F1: late to this news, but Haas is dropping both its drivers. Apparently it's for financial reasons.
Yes. (a) their drivers are shit, (b) Haas aren't scoring enough points to generate sponsorship revenues from anyone who isn't a fraudster, so (c) hire better drivers
c) hire cheaper drivers (or even better, ones who will pay to drive the car).
Yay! Pay drivers! The good old days of F1. Yes Pastor Maldonado causes £100k's in damage by crashing every other race. But but brings Venezuelan oil money. So woohoo! And as the mangled remains of the pay driver's car gets hauled away its great TV coverage for the sponsors.
It's worth reading Joe Saward's comments as he has named the likely options - although it seems to be bad news for George Russell.
I read Joe’s comments too, but still can’t imagine that Russell gets dropped given he’s a Mercedes junior driver. Maybe New Williams are looking for a better price on the engine supply.
It’s a bit out of date but there are lots of causes of death which could be prevented if we completely stopped doing stuff
If we banned all motor transport there would be a significant drop in vehicle related deaths. A significant number of people die of medical complications - perhaps we should ban all medical procedures. Some people are electrocuted - are you proposing that we go off grid? A small number of women die in childbirth - should we prevent all births? Oh wait we’ve already cancelled all medical procedures above.
Locking down the economy was supposed to be a temporary measure to allow NHS capacity to increase, and to allow time to assess the impact. Before the initial lockdown, and part of the delay was the advice that people only have a certain capacity for being locked down, and the scientists didn’t want to start it too soon
Depends what you mean by "lockdown". Driving is highly regulated. There's a huge list of rules, you have to get your car checked for roadworthiness each year, and you aren't allowed to go whatever speed you like. In fact, the speed you're allowed to go depends on not just where you are, but what conditions are like. Similarly safety regulations on medical procedures, retail and industrial electrical goods are there to minimise deaths. In all of the above cases, we find a balance. Nobody is proposing banning all economic activity, and nor is anybody with the slightest shred of decency advocating just letting it rip.
So now that we've established where we are, somewhere between those two end members, we need to find the right place. And like the speed limit, it's perfectly sensible to suggest that as conditions change, so should the rules. Now, are the kinds of lockdowns experienced and/or proposed by some people going too far one way? Is the loosening proposed by others going too far the other way? Perhaps, you can make your own mind up. In truth, I can see both sides of the argument and I'm not ready to commit. I'm glad I don't have to decide. But please don't go around pretending that temporary lockdowns are the same as "banning all motor transport". That's attacking a straw man and doesn't help convince persuadables like me.
The current Welsh option has to be up there as pretty close to banning all motor transport for a fortnight. Its likely to have a similar effect on the numbers - transmission will probably fall, but as the fundamental state of play won't have changed at the end of it, it won't be long before the numbers are back where they are now again - very much like banning driving for a fortnight would cut road deaths for a couple of weeks, but won't make a lot of difference in the long run.
The fundamental problem with lockdowns is the total absence of a coherent endgame. Unless there is some way out of this which doesn't involve everyone getting the disease, lockdowns are pointless but expensive can kicking (rather like the endless Brexit extensions - they only postponed exactly the same issues as everyone started with).
There isn't a silver bullet on the horizon. A vaccine isn't going to be enough (you can tell this from the way that governments are starting to talk about this going on all next year).
At some point lockdowns will stop working entirely, if that hasn't already happened. Based on what's happened in say Boulton over the summer, where various levels lockdown have made almost no difference to case numbers, it's quite possible that point has already pretty much been reached.
People have had enough (I'm honest, I'm one of them), and aren't taking a blind bit of notice of the rules if they even know what they are, so the only practical outworking of the restrictions is the ruination of the businesses forced to close (mind you what a time to own an off licence! It's an ill wind... ).
I read a post on Facebook today which linked to a petition for partners to be allowed to attend scans and all of labour for pregnant women (I think it covered Wales - I don't know the current English rules). Some of the stories in the comments below the post were truly heartbreaking; Women having miscarriages and stillbirths alone with their husbands sat waiting in the carpark. It's hard to explain how angry I felt after reading a few posts, and how outraged I was at the sheer barbarity of the current rules. My sister is currently heavily pregnant and under these rules in Ceredigion, which has a case rate of something like 22 per 100k. Its utterly mad, the more so given that presumably as most women live with their partners, if one has it, they probably both do anyway.
I think we should shield the vulnerable as best we can, then let it go, because the reality is that otherwise its going to go anyway sooner or later, but with the vulnerable unprotected.
As someone else has posted upthread, by January (it's bleak enough in a normal year) the public will be in open rebellion everywhere (lots of them aren't far off now), and nothing the politicians can do then will allow them to regain control. All that's occuring now is just adding extra pointless misery to that which will come from the ravages of the disease when the public mood breaks.
The devil is in the detail. You say we should "shield the vulnerable" but provide zero detail. Vulnerable people still need to eat, still need to access medical care. How do they get to the supermarket if the bus is full of people spewing out virus particles without catching it? How can they sit in a waiting room at the doctor's with coronavirus in the air, and not die from it? And even if some unspecified measures are put in place that will magically keep the vulnerable separate, how do you stop that becoming overwhelmed with people who just don't really want to get sick?
The "shield the vulnerable" mantra reminds me of communism... nice in theory but it doesn't work.
As a side note, I've noticed a LOT that people read something on Facebook or Twitter and get outraged. When I used to be on both platforms I was permanently of the opinion that the country was about to break out into insurrection because LOOK AT THIS CUTE CHILD HE DIED BECAUSE OF AUSTERITY/MUSLIMS/VACCINES/ISRAEL. The sad truth is, it's always a mix of the chronically angry, distillations of real things that happened that may or may not share the context you're talking about, liars, propagandists, and well-meaning idiots. And it's all wrapped up into a nice newsfeed that specifically designed to maximise your outrage, because that's what keeps you coming back for more. You see it in some of the people on here. They've become furious ideologues, certain of the righteousness of their cause and their cause alone. Then they find themselves on here, one of the many interfaces between their clan and another, and they go absolutely mad because "here are some filthy apostates who have been duped by the other clan, how can they be so stupidly partisan all the time?!"
Ok, so my side note ended up longer than my main point. Sorry about that. Just to tie it up, I'm not saying you're wrong about lockdowns, but nor am I saying you're right. But I have a sneaking suspicion that you think it's more clear cut than it really is, and one clue to that is this: you replied to a post recommending we take better care when wielding rhetorical devices, and by the sixth paragraph you were talking about dead babies. That kind of escalation doesn't happen in conversations unless at least one of them is furiously certain about something that is so very clearly uncertain enough that they need to have a conversation about it.
Two thoughts, and I'm sure Big G had similar experiences. When my children were born I was shooed out of the labour ward; father's only arrived after the baby had been born and the mother cleaned up. I, and most of my age-group can tell tales of sitting outside, waiting for the midwife to appear and tell us what sex the child was. And when I was a student pubs closed at 10pm. We just started earlier!
I agree and it was only when my youngest was born in 1975, 9 years and 5 years after his elder brother and sister, that I was actually allowed to be present at his birth
I was present at the births of all my children in 1970, 1971, 1973 and 1975. I was a key part of the team as I was the only person my wife would listen to. I relayed the message "push now".
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
250,000 thousand jobs and 4,600 companies depend on oil and gas in Houston alone.
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
250,000 thousand jobs and 4,600 companies depend on oil and gas in Houston alone.
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
Yes - and with a crashed oil price they are in the doldrums.
Wind power, on the other hand, is in the sell-me-all-you-have state. Firms that do the work are booked out.
Alot of the supply chain and contracting companies are grabbing the work with both hands. Rough necking is quite applicable to wind installation etc.
"the sell-me-all-you-have state"?? Which one is that?
I meant many supply chain and setup companies for wind power in Texas are working at 100% capacity. Literally having customers say "sell me all of x you can get hold of".
LOLs, thought it was some tag line, like the "Show Me" state.
This is very hard to watch. Not very illuminating. Jumbled sentences from both of them. I don't think it will change many votes. I don't think Trump will actually lose votes this time, but nor will he gain them. It is not the game changer that Trump needs.
If you believe Trafalgar or Rasmussen and IBID/TIPP he does not need a game changer, just not to lose any support tonight
If you believe the poll modellers like The Economist or Nate Silver, he most certainly does need a game changer.
If Nate Silver was right in 2016 Hillary Clinton would have won over 300 EC votes and now be President
How many times.....? Nate Silver's group was 28% right, which was more pro Trump than any of the other groups giving probability predictions for the 2016 election.
Or to put it another way, Biden is in a much better position in the polling than Clinton was 4 years ago and has been for months. If HYUFD really believes Trump should be favorite it's not based on any evidence.
Experience. Few predicted 2016 result.
Experience should teach you not to fall into the normalcy bias mistake. It happened with me in 2019 when I assumed Corbyn would repeat 2015.
The circumstances this time around are vastly, viscerally, different from 2016. The polls don't lie. They didn't in 2019 and they're not in 2020. But it's much more than that. The GOP have distanced themselves from their President. They know they've lost.
And lost big.
I'm going to use 538 and compare Trump's popular vote forecast lead with that of the Republican candidate in the closest Senate races. IA Trump +0.3 GOP -1.0 GA Trump 0.0 GOP +2.6 NC Trump -2.3 GOP -2.9 MT Trump +10.2 GOP +3.0 ME Trump -12.1 GOP -3.0 KS Trump +10.6 GOP +4.9 SC Trump +7.9 GOP +5.2 AZ Trump -2.9 GOP -6.0 AL Trump +19.2 GOP +6.2 AK Trump +7.4 GOP +6.3 MI Trump -7.9 GOP -6.4 CO Trump -11.7 GOP -7.7 TX Trump +2.1 GOP +8.1 MS Trump +13.2 GOP +9.1 MN Trump -7.7 GOP -12.0 KY Trump +19.1 GOP +13.4 ---- Mean Trump +2.8 GOP +1.2
I don't want this to be true, but Trump still looks like he is an electoral asset for the Republicans. I want American voters to judge him so badly that he drags the whole GOP down with him. But the numbers don't show that story.
Otherwise Republican Senate candidates should be outperforming Trump.
Trump won the biggest electoral college victory for the Republicans since Bush Snr in 1988 and he won Wisconsin for the first time for a Republican presidential candidate since Reagan in 1984, in the rustbelt he is an electoral asset for the GOP compared to a generic Republican, in California he certainly is not (Hillary won California by an even bigger percentage than Obama did in 2008 or 2012 for example) but it is the former he needs for EC victory, he can afford to lose California heavily and the popular vote
There are only three Midwest states in the 16 that I looked at and Trump's advantage over the GOP was smaller in those (+1.0) than in the set as a whole (+1.6).
In Iowa Trump did better than the GOP candidate, in Michigan fractionally worse (though Trafalgar suggest the GOP will win both the Michigan presidential and Senate race) you provided no data for Wisconsin or Pennsylvania in the rustbelt both of which Trump won for the first time for a Republican since the 1980s and Trump won Ohio by more than even George W Bush did too
HYUFD - please don't reply to this post with Trafalgar did best last time because that is not going to be the question.
Do you believe Trafalgar is a pollster or pundit? I genuinely don't know, but @rcs1000 and @Alistair have both posted evidence that Trafalgar is not a pollster but a pundit. They may well be a very good pundit.
If Trafalgar is a pundit it should not be posting spoof polls. If it is a pollster how do you respond to @rcs1000 and @Alistair?
If Trump wins the EC again Trafalgar will definitely be a pollster and a goldstandard one at that, if Trump loses the EC it will just be a pundit, simple really!
Why would Trump winning or losing make them a pollster or not?
They are either engaging in legitimate polling or they are not.
If they get the correct result obviously a legitimate pollster, the whole point of polls is to forecast, correctly, election results and the views of the public otherwise they are worthless
There is a bet on the throw of an unbiased six-sided die. If it doesn't come with a six, you get evens. A good value bet - yes? You take it.
Someone in the crowd, - let's call them Trafalgar - says "It's going to be a six!" The die is thrown. It comes up six. You lose.
Four years later, a similar bet is offered. Evens that it won't be a six. Analysis shows that that the chances that is won't be a six are 5/6 so evens is still a value bet.
But someone on a blog points out that Trafalgar got it right last time and is still saying it will be a six. Do you listen to them or rely on the analysis?
Barnesian nails it
I'd suggest the difference is that you don't know if the die is weighted. You couldn't work it out last time and you are not so sure this time.
So Evens vs 5/6 might not be so great
You are stretching massively - Barnesian made it clear that it is an unbiased six-sided die.
Plus last time Trafalgar shouted "it will be a six" repeatedly and were generally wrong. They hit a six in a state and then are perceived as a sage by ignoring all the times it wasn't a six elsewhere.
Does anyone have a view as to medium-term GBP value post Covid-19 assuming a full FTA Brexit deal?
My thinking is GBP/EUR approaching 1.25 and GBP/UDS flirting with 1.40 but others may have better insight.
I think sterling and the UK market loves any sort of deal at this point. Even if it's suboptimal - and Boris is good at putting lipstick on a pig. Frost/The Gov'ts behaviour I can recognise as that of a party in a somewhat weak position who are pushing as hard as they can to get the best deal possible. I'm quietly optimistic about prospects for a deal right now.
Yes, I expect a disproportionate uplift in sterling because it's the uncertainty that's killing it at present.
Mind you, if a vaccine is found and the new FTA beds-in well I'm not sure how much a stronger sterling will really help us next year if we are trying to climb out of a recession.
Perhaps a nice problem to have though. I'm buying both UK and US funds in my stocks & shares ISA - I think both are underpriced.
Couple of cutting edge thriller tips from me. Ruth Rendell. Barbara Vine.
Thanks - which particular books from those two authors?
Please try Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter.
Yes, I will.
My 2 are actually the same author. Rendell writes under Vine for her deeper 1st person narrative psychologicals.
What I like is the deceptively skillful prose and story telling. The horror creeps up on you without you noticing and you often end up relating to the deranged protagonist because she makes the weird seem oddly rational.
Also many are set in my part of London and you can read one in a couple of days.
Also "Winterwood" by Patrick McCabe. A creepy masterpiece that really sticks with you:
In one bank, the chap who came with a trolley to take away/replace dead PCs was the "Vice President of Desktop Support Operations". Really.
To make it perfect, they had taken away his two helper monkeys - and given hime the title. No more money.....
I have been offered a job which would have made me a Director. With no-one reporting to me (architecture role).
Many years ago, my first job was working in a 'Department of Corporate Operations', which was basically a trouble-shooting/analysis group reporting to the Finance Director. (An interesting job, because we got to do lots of different things). After I'd been there about a year, they wanted to put our salaries up, but we'd hit the maximum salary available for staff who weren't managers - this was before Thatcher got rid of all that them-and-us nonsense. So it was proposed that we were all promoted to be managers, until someone pointed out that we didn't actually manage anything or anyone.
So I was promoted to be a 'Corporate Operative'. Not many people can claim that.
So you were Chiwetel Ejiofor?
The Operative : You know, in certain older civilized cultures, when men failed as entirely as you have, they would throw themselves on their swords. Dr. Mathias : Well, unfortunately, I forgot to bring a sword.
[the Operative pulls out his sword]
*giggles*
Never mind non-manager managers, the one that really makes me laugh are non-director directors. Have seen (and worked for) several companies who get a bit giddy with the job titles and end up with Directors as subordinates of Directors. Only the guy at the top sits on the board and has the actual responsibility, the others just sound a bit daft.
Yes - when I was offered a banking "Director" level job with no reports, I was thinking this -
It's like the VP title in US banks.
I have no idea what my job title currently is. Yes I am a Company Director of my own business. For my major client? I am them in the UK, so call me what you like - stepping off the corporate ladder where people get antsy about titles was part of the reason for going self employed.
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
250,000 thousand jobs and 4,600 companies depend on oil and gas in Houston alone.
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
Top ten states by oil production
Texas (1,609,075) North Dakota (461,531) New Mexico (248,958) Oklahoma (200,685) Colorado (177,817) Alaska (174,800) California (169,166) Wyoming (87,955) Louisiana (48,841) Utah (37,063)
Fracking is very big in Pennsylvania. That's why Trump was in Eerie with the big screen showing Biden and Harris pledging to ban it.
And of course they have Annacott Steel.....
Fracking isn't a one way issue though. It is, of course extremely popular with those who work in it. Less so, with the many more who live near it. It may turn out to be a net neutral.
Couple of cutting edge thriller tips from me. Ruth Rendell. Barbara Vine.
Thanks - which particular books from those two authors?
Please try Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter.
Yes, I will.
My 2 are actually the same author. Rendell writes under Vine for her deeper 1st person narrative psychologicals.
What I like is the deceptively skillful prose and story telling. The horror creeps up on you without you noticing and you often end up relating to the deranged protagonist because she makes the weird seem oddly rational.
Also many are set in my part of London and you can read one in a couple of days.
I used to be very keen on Rendell/Vine, read them all I think (and there aint going to be any more obvs, unless some ghastly ghostwriting moneymaking thing happens). I have to say latterly I went off the Vine books a bit; there seemed to me to be a misanthropic, contemptuous tinge, some of it directed at people at the bottom of the pecking order. Also her ornate character names got a bit irritating.
Also, we're in the UK, it's Director of Operations, not Vice President of Operations.
Were we conquered by Les États Unis and nobody told me?
I love the way American companies do that. My friend who worked for an American bank once got arrested by Japanese police after throwing an egg at the nationalist sound truck outside his flat, which was opposite the Russian embassy. At one point his situation was looking pretty grim but their attitude changed when he whipped out is business card which would have said something like "$FAMOUS_BANK, Vice President (derivatives desk database backup tape archive management operations)".
Lol. A little standalone DLT drive on his desk to tape wrangle daily, probably, genuinely housed in a basement? VP, indeed!
Being on the systems admin side of the floor, I tend to be an occasional sellotape and string scripter rather than a serious coder using whatever language happens to be to hand for a few well chosen ines. However, one of the longest and most destruction tested scripts I ever produced was to correct and prompt men in vans and anticipate the multiple ways they could foul up ejecting tapes from different models of tape library. Fun times.
In one bank, the chap who came with a trolley to take away/replace dead PCs was the "Vice President of Desktop Support Operations". Really.
To make it perfect, they had taken away his two helper monkeys - and given hime the title. No more money.....
I have been offered a job which would have made me a Director. With no-one reporting to me (architecture role).
This is very hard to watch. Not very illuminating. Jumbled sentences from both of them. I don't think it will change many votes. I don't think Trump will actually lose votes this time, but nor will he gain them. It is not the game changer that Trump needs.
If you believe Trafalgar or Rasmussen and IBID/TIPP he does not need a game changer, just not to lose any support tonight
If you believe the poll modellers like The Economist or Nate Silver, he most certainly does need a game changer.
If Nate Silver was right in 2016 Hillary Clinton would have won over 300 EC votes and now be President
How many times.....? Nate Silver's group was 28% right, which was more pro Trump than any of the other groups giving probability predictions for the 2016 election.
Or to put it another way, Biden is in a much better position in the polling than Clinton was 4 years ago and has been for months. If HYUFD really believes Trump should be favorite it's not based on any evidence.
Experience. Few predicted 2016 result.
Experience should teach you not to fall into the normalcy bias mistake. It happened with me in 2019 when I assumed Corbyn would repeat 2015.
The circumstances this time around are vastly, viscerally, different from 2016. The polls don't lie. They didn't in 2019 and they're not in 2020. But it's much more than that. The GOP have distanced themselves from their President. They know they've lost.
And lost big.
I'm going to use 538 and compare Trump's popular vote forecast lead with that of the Republican candidate in the closest Senate races. IA Trump +0.3 GOP -1.0 GA Trump 0.0 GOP +2.6 NC Trump -2.3 GOP -2.9 MT Trump +10.2 GOP +3.0 ME Trump -12.1 GOP -3.0 KS Trump +10.6 GOP +4.9 SC Trump +7.9 GOP +5.2 AZ Trump -2.9 GOP -6.0 AL Trump +19.2 GOP +6.2 AK Trump +7.4 GOP +6.3 MI Trump -7.9 GOP -6.4 CO Trump -11.7 GOP -7.7 TX Trump +2.1 GOP +8.1 MS Trump +13.2 GOP +9.1 MN Trump -7.7 GOP -12.0 KY Trump +19.1 GOP +13.4 ---- Mean Trump +2.8 GOP +1.2
I don't want this to be true, but Trump still looks like he is an electoral asset for the Republicans. I want American voters to judge him so badly that he drags the whole GOP down with him. But the numbers don't show that story.
Otherwise Republican Senate candidates should be outperforming Trump.
Trump won the biggest electoral college victory for the Republicans since Bush Snr in 1988 and he won Wisconsin for the first time for a Republican presidential candidate since Reagan in 1984, in the rustbelt he is an electoral asset for the GOP compared to a generic Republican, in California he certainly is not (Hillary won California by an even bigger percentage than Obama did in 2008 or 2012 for example) but it is the former he needs for EC victory, he can afford to lose California heavily and the popular vote
There are only three Midwest states in the 16 that I looked at and Trump's advantage over the GOP was smaller in those (+1.0) than in the set as a whole (+1.6).
In Iowa Trump did better than the GOP candidate, in Michigan fractionally worse (though Trafalgar suggest the GOP will win both the Michigan presidential and Senate race) you provided no data for Wisconsin or Pennsylvania in the rustbelt both of which Trump won for the first time for a Republican since the 1980s and Trump won Ohio by more than even George W Bush did too
HYUFD - please don't reply to this post with Trafalgar did best last time because that is not going to be the question.
Do you believe Trafalgar is a pollster or pundit? I genuinely don't know, but @rcs1000 and @Alistair have both posted evidence that Trafalgar is not a pollster but a pundit. They may well be a very good pundit.
If Trafalgar is a pundit it should not be posting spoof polls. If it is a pollster how do you respond to @rcs1000 and @Alistair?
If Trump wins the EC again Trafalgar will definitely be a pollster and a goldstandard one at that, if Trump loses the EC it will just be a pundit, simple really!
Why would Trump winning or losing make them a pollster or not?
They are either engaging in legitimate polling or they are not.
If they get the correct result obviously a legitimate pollster, the whole point of polls is to forecast, correctly, election results and the views of the public otherwise they are worthless
There is a bet on the throw of an unbiased six-sided die. If it doesn't come with a six, you get evens. A good value bet - yes? You take it.
Someone in the crowd, - let's call them Trafalgar - says "It's going to be a six!" The die is thrown. It comes up six. You lose.
Four years later, a similar bet is offered. Evens that it won't be a six. Analysis shows that that the chances that is won't be a six are 5/6 so evens is still a value bet.
But someone on a blog points out that Trafalgar got it right last time and is still saying it will be a six. Do you listen to them or rely on the analysis?
Barnesian nails it
I'd suggest the difference is that you don't know if the die is weighted. You couldn't work it out last time and you are not so sure this time.
So Evens vs 5/6 might not be so great
You are stretching massively - Barnesian made it clear that it is an unbiased six-sided die.
Plus last time Trafalgar shouted "it will be a six" repeatedly and were generally wrong. They hit a six in a state and then are perceived as a sage by ignoring all the times it wasn't a six elsewhere.
Reminds me of a telephone tipster scam that I thought of years ago but never implemented. You get a bunch of people (say 80) to call a number for a racing tip. You pick , say, a 8 runner race where there ideally is no clear favourite. You split the 80 callers into 8 groups of 10 and give each group a different tip so that you have covered the field. You then start charging the 10 who were on the winner for future tips cus they think you are a genius.
Well after a quarter of an hour of free practice, the F1 cars are already more than half a minute faster than your 996!
😡😡😡😡
I've got a 991.2 GT3 Cup now so if covid ever ends I'll go back there and smash it.
Lewis in the ‘teens already, and on the hard tyres. They’ll be close to 70s laps by tomorrow afternoon! You bought a Cup car, you utter madman?
There are teams going bust all over Europe, they will never be this cheap again. Mine is a LHD 2018 Benelux Cup car. 40 hrs on the motor and more importantly 7hrs on the transmission since rebuild. There is a bloke on the Swiss Porsche FB group who reckons there is a way to register cars with motorsport VINs in Lichtenstein for the street...
@HYUFD - I really can't believe you are posting these posts. Firemen put out fires, train drivers drive trains and pollsters carry out polls.
If you don't drive a train you are not a train driver. Same goes for polls
I do struggle a bit with the 'probablistic' thing when it comes to Presidential elections. Its not like rolling a over and over again because its one roll every four years and the dice is a radically different shape every time. What does it really mean to say Clinton would have won 70% of the time in 2016, that dice will never be rolled again. So any result that turns up the maths guys can say, well we never said that was impossible just unlikely. Silver talks about this stuff himself in The Signal and the Noise, how impossible it is to call the path of hurricanes etc. Having said that I would rather tell the time with a clock that was always wrong by say10 minutes slow or 10 minutes fast rather than a stopped one that was precisely right twice a day.
Ah yes, this has been discussed in many universities over the last 100+ years. You are using the frequentist approach to probability, which doesn't work well in this kind of scenario. Bayesian and De Fenetti probability works much better, but I don't have time to discuss the differences now.
I get the general principles of the Bayesian thing, priors etc, that is Silvers big driver too, but on here everyone hits HYFUD with the dice analogy and I just think that's kind of the wrong metaphor.
I have had all kinds of problems with the Monty Hall Goats thing too btw, so free tutorials always welcome
What would be interesting, and I don't know whether it's been done or not, would be to re-run the 538 predictions in 2016, but with modifications to opinion polls for the undersampling of High School or less voters.
That way you'd have an estimate of how wrong the prediction was for that reason.
One of the problems I have with probabilistic forecasts is that I can't help but reduce them to a deterministic forecast with a certainty attached. But they have a lot more information than that.
They show where that uncertainty is, and what differences in the detail have the most impact on the overall result.
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
Indeed. The market has shifted dramatically from fossil fuels - and within five years, renewables will produce more energy globally than the next single largest source, coal. This article is largely about solar, which will shortly overtake wind in terms of global installed capacity, but much the same arguments apply. https://reneweconomy.com.au/solar-power-is-now-cheapest-electricity-in-history-says-iea-39195/
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
250,000 thousand jobs and 4,600 companies depend on oil and gas in Houston alone.
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
250,000 thousand jobs and 4,600 companies depend on oil and gas in Houston alone.
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
Yes - and with a crashed oil price they are in the doldrums.
Wind power, on the other hand, is in the sell-me-all-you-have state. Firms that do the work are booked out.
Alot of the supply chain and contracting companies are grabbing the work with both hands. Rough necking is quite applicable to wind installation etc.
"the sell-me-all-you-have state"?? Which one is that?
I meant many supply chain and setup companies for wind power in Texas are working at 100% capacity. Literally having customers say "sell me all of x you can get hold of".
Wind power is the future.
It is cheaper now, without subsidies to build and maintain wind turbines than it is to dig out and burn coal.
Plus wind is getting more and more economical annually as turbines become bigger and more efficient.
The tidal/sea current version is of interest - the one where turbines are mounted on pylons off the sea bed. This has several interesting features -
- out of the wave action zone. This is a killer for ocean engineering - out of the bottom zone. Another killer - debris from all but pure rock sea bed is a serious problem. - continuous/very predictable - power density - water moving represents vast amounts of energy. - scalable. You can put in one turbine and steadily scale to 1000. The problem with the tidal pond stuff is "first you invest 10 billion" - planning. Much easier to get planning for something that is sub-surface - should follow the offshore wind process, largely.
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
Hey man, you think Biden might win it?!! What about the singing canary?
He doesn't believe anything communicated via Twitter...
I read somewhere that the US is looking at positive GDP growth for 2020??
That can't be right, can it?
Probably not:
According to the most recent forecast released at the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting on Sept. 16, 2020, U.S. GDP growth is expected to contract by 3.7% in 2020. It may rebound up to a 4.0% growth rate in 2021. Growth could slow to 3.0% in 2022, and 2.5% in 2023.4
This is very hard to watch. Not very illuminating. Jumbled sentences from both of them. I don't think it will change many votes. I don't think Trump will actually lose votes this time, but nor will he gain them. It is not the game changer that Trump needs.
If you believe Trafalgar or Rasmussen and IBID/TIPP he does not need a game changer, just not to lose any support tonight
If you believe the poll modellers like The Economist or Nate Silver, he most certainly does need a game changer.
If Nate Silver was right in 2016 Hillary Clinton would have won over 300 EC votes and now be President
How many times.....? Nate Silver's group was 28% right, which was more pro Trump than any of the other groups giving probability predictions for the 2016 election.
Or to put it another way, Biden is in a much better position in the polling than Clinton was 4 years ago and has been for months. If HYUFD really believes Trump should be favorite it's not based on any evidence.
Experience. Few predicted 2016 result.
Experience should teach you not to fall into the normalcy bias mistake. It happened with me in 2019 when I assumed Corbyn would repeat 2015.
The circumstances this time around are vastly, viscerally, different from 2016. The polls don't lie. They didn't in 2019 and they're not in 2020. But it's much more than that. The GOP have distanced themselves from their President. They know they've lost.
And lost big.
I'm going to use 538 and compare Trump's popular vote forecast lead with that of the Republican candidate in the closest Senate races. IA Trump +0.3 GOP -1.0 GA Trump 0.0 GOP +2.6 NC Trump -2.3 GOP -2.9 MT Trump +10.2 GOP +3.0 ME Trump -12.1 GOP -3.0 KS Trump +10.6 GOP +4.9 SC Trump +7.9 GOP +5.2 AZ Trump -2.9 GOP -6.0 AL Trump +19.2 GOP +6.2 AK Trump +7.4 GOP +6.3 MI Trump -7.9 GOP -6.4 CO Trump -11.7 GOP -7.7 TX Trump +2.1 GOP +8.1 MS Trump +13.2 GOP +9.1 MN Trump -7.7 GOP -12.0 KY Trump +19.1 GOP +13.4 ---- Mean Trump +2.8 GOP +1.2
I don't want this to be true, but Trump still looks like he is an electoral asset for the Republicans. I want American voters to judge him so badly that he drags the whole GOP down with him. But the numbers don't show that story.
Otherwise Republican Senate candidates should be outperforming Trump.
Trump won the biggest electoral college victory for the Republicans since Bush Snr in 1988 and he won Wisconsin for the first time for a Republican presidential candidate since Reagan in 1984, in the rustbelt he is an electoral asset for the GOP compared to a generic Republican, in California he certainly is not (Hillary won California by an even bigger percentage than Obama did in 2008 or 2012 for example) but it is the former he needs for EC victory, he can afford to lose California heavily and the popular vote
There are only three Midwest states in the 16 that I looked at and Trump's advantage over the GOP was smaller in those (+1.0) than in the set as a whole (+1.6).
In Iowa Trump did better than the GOP candidate, in Michigan fractionally worse (though Trafalgar suggest the GOP will win both the Michigan presidential and Senate race) you provided no data for Wisconsin or Pennsylvania in the rustbelt both of which Trump won for the first time for a Republican since the 1980s and Trump won Ohio by more than even George W Bush did too
HYUFD - please don't reply to this post with Trafalgar did best last time because that is not going to be the question.
Do you believe Trafalgar is a pollster or pundit? I genuinely don't know, but @rcs1000 and @Alistair have both posted evidence that Trafalgar is not a pollster but a pundit. They may well be a very good pundit.
If Trafalgar is a pundit it should not be posting spoof polls. If it is a pollster how do you respond to @rcs1000 and @Alistair?
If Trump wins the EC again Trafalgar will definitely be a pollster and a goldstandard one at that, if Trump loses the EC it will just be a pundit, simple really!
Why would Trump winning or losing make them a pollster or not?
They are either engaging in legitimate polling or they are not.
If they get the correct result obviously a legitimate pollster, the whole point of polls is to forecast, correctly, election results and the views of the public otherwise they are worthless
There is a bet on the throw of an unbiased six-sided die. If it doesn't come with a six, you get evens. A good value bet - yes? You take it.
Someone in the crowd, - let's call them Trafalgar - says "It's going to be a six!" The die is thrown. It comes up six. You lose.
Four years later, a similar bet is offered. Evens that it won't be a six. Analysis shows that that the chances that is won't be a six are 5/6 so evens is still a value bet.
But someone on a blog points out that Trafalgar got it right last time and is still saying it will be a six. Do you listen to them or rely on the analysis?
Barnesian nails it
I'd suggest the difference is that you don't know if the die is weighted. You couldn't work it out last time and you are not so sure this time.
So Evens vs 5/6 might not be so great
You are stretching massively - Barnesian made it clear that it is an unbiased six-sided die.
Plus last time Trafalgar shouted "it will be a six" repeatedly and were generally wrong. They hit a six in a state and then are perceived as a sage by ignoring all the times it wasn't a six elsewhere.
Reminds me of a telephone tipster scam that I thought of years ago but never implemented. You get a bunch of people (say 80) to call a number for a racing tip. You pick , say, a 8 runner race where there ideally is no clear favourite. You split the 80 callers into 8 groups of 10 and give each group a different tip so that you have covered the field. You then start charging the 10 who were on the winner for future tips cus they think you are a genius.
That’s similar to what Derren Brown did for a show “The System” a few years back. He gave thousands of people random racing tips, and a handful of them ended up with half a dozen winners in a row and thought he was a genius tipster.
@HYUFD - I really can't believe you are posting these posts. Firemen put out fires, train drivers drive trains and pollsters carry out polls.
If you don't drive a train you are not a train driver. Same goes for polls
I do struggle a bit with the 'probablistic' thing when it comes to Presidential elections. Its not like rolling a over and over again because its one roll every four years and the dice is a radically different shape every time. What does it really mean to say Clinton would have won 70% of the time in 2016, that dice will never be rolled again. So any result that turns up the maths guys can say, well we never said that was impossible just unlikely. Silver talks about this stuff himself in The Signal and the Noise, how impossible it is to call the path of hurricanes etc. Having said that I would rather tell the time with a clock that was always wrong by say10 minutes slow or 10 minutes fast rather than a stopped one that was precisely right twice a day.
Ah yes, this has been discussed in many universities over the last 100+ years. You are using the frequentist approach to probability, which doesn't work well in this kind of scenario. Bayesian and De Fenetti probability works much better, but I don't have time to discuss the differences now.
I get the general principles of the Bayesian thing, priors etc, that is Silvers big driver too, but on here everyone hits HYFUD with the dice analogy and I just think that's kind of the wrong metaphor.
I have had all kinds of problems with the Monty Hall Goats thing too btw, so free tutorials always welcome
What would be interesting, and I don't know whether it's been done or not, would be to re-run the 538 predictions in 2016, but with modifications to opinion polls for the undersampling of High School or less voters.
That way you'd have an estimate of how wrong the prediction was for that reason.
One of the problems I have with probabilistic forecasts is that I can't help but reduce them to a deterministic forecast with a certainty attached. But they have a lot more information than that.
They show where that uncertainty is, and what differences in the detail have the most impact on the overall result.
I was wondering something sort of similar - might be a dumb question - but could the pollsters apply their 2016 weighting methodology to the current results they are seeing and show what the old methodology would have been saying now in terms of predicted results? would be interesting to see how much their changes have impacted the results they are showing
While I do not agree with Nicola over independence her speech just now demonstrates just why she is so popular as she outlines her 5 tier system recognising one fit does not suit all and emphasising she is trying to balance the health v wealth issue
She does not rule out a total lockdown but is in many ways mirroring England, but she is in a league of her own in promoting her government and taking the people with her
She says Scotland is not back at square one and they have more tools in the box to mitigate damage, and went onto say there are indications the level of infections are slowing
She does have this natural ability to have a social conscience but also is very pro business and I recognise that quality in her
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
250,000 thousand jobs and 4,600 companies depend on oil and gas in Houston alone.
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
250,000 thousand jobs and 4,600 companies depend on oil and gas in Houston alone.
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
Yes - and with a crashed oil price they are in the doldrums.
Wind power, on the other hand, is in the sell-me-all-you-have state. Firms that do the work are booked out.
Alot of the supply chain and contracting companies are grabbing the work with both hands. Rough necking is quite applicable to wind installation etc.
"the sell-me-all-you-have state"?? Which one is that?
I meant many supply chain and setup companies for wind power in Texas are working at 100% capacity. Literally having customers say "sell me all of x you can get hold of".
Wind power is the future.
It is cheaper now, without subsidies to build and maintain wind turbines than it is to dig out and burn coal.
Plus wind is getting more and more economical annually as turbines become bigger and more efficient.
The future is fusion. Breakthroughs in superconducting magnet technology allow reactors to contain the superhot , super condensed plasma with lower energy input.
Its really not that far away, now, I think. And that the good lord for that.
@HYUFD - I really can't believe you are posting these posts. Firemen put out fires, train drivers drive trains and pollsters carry out polls.
If you don't drive a train you are not a train driver. Same goes for polls
I do struggle a bit with the 'probablistic' thing when it comes to Presidential elections. Its not like rolling a over and over again because its one roll every four years and the dice is a radically different shape every time. What does it really mean to say Clinton would have won 70% of the time in 2016, that dice will never be rolled again. So any result that turns up the maths guys can say, well we never said that was impossible just unlikely. Silver talks about this stuff himself in The Signal and the Noise, how impossible it is to call the path of hurricanes etc. Having said that I would rather tell the time with a clock that was always wrong by say10 minutes slow or 10 minutes fast rather than a stopped one that was precisely right twice a day.
Ah yes, this has been discussed in many universities over the last 100+ years. You are using the frequentist approach to probability, which doesn't work well in this kind of scenario. Bayesian and De Fenetti probability works much better, but I don't have time to discuss the differences now.
I get the general principles of the Bayesian thing, priors etc, that is Silvers big driver too, but on here everyone hits HYFUD with the dice analogy and I just think that's kind of the wrong metaphor.
I have had all kinds of problems with the Monty Hall Goats thing too btw, so free tutorials always welcome
What would be interesting, and I don't know whether it's been done or not, would be to re-run the 538 predictions in 2016, but with modifications to opinion polls for the undersampling of High School or less voters.
That way you'd have an estimate of how wrong the prediction was for that reason.
One of the problems I have with probabilistic forecasts is that I can't help but reduce them to a deterministic forecast with a certainty attached. But they have a lot more information than that.
They show where that uncertainty is, and what differences in the detail have the most impact on the overall result.
Indeed, most models should not be used for prediction, but to learn more about the system and its most critical parts.
I read somewhere that the US is looking at positive GDP growth for 2020??
That can't be right, can it?
Probably not:
According to the most recent forecast released at the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting on Sept. 16, 2020, U.S. GDP growth is expected to contract by 3.7% in 2020. It may rebound up to a 4.0% growth rate in 2021. Growth could slow to 3.0% in 2022, and 2.5% in 2023.4
Does anyone have a view as to medium-term GBP value post Covid-19 assuming a full FTA Brexit deal?
My thinking is GBP/EUR approaching 1.25 and GBP/UDS flirting with 1.40 but others may have better insight.
GBPEUR fell to 1.20 in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote, when the assumption of most was a very close relationship or even that Brexit might not happen. When May signalled single market and customs union exit in late 2016 it fell to around 1.10. We are now hoping for an FTA even less advantageous than May's proposals. On that basis the current 1.10 level doesn't look absurd. If we assume that builds in some no deal premium then there is some room for upside, so I could see 1.15 or maybe a bit above once a deal is done. I don't think the market believes there will really be no deal. We were at 1.20 in February but that was post-election euphoria, and the govt doubling down on a really minimalist deal combined with the Covid shambles and ballooning borrowing has I think pushed GBP lower and I think some of that is fairly permanent. Meanwhile, market sentiment on EUR has been boosted by Covid since (probably wrongly) people see the recovery plan deal as the start of more effective fiscal risk sharing. Both the UK and EU are expected to more QE so that's probably a wash currency wise. There are certainly some pro-GBP voices in the market, who argue that the Brexit impact is exaggerated and the UK fundamentals are better. They've been saying that since 2016 though, and haven't been right yet.
Coronavirus not among 10 most common causes of death in September - ONS More than a tenth of all deaths in England and nine percent in Wales were caused by the pandemic, according to the data.
@HYUFD - I really can't believe you are posting these posts. Firemen put out fires, train drivers drive trains and pollsters carry out polls.
If you don't drive a train you are not a train driver. Same goes for polls
It seems that if you can imagine the 17:24 to King's Cross arriving in London, then you are a train driver.
I can imagine it arriving but not at the scheduled time.
If you are a surgeon you are paid to heal someone, not to merely carry out an operation.
If you carry out operations and end up making people worse then someone with alternative methods who does heal someone is clearly better.
It is no different with pollsters, they are paid to forecast elections not to simply carry out polls, if one has a better method of doing that than the other clearly it is the best and newspapers often cancel contracts with pollsters who have forecast an election wrong, Murdoch is famous for doing that with his papers as he correctly believes in judging by results
But the better method preferably involves some polling? Or are you not fussed?
I have lived in Havering almost all my life and in that time my address has always contained "Essex", and never London. @Stuartinromford is right, most people moved here from London and don't want London following them. It is though. We are probably going to move out to Non London Essex in the next few years. Our son was born in Broomfield Hospital in Essex but had to go to Queens in Romford after 4 days -the contrast was striking, enough to make me realise I was happier in Essex than London.
Yes, but the irony is that this process will (and already is) make Havering more like the rest of East London
Yeah but if I don't live there anymore I don't care!
EastEnders demographic is Havering although it pretends to be East London. I happen to think this is kind of racist of the BBC, and my guess is that they dont think the rest of the country would believe it if they accurately represented Stratford/Walthamstow
@HYUFD - I really can't believe you are posting these posts. Firemen put out fires, train drivers drive trains and pollsters carry out polls.
If you don't drive a train you are not a train driver. Same goes for polls
I do struggle a bit with the 'probablistic' thing when it comes to Presidential elections. Its not like rolling a over and over again because its one roll every four years and the dice is a radically different shape every time. What does it really mean to say Clinton would have won 70% of the time in 2016, that dice will never be rolled again. So any result that turns up the maths guys can say, well we never said that was impossible just unlikely. Silver talks about this stuff himself in The Signal and the Noise, how impossible it is to call the path of hurricanes etc. Having said that I would rather tell the time with a clock that was always wrong by say10 minutes slow or 10 minutes fast rather than a stopped one that was precisely right twice a day.
Ah yes, this has been discussed in many universities over the last 100+ years. You are using the frequentist approach to probability, which doesn't work well in this kind of scenario. Bayesian and De Fenetti probability works much better, but I don't have time to discuss the differences now.
I get the general principles of the Bayesian thing, priors etc, that is Silvers big driver too, but on here everyone hits HYFUD with the dice analogy and I just think that's kind of the wrong metaphor.
I have had all kinds of problems with the Monty Hall Goats thing too btw, so free tutorials always welcome
What would be interesting, and I don't know whether it's been done or not, would be to re-run the 538 predictions in 2016, but with modifications to opinion polls for the undersampling of High School or less voters.
That way you'd have an estimate of how wrong the prediction was for that reason.
One of the problems I have with probabilistic forecasts is that I can't help but reduce them to a deterministic forecast with a certainty attached. But they have a lot more information than that.
They show where that uncertainty is, and what differences in the detail have the most impact on the overall result.
If you do look at the polling the biggest swing away from Trump such as there is relative to 2016 is with suburban voters and over 65s, Trump still has a pretty big lead with non college educated whites and in rural areas and has even seen a slight swing to him with black and hispanic voters.
That is why I think Biden's best chances of a pick up of a Trump 2016 state are Pennsylvania and Arizona which both contain 1 of the top 10 largest cities by population in the US, Philadephia and Phoenix respectively and their associated suburbs.
Ohio, Iowa, Michigan and Wisconsin and North Carolina do not have an urban area as big or a city in the top 10 largest in the nation.
The election may then come down to Florida and over 65s swinging to Biden (Florida has the highest percentage of over 65s in the US) while its large Cuban American population has swung to Trump
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
250,000 thousand jobs and 4,600 companies depend on oil and gas in Houston alone.
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
250,000 thousand jobs and 4,600 companies depend on oil and gas in Houston alone.
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
Yes - and with a crashed oil price they are in the doldrums.
Wind power, on the other hand, is in the sell-me-all-you-have state. Firms that do the work are booked out.
Alot of the supply chain and contracting companies are grabbing the work with both hands. Rough necking is quite applicable to wind installation etc.
"the sell-me-all-you-have state"?? Which one is that?
I meant many supply chain and setup companies for wind power in Texas are working at 100% capacity. Literally having customers say "sell me all of x you can get hold of".
Wind power is the future.
It is cheaper now, without subsidies to build and maintain wind turbines than it is to dig out and burn coal.
Plus wind is getting more and more economical annually as turbines become bigger and more efficient.
The future is fusion. Breakthroughs in superconducting magnet technology allow reactors to contain the superhot , super condensed plasma with lower energy input.
Its really not that far away, now, I think. And that the good lord for that.
@HYUFD - I really can't believe you are posting these posts. Firemen put out fires, train drivers drive trains and pollsters carry out polls.
If you don't drive a train you are not a train driver. Same goes for polls
I do struggle a bit with the 'probablistic' thing when it comes to Presidential elections. Its not like rolling a over and over again because its one roll every four years and the dice is a radically different shape every time. What does it really mean to say Clinton would have won 70% of the time in 2016, that dice will never be rolled again. So any result that turns up the maths guys can say, well we never said that was impossible just unlikely. Silver talks about this stuff himself in The Signal and the Noise, how impossible it is to call the path of hurricanes etc. Having said that I would rather tell the time with a clock that was always wrong by say10 minutes slow or 10 minutes fast rather than a stopped one that was precisely right twice a day.
Ah yes, this has been discussed in many universities over the last 100+ years. You are using the frequentist approach to probability, which doesn't work well in this kind of scenario. Bayesian and De Fenetti probability works much better, but I don't have time to discuss the differences now.
I get the general principles of the Bayesian thing, priors etc, that is Silvers big driver too, but on here everyone hits HYFUD with the dice analogy and I just think that's kind of the wrong metaphor.
I have had all kinds of problems with the Monty Hall Goats thing too btw, so free tutorials always welcome
I understand the Monty Hall Goats thing each time I read the explanation, and then immediately forget it and have difficulty with it again.
The key thing to remember is that time travel isn't possible.
Future actions can't go back in time and change the probability of your past actions.
Reminds me of a telephone tipster scam that I thought of years ago but never implemented. You get a bunch of people (say 80) to call a number for a racing tip. You pick , say, a 8 runner race where there ideally is no clear favourite. You split the 80 callers into 8 groups of 10 and give each group a different tip so that you have covered the field. You then start charging the 10 who were on the winner for future tips cus they think you are a genius.
I used to work with/for racing tipsters, and there were some of the naughtier ones who did do something along those lines.
This is very hard to watch. Not very illuminating. Jumbled sentences from both of them. I don't think it will change many votes. I don't think Trump will actually lose votes this time, but nor will he gain them. It is not the game changer that Trump needs.
If you believe Trafalgar or Rasmussen and IBID/TIPP he does not need a game changer, just not to lose any support tonight
If you believe the poll modellers like The Economist or Nate Silver, he most certainly does need a game changer.
If Nate Silver was right in 2016 Hillary Clinton would have won over 300 EC votes and now be President
How many times.....? Nate Silver's group was 28% right, which was more pro Trump than any of the other groups giving probability predictions for the 2016 election.
Or to put it another way, Biden is in a much better position in the polling than Clinton was 4 years ago and has been for months. If HYUFD really believes Trump should be favorite it's not based on any evidence.
Experience. Few predicted 2016 result.
Experience should teach you not to fall into the normalcy bias mistake. It happened with me in 2019 when I assumed Corbyn would repeat 2015.
The circumstances this time around are vastly, viscerally, different from 2016. The polls don't lie. They didn't in 2019 and they're not in 2020. But it's much more than that. The GOP have distanced themselves from their President. They know they've lost.
And lost big.
I'm going to use 538 and compare Trump's popular vote forecast lead with that of the Republican candidate in the closest Senate races. IA Trump +0.3 GOP -1.0 GA Trump 0.0 GOP +2.6 NC Trump -2.3 GOP -2.9 MT Trump +10.2 GOP +3.0 ME Trump -12.1 GOP -3.0 KS Trump +10.6 GOP +4.9 SC Trump +7.9 GOP +5.2 AZ Trump -2.9 GOP -6.0 AL Trump +19.2 GOP +6.2 AK Trump +7.4 GOP +6.3 MI Trump -7.9 GOP -6.4 CO Trump -11.7 GOP -7.7 TX Trump +2.1 GOP +8.1 MS Trump +13.2 GOP +9.1 MN Trump -7.7 GOP -12.0 KY Trump +19.1 GOP +13.4 ---- Mean Trump +2.8 GOP +1.2
I don't want this to be true, but Trump still looks like he is an electoral asset for the Republicans. I want American voters to judge him so badly that he drags the whole GOP down with him. But the numbers don't show that story.
Otherwise Republican Senate candidates should be outperforming Trump.
Trump won the biggest electoral college victory for the Republicans since Bush Snr in 1988 and he won Wisconsin for the first time for a Republican presidential candidate since Reagan in 1984, in the rustbelt he is an electoral asset for the GOP compared to a generic Republican, in California he certainly is not (Hillary won California by an even bigger percentage than Obama did in 2008 or 2012 for example) but it is the former he needs for EC victory, he can afford to lose California heavily and the popular vote
There are only three Midwest states in the 16 that I looked at and Trump's advantage over the GOP was smaller in those (+1.0) than in the set as a whole (+1.6).
In Iowa Trump did better than the GOP candidate, in Michigan fractionally worse (though Trafalgar suggest the GOP will win both the Michigan presidential and Senate race) you provided no data for Wisconsin or Pennsylvania in the rustbelt both of which Trump won for the first time for a Republican since the 1980s and Trump won Ohio by more than even George W Bush did too
HYUFD - please don't reply to this post with Trafalgar did best last time because that is not going to be the question.
Do you believe Trafalgar is a pollster or pundit? I genuinely don't know, but @rcs1000 and @Alistair have both posted evidence that Trafalgar is not a pollster but a pundit. They may well be a very good pundit.
If Trafalgar is a pundit it should not be posting spoof polls. If it is a pollster how do you respond to @rcs1000 and @Alistair?
If Trump wins the EC again Trafalgar will definitely be a pollster and a goldstandard one at that, if Trump loses the EC it will just be a pundit, simple really!
Why would Trump winning or losing make them a pollster or not?
They are either engaging in legitimate polling or they are not.
If they get the correct result obviously a legitimate pollster, the whole point of polls is to forecast, correctly, election results and the views of the public otherwise they are worthless
There is a bet on the throw of an unbiased six-sided die. If it doesn't come with a six, you get evens. A good value bet - yes? You take it.
Someone in the crowd, - let's call them Trafalgar - says "It's going to be a six!" The die is thrown. It comes up six. You lose.
Four years later, a similar bet is offered. Evens that it won't be a six. Analysis shows that that the chances that is won't be a six are 5/6 so evens is still a value bet.
But someone on a blog points out that Trafalgar got it right last time and is still saying it will be a six. Do you listen to them or rely on the analysis?
Barnesian nails it
I'd suggest the difference is that you don't know if the die is weighted. You couldn't work it out last time and you are not so sure this time.
So Evens vs 5/6 might not be so great
You are stretching massively - Barnesian made it clear that it is an unbiased six-sided die.
Plus last time Trafalgar shouted "it will be a six" repeatedly and were generally wrong. They hit a six in a state and then are perceived as a sage by ignoring all the times it wasn't a six elsewhere.
Reminds me of a telephone tipster scam that I thought of years ago but never implemented. You get a bunch of people (say 80) to call a number for a racing tip. You pick , say, a 8 runner race where there ideally is no clear favourite. You split the 80 callers into 8 groups of 10 and give each group a different tip so that you have covered the field. You then start charging the 10 who were on the winner for future tips cus they think you are a genius.
That’s similar to what Derren Brown did for a show “The System” a few years back. He gave thousands of people random racing tips, and a handful of them ended up with half a dozen winners in a row and thought he was a genius tipster.
I thought that's an old one - sending out different tips to cover all the possibilities etc. Heard of it as a postal thing, though.
Come to think of it, email being free would make it easier. You could even auto-generate the emails based on the list of runners in the various races.
Couple of cutting edge thriller tips from me. Ruth Rendell. Barbara Vine.
Thanks - which particular books from those two authors?
Please try Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter.
Yes, I will.
My 2 are actually the same author. Rendell writes under Vine for her deeper 1st person narrative psychologicals.
What I like is the deceptively skillful prose and story telling. The horror creeps up on you without you noticing and you often end up relating to the deranged protagonist because she makes the weird seem oddly rational.
Also many are set in my part of London and you can read one in a couple of days.
I used to be very keen on Rendell/Vine, read them all I think (and there aint going to be any more obvs, unless some ghastly ghostwriting moneymaking thing happens). I have to say latterly I went off the Vine books a bit; there seemed to me to be a misanthropic, contemptuous tinge, some of it directed at people at the bottom of the pecking order. Also her ornate character names got a bit irritating.
I loved Ruth Rendell but I felt she went off the boil with her last few books; I was disappointed with "The Saint Zita Society". "Judgement in Stone" remains my favourite.
The author of 'Slaying Brexit Unicorns' doesn't like the trade deal?! No way!
It's a partisan point, but it's a true one. There are bits of this trade deal that definitely put us behind the EU in terms of trade with Japan. There are bits that look good for us as well. Playing the man not the ball doesn't rebuff the truth of his point, that there are difficulties and detriments to Brexit. You might be better off arguing about the positives; they do exist.
Reminds me of a telephone tipster scam that I thought of years ago but never implemented. You get a bunch of people (say 80) to call a number for a racing tip. You pick , say, a 8 runner race where there ideally is no clear favourite. You split the 80 callers into 8 groups of 10 and give each group a different tip so that you have covered the field. You then start charging the 10 who were on the winner for future tips cus they think you are a genius.
I used to work with/for racing tipsters, and there were some of the naughtier ones who did do something along those lines.
Nice to hear that I`d be amongst the naughtier ones!
Does anyone have a view as to medium-term GBP value post Covid-19 assuming a full FTA Brexit deal?
My thinking is GBP/EUR approaching 1.25 and GBP/UDS flirting with 1.40 but others may have better insight.
The UK economy is fundamentally weak so 1.25/1.40 isn't very likely. Brexit or no brexit we have an unbalanced economy and that's a long term drag on sterling.
Biden won the first debate 60% to 28% for Trump with CNN so while Biden won Trump did better last night, Hillary of course won all 3 debates in 2016 and still lost the election
There is a tendency to state the winner of a debate as your preferred candidate.
That must surely be doubly so if you have already voted for them, which 35% of the electorate - in practice more where the vote in the post - have already done so.
This is very hard to watch. Not very illuminating. Jumbled sentences from both of them. I don't think it will change many votes. I don't think Trump will actually lose votes this time, but nor will he gain them. It is not the game changer that Trump needs.
If you believe Trafalgar or Rasmussen and IBID/TIPP he does not need a game changer, just not to lose any support tonight
If you believe the poll modellers like The Economist or Nate Silver, he most certainly does need a game changer.
If Nate Silver was right in 2016 Hillary Clinton would have won over 300 EC votes and now be President
How many times.....? Nate Silver's group was 28% right, which was more pro Trump than any of the other groups giving probability predictions for the 2016 election.
Or to put it another way, Biden is in a much better position in the polling than Clinton was 4 years ago and has been for months. If HYUFD really believes Trump should be favorite it's not based on any evidence.
Experience. Few predicted 2016 result.
Experience should teach you not to fall into the normalcy bias mistake. It happened with me in 2019 when I assumed Corbyn would repeat 2015.
The circumstances this time around are vastly, viscerally, different from 2016. The polls don't lie. They didn't in 2019 and they're not in 2020. But it's much more than that. The GOP have distanced themselves from their President. They know they've lost.
And lost big.
I'm going to use 538 and compare Trump's popular vote forecast lead with that of the Republican candidate in the closest Senate races. IA Trump +0.3 GOP -1.0 GA Trump 0.0 GOP +2.6 NC Trump -2.3 GOP -2.9 MT Trump +10.2 GOP +3.0 ME Trump -12.1 GOP -3.0 KS Trump +10.6 GOP +4.9 SC Trump +7.9 GOP +5.2 AZ Trump -2.9 GOP -6.0 AL Trump +19.2 GOP +6.2 AK Trump +7.4 GOP +6.3 MI Trump -7.9 GOP -6.4 CO Trump -11.7 GOP -7.7 TX Trump +2.1 GOP +8.1 MS Trump +13.2 GOP +9.1 MN Trump -7.7 GOP -12.0 KY Trump +19.1 GOP +13.4 ---- Mean Trump +2.8 GOP +1.2
I don't want this to be true, but Trump still looks like he is an electoral asset for the Republicans. I want American voters to judge him so badly that he drags the whole GOP down with him. But the numbers don't show that story.
Otherwise Republican Senate candidates should be outperforming Trump.
Trump won the biggest electoral college victory for the Republicans since Bush Snr in 1988 and he won Wisconsin for the first time for a Republican presidential candidate since Reagan in 1984, in the rustbelt he is an electoral asset for the GOP compared to a generic Republican, in California he certainly is not (Hillary won California by an even bigger percentage than Obama did in 2008 or 2012 for example) but it is the former he needs for EC victory, he can afford to lose California heavily and the popular vote
There are only three Midwest states in the 16 that I looked at and Trump's advantage over the GOP was smaller in those (+1.0) than in the set as a whole (+1.6).
In Iowa Trump did better than the GOP candidate, in Michigan fractionally worse (though Trafalgar suggest the GOP will win both the Michigan presidential and Senate race) you provided no data for Wisconsin or Pennsylvania in the rustbelt both of which Trump won for the first time for a Republican since the 1980s and Trump won Ohio by more than even George W Bush did too
HYUFD - please don't reply to this post with Trafalgar did best last time because that is not going to be the question.
Do you believe Trafalgar is a pollster or pundit? I genuinely don't know, but @rcs1000 and @Alistair have both posted evidence that Trafalgar is not a pollster but a pundit. They may well be a very good pundit.
If Trafalgar is a pundit it should not be posting spoof polls. If it is a pollster how do you respond to @rcs1000 and @Alistair?
If Trump wins the EC again Trafalgar will definitely be a pollster and a goldstandard one at that, if Trump loses the EC it will just be a pundit, simple really!
Why would Trump winning or losing make them a pollster or not?
They are either engaging in legitimate polling or they are not.
If they get the correct result obviously a legitimate pollster, the whole point of polls is to forecast, correctly, election results and the views of the public otherwise they are worthless
There is a bet on the throw of an unbiased six-sided die. If it doesn't come with a six, you get evens. A good value bet - yes? You take it.
Someone in the crowd, - let's call them Trafalgar - says "It's going to be a six!" The die is thrown. It comes up six. You lose.
Four years later, a similar bet is offered. Evens that it won't be a six. Analysis shows that that the chances that is won't be a six are 5/6 so evens is still a value bet.
But someone on a blog points out that Trafalgar got it right last time and is still saying it will be a six. Do you listen to them or rely on the analysis?
Barnesian nails it
I'd suggest the difference is that you don't know if the die is weighted. You couldn't work it out last time and you are not so sure this time.
So Evens vs 5/6 might not be so great
You are stretching massively - Barnesian made it clear that it is an unbiased six-sided die.
Plus last time Trafalgar shouted "it will be a six" repeatedly and were generally wrong. They hit a six in a state and then are perceived as a sage by ignoring all the times it wasn't a six elsewhere.
Reminds me of a telephone tipster scam that I thought of years ago but never implemented. You get a bunch of people (say 80) to call a number for a racing tip. You pick , say, a 8 runner race where there ideally is no clear favourite. You split the 80 callers into 8 groups of 10 and give each group a different tip so that you have covered the field. You then start charging the 10 who were on the winner for future tips cus they think you are a genius.
That’s similar to what Derren Brown did for a show “The System” a few years back. He gave thousands of people random racing tips, and a handful of them ended up with half a dozen winners in a row and thought he was a genius tipster.
Probably Brown's best show. It has the 10 heads in a row sequence as well.
His decision to make the final race to convince his marks that he was a genius a Novice Hurdles race was utterly brilliant. Of course there were fallers, so of course the person who got given the winning "tip" was even more thoroughly convinced.
The polling saying there's going to be high Trump turnout on the day, isn't this mostly a function of the states that have lowish gross turnouts already.
Below average % of 2016 turnout (35.8%)
*New York State 0% (Safe Dem) Mississippi 4.9% (Solid GOP) Alabama 6.8% (Solid GOP) Oklahoma 11.8% (Solid GOP) West Virginia 13.9% (Solid GOP) New Hampshire 18% (Lean Dem) Kansas 18.9% (Safe GOP) Missouri 20.9% (Probably safe GOP) +Idaho 15% (Solid GOP) Utah 27% (Solid GOP) Wyoming 29.2% (Solid GOP) South Dakota 32.8% (Solid GOP) North Dakota 33.6% (Solid GOP)
+ Probably higher, no data about though
OTOH All the Dem heavy west coast states are almost entirely VBM this year - there's perhaps 15 million Dem heavy leaning ballots to come in California alone.
Haven't analysed it scientifically yet but the general vote in/vote left favours GOP nationwide with the Democrats continuing to mail/drop box their vote in.
This is very hard to watch. Not very illuminating. Jumbled sentences from both of them. I don't think it will change many votes. I don't think Trump will actually lose votes this time, but nor will he gain them. It is not the game changer that Trump needs.
If you believe Trafalgar or Rasmussen and IBID/TIPP he does not need a game changer, just not to lose any support tonight
If you believe the poll modellers like The Economist or Nate Silver, he most certainly does need a game changer.
If Nate Silver was right in 2016 Hillary Clinton would have won over 300 EC votes and now be President
How many times.....? Nate Silver's group was 28% right, which was more pro Trump than any of the other groups giving probability predictions for the 2016 election.
Or to put it another way, Biden is in a much better position in the polling than Clinton was 4 years ago and has been for months. If HYUFD really believes Trump should be favorite it's not based on any evidence.
Experience. Few predicted 2016 result.
Experience should teach you not to fall into the normalcy bias mistake. It happened with me in 2019 when I assumed Corbyn would repeat 2015.
The circumstances this time around are vastly, viscerally, different from 2016. The polls don't lie. They didn't in 2019 and they're not in 2020. But it's much more than that. The GOP have distanced themselves from their President. They know they've lost.
And lost big.
I'm going to use 538 and compare Trump's popular vote forecast lead with that of the Republican candidate in the closest Senate races. IA Trump +0.3 GOP -1.0 GA Trump 0.0 GOP +2.6 NC Trump -2.3 GOP -2.9 MT Trump +10.2 GOP +3.0 ME Trump -12.1 GOP -3.0 KS Trump +10.6 GOP +4.9 SC Trump +7.9 GOP +5.2 AZ Trump -2.9 GOP -6.0 AL Trump +19.2 GOP +6.2 AK Trump +7.4 GOP +6.3 MI Trump -7.9 GOP -6.4 CO Trump -11.7 GOP -7.7 TX Trump +2.1 GOP +8.1 MS Trump +13.2 GOP +9.1 MN Trump -7.7 GOP -12.0 KY Trump +19.1 GOP +13.4 ---- Mean Trump +2.8 GOP +1.2
I don't want this to be true, but Trump still looks like he is an electoral asset for the Republicans. I want American voters to judge him so badly that he drags the whole GOP down with him. But the numbers don't show that story.
Otherwise Republican Senate candidates should be outperforming Trump.
Trump won the biggest electoral college victory for the Republicans since Bush Snr in 1988 and he won Wisconsin for the first time for a Republican presidential candidate since Reagan in 1984, in the rustbelt he is an electoral asset for the GOP compared to a generic Republican, in California he certainly is not (Hillary won California by an even bigger percentage than Obama did in 2008 or 2012 for example) but it is the former he needs for EC victory, he can afford to lose California heavily and the popular vote
There are only three Midwest states in the 16 that I looked at and Trump's advantage over the GOP was smaller in those (+1.0) than in the set as a whole (+1.6).
In Iowa Trump did better than the GOP candidate, in Michigan fractionally worse (though Trafalgar suggest the GOP will win both the Michigan presidential and Senate race) you provided no data for Wisconsin or Pennsylvania in the rustbelt both of which Trump won for the first time for a Republican since the 1980s and Trump won Ohio by more than even George W Bush did too
HYUFD - please don't reply to this post with Trafalgar did best last time because that is not going to be the question.
Do you believe Trafalgar is a pollster or pundit? I genuinely don't know, but @rcs1000 and @Alistair have both posted evidence that Trafalgar is not a pollster but a pundit. They may well be a very good pundit.
If Trafalgar is a pundit it should not be posting spoof polls. If it is a pollster how do you respond to @rcs1000 and @Alistair?
If Trump wins the EC again Trafalgar will definitely be a pollster and a goldstandard one at that, if Trump loses the EC it will just be a pundit, simple really!
Why would Trump winning or losing make them a pollster or not?
They are either engaging in legitimate polling or they are not.
If they get the correct result obviously a legitimate pollster, the whole point of polls is to forecast, correctly, election results and the views of the public otherwise they are worthless
There is a bet on the throw of an unbiased six-sided die. If it doesn't come with a six, you get evens. A good value bet - yes? You take it.
Someone in the crowd, - let's call them Trafalgar - says "It's going to be a six!" The die is thrown. It comes up six. You lose.
Four years later, a similar bet is offered. Evens that it won't be a six. Analysis shows that that the chances that is won't be a six are 5/6 so evens is still a value bet.
But someone on a blog points out that Trafalgar got it right last time and is still saying it will be a six. Do you listen to them or rely on the analysis?
Barnesian nails it
I'd suggest the difference is that you don't know if the die is weighted. You couldn't work it out last time and you are not so sure this time.
So Evens vs 5/6 might not be so great
You are stretching massively - Barnesian made it clear that it is an unbiased six-sided die.
Plus last time Trafalgar shouted "it will be a six" repeatedly and were generally wrong. They hit a six in a state and then are perceived as a sage by ignoring all the times it wasn't a six elsewhere.
And - the clincher - the Trafalgar guy wears a bow tie all the time.
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
250,000 thousand jobs and 4,600 companies depend on oil and gas in Houston alone.
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
250,000 thousand jobs and 4,600 companies depend on oil and gas in Houston alone.
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
Yes - and with a crashed oil price they are in the doldrums.
Wind power, on the other hand, is in the sell-me-all-you-have state. Firms that do the work are booked out.
Alot of the supply chain and contracting companies are grabbing the work with both hands. Rough necking is quite applicable to wind installation etc.
"the sell-me-all-you-have state"?? Which one is that?
I meant many supply chain and setup companies for wind power in Texas are working at 100% capacity. Literally having customers say "sell me all of x you can get hold of".
Wind power is the future.
It is cheaper now, without subsidies to build and maintain wind turbines than it is to dig out and burn coal.
Plus wind is getting more and more economical annually as turbines become bigger and more efficient.
The future is fusion. Breakthroughs in superconducting magnet technology allow reactors to contain the superhot , super condensed plasma with lower energy input.
Its really not that far away, now, I think. And that the good lord for that.
Not far to break even, maybe.
But beyond that - neutron damage has been barely looked at. Yes, walls of liquid lithium sound awesome, but no-one has actually built one.
And there are many other issues. For example, a quench in ITER would mean kilotons of energy looking for a new home...
It's a long long way from breakeven to grid power.
US retailer Gap could close all of its own UK stores, putting thousands of jobs at risk, as it mulls shifting its operations to franchise-only in Europe. It may close all of its shops in the UK, France, Ireland and Italy next summer, the retailer said.
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
250,000 thousand jobs and 4,600 companies depend on oil and gas in Houston alone.
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
250,000 thousand jobs and 4,600 companies depend on oil and gas in Houston alone.
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
Yes - and with a crashed oil price they are in the doldrums.
Wind power, on the other hand, is in the sell-me-all-you-have state. Firms that do the work are booked out.
Alot of the supply chain and contracting companies are grabbing the work with both hands. Rough necking is quite applicable to wind installation etc.
"the sell-me-all-you-have state"?? Which one is that?
I meant many supply chain and setup companies for wind power in Texas are working at 100% capacity. Literally having customers say "sell me all of x you can get hold of".
Wind power is the future.
It is cheaper now, without subsidies to build and maintain wind turbines than it is to dig out and burn coal.
Plus wind is getting more and more economical annually as turbines become bigger and more efficient.
The future is fusion. Breakthroughs in superconducting magnet technology allow reactors to contain the superhot , super condensed plasma with lower energy input.
Its really not that far away, now, I think. And that the good lord for that.
Not far to break even, maybe.
But beyond that - neutron damage has been barely looked at. Yes, walls of liquid lithium sound awesome, but no-one has actually built one.
And there are many other issues. For example, a quench in ITER would mean kilotons of energy looking for a new home...
It's a long long way from breakeven to grid power.
Aneutronic fusion power is being looked at and there are quite a few candidate reactions but the ignition requirements are beyond current science.
One thing that room temperature superconducting doesn't solve is neutron energy release, you can't control neutron flow with magnets.
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
250,000 thousand jobs and 4,600 companies depend on oil and gas in Houston alone.
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
250,000 thousand jobs and 4,600 companies depend on oil and gas in Houston alone.
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
Yes - and with a crashed oil price they are in the doldrums.
Wind power, on the other hand, is in the sell-me-all-you-have state. Firms that do the work are booked out.
Alot of the supply chain and contracting companies are grabbing the work with both hands. Rough necking is quite applicable to wind installation etc.
"the sell-me-all-you-have state"?? Which one is that?
I meant many supply chain and setup companies for wind power in Texas are working at 100% capacity. Literally having customers say "sell me all of x you can get hold of".
Wind power is the future.
It is cheaper now, without subsidies to build and maintain wind turbines than it is to dig out and burn coal.
Plus wind is getting more and more economical annually as turbines become bigger and more efficient.
The future is fusion. Breakthroughs in superconducting magnet technology allow reactors to contain the superhot , super condensed plasma with lower energy input.
Its really not that far away, now, I think. And that the good lord for that.
Not far to break even, maybe.
But beyond that - neutron damage has been barely looked at. Yes, walls of liquid lithium sound awesome, but no-one has actually built one.
And there are many other issues. For example, a quench in ITER would mean kilotons of energy looking for a new home...
It's a long long way from breakeven to grid power.
Fusion is on John Rentoul's list of technology of great promise that are always twenty years away iirc.
This is very hard to watch. Not very illuminating. Jumbled sentences from both of them. I don't think it will change many votes. I don't think Trump will actually lose votes this time, but nor will he gain them. It is not the game changer that Trump needs.
If you believe Trafalgar or Rasmussen and IBID/TIPP he does not need a game changer, just not to lose any support tonight
If you believe the poll modellers like The Economist or Nate Silver, he most certainly does need a game changer.
If Nate Silver was right in 2016 Hillary Clinton would have won over 300 EC votes and now be President
How many times.....? Nate Silver's group was 28% right, which was more pro Trump than any of the other groups giving probability predictions for the 2016 election.
Or to put it another way, Biden is in a much better position in the polling than Clinton was 4 years ago and has been for months. If HYUFD really believes Trump should be favorite it's not based on any evidence.
Experience. Few predicted 2016 result.
Experience should teach you not to fall into the normalcy bias mistake. It happened with me in 2019 when I assumed Corbyn would repeat 2015.
The circumstances this time around are vastly, viscerally, different from 2016. The polls don't lie. They didn't in 2019 and they're not in 2020. But it's much more than that. The GOP have distanced themselves from their President. They know they've lost.
And lost big.
I'm going to use 538 and compare Trump's popular vote forecast lead with that of the Republican candidate in the closest Senate races. IA Trump +0.3 GOP -1.0 GA Trump 0.0 GOP +2.6 NC Trump -2.3 GOP -2.9 MT Trump +10.2 GOP +3.0 ME Trump -12.1 GOP -3.0 KS Trump +10.6 GOP +4.9 SC Trump +7.9 GOP +5.2 AZ Trump -2.9 GOP -6.0 AL Trump +19.2 GOP +6.2 AK Trump +7.4 GOP +6.3 MI Trump -7.9 GOP -6.4 CO Trump -11.7 GOP -7.7 TX Trump +2.1 GOP +8.1 MS Trump +13.2 GOP +9.1 MN Trump -7.7 GOP -12.0 KY Trump +19.1 GOP +13.4 ---- Mean Trump +2.8 GOP +1.2
I don't want this to be true, but Trump still looks like he is an electoral asset for the Republicans. I want American voters to judge him so badly that he drags the whole GOP down with him. But the numbers don't show that story.
Otherwise Republican Senate candidates should be outperforming Trump.
Trump won the biggest electoral college victory for the Republicans since Bush Snr in 1988 and he won Wisconsin for the first time for a Republican presidential candidate since Reagan in 1984, in the rustbelt he is an electoral asset for the GOP compared to a generic Republican, in California he certainly is not (Hillary won California by an even bigger percentage than Obama did in 2008 or 2012 for example) but it is the former he needs for EC victory, he can afford to lose California heavily and the popular vote
There are only three Midwest states in the 16 that I looked at and Trump's advantage over the GOP was smaller in those (+1.0) than in the set as a whole (+1.6).
In Iowa Trump did better than the GOP candidate, in Michigan fractionally worse (though Trafalgar suggest the GOP will win both the Michigan presidential and Senate race) you provided no data for Wisconsin or Pennsylvania in the rustbelt both of which Trump won for the first time for a Republican since the 1980s and Trump won Ohio by more than even George W Bush did too
HYUFD - please don't reply to this post with Trafalgar did best last time because that is not going to be the question.
Do you believe Trafalgar is a pollster or pundit? I genuinely don't know, but @rcs1000 and @Alistair have both posted evidence that Trafalgar is not a pollster but a pundit. They may well be a very good pundit.
If Trafalgar is a pundit it should not be posting spoof polls. If it is a pollster how do you respond to @rcs1000 and @Alistair?
If Trump wins the EC again Trafalgar will definitely be a pollster and a goldstandard one at that, if Trump loses the EC it will just be a pundit, simple really!
Why would Trump winning or losing make them a pollster or not?
They are either engaging in legitimate polling or they are not.
If they get the correct result obviously a legitimate pollster, the whole point of polls is to forecast, correctly, election results and the views of the public otherwise they are worthless
There is a bet on the throw of an unbiased six-sided die. If it doesn't come with a six, you get evens. A good value bet - yes? You take it.
Someone in the crowd, - let's call them Trafalgar - says "It's going to be a six!" The die is thrown. It comes up six. You lose.
Four years later, a similar bet is offered. Evens that it won't be a six. Analysis shows that that the chances that is won't be a six are 5/6 so evens is still a value bet.
But someone on a blog points out that Trafalgar got it right last time and is still saying it will be a six. Do you listen to them or rely on the analysis?
Barnesian nails it
I'd suggest the difference is that you don't know if the die is weighted. You couldn't work it out last time and you are not so sure this time.
So Evens vs 5/6 might not be so great
You are stretching massively - Barnesian made it clear that it is an unbiased six-sided die.
Plus last time Trafalgar shouted "it will be a six" repeatedly and were generally wrong. They hit a six in a state and then are perceived as a sage by ignoring all the times it wasn't a six elsewhere.
Reminds me of a telephone tipster scam that I thought of years ago but never implemented. You get a bunch of people (say 80) to call a number for a racing tip. You pick , say, a 8 runner race where there ideally is no clear favourite. You split the 80 callers into 8 groups of 10 and give each group a different tip so that you have covered the field. You then start charging the 10 who were on the winner for future tips cus they think you are a genius.
That is actually how it's done, I believe. Even better, do a bigger number to start, then do those who you gave the winner to but divide them up too, then REALLY hit on the sample of the sample who you have given 2 winners in a row to. If they were good prices, they will have a lot of faith in you, enough to get an upfront 12 month sub out of in some cases.
This is very hard to watch. Not very illuminating. Jumbled sentences from both of them. I don't think it will change many votes. I don't think Trump will actually lose votes this time, but nor will he gain them. It is not the game changer that Trump needs.
If you believe Trafalgar or Rasmussen and IBID/TIPP he does not need a game changer, just not to lose any support tonight
If you believe the poll modellers like The Economist or Nate Silver, he most certainly does need a game changer.
If Nate Silver was right in 2016 Hillary Clinton would have won over 300 EC votes and now be President
How many times.....? Nate Silver's group was 28% right, which was more pro Trump than any of the other groups giving probability predictions for the 2016 election.
Or to put it another way, Biden is in a much better position in the polling than Clinton was 4 years ago and has been for months. If HYUFD really believes Trump should be favorite it's not based on any evidence.
Experience. Few predicted 2016 result.
Experience should teach you not to fall into the normalcy bias mistake. It happened with me in 2019 when I assumed Corbyn would repeat 2015.
The circumstances this time around are vastly, viscerally, different from 2016. The polls don't lie. They didn't in 2019 and they're not in 2020. But it's much more than that. The GOP have distanced themselves from their President. They know they've lost.
And lost big.
I'm going to use 538 and compare Trump's popular vote forecast lead with that of the Republican candidate in the closest Senate races. IA Trump +0.3 GOP -1.0 GA Trump 0.0 GOP +2.6 NC Trump -2.3 GOP -2.9 MT Trump +10.2 GOP +3.0 ME Trump -12.1 GOP -3.0 KS Trump +10.6 GOP +4.9 SC Trump +7.9 GOP +5.2 AZ Trump -2.9 GOP -6.0 AL Trump +19.2 GOP +6.2 AK Trump +7.4 GOP +6.3 MI Trump -7.9 GOP -6.4 CO Trump -11.7 GOP -7.7 TX Trump +2.1 GOP +8.1 MS Trump +13.2 GOP +9.1 MN Trump -7.7 GOP -12.0 KY Trump +19.1 GOP +13.4 ---- Mean Trump +2.8 GOP +1.2
I don't want this to be true, but Trump still looks like he is an electoral asset for the Republicans. I want American voters to judge him so badly that he drags the whole GOP down with him. But the numbers don't show that story.
Otherwise Republican Senate candidates should be outperforming Trump.
Trump won the biggest electoral college victory for the Republicans since Bush Snr in 1988 and he won Wisconsin for the first time for a Republican presidential candidate since Reagan in 1984, in the rustbelt he is an electoral asset for the GOP compared to a generic Republican, in California he certainly is not (Hillary won California by an even bigger percentage than Obama did in 2008 or 2012 for example) but it is the former he needs for EC victory, he can afford to lose California heavily and the popular vote
There are only three Midwest states in the 16 that I looked at and Trump's advantage over the GOP was smaller in those (+1.0) than in the set as a whole (+1.6).
In Iowa Trump did better than the GOP candidate, in Michigan fractionally worse (though Trafalgar suggest the GOP will win both the Michigan presidential and Senate race) you provided no data for Wisconsin or Pennsylvania in the rustbelt both of which Trump won for the first time for a Republican since the 1980s and Trump won Ohio by more than even George W Bush did too
HYUFD - please don't reply to this post with Trafalgar did best last time because that is not going to be the question.
Do you believe Trafalgar is a pollster or pundit? I genuinely don't know, but @rcs1000 and @Alistair have both posted evidence that Trafalgar is not a pollster but a pundit. They may well be a very good pundit.
If Trafalgar is a pundit it should not be posting spoof polls. If it is a pollster how do you respond to @rcs1000 and @Alistair?
If Trump wins the EC again Trafalgar will definitely be a pollster and a goldstandard one at that, if Trump loses the EC it will just be a pundit, simple really!
Why would Trump winning or losing make them a pollster or not?
They are either engaging in legitimate polling or they are not.
If they get the correct result obviously a legitimate pollster, the whole point of polls is to forecast, correctly, election results and the views of the public otherwise they are worthless
There is a bet on the throw of an unbiased six-sided die. If it doesn't come with a six, you get evens. A good value bet - yes? You take it.
Someone in the crowd, - let's call them Trafalgar - says "It's going to be a six!" The die is thrown. It comes up six. You lose.
Four years later, a similar bet is offered. Evens that it won't be a six. Analysis shows that that the chances that is won't be a six are 5/6 so evens is still a value bet.
But someone on a blog points out that Trafalgar got it right last time and is still saying it will be a six. Do you listen to them or rely on the analysis?
Barnesian nails it
I'd suggest the difference is that you don't know if the die is weighted. You couldn't work it out last time and you are not so sure this time.
So Evens vs 5/6 might not be so great
You are stretching massively - Barnesian made it clear that it is an unbiased six-sided die.
Plus last time Trafalgar shouted "it will be a six" repeatedly and were generally wrong. They hit a six in a state and then are perceived as a sage by ignoring all the times it wasn't a six elsewhere.
Reminds me of a telephone tipster scam that I thought of years ago but never implemented. You get a bunch of people (say 80) to call a number for a racing tip. You pick , say, a 8 runner race where there ideally is no clear favourite. You split the 80 callers into 8 groups of 10 and give each group a different tip so that you have covered the field. You then start charging the 10 who were on the winner for future tips cus they think you are a genius.
That’s similar to what Derren Brown did for a show “The System” a few years back. He gave thousands of people random racing tips, and a handful of them ended up with half a dozen winners in a row and thought he was a genius tipster.
Probably Brown's best show. It has the 10 heads in a row sequence as well.
His decision to make the final race to convince his marks that he was a genius a Novice Hurdles race was utterly brilliant. Of course there were fallers, so of course the person who got given the winning "tip" was even more thoroughly convinced.
Yes, one of his best works. I really loved the “10 Heads” sequence, amazing that no-one had got that on camera previously.
But hold on, this is exactly what Australia has done after they already had community spread and it worked*.
*yes and New Zealand, but Australia is much closer to the UK in terms of international travel, dense cities, and Australia did have community spread going on.
Does anyone have a view as to medium-term GBP value post Covid-19 assuming a full FTA Brexit deal?
My thinking is GBP/EUR approaching 1.25 and GBP/UDS flirting with 1.40 but others may have better insight.
GBPEUR fell to 1.20 in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote, when the assumption of most was a very close relationship or even that Brexit might not happen. When May signalled single market and customs union exit in late 2016 it fell to around 1.10. We are now hoping for an FTA even less advantageous than May's proposals. On that basis the current 1.10 level doesn't look absurd. If we assume that builds in some no deal premium then there is some room for upside, so I could see 1.15 or maybe a bit above once a deal is done. I don't think the market believes there will really be no deal. We were at 1.20 in February but that was post-election euphoria, and the govt doubling down on a really minimalist deal combined with the Covid shambles and ballooning borrowing has I think pushed GBP lower and I think some of that is fairly permanent. Meanwhile, market sentiment on EUR has been boosted by Covid since (probably wrongly) people see the recovery plan deal as the start of more effective fiscal risk sharing. Both the UK and EU are expected to more QE so that's probably a wash currency wise. There are certainly some pro-GBP voices in the market, who argue that the Brexit impact is exaggerated and the UK fundamentals are better. They've been saying that since 2016 though, and haven't been right yet.
Thanks. I agree the scope for improvement in GBP/EUR is more modest. Nevertheless, I think stability in the new trading arrangements in a new treaty and the end of the "ticking clock" will be good for both GBP and EUR.
I don't agree it will stay at 1.10, although maybe 1.25 is a bit too optimistic.
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
250,000 thousand jobs and 4,600 companies depend on oil and gas in Houston alone.
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
250,000 thousand jobs and 4,600 companies depend on oil and gas in Houston alone.
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
Yes - and with a crashed oil price they are in the doldrums.
Wind power, on the other hand, is in the sell-me-all-you-have state. Firms that do the work are booked out.
Alot of the supply chain and contracting companies are grabbing the work with both hands. Rough necking is quite applicable to wind installation etc.
"the sell-me-all-you-have state"?? Which one is that?
I meant many supply chain and setup companies for wind power in Texas are working at 100% capacity. Literally having customers say "sell me all of x you can get hold of".
Wind power is the future.
It is cheaper now, without subsidies to build and maintain wind turbines than it is to dig out and burn coal.
Plus wind is getting more and more economical annually as turbines become bigger and more efficient.
The future is fusion. Breakthroughs in superconducting magnet technology allow reactors to contain the superhot , super condensed plasma with lower energy input.
Its really not that far away, now, I think. And that the good lord for that.
Not far to break even, maybe.
But beyond that - neutron damage has been barely looked at. Yes, walls of liquid lithium sound awesome, but no-one has actually built one.
And there are many other issues. For example, a quench in ITER would mean kilotons of energy looking for a new home...
It's a long long way from breakeven to grid power.
Aneutronic fusion power is being looked at and there are quite a few candidate reactions but the ignition requirements are beyond current science.
One thing that room temperature superconducting doesn't solve is neutron energy release, you can't control neutron flow with magnets.
Yes - light some Boron, get a Nobel, I reckon.
One of the reasons that maxing out a Polywell might be interesting science, if not getting you to a working reactor.
Does anyone have a view as to medium-term GBP value post Covid-19 assuming a full FTA Brexit deal?
My thinking is GBP/EUR approaching 1.25 and GBP/UDS flirting with 1.40 but others may have better insight.
The UK economy is fundamentally weak so 1.25/1.40 isn't very likely. Brexit or no brexit we have an unbalanced economy and that's a long term drag on sterling.
I agree, but shouldn't stability in trading arrangements help and certainty help the economic outlook? We recovered to 1.20/ 1.35 last year with the clear GE result and transition.
Do you think most of the recovery is already priced in expectations of a deal?
US retailer Gap could close all of its own UK stores, putting thousands of jobs at risk, as it mulls shifting its operations to franchise-only in Europe. It may close all of its shops in the UK, France, Ireland and Italy next summer, the retailer said.
My daughters don't like shopping - they much prefer the online picking. Followed by delivery day, when 3 different sizes of everything arrive. And then the unwanted stuff gets sent back free....
Good to see Mrs Truss earning her air miles. Well done.
Genuine question: how does the UK/Japan deal differ from the EU/Japan deal?
Virtually the same, which is actually a good result for the UK.
Content rules for digital disapplied as only of interest to the French; data protections disapplied - whether that's a good or bad thing is a chlorine chicken type question. The UK doesn't get the tariff quotas that the EU negotiated but can use any leftover EU quota. Opportunity to talk about financial services - I suspect that's a tactful refusal by Japan to include the UK ask in this FTA.
British retail sales have continued to increase for the fifth consecutive month, boosted by non-food items including DIY and garden supplies, according to official figures.
Well after a quarter of an hour of free practice, the F1 cars are already more than half a minute faster than your 996!
😡😡😡😡
I've got a 991.2 GT3 Cup now so if covid ever ends I'll go back there and smash it.
Lewis in the ‘teens already, and on the hard tyres. They’ll be close to 70s laps by tomorrow afternoon! You bought a Cup car, you utter madman?
There are teams going bust all over Europe, they will never be this cheap again. Mine is a LHD 2018 Benelux Cup car. 40 hrs on the motor and more importantly 7hrs on the transmission since rebuild. There is a bloke on the Swiss Porsche FB group who reckons there is a way to register cars with motorsport VINs in Lichtenstein for the street...
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
250,000 thousand jobs and 4,600 companies depend on oil and gas in Houston alone.
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
250,000 thousand jobs and 4,600 companies depend on oil and gas in Houston alone.
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
Yes - and with a crashed oil price they are in the doldrums.
Wind power, on the other hand, is in the sell-me-all-you-have state. Firms that do the work are booked out.
Alot of the supply chain and contracting companies are grabbing the work with both hands. Rough necking is quite applicable to wind installation etc.
"the sell-me-all-you-have state"?? Which one is that?
I meant many supply chain and setup companies for wind power in Texas are working at 100% capacity. Literally having customers say "sell me all of x you can get hold of".
Wind power is the future.
It is cheaper now, without subsidies to build and maintain wind turbines than it is to dig out and burn coal.
Plus wind is getting more and more economical annually as turbines become bigger and more efficient.
The future is fusion. Breakthroughs in superconducting magnet technology allow reactors to contain the superhot , super condensed plasma with lower energy input.
Its really not that far away, now, I think. And that the good lord for that.
Good to see Mrs Truss earning her air miles. Well done.
Genuine question: how does the UK/Japan deal differ from the EU/Japan deal?
The door has been wedged open for a future deal in services and mutual recognition of standards which is definitely a positive but not immediate.
In the longer-term, if Starmer wins, I don't expect him to run on a platform of re-join or re-vote but I do think he'll seek a mandate to take us back into the customs union and for free movement (in effect) for the under 30s.
If he's smart he'll balance that with tough talk on benefits qualification, asylum controls and hold the line on work permits/visas for families/older workers, albeit he might expand the cap/limits a bit.
This is very hard to watch. Not very illuminating. Jumbled sentences from both of them. I don't think it will change many votes. I don't think Trump will actually lose votes this time, but nor will he gain them. It is not the game changer that Trump needs.
If you believe Trafalgar or Rasmussen and IBID/TIPP he does not need a game changer, just not to lose any support tonight
If you believe the poll modellers like The Economist or Nate Silver, he most certainly does need a game changer.
If Nate Silver was right in 2016 Hillary Clinton would have won over 300 EC votes and now be President
How many times.....? Nate Silver's group was 28% right, which was more pro Trump than any of the other groups giving probability predictions for the 2016 election.
Or to put it another way, Biden is in a much better position in the polling than Clinton was 4 years ago and has been for months. If HYUFD really believes Trump should be favorite it's not based on any evidence.
Experience. Few predicted 2016 result.
Experience should teach you not to fall into the normalcy bias mistake. It happened with me in 2019 when I assumed Corbyn would repeat 2015.
The circumstances this time around are vastly, viscerally, different from 2016. The polls don't lie. They didn't in 2019 and they're not in 2020. But it's much more than that. The GOP have distanced themselves from their President. They know they've lost.
And lost big.
I'm going to use 538 and compare Trump's popular vote forecast lead with that of the Republican candidate in the closest Senate races. IA Trump +0.3 GOP -1.0 GA Trump 0.0 GOP +2.6 NC Trump -2.3 GOP -2.9 MT Trump +10.2 GOP +3.0 ME Trump -12.1 GOP -3.0 KS Trump +10.6 GOP +4.9 SC Trump +7.9 GOP +5.2 AZ Trump -2.9 GOP -6.0 AL Trump +19.2 GOP +6.2 AK Trump +7.4 GOP +6.3 MI Trump -7.9 GOP -6.4 CO Trump -11.7 GOP -7.7 TX Trump +2.1 GOP +8.1 MS Trump +13.2 GOP +9.1 MN Trump -7.7 GOP -12.0 KY Trump +19.1 GOP +13.4 ---- Mean Trump +2.8 GOP +1.2
I don't want this to be true, but Trump still looks like he is an electoral asset for the Republicans. I want American voters to judge him so badly that he drags the whole GOP down with him. But the numbers don't show that story.
Otherwise Republican Senate candidates should be outperforming Trump.
Trump won the biggest electoral college victory for the Republicans since Bush Snr in 1988 and he won Wisconsin for the first time for a Republican presidential candidate since Reagan in 1984, in the rustbelt he is an electoral asset for the GOP compared to a generic Republican, in California he certainly is not (Hillary won California by an even bigger percentage than Obama did in 2008 or 2012 for example) but it is the former he needs for EC victory, he can afford to lose California heavily and the popular vote
There are only three Midwest states in the 16 that I looked at and Trump's advantage over the GOP was smaller in those (+1.0) than in the set as a whole (+1.6).
In Iowa Trump did better than the GOP candidate, in Michigan fractionally worse (though Trafalgar suggest the GOP will win both the Michigan presidential and Senate race) you provided no data for Wisconsin or Pennsylvania in the rustbelt both of which Trump won for the first time for a Republican since the 1980s and Trump won Ohio by more than even George W Bush did too
HYUFD - please don't reply to this post with Trafalgar did best last time because that is not going to be the question.
Do you believe Trafalgar is a pollster or pundit? I genuinely don't know, but @rcs1000 and @Alistair have both posted evidence that Trafalgar is not a pollster but a pundit. They may well be a very good pundit.
If Trafalgar is a pundit it should not be posting spoof polls. If it is a pollster how do you respond to @rcs1000 and @Alistair?
If Trump wins the EC again Trafalgar will definitely be a pollster and a goldstandard one at that, if Trump loses the EC it will just be a pundit, simple really!
Why would Trump winning or losing make them a pollster or not?
They are either engaging in legitimate polling or they are not.
If they get the correct result obviously a legitimate pollster, the whole point of polls is to forecast, correctly, election results and the views of the public otherwise they are worthless
There is a bet on the throw of an unbiased six-sided die. If it doesn't come with a six, you get evens. A good value bet - yes? You take it.
Someone in the crowd, - let's call them Trafalgar - says "It's going to be a six!" The die is thrown. It comes up six. You lose.
Four years later, a similar bet is offered. Evens that it won't be a six. Analysis shows that that the chances that is won't be a six are 5/6 so evens is still a value bet.
But someone on a blog points out that Trafalgar got it right last time and is still saying it will be a six. Do you listen to them or rely on the analysis?
Barnesian nails it
I'd suggest the difference is that you don't know if the die is weighted. You couldn't work it out last time and you are not so sure this time.
So Evens vs 5/6 might not be so great
You are stretching massively - Barnesian made it clear that it is an unbiased six-sided die.
Plus last time Trafalgar shouted "it will be a six" repeatedly and were generally wrong. They hit a six in a state and then are perceived as a sage by ignoring all the times it wasn't a six elsewhere.
Reminds me of a telephone tipster scam that I thought of years ago but never implemented. You get a bunch of people (say 80) to call a number for a racing tip. You pick , say, a 8 runner race where there ideally is no clear favourite. You split the 80 callers into 8 groups of 10 and give each group a different tip so that you have covered the field. You then start charging the 10 who were on the winner for future tips cus they think you are a genius.
That’s similar to what Derren Brown did for a show “The System” a few years back. He gave thousands of people random racing tips, and a handful of them ended up with half a dozen winners in a row and thought he was a genius tipster.
Probably Brown's best show. It has the 10 heads in a row sequence as well.
His decision to make the final race to convince his marks that he was a genius a Novice Hurdles race was utterly brilliant. Of course there were fallers, so of course the person who got given the winning "tip" was even more thoroughly convinced.
Yes, one of his best works. I really loved the “10 Heads” sequence, amazing that no-one had got that on camera previously.
Thanks. Seems unlikely to offset the inability to export cars with substantial Japanese content into the EU tariff free. Especially when the same cars imported directly from Japan to the EU are seeing tariffs cut to zero in the next few years.
Coronavirus not among 10 most common causes of death in September - ONS More than a tenth of all deaths in England and nine percent in Wales were caused by the pandemic, according to the data.
@HYUFD - I really can't believe you are posting these posts. Firemen put out fires, train drivers drive trains and pollsters carry out polls.
If you don't drive a train you are not a train driver. Same goes for polls
I do struggle a bit with the 'probablistic' thing when it comes to Presidential elections. Its not like rolling a over and over again because its one roll every four years and the dice is a radically different shape every time. What does it really mean to say Clinton would have won 70% of the time in 2016, that dice will never be rolled again. So any result that turns up the maths guys can say, well we never said that was impossible just unlikely. Silver talks about this stuff himself in The Signal and the Noise, how impossible it is to call the path of hurricanes etc. Having said that I would rather tell the time with a clock that was always wrong by say10 minutes slow or 10 minutes fast rather than a stopped one that was precisely right twice a day.
Ah yes, this has been discussed in many universities over the last 100+ years. You are using the frequentist approach to probability, which doesn't work well in this kind of scenario. Bayesian and De Fenetti probability works much better, but I don't have time to discuss the differences now.
I get the general principles of the Bayesian thing, priors etc, that is Silvers big driver too, but on here everyone hits HYFUD with the dice analogy and I just think that's kind of the wrong metaphor.
I have had all kinds of problems with the Monty Hall Goats thing too btw, so free tutorials always welcome
That is because the Monty Hall thing (as usually expressed) is ambiguous and depends on whether MH has prior knowledge, and tends to have a different answer on either side of the Atlantic.
Does anyone have a view as to medium-term GBP value post Covid-19 assuming a full FTA Brexit deal?
My thinking is GBP/EUR approaching 1.25 and GBP/UDS flirting with 1.40 but others may have better insight.
GBPEUR fell to 1.20 in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote, when the assumption of most was a very close relationship or even that Brexit might not happen. When May signalled single market and customs union exit in late 2016 it fell to around 1.10. We are now hoping for an FTA even less advantageous than May's proposals. On that basis the current 1.10 level doesn't look absurd. If we assume that builds in some no deal premium then there is some room for upside, so I could see 1.15 or maybe a bit above once a deal is done. I don't think the market believes there will really be no deal. We were at 1.20 in February but that was post-election euphoria, and the govt doubling down on a really minimalist deal combined with the Covid shambles and ballooning borrowing has I think pushed GBP lower and I think some of that is fairly permanent. Meanwhile, market sentiment on EUR has been boosted by Covid since (probably wrongly) people see the recovery plan deal as the start of more effective fiscal risk sharing. Both the UK and EU are expected to more QE so that's probably a wash currency wise. There are certainly some pro-GBP voices in the market, who argue that the Brexit impact is exaggerated and the UK fundamentals are better. They've been saying that since 2016 though, and haven't been right yet.
Thanks. I agree the scope for improvement in GBP/EUR is more modest. Nevertheless, I think stability in the new trading arrangements in a new treaty and the end of the "ticking clock" will be good for both GBP and EUR.
I don't agree it will stay at 1.10, although maybe 1.25 is a bit too optimistic.
I think 1.10 embodies some residual no deal premium, so 1.15 looks reasonable to me if there is a deal. EUR parity or worse if no deal.
Does anyone have a view as to medium-term GBP value post Covid-19 assuming a full FTA Brexit deal?
My thinking is GBP/EUR approaching 1.25 and GBP/UDS flirting with 1.40 but others may have better insight.
GBPEUR fell to 1.20 in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote, when the assumption of most was a very close relationship or even that Brexit might not happen. When May signalled single market and customs union exit in late 2016 it fell to around 1.10. We are now hoping for an FTA even less advantageous than May's proposals. On that basis the current 1.10 level doesn't look absurd. If we assume that builds in some no deal premium then there is some room for upside, so I could see 1.15 or maybe a bit above once a deal is done. I don't think the market believes there will really be no deal. We were at 1.20 in February but that was post-election euphoria, and the govt doubling down on a really minimalist deal combined with the Covid shambles and ballooning borrowing has I think pushed GBP lower and I think some of that is fairly permanent. Meanwhile, market sentiment on EUR has been boosted by Covid since (probably wrongly) people see the recovery plan deal as the start of more effective fiscal risk sharing. Both the UK and EU are expected to more QE so that's probably a wash currency wise. There are certainly some pro-GBP voices in the market, who argue that the Brexit impact is exaggerated and the UK fundamentals are better. They've been saying that since 2016 though, and haven't been right yet.
On "$markets" a No Deal WTO Brexit is now a 33% chance.
That's a massive overstatement imo. I judge it quite close to zero.
US retailer Gap could close all of its own UK stores, putting thousands of jobs at risk, as it mulls shifting its operations to franchise-only in Europe. It may close all of its shops in the UK, France, Ireland and Italy next summer, the retailer said.
My daughters don't like shopping - they much prefer the online picking. Followed by delivery day, when 3 different sizes of everything arrive. And then the unwanted stuff gets sent back free....
So bye bye all jobs for non professionals and the highest skilled bar warehouse and delivery work then.
Though I still think traditional and distinctive local shops have a future
Does anyone have a view as to medium-term GBP value post Covid-19 assuming a full FTA Brexit deal?
My thinking is GBP/EUR approaching 1.25 and GBP/UDS flirting with 1.40 but others may have better insight.
GBPEUR fell to 1.20 in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote, when the assumption of most was a very close relationship or even that Brexit might not happen. When May signalled single market and customs union exit in late 2016 it fell to around 1.10. We are now hoping for an FTA even less advantageous than May's proposals. On that basis the current 1.10 level doesn't look absurd. If we assume that builds in some no deal premium then there is some room for upside, so I could see 1.15 or maybe a bit above once a deal is done. I don't think the market believes there will really be no deal. We were at 1.20 in February but that was post-election euphoria, and the govt doubling down on a really minimalist deal combined with the Covid shambles and ballooning borrowing has I think pushed GBP lower and I think some of that is fairly permanent. Meanwhile, market sentiment on EUR has been boosted by Covid since (probably wrongly) people see the recovery plan deal as the start of more effective fiscal risk sharing. Both the UK and EU are expected to more QE so that's probably a wash currency wise. There are certainly some pro-GBP voices in the market, who argue that the Brexit impact is exaggerated and the UK fundamentals are better. They've been saying that since 2016 though, and haven't been right yet.
On "$markets" a No Deal WTO Brexit is now a 33% chance.
That's a massive overstatement imo. I judge it quite close to zero.
I would put it below 33% but above 0%. Maybe 15%. It would be insane for both parties given Covid. But it could happen because both parties overestimate their own negotiating position. The EU in particular is being too stubborn. They are right to think they hold most of the cards, but they don't hold all of them.
"When Manchester and Yorkshire were put into Tier 3 restrictions, there were plenty of graphs looking at the virus – but none looking at the side-effects."
"Sweden is perhaps the first country in the world to make this case so clearly: isolation kills too"
This is very hard to watch. Not very illuminating. Jumbled sentences from both of them. I don't think it will change many votes. I don't think Trump will actually lose votes this time, but nor will he gain them. It is not the game changer that Trump needs.
If you believe Trafalgar or Rasmussen and IBID/TIPP he does not need a game changer, just not to lose any support tonight
If you believe the poll modellers like The Economist or Nate Silver, he most certainly does need a game changer.
If Nate Silver was right in 2016 Hillary Clinton would have won over 300 EC votes and now be President
How many times.....? Nate Silver's group was 28% right, which was more pro Trump than any of the other groups giving probability predictions for the 2016 election.
Or to put it another way, Biden is in a much better position in the polling than Clinton was 4 years ago and has been for months. If HYUFD really believes Trump should be favorite it's not based on any evidence.
Experience. Few predicted 2016 result.
Experience should teach you not to fall into the normalcy bias mistake. It happened with me in 2019 when I assumed Corbyn would repeat 2015.
The circumstances this time around are vastly, viscerally, different from 2016. The polls don't lie. They didn't in 2019 and they're not in 2020. But it's much more than that. The GOP have distanced themselves from their President. They know they've lost.
And lost big.
I'm going to use 538 and compare Trump's popular vote forecast lead with that of the Republican candidate in the closest Senate races. IA Trump +0.3 GOP -1.0 GA Trump 0.0 GOP +2.6 NC Trump -2.3 GOP -2.9 MT Trump +10.2 GOP +3.0 ME Trump -12.1 GOP -3.0 KS Trump +10.6 GOP +4.9 SC Trump +7.9 GOP +5.2 AZ Trump -2.9 GOP -6.0 AL Trump +19.2 GOP +6.2 AK Trump +7.4 GOP +6.3 MI Trump -7.9 GOP -6.4 CO Trump -11.7 GOP -7.7 TX Trump +2.1 GOP +8.1 MS Trump +13.2 GOP +9.1 MN Trump -7.7 GOP -12.0 KY Trump +19.1 GOP +13.4 ---- Mean Trump +2.8 GOP +1.2
I don't want this to be true, but Trump still looks like he is an electoral asset for the Republicans. I want American voters to judge him so badly that he drags the whole GOP down with him. But the numbers don't show that story.
Otherwise Republican Senate candidates should be outperforming Trump.
Trump won the biggest electoral college victory for the Republicans since Bush Snr in 1988 and he won Wisconsin for the first time for a Republican presidential candidate since Reagan in 1984, in the rustbelt he is an electoral asset for the GOP compared to a generic Republican, in California he certainly is not (Hillary won California by an even bigger percentage than Obama did in 2008 or 2012 for example) but it is the former he needs for EC victory, he can afford to lose California heavily and the popular vote
There are only three Midwest states in the 16 that I looked at and Trump's advantage over the GOP was smaller in those (+1.0) than in the set as a whole (+1.6).
In Iowa Trump did better than the GOP candidate, in Michigan fractionally worse (though Trafalgar suggest the GOP will win both the Michigan presidential and Senate race) you provided no data for Wisconsin or Pennsylvania in the rustbelt both of which Trump won for the first time for a Republican since the 1980s and Trump won Ohio by more than even George W Bush did too
HYUFD - please don't reply to this post with Trafalgar did best last time because that is not going to be the question.
Do you believe Trafalgar is a pollster or pundit? I genuinely don't know, but @rcs1000 and @Alistair have both posted evidence that Trafalgar is not a pollster but a pundit. They may well be a very good pundit.
If Trafalgar is a pundit it should not be posting spoof polls. If it is a pollster how do you respond to @rcs1000 and @Alistair?
If Trump wins the EC again Trafalgar will definitely be a pollster and a goldstandard one at that, if Trump loses the EC it will just be a pundit, simple really!
Why would Trump winning or losing make them a pollster or not?
They are either engaging in legitimate polling or they are not.
If they get the correct result obviously a legitimate pollster, the whole point of polls is to forecast, correctly, election results and the views of the public otherwise they are worthless
There is a bet on the throw of an unbiased six-sided die. If it doesn't come with a six, you get evens. A good value bet - yes? You take it.
Someone in the crowd, - let's call them Trafalgar - says "It's going to be a six!" The die is thrown. It comes up six. You lose.
Four years later, a similar bet is offered. Evens that it won't be a six. Analysis shows that that the chances that is won't be a six are 5/6 so evens is still a value bet.
But someone on a blog points out that Trafalgar got it right last time and is still saying it will be a six. Do you listen to them or rely on the analysis?
Barnesian nails it
I'd suggest the difference is that you don't know if the die is weighted. You couldn't work it out last time and you are not so sure this time.
So Evens vs 5/6 might not be so great
You are stretching massively - Barnesian made it clear that it is an unbiased six-sided die.
Plus last time Trafalgar shouted "it will be a six" repeatedly and were generally wrong. They hit a six in a state and then are perceived as a sage by ignoring all the times it wasn't a six elsewhere.
Reminds me of a telephone tipster scam that I thought of years ago but never implemented. You get a bunch of people (say 80) to call a number for a racing tip. You pick , say, a 8 runner race where there ideally is no clear favourite. You split the 80 callers into 8 groups of 10 and give each group a different tip so that you have covered the field. You then start charging the 10 who were on the winner for future tips cus they think you are a genius.
That was the plot of a Minder episode. For added topicality, the episode also turns on Arthur not having paid any income tax. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6oahcy
Couple of cutting edge thriller tips from me. Ruth Rendell. Barbara Vine.
Thanks - which particular books from those two authors?
Please try Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter.
Yes, I will.
My 2 are actually the same author. Rendell writes under Vine for her deeper 1st person narrative psychologicals.
What I like is the deceptively skillful prose and story telling. The horror creeps up on you without you noticing and you often end up relating to the deranged protagonist because she makes the weird seem oddly rational.
Also many are set in my part of London and you can read one in a couple of days.
I used to be very keen on Rendell/Vine, read them all I think (and there aint going to be any more obvs, unless some ghastly ghostwriting moneymaking thing happens). I have to say latterly I went off the Vine books a bit; there seemed to me to be a misanthropic, contemptuous tinge, some of it directed at people at the bottom of the pecking order. Also her ornate character names got a bit irritating.
It's been a while - like you, I think I've read most of them - but I don't recall picking up on that. Maybe I would if I re-read them now. Unlikely I will be, given all the stuff I haven't read.
You have changed your logo, I now see. Does this mean the West is no longer doomed?
I have lived in Havering almost all my life and in that time my address has always contained "Essex", and never London. @Stuartinromford is right, most people moved here from London and don't want London following them. It is though. We are probably going to move out to Non London Essex in the next few years. Our son was born in Broomfield Hospital in Essex but had to go to Queens in Romford after 4 days -the contrast was striking, enough to make me realise I was happier in Essex than London.
Yes, but the irony is that this process will (and already is) make Havering more like the rest of East London
Yeah but if I don't live there anymore I don't care!
EastEnders demographic is Havering although it pretends to be East London. I happen to think this is kind of racist of the BBC, and my guess is that they dont think the rest of the country would believe it if they accurately represented Stratford/Walthamstow
iirc Eastenders was originally based on Hoxton (which is not really in the East End anyway but never mind).
Can't resist commenting on this, as I've lived in Romford for 25 years and occasionally my path crosses with Mr Rosindell's.
Certainly among the older population there is a feeling that Romford is Essex not London. I'm not sure they'd be quite so keen if their TfL free travel was taken away.
There has been a big change in central Romford over the last few years, it now feels much more like the rest of London. I keep hearing from people that 'Romford's going downhill' and 'it isn't like it used to be' but I've been here a long time and it was always a bit scruffy in places. Scratch the surface and what many people mean is that there are more non-white faces around, and they're off to Clacton.
The rest of Havering is still very much 'East Enders', albeit changing gradually too.
US retailer Gap could close all of its own UK stores, putting thousands of jobs at risk, as it mulls shifting its operations to franchise-only in Europe. It may close all of its shops in the UK, France, Ireland and Italy next summer, the retailer said.
My daughters don't like shopping - they much prefer the online picking. Followed by delivery day, when 3 different sizes of everything arrive. And then the unwanted stuff gets sent back free....
So bye bye all jobs for non professionals and the highest skilled bar warehouse and delivery work then.
Though I still think traditional and distinctive local shops have a future
Provided they’re not killed off by high business rates and anti-car councils, yes.
On terminology, Frank Luntz is frequently described as a "GOP pollster" or "Republican pollster" even though he does not seem to run any polls, just focus groups. Maybe things are different in America.
Does anyone have a view as to medium-term GBP value post Covid-19 assuming a full FTA Brexit deal?
My thinking is GBP/EUR approaching 1.25 and GBP/UDS flirting with 1.40 but others may have better insight.
GBPEUR fell to 1.20 in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote, when the assumption of most was a very close relationship or even that Brexit might not happen. When May signalled single market and customs union exit in late 2016 it fell to around 1.10. We are now hoping for an FTA even less advantageous than May's proposals. On that basis the current 1.10 level doesn't look absurd. If we assume that builds in some no deal premium then there is some room for upside, so I could see 1.15 or maybe a bit above once a deal is done. I don't think the market believes there will really be no deal. We were at 1.20 in February but that was post-election euphoria, and the govt doubling down on a really minimalist deal combined with the Covid shambles and ballooning borrowing has I think pushed GBP lower and I think some of that is fairly permanent. Meanwhile, market sentiment on EUR has been boosted by Covid since (probably wrongly) people see the recovery plan deal as the start of more effective fiscal risk sharing. Both the UK and EU are expected to more QE so that's probably a wash currency wise. There are certainly some pro-GBP voices in the market, who argue that the Brexit impact is exaggerated and the UK fundamentals are better. They've been saying that since 2016 though, and haven't been right yet.
Thanks. I agree the scope for improvement in GBP/EUR is more modest. Nevertheless, I think stability in the new trading arrangements in a new treaty and the end of the "ticking clock" will be good for both GBP and EUR.
I don't agree it will stay at 1.10, although maybe 1.25 is a bit too optimistic.
I think 1.10 embodies some residual no deal premium, so 1.15 looks reasonable to me if there is a deal. EUR parity or worse if no deal.
GBP/USD is the one to trade for this, not /EUR. As the currency movements on Wednesday demonstrated. If there is a deal - as I too believe most likely - simply buy GBP/USD. With the added advantage that any uncertainty as the US election approaches will magnify the potential upside.
This is very hard to watch. Not very illuminating. Jumbled sentences from both of them. I don't think it will change many votes. I don't think Trump will actually lose votes this time, but nor will he gain them. It is not the game changer that Trump needs.
If you believe Trafalgar or Rasmussen and IBID/TIPP he does not need a game changer, just not to lose any support tonight
If you believe the poll modellers like The Economist or Nate Silver, he most certainly does need a game changer.
If Nate Silver was right in 2016 Hillary Clinton would have won over 300 EC votes and now be President
How many times.....? Nate Silver's group was 28% right, which was more pro Trump than any of the other groups giving probability predictions for the 2016 election.
Or to put it another way, Biden is in a much better position in the polling than Clinton was 4 years ago and has been for months. If HYUFD really believes Trump should be favorite it's not based on any evidence.
Experience. Few predicted 2016 result.
Experience should teach you not to fall into the normalcy bias mistake. It happened with me in 2019 when I assumed Corbyn would repeat 2015.
The circumstances this time around are vastly, viscerally, different from 2016. The polls don't lie. They didn't in 2019 and they're not in 2020. But it's much more than that. The GOP have distanced themselves from their President. They know they've lost.
And lost big.
I'm going to use 538 and compare Trump's popular vote forecast lead with that of the Republican candidate in the closest Senate races. IA Trump +0.3 GOP -1.0 GA Trump 0.0 GOP +2.6 NC Trump -2.3 GOP -2.9 MT Trump +10.2 GOP +3.0 ME Trump -12.1 GOP -3.0 KS Trump +10.6 GOP +4.9 SC Trump +7.9 GOP +5.2 AZ Trump -2.9 GOP -6.0 AL Trump +19.2 GOP +6.2 AK Trump +7.4 GOP +6.3 MI Trump -7.9 GOP -6.4 CO Trump -11.7 GOP -7.7 TX Trump +2.1 GOP +8.1 MS Trump +13.2 GOP +9.1 MN Trump -7.7 GOP -12.0 KY Trump +19.1 GOP +13.4 ---- Mean Trump +2.8 GOP +1.2
I don't want this to be true, but Trump still looks like he is an electoral asset for the Republicans. I want American voters to judge him so badly that he drags the whole GOP down with him. But the numbers don't show that story.
Otherwise Republican Senate candidates should be outperforming Trump.
Trump won the biggest electoral college victory for the Republicans since Bush Snr in 1988 and he won Wisconsin for the first time for a Republican presidential candidate since Reagan in 1984, in the rustbelt he is an electoral asset for the GOP compared to a generic Republican, in California he certainly is not (Hillary won California by an even bigger percentage than Obama did in 2008 or 2012 for example) but it is the former he needs for EC victory, he can afford to lose California heavily and the popular vote
There are only three Midwest states in the 16 that I looked at and Trump's advantage over the GOP was smaller in those (+1.0) than in the set as a whole (+1.6).
In Iowa Trump did better than the GOP candidate, in Michigan fractionally worse (though Trafalgar suggest the GOP will win both the Michigan presidential and Senate race) you provided no data for Wisconsin or Pennsylvania in the rustbelt both of which Trump won for the first time for a Republican since the 1980s and Trump won Ohio by more than even George W Bush did too
HYUFD - please don't reply to this post with Trafalgar did best last time because that is not going to be the question.
Do you believe Trafalgar is a pollster or pundit? I genuinely don't know, but @rcs1000 and @Alistair have both posted evidence that Trafalgar is not a pollster but a pundit. They may well be a very good pundit.
If Trafalgar is a pundit it should not be posting spoof polls. If it is a pollster how do you respond to @rcs1000 and @Alistair?
If Trump wins the EC again Trafalgar will definitely be a pollster and a goldstandard one at that, if Trump loses the EC it will just be a pundit, simple really!
Why would Trump winning or losing make them a pollster or not?
They are either engaging in legitimate polling or they are not.
If they get the correct result obviously a legitimate pollster, the whole point of polls is to forecast, correctly, election results and the views of the public otherwise they are worthless
There is a bet on the throw of an unbiased six-sided die. If it doesn't come with a six, you get evens. A good value bet - yes? You take it.
Someone in the crowd, - let's call them Trafalgar - says "It's going to be a six!" The die is thrown. It comes up six. You lose.
Four years later, a similar bet is offered. Evens that it won't be a six. Analysis shows that that the chances that is won't be a six are 5/6 so evens is still a value bet.
But someone on a blog points out that Trafalgar got it right last time and is still saying it will be a six. Do you listen to them or rely on the analysis?
Barnesian nails it
I'd suggest the difference is that you don't know if the die is weighted. You couldn't work it out last time and you are not so sure this time.
So Evens vs 5/6 might not be so great
You are stretching massively - Barnesian made it clear that it is an unbiased six-sided die.
Plus last time Trafalgar shouted "it will be a six" repeatedly and were generally wrong. They hit a six in a state and then are perceived as a sage by ignoring all the times it wasn't a six elsewhere.
Reminds me of a telephone tipster scam that I thought of years ago but never implemented. You get a bunch of people (say 80) to call a number for a racing tip. You pick , say, a 8 runner race where there ideally is no clear favourite. You split the 80 callers into 8 groups of 10 and give each group a different tip so that you have covered the field. You then start charging the 10 who were on the winner for future tips cus they think you are a genius.
That’s similar to what Derren Brown did for a show “The System” a few years back. He gave thousands of people random racing tips, and a handful of them ended up with half a dozen winners in a row and thought he was a genius tipster.
Probably Brown's best show. It has the 10 heads in a row sequence as well.
His decision to make the final race to convince his marks that he was a genius a Novice Hurdles race was utterly brilliant. Of course there were fallers, so of course the person who got given the winning "tip" was even more thoroughly convinced.
Yes, one of his best works. I really loved the “10 Heads” sequence, amazing that no-one had got that on camera previously.
@HYUFD - I really can't believe you are posting these posts. Firemen put out fires, train drivers drive trains and pollsters carry out polls.
If you don't drive a train you are not a train driver. Same goes for polls
I do struggle a bit with the 'probablistic' thing when it comes to Presidential elections. Its not like rolling a over and over again because its one roll every four years and the dice is a radically different shape every time. What does it really mean to say Clinton would have won 70% of the time in 2016, that dice will never be rolled again. So any result that turns up the maths guys can say, well we never said that was impossible just unlikely. Silver talks about this stuff himself in The Signal and the Noise, how impossible it is to call the path of hurricanes etc. Having said that I would rather tell the time with a clock that was always wrong by say10 minutes slow or 10 minutes fast rather than a stopped one that was precisely right twice a day.
Ah yes, this has been discussed in many universities over the last 100+ years. You are using the frequentist approach to probability, which doesn't work well in this kind of scenario. Bayesian and De Fenetti probability works much better, but I don't have time to discuss the differences now.
I get the general principles of the Bayesian thing, priors etc, that is Silvers big driver too, but on here everyone hits HYFUD with the dice analogy and I just think that's kind of the wrong metaphor.
I have had all kinds of problems with the Monty Hall Goats thing too btw, so free tutorials always welcome
That is because the Monty Hall thing (as usually expressed) is ambiguous and depends on whether MH has prior knowledge, and tends to have a different answer on either side of the Atlantic.
Agree about the Monty Hall problem. I always need to know the rule about which door Monty opens. You only get the surprising resukt though, if his rule is "never open the door with a car behind it"
Comments
Mind you, if a vaccine is found and the new FTA beds-in well I'm not sure how much a stronger sterling will really help us next year if we are trying to climb out of a recession.
Perhaps a nice problem to have though. I'm buying both UK and US funds in my stocks & shares ISA - I think both are underpriced.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Winterwood-Patrick-McCabe/dp/0747585989
Ignore some of the reviews - don`t know their arse from their elbow.
Less so, with the many more who live near it. It may turn out to be a net neutral.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/10/trump-fracking-energy-climate-election-pennsylvania
That way you'd have an estimate of how wrong the prediction was for that reason.
One of the problems I have with probabilistic forecasts is that I can't help but reduce them to a deterministic forecast with a certainty attached. But they have a lot more information than that.
They show where that uncertainty is, and what differences in the detail have the most impact on the overall result.
The market has shifted dramatically from fossil fuels - and within five years, renewables will produce more energy globally than the next single largest source, coal.
This article is largely about solar, which will shortly overtake wind in terms of global installed capacity, but much the same arguments apply.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/solar-power-is-now-cheapest-electricity-in-history-says-iea-39195/
- out of the wave action zone. This is a killer for ocean engineering
- out of the bottom zone. Another killer - debris from all but pure rock sea bed is a serious problem.
- continuous/very predictable
- power density - water moving represents vast amounts of energy.
- scalable. You can put in one turbine and steadily scale to 1000. The problem with the tidal pond stuff is "first you invest 10 billion"
- planning. Much easier to get planning for something that is sub-surface - should follow the offshore wind process, largely.
According to the most recent forecast released at the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting on Sept. 16, 2020, U.S. GDP growth is expected to contract by 3.7% in 2020. It may rebound up to a 4.0% growth rate in 2021. Growth could slow to 3.0% in 2022, and 2.5% in 2023.4
https://www.thebalance.com/us-economic-outlook-3305669
She does not rule out a total lockdown but is in many ways mirroring England, but she is in a league of her own in promoting her government and taking the people with her
She says Scotland is not back at square one and they have more tools in the box to mitigate damage, and went onto say there are indications the level of infections are slowing
She does have this natural ability to have a social conscience but also is very pro business and I recognise that quality in her
Its really not that far away, now, I think. And that the good lord for that.
We were at 1.20 in February but that was post-election euphoria, and the govt doubling down on a really minimalist deal combined with the Covid shambles and ballooning borrowing has I think pushed GBP lower and I think some of that is fairly permanent. Meanwhile, market sentiment on EUR has been boosted by Covid since (probably wrongly) people see the recovery plan deal as the start of more effective fiscal risk sharing. Both the UK and EU are expected to more QE so that's probably a wash currency wise.
There are certainly some pro-GBP voices in the market, who argue that the Brexit impact is exaggerated and the UK fundamentals are better. They've been saying that since 2016 though, and haven't been right yet.
Coronavirus not among 10 most common causes of death in September - ONS
More than a tenth of all deaths in England and nine percent in Wales were caused by the pandemic, according to the data.
https://www.ft.com/content/99299608-85b9-4770-afea-a7c621f2fc75
That is why I think Biden's best chances of a pick up of a Trump 2016 state are Pennsylvania and Arizona which both contain 1 of the top 10 largest cities by population in the US, Philadephia and Phoenix respectively and their associated suburbs.
Ohio, Iowa, Michigan and Wisconsin and North Carolina do not have an urban area as big or a city in the top 10 largest in the nation.
The election may then come down to Florida and over 65s swinging to Biden (Florida has the highest percentage of over 65s in the US) while its large Cuban American population has swung to Trump
Future actions can't go back in time and change the probability of your past actions.
Come to think of it, email being free would make it easier. You could even auto-generate the emails based on the list of runners in the various races.
Playing the man not the ball doesn't rebuff the truth of his point, that there are difficulties and detriments to Brexit. You might be better off arguing about the positives; they do exist.
That must surely be doubly so if you have already voted for them, which 35% of the electorate - in practice more where the vote in the post - have already done so.
I don't think that augurs well for Trump.
His decision to make the final race to convince his marks that he was a genius a Novice Hurdles race was utterly brilliant. Of course there were fallers, so of course the person who got given the winning "tip" was even more thoroughly convinced.
Below average % of 2016 turnout (35.8%)
*New York State 0% (Safe Dem)
Mississippi 4.9% (Solid GOP)
Alabama 6.8% (Solid GOP)
Oklahoma 11.8% (Solid GOP)
West Virginia 13.9% (Solid GOP)
New Hampshire 18% (Lean Dem)
Kansas 18.9% (Safe GOP)
Missouri 20.9% (Probably safe GOP)
+Idaho 15% (Solid GOP)
Utah 27% (Solid GOP)
Wyoming 29.2% (Solid GOP)
South Dakota 32.8% (Solid GOP)
North Dakota 33.6% (Solid GOP)
+ Probably higher, no data about though
OTOH All the Dem heavy west coast states are almost entirely VBM this year - there's perhaps 15 million Dem heavy leaning ballots to come in California alone.
Haven't analysed it scientifically yet but the general vote in/vote left favours GOP nationwide with the Democrats continuing to mail/drop box their vote in.
But beyond that - neutron damage has been barely looked at. Yes, walls of liquid lithium sound awesome, but no-one has actually built one.
And there are many other issues. For example, a quench in ITER would mean kilotons of energy looking for a new home...
It's a long long way from breakeven to grid power.
His lectures in his “Harms of the Powerful” module have made some Jewish students feel increasingly uncomfortable and unwelcome in his classroom.
https://thetab.com/uk/bristol/2020/10/22/im-a-jewish-uob-student-and-im-sick-of-worrying-about-professor-david-miller-41136
Uncomfortable, I think I would be a bit more than uncomfortable!
US retailer Gap could close all of its own UK stores, putting thousands of jobs at risk, as it mulls shifting its operations to franchise-only in Europe. It may close all of its shops in the UK, France, Ireland and Italy next summer, the retailer said.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54635810
One thing that room temperature superconducting doesn't solve is neutron energy release, you can't control neutron flow with magnets.
https://twitter.com/drmistercody/status/1319502668071485440?s=19
Alcohol IS essential, but hairdryers and clothes aren't:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8871385/Welsh-ministers-flounder-try-defend-new-shopping-rules.html
Jeff Bezos says thanks.
https://electproject.github.io/Early-Vote-2020G/index.html
Whole thing now posted on his YouTube channel. Well worth watching for anyone who hasn’t seen it before. https://youtube.com/watch?v=zv-3EfC17Rc
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8604561/Britain-eradicate-Covid-19-banned-international-travel.html
But hold on, this is exactly what Australia has done after they already had community spread and it worked*.
*yes and New Zealand, but Australia is much closer to the UK in terms of international travel, dense cities, and Australia did have community spread going on.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/23/early-voting-numbers-swing-states-431363
I don't agree it will stay at 1.10, although maybe 1.25 is a bit too optimistic.
One of the reasons that maxing out a Polywell might be interesting science, if not getting you to a working reactor.
Do you think most of the recovery is already priced in expectations of a deal?
My daughters don't like shopping - they much prefer the online picking. Followed by delivery day, when 3 different sizes of everything arrive. And then the unwanted stuff gets sent back free....
Content rules for digital disapplied as only of interest to the French; data protections disapplied - whether that's a good or bad thing is a chlorine chicken type question. The UK doesn't get the tariff quotas that the EU negotiated but can use any leftover EU quota. Opportunity to talk about financial services - I suspect that's a tactful refusal by Japan to include the UK ask in this FTA.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54656486
If he's smart he'll balance that with tough talk on benefits qualification, asylum controls and hold the line on work permits/visas for families/older workers, albeit he might expand the cap/limits a bit.
That's a massive overstatement imo. I judge it quite close to zero.
Though I still think traditional and distinctive local shops have a future
"Sweden is perhaps the first country in the world to make this case so clearly: isolation kills too"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/10/22/elderly-paying-terrible-price-protected-covid/
Outstanding piece by Fraser Nelson today.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6oahcy
You have changed your logo, I now see. Does this mean the West is no longer doomed?
Certainly among the older population there is a feeling that Romford is Essex not London. I'm not sure they'd be quite so keen if their TfL free travel was taken away.
There has been a big change in central Romford over the last few years, it now feels much more like the rest of London. I keep hearing from people that 'Romford's going downhill' and 'it isn't like it used to be' but I've been here a long time and it was always a bit scruffy in places. Scratch the surface and what many people mean is that there are more non-white faces around, and they're off to Clacton.
The rest of Havering is still very much 'East Enders', albeit changing gradually too.
https://twitter.com/BBCScotlandNews/status/1319604085444792320
I see she has in any case added a lower tier. And so on.
And there's nothing wrong with having a tier zero.