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The betting continues on the by-election that might not happen – politicalbetting.com
The betting continues on the by-election that might not happen – politicalbetting.com
On June 9th the novelist, TV presenter, and occasional MP Nadine Dorries, announced that she was resigning as an MP “with immediate effect”. This prompted the bookies and betting exchanges to set up markets on a by-elecion in Mid Bedfordshire..
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But if her resignation hasn't happened by now, I'm not sure it will unless something else happens to force the issue.
Of which looking at the chart on the bottom, the last big stake matching was on Labour at about 11 July so nearly three weeks ago now.
No real trading seems to have happened then. Tiny dots at the bottom of the chart representing a few quid a day at best.
Punters seem to be alert to the fact this is a void market and if you bet on it you're just giving Smarkets your stake interest-free for five months until it gets voided.
Considerably higher stakes have been matched in recent days on other Smarkets political betting markets, such as the Year of Next General Election (where for some bizarre reason people are betting on 2023 - weirdos!), Overall Majority (where thousands have been staked on Labour in recent days).
Not to forget US Presidential Markets. Versus the about £5 a day getting matched on this market, close to £5k a day is being matched on the Democratic Nominee as well as more on the Republican Nominee and Overall winner markets.
The Farage affair is highlighting some quite interesting stats.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jul/30/uk-banks-closing-more-than-1000-accounts-every-day
...The figures, obtained through a freedom of information (FoI) request made to City watchdog the Financial Conduct Authority and first reported in the Mail on Sunday, revealed that in 2016-17, just over 45,000 accounts were shut by banks.
The total has increased every year since, climbing to just over 343,000 accounts in 2021-22 – representing well over 1,000 for every business day of the week....
...A few weeks before the Farage story broke, the Guardian revealed how a retired social worker who had spent the past year doing humanitarian work across Ukraine had her account suddenly shut by Lloyds...
Journalists should be FOI-ing more regularly to check the effects of changes in legislation on its unintended victims.
This government is, of course, hostile to the idea of FOI rights.
How decisions by physicians are affected by left-digit bias (like retail pricing of $7.99 instead of $8.00)
—ED diagnosis of heart attacks age < 40
—Decision to do heart surgery age > 80
—Opioid prescription for age < 18
From Random Acts of Medicine
https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1685665928233795584
It quickly becomes clear that the direction of travel will accelerate further against the customer, and society, until the laws are changed.
We don't need a royal commission but a couple of hours clear thought to establish this.
Anecdotes are interesting; statistics definitive.
Problems with first two phases, from London to Birmingham and then to Crewe, ‘do not appear to be resolvable’
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jul/30/hs2-officially-unachievable-red-rating-problems-london-birmingham
The HS2 rail project, which has been beset by severe delays and soaring costs, has been branded as “unachievable” by the government’s infrastructure watchdog.
Having analysed plans for the construction of the first two phases of the high-speed line, from London to Birmingham and then on to Crewe, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority said the project was not, in its view, deliverable in its current form.
The IPA sits at the heart of government, reporting to the Cabinet Office and the Treasury, and its finding will be seized on by campaigners...
.. A “red” rating was assigned to the plans for the construction of the first two phases. This means that “successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable”, the IPA said in its annual report on big projects.
It added: “There are major issues with project definition, schedule, budget, quality and/or benefits delivery, which at this stage do not appear to be manageable or resolvable. The project may need rescoping and/or its overall viability reassessed….
No plans to address any of this, but the sunk cost fallacy means we plough on.
… A DfT spokesperson said: “Spades are already in the ground on HS2, with 350 construction sites, over £20bn invested to date and supporting over 28,500 jobs. We remain committed to delivering HS2 in the most cost-effective way for taxpayers.
“HS2 will bring transformational benefits for generations to come, improving connections and helping grow the economy.”
That last assertion looks increasingly dubious.
There will be zero benefits for at least a decade, as we carry on spending.
A satisfying day of betting yesterday.
When the England men decided to carry on batting, and having studied the rainfall radar, I bet on a draw at 11/1. By 5 pm the odds had tightened to 3/1 and I cashed out having more than doubled my money. Not too shabby for 6 hours.
The Aussie batters are still top drawer and the England bowlers look knackered.*
I could have stayed in the market but today might go any of four ways and I decided to cut and run.
* The ECB have been remiss in jamming 5 test matches into a month all so that they can prioritise their Hundred franchise. The latter is good for women's cricket but doing this to the Ashes test series is all wrong.
Someone yesterday dared to post that the sleaze of this regime is nothing compared to 1992-7. I didn't respond at the time, but it is I am afraid nonsense.
1992-7 was bemusingly bad. 2019-2024 has rubbed people's noses into the stench of corruption and, worse than that, has been associated with the death of loved ones. The fact that Johnson, Sunak, and their buddies partied away whilst people were deprived of the most basic freedoms, and in some cases even visiting dying relatives, will not be forgotten in a long, long, time.
Okay, so she was on a different level than ordinary people but this haunting image of The Queen, mourning her beloved husband, alone ... whilst those f*ckers partied the night away is one example. Do people really think all this won't be brought back at the General Election? There will be a reckoning at the ballot box and the full fury of the people will be voiced.
People will always have cars.
Soon to be a major situation comedy.
Nearest bus stop to me is a 1.4 mile walk.
In the good old days you wanted to do a bank transfer or international payment you had to go to the bank, now you perform those actions from your smartphone.
Surely the real green issue is not about having cars? It's how we power them.
1. Infrastructure has been mandated to be resistant to plagues of locusts and other calamities for an extended period at the contractor's expense. Remove such bullshit and the construction cost falls rather significantly
2. The cost- benefit analysis of the section being built will be awful because only building this section is lunacy. Commit to further stages now and suddenly the CBA is favourable again
3. It is not zero cost scrapping the thing now - many many billions would be needed to remove / mothball the works
That we have (a) both allowed HS2 to be a ludicrously expensive political football and (b) are seriously talking about scrapping it is very British. We're shit at major infrastructure projects when it comes to planning and concept. Very few get built compared to comparable countries. And at vastly greater cost
Of course before long your e-car, when you have one, could be part of your off grid. Friends I know who explored the issue used to think of the grid as a seasonal battery store, and balance it over the year.
As a country which is 85% urbanised we need attractive alternatives in urban areas. We have hardly invested in anything else other than facilities for private motor vehicles for 60-70 years (I'm dating it to about 1965); the balance needs to be pushed back a hell of a long way.
Rural roads tend to simply be too dangerous for other modes than motor vehicles. Deaths on rural roads are much higher per mile travelled than urban roads - 60% of all fatalities occur on country roads. That brings me back to my main campaigning issue - people locked out of the network of public footpaths and bridleways.
As ever, the big need is to reform behaviour of drivers who put others (and themselves) at risk.
They seem incredulous that somebody owns one property and lives at another.
If I want to keep my AMEX cards I will need to have my payslips changed to my regular residential address rather than the address I spend 1/2 nights a week in.
Like so much of our regulation, I remain unconvinced that the benefit outweighs the harm.
It used to be so much easier. A friend of mine in the Eighties opened an account with a high St bank in the name of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov just for a laugh with the chequebook.
I believe this forum has a strong London representation and of course with the tens of billions spent on its transport infrastructure it, in common with other large cities, provides the means to travel without a car and indeed why would anyone want to drive into cental London
However, move out of London and the country is very much car dependent, and the idea we can walk and cycle everywhere is not the case and in our area there are not many cyclists on the road anyway and of course cycle tracks are being built to separate them from cars, though some cyclists still use the roads
The move to ev's will be a long drawn out one as new ICE vehicles will be available throughout Europe until 2035, ( expect the UK to move the 2030 date to match Europe) and this does give space for the provision of the infrastructure needed plus hopefully a huge drop in their prices, as being green at present certainly is a wealthy person's domain
I notice the government have confirmed the granting of hundreds of oil and gas licences in the North Sea and this will be a challenge for Starmer, especially in Scotland, if he maintains his objection to these new licences, though this may be number 35 reverse of policy from him
There's no good clinical reason for the cliff edges in those graphs.
Though whether it's practical to do anything about them is an interesting question.
Amazing clash on Radio Scotland between presenter Martin Geissler and Rishi Sunak, who confirmed he is taking a private jet to Scotland to make his, er, green energy announcement today.
The PM bizarrely accused him of wanting to ban people going on holiday. Extraordinary stuff.
@peterwalker99
Rishi Sunak can sometimes be surprisingly peevish, even charmless, and that was very much on show with his Good Morning Scotland interview just now. Began with a whinge, complained about questions, talked over others, and ended after five mins by more or less hanging up.
Otherwise banks would just say 'we're working to address it', or some such pablum.
Also, the last time I looked road accidents were the leading cause of death among 5-18 year olds in the UK, and current traffic imposes a kind of permanent semi lockdown on millions of children.
I know this is controversial but I'm a believer in nuclear power. It's the greenest and most naturally occurring form of energy in the universe, particularly so when we succeed in harnessing fusion.
You just have to try and ensure that the things don't blow up but that's a secondary point and not, in my opinion, a reason for preventing their expansion.
I'd much rather we push nuclear power than further drilling for finite fossil fuels.
UK: 2030 ban on 100% ICE cars. Hybrids can still be sold. There won't be any 100% ICE cars available from volume manufacturers in 2030 so there really isn't any point to this lofty goal. It's just the reality.
EU: 2035 ban on new vehicles that don't have zero CO2 emissions (exemption for small volume manufacturers). A more stringent and worthy goal that can only be met by BEV or e-fuel vehicles.
Otherwise I agree. But none of what you suggest will happen.
What. A. Fight.
Hope everyone has seen it. Worth getting up at 3am to watch.
She said it was nigh on impossible. This form and that AML declaration and all the rest.
The road safety focus is overwhelmingly on people driving motor vehicles because that group, which I imagine includes nearly all of us on PB, is overwhelmingly the group that injures and kills on our roads.
The FATAL5 linked to road danger that are the police safety focus are careless driving, mobile phone use when driving, drink and drug driving, not wearing a seatbelt, and speeding.
The only snag was, they couldn't tell me what information they needed.
Which made the entire process truly Kafkaesque.
I cannot understand why some people are turned on by violence.
They are usually middle class professionals with attitude. They hog the roads and are more likely to ram in to walkers using the same road space. And why can they never use a bell ?
Typical is a peloton of cyclists coming down a hill and threatening one of our local farmers because his cows were the crossing at milking time and they had to stop. Apparently he shouldnt have had them on the road ( and they might sue him ) despite signs either side of his farm warning road users that cows crossing the road was a hazard.
If indeed you did travel four miles to the local Spar by bike for a curly wurly.
How Russian colonialism took the Western anti-imperialist Left for a ride
https://www.salon.com/2023/07/29/how-russian-colonialism-took-the-western-anti-imperialist-left-for-a-ride/
..."People, I think, just get so wedded to their vision of themselves as fighting 'The Man,' fighting the power that they are blinded and taken for a ride by Russia, in this case serving as useful idiots," Junisbai said.
Both Yuliia and Artem Shaipov pointed the finger at academic studies of Russia in the West that view it through Moscow's imperial lens. The two have published articles advocating for a "decolonization" of Russia studies and greater attention to how veneration of the "great Russian culture" – such as the genocide- and conquest-glorifying literature of Mikhail Lermontov and Alexander Pushkin – has provided a conduit for Russian imperialist ideology to sneak into the Western mind...
It is unlikely this can occur without a statutory basis unless there were a 'state' bank of last resort.
They often start with a soft opening - your account is just a user name, email address, password. You can receive money up to a certain amount.
To send money, BACS, etc you need to do some KYC checks - scan a passport or driving license via a phone. Up and running in an hour. Often less.
The offer you virtual as well as physical cards. So from the moment the account is verified you can add the virtual card to Apple Pay or the Google equivalent.
The next banking crisis will be the alt-banks of course. Chase is kind of interesting, because it is actually an old bank, operating in the alt-bank space in the U.K.
16,000 cyclists were injured or killed last year.
Cyclists round me quite regularly come through in bunches which will mow pedestrians down, yelling at the last moment instead of slowing down and using a bell, In some places where the speed limit is 20mph for cars they dont think it applies to them. And on one local stretch of road which is up hill and round corners they could at least spread out to let cars pass but instead hog the width of the road so everyone is doing 15 mph and drivers in a hurry get frustrated and do daft things.
Cyclists need to be trained on road use since we have so many more of them on the road and theyre no longer people going to work.. I dread when the Tour de France starts as they all come out and think theyre Bradley Wiggins.
The speed limit does not apply to cyclists.
Cycling has fallen by 8x since the 1950s.
The vast majority of cyclists hold driving licences and have insurance (usually through their home insurance).
100% of your post was nonsense.
Often they are those “mound” ones - which are always place to encourage drivers to swerve out of their lane.
Many humps are so sharp that they penalise small cars, mopeds and bikes severely. Way back, when I was living in Hampstead, a nasty outbreak of such bumps led all the rich people to start buy giant American cars. That lasted about a year, until they realised the downsides of owning Der P1000 Ratte.
Apparently, competitors to the companies making the current speed cameras have come out with miniaturised, higher performance, cheaper cameras. Which the existing vendors are trying hard to prevent being certified. These could be cheaper, apparently, than creating and maintaining a road full of humps.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casualties-in-great-britain-provisional-estimates-year-ending-june-2022/reported-road-casualties-in-great-britain-provisional-estimates-year-ending-june-2022
Hope you and your family are well
As a matter of interest do you support the granting of the new licences
They act as if they own the road and everyone else is an annoying inconvenience.
Often they are those “mound” ones - which are always place to encourage drivers to swerve out of their lane.
Many humps are so sharp that they penalise small cars, mopeds and bikes severely. Way back, when I was living in Hampstead, a nasty outbreak of such bumps led all the rich people to start buy giant American c Cycling registration will happen, but not for these reasons.
While I was away, there was a collision between a rider of a souped up electric bike and a child on a bike, locally. Head on in a segregated bike lane. Child is ok. Electric bike rider left the scene. According to eye witnesses, he was exceeding 20mph, and had been pulling wheelies.
Since there will be all kinds of games played registering everything on 2 wheels will be the simple answer.
And they dont predestrians do.
Also which ever civil servant drew up the rules has never seen a peloton heading straight for horse riders.
How many drivers were killed by pedestrians?
Bizarre conversation as he was extremely deaf and I had to repeat everything 2 or 3 times.
Equal to other cyclists & people using horses 'regard to their own safety and others' (In the specific case of horse riders that'll generally mean cyclists passing safely as horses tend to walk or trot on the road which is between 3 and 8 mph generally)
Priority to anything with a motor.
The only dnagerous ones are usually nervy horses or inexperienced riders. But L Plate riders are usually accompanied by an expeirenced adult.
I *wish* it was easier for pubs to become local hubs and sell other stuff and services, e.g. post.
Even today cycling to and from work to Fairmilehead would be unrealistic, unless you are a tour de France cyclist
Only a fool wouldn't cycle that.