best explanation I can come up with is that he's rich, curious, audacious and easily led. You can achieve an incredible amount in America with those characteristics... provided you're around the right people...
Why are so many on here so fascinated by Twitter?
It's a subject I've never heard anyone raise in real life.
I was on it for 48 hours in about 2013. Tweeted twice and then never bothered as I was overwhelmed by a veritable tsunami of banality, idiocy, anger and nonsense.
They tend to come in gentle, soothing waves on here.
Selby - probably CON hold
Uxbridge - LAB but could be surprisingly close
End August - most people will have forgotten about these by elections
It’s arrant fucking nonsense. Embarrassing
What it's not a good platform for is *arguing*, so the experience has kind of degraded as they (and this predates Musk) increasingly tried to maximize engagement by showing you more and more stuff that you'll get mad at. But even now, it still works as long as you know how to use it (you have to cultivate your own list of a range of smart people) and stay away from the For You tab.
This week is Peak sport for this year.
I don't.
I think the Greens may well have a chance in Boleyn but my patch (Wall End) is going to remain in the Labour camp. I'm still reeling from the 40 activists Labour got out on a Sunday morning to deliver and canvass. In my days of political activity for the LDs, if I got six out for an evening's surveying and leafleting I'd consider that a good turnout.
Perhaps more beneficially - for me - it has indeed reduced my booze intake, which is still heroic by most standards but definitely down. 👍🥂
SpaceX is working. Musk doesn't design the rockets.
Musk apparently does demand explicit Twitter features. It's a shitshow
They aren't used by most people.
Nor obsessively discussed in detail daily on here.
I'm asking why so many PBers are so invested in its progress?
I’m not sure if any other social media has so captured a profession as Twitter has done to journalists
MEDIUM
MEDIUM
or
HAVE
HAVE
HAVE
*ROLLS ON FLOOR IN AGONY*
Drive inland my friend
The most recent Blue Wall voting did show a drift from Labour to Lib Dem, the sight of that is the Dutch Salute.
Dutch Salute Theory can’t predict by-elections or seats though, only give us a feeling how tactical voting is shaping ahead of the General Election, becuase surely if you want to vote tactically to get a Tory out, you know today exactly what to do, so why tell pollster something else? Perhaps Labours increase in polls indicates Starmer and his party now not really feared, which is an ingredient to attract Lib Dem votes, but in many places, like Somerton and Frome those voters can’t actually vote labour, by my fur and whiskers no, it will result in HY’s Opposition Flaccid Night, and that won’t be any fun at all for most the rest of us.
Hope this helps.
Solar storm and aurora forecast ove rnext two days or so - shame it's cloudy tonight.
Will you then accept the writing is on the wall?
I'm not at all convinced what will flip and what will not, but Selby will be redder than Uxbridge.
It may be that it's just easier to make a change faster with a website, so there's less time for people to delay or distract him.
22 And thou his son, O Belshazzar, hast not humbled thine heart, though thou knewest all this;
23 But hast lifted up thyself against the Lord of heaven; and they have brought the vessels of his house before thee, and thou, and thy lords, thy wives, and thy concubines, have drunk wine in them; and thou hast praised the gods of silver, and gold, of brass, iron, wood, and stone, which see not, nor hear, nor know: and the God in whose hand thy breath is, and whose are all thy ways, hast thou not glorified:
24 Then was the part of the hand sent from him; and this writing was written.
25 And this is the writing that was written, Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin.
26 This is the interpretation of the thing: Mene; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it.
27 Tekel; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.
28 Peres; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.
Still usable, and better than the monstrosity of Meta, WhatsApp being the only bit I use.
It's gone from being a fairly lively place to share ideas and opinions to being completely dead. Now you could argue I should just pay the eight bucks or whatever it is a month but the problem isn't just me, the problem is it's also downgrading the visibility of a lot of other people I used to follow, thus making the platform less valuable.
Imagine if PB charged a $8 a month fee, I'd probably pay it as I enjoy the site (heck, I do donate when the paypal button goes up). But imagine if it also bunged interesting and insightful posts from some of my favourite posters down the bottom of the page because they haven't paid the $8 a month fee, and upgraded the site's shitposters jus because they have paid. That is twitter now, and that it is why it is not worth the eight bucks.
1-1 in sets!
All the pressure in these by-elections is on Starmer and Labour. It will only be a noteworthy and game changing night if Labour fail to take at least one.
If Ulez is so wildly popular with voters, why is the Labour candidate in Uxbridge distancing themself from it?
Labour have every right to be getting nervous.
That is the opposite of a plausible huckster
He got where he is by having tremendous insights, a willingness to imagine, a great gift for conceptual engineering, and a formidable work ethic
Musk has made innovations I dislike quite a lot. The cheap seat blue ticks are annoying. The 600 tweet thing was insane (and could have destroyed the site) but he backtracked
Other than that I still find it immensely useful and entertaining. Far more than any other social media. But it does suit my mindset
They treat him like he is now the most dangerous man in the world by owning twitter....
It’s not a black and white exam answer, but William is closer. To be more confident the madness of large scale tactical voting will happen, would we not be seeing Lib Dem share of the LLG increase from here to General Election day. At LLG expense. I mean like Lib Dem’s polling 17 or 18, and Labour just about 40.
The gap then from Lab back to Con would be a lot smaller, perhaps even single figures in many polls. But I would be extremely confident the Tories will be reduced to just 100 to 140 seats.
Look at the Terrible Tory result local election night, look at what the vote levels were. Labour 36% Lib Dem’s 18%. The LLG really worked the Torys over that night.
I also wonder about Gerard Manley Hopkins. Tremendous intelligent and an incredible focused talent. Genius. Yet apparently hopelessly awkward in society and prone to saying weird things and making terrible faux pas
One thing that is worth noting is Musk has shown to be very smart in seeing opportunities others others haven't e.g. how he has so many prime locations with Tesla charges (he basically bagged the best spots), Starlink, that looks like it will provide the internet to all planes in the near future, due to safety regs, manufacturer demands and customers...and twitter, all that data is fantastically useful for LLMs.
Overall the public mood seems to be as it was at the time of the local elections, or perhaps even stronger. So the Tories are set for a proper drubbing - at the hands of the Lib Dems where they are strongly organised, and of Labour where they are not.
As Mrs Thatcher once said, "Rejoice, rejoice!"
Not that I like Meta either.
Twitter has never had that and thus always had issues with advertisers, as unlike Facebook you can't ask to target left handed Asian cat lovers in Swindon.
Musk has been open that he doesn't see twitter as a social media app, rather an "everything" app like WeChat.
If I had to guess where it went wrong was he thought he would pay a lot less for twitter and that he would then have this large userbase to monetarise. Instead he is on the hook for silly money and the internal financials of twitter were a lot worse than he first thought.