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Political betting can get you into serious trouble – politicalbetting.com
Political betting can get you into serious trouble – politicalbetting.com
? NEW via @joncraig: The Gambling Commission is looking to prosecute at least three suspects – potentially up to five – following their investigation into the election date betting scandal.This includes a politician, and a close protection guard.
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https://bsky.app/profile/jamesmeek.bsky.social/post/3latvtnhh4s2l
On the second day of my son's bikeability course.
"The situation is a miniature of the tridentine internal politics of Ukraine since the Orange Revolution of 2004: the archaic, populist, nationalist-patriotic tendency; the geeky, bourgeois strand, people who aspire to what they see as a liberal European ideal of personal freedom, communal fairness and the rule of law; and the cynical, apolitical, transactional, personal loyalty-based matrix of oligarchs, civil servants of varying degrees of integrity, and those who depend on them."
Thanks for the link. Well worth the read.
Meeks is a good writer, but he needs a good editor. He *always* over-writes. And that's quite an accusation coming from me.
(If you want to see a video from Ukraine which IMV is better than that article, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQQCq1ijRjc Sometimes images really do cover 1,000 words.)
If they are "insiders" I suppose they had access to MNPI but I had not thought that the betting markets were subject to MAR 1.3.
@TSE?
We can only be grateful that none of us have ever had to make similar choices, and we should do all we can to help that brave country so we never have to.
I would like us to do more, a lot more. But I don't think we will.
Meek is an under appreciated treasure, partly I suspect because he appears completely uninterested in any kind of noisy public and social media profile.
Nothing exciting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hoqI2NfVjo&t=152s
So probably not him up before the GC.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/gb-energy-will-help-drive-down-bills-by-300-keir-starmer-pledges
So the slightly remote possibility of further exports and modest growth seems to outweigh such considerations. Can't say I am impressed.
And there have now been 1,000 days of this hideous war.
In the meantime, the ruble continues to fall. Putin is not negotiating from a particularly strong position.
we need to know.
https://bsky.app/profile/jamesmeek.bsky.social
"High Street job losses are "inevitable", prices will rise, and shops will close as the result of the tax increases in the Budget and other rising costs, a group of the biggest retailers in the UK is warning.
Tesco, Amazon, Greggs, Next, and dozens of other chains are urging the Treasury to reconsider some of the measures."
About that growth thing....
https://www.holyrood.com/news/view,edinburgh-university-issues-redundancies-warning
One of Scotland's most prestigious universities has blamed the UK Government's National Insurance hike for looming job cuts.
In an official message to all staff, Sir Peter Mathieson, principal and vice-chancellor of the University of Edinburgh, says the change by the new Labour administration has created "a multi-million pound increase to our salary bill".
Student numbers are also down and Mathieson has warned staff it of "selective voluntary and, if unavoidable, compulsory redundancy" measures to come.
If you run a farm or business
If you have a pension
This government is out to get you
There are truly people who would happily live under the jackboot, or compel others to live under the jackboot, so long as they saw the chance to gain pennies from it.
One easy win would be to extend the employment allowance a bit to help out smaller businesses more. Wouldn't be surprised if that is in the next budget.
Its much tougher amongst the less prestigious Universities. Dundee has announced substantial redundancies as have Robert Gordon amongst others.
Thought there was no chance of doing anything when I looked out at midnight last night.
The price I pay for beer club this evening. Its brutal.
The Scottish universities have it slightly tougher than English ones but there are a lot of English ones in trouble.
Glen O'Hara who tweets about redundancies reported that Durham, Northumbria, Newcastle, Sunderland and Middlesbrough are all trying to cut staff - and yes that is every university in the North East and 2 are the prestigious ones you refer to above (as probably is Northumbria nowadays).
Snow reaches London
published at 08:41
08:41
Snowy weather has now reached London
Just how useless is she ?
It's bizarre you can't travel from London to Newcastle by train at any time in the train timetables apart from one train (£140) at I think 10.30am.
I searched up London - Manchester and if you want the journey to take 2hrs 20mins with no changes, rather than 3hrs 30mins with one change, it costs you £369 return (vs I think £170-odd).
ffs
The other option would have been to reverse the employee NI cuts.
I can actually see why the NI cut was made (it removes an incentive to keep workers on 14/16 hours) but it's not playing out well...
Your examples illustrate the reason there needs to be considerably more rail capacity North-South in the UK. Now if only there were a plan to achieve that…
Direct trains every half hour, it looks like.
London to Manchester direct is only 369 quid if you absolutely must travel in the peak. If you're willing to wait to leave until 9.30 it's only 109 quid for a return. (And in practice for this kind of long distance intercity journey the cost effective approach is to buy an advance ticket for a specific train, i.e. treat it the way you would a plane journey; walk up fares in peak time are the worst case for costs.)
Puppy's first experience of snow.
The BBC report was about traffic grinding to a standstill. In London. Where there was about half an inch of snow visible behind the reporter, along which slowly moving cars drove.
https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/journey-planner/?type=single&origin=182&destination=115&leavingType=departing&leavingDate=201124&leavingHour=09&leavingMin=30&adults=1&extraTime=0&via=MAN&viaType=via#O
What site were you looking at?
But you are seriously penalised if you have to travel at no notice. I usually book a week or more in advance so my journey this week is £90 there and back - plus probably £40 for first class upgrades.
I do have to travel down Tuesday night rather than Wednesday morning but a 5:30 start doesn't do me any favours nowadays and it saves £160 which covers a decent hotel room.
6:15 - £69.50
7:00 £132.10
7:30 £132.10
8:00 - £140.10
8:30 - £132.10
9:00 - £141.10
9:30 £84.50
10:00 - £84.50
10:30 - £80.10
I'd have hiked basic rate tax to 25p and higher rate to 50p - a lot of pain but for everyone.
There's another side to this - it seems business cries wolf at the slightest increase to their costs and are all too quick to cut back to maintain profit. I see numerous examples across the economy of service and retail businesses reducing their overheads to the detriment of the customer who either pays more, gets less or both. Yet I would imagine most businesses would like to think of themselves as customer and community-focussed.
I can't help but feel an economic model based on the principle of knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing isn't going to end well for anyone. It's all about the park keepers.
Cant be too long until we get the freezing pensioner stories and Reeves bleating it's all to fund the NHS
But it's melted everywhere else, mind (street, car, garden, shed roof, etc).
In response to @NickPalmer questioning if the conservatives will cancel the farmers IHT, Kemi is to join Jeremy Clarkson on stage to address and support the farmer's demonstration outside no 10
Also Scottish Labour are announcing they will reinstate the WFP
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/11/19/france-seeks-lure-british-companies-advertising-blitz/
The top problem with FDA is the agency’s reckless disregard for the impact of its daily decisions on the cost of new innovation. FDA’s day-to-day decisions include not just the final drug approval decisions that grab headlines, but their micromanagement of every single step of the clinical & even preclinical drug development process. This increases overall healthcare costs by raising the cost barriers to competition, which in turn advantages big pharma over smaller biotechs that face a higher cost of capital to fund their projects. That’s the *real* FDA issue we need to be talking much more about, even if it takes some level of nuance to understand.
https://x.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1858704283061153944
As an illustration of the costs of regulatory delay, priority review vouchers, which enable drug developers to get FDA review in 6 months, rather than a year, change hands for around $100m.
While I don't share the desire of the US right to get rid of all regulation, the left needs to realise the enormous cost of unnecessary regulation (which we've discussed often in the context of UK development).
It's the one area where we could massively boost our prospects of economic growth without having to borrow.
That's £55 you need to find for a full time worker on minimum wage..
Something's wrong with the search engine Topping is using.
I was prepared to wait and see if they came up with significant reforms to improve our lot. We're nearly half a year in, well into the period where a new government spends its political capital, and so far... for what ?
CHART OF THE DAY: As the 2024-25 harvest gets underway in Spain and the rest of the Mediterranean, **wholesale** olive oil prices have crashed.
Retail olive oil prices will follow down very soon (they have already in origin countries like Spain / Italy)
https://x.com/JavierBlas/status/1858504357655810070