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PB 2025 predicitions competition – final chance to enter – politicalbetting.com
PB 2025 predicitions competition – final chance to enter – politicalbetting.com
It’s time to get your entries in for the 2025 PB Predictions Competition if you haven’t already. All entries must be in by midnight tonight on Friday 31st January!
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Anyhoo, you'd be more Luca Badoer in a Ferrari, he's the Hannibal Barca of F1 drivers.
(I didn’t enter because I didn’t get around to it.)
(Hurriedly runs away to look up my first guesses on the original thread, and re-evaluate in the context of Janaury’s data and news events).
1) Lab 31, Con 28, LD 15, Ref 31
2) Lab 18, Con 16, LD 10, Ref 18
3) 7
4) 0
5) 2
6) 4
7) 163 seats
8) 2.3% CPI.
9) £107 billion
10) 1.6%
11) -1.0%
12) 0.8%
13) 142
14 4 nil Australia
So it looks like the "condoms in Gaza" were being sent to the province of "Gaza" in...Mozambique. If the Administration doesn't like the idea of helping fight STDs in Africa (like PEPFAR) then they should say so. But they thought you'd think of that other Gaza…
… Needless to say, the full grant here was clearly not just for condoms. It's for Alcancar, which provides maternal, neonatal, and child health care and also works with the Integrated Family Planning Project in a neighboring province.
https://x.com/AstorAaron/status/1884724339548774415
Trump supported the program in 2019.
England's U-19 women's team against India in the semi final of the World T20 have gone from 81/2 to 92/8.
The number of foreigners working in Japan surged by 250,000 in a year to 2.3m in October, the largest year-on-year increase since records began in 2008, as efforts by companies to shore up labor shortages with employees from overseas start to bear fruit.
https://x.com/NikkeiAsia/status/1885210933816893885
Also starting to see names released of the victims, including the crews of both aircraft. A number of those on board were returning from an ice-skating competition in Kansas, including teens and young adults in an elite Washington-based training group.
RIP.
One of the organisations exposed by Hope not Hate in the October 2024 Despatches documentary was trying to mainstream "Race Science" again, which is the ideas around different "races" being different for IQ, libido etc, and an ideology to allow the current self-regarded "top dogs" to self-justify their position.
The modern era has a long history of efforts to establish the legitimacy of race science. Race science states that biological race and genetic endowments explain differences between ‘races’ in intelligence (IQ), health, physical abilities, cognitive skills, and behavioural propensities (e.g., criminality).
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9668105/#:~:text=The modern era has a,propensities (e.g., criminality).
(One of the surveys mentioned in the programme by the organisers on hidden camera was of prostitutes trying to evaluate the libido of black men vs white men and so on. They were being funded to $1m+ by the internet entrepreneur who founded Adult Friend Finder, who ran a mile when it became public.)
It's the sort of racist theme pursued from time to time by eg Spectator Columnist Taki Theodoracopulos (and perhaps more so in his own Taki's Magazine). He is also party responsible for "The American Conservative" started in 2002 where my "America First" article linked earlier came from, with Pat Buchanan and Scott McDonnell. That type of tradition has some input on the ground floor of the American Right as it is now; I would call it frivolous, but it gets traction sometimes then is no longer frivolous.
The Establishment Right were cool with it for decades; they only chucked Taki him off the Spectator after 40+ years when he became a convicted, attempted rapist, as well as a public racist.
The Hope not Hate Despatches documentary is here:
https://www.channel4.com/programmes/undercover-exposing-the-far-right
(To be clear - this is my personal opinion.)
I guess your lack of predictive ability prevented you from foreseeing this difficulty?
- He's lying
- How can you tell?
- His lips are moving
Except with Trump it's less of a joke, and more a useful rule of thumb.
https://x.com/osinttechnical/status/1884889137972466142
The number of flight slots at Reagan airport actually gets discussed by the US Senate, with of course Senators from almost everywhere wanting more of them to the closest airport to their offices.
The UK equivalent would be the MPs demanding one flight a minute into LCY, from every little regional airport in a country with no motorways and no railway lines. Because they all think LHR is too far away.
@alexkirshner.com
classic DCA thing is that it has a lot of routes that definitely only exist because some senator doesn't wanna fly through Dulles
@dreyesceron.bsky.social
right on cue during the first presser: Jerry Moran (R), Senator from Kansas, just said that he lobbied the hill for a direct flight from Kansas to DC which has been active for about a year now
https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/crime/2025/01/27/512085/houston-man-pardoned-for-jan-6-conviction-wanted-for-online-solicitation-of-a-minor/
I knew one of the Jan 6 rioters that Trump pardoned was killed by a policeman.
I didn't know 3 more are facing charges for kiddie porn
https://x.com/TheDailyShow/status/1884678238221287657
All the best people...
2 down and just 202 weeks to go.
Having said that thanks to @Benpointer for organising it.
While a superb prize, I have not come any where close since.
* https://amzn.eu/d/81bglMj
I have a suspicion that Reagan is going to end up closed to either the civvies or the mil as a result of this accident. There’s been so many near misses that an accident was inevitable at some point. It’s right next to the Pentagon and a lot of closed airspace.
Probably sending all the civvy traffic to Dulles, and improving the transport links from there into the centre of DC - maybe with a John Prescott style ‘bus lane’ - is the way forward. Everyone in DC, along with their families and staff, knows that it could have been them on that plane that went down.
I don't quite know why there is quite so much news and discussion about it though.
The MAGA crew just doubles down and says “so what - Africa should fund itself.”
It’s an accident between two perfectly serviceable aircraft, that should quite simply never happen. The investigation is going to be 90% human factors, and we already have whistleblowers and journalists saying that Reagan Airport has been an accident waiting to happen for years.
Hundreds of political journalists have witnessed the accident and its aftermath first hand, and tens of thousands of the DC ‘blob’ have had their travel plans for the weekend ruined.
The UK equivalent would be a plane heading to LCY crashing into the Thames half a mile from Parliament, with 60 people all heading for Westminster on board.
If it had been a plane that went down after an engine failure in the middle of a field somewhere in Appalachia, it would have dropped off the news already.
Solar farms, tree planting and wildlife habitats to replace food production.
Meanwhile from 2022 to 2032 our population will grow by 5 Million people.
‘Brutal Budget has hurt farming’
Tom Bradshaw, president of the NFU, said it was “imperative this framework does not further restrict farmers’ ability to produce the nation’s food”.
“Over the past 18 months, the UK farming industry has taken a battering,” he said. “Volatile input costs, commodity prices on the floor in some sectors, a reduction in direct payments, one of the wettest periods in decades, and a brutal Budget delivered by this Government. All have left their mark and have put homegrown food production under serious pressure.”
The Government believes food production can be largely maintained at current levels by focusing on removing only the least productive land. About 20 per cent of England’s farmed land produces just 3 per cent of total calories, in areas where subsidies have historically accounted for 90 per cent of farm incomes.
https://archive.ph/CXjt0
Though no doubt some fresh new folly today will supersede them.
It does seem like an accident waiting to happen. A contributory factor seems to have been the use of a shorter, alternate runway for the plane, which is only used about ten times a year.
The (experienced) helo pilot wouldn’t have been expecting a landing on the heading.
Noticed the lack of pollinating insects in the air during summer, and the relative silence of birdsong in the spring? That’s down to decades of industrial monoculture and overuse of pesticides on unsuitable land. The dead rivers? Those are down to nitrate runoff from livestock farms. It’s not as bad as continental Europe but it’s still a slow moving catastrophe.
Sounds an excellent plan, thanks for flagging up the good work that the government is doing. It doesn't get enough publicity here.
I really don’t like the politicisation of accident investigations, but this one looks like it was going to be inevitable the more one reads about it. The NTSB are one of very few truly independent agencies in the country, but their report will be studied like none they’ve written since the 9/11 reports - which led to locked cockpit doors and the invasive ‘security’ measures at US airports.
As I mentioned on the last thread, it appears there’s been serious management issues with air traffic control at Reagan for years. Those who were on duty on Wednesday night are unlikely ever to be declared fit to return to work, and will need years if not decades of counselling. They’ll need to be on suicide watch for a long time, as I’m sure you’d appreciate.
Apparently, the crops benefit from windbreaks, so it makes perfect sense to use solar panels for that purpose. The crops grow just as well, and there is still access for machinery.
Like a toddler.
"I didn't do it. It wasn't me"
It doesn't appear to be the fault of the ATC. More likely the chopper had sight of the wrong plane.
The evidence base on PTSD from the military is that short term withdrawal from the front line, debriefing both individually and in small groups of peers then a return to the front is the most effective strategy. It's why there were fewer psychological casualties in WW2 than WW1.
The key thing is to allow farmers (not landowners) to reap the benefits of all this.
The allegations are that there has been racial and ‘gender’ profiling in recruitment in recent years, which has led to staff shortages, and in common with most Biden-era agencies there’s plenty of public documents and videos saying that “aviation has a white man problem” and similar sentiments.
The NTSB investigation isn’t going to go into the hiring policies of the FAA, but it is very much going to go into staffing levels, shift patterns, and work hours at Reagan Airport. There’s been suggestions that ATC have been working 10h days and 6d weeks, which would be totally illegal in pretty much every other Western country.
There is now a link to Dulles on the Metro (Silver line), but it stops at about 20 stations before reaching downtown. They should have built it as a direct fast train.
Much of the land being taken out of production would be low productivity sheepy uplands (makes sense for windfarms), but I don't even see why things like solar and wind necessarily mean taking it out of production - combinations are possible.
On windbreaks, I've long argued for Ukraine style field margins, which would be excellent.
There's some interesting stuff in the piece, but the numbers are not very clear.
Consultation here.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-launches-national-conversation-on-land-use
Would it be impossible to do the ratings based from another station say 10 miles away, out of the glide path?
Trump lied about changes in FAA hiring, and falsely blamed diversity policies for the crash. It's not just the timing that was disgusting.
And that both aircraft were being flown by white males?
Edit: Actually, no I don't wonder. We all know, don't we.
My only concern is that this could restrict a new generation of Theresa Mays from running through farmers' fields - or at least, limit them to a single direction
I wonder if the civvies can learn from the military in this regard, in terms of PTSD treatment?
I know that in the event of minor incidents and accidents, “get back on the horse” is the right approach, but certainly within the aviation industry there’s a long history of suicide from accident survivors who saw themselves are responsible for the deaths of others, as pilots, engineers, ATC etc.
As to this accident, the non-human factors are going to involve what view the ATC had of the two aircraft on their screens.
A Congressman posted this video yesterday, which I think is a computer simulation of the accident rather than an actual replay of the recording. https://x.com/repthomasmassie/status/1885017091964637558. (Ignore his commentary, the screens are deliberately decluttered to improve clarity).
The flashing red “CA”, however, would be accompanied by an alarm to the controller. It stands for collision alert, or collision avoidance. It’s not impossible that, because of the nature of the airport, that these alerts had become routine and therefore ignored, which would be a major systems factor in the accident.
1) Lab 29, Con 26, Ref 33, LD 16
2) Lab 20, Con 18, Ref 22, LD 10
3) 7
4) 1
5) 4
6) 3 (is this just full cabinet members, or including those who attend cabinet)
7) 150
8) 2.7%
9) £135bn
10) 0.3%
11) 3.8%
12) 0.75%
13) 90
14) 2-2 (literally no knowledge on that one!)
Interestingly the quote I’ve just got for solar panels in France has them on a West facing roof, and the modelled output is only about 10% less than full South.
Cycling Mikey in London with French TV.
In France rules on filtering in traffic are different (and they keep changing their minds), and rules are different around Dashcams.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnKcP2UGJdw
https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:EU:3e2c0fad-953c-4af8-8ded-ab56d7d7e3de
The key change is to recognise combat exhaustion, treat near the front, treat with peers and return to duty fairly rapidly. Long term withdrawal to more distant locations away from unit peers breaks unit cohesion and increases feelings of guilt and letting comrades down. In modern practice exhaustion is normalised rather than medicalised and pathologised.
The NHS took a similar approach during the peaks of covid, with my hospital setting up "Staff wellbeing" areas (with appropriate infection control) where staff could formally and informally debrief, eat healthily, talk through what they had seen etc. The areas where these were set up kept stress related absences to a minimum.
The political angle is that ATC couldn’t recruit enough people, because the recruiters wanted to have their employees “represent the makeup of the population”, or some such woke DEI bollocks. There are reports of potential recruits being turned down “because they were white men”. (Similar to stories around university admission in the US). So ATC ended up understaffed as they’re couldn’t find enough “minorities” who both applied, met the appliacation standard, and completed the course.
If so, then I fear it will be wrong - at least if those factors are the aircrew and controllers alone.
It looks as though there have been several (at least) near misses before. When you get different people making similar 'mistakes' on many different occasions, human factors become far less important than the processes and systems they were having to work under.
It might well be that the controllers, or one or both sets of aircrew, made mistakes on the night. But they would have been at the end of a long chain of causal factors that led to the incident. Much more attention needs to be paid to the processes that led to the decisions that caused the collision.
That's very interesting.
In psychology there's long been a drive to pathologise every little personality quirk into a syndrome or condition, so it's reassuring to see something move the other way.
Don’t be a hero and call them by their name because inevitability one day you’ll call them the wrong name and that’s when it all unravels.
1 - Lab 30, Con 27, Ref 33, LD 20
2 - Lab 21, Con 18, Ref 22, LD 10
3 - 8
4 - 2
5 - 1
6 - 3
7 - 155
8 - 3%
9 - £115bn
10 - 0.8%
11 - 6%
12 - -0.3%
13 - 250
14 - 0-5 (Oz win all)
Most of my recent education on PTSD has been from the University of Joe Rogan, which is centered around a drug called Ibogaine, something which appears to be working in clinical studies in Mexico but is currently banned in the US.
"Late last year Hermer strengthened the guidance on legal risk, changing it to say government lawyers must advise ministers that policies are unlawful if they believe an argument could not be properly put forward in court. This was not previously the case. The new guidance states that they should only as a last resort put forward legal arguments that are legitimate but which have a high risk of failing
In doing so he reversed changes introduced by Suella Braverman, the former attorney-general, who relaxed the guidance amid concerns that lawyers had taken a “computer says no” approach and “needlessly” hampered policies."
It's pretty fucking damning and Starmer needs to get rid.