With regard to the discovery of intelligent life, fi is, I think, the biggest unknown in the Drake Equation. You can't really extrapolate from a sample of one, but it seems to me that it's not ridiculously difficult for life to get started in a simple way given a sufficiently large and complex environment that remains relatively stable for a long period of time, such as the early Earth (though that may not be so common either). The development of intelligent life is another matter again though. It took a long time for human-level intelligence to develop on Earth, despite plenty of opportunity for it to do so, and its eventual emergence in hominids seems to have happened almost by chance.
I do recall seeing a theory that for a planet to be stable enough to support an evolutionary chain long enough to result in intelligence, an exceptionally large moon might be necessary. The tidal effects would stabilise the spin axis (Mars, in comparison to Earth, apparently had significant axial tilt changes multiple times in just the past few million years). Our Moon is exceptionally large for a planet our size - in our current knowledge - and the course of events that led to its formation (as we understand it) were quite freakish.
I also recall Asimov (who was quite scientifically sharp) speculating that the tidal effects of such a large Moon on flexing the Earth's crust may have led to heavier elements (such as uranium) being unusually concentrated near the surface and possibly contributing to the mutation rate that is necessary for evolution in "shorter" timescales (and perhaps even to tectonic plate formation, which may be necessary for life). No idea how solid this speculation may be, but those are the best argument for intelligent life being extremely rare - and they are VERY speculative.
Yes, I think the moon has played an essential role in creating an environment suitable for life on Earth. For intelligent life to evolve, you need, fundamentally, a sufficiently large, complex, long-lasting and stable (but not too stable) environment, and the presence of the moon has been vital in creating this on earth. My feeling is that this set of conditions is likely to be fulfilled very rarely and that the evolution of intelligent life is an extremely unusual occurrence. We may not be alone in the universe, but I think we might as well be, given the likely rarity of intelligent life and the distances involved.
Do we really know the pre-requisites for intelligent life to evolve? And are we referring to humanity as the example? Arguably humans arose fairly rapidly from common ancesters to the other great apes etc. Why didn't an intelligent dinosaur arise? Some were bipedal and thus in theory could have developed tool use. I think of our intelligence as a quirk of evolution - other creatures are faster, stronger etc, we are weak, slow etc but cunning.
1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. 12%
2. Date of the next UK General Election. 26th September
3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called. Sunak, Starmer, Davey, Yousaf, Tice
4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%). Labour majority 180
5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. Haley & Biden
6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. Haley
7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. 4.75%
8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 4.2%). 3.9%
9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). £108bn
10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). 67
Yet another Haley prediction!
I'll be interested to see what the 'hive mind' summary is on Saturday if @Benpointer is able to do a summation.
I've bet on Haley as my long shot bet for GOP, but I am pretty sure it wont happen.
Haley is a good shout for a political betting site. Probably the biggest thing counting against Trump in the nomination process is that his record in office was so shambolic he didn’t deliver on expectations. For example, if he had gone down the route of state governor first, to prove with evidence he could run an administration that delivers, he would never have won the nomination on such a record of chaos and non delivery. It’s not Trump any Trump supporters want, it’s delivery of the Trump agenda.
I'm not sure that's true of all or even most of them. I know a few, and from what I can see, Trump supporters break down into the following, overlapping, categories:
- those who really hate woke/political correctness/the Democrats/New World Order/liberal media/Washington swamp, and regard everything the NY Times/MSNBC/mainstream media post against him as proof that he's right - those who regard politics as entertainment, a reality show for ugly people, or cage wrestling with words, and just see Trump as more entertaining than Biden, even if the joke is ultimately on them. For these people, there's no such thing as bad publicity for Trump - those who believe in Trump's policies. But I think this is the smallest category, because he's so erratic there's no telling what those are from one month to the next. You do meet people, occasionally, who really like his tax cuts or conservative judge nominations or whatever though.
None of these groups are particularly susceptible to reasoned debate on record in government or policy options, which is why Trump's popularity is so strong despite the various disasters and terrible decisions of his years in power.
The ultimate test of your claim “Trumps popularity is so strong” only comes at the general election. Let’s dig this post of yours out again after the result. Who won’t just lose tge White House, he will cost the party the house and Senate too.
Trump only won the first time due to the “Brexit States” hitting the “we have nothing to lose but hit the promise of change” button. That’s a one hit button. Once the penny drops you won’t reverse globalisation, bring all the jobs and wealth back, and turn rust into gleaming steal, your promises don’t get their vote again.
It’s not remotely ideological. Take UK Red Wall as example - pro Brexit Corbyn lost the Red Wall, those voters now switch to Brexit hater Starmer on the ideological point of Brexit? It’s not remotely ideological. There’s no ideological point there, or Starmer would get a worse Red Wall result than Corbyn.
Corbyn actually won the red wall seats in 2017, the red wall voted for Boris in 2019 to get Brexit done, note for Boris not the Tories. Now Boris has gone and Brexit has gone they have just gone back to voting for Labour as most of them normally do.
Daft post HY. “Corbyn won Red Wall seats” so did all Labour leaders.
The point remains, if Red Wall believe in and want Brexit to happen- that is UKs economic divergence from EU in order to finally bring the promised brexit benefits, then they would vote Tory at the 2024 election, not for Starmer, Lamy and a Labour top team of Brexit haters.
Brexit was done in 2020, we left the single market in 2021. Now even Starmer says he won't take the UK back into the EEA let alone reverse Brexit.
The redwallers got the Brexit they voted for in 2019, now even Starmer Labour won't reverse Brexit they will mostly vote Labour again
On the migration point, ReFUK and Tice are very clearly going fishing for angry red wall voters who think they voted for the foreign to go home and still want that to happen. Some of these are the voters who have gone Lab > UKIP > Con/BXP and aren't going back to Labour.
But how many are there ? Not many I’d suspect. I live and work in north east red wall area and my, admittedly anecdotal, experience is people care far more about car insurance going up, the price of groceries, utility prices, buses not running until recently due to strikes, things just not feeling like they work and high council tax, than they do a few thousand people coming over on rubber dinghies.
The price on Trump winning will change as soon as a courtroom wordfight is shown on live TV between himself and a prosecutor or judge.
This is the guy who can't cope with being told he has small hands.
He can't say, for example, "I think I took the best decision given the difficult circumstances and the amount of information available at the time", either. He can only say he made the greatest phone call to Georgia that anyone ever made, a truly beautiful phone call. What defence attorney would want such a headbanger as his client? You'd do your utmost to stop him being called to the witness box. Courts work differently from wrestling, reality TV, and politics.
Trump is not going to look good when he's told to shut his mouth or get taken down to the cells, or when he's told "Answer the question. I'll repeat it - you lied, didn't you?"
Does any USpol maven here know when this is likely to be? Possibly for the Dems later will be better than sooner?
An oddity of modern politics is the extremely extreme gap between the extent to which all politics, especially high level, gets away with not answering questions at all - even easy ones but especially hard ones, and even in parliament - as compared with how it is in the witness box even in the most trivial of cases.
If I could make a single change in parliament it would be for the speaker's role to include that of requiring questions to be answered in the same way a judge does, and not backing down until he/she has done so.
Parliament is our highest court. Failing to answer a question should be as great an offence as a lie direct.
The one thing that Ms Truss did right was that she did actually answer the questions at PMQs, something that neither Johnson nor Sunak do.
For the full bantz, PB needs to know that UFO TwiX believes the revelation of a an exoplanetary biosignature in 2024 (which now looks quite likely given the various signals from different UK space bods) is merely Stage 1 of Disclosure
It’s the easiest bit to sell, of course (in this theory). So there are bugs on a planet seven billion miles away? Hey ho. Whatever. It’s profound (we’re not alone) yet also trivial (bugs, a billion miles away, meh)
Next will come revelation of a techno signature. That we have received signals from apparently intelligent life Out There Somewhere
Then comes the kicker. We have evidence of non human intelligent life visiting or existing on Earth…
For the purposes of clarity I am only predicting, as my official black swan, the first
I love all this. But see the Piltdown Man hoax, in which Teilhard de Chardin [*] allegedly played a major role. Have any of the breakthrough discoveries this time been made (or surfaced) using the VAT Telescope?
* Gotta love those Jesuits. It's like a four-armed cross then: microbiology; radioastronomy; archaeology; and the role of Spectator editors, especially converts [+].
+ Including one who apparently doesn't like Opus at all.
Poor Rishi now even the weather Gods want rid of him .
A chance now of some severe winter weather towards the second half of January . Likely to hit GDP so his growth pledge which was on shaky ground is likely to take a further hit .
With regard to the discovery of intelligent life, fi is, I think, the biggest unknown in the Drake Equation. You can't really extrapolate from a sample of one, but it seems to me that it's not ridiculously difficult for life to get started in a simple way given a sufficiently large and complex environment that remains relatively stable for a long period of time, such as the early Earth (though that may not be so common either). The development of intelligent life is another matter again though. It took a long time for human-level intelligence to develop on Earth, despite plenty of opportunity for it to do so, and its eventual emergence in hominids seems to have happened almost by chance.
I do recall seeing a theory that for a planet to be stable enough to support an evolutionary chain long enough to result in intelligence, an exceptionally large moon might be necessary. The tidal effects would stabilise the spin axis (Mars, in comparison to Earth, apparently had significant axial tilt changes multiple times in just the past few million years). Our Moon is exceptionally large for a planet our size - in our current knowledge - and the course of events that led to its formation (as we understand it) were quite freakish.
I also recall Asimov (who was quite scientifically sharp) speculating that the tidal effects of such a large Moon on flexing the Earth's crust may have led to heavier elements (such as uranium) being unusually concentrated near the surface and possibly contributing to the mutation rate that is necessary for evolution in "shorter" timescales (and perhaps even to tectonic plate formation, which may be necessary for life). No idea how solid this speculation may be, but those are the best argument for intelligent life being extremely rare - and they are VERY speculative.
Yes, I think the moon has played an essential role in creating an environment suitable for life on Earth. For intelligent life to evolve, you need, fundamentally, a sufficiently large, complex, long-lasting and stable (but not too stable) environment, and the presence of the moon has been vital in creating this on earth. My feeling is that this set of conditions is likely to be fulfilled very rarely and that the evolution of intelligent life is an extremely unusual occurrence. We may not be alone in the universe, but I think we might as well be, given the likely rarity of intelligent life and the distances involved.
There are two distinct meanings to 'intelligent life' in one important respect.
The laws of physics, biology and evolution can give an account of how by the survival of the fittest etc first life can come by adaptation to develop into tigers and elephants and so on. This requires objective and metaphorical intelligence. But it does not require (though I have no doubt it in fact has) subjective intelligence, any more than the remarkable capacities of oak trees does (most people, pace King Charles III think oak trees lack this quality, though I feel agnostic about it.)
We know quite a lot about the evolution of objective capacities, but nothing at all about the evolution (the how and why and by what mechanism) of the subjective ones. In this respect speculation from our only sample planet can easily go too far.
One reason that The Post Office scandal has been repeatedly... put on back burner is that the list of organisations involved is
Conservative Party Labour Party Lib Dem Party Senior Civil Service Senior lawyers and law firms
When you add in all the places that people involved have moved to, you get a complete set of the NU10K Great And The Good. The whole apparatus of Government.
A scandal that is Too Big To Happen. See Rotherham.
1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. 12%
2. Date of the next UK General Election. 26th September
3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called. Sunak, Starmer, Davey, Yousaf, Tice
4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%). Labour majority 180
5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. Haley & Biden
6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. Haley
7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. 4.75%
8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 4.2%). 3.9%
9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). £108bn
10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). 67
Yet another Haley prediction!
I'll be interested to see what the 'hive mind' summary is on Saturday if @Benpointer is able to do a summation.
I've bet on Haley as my long shot bet for GOP, but I am pretty sure it wont happen.
Haley is a good shout for a political betting site. Probably the biggest thing counting against Trump in the nomination process is that his record in office was so shambolic he didn’t deliver on expectations. For example, if he had gone down the route of state governor first, to prove with evidence he could run an administration that delivers, he would never have won the nomination on such a record of chaos and non delivery. It’s not Trump any Trump supporters want, it’s delivery of the Trump agenda.
I'm not sure that's true of all or even most of them. I know a few, and from what I can see, Trump supporters break down into the following, overlapping, categories:
- those who really hate woke/political correctness/the Democrats/New World Order/liberal media/Washington swamp, and regard everything the NY Times/MSNBC/mainstream media post against him as proof that he's right - those who regard politics as entertainment, a reality show for ugly people, or cage wrestling with words, and just see Trump as more entertaining than Biden, even if the joke is ultimately on them. For these people, there's no such thing as bad publicity for Trump - those who believe in Trump's policies. But I think this is the smallest category, because he's so erratic there's no telling what those are from one month to the next. You do meet people, occasionally, who really like his tax cuts or conservative judge nominations or whatever though.
None of these groups are particularly susceptible to reasoned debate on record in government or policy options, which is why Trump's popularity is so strong despite the various disasters and terrible decisions of his years in power.
The ultimate test of your claim “Trumps popularity is so strong” only comes at the general election. Let’s dig this post of yours out again after the result. Who won’t just lose tge White House, he will cost the party the house and Senate too.
Trump only won the first time due to the “Brexit States” hitting the “we have nothing to lose but hit the promise of change” button. That’s a one hit button. Once the penny drops you won’t reverse globalisation, bring all the jobs and wealth back, and turn rust into gleaming steal, your promises don’t get their vote again.
It’s not remotely ideological. Take UK Red Wall as example - pro Brexit Corbyn lost the Red Wall, those voters now switch to Brexit hater Starmer on the ideological point of Brexit? It’s not remotely ideological. There’s no ideological point there, or Starmer would get a worse Red Wall result than Corbyn.
Corbyn actually won the red wall seats in 2017, the red wall voted for Boris in 2019 to get Brexit done, note for Boris not the Tories. Now Boris has gone and Brexit has gone they have just gone back to voting for Labour as most of them normally do.
Daft post HY. “Corbyn won Red Wall seats” so did all Labour leaders.
The point remains, if Red Wall believe in and want Brexit to happen- that is UKs economic divergence from EU in order to finally bring the promised brexit benefits, then they would vote Tory at the 2024 election, not for Starmer, Lamy and a Labour top team of Brexit haters.
Brexit was done in 2020, we left the single market in 2021. Now even Starmer says he won't take the UK back into the EEA let alone reverse Brexit.
The redwallers got the Brexit they voted for in 2019, now even Starmer Labour won't reverse Brexit they will mostly vote Labour again
On the migration point, ReFUK and Tice are very clearly going fishing for angry red wall voters who think they voted for the foreign to go home and still want that to happen. Some of these are the voters who have gone Lab > UKIP > Con/BXP and aren't going back to Labour.
I think the number one reason for things like Trump and Brexit is some people deciding, about 10 years ago, that it was okay to insult large numbers of voters. If they hadn't started doing that, we probably wouldn't have got either of those outcomes.
1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. 12%
2. Date of the next UK General Election. 26th September
3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called. Sunak, Starmer, Davey, Yousaf, Tice
4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%). Labour majority 180
5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. Haley & Biden
6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. Haley
7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. 4.75%
8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 4.2%). 3.9%
9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). £108bn
10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). 67
Yet another Haley prediction!
I'll be interested to see what the 'hive mind' summary is on Saturday if @Benpointer is able to do a summation.
I've bet on Haley as my long shot bet for GOP, but I am pretty sure it wont happen.
Haley is a good shout for a political betting site. Probably the biggest thing counting against Trump in the nomination process is that his record in office was so shambolic he didn’t deliver on expectations. For example, if he had gone down the route of state governor first, to prove with evidence he could run an administration that delivers, he would never have won the nomination on such a record of chaos and non delivery. It’s not Trump any Trump supporters want, it’s delivery of the Trump agenda.
I'm not sure that's true of all or even most of them. I know a few, and from what I can see, Trump supporters break down into the following, overlapping, categories:
- those who really hate woke/political correctness/the Democrats/New World Order/liberal media/Washington swamp, and regard everything the NY Times/MSNBC/mainstream media post against him as proof that he's right - those who regard politics as entertainment, a reality show for ugly people, or cage wrestling with words, and just see Trump as more entertaining than Biden, even if the joke is ultimately on them. For these people, there's no such thing as bad publicity for Trump - those who believe in Trump's policies. But I think this is the smallest category, because he's so erratic there's no telling what those are from one month to the next. You do meet people, occasionally, who really like his tax cuts or conservative judge nominations or whatever though.
None of these groups are particularly susceptible to reasoned debate on record in government or policy options, which is why Trump's popularity is so strong despite the various disasters and terrible decisions of his years in power.
The ultimate test of your claim “Trumps popularity is so strong” only comes at the general election. Let’s dig this post of yours out again after the result. Who won’t just lose tge White House, he will cost the party the house and Senate too.
Trump only won the first time due to the “Brexit States” hitting the “we have nothing to lose but hit the promise of change” button. That’s a one hit button. Once the penny drops you won’t reverse globalisation, bring all the jobs and wealth back, and turn rust into gleaming steal, your promises don’t get their vote again.
It’s not remotely ideological. Take UK Red Wall as example - pro Brexit Corbyn lost the Red Wall, those voters now switch to Brexit hater Starmer on the ideological point of Brexit? It’s not remotely ideological. There’s no ideological point there, or Starmer would get a worse Red Wall result than Corbyn.
Corbyn actually won the red wall seats in 2017, the red wall voted for Boris in 2019 to get Brexit done, note for Boris not the Tories. Now Boris has gone and Brexit has gone they have just gone back to voting for Labour as most of them normally do.
Daft post HY. “Corbyn won Red Wall seats” so did all Labour leaders.
The point remains, if Red Wall believe in and want Brexit to happen- that is UKs economic divergence from EU in order to finally bring the promised brexit benefits, then they would vote Tory at the 2024 election, not for Starmer, Lamy and a Labour top team of Brexit haters.
Brexit was done in 2020, we left the single market in 2021. Now even Starmer says he won't take the UK back into the EEA let alone reverse Brexit.
The redwallers got the Brexit they voted for in 2019, now even Starmer Labour won't reverse Brexit they will mostly vote Labour again
On the migration point, ReFUK and Tice are very clearly going fishing for angry red wall voters who think they voted for the foreign to go home and still want that to happen. Some of these are the voters who have gone Lab > UKIP > Con/BXP and aren't going back to Labour.
I think the number one reason for things like Trump and Brexit is some people deciding, about 10 years ago, that it was okay to insult large numbers of voters. If they hadn't started doing that, we probably wouldn't have got either of those outcomes.
It was more understandable in the UK .
Most of the Trump support is just continually angry and thick bigoted trash .
In the spirit of being more precise in black-swan predictions, I predict the Campi Phlaegri will undergo a super-Plinian eruption creating a vast new caldera and wiping out much of the Bay of Naples, in early September 2024.
Depending on how badly it erupts, that could range between "devastation to Southern Europe" and "civilizational collapse in the northern hemisphere." Burying half of Europe under and ash-field and wiping out a non-trivial proportion of food production on the planet would have pretty serious effects. (I've seen speculation that an earlier Campi Phlaegri eruption provided the final nail to render the Neanderthals extinct).
Which would be a sufficiently large black swan to render all the other predictions irrelevant, I'll grant you, but we may not be congratulating you online on your successful guess.
With regard to the discovery of intelligent life, fi is, I think, the biggest unknown in the Drake Equation. You can't really extrapolate from a sample of one, but it seems to me that it's not ridiculously difficult for life to get started in a simple way given a sufficiently large and complex environment that remains relatively stable for a long period of time, such as the early Earth (though that may not be so common either). The development of intelligent life is another matter again though. It took a long time for human-level intelligence to develop on Earth, despite plenty of opportunity for it to do so, and its eventual emergence in hominids seems to have happened almost by chance.
I do recall seeing a theory that for a planet to be stable enough to support an evolutionary chain long enough to result in intelligence, an exceptionally large moon might be necessary. The tidal effects would stabilise the spin axis (Mars, in comparison to Earth, apparently had significant axial tilt changes multiple times in just the past few million years). Our Moon is exceptionally large for a planet our size - in our current knowledge - and the course of events that led to its formation (as we understand it) were quite freakish.
I also recall Asimov (who was quite scientifically sharp) speculating that the tidal effects of such a large Moon on flexing the Earth's crust may have led to heavier elements (such as uranium) being unusually concentrated near the surface and possibly contributing to the mutation rate that is necessary for evolution in "shorter" timescales (and perhaps even to tectonic plate formation, which may be necessary for life). No idea how solid this speculation may be, but those are the best argument for intelligent life being extremely rare - and they are VERY speculative.
Yes, I think the moon has played an essential role in creating an environment suitable for life on Earth. For intelligent life to evolve, you need, fundamentally, a sufficiently large, complex, long-lasting and stable (but not too stable) environment, and the presence of the moon has been vital in creating this on earth. My feeling is that this set of conditions is likely to be fulfilled very rarely and that the evolution of intelligent life is an extremely unusual occurrence. We may not be alone in the universe, but I think we might as well be, given the likely rarity of intelligent life and the distances involved.
Do we really know the pre-requisites for intelligent life to evolve? And are we referring to humanity as the example? Arguably humans arose fairly rapidly from common ancesters to the other great apes etc. Why didn't an intelligent dinosaur arise? Some were bipedal and thus in theory could have developed tool use. I think of our intelligence as a quirk of evolution - other creatures are faster, stronger etc, we are weak, slow etc but cunning.
You certainly get the impression that intelligence isn't a particularly useful trait for survival beyond that needed to find food and evade predators. The development of human-level intelligence seems to have required a very specific set of circumstances.
With regard to the discovery of intelligent life, fi is, I think, the biggest unknown in the Drake Equation. You can't really extrapolate from a sample of one, but it seems to me that it's not ridiculously difficult for life to get started in a simple way given a sufficiently large and complex environment that remains relatively stable for a long period of time, such as the early Earth (though that may not be so common either). The development of intelligent life is another matter again though. It took a long time for human-level intelligence to develop on Earth, despite plenty of opportunity for it to do so, and its eventual emergence in hominids seems to have happened almost by chance.
I do recall seeing a theory that for a planet to be stable enough to support an evolutionary chain long enough to result in intelligence, an exceptionally large moon might be necessary. The tidal effects would stabilise the spin axis (Mars, in comparison to Earth, apparently had significant axial tilt changes multiple times in just the past few million years). Our Moon is exceptionally large for a planet our size - in our current knowledge - and the course of events that led to its formation (as we understand it) were quite freakish.
I also recall Asimov (who was quite scientifically sharp) speculating that the tidal effects of such a large Moon on flexing the Earth's crust may have led to heavier elements (such as uranium) being unusually concentrated near the surface and possibly contributing to the mutation rate that is necessary for evolution in "shorter" timescales (and perhaps even to tectonic plate formation, which may be necessary for life). No idea how solid this speculation may be, but those are the best argument for intelligent life being extremely rare - and they are VERY speculative.
Yes, I think the moon has played an essential role in creating an environment suitable for life on Earth. For intelligent life to evolve, you need, fundamentally, a sufficiently large, complex, long-lasting and stable (but not too stable) environment, and the presence of the moon has been vital in creating this on earth. My feeling is that this set of conditions is likely to be fulfilled very rarely and that the evolution of intelligent life is an extremely unusual occurrence. We may not be alone in the universe, but I think we might as well be, given the likely rarity of intelligent life and the distances involved.
There are two distinct meanings to 'intelligent life' in one important respect.
The laws of physics, biology and evolution can give an account of how by the survival of the fittest etc first life can come by adaptation to develop into tigers and elephants and so on. This requires objective and metaphorical intelligence. But it does not require (though I have no doubt it in fact has) subjective intelligence, any more than the remarkable capacities of oak trees does (most people, pace King Charles III think oak trees lack this quality, though I feel agnostic about it.)
We know quite a lot about the evolution of objective capacities, but nothing at all about the evolution (the how and why and by what mechanism) of the subjective ones. In this respect speculation from our only sample planet can easily go too far.
I was very taken by the idea of alien intelligence in the classic sci-fi "Solaris" being simply not interested in us. Well worth a read.
With regard to the discovery of intelligent life, fi is, I think, the biggest unknown in the Drake Equation. You can't really extrapolate from a sample of one, but it seems to me that it's not ridiculously difficult for life to get started in a simple way given a sufficiently large and complex environment that remains relatively stable for a long period of time, such as the early Earth (though that may not be so common either). The development of intelligent life is another matter again though. It took a long time for human-level intelligence to develop on Earth, despite plenty of opportunity for it to do so, and its eventual emergence in hominids seems to have happened almost by chance.
I do recall seeing a theory that for a planet to be stable enough to support an evolutionary chain long enough to result in intelligence, an exceptionally large moon might be necessary. The tidal effects would stabilise the spin axis (Mars, in comparison to Earth, apparently had significant axial tilt changes multiple times in just the past few million years). Our Moon is exceptionally large for a planet our size - in our current knowledge - and the course of events that led to its formation (as we understand it) were quite freakish.
I also recall Asimov (who was quite scientifically sharp) speculating that the tidal effects of such a large Moon on flexing the Earth's crust may have led to heavier elements (such as uranium) being unusually concentrated near the surface and possibly contributing to the mutation rate that is necessary for evolution in "shorter" timescales (and perhaps even to tectonic plate formation, which may be necessary for life). No idea how solid this speculation may be, but those are the best argument for intelligent life being extremely rare - and they are VERY speculative.
But it’s all still anthropocentric in the extreme
This is how intelligent life as we understand and which is really really like us might evolve. Intelligent life - sentient gas clouds, really smart hives of silicon based amoebae - might evolve in ways we don’t understand and - more importantly - might never be able to understand no more than a wasp can ever understand Mozart, even if you lock it in a room with a chamber orchestra forever playing the 40th symphony
True, but: 1 - As we've only got that sample size of one, all of our understanding is going to be based on ringing the changes on it (and speculation on more esoteric ones becomes even further away from our ability to even remotely meaningfully estimate chances); 2 - If intelligent life is so different from our experience and comprehension that we can't even perceive it, for our purposes, it may as well not exist (up to the point where its decisions impact upon us. At which point we may well perceive it, so it no longer falls into this category).
With regard to the discovery of intelligent life, fi is, I think, the biggest unknown in the Drake Equation. You can't really extrapolate from a sample of one, but it seems to me that it's not ridiculously difficult for life to get started in a simple way given a sufficiently large and complex environment that remains relatively stable for a long period of time, such as the early Earth (though that may not be so common either). The development of intelligent life is another matter again though. It took a long time for human-level intelligence to develop on Earth, despite plenty of opportunity for it to do so, and its eventual emergence in hominids seems to have happened almost by chance.
I do recall seeing a theory that for a planet to be stable enough to support an evolutionary chain long enough to result in intelligence, an exceptionally large moon might be necessary. The tidal effects would stabilise the spin axis (Mars, in comparison to Earth, apparently had significant axial tilt changes multiple times in just the past few million years). Our Moon is exceptionally large for a planet our size - in our current knowledge - and the course of events that led to its formation (as we understand it) were quite freakish.
I also recall Asimov (who was quite scientifically sharp) speculating that the tidal effects of such a large Moon on flexing the Earth's crust may have led to heavier elements (such as uranium) being unusually concentrated near the surface and possibly contributing to the mutation rate that is necessary for evolution in "shorter" timescales (and perhaps even to tectonic plate formation, which may be necessary for life). No idea how solid this speculation may be, but those are the best argument for intelligent life being extremely rare - and they are VERY speculative.
Yes, I think the moon has played an essential role in creating an environment suitable for life on Earth. For intelligent life to evolve, you need, fundamentally, a sufficiently large, complex, long-lasting and stable (but not too stable) environment, and the presence of the moon has been vital in creating this on earth. My feeling is that this set of conditions is likely to be fulfilled very rarely and that the evolution of intelligent life is an extremely unusual occurrence. We may not be alone in the universe, but I think we might as well be, given the likely rarity of intelligent life and the distances involved.
Do we really know the pre-requisites for intelligent life to evolve? And are we referring to humanity as the example? Arguably humans arose fairly rapidly from common ancesters to the other great apes etc. Why didn't an intelligent dinosaur arise? Some were bipedal and thus in theory could have developed tool use. I think of our intelligence as a quirk of evolution - other creatures are faster, stronger etc, we are weak, slow etc but cunning.
The pre-requisites for life developing on a given planet are generally assumed to be "anything we have access to on Earth, and an absence of anything we don't have". So, the answer to the first question is basically "no". The second question is even harder to answer, because the sample size we have to work with is even smaller.
It's why debates about evolution get so tiresome, because, if you break it down enough, evolutionary biologists and creationists are actually arguing from indistinguishable points of view.
With regard to the discovery of intelligent life, fi is, I think, the biggest unknown in the Drake Equation. You can't really extrapolate from a sample of one, but it seems to me that it's not ridiculously difficult for life to get started in a simple way given a sufficiently large and complex environment that remains relatively stable for a long period of time, such as the early Earth (though that may not be so common either). The development of intelligent life is another matter again though. It took a long time for human-level intelligence to develop on Earth, despite plenty of opportunity for it to do so, and its eventual emergence in hominids seems to have happened almost by chance.
I do recall seeing a theory that for a planet to be stable enough to support an evolutionary chain long enough to result in intelligence, an exceptionally large moon might be necessary. The tidal effects would stabilise the spin axis (Mars, in comparison to Earth, apparently had significant axial tilt changes multiple times in just the past few million years). Our Moon is exceptionally large for a planet our size - in our current knowledge - and the course of events that led to its formation (as we understand it) were quite freakish.
I also recall Asimov (who was quite scientifically sharp) speculating that the tidal effects of such a large Moon on flexing the Earth's crust may have led to heavier elements (such as uranium) being unusually concentrated near the surface and possibly contributing to the mutation rate that is necessary for evolution in "shorter" timescales (and perhaps even to tectonic plate formation, which may be necessary for life). No idea how solid this speculation may be, but those are the best argument for intelligent life being extremely rare - and they are VERY speculative.
Yes, I think the moon has played an essential role in creating an environment suitable for life on Earth. For intelligent life to evolve, you need, fundamentally, a sufficiently large, complex, long-lasting and stable (but not too stable) environment, and the presence of the moon has been vital in creating this on earth. My feeling is that this set of conditions is likely to be fulfilled very rarely and that the evolution of intelligent life is an extremely unusual occurrence. We may not be alone in the universe, but I think we might as well be, given the likely rarity of intelligent life and the distances involved.
Do we really know the pre-requisites for intelligent life to evolve? And are we referring to humanity as the example? Arguably humans arose fairly rapidly from common ancesters to the other great apes etc. Why didn't an intelligent dinosaur arise? Some were bipedal and thus in theory could have developed tool use. I think of our intelligence as a quirk of evolution - other creatures are faster, stronger etc, we are weak, slow etc but cunning.
You certainly get the impression that intelligence isn't a particularly useful trait for survival beyond that needed to find food and evade predators. The development of human-level intelligence seems to have required a very specific set of circumstances.
No, the development of human-LIKE intelligence, AKA "humans", requires a certain set of circumstances, funnily enough, the ones we evolved in
It is beyond arrogant to assume that all intelligent life MUST evolve in the ways and context we did, for a start we might live in one of an infinite number of parallel universes where EVERY kind of life MUST evolve. Some of them might be able to move between and around universes, or dimensions, or time
This really is one occasion for thinking outside the box, to put it with exceptional mildness
The FIRST kinds of life we encounter are likely to be similar to us, because that is what we are attuned to, and that is in our bandwidth and our intellectual spectrum: the same way ants can become really aware of other ants, or maybe woodlice or dead bees, but don't have much clue about the mortgage broker who owns the Chiswick garden in which they build their nest
With regard to the discovery of intelligent life, fi is, I think, the biggest unknown in the Drake Equation. You can't really extrapolate from a sample of one, but it seems to me that it's not ridiculously difficult for life to get started in a simple way given a sufficiently large and complex environment that remains relatively stable for a long period of time, such as the early Earth (though that may not be so common either). The development of intelligent life is another matter again though. It took a long time for human-level intelligence to develop on Earth, despite plenty of opportunity for it to do so, and its eventual emergence in hominids seems to have happened almost by chance.
I do recall seeing a theory that for a planet to be stable enough to support an evolutionary chain long enough to result in intelligence, an exceptionally large moon might be necessary. The tidal effects would stabilise the spin axis (Mars, in comparison to Earth, apparently had significant axial tilt changes multiple times in just the past few million years). Our Moon is exceptionally large for a planet our size - in our current knowledge - and the course of events that led to its formation (as we understand it) were quite freakish.
I also recall Asimov (who was quite scientifically sharp) speculating that the tidal effects of such a large Moon on flexing the Earth's crust may have led to heavier elements (such as uranium) being unusually concentrated near the surface and possibly contributing to the mutation rate that is necessary for evolution in "shorter" timescales (and perhaps even to tectonic plate formation, which may be necessary for life). No idea how solid this speculation may be, but those are the best argument for intelligent life being extremely rare - and they are VERY speculative.
Yes, I think the moon has played an essential role in creating an environment suitable for life on Earth. For intelligent life to evolve, you need, fundamentally, a sufficiently large, complex, long-lasting and stable (but not too stable) environment, and the presence of the moon has been vital in creating this on earth. My feeling is that this set of conditions is likely to be fulfilled very rarely and that the evolution of intelligent life is an extremely unusual occurrence. We may not be alone in the universe, but I think we might as well be, given the likely rarity of intelligent life and the distances involved.
Do we really know the pre-requisites for intelligent life to evolve? And are we referring to humanity as the example? Arguably humans arose fairly rapidly from common ancesters to the other great apes etc. Why didn't an intelligent dinosaur arise? Some were bipedal and thus in theory could have developed tool use. I think of our intelligence as a quirk of evolution - other creatures are faster, stronger etc, we are weak, slow etc but cunning.
The pre-requisites for life developing on a given planet are generally assumed to be "anything we have access to on Earth, and an absence of anything we don't have". So, the answer to the first question is basically "no". The second question is even harder to answer, because the sample size we have to work with is even smaller.
It's why debates about evolution get so tiresome, because, if you break it down enough, evolutionary biologists and creationists are actually arguing from indistinguishable points of view.
But everyone should agree that Giordano Bruno should be rehabilitated.
This could also be a plausible black swan event. Unlike last August with LK-99, it has apparently already been replicated (although I'd like to see solid confirmation on that), and the researchers are being far more cautious in their claims (which does usually characterise genuine successes).
Going to need to see a lot more on this, but an ambient pressure near-room-temperature superconductor could be very very significant indeed. IF it pans out (still very much to see yet)
1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. 12%
2. Date of the next UK General Election. 26th September
3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called. Sunak, Starmer, Davey, Yousaf, Tice
4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%). Labour majority 180
5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. Haley & Biden
6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. Haley
7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. 4.75%
8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 4.2%). 3.9%
9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). £108bn
10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). 67
Yet another Haley prediction!
I'll be interested to see what the 'hive mind' summary is on Saturday if @Benpointer is able to do a summation.
I've bet on Haley as my long shot bet for GOP, but I am pretty sure it wont happen.
Haley is a good shout for a political betting site. Probably the biggest thing counting against Trump in the nomination process is that his record in office was so shambolic he didn’t deliver on expectations. For example, if he had gone down the route of state governor first, to prove with evidence he could run an administration that delivers, he would never have won the nomination on such a record of chaos and non delivery. It’s not Trump any Trump supporters want, it’s delivery of the Trump agenda.
I'm not sure that's true of all or even most of them. I know a few, and from what I can see, Trump supporters break down into the following, overlapping, categories:
- those who really hate woke/political correctness/the Democrats/New World Order/liberal media/Washington swamp, and regard everything the NY Times/MSNBC/mainstream media post against him as proof that he's right - those who regard politics as entertainment, a reality show for ugly people, or cage wrestling with words, and just see Trump as more entertaining than Biden, even if the joke is ultimately on them. For these people, there's no such thing as bad publicity for Trump - those who believe in Trump's policies. But I think this is the smallest category, because he's so erratic there's no telling what those are from one month to the next. You do meet people, occasionally, who really like his tax cuts or conservative judge nominations or whatever though.
None of these groups are particularly susceptible to reasoned debate on record in government or policy options, which is why Trump's popularity is so strong despite the various disasters and terrible decisions of his years in power.
The ultimate test of your claim “Trumps popularity is so strong” only comes at the general election. Let’s dig this post of yours out again after the result. Who won’t just lose tge White House, he will cost the party the house and Senate too.
Trump only won the first time due to the “Brexit States” hitting the “we have nothing to lose but hit the promise of change” button. That’s a one hit button. Once the penny drops you won’t reverse globalisation, bring all the jobs and wealth back, and turn rust into gleaming steal, your promises don’t get their vote again.
It’s not remotely ideological. Take UK Red Wall as example - pro Brexit Corbyn lost the Red Wall, those voters now switch to Brexit hater Starmer on the ideological point of Brexit? It’s not remotely ideological. There’s no ideological point there, or Starmer would get a worse Red Wall result than Corbyn.
Corbyn actually won the red wall seats in 2017, the red wall voted for Boris in 2019 to get Brexit done, note for Boris not the Tories. Now Boris has gone and Brexit has gone they have just gone back to voting for Labour as most of them normally do.
Daft post HY. “Corbyn won Red Wall seats” so did all Labour leaders.
The point remains, if Red Wall believe in and want Brexit to happen- that is UKs economic divergence from EU in order to finally bring the promised brexit benefits, then they would vote Tory at the 2024 election, not for Starmer, Lamy and a Labour top team of Brexit haters.
Brexit was done in 2020, we left the single market in 2021. Now even Starmer says he won't take the UK back into the EEA let alone reverse Brexit.
The redwallers got the Brexit they voted for in 2019, now even Starmer Labour won't reverse Brexit they will mostly vote Labour again
On the migration point, ReFUK and Tice are very clearly going fishing for angry red wall voters who think they voted for the foreign to go home and still want that to happen. Some of these are the voters who have gone Lab > UKIP > Con/BXP and aren't going back to Labour.
But how many are there ? Not many I’d suspect. I live and work in north east red wall area and my, admittedly anecdotal, experience is people care far more about car insurance going up, the price of groceries, utility prices, buses not running until recently due to strikes, things just not feeling like they work and high council tax, than they do a few thousand people coming over on rubber dinghies.
But politics isn’t just about what issues are important; it’s also about the whys, providing a reason. Why is car insurance going up, the price of groceries high, buses not running, etc.? RefUK seek to persuade people that the reason is because of immigrants and the failure to deliver Brexit. Labour seek to persuade people it’s because of the Tories. The Tories seek to persuade people it’s because of… immigrants again? The unions? Labour? Woke culture?
There was a judge in Texas, a while back who wore a gun under his robe. IIRC a defendant made a grab for a courtroom security guy's gun. The judge shot him dead.
This could also be a plausible black swan event. Unlike last August with LK-99, it has apparently already been replicated (although I'd like to see solid confirmation on that), and the researchers are being far more cautious in their claims (which does usually characterise genuine successes).
Going to need to see a lot more on this, but an ambient pressure near-room-temperature superconductor could be very very significant indeed. IF it pans out (still very much to see yet)
For a layman, such as myself, why is this possibly significant ?
1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. 12%
2. Date of the next UK General Election. 26th September
3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called. Sunak, Starmer, Davey, Yousaf, Tice
4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%). Labour majority 180
5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. Haley & Biden
6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. Haley
7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. 4.75%
8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 4.2%). 3.9%
9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). £108bn
10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). 67
Yet another Haley prediction!
I'll be interested to see what the 'hive mind' summary is on Saturday if @Benpointer is able to do a summation.
I've bet on Haley as my long shot bet for GOP, but I am pretty sure it wont happen.
Haley is a good shout for a political betting site. Probably the biggest thing counting against Trump in the nomination process is that his record in office was so shambolic he didn’t deliver on expectations. For example, if he had gone down the route of state governor first, to prove with evidence he could run an administration that delivers, he would never have won the nomination on such a record of chaos and non delivery. It’s not Trump any Trump supporters want, it’s delivery of the Trump agenda.
I'm not sure that's true of all or even most of them. I know a few, and from what I can see, Trump supporters break down into the following, overlapping, categories:
- those who really hate woke/political correctness/the Democrats/New World Order/liberal media/Washington swamp, and regard everything the NY Times/MSNBC/mainstream media post against him as proof that he's right - those who regard politics as entertainment, a reality show for ugly people, or cage wrestling with words, and just see Trump as more entertaining than Biden, even if the joke is ultimately on them. For these people, there's no such thing as bad publicity for Trump - those who believe in Trump's policies. But I think this is the smallest category, because he's so erratic there's no telling what those are from one month to the next. You do meet people, occasionally, who really like his tax cuts or conservative judge nominations or whatever though.
None of these groups are particularly susceptible to reasoned debate on record in government or policy options, which is why Trump's popularity is so strong despite the various disasters and terrible decisions of his years in power.
The ultimate test of your claim “Trumps popularity is so strong” only comes at the general election. Let’s dig this post of yours out again after the result. Who won’t just lose tge White House, he will cost the party the house and Senate too.
Trump only won the first time due to the “Brexit States” hitting the “we have nothing to lose but hit the promise of change” button. That’s a one hit button. Once the penny drops you won’t reverse globalisation, bring all the jobs and wealth back, and turn rust into gleaming steal, your promises don’t get their vote again.
It’s not remotely ideological. Take UK Red Wall as example - pro Brexit Corbyn lost the Red Wall, those voters now switch to Brexit hater Starmer on the ideological point of Brexit? It’s not remotely ideological. There’s no ideological point there, or Starmer would get a worse Red Wall result than Corbyn.
Corbyn actually won the red wall seats in 2017, the red wall voted for Boris in 2019 to get Brexit done, note for Boris not the Tories. Now Boris has gone and Brexit has gone they have just gone back to voting for Labour as most of them normally do.
Daft post HY. “Corbyn won Red Wall seats” so did all Labour leaders.
The point remains, if Red Wall believe in and want Brexit to happen- that is UKs economic divergence from EU in order to finally bring the promised brexit benefits, then they would vote Tory at the 2024 election, not for Starmer, Lamy and a Labour top team of Brexit haters.
Brexit was done in 2020, we left the single market in 2021. Now even Starmer says he won't take the UK back into the EEA let alone reverse Brexit.
The redwallers got the Brexit they voted for in 2019, now even Starmer Labour won't reverse Brexit they will mostly vote Labour again
“Brexit was done in 2020. Redwallers got the brexit they voted for.”
You are simply repeating, not listening to what’s being put to you. Redwallers were promised benefits of Brexit, it is not done or delivered until those are delivered. Essentially, they were promised they would feel better off. They would see an improvement in public services. And where immigration looked a bit out of control pre Brexit, governments not keeping to “tens of thousands” of immigration promises pre Brexit, we would have control back to deliver this after Brexit.
Until these things are delivered, no it’s not done is it. That is the question being put to you HY, and you really have no choice but to agree. Because, whilst voters supported the Tory party to deliver on the Brexit promises, those voters are now marking the Tory’s down as failed to deliver on Brexit promise, and are now looking elsewhere for those same things to be delivered. Take a look at the polls.
So lets go down the Sunak election rabbit hole. Despite building momentum towards 2nd May, he decided the best decision is no decision. So we go on. They get a beating in the locals, which gets the parliamentary party creating all kinds of aggro. The recession and poor economic performance makes building any kind of momentum difficult.
So we get through a very silly summer, endless complaining and plotting. An election needs to be called but they are in a worse place than they were in March. Tory conference turns into another mess, so that window passes and besides which the King reiterates he is in Samoa Australia and New Zealand. Then the US election gets messy.
Like having children, if you wait for the right time it will never happen. There is no right time to go - the polls won't swing back in their favour, and the longer they go on the further away that is.
He can say "2nd half of the year" but he will dither on, behind in the polls, battered by his own side, waiting for *something* to happen. So if he doesn't go for 2nd May, there is a real likelihood that it drags out to 23rd January 2025. With the New Year campaign as the wild card attempt to make something change...
Poor Rishi now even the weather Gods want rid of him .
A chance now of some severe winter weather towards the second half of January . Likely to hit GDP so his growth pledge which was on shaky ground is likely to take a further hit .
This could also be a plausible black swan event. Unlike last August with LK-99, it has apparently already been replicated (although I'd like to see solid confirmation on that), and the researchers are being far more cautious in their claims (which does usually characterise genuine successes).
Going to need to see a lot more on this, but an ambient pressure near-room-temperature superconductor could be very very significant indeed. IF it pans out (still very much to see yet)
For a layman, such as myself, why is this possibly significant ?
Traditional superconductors need liquid helium temperatures. This is claiming domestic fridge reachable temperatures.
Which would bring superconductors out of a "exotic" uses such as MRI machines - to things like transport. Maglev trains might get another look, for a start.
November then, IMHO. Afraid we’ve got another 10 months of this. Sigh.
Unless he is doing this to try and catch Labour off guard, but I’m not sure I credit him with that much strategic thinking.
No. September. Only another 8 months or so.
A campaign in the school holidays? That would be brave.
Rishi really isn't much of a politician is he.
The only thing from June onwards is that everyone will have forgot about the tax cuts (as prices instantly swallow the extra spending power) and the likelihood of small boats still crossing the channel...
1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. 12%
2. Date of the next UK General Election. 26th September
3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called. Sunak, Starmer, Davey, Yousaf, Tice
4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%). Labour majority 180
5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. Haley & Biden
6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. Haley
7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. 4.75%
8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 4.2%). 3.9%
9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). £108bn
10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). 67
Yet another Haley prediction!
I'll be interested to see what the 'hive mind' summary is on Saturday if @Benpointer is able to do a summation.
I've bet on Haley as my long shot bet for GOP, but I am pretty sure it wont happen.
Haley is a good shout for a political betting site. Probably the biggest thing counting against Trump in the nomination process is that his record in office was so shambolic he didn’t deliver on expectations. For example, if he had gone down the route of state governor first, to prove with evidence he could run an administration that delivers, he would never have won the nomination on such a record of chaos and non delivery. It’s not Trump any Trump supporters want, it’s delivery of the Trump agenda.
I'm not sure that's true of all or even most of them. I know a few, and from what I can see, Trump supporters break down into the following, overlapping, categories:
- those who really hate woke/political correctness/the Democrats/New World Order/liberal media/Washington swamp, and regard everything the NY Times/MSNBC/mainstream media post against him as proof that he's right - those who regard politics as entertainment, a reality show for ugly people, or cage wrestling with words, and just see Trump as more entertaining than Biden, even if the joke is ultimately on them. For these people, there's no such thing as bad publicity for Trump - those who believe in Trump's policies. But I think this is the smallest category, because he's so erratic there's no telling what those are from one month to the next. You do meet people, occasionally, who really like his tax cuts or conservative judge nominations or whatever though.
None of these groups are particularly susceptible to reasoned debate on record in government or policy options, which is why Trump's popularity is so strong despite the various disasters and terrible decisions of his years in power.
The ultimate test of your claim “Trumps popularity is so strong” only comes at the general election. Let’s dig this post of yours out again after the result. Who won’t just lose tge White House, he will cost the party the house and Senate too.
Trump only won the first time due to the “Brexit States” hitting the “we have nothing to lose but hit the promise of change” button. That’s a one hit button. Once the penny drops you won’t reverse globalisation, bring all the jobs and wealth back, and turn rust into gleaming steal, your promises don’t get their vote again.
It’s not remotely ideological. Take UK Red Wall as example - pro Brexit Corbyn lost the Red Wall, those voters now switch to Brexit hater Starmer on the ideological point of Brexit? It’s not remotely ideological. There’s no ideological point there, or Starmer would get a worse Red Wall result than Corbyn.
Corbyn actually won the red wall seats in 2017, the red wall voted for Boris in 2019 to get Brexit done, note for Boris not the Tories. Now Boris has gone and Brexit has gone they have just gone back to voting for Labour as most of them normally do.
Daft post HY. “Corbyn won Red Wall seats” so did all Labour leaders.
The point remains, if Red Wall believe in and want Brexit to happen- that is UKs economic divergence from EU in order to finally bring the promised brexit benefits, then they would vote Tory at the 2024 election, not for Starmer, Lamy and a Labour top team of Brexit haters.
Brexit was done in 2020, we left the single market in 2021. Now even Starmer says he won't take the UK back into the EEA let alone reverse Brexit.
The redwallers got the Brexit they voted for in 2019, now even Starmer Labour won't reverse Brexit they will mostly vote Labour again
“Brexit was done in 2020. Redwallers got the brexit they voted for.”
You are simply repeating, not listening to what’s being put to you. Redwallers were promised benefits of Brexit, it is not done or delivered until those are delivered. Essentially, they were promised they would feel better off. They would see an improvement in public services. And where immigration looked a bit out of control pre Brexit, governments not keeping to “tens of thousands” of immigration promises pre Brexit, we would have control back to deliver this after Brexit.
Until these things are delivered, no it’s not done is it. That is the question being put to you HY, and you really have no choice but to agree. Because, whilst voters supported the Tory party to deliver on the Brexit promises, those voters are now marking the Tory’s down as failed to deliver on Brexit promise, and are now looking elsewhere for those same things to be delivered. Take a look at the polls.
More money has been put into the NHS and EU migrants now cannot get a Visa to work in the UK unless they earn over £38k a year thanks to the new government proposals.
So yes Brexit is done, done so much even Starmer Labour now promises not to reverse Brexit, not to restore free movement and not to return to the EU or EEA.
The 2019 general election was a clear choice for the UK of Brexit with the Boris led Conservatives or EUref2 or no Brexit at all with Corbyn Labour or the LDs.
Boris won that general election and now this year's general election will not be about Brexit unlike 2019 as both Starmer Labour and the Sunak Tories back Brexit and won't reverse it
1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. 12%
2. Date of the next UK General Election. 26th September
3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called. Sunak, Starmer, Davey, Yousaf, Tice
4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%). Labour majority 180
5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. Haley & Biden
6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. Haley
7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. 4.75%
8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 4.2%). 3.9%
9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). £108bn
10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). 67
Yet another Haley prediction!
I'll be interested to see what the 'hive mind' summary is on Saturday if @Benpointer is able to do a summation.
I've bet on Haley as my long shot bet for GOP, but I am pretty sure it wont happen.
Haley is a good shout for a political betting site. Probably the biggest thing counting against Trump in the nomination process is that his record in office was so shambolic he didn’t deliver on expectations. For example, if he had gone down the route of state governor first, to prove with evidence he could run an administration that delivers, he would never have won the nomination on such a record of chaos and non delivery. It’s not Trump any Trump supporters want, it’s delivery of the Trump agenda.
I'm not sure that's true of all or even most of them. I know a few, and from what I can see, Trump supporters break down into the following, overlapping, categories:
- those who really hate woke/political correctness/the Democrats/New World Order/liberal media/Washington swamp, and regard everything the NY Times/MSNBC/mainstream media post against him as proof that he's right - those who regard politics as entertainment, a reality show for ugly people, or cage wrestling with words, and just see Trump as more entertaining than Biden, even if the joke is ultimately on them. For these people, there's no such thing as bad publicity for Trump - those who believe in Trump's policies. But I think this is the smallest category, because he's so erratic there's no telling what those are from one month to the next. You do meet people, occasionally, who really like his tax cuts or conservative judge nominations or whatever though.
None of these groups are particularly susceptible to reasoned debate on record in government or policy options, which is why Trump's popularity is so strong despite the various disasters and terrible decisions of his years in power.
The ultimate test of your claim “Trumps popularity is so strong” only comes at the general election. Let’s dig this post of yours out again after the result. Who won’t just lose tge White House, he will cost the party the house and Senate too.
Trump only won the first time due to the “Brexit States” hitting the “we have nothing to lose but hit the promise of change” button. That’s a one hit button. Once the penny drops you won’t reverse globalisation, bring all the jobs and wealth back, and turn rust into gleaming steal, your promises don’t get their vote again.
It’s not remotely ideological. Take UK Red Wall as example - pro Brexit Corbyn lost the Red Wall, those voters now switch to Brexit hater Starmer on the ideological point of Brexit? It’s not remotely ideological. There’s no ideological point there, or Starmer would get a worse Red Wall result than Corbyn.
Corbyn actually won the red wall seats in 2017, the red wall voted for Boris in 2019 to get Brexit done, note for Boris not the Tories. Now Boris has gone and Brexit has gone they have just gone back to voting for Labour as most of them normally do.
Daft post HY. “Corbyn won Red Wall seats” so did all Labour leaders.
The point remains, if Red Wall believe in and want Brexit to happen- that is UKs economic divergence from EU in order to finally bring the promised brexit benefits, then they would vote Tory at the 2024 election, not for Starmer, Lamy and a Labour top team of Brexit haters.
Brexit was done in 2020, we left the single market in 2021. Now even Starmer says he won't take the UK back into the EEA let alone reverse Brexit.
The redwallers got the Brexit they voted for in 2019, now even Starmer Labour won't reverse Brexit they will mostly vote Labour again
On the migration point, ReFUK and Tice are very clearly going fishing for angry red wall voters who think they voted for the foreign to go home and still want that to happen. Some of these are the voters who have gone Lab > UKIP > Con/BXP and aren't going back to Labour.
But how many are there ? Not many I’d suspect. I live and work in north east red wall area and my, admittedly anecdotal, experience is people care far more about car insurance going up, the price of groceries, utility prices, buses not running until recently due to strikes, things just not feeling like they work and high council tax, than they do a few thousand people coming over on rubber dinghies.
But politics isn’t just about what issues are important; it’s also about the whys, providing a reason. Why is car insurance going up, the price of groceries high, buses not running, etc.? RefUK seek to persuade people that the reason is because of immigrants and the failure to deliver Brexit. Labour seek to persuade people it’s because of the Tories. The Tories seek to persuade people it’s because of… immigrants again? The unions? Labour? Woke culture?
“The Tories seek to persuade people it’s because of”
The true Tory position, from True Tory’s, is Brexit has been delivered. Brexit is done. It’s history. There is no failure to deliver Brexit. Take a look at HY’s posts.
This could also be a plausible black swan event. Unlike last August with LK-99, it has apparently already been replicated (although I'd like to see solid confirmation on that), and the researchers are being far more cautious in their claims (which does usually characterise genuine successes).
Going to need to see a lot more on this, but an ambient pressure near-room-temperature superconductor could be very very significant indeed. IF it pans out (still very much to see yet)
For a layman, such as myself, why is this possibly significant ?
Lots of applications. Personally I use liquid helium cooled superconductors in nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers and hospitals use it in MRI. Removing the need for liquid he will be huge cost wise and potentially tech wise too. Then there is power transmission - no electrical resistance.
Then there is applications towards nuclear fusion (which I think uses superconducters to manage the high temps and pressures needed).
This could also be a plausible black swan event. Unlike last August with LK-99, it has apparently already been replicated (although I'd like to see solid confirmation on that), and the researchers are being far more cautious in their claims (which does usually characterise genuine successes).
Going to need to see a lot more on this, but an ambient pressure near-room-temperature superconductor could be very very significant indeed. IF it pans out (still very much to see yet)
For a layman, such as myself, why is this possibly significant ?
Traditional superconductors need liquid helium temperatures. This is claiming domestic fridge reachable temperatures.
Which would bring superconductors out of a "exotic" uses such as MRI machines - to things like transport. Maglev trains might get another look, for a start.
So lets go down the Sunak election rabbit hole. Despite building momentum towards 2nd May, he decided the best decision is no decision. So we go on. They get a beating in the locals, which gets the parliamentary party creating all kinds of aggro. The recession and poor economic performance makes building any kind of momentum difficult.
So we get through a very silly summer, endless complaining and plotting. An election needs to be called but they are in a worse place than they were in March. Tory conference turns into another mess, so that window passes and besides which the King reiterates he is in Samoa Australia and New Zealand. Then the US election gets messy.
Like having children, if you wait for the right time it will never happen. There is no right time to go - the polls won't swing back in their favour, and the longer they go on the further away that is.
He can say "2nd half of the year" but he will dither on, behind in the polls, battered by his own side, waiting for *something* to happen. So if he doesn't go for 2nd May, there is a real likelihood that it drags out to 23rd January 2025. With the New Year campaign as the wild card attempt to make something change...
Plenty of small boat crossings to come in the summer months too (if the Great British Weather is kind).
1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. 12%
2. Date of the next UK General Election. 26th September
3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called. Sunak, Starmer, Davey, Yousaf, Tice
4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%). Labour majority 180
5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. Haley & Biden
6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. Haley
7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. 4.75%
8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 4.2%). 3.9%
9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). £108bn
10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). 67
Yet another Haley prediction!
I'll be interested to see what the 'hive mind' summary is on Saturday if @Benpointer is able to do a summation.
I've bet on Haley as my long shot bet for GOP, but I am pretty sure it wont happen.
Haley is a good shout for a political betting site. Probably the biggest thing counting against Trump in the nomination process is that his record in office was so shambolic he didn’t deliver on expectations. For example, if he had gone down the route of state governor first, to prove with evidence he could run an administration that delivers, he would never have won the nomination on such a record of chaos and non delivery. It’s not Trump any Trump supporters want, it’s delivery of the Trump agenda.
I'm not sure that's true of all or even most of them. I know a few, and from what I can see, Trump supporters break down into the following, overlapping, categories:
- those who really hate woke/political correctness/the Democrats/New World Order/liberal media/Washington swamp, and regard everything the NY Times/MSNBC/mainstream media post against him as proof that he's right - those who regard politics as entertainment, a reality show for ugly people, or cage wrestling with words, and just see Trump as more entertaining than Biden, even if the joke is ultimately on them. For these people, there's no such thing as bad publicity for Trump - those who believe in Trump's policies. But I think this is the smallest category, because he's so erratic there's no telling what those are from one month to the next. You do meet people, occasionally, who really like his tax cuts or conservative judge nominations or whatever though.
None of these groups are particularly susceptible to reasoned debate on record in government or policy options, which is why Trump's popularity is so strong despite the various disasters and terrible decisions of his years in power.
The ultimate test of your claim “Trumps popularity is so strong” only comes at the general election. Let’s dig this post of yours out again after the result. Who won’t just lose tge White House, he will cost the party the house and Senate too.
Trump only won the first time due to the “Brexit States” hitting the “we have nothing to lose but hit the promise of change” button. That’s a one hit button. Once the penny drops you won’t reverse globalisation, bring all the jobs and wealth back, and turn rust into gleaming steal, your promises don’t get their vote again.
It’s not remotely ideological. Take UK Red Wall as example - pro Brexit Corbyn lost the Red Wall, those voters now switch to Brexit hater Starmer on the ideological point of Brexit? It’s not remotely ideological. There’s no ideological point there, or Starmer would get a worse Red Wall result than Corbyn.
Corbyn actually won the red wall seats in 2017, the red wall voted for Boris in 2019 to get Brexit done, note for Boris not the Tories. Now Boris has gone and Brexit has gone they have just gone back to voting for Labour as most of them normally do.
Daft post HY. “Corbyn won Red Wall seats” so did all Labour leaders.
The point remains, if Red Wall believe in and want Brexit to happen- that is UKs economic divergence from EU in order to finally bring the promised brexit benefits, then they would vote Tory at the 2024 election, not for Starmer, Lamy and a Labour top team of Brexit haters.
Brexit was done in 2020, we left the single market in 2021. Now even Starmer says he won't take the UK back into the EEA let alone reverse Brexit.
The redwallers got the Brexit they voted for in 2019, now even Starmer Labour won't reverse Brexit they will mostly vote Labour again
On the migration point, ReFUK and Tice are very clearly going fishing for angry red wall voters who think they voted for the foreign to go home and still want that to happen. Some of these are the voters who have gone Lab > UKIP > Con/BXP and aren't going back to Labour.
But how many are there ? Not many I’d suspect. I live and work in north east red wall area and my, admittedly anecdotal, experience is people care far more about car insurance going up, the price of groceries, utility prices, buses not running until recently due to strikes, things just not feeling like they work and high council tax, than they do a few thousand people coming over on rubber dinghies.
But politics isn’t just about what issues are important; it’s also about the whys, providing a reason. Why is car insurance going up, the price of groceries high, buses not running, etc.? RefUK seek to persuade people that the reason is because of immigrants and the failure to deliver Brexit. Labour seek to persuade people it’s because of the Tories. The Tories seek to persuade people it’s because of… immigrants again? The unions? Labour? Woke culture?
The point was about Refuk and immigrants and I just cannot see there being large numbers there for that and if they did try to blame immigrants or failure to deliver Brexit for those issues they’d rapidly become a laughing stock. If Refuk offered what they considered to be a proper conservative vision, Small state, low taxes, controlled migration, then that makes it a different matter.
Just cannot see the numbers being there who are overly motivated by tackling small boats and when it comes to migration people are generally supportive.
With regard to the discovery of intelligent life, fi is, I think, the biggest unknown in the Drake Equation. You can't really extrapolate from a sample of one, but it seems to me that it's not ridiculously difficult for life to get started in a simple way given a sufficiently large and complex environment that remains relatively stable for a long period of time, such as the early Earth (though that may not be so common either). The development of intelligent life is another matter again though. It took a long time for human-level intelligence to develop on Earth, despite plenty of opportunity for it to do so, and its eventual emergence in hominids seems to have happened almost by chance.
I do recall seeing a theory that for a planet to be stable enough to support an evolutionary chain long enough to result in intelligence, an exceptionally large moon might be necessary. The tidal effects would stabilise the spin axis (Mars, in comparison to Earth, apparently had significant axial tilt changes multiple times in just the past few million years). Our Moon is exceptionally large for a planet our size - in our current knowledge - and the course of events that led to its formation (as we understand it) were quite freakish.
I also recall Asimov (who was quite scientifically sharp) speculating that the tidal effects of such a large Moon on flexing the Earth's crust may have led to heavier elements (such as uranium) being unusually concentrated near the surface and possibly contributing to the mutation rate that is necessary for evolution in "shorter" timescales (and perhaps even to tectonic plate formation, which may be necessary for life). No idea how solid this speculation may be, but those are the best argument for intelligent life being extremely rare - and they are VERY speculative.
But it’s all still anthropocentric in the extreme
This is how intelligent life as we understand and which is really really like us might evolve. Intelligent life - sentient gas clouds, really smart hives of silicon based amoebae - might evolve in ways we don’t understand and - more importantly - might never be able to understand no more than a wasp can ever understand Mozart, even if you lock it in a room with a chamber orchestra forever playing the 40th symphony
True, but: 1 - As we've only got that sample size of one, all of our understanding is going to be based on ringing the changes on it (and speculation on more esoteric ones becomes even further away from our ability to even remotely meaningfully estimate chances); 2 - If intelligent life is so different from our experience and comprehension that we can't even perceive it, for our purposes, it may as well not exist (up to the point where its decisions impact upon us. At which point we may well perceive it, so it no longer falls into this category).
The universe outside of our possible experience of it is and will always remain entirely unknowable. SFAICS empiricism is our only access and possible access to other intelligences, life on other planets etc. The change in my lifetime is that the development in technology means that stuff which was empirically imaginable 50/100 years ago but not doable can be endlessly tested.
And of course if, like the Loch Ness monster, the truth is that there is nothing to find, it will take a long time.
This could also be a plausible black swan event. Unlike last August with LK-99, it has apparently already been replicated (although I'd like to see solid confirmation on that), and the researchers are being far more cautious in their claims (which does usually characterise genuine successes).
Going to need to see a lot more on this, but an ambient pressure near-room-temperature superconductor could be very very significant indeed. IF it pans out (still very much to see yet)
For a layman, such as myself, why is this possibly significant ?
Traditional superconductors need liquid helium temperatures. This is claiming domestic fridge reachable temperatures.
Which would bring superconductors out of a "exotic" uses such as MRI machines - to things like transport. Maglev trains might get another look, for a start.
You mean buses might start to run on time?
Wow!
Not quite. Superconductors have been replaced by driver only buses which slows it down.
This could also be a plausible black swan event. Unlike last August with LK-99, it has apparently already been replicated (although I'd like to see solid confirmation on that), and the researchers are being far more cautious in their claims (which does usually characterise genuine successes).
Going to need to see a lot more on this, but an ambient pressure near-room-temperature superconductor could be very very significant indeed. IF it pans out (still very much to see yet)
For a layman, such as myself, why is this possibly significant ?
Lots of applications. Personally I use liquid helium cooled superconductors in nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers and hospitals use it in MRI. Removing the need for liquid he will be huge cost wise and potentially tech wise too. Then there is power transmission - no electrical resistance.
Then there is applications towards nuclear fusion (which I think uses superconducters to manage the high temps and pressures needed).
Easy magnetic levitation of trains etc.
And that's just the start.
It’s not what one might call a black swan event with respect to the general election, however. The benefits of any new tech won’t be kicking in before the election is due.
November then, IMHO. Afraid we’ve got another 10 months of this. Sigh.
Unless he is doing this to try and catch Labour off guard, but I’m not sure I credit him with that much strategic thinking.
He’s doing this to try and avoid the immense damage to him of “you bottled the May election” vibe.
With timing of budget and the whole “you will feel better off in your pocket” media campaign of the last few weeks, their war gaming has clearly tried to keep May option on the table.
People who really don’t like the Tories will be happy if it isn’t May, despite the faux grumbling on PB posts. Once the date ticks beyond May 2nd, the Tories are on for a worse result than if it had been May 2nd.
On topic, OGH says that "It is not beyond the bound of possibility that Trump could find himself in jail in the coming months."
In the craziness of US politics at the moment, I suppose nothing is beyond the bounds, but this appears extremely unlikely in 2024.
Even the Georgia prosecutors are talking about the trial stretching beyond November, and Trump's defence seem to be getting some joy on pushing out the timeline for the federal case. The Florida case has a very favourable judge so neither the timelines nor sentence in the event of conviction present an issue. Even if convicted in any case pre-November, sentencing is a separate matter, and he'd be very likely to be free pending appeal even then.
It's just as crazy that he could be President whilst awaiting sentencing in 2024. But it's extremely unlikely he'll see the inside of a cell this year.
OGH also says, "There’s also been the recent story that he has to wear diapers and stinks." This really is an utterly appalling remark that is beneath the standards of this site and cannot go uncorrected. The word we use in this country is "nappies", not "diapers".
The criminal trial that is likely to happen early (March / April) is the Washington Election Interference case imo.
1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. 12%
2. Date of the next UK General Election. 26th September
3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called. Sunak, Starmer, Davey, Yousaf, Tice
4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%). Labour majority 180
5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. Haley & Biden
6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. Haley
7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. 4.75%
8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 4.2%). 3.9%
9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). £108bn
10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). 67
Yet another Haley prediction!
I'll be interested to see what the 'hive mind' summary is on Saturday if @Benpointer is able to do a summation.
I've bet on Haley as my long shot bet for GOP, but I am pretty sure it wont happen.
Haley is a good shout for a political betting site. Probably the biggest thing counting against Trump in the nomination process is that his record in office was so shambolic he didn’t deliver on expectations. For example, if he had gone down the route of state governor first, to prove with evidence he could run an administration that delivers, he would never have won the nomination on such a record of chaos and non delivery. It’s not Trump any Trump supporters want, it’s delivery of the Trump agenda.
I'm not sure that's true of all or even most of them. I know a few, and from what I can see, Trump supporters break down into the following, overlapping, categories:
- those who really hate woke/political correctness/the Democrats/New World Order/liberal media/Washington swamp, and regard everything the NY Times/MSNBC/mainstream media post against him as proof that he's right - those who regard politics as entertainment, a reality show for ugly people, or cage wrestling with words, and just see Trump as more entertaining than Biden, even if the joke is ultimately on them. For these people, there's no such thing as bad publicity for Trump - those who believe in Trump's policies. But I think this is the smallest category, because he's so erratic there's no telling what those are from one month to the next. You do meet people, occasionally, who really like his tax cuts or conservative judge nominations or whatever though.
None of these groups are particularly susceptible to reasoned debate on record in government or policy options, which is why Trump's popularity is so strong despite the various disasters and terrible decisions of his years in power.
The ultimate test of your claim “Trumps popularity is so strong” only comes at the general election. Let’s dig this post of yours out again after the result. Who won’t just lose tge White House, he will cost the party the house and Senate too.
Trump only won the first time due to the “Brexit States” hitting the “we have nothing to lose but hit the promise of change” button. That’s a one hit button. Once the penny drops you won’t reverse globalisation, bring all the jobs and wealth back, and turn rust into gleaming steal, your promises don’t get their vote again.
It’s not remotely ideological. Take UK Red Wall as example - pro Brexit Corbyn lost the Red Wall, those voters now switch to Brexit hater Starmer on the ideological point of Brexit? It’s not remotely ideological. There’s no ideological point there, or Starmer would get a worse Red Wall result than Corbyn.
Corbyn actually won the red wall seats in 2017, the red wall voted for Boris in 2019 to get Brexit done, note for Boris not the Tories. Now Boris has gone and Brexit has gone they have just gone back to voting for Labour as most of them normally do.
Daft post HY. “Corbyn won Red Wall seats” so did all Labour leaders.
The point remains, if Red Wall believe in and want Brexit to happen- that is UKs economic divergence from EU in order to finally bring the promised brexit benefits, then they would vote Tory at the 2024 election, not for Starmer, Lamy and a Labour top team of Brexit haters.
Brexit was done in 2020, we left the single market in 2021. Now even Starmer says he won't take the UK back into the EEA let alone reverse Brexit.
The redwallers got the Brexit they voted for in 2019, now even Starmer Labour won't reverse Brexit they will mostly vote Labour again
On the migration point, ReFUK and Tice are very clearly going fishing for angry red wall voters who think they voted for the foreign to go home and still want that to happen. Some of these are the voters who have gone Lab > UKIP > Con/BXP and aren't going back to Labour.
But how many are there ? Not many I’d suspect. I live and work in north east red wall area and my, admittedly anecdotal, experience is people care far more about car insurance going up, the price of groceries, utility prices, buses not running until recently due to strikes, things just not feeling like they work and high council tax, than they do a few thousand people coming over on rubber dinghies.
But politics isn’t just about what issues are important; it’s also about the whys, providing a reason. Why is car insurance going up, the price of groceries high, buses not running, etc.? RefUK seek to persuade people that the reason is because of immigrants and the failure to deliver Brexit. Labour seek to persuade people it’s because of the Tories. The Tories seek to persuade people it’s because of… immigrants again? The unions? Labour? Woke culture?
The point was about Refuk and immigrants and I just cannot see there being large numbers there for that and if they did try to blame immigrants or failure to deliver Brexit for those issues they’d rapidly become a laughing stock. If Refuk offered what they considered to be a proper conservative vision, Small state, low taxes, controlled migration, then that makes it a different matter.
Just cannot see the numbers being there who are overly motivated by tackling small boats and when it comes to migration people are generally supportive.
Tice on Newsnight last night didn’t mention small boats. He was more focused on immigration in general (and small boats is a small proportion of all immigration), with his one in/one out policy. He also talked about small state and low taxes.
I’m not saying he’s going to be successful with this message, but that’s what they’re trying.
1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. 12%
2. Date of the next UK General Election. 26th September
3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called. Sunak, Starmer, Davey, Yousaf, Tice
4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%). Labour majority 180
5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. Haley & Biden
6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. Haley
7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. 4.75%
8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 4.2%). 3.9%
9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). £108bn
10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). 67
Yet another Haley prediction!
I'll be interested to see what the 'hive mind' summary is on Saturday if @Benpointer is able to do a summation.
I've bet on Haley as my long shot bet for GOP, but I am pretty sure it wont happen.
Haley is a good shout for a political betting site. Probably the biggest thing counting against Trump in the nomination process is that his record in office was so shambolic he didn’t deliver on expectations. For example, if he had gone down the route of state governor first, to prove with evidence he could run an administration that delivers, he would never have won the nomination on such a record of chaos and non delivery. It’s not Trump any Trump supporters want, it’s delivery of the Trump agenda.
I'm not sure that's true of all or even most of them. I know a few, and from what I can see, Trump supporters break down into the following, overlapping, categories:
- those who really hate woke/political correctness/the Democrats/New World Order/liberal media/Washington swamp, and regard everything the NY Times/MSNBC/mainstream media post against him as proof that he's right - those who regard politics as entertainment, a reality show for ugly people, or cage wrestling with words, and just see Trump as more entertaining than Biden, even if the joke is ultimately on them. For these people, there's no such thing as bad publicity for Trump - those who believe in Trump's policies. But I think this is the smallest category, because he's so erratic there's no telling what those are from one month to the next. You do meet people, occasionally, who really like his tax cuts or conservative judge nominations or whatever though.
None of these groups are particularly susceptible to reasoned debate on record in government or policy options, which is why Trump's popularity is so strong despite the various disasters and terrible decisions of his years in power.
The ultimate test of your claim “Trumps popularity is so strong” only comes at the general election. Let’s dig this post of yours out again after the result. Who won’t just lose tge White House, he will cost the party the house and Senate too.
Trump only won the first time due to the “Brexit States” hitting the “we have nothing to lose but hit the promise of change” button. That’s a one hit button. Once the penny drops you won’t reverse globalisation, bring all the jobs and wealth back, and turn rust into gleaming steal, your promises don’t get their vote again.
It’s not remotely ideological. Take UK Red Wall as example - pro Brexit Corbyn lost the Red Wall, those voters now switch to Brexit hater Starmer on the ideological point of Brexit? It’s not remotely ideological. There’s no ideological point there, or Starmer would get a worse Red Wall result than Corbyn.
Corbyn actually won the red wall seats in 2017, the red wall voted for Boris in 2019 to get Brexit done, note for Boris not the Tories. Now Boris has gone and Brexit has been done they have just gone back to voting for Labour as most of them normally do.
Brexit in many of their minds hasn't been done because immigration continues apace.
It doesn't matter much what voters say to pollsters months or years ahead of an election, as the 2017 general election so clearly showed. Local elections don't matter much either. [*]
* Except for the London mayoral election. Sunak or whoever is Tory leader in the spring will be nuts not to call the GE for the same day.
Khan will win anyway, Sunak is not going to cut 6 months from his premiership to slightly increase Susan Hall's vote. Who won the 2017 general election? The Tories, even if closer than expected.
Of course the government recently announced measures to raise the threshold for migrants to £38k to get a visa to work here, both EU and non EU, unless in a shortage area
He might not get a choice.
If May local results are terrible, as we all expect them to be, there is a chance the backbenchers roll the dice again....
The May locals were terrible last year and Sunak survived (and fewer councils and seats are up this year so Tory losses will be less than last year).
There simply aren't enough votes amongst ERG Tory MPs to oust Sunak as PM and Tory leader, after all over 50% of Tory MPs nominated Sunak to be Tory leader last autumn and even last summer Sunak beat Truss and Mordaunt with Tory MPs even if Tory members voted for Truss over Sunak.
The ERG right might be able to get their candidate in the last 2 if Sunak loses the next general election and resigns and then win the membership vote. However until then Sunak and Hunt almost certainly lead the Tories into the next general election
This could also be a plausible black swan event. Unlike last August with LK-99, it has apparently already been replicated (although I'd like to see solid confirmation on that), and the researchers are being far more cautious in their claims (which does usually characterise genuine successes).
Going to need to see a lot more on this, but an ambient pressure near-room-temperature superconductor could be very very significant indeed. IF it pans out (still very much to see yet)
It could be huge but, like other scientific breakthroughs, it wouldn't have an immediate global impact in the same way a pandemic, major war or volcanic eruption do. Looking over past inventions the only one with such an impact was the creation of the fission atomic bomb. All others - steam locomotives, transistors, internal combustion engine, microcomputers etc - took years or decades for their effects to be felt.
This could also be a plausible black swan event. Unlike last August with LK-99, it has apparently already been replicated (although I'd like to see solid confirmation on that), and the researchers are being far more cautious in their claims (which does usually characterise genuine successes).
Going to need to see a lot more on this, but an ambient pressure near-room-temperature superconductor could be very very significant indeed. IF it pans out (still very much to see yet)
For a layman, such as myself, why is this possibly significant ?
Lots of applications. Personally I use liquid helium cooled superconductors in nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers and hospitals use it in MRI. Removing the need for liquid he will be huge cost wise and potentially tech wise too. Then there is power transmission - no electrical resistance.
Then there is applications towards nuclear fusion (which I think uses superconducters to manage the high temps and pressures needed).
Easy magnetic levitation of trains etc.
And that's just the start.
One of the reasons I live PB is posters saying things like: "Personally I use liquid helium cooled superconductors..."
They're far better drops than another boring meal on another boring beach.
1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. 12%
2. Date of the next UK General Election. 26th September
3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called. Sunak, Starmer, Davey, Yousaf, Tice
4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%). Labour majority 180
5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. Haley & Biden
6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. Haley
7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. 4.75%
8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 4.2%). 3.9%
9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). £108bn
10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). 67
Yet another Haley prediction!
I'll be interested to see what the 'hive mind' summary is on Saturday if @Benpointer is able to do a summation.
I've bet on Haley as my long shot bet for GOP, but I am pretty sure it wont happen.
Haley is a good shout for a political betting site. Probably the biggest thing counting against Trump in the nomination process is that his record in office was so shambolic he didn’t deliver on expectations. For example, if he had gone down the route of state governor first, to prove with evidence he could run an administration that delivers, he would never have won the nomination on such a record of chaos and non delivery. It’s not Trump any Trump supporters want, it’s delivery of the Trump agenda.
I'm not sure that's true of all or even most of them. I know a few, and from what I can see, Trump supporters break down into the following, overlapping, categories:
- those who really hate woke/political correctness/the Democrats/New World Order/liberal media/Washington swamp, and regard everything the NY Times/MSNBC/mainstream media post against him as proof that he's right - those who regard politics as entertainment, a reality show for ugly people, or cage wrestling with words, and just see Trump as more entertaining than Biden, even if the joke is ultimately on them. For these people, there's no such thing as bad publicity for Trump - those who believe in Trump's policies. But I think this is the smallest category, because he's so erratic there's no telling what those are from one month to the next. You do meet people, occasionally, who really like his tax cuts or conservative judge nominations or whatever though.
None of these groups are particularly susceptible to reasoned debate on record in government or policy options, which is why Trump's popularity is so strong despite the various disasters and terrible decisions of his years in power.
The ultimate test of your claim “Trumps popularity is so strong” only comes at the general election. Let’s dig this post of yours out again after the result. Who won’t just lose tge White House, he will cost the party the house and Senate too.
Trump only won the first time due to the “Brexit States” hitting the “we have nothing to lose but hit the promise of change” button. That’s a one hit button. Once the penny drops you won’t reverse globalisation, bring all the jobs and wealth back, and turn rust into gleaming steal, your promises don’t get their vote again.
It’s not remotely ideological. Take UK Red Wall as example - pro Brexit Corbyn lost the Red Wall, those voters now switch to Brexit hater Starmer on the ideological point of Brexit? It’s not remotely ideological. There’s no ideological point there, or Starmer would get a worse Red Wall result than Corbyn.
Corbyn actually won the red wall seats in 2017, the red wall voted for Boris in 2019 to get Brexit done, note for Boris not the Tories. Now Boris has gone and Brexit has gone they have just gone back to voting for Labour as most of them normally do.
Daft post HY. “Corbyn won Red Wall seats” so did all Labour leaders.
The point remains, if Red Wall believe in and want Brexit to happen- that is UKs economic divergence from EU in order to finally bring the promised brexit benefits, then they would vote Tory at the 2024 election, not for Starmer, Lamy and a Labour top team of Brexit haters.
Brexit was done in 2020, we left the single market in 2021. Now even Starmer says he won't take the UK back into the EEA let alone reverse Brexit.
The redwallers got the Brexit they voted for in 2019, now even Starmer Labour won't reverse Brexit they will mostly vote Labour again
On the migration point, ReFUK and Tice are very clearly going fishing for angry red wall voters who think they voted for the foreign to go home and still want that to happen. Some of these are the voters who have gone Lab > UKIP > Con/BXP and aren't going back to Labour.
But how many are there ? Not many I’d suspect. I live and work in north east red wall area and my, admittedly anecdotal, experience is people care far more about car insurance going up, the price of groceries, utility prices, buses not running until recently due to strikes, things just not feeling like they work and high council tax, than they do a few thousand people coming over on rubber dinghies.
But politics isn’t just about what issues are important; it’s also about the whys, providing a reason. Why is car insurance going up, the price of groceries high, buses not running, etc.? RefUK seek to persuade people that the reason is because of immigrants and the failure to deliver Brexit. Labour seek to persuade people it’s because of the Tories. The Tories seek to persuade people it’s because of… immigrants again? The unions? Labour? Woke culture?
The point was about Refuk and immigrants and I just cannot see there being large numbers there for that and if they did try to blame immigrants or failure to deliver Brexit for those issues they’d rapidly become a laughing stock. If Refuk offered what they considered to be a proper conservative vision, Small state, low taxes, controlled migration, then that makes it a different matter.
Just cannot see the numbers being there who are overly motivated by tackling small boats and when it comes to migration people are generally supportive.
Tice on Newsnight last night didn’t mention small boats. He was more focused on immigration in general (and small boats is a small proportion of all immigration), with his one in/one out policy. He also talked about small state and low taxes.
I’m not saying he’s going to be successful with this message, but that’s what they’re trying.
It's a message that will work in some places I think. Essentially British Poujadisme. North Kent and South Essex feel like the obvious candidates.
In the spirit of being more precise in black-swan predictions, I predict the Campi Phlaegri will undergo a super-Plinian eruption creating a vast new caldera and wiping out much of the Bay of Naples, in early September 2024.
Depending on how badly it erupts, that could range between "devastation to Southern Europe" and "civilizational collapse in the northern hemisphere." Burying half of Europe under and ash-field and wiping out a non-trivial proportion of food production on the planet would have pretty serious effects. (I've seen speculation that an earlier Campi Phlaegri eruption provided the final nail to render the Neanderthals extinct).
Which would be a sufficiently large black swan to render all the other predictions irrelevant, I'll grant you, but we may not be congratulating you online on your successful guess.
Somewhere, somehow - there would still be a couple of PBers bickering about grammar schools.
In the spirit of being more precise in black-swan predictions, I predict the Campi Phlaegri will undergo a super-Plinian eruption creating a vast new caldera and wiping out much of the Bay of Naples, in early September 2024.
Depending on how badly it erupts, that could range between "devastation to Southern Europe" and "civilizational collapse in the northern hemisphere." Burying half of Europe under and ash-field and wiping out a non-trivial proportion of food production on the planet would have pretty serious effects. (I've seen speculation that an earlier Campi Phlaegri eruption provided the final nail to render the Neanderthals extinct).
Which would be a sufficiently large black swan to render all the other predictions irrelevant, I'll grant you, but we may not be congratulating you online on your successful guess.
Somewhere, somehow - there would still be a couple of PBers bickering about grammar schools.
This could also be a plausible black swan event. Unlike last August with LK-99, it has apparently already been replicated (although I'd like to see solid confirmation on that), and the researchers are being far more cautious in their claims (which does usually characterise genuine successes).
Going to need to see a lot more on this, but an ambient pressure near-room-temperature superconductor could be very very significant indeed. IF it pans out (still very much to see yet)
It could be huge but, like other scientific breakthroughs, it wouldn't have an immediate global impact in the same way a pandemic, major war or volcanic eruption do. Looking over past inventions the only one with such an impact was the creation of the fission atomic bomb. All others - steam locomotives, transistors, internal combustion engine, microcomputers etc - took years or decades for their effects to be felt.
People dispute what was the first smartphone - you can go back to the 1990s for primitive models - but the first really reliable and widely available smartphone, with "apps", was probably the original iPhone in 2007, and that changed human society within a few brief years
This could also be a plausible black swan event. Unlike last August with LK-99, it has apparently already been replicated (although I'd like to see solid confirmation on that), and the researchers are being far more cautious in their claims (which does usually characterise genuine successes).
Going to need to see a lot more on this, but an ambient pressure near-room-temperature superconductor could be very very significant indeed. IF it pans out (still very much to see yet)
It could be huge but, like other scientific breakthroughs, it wouldn't have an immediate global impact in the same way a pandemic, major war or volcanic eruption do. Looking over past inventions the only one with such an impact was the creation of the fission atomic bomb. All others - steam locomotives, transistors, internal combustion engine, microcomputers etc - took years or decades for their effects to be felt.
People dispute what was the first smartphone - you can go back to the 1990s for primitive models - but the first really reliable and widely available smartphone, with "apps", was probably the original iPhone in 2007, and that changed human society within a few brief years
This could also be a plausible black swan event. Unlike last August with LK-99, it has apparently already been replicated (although I'd like to see solid confirmation on that), and the researchers are being far more cautious in their claims (which does usually characterise genuine successes).
Going to need to see a lot more on this, but an ambient pressure near-room-temperature superconductor could be very very significant indeed. IF it pans out (still very much to see yet)
For a layman, such as myself, why is this possibly significant ?
Lots of applications. Personally I use liquid helium cooled superconductors in nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers and hospitals use it in MRI. Removing the need for liquid he will be huge cost wise and potentially tech wise too. Then there is power transmission - no electrical resistance.
Then there is applications towards nuclear fusion (which I think uses superconducters to manage the high temps and pressures needed).
Easy magnetic levitation of trains etc.
And that's just the start.
One of the reasons I live PB is posters saying things like: "Personally I use liquid helium cooled superconductors..."
They're far better drops than another boring meal on another boring beach.
I've just told you that we have likely discovered aliens. Stop complaining about my drinx pix
This could also be a plausible black swan event. Unlike last August with LK-99, it has apparently already been replicated (although I'd like to see solid confirmation on that), and the researchers are being far more cautious in their claims (which does usually characterise genuine successes).
Going to need to see a lot more on this, but an ambient pressure near-room-temperature superconductor could be very very significant indeed. IF it pans out (still very much to see yet)
It could be huge but, like other scientific breakthroughs, it wouldn't have an immediate global impact in the same way a pandemic, major war or volcanic eruption do. Looking over past inventions the only one with such an impact was the creation of the fission atomic bomb. All others - steam locomotives, transistors, internal combustion engine, microcomputers etc - took years or decades for their effects to be felt.
People dispute what was the first smartphone - you can go back to the 1990s for primitive models - but the first really reliable and widely available smartphone, with "apps", was probably the original iPhone in 2007, and that changed human society within a few brief years
Changed it for the worse.
Arguably only the Social Media apps, weather, train times, maps/traffic and music would be an undoubted plus.
An aside: the other day it occurred to me that from Colossus to today less than a century has passed, and we've moved from the 'first' computer (arguably, I know, Difference Engine etc) to serious concerns about AI.
We still don't fully understand the social and psychological impact of mobile phones and the internet.
1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. 12%
2. Date of the next UK General Election. 26th September
3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called. Sunak, Starmer, Davey, Yousaf, Tice
4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%). Labour majority 180
5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. Haley & Biden
6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. Haley
7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. 4.75%
8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 4.2%). 3.9%
9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). £108bn
10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). 67
Yet another Haley prediction!
I'll be interested to see what the 'hive mind' summary is on Saturday if @Benpointer is able to do a summation.
I've bet on Haley as my long shot bet for GOP, but I am pretty sure it wont happen.
Haley is a good shout for a political betting site. Probably the biggest thing counting against Trump in the nomination process is that his record in office was so shambolic he didn’t deliver on expectations. For example, if he had gone down the route of state governor first, to prove with evidence he could run an administration that delivers, he would never have won the nomination on such a record of chaos and non delivery. It’s not Trump any Trump supporters want, it’s delivery of the Trump agenda.
I'm not sure that's true of all or even most of them. I know a few, and from what I can see, Trump supporters break down into the following, overlapping, categories:
- those who really hate woke/political correctness/the Democrats/New World Order/liberal media/Washington swamp, and regard everything the NY Times/MSNBC/mainstream media post against him as proof that he's right - those who regard politics as entertainment, a reality show for ugly people, or cage wrestling with words, and just see Trump as more entertaining than Biden, even if the joke is ultimately on them. For these people, there's no such thing as bad publicity for Trump - those who believe in Trump's policies. But I think this is the smallest category, because he's so erratic there's no telling what those are from one month to the next. You do meet people, occasionally, who really like his tax cuts or conservative judge nominations or whatever though.
None of these groups are particularly susceptible to reasoned debate on record in government or policy options, which is why Trump's popularity is so strong despite the various disasters and terrible decisions of his years in power.
The ultimate test of your claim “Trumps popularity is so strong” only comes at the general election. Let’s dig this post of yours out again after the result. Who won’t just lose tge White House, he will cost the party the house and Senate too.
Trump only won the first time due to the “Brexit States” hitting the “we have nothing to lose but hit the promise of change” button. That’s a one hit button. Once the penny drops you won’t reverse globalisation, bring all the jobs and wealth back, and turn rust into gleaming steal, your promises don’t get their vote again.
It’s not remotely ideological. Take UK Red Wall as example - pro Brexit Corbyn lost the Red Wall, those voters now switch to Brexit hater Starmer on the ideological point of Brexit? It’s not remotely ideological. There’s no ideological point there, or Starmer would get a worse Red Wall result than Corbyn.
Corbyn actually won the red wall seats in 2017, the red wall voted for Boris in 2019 to get Brexit done, note for Boris not the Tories. Now Boris has gone and Brexit has gone they have just gone back to voting for Labour as most of them normally do.
Daft post HY. “Corbyn won Red Wall seats” so did all Labour leaders.
The point remains, if Red Wall believe in and want Brexit to happen- that is UKs economic divergence from EU in order to finally bring the promised brexit benefits, then they would vote Tory at the 2024 election, not for Starmer, Lamy and a Labour top team of Brexit haters.
Brexit was done in 2020, we left the single market in 2021. Now even Starmer says he won't take the UK back into the EEA let alone reverse Brexit.
The redwallers got the Brexit they voted for in 2019, now even Starmer Labour won't reverse Brexit they will mostly vote Labour again
On the migration point, ReFUK and Tice are very clearly going fishing for angry red wall voters who think they voted for the foreign to go home and still want that to happen. Some of these are the voters who have gone Lab > UKIP > Con/BXP and aren't going back to Labour.
But how many are there ? Not many I’d suspect. I live and work in north east red wall area and my, admittedly anecdotal, experience is people care far more about car insurance going up, the price of groceries, utility prices, buses not running until recently due to strikes, things just not feeling like they work and high council tax, than they do a few thousand people coming over on rubber dinghies.
But politics isn’t just about what issues are important; it’s also about the whys, providing a reason. Why is car insurance going up, the price of groceries high, buses not running, etc.? RefUK seek to persuade people that the reason is because of immigrants and the failure to deliver Brexit. Labour seek to persuade people it’s because of the Tories. The Tories seek to persuade people it’s because of… immigrants again? The unions? Labour? Woke culture?
The point was about Refuk and immigrants and I just cannot see there being large numbers there for that and if they did try to blame immigrants or failure to deliver Brexit for those issues they’d rapidly become a laughing stock. If Refuk offered what they considered to be a proper conservative vision, Small state, low taxes, controlled migration, then that makes it a different matter.
Just cannot see the numbers being there who are overly motivated by tackling small boats and when it comes to migration people are generally supportive.
Tice on Newsnight last night didn’t mention small boats. He was more focused on immigration in general (and small boats is a small proportion of all immigration), with his one in/one out policy. He also talked about small state and low taxes.
I’m not saying he’s going to be successful with this message, but that’s what they’re trying.
It's a message that will work in some places I think. Essentially British Poujadisme. North Kent and South Essex feel like the obvious candidates.
It’s perhaps relevant to the discussion that Castle Point Council is now controlled by an alliance between the Canvey Island Independence Party and the non-Canvey People’s Independent Party.
1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. 12%
2. Date of the next UK General Election. 26th September
3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called. Sunak, Starmer, Davey, Yousaf, Tice
4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%). Labour majority 180
5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. Haley & Biden
6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. Haley
7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. 4.75%
8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 4.2%). 3.9%
9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). £108bn
10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). 67
Yet another Haley prediction!
I'll be interested to see what the 'hive mind' summary is on Saturday if @Benpointer is able to do a summation.
I've bet on Haley as my long shot bet for GOP, but I am pretty sure it wont happen.
Haley is a good shout for a political betting site. Probably the biggest thing counting against Trump in the nomination process is that his record in office was so shambolic he didn’t deliver on expectations. For example, if he had gone down the route of state governor first, to prove with evidence he could run an administration that delivers, he would never have won the nomination on such a record of chaos and non delivery. It’s not Trump any Trump supporters want, it’s delivery of the Trump agenda.
I'm not sure that's true of all or even most of them. I know a few, and from what I can see, Trump supporters break down into the following, overlapping, categories:
- those who really hate woke/political correctness/the Democrats/New World Order/liberal media/Washington swamp, and regard everything the NY Times/MSNBC/mainstream media post against him as proof that he's right - those who regard politics as entertainment, a reality show for ugly people, or cage wrestling with words, and just see Trump as more entertaining than Biden, even if the joke is ultimately on them. For these people, there's no such thing as bad publicity for Trump - those who believe in Trump's policies. But I think this is the smallest category, because he's so erratic there's no telling what those are from one month to the next. You do meet people, occasionally, who really like his tax cuts or conservative judge nominations or whatever though.
None of these groups are particularly susceptible to reasoned debate on record in government or policy options, which is why Trump's popularity is so strong despite the various disasters and terrible decisions of his years in power.
The ultimate test of your claim “Trumps popularity is so strong” only comes at the general election. Let’s dig this post of yours out again after the result. Who won’t just lose tge White House, he will cost the party the house and Senate too.
Trump only won the first time due to the “Brexit States” hitting the “we have nothing to lose but hit the promise of change” button. That’s a one hit button. Once the penny drops you won’t reverse globalisation, bring all the jobs and wealth back, and turn rust into gleaming steal, your promises don’t get their vote again.
It’s not remotely ideological. Take UK Red Wall as example - pro Brexit Corbyn lost the Red Wall, those voters now switch to Brexit hater Starmer on the ideological point of Brexit? It’s not remotely ideological. There’s no ideological point there, or Starmer would get a worse Red Wall result than Corbyn.
Corbyn actually won the red wall seats in 2017, the red wall voted for Boris in 2019 to get Brexit done, note for Boris not the Tories. Now Boris has gone and Brexit has gone they have just gone back to voting for Labour as most of them normally do.
Daft post HY. “Corbyn won Red Wall seats” so did all Labour leaders.
The point remains, if Red Wall believe in and want Brexit to happen- that is UKs economic divergence from EU in order to finally bring the promised brexit benefits, then they would vote Tory at the 2024 election, not for Starmer, Lamy and a Labour top team of Brexit haters.
For most Brexit voters, Brexit happened when we left the EU. They were annoyed, following the Leave vote in mid 2016 that it hadn't happened by late 2019 because they felt that showed a lack of respect for their decision, and voted for Johnson as the best way to end the impasse.
People just aren't going to be voting this year, in significant numbers, on the extent of economic divergence necessary to achieve Brexit benefits. It has simply lost its salience - as demonstrated by the various by-election gains in solidly Leave seats by both Labour and the Lib Dems.
Maybe you think people SHOULD vote on the basis you say, but they really won't in meaningful numbers.
No. I called HY’s a daft post. I have to call yours a daft post too. If Brexit has been delivered, where’s the thanks for it?
The promise of things getting better after Brexit, has not been delivered. Simple as that. The position of the Tory party is that Brexit has been delivered, end of, but this is subject to change as Reform and Labour both go for Tory votes about things not being better, squeezing the Tory Party from both sides. So what the Tory Party will start listening to as an answer is the idea, the Tory party did not deliver Brexit promises, because it did not make the most of Brexit by diverging from the EU position.
If you are right about the Tory’s perceived success in delivering Brexit, as you claim in your post, why are Reform already on double digits in polls, even before the Tory toes are more seriously held to the fire in this and coming years? And if you are right, Lefties voted for Brexit so a Corbyn government would have the power to renationalise everything, Starmer should not be picking up these votes as easily as he is.
Take a look at the polls. If voters believe the promise of Brexit has been delivered, it doesn’t show up in the polls does it. Quite the opposite - reform plus Labour = over 50%.
I’m only allowed water, black coffee and black or green tea
I want a total detox and to keep the weight loss going
I’ve done it before - once - and failed several times. Getting through the second day is hard hard hard, hence my failures
But if you can, the mental clarity on day 3 onwards is intense. A kind of manic elation
Here goes
I'm on Day 4 of my diet / life extension. Am doing 16/8 fasting during the week - and have managed to get into the rhythm of it. Just had a big salad (much leaves, a little meat / cheese) for breakfast, and then non-junk dinner of some description later.
1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. 12%
2. Date of the next UK General Election. 26th September
3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called. Sunak, Starmer, Davey, Yousaf, Tice
4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%). Labour majority 180
5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. Haley & Biden
6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. Haley
7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. 4.75%
8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 4.2%). 3.9%
9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). £108bn
10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). 67
Yet another Haley prediction!
I'll be interested to see what the 'hive mind' summary is on Saturday if @Benpointer is able to do a summation.
I've bet on Haley as my long shot bet for GOP, but I am pretty sure it wont happen.
Haley is a good shout for a political betting site. Probably the biggest thing counting against Trump in the nomination process is that his record in office was so shambolic he didn’t deliver on expectations. For example, if he had gone down the route of state governor first, to prove with evidence he could run an administration that delivers, he would never have won the nomination on such a record of chaos and non delivery. It’s not Trump any Trump supporters want, it’s delivery of the Trump agenda.
I'm not sure that's true of all or even most of them. I know a few, and from what I can see, Trump supporters break down into the following, overlapping, categories:
- those who really hate woke/political correctness/the Democrats/New World Order/liberal media/Washington swamp, and regard everything the NY Times/MSNBC/mainstream media post against him as proof that he's right - those who regard politics as entertainment, a reality show for ugly people, or cage wrestling with words, and just see Trump as more entertaining than Biden, even if the joke is ultimately on them. For these people, there's no such thing as bad publicity for Trump - those who believe in Trump's policies. But I think this is the smallest category, because he's so erratic there's no telling what those are from one month to the next. You do meet people, occasionally, who really like his tax cuts or conservative judge nominations or whatever though.
None of these groups are particularly susceptible to reasoned debate on record in government or policy options, which is why Trump's popularity is so strong despite the various disasters and terrible decisions of his years in power.
The ultimate test of your claim “Trumps popularity is so strong” only comes at the general election. Let’s dig this post of yours out again after the result. Who won’t just lose tge White House, he will cost the party the house and Senate too.
Trump only won the first time due to the “Brexit States” hitting the “we have nothing to lose but hit the promise of change” button. That’s a one hit button. Once the penny drops you won’t reverse globalisation, bring all the jobs and wealth back, and turn rust into gleaming steal, your promises don’t get their vote again.
It’s not remotely ideological. Take UK Red Wall as example - pro Brexit Corbyn lost the Red Wall, those voters now switch to Brexit hater Starmer on the ideological point of Brexit? It’s not remotely ideological. There’s no ideological point there, or Starmer would get a worse Red Wall result than Corbyn.
Corbyn actually won the red wall seats in 2017, the red wall voted for Boris in 2019 to get Brexit done, note for Boris not the Tories. Now Boris has gone and Brexit has gone they have just gone back to voting for Labour as most of them normally do.
Daft post HY. “Corbyn won Red Wall seats” so did all Labour leaders.
The point remains, if Red Wall believe in and want Brexit to happen- that is UKs economic divergence from EU in order to finally bring the promised brexit benefits, then they would vote Tory at the 2024 election, not for Starmer, Lamy and a Labour top team of Brexit haters.
For most Brexit voters, Brexit happened when we left the EU. They were annoyed, following the Leave vote in mid 2016 that it hadn't happened by late 2019 because they felt that showed a lack of respect for their decision, and voted for Johnson as the best way to end the impasse.
People just aren't going to be voting this year, in significant numbers, on the extent of economic divergence necessary to achieve Brexit benefits. It has simply lost its salience - as demonstrated by the various by-election gains in solidly Leave seats by both Labour and the Lib Dems.
Maybe you think people SHOULD vote on the basis you say, but they really won't in meaningful numbers.
No. I called HY’s a daft post. I have to call yours a daft post too. If Brexit has been delivered, where’s the thanks for it?
The promise of things getting better after Brexit, has not been delivered. Simple as that. The position of the Tory party is that Brexit has been delivered, end of, but this is subject to change as Reform and Labour both go for Tory votes about things not being better, squeezing the Tory Party from both sides. So what the Tory Party will start listening to as an answer is the idea, the Tory party did not deliver Brexit promises, because it did not make the most of Brexit by diverging from the EU position.
If you are right about the Tory’s perceived success in delivering Brexit, as you claim in your post, why are Reform already on double digits in polls, even before the Tory toes are more seriously held to the fire in this and coming years? And if you are right, Lefties voted for Brexit so a Corbyn government would have the power to renationalise everything, Starmer should not be picking up these votes as easily as he is.
Take a look at the polls. If voters believe the promise of Brexit has been delivered, it doesn’t show up in the polls does it. Quite the opposite - reform plus Labour = over 50%.
"If Brexit has been delivered, where’s the thanks for it?" You want thanks? Incredible!
Also why add Reform and Labour opinion poll predictions together, you can't draw any meaningful conclusions from that.
This could also be a plausible black swan event. Unlike last August with LK-99, it has apparently already been replicated (although I'd like to see solid confirmation on that), and the researchers are being far more cautious in their claims (which does usually characterise genuine successes).
Going to need to see a lot more on this, but an ambient pressure near-room-temperature superconductor could be very very significant indeed. IF it pans out (still very much to see yet)
It could be huge but, like other scientific breakthroughs, it wouldn't have an immediate global impact in the same way a pandemic, major war or volcanic eruption do. Looking over past inventions the only one with such an impact was the creation of the fission atomic bomb. All others - steam locomotives, transistors, internal combustion engine, microcomputers etc - took years or decades for their effects to be felt.
People dispute what was the first smartphone - you can go back to the 1990s for primitive models - but the first really reliable and widely available smartphone, with "apps", was probably the original iPhone in 2007, and that changed human society within a few brief years
This could also be a plausible black swan event. Unlike last August with LK-99, it has apparently already been replicated (although I'd like to see solid confirmation on that), and the researchers are being far more cautious in their claims (which does usually characterise genuine successes).
Going to need to see a lot more on this, but an ambient pressure near-room-temperature superconductor could be very very significant indeed. IF it pans out (still very much to see yet)
It could be huge but, like other scientific breakthroughs, it wouldn't have an immediate global impact in the same way a pandemic, major war or volcanic eruption do. Looking over past inventions the only one with such an impact was the creation of the fission atomic bomb. All others - steam locomotives, transistors, internal combustion engine, microcomputers etc - took years or decades for their effects to be felt.
People dispute what was the first smartphone - you can go back to the 1990s for primitive models - but the first really reliable and widely available smartphone, with "apps", was probably the original iPhone in 2007, and that changed human society within a few brief years
Poor Rishi now even the weather Gods want rid of him .
A chance now of some severe winter weather towards the second half of January . Likely to hit GDP so his growth pledge which was on shaky ground is likely to take a further hit .
Bit desperate to post that.
What’s desperate about pointing out the effects of the weather on GDP .
I’m only allowed water, black coffee and black or green tea
I want a total detox and to keep the weight loss going
I’ve done it before - once - and failed several times. Getting through the second day is hard hard hard, hence my failures
But if you can, the mental clarity on day 3 onwards is intense. A kind of manic elation
Here goes
Good luck. Dieting is fucking difficult, hence Ozempic. Plus the elation at your diet if it is successful is often enough to put you right back to where you were.
We have all discussed dieting plenty of times in the past so each to their own.
Any diet will work (water, black coffee, tea - big mac, BLT, mars bar) if it regulates eating as being overweight stems from too much eating so all those books very cleverly just decide on a theme and then use that as contents for regulated eating.
Exercise can also help but can also be used to "justify" eating more (just another 15mins running before I can have that Mars Bar) so should be handled with care.
This could also be a plausible black swan event. Unlike last August with LK-99, it has apparently already been replicated (although I'd like to see solid confirmation on that), and the researchers are being far more cautious in their claims (which does usually characterise genuine successes).
Going to need to see a lot more on this, but an ambient pressure near-room-temperature superconductor could be very very significant indeed. IF it pans out (still very much to see yet)
It could be huge but, like other scientific breakthroughs, it wouldn't have an immediate global impact in the same way a pandemic, major war or volcanic eruption do. Looking over past inventions the only one with such an impact was the creation of the fission atomic bomb. All others - steam locomotives, transistors, internal combustion engine, microcomputers etc - took years or decades for their effects to be felt.
People dispute what was the first smartphone - you can go back to the 1990s for primitive models - but the first really reliable and widely available smartphone, with "apps", was probably the original iPhone in 2007, and that changed human society within a few brief years
I consider the Blackberry the first smartphone.
It really did revolutionise things
Yes, you can dispute what was the first smartphone - but there’s no doubt it changed the world very quickly. More than any other comparable tech
November then, IMHO. Afraid we’ve got another 10 months of this. Sigh.
Unless he is doing this to try and catch Labour off guard, but I’m not sure I credit him with that much strategic thinking.
He’s doing this to try and avoid the immense damage to him of “you bottled the May election” vibe.
With timing of budget and the whole “you will feel better off in your pocket” media campaign of the last few weeks, their war gaming has clearly tried to keep May option on the table.
People who really don’t like the Tories will be happy if it isn’t May, despite the faux grumbling on PB posts. Once the date ticks beyond May 2nd, the Tories are on for a worse result than if it had been May 2nd.
The Tory party need people to go out and canvass during the election and get people to vote on the day.
If you were a Tory councilor and you lost your seat in May because Rishi destroyed the Tory party vote , you are not exactly going to waste a month in October / November canvassing for the Tory party.
That’s why I expect the Tory party will do disastrously if he delays an election - there won’t be anyone going out to ensure the Tory vote gets out and actually votes
This could also be a plausible black swan event. Unlike last August with LK-99, it has apparently already been replicated (although I'd like to see solid confirmation on that), and the researchers are being far more cautious in their claims (which does usually characterise genuine successes).
Going to need to see a lot more on this, but an ambient pressure near-room-temperature superconductor could be very very significant indeed. IF it pans out (still very much to see yet)
It could be huge but, like other scientific breakthroughs, it wouldn't have an immediate global impact in the same way a pandemic, major war or volcanic eruption do. Looking over past inventions the only one with such an impact was the creation of the fission atomic bomb. All others - steam locomotives, transistors, internal combustion engine, microcomputers etc - took years or decades for their effects to be felt.
People dispute what was the first smartphone - you can go back to the 1990s for primitive models - but the first really reliable and widely available smartphone, with "apps", was probably the original iPhone in 2007, and that changed human society within a few brief years
I’m only allowed water, black coffee and black or green tea
I want a total detox and to keep the weight loss going
I’ve done it before - once - and failed several times. Getting through the second day is hard hard hard, hence my failures
But if you can, the mental clarity on day 3 onwards is intense. A kind of manic elation
Here goes
Good luck. Dieting is fucking difficult, hence Ozempic. Plus the elation at your diet if it is successful is often enough to put you right back to where you were.
We have all discussed dieting plenty of times in the past so each to their own.
Any diet will work (water, black coffee, tea - big mac, BLT, mars bar) if it regulates eating as being overweight stems from too much eating so all those books very cleverly just decide on a theme and then use that as contents for regulated eating.
Exercise can also help but can also be used to "justify" eating more (just another 15mins running before I can have that Mars Bar) so should be handled with care.
As I say, good luck.
Best 'diet' I ever had - five weeks in the hospital receiving chemotherapy with associated gastric issues and eating appalling hospital food. Lost three stone...
This could also be a plausible black swan event. Unlike last August with LK-99, it has apparently already been replicated (although I'd like to see solid confirmation on that), and the researchers are being far more cautious in their claims (which does usually characterise genuine successes).
Going to need to see a lot more on this, but an ambient pressure near-room-temperature superconductor could be very very significant indeed. IF it pans out (still very much to see yet)
It could be huge but, like other scientific breakthroughs, it wouldn't have an immediate global impact in the same way a pandemic, major war or volcanic eruption do. Looking over past inventions the only one with such an impact was the creation of the fission atomic bomb. All others - steam locomotives, transistors, internal combustion engine, microcomputers etc - took years or decades for their effects to be felt.
People dispute what was the first smartphone - you can go back to the 1990s for primitive models - but the first really reliable and widely available smartphone, with "apps", was probably the original iPhone in 2007, and that changed human society within a few brief years
I’m only allowed water, black coffee and black or green tea
I want a total detox and to keep the weight loss going
I’ve done it before - once - and failed several times. Getting through the second day is hard hard hard, hence my failures
But if you can, the mental clarity on day 3 onwards is intense. A kind of manic elation
Here goes
Good luck. Dieting is fucking difficult, hence Ozempic. Plus the elation at your diet if it is successful is often enough to put you right back to where you were.
We have all discussed dieting plenty of times in the past so each to their own.
Any diet will work (water, black coffee, tea - big mac, BLT, mars bar) if it regulates eating as being overweight stems from too much eating so all those books very cleverly just decide on a theme and then use that as contents for regulated eating.
Exercise can also help but can also be used to "justify" eating more (just another 15mins running before I can have that Mars Bar) so should be handled with care.
As I say, good luck.
Thanks
I'm doing it partly because I am off on assignment to Phnom Penh in a few days, and I will be deluged there with delicious free meals, so this is partly to offset that. Also I just enjoy a challenge, and five days is a REAL challenge
1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. 12%
2. Date of the next UK General Election. 26th September
3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called. Sunak, Starmer, Davey, Yousaf, Tice
4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%). Labour majority 180
5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. Haley & Biden
6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. Haley
7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. 4.75%
8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 4.2%). 3.9%
9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). £108bn
10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). 67
Yet another Haley prediction!
I'll be interested to see what the 'hive mind' summary is on Saturday if @Benpointer is able to do a summation.
I've bet on Haley as my long shot bet for GOP, but I am pretty sure it wont happen.
Haley is a good shout for a political betting site. Probably the biggest thing counting against Trump in the nomination process is that his record in office was so shambolic he didn’t deliver on expectations. For example, if he had gone down the route of state governor first, to prove with evidence he could run an administration that delivers, he would never have won the nomination on such a record of chaos and non delivery. It’s not Trump any Trump supporters want, it’s delivery of the Trump agenda.
I'm not sure that's true of all or even most of them. I know a few, and from what I can see, Trump supporters break down into the following, overlapping, categories:
- those who really hate woke/political correctness/the Democrats/New World Order/liberal media/Washington swamp, and regard everything the NY Times/MSNBC/mainstream media post against him as proof that he's right - those who regard politics as entertainment, a reality show for ugly people, or cage wrestling with words, and just see Trump as more entertaining than Biden, even if the joke is ultimately on them. For these people, there's no such thing as bad publicity for Trump - those who believe in Trump's policies. But I think this is the smallest category, because he's so erratic there's no telling what those are from one month to the next. You do meet people, occasionally, who really like his tax cuts or conservative judge nominations or whatever though.
None of these groups are particularly susceptible to reasoned debate on record in government or policy options, which is why Trump's popularity is so strong despite the various disasters and terrible decisions of his years in power.
The ultimate test of your claim “Trumps popularity is so strong” only comes at the general election. Let’s dig this post of yours out again after the result. Who won’t just lose tge White House, he will cost the party the house and Senate too.
Trump only won the first time due to the “Brexit States” hitting the “we have nothing to lose but hit the promise of change” button. That’s a one hit button. Once the penny drops you won’t reverse globalisation, bring all the jobs and wealth back, and turn rust into gleaming steal, your promises don’t get their vote again.
It’s not remotely ideological. Take UK Red Wall as example - pro Brexit Corbyn lost the Red Wall, those voters now switch to Brexit hater Starmer on the ideological point of Brexit? It’s not remotely ideological. There’s no ideological point there, or Starmer would get a worse Red Wall result than Corbyn.
Corbyn actually won the red wall seats in 2017, the red wall voted for Boris in 2019 to get Brexit done, note for Boris not the Tories. Now Boris has gone and Brexit has gone they have just gone back to voting for Labour as most of them normally do.
Daft post HY. “Corbyn won Red Wall seats” so did all Labour leaders.
The point remains, if Red Wall believe in and want Brexit to happen- that is UKs economic divergence from EU in order to finally bring the promised brexit benefits, then they would vote Tory at the 2024 election, not for Starmer, Lamy and a Labour top team of Brexit haters.
Brexit was done in 2020, we left the single market in 2021. Now even Starmer says he won't take the UK back into the EEA let alone reverse Brexit.
The redwallers got the Brexit they voted for in 2019, now even Starmer Labour won't reverse Brexit they will mostly vote Labour again
“Brexit was done in 2020. Redwallers got the brexit they voted for.”
You are simply repeating, not listening to what’s being put to you. Redwallers were promised benefits of Brexit, it is not done or delivered until those are delivered. Essentially, they were promised they would feel better off. They would see an improvement in public services. And where immigration looked a bit out of control pre Brexit, governments not keeping to “tens of thousands” of immigration promises pre Brexit, we would have control back to deliver this after Brexit.
Until these things are delivered, no it’s not done is it. That is the question being put to you HY, and you really have no choice but to agree. Because, whilst voters supported the Tory party to deliver on the Brexit promises, those voters are now marking the Tory’s down as failed to deliver on Brexit promise, and are now looking elsewhere for those same things to be delivered. Take a look at the polls.
More money has been put into the NHS and EU migrants now cannot get a Visa to work in the UK unless they earn over £38k a year thanks to the new government proposals.
So yes Brexit is done, done so much even Starmer Labour now promises not to reverse Brexit, not to restore free movement and not to return to the EU or EEA.
The 2019 general election was a clear choice for the UK of Brexit with the Boris led Conservatives or EUref2 or no Brexit at all with Corbyn Labour or the LDs.
Boris won that general election and now this year's general election will not be about Brexit unlike 2019 as both Starmer Labour and the Sunak Tories back Brexit and won't reverse it
“ now this year's general election will not be about Brexit”
You seriously believe that? 🤣
This years election is a huge Brexit election. Now with Corbyn out the way, all of Remainia get their first GE chance to give the Tory Party a thorough kicking for Brexit. We are talking historical Tory seats, where thanks to Brexit life long Tory voters now can’t wait to give the Tory’s a kicking, safe in the knowledge the worse that could happen is a Starmer/Reeves government.
Meanwhile Reform are on the rise simply because voters feel the promised benefits of Brexit are not happening yet. The argument the promised benefits of Brexit won’t be felt by voters until the UKs freedom to divulge is properly implemented, will only grow stronger from here, so that it won’t just be Reform arguing this, but increasing amounts of Tory’s too. This too makes 2024 a Brexit election.
2024 goes into history books as a Brexit election.
This could also be a plausible black swan event. Unlike last August with LK-99, it has apparently already been replicated (although I'd like to see solid confirmation on that), and the researchers are being far more cautious in their claims (which does usually characterise genuine successes).
Going to need to see a lot more on this, but an ambient pressure near-room-temperature superconductor could be very very significant indeed. IF it pans out (still very much to see yet)
It could be huge but, like other scientific breakthroughs, it wouldn't have an immediate global impact in the same way a pandemic, major war or volcanic eruption do. Looking over past inventions the only one with such an impact was the creation of the fission atomic bomb. All others - steam locomotives, transistors, internal combustion engine, microcomputers etc - took years or decades for their effects to be felt.
People dispute what was the first smartphone - you can go back to the 1990s for primitive models - but the first really reliable and widely available smartphone, with "apps", was probably the original iPhone in 2007, and that changed human society within a few brief years
This could also be a plausible black swan event. Unlike last August with LK-99, it has apparently already been replicated (although I'd like to see solid confirmation on that), and the researchers are being far more cautious in their claims (which does usually characterise genuine successes).
Going to need to see a lot more on this, but an ambient pressure near-room-temperature superconductor could be very very significant indeed. IF it pans out (still very much to see yet)
It could be huge but, like other scientific breakthroughs, it wouldn't have an immediate global impact in the same way a pandemic, major war or volcanic eruption do. Looking over past inventions the only one with such an impact was the creation of the fission atomic bomb. All others - steam locomotives, transistors, internal combustion engine, microcomputers etc - took years or decades for their effects to be felt.
People dispute what was the first smartphone - you can go back to the 1990s for primitive models - but the first really reliable and widely available smartphone, with "apps", was probably the original iPhone in 2007, and that changed human society within a few brief years
I’m only allowed water, black coffee and black or green tea
I want a total detox and to keep the weight loss going
I’ve done it before - once - and failed several times. Getting through the second day is hard hard hard, hence my failures
But if you can, the mental clarity on day 3 onwards is intense. A kind of manic elation
Here goes
Good luck. Dieting is fucking difficult, hence Ozempic. Plus the elation at your diet if it is successful is often enough to put you right back to where you were.
We have all discussed dieting plenty of times in the past so each to their own.
Any diet will work (water, black coffee, tea - big mac, BLT, mars bar) if it regulates eating as being overweight stems from too much eating so all those books very cleverly just decide on a theme and then use that as contents for regulated eating.
Exercise can also help but can also be used to "justify" eating more (just another 15mins running before I can have that Mars Bar) so should be handled with care.
As I say, good luck.
Best 'diet' I ever had - five weeks in the hospital receiving chemotherapy with associated gastric issues and eating appalling hospital food. Lost three stone...
Not recommended!
Good for you. There's a wider issue about hospital food. A massive proportion of health and healing is good nutrition. Nutrition in hospitals should have the same care and attention as the details of heart surgery.
Top dieting tip: If it is in the house, you'll eat it. So don't buy the bad foods in the first place. If the only snacks available at home are dried fruit and nuts, that's what you'll eat - not biscuits, crisps or chocolate.
Top dieting tip: If it is in the house, you'll eat it. So don't buy the bad foods in the first place. If the only snacks available at home are dried fruit and nuts, that's what you'll eat - not biscuits, crisps or chocolate.
Chocoholics may find that drinking lots of cocoa (unsweetened preferably) is as vapes is to smoking; not so good but it will do, and it helps. (Unsweetened chocolate tastes like marmite, but cocoa is fine).
Top dieting tip: If it is in the house, you'll eat it. So don't buy the bad foods in the first place. If the only snacks available at home are dried fruit and nuts, that's what you'll eat - not biscuits, crisps or chocolate.
The best snack is no snack. Helps that I have several weeks working from home to start the year, but am just saying no. And thats with a decent pile of leftover Christmas goodies in the pantry.
With regard to the discovery of intelligent life, fi is, I think, the biggest unknown in the Drake Equation. You can't really extrapolate from a sample of one, but it seems to me that it's not ridiculously difficult for life to get started in a simple way given a sufficiently large and complex environment that remains relatively stable for a long period of time, such as the early Earth (though that may not be so common either). The development of intelligent life is another matter again though. It took a long time for human-level intelligence to develop on Earth, despite plenty of opportunity for it to do so, and its eventual emergence in hominids seems to have happened almost by chance.
I do recall seeing a theory that for a planet to be stable enough to support an evolutionary chain long enough to result in intelligence, an exceptionally large moon might be necessary. The tidal effects would stabilise the spin axis (Mars, in comparison to Earth, apparently had significant axial tilt changes multiple times in just the past few million years). Our Moon is exceptionally large for a planet our size - in our current knowledge - and the course of events that led to its formation (as we understand it) were quite freakish.
I also recall Asimov (who was quite scientifically sharp) speculating that the tidal effects of such a large Moon on flexing the Earth's crust may have led to heavier elements (such as uranium) being unusually concentrated near the surface and possibly contributing to the mutation rate that is necessary for evolution in "shorter" timescales (and perhaps even to tectonic plate formation, which may be necessary for life). No idea how solid this speculation may be, but those are the best argument for intelligent life being extremely rare - and they are VERY speculative.
Yes, I think the moon has played an essential role in creating an environment suitable for life on Earth. For intelligent life to evolve, you need, fundamentally, a sufficiently large, complex, long-lasting and stable (but not too stable) environment, and the presence of the moon has been vital in creating this on earth. My feeling is that this set of conditions is likely to be fulfilled very rarely and that the evolution of intelligent life is an extremely unusual occurrence. We may not be alone in the universe, but I think we might as well be, given the likely rarity of intelligent life and the distances involved.
Do we really know the pre-requisites for intelligent life to evolve? And are we referring to humanity as the example? Arguably humans arose fairly rapidly from common ancesters to the other great apes etc. Why didn't an intelligent dinosaur arise? Some were bipedal and thus in theory could have developed tool use. I think of our intelligence as a quirk of evolution - other creatures are faster, stronger etc, we are weak, slow etc but cunning.
The key element in moving from individual intelligence to species intelligence is communication (sophisticated language, writing, printing, computing, the internet). These enable what each learns over their lifetime to be shared with others and, crucially, passed on to the not yet living. Without, each generation would start with merely gene-inherited instinct, and we wouldn’t be able to learn during a double lesson at school what someone from history spent a lifetime discovering. (Other important factors are the scarcity or absence of predators, and farming, so that the work of a few can feed others while they make and think).
Since these factors came together, the glacial pace of evolution has been replaced by an explosion in terms of knowledge and technology. There’s no sign of this slowing (indeed, the reverse); our ability to imagine what will be known and done in the year 3000 is surely no better than William or Harold’s ability would have been in 1066 to envisage the world today?
Projecting forward, either our species will destroy ourselves, or our planet, or be made extinct by some externality, such that development ends (or returns to primitive). Or human technology continues off exponentially into the stratosphere. Or there is some currently unimagined limit beyond which everything levels off (I.E. there’s only so much to know).
One assumes that there’s every chance that the same process can take place on at least some other planets.
Forget the matter of how we would make contact. The greater consideration is that the time over which this has taken place is infinitesimally tiny in relation to the age of the universe. Such that, even if alien life has existed over and over and over, the chance of any sci-fi scenario where aliens sufficiently close in development to ourselves that we might communicate or compete with, actually exists at the same moment as us would appear to be very remote indeed. Unless knowledge and technology are finite and level off, and humans approach that point not that many generations down the line, alien life on other planets will either be extinct, microbic, some uncommunicative form of animal/insect/reptile, or so much more sophisticated than ourselves that we are mere ants in comparison.
1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. 12%
2. Date of the next UK General Election. 26th September
3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called. Sunak, Starmer, Davey, Yousaf, Tice
4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%). Labour majority 180
5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. Haley & Biden
6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. Haley
7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. 4.75%
8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 4.2%). 3.9%
9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). £108bn
10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). 67
Yet another Haley prediction!
I'll be interested to see what the 'hive mind' summary is on Saturday if @Benpointer is able to do a summation.
I've bet on Haley as my long shot bet for GOP, but I am pretty sure it wont happen.
Haley is a good shout for a political betting site. Probably the biggest thing counting against Trump in the nomination process is that his record in office was so shambolic he didn’t deliver on expectations. For example, if he had gone down the route of state governor first, to prove with evidence he could run an administration that delivers, he would never have won the nomination on such a record of chaos and non delivery. It’s not Trump any Trump supporters want, it’s delivery of the Trump agenda.
I'm not sure that's true of all or even most of them. I know a few, and from what I can see, Trump supporters break down into the following, overlapping, categories:
- those who really hate woke/political correctness/the Democrats/New World Order/liberal media/Washington swamp, and regard everything the NY Times/MSNBC/mainstream media post against him as proof that he's right - those who regard politics as entertainment, a reality show for ugly people, or cage wrestling with words, and just see Trump as more entertaining than Biden, even if the joke is ultimately on them. For these people, there's no such thing as bad publicity for Trump - those who believe in Trump's policies. But I think this is the smallest category, because he's so erratic there's no telling what those are from one month to the next. You do meet people, occasionally, who really like his tax cuts or conservative judge nominations or whatever though.
None of these groups are particularly susceptible to reasoned debate on record in government or policy options, which is why Trump's popularity is so strong despite the various disasters and terrible decisions of his years in power.
The ultimate test of your claim “Trumps popularity is so strong” only comes at the general election. Let’s dig this post of yours out again after the result. Who won’t just lose tge White House, he will cost the party the house and Senate too.
Trump only won the first time due to the “Brexit States” hitting the “we have nothing to lose but hit the promise of change” button. That’s a one hit button. Once the penny drops you won’t reverse globalisation, bring all the jobs and wealth back, and turn rust into gleaming steal, your promises don’t get their vote again.
It’s not remotely ideological. Take UK Red Wall as example - pro Brexit Corbyn lost the Red Wall, those voters now switch to Brexit hater Starmer on the ideological point of Brexit? It’s not remotely ideological. There’s no ideological point there, or Starmer would get a worse Red Wall result than Corbyn.
Corbyn actually won the red wall seats in 2017, the red wall voted for Boris in 2019 to get Brexit done, note for Boris not the Tories. Now Boris has gone and Brexit has gone they have just gone back to voting for Labour as most of them normally do.
Daft post HY. “Corbyn won Red Wall seats” so did all Labour leaders.
The point remains, if Red Wall believe in and want Brexit to happen- that is UKs economic divergence from EU in order to finally bring the promised brexit benefits, then they would vote Tory at the 2024 election, not for Starmer, Lamy and a Labour top team of Brexit haters.
Brexit was done in 2020, we left the single market in 2021. Now even Starmer says he won't take the UK back into the EEA let alone reverse Brexit.
The redwallers got the Brexit they voted for in 2019, now even Starmer Labour won't reverse Brexit they will mostly vote Labour again
“Brexit was done in 2020. Redwallers got the brexit they voted for.”
You are simply repeating, not listening to what’s being put to you. Redwallers were promised benefits of Brexit, it is not done or delivered until those are delivered. Essentially, they were promised they would feel better off. They would see an improvement in public services. And where immigration looked a bit out of control pre Brexit, governments not keeping to “tens of thousands” of immigration promises pre Brexit, we would have control back to deliver this after Brexit.
Until these things are delivered, no it’s not done is it. That is the question being put to you HY, and you really have no choice but to agree. Because, whilst voters supported the Tory party to deliver on the Brexit promises, those voters are now marking the Tory’s down as failed to deliver on Brexit promise, and are now looking elsewhere for those same things to be delivered. Take a look at the polls.
More money has been put into the NHS and EU migrants now cannot get a Visa to work in the UK unless they earn over £38k a year thanks to the new government proposals.
So yes Brexit is done, done so much even Starmer Labour now promises not to reverse Brexit, not to restore free movement and not to return to the EU or EEA.
The 2019 general election was a clear choice for the UK of Brexit with the Boris led Conservatives or EUref2 or no Brexit at all with Corbyn Labour or the LDs.
Boris won that general election and now this year's general election will not be about Brexit unlike 2019 as both Starmer Labour and the Sunak Tories back Brexit and won't reverse it
“ now this year's general election will not be about Brexit”
You seriously believe that? 🤣
This years election is a huge Brexit election. Now with Corbyn out the way, all of Remainia get their first GE chance to give the Tory Party a thorough kicking for Brexit. We are talking historical Tory seats, where thanks to Brexit life long Tory voters now can’t wait to give the Tory’s a kicking, safe in the knowledge the worse that could happen is a Starmer/Reeves government.
Meanwhile Reform are on the rise simply because voters feel the promised benefits of Brexit are not happening yet. The argument the promised benefits of Brexit won’t be felt by voters until the UKs freedom to divulge is properly implemented, will only grow stronger from here, so that it won’t just be Reform arguing this, but increasing amounts of Tory’s too. This too makes 2024 a Brexit election.
2024 goes into history books as a Brexit election.
Nah. I know you keep pushing this line but that is just your wishful thinking. If we had had even slightly competent or honest Government over the last 7 years then Brexit wouldn't eeven register as an issue with anyone except the fanatics on both sides. As it is this Government will (hopefully) be destroyed by their incompetence and lies, not about Brexit but about the basic day to day running of the country.
This is why Starmer feels safe not even bothering to mention Brexit. He knows he has an open goal with the current rubbish administration and can safely ignore the minor disturbance of Brexit in the Force as he knows he doesn't have to promise anything or do anything other than be a reasonable and competent PM.
Top dieting tip: If it is in the house, you'll eat it. So don't buy the bad foods in the first place. If the only snacks available at home are dried fruit and nuts, that's what you'll eat - not biscuits, crisps or chocolate.
It's a good way of busting temptation.
Unfortunately we've been inundated with chocolate this Christmas. We were going to give a couple of trays away to friends of ours, but they came around and gave us some of their excess...
So lets go down the Sunak election rabbit hole. Despite building momentum towards 2nd May, he decided the best decision is no decision. So we go on. They get a beating in the locals, which gets the parliamentary party creating all kinds of aggro. The recession and poor economic performance makes building any kind of momentum difficult.
So we get through a very silly summer, endless complaining and plotting. An election needs to be called but they are in a worse place than they were in March. Tory conference turns into another mess, so that window passes and besides which the King reiterates he is in Samoa Australia and New Zealand. Then the US election gets messy.
Like having children, if you wait for the right time it will never happen. There is no right time to go - the polls won't swing back in their favour, and the longer they go on the further away that is.
He can say "2nd half of the year" but he will dither on, behind in the polls, battered by his own side, waiting for *something* to happen. So if he doesn't go for 2nd May, there is a real likelihood that it drags out to 23rd January 2025. With the New Year campaign as the wild card attempt to make something change...
Yes that sums it up. You don’t call an election if double digits behind, when you can wait another 6 months hoping for something to turn up. McCawberism.
Hopefully it’s not just us on PB who can see this spring as being most favourable moment for the Tories. There more concrete negatives in waiting into second half of year than concrete positives.
If you announce an upbeat budget, you strike then whilst the promise is hot, not give opponents time to pick it apart. I’ve got long Summer and Autumn period set against the Tories local election disaster, and looking like electoral failures and had beens, running scared from calling an election. That period allowing the opposition parties to convince voters any tax cuts have actually been funded by borrowing, and the already high tax burden, not from growth - tax cuts whilst social services, NHS, education, the environment, infrastructure is actually falling apart - and the longer with tax cuts in their pockets the more voters won’t feel better off, the strongest moment is thoughts you might be better off.
That summer and autumn period more government promises might not go anywhere good or fall apart, such as immigration, NHS, borrowing, growth. And stopping the boats. And more light can be shone upon government incompetence in this parliament, not least the abuse of covid crisis to create a secret and corrupt fast lane to government money, that’s still largely unexplored by the media.
All these things will or likely come to pass to hurt the Conservatives next Summer and Autumn, it’s based on the understanding the Tory electoral battle for votes and best possible election result is not a battle between Tory and Labour but between Tory and Reform - the longer the gap is between now and the next election, the greater likelihood is Tory’s shipping more votes to Reform, not winning them back.
Comments
* Gotta love those Jesuits. It's like a four-armed cross then: microbiology; radioastronomy; archaeology; and the role of Spectator editors, especially converts [+].
+ Including one who apparently doesn't like Opus at all.
A chance now of some severe winter weather towards the second half of January . Likely to hit GDP so his growth pledge which was on shaky ground is likely to take a further hit .
The laws of physics, biology and evolution can give an account of how by the survival of the fittest etc first life can come by adaptation to develop into tigers and elephants and so on. This requires objective and metaphorical intelligence. But it does not require (though I have no doubt it in fact has) subjective intelligence, any more than the remarkable capacities of oak trees does (most people, pace King Charles III think oak trees lack this quality, though I feel agnostic about it.)
We know quite a lot about the evolution of objective capacities, but nothing at all about the evolution (the how and why and by what mechanism) of the subjective ones. In this respect speculation from our only sample planet can easily go too far.
One reason that The Post Office scandal has been repeatedly... put on back burner is that the list of organisations involved is
Conservative Party
Labour Party
Lib Dem Party
Senior Civil Service
Senior lawyers and law firms
When you add in all the places that people involved have moved to, you get a complete set of the NU10K Great And The Good. The whole apparatus of Government.
A scandal that is Too Big To Happen. See Rotherham.
Most of the Trump support is just continually angry and thick bigoted trash .
Burying half of Europe under and ash-field and wiping out a non-trivial proportion of food production on the planet would have pretty serious effects.
(I've seen speculation that an earlier Campi Phlaegri eruption provided the final nail to render the Neanderthals extinct).
Which would be a sufficiently large black swan to render all the other predictions irrelevant, I'll grant you, but we may not be congratulating you online on your successful guess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(novel)
1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. 9%
2. Date of the next UK General Election. 13/06/2024
3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called. Sunak, Starmer, Davey, Yousaf, Tice
4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%). Labour majority 75 seats
5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. Trump & Biden
6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. Trump
7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. 4.25%
8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 4.2%). 3.8%
9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). £90bn
10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). 48
1 - As we've only got that sample size of one, all of our understanding is going to be based on ringing the changes on it (and speculation on more esoteric ones becomes even further away from our ability to even remotely meaningfully estimate chances);
2 - If intelligent life is so different from our experience and comprehension that we can't even perceive it, for our purposes, it may as well not exist (up to the point where its decisions impact upon us. At which point we may well perceive it, so it no longer falls into this category).
It's why debates about evolution get so tiresome, because, if you break it down enough, evolutionary biologists and creationists are actually arguing from indistinguishable points of view.
Watch: Man leaps over US courtroom bench to attack judge
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-67879499
Rishi says second half of the year for GE
It is beyond arrogant to assume that all intelligent life MUST evolve in the ways and context we did, for a start we might live in one of an infinite number of parallel universes where EVERY kind of life MUST evolve. Some of them might be able to move between and around universes, or dimensions, or time
This really is one occasion for thinking outside the box, to put it with exceptional mildness
The FIRST kinds of life we encounter are likely to be similar to us, because that is what we are attuned to, and that is in our bandwidth and our intellectual spectrum: the same way ants can become really aware of other ants, or maybe woodlice or dead bees, but don't have much clue about the mortgage broker who owns the Chiswick garden in which they build their nest
This was news to me. A Tom Scott video from a few years ago.
"The Fake Vinegar In British Fish and Chip Shops"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=642x2Y3Zla0
Unless he is doing this to try and catch Labour off guard, but I’m not sure I credit him with that much strategic thinking.
Unlike last August with LK-99, it has apparently already been replicated (although I'd like to see solid confirmation on that), and the researchers are being far more cautious in their claims (which does usually characterise genuine successes).
Going to need to see a lot more on this, but an ambient pressure near-room-temperature superconductor could be very very significant indeed. IF it pans out (still very much to see yet)
You are simply repeating, not listening to what’s being put to you. Redwallers were promised benefits of Brexit, it is not done or delivered until those are delivered. Essentially, they were promised they would feel better off. They would see an improvement in public services. And where immigration looked a bit out of control pre Brexit, governments not keeping to “tens of thousands” of immigration promises pre Brexit, we would have control back to deliver this after Brexit.
Until these things are delivered, no it’s not done is it. That is the question being put to you HY, and you really have no choice but to agree. Because, whilst voters supported the Tory party to deliver on the Brexit promises, those voters are now marking the Tory’s down as failed to deliver on Brexit promise, and are now looking elsewhere for those same things to be delivered. Take a look at the polls.
If you speak nicely to Benpointer he will probably let you change answer 2.
Good luck.
So we get through a very silly summer, endless complaining and plotting. An election needs to be called but they are in a worse place than they were in March. Tory conference turns into another mess, so that window passes and besides which the King reiterates he is in Samoa Australia and New Zealand. Then the US election gets messy.
Like having children, if you wait for the right time it will never happen. There is no right time to go - the polls won't swing back in their favour, and the longer they go on the further away that is.
He can say "2nd half of the year" but he will dither on, behind in the polls, battered by his own side, waiting for *something* to happen. So if he doesn't go for 2nd May, there is a real likelihood that it drags out to 23rd January 2025. With the New Year campaign as the wild card attempt to make something change...
Which would bring superconductors out of a "exotic" uses such as MRI machines - to things like transport. Maglev trains might get another look, for a start.
The only thing from June onwards is that everyone will have forgot about the tax cuts (as prices instantly swallow the extra spending power) and the likelihood of small boats still crossing the channel...
So yes Brexit is done, done so much even Starmer Labour now promises not to reverse Brexit, not to restore free movement and not to return to the EU or EEA.
The 2019 general election was a clear choice for the UK of Brexit with the Boris led Conservatives or EUref2 or no Brexit at all with Corbyn Labour or the LDs.
Boris won that general election and now this year's general election will not be about Brexit unlike 2019 as both Starmer Labour and the Sunak Tories back Brexit and won't reverse it
The true Tory position, from True Tory’s, is Brexit has been delivered. Brexit is done. It’s history. There is no failure to deliver Brexit. Take a look at HY’s posts.
Then there is power transmission - no electrical resistance.
Then there is applications towards nuclear fusion (which I think uses superconducters to manage the high temps and pressures needed).
Easy magnetic levitation of trains etc.
And that's just the start.
Wow!
Just cannot see the numbers being there who are overly motivated by tackling small boats and when it comes to migration people are generally supportive.
And of course if, like the Loch Ness monster, the truth is that there is nothing to find, it will take a long time.
With timing of budget and the whole “you will feel better off in your pocket” media campaign of the last few weeks, their war gaming has clearly tried to keep May option on the table.
People who really don’t like the Tories will be happy if it isn’t May, despite the faux grumbling on PB posts. Once the date ticks beyond May 2nd, the Tories are on for a worse result than if it had been May 2nd.
That's Judge Chutkin.
Plus the two New York Civil ones.
I’m not saying he’s going to be successful with this message, but that’s what they’re trying.
There simply aren't enough votes amongst ERG Tory MPs to oust Sunak as PM and Tory leader, after all over 50% of Tory MPs nominated Sunak to be Tory leader last autumn and even last summer Sunak beat Truss and Mordaunt with Tory MPs even if Tory members voted for Truss over Sunak.
The ERG right might be able to get their candidate in the last 2 if Sunak loses the next general election and resigns and then win the membership vote. However until then Sunak and Hunt almost certainly lead the Tories into the next general election
They're far better drops than another boring meal on another boring beach.
I’m only allowed water, black coffee and black or green tea
I want a total detox and to keep the weight loss going
I’ve done it before - once - and failed several times. Getting through the second day is hard hard hard, hence my failures
But if you can, the mental clarity on day 3 onwards is intense. A kind of manic elation
Here goes
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/crypto-hedge-fund-ceo-may-not-exist-probe-finds-no-record-of-identity/
An aside: the other day it occurred to me that from Colossus to today less than a century has passed, and we've moved from the 'first' computer (arguably, I know, Difference Engine etc) to serious concerns about AI.
We still don't fully understand the social and psychological impact of mobile phones and the internet.
The promise of things getting better after Brexit, has not been delivered. Simple as that. The position of the Tory party is that Brexit has been delivered, end of, but this is subject to change as Reform and Labour both go for Tory votes about things not being better, squeezing the Tory Party from both sides. So what the Tory Party will start listening to as an answer is the idea, the Tory party did not deliver Brexit promises, because it did not make the most of Brexit by diverging from the EU position.
If you are right about the Tory’s perceived success in delivering Brexit, as you claim in your post, why are Reform already on double digits in polls, even before the Tory toes are more seriously held to the fire in this and coming years? And if you are right, Lefties voted for Brexit so a Corbyn government would have the power to renationalise everything, Starmer should not be picking up these votes as easily as he is.
Take a look at the polls. If voters believe the promise of Brexit has been delivered, it doesn’t show up in the polls does it. Quite the opposite - reform plus Labour = over 50%.
Have lost 3.2kgs in 3 days...
Been at about eight and a half stone for some time. Turns out not being that fussed about food is the easiest way to not gain weight.
Rich kiddy fiddlers, not as bad as Hamas rapists.
You want thanks?
Incredible!
Also why add Reform and Labour opinion poll predictions together, you can't draw any meaningful conclusions from that.
It really did revolutionise things
Normally however I do fruit fasts or 24 hour fasts
This is the real test
We have all discussed dieting plenty of times in the past so each to their own.
Any diet will work (water, black coffee, tea - big mac, BLT, mars bar) if it regulates eating as being overweight stems from too much eating so all those books very cleverly just decide on a theme and then use that as contents for regulated eating.
Exercise can also help but can also be used to "justify" eating more (just another 15mins running before I can have that Mars Bar) so should be handled with care.
As I say, good luck.
If you were a Tory councilor and you lost your seat in May because Rishi destroyed the Tory party vote , you are not exactly going to waste a month in October / November canvassing for the Tory party.
That’s why I expect the Tory party will do disastrously if he delays an election - there won’t be anyone going out to ensure the Tory vote gets out and actually votes
https://www.mobilephonemuseum.com/phone-detail/one-touch-com - had this, and it wasn't the first smart phone I owned, either.
Not recommended!
I'm doing it partly because I am off on assignment to Phnom Penh in a few days, and I will be deluged there with delicious free meals, so this is partly to offset that. Also I just enjoy a challenge, and five days is a REAL challenge
Is it exhaustion? I dunno. The body going into some kind of muscle-memory of hibernation?
But it is a widely reported side-effect - for some
You seriously believe that? 🤣
This years election is a huge Brexit election. Now with Corbyn out the way, all of Remainia get their first GE chance to give the Tory Party a thorough kicking for Brexit. We are talking historical Tory seats, where thanks to Brexit life long Tory voters now can’t wait to give the Tory’s a kicking, safe in the knowledge the worse that could happen is a Starmer/Reeves government.
Meanwhile Reform are on the rise simply because voters feel the promised benefits of Brexit are not happening yet. The argument the promised benefits of Brexit won’t be felt by voters until the UKs freedom to divulge is properly implemented, will only grow stronger from here, so that it won’t just be Reform arguing this, but increasing amounts of Tory’s too. This too makes 2024 a Brexit election.
2024 goes into history books as a Brexit election.
Since these factors came together, the glacial pace of evolution has been replaced by an explosion in terms of knowledge and technology. There’s no sign of this slowing (indeed, the reverse); our ability to imagine what will be known and done in the year 3000 is surely no better than William or Harold’s ability would have been in 1066 to envisage the world today?
Projecting forward, either our species will destroy ourselves, or our planet, or be made extinct by some externality, such that development ends (or returns to primitive). Or human technology continues off exponentially into the stratosphere. Or there is some currently unimagined limit beyond which everything levels off (I.E. there’s only so much to know).
One assumes that there’s every chance that the same process can take place on at least some other planets.
Forget the matter of how we would make contact. The greater consideration is that the time over which this has taken place is infinitesimally tiny in relation to the age of the universe. Such that, even if alien life has existed over and over and over, the chance of any sci-fi scenario where aliens sufficiently close in development to ourselves that we might communicate or compete with, actually exists at the same moment as us would appear to be very remote indeed. Unless knowledge and technology are finite and level off, and humans approach that point not that many generations down the line, alien life on other planets will either be extinct, microbic, some uncommunicative form of animal/insect/reptile, or so much more sophisticated than ourselves that we are mere ants in comparison.
This is why Starmer feels safe not even bothering to mention Brexit. He knows he has an open goal with the current rubbish administration and can safely ignore the minor disturbance of Brexit in the Force as he knows he doesn't have to promise anything or do anything other than be a reasonable and competent PM.
Unfortunately we've been inundated with chocolate this Christmas. We were going to give a couple of trays away to friends of ours, but they came around and gave us some of their excess...
Hopefully it’s not just us on PB who can see this spring as being most favourable moment for the Tories. There more concrete negatives in waiting into second half of year than concrete positives.
If you announce an upbeat budget, you strike then whilst the promise is hot, not give opponents time to pick it apart. I’ve got long Summer and Autumn period set against the Tories local election disaster, and looking like electoral failures and had beens, running scared from calling an election. That period allowing the opposition parties to convince voters any tax cuts have actually been funded by borrowing, and the already high tax burden, not from growth - tax cuts whilst social services, NHS, education, the environment, infrastructure is actually falling apart - and the longer with tax cuts in their pockets the more voters won’t feel better off, the strongest moment is thoughts you might be better off.
That summer and autumn period more government promises might not go anywhere good or fall apart, such as immigration, NHS, borrowing, growth. And stopping the boats. And more light can be shone upon government incompetence in this parliament, not least the abuse of covid crisis to create a secret and corrupt fast lane to government money, that’s still largely unexplored by the media.
All these things will or likely come to pass to hurt the Conservatives next Summer and Autumn, it’s based on the understanding the Tory electoral battle for votes and best possible election result is not a battle between Tory and Labour but between Tory and Reform - the longer the gap is between now and the next election, the greater likelihood is Tory’s shipping more votes to Reform, not winning them back.