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The betting (and polling) seem to be headed in one direction for the moment – politicalbetting.com
The betting (and polling) seem to be headed in one direction for the moment – politicalbetting.com
Kamala Harris leads Donald Trump in three crucial battleground states, according to new surveys by The New York Times and Siena College, the latest indication of a dramatic reversal in standing for Democrats since President Biden ended his re-election bid. https://t.co/lhXdmnNImo
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Whenever someone looks at the evidence and says "on balance it looks like it came from a lab leak", you trumpet this as somehow new evidence, when it is nothing of the sort.
While I get that the polls have narrowed a great deal and favour Kamala Harris, plus all the momentum is with her, plus she has made a way better pick for VP than Trump... I'm still wary of how much the Betfair odds are wishcasting on the part of non-US punters who just don't understand Trump's appeal as his politics is outside of the Overton Window for most of us over here. Just feels like there's an obvious bias showing up in the available odds which, as you say, may make Trump value at these prices.
https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7456/Who-will-win-the-2024-US-presidential-election
Look at the debate here today. Who is the only person offering citations, quotes, photos, new evidence. It's me, isn't it? Only me. Half the forum was apparently unaware that the Wuhan CDC was just 280m from the market. As you were unaware some months ago, until I corrected you
I imagine 90% of the forum was unware of that early Chinese research paper identifying the Wuhan CDC as the source of Covid, now they know about it, because I have showed it to them, and linked to it. I give new evidence, and you are all better informed
However, the ironic thing is I reckon the fact it is ME adducing this evidence probably makes quite a few people even more determined to believe it came from the market, because I am - on this site, but not in real life- notably arrogant, punchy and annoying, and admitting that I am right is too much to swallow. Which is amusing and perfectly fine, I come on the site to argue, not to nod along in boring, centrist dad agreement
Now onwards to reorganise my wine collection. Later
“Harris’ failure to pick Shapiro as her running mate does not appear to have damaged her chances in Pennsylvania.”
?
Her big advantage is that she is a reasonable candidate with a reasonable running mate against a pair of very weird… characters.
On the other hand, there is little sign of the Trump Wall crumbling. We’ve been waiting the best part of a decade for the Orange Implosion.
So it’s up to Harris/Walz to get all the Democrats out and start gathering the swing voters - maybe 10% out there who are moveable.
I would say that so far, Harris has done an incredible job on party unity. Her choice of VP has met with universal praise in the party and beyond.
So she’s got the base and party fired up - good for turnout.
This is a very good position to build on. But to win she needs more.
https://www.science.org/content/article/virologists-and-epidemiologists-back-natural-origin-covid-19-survey-suggests
Your whole approach to the issue is irrational. What you call gathering evidence is simply confirmation bias on your part. You have no idea at all how to approach this issue, or any other issue, in a dispassionate manner. But then, why would you? Dispassion isn't what you trade in.
My bias is remembering 2016 when literally everyone said Trump couldn't win. I had him at 50/1, but cashed out after the first debate at 5/1 because *I simply couldn't believe* America would elect the man after that performance. But that was my own bias showing. Now I'm probably over-correcting a bit, going *I absolutely can believe* American voters could elect him again despite my own disbelief. Good to see what a US market actually thinks.
Mrs C used to buy them fairly regularly from Sainsburys - imported all the way from lancashire. Apparently however made in somewhere called Ardwick, which is seemingly the wrong side of the river and Salford.
"It’s 2030 in the UK & you’re being executed for posting a meme …"
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1822254173359890461
So, this is where you and I slightly break ranks, because there is plenty of evidence that the vast bulk of coronavirus research took place at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, while the CDC was a much smaller facility with a much broader remit. If you go back and look at the Internet Archive from pre-Covid, you can see that the mission of the Chinese CDC - like in the US - has a primary focus on "preparing for and responding to public health emergencies, including pandemics, natural disasters, and bioterrorism. This involves developing protocols and response strategies for various scenarios." The other major element (for Wuhan) is "conducts laboratory-based research to develop diagnostic tools and improve the detection of infectious diseases. This includes the development of PCR tests and other methodologies for identifying pathogens in clinical and environmental samples."
The main site for the studying of bats and coronaviruses was the WIV. I think it is massively more likely it escaped from there than from the CDC. And I think the location thing is a complete red herring: what you think that people that work at the WIV don't live all over the city? Because in all probability we're talking about a single employee who got the sniffles, and maybe gave it to a wife or son or neighbour or cleaner or person on public transport, and who took it to the wet market.
Could it have escaped from the CDC? Sure. But if there are 1,000x more bat viruses at another facility in Wuhan, and people in Wuhan get around, then I think the balance of probabilities is clearly on the side of the WIV.
Your credibility as a source of info on the lab leak is low because you very clearly went all in on it a while ago. Anyone can find a scientific paper to back their argument because internet, though it does you credit that you go to the effort of doing so.
Whereas they are listing Trafalgar Group polls all showing Trump leading.
Is 538 being slow or cherry picking?
Is there ANY site which just lists all polls promptly?
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/
Labour ends plans by Michael Gove to introduce a ‘UK connection test’ to limit social housing to those resident for at least 10 years"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/08/10/angela-rayner-social-housing-migrants-drop-restrictions/
Or is it simpler to list those that weren't?
But hey that's what makes betting tick. Different perceptions.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1986/64#:~:text=(1)Where 12 or more,unlawful violence for the common
https://x.com/newyorker/status/1821630968144294048
Below is a letter that I am sending to the nearby Tesla Centre.
Key sentence; I do not support rioting and throwing missiles at the police.
==============================================
Dear Tesla
I have an electric car (Volkswagen ID.3)
Our next car will be electric. There is no way that I would buy a Tesla.
I do not support rioting and throwing missiles at the police.
Elon Musk has allowed Tommy Robinson back onto X/Twitter and Musk seems to support the Far-Right.
Regards
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
If you want to damage his brand use some ai generating software to mock up an image of a tesla on fire this takes about a minute). Share it on social media. After all that would be "free speech" under Musk's definition.
I have a theory that a part of the problem is people for whom there isn't *progression*
In times past, work your whole life at a job. Get pay rises, sure. Maybe, if you were ambitious, the foreman's job.
The modern world sells the idea that you should be going *up*.
So you have people, who are in jobs, but they aren't going to progress. So they do their work. What's next?
There is also, as a part of this, a lot of people bumbling along on a mix of benefits and part time, poorly paid work. How are they ever going to retire? A pension that would pay for their rent is beyond them.
Have you NO shame???
Musk wants Trump/GOP to win. He's made that clear. Whether that is because a deal has been done, or he likes their anti-woman policies (*), or some other thing, I don't know. But there is a chance that the Dems might win, and that might be bad for him if he has attacked them too much.
So instead of fully attacking them head-on, he's attacking a newly-elected leftish government in a country with close social and historic links to the USA - us. We are an exemplar for the USA, with a left government. And we are powerless to stop him trashing our reputation.
And make no mistake: he is harming the UK.
(*) He thinks the US should have a billion people in it, likes people to have large families, and is rabidly anti-immigration (except for him and his buds, of course). It's hard to square these without thinking he wants women to be baby-making machines - and the GOP's current policies are heading that way.
IF they actually gave a damn about accuracy instead of pontificating about it!
How important are they? Somewhere around 20 percent of the vote, at a guess. George W. Bush was not hurt, politically, by living in Crawford, Texas.
(Incidentally, the Secret Service loved that location, since it made their work far easier.)
Absolute idiocy.
Funny how history rhymes...
EDIT - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Bad_Neighbors
His strength is (or was) in government.
I got much about the last Presidential wrong, but salvaged a very decent profit overall thanks to staying up through the night.
The thing I take out of that era Simpsons was how *normal* it was back then to be a working Joe, live in a decently sized house, and be able to afford three kids, and have a stay at home wife so she can look after them (a bit trad, I know, but still, most mums I know would love to spend more time with their kids than work long hours to dump them in daycare).
America (and the UK) probably needs a lot more families like the Simpsons.
It's all a matter of interpretation. I don't force my interpretation on anyone else but I would gently suggest those who say they know, don't know what they claim to know.
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
(With the honourable exception of subsidised early years childcare)
My wife spent the last half decade of her career teaching in a primary school in an area of serious social deprivation. The system undoubtedly fails a lot of bright kids with potential (though some still make it through), for all manner of reasons. Resources is part of it, but it’s not a simple problem.
The last government failed miserably on “levelling up”. How Labour do on this is one of the big tests for Starmer.
And are you aware that roads are also used by public transport ?
There are other roads apart from motorways as well.
Most journeys are less than ten miles.
Not to mention that congestion on transport isn't helped by an expanding population - stop it expanding and you reduce future congestion.
The problem is that government (in this country) is trained to believe in The One Big Hammer.
Was discussing this with someone in context of prison rehabilitation programs. Many times the following has been observed - an approach works. Then fails when scaled up.
I suggested that we should have zillions of small initiatives, all different, all run by the enthusiasts for that approach. Filter out the ones that work - support them. But don't try and make them universal.
What was interesting was the horror with which this was met - I was suggesting Anarchy. Rather than The One Big Program. How could this work?!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
There is a more recent book on American meritocracy (the Meritocracy Trap) that touches similar ground, but to my mind doesn't get the core issue, but rather wants to expand the meritocracy to the middle. There's a good discussion on the ideas here:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/24/20919030/meritocracy-book-daniel-markovits-inequality-rich
Ultimately the problem of Meritocracy is that it sorts people by "merit" (however judged) and their children have both the advantage genetically, and in terms of privileged access to educational and other resources. It is perhaps more just than a fuedal or aristocratic system, but nonetheless one with a lot of inequality. People deserve good lives even if they are without "merit" and that requires a conscious effort by society to redistribute national resources in their favour.
The right (and Reform in particular) blame immigrants, and this is a story that people are generally receptive to, particularly as many immigrants tend to be more motivated to be socially upwards mobile, hence the domination of professions like mine by second and third generation immigrants. This entrenches a further barrier for the social progress of the left behind.
The right are not interested in social mobility because it threatens their own or their children's position, hence the horror that their children might have to slum it in state schools, but Labour also often fails by focusing on welfarism rather on more permanent redistribution. There are exceptions, for example Rayners plans for a payrise to those employed in Social Care. Welfare has a part, but better is a system where unskilled and semi-skilled work pays enough for a decent life, has security of employment and is not pushed to the marginal towns and fringes of cities.
I have no truck with looters and stone throwers, but plenty of sympathy for the unskilled and poorly educated.
The issue is that while motorways increase capacity between cities, they do nothing to improve capacity in the cities themselves. For example, the Edinburgh bypass made it easier for people to commute to the business parks in the west, and for people to come in from Fife., the Lothians etc. Great!
But now the city itself is incredibly congested and the bypass is clogged up with commuters rather than commercial traffic.
In France it all goes into TGV plus roads and motorways. As a result local train services are scant, and buses where you want to go are almost non existant.
In Britain it goes successfully into multiple modes, not only in London. Not that I’m complaining, because I live there, but London shows what the rest of the country is missing. We have a dense and reliable tube network, buses that go everywhere and are all contactless payment at standard fares, roads which - while congested - are even more densely built and outside the central zone are free to use, and getting ongoing investment (witness the near completed Silvertown tunnel which to their shame my Lib Dem assembly
members oppose). And we have an ever improving cycle lane network coupled with a recent proliferation of Lime e-Bikes for hire. And Ubers or Bolts around every corner.
Spend spend spend!
It worked in the 90s. Since 2007 we’ve all stopped spending and the result has been a proto-Japan.
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
They analyse and adopt best practice each year, from hospitals which have the individual freedom to innovate.
In Hampstead, for example, there is a group who are oh so proud that their children attend the local school. Good luck getting into that school unless you happen to live in a house that costs more than a million. There aren't any for miles. Though the servants of the really rich live in, so their children get to go. So there's that.
You also see in media and arts a ferocious system of cronyism - starter jobs are now paid and mostly go to the scions of other families In The Thing.
Ironically, in the City, such practises have largely been banned. After a period of degree credentialism (couldn't get a job sorting post in a bank without a degree) - apprenticeships are coming in.
I caused an upset at a recent meeting on inclusion though. I pointed out the gaps in the proudly displayed slide of about 20 social and ethnic groups that inclusion team had found in the bank....
I'll get my coat. It's the one with the Aleph in the pocket.
I've blown the long game, so may as well play the short game.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce80x0jn44jo
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On Monday 29 July, our world was shattered by the loss of our precious daughter, Bebe.
Along with two other beautiful souls, Elsie and Alice, she was taken from us in an unimaginable act of violence that has left our hearts broken beyond repair.
Our beloved Bebe, only six years old, was full of joy, light, and love, and she will always remain in our hearts as the sweet, kind, and spirited girl we adore.
The outpouring of love and support from our community and beyond has been a source of incredible comfort during this unimaginably difficult time.
From the pink lights illuminating Sefton and Liverpool, to the pink bows, flowers, balloons, cards, and candles left in her memory, we have been overwhelmed by the kindness and compassion shown to our family.
The response from Southport, the whole of Liverpool, and even further afield has deeply touched our hearts, and we are so grateful to everyone who has reached out to us.
We want to acknowledge our older daughter, Genie, who witnessed the attack and managed to escape.
She has shown such incredible strength and courage, and we are so proud of her. Her resilience is a testament to the love and bond she shared with her little sister, and we will continue to support her as we navigate this painful journey together as a family.
Our thoughts are also with everyone else involved in this tragedy and all those who were injured.
We hope that they find strength and healing in the days ahead.
To the children who witnessed this terrible event, we send our love and hope that they too can begin to heal, surrounded by the care and support of those who love them.
To the emergency services, who acted with such care and professionalism on that terrible day: thank you.
Your support has continued as you have looked after our family with compassion and dedication, and we will forever be grateful for the way you have helped us through this harrowing time.
To our community, friends, and strangers who have shown us such love: Thank you.
Your messages, your tributes, and your presence have meant the world to us and have helped us find some solace in our grief.
We are also thinking of Elsie and Alice's families, who are sharing in this unimaginable loss, and we hold them close in our hearts.
Our hearts are broken, but we find some comfort in knowing that Bebe was so deeply loved by all who knew her.
She will forever be our shimmering star, and we will carry her with us in everything we do.
With love and gratitude,
Lauren, Ben, and Genie.
---
“Levelling up” isn’t confined to the high achievers. That is rather where you most notice the wasted potential.
How many people can or want to live like that now ?
This is the era of commuters - for work, for shopping, for education, for entertainment, for family.
One thing I would suggest would reduce congestion is more flexible hours - working from home is an aspect of this.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
If journeys are less than ten miles take the bus or an electric bike!
I like the way you have craftily linked a gridlocked road network with immigration. Nice trick!
JD Vance tells Steve Bannon today that people in Washington want to cut Social Security benefits to then give that money to Ukraine so Zelensky’s ministers can buy yachts.
https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1734288605751734631
In London, we have trains.