Perhaps RP/MP/ can have a whip round to make up for the 25% loss of income.
Gosh, that's a lot.
Do you have a link to an souses for that?
Meanwhile the trade union political funds continue to amass money, £24 million in income last year, only £16 million spent, and an acuminated total of £41 million in ready to be spent.
I enjoyed reading what @Cyclefree had to say and I agree with it - although I'd venture to suggest that item 8 on her list is the most relevant, and stretches back well before Corbyn. The real trigger for the collapse of cultural Labour identification in what we've since come to call the Red Wall was Bigotgate. Blair sold a positive vision of Britain as a nation and as a people; Brown revealed what most metropolitan left-liberals really thought about provincial small-c conservatives.
The swing to the Left post-2015, Jeremy Corbyn's anti-patriotism, Emily Thornberry and the house with the England flags, Keir Starmer's attempt to push a second EU referendum and everything else merely resolved and crystallised the notion that Labour's leadership and most of its members had come to regard a vast section of its supporter base - modest-to-average income white people without university degrees - with naked contempt. Frankly, Labour is doing well to be polling as healthily as it still does under the circumstances.
Others will doubtless strongly disagree and suggest that I'm flat wrong, or at least exaggerate the problem, but we must ask ourselves what the reasons are as to why a Government as poor as that currently in office is not merely tolerated, but rewarded with healthy levels of support. Simply getting angry that large numbers of ex-Labour voters won't see the light and writing them off as thick really isn't helpful.
There is a lot in that, and in @Cyclefree's header list, I'd look at combining these:- 1. Boris got Brexit done. 5. Levelling up promises. 7. A Conservative country? 8. Long Corbyn. 9. Being not-Corbyn is not enough.
What binds these together is the sense for many former Labour voters is the impression that Labour is no longer on their side.
SKS is also in danger of falling for the Corbyn paradox. It is not that Corbynism was especially unpopular but that Corbyn himself added to the charge that Labour was not interested in its own people. Corbyn instead was forever banging on about the Middle East or Venezuela, and even if he wasn't, the Tories said he was and that was good enough. Emily Thornberry's flag tweet was a lower level manifestation of the same thing. And so was Starmer's own role in fighting the Brexit referendum result.
But Corbyn came very close in 2017. That's the paradox. Boris got it right when he pinched the popular parts of Labour's 2017 platform. Investment; hospitals; police.
SKS attacking Corbynistas will not help win back ex-Labour voters. Nor will talking about Israel. What they want is Corbynism without Corbyn. But that's Boris and they've already got one of those.
Starmer needs to say that Labour is on your side. How? No idea. That's why he gets paid more than me. The football helped a bit, with Tories attacking the national team, but Euro 2020 is done now. Starmer should also do what I urged at the start and hire a drama coach so he at least sounds interesting. It worked for Mrs Thatcher.
My point is, what is difference between Boris and May proposal for you to say that? Unless you think it’s just 1% income tax funding it, which I don’t think is true.
Both have a tax element funding them. Both a basement level where the scheme kicks in (50 under dilmot, 100K for May, tbc under Boris and Rishi).
You say it is better, what is the difference making it better?
If are you middle aged and you have elderly parents who live in a £300,000+ house you do not stand to lose hundreds of thousands of pounds in inheritance under the Boris and Sunak plan you would have done under the May plan.
You can live with a 1% rise in the amount of NI you pay annually, you cannot live with losing most of your inheritance if your parents need at home social care and their house ultimately needs to be sold to pay for it.
Under the May plan all assets over £100,000 including your house would have been liable for at home social care costs
What we need is some raging Trot to lead the Party and send the Labour figures through the roof. Now there's a thought. Why did the party never think of that before? What? We did try that before. So what happened?
Is Andy Burnham a "raging Trot?"
What we need is a competent leader with an actual personality like Andy Burnham
What we need is a competent leader with some actual policies like Andy Burnham
What we need is not to be to the right of the Tories on NHS pay. Funding Social Care etc as Andy Burnham isnt
What we need now is a unifying figure as leader like Andy Burnham
SKS fails on every single count.
If you cant see he is shit now Pete what will it take?
Andy Burnham is about as available as Clement Attlee. Politics is the art of the ------- (7 letters).
8?
Fuck. 8.
Bit early for the Christmas crossword.
Is it Copulate?
Copulate's 9 letters ;-)
Congress could work.
Copulate is eight letters!
Self-styled betting experts trying to work out how many letters there are in a word.
It's not as easy as it looks.
Very true. Better stick to easy stuff like those non-linear differential equations that model the future course of the pandemic.
Just don't tell us how many people will go to hospital, if you mean how many people _won't_ go to hospital!
Perhaps RP/MP/ can have a whip round to make up for the 25% loss of income.
I'll match Len's personal contribution to the Labour Party, less the contribution Unite made directly to Len including a notional value on the grace and favour perks.
Labour's problem is with working-class voters outside the big cities and university towns. They're still pretty popular with working-class voters in those two categories of place, but it's in the medium-sized and small towns where their support has utterly tanked. And a disproportionate number of marginal seats contain those types of towns. The big cities and university towns are mostly safe Labor seats, so what happens there isn't so important, unless a challenge from the Greens and/or LDs comes into play.
Out of all stories on the front pages I have selected two.
Front of FT, Biden seeks to calm inflation fears, saying he is vigilant against rising prices. What does this vigilance mean in practice Joe. I have this increasing feeling this White House is making a catastrophic error that gets them hammered in 2024. You can’t just come to power and do what you want with economics, whatever long held plans you had, you have to work only with the landscape before you and the art of the possible. From this mistake not just 4 more years of Popular Trump, but 12 years straight.
Front of Daily Star, tomatoes have feelings too. Apart from that, predictable and boring front pages.
Get everyone to pay it, including the oldies, and it might wash.
After all this is for care when you're in your early 80s for the last 2-3 years of your life.
Except that NI, of course, is conveniently not paid by pensioners.
That's my point. You'd have to extend NI to pensioners (at least at 2% levels) for this to wash.
As an aside, I don't like tax rises on working people. Last thing they need.
I'd introduce a 10% additional income tax rate on defined benefit pensions schemes phased in over 10 years at an additional 1% per year. Essentially the government recouping the cost of public sector DB schemes on the other side.
Why should beneficiaries of private sector DB schemes be penalised?
The scheme my mother is in was funded entirely by employer contributions and is currently in surplus.
I think @MaxPB has come up with an interesting idea that mainly applies to over generous public sector schemes. Re your mother the employer received tax relief on the contributions and your mother did not have to pay any tax on the benefit. Often with DB the employer contribution had to be very large hence most companies bailing out so is often a big tax free benefit that a DC employee can only dream of getting.
But treating pensions as deferred income, for the purposes of taxation, has been pretty universal. With some limits, to be sure, but whether the DB employer has to put a lot of (untaxed) cash in to deliver the (taxed) benefits down the line, or whether a DC employer matches (untaxed) contributions now to deliver (taxed) benefits down the line, is pretty much the same thing from the point of view of tax. The DB was just a more generous employer offer; DC employers are free to do the same (within the annual allowance) if they want.
They should probably update the AA calculations regarding DB entitlement, though.
--AS
I don't disagree with any of that (how can I as it is factually correct), but invariably the employer contribution to the DB scheme is much bigger so providing the employee with a bigger benefit. In addition there is likely a tax benefit as the marginal tax rate is likely higher in employment than retirement plus there is the tax free lump sum. Applies to DC as well but the employer contribution is likely much lower.
The employer may well still be contributing to the DB pension after retirement.
Well, the DB tax free lump sum is sort-of-equal to the 25% tax-free element of DC benefits. (It's actually probably worth less, in modern valuations.) I think the argument you are making is really for lower limits on the tax benefit, rather than treating DB differently to DC. That's why I mention the AA calculations for DB entitlement, which made sense when brought in but are too low in the current monetary environment.
I hadn't really thought about the implications of employers topping-up DB pensions after retirement. That does indeed fall outside something that can happen with DC. The extent to which current DB pensions are under-funded (those which are funded at all) is driven by discount rates and, in my opinion, rather a mess.
Out of all stories on the front pages I have selected two.
Front of FT, Biden seeks to calm inflation fears, saying he is vigilant against rising prices. What does this vigilance mean in practice Joe. I have this increasing feeling this White House is making a catastrophic error that gets them hammered in 2024. You can’t just come to power and do what you want with economics, whatever long held plans you had, you have to work only with the landscape before you and the art of the possible. From this mistake not just 4 more years of Popular Trump, but 12 years straight.
Front of Daily Star, tomatoes have feelings too. Apart from that, predictable and boring front pages.
Everyone is against inflation in theory. But what is Biden going to do about it, in practical terms?
Labour's problem is with working-class voters outside the big cities and university towns. They're still pretty popular with working-class voters in those two categories of place, but it's in the medium-sized and small towns where their support has utterly tanked. And a disproportionate number of marginal seats contain those types of towns. The big cities and university towns are mostly safe Labor seats, so what happens there isn't so important, unless a challenge from the Greens and/or LDs comes into play.
Mainly because the big city working class has a high percentage of BAME, it is the white working class vote where the Labour vote has collapsed
Out of all stories on the front pages I have selected two.
Front of FT, Biden seeks to calm inflation fears, saying he is vigilant against rising prices. What does this vigilance mean in practice Joe. I have this increasing feeling this White House is making a catastrophic error that gets them hammered in 2024. You can’t just come to power and do what you want with economics, whatever long held plans you had, you have to work only with the landscape before you and the art of the possible. From this mistake not just 4 more years of Popular Trump, but 12 years straight.
Front of Daily Star, tomatoes have feelings too. Apart from that, predictable and boring front pages.
Even if Trump returned to win the 2024 election he could only serve 1 more 4 year term, section 1 of the 22nd amendment of the US constitution is clear that 'No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice'
Get everyone to pay it, including the oldies, and it might wash.
After all this is for care when you're in your early 80s for the last 2-3 years of your life.
Except that NI, of course, is conveniently not paid by pensioners.
That's my point. You'd have to extend NI to pensioners (at least at 2% levels) for this to wash.
As an aside, I don't like tax rises on working people. Last thing they need.
I'd introduce a 10% additional income tax rate on defined benefit pensions schemes phased in over 10 years at an additional 1% per year. Essentially the government recouping the cost of public sector DB schemes on the other side.
Why should beneficiaries of private sector DB schemes be penalised?
The scheme my mother is in was funded entirely by employer contributions and is currently in surplus.
I think @MaxPB has come up with an interesting idea that mainly applies to over generous public sector schemes. Re your mother the employer received tax relief on the contributions and your mother did not have to pay any tax on the benefit. Often with DB the employer contribution had to be very large hence most companies bailing out so is often a big tax free benefit that a DC employee can only dream of getting.
But treating pensions as deferred income, for the purposes of taxation, has been pretty universal. With some limits, to be sure, but whether the DB employer has to put a lot of (untaxed) cash in to deliver the (taxed) benefits down the line, or whether a DC employer matches (untaxed) contributions now to deliver (taxed) benefits down the line, is pretty much the same thing from the point of view of tax. The DB was just a more generous employer offer; DC employers are free to do the same (within the annual allowance) if they want.
They should probably update the AA calculations regarding DB entitlement, though.
--AS
I don't disagree with any of that (how can I as it is factually correct), but invariably the employer contribution to the DB scheme is much bigger so providing the employee with a bigger benefit. In addition there is likely a tax benefit as the marginal tax rate is likely higher in employment than retirement plus there is the tax free lump sum. Applies to DC as well but the employer contribution is likely much lower.
The employer may well still be contributing to the DB pension after retirement.
I thought that for private companies, at retirement the DB pension is provided by buying an annuity from the pension fund. No further liability from the employer for that employee after retirement.
I am only really familiar with 2 and that certainly isn't the case with them and if it were existing pensioners would not be impacted when funds go into the PPF and they are..
I enjoyed reading what @Cyclefree had to say and I agree with it - although I'd venture to suggest that item 8 on her list is the most relevant, and stretches back well before Corbyn. The real trigger for the collapse of cultural Labour identification in what we've since come to call the Red Wall was Bigotgate. Blair sold a positive vision of Britain as a nation and as a people; Brown revealed what most metropolitan left-liberals really thought about provincial small-c conservatives.
The swing to the Left post-2015, Jeremy Corbyn's anti-patriotism, Emily Thornberry and the house with the England flags, Keir Starmer's attempt to push a second EU referendum and everything else merely resolved and crystallised the notion that Labour's leadership and most of its members had come to regard a vast section of its supporter base - modest-to-average income white people without university degrees - with naked contempt. Frankly, Labour is doing well to be polling as healthily as it still does under the circumstances.
Others will doubtless strongly disagree and suggest that I'm flat wrong, or at least exaggerate the problem, but we must ask ourselves what the reasons are as to why a Government as poor as that currently in office is not merely tolerated, but rewarded with healthy levels of support. Simply getting angry that large numbers of ex-Labour voters won't see the light and writing them off as thick really isn't helpful.
There is a lot in that, and in @Cyclefree's header list, I'd look at combining these:- 1. Boris got Brexit done. 5. Levelling up promises. 7. A Conservative country? 8. Long Corbyn. 9. Being not-Corbyn is not enough.
What binds these together is the sense for many former Labour voters is the impression that Labour is no longer on their side.
SKS is also in danger of falling for the Corbyn paradox. It is not that Corbynism was especially unpopular but that Corbyn himself added to the charge that Labour was not interested in its own people. Corbyn instead was forever banging on about the Middle East or Venezuela, and even if he wasn't, the Tories said he was and that was good enough. Emily Thornberry's flag tweet was a lower level manifestation of the same thing. And so was Starmer's own role in fighting the Brexit referendum result.
But Corbyn came very close in 2017. That's the paradox. Boris got it right when he pinched the popular parts of Labour's 2017 platform. Investment; hospitals; police.
SKS attacking Corbynistas will not help win back ex-Labour voters. Nor will talking about Israel. What they want is Corbynism without Corbyn. But that's Boris and they've already got one of those.
Starmer needs to say that Labour is on your side. How? No idea. That's why he gets paid more than me. The football helped a bit, with Tories attacking the national team, but Euro 2020 is done now. Starmer should also do what I urged at the start and hire a drama coach so he at least sounds interesting. It worked for Mrs Thatcher.
What I don't understand is why the issue is looked at that way round? The Tories have it sussed. Who votes Tory? Brexiters and the retired. Their policies follow. So. Who votes Labour? Young people. Policies should follow. It won't be enough, but it would at least give your supporters a reason to vote. Corbyn 2017 got that and maxxed out the potential vote. Policies should be young, hip, tech savvy. Radical. And about Zoomers and Millenials in the UK. No idea what they would be. But they couldn't do worse. Long term, of course that means they are "on your side". Labour's moaning about huge youth unemployment, etc. during the early 80's played a part in 1997.
Out of all stories on the front pages I have selected two.
Front of FT, Biden seeks to calm inflation fears, saying he is vigilant against rising prices. What does this vigilance mean in practice Joe. I have this increasing feeling this White House is making a catastrophic error that gets them hammered in 2024. You can’t just come to power and do what you want with economics, whatever long held plans you had, you have to work only with the landscape before you and the art of the possible. From this mistake not just 4 more years of Popular Trump, but 12 years straight.
Front of Daily Star, tomatoes have feelings too. Apart from that, predictable and boring front pages.
Everyone is against inflation in theory. But what is Biden going to do about it, in practical terms?
He could stop coming out with multi-trillion dollar stimulus packages one after another with an economy already rebounding.
Get everyone to pay it, including the oldies, and it might wash.
After all this is for care when you're in your early 80s for the last 2-3 years of your life.
Except that NI, of course, is conveniently not paid by pensioners.
That's my point. You'd have to extend NI to pensioners (at least at 2% levels) for this to wash.
As an aside, I don't like tax rises on working people. Last thing they need.
I'd introduce a 10% additional income tax rate on defined benefit pensions schemes phased in over 10 years at an additional 1% per year. Essentially the government recouping the cost of public sector DB schemes on the other side.
Why should beneficiaries of private sector DB schemes be penalised?
The scheme my mother is in was funded entirely by employer contributions and is currently in surplus.
I think @MaxPB has come up with an interesting idea that mainly applies to over generous public sector schemes. Re your mother the employer received tax relief on the contributions and your mother did not have to pay any tax on the benefit. Often with DB the employer contribution had to be very large hence most companies bailing out so is often a big tax free benefit that a DC employee can only dream of getting.
But treating pensions as deferred income, for the purposes of taxation, has been pretty universal. With some limits, to be sure, but whether the DB employer has to put a lot of (untaxed) cash in to deliver the (taxed) benefits down the line, or whether a DC employer matches (untaxed) contributions now to deliver (taxed) benefits down the line, is pretty much the same thing from the point of view of tax. The DB was just a more generous employer offer; DC employers are free to do the same (within the annual allowance) if they want.
They should probably update the AA calculations regarding DB entitlement, though.
--AS
I don't disagree with any of that (how can I as it is factually correct), but invariably the employer contribution to the DB scheme is much bigger so providing the employee with a bigger benefit. In addition there is likely a tax benefit as the marginal tax rate is likely higher in employment than retirement plus there is the tax free lump sum. Applies to DC as well but the employer contribution is likely much lower.
The employer may well still be contributing to the DB pension after retirement.
I thought that for private companies, at retirement the DB pension is provided by buying an annuity from the pension fund. No further liability from the employer for that employee after retirement.
I think most don't, or at least the big ones don't. It's too expensive. They keep the funds invested and pay pensions out of the returns. The regulator puts a lot of pressure on them to de-risk the investment and match at least some of the liabilities with indexed gilts of appropriate duration (negative yields making this also very expensive), but their only obligation is to show that the fund is sufficient for future liabilities.
Things change if the scheme is closed to new members, and I don't know much about that situation.
I enjoyed reading what @Cyclefree had to say and I agree with it - although I'd venture to suggest that item 8 on her list is the most relevant, and stretches back well before Corbyn. The real trigger for the collapse of cultural Labour identification in what we've since come to call the Red Wall was Bigotgate. Blair sold a positive vision of Britain as a nation and as a people; Brown revealed what most metropolitan left-liberals really thought about provincial small-c conservatives.
The swing to the Left post-2015, Jeremy Corbyn's anti-patriotism, Emily Thornberry and the house with the England flags, Keir Starmer's attempt to push a second EU referendum and everything else merely resolved and crystallised the notion that Labour's leadership and most of its members had come to regard a vast section of its supporter base - modest-to-average income white people without university degrees - with naked contempt. Frankly, Labour is doing well to be polling as healthily as it still does under the circumstances.
Others will doubtless strongly disagree and suggest that I'm flat wrong, or at least exaggerate the problem, but we must ask ourselves what the reasons are as to why a Government as poor as that currently in office is not merely tolerated, but rewarded with healthy levels of support. Simply getting angry that large numbers of ex-Labour voters won't see the light and writing them off as thick really isn't helpful.
There is a lot in that, and in @Cyclefree's header list, I'd look at combining these:- 1. Boris got Brexit done. 5. Levelling up promises. 7. A Conservative country? 8. Long Corbyn. 9. Being not-Corbyn is not enough.
What binds these together is the sense for many former Labour voters is the impression that Labour is no longer on their side.
SKS is also in danger of falling for the Corbyn paradox. It is not that Corbynism was especially unpopular but that Corbyn himself added to the charge that Labour was not interested in its own people. Corbyn instead was forever banging on about the Middle East or Venezuela, and even if he wasn't, the Tories said he was and that was good enough. Emily Thornberry's flag tweet was a lower level manifestation of the same thing. And so was Starmer's own role in fighting the Brexit referendum result.
But Corbyn came very close in 2017. That's the paradox. Boris got it right when he pinched the popular parts of Labour's 2017 platform. Investment; hospitals; police.
SKS attacking Corbynistas will not help win back ex-Labour voters. Nor will talking about Israel. What they want is Corbynism without Corbyn. But that's Boris and they've already got one of those.
Starmer needs to say that Labour is on your side. How? No idea. That's why he gets paid more than me. The football helped a bit, with Tories attacking the national team, but Euro 2020 is done now. Starmer should also do what I urged at the start and hire a drama coach so he at least sounds interesting. It worked for Mrs Thatcher.
What we have seen in the UK and USA is a realignment of the two main parties. The Democrats and Labour were both the parties of the lower economic working class, but have gone for the progressive vote assuming they can keep their base. The Republicans and Conservatives have picked up the socially conservative base votes left behind, and potentially expanded their base. The difference between the UK and USA is that Trump is a massively more polarising character than Boris: Trump repels core traditional Republicans and independents, and hence lost. Boris kept more on board, and hence the Conservatives won here. Labour are stuffed unless they row back from the progressive froth or Boris repels more people. I think Labour are stuffed because they are too London centric now and everyone underestimates Boris..
My point is, what is difference between Boris and May proposal for you to say that? Unless you think it’s just 1% income tax funding it, which I don’t think is true.
Both have a tax element funding them. Both a basement level where the scheme kicks in (50 under dilmot, 100K for May, tbc under Boris and Rishi).
You say it is better, what is the difference making it better?
If are you middle aged and you have elderly parents who live in a £300,000+ house you do not stand to lose hundreds of thousands of pounds in inheritance under the Boris and Sunak plan you would have done under the May plan.
You can live with a 1% rise in the amount of NI you pay annually, you cannot live with losing most of your inheritance if your parents need at home social care and their house ultimately needs to be sold to pay for it.
Under the May plan all assets over £100,000 including your house would have been liable for at home social care costs
“ Under the May plan all assets over £100,000 including your house would have been liable for at home social care costs‘.
I agree on what you said there, but I understand Boris plan still has a figure in it that does the same thing, so it’s not all funded by the tax rise, so that part of the argument still remains, indeed as they argue over the threshold between individual liability on their wealth and what point tax payer steps in, Rishi stonewalling on behalf of the tax payer/his own coffers.
My understanding of the proposal is clearly different than yours in this regard. Am I wrong?
I am though 100% convinced Labour back this and it’s getting through parliament., if Boris had the courage to present it and not U turn.
American kids watched so much Peppa Pig during the pandemic that they developed British accents and started regularly using British words like “holiday” instead of “vacation,” confusing their parents.
Of everything on the list, number 10 is by far the most important. The economy is still doing relatively good. I don't think that much of Sir Keir but the environment will be different when furloughs end.
American kids watched so much Peppa Pig during the pandemic that they developed British accents and started regularly using British words like “holiday” instead of “vacation,” confusing their parents.
Labour's problem is with working-class voters outside the big cities and university towns. They're still pretty popular with working-class voters in those two categories of place, but it's in the medium-sized and small towns where their support has utterly tanked. And a disproportionate number of marginal seats contain those types of towns. The big cities and university towns are mostly safe Labor seats, so what happens there isn't so important, unless a challenge from the Greens and/or LDs comes into play.
Mainly because the big city working class has a high percentage of BAME, it is the white working class vote where the Labour vote has collapsed
That might be wrong to concentrate on ethnicity and ignore that the smaller, left-behind, red wall towns have often seen economic decline with the loss of large employers (and Osborne's austerity).
I enjoyed reading what @Cyclefree had to say and I agree with it - although I'd venture to suggest that item 8 on her list is the most relevant, and stretches back well before Corbyn. The real trigger for the collapse of cultural Labour identification in what we've since come to call the Red Wall was Bigotgate. Blair sold a positive vision of Britain as a nation and as a people; Brown revealed what most metropolitan left-liberals really thought about provincial small-c conservatives.
The swing to the Left post-2015, Jeremy Corbyn's anti-patriotism, Emily Thornberry and the house with the England flags, Keir Starmer's attempt to push a second EU referendum and everything else merely resolved and crystallised the notion that Labour's leadership and most of its members had come to regard a vast section of its supporter base - modest-to-average income white people without university degrees - with naked contempt. Frankly, Labour is doing well to be polling as healthily as it still does under the circumstances.
Others will doubtless strongly disagree and suggest that I'm flat wrong, or at least exaggerate the problem, but we must ask ourselves what the reasons are as to why a Government as poor as that currently in office is not merely tolerated, but rewarded with healthy levels of support. Simply getting angry that large numbers of ex-Labour voters won't see the light and writing them off as thick really isn't helpful.
There is a lot in that, and in @Cyclefree's header list, I'd look at combining these:- 1. Boris got Brexit done. 5. Levelling up promises. 7. A Conservative country? 8. Long Corbyn. 9. Being not-Corbyn is not enough.
What binds these together is the sense for many former Labour voters is the impression that Labour is no longer on their side.
SKS is also in danger of falling for the Corbyn paradox. It is not that Corbynism was especially unpopular but that Corbyn himself added to the charge that Labour was not interested in its own people. Corbyn instead was forever banging on about the Middle East or Venezuela, and even if he wasn't, the Tories said he was and that was good enough. Emily Thornberry's flag tweet was a lower level manifestation of the same thing. And so was Starmer's own role in fighting the Brexit referendum result.
But Corbyn came very close in 2017. That's the paradox. Boris got it right when he pinched the popular parts of Labour's 2017 platform. Investment; hospitals; police.
SKS attacking Corbynistas will not help win back ex-Labour voters. Nor will talking about Israel. What they want is Corbynism without Corbyn. But that's Boris and they've already got one of those.
Starmer needs to say that Labour is on your side. How? No idea. That's why he gets paid more than me. The football helped a bit, with Tories attacking the national team, but Euro 2020 is done now. Starmer should also do what I urged at the start and hire a drama coach so he at least sounds interesting. It worked for Mrs Thatcher.
What we have seen in the UK and USA is a realignment of the two main parties. The Democrats and Labour were both the parties of the lower economic working class, but have gone for the progressive vote assuming they can keep their base. The Republicans and Conservatives have picked up the socially conservative base votes left behind, and potentially expanded their base. The difference between the UK and USA is that Trump is a massively more polarising character than Boris: Trump repels core traditional Republicans and independents, and hence lost. Boris kept more on board, and hence the Conservatives won here. Labour are stuffed unless they row back from the progressive froth or Boris repels more people. I think Labour are stuffed because they are too London centric now and everyone underestimates Boris..
As an election winning machine, few underestimate Johnson.
As a Prime Minister, a great many posters on this board vastly overestimate Johnson.
Labour's problem is with working-class voters outside the big cities and university towns. They're still pretty popular with working-class voters in those two categories of place, but it's in the medium-sized and small towns where their support has utterly tanked. And a disproportionate number of marginal seats contain those types of towns. The big cities and university towns are mostly safe Labor seats, so what happens there isn't so important, unless a challenge from the Greens and/or LDs comes into play.
Mainly because the big city working class has a high percentage of BAME, it is the white working class vote where the Labour vote has collapsed
That might be wrong to concentrate on ethnicity and ignore that the smaller, left-behind, red wall towns have often seen economic decline with the loss of large employers (and Osborne's austerity).
Yes, but. Full employment exists. Not on great wages, no. But even in the most deprived small towns, there are vacancies. This hasn't been true for 50+ years. It is vastly under-estimated as a factor.
Out of all stories on the front pages I have selected two.
Front of FT, Biden seeks to calm inflation fears, saying he is vigilant against rising prices. What does this vigilance mean in practice Joe. I have this increasing feeling this White House is making a catastrophic error that gets them hammered in 2024. You can’t just come to power and do what you want with economics, whatever long held plans you had, you have to work only with the landscape before you and the art of the possible. From this mistake not just 4 more years of Popular Trump, but 12 years straight.
Front of Daily Star, tomatoes have feelings too. Apart from that, predictable and boring front pages.
Everyone is against inflation in theory. But what is Biden going to do about it, in practical terms?
He could stop coming out with multi-trillion dollar stimulus packages one after another with an economy already rebounding.
I agree with you Phillip. Adding unnecessary fuel to something already getting a bit hot. They are effectively gambling on expert promises there will be inflationary pressures but they will soon ease back. But lots of different things cause inflation, one of these things is scarcity of supply, issue of putting your hand on what you need, which I would put down to Covid, where I think the experts may be wrong is in the time frame for that particular inflationary pressure to unravel. Why is time frame important? Because debt is tied in to inflation figure with more affect the longer it is high, in turn that’s government liquidity, and fears over the liquidity of governments individually and to act as an international club can do a terrible thing to the markets and government spending.
My eldest tells me the Lib Dems have pledged to fight any requirement for a vaccine passport for clubs - he is now voting yellow
LibDems finally have something to seriously campaign on that will get attention.
Vaccine passport is a digital id in all but name, the uses of which will widened every year whilst every senior politician tell us they have no plan to do x or y with it.
Beggars belief that is Johnson of all people, the old libertarian lounge lizard himself, who will go down in history as the guy who introduced them.
I intend to resist.
Vax passports are utter evil and need fighting tooth and nail, by left and right combined. Unfortunately, while doubtless there will be a massive Tory rebellion but that nice Mr Starmer will provide the votes anyway.
It's nothing to do with vaccines (there are hardly any refusers, and even if there were, we shouldn't be excluding people from society because they refuse a medical procedure) and everything to do with an oppressive desire by the government to track everyone everywhere. By the time they arrive we'll be well into herd immunity anyway at the current rates on infection, so utterly pointless too, at least for their stated purpose.
Fundamentally government needs cutting back to size, and fast. This constant growth of surveillance, overbearing regulations and pettyflogging rules means we are being boiled like frogs, with our rulers behaving like the CCP.
It's tragic that Starmer won't fight this. Pinning one's hopes on the Lib Dems and Tory back benches seems a desperate place to be, but it seems there is nothing else available.
Making the case, quite elegantly, that the big tech firms have backed the wrong horse here and that automated driver assistance has a much brighter future than full self-driving vehicles and if self-driving is ever achieved its more likely in increments from automated assistance rather than by a giant leap to fully automated vehicles.
Though one quote that caught my, as an example of being mistaken: Chris Urmson, Aurora chief executive, put it eloquently in 2015 when he was Google’s leading driverless engineer: “Conventional wisdom would say that we’ll just take these driver assistance systems and we’ll kind of push them and . . . over time, they’ll turn into self-driving cars,” he said. “Well, that’s like me saying that if I work really hard at jumping, one day I’ll be able to fly.”
Its worth remembering that Superman's ability to fly is because he is a good jumper. He is so good at jumping he can leap over tall buildings, which became the ability to fly.
Out of all stories on the front pages I have selected two.
Front of FT, Biden seeks to calm inflation fears, saying he is vigilant against rising prices. What does this vigilance mean in practice Joe. I have this increasing feeling this White House is making a catastrophic error that gets them hammered in 2024. You can’t just come to power and do what you want with economics, whatever long held plans you had, you have to work only with the landscape before you and the art of the possible. From this mistake not just 4 more years of Popular Trump, but 12 years straight.
Front of Daily Star, tomatoes have feelings too. Apart from that, predictable and boring front pages.
Even if Trump returned to win the 2024 election he could only serve 1 more 4 year term, section 1 of the 22nd amendment of the US constitution is clear that 'No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice'
I know. But Trumpism could keep winning.
I took the ism out before posting because I thought the Popular Trump sounded like a good platform name for fascists. 🙂
My eldest tells me the Lib Dems have pledged to fight any requirement for a vaccine passport for clubs - he is now voting yellow
LibDems finally have something to seriously campaign on that will get attention.
Vaccine passport is a digital id in all but name, the uses of which will widened every year whilst every senior politician tell us they have no plan to do x or y with it.
Beggars belief that is Johnson of all people, the old libertarian lounge lizard himself, who will go down in history as the guy who introduced them.
I intend to resist.
Vax passports are utter evil and need fighting tooth and nail, by left and right combined. Unfortunately, while doubtless there will be a massive Tory rebellion but that nice Mr Starmer will provide the votes anyway.
It's nothing to do with vaccines (there are hardly any refusers, and even if there were, we shouldn't be excluding people from society because they refuse a medical procedure) and everything to do with an oppressive desire by the government to track everyone everywhere. By the time they arrive we'll be well into herd immunity anyway at the current rates on infection, so utterly pointless too, at least for their stated purpose.
Fundamentally government needs cutting back to size, and fast. This constant growth of surveillance, overbearing regulations and pettyflogging rules means we are being boiled like frogs, with our rulers behaving like the CCP.
It's tragic that Starmer won't fight this. Pinning one's hopes on the Lib Dems and Tory back benches seems a desperate place to be, but it seems there is nothing else available.
I enjoyed reading what @Cyclefree had to say and I agree with it - although I'd venture to suggest that item 8 on her list is the most relevant, and stretches back well before Corbyn. The real trigger for the collapse of cultural Labour identification in what we've since come to call the Red Wall was Bigotgate. Blair sold a positive vision of Britain as a nation and as a people; Brown revealed what most metropolitan left-liberals really thought about provincial small-c conservatives.
The swing to the Left post-2015, Jeremy Corbyn's anti-patriotism, Emily Thornberry and the house with the England flags, Keir Starmer's attempt to push a second EU referendum and everything else merely resolved and crystallised the notion that Labour's leadership and most of its members had come to regard a vast section of its supporter base - modest-to-average income white people without university degrees - with naked contempt. Frankly, Labour is doing well to be polling as healthily as it still does under the circumstances.
Others will doubtless strongly disagree and suggest that I'm flat wrong, or at least exaggerate the problem, but we must ask ourselves what the reasons are as to why a Government as poor as that currently in office is not merely tolerated, but rewarded with healthy levels of support. Simply getting angry that large numbers of ex-Labour voters won't see the light and writing them off as thick really isn't helpful.
There is a lot in that, and in @Cyclefree's header list, I'd look at combining these:- 1. Boris got Brexit done. 5. Levelling up promises. 7. A Conservative country? 8. Long Corbyn. 9. Being not-Corbyn is not enough.
What binds these together is the sense for many former Labour voters is the impression that Labour is no longer on their side.
SKS is also in danger of falling for the Corbyn paradox. It is not that Corbynism was especially unpopular but that Corbyn himself added to the charge that Labour was not interested in its own people. Corbyn instead was forever banging on about the Middle East or Venezuela, and even if he wasn't, the Tories said he was and that was good enough. Emily Thornberry's flag tweet was a lower level manifestation of the same thing. And so was Starmer's own role in fighting the Brexit referendum result.
But Corbyn came very close in 2017. That's the paradox. Boris got it right when he pinched the popular parts of Labour's 2017 platform. Investment; hospitals; police.
SKS attacking Corbynistas will not help win back ex-Labour voters. Nor will talking about Israel. What they want is Corbynism without Corbyn. But that's Boris and they've already got one of those.
Starmer needs to say that Labour is on your side. How? No idea. That's why he gets paid more than me. The football helped a bit, with Tories attacking the national team, but Euro 2020 is done now. Starmer should also do what I urged at the start and hire a drama coach so he at least sounds interesting. It worked for Mrs Thatcher.
What we have seen in the UK and USA is a realignment of the two main parties. The Democrats and Labour were both the parties of the lower economic working class, but have gone for the progressive vote assuming they can keep their base. The Republicans and Conservatives have picked up the socially conservative base votes left behind, and potentially expanded their base. The difference between the UK and USA is that Trump is a massively more polarising character than Boris: Trump repels core traditional Republicans and independents, and hence lost. Boris kept more on board, and hence the Conservatives won here. Labour are stuffed unless they row back from the progressive froth or Boris repels more people. I think Labour are stuffed because they are too London centric now and everyone underestimates Boris..
As an election winning machine, few underestimate Johnson.
As a Prime Minister, a great many posters on this board vastly overestimate Johnson.
Boris will, imo, step down before the next election. That said, I am less sure about that since reading that Carrie wants him to continue in office. The danger for the Conservatives is not just losing their talisman but without him they veer back to the nasty party of spending cuts and devil take the hindmost.
Perhaps RP/MP/ can have a whip round to make up for the 25% loss of income.
Gosh, that's a lot.
Do you have a link to an souses for that?
Meanwhile the trade union political funds continue to amass money, £24 million in income last year, only £16 million spent, and an acuminated total of £41 million in ready to be spent.
American kids watched so much Peppa Pig during the pandemic that they developed British accents and started regularly using British words like “holiday” instead of “vacation,” confusing their parents.
I love the line: Boston-based Tess Darci says that her 4-year-old daughter, Cecilie, sounds like “a little lady” thanks to the show. “She says ‘lovely’ and ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ all the time,” says Ms. Darci, who runs a communications agency.
We took our kids for a walk in the forest a couple of weeks ago week, when it had been raining and there were muddy puddles everywhere. We dressed them appropriately and they were in wellies so on the walk back to the car we agreed to let them jump in the muddy puddles like Peppa. They absolutely got covered in mud and had a whale of a time. We then bumped into another family in the car park who looked a bit shocked at how muddy ours were and asking if it was really bad on the trail, as soon as we said no but they'd just been jumping in the mud like Peppa the mum looked relieved, then instantly horrified and said that her son loves Peppa and will be doing the same thing. 😂
So 40% of admissions are from double vaccinated people? That still seems astonishingly high.
Single and double total 40%.
Not sure if there is a time cut off either - I had my first dose on Sunday, so currently am effectively unprotected, but were I to be hospitalised in the next couple of weeks I would probably go in the vaccinated column despite not having had time for the vaccines to work.
So 40% of admissions are from double vaccinated people? That still seems astonishingly high.
Single and double total 40%.
Not sure if there is a time cut off either - I had my first dose on Sunday, so currently am effectively unprotected, but were I to be hospitalised in the next couple of weeks I would probably go in the vaccinated column despite not having had time for the vaccines to work.
This is a crucial point, and is why the South Africa AZ test was so completely wrong.
And just as you list of explanations tells us why the lead is there and is likely to persist, the same list provides hints of how it could all unravel.
American kids watched so much Peppa Pig during the pandemic that they developed British accents and started regularly using British words like “holiday” instead of “vacation,” confusing their parents.
I love the line: Boston-based Tess Darci says that her 4-year-old daughter, Cecilie, sounds like “a little lady” thanks to the show. “She says ‘lovely’ and ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ all the time,” says Ms. Darci, who runs a communications agency.
We took our kids for a walk in the forest a couple of weeks ago week, when it had been raining and there were muddy puddles everywhere. We dressed them appropriately and they were in wellies so on the walk back to the car we agreed to let them jump in the muddy puddles like Peppa. They absolutely got covered in mud and had a whale of a time. We then bumped into another family in the car park who looked a bit shocked at how muddy ours were and asking if it was really bad on the trail, as soon as we said no but they'd just been jumping in the mud like Peppa the mum looked relieved, then instantly horrified and said that her son loves Peppa and will be doing the same thing. 😂
Revenge for Sesame Street misleading generations of Britons into thinking the alphabet ends with Z instead of Z.
I enjoyed reading what @Cyclefree had to say and I agree with it - although I'd venture to suggest that item 8 on her list is the most relevant, and stretches back well before Corbyn. The real trigger for the collapse of cultural Labour identification in what we've since come to call the Red Wall was Bigotgate. Blair sold a positive vision of Britain as a nation and as a people; Brown revealed what most metropolitan left-liberals really thought about provincial small-c conservatives.
The swing to the Left post-2015, Jeremy Corbyn's anti-patriotism, Emily Thornberry and the house with the England flags, Keir Starmer's attempt to push a second EU referendum and everything else merely resolved and crystallised the notion that Labour's leadership and most of its members had come to regard a vast section of its supporter base - modest-to-average income white people without university degrees - with naked contempt. Frankly, Labour is doing well to be polling as healthily as it still does under the circumstances.
Others will doubtless strongly disagree and suggest that I'm flat wrong, or at least exaggerate the problem, but we must ask ourselves what the reasons are as to why a Government as poor as that currently in office is not merely tolerated, but rewarded with healthy levels of support. Simply getting angry that large numbers of ex-Labour voters won't see the light and writing them off as thick really isn't helpful.
There is a lot in that, and in @Cyclefree's header list, I'd look at combining these:- 1. Boris got Brexit done. 5. Levelling up promises. 7. A Conservative country? 8. Long Corbyn. 9. Being not-Corbyn is not enough.
What binds these together is the sense for many former Labour voters is the impression that Labour is no longer on their side.
SKS is also in danger of falling for the Corbyn paradox. It is not that Corbynism was especially unpopular but that Corbyn himself added to the charge that Labour was not interested in its own people. Corbyn instead was forever banging on about the Middle East or Venezuela, and even if he wasn't, the Tories said he was and that was good enough. Emily Thornberry's flag tweet was a lower level manifestation of the same thing. And so was Starmer's own role in fighting the Brexit referendum result.
But Corbyn came very close in 2017. That's the paradox. Boris got it right when he pinched the popular parts of Labour's 2017 platform. Investment; hospitals; police.
SKS attacking Corbynistas will not help win back ex-Labour voters. Nor will talking about Israel. What they want is Corbynism without Corbyn. But that's Boris and they've already got one of those.
Starmer needs to say that Labour is on your side. How? No idea. That's why he gets paid more than me. The football helped a bit, with Tories attacking the national team, but Euro 2020 is done now. Starmer should also do what I urged at the start and hire a drama coach so he at least sounds interesting. It worked for Mrs Thatcher.
What we have seen in the UK and USA is a realignment of the two main parties. The Democrats and Labour were both the parties of the lower economic working class, but have gone for the progressive vote assuming they can keep their base. The Republicans and Conservatives have picked up the socially conservative base votes left behind, and potentially expanded their base. The difference between the UK and USA is that Trump is a massively more polarising character than Boris: Trump repels core traditional Republicans and independents, and hence lost. Boris kept more on board, and hence the Conservatives won here. Labour are stuffed unless they row back from the progressive froth or Boris repels more people. I think Labour are stuffed because they are too London centric now and everyone underestimates Boris..
The difference is demographic; the American working class or as they say "middle class" is more racially polarised, and black voters are a pillar of support for the Democrats. They also have live topics like abortion that push some wealthier women to vote Democrat; whereas Brexit didn't cause any meaningful middle-class repulsion in 2017-19.
I enjoyed reading what @Cyclefree had to say and I agree with it - although I'd venture to suggest that item 8 on her list is the most relevant, and stretches back well before Corbyn. The real trigger for the collapse of cultural Labour identification in what we've since come to call the Red Wall was Bigotgate. Blair sold a positive vision of Britain as a nation and as a people; Brown revealed what most metropolitan left-liberals really thought about provincial small-c conservatives.
The swing to the Left post-2015, Jeremy Corbyn's anti-patriotism, Emily Thornberry and the house with the England flags, Keir Starmer's attempt to push a second EU referendum and everything else merely resolved and crystallised the notion that Labour's leadership and most of its members had come to regard a vast section of its supporter base - modest-to-average income white people without university degrees - with naked contempt. Frankly, Labour is doing well to be polling as healthily as it still does under the circumstances.
Others will doubtless strongly disagree and suggest that I'm flat wrong, or at least exaggerate the problem, but we must ask ourselves what the reasons are as to why a Government as poor as that currently in office is not merely tolerated, but rewarded with healthy levels of support. Simply getting angry that large numbers of ex-Labour voters won't see the light and writing them off as thick really isn't helpful.
There is a lot in that, and in @Cyclefree's header list, I'd look at combining these:- 1. Boris got Brexit done. 5. Levelling up promises. 7. A Conservative country? 8. Long Corbyn. 9. Being not-Corbyn is not enough.
What binds these together is the sense for many former Labour voters is the impression that Labour is no longer on their side.
SKS is also in danger of falling for the Corbyn paradox. It is not that Corbynism was especially unpopular but that Corbyn himself added to the charge that Labour was not interested in its own people. Corbyn instead was forever banging on about the Middle East or Venezuela, and even if he wasn't, the Tories said he was and that was good enough. Emily Thornberry's flag tweet was a lower level manifestation of the same thing. And so was Starmer's own role in fighting the Brexit referendum result.
But Corbyn came very close in 2017. That's the paradox. Boris got it right when he pinched the popular parts of Labour's 2017 platform. Investment; hospitals; police.
SKS attacking Corbynistas will not help win back ex-Labour voters. Nor will talking about Israel. What they want is Corbynism without Corbyn. But that's Boris and they've already got one of those.
Starmer needs to say that Labour is on your side. How? No idea. That's why he gets paid more than me. The football helped a bit, with Tories attacking the national team, but Euro 2020 is done now. Starmer should also do what I urged at the start and hire a drama coach so he at least sounds interesting. It worked for Mrs Thatcher.
What we have seen in the UK and USA is a realignment of the two main parties. The Democrats and Labour were both the parties of the lower economic working class, but have gone for the progressive vote assuming they can keep their base. The Republicans and Conservatives have picked up the socially conservative base votes left behind, and potentially expanded their base. The difference between the UK and USA is that Trump is a massively more polarising character than Boris: Trump repels core traditional Republicans and independents, and hence lost. Boris kept more on board, and hence the Conservatives won here. Labour are stuffed unless they row back from the progressive froth or Boris repels more people. I think Labour are stuffed because they are too London centric now and everyone underestimates Boris..
The difference is demographic; the American working class or as they say "middle class" is more racially polarised, and black voters are a pillar of support for the Democrats. They also have live topics like abortion that push some wealthier women to vote Democrat; whereas Brexit didn't cause any meaningful middle-class repulsion in 2017-19.
The transAtlantic comparisons tend to fail because the left-right divide there doesn't at all line up with here.
The problem is that the GOP in the USA has gone complete and utter batshit crazy over a process of decades. Their courting of the religious right nutjobs, then eventually leading to QAnon, Trump etc - none of that has any sort of corollary here. Despite how much certain people want to mislabel Brexit as our version of that.
I'm certainly of the opinion in the UK that we are Taxed Enough Already but that's not really what the TEA Party or the GOP ever stood for, despite that being the etymology of that name.
Out of all stories on the front pages I have selected two.
Front of FT, Biden seeks to calm inflation fears, saying he is vigilant against rising prices. What does this vigilance mean in practice Joe. I have this increasing feeling this White House is making a catastrophic error that gets them hammered in 2024. You can’t just come to power and do what you want with economics, whatever long held plans you had, you have to work only with the landscape before you and the art of the possible. From this mistake not just 4 more years of Popular Trump, but 12 years straight.
Front of Daily Star, tomatoes have feelings too. Apart from that, predictable and boring front pages.
Everyone is against inflation in theory. But what is Biden going to do about it, in practical terms?
He could stop coming out with multi-trillion dollar stimulus packages one after another with an economy already rebounding.
Out of all stories on the front pages I have selected two.
Front of FT, Biden seeks to calm inflation fears, saying he is vigilant against rising prices. What does this vigilance mean in practice Joe. I have this increasing feeling this White House is making a catastrophic error that gets them hammered in 2024. You can’t just come to power and do what you want with economics, whatever long held plans you had, you have to work only with the landscape before you and the art of the possible. From this mistake not just 4 more years of Popular Trump, but 12 years straight.
Front of Daily Star, tomatoes have feelings too. Apart from that, predictable and boring front pages.
Everyone is against inflation in theory. But what is Biden going to do about it, in practical terms?
He could stop coming out with multi-trillion dollar stimulus packages one after another with an economy already rebounding.
Yes: the US is already booming.
Indeed. So what does Biden want to do? Add $4 trillion of gasoline to the fire.
Its utter madness. But there's no fiscally responsible party left in America.
So 40% of admissions are from double vaccinated people? That still seems astonishingly high.
Single and double total 40%.
Not sure if there is a time cut off either - I had my first dose on Sunday, so currently am effectively unprotected, but were I to be hospitalised in the next couple of weeks I would probably go in the vaccinated column despite not having had time for the vaccines to work.
15% double vaccinated, 25% single.
I believe they adjust for 3 weeks after for 1st dose, 2 weeks for 2nd..but you could be first dose, infected 2 weeks, then end up in hospitals at 3.5 weeks and you go down in the vaccinated with one dose column.
Also worth pointing out that we know AZN take a lot longer than 3 weeks to reach max efficacy.
So 40% of admissions are from double vaccinated people? That still seems astonishingly high.
Single and double total 40%.
Not sure if there is a time cut off either - I had my first dose on Sunday, so currently am effectively unprotected, but were I to be hospitalised in the next couple of weeks I would probably go in the vaccinated column despite not having had time for the vaccines to work.
15% doible vaccinated, 25% single.
When based on original rates of hospitalisations etc the cohort that is double-vaccinated would have been about 99% of deaths and admissions, so being down to 15% is much more than 85% effective.
Making the case, quite elegantly, that the big tech firms have backed the wrong horse here and that automated driver assistance has a much brighter future than full self-driving vehicles and if self-driving is ever achieved its more likely in increments from automated assistance rather than by a giant leap to fully automated vehicles.
Though one quote that caught my, as an example of being mistaken: Chris Urmson, Aurora chief executive, put it eloquently in 2015 when he was Google’s leading driverless engineer: “Conventional wisdom would say that we’ll just take these driver assistance systems and we’ll kind of push them and . . . over time, they’ll turn into self-driving cars,” he said. “Well, that’s like me saying that if I work really hard at jumping, one day I’ll be able to fly.”
Its worth remembering that Superman's ability to fly is because he is a good jumper. He is so good at jumping he can leap over tall buildings, which became the ability to fly.
So...
Does anybody remember speech recognition back in 1999? At that time, all the leading players were boasting of 99% accuracy, and IBM said their speech recognition business could be a leading driver of growth, etc.
But it turned out that 99% speech recognition was rubbish. Correcting that 1% took far longer than typing everything.
And so it stagnated until Google in about 2016-17. You see, it turned out you needed 99.95% accuracy before people would use it.
That's where we are with ADAS. It's really cool. But a system that throws it's hands in the air and says "YOU TAKE OVER NOW!" is pretty useless, as it means you have to pay attention all the time.
So 40% of admissions are from double vaccinated people? That still seems astonishingly high.
Single and double total 40%.
Not sure if there is a time cut off either - I had my first dose on Sunday, so currently am effectively unprotected, but were I to be hospitalised in the next couple of weeks I would probably go in the vaccinated column despite not having had time for the vaccines to work.
15% doible vaccinated, 25% single.
When based on original rates of hospitalisations etc the cohort that is double-vaccinated would have been about 99% of deaths and admissions, so being down to 15% is much more than 85% effective.
Ed Conway head just exploded....he thinks 21% of all double vaccinated people will get it, because vaccines are 79% effective....
Making the case, quite elegantly, that the big tech firms have backed the wrong horse here and that automated driver assistance has a much brighter future than full self-driving vehicles and if self-driving is ever achieved its more likely in increments from automated assistance rather than by a giant leap to fully automated vehicles.
Though one quote that caught my, as an example of being mistaken: Chris Urmson, Aurora chief executive, put it eloquently in 2015 when he was Google’s leading driverless engineer: “Conventional wisdom would say that we’ll just take these driver assistance systems and we’ll kind of push them and . . . over time, they’ll turn into self-driving cars,” he said. “Well, that’s like me saying that if I work really hard at jumping, one day I’ll be able to fly.”
Its worth remembering that Superman's ability to fly is because he is a good jumper. He is so good at jumping he can leap over tall buildings, which became the ability to fly.
So...
Does anybody remember speech recognition back in 1999? At that time, all the leading players were boasting of 99% accuracy, and IBM said their speech recognition business could be a leading driver of growth, etc.
But it turned out that 99% speech recognition was rubbish. Correcting that 1% took far longer than typing everything.
And so it stagnated until Google in about 2016-17. You see, it turned out you needed 99.95% accuracy before people would use it.
That's where we are with ADAS. It's really cool. But a system that throws it's hands in the air and says "YOU TAKE OVER NOW!" is pretty useless, as it means you have to pay attention all the time.
Actually its not useless and the FT Article (have you read it?) puts it well, as to why ADAS is working while fully-self-driving robocars are not.
Because ADAS while not being ideal, is both useful, appreciated, better than the alternative that does exist and is profitable.
Companies that have chosen to solve the full 100% or nothing have sunk billions in to do research and developement and have nothing to show for it yet - and are not likely to have anything to show for it for a while.
Companies that have gone down the ADAS route are already reaping a return in investment as cars are on the road using that ADAS system - and the development companies can reap a solid return of cash as vehicles with their systems are sold, and can analyse an increasing stream of data to iterate and improve ADAS based on the vehicles that are live using the systems sending data back.
Its another good example of how iteration beats revolution.
Get everyone to pay it, including the oldies, and it might wash.
After all this is for care when you're in your early 80s for the last 2-3 years of your life.
Except that NI, of course, is conveniently not paid by pensioners.
That's my point. You'd have to extend NI to pensioners (at least at 2% levels) for this to wash.
As an aside, I don't like tax rises on working people. Last thing they need.
I'd introduce a 10% additional income tax rate on defined benefit pensions schemes phased in over 10 years at an additional 1% per year. Essentially the government recouping the cost of public sector DB schemes on the other side.
Why should beneficiaries of private sector DB schemes be penalised?
The scheme my mother is in was funded entirely by employer contributions and is currently in surplus.
I did say public sector fatcats.
The trouble is, that won't bring very much in, as very few Public Sector fat cats exist, Most Civil Servants don't earn £60k per year when working,
Put DB schemes on income tax rates of 30% and 50%. It would raise a significant amount of money. Enough to not need to put taxes up on working people for social care.
I worked in the public sector for about a decade, so I have a final salary pension preserved from my time there, but given that my final salary was at a fairly junior level it's not going to amount to much, and I received it as a quid pro quo for having a lower salary than I could go and earn in the private sector (as I am now doing). Bit unfair to tax my modest pension at a punitive rate.
You are making assumptions there, I suspect you will find your final salary pension is worth more year on year than you private sector pension. For a start you dc pension is unlikely to be indexed linked as final salary will be. I was fortunate I was in a db penison scheme for 10 years too working for ici and every year I look at payouts for both when I get a statement and still finding my 10 years at ici are paying more than all my other pension schemes put together by about 25 %. It also no longer true public sector get paid less. It is true however that the various public sector schemes have a 1.8 trillion hole in them
Everton can confirm it has suspended a First-Team player pending a police investigation. The Club will continue to support the authorities with their inquiries and will not be making any further statement at this time.
A big mystery — which does around 18 degrees at night feel swelteringly hot, but about 12 degrees feel okay? You wouldn't think those 6 degrees would make such a big difference. During the day they don't particularly.
Everton can confirm it has suspended a First-Team player pending a police investigation. The Club will continue to support the authorities with their inquiries and will not be making any further statement at this time.
A big mystery — which does around 18 degrees at night feel swelteringly hot, but about 12 degrees feel okay? You wouldn't think those 6 degrees would make such a big difference. During the day they don't particularly.
You get used to it. Familiarity is all. Plus. We aren't set up for it. Actually chilly in a t shirt here after the Sun went down.
A big mystery — which does around 18 degrees at night feel swelteringly hot, but about 12 degrees feel okay? You wouldn't think those 6 degrees would make such a big difference. During the day they don't particularly.
Probably because you normally cool down when sleeping. If it's too hot, you can't do that.
Out of all stories on the front pages I have selected two.
Front of FT, Biden seeks to calm inflation fears, saying he is vigilant against rising prices. What does this vigilance mean in practice Joe. I have this increasing feeling this White House is making a catastrophic error that gets them hammered in 2024. You can’t just come to power and do what you want with economics, whatever long held plans you had, you have to work only with the landscape before you and the art of the possible. From this mistake not just 4 more years of Popular Trump, but 12 years straight.
Front of Daily Star, tomatoes have feelings too. Apart from that, predictable and boring front pages.
Everyone is against inflation in theory. But what is Biden going to do about it, in practical terms?
He could stop coming out with multi-trillion dollar stimulus packages one after another with an economy already rebounding.
Yes: the US is already booming.
Indeed. So what does Biden want to do? Add $4 trillion of gasoline to the fire.
Its utter madness. But there's no fiscally responsible party left in America.
On topic, the reason the Tories are doing so well is because the majority of the UK electorate is economically centrist and culturally centre-right. The Tories are economically centre-right and culturally centre-right. Labour are economically centre-left and culturally very left. What protected Labour for years was a cultural hatred in northern heartlands for the Tories, but Corbyn and Remainerism meant those places were willing to vote Tory once, and now that cultural hatred is broken. Labour have to overcompensate to win them back and the Labour members won't let them.
Out of all stories on the front pages I have selected two.
Front of FT, Biden seeks to calm inflation fears, saying he is vigilant against rising prices. What does this vigilance mean in practice Joe. I have this increasing feeling this White House is making a catastrophic error that gets them hammered in 2024. You can’t just come to power and do what you want with economics, whatever long held plans you had, you have to work only with the landscape before you and the art of the possible. From this mistake not just 4 more years of Popular Trump, but 12 years straight.
Front of Daily Star, tomatoes have feelings too. Apart from that, predictable and boring front pages.
Everyone is against inflation in theory. But what is Biden going to do about it, in practical terms?
He could stop coming out with multi-trillion dollar stimulus packages one after another with an economy already rebounding.
Yes: the US is already booming.
Indeed. So what does Biden want to do? Add $4 trillion of gasoline to the fire.
Its utter madness. But there's no fiscally responsible party left in America.
I don't really blame the Democrats for this. Their last two presidents were fiscally responsible and all it did was add to the size of the next Republican's big tax cut for the top 10%.
I say this as a Remainer/Rejoiner. We are not going to get anywhere against Johnson while a large proportion of our number include utter utter bellends like this -
...snip...
What's the meaning of the 3.5% in their twitter names?
It relates to social research which concludes that a committed 3.5% of the population is sufficient to create political change by means of non-violent direct action, presumably forming a critical mass that then changes views in the other 96.5% by force of their example, rather than imposing the will of the 3.5% on the rest.
So I guess it's a claim from that individual that they see themselves as part of the 3.5%. Not sure that the research they are citing would have shown the same beneficial impact of 3.5% talking to itself on twitter, though.
On topic, the reason the Tories are doing so well is because the majority of the UK electorate is economically centrist and culturally centre-right. The Tories are economically centre-right and culturally centre-right. Labour are economically centre-left and culturally very left. What protected Labour for years was a cultural hatred in northern heartlands for the Tories, but Corbyn and Remainerism meant those places were willing to vote Tory once, and now that cultural hatred is broken. Labour have to overcompensate to win them back and the Labour members won't let them.
In other words, Labour are no longer fit for purpose. Well, they had a decent run for about a century.
This ought to be a golden opportunity for both the English Liberal Democrats and the Green Party of England and Wales. Are they up to the challenge?
I now think Labour will take poll leads in the next few months. This isn't wishful thinking on my part. The wheels are coming off the Johnson blunderbus.
After Black Wednesday there wasn't an instant Armageddon poll loss. It took months for it to seep through.
On topic, the reason the Tories are doing so well is because the majority of the UK electorate is economically centrist and culturally centre-right. .
Simply untrue.
Economically the country is centre-right and socially ('culturally') it's soft left. Despite Brexit, Tony Blair, David Cameron and Boris Johnson all appealed to a soft left socially relaxed and quite liberal country. In particular we venerate the NHS: something not found in the US or many other countries. We like our arts and sports, still believe in nationalised industries, and are relaxed about social equality including gay marriage.
The Alf Garnett vote is not the mainstream of this country. It may shout the loudest but it's not the majority. Nor are the occasional old gammons complaining about wokedom.
On topic, the reason the Tories are doing so well is because the majority of the UK electorate is economically centrist and culturally centre-right. .
Simply untrue.
Economically the country is centre-right and socially ('culturally') it's soft left. Despite Brexit, Tony Blair, David Cameron and Boris Johnson all appealed to a soft left socially relaxed and quite liberal country. In particular we venerate the NHS: something not found in the US or many other countries. We like our arts and sports, still believe in nationalised industries, and are relaxed about social equality including gay marriage.
The Alf Garnett vote is not the mainstream of this country. It may shout the loudest but it's not the majority. Nor are the occasional old gammons complaining about wokedom.
Given the way things have developed over the last few years, what you describe is centre right.
Get everyone to pay it, including the oldies, and it might wash.
After all this is for care when you're in your early 80s for the last 2-3 years of your life.
Except that NI, of course, is conveniently not paid by pensioners.
That's my point. You'd have to extend NI to pensioners (at least at 2% levels) for this to wash.
As an aside, I don't like tax rises on working people. Last thing they need.
I'd introduce a 10% additional income tax rate on defined benefit pensions schemes phased in over 10 years at an additional 1% per year. Essentially the government recouping the cost of public sector DB schemes on the other side.
Why should beneficiaries of private sector DB schemes be penalised?
The scheme my mother is in was funded entirely by employer contributions and is currently in surplus.
I did say public sector fatcats.
The trouble is, that won't bring very much in, as very few Public Sector fat cats exist, Most Civil Servants don't earn £60k per year when working,
Put DB schemes on income tax rates of 30% and 50%. It would raise a significant amount of money. Enough to not need to put taxes up on working people for social care.
I worked in the public sector for about a decade, so I have a final salary pension preserved from my time there, but given that my final salary was at a fairly junior level it's not going to amount to much, and I received it as a quid pro quo for having a lower salary than I could go and earn in the private sector (as I am now doing). Bit unfair to tax my modest pension at a punitive rate.
You are making assumptions there, I suspect you will find your final salary pension is worth more year on year than you private sector pension. For a start you dc pension is unlikely to be indexed linked as final salary will be. I was fortunate I was in a db penison scheme for 10 years too working for ici and every year I look at payouts for both when I get a statement and still finding my 10 years at ici are paying more than all my other pension schemes put together by about 25 %. It also no longer true public sector get paid less. It is true however that the various public sector schemes have a 1.8 trillion hole in them
It is true that DC pensions are not index linked but assuming the fund manager is any good, DC funds will have been rising by more than the rate of inflation, not less. It probably is true that most DC pension contributions are too low and until recently, many jobs came without pension schemes at all. ICI was in the private sector, was it not?
Why is there so much intolerance by portable phone users towards non-portable phone users?
What's a non-portable phone?
my guess is that it is a phone that is not portable
LOL. You mean like the very first satellite phones. IIRC, the INMARSAT came in its own briefcase with a collapsible antenna.
We had an early portable phone at work. It came in a large bag that also held its battery. It might have been Motorola. Once we sent it in a taxi round to a colleague's flat so he could phone in while off sick.
Where's the crime? It might be misleading to omit 100-odd pages or an ellipsis but at first glance, the two sentences fit well together and express more-or-less the same thought. Whether it is misleading depends on what Smith said in the rest of the book.
Out of all stories on the front pages I have selected two.
Front of FT, Biden seeks to calm inflation fears, saying he is vigilant against rising prices. What does this vigilance mean in practice Joe. I have this increasing feeling this White House is making a catastrophic error that gets them hammered in 2024. You can’t just come to power and do what you want with economics, whatever long held plans you had, you have to work only with the landscape before you and the art of the possible. From this mistake not just 4 more years of Popular Trump, but 12 years straight.
Front of Daily Star, tomatoes have feelings too. Apart from that, predictable and boring front pages.
Everyone is against inflation in theory. But what is Biden going to do about it, in practical terms?
He could stop coming out with multi-trillion dollar stimulus packages one after another with an economy already rebounding.
Yes: the US is already booming.
Indeed. So what does Biden want to do? Add $4 trillion of gasoline to the fire.
Its utter madness. But there's no fiscally responsible party left in America.
I don't really blame the Democrats for this. Their last two presidents were fiscally responsible and all it did was add to the size of the next Republican's big tax cut for the top 10%.
There's a lot of truth in this: both Clinton and Obama ran very fiscally responsible administrations, largely because they were constrained by Republican Congress.
On topic: I think 4-1 is pretty good odds for this year. If the 'real' gap were to narrow to 7-8 points, you could probably expect one poll to show a Labour lead.
Out of all stories on the front pages I have selected two.
Front of FT, Biden seeks to calm inflation fears, saying he is vigilant against rising prices. What does this vigilance mean in practice Joe. I have this increasing feeling this White House is making a catastrophic error that gets them hammered in 2024. You can’t just come to power and do what you want with economics, whatever long held plans you had, you have to work only with the landscape before you and the art of the possible. From this mistake not just 4 more years of Popular Trump, but 12 years straight.
Front of Daily Star, tomatoes have feelings too. Apart from that, predictable and boring front pages.
Everyone is against inflation in theory. But what is Biden going to do about it, in practical terms?
He could stop coming out with multi-trillion dollar stimulus packages one after another with an economy already rebounding.
Yes: the US is already booming.
Indeed. So what does Biden want to do? Add $4 trillion of gasoline to the fire.
Its utter madness. But there's no fiscally responsible party left in America.
I don't really blame the Democrats for this. Their last two presidents were fiscally responsible and all it did was add to the size of the next Republican's big tax cut for the top 10%.
There's a lot of truth in this: both Clinton and Obama ran very fiscally responsible administrations, largely because they were constrained by Republican Congress.
Funny how Republican Congresses were happy for Reagan, Bush and Trump to let rip.
Mr. JohnL, it's presenting as a single quote something that is not. That is misleading.
It's bad enough that headlines, news soundbites, and social media all funnel discourse into shorter, simplistic segments bereft of wider context and nuance.
Where's the crime? It might be misleading to omit 100-odd pages or an ellipsis but at first glance, the two sentences fit well together and express more-or-less the same thought. Whether it is misleading depends on what Smith said in the rest of the book.
You think that? Seriously?
Fabricating a quote by pretending someone said or wrote something that they did not? Then passing it off as a real quote in their literal words? And that the fabricated quote representing what you think the book says is some sort of jusification?
In this case the second sentence is not even a complete sentence in the original.
There are three issues here:
1 is Murphy's absent integrity of process. It's all of a piece with how he (mis)handles evidence, and has done since I started occasionally reading him about 15 years ago. 2 is Murphy deceiving his followers by pretending that this is a quote. For an academic of sorts that is fatal. It would be embarrassing for a 12 year old blogger. 3 Is that he doesn't seem to think there is a problem.
Where's the crime? It might be misleading to omit 100-odd pages or an ellipsis but at first glance, the two sentences fit well together and express more-or-less the same thought. Whether it is misleading depends on what Smith said in the rest of the book.
You think that? Seriously?
Fabricating a quote by pretending someone said or wrote something that they did not? Then passing it off as a real quote in their literal words? And that the fabricated quote representing what you think the book says is some sort of jusification?
In this case the second sentence is not even a complete sentence in the original.
There are three issues here:
1 is Murphy's absent integrity of process. It's all of a piece with how he (mis)handles evidence, and has done since I started occasionally reading him about 15 years ago. 2 is Murphy deceiving his followers by pretending that this is a quote. For an academic of sorts that is fatal. It would be embarrassing for a 12 year old blogger. 3 Is that he doesn't seem to think there is a problem.
It's the Johann Hari playbook revisited.
Seems small beer when we have our leading politician promising there’ll be no border down the Irish Sea and that we’ll enjoy “frictionless trade” and “all the same benefits” as being in the EU without any additional non-tariff barriers to trade at all, no siree.
Where's the crime? It might be misleading to omit 100-odd pages or an ellipsis but at first glance, the two sentences fit well together and express more-or-less the same thought. Whether it is misleading depends on what Smith said in the rest of the book.
You think that? Seriously?
Fabricating a quote by pretending someone said or wrote something that they did not? Then passing it off as a real quote in their literal words? And that the fabricated quote representing what you think the book says is some sort of jusification?
In this case the second sentence is not even a complete sentence in the original.
There are three issues here:
1 is Murphy's absent integrity of process. It's all of a piece with how he (mis)handles evidence, and has done since I started occasionally reading him about 15 years ago. 2 is Murphy deceiving his followers by pretending that this is a quote. For an academic of sorts that is fatal. It would be embarrassing for a 12 year old blogger. 3 Is that he doesn't seem to think there is a problem.
It's the Johann Hari playbook revisited.
Yes, there should be an ellipsis. But the larger question is whether it distorts what Adam Smith wrote. At first glance, the two sentences express more-or-less the same idea. This is not the same as corpses cavorting round unbuilt palaces.
Where's the crime? It might be misleading to omit 100-odd pages or an ellipsis but at first glance, the two sentences fit well together and express more-or-less the same thought. Whether it is misleading depends on what Smith said in the rest of the book.
You think that? Seriously?
Fabricating a quote by pretending someone said or wrote something that they did not? Then passing it off as a real quote in their literal words? And that the fabricated quote representing what you think the book says is some sort of jusification?
In this case the second sentence is not even a complete sentence in the original.
There are three issues here:
1 is Murphy's absent integrity of process. It's all of a piece with how he (mis)handles evidence, and has done since I started occasionally reading him about 15 years ago. 2 is Murphy deceiving his followers by pretending that this is a quote. For an academic of sorts that is fatal. It would be embarrassing for a 12 year old blogger. 3 Is that he doesn't seem to think there is a problem.
It's the Johann Hari playbook revisited.
I'm with you until the last sentence. It's a long, long way from Mr Hari's antics.
I now think Labour will take poll leads in the next few months. This isn't wishful thinking on my part. The wheels are coming off the Johnson blunderbus.
After Black Wednesday there wasn't an instant Armageddon poll loss. It took months for it to seep through.
If they are serious about a 1% tax rise by way of national insurance then they will quickly get themselves into a mess. It heavily penalises the economically active, to essentially subsidise the economically inactive. Perhaps the labour party will start to honour its name.
Where's the crime? It might be misleading to omit 100-odd pages or an ellipsis but at first glance, the two sentences fit well together and express more-or-less the same thought. Whether it is misleading depends on what Smith said in the rest of the book.
You think that? Seriously?
Fabricating a quote by pretending someone said or wrote something that they did not? Then passing it off as a real quote in their literal words? And that the fabricated quote representing what you think the book says is some sort of jusification?
In this case the second sentence is not even a complete sentence in the original.
There are three issues here:
1 is Murphy's absent integrity of process. It's all of a piece with how he (mis)handles evidence, and has done since I started occasionally reading him about 15 years ago. 2 is Murphy deceiving his followers by pretending that this is a quote. For an academic of sorts that is fatal. It would be embarrassing for a 12 year old blogger. 3 Is that he doesn't seem to think there is a problem.
It's the Johann Hari playbook revisited.
Yes, there should be an ellipsis. But the larger question is whether it distorts what Adam Smith wrote. At first glance, the two sentences express more-or-less the same idea. This is not the same as corpses cavorting round unbuilt palaces.
You cannot tell if the sentences express more-or-less the same idea out of their context. They may; or they be an expression of an argument that the writer then demolishes.
It's crass and sh*t. it'd be relatively easy to take (say) your posts on here and construct a hateful argument you'd never agree with from sentences you have made. There are over 8,500 posts to choose from, most containing multiple sentences.
The Tories are in the lead because the Opposition isn't credible. That's it in a nutshell. Starmer needs to have a very public fight with the left and be seen to have a major victory, like Kinnock did. Until then all the comments and threads in the world will alter nothing.
I now think Labour will take poll leads in the next few months. This isn't wishful thinking on my part. The wheels are coming off the Johnson blunderbus.
After Black Wednesday there wasn't an instant Armageddon poll loss. It took months for it to seep through.
If they are serious about a 1% tax rise by way of national insurance then they will quickly get themselves into a mess. It heavily penalises the economically active, to essentially subsidise the economically inactive. Perhaps the labour party will start to honour its name.
Raising national insurance also breaks the manifesto pledge not to raise income tax or NI.
Where's the crime? It might be misleading to omit 100-odd pages or an ellipsis but at first glance, the two sentences fit well together and express more-or-less the same thought. Whether it is misleading depends on what Smith said in the rest of the book.
You think that? Seriously?
Fabricating a quote by pretending someone said or wrote something that they did not? Then passing it off as a real quote in their literal words? And that the fabricated quote representing what you think the book says is some sort of jusification?
In this case the second sentence is not even a complete sentence in the original.
There are three issues here:
1 is Murphy's absent integrity of process. It's all of a piece with how he (mis)handles evidence, and has done since I started occasionally reading him about 15 years ago. 2 is Murphy deceiving his followers by pretending that this is a quote. For an academic of sorts that is fatal. It would be embarrassing for a 12 year old blogger. 3 Is that he doesn't seem to think there is a problem.
It's the Johann Hari playbook revisited.
Yes, there should be an ellipsis. But the larger question is whether it distorts what Adam Smith wrote. At first glance, the two sentences express more-or-less the same idea. This is not the same as corpses cavorting round unbuilt palaces.
You cannot tell if the sentences express more-or-less the same idea out of their context. They may; or they be an expression of an argument that the writer then demolishes.
It's crass and sh*t. it'd be relatively easy to take (say) your posts on here and construct a hateful argument you'd never agree with from sentences you have made. There are over 8,500 posts to choose from, most containing multiple sentences.
Yes, that's the point. I am asking if concatenating the two sentences does express a meaning other than that intended by Adam Smith. Does it?
Mr. B2, you can think deception is generally a bad thing, whether on a large or small scale.
Mr. JohnL, that's true, although we are in exceptional circumstances. I think a bigger potential problem is that people are never thrilled by new taxes and, for some, this will come at a very difficult time.
Out of all stories on the front pages I have selected two.
Front of FT, Biden seeks to calm inflation fears, saying he is vigilant against rising prices. What does this vigilance mean in practice Joe. I have this increasing feeling this White House is making a catastrophic error that gets them hammered in 2024. You can’t just come to power and do what you want with economics, whatever long held plans you had, you have to work only with the landscape before you and the art of the possible. From this mistake not just 4 more years of Popular Trump, but 12 years straight.
Front of Daily Star, tomatoes have feelings too. Apart from that, predictable and boring front pages.
Everyone is against inflation in theory. But what is Biden going to do about it, in practical terms?
He could stop coming out with multi-trillion dollar stimulus packages one after another with an economy already rebounding.
Yes: the US is already booming.
Indeed. So what does Biden want to do? Add $4 trillion of gasoline to the fire.
Its utter madness. But there's no fiscally responsible party left in America.
… nor in England.
Really not comparable.
Post pandemic Sunak has laid out plans to return to a balanced budget.
Post pandemic Biden is trying to add $4 trillion of stimulus, on top of the $2 trillion of stimulus earlier this year.
Even if you ignore the $2 trillion earlier this year there's no comparison with adding $4 trillion more stimulus now. Pro rata that's like Sunak coming up with a further £300 billion of post pandemic stimulus.
Comments
Do you have a link to an souses for that?
Meanwhile the trade union political funds continue to amass money, £24 million in income last year, only £16 million spent, and an acuminated total of £41 million in ready to be spent.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/annual-report-of-the-certification-officer-2020-2021-pdf-format
But trust him when he tells you what the peak will be. He is a doctor ...
1. Boris got Brexit done.
5. Levelling up promises.
7. A Conservative country?
8. Long Corbyn.
9. Being not-Corbyn is not enough.
What binds these together is the sense for many former Labour voters is the impression that Labour is no longer on their side.
SKS is also in danger of falling for the Corbyn paradox. It is not that Corbynism was especially unpopular but that Corbyn himself added to the charge that Labour was not interested in its own people. Corbyn instead was forever banging on about the Middle East or Venezuela, and even if he wasn't, the Tories said he was and that was good enough. Emily Thornberry's flag tweet was a lower level manifestation of the same thing. And so was Starmer's own role in fighting the Brexit referendum result.
But Corbyn came very close in 2017. That's the paradox. Boris got it right when he pinched the popular parts of Labour's 2017 platform. Investment; hospitals; police.
SKS attacking Corbynistas will not help win back ex-Labour voters. Nor will talking about Israel. What they want is Corbynism without Corbyn. But that's Boris and they've already got one of those.
Starmer needs to say that Labour is on your side. How? No idea. That's why he gets paid more than me. The football helped a bit, with Tories attacking the national team, but Euro 2020 is done now. Starmer should also do what I urged at the start and hire a drama coach so he at least sounds interesting. It worked for Mrs Thatcher.
You can live with a 1% rise in the amount of NI you pay annually, you cannot live with losing most of your inheritance if your parents need at home social care and their house ultimately needs to be sold to pay for it.
Under the May plan all assets over £100,000 including your house would have been liable for at home social care costs
Just don't tell us how many people will go to hospital, if you mean how many people _won't_ go to hospital!
There, I'm prepared to do my bit.
Front of FT, Biden seeks to calm inflation fears, saying he is vigilant against rising prices.
What does this vigilance mean in practice Joe. I have this increasing feeling this White House is making a catastrophic error that gets them hammered in 2024. You can’t just come to power and do what you want with economics, whatever long held plans you had, you have to work only with the landscape before you and the art of the possible.
From this mistake not just 4 more years of Popular Trump, but 12 years straight.
Front of Daily Star, tomatoes have feelings too.
Apart from that, predictable and boring front pages.
I hadn't really thought about the implications of employers topping-up DB pensions after retirement. That does indeed fall outside something that can happen with DC. The extent to which current DB pensions are under-funded (those which are funded at all) is driven by discount rates and, in my opinion, rather a mess.
--AS
So. Who votes Labour?
Young people. Policies should follow. It won't be enough, but it would at least give your supporters a reason to vote. Corbyn 2017 got that and maxxed out the potential vote.
Policies should be young, hip, tech savvy. Radical. And about Zoomers and Millenials in the UK.
No idea what they would be. But they couldn't do worse.
Long term, of course that means they are "on your side".
Labour's moaning about huge youth unemployment, etc. during the early 80's played a part in 1997.
Things change if the scheme is closed to new members, and I don't know much about that situation.
--AS
I agree on what you said there, but I understand Boris plan still has a figure in it that does the same thing, so it’s not all funded by the tax rise, so that part of the argument still remains, indeed as they argue over the threshold between individual liability on their wealth and what point tax payer steps in, Rishi stonewalling on behalf of the tax payer/his own coffers.
My understanding of the proposal is clearly different than yours in this regard. Am I wrong?
I am though 100% convinced Labour back this and it’s getting through parliament., if Boris had the courage to present it and not U turn.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/peppa-pig-a-pandemic-favorite-has-american-children-acting-british-11626627266
As a Prime Minister, a great many posters on this board vastly overestimate Johnson.
No they don't.
'Nuff said, and I am allowed to write that without prejudice, as I sound like that too.
They are effectively gambling on expert promises there will be inflationary pressures but they will soon ease back. But lots of different things cause inflation, one of these things is scarcity of supply, issue of putting your hand on what you need, which I would put down to Covid, where I think the experts may be wrong is in the time frame for that particular inflationary pressure to unravel. Why is time frame important? Because debt is tied in to inflation figure with more affect the longer it is high, in turn that’s government liquidity, and fears over the liquidity of governments individually and to act as an international club can do a terrible thing to the markets and government spending.
It's nothing to do with vaccines (there are hardly any refusers, and even if there were, we shouldn't be excluding people from society because they refuse a medical procedure) and everything to do with an oppressive desire by the government to track everyone everywhere.
By the time they arrive we'll be well into herd immunity anyway at the current rates on infection, so utterly pointless too, at least for their stated purpose.
Fundamentally government needs cutting back to size, and fast. This constant growth of surveillance, overbearing regulations and pettyflogging rules means we are being boiled like frogs, with our rulers behaving like the CCP.
It's tragic that Starmer won't fight this. Pinning one's hopes on the Lib Dems and Tory back benches seems a desperate place to be, but it seems there is nothing else available.
Making the case, quite elegantly, that the big tech firms have backed the wrong horse here and that automated driver assistance has a much brighter future than full self-driving vehicles and if self-driving is ever achieved its more likely in increments from automated assistance rather than by a giant leap to fully automated vehicles.
Though one quote that caught my, as an example of being mistaken:
Chris Urmson, Aurora chief executive, put it eloquently in 2015 when he was Google’s leading driverless engineer: “Conventional wisdom would say that we’ll just take these driver assistance systems and we’ll kind of push them and . . . over time, they’ll turn into self-driving cars,” he said. “Well, that’s like me saying that if I work really hard at jumping, one day I’ll be able to fly.”
Its worth remembering that Superman's ability to fly is because he is a good jumper. He is so good at jumping he can leap over tall buildings, which became the ability to fly.
I took the ism out before posting because I thought the Popular Trump sounded like a good platform name for fascists. 🙂
Don't give @HYUFD ideas.
"Times cricket writer John Woodcock dies, aged 94
He was considered one of the finest writers in the history of the game" (£)
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/times-cricket-writer-john-woodcock-dies-aged-94-mxjgt6t5p
https://twitter.com/AaronBastani/status/1417251948080680960/photo/2
I love the line: Boston-based Tess Darci says that her 4-year-old daughter, Cecilie, sounds like “a little lady” thanks to the show. “She says ‘lovely’ and ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ all the time,” says Ms. Darci, who runs a communications agency.
We took our kids for a walk in the forest a couple of weeks ago week, when it had been raining and there were muddy puddles everywhere. We dressed them appropriately and they were in wellies so on the walk back to the car we agreed to let them jump in the muddy puddles like Peppa. They absolutely got covered in mud and had a whale of a time. We then bumped into another family in the car park who looked a bit shocked at how muddy ours were and asking if it was really bad on the trail, as soon as we said no but they'd just been jumping in the mud like Peppa the mum looked relieved, then instantly horrified and said that her son loves Peppa and will be doing the same thing. 😂
Not sure if there is a time cut off either - I had my first dose on Sunday, so currently am effectively unprotected, but were I to be hospitalised in the next couple of weeks I would probably go in the vaccinated column despite not having had time for the vaccines to work.
And just as you list of explanations tells us why the lead is there and is likely to persist, the same list provides hints of how it could all unravel.
The problem is that the GOP in the USA has gone complete and utter batshit crazy over a process of decades. Their courting of the religious right nutjobs, then eventually leading to QAnon, Trump etc - none of that has any sort of corollary here. Despite how much certain people want to mislabel Brexit as our version of that.
I'm certainly of the opinion in the UK that we are Taxed Enough Already but that's not really what the TEA Party or the GOP ever stood for, despite that being the etymology of that name.
Its utter madness. But there's no fiscally responsible party left in America.
I believe they adjust for 3 weeks after for 1st dose, 2 weeks for 2nd..but you could be first dose, infected 2 weeks, then end up in hospitals at 3.5 weeks and you go down in the vaccinated with one dose column.
Also worth pointing out that we know AZN take a lot longer than 3 weeks to reach max efficacy.
Does anybody remember speech recognition back in 1999? At that time, all the leading players were boasting of 99% accuracy, and IBM said their speech recognition business could be a leading driver of growth, etc.
But it turned out that 99% speech recognition was rubbish. Correcting that 1% took far longer than typing everything.
And so it stagnated until Google in about 2016-17. You see, it turned out you needed 99.95% accuracy before people would use it.
That's where we are with ADAS. It's really cool. But a system that throws it's hands in the air and says "YOU TAKE OVER NOW!" is pretty useless, as it means you have to pay attention all the time.
Its like saying why is there so much intolerance of the illiterate, by the literate?
People just assume nowadays you can read and write, have electricity, have running water, have internet access, have a phone.
Because ADAS while not being ideal, is both useful, appreciated, better than the alternative that does exist and is profitable.
Companies that have chosen to solve the full 100% or nothing have sunk billions in to do research and developement and have nothing to show for it yet - and are not likely to have anything to show for it for a while.
Companies that have gone down the ADAS route are already reaping a return in investment as cars are on the road using that ADAS system - and the development companies can reap a solid return of cash as vehicles with their systems are sold, and can analyse an increasing stream of data to iterate and improve ADAS based on the vehicles that are live using the systems sending data back.
Its another good example of how iteration beats revolution.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57893161
It's one you can't drink.
https://twitter.com/TheEvertonEnd/status/1417264372745969664?s=20
I am not going to post anything more, but the story is being reported in the press and the initial reports by them dropped a massive clanger.
Actually chilly in a t shirt here after the Sun went down.
This ought to be a golden opportunity for both the English Liberal Democrats and the Green Party of England and Wales. Are they up to the challenge?
I now think Labour will take poll leads in the next few months. This isn't wishful thinking on my part. The wheels are coming off the Johnson blunderbus.
After Black Wednesday there wasn't an instant Armageddon poll loss. It took months for it to seep through.
Economically the country is centre-right and socially ('culturally') it's soft left. Despite Brexit, Tony Blair, David Cameron and Boris Johnson all appealed to a soft left socially relaxed and quite liberal country. In particular we venerate the NHS: something not found in the US or many other countries. We like our arts and sports, still believe in nationalised industries, and are relaxed about social equality including gay marriage.
The Alf Garnett vote is not the mainstream of this country. It may shout the loudest but it's not the majority. Nor are the occasional old gammons complaining about wokedom.
https://twitter.com/worstall/status/1417123581343977477
Mr. JohnL, it's presenting as a single quote something that is not. That is misleading.
It's bad enough that headlines, news soundbites, and social media all funnel discourse into shorter, simplistic segments bereft of wider context and nuance.
Fabricating a quote by pretending someone said or wrote something that they did not? Then passing it off as a real quote in their literal words? And that the fabricated quote representing what you think the book says is some sort of jusification?
In this case the second sentence is not even a complete sentence in the original.
There are three issues here:
1 is Murphy's absent integrity of process. It's all of a piece with how he (mis)handles evidence, and has done since I started occasionally reading him about 15 years ago.
2 is Murphy deceiving his followers by pretending that this is a quote. For an academic of sorts that is fatal. It would be embarrassing for a 12 year old blogger.
3 Is that he doesn't seem to think there is a problem.
It's the Johann Hari playbook revisited.
It's crass and sh*t. it'd be relatively easy to take (say) your posts on here and construct a hateful argument you'd never agree with from sentences you have made. There are over 8,500 posts to choose from, most containing multiple sentences.
Mr. JohnL, that's true, although we are in exceptional circumstances. I think a bigger potential problem is that people are never thrilled by new taxes and, for some, this will come at a very difficult time.
Post pandemic Sunak has laid out plans to return to a balanced budget.
Post pandemic Biden is trying to add $4 trillion of stimulus, on top of the $2 trillion of stimulus earlier this year.
Even if you ignore the $2 trillion earlier this year there's no comparison with adding $4 trillion more stimulus now. Pro rata that's like Sunak coming up with a further £300 billion of post pandemic stimulus.