I have been with the family this weekend so have not posted, but did pick up a discussion on the merits of smart watches
I have always considered men and women should be equals and indeed it is the basis of our 60 years of marriage
I am sure some young men may struggle with their masculinity, but certainly neither Trump of Tate are role models, and finding a way to navigate them to a changed society is the challenge for all parents and teachers
I was saddened to hear of the death of Alex Salmond, who along with Farage, have had a profound impact on Scotland and the UK
Whilst being a Unionist, Alex was the one person who could have persuaded me about Scottish Independence and he will be greatly missed by many.
He died at the relative young age of 69 apparently from a heart attack
It is one year on Monday when I experienced a large dvt medical emergency and in the ultrasound in the hospital it also showed I had an undetected aneurysm of 4cm.
What followed was protracted medical investigations culminating at Christmas in a diagnosis of atrial fibulation requiring an immediate pacemaker operation.
It was ironic that my dvt actually led to two diagnosis on potential life threatening events both of which have been treated and will require a lifetime of monitoring
I am so grateful for everything the medics and my family have given in support and I am very much a champion for regular health checks
It is government policy to provide regular blood pressure, pulse and oxygen level tests, and screening for aneurysm is offered to all men during the year they become 65 and men should take this opportunity
It also follows stopping smoking (or vapping) is the number one best thing anyone can do, followed by weight loss and exercise
I hope that as we go forward Streeting and the devolved administrations continue to promote preventative screening, as in my case I had two life threatening issues I knew nothing about
The Vitality scheme - private healthcare, with big incentives for exercise, health stats etc - includes (drum roll) massive discounts on smart watches….
I use my Samsung smart watch to monitor my bps, sleep and walking, but not ECG or body mass due to the effect it could have on my pacemaker
My wife also has one, and it is good we can answer our phones on them and they also are set to call our family if they detect a hard fall
Can resident experts give guidance on what is best wristwatch for health , sure there are many on here who have them
The Garmin or Apple watches are the market leaders in this. Buy Garmin if you want really detailed fitness data, and 12 days between charges; buy Apple for nicer design and seamless Apple interfacing, but expect to be charging every 2-4 days
I really like my Fitbit although I liked the earlier, simpler versions better. As usual "improvements" have reduced its utility and efficacy. What has surprised me is that when I have done measured exercise with a recorded body weight in the gym the machine's estimate of calories burned and that of my Fitbit are remarkably similar. This suggests to me that it is fairly accurate in this respect.
Anyone else watching the SpaceX Starship test flight, where they are going to try and hover the rocket alongside the near the tower on the way back, then reach out and grab it with a large metal arm?
Looks like it’s scheduled for around 12:20 UK time, it’s either going to be one of the most spectacular things done in years in the field of aerospace, or it’s going to go horribly wrong and generate a somewhat massive explosion!
Garcia-Navarro tried arguing that illegal immigrants can't be deported because America needs them for jobs.
She pointed to the unemployment rate to back up her claim but was immediately shot down by Vance.
"The unemployment rate does not count labor force participation dropouts.
"This is one of the really deranged things that I think illegal immigration does to our society, is it gets us in a mindset of saying, 'we can only build houses with illegal immigrants.'
"We have 7 million men, not even women, just men who have completely dropped out of the labor force.
"Sometimes people who may be struggling with addiction or trauma, need to get reengaged in American society.
"We cannot have an entire American business community that is giving up on American workers and then importing millions of illegal laborers. That is what we have thanks to Kamala Harris' border policies. I think it's one of the biggest drivers of inequality.
"It's one of the biggest reasons why we have millions of people who've dropped out of the labor force. Why try to reengage an American citizen in a good job if you can just import somebody from Central America who's gonna work under the table for poverty wages?
"It is a disgrace and it has led to the evisceration of the American Middle class."
The problem is that the illegal immigrants are not in the areas of country where labor rate participation levels have collapsed. They're not in the broken towns of the Rustbelt, they're in California and Texas and Arizona and Nevada.
According to the stats here, the labor participation rate is lower in California, Texas, Arizona and Nevada than in Illinois, Missouri, Iowa or Minnesota.
And is not measuring what you think it is: you would think it was measuring the percent of people in work. It is not; is measuring the percent of people aged 18 and older who report themselves as willing and able to work; i.e., that they are part of the workforce.
It therefore is skewed in two ways: (1) because it's 18+, then places with lots of retirees will appear to have lower labour force participation because retirees are not reporting themselves as willing and able to work (2) by including the unemployed as part of the total, you can see rising employment and falling labour force particpation. (Or put it another way, you will see labour force partipation rise when unemployment rises, because when the husband loses his job, then the stay-at-home wife is now looking for work too.)
Michigan also has a lower unemployment rate than California, so even if you subtract the unemployed from the data, you have a lower employment rate in California than in Michigan. In some ways this is what you would expect given the obvious social malaise in California alongside the wealth.
Vance's point was that the unemployment figures aren't an accurate representation of the potential labour force available which seems to stand up.
We have exactly the same debate in this country arising from the increase in the number of people of working age who are not economically active. We debated it on here recently...
Except the US tends not to spend billions keeping their asylum seekers in enforced idleness. And so they probably make a net contribution to the economy.
Garcia-Navarro tried arguing that illegal immigrants can't be deported because America needs them for jobs.
She pointed to the unemployment rate to back up her claim but was immediately shot down by Vance.
"The unemployment rate does not count labor force participation dropouts.
"This is one of the really deranged things that I think illegal immigration does to our society, is it gets us in a mindset of saying, 'we can only build houses with illegal immigrants.'
"We have 7 million men, not even women, just men who have completely dropped out of the labor force.
"Sometimes people who may be struggling with addiction or trauma, need to get reengaged in American society.
"We cannot have an entire American business community that is giving up on American workers and then importing millions of illegal laborers. That is what we have thanks to Kamala Harris' border policies. I think it's one of the biggest drivers of inequality.
"It's one of the biggest reasons why we have millions of people who've dropped out of the labor force. Why try to reengage an American citizen in a good job if you can just import somebody from Central America who's gonna work under the table for poverty wages?
"It is a disgrace and it has led to the evisceration of the American Middle class."
The problem is that the illegal immigrants are not in the areas of country where labor rate participation levels have collapsed. They're not in the broken towns of the Rustbelt, they're in California and Texas and Arizona and Nevada.
According to the stats here, the labor participation rate is lower in California, Texas, Arizona and Nevada than in Illinois, Missouri, Iowa or Minnesota.
And is not measuring what you think it is: you would think it was measuring the percent of people in work. It is not; is measuring the percent of people aged 18 and older who report themselves as willing and able to work; i.e., that they are part of the workforce.
It therefore is skewed in two ways: (1) because it's 18+, then places with lots of retirees will appear to have lower labour force participation because retirees are not reporting themselves as willing and able to work (2) by including the unemployed as part of the total, you can see rising employment and falling labour force particpation. (Or put it another way, you will see labour force partipation rise when unemployment rises, because when the husband loses his job, then the stay-at-home wife is now looking for work too.)
Michigan also has a lower unemployment rate than California, so even if you subtract the unemployed from the data, you have a lower employment rate in California than in Michigan. In some ways this is what you would expect given the obvious social malaise in California alongside the wealth.
A really thought-provoking thread header, thanks. One of the more questions to me about the current drive to rid us of toxic masculinity is whether it is making women and girls happier. It doesn't seem to me to be working that way. I'm not sure that grievance ever works well for the aggrieved. The civil rights movement was moving toward a positive goal. The current grievance politics on race and the fight against 'toxic masculinity' are not. They're saying 'comport yourself differently so I can feel better' - that's a disaster in a number of ways. It is never 'done', the finish line is never reached. It wants some people to have things worse so others can (in theory) have things better, as if wellbeing is a zero sum game. Teach all kids to be polite, respectful, kind, and to value and respect themselves. Leave race and gender out of it.
It's all about difference really. We are a tribal species, our instinct is to "other" people who are not like us, regardless of what that difference is, racial, gender, culture, what team you support, your accent, language, politics, education, class, etc. When in actual fact our differences are few, we're largely the same, underneath it all.
Also, what the living fuck. This is extraordinary. Look at the gradient. Starmer is HATED
To be honest I don't think he can even aspire to hate. Trump is hated and feared. Starmer is just coming across as pathetic.
Don't quite get it myself - he's had some early missteps that have rightly earned bad press, but the drop is extraordinary. Has there been anything like it before?
Truss ?
She didn’t make it to 100 days. She never won a general election. She never had a landslide majority. She inherited a party in total chaos after 13 increasingly wretched years
You can’t compare them
For a newly elected PM this is indeed utterly unprecedented. The stats show it. No one has plunged this badly this quickly, nowhere near it
So what, though ? Either he delivers, in which case it doesn't matter, or he doesn't - in which case Labour are screwed anyway.
It cheers you up to realise you have company in feeling slightly foolish having voted for him, I guess ?
"So what?" is a near five-year lame duck PM. At a time when this country faces enormous challenges.
Leon won't be alone in his buyers' remorse of voting for Starmer. The "Ming vase" strategy wasn't so much a strategy as all he had. His failure to talk about anything contentious that might have lost him voters was because he had nothing tosay. Boats across the Channel? Relationship with the unions? Strategy for growth? Just a vacuum at the heart of Starmer's "delivery plan".
Also, what the living fuck. This is extraordinary. Look at the gradient. Starmer is HATED
To be honest I don't think he can even aspire to hate. Trump is hated and feared. Starmer is just coming across as pathetic.
Don't quite get it myself - he's had some early missteps that have rightly earned bad press, but the drop is extraordinary. Has there been anything like it before?
Truss ?
She didn’t make it to 100 days. She never won a general election. She never had a landslide majority. She inherited a party in total chaos after 13 increasingly wretched years
You can’t compare them
For a newly elected PM this is indeed utterly unprecedented. The stats show it. No one has plunged this badly this quickly, nowhere near it
So what, though ? Either he delivers, in which case it doesn't matter, or he doesn't - in which case Labour are screwed anyway.
It cheers you up to realise you have company in feeling slightly foolish having voted for him, I guess ?
“So what”?!
We are a politics website that debates the minutiae of polls down to the last council by election in West Newent. For politics geeks of every stripe what is happening to Starmer (and to a lesser extent Labour) is surely fascinating because we’ve never seen it before. This is entirely unprecedented
Also it points to even greater volatility in the future, which is pretty relevant in a political BETTING forum
I'd agree if we were a couple years out from the next election. It was pretty clear from the vote (not seat) totals that Labour will be out if they don't deliver. This is just confirmation. As we've seen before, PM approval ratings aren't everything, this early in a Parliament.
I wonder if these polls are just the Great British Public discovering what Londoners have known for years: that rich, lefty, pious, self-regarding North London lawyers are some of the most loathsome people on the planet
My mother, both before and after she met my father ran her own business. She was a self-employed pharmacist with one of the two pharmacies in a (then) small South Essex town. My father was a teacher, but from the time I was about 2 until I was nearly 7 he was away in the services. After the war he went back to teachingo but, as I understand it, he couldn't be a headmaster in a state primary or secondary school because Essex, very short of teachers, were only giving such jobs to candidates from outside the County s so in the very late 40's he became discouraged and went to work for his wife! She didn't want to leave what had become a very successful enterprise, which she would have had to do if he'd got a headship outside Essex. Plenty of people, as I grew up couldn't understand that he wasn't 'the chemist'.
When my Aunt Flora got married in 1936, she had to give up her job in the civil service.
Also, what the living fuck. This is extraordinary. Look at the gradient. Starmer is HATED
To be honest I don't think he can even aspire to hate. Trump is hated and feared. Starmer is just coming across as pathetic.
Don't quite get it myself - he's had some early missteps that have rightly earned bad press, but the drop is extraordinary. Has there been anything like it before?
Truss ?
She didn’t make it to 100 days. She never won a general election. She never had a landslide majority. She inherited a party in total chaos after 13 increasingly wretched years
You can’t compare them
For a newly elected PM this is indeed utterly unprecedented. The stats show it. No one has plunged this badly this quickly, nowhere near it
So what, though ? Either he delivers, in which case it doesn't matter, or he doesn't - in which case Labour are screwed anyway.
It cheers you up to realise you have company in feeling slightly foolish having voted for him, I guess ?
“So what”?!
We are a politics website that debates the minutiae of polls down to the last council by election in West Newent. For politics geeks of every stripe what is happening to Starmer (and to a lesser extent Labour) is surely fascinating because we’ve never seen it before. This is entirely unprecedented
Also it points to even greater volatility in the future, which is pretty relevant in a political BETTING forum
I'd agree if we were a couple years out from the next election. It was pretty clear from the vote (not seat) totals that Labour will be out if they don't deliver. This is just confirmation. As we've seen before, PM approval ratings aren't everything, this early in a Parliament.
I mean if they don’t deliver they should be out that’s literally the point
Garcia-Navarro tried arguing that illegal immigrants can't be deported because America needs them for jobs.
She pointed to the unemployment rate to back up her claim but was immediately shot down by Vance.
"The unemployment rate does not count labor force participation dropouts.
"This is one of the really deranged things that I think illegal immigration does to our society, is it gets us in a mindset of saying, 'we can only build houses with illegal immigrants.'
"We have 7 million men, not even women, just men who have completely dropped out of the labor force.
"Sometimes people who may be struggling with addiction or trauma, need to get reengaged in American society.
"We cannot have an entire American business community that is giving up on American workers and then importing millions of illegal laborers. That is what we have thanks to Kamala Harris' border policies. I think it's one of the biggest drivers of inequality.
"It's one of the biggest reasons why we have millions of people who've dropped out of the labor force. Why try to reengage an American citizen in a good job if you can just import somebody from Central America who's gonna work under the table for poverty wages?
"It is a disgrace and it has led to the evisceration of the American Middle class."
The problem is that the illegal immigrants are not in the areas of country where labor rate participation levels have collapsed. They're not in the broken towns of the Rustbelt, they're in California and Texas and Arizona and Nevada.
According to the stats here, the labor participation rate is lower in California, Texas, Arizona and Nevada than in Illinois, Missouri, Iowa or Minnesota.
And is not measuring what you think it is: you would think it was measuring the percent of people in work. It is not; is measuring the percent of people aged 18 and older who report themselves as willing and able to work; i.e., that they are part of the workforce.
It therefore is skewed in two ways: (1) because it's 18+, then places with lots of retirees will appear to have lower labour force participation because retirees are not reporting themselves as willing and able to work (2) by including the unemployed as part of the total, you can see rising employment and falling labour force particpation. (Or put it another way, you will see labour force partipation rise when unemployment rises, because when the husband loses his job, then the stay-at-home wife is now looking for work too.)
Michigan also has a lower unemployment rate than California, so even if you subtract the unemployed from the data, you have a lower employment rate in California than in Michigan. In some ways this is what you would expect given the obvious social malaise in California alongside the wealth.
Vance's point was that the unemployment figures aren't an accurate representation of the potential labour force available which seems to stand up.
We have exactly the same debate in this country arising from the increase in the number of people of working age who are not economically active. We debated it on here recently...
Except the US tends not to spend billions keeping their asylum seekers in enforced idleness. And so they probably make a net contribution to the economy.
That's true, and a self inflicted wound on our part without a doubt, but remember that asylum speakers form a relatively small part of our overall migration.
Also, what the living fuck. This is extraordinary. Look at the gradient. Starmer is HATED
To be honest I don't think he can even aspire to hate. Trump is hated and feared. Starmer is just coming across as pathetic.
Don't quite get it myself - he's had some early missteps that have rightly earned bad press, but the drop is extraordinary. Has there been anything like it before?
Truss ?
She didn’t make it to 100 days. She never won a general election. She never had a landslide majority. She inherited a party in total chaos after 13 increasingly wretched years
You can’t compare them
For a newly elected PM this is indeed utterly unprecedented. The stats show it. No one has plunged this badly this quickly, nowhere near it
So what, though ? Either he delivers, in which case it doesn't matter, or he doesn't - in which case Labour are screwed anyway.
It cheers you up to realise you have company in feeling slightly foolish having voted for him, I guess ?
"So what?" is a near five-year lame duck PM. At a time when this country faces enormous challenges.
Leon won't be alone in his buyers' remorse of voting for Starmer. The "Ming vase" strategy wasn't so much a strategy as all he had. His failure to talk about anything contentious that might have lost him voters was because he had nothing tosay. Boats across the Channel? Relationship with the unions? Strategy for growth? Just a vacuum at the heart of Starmer's "delivery plan".
From a Guardian profile of him when he first went into frontline politics:
“If I’m right, then the next 10 years are going to be really tough and – this isn’t meant to sound arrogant – but I think if I do have skills and experience that might help, I don’t really think I can walk away from it.”
Also, what the living fuck. This is extraordinary. Look at the gradient. Starmer is HATED
To be honest I don't think he can even aspire to hate. Trump is hated and feared. Starmer is just coming across as pathetic.
Don't quite get it myself - he's had some early missteps that have rightly earned bad press, but the drop is extraordinary. Has there been anything like it before?
Truss ?
She didn’t make it to 100 days. She never won a general election. She never had a landslide majority. She inherited a party in total chaos after 13 increasingly wretched years
You can’t compare them
For a newly elected PM this is indeed utterly unprecedented. The stats show it. No one has plunged this badly this quickly, nowhere near it
So what, though ? Either he delivers, in which case it doesn't matter, or he doesn't - in which case Labour are screwed anyway.
It cheers you up to realise you have company in feeling slightly foolish having voted for him, I guess ?
"So what?" is a near five-year lame duck PM. At a time when this country faces enormous challenges.
Leon won't be alone in his buyers' remorse of voting for Starmer. The "Ming vase" strategy wasn't so much a strategy as all he had. His failure to talk about anything contentious that might have lost him voters was because he had nothing tosay. Boats across the Channel? Relationship with the unions? Strategy for growth? Just a vacuum at the heart of Starmer's "delivery plan".
He's not a lame duck. Yet.
You might be right that there's nothing there. The elevation of McSweeney - Ming vase strategist - suggests as much. But you might not.
Anyone else watching the SpaceX Starship test flight, where they are going to try and hover the rocket alongside the near the tower on the way back, they reach out and grab it with a large metal arm?
Looks like it’s scheduled for around 12:20 UK time, it’s either going to be one of the most spectacular things done in years in the field of aerospace, or it’s going to go horribly wrong and generate a somewhat massive explosion!
Time to repost this from Asif Siddiq's excellent: "The Challenge to Apollo". It is Valeriy A Menshikov's memory of the explosion after the second N1 flight.
" We were all looking in the direction of the launch, where the hundred-meter pyramid of the rocket was being readied to be hurled into space. Ignition, the flash of flame from the engines, and the rocket slowly rose on a column of flame . And suddenly, at the place where it had just been, a bright fireball. Not one of us understood anything at first. A terrible purple-black mushroom cloud, so familiar from the pictures from the textbook on weapons of mass destruction. The steppe began to rock and the air began to shake, and all of the soldiers and officers froze. "
" Only in the trench did I understand the sense of the expression "your heart in your mouth." Something quite improbable was being created all around-the steppe was trembling like a vibration test jig, thundering, rumbling. whistling. gnashing-all mixed together in some terrible. seemingly unending cacophony. The trench proved to be so shallow and unreliable that one wanted to burrow into the sand so as not to hear this nightmare . .. the thick wave from the explosion passed over us. sweeping away and leveling everything. Behind it came hot metal raining down from above. Pieces of the rocket were thrown ten kilometers away. and large windows were shattered in structures 40 kilometers away. A 400 kilogram spherical tank landed on the roof of the installation and testing wing, seven kilometers from the launch pad. "
" We arrived at the fueling station and were horrified-the windows and doors were smashed out. the iron entrance gate was askew. the equipment was scattered about with the light of dawn and was turned to stone-the steppe was literally strewn with dead animals and birds. Where so many of them came from and how they appeared in such quantities at the station I still do not understand."
Also, what the living fuck. This is extraordinary. Look at the gradient. Starmer is HATED
To be honest I don't think he can even aspire to hate. Trump is hated and feared. Starmer is just coming across as pathetic.
Don't quite get it myself - he's had some early missteps that have rightly earned bad press, but the drop is extraordinary. Has there been anything like it before?
Truss ?
She didn’t make it to 100 days. She never won a general election. She never had a landslide majority. She inherited a party in total chaos after 13 increasingly wretched years
You can’t compare them
For a newly elected PM this is indeed utterly unprecedented. The stats show it. No one has plunged this badly this quickly, nowhere near it
So what, though ? Either he delivers, in which case it doesn't matter, or he doesn't - in which case Labour are screwed anyway.
It cheers you up to realise you have company in feeling slightly foolish having voted for him, I guess ?
“So what”?!
We are a politics website that debates the minutiae of polls down to the last council by election in West Newent. For politics geeks of every stripe what is happening to Starmer (and to a lesser extent Labour) is surely fascinating because we’ve never seen it before. This is entirely unprecedented
Also it points to even greater volatility in the future, which is pretty relevant in a political BETTING forum
I'd agree if we were a couple years out from the next election. It was pretty clear from the vote (not seat) totals that Labour will be out if they don't deliver. This is just confirmation. As we've seen before, PM approval ratings aren't everything, this early in a Parliament.
But we love polls and we love massive surprising polling movements, don’t we? It’s our meat and drink on PB
The quality of scandals in this country has dropped alarmingly. There was a time when a front-page "VIP escort" story didn't involve a police motorcade...
I blame that Starmer.
I don't think scandals of the sex variety are really allowed to happen any more. Post-Leveson, not only do the papers have to stand things up (rightly) a judge has to agree that they are in the public interest. It's very unhealthy, and part of the reason the UK is waaay down the list of free countries with some rather unsavoury friends these days.
Not just politicians are happy about this, footballers are over the moon....every Sunday used to be I shagged a married footballer, read my story on page 2,3,4,5,6,7,8...
It appears now they can't even name footballers when they alleged done drugs.
It's really awful - the rich and powerful neutered the press, using the unfortunate victims of crime as their weapon. I would still like @SandyRentool to tell us whether he'd have been happy for Major's ministers' sex scandals to be kept from the public in the cause of the individuals' right to privacy.
Also, what the living fuck. This is extraordinary. Look at the gradient. Starmer is HATED
To be honest I don't think he can even aspire to hate. Trump is hated and feared. Starmer is just coming across as pathetic.
Don't quite get it myself - he's had some early missteps that have rightly earned bad press, but the drop is extraordinary. Has there been anything like it before?
Truss ?
She didn’t make it to 100 days. She never won a general election. She never had a landslide majority. She inherited a party in total chaos after 13 increasingly wretched years
You can’t compare them
For a newly elected PM this is indeed utterly unprecedented. The stats show it. No one has plunged this badly this quickly, nowhere near it
So what, though ? Either he delivers, in which case it doesn't matter, or he doesn't - in which case Labour are screwed anyway.
It cheers you up to realise you have company in feeling slightly foolish having voted for him, I guess ?
"So what?" is a near five-year lame duck PM. At a time when this country faces enormous challenges.
Leon won't be alone in his buyers' remorse of voting for Starmer. The "Ming vase" strategy wasn't so much a strategy as all he had. His failure to talk about anything contentious that might have lost him voters was because he had nothing tosay. Boats across the Channel? Relationship with the unions? Strategy for growth? Just a vacuum at the heart of Starmer's "delivery plan".
Yes. It’s a void
I wonder if the Budget delay is simply because they had no ideas and they’ve spent the last months urgently trying to conjure something up. Depressingly plausible
Garcia-Navarro tried arguing that illegal immigrants can't be deported because America needs them for jobs.
She pointed to the unemployment rate to back up her claim but was immediately shot down by Vance.
"The unemployment rate does not count labor force participation dropouts.
"This is one of the really deranged things that I think illegal immigration does to our society, is it gets us in a mindset of saying, 'we can only build houses with illegal immigrants.'
"We have 7 million men, not even women, just men who have completely dropped out of the labor force.
"Sometimes people who may be struggling with addiction or trauma, need to get reengaged in American society.
"We cannot have an entire American business community that is giving up on American workers and then importing millions of illegal laborers. That is what we have thanks to Kamala Harris' border policies. I think it's one of the biggest drivers of inequality.
"It's one of the biggest reasons why we have millions of people who've dropped out of the labor force. Why try to reengage an American citizen in a good job if you can just import somebody from Central America who's gonna work under the table for poverty wages?
"It is a disgrace and it has led to the evisceration of the American Middle class."
The problem is that the illegal immigrants are not in the areas of country where labor rate participation levels have collapsed. They're not in the broken towns of the Rustbelt, they're in California and Texas and Arizona and Nevada.
According to the stats here, the labor participation rate is lower in California, Texas, Arizona and Nevada than in Illinois, Missouri, Iowa or Minnesota.
And is not measuring what you think it is: you would think it was measuring the percent of people in work. It is not; is measuring the percent of people aged 18 and older who report themselves as willing and able to work; i.e., that they are part of the workforce.
It therefore is skewed in two ways: (1) because it's 18+, then places with lots of retirees will appear to have lower labour force participation because retirees are not reporting themselves as willing and able to work (2) by including the unemployed as part of the total, you can see rising employment and falling labour force particpation. (Or put it another way, you will see labour force partipation rise when unemployment rises, because when the husband loses his job, then the stay-at-home wife is now looking for work too.)
Michigan also has a lower unemployment rate than California, so even if you subtract the unemployed from the data, you have a lower employment rate in California than in Michigan. In some ways this is what you would expect given the obvious social malaise in California alongside the wealth.
Vance's point was that the unemployment figures aren't an accurate representation of the potential labour force available which seems to stand up.
We have exactly the same debate in this country arising from the increase in the number of people of working age who are not economically active. We debated it on here recently...
Except the US tends not to spend billions keeping their asylum seekers in enforced idleness. And so they probably make a net contribution to the economy.
That's true, and a self inflicted wound on our part without a doubt, but remember that asylum speakers form a relatively small part of our overall migration.
Doesn't the US, though, also have (as has always had) a much higher percentage of illegal immigrants ? That has been the crux of their long running debates over immigration reform.
Also, what the living fuck. This is extraordinary. Look at the gradient. Starmer is HATED
To be honest I don't think he can even aspire to hate. Trump is hated and feared. Starmer is just coming across as pathetic.
Don't quite get it myself - he's had some early missteps that have rightly earned bad press, but the drop is extraordinary. Has there been anything like it before?
Truss ?
She didn’t make it to 100 days. She never won a general election. She never had a landslide majority. She inherited a party in total chaos after 13 increasingly wretched years
You can’t compare them
For a newly elected PM this is indeed utterly unprecedented. The stats show it. No one has plunged this badly this quickly, nowhere near it
So what, though ? Either he delivers, in which case it doesn't matter, or he doesn't - in which case Labour are screwed anyway.
It cheers you up to realise you have company in feeling slightly foolish having voted for him, I guess ?
"So what?" is a near five-year lame duck PM. At a time when this country faces enormous challenges.
Leon won't be alone in his buyers' remorse of voting for Starmer. The "Ming vase" strategy wasn't so much a strategy as all he had. His failure to talk about anything contentious that might have lost him voters was because he had nothing tosay. Boats across the Channel? Relationship with the unions? Strategy for growth? Just a vacuum at the heart of Starmer's "delivery plan".
Yes. It’s a void
I wonder if the Budget delay is simply because they had no ideas and they’ve spent the last months urgently trying to conjure something up. Depressingly plausible
The other bad thing is that the policy void seems to have resulted in the civil service stealing the agenda.
Anyone else watching the SpaceX Starship test flight, where they are going to try and hover the rocket alongside the near the tower on the way back, they reach out and grab it with a large metal arm?
Looks like it’s scheduled for around 12:20 UK time, it’s either going to be one of the most spectacular things done in years in the field of aerospace, or it’s going to go horribly wrong and generate a somewhat massive explosion!
Time to repost this from Asif Siddiq's excellent: "The Challenge to Apollo". It is Valeriy A Menshikov's memory of the explosion after the second N1 flight.
" We were all looking in the direction of the launch, where the hundred-meter pyramid of the rocket was being readied to be hurled into space. Ignition, the flash of flame from the engines, and the rocket slowly rose on a column of flame . And suddenly, at the place where it had just been, a bright fireball. Not one of us understood anything at first. A terrible purple-black mushroom cloud, so familiar from the pictures from the textbook on weapons of mass destruction. The steppe began to rock and the air began to shake, and all of the soldiers and officers froze. "
" Only in the trench did I understand the sense of the expression "your heart in your mouth." Something quite improbable was being created all around-the steppe was trembling like a vibration test jig, thundering, rumbling. whistling. gnashing-all mixed together in some terrible. seemingly unending cacophony. The trench proved to be so shallow and unreliable that one wanted to burrow into the sand so as not to hear this nightmare . .. the thick wave from the explosion passed over us. sweeping away and leveling everything. Behind it came hot metal raining down from above. Pieces of the rocket were thrown ten kilometers away. and large windows were shattered in structures 40 kilometers away. A 400 kilogram spherical tank landed on the roof of the installation and testing wing, seven kilometers from the launch pad. "
" We arrived at the fueling station and were horrified-the windows and doors were smashed out. the iron entrance gate was askew. the equipment was scattered about with the light of dawn and was turned to stone-the steppe was literally strewn with dead animals and birds. Where so many of them came from and how they appeared in such quantities at the station I still do not understand."
I've been reading the obituaries for Alex Salmond and from the photos he was quite atractive in his youth. But then John Prescott was really good looking when he was young.
Also, what the living fuck. This is extraordinary. Look at the gradient. Starmer is HATED
To be honest I don't think he can even aspire to hate. Trump is hated and feared. Starmer is just coming across as pathetic.
Don't quite get it myself - he's had some early missteps that have rightly earned bad press, but the drop is extraordinary. Has there been anything like it before?
Truss ?
She didn’t make it to 100 days. She never won a general election. She never had a landslide majority. She inherited a party in total chaos after 13 increasingly wretched years
You can’t compare them
For a newly elected PM this is indeed utterly unprecedented. The stats show it. No one has plunged this badly this quickly, nowhere near it
So what, though ? Either he delivers, in which case it doesn't matter, or he doesn't - in which case Labour are screwed anyway.
It cheers you up to realise you have company in feeling slightly foolish having voted for him, I guess ?
“So what”?!
We are a politics website that debates the minutiae of polls down to the last council by election in West Newent. For politics geeks of every stripe what is happening to Starmer (and to a lesser extent Labour) is surely fascinating because we’ve never seen it before. This is entirely unprecedented
Also it points to even greater volatility in the future, which is pretty relevant in a political BETTING forum
I'd agree if we were a couple years out from the next election. It was pretty clear from the vote (not seat) totals that Labour will be out if they don't deliver. This is just confirmation. As we've seen before, PM approval ratings aren't everything, this early in a Parliament.
But we love polls and we love massive surprising polling movements, don’t we? It’s our meat and drink on PB
Perhaps you just don’t like THIS polling shift
But there's another, more important point. It's easy to lose high approval ratings, but incredibly difficult to get them back again. It's possible, no doubt, but it's far easier to think of PMs who've been held in contempt and has continued to be than those who have bounced back. Mrs Thatcher managed it with the economic recovery and the Falklands War. But John Major never recovered from the events of 1992/3 despite a booming economy. Rishi lost his high approval ratings from the pandemic as Chancellor before he became PM. Etc.
And given the increasing short-termist fractious society we have where the government has run out of other people's money to bribe them with, I think that's even more difficult than it was.
Also, what the living fuck. This is extraordinary. Look at the gradient. Starmer is HATED
To be honest I don't think he can even aspire to hate. Trump is hated and feared. Starmer is just coming across as pathetic.
Don't quite get it myself - he's had some early missteps that have rightly earned bad press, but the drop is extraordinary. Has there been anything like it before?
Truss ?
She didn’t make it to 100 days. She never won a general election. She never had a landslide majority. She inherited a party in total chaos after 13 increasingly wretched years
You can’t compare them
For a newly elected PM this is indeed utterly unprecedented. The stats show it. No one has plunged this badly this quickly, nowhere near it
So what, though ? Either he delivers, in which case it doesn't matter, or he doesn't - in which case Labour are screwed anyway.
It cheers you up to realise you have company in feeling slightly foolish having voted for him, I guess ?
"So what?" is a near five-year lame duck PM. At a time when this country faces enormous challenges.
Leon won't be alone in his buyers' remorse of voting for Starmer. The "Ming vase" strategy wasn't so much a strategy as all he had. His failure to talk about anything contentious that might have lost him voters was because he had nothing tosay. Boats across the Channel? Relationship with the unions? Strategy for growth? Just a vacuum at the heart of Starmer's "delivery plan".
From a Guardian profile of him when he first went into frontline politics:
“If I’m right, then the next 10 years are going to be really tough and – this isn’t meant to sound arrogant – but I think if I do have skills and experience that might help, I don’t really think I can walk away from it.”
Also, what the living fuck. This is extraordinary. Look at the gradient. Starmer is HATED
To be honest I don't think he can even aspire to hate. Trump is hated and feared. Starmer is just coming across as pathetic.
Don't quite get it myself - he's had some early missteps that have rightly earned bad press, but the drop is extraordinary. Has there been anything like it before?
Truss ?
She didn’t make it to 100 days. She never won a general election. She never had a landslide majority. She inherited a party in total chaos after 13 increasingly wretched years
You can’t compare them
For a newly elected PM this is indeed utterly unprecedented. The stats show it. No one has plunged this badly this quickly, nowhere near it
So what, though ? Either he delivers, in which case it doesn't matter, or he doesn't - in which case Labour are screwed anyway.
It cheers you up to realise you have company in feeling slightly foolish having voted for him, I guess ?
"So what?" is a near five-year lame duck PM. At a time when this country faces enormous challenges.
Leon won't be alone in his buyers' remorse of voting for Starmer. The "Ming vase" strategy wasn't so much a strategy as all he had. His failure to talk about anything contentious that might have lost him voters was because he had nothing tosay. Boats across the Channel? Relationship with the unions? Strategy for growth? Just a vacuum at the heart of Starmer's "delivery plan".
He's not a lame duck. Yet.
You might be right that there's nothing there. The elevation of McSweeney - Ming vase strategist - suggests as much. But you might not.
What I have found depressing is that the evidence is that so little thought has been given to our long term, deep rooted problems as a society and as an economy during their long, long wait in opposition.
People used to make excuses that if they announced policies the Tories would only nick them and there was some truth in that. But the lack of deep thinking, other than the thought that Buggin's turn was coming, is catching up with them now. Reeves said, rightly, that growth was essential if public services were to flourish. But her policies since then seem anti-growth so far. Miliband is a dangerous and foolish ideologue. The policies on VAT on school fees and Non Doms are increasingly looking like net costs rather than modest boosts on spending. The planning changes are not obviously getting anywhere. Their education reviews seem to indicate a desire for both the eating and having of cake, as Boris would put it. Their changes to the rented sector seem likely to reduce supply.
Nearly all of this was predictable and indeed much of it was predicted. What are we to do about productivity? About infrastructure? About our horrendous trade deficit? Our skills gaps? .... brushwood.
Anyone else watching the SpaceX Starship test flight, where they are going to try and hover the rocket alongside the near the tower on the way back, they reach out and grab it with a large metal arm?
Looks like it’s scheduled for around 12:20 UK time, it’s either going to be one of the most spectacular things done in years in the field of aerospace, or it’s going to go horribly wrong and generate a somewhat massive explosion!
Time to repost this from Asif Siddiq's excellent: "The Challenge to Apollo". It is Valeriy A Menshikov's memory of the explosion after the second N1 flight.
" We were all looking in the direction of the launch, where the hundred-meter pyramid of the rocket was being readied to be hurled into space. Ignition, the flash of flame from the engines, and the rocket slowly rose on a column of flame . And suddenly, at the place where it had just been, a bright fireball. Not one of us understood anything at first. A terrible purple-black mushroom cloud, so familiar from the pictures from the textbook on weapons of mass destruction. The steppe began to rock and the air began to shake, and all of the soldiers and officers froze. "
" Only in the trench did I understand the sense of the expression "your heart in your mouth." Something quite improbable was being created all around-the steppe was trembling like a vibration test jig, thundering, rumbling. whistling. gnashing-all mixed together in some terrible. seemingly unending cacophony. The trench proved to be so shallow and unreliable that one wanted to burrow into the sand so as not to hear this nightmare . .. the thick wave from the explosion passed over us. sweeping away and leveling everything. Behind it came hot metal raining down from above. Pieces of the rocket were thrown ten kilometers away. and large windows were shattered in structures 40 kilometers away. A 400 kilogram spherical tank landed on the roof of the installation and testing wing, seven kilometers from the launch pad. "
" We arrived at the fueling station and were horrified-the windows and doors were smashed out. the iron entrance gate was askew. the equipment was scattered about with the light of dawn and was turned to stone-the steppe was literally strewn with dead animals and birds. Where so many of them came from and how they appeared in such quantities at the station I still do not understand."
I strongly recommend the Netflix Apollo 13 documentary. It made me tear up a bit
I quite like Mark Kermode's anecdote about the Tom Hanks' Apollo 13 film. As Kermode was coming out of the cinema, he overheard one woman say: "I had no idea it was going to end like that!"
Anyone else watching the SpaceX Starship test flight, where they are going to try and hover the rocket alongside the near the tower on the way back, they reach out and grab it with a large metal arm?
Looks like it’s scheduled for around 12:20 UK time, it’s either going to be one of the most spectacular things done in years in the field of aerospace, or it’s going to go horribly wrong and generate a somewhat massive explosion!
Time to repost this from Asif Siddiq's excellent: "The Challenge to Apollo". It is Valeriy A Menshikov's memory of the explosion after the second N1 flight.
" We were all looking in the direction of the launch, where the hundred-meter pyramid of the rocket was being readied to be hurled into space. Ignition, the flash of flame from the engines, and the rocket slowly rose on a column of flame . And suddenly, at the place where it had just been, a bright fireball. Not one of us understood anything at first. A terrible purple-black mushroom cloud, so familiar from the pictures from the textbook on weapons of mass destruction. The steppe began to rock and the air began to shake, and all of the soldiers and officers froze. "
" Only in the trench did I understand the sense of the expression "your heart in your mouth." Something quite improbable was being created all around-the steppe was trembling like a vibration test jig, thundering, rumbling. whistling. gnashing-all mixed together in some terrible. seemingly unending cacophony. The trench proved to be so shallow and unreliable that one wanted to burrow into the sand so as not to hear this nightmare . .. the thick wave from the explosion passed over us. sweeping away and leveling everything. Behind it came hot metal raining down from above. Pieces of the rocket were thrown ten kilometers away. and large windows were shattered in structures 40 kilometers away. A 400 kilogram spherical tank landed on the roof of the installation and testing wing, seven kilometers from the launch pad. "
" We arrived at the fueling station and were horrified-the windows and doors were smashed out. the iron entrance gate was askew. the equipment was scattered about with the light of dawn and was turned to stone-the steppe was literally strewn with dead animals and birds. Where so many of them came from and how they appeared in such quantities at the station I still do not understand."
Also, what the living fuck. This is extraordinary. Look at the gradient. Starmer is HATED
To be honest I don't think he can even aspire to hate. Trump is hated and feared. Starmer is just coming across as pathetic.
Don't quite get it myself - he's had some early missteps that have rightly earned bad press, but the drop is extraordinary. Has there been anything like it before?
Truss ?
She didn’t make it to 100 days. She never won a general election. She never had a landslide majority. She inherited a party in total chaos after 13 increasingly wretched years
You can’t compare them
For a newly elected PM this is indeed utterly unprecedented. The stats show it. No one has plunged this badly this quickly, nowhere near it
So what, though ? Either he delivers, in which case it doesn't matter, or he doesn't - in which case Labour are screwed anyway.
It cheers you up to realise you have company in feeling slightly foolish having voted for him, I guess ?
“So what”?!
We are a politics website that debates the minutiae of polls down to the last council by election in West Newent. For politics geeks of every stripe what is happening to Starmer (and to a lesser extent Labour) is surely fascinating because we’ve never seen it before. This is entirely unprecedented
Also it points to even greater volatility in the future, which is pretty relevant in a political BETTING forum
I'd agree if we were a couple years out from the next election. It was pretty clear from the vote (not seat) totals that Labour will be out if they don't deliver. This is just confirmation. As we've seen before, PM approval ratings aren't everything, this early in a Parliament.
But we love polls and we love massive surprising polling movements, don’t we? It’s our meat and drink on PB
Perhaps you just don’t like THIS polling shift
I don't care much - I'm not a Labour supporter. But I'll be quite disappointed if this government turns out to be crap too.
The polling shift is remarkable, but at this stage of Parliament, less interesting than Culinary Culture Wars.
Leon hating Starmer, (the guy he supposedly voted for) after 100 days ..what a shock..😏 Roll on 4 years and Big G will no doubt be wrestling with his conscience when voting for Jenrick/Jemi..🤨
I don’t hate him, I am contemptuous of him, and his politics. I find him personally dislikeable, on TV, but I’ve never actually met him so “hate” would be too strong
However I do know people that say “I hate him” - and seem to believe it. He really irks voters
A Leon U turn before the ink is dry on his previous post. Now there's a surprise.
Thank-you for an interesting header, @maxh . My reflections.
What goes around, comes around . It's good to see unapologetic public thinking around about masculinity. I think some feminists have sometimes overly focused on women, and can expect men to sit down and shut up and do as they are told. IMO it's about men as well. Keeping it short, you have reminded me about "men rediscovering themselves" books such as "Iron John", by Robert Bly (1990).
I think some feminists make it overly focused on women, and can expect men to sit down and shut up and do as they are told. It's about men as well.
One principle of thinking I was involved in (in what I would now call liberal evangelical circles) was to to try and redefine "Real Man". Being strong and silent, dominant, aggressive and 'powerful' is, in reality, weak and a little pitiable. But we are presented with a spectrum of 'icons of masculinity' such as (1970s to date) Captain Kirk, the Marlborough Cowboy, Dirty Harry, City Boys, Misbehaving Footballers who 'harvest' attractive sales assistants so they have convenient girls on hand to fuck after their Christmas Parties despite their WAGs, Wham, Justin Bieber and Music Artistes, F1 Drivers, Rappers, and more recently local gang members and others performing on social media, and expectations of behaviour for young men and women conditioned by Pornhub etc.
How does a school teacher, or a school community, question that? How do you provide an environment / community / safe space, where your pupils (of both sexes) can grow to be what they choose?
I'm perhaps too out of touch to be helpful, but I wonder where the alternative, enduring male role models are these days, and how their stories are communicated? I'm sure they exist (somewhere!),and can be identified as achievable as being like the latest social media sensation.
For women/girls, there's a minor industry pushing role models to prominence, and creating 'heroes'. Where's the male version? And how can the rest of us help?
Also, what the living fuck. This is extraordinary. Look at the gradient. Starmer is HATED
To be honest I don't think he can even aspire to hate. Trump is hated and feared. Starmer is just coming across as pathetic.
Don't quite get it myself - he's had some early missteps that have rightly earned bad press, but the drop is extraordinary. Has there been anything like it before?
Truss ?
She didn’t make it to 100 days. She never won a general election. She never had a landslide majority. She inherited a party in total chaos after 13 increasingly wretched years
You can’t compare them
For a newly elected PM this is indeed utterly unprecedented. The stats show it. No one has plunged this badly this quickly, nowhere near it
So what, though ? Either he delivers, in which case it doesn't matter, or he doesn't - in which case Labour are screwed anyway.
It cheers you up to realise you have company in feeling slightly foolish having voted for him, I guess ?
"So what?" is a near five-year lame duck PM. At a time when this country faces enormous challenges.
Leon won't be alone in his buyers' remorse of voting for Starmer. The "Ming vase" strategy wasn't so much a strategy as all he had. His failure to talk about anything contentious that might have lost him voters was because he had nothing tosay. Boats across the Channel? Relationship with the unions? Strategy for growth? Just a vacuum at the heart of Starmer's "delivery plan".
He's not a lame duck. Yet.
You might be right that there's nothing there. The elevation of McSweeney - Ming vase strategist - suggests as much. But you might not.
What I have found depressing is that the evidence is that so little thought has been given to our long term, deep rooted problems as a society and as an economy during their long, long wait in opposition.
People used to make excuses that if they announced policies the Tories would only nick them and there was some truth in that. But the lack of deep thinking, other than the thought that Buggin's turn was coming, is catching up with them now. Reeves said, rightly, that growth was essential if public services were to flourish. But her policies since then seem anti-growth so far. Miliband is a dangerous and foolish ideologue. The policies on VAT on school fees and Non Doms are increasingly looking like net costs rather than modest boosts on spending. The planning changes are not obviously getting anywhere. Their education reviews seem to indicate a desire for both the eating and having of cake, as Boris would put it. Their changes to the rented sector seem likely to reduce supply.
Nearly all of this was predictable and indeed much of it was predicted. What are we to do about productivity? About infrastructure? About our horrendous trade deficit? Our skills gaps? .... brushwood.
Yes it’s bleak
And then contrast their policy void and cluelessness with their eagerness to grab the baubles of office. The perks and treats. The optics are terrible
They could end up the most loathed government in history, very easily
Anyone else watching the SpaceX Starship test flight, where they are going to try and hover the rocket alongside the near the tower on the way back, they reach out and grab it with a large metal arm?
Looks like it’s scheduled for around 12:20 UK time, it’s either going to be one of the most spectacular things done in years in the field of aerospace, or it’s going to go horribly wrong and generate a somewhat massive explosion!
Time to repost this from Asif Siddiq's excellent: "The Challenge to Apollo". It is Valeriy A Menshikov's memory of the explosion after the second N1 flight.
" We were all looking in the direction of the launch, where the hundred-meter pyramid of the rocket was being readied to be hurled into space. Ignition, the flash of flame from the engines, and the rocket slowly rose on a column of flame . And suddenly, at the place where it had just been, a bright fireball. Not one of us understood anything at first. A terrible purple-black mushroom cloud, so familiar from the pictures from the textbook on weapons of mass destruction. The steppe began to rock and the air began to shake, and all of the soldiers and officers froze. "
" Only in the trench did I understand the sense of the expression "your heart in your mouth." Something quite improbable was being created all around-the steppe was trembling like a vibration test jig, thundering, rumbling. whistling. gnashing-all mixed together in some terrible. seemingly unending cacophony. The trench proved to be so shallow and unreliable that one wanted to burrow into the sand so as not to hear this nightmare . .. the thick wave from the explosion passed over us. sweeping away and leveling everything. Behind it came hot metal raining down from above. Pieces of the rocket were thrown ten kilometers away. and large windows were shattered in structures 40 kilometers away. A 400 kilogram spherical tank landed on the roof of the installation and testing wing, seven kilometers from the launch pad. "
" We arrived at the fueling station and were horrified-the windows and doors were smashed out. the iron entrance gate was askew. the equipment was scattered about with the light of dawn and was turned to stone-the steppe was literally strewn with dead animals and birds. Where so many of them came from and how they appeared in such quantities at the station I still do not understand."
The N1 explosions were pretty damn spectacular, however far they all kept back from the pad it wasn’t nearly far enough!
Today’s launch is unlikely to be anything like that bad, modern Western rocket designs being much less likely to blow up on the pad, and with this design already having been tested a number of times already. By the time the first stage arrives back at the launch site, waiting to be grabbed, it should be almost empty of fuel. Will still make one hell of a mess if it crashes and blows up though!
Leon hating Starmer, (the guy he supposedly voted for) after 100 days ..what a shock..😏 Roll on 4 years and Big G will no doubt be wrestling with his conscience when voting for Jenrick/Jemi..🤨
I will not be voting Labour for certain
You will have one of two shiny new potential leaders to vote for. The only way is up for the Conservatives, unless Farage captures the zeitgeist, in which case you'll have to vote Reform to avoid another Government of the left.
Leon hating Starmer, (the guy he supposedly voted for) after 100 days ..what a shock..😏 Roll on 4 years and Big G will no doubt be wrestling with his conscience when voting for Jenrick/Jemi..🤨
I don’t hate him, I am contemptuous of him, and his politics. I find him personally dislikeable, on TV, but I’ve never actually met him so “hate” would be too strong
However I do know people that say “I hate him” - and seem to believe it. He really irks voters
A Leon U turn before the ink is dry on his previous post. Now there's a surprise.
I never said I hated him. I said the polls are so bad and dramatic they imply that some DO. And they do. I have a lefty friend that hates him and says it. To be fair he was never that keen on Skyr Toolmakersson in the first place - he expected Starmer to be mediocre (he knows him) - but he’s underperformed those low expectations and my friend’s skepticism has greatly hardened
For my friend it was Griftgate. The avarice and entitlement
Also, what the living fuck. This is extraordinary. Look at the gradient. Starmer is HATED
To be honest I don't think he can even aspire to hate. Trump is hated and feared. Starmer is just coming across as pathetic.
Don't quite get it myself - he's had some early missteps that have rightly earned bad press, but the drop is extraordinary. Has there been anything like it before?
Truss ?
She didn’t make it to 100 days. She never won a general election. She never had a landslide majority. She inherited a party in total chaos after 13 increasingly wretched years
You can’t compare them
For a newly elected PM this is indeed utterly unprecedented. The stats show it. No one has plunged this badly this quickly, nowhere near it
So what, though ? Either he delivers, in which case it doesn't matter, or he doesn't - in which case Labour are screwed anyway.
It cheers you up to realise you have company in feeling slightly foolish having voted for him, I guess ?
"So what?" is a near five-year lame duck PM. At a time when this country faces enormous challenges.
Leon won't be alone in his buyers' remorse of voting for Starmer. The "Ming vase" strategy wasn't so much a strategy as all he had. His failure to talk about anything contentious that might have lost him voters was because he had nothing tosay. Boats across the Channel? Relationship with the unions? Strategy for growth? Just a vacuum at the heart of Starmer's "delivery plan".
Yes. It’s a void
I wonder if the Budget delay is simply because they had no ideas and they’ve spent the last months urgently trying to conjure something up. Depressingly plausible
Given all the hype you would have expected they had it ready to implement , yet all we have had is black hole, filling their own pockets and robbing pensioners.
Anyone else watching the SpaceX Starship test flight, where they are going to try and hover the rocket alongside the near the tower on the way back, they reach out and grab it with a large metal arm?
Looks like it’s scheduled for around 12:20 UK time, it’s either going to be one of the most spectacular things done in years in the field of aerospace, or it’s going to go horribly wrong and generate a somewhat massive explosion!
Time to repost this from Asif Siddiq's excellent: "The Challenge to Apollo". It is Valeriy A Menshikov's memory of the explosion after the second N1 flight.
" We were all looking in the direction of the launch, where the hundred-meter pyramid of the rocket was being readied to be hurled into space. Ignition, the flash of flame from the engines, and the rocket slowly rose on a column of flame . And suddenly, at the place where it had just been, a bright fireball. Not one of us understood anything at first. A terrible purple-black mushroom cloud, so familiar from the pictures from the textbook on weapons of mass destruction. The steppe began to rock and the air began to shake, and all of the soldiers and officers froze. "
" Only in the trench did I understand the sense of the expression "your heart in your mouth." Something quite improbable was being created all around-the steppe was trembling like a vibration test jig, thundering, rumbling. whistling. gnashing-all mixed together in some terrible. seemingly unending cacophony. The trench proved to be so shallow and unreliable that one wanted to burrow into the sand so as not to hear this nightmare . .. the thick wave from the explosion passed over us. sweeping away and leveling everything. Behind it came hot metal raining down from above. Pieces of the rocket were thrown ten kilometers away. and large windows were shattered in structures 40 kilometers away. A 400 kilogram spherical tank landed on the roof of the installation and testing wing, seven kilometers from the launch pad. "
" We arrived at the fueling station and were horrified-the windows and doors were smashed out. the iron entrance gate was askew. the equipment was scattered about with the light of dawn and was turned to stone-the steppe was literally strewn with dead animals and birds. Where so many of them came from and how they appeared in such quantities at the station I still do not understand."
In the film of it, you can see people catching fire as they ran….
Yes, that's quite a horrific film. But Brazil had something similar in the 1980s, where >20 people died. From memory, the stage started whilst the rocket was on the ground, a few days before the planned launch.
Also, I'd say that if a Saturn V had gone up on, or near, the pad, the devastation would have been massive (NASA did a study onto the effects of a Shuttle explosion, and the results would not have been pretty...). Incidentally, that N1 rocket blast only used up a small fraction of the available fuel.
Also, what the living fuck. This is extraordinary. Look at the gradient. Starmer is HATED
To be honest I don't think he can even aspire to hate. Trump is hated and feared. Starmer is just coming across as pathetic.
Don't quite get it myself - he's had some early missteps that have rightly earned bad press, but the drop is extraordinary. Has there been anything like it before?
Truss ?
She didn’t make it to 100 days. She never won a general election. She never had a landslide majority. She inherited a party in total chaos after 13 increasingly wretched years
You can’t compare them
For a newly elected PM this is indeed utterly unprecedented. The stats show it. No one has plunged this badly this quickly, nowhere near it
So what, though ? Either he delivers, in which case it doesn't matter, or he doesn't - in which case Labour are screwed anyway.
It cheers you up to realise you have company in feeling slightly foolish having voted for him, I guess ?
“So what”?!
We are a politics website that debates the minutiae of polls down to the last council by election in West Newent. For politics geeks of every stripe what is happening to Starmer (and to a lesser extent Labour) is surely fascinating because we’ve never seen it before. This is entirely unprecedented
Also it points to even greater volatility in the future, which is pretty relevant in a political BETTING forum
I'd agree if we were a couple years out from the next election. It was pretty clear from the vote (not seat) totals that Labour will be out if they don't deliver. This is just confirmation. As we've seen before, PM approval ratings aren't everything, this early in a Parliament.
But we love polls and we love massive surprising polling movements, don’t we? It’s our meat and drink on PB
Perhaps you just don’t like THIS polling shift
I don't care much - I'm not a Labour supporter. But I'll be quite disappointed if this government turns out to be crap too.
The polling shift is remarkable, but at this stage of Parliament, less interesting than Culinary Culture Wars.
Garcia-Navarro tried arguing that illegal immigrants can't be deported because America needs them for jobs.
She pointed to the unemployment rate to back up her claim but was immediately shot down by Vance.
"The unemployment rate does not count labor force participation dropouts.
"This is one of the really deranged things that I think illegal immigration does to our society, is it gets us in a mindset of saying, 'we can only build houses with illegal immigrants.'
"We have 7 million men, not even women, just men who have completely dropped out of the labor force.
"Sometimes people who may be struggling with addiction or trauma, need to get reengaged in American society.
"We cannot have an entire American business community that is giving up on American workers and then importing millions of illegal laborers. That is what we have thanks to Kamala Harris' border policies. I think it's one of the biggest drivers of inequality.
"It's one of the biggest reasons why we have millions of people who've dropped out of the labor force. Why try to reengage an American citizen in a good job if you can just import somebody from Central America who's gonna work under the table for poverty wages?
"It is a disgrace and it has led to the evisceration of the American Middle class."
The problem is that the illegal immigrants are not in the areas of country where labor rate participation levels have collapsed. They're not in the broken towns of the Rustbelt, they're in California and Texas and Arizona and Nevada.
According to the stats here, the labor participation rate is lower in California, Texas, Arizona and Nevada than in Illinois, Missouri, Iowa or Minnesota.
And is not measuring what you think it is: you would think it was measuring the percent of people in work. It is not; is measuring the percent of people aged 18 and older who report themselves as willing and able to work; i.e., that they are part of the workforce.
It therefore is skewed in two ways: (1) because it's 18+, then places with lots of retirees will appear to have lower labour force participation because retirees are not reporting themselves as willing and able to work (2) by including the unemployed as part of the total, you can see rising employment and falling labour force particpation. (Or put it another way, you will see labour force partipation rise when unemployment rises, because when the husband loses his job, then the stay-at-home wife is now looking for work too.)
Michigan also has a lower unemployment rate than California, so even if you subtract the unemployed from the data, you have a lower employment rate in California than in Michigan. In some ways this is what you would expect given the obvious social malaise in California alongside the wealth.
Vance's point was that the unemployment figures aren't an accurate representation of the potential labour force available which seems to stand up.
We have exactly the same debate in this country arising from the increase in the number of people of working age who are not economically active. We debated it on here recently...
Except the US tends not to spend billions keeping their asylum seekers in enforced idleness. And so they probably make a net contribution to the economy.
That's true, and a self inflicted wound on our part without a doubt, but remember that asylum speakers form a relatively small part of our overall migration.
Doesn't the US, though, also have (as has always had) a much higher percentage of illegal immigrants ? That has been the crux of their long running debates over immigration reform.
It’s around 11m people, more than 3% of population, based on data from border patrol.
Leon hating Starmer, (the guy he supposedly voted for) after 100 days ..what a shock..😏 Roll on 4 years and Big G will no doubt be wrestling with his conscience when voting for Jenrick/Jemi..🤨
I don’t hate him, I am contemptuous of him, and his politics. I find him personally dislikeable, on TV, but I’ve never actually met him so “hate” would be too strong
However I do know people that say “I hate him” - and seem to believe it. He really irks voters
A Leon U turn before the ink is dry on his previous post. Now there's a surprise.
I never said I hated him. I said the polls are so bad and dramatic they imply that some DO. And they do. I have a lefty friend that hates him and says it. To be fair he was never that keen on Skyr Toolmakersson in the first place - he expected Starmer to be mediocre (he knows him) - but he’s underperformed those low expectations and my friend’s skepticism has greatly hardened
For my friend it was Griftgate. The avarice and entitlement
You do seem to have lots of imaginary friends. Were you an only child?
Also, what the living fuck. This is extraordinary. Look at the gradient. Starmer is HATED
To be honest I don't think he can even aspire to hate. Trump is hated and feared. Starmer is just coming across as pathetic.
Don't quite get it myself - he's had some early missteps that have rightly earned bad press, but the drop is extraordinary. Has there been anything like it before?
Truss ?
She didn’t make it to 100 days. She never won a general election. She never had a landslide majority. She inherited a party in total chaos after 13 increasingly wretched years
You can’t compare them
For a newly elected PM this is indeed utterly unprecedented. The stats show it. No one has plunged this badly this quickly, nowhere near it
So what, though ? Either he delivers, in which case it doesn't matter, or he doesn't - in which case Labour are screwed anyway.
It cheers you up to realise you have company in feeling slightly foolish having voted for him, I guess ?
"So what?" is a near five-year lame duck PM. At a time when this country faces enormous challenges.
Leon won't be alone in his buyers' remorse of voting for Starmer. The "Ming vase" strategy wasn't so much a strategy as all he had. His failure to talk about anything contentious that might have lost him voters was because he had nothing tosay. Boats across the Channel? Relationship with the unions? Strategy for growth? Just a vacuum at the heart of Starmer's "delivery plan".
Yes. It’s a void
I wonder if the Budget delay is simply because they had no ideas and they’ve spent the last months urgently trying to conjure something up. Depressingly plausible
Given all the hype you would have expected they had it ready to implement , yet all we have had is black hole, filling their own pockets and robbing pensioners.
It'll be fine. Don't forget they inherited a golden legacy, although not so much in Scotland.
Leon hating Starmer, (the guy he supposedly voted for) after 100 days ..what a shock..😏 Roll on 4 years and Big G will no doubt be wrestling with his conscience when voting for Jenrick/Jemi..🤨
I don’t hate him, I am contemptuous of him, and his politics. I find him personally dislikeable, on TV, but I’ve never actually met him so “hate” would be too strong
However I do know people that say “I hate him” - and seem to believe it. He really irks voters
A Leon U turn before the ink is dry on his previous post. Now there's a surprise.
I never said I hated him. I said the polls are so bad and dramatic they imply that some DO. And they do. I have a lefty friend that hates him and says it. To be fair he was never that keen on Skyr Toolmakersson in the first place - he expected Starmer to be mediocre (he knows him) - but he’s underperformed those low expectations and my friend’s skepticism has greatly hardened
For my friend it was Griftgate. The avarice and entitlement
You do seem to have lots of imaginary friends. Were you an only child?
One older sister, one mystical younger half brother living on a hilltop in Peru
I am blessed with lots of friends. I’m good at friends… but I’m bad at family. I’m not Homo domesticus
Good afternoon @maxh. A good article, both in itself and in the discussion it engendered. I enjoyed it but I had to cut-and-paste it into Word to try to understand it by inserting subheadings. I did and it looked like this
1. INTRODUCTION 2. THE PROBLEM 3. THE CAUSE 4. THE CURE 4.1 Powerlessness leads to resentment 4.2 Vulnerability leading to radicalisation 4.3 A more positive role model 4.3.1 Be bold but adaptable 4.3.2 Swap emotional independence for emotional openness 4.3.3 Be present if you’re a father 5. THE POLITICS 6. LONG TERM EFFECTS OF THE CURE
I wouldn't have changed a word, but I would have swapped sections around, giving this:
1. INTRODUCTION 2. THE PROBLEM 3. THE CAUSE 3.1 Andrew Tate, incels, et al 3.2 Powerlessness leads to resentment 3.3 Vulnerability leading to radicalisation 4. THE CURE: A MORE POSITIVE ROLE MODEL 4.1 Be bold but adaptable 4.2 Swap emotional independence for emotional openness 4.3 Be present if you’re a father 5. LONG TERM EFFECTS OF THE CURE 6. THE POLITICS
Plesae feel free to deride my Monday-morning quarterbacking...
Leon hating Starmer, (the guy he supposedly voted for) after 100 days ..what a shock..😏 Roll on 4 years and Big G will no doubt be wrestling with his conscience when voting for Jenrick/Jemi..🤨
I will not be voting Labour for certain
You will have one of two shiny new potential leaders to vote for. The only way is up for the Conservatives, unless Farage captures the zeitgeist, in which case you'll have to vote Reform to avoid another Government of the left.
We really have no idea where we will be by the next GE nor any certainty on the conservative party leader going into the next election
Isn't Starmer just "continuity technocrat? 🤔 A red tie wearing technocrat as opposed to Sunaks blue one..hard to hate really in that context..more a sense nothing will really change..🧐🤨
UK debt was running at 40% right up until the GFC. Then in a couple of years it doubled to 80%. In September 2024, it rose to 100% of GDP. The cost of servicing that debt alone comes to £112bn last year, which is about equal to what we spend on education, and 2/3rds of what we spend on the NHS.
Whether the chancellor is wearing a blue tie or a red tie, the only answers are cutting public services or raising taxes, or a combination thereof.
Fundamentally the UK's problem is it never recovered from the GFC, and now UK PLC lurches on much like a "zombie company" that's up to its eyeballs in debt, no longer investing in growth and sweating existing assets until they eventually break. Companies like that eventually go broke and disappear. What happens to UK PLC?
Unpalatable as it is, there's an argument that the big taxes - income tax, NI, VAT - need to go up temporarily to pay down debt and start investing in growth again. Benefits need to be cut. The billions we spend every year on asylum seekers and so on. The problem is there is every indication this lot will waste any extra money on pay rises for their trade union mates, 22bn carbon capture schemes, and so on. The Tories were just as bad though, diverting money from Network North to fix potholes in London, for example.
Taxes need to go up and/or public spending needs to be cut. And things are going to be very grim for the next few years. TINA.
Will we get an apology from the PBers who did not agree with some of us that axing WFA universality was terrible politics and would be a disaster for Reeves and Starmer going forward?
Luke Tryl @LukeTryl · 3h Asked to name the Government’s biggest mistakes the winter fuel allowance restrictions come on top. In terms of biggest success handling of the riots, clamping down on water companies and launching GB Energy are the top achievements selected.
I wonder if these polls are just the Great British Public discovering what Londoners have known for years: that rich, lefty, pious, self-regarding North London lawyers are some of the most loathsome people on the planet
Perhaps somewhat unfair on North London at least.
There's no evidence that I know of that rich, lefty, pious, self-regarding lawyers get any less loathsome once you cross the river?
Leon hating Starmer, (the guy he supposedly voted for) after 100 days ..what a shock..😏 Roll on 4 years and Big G will no doubt be wrestling with his conscience when voting for Jenrick/Jemi..🤨
I will not be voting Labour for certain
You will have one of two shiny new potential leaders to vote for. The only way is up for the Conservatives, unless Farage captures the zeitgeist, in which case you'll have to vote Reform to avoid another Government of the left.
We really have no idea where we will be by the next GE nor any certainty on the conservative party leader going into the next election
I wonder if these polls are just the Great British Public discovering what Londoners have known for years: that rich, lefty, pious, self-regarding North London lawyers are some of the most loathsome people on the planet
Perhaps somewhat unfair on North London at least.
There's no evidence that I know of that rich, lefty, pious, self-regarding lawyers get any less loathsome once you cross the river?
South of the river it’s just thieves and c*nts, as any north Londoner knows all too well. Never go there
Isn't Starmer just "continuity technocrat? 🤔 A red tie wearing technocrat as opposed to Sunaks blue one..hard to hate really in that context..more a sense nothing will really change..🧐🤨
UK debt was running at 40% right up until the GFC. Then in a couple of years it doubled to 80%. In September 2024, it rose to 100% of GDP. The cost of servicing that debt alone comes to £112bn last year, which is about equal to what we spend on education, and 2/3rds of what we spend on the NHS.
Whether the chancellor is wearing a blue tie or a red tie, the only answers are cutting public services or raising taxes, or a combination thereof.
Fundamentally the UK's problem is it never recovered from the GFC, and now UK PLC lurches on much like a "zombie company" that's up to its eyeballs in debt, no longer investing in growth and sweating existing assets until they eventually break. Companies like that eventually go broke and disappear. What happens to UK PLC?
Unpalatable as it is, there's an argument that the big taxes - income tax, NI, VAT - need to go up temporarily to pay down debt and start investing in growth again. Benefits need to be cut. The billions we spend every year on asylum seekers and so on. The problem is there is every indication this lot will waste any extra money on pay rises for their trade union mates, 22bn carbon capture schemes, and so on. The Tories were just as bad though, diverting money from Network North to fix potholes in London, for example.
Taxes need to go up and/or public spending needs to be cut. And things are going to be very grim for the next few years. TINA.
Not sure how much longer we can stumble along like this. 10 years? 20?
Leon hating Starmer, (the guy he supposedly voted for) after 100 days ..what a shock..😏 Roll on 4 years and Big G will no doubt be wrestling with his conscience when voting for Jenrick/Jemi..🤨
I don’t hate him, I am contemptuous of him, and his politics. I find him personally dislikeable, on TV, but I’ve never actually met him so “hate” would be too strong
However I do know people that say “I hate him” - and seem to believe it. He really irks voters
A Leon U turn before the ink is dry on his previous post. Now there's a surprise.
I never said I hated him. I said the polls are so bad and dramatic they imply that some DO. And they do. I have a lefty friend that hates him and says it. To be fair he was never that keen on Skyr Toolmakersson in the first place - he expected Starmer to be mediocre (he knows him) - but he’s underperformed those low expectations and my friend’s skepticism has greatly hardened
For my friend it was Griftgate. The avarice and entitlement
The thing about Starmer is that he is utterly bland and uninspiring. Which might not have mattered much in his previous roles, but does matter when leading a political party or a country.
Blair's charisma saw him through quite a few challenges during his time as PM. The fact Starmer has zero charisma is going to hurt him very, very quickly. He is not a salesman; he cannot sell policy. And neither, I fear, can many of the team immediately around him - e.g. Reeves and Rayner.
Also, Starmer needs to sell us some positivity. By all means say that his government had a terrible inheritance, but he also needs to say clearly and often that it *will* get better.
Isn't Starmer just "continuity technocrat? 🤔 A red tie wearing technocrat as opposed to Sunaks blue one..hard to hate really in that context..more a sense nothing will really change..🧐🤨
UK debt was running at 40% right up until the GFC. Then in a couple of years it doubled to 80%. In September 2024, it rose to 100% of GDP. The cost of servicing that debt alone comes to £112bn last year, which is about equal to what we spend on education, and 2/3rds of what we spend on the NHS.
Whether the chancellor is wearing a blue tie or a red tie, the only answers are cutting public services or raising taxes, or a combination thereof.
Fundamentally the UK's problem is it never recovered from the GFC, and now UK PLC lurches on much like a "zombie company" that's up to its eyeballs in debt, no longer investing in growth and sweating existing assets until they eventually break. Companies like that eventually go broke and disappear. What happens to UK PLC?
Unpalatable as it is, there's an argument that the big taxes - income tax, NI, VAT - need to go up temporarily to pay down debt and start investing in growth again. Benefits need to be cut. The billions we spend every year on asylum seekers and so on. The problem is there is every indication this lot will waste any extra money on pay rises for their trade union mates, 22bn carbon capture schemes, and so on. The Tories were just as bad though, diverting money from Network North to fix potholes in London, for example.
Taxes need to go up and/or public spending needs to be cut. And things are going to be very grim for the next few years. TINA.
Not sure how much longer we can stumble along like this. 10 years? 20?
We are the country that ran out of road and now we’re over the edge, legs still whirling
Anyone else watching the SpaceX Starship test flight, where they are going to try and hover the rocket alongside the near the tower on the way back, they reach out and grab it with a large metal arm?
Looks like it’s scheduled for around 12:20 UK time, it’s either going to be one of the most spectacular things done in years in the field of aerospace, or it’s going to go horribly wrong and generate a somewhat massive explosion!
Time to repost this from Asif Siddiq's excellent: "The Challenge to Apollo". It is Valeriy A Menshikov's memory of the explosion after the second N1 flight.
" We were all looking in the direction of the launch, where the hundred-meter pyramid of the rocket was being readied to be hurled into space. Ignition, the flash of flame from the engines, and the rocket slowly rose on a column of flame . And suddenly, at the place where it had just been, a bright fireball. Not one of us understood anything at first. A terrible purple-black mushroom cloud, so familiar from the pictures from the textbook on weapons of mass destruction. The steppe began to rock and the air began to shake, and all of the soldiers and officers froze. "
" Only in the trench did I understand the sense of the expression "your heart in your mouth." Something quite improbable was being created all around-the steppe was trembling like a vibration test jig, thundering, rumbling. whistling. gnashing-all mixed together in some terrible. seemingly unending cacophony. The trench proved to be so shallow and unreliable that one wanted to burrow into the sand so as not to hear this nightmare . .. the thick wave from the explosion passed over us. sweeping away and leveling everything. Behind it came hot metal raining down from above. Pieces of the rocket were thrown ten kilometers away. and large windows were shattered in structures 40 kilometers away. A 400 kilogram spherical tank landed on the roof of the installation and testing wing, seven kilometers from the launch pad. "
" We arrived at the fueling station and were horrified-the windows and doors were smashed out. the iron entrance gate was askew. the equipment was scattered about with the light of dawn and was turned to stone-the steppe was literally strewn with dead animals and birds. Where so many of them came from and how they appeared in such quantities at the station I still do not understand."
In the film of it, you can see people catching fire as they ran….
Yes, that's quite a horrific film. But Brazil had something similar in the 1980s, where >20 people died. From memory, the stage started whilst the rocket was on the ground, a few days before the planned launch.
Also, I'd say that if a Saturn V had gone up on, or near, the pad, the devastation would have been massive (NASA did a study onto the effects of a Shuttle explosion, and the results would not have been pretty...). Incidentally, that N1 rocket blast only used up a small fraction of the available fuel.
The shuttle estimates proved to be way off - they assumed an instantaneous detonation of all the hydrogen and oxygen.
Challenger showed that you actually get a deflagration with cryogenics as they mix. As did the high altitude breakup of Super Heavy.
The biggest miss was the solid boosters -assumed to pretty much sit there - they could fly off like ICBMs, and/or break up into large, heavy, burning fragments. See the failed Titan launch from the 80s
Will we get an apology from the PBers who did not agree with some of us that axing WFA universality was terrible politics and would be a disaster for Reeves and Starmer going forward?
Luke Tryl @LukeTryl · 3h Asked to name the Government’s biggest mistakes the winter fuel allowance restrictions come on top. In terms of biggest success handling of the riots, clamping down on water companies and launching GB Energy are the top achievements selected.
Anyone else watching the SpaceX Starship test flight, where they are going to try and hover the rocket alongside the near the tower on the way back, they reach out and grab it with a large metal arm?
Looks like it’s scheduled for around 12:20 UK time, it’s either going to be one of the most spectacular things done in years in the field of aerospace, or it’s going to go horribly wrong and generate a somewhat massive explosion!
Time to repost this from Asif Siddiq's excellent: "The Challenge to Apollo". It is Valeriy A Menshikov's memory of the explosion after the second N1 flight.
" We were all looking in the direction of the launch, where the hundred-meter pyramid of the rocket was being readied to be hurled into space. Ignition, the flash of flame from the engines, and the rocket slowly rose on a column of flame . And suddenly, at the place where it had just been, a bright fireball. Not one of us understood anything at first. A terrible purple-black mushroom cloud, so familiar from the pictures from the textbook on weapons of mass destruction. The steppe began to rock and the air began to shake, and all of the soldiers and officers froze. "
" Only in the trench did I understand the sense of the expression "your heart in your mouth." Something quite improbable was being created all around-the steppe was trembling like a vibration test jig, thundering, rumbling. whistling. gnashing-all mixed together in some terrible. seemingly unending cacophony. The trench proved to be so shallow and unreliable that one wanted to burrow into the sand so as not to hear this nightmare . .. the thick wave from the explosion passed over us. sweeping away and leveling everything. Behind it came hot metal raining down from above. Pieces of the rocket were thrown ten kilometers away. and large windows were shattered in structures 40 kilometers away. A 400 kilogram spherical tank landed on the roof of the installation and testing wing, seven kilometers from the launch pad. "
" We arrived at the fueling station and were horrified-the windows and doors were smashed out. the iron entrance gate was askew. the equipment was scattered about with the light of dawn and was turned to stone-the steppe was literally strewn with dead animals and birds. Where so many of them came from and how they appeared in such quantities at the station I still do not understand."
In the film of it, you can see people catching fire as they ran….
Yes, that's quite a horrific film. But Brazil had something similar in the 1980s, where >20 people died. From memory, the stage started whilst the rocket was on the ground, a few days before the planned launch.
Also, I'd say that if a Saturn V had gone up on, or near, the pad, the devastation would have been massive (NASA did a study onto the effects of a Shuttle explosion, and the results would not have been pretty...). Incidentally, that N1 rocket blast only used up a small fraction of the available fuel.
The shuttle estimates proved to be way off - they assumed an instantaneous detonation of all the hydrogen and oxygen.
Challenger showed that you actually get a deflagration with cryogenics as they mix. As did the high altitude breakup of Super Heavy.
The biggest miss was the solid boosters -assumed to pretty much sit there - they could fly off like ICBMs, and/or break up into large, heavy, burning fragments. See the failed Titan launch from the 80s
I'm talking about a study done in 2003/4 after the Colombia disaster, as part of their rework of the program.
Both my parents voted Tory, being farmers it seemed pretty natural..I never felt my mum simply "followed" my dad in voting that way. But things eventually change even in rural constituencies..North Shropshire now has a Lib Dem MP..🧐
Only as they won it in a by election, even now most rural seats have a Tory MP
Basically they’re acting like a Maoist government. Setting absurdly unreal targets - “50 trillion tons of steel by April, and kill all the sparrows!” - then saying to councils “hit that target” even when it’s clearly impossible
Isn't Starmer just "continuity technocrat? 🤔 A red tie wearing technocrat as opposed to Sunaks blue one..hard to hate really in that context..more a sense nothing will really change..🧐🤨
UK debt was running at 40% right up until the GFC. Then in a couple of years it doubled to 80%. In September 2024, it rose to 100% of GDP. The cost of servicing that debt alone comes to £112bn last year, which is about equal to what we spend on education, and 2/3rds of what we spend on the NHS.
Whether the chancellor is wearing a blue tie or a red tie, the only answers are cutting public services or raising taxes, or a combination thereof.
Fundamentally the UK's problem is it never recovered from the GFC, and now UK PLC lurches on much like a "zombie company" that's up to its eyeballs in debt, no longer investing in growth and sweating existing assets until they eventually break. Companies like that eventually go broke and disappear. What happens to UK PLC?
Unpalatable as it is, there's an argument that the big taxes - income tax, NI, VAT - need to go up temporarily to pay down debt and start investing in growth again. Benefits need to be cut. The billions we spend every year on asylum seekers and so on. The problem is there is every indication this lot will waste any extra money on pay rises for their trade union mates, 22bn carbon capture schemes, and so on. The Tories were just as bad though, diverting money from Network North to fix potholes in London, for example.
Taxes need to go up and/or public spending needs to be cut. And things are going to be very grim for the next few years. TINA.
Not sure how much longer we can stumble along like this. 10 years? 20?
We are the country that ran out of road and now we’re over the edge, legs still whirling
However, two points:
1. We’re not alone 2. Technology might save us
Technology might also finish us off.
AI has eaten into my consultancy work quite substantially, and I have no doubt it will be coming for other middle class jobs in a big way. If you buy into the Turchin elite overproduction thing now, wait until we need a fraction of the knowledge based workers we currently employ, with all the tax revenues we take from them.
Anyone else watching the SpaceX Starship test flight, where they are going to try and hover the rocket alongside the near the tower on the way back, they reach out and grab it with a large metal arm?
Looks like it’s scheduled for around 12:20 UK time, it’s either going to be one of the most spectacular things done in years in the field of aerospace, or it’s going to go horribly wrong and generate a somewhat massive explosion!
Time to repost this from Asif Siddiq's excellent: "The Challenge to Apollo". It is Valeriy A Menshikov's memory of the explosion after the second N1 flight.
" We were all looking in the direction of the launch, where the hundred-meter pyramid of the rocket was being readied to be hurled into space. Ignition, the flash of flame from the engines, and the rocket slowly rose on a column of flame . And suddenly, at the place where it had just been, a bright fireball. Not one of us understood anything at first. A terrible purple-black mushroom cloud, so familiar from the pictures from the textbook on weapons of mass destruction. The steppe began to rock and the air began to shake, and all of the soldiers and officers froze. "
" Only in the trench did I understand the sense of the expression "your heart in your mouth." Something quite improbable was being created all around-the steppe was trembling like a vibration test jig, thundering, rumbling. whistling. gnashing-all mixed together in some terrible. seemingly unending cacophony. The trench proved to be so shallow and unreliable that one wanted to burrow into the sand so as not to hear this nightmare . .. the thick wave from the explosion passed over us. sweeping away and leveling everything. Behind it came hot metal raining down from above. Pieces of the rocket were thrown ten kilometers away. and large windows were shattered in structures 40 kilometers away. A 400 kilogram spherical tank landed on the roof of the installation and testing wing, seven kilometers from the launch pad. "
" We arrived at the fueling station and were horrified-the windows and doors were smashed out. the iron entrance gate was askew. the equipment was scattered about with the light of dawn and was turned to stone-the steppe was literally strewn with dead animals and birds. Where so many of them came from and how they appeared in such quantities at the station I still do not understand."
In the film of it, you can see people catching fire as they ran….
Yes, that's quite a horrific film. But Brazil had something similar in the 1980s, where >20 people died. From memory, the stage started whilst the rocket was on the ground, a few days before the planned launch.
Also, I'd say that if a Saturn V had gone up on, or near, the pad, the devastation would have been massive (NASA did a study onto the effects of a Shuttle explosion, and the results would not have been pretty...). Incidentally, that N1 rocket blast only used up a small fraction of the available fuel.
The shuttle estimates proved to be way off - they assumed an instantaneous detonation of all the hydrogen and oxygen.
Challenger showed that you actually get a deflagration with cryogenics as they mix. As did the high altitude breakup of Super Heavy.
The biggest miss was the solid boosters -assumed to pretty much sit there - they could fly off like ICBMs, and/or break up into large, heavy, burning fragments. See the failed Titan launch from the 80s
I'm talking about a study done in 2003/4 after the Colombia disaster, as part of their rework of the program.
Which, IIRC, pointed out that deflagration would be the outcome of a pad explosion. But that the SRBs would do most of the damage. The extreme worst case was the SRB launching themselves, then requiring the destruct to be activated - the thick steel cases would form huge bombs. At ground level or low altitude, the damage would be pretty bad.
I ended up corresponding with the late Danny Deager (ex-Shuttle guy) on the sim he created that proved that SRB destruct was a lethal danger for Ares I. I adapted his code to run on GPU.
He managed to get this into the report on Ares I. Which was part of the reason The Stick died.
Isn't Starmer just "continuity technocrat? 🤔 A red tie wearing technocrat as opposed to Sunaks blue one..hard to hate really in that context..more a sense nothing will really change..🧐🤨
UK debt was running at 40% right up until the GFC. Then in a couple of years it doubled to 80%. In September 2024, it rose to 100% of GDP. The cost of servicing that debt alone comes to £112bn last year, which is about equal to what we spend on education, and 2/3rds of what we spend on the NHS.
Whether the chancellor is wearing a blue tie or a red tie, the only answers are cutting public services or raising taxes, or a combination thereof.
Fundamentally the UK's problem is it never recovered from the GFC, and now UK PLC lurches on much like a "zombie company" that's up to its eyeballs in debt, no longer investing in growth and sweating existing assets until they eventually break. Companies like that eventually go broke and disappear. What happens to UK PLC?
Unpalatable as it is, there's an argument that the big taxes - income tax, NI, VAT - need to go up temporarily to pay down debt and start investing in growth again. Benefits need to be cut. The billions we spend every year on asylum seekers and so on. The problem is there is every indication this lot will waste any extra money on pay rises for their trade union mates, 22bn carbon capture schemes, and so on. The Tories were just as bad though, diverting money from Network North to fix potholes in London, for example.
Taxes need to go up and/or public spending needs to be cut. And things are going to be very grim for the next few years. TINA.
Not sure how much longer we can stumble along like this. 10 years? 20?
We are the country that ran out of road and now we’re over the edge, legs still whirling
However, two points:
1. We’re not alone 2. Technology might save us
Technology might also finish us off.
AI has eaten into my consultancy work quite substantially, and I have no doubt it will be coming for other middle class jobs in a big way. If you buy into the Turchin elite overproduction thing now, wait until we need a fraction of the knowledge based workers we currently employ, with all the tax revenues we take from them.
Machines will run governments better than people, tho. Indeed my toaster could probably do a better job than Starmer, as is
Anyone else watching the SpaceX Starship test flight, where they are going to try and hover the rocket alongside the near the tower on the way back, they reach out and grab it with a large metal arm?
Looks like it’s scheduled for around 12:20 UK time, it’s either going to be one of the most spectacular things done in years in the field of aerospace, or it’s going to go horribly wrong and generate a somewhat massive explosion!
Time to repost this from Asif Siddiq's excellent: "The Challenge to Apollo". It is Valeriy A Menshikov's memory of the explosion after the second N1 flight.
" We were all looking in the direction of the launch, where the hundred-meter pyramid of the rocket was being readied to be hurled into space. Ignition, the flash of flame from the engines, and the rocket slowly rose on a column of flame . And suddenly, at the place where it had just been, a bright fireball. Not one of us understood anything at first. A terrible purple-black mushroom cloud, so familiar from the pictures from the textbook on weapons of mass destruction. The steppe began to rock and the air began to shake, and all of the soldiers and officers froze. "
" Only in the trench did I understand the sense of the expression "your heart in your mouth." Something quite improbable was being created all around-the steppe was trembling like a vibration test jig, thundering, rumbling. whistling. gnashing-all mixed together in some terrible. seemingly unending cacophony. The trench proved to be so shallow and unreliable that one wanted to burrow into the sand so as not to hear this nightmare . .. the thick wave from the explosion passed over us. sweeping away and leveling everything. Behind it came hot metal raining down from above. Pieces of the rocket were thrown ten kilometers away. and large windows were shattered in structures 40 kilometers away. A 400 kilogram spherical tank landed on the roof of the installation and testing wing, seven kilometers from the launch pad. "
" We arrived at the fueling station and were horrified-the windows and doors were smashed out. the iron entrance gate was askew. the equipment was scattered about with the light of dawn and was turned to stone-the steppe was literally strewn with dead animals and birds. Where so many of them came from and how they appeared in such quantities at the station I still do not understand."
In the film of it, you can see people catching fire as they ran….
Yes, that's quite a horrific film. But Brazil had something similar in the 1980s, where >20 people died. From memory, the stage started whilst the rocket was on the ground, a few days before the planned launch.
Also, I'd say that if a Saturn V had gone up on, or near, the pad, the devastation would have been massive (NASA did a study onto the effects of a Shuttle explosion, and the results would not have been pretty...). Incidentally, that N1 rocket blast only used up a small fraction of the available fuel.
The shuttle estimates proved to be way off - they assumed an instantaneous detonation of all the hydrogen and oxygen.
Challenger showed that you actually get a deflagration with cryogenics as they mix. As did the high altitude breakup of Super Heavy.
The biggest miss was the solid boosters -assumed to pretty much sit there - they could fly off like ICBMs, and/or break up into large, heavy, burning fragments. See the failed Titan launch from the 80s
I'm talking about a study done in 2003/4 after the Colombia disaster, as part of their rework of the program.
Which, IIRC, pointed out that deflagration would be the outcome of a pad explosion. But that the SRBs would do most of the damage. The extreme worst case was the SRB launching themselves, then requiring the destruct to be activated - the thick steel cases would form huge bombs. At ground level or low altitude, the damage would be pretty bad.
I ended up corresponding with the late Danny Deager (ex-Shuttle guy) on the sim he created that proved that SRB destruct was a lethal danger for Ares I. I adapted his code to run on GPU.
He managed to get this into the report on Ares I. Which was part of the reason The Stick died.
I can't find it atm, but I'm pretty sure that Wayne Hale went into it a little as part of his posts / interviews about the Colombia aftermath. And as I said, the N1 explosion only used a small portion of its fuel mass, but was still devastating. So I'm not quite sure the point you're making?
It’s a fascinating area caught up with political reactions to the Industrial Revolution and the technological revolution. The history of the last 500 years or so has seen a shift from men and women largely being in a complementary relationship to one where they are encouraged to compete with each other. This is having effects for good and ill on both sides, and is arguably only working to the advantage of a small minority of either group. When you couple this with the hyper individualism that has become the dominant approach to society it appears to be a toxic brew that exacerbates and reconfigures underlying economic disparities.
We need to find a way to get back to a more complementary approach and a more community based society because setting everyone up as in a fee for all race is something only a few can win and most will lose even if they don’t recognise that they are losing.
“get back to a more complementary approach” means pushing traditional gender roles, i.e. telling women to get back in the kitchen. This is stupid. It won’t be popular with women. I, as a man, am very happen with more overlapping gender roles.
If there’s a problem with too much competition in the labour market, that’s because of companies increasingly treating their employees as interchangeable and disposable units. Better protection for labour is the answer there.
I’m against telling anyone anything about the way they structure themselves. However if the only value society places on you is your earning power then a number of tricks get missed. We are very bad at quantifying value in anything other than monetary terms. The housewife/mother who does limited paid work is not for everyone but not having a means of valuing the contribution of those who would choose that option is not good. Deciding that there is only one approach to womanhood is every bit as myopic as pushing a certain type of masculinity. At present it’s not clear that society is working for most of us.
I largely agree with that, but that’s not about traditional gender roles, that’s a critique of capitalism. Great, I’m all for critiques of capitalism. I don’t usually expect them from someone called ToryJim!
Will we get an apology from the PBers who did not agree with some of us that axing WFA universality was terrible politics and would be a disaster for Reeves and Starmer going forward?
Luke Tryl @LukeTryl · 3h Asked to name the Government’s biggest mistakes the winter fuel allowance restrictions come on top. In terms of biggest success handling of the riots, clamping down on water companies and launching GB Energy are the top achievements selected.
GB Energy is just a name , feck all behind it and it will do feck all to help with energy costs other than jobs for the boys. Anything from Milliband is doomed to be a monumental clusterfcuk
Will we get an apology from the PBers who did not agree with some of us that axing WFA universality was terrible politics and would be a disaster for Reeves and Starmer going forward?
Luke Tryl @LukeTryl · 3h Asked to name the Government’s biggest mistakes the winter fuel allowance restrictions come on top. In terms of biggest success handling of the riots, clamping down on water companies and launching GB Energy are the top achievements selected.
GB Energy is just a name , feck all behind it and it will do feck all to help with energy costs other than jobs for the boys. Anything from Milliband is doomed to be a monumental clusterfcuk
I admire your optimism but frankly worry about its foundation.
Isn't Starmer just "continuity technocrat? 🤔 A red tie wearing technocrat as opposed to Sunaks blue one..hard to hate really in that context..more a sense nothing will really change..🧐🤨
UK debt was running at 40% right up until the GFC. Then in a couple of years it doubled to 80%. In September 2024, it rose to 100% of GDP. The cost of servicing that debt alone comes to £112bn last year, which is about equal to what we spend on education, and 2/3rds of what we spend on the NHS.
Whether the chancellor is wearing a blue tie or a red tie, the only answers are cutting public services or raising taxes, or a combination thereof.
Fundamentally the UK's problem is it never recovered from the GFC, and now UK PLC lurches on much like a "zombie company" that's up to its eyeballs in debt, no longer investing in growth and sweating existing assets until they eventually break. Companies like that eventually go broke and disappear. What happens to UK PLC?
Unpalatable as it is, there's an argument that the big taxes - income tax, NI, VAT - need to go up temporarily to pay down debt and start investing in growth again. Benefits need to be cut. The billions we spend every year on asylum seekers and so on. The problem is there is every indication this lot will waste any extra money on pay rises for their trade union mates, 22bn carbon capture schemes, and so on. The Tories were just as bad though, diverting money from Network North to fix potholes in London, for example.
Taxes need to go up and/or public spending needs to be cut. And things are going to be very grim for the next few years. TINA.
Taxes going up will harm the economy, resulting in a doom spiral of lower tax returns. We need to increase supply and drive down the cost of energy and food. We need to lower taxes, especially those on business and employment. We need to reduce spending on the business of Governing - go back to staffing numbers we had 10 years ago. We need to release the billions being burned away by the Bank of England. Doing all that will get us back in excellent shape.
Also, what the living fuck. This is extraordinary. Look at the gradient. Starmer is HATED
To be honest I don't think he can even aspire to hate. Trump is hated and feared. Starmer is just coming across as pathetic.
Don't quite get it myself - he's had some early missteps that have rightly earned bad press, but the drop is extraordinary. Has there been anything like it before?
Truss ?
She didn’t make it to 100 days. She never won a general election. She never had a landslide majority. She inherited a party in total chaos after 13 increasingly wretched years
You can’t compare them
For a newly elected PM this is indeed utterly unprecedented. The stats show it. No one has plunged this badly this quickly, nowhere near it
So what, though ? Either he delivers, in which case it doesn't matter, or he doesn't - in which case Labour are screwed anyway.
It cheers you up to realise you have company in feeling slightly foolish having voted for him, I guess ?
“So what”?!
We are a politics website that debates the minutiae of polls down to the last council by election in West Newent. For politics geeks of every stripe what is happening to Starmer (and to a lesser extent Labour) is surely fascinating because we’ve never seen it before. This is entirely unprecedented
Also it points to even greater volatility in the future, which is pretty relevant in a political BETTING forum
I'd agree if we were a couple years out from the next election. It was pretty clear from the vote (not seat) totals that Labour will be out if they don't deliver. This is just confirmation. As we've seen before, PM approval ratings aren't everything, this early in a Parliament.
But we love polls and we love massive surprising polling movements, don’t we? It’s our meat and drink on PB
Perhaps you just don’t like THIS polling shift
I don't care much - I'm not a Labour supporter. But I'll be quite disappointed if this government turns out to be crap too.
The polling shift is remarkable, but at this stage of Parliament, less interesting than Culinary Culture Wars.
What is culinary culture wotsit?
It's a (sort of) Korean mashup of Masterchef and Great British Menu. Fun.
Will we get an apology from the PBers who did not agree with some of us that axing WFA universality was terrible politics and would be a disaster for Reeves and Starmer going forward?
Luke Tryl @LukeTryl · 3h Asked to name the Government’s biggest mistakes the winter fuel allowance restrictions come on top. In terms of biggest success handling of the riots, clamping down on water companies and launching GB Energy are the top achievements selected.
Terrible politics if your client vote is pensioners. I think it's the most heartening thing this administration had done so far - taking on the oldies is a necessity if the UK is to become solvent and start growing again.
Happily, the Conservatives have helped out somewhat with the Rolex advert.
Isn't Starmer just "continuity technocrat? 🤔 A red tie wearing technocrat as opposed to Sunaks blue one..hard to hate really in that context..more a sense nothing will really change..🧐🤨
UK debt was running at 40% right up until the GFC. Then in a couple of years it doubled to 80%. In September 2024, it rose to 100% of GDP. The cost of servicing that debt alone comes to £112bn last year, which is about equal to what we spend on education, and 2/3rds of what we spend on the NHS.
Whether the chancellor is wearing a blue tie or a red tie, the only answers are cutting public services or raising taxes, or a combination thereof.
Fundamentally the UK's problem is it never recovered from the GFC, and now UK PLC lurches on much like a "zombie company" that's up to its eyeballs in debt, no longer investing in growth and sweating existing assets until they eventually break. Companies like that eventually go broke and disappear. What happens to UK PLC?
Unpalatable as it is, there's an argument that the big taxes - income tax, NI, VAT - need to go up temporarily to pay down debt and start investing in growth again. Benefits need to be cut. The billions we spend every year on asylum seekers and so on. The problem is there is every indication this lot will waste any extra money on pay rises for their trade union mates, 22bn carbon capture schemes, and so on. The Tories were just as bad though, diverting money from Network North to fix potholes in London, for example.
Taxes need to go up and/or public spending needs to be cut. And things are going to be very grim for the next few years. TINA.
Taxes going up will harm the economy, resulting in a doom spiral of lower tax returns. We need to increase supply and drive down the cost of energy and food. We need to lower taxes, especially those on business and employment. We need to reduce spending on the business of Governing - go back to staffing numbers we had 10 years ago. We need to release the billions being burned away by the Bank of England. Doing all that will get us back in excellent shape.
" go back to staffing numbers we had 10 years ago. "
Do you honestly think that can be done without bringing things like the NHS or education to their knees?
Also, what the living fuck. This is extraordinary. Look at the gradient. Starmer is HATED
To be honest I don't think he can even aspire to hate. Trump is hated and feared. Starmer is just coming across as pathetic.
Don't quite get it myself - he's had some early missteps that have rightly earned bad press, but the drop is extraordinary. Has there been anything like it before?
Truss ?
She didn’t make it to 100 days. She never won a general election. She never had a landslide majority. She inherited a party in total chaos after 13 increasingly wretched years
You can’t compare them
For a newly elected PM this is indeed utterly unprecedented. The stats show it. No one has plunged this badly this quickly, nowhere near it
So what, though ? Either he delivers, in which case it doesn't matter, or he doesn't - in which case Labour are screwed anyway.
It cheers you up to realise you have company in feeling slightly foolish having voted for him, I guess ?
"So what?" is a near five-year lame duck PM. At a time when this country faces enormous challenges.
Leon won't be alone in his buyers' remorse of voting for Starmer. The "Ming vase" strategy wasn't so much a strategy as all he had. His failure to talk about anything contentious that might have lost him voters was because he had nothing tosay. Boats across the Channel? Relationship with the unions? Strategy for growth? Just a vacuum at the heart of Starmer's "delivery plan".
He's not a lame duck. Yet.
You might be right that there's nothing there. The elevation of McSweeney - Ming vase strategist - suggests as much. But you might not.
What I have found depressing is that the evidence is that so little thought has been given to our long term, deep rooted problems as a society and as an economy during their long, long wait in opposition.
People used to make excuses that if they announced policies the Tories would only nick them and there was some truth in that. But the lack of deep thinking, other than the thought that Buggin's turn was coming, is catching up with them now. Reeves said, rightly, that growth was essential if public services were to flourish. But her policies since then seem anti-growth so far. Miliband is a dangerous and foolish ideologue. The policies on VAT on school fees and Non Doms are increasingly looking like net costs rather than modest boosts on spending. The planning changes are not obviously getting anywhere. Their education reviews seem to indicate a desire for both the eating and having of cake, as Boris would put it. Their changes to the rented sector seem likely to reduce supply.
Nearly all of this was predictable and indeed much of it was predicted. What are we to do about productivity? About infrastructure? About our horrendous trade deficit? Our skills gaps? .... brushwood.
Those are all fair comments and questions. I criticised the Ming vase rubbish before the election, and I didn't vote for them.
I still hope that they don't prove completely incompetent, though. For the country's sake, not theirs.
Isn't Starmer just "continuity technocrat? 🤔 A red tie wearing technocrat as opposed to Sunaks blue one..hard to hate really in that context..more a sense nothing will really change..🧐🤨
UK debt was running at 40% right up until the GFC. Then in a couple of years it doubled to 80%. In September 2024, it rose to 100% of GDP. The cost of servicing that debt alone comes to £112bn last year, which is about equal to what we spend on education, and 2/3rds of what we spend on the NHS.
Whether the chancellor is wearing a blue tie or a red tie, the only answers are cutting public services or raising taxes, or a combination thereof.
Fundamentally the UK's problem is it never recovered from the GFC, and now UK PLC lurches on much like a "zombie company" that's up to its eyeballs in debt, no longer investing in growth and sweating existing assets until they eventually break. Companies like that eventually go broke and disappear. What happens to UK PLC?
Unpalatable as it is, there's an argument that the big taxes - income tax, NI, VAT - need to go up temporarily to pay down debt and start investing in growth again. Benefits need to be cut. The billions we spend every year on asylum seekers and so on. The problem is there is every indication this lot will waste any extra money on pay rises for their trade union mates, 22bn carbon capture schemes, and so on. The Tories were just as bad though, diverting money from Network North to fix potholes in London, for example.
Taxes need to go up and/or public spending needs to be cut. And things are going to be very grim for the next few years. TINA.
Taxes going up will harm the economy, resulting in a doom spiral of lower tax returns. We need to increase supply and drive down the cost of energy and food. We need to lower taxes, especially those on business and employment. We need to reduce spending on the business of Governing - go back to staffing numbers we had 10 years ago. We need to release the billions being burned away by the Bank of England. Doing all that will get us back in excellent shape.
" go back to staffing numbers we had 10 years ago. "
Do you honestly think that can be done without bringing things like the NHS or education to their knees?
Frontline services need to be commensurate with the numbers being served, so of course if a hospital is now serving 500,000 and it used to be serving 300,000, the staffing numbers can't be reduced to what they were. But the Department of Health and the NHS quangos above them? That certainly can.
Also, what the living fuck. This is extraordinary. Look at the gradient. Starmer is HATED
To be honest I don't think he can even aspire to hate. Trump is hated and feared. Starmer is just coming across as pathetic.
Don't quite get it myself - he's had some early missteps that have rightly earned bad press, but the drop is extraordinary. Has there been anything like it before?
Truss ?
She didn’t make it to 100 days. She never won a general election. She never had a landslide majority. She inherited a party in total chaos after 13 increasingly wretched years
You can’t compare them
For a newly elected PM this is indeed utterly unprecedented. The stats show it. No one has plunged this badly this quickly, nowhere near it
So what, though ? Either he delivers, in which case it doesn't matter, or he doesn't - in which case Labour are screwed anyway.
It cheers you up to realise you have company in feeling slightly foolish having voted for him, I guess ?
“So what”?!
We are a politics website that debates the minutiae of polls down to the last council by election in West Newent. For politics geeks of every stripe what is happening to Starmer (and to a lesser extent Labour) is surely fascinating because we’ve never seen it before. This is entirely unprecedented
Also it points to even greater volatility in the future, which is pretty relevant in a political BETTING forum
I'd agree if we were a couple years out from the next election. It was pretty clear from the vote (not seat) totals that Labour will be out if they don't deliver. This is just confirmation. As we've seen before, PM approval ratings aren't everything, this early in a Parliament.
But we love polls and we love massive surprising polling movements, don’t we? It’s our meat and drink on PB
Perhaps you just don’t like THIS polling shift
I don't care much - I'm not a Labour supporter. But I'll be quite disappointed if this government turns out to be crap too.
The polling shift is remarkable, but at this stage of Parliament, less interesting than Culinary Culture Wars.
What is culinary culture wotsit?
It's a (sort of) Korean mashup of Masterchef and Great British Menu. Fun.
Thanks. I’m heading to Asia shortly so it will be germane
Glad you’re enjoying the Travellers in Hitler-land book
Will we get an apology from the PBers who did not agree with some of us that axing WFA universality was terrible politics and would be a disaster for Reeves and Starmer going forward?
Luke Tryl @LukeTryl · 3h Asked to name the Government’s biggest mistakes the winter fuel allowance restrictions come on top. In terms of biggest success handling of the riots, clamping down on water companies and launching GB Energy are the top achievements selected.
GB Energy is just a name , feck all behind it and it will do feck all to help with energy costs other than jobs for the boys. Anything from Milliband is doomed to be a monumental clusterfcuk
Will we get an apology from the PBers who did not agree with some of us that axing WFA universality was terrible politics and would be a disaster for Reeves and Starmer going forward?
Luke Tryl @LukeTryl · 3h Asked to name the Government’s biggest mistakes the winter fuel allowance restrictions come on top. In terms of biggest success handling of the riots, clamping down on water companies and launching GB Energy are the top achievements selected.
Terrible politics if your client vote is pensioners. I think it's the most heartening thing this administration had done so far - taking on the oldies is a necessity if the UK is to become solvent and start growing again.
Happily, the Conservatives have helped out somewhat with the Rolex advert.
The Rolex advert will have zero impact - less than zero - on Labour’s dire polling. Only about 0.000006% of people are aware of it. And they’re all on this site
The decline of traditional and heavy industries in the West is a factor here. Men still conceptualise themselves as the protector and breadwinner. There are no longer enough well-paying, traditional jobs for the less academically gifted male.
I think that's a good comment.
The core of the issue is always in our heads, as you say ... how we conceptualise.
And how can we differently conceptualise?
And in @maxh 's thinking - how to we help our young men to have a place where they can differently conceptualise, and grow to be themselves?
Anyone else watching the SpaceX Starship test flight, where they are going to try and hover the rocket alongside the near the tower on the way back, they reach out and grab it with a large metal arm?
Looks like it’s scheduled for around 12:20 UK time, it’s either going to be one of the most spectacular things done in years in the field of aerospace, or it’s going to go horribly wrong and generate a somewhat massive explosion!
Time to repost this from Asif Siddiq's excellent: "The Challenge to Apollo". It is Valeriy A Menshikov's memory of the explosion after the second N1 flight.
" We were all looking in the direction of the launch, where the hundred-meter pyramid of the rocket was being readied to be hurled into space. Ignition, the flash of flame from the engines, and the rocket slowly rose on a column of flame . And suddenly, at the place where it had just been, a bright fireball. Not one of us understood anything at first. A terrible purple-black mushroom cloud, so familiar from the pictures from the textbook on weapons of mass destruction. The steppe began to rock and the air began to shake, and all of the soldiers and officers froze. "
" Only in the trench did I understand the sense of the expression "your heart in your mouth." Something quite improbable was being created all around-the steppe was trembling like a vibration test jig, thundering, rumbling. whistling. gnashing-all mixed together in some terrible. seemingly unending cacophony. The trench proved to be so shallow and unreliable that one wanted to burrow into the sand so as not to hear this nightmare . .. the thick wave from the explosion passed over us. sweeping away and leveling everything. Behind it came hot metal raining down from above. Pieces of the rocket were thrown ten kilometers away. and large windows were shattered in structures 40 kilometers away. A 400 kilogram spherical tank landed on the roof of the installation and testing wing, seven kilometers from the launch pad. "
" We arrived at the fueling station and were horrified-the windows and doors were smashed out. the iron entrance gate was askew. the equipment was scattered about with the light of dawn and was turned to stone-the steppe was literally strewn with dead animals and birds. Where so many of them came from and how they appeared in such quantities at the station I still do not understand."
In the film of it, you can see people catching fire as they ran….
Yes, that's quite a horrific film. But Brazil had something similar in the 1980s, where >20 people died. From memory, the stage started whilst the rocket was on the ground, a few days before the planned launch.
Also, I'd say that if a Saturn V had gone up on, or near, the pad, the devastation would have been massive (NASA did a study onto the effects of a Shuttle explosion, and the results would not have been pretty...). Incidentally, that N1 rocket blast only used up a small fraction of the available fuel.
The shuttle estimates proved to be way off - they assumed an instantaneous detonation of all the hydrogen and oxygen.
Challenger showed that you actually get a deflagration with cryogenics as they mix. As did the high altitude breakup of Super Heavy.
The biggest miss was the solid boosters -assumed to pretty much sit there - they could fly off like ICBMs, and/or break up into large, heavy, burning fragments. See the failed Titan launch from the 80s
I'm talking about a study done in 2003/4 after the Colombia disaster, as part of their rework of the program.
Which, IIRC, pointed out that deflagration would be the outcome of a pad explosion. But that the SRBs would do most of the damage. The extreme worst case was the SRB launching themselves, then requiring the destruct to be activated - the thick steel cases would form huge bombs. At ground level or low altitude, the damage would be pretty bad.
I ended up corresponding with the late Danny Deager (ex-Shuttle guy) on the sim he created that proved that SRB destruct was a lethal danger for Ares I. I adapted his code to run on GPU.
He managed to get this into the report on Ares I. Which was part of the reason The Stick died.
I remember watching the Shuttle that didn’t take off*, and thinking what a mess that would make if it had blown up on the pad. Such a complex machine, but also the construction being unlike any other launch vehicle, with heavy parts like landing gear which could be sent many miles away by the explosion.
* STS-68, the abort called automatically at T-1.9” with one of the SSMEs not 100% right. Looked more dramatic than it was, with no danger of the SRBs actually being fired once the computer had called the abort. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxjxyJ1-q20
Joshua Smithley @blockedfreq There is still a ways to go and a lot can change in three weeks, but as far as PA is concerned, the last few days have been the most revealing thus far when it comes to the POTUS race since the start of election season.
Will we get an apology from the PBers who did not agree with some of us that axing WFA universality was terrible politics and would be a disaster for Reeves and Starmer going forward?
Luke Tryl @LukeTryl · 3h Asked to name the Government’s biggest mistakes the winter fuel allowance restrictions come on top. In terms of biggest success handling of the riots, clamping down on water companies and launching GB Energy are the top achievements selected.
Terrible politics if your client vote is pensioners. I think it's the most heartening thing this administration had done so far - taking on the oldies is a necessity if the UK is to become solvent and start growing again.
Happily, the Conservatives have helped out somewhat with the Rolex advert.
The Rolex advert will have zero impact - less than zero - on Labour’s dire polling. Only about 0.000006% of people are aware of it. And they’re all on this site
Also, what the living fuck. This is extraordinary. Look at the gradient. Starmer is HATED
Morning Leon. Any interest in Culinary Culture Wars ? Bit slow to start, but great intro to Korean food and food culture. And I've always wanted to see a Michelin star chef compete with a school dinner lady in a blind tasting.
“Culinary Class Wars” is great. Masterchef crossed with Squid Game crossed with proletarian revolution.
Thanks all for some insightful comments this morning. Too many great responses to mention but I'm pleased to have written something that allows constructive engagement and challenge from across the spectrum of political thinking on here.
Also, what the living fuck. This is extraordinary. Look at the gradient. Starmer is HATED
To be honest I don't think he can even aspire to hate. Trump is hated and feared. Starmer is just coming across as pathetic.
Don't quite get it myself - he's had some early missteps that have rightly earned bad press, but the drop is extraordinary. Has there been anything like it before?
Truss ?
She didn’t make it to 100 days. She never won a general election. She never had a landslide majority. She inherited a party in total chaos after 13 increasingly wretched years
You can’t compare them
For a newly elected PM this is indeed utterly unprecedented. The stats show it. No one has plunged this badly this quickly, nowhere near it
So what, though ? Either he delivers, in which case it doesn't matter, or he doesn't - in which case Labour are screwed anyway.
It cheers you up to realise you have company in feeling slightly foolish having voted for him, I guess ?
"So what?" is a near five-year lame duck PM. At a time when this country faces enormous challenges.
Leon won't be alone in his buyers' remorse of voting for Starmer. The "Ming vase" strategy wasn't so much a strategy as all he had. His failure to talk about anything contentious that might have lost him voters was because he had nothing tosay. Boats across the Channel? Relationship with the unions? Strategy for growth? Just a vacuum at the heart of Starmer's "delivery plan".
He's not a lame duck. Yet.
You might be right that there's nothing there. The elevation of McSweeney - Ming vase strategist - suggests as much. But you might not.
What I have found depressing is that the evidence is that so little thought has been given to our long term, deep rooted problems as a society and as an economy during their long, long wait in opposition.
People used to make excuses that if they announced policies the Tories would only nick them and there was some truth in that. But the lack of deep thinking, other than the thought that Buggin's turn was coming, is catching up with them now. Reeves said, rightly, that growth was essential if public services were to flourish. But her policies since then seem anti-growth so far. Miliband is a dangerous and foolish ideologue. The policies on VAT on school fees and Non Doms are increasingly looking like net costs rather than modest boosts on spending. The planning changes are not obviously getting anywhere. Their education reviews seem to indicate a desire for both the eating and having of cake, as Boris would put it. Their changes to the rented sector seem likely to reduce supply.
Nearly all of this was predictable and indeed much of it was predicted. What are we to do about productivity? About infrastructure? About our horrendous trade deficit? Our skills gaps? .... brushwood.
Those are all fair comments and questions. I criticised the Ming vase rubbish before the election, and I didn't vote for them.
I still hope that they don't prove completely incompetent, though. For the country's sake, not theirs.
Completely agree. Those who want to this government to fail catastrophically are, in the words of the old phrase, cutting off their own nose to spite their own face.
'The UK Foreign Office (FCDO) asked for a visit by the former Taiwanese president to be postponed so as not to anger China ahead of a trip by David Lammy, the Guardian has learned.
And I am not aware of MoreInCommon changing their post-election methodology? So if Yougov has changed theirs to give the Tories 5 more points or so, that's Labour potentially well beneath the leaderless Tories.
" 'I'm very very concerned and very scared,' James Carville... told the news channel MSNBC last week as he warned there was limited time for Harris to communicate a more aggressive message."
"Calling for targeted attack on Trump's plan for import tariffs he added:"They need to be sharp, they need to be aggressive..."
"They need to stop answering questions and start asking questions"
A really thought-provoking thread header, thanks. One of the more questions to me about the current drive to rid us of toxic masculinity is whether it is making women and girls happier. It doesn't seem to me to be working that way. I'm not sure that grievance ever works well for the aggrieved. The civil rights movement was moving toward a positive goal. The current grievance politics on race and the fight against 'toxic masculinity' are not. They're saying 'comport yourself differently so I can feel better' - that's a disaster in a number of ways. It is never 'done', the finish line is never reached. It wants some people to have things worse so others can (in theory) have things better, as if wellbeing is a zero sum game. Teach all kids to be polite, respectful, kind, and to value and respect themselves. Leave race and gender out of it.
Leaving race and gender out of it is turning a blind eye to the ongoing sexism and racism in the world. A bunch of white men saying, “We’ve done enough. You can stop complaining now.” isn’t very persuasive.
Anyone else watching the SpaceX Starship test flight, where they are going to try and hover the rocket alongside the near the tower on the way back, they reach out and grab it with a large metal arm?
Looks like it’s scheduled for around 12:20 UK time, it’s either going to be one of the most spectacular things done in years in the field of aerospace, or it’s going to go horribly wrong and generate a somewhat massive explosion!
Time to repost this from Asif Siddiq's excellent: "The Challenge to Apollo". It is Valeriy A Menshikov's memory of the explosion after the second N1 flight.
" We were all looking in the direction of the launch, where the hundred-meter pyramid of the rocket was being readied to be hurled into space. Ignition, the flash of flame from the engines, and the rocket slowly rose on a column of flame . And suddenly, at the place where it had just been, a bright fireball. Not one of us understood anything at first. A terrible purple-black mushroom cloud, so familiar from the pictures from the textbook on weapons of mass destruction. The steppe began to rock and the air began to shake, and all of the soldiers and officers froze. "
" Only in the trench did I understand the sense of the expression "your heart in your mouth." Something quite improbable was being created all around-the steppe was trembling like a vibration test jig, thundering, rumbling. whistling. gnashing-all mixed together in some terrible. seemingly unending cacophony. The trench proved to be so shallow and unreliable that one wanted to burrow into the sand so as not to hear this nightmare . .. the thick wave from the explosion passed over us. sweeping away and leveling everything. Behind it came hot metal raining down from above. Pieces of the rocket were thrown ten kilometers away. and large windows were shattered in structures 40 kilometers away. A 400 kilogram spherical tank landed on the roof of the installation and testing wing, seven kilometers from the launch pad. "
" We arrived at the fueling station and were horrified-the windows and doors were smashed out. the iron entrance gate was askew. the equipment was scattered about with the light of dawn and was turned to stone-the steppe was literally strewn with dead animals and birds. Where so many of them came from and how they appeared in such quantities at the station I still do not understand."
In the film of it, you can see people catching fire as they ran….
Yes, that's quite a horrific film. But Brazil had something similar in the 1980s, where >20 people died. From memory, the stage started whilst the rocket was on the ground, a few days before the planned launch.
Also, I'd say that if a Saturn V had gone up on, or near, the pad, the devastation would have been massive (NASA did a study onto the effects of a Shuttle explosion, and the results would not have been pretty...). Incidentally, that N1 rocket blast only used up a small fraction of the available fuel.
The shuttle estimates proved to be way off - they assumed an instantaneous detonation of all the hydrogen and oxygen.
Challenger showed that you actually get a deflagration with cryogenics as they mix. As did the high altitude breakup of Super Heavy.
The biggest miss was the solid boosters -assumed to pretty much sit there - they could fly off like ICBMs, and/or break up into large, heavy, burning fragments. See the failed Titan launch from the 80s
I'm talking about a study done in 2003/4 after the Colombia disaster, as part of their rework of the program.
Which, IIRC, pointed out that deflagration would be the outcome of a pad explosion. But that the SRBs would do most of the damage. The extreme worst case was the SRB launching themselves, then requiring the destruct to be activated - the thick steel cases would form huge bombs. At ground level or low altitude, the damage would be pretty bad.
I ended up corresponding with the late Danny Deager (ex-Shuttle guy) on the sim he created that proved that SRB destruct was a lethal danger for Ares I. I adapted his code to run on GPU.
He managed to get this into the report on Ares I. Which was part of the reason The Stick died.
I can't find it atm, but I'm pretty sure that Wayne Hale went into it a little as part of his posts / interviews about the Colombia aftermath. And as I said, the N1 explosion only used a small portion of its fuel mass, but was still devastating. So I'm not quite sure the point you're making?
N1 used RP1. The problem there is that the initial Unplanned Disassembly turned the RP1 into a cloud of droplets/mist. At pretty much air temperature. Which was near perfect for a FAE.
Cryogenic fuels have an interesting property, as they boil off, of generating static electricity. This prevents FAE clouds forming from large amounts of methane or hydrogen. Instead you get a slower deflagration. Auto ignition…
The crew compartment of Challenger was inside this deflagration cloud. There is hard evidence the crew survived this and were alive till impact.
Also, what the living fuck. This is extraordinary. Look at the gradient. Starmer is HATED
To be honest I don't think he can even aspire to hate. Trump is hated and feared. Starmer is just coming across as pathetic.
Don't quite get it myself - he's had some early missteps that have rightly earned bad press, but the drop is extraordinary. Has there been anything like it before?
Truss ?
She didn’t make it to 100 days. She never won a general election. She never had a landslide majority. She inherited a party in total chaos after 13 increasingly wretched years
You can’t compare them
For a newly elected PM this is indeed utterly unprecedented. The stats show it. No one has plunged this badly this quickly, nowhere near it
So what, though ? Either he delivers, in which case it doesn't matter, or he doesn't - in which case Labour are screwed anyway.
It cheers you up to realise you have company in feeling slightly foolish having voted for him, I guess ?
"So what?" is a near five-year lame duck PM. At a time when this country faces enormous challenges.
Leon won't be alone in his buyers' remorse of voting for Starmer. The "Ming vase" strategy wasn't so much a strategy as all he had. His failure to talk about anything contentious that might have lost him voters was because he had nothing tosay. Boats across the Channel? Relationship with the unions? Strategy for growth? Just a vacuum at the heart of Starmer's "delivery plan".
He's not a lame duck. Yet.
You might be right that there's nothing there. The elevation of McSweeney - Ming vase strategist - suggests as much. But you might not.
What I have found depressing is that the evidence is that so little thought has been given to our long term, deep rooted problems as a society and as an economy during their long, long wait in opposition.
People used to make excuses that if they announced policies the Tories would only nick them and there was some truth in that. But the lack of deep thinking, other than the thought that Buggin's turn was coming, is catching up with them now. Reeves said, rightly, that growth was essential if public services were to flourish. But her policies since then seem anti-growth so far. Miliband is a dangerous and foolish ideologue. The policies on VAT on school fees and Non Doms are increasingly looking like net costs rather than modest boosts on spending. The planning changes are not obviously getting anywhere. Their education reviews seem to indicate a desire for both the eating and having of cake, as Boris would put it. Their changes to the rented sector seem likely to reduce supply.
Nearly all of this was predictable and indeed much of it was predicted. What are we to do about productivity? About infrastructure? About our horrendous trade deficit? Our skills gaps? .... brushwood.
Those are all fair comments and questions. I criticised the Ming vase rubbish before the election, and I didn't vote for them.
I still hope that they don't prove completely incompetent, though. For the country's sake, not theirs.
Completely agree. Those who want to this government to fail catastrophically are, in the words of the old phrase, cutting off their own nose to spite their own face.
Surely no one WANTS this government to fail
It’s more that - as they fail, and fail terribly, we may as well take some pleasure in kicking them while they’re down. Because they are utter wankers, and hypocritical thieves, so they deserve it
'The UK Foreign Office (FCDO) asked for a visit by the former Taiwanese president to be postponed so as not to anger China ahead of a trip by David Lammy, the Guardian has learned.
Also, what the living fuck. This is extraordinary. Look at the gradient. Starmer is HATED
To be honest I don't think he can even aspire to hate. Trump is hated and feared. Starmer is just coming across as pathetic.
Don't quite get it myself - he's had some early missteps that have rightly earned bad press, but the drop is extraordinary. Has there been anything like it before?
Truss ?
She didn’t make it to 100 days. She never won a general election. She never had a landslide majority. She inherited a party in total chaos after 13 increasingly wretched years
You can’t compare them
For a newly elected PM this is indeed utterly unprecedented. The stats show it. No one has plunged this badly this quickly, nowhere near it
So what, though ? Either he delivers, in which case it doesn't matter, or he doesn't - in which case Labour are screwed anyway.
It cheers you up to realise you have company in feeling slightly foolish having voted for him, I guess ?
"So what?" is a near five-year lame duck PM. At a time when this country faces enormous challenges.
Leon won't be alone in his buyers' remorse of voting for Starmer. The "Ming vase" strategy wasn't so much a strategy as all he had. His failure to talk about anything contentious that might have lost him voters was because he had nothing tosay. Boats across the Channel? Relationship with the unions? Strategy for growth? Just a vacuum at the heart of Starmer's "delivery plan".
He's not a lame duck. Yet.
You might be right that there's nothing there. The elevation of McSweeney - Ming vase strategist - suggests as much. But you might not.
What I have found depressing is that the evidence is that so little thought has been given to our long term, deep rooted problems as a society and as an economy during their long, long wait in opposition.
People used to make excuses that if they announced policies the Tories would only nick them and there was some truth in that. But the lack of deep thinking, other than the thought that Buggin's turn was coming, is catching up with them now. Reeves said, rightly, that growth was essential if public services were to flourish. But her policies since then seem anti-growth so far. Miliband is a dangerous and foolish ideologue. The policies on VAT on school fees and Non Doms are increasingly looking like net costs rather than modest boosts on spending. The planning changes are not obviously getting anywhere. Their education reviews seem to indicate a desire for both the eating and having of cake, as Boris would put it. Their changes to the rented sector seem likely to reduce supply.
Nearly all of this was predictable and indeed much of it was predicted. What are we to do about productivity? About infrastructure? About our horrendous trade deficit? Our skills gaps? .... brushwood.
Those are all fair comments and questions. I criticised the Ming vase rubbish before the election, and I didn't vote for them.
I still hope that they don't prove completely incompetent, though. For the country's sake, not theirs.
Completely agree. Those who want to this government to fail catastrophically are, in the words of the old phrase, cutting off their own nose to spite their own face.
Surely no one WANTS this government to fail
It’s more that - as they fail, and fail terribly, we may as well take some pleasure in kicking them while they’re down. Because they are utter wankers, and hypocritical thieves, so they deserve it
I think you do seeing as Britain’s decline has absolutely no material effect on your wealth or standard of living.
What an interesting and thought-provoking thread, thanks @maxh
The phenomenon of young men moving sharply to the right, and young women moving sharply to the left, appears to be happening in a number of Western countries, the common thread being perhaps internet and woke culture that has emphasised the differences.
This is especially true of the white working classes, who are somewhat under-represented on forums such as this, but turn up in droves to hear Farage and Trump speak, and follow the likes of Andrew Tate online. The trick is to find good role models for these young men, rather than the likes of the more extremist politicians and activists we see around Europe and the US.
The likes of Chris Williamson and Joe Rogan, while not perfect, at least talk about healthy eating, exercise, outdoor activities, moderation of drink and drugs etc. Dr Jordan Peterson is another one, with his books that start by telling young men to tidy their room and dress well. As a society, we need to be steering the youth towards these more positive characters and away from more extreme and divisive characters.
Just in terms of psephological implications, I think we should remember that young men are generally poor at voting for anyone. Trump and Farage do well off the votes of old and middle-aged men.
A really thought-provoking thread header, thanks. One of the more questions to me about the current drive to rid us of toxic masculinity is whether it is making women and girls happier. It doesn't seem to me to be working that way. I'm not sure that grievance ever works well for the aggrieved. The civil rights movement was moving toward a positive goal. The current grievance politics on race and the fight against 'toxic masculinity' are not. They're saying 'comport yourself differently so I can feel better' - that's a disaster in a number of ways. It is never 'done', the finish line is never reached. It wants some people to have things worse so others can (in theory) have things better, as if wellbeing is a zero sum game. Teach all kids to be polite, respectful, kind, and to value and respect themselves. Leave race and gender out of it.
Leaving race and gender out of it is turning a blind eye to the ongoing sexism and racism in the world. A bunch of white men saying, “We’ve done enough. You can stop complaining now.” isn’t very persuasive.
The problems occur when, instead of calling out actual racism and sexism, people instead seek to blame mostly white men *as a group* for behaviours which the vast majority of individuals don’t exhibit.
Also, what the living fuck. This is extraordinary. Look at the gradient. Starmer is HATED
To be honest I don't think he can even aspire to hate. Trump is hated and feared. Starmer is just coming across as pathetic.
Don't quite get it myself - he's had some early missteps that have rightly earned bad press, but the drop is extraordinary. Has there been anything like it before?
Truss ?
She didn’t make it to 100 days. She never won a general election. She never had a landslide majority. She inherited a party in total chaos after 13 increasingly wretched years
You can’t compare them
For a newly elected PM this is indeed utterly unprecedented. The stats show it. No one has plunged this badly this quickly, nowhere near it
So what, though ? Either he delivers, in which case it doesn't matter, or he doesn't - in which case Labour are screwed anyway.
It cheers you up to realise you have company in feeling slightly foolish having voted for him, I guess ?
"So what?" is a near five-year lame duck PM. At a time when this country faces enormous challenges.
Leon won't be alone in his buyers' remorse of voting for Starmer. The "Ming vase" strategy wasn't so much a strategy as all he had. His failure to talk about anything contentious that might have lost him voters was because he had nothing tosay. Boats across the Channel? Relationship with the unions? Strategy for growth? Just a vacuum at the heart of Starmer's "delivery plan".
He's not a lame duck. Yet.
You might be right that there's nothing there. The elevation of McSweeney - Ming vase strategist - suggests as much. But you might not.
What I have found depressing is that the evidence is that so little thought has been given to our long term, deep rooted problems as a society and as an economy during their long, long wait in opposition.
People used to make excuses that if they announced policies the Tories would only nick them and there was some truth in that. But the lack of deep thinking, other than the thought that Buggin's turn was coming, is catching up with them now. Reeves said, rightly, that growth was essential if public services were to flourish. But her policies since then seem anti-growth so far. Miliband is a dangerous and foolish ideologue. The policies on VAT on school fees and Non Doms are increasingly looking like net costs rather than modest boosts on spending. The planning changes are not obviously getting anywhere. Their education reviews seem to indicate a desire for both the eating and having of cake, as Boris would put it. Their changes to the rented sector seem likely to reduce supply.
Nearly all of this was predictable and indeed much of it was predicted. What are we to do about productivity? About infrastructure? About our horrendous trade deficit? Our skills gaps? .... brushwood.
Those are all fair comments and questions. I criticised the Ming vase rubbish before the election, and I didn't vote for them.
I still hope that they don't prove completely incompetent, though. For the country's sake, not theirs.
Completely agree. Those who want to this government to fail catastrophically are, in the words of the old phrase, cutting off their own nose to spite their own face.
Surely no one WANTS this government to fail
It’s more that - as they fail, and fail terribly, we may as well take some pleasure in kicking them while they’re down. Because they are utter wankers, and hypocritical thieves, so they deserve it
I think you do seeing as Britain’s decline has absolutely no material effect on your wealth or standard of living.
Don’t be a dork
Of course it affects me
1. I’m patriotic in a very basic way. I might slag off my country but I still love her
2. I may be moderately insulated from Britain’s travails, not least by being absent a lot, but I have beloved friends and family in the UK - kids, siblings, best friends - I don’t want them to suffer
Comments
My Fitbit needs charged roughly once a week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slu4rTF-Bz0
Looks like it’s scheduled for around 12:20 UK time, it’s either going to be one of the most spectacular things done in years in the field of aerospace, or it’s going to go horribly wrong and generate a somewhat massive explosion!
Leon won't be alone in his buyers' remorse of voting for Starmer. The "Ming vase" strategy wasn't so much a strategy as all he had. His failure to talk about anything contentious that might have lost him voters was because he had nothing tosay. Boats across the Channel? Relationship with the unions? Strategy for growth? Just a vacuum at the heart of Starmer's "delivery plan".
It was pretty clear from the vote (not seat) totals that Labour will be out if they don't deliver. This is just confirmation.
As we've seen before, PM approval ratings aren't everything, this early in a Parliament.
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2014/dec/19/keir-starmer-former-top-prosecutor-2015-general-election-frank-dobson-labour-inequality
“If I’m right, then the next 10 years are going to be really tough and – this isn’t meant to sound arrogant – but I think if I do have skills and experience that might help, I don’t really think I can walk away from it.”
You might be right that there's nothing there. The elevation of McSweeney - Ming vase strategist - suggests as much. But you might not.
" We were all looking in the direction of the launch, where the hundred-meter pyramid of the rocket was being readied to be hurled into space. Ignition, the flash of flame from the engines, and the rocket slowly rose on a column of flame . And suddenly, at the place where it had just been, a bright fireball. Not one of us understood anything at first. A terrible purple-black mushroom cloud, so familiar from the pictures from the textbook on weapons of mass destruction. The steppe began to rock and the air began to shake, and all of the soldiers and officers froze. "
" Only in the trench did I understand the sense of the expression "your heart in your mouth." Something quite improbable was being created all around-the steppe was trembling like a vibration test jig, thundering, rumbling. whistling. gnashing-all mixed together in some terrible. seemingly unending cacophony. The trench proved to be so shallow and unreliable that one wanted to burrow into the sand so as not to hear this nightmare . .. the thick wave from the explosion passed over us. sweeping away and leveling everything. Behind it came hot metal raining down from above. Pieces of the rocket were thrown ten kilometers away. and large windows were shattered in structures 40 kilometers away. A 400 kilogram spherical tank landed on the roof of the installation and testing wing, seven kilometers from the launch pad. "
" We arrived at the fueling station and were horrified-the windows and doors were smashed out. the iron entrance gate was askew. the equipment was scattered about with the light of dawn and was turned to stone-the steppe was literally strewn with dead animals and birds. Where so many of them came from and how they appeared in such quantities at the station I still do not understand."
Edit: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/static/history/SP-4408pt1.pdf for anyone who wants to read up on the Soviet moon program
Perhaps you just don’t like THIS polling shift
I wonder if the Budget delay is simply because they had no ideas and they’ve spent the last months urgently trying to conjure something up. Depressingly plausible
That has been the crux of their long running debates over immigration reform.
And given the increasing short-termist fractious society we have where the government has run out of other people's money to bribe them with, I think that's even more difficult than it was.
People used to make excuses that if they announced policies the Tories would only nick them and there was some truth in that. But the lack of deep thinking, other than the thought that Buggin's turn was coming, is catching up with them now. Reeves said, rightly, that growth was essential if public services were to flourish. But her policies since then seem anti-growth so far. Miliband is a dangerous and foolish ideologue. The policies on VAT on school fees and Non Doms are increasingly looking like net costs rather than modest boosts on spending. The planning changes are not obviously getting anywhere. Their education reviews seem to indicate a desire for both the eating and having of cake, as Boris would put it. Their changes to the rented sector seem likely to reduce supply.
Nearly all of this was predictable and indeed much of it was predicted. What are we to do about productivity? About infrastructure? About our horrendous trade deficit? Our skills gaps? .... brushwood.
The US blew up plenty of rockets in the same time period, without causing even a fraction of the death and destruction.
The worst was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nedelin_catastrophe
In the film of it, you can see people catching fire as they ran….
But I'll be quite disappointed if this government turns out to be crap too.
The polling shift is remarkable, but at this stage of Parliament, less interesting than Culinary Culture Wars.
What goes around, comes around
I think some feminists make it overly focused on women, and can expect men to sit down and shut up and do as they are told. It's about men as well.
One principle of thinking I was involved in (in what I would now call liberal evangelical circles) was to to try and redefine "Real Man". Being strong and silent, dominant, aggressive and 'powerful' is, in reality, weak and a little pitiable. But we are presented with a spectrum of 'icons of masculinity' such as (1970s to date) Captain Kirk, the Marlborough Cowboy, Dirty Harry, City Boys, Misbehaving Footballers who 'harvest' attractive sales assistants so they have convenient girls on hand to fuck after their Christmas Parties despite their WAGs, Wham, Justin Bieber and Music Artistes, F1 Drivers, Rappers, and more recently local gang members and others performing on social media, and expectations of behaviour for young men and women conditioned by Pornhub etc.
How does a school teacher, or a school community, question that? How do you provide an environment / community / safe space, where your pupils (of both sexes) can grow to be what they choose?
I'm perhaps too out of touch to be helpful, but I wonder where the alternative, enduring male role models are these days, and how their stories are communicated? I'm sure they exist (somewhere!),and can be identified as achievable as being like the latest social media sensation.
For women/girls, there's a minor industry pushing role models to prominence, and creating 'heroes'. Where's the male version? And how can the rest of us help?
And then contrast their policy void and cluelessness with their eagerness to grab the baubles of office. The perks and treats. The optics are terrible
They could end up the most loathed government in history, very easily
Today’s launch is unlikely to be anything like that bad, modern Western rocket designs being much less likely to blow up on the pad, and with this design already having been tested a number of times already. By the time the first stage arrives back at the launch site, waiting to be grabbed, it should be almost empty of fuel. Will still make one hell of a mess if it crashes and blows up though!
T-23’
For my friend it was Griftgate. The avarice and entitlement
Also, I'd say that if a Saturn V had gone up on, or near, the pad, the devastation would have been massive (NASA did a study onto the effects of a Shuttle explosion, and the results would not have been pretty...). Incidentally, that N1 rocket blast only used up a small fraction of the available fuel.
Or the Cygnus Orb-3 explosion from a decade or so ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_Orb-3 Or the SpaceX F9 launchpad explosion.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/329256/alien-apprehensions-registered-by-the-us-border-patrol/
JD Vance will tell you that’s a woeful underestimate of the true number of illegals in the country, I think he’s been using 20m.
How does one make melba toast in an air fryer?
I am blessed with lots of friends. I’m good at friends… but I’m bad at family. I’m not Homo domesticus
1. INTRODUCTION
2. THE PROBLEM
3. THE CAUSE
4. THE CURE
4.1 Powerlessness leads to resentment
4.2 Vulnerability leading to radicalisation
4.3 A more positive role model
4.3.1 Be bold but adaptable
4.3.2 Swap emotional independence for emotional openness
4.3.3 Be present if you’re a father
5. THE POLITICS
6. LONG TERM EFFECTS OF THE CURE
I wouldn't have changed a word, but I would have swapped sections around, giving this:
1. INTRODUCTION
2. THE PROBLEM
3. THE CAUSE
3.1 Andrew Tate, incels, et al
3.2 Powerlessness leads to resentment
3.3 Vulnerability leading to radicalisation
4. THE CURE: A MORE POSITIVE ROLE MODEL
4.1 Be bold but adaptable
4.2 Swap emotional independence for emotional openness
4.3 Be present if you’re a father
5. LONG TERM EFFECTS OF THE CURE
6. THE POLITICS
Plesae feel free to deride my Monday-morning quarterbacking...
One thing is certain, it is all uncertain
Whether the chancellor is wearing a blue tie or a red tie, the only answers are cutting public services or raising taxes, or a combination thereof.
Fundamentally the UK's problem is it never recovered from the GFC, and now UK PLC lurches on much like a "zombie company" that's up to its eyeballs in debt, no longer investing in growth and sweating existing assets until they eventually break. Companies like that eventually go broke and disappear. What happens to UK PLC?
Unpalatable as it is, there's an argument that the big taxes - income tax, NI, VAT - need to go up temporarily to pay down debt and start investing in growth again. Benefits need to be cut. The billions we spend every year on asylum seekers and so on. The problem is there is every indication this lot will waste any extra money on pay rises for their trade union mates, 22bn carbon capture schemes, and so on. The Tories were just as bad though, diverting money from Network North to fix potholes in London, for example.
Taxes need to go up and/or public spending needs to be cut. And things are going to be very grim for the next few years. TINA.
Luke Tryl
@LukeTryl
·
3h
Asked to name the Government’s biggest mistakes the winter fuel allowance restrictions come on top. In terms of biggest success handling of the riots, clamping down on water companies and launching GB Energy are the top achievements selected.
https://x.com/LukeTryl/status/1845362163730338082
There's no evidence that I know of that rich, lefty, pious, self-regarding lawyers get any less loathsome once you cross the river?
Like the sound of her.
When does she become an MP?
Blair's charisma saw him through quite a few challenges during his time as PM. The fact Starmer has zero charisma is going to hurt him very, very quickly. He is not a salesman; he cannot sell policy. And neither, I fear, can many of the team immediately around him - e.g. Reeves and Rayner.
Also, Starmer needs to sell us some positivity. By all means say that his government had a terrible inheritance, but he also needs to say clearly and often that it *will* get better.
(I was essentially saying this before the GE...)
However, two points:
1. We’re not alone
2. Technology might save us
Challenger showed that you actually get a deflagration with cryogenics as they mix. As did the high altitude breakup of Super Heavy.
The biggest miss was the solid boosters -assumed to pretty much sit there - they could fly off like ICBMs, and/or break up into large, heavy, burning fragments. See the failed Titan launch from the 80s
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/oct/13/government-housing-targets-unrealistic-unfair-english-councils-warn
Basically they’re acting like a Maoist government. Setting absurdly unreal targets - “50 trillion tons of steel by April, and kill all the sparrows!” - then saying to councils “hit that target” even when it’s clearly impossible
AI has eaten into my consultancy work quite substantially, and I have no doubt it will be coming for other middle class jobs in a big way. If you buy into the Turchin elite overproduction thing now, wait until we need a fraction of the knowledge based workers we currently employ, with all the tax revenues we take from them.
I ended up corresponding with the late Danny Deager (ex-Shuttle guy) on the sim he created that proved that SRB destruct was a lethal danger for Ares I. I adapted his code to run on GPU.
He managed to get this into the report on Ares I. Which was part of the reason The Stick died.
Fun.
Happily, the Conservatives have helped out somewhat with the Rolex advert.
Do you honestly think that can be done without bringing things like the NHS or education to their knees?
I criticised the Ming vase rubbish before the election, and I didn't vote for them.
I still hope that they don't prove completely incompetent, though. For the country's sake, not theirs.
Glad you’re enjoying the Travellers in Hitler-land book
The core of the issue is always in our heads, as you say ... how we conceptualise.
And how can we differently conceptualise?
And in @maxh 's thinking - how to we help our young men to have a
place where they can differently conceptualise, and grow to be themselves?
* STS-68, the abort called automatically at T-1.9” with one of the SSMEs not 100% right. Looked more dramatic than it was, with no danger of the SRBs actually being fired once the computer had called the abort.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxjxyJ1-q20
Joshua Smithley
@blockedfreq
There is still a ways to go and a lot can change in three weeks, but as far as PA is concerned, the last few days have been the most revealing thus far when it comes to the POTUS race since the start of election season.
Why? Let's break a few key factors down. ⬇️
https://x.com/blockedfreq/status/1845267122982719709
Our polling on Labour’s first 100 days for this
@cazjwheeler
@thetimes
piece finds the Tories and Labour tied on 27 and Reform at highest we’ve recorded.
🌹 LAB 27% (-2)
🌳 CON 27% (-1)
➡️ REF UK 21% (+2)
🔶 LIB DEM 13% (+2)
🌍 GRN 7% (-)
🟡 SNP 2% (-)
https://x.com/LukeTryl/status/1845359983107486155
Would give a hung parliament, Labour on 299, Tories on 211, LDs 70 and Reform 26 and SNP 9
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/fcgi-bin/usercode.py?scotcontrol=N&CON=27&LAB=27&LIB=13&Reform=21&Green=7&UKIP=&TVCON=&TVLAB=&TVLIB=&TVReform=&TVGreen=&TVUKIP=&SCOTCON=&SCOTLAB=&SCOTLIB=&SCOTReform=&SCOTGreen=&SCOTUKIP=&SCOTNAT=&display=AllChanged&regorseat=(none)&boundary=2024
Lammy is due to travel to China next week for high-level meetings in his first trip to the country as foreign secretary.'
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/12/foreign-office-uk-visit-taiwan-tsai-ing-wen
"Calling for targeted attack on Trump's plan for import tariffs he added:"They need to be sharp, they need to be aggressive..."
"They need to stop answering questions and start asking questions"
Observer.
Cryogenic fuels have an interesting property, as they boil off, of generating static electricity. This prevents FAE clouds forming from large amounts of methane or hydrogen. Instead you get a slower deflagration. Auto ignition…
The crew compartment of Challenger was inside this deflagration cloud. There is hard evidence the crew survived this and were alive till impact.
It’s more that - as they fail, and fail terribly, we may as well take some pleasure in kicking them while they’re down. Because they are utter wankers, and hypocritical thieves, so they deserve it
Of course it affects me
1. I’m patriotic in a very basic way. I might slag off my country but I still love her
2. I may be moderately insulated from Britain’s travails, not least by being absent a lot, but I have beloved friends and family in the UK - kids, siblings, best friends - I don’t want them to suffer