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Make your suggestions – politicalbetting.com
Make your suggestions – politicalbetting.com
Will the UK enter a recession in 2025?
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Will the UK enter a recession in 2025?
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Worth getting up for.
Bit gloomy but Labour have another Budget not that far away. If they haven't learned that just smacking the private sector then blowing money on the carbon capture crap (which even if you really want green spending is a poor idea) then things will just get worse.
But something that's better, ahem, is the second episode of my new F1 podcast, which focuses on the midfield battle:
Podbean: https://undercutters.podbean.com/e/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/05TYpdrVsQObsCpTLZnsNV
Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b...cast-undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle
Transcript: https://morrisf1.blogspot.com/2024/12/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield.html
Lib Dems to win/gain more council seats in May than Reform, but Reform to get more headlines?
On a more serious note, waste incinerators are more numerous than they were but they're hardly building them faster than wind turbines. If you really want to encourage more green stuff than alongside more renewable energy production things like better internet accessibility will help people to work without needing to travel.
I'd want to know precisely how much cement and lime production we actually do. Carbon capture getting £22bn in difficult economic times, when we have a a higher Defence target but have only decommissioned ships and such lately, does not seem terribly sensible.
It would steady the nerves over KB's rather shouty and ineffectual debut.
Merry Xmas to you all in case I lack the time over the next few days
Even if he doesn't, endlessly tweeting about them in all caps is going to unnerve businesses.
It’s the reason why I’d have preferred the hapless Harris.
I'll also file under 'not happening' because he's so controversial. He wouldn't get 38 states to endorse. Of course, if they take the Herdson option that may not be a problem.
A likelier bet for me is Vance to be president in 2025. Trump's old, clearly not well, under a lot of stress (even now his legal problems haven't gone away although they've been somewhat ameliorated) and moreover has twice been targeted for assassination. There are several routes I can see to Vance suddenly stepping up.
This would be very bad news given Vance is as nasty as Trump and considerably brighter and more mentally stable, making him much more dangerous. But it's a realistic chance.
He's at 11/4 to be the next President I think, not sure if there's a specific market on 2025.
I presume they mean GDP growth.
The Reeves effect in action but it’s all the Tories fault. Darren Jones seems a plausible chap. Could he replace Reeves ?
Also.
https://news.sky.com/story/uk-economy-heading-for-worst-of-all-worlds-cbi-warns-as-businesses-expect-fall-in-activity-13279012
Oh, and I agree that renewables (plus storage to make them dispatchable) is a better approach than CCGTs with CCS for power generation. But DESNZ has different ideas.
And the £22 billion is spread over 15 years or more - the up front CAPEX comes from the private sector. BP and their partners have already signed £5 billion worth of contracts.
There are simply far more cost effective and economically beneficial ways to spend the money.
It's a lose/lose economically and environmentally. Plus the storage part of the process probably wont work at scale.
Other than that, great idea.
For example yesterdays announcement of plans to invade Panama. My understanding of the reasons for reduced traffic and resulting logistics difficulties is to do with drought and low water levels rather than anything deliberate by the Panamanians.
There are others. Harris isn't a criminal, or a sex offender, or a failed President, or a serial liar, or a traitor, or 78.
That would be like trying to explain to Stalin that grain shortages in the 1920s were due to drought not bourgeois exceptionalism.
I truly loathe this time of year. I cannot wait till it’s over.
As for storage, the geology offshore the UK gives us vast storage potential. Well that's what geoscience professors tell me, anyway.
It's not impossible, but is unlikely.
And if Trump doesn't drop below the Biden baseline, he'll do a full term.
The more interesting and alarming question is why, knowing all these things, enough Americans still voted for him to put him back in the White House (leaving aside the efforts of the courts and Musk to put their thumb on the scales on his behalf). If the Democrats have any sense they will start their inquest there. They probably won't, but they should.
Unless he's actually comatose I can't see him being removed because he'll never willingly give up the trappings of power. But there are ways it could happen.
I get the impression many people saw the NY court case as political especially after some statements from the DA.
My main reason for going today was my wife and I have a radically different approach to spending. Had she gone alone the bill would be thirty quid more.
Something like that.
It's fairly nuts - or a mark of the effectiveness of the industry lobbying - that we consider it such a priority.
In the meantime, all such schemes do is continue to push up the cost of our energy generation, to the disbenefit of everyone else.
I know she almost universally loathed on here for being a mouthy working class woman of a certain age who shows no sign of knowing her place but I think she'd do ok in a GE campaign and would be effective against Farage's malevolent toss.
If Starmer fails, the party will look leftwards, similar to how the Tory Party looked to the candidate of the right when they held their contests.
After Sunak they would've gone for Cleverly had his supporters not been confounded by Jenrick's nonsense.
The Labour equivalent of a pissing contest to be pro-EU is perhaps unlikely. But they might well go further left, trying to fling red meat to the unions to get their support.
https://starfightersspace.com/
Starfighters Space operates an active fleet of F-104 Starfighters and is the only commercial company in the world with the capability to fly at MACH 2 while launching payloads into space. ..
That scepticism has a firm and solid basis.
So it isn't possible to generate the sort of communal enthusiasm willing to undergo change, inconvenience and cost - and there may be other downsides - for the sake of something that deep down we think won't work because of the nature of planet earth's politics.
Politically this will do Reform no harm. It didn't do Trump much damage.
The Florida documents charges, the Georgia election interference cases and the DC Jan 6th cases against weren't political, in that he'd probably have been charged for them whoever he was, but unfortunately for prosecutors the first had the most pro-Trump judge imaginable, the second got sidetracked with some irrelevant rubbish about the DA's sex life and the third was in effect destroyed by the bizarre and terrible immunity ruling from the Supreme Court.
So Trump lives to fight another day, doubtless to the detriment of America and the world.
Though not as crazy as the idea to use an old cargo boat instead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGKezOhZoUY
Tosser would win.
I am still none the wiser.
She gave a metaphor (which she loves) of opening a restaurant in 4 years time. We will see the menu at that time whilst she plans now.
My thought was, yes but tell us whether the food would be high end, Italian, thematic or breakfast?
Genuinely the worst government ever
I don't know why but I saw an "Alliance to destroy Elon Musk's testicles with a spinning kick" flag yesterday
https://x.com/yejinjgim/status/1871067515562110990
She jacked up National Insurance, the worst possible tax, whacking up taxes on employment so that people working for a living get less money in their pockets while leaving those with unearned incomes unaffected.
It was wrong when Gordon Brown did it, it was wrong when Rishi Sunak (as Chancellor) did it, and its wrong when Reeves does it.
We should be seeking to abolish National Insurance and equalise taxes between earned and unearned incomes, not whack it up and whacking it up is the opposite of creating growth.
However we might not realise until 2026. Or 2027, at a stretch
Trump gets the adulation, the people in the shadows run things from the shadows. Win-win, except for America.
Mach 2 with any external payload (such as an actual rocket) would be pretty difficult.
An F104 couldn’t take off with a rocket capable of putting more than a cube sat into space.
The thing about air launch is that unless your first stage has the size and performance of a B70, it doesn’t give you that much.
See the Roc vs F9
1980 Q1: −1.7%
1980 Q2: −2.0%
1980 Q3: −0.2%
1980 Q4: −1.0%
1981 Q1: −0.3%
"Something massive will happen, but we won't know for years!!!!"
What was the last technological development that was world-changing, that occurred in just a year?
(2025 is the 200th anniversary of the Stockton and Darlington Railway; arguably (and they will argue...) the first passenger railway in the world. I'd argue that was the start of an epochal change to the world. Perhaps the biggest, as it changed the entire way society formed itself.)
But see my prior comment
Just a group of US DuraAces who've worked out a way to get someone else to pay for their need for speed ?
Edit: no need to sit on your backside waiting for the coppices to grow again so you could make more charcoal. Or wait for the millpond to fill up again in a dry summer.
He'd rather be Grima Wormtongue than Theoden.
Sure Labour havent been great at explaining why, but there are few signs the public is accepting of fiscal realities. We prefer to be lied to and get angry and disappointed about it instead.
Look at things through that lens, Harris did pretty well by comparison with other members of the Incumbents Club. Look at what happened in France, the UK, or polls coming out of Canada.
(How are all those other new governments doing in the polls? Is the Starmer Slide special, or is nobody getting a honeymoon this year?)
Trump won, which is all that ultimately matters, sure. But not by much in votes, and probably by less than a better Republican candidate would. He was bowling at Sabina Park in that 1998 Test match.
I haven't talked to a huge number of people about it, but my mother's in the relevant age range and thinks it's a crock of shit and it was obvious the age of retirement was going to rise.
The issue isn't the level wages are set at, its the existence of the taper and the level it is set at. Nobody should be on a net tax rate of over 50% but the poorest in society are taxed effectively at 55% on top of National Insurance and Income Tax etc - it is insane.
Real tax rates of close to 100% and we wonder why people don't bother working. We wouldn't tax the richest in society at that rate, so why do we expect the poorest in society on minimum wage to actually bother working at all, or more than 16 hours, if they're not going to keep any extra that they earn?
I have to leave the site anyway for a few days to drive to Cornwall and see fam and friends for chrimble - so they don’t have to ban me
Here goes. I believe we have reached Artificial General Intelligence. A few days ago OpenAI launched ChatGPTo3. It performs better than 98% of Phd candidates in MULTIPLE domains - ie it is smarter than 99.996% of humanity. It is “the 175th best coder in the world”. It passed the Arc AGI test - a test so hard it was thought it would take until 2030 for any AI to have a chance, a test that was contrived - in part - as a skeptical challenge to show AI could never equal or surpass the best humans
Perhaps more importantly, in my own secondary field of writing I have seen - in the last year - AI going from “pretty good” at editing and writing to “OMFG that’s professionally good” - this is in one year
We are now on the exponential bit of the AI curve. GPTo3 came 3 months after GPTo1. The speed of progress is actually accelerating. Human inertia being what it is, this may take some time to impact, but if you have a job which involves a screen and cognition, you should expect your job to disappear within 5 years, or less
Here’s a graph to represent what has just happened
*) There was no 'big-bang' event at the start of the canals; the Bridgewater Canal was not greatly acknowledged at the time, or even nowadays. Whereas AIUI a fair few people at the time acknowledged that the S&D was something different. The Liverpool and Manchester five years later, even more so.
*) The changes the canals started were minor and very gradual. Whereas passenger railways changed so much about how, and where, we lived, in just a few decades. As a minor example, they made suburbia possible.
Life was different before the industrial revolution compared to afterwards. But what was *the* starting point of the industrial revolution? The first canals? Arkwright's first mills? Lombe's mill in Derby? Newcomen's atmospheric engine?
Yet we can point at the opening of the S&D (or if you ware so minded, the L&M), and say "Yes, that's the point that the world changed."
Saw or rather heard one doing a flyover at an airshow when I was very young, amazing noise.
If they were running on a platform to stabilise the public finances for long term prosperity and growth, and therefore having to make difficult decisions on tax and spend, they should have had the confidence to say that. The problem was that they at least gave the impression that they wouldn’t be doing these unpopular policies, then had to tie themselves in knots over black holes and what counts as working people in the first few months of government to justify why they didn’t say it at the GE. I am hardly surprised that people feel duped and let down.
Edit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staplehurst_rail_crash
Also, three weeks ago I lost one of my main flint knapping jobs - to AI. It is now personally impacting
Look away, if you prefer
The current ML/AI tech is good. Good enough to fool many. But is it actually intelligence, let alone an AGI?
I'd argue the many stupid mistakes they make prove otherwise.
In addition a fair amount of comments on WFA have agreed in principle but have argued the cut off point was the issue.
The mods can be reassured I’m not going to bang on about it all day coz in an hour or two I have to get in a car and drive to Cornwall