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  • Tom Harris, 2011- 2018: How dare you call me a red Tory!
    Tom Harris, 2019: Vote Tory.

    https://twitter.com/MhairiHunter/status/1194512198699237376?s=20
  • EndillionEndillion Posts: 4,976

    TOPPING said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Sean_F said:

    Sandpit said:

    Nigel who? He should be grateful that it looks like his life’s work is about to be achieved - but instead he’s mad because others are now getting the credit for it.

    I can't remember who said it but it's true that "there's no limit to what you can achieve, so long as you don't care who gets the credit for it."
    I prefer John Grisham's description of the American Dream:

    'Basically the American Dream means benefitting from other people's misfortune.'

    Kinda sums up the state of things in the US right now ...
    Being personally successful in a capitalist system almost always means that. It's amazing the psychological contortions people go through to persuade themselves otherwise.
    With all due respect, that's complete and utter shit.

    I'm building a new business (well, not right now, as I'm on a plane) that will hopefully radically change car insurance. It will make insurance more affordable to poorer people and reduce the number of road accidents each year.

    If I do it right, I expect I will make a very large amount of money, possibly billions.

    I'm pretty sure I'm doing the opposite of benefiting from people's misfortunes.
    Is the plan to bundle up high insurance risks with low insurance risks and then sell them under a wrapper to the investment community?

    :wink:
    That’s reinsurance.
    Specifically, it's catastrophe bonds. I'd like to say the insurance industry have a far better idea what we're doing than the bankers did, but who knows.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 123,149
    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Interesting - is Trump's (hormone treated) beef with Europe tariffs or standards?

    https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1194467422100738049?s=20

    One person's Non Tariff Barrier is another person's sovereign right to decide on food standards.

    This, of course, is where US trade negotiations will fall down. The US will require us to accept GM crops, and will also prevent us from labeling said crops as GM.

    Johnson will push hard for it, and it will be really unpopular. (With both his own party and the country at large.)
    We won't get a trade deal with the US. There's no political will for it outside of a few hardcore Tories. I'm not even sure that Bozza will push the angle other than as a distraction if the EU trade talks aren't going well.
    I think Johnson genuinely does want to reorient the UK away from Europe and towards the US. I just don't think he realises the compromises that will be necessary to achieve such a pivot.
    No Boris just wants an equal relationship with both, hence his Deal enables FTA talks with the EU and the US.

    By contrast the LDs want to stay in the EU and oppose a US FTA and the Brexit Party back no Deal and oppose a FTA the EU will agree to, so it is actually Farage who wishes to reorient us towards the US, indeed Farage is closer to Trump than Boris is.

    Corbyn of course wants a closer relationship with Cuba and Venezuela and Russia than either the EU or the US
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 34,695

    IanB2 said:

    I'm perplexed about the YouGov and wonder if someone can help me out.

    I'm an arty-farty type (hence the occasional poetry) and not a mathematician so the fact that something doesn't ring true may be all down to me.

    Leaving aside the fact that YouGov starts with polling much more favourable to the blues, here's my perplexity. Okay, so I don't see how a poll can show a higher Cons figure when you take out the non-BXP seats. You cannot remove a region (Cons held seats) and then apply the net loss to the national figure. Either the figures are national polling figures, or they're not. If they are regional breakdowns then we should have the regional breakdowns.

    Forgive my ignorance, but this methodology looks totally flawed.

    I'm also not factoring in the inevitable small sample size once you begin chopping out a region.

    I guess the other way of putting this more simply is that the Conservatives don't hold a 14% lead across all the non-tory held seats. Right? If YouGov are going to try this then they need to poll every constituency, remove all the blue seats, and then release the figures for all the remaining 'regions' (non tory held seats).

    Otherwise this looks to me like a crock of sh*t.

    Havent they simply narrowed the choice of parties given to those respondents living in those seats? So people who might previously have replied "BXP" now have to choose one of the others.
    But how can you then strip that out and apply it to a national polling figure? It doesn't make sense.

    If you're going to conduct what is effectively a regional poll: 650 seats minus 317 then you have to conduct a regional poll. You can't do a national survey with a standard sample size and remove a regional chunk. The whole thing looks massively flawed to my amateurish eye.
    Is there a link to the underlying poll data tables?
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 42,992

    TOPPING said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Sean_F said:

    Sandpit said:

    Nigel who? He should be grateful that it looks like his life’s work is about to be achieved - but instead he’s mad because others are now getting the credit for it.

    I can't remember who said it but it's true that "there's no limit to what you can achieve, so long as you don't care who gets the credit for it."
    I prefer John Grisham's description of the American Dream:

    'Basically the American Dream means benefitting from other people's misfortune.'

    Kinda sums up the state of things in the US right now ...
    Being personally successful in a capitalist system almost always means that. It's amazing the psychological contortions people go through to persuade themselves otherwise.
    With all due respect, that's complete and utter shit.

    I'm building a new business (well, not right now, as I'm on a plane) that will hopefully radically change car insurance. It will make insurance more affordable to poorer people and reduce the number of road accidents each year.

    If I do it right, I expect I will make a very large amount of money, possibly billions.

    I'm pretty sure I'm doing the opposite of benefiting from people's misfortunes.
    Is the plan to bundle up high insurance risks with low insurance risks and then sell them under a wrapper to the investment community?

    :wink:
    Look at the list of links from this very pb! To save time, start with the letter J.
    I am looking up GFC under C for CDSs.
  • MysticroseMysticrose Posts: 4,688
    Maybe a simpler way of putting the YouGov issue is this. What they are basically doing is applying an enforced tactical voting filter.

    But if you're going to start doing that you need a country-wide huge sample which applies practical tactical voting filters.

    It's not just that this could be out by 1% or 2%. It could be out by 20%!
  • 148grss148grss Posts: 4,155
    edited November 2019
    Deleted due to duplication
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 123,149
    edited November 2019

    I always thought freedom of movement was potenitally sellable as a benefit of EU membership - basically because it is. Most salesmen can sell a good product. But I might have been underestimating the good sense of the British public. They seem to want it already.

    https://twitter.com/jdportes/status/1194336599842144256/photo/1

    Even the Boris Deal gives a right to come here if you have the skills and Survation has 59% of voters backing a Boris style points system

    https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/708162/Theresa-May-migration-Brexit-Nigel-Farage-Ukip
  • TheJezziahTheJezziah Posts: 3,840

    IanB2 said:

    Ouch!

    A Labour member beaten in the race for a plum seat by a close ally of Jeremy Corbyn has hit out at the party's "crooked" candidate selection process.

    Sundip Meghani lost out to Claudia Webbe in the race to contest Labour-held Leicester East at the general election. Islington councillor Ms Webbe is a member of Labour's ruling national executive committee and had tried unsuccessfully to be chosen as the party's candidate in a number of constituencies. She was chosen as the candidate in Leicester seat - which Keith Vaz held with a majority of more than 22,000 in 2017 - by a selection panel including two NEC members.

    In a statement posted on Twitter, Mr Meghani, a lead investigator at the Independent Office for Police Conduct, said: "In my job I challenge abuse of power and corruption - and as a Labour member I fight injustice and unfairness. "So I cannot stay silent on the obvious dodgy practices and nepotism involved in this process, where Labour's ruling executive chose a member of Labour's ruling executive as the candidiate."

    He added: "This type of conduct, where a well-connected favourite is nodded through, is no better than the Etonian old boys' network that Labour seeks to condemn."


    https://www.politicshome.com/news/uk/political-parties/labour-party/news/107950/snubbed-labour-candidate-slams-partys-crooked

    We will soon be in a position where the London party holds all 591 English & Welsh seats in Westminster.
    Isn't Claudia from Leicester?

    Edit: And wasn't Vaz the previous MP actually not from Leicester?
    I don't know where Vaz was from. Claudia certainly says she was born in Leicester.

    Let me put it this way.

    How many former Councillors for Islington end up as MPs? And how many former Councillors for Rhondda-Cynon-Taff end up as MPs? Why are those numbers so very different?
    Nevertheless they made sure that Camden councillor was barred from Mann's seat; the difference just a few miles makes, or something more political?
    They should both be barred. There are far too many former London Councillors in Parliament, representing seats with which they have no connection.

    Unsurprisingly, I am completely against more London representation for the North of England, the Midlands and Wales.

    It is one of the problems that caused Brexit.
    My preference would be politicians with some connections with the area they represent, admittedly a little less worried about ex London councillors unless it really is an excessive thing.

  • SquareRootSquareRoot Posts: 7,095

    Maybe a simpler way of putting the YouGov issue is this. What they are basically doing is applying an enforced tactical voting filter.

    But if you're going to start doing that you need a country-wide huge sample which applies practical tactical voting filters.

    It's not just that this could be out by 1% or 2%. It could be out by 20%!

    or it might not..
  • Gauke today exposing once again how May & her terrible cabinet made such a horlicks of Brexit. Given the visceral hatred he and Hammond clearly have towards Boris, how did they sit in the same cabinet for so long?
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 96,156

    Tom Harris, 2011- 2018: How dare you call me a red Tory!
    Tom Harris, 2019: Vote Tory.

    https://twitter.com/MhairiHunter/status/1194512198699237376?s=20

    Funny, but do we know if he still voted labour in those years and so really wants red tory?
  • EndillionEndillion Posts: 4,976
    IanB2 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    148grss said:

    In whatever sense the business will depend on the labour of more than just yourself, and I can only assume you plan to make more money that other people despite the fact their labour will be as necessary, which in the Marxist sense is where the class conflict enters. Does "ownership" of the business mean your contribution is more "valuable" than the people who actually do the work.

    The risk is mine, and therefore the rewards should predominantly be mine. (For the record, I pay well, and I'm extremely generous from an ownership perspective.)
    Straight out of the American self-justification manual.

    You're welcome to it Robert. Make your millions. One day though I guarantee you will look back and wonder if all you did to get there was 'right.'

    Now then, back to UK politics ... can anyone respond to my query about YouGov flawed methodology? It doesn't look right to me ...
    If I succeed in:

    (a) reducing the number of people who die on the roads
    (b) making car insurance more affordable (and accessible)
    (c) making good money for the people who work for me

    Then I think I can reasonably claim that I've left the world in a better place than I found it.
    You're tempting people with a low cost offer to abandon covering their own and other vehicles for theft and damage?
    Er, just their own, surely?

    Have to say, I was a little uneasy at the description of comprehensive cover as an "unnecessary extra".
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 123,149
    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    O/T Recently, my near PB namesake suggested backing the LibDems to win the hitherto Tory-held consitituency of The Cotswolds if near double digit odds could be attained. Well so it has proved with those nice folk at Ladbrokes offering 8/1 or 17/2 including their daily odds boost against such an eventuality. It's definitely not one for me, but don't let me dissuade you from having a small punt.

    Hmmm. Not convinced those are attractive odds.
    The campaign polling story so far has been Conservatives going forward, LibDems going backwards. A lot of LibDem longshots are falling ever further out of range. In the SW, they have efffectively given up on winning Torbay; I wonder how long before they give up on Dr. Sarah in Totnes and focus on still in reach North Devon and North Cornwall?
    Is it? The LDs dipped 3-4% in the initial aftermath of the election announcement, but every single poll in the last week has had them in 15-17%, so I think they're pretty much stable. (Likewise, Sunil's Elbow had their share up 0.1% in the last week, and the Wikipedia chart shows them as flat.)

    I agree the Conservatives have picked up with the decline of the BXP, mind.

    I never felt the LDs had much of a chance in the South West. Bollocks to Brexit works in South West London, but is less compelling in Cornwall and Devon.
    The LDs have a better chance at this election in Hampstead and Kilburn, Cities of London and Westminster, Kensington, Hornsey and Wood Green, Finchley and Golders Green etc than they do in almost any South West seat bar maybe Cheltenham and St Ives. Their easiest target is also in London, Richmond Park
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 37,381
    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    148grss said:

    In whatever sense the business will depend on the labour of more than just yourself, and I can only assume you plan to make more money that other people despite the fact their labour will be as necessary, which in the Marxist sense is where the class conflict enters. Does "ownership" of the business mean your contribution is more "valuable" than the people who actually do the work.

    The risk is mine, and therefore the rewards should predominantly be mine. (For the record, I pay well, and I'm extremely generous from an ownership perspective.)
    Straight out of the American self-justification manual.

    You're welcome to it Robert. Make your millions. One day though I guarantee you will look back and wonder if all you did to get there was 'right.'

    Now then, back to UK politics ... can anyone respond to my query about YouGov flawed methodology? It doesn't look right to me ...
    If I succeed in:

    (a) reducing the number of people who die on the roads
    (b) making car insurance more affordable (and accessible)
    (c) making good money for the people who work for me

    Then I think I can reasonably claim that I've left the world in a better place than I found it.
    No. An equal distribution of misery must be preferable to an unequal distribution of blessings.
  • 148grss148grss Posts: 4,155
    HYUFD said:

    I always thought freedom of movement was potenitally sellable as a benefit of EU membership - basically because it is. Most salesmen can sell a good product. But I might have been underestimating the good sense of the British public. They seem to want it already.

    https://twitter.com/jdportes/status/1194336599842144256/photo/1

    Even the Boris Deal gives a right to come here if you have the skills and Survation has 59% of voters backing a Boris style points system

    https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/708162/Theresa-May-migration-Brexit-Nigel-Farage-Ukip
    Does Johnson's deal allow me the right to go to countries within the EU with the same ease as our current membership does?
  • EndillionEndillion Posts: 4,976

    Maybe a simpler way of putting the YouGov issue is this. What they are basically doing is applying an enforced tactical voting filter.

    But if you're going to start doing that you need a country-wide huge sample which applies practical tactical voting filters.

    It's not just that this could be out by 1% or 2%. It could be out by 20%!

    They're applying the same filter that will be applied on Dec 12 by the ballot papers.

    See my comment further down. I think you've misunderstood something.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 123,149
    edited November 2019
    Banterman said:

    Gauke today exposing once again how May & her terrible cabinet made such a horlicks of Brexit. Given the visceral hatred he and Hammond clearly have towards Boris, how did they sit in the same cabinet for so long?

    Indeed Gauke now backing EUref2 too today, so clearly he is a diehard Remainer after all.

    He may even lose his deposit in SW Herts as an Independent
  • Tom Harris, 2011- 2018: How dare you call me a red Tory!
    Tom Harris, 2019: Vote Tory.

    https://twitter.com/MhairiHunter/status/1194512198699237376?s=20

    Perfectly reasonable when the alternative are deeply unpleasant, malevolent, incompetent bolsheviks.

    Says more about Corbyn et al than about Harris

  • BurgessianBurgessian Posts: 2,755
    malcolmg said:

    malcolmg said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    O/T Recently, my near PB namesake suggested backing the LibDems to win the hitherto Tory-held consitituency of The Cotswolds if near double digit odds could be attained. Well so it has proved with those nice folk at Ladbrokes offering 8/1 or 17/2 including their daily odds boost against such an eventuality. It's definitely not one for me, but don't let me dissuade you from having a small punt.

    Hmmm. Not convinced those are attractive odds.
    The campaign polling story so far has been Conservatives going forward, LibDems going backwards. A lot of LibDem longshots are falling ever further out of range. In the SW, they have efffectively given up on winning Torbay; I wonder how long before they give up on Dr. Sarah in Totnes and focus on still in reach North Devon and North Cornwall?
    Is it? The LDs dipped 3-4% in the initial aftermath of the election announcement, but every single poll in the last week has had them in 15-17%, so I think they're pretty much stable. (Likewise, Sunil's Elbow had their share up 0.1% in the last week, and the Wikipedia chart shows them as flat.)

    I agree the Conservatives have picked up with the decline of the BXP, mind.

    I never felt the LDs had much of a chance in the South West. Bollocks to Brexit works in South West London, but is less compelling in Cornwall and Devon.
    They need an anti-Brexit slogan that incorporates “alright, my lurver” and “get off my land”.
    I expect their local literature will go big on how they defend the Green Belt.

    Yet again.
    My house was built on the Green Belt. I love how much it annoys people.
    Good morning Gallowgate, you are a naughty boy gloating at your destruction of the green belt. All that brown stuff about as well.
    But I have wonderful views of rural Northumberland
    I am sending the Lib Dems round
    There aren't any left in rural Northumberland. Or in the Scottish Borders either.
  • XtrainXtrain Posts: 341
    IanB2 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    More crucially Johnson seems to have ran water straight from a tap into his tea !
    There was a kettle across the kitchen which I'd have thought would be redundant with a boiling water tap... ?

    I think the tea you are likely to get from a boiling water tap is likely to be poor, because the water is likely to have been held at a higher temperature for longer than for water freshly boiled in a kettle. Might be good enough for coffee.
    Does it really make that much difference? It's already ahead of any cup of tea you're likely to get in America.
    Don't you hate it when you ask for a tea and your presented with a cup of hot water and a wrapped tea bag!
  • NickPalmerNickPalmer Posts: 21,533



    But how can you then strip that out and apply it to a national polling figure? It doesn't make sense.

    If you're going to conduct what is effectively a regional poll: 650 seats minus 317 then you have to conduct a regional poll. You can't do a national survey with a standard sample size and remove a regional chunk. The whole thing looks massively flawed to my amateurish eye.

    What it does is more precisely show the likely shares of the vote, as opposed to what people nationally think. I think there's a good case for it, but we should keep it in mind when we compare with other polls, which may correctly show the BXP higher without allowing for the fact that in half the seats their voters will need to go elsewhere. YouGov should however do the same for Greens for exactly the same reason, and perhaps that's what they'll do? They can't quite yet since we don't know the final lineups till Friday.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 71,236
    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    A question regarding air travel and emissions . . . is there a safety or technological reason why hydrogen [ie like in hydrogen cars, not blimps] isn't or can't be used to fuel jets?

    Electric jets seem to be a very long time off but electricity can be used to create hydrogen and the only emission from hydrogen cars is water vapor from memory - could jets be powered that way?

    Two reasons off the top of my head:

    1. Relatively low energy density. You need a lot of space to store even compressed hydrogen.

    2. Jet engines are really good at going at high speeds. Using hydrogen to generate electricity to power a prop would limit achieveable speeds to perhaps 400mph.
    1. Hydrogen has a higher energy density than Avgas, weightwise (which it what's important for aviation, surely?)
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Table_of_energy_content

    2. Why wouldn't you use the hydrogen to power jet turbines, turboprops etc.?
    Also, jets fly on Jet-A (kerosene) not Avgas, which IIRC is for prop planes.
    It's entirely possible to power jets on liquid hydrogen:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-155

    The handling, storage and containment issues are non trivial, though.
  • eekeek Posts: 28,405
    HYUFD said:

    Banterman said:

    Gauke today exposing once again how May & her terrible cabinet made such a horlicks of Brexit. Given the visceral hatred he and Hammond clearly have towards Boris, how did they sit in the same cabinet for so long?

    Indeed Gauke now backing EUref2 too today, so clearly he is a diehard Remainer after all.

    He may even lose his deposit in SW Herts as an Independent
    The deposit is far less than the enhanced payoff he gets from standing and losing.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 123,149

    rcs1000 said:

    148grss said:

    In whatever sense the business will depend on the labour of more than just yourself, and I can only assume you plan to make more money that other people despite the fact their labour will be as necessary, which in the Marxist sense is where the class conflict enters. Does "ownership" of the business mean your contribution is more "valuable" than the people who actually do the work.

    The risk is mine, and therefore the rewards should predominantly be mine. (For the record, I pay well, and I'm extremely generous from an ownership perspective.)
    Straight out of the American self-justification manual.

    You're welcome to it Robert. Make your millions. One day though I guarantee you will look back and wonder if all you did to get there was 'right.'

    Now then, back to UK politics ... can anyone respond to my query about YouGov flawed methodology? It doesn't look right to me ...
    The US is a great place to be rich but for middle and low income people it is not really that great compared to other western countries
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 34,695
    Endillion said:

    I'm perplexed about the YouGov and wonder if someone can help me out.

    I'm an arty-farty type (hence the occasional poetry) and not a mathematician so the fact that something doesn't ring true may be all down to me.

    Leaving aside the fact that YouGov starts with polling much more favourable to the blues, here's my perplexity. Okay, so I don't see how a poll can show a higher Cons figure when you take out the non-BXP seats. You cannot remove a region (Cons held seats) and then apply the net loss to the national figure. Either the figures are national polling figures, or they're not. If they are regional breakdowns then we should have the regional breakdowns.

    Forgive my ignorance, but this methodology looks totally flawed.

    I'm also not factoring in the inevitable small sample size once you begin chopping out a region.

    I guess the other way of putting this more simply is that the Conservatives don't hold a 14% lead across all the non-tory held seats. Right? If YouGov are going to try this then they need to poll every constituency, remove all the blue seats, and then release the figures for all the remaining 'regions' (non tory held seats).

    Otherwise this looks to me like a crock of sh*t.

    I'm cheekily going to bump this ^^^

    Although Nemtynakht responded (thank you) no one so far has addressed my point.

    Either YouGov conduct a full poll of every constituency and then remove the tory held seats from the figure. Or their new methodology is MASSIVELY flawed.

    I'm surprised Mike / Robert haven't yet picked up on this.

    I'm even more surprised YouGov are allowed by BPC to get away with it.

    Less surprised the Daily Express have headlined it :wink:
    I think you've misunderstood both the way polling works and the methodology for adjusting BXP. They poll c 2k people, and give each of them, individually, the specific options available in their constituency. Then they combine the results and weight them to be a representative sample. They do not only poll people in non-Tory seats, nor do they have to remove Tory seats afterwards. You are correct insofar as the process probably increases the polling error due to the extra assumption that needs to be made when weighting, but only slightly
    The question surely is how do you translate such a poll into seats.

    UNS is not going to cut it, that's for sure.
  • rcs1000 said:

    For anyone who wants to know more about my insurance company, its website is here: https://just.insure

    Interesting. In order to bill people accurately I suppose you have to make taking a phone with GPS enabled a condition of the insurance - ie a driver would not be insured if they left their phone at home, or it had stopped working?
  • 148grss148grss Posts: 4,155
    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Interesting - is Trump's (hormone treated) beef with Europe tariffs or standards?

    https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1194467422100738049?s=20

    One person's Non Tariff Barrier is another person's sovereign right to decide on food standards.

    This, of course, is where US trade negotiations will fall down. The US will require us to accept GM crops, and will also prevent us from labeling said crops as GM.

    Johnson will push hard for it, and it will be really unpopular. (With both his own party and the country at large.)
    We won't get a trade deal with the US. There's no political will for it outside of a few hardcore Tories. I'm not even sure that Bozza will push the angle other than as a distraction if the EU trade talks aren't going well.
    I think Johnson genuinely does want to reorient the UK away from Europe and towards the US. I just don't think he realises the compromises that will be necessary to achieve such a pivot.
    No Boris just wants an equal relationship with both, hence his Deal enables FTA talks with the EU and the US.

    By contrast the LDs want to stay in the EU and oppose a US FTA and the Brexit Party back no Deal and oppose a FTA the EU will agree to, so it is actually Farage who wishes to reorient us towards the US, indeed Farage is closer to Trump than Boris is.

    Corbyn of course wants a closer relationship with Cuba and Venezuela and Russia than either the EU or the US
    We cannot have an equal relationship with huge trading blocs because we are not a huge trading bloc. We are a smallish sized island with an economy that punches way above our geography partly due to our history and partly due to leveraging our membership of the closest large trading bloc.

    The US as a trading bloc has no reason to consider us an equal; what do we produce that they need to buy? Pretty much nothing except our assets. Whereas they have many goods they want to sell: wormy pork, chlorinated chicken, houseware produced by prison labour that will undercut our prices. Lots of stuff that will be sub current health and safety standards of products sold in the UK or cheaper than current products manufactured in the UK due to worse worker conditions (or both).
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 71,236
    HYUFD said:

    I always thought freedom of movement was potenitally sellable as a benefit of EU membership - basically because it is. Most salesmen can sell a good product. But I might have been underestimating the good sense of the British public. They seem to want it already.

    https://twitter.com/jdportes/status/1194336599842144256/photo/1

    Even the Boris Deal gives a right to come here if you have the skills and Survation has 59% of voters backing a Boris style points system

    https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/708162/Theresa-May-migration-Brexit-Nigel-Farage-Ukip
    Is a "Boris style points system" the handwavy one devoid of details ?

  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 123,149
    148grss said:

    HYUFD said:

    I always thought freedom of movement was potenitally sellable as a benefit of EU membership - basically because it is. Most salesmen can sell a good product. But I might have been underestimating the good sense of the British public. They seem to want it already.

    https://twitter.com/jdportes/status/1194336599842144256/photo/1

    Even the Boris Deal gives a right to come here if you have the skills and Survation has 59% of voters backing a Boris style points system

    https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/708162/Theresa-May-migration-Brexit-Nigel-Farage-Ukip
    Does Johnson's deal allow me the right to go to countries within the EU with the same ease as our current membership does?
    If you have the skills needed yes
  • 148grss148grss Posts: 4,155
    HYUFD said:

    Banterman said:

    Gauke today exposing once again how May & her terrible cabinet made such a horlicks of Brexit. Given the visceral hatred he and Hammond clearly have towards Boris, how did they sit in the same cabinet for so long?

    Indeed Gauke now backing EUref2 too today, so clearly he is a diehard Remainer after all.

    He may even lose his deposit in SW Herts as an Independent
    EURef 2 =/= Diehard Remainer. Like a referendum on a deal to pass a deal through political deadlock could enable Brexit in a hung parliament scenario.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 54,627
    Endillion said:

    IanB2 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    148grss said:

    In whatever sense the business will depend on the labour of more than just yourself, and I can only assume you plan to make more money that other people despite the fact their labour will be as necessary, which in the Marxist sense is where the class conflict enters. Does "ownership" of the business mean your contribution is more "valuable" than the people who actually do the work.

    The risk is mine, and therefore the rewards should predominantly be mine. (For the record, I pay well, and I'm extremely generous from an ownership perspective.)
    Straight out of the American self-justification manual.

    You're welcome to it Robert. Make your millions. One day though I guarantee you will look back and wonder if all you did to get there was 'right.'

    Now then, back to UK politics ... can anyone respond to my query about YouGov flawed methodology? It doesn't look right to me ...
    If I succeed in:

    (a) reducing the number of people who die on the roads
    (b) making car insurance more affordable (and accessible)
    (c) making good money for the people who work for me

    Then I think I can reasonably claim that I've left the world in a better place than I found it.
    You're tempting people with a low cost offer to abandon covering their own and other vehicles for theft and damage?
    Er, just their own, surely?

    Have to say, I was a little uneasy at the description of comprehensive cover as an "unnecessary extra".
    For millions of people on low or unpredictable incomes, this product could be the difference between being able to run a car or not, between being able to work more hours or take a better job in another town.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,234

    rcs1000 said:

    For anyone who wants to know more about my insurance company, its website is here: https://just.insure

    Who’s your carrier?
    We haven't gone the MGA route, for reasons that are too long and complex to go into. We're underwriting all the risk.

    Worth remembering that the reason that insurance companies have to carry so much capital is because of the risk of having a substantial book of mispriced risk. If you have to go into runoff, you need to have the capital to pay out all the claims that are yet to happen. And that's 12 months of risk for a normal insurer. With us, it's just 30 days.
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 34,695
    Nigelb said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    A question regarding air travel and emissions . . . is there a safety or technological reason why hydrogen [ie like in hydrogen cars, not blimps] isn't or can't be used to fuel jets?

    Electric jets seem to be a very long time off but electricity can be used to create hydrogen and the only emission from hydrogen cars is water vapor from memory - could jets be powered that way?

    Two reasons off the top of my head:

    1. Relatively low energy density. You need a lot of space to store even compressed hydrogen.

    2. Jet engines are really good at going at high speeds. Using hydrogen to generate electricity to power a prop would limit achieveable speeds to perhaps 400mph.
    1. Hydrogen has a higher energy density than Avgas, weightwise (which it what's important for aviation, surely?)
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Table_of_energy_content

    2. Why wouldn't you use the hydrogen to power jet turbines, turboprops etc.?
    Also, jets fly on Jet-A (kerosene) not Avgas, which IIRC is for prop planes.
    It's entirely possible to power jets on liquid hydrogen:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-155

    The handling, storage and containment issues are non trivial, though.
    The things PB leads you to... Found out this startling fact (I assume it's correct) on wiki:

    "there is actually about 64% more hydrogen in a liter of gasoline (116 grams hydrogen) than there is in a liter of pure liquid hydrogen (71 grams hydrogen)."
  • rcs1000 said:

    For anyone who wants to know more about my insurance company, its website is here: https://just.insure

    Determining whether someone is driving as well as the safety of their driving on the basis of phone data must be something of a challenge, I'd have thought! And what if their phone dies? Would they then be unable to drive legally?
  • SandyRentoolSandyRentool Posts: 22,038

    Nigelb said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    A question regarding air travel and emissions . . . is there a safety or technological reason why hydrogen [ie like in hydrogen cars, not blimps] isn't or can't be used to fuel jets?

    Electric jets seem to be a very long time off but electricity can be used to create hydrogen and the only emission from hydrogen cars is water vapor from memory - could jets be powered that way?

    Two reasons off the top of my head:

    1. Relatively low energy density. You need a lot of space to store even compressed hydrogen.

    2. Jet engines are really good at going at high speeds. Using hydrogen to generate electricity to power a prop would limit achieveable speeds to perhaps 400mph.
    1. Hydrogen has a higher energy density than Avgas, weightwise (which it what's important for aviation, surely?)
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Table_of_energy_content

    2. Why wouldn't you use the hydrogen to power jet turbines, turboprops etc.?
    Also, jets fly on Jet-A (kerosene) not Avgas, which IIRC is for prop planes.
    It's entirely possible to power jets on liquid hydrogen:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-155

    The handling, storage and containment issues are non trivial, though.
    The things PB leads you to... Found out this startling fact (I assume it's correct) on wiki:

    "there is actually about 64% more hydrogen in a liter of gasoline (116 grams hydrogen) than there is in a liter of pure liquid hydrogen (71 grams hydrogen)."
    I anticipate that the aviation is more likely to use biofuel (e.g. biomass gasification plus Fischer-Tropsch synthesis to Jet A1) and then claim to be carbon neutral.
  • TheJezziahTheJezziah Posts: 3,840

    Tom Harris, 2011- 2018: How dare you call me a red Tory!
    Tom Harris, 2019: Vote Tory.

    https://twitter.com/MhairiHunter/status/1194512198699237376?s=20

    TBH I always suspected Labour had some MPs that were more right wing than some in the Conservatives... you've had Conservatives leave the party and parliament because they couldn't possibly back Johnson, not some of the red Tories we have had in Labour though.

    At least this has forced them to show their true colours, no longer red Tories.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 71,236
    rcs1000 said:

    For anyone who wants to know more about my insurance company, its website is here: https://just.insure

    Interesting - though not an entirely unique idea:
    https://www.interceptip.com/products/ic6/

    And there is, of course, the competitive threat of companies like Tesla offering their own insurance on the same basis, as they already collect the necessary data.
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 34,695
    edited November 2019

    Nigelb said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    A question regarding air travel and emissions . . . is there a safety or technological reason why hydrogen [ie like in hydrogen cars, not blimps] isn't or can't be used to fuel jets?

    Electric jets seem to be a very long time off but electricity can be used to create hydrogen and the only emission from hydrogen cars is water vapor from memory - could jets be powered that way?

    Two reasons off the top of my head:

    1. Relatively low energy density. You need a lot of space to store even compressed hydrogen.

    2. Jet engines are really good at going at high speeds. Using hydrogen to generate electricity to power a prop would limit achieveable speeds to perhaps 400mph.
    1. Hydrogen has a higher energy density than Avgas, weightwise (which it what's important for aviation, surely?)
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Table_of_energy_content

    2. Why wouldn't you use the hydrogen to power jet turbines, turboprops etc.?
    Also, jets fly on Jet-A (kerosene) not Avgas, which IIRC is for prop planes.
    It's entirely possible to power jets on liquid hydrogen:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-155

    The handling, storage and containment issues are non trivial, though.
    The things PB leads you to... Found out this startling fact (I assume it's correct) on wiki:

    "there is actually about 64% more hydrogen in a liter of gasoline (116 grams hydrogen) than there is in a liter of pure liquid hydrogen (71 grams hydrogen)."
    I anticipate that the aviation is more likely to use biofuel (e.g. biomass gasification plus Fischer-Tropsch synthesis to Jet A1) and then claim to be carbon neutral.
    Now you're going to open up the whole is-biofuel-carbon-neutral? can of worms again!

    Can we just stick to Brexit, it's less contentious. :lol:
  • ozymandiasozymandias Posts: 1,503
    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    For anyone who wants to know more about my insurance company, its website is here: https://just.insure

    Who’s your carrier?
    We haven't gone the MGA route, for reasons that are too long and complex to go into. We're underwriting all the risk.

    Worth remembering that the reason that insurance companies have to carry so much capital is because of the risk of having a substantial book of mispriced risk. If you have to go into runoff, you need to have the capital to pay out all the claims that are yet to happen. And that's 12 months of risk for a normal insurer. With us, it's just 30 days.
    Thanks. I'm just looking at your website.

    Interesting. Can I contact you through your website? As a London broker I'm very much in this space with our US clients - especially (but not exclusively) with integrating clip policies into exactly your kind of product.



  • 148grss148grss Posts: 4,155
    Sean_F said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    148grss said:

    In whatever sense the business will depend on the labour of more than just yourself, and I can only assume you plan to make more money that other people despite the fact their labour will be as necessary, which in the Marxist sense is where the class conflict enters. Does "ownership" of the business mean your contribution is more "valuable" than the people who actually do the work.

    The risk is mine, and therefore the rewards should predominantly be mine. (For the record, I pay well, and I'm extremely generous from an ownership perspective.)
    Straight out of the American self-justification manual.

    You're welcome to it Robert. Make your millions. One day though I guarantee you will look back and wonder if all you did to get there was 'right.'

    Now then, back to UK politics ... can anyone respond to my query about YouGov flawed methodology? It doesn't look right to me ...
    If I succeed in:

    (a) reducing the number of people who die on the roads
    (b) making car insurance more affordable (and accessible)
    (c) making good money for the people who work for me

    Then I think I can reasonably claim that I've left the world in a better place than I found it.
    No. An equal distribution of misery must be preferable to an unequal distribution of blessings.
    I mean, my focus is on part c. The product may be good, but is it logical or necessary for unequal treatment of workers to make that product?

    This is where the notions of Marxist "exploitation" enter. Sure, you may be giving people "good" money, but is it equitable to the value they are creating? Arguably not if you are able to make multiple times what they make. Every business needs cleaners to function, for example, but most cleaners are only paid minimum wage. A cleaner is as necessary for the functioning of a business as managers (many would argue more necessary), and yet their labour is valued as lesser.

    Again, not trying to be personal about this, I'm sure your company has good aims and your treatment of workers is better than average, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is good, just better than the badness that exists. Although this is from a very leftist point of view.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,234
    IanB2 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    148grss said:

    In whatever sense the business will depend on the labour of more than just yourself, and I can only assume you plan to make more money that other people despite the fact their labour will be as necessary, which in the Marxist sense is where the class conflict enters. Does "ownership" of the business mean your contribution is more "valuable" than the people who actually do the work.

    The risk is mine, and therefore the rewards should predominantly be mine. (For the record, I pay well, and I'm extremely generous from an ownership perspective.)
    Straight out of the American self-justification manual.

    You're welcome to it Robert. Make your millions. One day though I guarantee you will look back and wonder if all you did to get there was 'right.'

    Now then, back to UK politics ... can anyone respond to my query about YouGov flawed methodology? It doesn't look right to me ...
    If I succeed in:

    (a) reducing the number of people who die on the roads
    (b) making car insurance more affordable (and accessible)
    (c) making good money for the people who work for me

    Then I think I can reasonably claim that I've left the world in a better place than I found it.
    You're tempting people with a low cost offer to abandon covering their own and other vehicles for theft and damage?
    We're starting with liability (i.e. third party) so as to make sure our algorithms for predicting accidents are right with less risk...
  • EndillionEndillion Posts: 4,976
    edited November 2019
    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    For anyone who wants to know more about my insurance company, its website is here: https://just.insure

    Who’s your carrier?
    We haven't gone the MGA route, for reasons that are too long and complex to go into. We're underwriting all the risk.

    Worth remembering that the reason that insurance companies have to carry so much capital is because of the risk of having a substantial book of mispriced risk. If you have to go into runoff, you need to have the capital to pay out all the claims that are yet to happen. And that's 12 months of risk for a normal insurer. With us, it's just 30 days.
    Payment tail on motor claims is up to 90 years in the UK, due to the rise of Periodical Payment Orders. Even without those, large liability losses can have settlement delays of several years. I don't think reducing your unearned exposure timeframe by 11 months will make that much difference to your capital, all else being equal.

    Edit: I've never actually seen an insurance company claim mispricing risk as the main driver of capital. At most, it's maybe ten percentage points loss ratio (claims/premiums) impact, whereas pure bad luck can often have several times that impact - much more where catastrophe exposure or legal changes are factors.
  • MysticroseMysticrose Posts: 4,688
    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    148grss said:

    In whatever sense the business will depend on the labour of more than just yourself, and I can only assume you plan to make more money that other people despite the fact their labour will be as necessary, which in the Marxist sense is where the class conflict enters. Does "ownership" of the business mean your contribution is more "valuable" than the people who actually do the work.

    The risk is mine, and therefore the rewards should predominantly be mine. (For the record, I pay well, and I'm extremely generous from an ownership perspective.)
    Straight out of the American self-justification manual.

    You're welcome to it Robert. Make your millions. One day though I guarantee you will look back and wonder if all you did to get there was 'right.'

    Now then, back to UK politics ... can anyone respond to my query about YouGov flawed methodology? It doesn't look right to me ...
    The US is a great place to be rich but for middle and low income people it is not really that great compared to other western countries
    I totally agree with you - at last!
  • stodgestodge Posts: 13,899
    Morning all :)

    Some chilling statistics from the Institute of Fiscal Studies released as part one of a two part report last Monday.

    For those who come on here and claim there has been no austerity, per person spending on non-statutory services has been cut by 40% in real terms in the last decade.

    57% of non education service budgets now go on social care and that continues to rise.

    Another example is the amount spent on bus passes, a statutory provision, now accounts for a quarter of all highways and transport spend while the amount spent on routine road maintenance has fallen by 53%.

    As for income, half of all non-education funding is raised from Council Tax and a third from business rates so councils with large tax bases are able to get some funding for services such as planning, development and culture while those with smaller tax bases can't.

    Councils are increasingly withdrawing from non-statutory areas because they don't have the money - there has always been a redistributive element within local Government finance but with the ring-fencing of education and health since 2010 the balance of that spend has become distorted.

    It will be interesting to see if any Party has some serious proposals regarding local Government finance going forward.
  • 148grss148grss Posts: 4,155
    Sandpit said:

    Endillion said:

    IanB2 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    148grss said:

    In whatever sense the business will depend on the labour of more than just yourself, and I can only assume you plan to make more money that other people despite the fact their labour will be as necessary, which in the Marxist sense is where the class conflict enters. Does "ownership" of the business mean your contribution is more "valuable" than the people who actually do the work.

    The risk is mine, and therefore the rewards should predominantly be mine. (For the record, I pay well, and I'm extremely generous from an ownership perspective.)
    Straight out of the American self-justification manual.

    You're welcome to it Robert. Make your millions. One day though I guarantee you will look back and wonder if all you did to get there was 'right.'

    Now then, back to UK politics ... can anyone respond to my query about YouGov flawed methodology? It doesn't look right to me ...
    If I succeed in:

    (a) reducing the number of people who die on the roads
    (b) making car insurance more affordable (and accessible)
    (c) making good money for the people who work for me

    Then I think I can reasonably claim that I've left the world in a better place than I found it.
    You're tempting people with a low cost offer to abandon covering their own and other vehicles for theft and damage?
    Er, just their own, surely?

    Have to say, I was a little uneasy at the description of comprehensive cover as an "unnecessary extra".
    For millions of people on low or unpredictable incomes, this product could be the difference between being able to run a car or not, between being able to work more hours or take a better job in another town.
    But is only a plaster (for profit) over a systemic problem (not that I'm suggesting it is rcs1000s duty to deal with systemic problems).
  • MysticroseMysticrose Posts: 4,688

    Endillion said:

    I'm perplexed about the YouGov and wonder if someone can help me out.

    I'm an arty-farty type (hence the occasional poetry) and not a mathematician so the fact that something doesn't ring true may be all down to me.

    Leaving aside the fact that YouGov starts with polling much more favourable to the blues, here's my perplexity. Okay, so I don't see how a poll can show a higher Cons figure when you take out the non-BXP seats. You cannot remove a region (Cons held seats) and then apply the net loss to the national figure. Either the figures are national polling figures, or they're not. If they are regional breakdowns then we should have the regional breakdowns.

    Forgive my ignorance, but this methodology looks totally flawed.

    I'm also not factoring in the inevitable small sample size once you begin chopping out a region.

    I guess the other way of putting this more simply is that the Conservatives don't hold a 14% lead across all the non-tory held seats. Right? If YouGov are going to try this then they need to poll every constituency, remove all the blue seats, and then release the figures for all the remaining 'regions' (non tory held seats).

    Otherwise this looks to me like a crock of sh*t.

    I'm cheekily going to bump this ^^^

    Although Nemtynakht responded (thank you) no one so far has addressed my point.

    Either YouGov conduct a full poll of every constituency and then remove the tory held seats from the figure. Or their new methodology is MASSIVELY flawed.

    I'm surprised Mike / Robert haven't yet picked up on this.

    I'm even more surprised YouGov are allowed by BPC to get away with it.

    Less surprised the Daily Express have headlined it :wink:
    I think you've misunderstood both the way polling works and the methodology for adjusting BXP. They poll c 2k people, and give each of them, individually, the specific options available in their constituency. Then they combine the results and weight them to be a representative sample. They do not only poll people in non-Tory seats, nor do they have to remove Tory seats afterwards. You are correct insofar as the process probably increases the polling error due to the extra assumption that needs to be made when weighting, but only slightly
    The question surely is how do you translate such a poll into seats.

    UNS is not going to cut it, that's for sure.
    Exactly. Which is what I'm driving at. The room for error with this is massive.
  • rcs1000 said:

    IanB2 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    148grss said:

    In whatever sense the business will depend on the labour of more than just yourself, and I can only assume you plan to make more money that other people despite the fact their labour will be as necessary, which in the Marxist sense is where the class conflict enters. Does "ownership" of the business mean your contribution is more "valuable" than the people who actually do the work.

    The risk is mine, and therefore the rewards should predominantly be mine. (For the record, I pay well, and I'm extremely generous from an ownership perspective.)
    Straight out of the American self-justification manual.

    You're welcome to it Robert. Make your millions. One day though I guarantee you will look back and wonder if all you did to get there was 'right.'

    Now then, back to UK politics ... can anyone respond to my query about YouGov flawed methodology? It doesn't look right to me ...
    If I succeed in:

    (a) reducing the number of people who die on the roads
    (b) making car insurance more affordable (and accessible)
    (c) making good money for the people who work for me

    Then I think I can reasonably claim that I've left the world in a better place than I found it.
    You're tempting people with a low cost offer to abandon covering their own and other vehicles for theft and damage?
    We're starting with liability (i.e. third party) so as to make sure our algorithms for predicting accidents are right with less risk...
    Depending on how you train your algorithms it's possible that they will end up identifying demographic markers (eg wealth) by the quality of the GPS data (and therefore the expense of the phone).
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 49,868
    Xtrain said:

    IanB2 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    More crucially Johnson seems to have ran water straight from a tap into his tea !
    There was a kettle across the kitchen which I'd have thought would be redundant with a boiling water tap... ?

    I think the tea you are likely to get from a boiling water tap is likely to be poor, because the water is likely to have been held at a higher temperature for longer than for water freshly boiled in a kettle. Might be good enough for coffee.
    Does it really make that much difference? It's already ahead of any cup of tea you're likely to get in America.
    Don't you hate it when you ask for a tea and your presented with a cup of hot water and a wrapped tea bag!

    Yes, the invitation to continue the near two hundred and fifty year old tradition of dropping tea into cold water always annoys.
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 52,614
    Banterman said:

    Gauke today exposing once again how May & her terrible cabinet made such a horlicks of Brexit. Given the visceral hatred he and Hammond clearly have towards Boris, how did they sit in the same cabinet for so long?

    Some people would endure the worst of the Spanish Inquisition to keep their Ministerial cars.....
  • 148grss148grss Posts: 4,155

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    148grss said:

    In whatever sense the business will depend on the labour of more than just yourself, and I can only assume you plan to make more money that other people despite the fact their labour will be as necessary, which in the Marxist sense is where the class conflict enters. Does "ownership" of the business mean your contribution is more "valuable" than the people who actually do the work.

    The risk is mine, and therefore the rewards should predominantly be mine. (For the record, I pay well, and I'm extremely generous from an ownership perspective.)
    Straight out of the American self-justification manual.

    You're welcome to it Robert. Make your millions. One day though I guarantee you will look back and wonder if all you did to get there was 'right.'

    Now then, back to UK politics ... can anyone respond to my query about YouGov flawed methodology? It doesn't look right to me ...
    The US is a great place to be rich but for middle and low income people it is not really that great compared to other western countries
    I totally agree with you - at last!
    And yet I'm sure HYUFD would suggest more Reaganism as the answer to, rather than the cause of, these myriad of problems.
  • EndillionEndillion Posts: 4,976
    Sandpit said:

    Endillion said:

    IanB2 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    148grss said:

    In whatever sense the business will depend on the labour of more than just yourself, and I can only assume you plan to make more money that other people despite the fact their labour will be as necessary, which in the Marxist sense is where the class conflict enters. Does "ownership" of the business mean your contribution is more "valuable" than the people who actually do the work.

    The risk is mine, and therefore the rewards should predominantly be mine. (For the record, I pay well, and I'm extremely generous from an ownership perspective.)
    Straight out of the American self-justification manual.

    You're welcome to it Robert. Make your millions. One day though I guarantee you will look back and wonder if all you did to get there was 'right.'

    Now then, back to UK politics ... can anyone respond to my query about YouGov flawed methodology? It doesn't look right to me ...
    If I succeed in:

    (a) reducing the number of people who die on the roads
    (b) making car insurance more affordable (and accessible)
    (c) making good money for the people who work for me

    Then I think I can reasonably claim that I've left the world in a better place than I found it.
    You're tempting people with a low cost offer to abandon covering their own and other vehicles for theft and damage?
    Er, just their own, surely?

    Have to say, I was a little uneasy at the description of comprehensive cover as an "unnecessary extra".
    For millions of people on low or unpredictable incomes, this product could be the difference between being able to run a car or not, between being able to work more hours or take a better job in another town.
    Maybe. I've seen several of these in the UK - in a professional capacity - and haven't been overly impressed. The US is a very different market, admittedly.

    It doesn't really help regular commuters etc - as they'll drive enough that they'd usually be better off with a standard annual policy. These things mostly target those for whom their occasional use means an annual policy is prohibitively expensive.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,234

    rcs1000 said:

    For anyone who wants to know more about my insurance company, its website is here: https://just.insure

    Determining whether someone is driving as well as the safety of their driving on the basis of phone data must be something of a challenge, I'd have thought! And what if their phone dies? Would they then be unable to drive legally?
    There are a lot of amazing way's we're using phones to gauge accident risk.

    For example...

    1. One 18 year old man in a car is a lot less likely to have an accident than five 18 year old men.

    2. People who use their horn a lot are more likely to have accidents.

    3. Speeding when on a motorway when the road is empty and the conditions are good isn't very dangerous. Speeding when it's dark and rainy and there's lots of traffic is.

    4. People who speed up with traffic lights go yellow are also more dangerous.

    5. Driving home from work at 11pm probably isn't dangerous. Driving home from a bar probably is.

    We have about 40 measures of driver safety (i.e. bahviour) and another 12 measures of road safety (i.e conditions). And risk factors are multiplicative, not additive.
  • ozymandiasozymandias Posts: 1,503
    Endillion said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    For anyone who wants to know more about my insurance company, its website is here: https://just.insure

    Who’s your carrier?
    We haven't gone the MGA route, for reasons that are too long and complex to go into. We're underwriting all the risk.

    Worth remembering that the reason that insurance companies have to carry so much capital is because of the risk of having a substantial book of mispriced risk. If you have to go into runoff, you need to have the capital to pay out all the claims that are yet to happen. And that's 12 months of risk for a normal insurer. With us, it's just 30 days.
    Payment tail on motor claims is up to 90 years in the UK, due to the rise of Periodical Payment Orders. Even without those, large liability losses can have settlement delays of several years. I don't think reducing your unearned exposure timeframe by 11 months will make that much difference to your capital, all else being equal.

    Edit: I've never actually seen an insurance company claim mispricing risk as the main driver of capital. At most, it's maybe ten percentage points loss ratio (claims/premiums) impact, whereas pure bad luck can often have several times that impact - much more where catastrophe exposure or legal changes are factors.
    The tail is substantially reduced and reserves more easily be determined. Presumably and without seeing the coverage wording this is claims-made liability and he won't have to factor in any IBNR (you have to make a claim during the currency of the coverage otherwise no cover - as opposed to occurrence when a claim can be made any time so long as the event happened during the currency.)
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,234
    Nigelb said:

    rcs1000 said:

    For anyone who wants to know more about my insurance company, its website is here: https://just.insure

    Interesting - though not an entirely unique idea:
    https://www.interceptip.com/products/ic6/

    And there is, of course, the competitive threat of companies like Tesla offering their own insurance on the same basis, as they already collect the necessary data.
    Better risk pricing is only part of the puzzle. I think our business model - prepaid, per mile - is also unique.

    (We also have a unique go-to-market strategy, but I'm not sharing that on here.)
  • dyedwooliedyedwoolie Posts: 7,786
    New poll from Kantar, 7-11 Nov
    Con 37% -2
    Lab 27% +2
    Lib Dem 17% -1
    Brexit 9% +1
    Green 3% ±0
    (Change since 10-15 Oct) New squeeze question & imputation model
    https://t.co/kKtUNT8hte

    Note methodology change. Without, it would have been 42/28 suggesting tactical voting is a thing
  • Xtrain said:

    IanB2 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    More crucially Johnson seems to have ran water straight from a tap into his tea !
    There was a kettle across the kitchen which I'd have thought would be redundant with a boiling water tap... ?

    I think the tea you are likely to get from a boiling water tap is likely to be poor, because the water is likely to have been held at a higher temperature for longer than for water freshly boiled in a kettle. Might be good enough for coffee.
    Does it really make that much difference? It's already ahead of any cup of tea you're likely to get in America.
    Don't you hate it when you ask for a tea and your presented with a cup of hot water and a wrapped tea bag!
    This has happened to me several times in the UK. Most memorably at Edinburgh Airport when I was hoping for a last good cup of tea before heading to the US, but also in Staffordshire! Tea is at risk, and the Johnson video makes clear it's not safe under his leadership.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,234
    Endillion said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    For anyone who wants to know more about my insurance company, its website is here: https://just.insure

    Who’s your carrier?
    We haven't gone the MGA route, for reasons that are too long and complex to go into. We're underwriting all the risk.

    Worth remembering that the reason that insurance companies have to carry so much capital is because of the risk of having a substantial book of mispriced risk. If you have to go into runoff, you need to have the capital to pay out all the claims that are yet to happen. And that's 12 months of risk for a normal insurer. With us, it's just 30 days.
    Payment tail on motor claims is up to 90 years in the UK, due to the rise of Periodical Payment Orders. Even without those, large liability losses can have settlement delays of several years. I don't think reducing your unearned exposure timeframe by 11 months will make that much difference to your capital, all else being equal.

    Edit: I've never actually seen an insurance company claim mispricing risk as the main driver of capital. At most, it's maybe ten percentage points loss ratio (claims/premiums) impact, whereas pure bad luck can often have several times that impact - much more where catastrophe exposure or legal changes are factors.
    The US is different. Our maximum exposure per accident (on a state minimum liability product) is $10,000 of property damage, $15,000 per person personal injury up to a maximum of $30,00 per accident. So we simply don't have the tail risk of a UK insurer.
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 37,381
    HYUFD said:

    Banterman said:

    Gauke today exposing once again how May & her terrible cabinet made such a horlicks of Brexit. Given the visceral hatred he and Hammond clearly have towards Boris, how did they sit in the same cabinet for so long?

    Indeed Gauke now backing EUref2 too today, so clearly he is a diehard Remainer after all.

    He may even lose his deposit in SW Herts as an Independent
    Well, he's plainly happier outside the Conservative party.
  • EndillionEndillion Posts: 4,976
    rcs1000 said:

    Endillion said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    For anyone who wants to know more about my insurance company, its website is here: https://just.insure

    Who’s your carrier?
    We haven't gone the MGA route, for reasons that are too long and complex to go into. We're underwriting all the risk.

    Worth remembering that the reason that insurance companies have to carry so much capital is because of the risk of having a substantial book of mispriced risk. If you have to go into runoff, you need to have the capital to pay out all the claims that are yet to happen. And that's 12 months of risk for a normal insurer. With us, it's just 30 days.
    Payment tail on motor claims is up to 90 years in the UK, due to the rise of Periodical Payment Orders. Even without those, large liability losses can have settlement delays of several years. I don't think reducing your unearned exposure timeframe by 11 months will make that much difference to your capital, all else being equal.

    Edit: I've never actually seen an insurance company claim mispricing risk as the main driver of capital. At most, it's maybe ten percentage points loss ratio (claims/premiums) impact, whereas pure bad luck can often have several times that impact - much more where catastrophe exposure or legal changes are factors.
    The US is different. Our maximum exposure per accident (on a state minimum liability product) is $10,000 of property damage, $15,000 per person personal injury up to a maximum of $30,00 per accident. So we simply don't have the tail risk of a UK insurer.
    Gotcha - thank you, I knew there were limits but I hadn't realised they were anything like that low.

    Out of interest, who pays the rest of the costs? Seems like any hospital stay in the US would burn through those limits within a few hours of admission.
  • EndillionEndillion Posts: 4,976

    Endillion said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    For anyone who wants to know more about my insurance company, its website is here: https://just.insure

    Who’s your carrier?
    We haven't gone the MGA route, for reasons that are too long and complex to go into. We're underwriting all the risk.

    Worth remembering that the reason that insurance companies have to carry so much capital is because of the risk of having a substantial book of mispriced risk. If you have to go into runoff, you need to have the capital to pay out all the claims that are yet to happen. And that's 12 months of risk for a normal insurer. With us, it's just 30 days.
    Payment tail on motor claims is up to 90 years in the UK, due to the rise of Periodical Payment Orders. Even without those, large liability losses can have settlement delays of several years. I don't think reducing your unearned exposure timeframe by 11 months will make that much difference to your capital, all else being equal.

    Edit: I've never actually seen an insurance company claim mispricing risk as the main driver of capital. At most, it's maybe ten percentage points loss ratio (claims/premiums) impact, whereas pure bad luck can often have several times that impact - much more where catastrophe exposure or legal changes are factors.
    The tail is substantially reduced and reserves more easily be determined. Presumably and without seeing the coverage wording this is claims-made liability and he won't have to factor in any IBNR (you have to make a claim during the currency of the coverage otherwise no cover - as opposed to occurrence when a claim can be made any time so long as the event happened during the currency.)
    I seriously doubt it's claims made basis. Potential for moral hazard is far too high.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,234

    New poll from Kantar, 7-11 Nov
    Con 37% -2
    Lab 27% +2
    Lib Dem 17% -1
    Brexit 9% +1
    Green 3% ±0
    (Change since 10-15 Oct) New squeeze question & imputation model
    https://t.co/kKtUNT8hte

    Note methodology change. Without, it would have been 42/28 suggesting tactical voting is a thing

    Another poll with the LDs in the 15-17% band. My certainty that they will end up outside that band grows with each new poll.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 71,236
    rcs1000 said:

    Nigelb said:

    rcs1000 said:

    For anyone who wants to know more about my insurance company, its website is here: https://just.insure

    Interesting - though not an entirely unique idea:
    https://www.interceptip.com/products/ic6/

    And there is, of course, the competitive threat of companies like Tesla offering their own insurance on the same basis, as they already collect the necessary data.
    Better risk pricing is only part of the puzzle. I think our business model - prepaid, per mile - is also unique.

    (We also have a unique go-to-market strategy, but I'm not sharing that on here.)
    Cool.
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 51,717

    Xtrain said:

    IanB2 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    More crucially Johnson seems to have ran water straight from a tap into his tea !
    There was a kettle across the kitchen which I'd have thought would be redundant with a boiling water tap... ?

    I think the tea you are likely to get from a boiling water tap is likely to be poor, because the water is likely to have been held at a higher temperature for longer than for water freshly boiled in a kettle. Might be good enough for coffee.
    Does it really make that much difference? It's already ahead of any cup of tea you're likely to get in America.
    Don't you hate it when you ask for a tea and your presented with a cup of hot water and a wrapped tea bag!
    This has happened to me several times in the UK. Most memorably at Edinburgh Airport when I was hoping for a last good cup of tea before heading to the US, but also in Staffordshire! Tea is at risk, and the Johnson video makes clear it's not safe under his leadership.
    "24 hours to save the British cuppa!"
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 71,236
    rcs1000 said:

    New poll from Kantar, 7-11 Nov
    Con 37% -2
    Lab 27% +2
    Lib Dem 17% -1
    Brexit 9% +1
    Green 3% ±0
    (Change since 10-15 Oct) New squeeze question & imputation model
    https://t.co/kKtUNT8hte

    Note methodology change. Without, it would have been 42/28 suggesting tactical voting is a thing

    Another poll with the LDs in the 15-17% band. My certainty that they will end up outside that band grows with each new poll.
    In which direction ?
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,234

    rcs1000 said:

    IanB2 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    148grss said:

    In whatever sense the business will depend on the labour of more than just yourself, and I can only assume you plan to make more money that other people despite the fact their labour will be as necessary, which in the Marxist sense is where the class conflict enters. Does "ownership" of the business mean your contribution is more "valuable" than the people who actually do the work.

    The risk is mine, and therefore the rewards should predominantly be mine. (For the record, I pay well, and I'm extremely generous from an ownership perspective.)
    Straight out of the American self-justification manual.

    You're welcome to it Robert. Make your millions. One day though I guarantee you will look back and wonder if all you did to get there was 'right.'

    Now then, back to UK politics ... can anyone respond to my query about YouGov flawed methodology? It doesn't look right to me ...
    If I succeed in:

    (a) reducing the number of people who die on the roads
    (b) making car insurance more affordable (and accessible)
    (c) making good money for the people who work for me

    Then I think I can reasonably claim that I've left the world in a better place than I found it.
    You're tempting people with a low cost offer to abandon covering their own and other vehicles for theft and damage?
    We're starting with liability (i.e. third party) so as to make sure our algorithms for predicting accidents are right with less risk...
    Depending on how you train your algorithms it's possible that they will end up identifying demographic markers (eg wealth) by the quality of the GPS data (and therefore the expense of the phone).
    That's possible. But, equally, richer people have more expensive cars which are probably better at blocking GPS signals...

    Earlier this year we paid 12,000 people to drive with our app, and the GPS track data didn't seem meaningfully worse on an Alcetel Pixi than an iPhone XS.
  • NemtynakhtNemtynakht Posts: 2,329
    edited November 2019

    Isn't Claudia from Leicester?

    Edit: And wasn't Vaz the previous MP actually not from Leicester?
    I don't know where Vaz was from. Claudia certainly says she was born in Leicester.

    Let me put it this way.

    How many former Councillors for Islington end up as MPs? And how many former Councillors for Rhondda-Cynon-Taff end up as MPs? Why are those numbers so very different?

    I always thought freedom of movement was potenitally sellable as a benefit of EU membership - basically because it is. Most salesmen can sell a good product. But I might have been underestimating the good sense of the British public. They seem to want it already.

    https://twitter.com/jdportes/status/1194336599842144256/photo/1

    People are reading too much into this response. It seems like motherhood and apple pie to me - after Brexit should we aim to retain does not mean do you support in all cases. If they asked are you for or against freedom of movement I would expect a different response.
    Because "freedom of movement" has been maligned as meaning a three bed house with 20 Romanian men living in it, rather than the rights of all of us to make a living, enjoy our retirement or find love right across our continent. I see this response as being a more accurate one because it strips out all the toxic tabloid rhetoric and asks people about the principles underlying the policy - which of course they support because it is common sense.
    Yes but it is prefixed with after Brexit, therefore removing the EU from the equation. These things are always a balance. Do we want free movement? Yes. It will cost 30bn a year. No. It will cost 2bn a year, yes. We will have to allow ECJ jurisdiction. No.

    It is always dependent on the assumptions made, and the wording of this question allows Leavers and remainers to intepret as they wish.
  • Tom Harris, 2011- 2018: How dare you call me a red Tory!
    Tom Harris, 2019: Vote Tory.

    https://twitter.com/MhairiHunter/status/1194512198699237376?s=20

    Labour will be saying good riddance to bad rubbish. He was part of their small, nasty BritNat wing. Although few in number, these vocal idgits have trashed the entire Labour brand in Scotland.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    edited November 2019
    148grss said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Sean_F said:

    Sandpit said:

    Nigel who? He should be grateful that it looks like his life’s work is about to be achieved - but instead he’s mad because others are now getting the credit for it.

    I can't remember who said it but it's true that "there's no limit to what you can achieve, so long as you don't care who gets the credit for it."
    I prefer John Grisham's description of the American Dream:

    'Basically the American Dream means benefitting from other people's misfortune.'

    Kinda sums up the state of things in the US right now ...
    Being personally successful in a capitalist system almost always means that. It's amazing the psychological contortions people go through to persuade themselves otherwise.
    With all due respect, that's complete and utter shit.

    I'm building a new business (well, not right now, as I'm on a plane) that will hopefully radically change car insurance. It will make insurance more affordable to poorer people and reduce the number of road accidents each year.

    If I do it right, I expect I will make a very large amount of money, possibly billions.

    I'm pretty sure I'm doing the opposite of benefiting from people's misfortunes.
    I mean, it depends on the treatment and remuneration of your staff.

    If you (owner, top dog, etc) are paying everyone minimum wage to enact your idea that you can't enact alone, but paying them a wage they can't live on, or putting them in conditions that are bad, the service may be a useful one, but I would argue you are still benefiting from the misfortune of others, just the workers not the customer. (This isn't saying you would do that, just as a point).

    In whatever sense the business will depend on the labour of more than just yourself, and I can only assume you plan to make more money that other people despite the fact their labour will be as necessary, which in the Marxist sense is where the class conflict enters. Does "ownership" of the business mean your contribution is more "valuable" than the people who actually do the work.

    This is meant to a comment on the nature of capitalism and not a personal attack on what sounds like a potentially good idea in the morally dubious business of legally necessary but only privately accessible insurance.
    Yes his contribution is more valuable than others. It is his idea, his initiative. He is taking the risk in developing the business. An employee puts in effort and gets renumerated, a business owner puts in their own savings to seed the business as well as his own ideas and effort and they could lose everything they put into the business.

    There is no moral ambiguity unless you're dogmatic.
  • stodgestodge Posts: 13,899
    rcs1000 said:


    There are a lot of amazing way's we're using phones to gauge accident risk.

    For example...

    1. One 18 year old man in a car is a lot less likely to have an accident than five 18 year old men.

    2. People who use their horn a lot are more likely to have accidents.

    3. Speeding when on a motorway when the road is empty and the conditions are good isn't very dangerous. Speeding when it's dark and rainy and there's lots of traffic is.

    4. People who speed up with traffic lights go yellow are also more dangerous.

    5. Driving home from work at 11pm probably isn't dangerous. Driving home from a bar probably is.

    We have about 40 measures of driver safety (i.e. bahviour) and another 12 measures of road safety (i.e conditions). And risk factors are multiplicative, not additive.

    I thought car insurance was very little about how one drove but more about the car and where one lived. The risk of getting one's vehicle damaged or stolen seems to be a large factor in determining how much you pay in premium. I don't have a garage and live in a high-crime area - I suspect if I had a garage and lived in a low-crime area I'd pay less. That has nothing to do with how and when I drive the car.

    Using phone data to determine insurance risk seems, to pardon the pun, risky. What if I'm a passenger in someone else's car? What if their phone is off and mine is on - whose data is being captured and should such data be captured without explicit consent under the Data Protection Act?
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,234
    Endillion said:

    Maybe. I've seen several of these in the UK - in a professional capacity - and haven't been overly impressed. The US is a very different market, admittedly.

    It doesn't really help regular commuters etc - as they'll drive enough that they'd usually be better off with a standard annual policy. These things mostly target those for whom their occasional use means an annual policy is prohibitively expensive.

    The product is not for everyone. If you're an infrequent driver, or only drive when you have a job, it's great. If you're a safer driver than your demographic bucket, it's great.

    But the long term success (or failure) depends on our ability to change driving behaviour - can we make you into a safer driver? That's a combination of psychology and finance. If we can turn the average 18 year old into a 25 year old, in terms of propensity to crash, then we'll have dramatically cut their costs and made the roads safer.
  • alb1onalb1on Posts: 698
    rcs1000 said:

    Sean_F said:

    Sandpit said:

    Nigel who? He should be grateful that it looks like his life’s work is about to be achieved - but instead he’s mad because others are now getting the credit for it.

    I can't remember who said it but it's true that "there's no limit to what you can achieve, so long as you don't care who gets the credit for it."
    I prefer John Grisham's description of the American Dream:

    'Basically the American Dream means benefitting from other people's misfortune.'

    Kinda sums up the state of things in the US right now ...
    Being personally successful in a capitalist system almost always means that. It's amazing the psychological contortions people go through to persuade themselves otherwise.
    With all due respect, that's complete and utter shit.

    I'm building a new business (well, not right now, as I'm on a plane) that will hopefully radically change car insurance. It will make insurance more affordable to poorer people and reduce the number of road accidents each year.

    If I do it right, I expect I will make a very large amount of money, possibly billions.

    I'm pretty sure I'm doing the opposite of benefiting from people's misfortunes.
    Good luck with the business, but as someone who was an underwriting director with a big motor book I have seen many such attempts. Even Mike Brockman (who I rate as the best retail actuary of them all and a good eneough entrepreneur to make a fortune) never cracked it. A specific part of the problem with your model is that you will need to not only reduce the general price (which can be done in a few ways such as telematics/cover restrictions etc) but also mitigate the excess risk associated with poor people. I am sure posters will object, but affluence (measured by any one of various criteria such as credit score or demographic classification and analysed by GLM or GNLM) is a significant factor in risk (ignoring all other factors, the poorer you are the worse your risk. The only way I can see of managing this factor is to introduce an element of public pool into risk pricing (as is done for flood in the UK).
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 123,149
    Good news for Tories as will take Labour votes
  • BurgessianBurgessian Posts: 2,755
    stodge said:

    Morning all :)

    Some chilling statistics from the Institute of Fiscal Studies released as part one of a two part report last Monday.

    For those who come on here and claim there has been no austerity, per person spending on non-statutory services has been cut by 40% in real terms in the last decade.

    57% of non education service budgets now go on social care and that continues to rise.

    Another example is the amount spent on bus passes, a statutory provision, now accounts for a quarter of all highways and transport spend while the amount spent on routine road maintenance has fallen by 53%.

    As for income, half of all non-education funding is raised from Council Tax and a third from business rates so councils with large tax bases are able to get some funding for services such as planning, development and culture while those with smaller tax bases can't.

    Councils are increasingly withdrawing from non-statutory areas because they don't have the money - there has always been a redistributive element within local Government finance but with the ring-fencing of education and health since 2010 the balance of that spend has become distorted.

    It will be interesting to see if any Party has some serious proposals regarding local Government finance going forward.

    Excellent commentary. And it is equally true of Scotland where the SNP Government has slashed the budgets of councils despite the benefits of the Barnett Formula which should have protected them. Always easier for Govts to spend on their pet projects when you can blame hapless councils for local cuts.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 23,254
    FPT:

    Noo said:

    Noo said:

    The Conservative Party is in a bleak state
    https://twitter.com/SayeedaWarsi/status/1194367239727828994

    Warsi hates us atheists!
    Click through to the article and you'll see the important story in there is racist Conservative councillors.
    I did deliberately choose to post the Warsi tweet rather than just the Guardian link, though, entirely to annoy you.
    It’s a bit of a weird article -

    Considering the amount of scandal this brings wouldn’t it benefit the main parties to review social media activity of their own representatives? Employ 1 person, have a confidential reporting system, systematically review social media.
    It's notable that the number of cases of actual Islamophobia cited by the Guardian is between one and five rather than the 25 in the headline, and one of them is a *Parish* Councillor.

    The same chap anonymous twitter use who generated this 'dossier', @MatesJacob, generated another one of 115 allegations back in May 2019, of which 80-85% turned out to be repeats of previous allegations. Fair enough, as it was a collection, but without specifics the numbers mean little, and the G does not supply specifics.

    Also worth a note that the big one from last week - Calvert - was relating to statements in 2002 that had been addressed by him in 2008. But in the narrative of an election that will not catch.

    And that the MCB supplied a dossier of alleged cases to the EHCR in May 2019 requesting a statutory investigation, and 6 months later nothing has happened. Why not? Much of the credibility remains to be confirmed.

    (Similarly I think to claims Sam Gyimah is making about Emma Dent-Coad having been on the committee that approved the Grenfell Refurb, and therefore being responsible. Doesn't stand up, but the damage is done.)

    So I think think there is at least *some* media-windup/trolling going on here.

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tory-islamophobia-racism-party-members-dossier-a8919581.html
    https://mcb.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/201905-Complaint-to-the-EHRC-about-Islamophobia-in-the-Conservative-Party_website.pdf
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,234
    alb1on said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Sean_F said:

    Sandpit said:

    Nigel who? He should be grateful that it looks like his life’s work is about to be achieved - but instead he’s mad because others are now getting the credit for it.

    I can't remember who said it but it's true that "there's no limit to what you can achieve, so long as you don't care who gets the credit for it."
    I prefer John Grisham's description of the American Dream:

    'Basically the American Dream means benefitting from other people's misfortune.'

    Kinda sums up the state of things in the US right now ...
    Being personally successful in a capitalist system almost always means that. It's amazing the psychological contortions people go through to persuade themselves otherwise.
    With all due respect, that's complete and utter shit.

    I'm building a new business (well, not right now, as I'm on a plane) that will hopefully radically change car insurance. It will make insurance more affordable to poorer people and reduce the number of road accidents each year.

    If I do it right, I expect I will make a very large amount of money, possibly billions.

    I'm pretty sure I'm doing the opposite of benefiting from people's misfortunes.
    Good luck with the business, but as someone who was an underwriting director with a big motor book I have seen many such attempts. Even Mike Brockman (who I rate as the best retail actuary of them all and a good eneough entrepreneur to make a fortune) never cracked it. A specific part of the problem with your model is that you will need to not only reduce the general price (which can be done in a few ways such as telematics/cover restrictions etc) but also mitigate the excess risk associated with poor people. I am sure posters will object, but affluence (measured by any one of various criteria such as credit score or demographic classification and analysed by GLM or GNLM) is a significant factor in risk (ignoring all other factors, the poorer you are the worse your risk. The only way I can see of managing this factor is to introduce an element of public pool into risk pricing (as is done for flood in the UK).
    Well, we'll soon find out. Worth remembering, though, that one of the reasons lower income consumers are bad risks is because of the high level of delinquencies. Someone enters into a 12 month contract and pays month one and two, and then doesn't pay month three... The insurer (in most US states, and I'm sure in the UK too) is still on the hook for a few weeks while they threaten and cajole. Our prepay model doesn't have that risk, which means we should have fewer miles we're insuring for which we're not being paid.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 123,149
    148grss said:

    HYUFD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Interesting - is Trump's (hormone treated) beef with Europe tariffs or standards?

    https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1194467422100738049?s=20

    One person's Non Tariff Barrier is another person's sovereign right to decide on food standards.

    This, of course, is where US trade negotiations will fall down. The US will require us to accept GM crops, and will also prevent us from labeling said crops as GM.

    Johnson will push hard for it, and it will be really unpopular. (With both his own party and the country at large.)
    We won't get a trade deal with the US. There's no political will for it outside of a few hardcore Tories. I'm not even sure that Bozza will push the angle other than as a distraction if the EU trade talks aren't going well.
    I think Johnson genuinely does want to reorient the UK away from Europe and towards the US. I just don't think he realises the compromises that will be necessary to achieve such a pivot.
    No Boris just wants an equal relationship with both, hence his Deal enables FTA talks with the EU and the US.

    By contrast the LDs want to stay in the EU and oppose a US FTA and the Brexit Party back no Deal and oppose a FTA the EU will agree to, so it is actually Farage who wishes to reorient us towards the US, indeed Farage is closer to Trump than Boris is.

    Corbyn of course wants a closer relationship with Cuba and Venezuela and Russia than either the EU or the US
    We cannot have an equal relationship with huge trading blocs because we are not a huge trading bloc. We are a smallish sized island with an economy that punches way above our geography partly due to our history and partly due to leveraging our membership of the closest large trading bloc.

    The US as a trading bloc has no reason to consider us an equal; what do we produce that they need to buy? Pretty much nothing except our assets. Whereas they have many goods they want to sell: wormy pork, chlorinated chicken, houseware produced by prison labour that will undercut our prices. Lots of stuff that will be sub current health and safety standards of products sold in the UK or cheaper than current products manufactured in the UK due to worse worker conditions (or both).
    The US is our largest single export destination and the EU our largest multinational export destination, we need trade deals with both
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,234
    stodge said:

    rcs1000 said:


    There are a lot of amazing way's we're using phones to gauge accident risk.

    For example...

    1. One 18 year old man in a car is a lot less likely to have an accident than five 18 year old men.

    2. People who use their horn a lot are more likely to have accidents.

    3. Speeding when on a motorway when the road is empty and the conditions are good isn't very dangerous. Speeding when it's dark and rainy and there's lots of traffic is.

    4. People who speed up with traffic lights go yellow are also more dangerous.

    5. Driving home from work at 11pm probably isn't dangerous. Driving home from a bar probably is.

    We have about 40 measures of driver safety (i.e. bahviour) and another 12 measures of road safety (i.e conditions). And risk factors are multiplicative, not additive.

    I thought car insurance was very little about how one drove but more about the car and where one lived. The risk of getting one's vehicle damaged or stolen seems to be a large factor in determining how much you pay in premium. I don't have a garage and live in a high-crime area - I suspect if I had a garage and lived in a low-crime area I'd pay less. That has nothing to do with how and when I drive the car.

    Using phone data to determine insurance risk seems, to pardon the pun, risky. What if I'm a passenger in someone else's car? What if their phone is off and mine is on - whose data is being captured and should such data be captured without explicit consent under the Data Protection Act?
    This is (for now) a US only product. (And specifically, it's an Arizona product, from when it launches...)

    It's also a liability (i.e third party) only product right now. So all I have to do is better measure risk of accident. (And yes, the car still matters. Simply, in an accident a Hummer will do a lot less damage than a 2CV.)

    But we have an incredible amount of data on where is dangerous, when is dangerous, etc. We can measure accident-likelihood better than a traditional demographic model, and (hopefully) we can dangle lower rates in front of people if they change their driving behaviour.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,234
    HYUFD said:
    You didn't post the other Iowa poll released yesterday, I see.
  • kyf_100kyf_100 Posts: 4,951
    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    For anyone who wants to know more about my insurance company, its website is here: https://just.insure

    Determining whether someone is driving as well as the safety of their driving on the basis of phone data must be something of a challenge, I'd have thought! And what if their phone dies? Would they then be unable to drive legally?
    There are a lot of amazing way's we're using phones to gauge accident risk.

    For example...

    1. One 18 year old man in a car is a lot less likely to have an accident than five 18 year old men.

    2. People who use their horn a lot are more likely to have accidents.

    3. Speeding when on a motorway when the road is empty and the conditions are good isn't very dangerous. Speeding when it's dark and rainy and there's lots of traffic is.

    4. People who speed up with traffic lights go yellow are also more dangerous.

    5. Driving home from work at 11pm probably isn't dangerous. Driving home from a bar probably is.

    We have about 40 measures of driver safety (i.e. bahviour) and another 12 measures of road safety (i.e conditions). And risk factors are multiplicative, not additive.
    When I drive home from a bar its always because I'm the designated driver. If driving home from a bar put my insurance premium up I would stop offering this favour to my friends.
  • rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    For anyone who wants to know more about my insurance company, its website is here: https://just.insure

    Determining whether someone is driving as well as the safety of their driving on the basis of phone data must be something of a challenge, I'd have thought! And what if their phone dies? Would they then be unable to drive legally?
    There are a lot of amazing way's we're using phones to gauge accident risk.

    For example...

    1. One 18 year old man in a car is a lot less likely to have an accident than five 18 year old men.

    2. People who use their horn a lot are more likely to have accidents.

    3. Speeding when on a motorway when the road is empty and the conditions are good isn't very dangerous. Speeding when it's dark and rainy and there's lots of traffic is.

    4. People who speed up with traffic lights go yellow are also more dangerous.

    5. Driving home from work at 11pm probably isn't dangerous. Driving home from a bar probably is.

    We have about 40 measures of driver safety (i.e. bahviour) and another 12 measures of road safety (i.e conditions). And risk factors are multiplicative, not additive.
    Sounds very interesting though what happens if a driver's phone is flat while they drive?

    Hope it works for you!
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,234
    kyf_100 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    For anyone who wants to know more about my insurance company, its website is here: https://just.insure

    Determining whether someone is driving as well as the safety of their driving on the basis of phone data must be something of a challenge, I'd have thought! And what if their phone dies? Would they then be unable to drive legally?
    There are a lot of amazing way's we're using phones to gauge accident risk.

    For example...

    1. One 18 year old man in a car is a lot less likely to have an accident than five 18 year old men.

    2. People who use their horn a lot are more likely to have accidents.

    3. Speeding when on a motorway when the road is empty and the conditions are good isn't very dangerous. Speeding when it's dark and rainy and there's lots of traffic is.

    4. People who speed up with traffic lights go yellow are also more dangerous.

    5. Driving home from work at 11pm probably isn't dangerous. Driving home from a bar probably is.

    We have about 40 measures of driver safety (i.e. bahviour) and another 12 measures of road safety (i.e conditions). And risk factors are multiplicative, not additive.
    When I drive home from a bar its always because I'm the designated driver. If driving home from a bar put my insurance premium up I would stop offering this favour to my friends.
    We're getting pretty good at working out when drivers are impaired (drink, drugs, tiredness): their control motions become less frequent and more extreme, they often drive at a different speed to normal or are excessively cautious around traffic signals.

    Hopefully we can persuade people to pull over and get an Uber if we see this behaviour.
  • MattW said:

    FPT:

    Noo said:

    Noo said:

    The Conservative Party is in a bleak state
    https://twitter.com/SayeedaWarsi/status/1194367239727828994

    Warsi hates us atheists!
    Click through to the article and you'll see the important story in there is racist Conservative councillors.
    I did deliberately choose to post the Warsi tweet rather than just the Guardian link, though, entirely to annoy you.
    It’s a bit of a weird article -

    Considering the amount of scandal this brings wouldn’t it benefit the main parties to review social media activity of their own representatives? Employ 1 person, have a confidential reporting system, systematically review social media.
    It's notable that the number of cases of actual Islamophobia cited by the Guardian is between one and five rather than the 25 in the headline, and one of them is a *Parish* Councillor.

    The same chap anonymous twitter use who generated this 'dossier', @MatesJacob, generated another one of 115 allegations back in May 2019, of which 80-85% turned out to be repeats of previous allegations. Fair enough, as it was a collection, but without specifics the numbers mean little, and the G does not supply specifics.

    Also worth a note that the big one from last week - Calvert - was relating to statements in 2002 that had been addressed by him in 2008. But in the narrative of an election that will not catch.

    And that the MCB supplied a dossier of alleged cases to the EHCR in May 2019 requesting a statutory investigation, and 6 months later nothing has happened. Why not? Much of the credibility remains to be confirmed.

    (Similarly I think to claims Sam Gyimah is making about Emma Dent-Coad having been on the committee that approved the Grenfell Refurb, and therefore being responsible. Doesn't stand up, but the damage is done.)

    So I think think there is at least *some* media-windup/trolling going on here.

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tory-islamophobia-racism-party-members-dossier-a8919581.html
    https://mcb.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/201905-Complaint-to-the-EHRC-about-Islamophobia-in-the-Conservative-Party_website.pdf
    It is interesting how the tories, who do have a chronic problem with islamophobia, is very much downplayed, mitigated and even excused.

    Not only interesting but shameful really.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,234

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    For anyone who wants to know more about my insurance company, its website is here: https://just.insure

    Determining whether someone is driving as well as the safety of their driving on the basis of phone data must be something of a challenge, I'd have thought! And what if their phone dies? Would they then be unable to drive legally?
    There are a lot of amazing way's we're using phones to gauge accident risk.

    For example...

    1. One 18 year old man in a car is a lot less likely to have an accident than five 18 year old men.

    2. People who use their horn a lot are more likely to have accidents.

    3. Speeding when on a motorway when the road is empty and the conditions are good isn't very dangerous. Speeding when it's dark and rainy and there's lots of traffic is.

    4. People who speed up with traffic lights go yellow are also more dangerous.

    5. Driving home from work at 11pm probably isn't dangerous. Driving home from a bar probably is.

    We have about 40 measures of driver safety (i.e. bahviour) and another 12 measures of road safety (i.e conditions). And risk factors are multiplicative, not additive.
    Sounds very interesting though what happens if a driver's phone is flat while they drive?

    Hope it works for you!
    There are quite a few things I don't want to disclose in a public forum :smile:

    Thanks for your support.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 71,236
    rcs1000 said:

    Endillion said:

    Maybe. I've seen several of these in the UK - in a professional capacity - and haven't been overly impressed. The US is a very different market, admittedly.

    It doesn't really help regular commuters etc - as they'll drive enough that they'd usually be better off with a standard annual policy. These things mostly target those for whom their occasional use means an annual policy is prohibitively expensive.

    The product is not for everyone. If you're an infrequent driver, or only drive when you have a job, it's great. If you're a safer driver than your demographic bucket, it's great.

    But the long term success (or failure) depends on our ability to change driving behaviour - can we make you into a safer driver? That's a combination of psychology and finance. If we can turn the average 18 year old into a 25 year old, in terms of propensity to crash, then we'll have dramatically cut their costs and made the roads safer.
    That would be good - but I suspect all you will do is identify the 18 year olds less likely to have an accident. The average 18 year old will carry on being the average 18 year old.

    And in the long term, the car will be doing the driving.
  • Hello PB, occasional lurker here. Just to share an observation on Boris's 12 questions broadcast: count the food mentions.

    Thai curry
    Fish and chips
    Sunday roast
    Marmite
    Steak and oven chips

    I doubt this is an accident. The aim will be to bypass the rational brain and trigger positive emotions that then, because we're watching Boris, subliminally get linked with Boris. And of course this is all feelgood food - he doesn't talk about salads.

    Then the food theme is paid off with a Brexit link as Boris tells us his deal is ready to go in the microwave. It's really quite clever.
  • Tom Harris, 2011- 2018: How dare you call me a red Tory!
    Tom Harris, 2019: Vote Tory.

    https://twitter.com/MhairiHunter/status/1194512198699237376?s=20

    Labour will be saying good riddance to bad rubbish. He was part of their small, nasty BritNat wing. Although few in number, these vocal idgits have trashed the entire Labour brand in Scotland.
    I think you're in for a surprise and will discover that the likes of Tom Harris speak for rather more scots than you seem to realise...
  • ozymandiasozymandias Posts: 1,503
    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    For anyone who wants to know more about my insurance company, its website is here: https://just.insure

    Determining whether someone is driving as well as the safety of their driving on the basis of phone data must be something of a challenge, I'd have thought! And what if their phone dies? Would they then be unable to drive legally?
    There are a lot of amazing way's we're using phones to gauge accident risk.

    For example...

    1. One 18 year old man in a car is a lot less likely to have an accident than five 18 year old men.

    2. People who use their horn a lot are more likely to have accidents.

    3. Speeding when on a motorway when the road is empty and the conditions are good isn't very dangerous. Speeding when it's dark and rainy and there's lots of traffic is.

    4. People who speed up with traffic lights go yellow are also more dangerous.

    5. Driving home from work at 11pm probably isn't dangerous. Driving home from a bar probably is.

    We have about 40 measures of driver safety (i.e. bahviour) and another 12 measures of road safety (i.e conditions). And risk factors are multiplicative, not additive.
    Sounds very interesting though what happens if a driver's phone is flat while they drive?

    Hope it works for you!
    There are quite a few things I don't want to disclose in a public forum :smile:

    Thanks for your support.
    I'm doing something very similar with a client in Texas right now - so maybe our paths will cross.. :wink:
  • rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    For anyone who wants to know more about my insurance company, its website is here: https://just.insure

    Determining whether someone is driving as well as the safety of their driving on the basis of phone data must be something of a challenge, I'd have thought! And what if their phone dies? Would they then be unable to drive legally?
    There are a lot of amazing way's we're using phones to gauge accident risk.

    For example...

    1. One 18 year old man in a car is a lot less likely to have an accident than five 18 year old men.

    2. People who use their horn a lot are more likely to have accidents.

    3. Speeding when on a motorway when the road is empty and the conditions are good isn't very dangerous. Speeding when it's dark and rainy and there's lots of traffic is.

    4. People who speed up with traffic lights go yellow are also more dangerous.

    5. Driving home from work at 11pm probably isn't dangerous. Driving home from a bar probably is.

    We have about 40 measures of driver safety (i.e. bahviour) and another 12 measures of road safety (i.e conditions). And risk factors are multiplicative, not additive.
    Sounds very interesting though what happens if a driver's phone is flat while they drive?

    Hope it works for you!
    There are quite a few things I don't want to disclose in a public forum :smile:

    Thanks for your support.
    If you're happy to disclose this, if this works in the USA are there any plans for a British version of this? Or are the plans USA and if it ever came to coming to this side of the pond that this would be not for a long time if ever?
  • CookieCookie Posts: 13,838
    How disappointing that BXP got to 9 rather than the much more numerically satisfying 7.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 42,992
    I bloody love it. PB as Dragon's Den with the candidate 35,000 ft in the air over the Pacific Ocean.
  • theakestheakes Posts: 931
    Iowa Primary, latest Monmouth poll has Buttigieg 4 points clear and closing fast in New Hampshire.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 23,254
    edited November 2019

    MattW said:

    FPT:

    Noo said:

    Noo said:

    The Conservative Party is in a bleak state
    https://twitter.com/SayeedaWarsi/status/1194367239727828994

    Warsi hates us atheists!
    It’s a bit of a weird article -

    Considering the amount of scandal this brings wouldn’t it benefit the main parties to review social media activity of their own representatives? Employ 1 person, have a confidential reporting system, systematically review social media.
    It's notable that the number of cases of actual Islamophobia cited by the Guardian is between one and five rather than the 25 in the headline, and one of them is a *Parish* Councillor.

    The same anonymous twitter user who generated this 'dossier', @MatesJacob, generated another one of 115 allegations back in May 2019, of which 80-85% turned out to be repeats of previous allegations. Fair enough, as it was a collection, but without specifics the numbers mean little, and the G does not supply specifics.

    Also worth a note that the big one from last week - Calvert - was relating to statements in 2002 that had been addressed by him in 2008. But in the narrative of an election that will not catch.

    And that the MCB supplied a dossier of alleged cases to the EHCR in May 2019 requesting a statutory investigation, and 6 months later nothing has happened. Why not? Much of the credibility remains to be confirmed.

    So I think think there is at least *some* media-windup/trolling going on here.

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tory-islamophobia-racism-party-members-dossier-a8919581.html
    https://mcb.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/201905-Complaint-to-the-EHRC-about-Islamophobia-in-the-Conservative-Party_website.pdf
    It is interesting how the tories, who do have a chronic problem with islamophobia, is very much downplayed, mitigated and even excused.

    Not only interesting but shameful really.
    It is interesting how some people do not address the points made :-) .

    Nothing downplayed, just some appropriate skepticism applied. The Tories should have had an investigation 6 months ago.

    Take a look at the original MCB 'cases emerging week by week' dossier from a couple of years ago, and compare the claim to the actual cases presented.

    Or the nebulous piece of work which is the APPG definition of Islamophobia, especially compared to the Working Definition of Antisemitism.

    Then you would perhaps be equally skeptical.

    I want to see the response from the EHCR to the MCB claims.

    Not a Tory btw - though definitely anti-Corbyn's Labour.
  • Here’s the current best prices in Tom Harris’ old constituency, Glasgow South. Fascinating, the 2019 Labour candidate is the former party leader Johann Lamont. (The SNP only have a majority of 2,027 in this seat.)

    SNP 1/12
    Lab 6/1
    Con 25/1
    Bxp 50/1
    LD 66/1

    I cannot see this Tom Harris statement today helping the Labour vote. It will get a lot of coverage locally, because he was the MP for 14 years.

    This was the seat of Tory Teddy Taylor, before he went into exile after getting turfed out at GE 1979.
This discussion has been closed.