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The Trump Presidency – are we about to start the end days? – politicalbetting.com

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    kinabalukinabalu Posts: 39,519
    So, the Big Day has arrived and you can still (!) get 4/7 at Hills on the racing certainty of Joe Biden to win. Amazing. Has there ever been such a value politics bet on such a liquid, high profile market?

    Well, yes there has and we need only go back 11 months to find it. It was much closer to home. Our general election of 12th Dec 2019. On the eve of polling a Con majority - ANY Con majority - was available at 4/9.

    Great game, politics betting, it really is.
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    GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,117
    edited November 2020
    Scott_xP said:

    Report from suburban Philadelphia

    got to the polls at 615, was 25th in line polls opened at 7 and was done by 720

    Probably over 200 people in line when I Ieft

    I didn't know you lived in Philadelphia?
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    contrariancontrarian Posts: 5,818

    Only two tins of tomatoes left in my local (small) supermarket.

    People are bonkers. We've been through this last spring - there isn't going to be food shortages in the next 28 days.

    They don't believe it is going to be 28 days.
    They may think it's going to be 28 Days Later...
    After this latest lockdown, they may not be completely wrong.
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    Vienna gunman, 20, who killed four and wounded 17 was released early from prison on terror charges because of his age, had wanted to join ISIS in Syria - but 'was deemed incapable of an attack'

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8906871/Shots-fired-near-synagogue-Vienna-police-say-major-operation-underway.html

    FFS this sums up European handling of the problem.

    Had they tried to keep him in jail I can imagine all sorts of human rights lawyers taking the government to the cleaners.
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    Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 33,300

    Scott_xP said:

    Report from suburban Philadelphia

    got to the polls at 615, was 25th in line polls opened at 7 and was done by 720

    Probably over 200 people in line when I Ieft

    I didn't know you lived in Philadelphia?
    I did, at one time. I should have put quotes round the report, obviously.
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    Only two tins of tomatoes left in my local (small) supermarket.

    People are bonkers. We've been through this last spring - there isn't going to be food shortages in the next 28 days.

    They don't believe it is going to be 28 days.
    Stocking up for Christmas?
    People eat tinned tomatoes at Xmas?
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    LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 15,644

    Only two tins of tomatoes left in my local (small) supermarket.

    People are bonkers. We've been through this last spring - there isn't going to be food shortages in the next 28 days.

    It's not about food shortages, it's about doing a slightly bigger shop than normal so that you don't have to go to the supermarket as often, exactly as advised to reduce your contacts outside your home.

    There's no slack in the supermarket system, so when everybody increases the size of their shop a bit the shelves empty. People then think they ought to buy a bit extra of what is available - in case it's missing the next time they go in - and more shelves empty. Temporarily.

    The issue, if there is one, is the supermarkets not being able to cope with the modest change in demand patterns. Do we want the supermarkets to run more inefficiently 99.9% of the time to deal with these rare events?

    Maybe. I'm in favour of more robust systems in general. But maybe not.

    I think we can do without the absurd moralizing about it though.
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    Cyclefree said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Sean_F said:

    Cyclefree said:

    While we wait on the US, I just want to praise Tim Farron. He has been very active fighting for the Lake District and its hospitality sector.

    I wrote to him last night about this new rule about pubs not being able to sell takeaway alcohol and got a substantive reply this morning and confirmation that he’s written to the PM about it.

    Meanwhile let’s see if Trudi Harrison, the MP in whose constituency we live, will respond. I doubt it - she is Boris’s PPS after all. Nice lady. But she’s been utterly feeble these past few months.

    Has anybody provided a rationale for allowing pubs to sell takeaway food but not takeaway alcohol, which is, after all, their core business?
    Not from government as far as I am aware.

    It favours supermarkets over all other businesses selling alcohol, even when - as you rightly point out - it is their core business.
    I mentioned the other day, that I was told by a local involved with the council and licensing, that the police had complained that several pubs were allowing selling over the wall to turn into out of control street parties.

    The political problem with cracking down on this and leaving the sensible places open was that this would mean, essentially, shutting pubs isn the poor areas. While the posh places sold champagne over the wall.....
    So because the police won't enforce license conditions every pub - even those who comply with the terms of their licence - will suffer.

    What is the effing point of having licence conditions, of having police if they won't do their bloody job, for Christ's sake?!

    Indeed, why should good licensees like my daughter comply? She may as well do what she wants since rural policemen are like unicorns round here.
    The problem of course being that there aren't enough police to enforce any of this should people rebel.
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    Floater said:

    Floater said:

    Son who doesnt watch live tv has been issued a fine by BBC - any idea how to appeal anyone?

    Even better - they fined him because they scared him into getting a license even though he doesnt watch live tv - netflix and amazon only - but he got the license 5 months into living in the place
    Are you sure he is not being scammed? A fine direct from the BBC and without appeal details sounds a bit iffy (but IANAL).
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    NigelbNigelb Posts: 63,219

    HYUFD said:

    any photos of the queues at polling station yet?

    As good a bleedin' guide as any....

    Here you go,
    https://twitter.com/rayfitt1/status/1323593421748056066
    Rural Pennsylvania I believe
    I am guessing you are assuming every last man jack of them is there to support Trump?

    They might be but that is a bold assumption to make, particularly as Pennysylvania did not lend itself to early voting.
    Judging by the number of masks here, I think the line skews Biden.
    https://twitter.com/CHueyBurns/status/1323599984978255874
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    kjh said:

    RobD said:

    rkrkrk said:

    Nigelb said:


    Everyone you're detecting is almost certainly infectious, and is detected in real time, so there's no tracing to do. In a city of 500k, that might mean enforcing isolation for 5,000 people. How hard is that in reality ?

    .

    I don't think it's right that everyone detected is almost certainly infectious?

    If you use Abbott figures of: sensitivity (97.1%) and specificity (98.5%) on a population of 500k and assume 1% of population actually has the disease...

    Then you get 4,855 true positives and 7,425 false positives = 40% chance person testing positive actually has disease.

    It's clearly great news that you've got a big proportion of the infected into isolation, but you are probably falsely isolating a reasonable number of people.

    https://abbott.mediaroom.com/2020-08-26-Abbotts-Fast-5-15-Minute-Easy-to-Use-COVID-19-Antigen-Test-Receives-FDA-Emergency-Use-Authorization-Mobile-App-Displays-Test-Results-to-Help-Our-Return-to-Daily-Life-Ramping-Production-to-50-Million-Tests-a-Month
    Then test all those people with a positive with a PCR, and release them if it comes out negative.
    "Release" ... yes

    How much do you want to bet that the only way to get 90% isolation involves dragging people off the streets?

    I guess those old plans fro interment without trial that Blair was interested in might come in handy.
    Now that Boris Johnson has screwed over the Northern Irish I can think of no better way of him showing his love for Northern Ireland by introducing internment in Great Britain for those people who don't self isolate.

    https://twitter.com/StewartWood/status/1323342287171178499
    A week on Monday I am going onto a UK government webinar to explain what my company must do to prepare for transition exit 6 weeks later. Currently the UK government hasn't established what the trading arrangements will be, hasn't built the computer system we will need to use nor hired the customs and standards officials required. So I have no idea what they will tell us because they themselves have no idea.

    You can imagine my bemusement when I see millions spaffed up against the wall on adverts telling me TIME IS RUNNING OUT and that I need to Check & Change arrangements that haven't yet been made. Not that it will be physically possible to switch said arrangements on should they unveil them tomorrow.
    The pharmaceutical safety regulations are still outstanding for NI. The pharmaceutical companies are sitting there pulling their hair out currently. I imagine it is now too late to meet them even if decided today. Every time I see those bloody adverts I shout at the television how are they supposed to prepare?
    Which is why despite the protests from hard Brexit frothers we will get a deal which continues along with the current open border arrangements we have now. It simply isn't possible to go WTO / Australia and the EU have known this for months.

    They will create a compromise name for it - "UKEA Free Trade Area" or something, let Shagger choose his pig lipstick colour, and then we carry on as defacto members of the EEA/CU
    So you're suggesting we will get free trade with Europe but without free movement, without paying membership subscriptions, without being tied down as members - but trade will continue uninterrupted?

    Sounds like a tremendous "cake and eat it" arrangement if so. Completely dividing the EU's "four freedoms" and cherrypicking.

    Are you that confident?
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    GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,117

    Vienna gunman, 20, who killed four and wounded 17 was released early from prison on terror charges because of his age, had wanted to join ISIS in Syria - but 'was deemed incapable of an attack'

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8906871/Shots-fired-near-synagogue-Vienna-police-say-major-operation-underway.html

    FFS this sums up European handling of the problem.

    Had they tried to keep him in jail I can imagine all sorts of human rights lawyers taking the government to the cleaners.
    You want to defend western democratic values against islamism by ripping up the rule of law, its very foundation?

    You my friend may want to think that through.
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    MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 50,193

    Only two tins of tomatoes left in my local (small) supermarket.

    People are bonkers. We've been through this last spring - there isn't going to be food shortages in the next 28 days.

    Has anybody hoarding pasta in November remotely got near to using some (any?) of their March pasta panic buy?
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    gealbhangealbhan Posts: 2,362

    Yvette Cooper must come back to the front bench soon please.

    Cooper Benn etc. What was the original thinking keeping them out of Starmers top team? They can provide more effective help as Chairs? Labour wouldn’t lose the Committee chair if they joined Shadow Cabinet?

    Who are you saying makes way for Cooper, Doddy?

    Surely the better coup/top trolling for Starmer, resign some of the high profile quitters from Corbyn’s labour, for the optics that would send out to all who quit party in that era?
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    TimTTimT Posts: 6,328
    Interesting COVID paper from Singapore. It is based on data from the spring outbreak, so things may have changed a bit with the evolution of the virus, but the findings are interesting, with implications for both testing strategies, and for social distancing/lockdown policies:

    "Bayesian analysis of serology and symptom data obtained from 1150 close contacts (524 household contacts, 207 work contacts, and 419 social contacts) estimated that a symptom-based PCR-testing strategy missed 62% (95% credible interval 55–69) of COVID-19 diagnoses, and 36% (27–45) of individuals with SARS-CoV-2 infection were asymptomatic. Sharing a bedroom (multivariable odds ratio [OR] 5·38 [95% CI 1·82–15·84]; p=0·0023) and being spoken to by an index case for 30 min or longer (7·86 [3·86–16·02]; p<0·0001) were associated with SARS-CoV-2 transmission among household contacts. Among non-household contacts, exposure to more than one case (multivariable OR 3·92 [95% CI 2·07–7·40], p<0·0001), being spoken to by an index case for 30 min or longer (2·67 [1·21–5·88]; p=0·015), and sharing a vehicle with an index case (3·07 [1·55–6·08]; p=0·0013) were associated with SARS-CoV-2 transmission. Among both household and non-household contacts, indirect contact, meal sharing, and lavatory co-usage were not independently associated with SARS-CoV-2 transmission."

    https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30833-1/fulltext
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    HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 117,304
    Nigelb said:

    HYUFD said:

    any photos of the queues at polling station yet?

    As good a bleedin' guide as any....

    Here you go,
    https://twitter.com/rayfitt1/status/1323593421748056066
    Rural Pennsylvania I believe
    I am guessing you are assuming every last man jack of them is there to support Trump?

    They might be but that is a bold assumption to make, particularly as Pennysylvania did not lend itself to early voting.
    Judging by the number of masks here, I think the line skews Biden.
    https://twitter.com/CHueyBurns/status/1323599984978255874
    Biden will win Philadelphia by miles, Hillary won 82% of the vote there in 2016 so yes you are correct
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    Landslide in Dixville.
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    not_on_firenot_on_fire Posts: 4,342
    Final forecast from the Economist gives Biden a 97% (!) chance
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    MrEdMrEd Posts: 5,578
    To be fair to Nate Silver, he has his business to think of so I would be trying to give myself enough wriggle room if Trump wins.
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    CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 40,167

    Only two tins of tomatoes left in my local (small) supermarket.

    People are bonkers. We've been through this last spring - there isn't going to be food shortages in the next 28 days.

    They don't believe it is going to be 28 days.
    Stocking up for Christmas?
    People eat tinned tomatoes at Xmas?
    Oh yes, to make the tomato soup that presages the turkey.

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    Nigelb said:

    HYUFD said:

    any photos of the queues at polling station yet?

    As good a bleedin' guide as any....

    Here you go,
    https://twitter.com/rayfitt1/status/1323593421748056066
    Rural Pennsylvania I believe
    I am guessing you are assuming every last man jack of them is there to support Trump?

    They might be but that is a bold assumption to make, particularly as Pennysylvania did not lend itself to early voting.
    Judging by the number of masks here, I think the line skews Biden.
    twitter.com/CHueyBurns/status/1323599984978255874
    I presume this is how they are going to do the exit poll....just count masks.
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    dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 28,061
    Speaker less than gruntled again.
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    not_on_firenot_on_fire Posts: 4,342
    edited November 2020

    Final forecast from the Economist gives Biden a 97% (!) chance

    ...
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    not_on_firenot_on_fire Posts: 4,342
    edited November 2020
    MrEd said:

    To be fair to Nate Silver, he has his business to think of so I would be trying to give myself enough wriggle room if Trump wins.
    I will give you that Silver seems surprisingly unconfident in his own model. But this is Nate Cohn I'm referring to.
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    They will create a compromise name for it - "UKEA Free Trade Area" or something, let Shagger choose his pig lipstick colour, and then we carry on as defacto members of the EEA/CU

    Surely your solution implies Freedom of Movement? The inflamed prostates of the Telegraph's letter page would all explode! :open_mouth:

    On second thoughts, your solution has much to merit it! :D
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    TimTTimT Posts: 6,328

    MrEd said:

    My bet for the election.

    No surprise, I think Trump will win. I think his EV count will be marginally higher than last time so just below 320 but I wouldn't be surprised. I would expect him to hold all the states he won last time (although I would be nervous on Georgia - but I think he will benefit from a surge in white non-college voters) and flip the following (I have omitted Nevada given Ralston's view on the matter but gut feel is, given NV's reliance on tourism / events, there is a decent chance many independents ):

    - New Hampshire
    - Minnesota

    If I was looking for possible surprises where he might flip further Democrat states, I would be looking at those where there was quite a close vote last time, a decent white non-college educated percentage and also fairly decent 3rd party support in 2016. The three further I think he could flip are:

    - Virginia
    - Colorado
    - New Mexico

    Vote wise, I think the 45%+ being offered on Ladbrokes is a decent bet at 10/11 but my feeling is he will do more like 48-50% and possibly more. Before I am being accused of being on drugs, my rationale is the following:

    - mainly, white non-college voters are going to come out to vote in unprecedented numbers which will simply not have been captured in the polling data, which will mainly base their samples on the 2016 splits. I mentioned on here about the data Ralston has been posting out of Nevada, with rural votes much higher than expected;
    - A turndown in Black turnout, which seems to be happening in most states with a few exceptions (e.g. Georgia). That is particularly an issue for the Democrats in the Rust Belt states;
    - Mobilisation of younger student voters being hit by campus closures / restrictions;
    - Hispanic vote turning more to Trump, and not just in the communities in FL.

    If you don't think Trump will win, then (personally) I would be looking at bets that point to a close election as the EV data so far is not pointing to a blowout win for Biden. I think the 229.5+ Republican EC votes at Evens on Ladbrokes is a good one or the Biden 270-299 at 6/1

    So, you are 1948 believer (see my header a week or two ago)?
    Virginia??? Splutters into coffee ... Even with all your quite reasonable (although not correct IMO) assumptions coming true, VA will be Blue.
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    Final forecast from the Economist gives Biden a 97% (!) chance

    That's my prediction.

    Roll two dice. Snake eyes and it is Trump. Three plus and it is Biden.
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    Vienna gunman, 20, who killed four and wounded 17 was released early from prison on terror charges because of his age, had wanted to join ISIS in Syria - but 'was deemed incapable of an attack'

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8906871/Shots-fired-near-synagogue-Vienna-police-say-major-operation-underway.html

    FFS this sums up European handling of the problem.

    Had they tried to keep him in jail I can imagine all sorts of human rights lawyers taking the government to the cleaners.
    You want to defend western democratic values against islamism by ripping up the rule of law, its very foundation?

    You my friend may want to think that through.
    I could have guessed that you would have supported releasing this bloke to allow him to go on a gun rampage.

    I don't want to rip up the rule of law, I want the law changed to stop people like this getting released for a very long time before being deported.
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    dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 28,061

    Cyclefree said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Sean_F said:

    Cyclefree said:

    While we wait on the US, I just want to praise Tim Farron. He has been very active fighting for the Lake District and its hospitality sector.

    I wrote to him last night about this new rule about pubs not being able to sell takeaway alcohol and got a substantive reply this morning and confirmation that he’s written to the PM about it.

    Meanwhile let’s see if Trudi Harrison, the MP in whose constituency we live, will respond. I doubt it - she is Boris’s PPS after all. Nice lady. But she’s been utterly feeble these past few months.

    Has anybody provided a rationale for allowing pubs to sell takeaway food but not takeaway alcohol, which is, after all, their core business?
    Not from government as far as I am aware.

    It favours supermarkets over all other businesses selling alcohol, even when - as you rightly point out - it is their core business.
    I mentioned the other day, that I was told by a local involved with the council and licensing, that the police had complained that several pubs were allowing selling over the wall to turn into out of control street parties.

    The political problem with cracking down on this and leaving the sensible places open was that this would mean, essentially, shutting pubs isn the poor areas. While the posh places sold champagne over the wall.....
    So because the police won't enforce license conditions every pub - even those who comply with the terms of their licence - will suffer.

    What is the effing point of having licence conditions, of having police if they won't do their bloody job, for Christ's sake?!

    Indeed, why should good licensees like my daughter comply? She may as well do what she wants since rural policemen are like unicorns round here.
    The problem of course being that there aren't enough police to enforce any of this should people rebel.
    The problem was that there was no enforcement from reopening.
    It would only have taken a couple of licences lost in an area.
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    TimTTimT Posts: 6,328
    MrEd said:

    To be fair to Nate Silver, he has his business to think of so I would be trying to give myself enough wriggle room if Trump wins.
    Wrong Nate.
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    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 44,889

    Only two tins of tomatoes left in my local (small) supermarket.

    People are bonkers. We've been through this last spring - there isn't going to be food shortages in the next 28 days.

    Has anybody hoarding pasta in November remotely got near to using some (any?) of their March pasta panic buy?
    Given the large contingent living with me (some in-laws) - I simply bought some 5 litre kitchen storage containers from OXO.

    So my inventory is larger, but given the throughput of rice and pasta, none of it is more than 2 months old.
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    CiceroCicero Posts: 2,324

    kamski said:

    Alistair said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Alistair said:

    As a consequence of the Texas federal Court case Harris County is closing all but 1 of its drive through voting locations.

    So the Judge achieved his objective without appearing to be a hack in the headlines.

    Does preventing people from voting on the day help Trump?
    It does in Harris County!
    It went 54%-42% for Clinton last time, but if most Biden voters have already voted and most Trump voters haven't maybe it's not clear who it helps. But it might be Dem voters are more likely to rely on drive-through voting??
    As an old-fashioned Democrat (in a general sense, rather than the US sense) I'm in favour of people voting even when they vote for people I would never vote for.

    Republicans have become so obsessed with making it hard for Democrats to vote that they almost see stopping voting as an end in itself. It's deranged.
    100% agreed.

    The Republicans aren't fit for office until this ends and they stop trying to stop others from voting and instead start trying to win them over.
    Amen Brother
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    dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 28,061

    Final forecast from the Economist gives Biden a 97% (!) chance

    That's my prediction.

    Roll two dice. Snake eyes and it is Trump. Three plus and it is Biden.
    I just tried that. Double 5. Biden landslide it is.
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    Yokes said:

    Can one of our US experts please educate me a little on this business of US Voter Registration?

    I see Registered Voters can be GoP, Dem or Independent. But what difference does that make to the vote cast? How binding is it? If I register under one Party, surely I am not bound to vote for them.

    I ask because I see that the GoP has been much more successful than the Dems in getting voter registrations since the election, but is that really significant is all they are doing is enabling voters of all persuasions to cast a vote when the time comes.

    You can vote for anyone in GE/Senate etc, party affiliation at registration doesn't matter. Primaries it does since some states use that.
    Thanks Yokes. So if I register as a Republican I am likely to vote for them, but not obliged to.

    That's what I thought. It means I suspect that the big lead the GoP has in registrations is interesting but not decisive.
    A lot of it comes from re-registering in recent years voters who have for years been voting GOP from Democrat to Republican.

    Imagine in the UK if someone registered as Labour when Tony Blair was Labour leader, voted for the Tories from Cameron onwards while still being registered Labour and now changed their registration from Labour to Tory - would that imply a change in votes next time?
    Thanks Philip. That eases one of my concerns.

    My chief remaining concern now is that turnout goes completely through the roof. That would imply Republican voters turning out in sufficient numbers to overhaul the assumed lead Biden would have through early and postal voting.

    It's an imponderable.
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    GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,117
    HYUFD said:
    Who's talking about Nate Silver?
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    HYUFD said:
    You still don't understand probability.
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    This is remarkable (or maybe y'all knew about it already) - you can look at Florida voting patterns in real time. This for example is Pinellas country, which in 2016 split pretty much evenly Trump/Clinton. You can see the registered Dem early advantage, but more GOP-registered voting today:

    https://tqv.vrswebapps.com/?state=FL&county=pin

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    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 44,889

    Vienna gunman, 20, who killed four and wounded 17 was released early from prison on terror charges because of his age, had wanted to join ISIS in Syria - but 'was deemed incapable of an attack'

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8906871/Shots-fired-near-synagogue-Vienna-police-say-major-operation-underway.html

    FFS this sums up European handling of the problem.

    Had they tried to keep him in jail I can imagine all sorts of human rights lawyers taking the government to the cleaners.
    You want to defend western democratic values against islamism by ripping up the rule of law, its very foundation?

    You my friend may want to think that through.
    I could have guessed that you would have supported releasing this bloke to allow him to go on a gun rampage.

    I don't want to rip up the rule of law, I want the law changed to stop people like this getting released for a very long time before being deported.
    Again, stop putting words in my mouth.

    If you want to change the law that's fine, but stop whinging about "human rights lawyers" who are simply ensuring that the Government operates within the law as it currently is.
    Well, the other option would have been to wave him onto the bus to Syria. Hell, buy him a ticket.

    Track him to the training camp. rm -rf *.* the training camp.

    Incidentally several British muslims of my acquaintance give credence to the idea that the security services in the UK were doing exactly the above.
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    gealbhangealbhan Posts: 2,362
    I see it as two sides both hyping tightness of vote to get the votes out, hence the bogus Trump leading everything polls (created by Ave_it in a booth in spoons and publicised by HY) and Dem lean site (who I read daily btw) electoral-vote spinning chart and message to make it sound as nerve jangling as possible this week.

    A dead one sided blue wave contest (which it actually is) is the sort of message to have voters dangerously staying home. Like what happened to French President Jospin.
    Who?
    Exactly!
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    kamskikamski Posts: 4,340
    HYUFD said:
    Which has got bugger-all to do with the point made.

    I wonder why Republicans are producing fake polls and trying to skew polling averages to make a Trump victory seem less unlikely? Nothing to do with Trump saying that counting votes should stop tonight.

    When Trump declares victory before all the votes have been counted what are the odds that HYUFD will agree with him that he is the winner?
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    kjh said:

    RobD said:

    rkrkrk said:

    Nigelb said:


    Everyone you're detecting is almost certainly infectious, and is detected in real time, so there's no tracing to do. In a city of 500k, that might mean enforcing isolation for 5,000 people. How hard is that in reality ?

    .

    I don't think it's right that everyone detected is almost certainly infectious?

    If you use Abbott figures of: sensitivity (97.1%) and specificity (98.5%) on a population of 500k and assume 1% of population actually has the disease...

    Then you get 4,855 true positives and 7,425 false positives = 40% chance person testing positive actually has disease.

    It's clearly great news that you've got a big proportion of the infected into isolation, but you are probably falsely isolating a reasonable number of people.

    https://abbott.mediaroom.com/2020-08-26-Abbotts-Fast-5-15-Minute-Easy-to-Use-COVID-19-Antigen-Test-Receives-FDA-Emergency-Use-Authorization-Mobile-App-Displays-Test-Results-to-Help-Our-Return-to-Daily-Life-Ramping-Production-to-50-Million-Tests-a-Month
    Then test all those people with a positive with a PCR, and release them if it comes out negative.
    "Release" ... yes

    How much do you want to bet that the only way to get 90% isolation involves dragging people off the streets?

    I guess those old plans fro interment without trial that Blair was interested in might come in handy.
    Now that Boris Johnson has screwed over the Northern Irish I can think of no better way of him showing his love for Northern Ireland by introducing internment in Great Britain for those people who don't self isolate.

    https://twitter.com/StewartWood/status/1323342287171178499
    A week on Monday I am going onto a UK government webinar to explain what my company must do to prepare for transition exit 6 weeks later. Currently the UK government hasn't established what the trading arrangements will be, hasn't built the computer system we will need to use nor hired the customs and standards officials required. So I have no idea what they will tell us because they themselves have no idea.

    You can imagine my bemusement when I see millions spaffed up against the wall on adverts telling me TIME IS RUNNING OUT and that I need to Check & Change arrangements that haven't yet been made. Not that it will be physically possible to switch said arrangements on should they unveil them tomorrow.
    The pharmaceutical safety regulations are still outstanding for NI. The pharmaceutical companies are sitting there pulling their hair out currently. I imagine it is now too late to meet them even if decided today. Every time I see those bloody adverts I shout at the television how are they supposed to prepare?
    Which is why despite the protests from hard Brexit frothers we will get a deal which continues along with the current open border arrangements we have now. It simply isn't possible to go WTO / Australia and the EU have known this for months.

    They will create a compromise name for it - "UKEA Free Trade Area" or something, let Shagger choose his pig lipstick colour, and then we carry on as defacto members of the EEA/CU
    So you're suggesting we will get free trade with Europe but without free movement, without paying membership subscriptions, without being tied down as members - but trade will continue uninterrupted?

    Sounds like a tremendous "cake and eat it" arrangement if so. Completely dividing the EU's "four freedoms" and cherrypicking.

    Are you that confident?
    No, I'm suggesting that we will carry on as we are now. That means paying. Whats more our subs as UKEA members will look like a bargain compared to the disruption costs of trying to crash out in 2 months with literally no prep at all.

    We have zero options. We carry on as we are. Or we don't carry on. WTO or indeed ANY change to current arrangements is impossible to implement.
  • Options
    MrEdMrEd Posts: 5,578

    MrEd said:

    My bet for the election.

    No surprise, I think Trump will win. I think his EV count will be marginally higher than last time so just below 320 but I wouldn't be surprised. I would expect him to hold all the states he won last time (although I would be nervous on Georgia - but I think he will benefit from a surge in white non-college voters) and flip the following (I have omitted Nevada given Ralston's view on the matter but gut feel is, given NV's reliance on tourism / events, there is a decent chance many independents ):

    - New Hampshire
    - Minnesota

    If I was looking for possible surprises where he might flip further Democrat states, I would be looking at those where there was quite a close vote last time, a decent white non-college educated percentage and also fairly decent 3rd party support in 2016. The three further I think he could flip are:

    - Virginia
    - Colorado
    - New Mexico

    Vote wise, I think the 45%+ being offered on Ladbrokes is a decent bet at 10/11 but my feeling is he will do more like 48-50% and possibly more. Before I am being accused of being on drugs, my rationale is the following:

    - mainly, white non-college voters are going to come out to vote in unprecedented numbers which will simply not have been captured in the polling data, which will mainly base their samples on the 2016 splits. I mentioned on here about the data Ralston has been posting out of Nevada, with rural votes much higher than expected;
    - A turndown in Black turnout, which seems to be happening in most states with a few exceptions (e.g. Georgia). That is particularly an issue for the Democrats in the Rust Belt states;
    - Mobilisation of younger student voters being hit by campus closures / restrictions;
    - Hispanic vote turning more to Trump, and not just in the communities in FL.

    If you don't think Trump will win, then (personally) I would be looking at bets that point to a close election as the EV data so far is not pointing to a blowout win for Biden. I think the 229.5+ Republican EC votes at Evens on Ladbrokes is a good one or the Biden 270-299 at 6/1

    So, you are 1948 believer (see my header a week or two ago)?
    You mean Dewey and Truman? Essentially yes.
  • Options
    dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 28,061
    It really is remarkable that folk are openly discussing a sitting President losing an election and claiming victory. Then refusing to leave.
    Four years ago it would have been unthinkable.
  • Options
    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 44,889
    Cicero said:

    kamski said:

    Alistair said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Alistair said:

    As a consequence of the Texas federal Court case Harris County is closing all but 1 of its drive through voting locations.

    So the Judge achieved his objective without appearing to be a hack in the headlines.

    Does preventing people from voting on the day help Trump?
    It does in Harris County!
    It went 54%-42% for Clinton last time, but if most Biden voters have already voted and most Trump voters haven't maybe it's not clear who it helps. But it might be Dem voters are more likely to rely on drive-through voting??
    As an old-fashioned Democrat (in a general sense, rather than the US sense) I'm in favour of people voting even when they vote for people I would never vote for.

    Republicans have become so obsessed with making it hard for Democrats to vote that they almost see stopping voting as an end in itself. It's deranged.
    100% agreed.

    The Republicans aren't fit for office until this ends and they stop trying to stop others from voting and instead start trying to win them over.
    Amen Brother
    Have you considered the irony of using the handle "Cicero" and advocating secret ballot voting by the entire Plebian Order?
  • Options
    contrariancontrarian Posts: 5,818

    This is remarkable (or maybe y'all knew about it already) - you can look at Florida voting patterns in real time. This for example is Pinellas country, which in 2016 split pretty much evenly Trump/Clinton. You can see the registered Dem early advantage, but more GOP-registered voting today:

    https://tqv.vrswebapps.com/?state=FL&county=pin

    With the caveat those are a guide only. Registered repubs sometimes vote dem, and vice versa.
  • Options

    Vienna gunman, 20, who killed four and wounded 17 was released early from prison on terror charges because of his age, had wanted to join ISIS in Syria - but 'was deemed incapable of an attack'

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8906871/Shots-fired-near-synagogue-Vienna-police-say-major-operation-underway.html

    FFS this sums up European handling of the problem.

    Had they tried to keep him in jail I can imagine all sorts of human rights lawyers taking the government to the cleaners.
    You want to defend western democratic values against islamism by ripping up the rule of law, its very foundation?

    You my friend may want to think that through.
    I could have guessed that you would have supported releasing this bloke to allow him to go on a gun rampage.

    I don't want to rip up the rule of law, I want the law changed to stop people like this getting released for a very long time before being deported.
    Again, stop putting words in my mouth.

    If you want to change the law that's fine, but stop whinging about "human rights lawyers" who are simply ensuring that the Government operates within the law as it currently is.
    Sure the current system works great.

    No problemo.
  • Options

    kjh said:

    RobD said:

    rkrkrk said:

    Nigelb said:


    Everyone you're detecting is almost certainly infectious, and is detected in real time, so there's no tracing to do. In a city of 500k, that might mean enforcing isolation for 5,000 people. How hard is that in reality ?

    .

    I don't think it's right that everyone detected is almost certainly infectious?

    If you use Abbott figures of: sensitivity (97.1%) and specificity (98.5%) on a population of 500k and assume 1% of population actually has the disease...

    Then you get 4,855 true positives and 7,425 false positives = 40% chance person testing positive actually has disease.

    It's clearly great news that you've got a big proportion of the infected into isolation, but you are probably falsely isolating a reasonable number of people.

    https://abbott.mediaroom.com/2020-08-26-Abbotts-Fast-5-15-Minute-Easy-to-Use-COVID-19-Antigen-Test-Receives-FDA-Emergency-Use-Authorization-Mobile-App-Displays-Test-Results-to-Help-Our-Return-to-Daily-Life-Ramping-Production-to-50-Million-Tests-a-Month
    Then test all those people with a positive with a PCR, and release them if it comes out negative.
    "Release" ... yes

    How much do you want to bet that the only way to get 90% isolation involves dragging people off the streets?

    I guess those old plans fro interment without trial that Blair was interested in might come in handy.
    Now that Boris Johnson has screwed over the Northern Irish I can think of no better way of him showing his love for Northern Ireland by introducing internment in Great Britain for those people who don't self isolate.

    https://twitter.com/StewartWood/status/1323342287171178499
    A week on Monday I am going onto a UK government webinar to explain what my company must do to prepare for transition exit 6 weeks later. Currently the UK government hasn't established what the trading arrangements will be, hasn't built the computer system we will need to use nor hired the customs and standards officials required. So I have no idea what they will tell us because they themselves have no idea.

    You can imagine my bemusement when I see millions spaffed up against the wall on adverts telling me TIME IS RUNNING OUT and that I need to Check & Change arrangements that haven't yet been made. Not that it will be physically possible to switch said arrangements on should they unveil them tomorrow.
    The pharmaceutical safety regulations are still outstanding for NI. The pharmaceutical companies are sitting there pulling their hair out currently. I imagine it is now too late to meet them even if decided today. Every time I see those bloody adverts I shout at the television how are they supposed to prepare?
    Which is why despite the protests from hard Brexit frothers we will get a deal which continues along with the current open border arrangements we have now. It simply isn't possible to go WTO / Australia and the EU have known this for months.

    They will create a compromise name for it - "UKEA Free Trade Area" or something, let Shagger choose his pig lipstick colour, and then we carry on as defacto members of the EEA/CU
    So you're suggesting we will get free trade with Europe but without free movement, without paying membership subscriptions, without being tied down as members - but trade will continue uninterrupted?

    Sounds like a tremendous "cake and eat it" arrangement if so. Completely dividing the EU's "four freedoms" and cherrypicking.

    Are you that confident?
    No, I'm suggesting that we will carry on as we are now. That means paying. Whats more our subs as UKEA members will look like a bargain compared to the disruption costs of trying to crash out in 2 months with literally no prep at all.

    We have zero options. We carry on as we are. Or we don't carry on. WTO or indeed ANY change to current arrangements is impossible to implement.
    Should be very easy to see if you're right or wrong then - if we are paying membership subs still post-transition then you're right on that. I would be very annoyed if we are.

    What about free movement?
  • Options
    dixiedean said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Sean_F said:

    Cyclefree said:

    While we wait on the US, I just want to praise Tim Farron. He has been very active fighting for the Lake District and its hospitality sector.

    I wrote to him last night about this new rule about pubs not being able to sell takeaway alcohol and got a substantive reply this morning and confirmation that he’s written to the PM about it.

    Meanwhile let’s see if Trudi Harrison, the MP in whose constituency we live, will respond. I doubt it - she is Boris’s PPS after all. Nice lady. But she’s been utterly feeble these past few months.

    Has anybody provided a rationale for allowing pubs to sell takeaway food but not takeaway alcohol, which is, after all, their core business?
    Not from government as far as I am aware.

    It favours supermarkets over all other businesses selling alcohol, even when - as you rightly point out - it is their core business.
    I mentioned the other day, that I was told by a local involved with the council and licensing, that the police had complained that several pubs were allowing selling over the wall to turn into out of control street parties.

    The political problem with cracking down on this and leaving the sensible places open was that this would mean, essentially, shutting pubs isn the poor areas. While the posh places sold champagne over the wall.....
    So because the police won't enforce license conditions every pub - even those who comply with the terms of their licence - will suffer.

    What is the effing point of having licence conditions, of having police if they won't do their bloody job, for Christ's sake?!

    Indeed, why should good licensees like my daughter comply? She may as well do what she wants since rural policemen are like unicorns round here.
    The problem of course being that there aren't enough police to enforce any of this should people rebel.
    The problem was that there was no enforcement from reopening.
    It would only have taken a couple of licences lost in an area.
    Some of these things are so simple it beggars belief. I understand that licensing resources are likely to have been cut through austerity and they don't have the time to do lots of random checks. Fair enough.

    But we had 750k volunteers. Use 10k (or whatever number is needed) of them to go round hospitality venues with a checklist, if its bad the first time talk to the proprietor initially and informally. Then the licensing official has a much smaller list of the worst offenders who have already had an informal warning, it puts them in a far better position to enforce the rules and do it fairly.
  • Options
    GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,117

    Vienna gunman, 20, who killed four and wounded 17 was released early from prison on terror charges because of his age, had wanted to join ISIS in Syria - but 'was deemed incapable of an attack'

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8906871/Shots-fired-near-synagogue-Vienna-police-say-major-operation-underway.html

    FFS this sums up European handling of the problem.

    Had they tried to keep him in jail I can imagine all sorts of human rights lawyers taking the government to the cleaners.
    You want to defend western democratic values against islamism by ripping up the rule of law, its very foundation?

    You my friend may want to think that through.
    I could have guessed that you would have supported releasing this bloke to allow him to go on a gun rampage.

    I don't want to rip up the rule of law, I want the law changed to stop people like this getting released for a very long time before being deported.
    Again, stop putting words in my mouth.

    If you want to change the law that's fine, but stop whinging about "human rights lawyers" who are simply ensuring that the Government operates within the law as it currently is.
    Sure the current system works great.

    No problemo.
    Who said it did?
  • Options

    Vienna gunman, 20, who killed four and wounded 17 was released early from prison on terror charges because of his age, had wanted to join ISIS in Syria - but 'was deemed incapable of an attack'

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8906871/Shots-fired-near-synagogue-Vienna-police-say-major-operation-underway.html

    FFS this sums up European handling of the problem.

    Had they tried to keep him in jail I can imagine all sorts of human rights lawyers taking the government to the cleaners.
    You want to defend western democratic values against islamism by ripping up the rule of law, its very foundation?

    You my friend may want to think that through.
    I could have guessed that you would have supported releasing this bloke to allow him to go on a gun rampage.

    I don't want to rip up the rule of law, I want the law changed to stop people like this getting released for a very long time before being deported.
    Again, stop putting words in my mouth.

    If you want to change the law that's fine, but stop whinging about "human rights lawyers" who are simply ensuring that the Government operates within the law as it currently is.
    Why is it wrong to complain about lawyers using every trick to pervert the system?

    How is that any different to complaining about aggressive tax avoidance?

    Are lawyers perverting the system within the law any better than accountants doing the same?

    If someone is lawfully avoiding paying taxes by their accountants using every trick in the book - or if someone is lawfully avoiding deportation by their lawyers using every trick in the book - should governments, campaigners and voters just accept that? Or should they identify the problem and look to fix it by closing the loopholes?
  • Options
    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 44,889

    dixiedean said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Sean_F said:

    Cyclefree said:

    While we wait on the US, I just want to praise Tim Farron. He has been very active fighting for the Lake District and its hospitality sector.

    I wrote to him last night about this new rule about pubs not being able to sell takeaway alcohol and got a substantive reply this morning and confirmation that he’s written to the PM about it.

    Meanwhile let’s see if Trudi Harrison, the MP in whose constituency we live, will respond. I doubt it - she is Boris’s PPS after all. Nice lady. But she’s been utterly feeble these past few months.

    Has anybody provided a rationale for allowing pubs to sell takeaway food but not takeaway alcohol, which is, after all, their core business?
    Not from government as far as I am aware.

    It favours supermarkets over all other businesses selling alcohol, even when - as you rightly point out - it is their core business.
    I mentioned the other day, that I was told by a local involved with the council and licensing, that the police had complained that several pubs were allowing selling over the wall to turn into out of control street parties.

    The political problem with cracking down on this and leaving the sensible places open was that this would mean, essentially, shutting pubs isn the poor areas. While the posh places sold champagne over the wall.....
    So because the police won't enforce license conditions every pub - even those who comply with the terms of their licence - will suffer.

    What is the effing point of having licence conditions, of having police if they won't do their bloody job, for Christ's sake?!

    Indeed, why should good licensees like my daughter comply? She may as well do what she wants since rural policemen are like unicorns round here.
    The problem of course being that there aren't enough police to enforce any of this should people rebel.
    The problem was that there was no enforcement from reopening.
    It would only have taken a couple of licences lost in an area.
    Some of these things are so simple it beggars belief. I understand that licensing resources are likely to have been cut through austerity and they don't have the time to do lots of random checks. Fair enough.

    But we had 750k volunteers. Use 10k (or whatever number is needed) of them to go round hospitality venues with a checklist, if its bad the first time talk to the proprietor initially and informally. Then the licensing official has a much smaller list of the worst offenders who have already had an informal warning, it puts them in a far better position to enforce the rules and do it fairly.
    It was more, so I was told, of the political problem of being seen to target the problem areas. The actual number of problem pubs was quite small.

    Hence it is easier this time round to tell pull all the alcohol licenses.
  • Options
    TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 41,590

    Vienna gunman, 20, who killed four and wounded 17 was released early from prison on terror charges because of his age, had wanted to join ISIS in Syria - but 'was deemed incapable of an attack'

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8906871/Shots-fired-near-synagogue-Vienna-police-say-major-operation-underway.html

    FFS this sums up European handling of the problem.

    Had they tried to keep him in jail I can imagine all sorts of human rights lawyers taking the government to the cleaners.
    You want to defend western democratic values against islamism by ripping up the rule of law, its very foundation?

    You my friend may want to think that through.
    I could have guessed that you would have supported releasing this bloke to allow him to go on a gun rampage.

    I don't want to rip up the rule of law, I want the law changed to stop people like this getting released for a very long time before being deported.
    Again, stop putting words in my mouth.

    If you want to change the law that's fine, but stop whinging about "human rights lawyers" who are simply ensuring that the Government operates within the law as it currently is.
    Sure the current system works great.

    No problemo.
    No. It is the worst form of government...
  • Options
    DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,459

    HYUFD said:
    Who's talking about Nate Silver?
    @HYUFD has this wierd obsession with Nate Silver and 2016. It's amost as if history started that year.
  • Options
    Andy_CookeAndy_Cooke Posts: 4,823
    Scott_xP said:
    Won't that be something like 10% of all on-the-day votes in Florida this year?
  • Options
    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 44,889

    Vienna gunman, 20, who killed four and wounded 17 was released early from prison on terror charges because of his age, had wanted to join ISIS in Syria - but 'was deemed incapable of an attack'

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8906871/Shots-fired-near-synagogue-Vienna-police-say-major-operation-underway.html

    FFS this sums up European handling of the problem.

    Had they tried to keep him in jail I can imagine all sorts of human rights lawyers taking the government to the cleaners.
    You want to defend western democratic values against islamism by ripping up the rule of law, its very foundation?

    You my friend may want to think that through.
    I could have guessed that you would have supported releasing this bloke to allow him to go on a gun rampage.

    I don't want to rip up the rule of law, I want the law changed to stop people like this getting released for a very long time before being deported.
    Again, stop putting words in my mouth.

    If you want to change the law that's fine, but stop whinging about "human rights lawyers" who are simply ensuring that the Government operates within the law as it currently is.
    Why is it wrong to complain about lawyers using every trick to pervert the system?

    How is that any different to complaining about aggressive tax avoidance?

    Are lawyers perverting the system within the law any better than accountants doing the same?

    If someone is lawfully avoiding paying taxes by their accountants using every trick in the book - or if someone is lawfully avoiding deportation by their lawyers using every trick in the book - should governments, campaigners and voters just accept that? Or should they identify the problem and look to fix it by closing the loopholes?
    I commendably use the law to my clients advantage
    You are a shyster
    He is attacking society with loopholes in the law.
  • Options
    paulyork64paulyork64 Posts: 2,461
    365 are now just 4/11 biden winning Michigan (paddys still 3/1 trump). I havent seen anything to suggest trump's chances improving here but it ties in with biden drifting for the presidency.
  • Options

    dixiedean said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Sean_F said:

    Cyclefree said:

    While we wait on the US, I just want to praise Tim Farron. He has been very active fighting for the Lake District and its hospitality sector.

    I wrote to him last night about this new rule about pubs not being able to sell takeaway alcohol and got a substantive reply this morning and confirmation that he’s written to the PM about it.

    Meanwhile let’s see if Trudi Harrison, the MP in whose constituency we live, will respond. I doubt it - she is Boris’s PPS after all. Nice lady. But she’s been utterly feeble these past few months.

    Has anybody provided a rationale for allowing pubs to sell takeaway food but not takeaway alcohol, which is, after all, their core business?
    Not from government as far as I am aware.

    It favours supermarkets over all other businesses selling alcohol, even when - as you rightly point out - it is their core business.
    I mentioned the other day, that I was told by a local involved with the council and licensing, that the police had complained that several pubs were allowing selling over the wall to turn into out of control street parties.

    The political problem with cracking down on this and leaving the sensible places open was that this would mean, essentially, shutting pubs isn the poor areas. While the posh places sold champagne over the wall.....
    So because the police won't enforce license conditions every pub - even those who comply with the terms of their licence - will suffer.

    What is the effing point of having licence conditions, of having police if they won't do their bloody job, for Christ's sake?!

    Indeed, why should good licensees like my daughter comply? She may as well do what she wants since rural policemen are like unicorns round here.
    The problem of course being that there aren't enough police to enforce any of this should people rebel.
    The problem was that there was no enforcement from reopening.
    It would only have taken a couple of licences lost in an area.
    Some of these things are so simple it beggars belief. I understand that licensing resources are likely to have been cut through austerity and they don't have the time to do lots of random checks. Fair enough.

    But we had 750k volunteers. Use 10k (or whatever number is needed) of them to go round hospitality venues with a checklist, if its bad the first time talk to the proprietor initially and informally. Then the licensing official has a much smaller list of the worst offenders who have already had an informal warning, it puts them in a far better position to enforce the rules and do it fairly.
    It was more, so I was told, of the political problem of being seen to target the problem areas. The actual number of problem pubs was quite small.

    Hence it is easier this time round to tell pull all the alcohol licenses.
    Well then it is pathetic governance. Dont introduce laws you dont want to implement for political reasons.

    Governments (of all flavours) introduce laws at an ever increasing rate without providing the resources to enforce them. It results in a world where cheaters win and the law abiding lose, and respect for the rule of law ebbs away.

    It is genuinely pathetic.
  • Options
    Scott_xP said:
    John Sessions played Sir Geoffrey Howe brilliantly.

    My favourite story as told by John Sessions.

    Probably NSFW (or if you've got kids about.)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6HRQVki-HM
  • Options
    MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 25,527

    kjh said:

    RobD said:

    rkrkrk said:

    Nigelb said:


    Everyone you're detecting is almost certainly infectious, and is detected in real time, so there's no tracing to do. In a city of 500k, that might mean enforcing isolation for 5,000 people. How hard is that in reality ?

    .

    I don't think it's right that everyone detected is almost certainly infectious?

    If you use Abbott figures of: sensitivity (97.1%) and specificity (98.5%) on a population of 500k and assume 1% of population actually has the disease...

    Then you get 4,855 true positives and 7,425 false positives = 40% chance person testing positive actually has disease.

    It's clearly great news that you've got a big proportion of the infected into isolation, but you are probably falsely isolating a reasonable number of people.

    https://abbott.mediaroom.com/2020-08-26-Abbotts-Fast-5-15-Minute-Easy-to-Use-COVID-19-Antigen-Test-Receives-FDA-Emergency-Use-Authorization-Mobile-App-Displays-Test-Results-to-Help-Our-Return-to-Daily-Life-Ramping-Production-to-50-Million-Tests-a-Month
    Then test all those people with a positive with a PCR, and release them if it comes out negative.
    "Release" ... yes

    How much do you want to bet that the only way to get 90% isolation involves dragging people off the streets?

    I guess those old plans fro interment without trial that Blair was interested in might come in handy.
    Now that Boris Johnson has screwed over the Northern Irish I can think of no better way of him showing his love for Northern Ireland by introducing internment in Great Britain for those people who don't self isolate.

    https://twitter.com/StewartWood/status/1323342287171178499
    A week on Monday I am going onto a UK government webinar to explain what my company must do to prepare for transition exit 6 weeks later. Currently the UK government hasn't established what the trading arrangements will be, hasn't built the computer system we will need to use nor hired the customs and standards officials required. So I have no idea what they will tell us because they themselves have no idea.

    You can imagine my bemusement when I see millions spaffed up against the wall on adverts telling me TIME IS RUNNING OUT and that I need to Check & Change arrangements that haven't yet been made. Not that it will be physically possible to switch said arrangements on should they unveil them tomorrow.
    The pharmaceutical safety regulations are still outstanding for NI. The pharmaceutical companies are sitting there pulling their hair out currently. I imagine it is now too late to meet them even if decided today. Every time I see those bloody adverts I shout at the television how are they supposed to prepare?
    Which is why despite the protests from hard Brexit frothers we will get a deal which continues along with the current open border arrangements we have now. It simply isn't possible to go WTO / Australia and the EU have known this for months.

    They will create a compromise name for it - "UKEA Free Trade Area" or something, let Shagger choose his pig lipstick colour, and then we carry on as defacto members of the EEA/CU
    So you're suggesting we will get free trade with Europe but without free movement, without paying membership subscriptions, without being tied down as members - but trade will continue uninterrupted?

    Sounds like a tremendous "cake and eat it" arrangement if so. Completely dividing the EU's "four freedoms" and cherrypicking.

    Are you that confident?
    No, I'm suggesting that we will carry on as we are now. That means paying. Whats more our subs as UKEA members will look like a bargain compared to the disruption costs of trying to crash out in 2 months with literally no prep at all.

    We have zero options. We carry on as we are. Or we don't carry on. WTO or indeed ANY change to current arrangements is impossible to implement.
    Not an easy sell to Graham Brady and chums.
  • Options
    Beibheirli_CBeibheirli_C Posts: 7,981
    edited November 2020

    kjh said:

    RobD said:

    rkrkrk said:

    Nigelb said:


    Everyone you're detecting is almost certainly infectious, and is detected in real time, so there's no tracing to do. In a city of 500k, that might mean enforcing isolation for 5,000 people. How hard is that in reality ?

    .

    I don't think it's right that everyone detected is almost certainly infectious?

    If you use Abbott figures of: sensitivity (97.1%) and specificity (98.5%) on a population of 500k and assume 1% of population actually has the disease...

    Then you get 4,855 true positives and 7,425 false positives = 40% chance person testing positive actually has disease.

    It's clearly great news that you've got a big proportion of the infected into isolation, but you are probably falsely isolating a reasonable number of people.

    https://abbott.mediaroom.com/2020-08-26-Abbotts-Fast-5-15-Minute-Easy-to-Use-COVID-19-Antigen-Test-Receives-FDA-Emergency-Use-Authorization-Mobile-App-Displays-Test-Results-to-Help-Our-Return-to-Daily-Life-Ramping-Production-to-50-Million-Tests-a-Month
    Then test all those people with a positive with a PCR, and release them if it comes out negative.
    "Release" ... yes

    How much do you want to bet that the only way to get 90% isolation involves dragging people off the streets?

    I guess those old plans fro interment without trial that Blair was interested in might come in handy.
    Now that Boris Johnson has screwed over the Northern Irish I can think of no better way of him showing his love for Northern Ireland by introducing internment in Great Britain for those people who don't self isolate.

    https://twitter.com/StewartWood/status/1323342287171178499
    A week on Monday I am going onto a UK government webinar to explain what my company must do to prepare for transition exit 6 weeks later. Currently the UK government hasn't established what the trading arrangements will be, hasn't built the computer system we will need to use nor hired the customs and standards officials required. So I have no idea what they will tell us because they themselves have no idea.

    You can imagine my bemusement when I see millions spaffed up against the wall on adverts telling me TIME IS RUNNING OUT and that I need to Check & Change arrangements that haven't yet been made. Not that it will be physically possible to switch said arrangements on should they unveil them tomorrow.
    The pharmaceutical safety regulations are still outstanding for NI. The pharmaceutical companies are sitting there pulling their hair out currently. I imagine it is now too late to meet them even if decided today. Every time I see those bloody adverts I shout at the television how are they supposed to prepare?
    Which is why despite the protests from hard Brexit frothers we will get a deal which continues along with the current open border arrangements we have now. It simply isn't possible to go WTO / Australia and the EU have known this for months.

    They will create a compromise name for it - "UKEA Free Trade Area" or something, let Shagger choose his pig lipstick colour, and then we carry on as defacto members of the EEA/CU
    So you're suggesting we will get free trade with Europe but without free movement, without paying membership subscriptions, without being tied down as members - but trade will continue uninterrupted?

    Sounds like a tremendous "cake and eat it" arrangement if so. Completely dividing the EU's "four freedoms" and cherrypicking.

    Are you that confident?
    No, I'm suggesting that we will carry on as we are now. That means paying. Whats more our subs as UKEA members will look like a bargain compared to the disruption costs of trying to crash out in 2 months with literally no prep at all.

    We have zero options. We carry on as we are. Or we don't carry on. WTO or indeed ANY change to current arrangements is impossible to implement.
    Should be very easy to see if you're right or wrong then - if we are paying membership subs still post-transition then you're right on that. I would be very annoyed if we are.

    What about free movement?
    If we go into EEA then we are outside the EU and Brexit's goal has been met in full. Leavers have no cause for complaint.

    Of course, we will just be 2nd class EU citizens but there you go........
  • Options
    GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,117

    Vienna gunman, 20, who killed four and wounded 17 was released early from prison on terror charges because of his age, had wanted to join ISIS in Syria - but 'was deemed incapable of an attack'

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8906871/Shots-fired-near-synagogue-Vienna-police-say-major-operation-underway.html

    FFS this sums up European handling of the problem.

    Had they tried to keep him in jail I can imagine all sorts of human rights lawyers taking the government to the cleaners.
    You want to defend western democratic values against islamism by ripping up the rule of law, its very foundation?

    You my friend may want to think that through.
    I could have guessed that you would have supported releasing this bloke to allow him to go on a gun rampage.

    I don't want to rip up the rule of law, I want the law changed to stop people like this getting released for a very long time before being deported.
    Again, stop putting words in my mouth.

    If you want to change the law that's fine, but stop whinging about "human rights lawyers" who are simply ensuring that the Government operates within the law as it currently is.
    Why is it wrong to complain about lawyers using every trick to pervert the system?

    How is that any different to complaining about aggressive tax avoidance?

    Are lawyers perverting the system within the law any better than accountants doing the same?

    If someone is lawfully avoiding paying taxes by their accountants using every trick in the book - or if someone is lawfully avoiding deportation by their lawyers using every trick in the book - should governments, campaigners and voters just accept that? Or should they identify the problem and look to fix it by closing the loopholes?
    Because this isn't about money, this is about people's liberty.

    People like @DAlexander are very quick to criticise but very slow to produce any actual solutions.

    If you want to dis-apply the Human Rights Act to "terrorism" suspects you then are into the territory of what constitutes a "terrorist" - is it simply at the whim of the Government? The court? Are you comfortable that your human rights could be similarly taken away, almost on an arbitrary basis?

    You may be comfortable with that but people like @DAlexander never want to discuss the hard questions.
  • Options
    kinabalukinabalu Posts: 39,519
    Had a bash at that interactive map. Hope it works.

    A PV margin of 12m to Biden giving the following EC win -

    https://www.270towin.com/maps/AJjQW
  • Options

    kjh said:

    RobD said:

    rkrkrk said:

    Nigelb said:


    Everyone you're detecting is almost certainly infectious, and is detected in real time, so there's no tracing to do. In a city of 500k, that might mean enforcing isolation for 5,000 people. How hard is that in reality ?

    .

    I don't think it's right that everyone detected is almost certainly infectious?

    If you use Abbott figures of: sensitivity (97.1%) and specificity (98.5%) on a population of 500k and assume 1% of population actually has the disease...

    Then you get 4,855 true positives and 7,425 false positives = 40% chance person testing positive actually has disease.

    It's clearly great news that you've got a big proportion of the infected into isolation, but you are probably falsely isolating a reasonable number of people.

    https://abbott.mediaroom.com/2020-08-26-Abbotts-Fast-5-15-Minute-Easy-to-Use-COVID-19-Antigen-Test-Receives-FDA-Emergency-Use-Authorization-Mobile-App-Displays-Test-Results-to-Help-Our-Return-to-Daily-Life-Ramping-Production-to-50-Million-Tests-a-Month
    Then test all those people with a positive with a PCR, and release them if it comes out negative.
    "Release" ... yes

    How much do you want to bet that the only way to get 90% isolation involves dragging people off the streets?

    I guess those old plans fro interment without trial that Blair was interested in might come in handy.
    Now that Boris Johnson has screwed over the Northern Irish I can think of no better way of him showing his love for Northern Ireland by introducing internment in Great Britain for those people who don't self isolate.

    https://twitter.com/StewartWood/status/1323342287171178499
    A week on Monday I am going onto a UK government webinar to explain what my company must do to prepare for transition exit 6 weeks later. Currently the UK government hasn't established what the trading arrangements will be, hasn't built the computer system we will need to use nor hired the customs and standards officials required. So I have no idea what they will tell us because they themselves have no idea.

    You can imagine my bemusement when I see millions spaffed up against the wall on adverts telling me TIME IS RUNNING OUT and that I need to Check & Change arrangements that haven't yet been made. Not that it will be physically possible to switch said arrangements on should they unveil them tomorrow.
    The pharmaceutical safety regulations are still outstanding for NI. The pharmaceutical companies are sitting there pulling their hair out currently. I imagine it is now too late to meet them even if decided today. Every time I see those bloody adverts I shout at the television how are they supposed to prepare?
    Which is why despite the protests from hard Brexit frothers we will get a deal which continues along with the current open border arrangements we have now. It simply isn't possible to go WTO / Australia and the EU have known this for months.

    They will create a compromise name for it - "UKEA Free Trade Area" or something, let Shagger choose his pig lipstick colour, and then we carry on as defacto members of the EEA/CU
    So you're suggesting we will get free trade with Europe but without free movement, without paying membership subscriptions, without being tied down as members - but trade will continue uninterrupted?

    Sounds like a tremendous "cake and eat it" arrangement if so. Completely dividing the EU's "four freedoms" and cherrypicking.

    Are you that confident?
    Erm... no.

    We can have an open border, provided the rules of business and trade are the same on each side. Otherwise, how can you enforce different rules? How can the UK ever have higher standards than the EU on anything? You have to check somewhere, and checking anywhere other than the border is much more intrusive and bureaucratic.

    So open border = we're going to be following EEA rules. Without direct input. Maybe the EU will offer a joint consultative panel- 27 EU nations, 1 UK? Or 45:7, with 1 member per 10 million population.

    And obviously the UK isn't a nation of freeloaders, so it seems fair that we contribute to the costs of the trade area. If I were trolling, I'd suggest £300 million a week- that's a saving on before, isn't it?

    And, naturlich, the UK can walk out on this arrangement at any time. It just needs to work out how it will manage its borders and put the systems in place.

    Not such a deal would be terrible, and I'm not expecting anything that blatant. But it would very probably cost the UK less than what we're likely to end up with and be better for the British economy.

    And the lack of booths in Dover is still a massive giveaway.
  • Options
    GaussianGaussian Posts: 793


    kjh said:

    RobD said:

    rkrkrk said:

    Nigelb said:


    Everyone you're detecting is almost certainly infectious, and is detected in real time, so there's no tracing to do. In a city of 500k, that might mean enforcing isolation for 5,000 people. How hard is that in reality ?

    .

    I don't think it's right that everyone detected is almost certainly infectious?

    If you use Abbott figures of: sensitivity (97.1%) and specificity (98.5%) on a population of 500k and assume 1% of population actually has the disease...

    Then you get 4,855 true positives and 7,425 false positives = 40% chance person testing positive actually has disease.

    It's clearly great news that you've got a big proportion of the infected into isolation, but you are probably falsely isolating a reasonable number of people.

    https://abbott.mediaroom.com/2020-08-26-Abbotts-Fast-5-15-Minute-Easy-to-Use-COVID-19-Antigen-Test-Receives-FDA-Emergency-Use-Authorization-Mobile-App-Displays-Test-Results-to-Help-Our-Return-to-Daily-Life-Ramping-Production-to-50-Million-Tests-a-Month
    Then test all those people with a positive with a PCR, and release them if it comes out negative.
    "Release" ... yes

    How much do you want to bet that the only way to get 90% isolation involves dragging people off the streets?

    I guess those old plans fro interment without trial that Blair was interested in might come in handy.
    Now that Boris Johnson has screwed over the Northern Irish I can think of no better way of him showing his love for Northern Ireland by introducing internment in Great Britain for those people who don't self isolate.

    https://twitter.com/StewartWood/status/1323342287171178499
    A week on Monday I am going onto a UK government webinar to explain what my company must do to prepare for transition exit 6 weeks later. Currently the UK government hasn't established what the trading arrangements will be, hasn't built the computer system we will need to use nor hired the customs and standards officials required. So I have no idea what they will tell us because they themselves have no idea.

    You can imagine my bemusement when I see millions spaffed up against the wall on adverts telling me TIME IS RUNNING OUT and that I need to Check & Change arrangements that haven't yet been made. Not that it will be physically possible to switch said arrangements on should they unveil them tomorrow.
    The pharmaceutical safety regulations are still outstanding for NI. The pharmaceutical companies are sitting there pulling their hair out currently. I imagine it is now too late to meet them even if decided today. Every time I see those bloody adverts I shout at the television how are they supposed to prepare?
    Which is why despite the protests from hard Brexit frothers we will get a deal which continues along with the current open border arrangements we have now. It simply isn't possible to go WTO / Australia and the EU have known this for months.

    They will create a compromise name for it - "UKEA Free Trade Area" or something, let Shagger choose his pig lipstick colour, and then we carry on as defacto members of the EEA/CU
    So you're suggesting we will get free trade with Europe but without free movement, without paying membership subscriptions, without being tied down as members - but trade will continue uninterrupted?

    Sounds like a tremendous "cake and eat it" arrangement if so. Completely dividing the EU's "four freedoms" and cherrypicking.

    Are you that confident?
    No, I'm suggesting that we will carry on as we are now. That means paying. Whats more our subs as UKEA members will look like a bargain compared to the disruption costs of trying to crash out in 2 months with literally no prep at all.

    We have zero options. We carry on as we are. Or we don't carry on. WTO or indeed ANY change to current arrangements is impossible to implement.
    Not an easy sell to Graham Brady and chums.
    No problem, Labour will abstain.
  • Options
    MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,684
    Interesting that the ZOE app data now shows more people leaving the funnel than entering it nationally. I haven't had a chance to look at the detail of the regional breakdowns but I suspect it mirrors a lot of the other public data with the R below 1 in Scotland, quite a few parts of England and NI.

    As @Andy_Cooke has pointed out there are still huge numbers of potential hospitalisations coming into the system and the absolute number of new infections is still high even though it is probably coming down it may still cause crunch situations at a lot hospitals. I think there's a serious case for a Scottish tier 4 level for regions where the absolute infection rate is too high and needs to be brought down quickly, I don't think there is a need for a national lockdown and the government has been bounced into it unnecessarily by scientists cherry picking data.

    Obviously I still stand by isolation measures as the key to beating the virus to a level which allows us to open up basically everything but it's become clear that the government isn't going to take isolation measures seriously at all.
  • Options
    felixfelix Posts: 15,125

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    https://twitter.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1323579286549417984

    Commanding lead in Wales, I guess Drakeford isn't a disaster as many here claimed

    At Westminster Starmer is the Labour leader and making gains in Wales relative to Corbyn in 2019, in Cardiff Bay Drakeford is Labour leader and projected to lose seats at the Assembly elections next year compared to what Carwyn Jones got in 2016 on the same poll
    https://blogs.cardiff.ac.uk/electionsinwales/2020/11/03/the-new-welsh-political-barometer-poll-7/
    At the 2016 Welsh Assembly elections Labour got 29 seats and the Tories 11, on that link the Tories will get 16 seats in the 2021 elections ie up 5 on 2016 and Labour 28 ie down 1 on 2016 so the Tories will make gains next year at the Assembly elections and Labour under Drakeford will make a loss

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_National_Assembly_for_Wales_election
    Ah, so we're back to picking out parts of a poll you like.

    At Westminster 43 to 30 something is a landslide
    You are confusing Wales with the UK. In the former Labour have nearly always had quite large leads which have not been matched in England. This poll shows a swing back to Labour in Wales but not a large one and in fact if replicated in the Welsh elections next year would see gains for the Tories. Even looking at the UK GE potential gains for Labour of 5 would just be reversing most but not all of the gains made last year.
  • Options
    MrEdMrEd Posts: 5,578

    Scott_xP said:
    Won't that be something like 10% of all on-the-day votes in Florida this year?
    Doesn't actually look like that many people....
  • Options
    GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,117
    MrEd said:

    Scott_xP said:
    Won't that be something like 10% of all on-the-day votes in Florida this year?
    Doesn't actually look like that many people....
    Scott was discussing the quote "the supervisor of elections expects about 200,000 people will vote in person today in Miami-Dade County" rather than the subjective length of the line.
  • Options
    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 44,889

    dixiedean said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Sean_F said:

    Cyclefree said:

    While we wait on the US, I just want to praise Tim Farron. He has been very active fighting for the Lake District and its hospitality sector.

    I wrote to him last night about this new rule about pubs not being able to sell takeaway alcohol and got a substantive reply this morning and confirmation that he’s written to the PM about it.

    Meanwhile let’s see if Trudi Harrison, the MP in whose constituency we live, will respond. I doubt it - she is Boris’s PPS after all. Nice lady. But she’s been utterly feeble these past few months.

    Has anybody provided a rationale for allowing pubs to sell takeaway food but not takeaway alcohol, which is, after all, their core business?
    Not from government as far as I am aware.

    It favours supermarkets over all other businesses selling alcohol, even when - as you rightly point out - it is their core business.
    I mentioned the other day, that I was told by a local involved with the council and licensing, that the police had complained that several pubs were allowing selling over the wall to turn into out of control street parties.

    The political problem with cracking down on this and leaving the sensible places open was that this would mean, essentially, shutting pubs isn the poor areas. While the posh places sold champagne over the wall.....
    So because the police won't enforce license conditions every pub - even those who comply with the terms of their licence - will suffer.

    What is the effing point of having licence conditions, of having police if they won't do their bloody job, for Christ's sake?!

    Indeed, why should good licensees like my daughter comply? She may as well do what she wants since rural policemen are like unicorns round here.
    The problem of course being that there aren't enough police to enforce any of this should people rebel.
    The problem was that there was no enforcement from reopening.
    It would only have taken a couple of licences lost in an area.
    Some of these things are so simple it beggars belief. I understand that licensing resources are likely to have been cut through austerity and they don't have the time to do lots of random checks. Fair enough.

    But we had 750k volunteers. Use 10k (or whatever number is needed) of them to go round hospitality venues with a checklist, if its bad the first time talk to the proprietor initially and informally. Then the licensing official has a much smaller list of the worst offenders who have already had an informal warning, it puts them in a far better position to enforce the rules and do it fairly.
    It was more, so I was told, of the political problem of being seen to target the problem areas. The actual number of problem pubs was quite small.

    Hence it is easier this time round to tell pull all the alcohol licenses.
    Well then it is pathetic governance. Dont introduce laws you dont want to implement for political reasons.

    Governments (of all flavours) introduce laws at an ever increasing rate without providing the resources to enforce them. It results in a world where cheaters win and the law abiding lose, and respect for the rule of law ebbs away.

    It is genuinely pathetic.
    It's the world we live in.

    Where the truth is not acceptable, some of the time.
  • Options

    Vienna gunman, 20, who killed four and wounded 17 was released early from prison on terror charges because of his age, had wanted to join ISIS in Syria - but 'was deemed incapable of an attack'

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8906871/Shots-fired-near-synagogue-Vienna-police-say-major-operation-underway.html

    FFS this sums up European handling of the problem.

    Had they tried to keep him in jail I can imagine all sorts of human rights lawyers taking the government to the cleaners.
    You want to defend western democratic values against islamism by ripping up the rule of law, its very foundation?

    You my friend may want to think that through.
    I could have guessed that you would have supported releasing this bloke to allow him to go on a gun rampage.

    I don't want to rip up the rule of law, I want the law changed to stop people like this getting released for a very long time before being deported.
    Again, stop putting words in my mouth.

    If you want to change the law that's fine, but stop whinging about "human rights lawyers" who are simply ensuring that the Government operates within the law as it currently is.
    Why is it wrong to complain about lawyers using every trick to pervert the system?

    How is that any different to complaining about aggressive tax avoidance?

    Are lawyers perverting the system within the law any better than accountants doing the same?

    If someone is lawfully avoiding paying taxes by their accountants using every trick in the book - or if someone is lawfully avoiding deportation by their lawyers using every trick in the book - should governments, campaigners and voters just accept that? Or should they identify the problem and look to fix it by closing the loopholes?
    Because this isn't about money, this is about people's liberty.

    People like @DAlexander are very quick to criticise but very slow to produce any actual solutions.

    If you want to dis-apply the Human Rights Act to "terrorism" suspects you then are into the territory of what constitutes a "terrorist" - is it simply at the whim of the Government? The court? Are you comfortable that your human rights could be similarly taken away, almost on an arbitrary basis?

    You may be comfortable with that but people like @DAlexander never want to discuss the hard questions.
    Money and property right are part of people's liberty so that is not a distinction.

    I'm not suggesting disapplying the HRA per se but if Parliament overrides it by changing the law that should be debated on its merits. If the HRA is being abused and it needs tightening up that should be debated on its merits. Just the same as tax laws and tightening up on tax avoidance.
  • Options
    CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 40,167

    kjh said:

    RobD said:

    rkrkrk said:

    Nigelb said:


    Everyone you're detecting is almost certainly infectious, and is detected in real time, so there's no tracing to do. In a city of 500k, that might mean enforcing isolation for 5,000 people. How hard is that in reality ?

    .

    I don't think it's right that everyone detected is almost certainly infectious?

    If you use Abbott figures of: sensitivity (97.1%) and specificity (98.5%) on a population of 500k and assume 1% of population actually has the disease...

    Then you get 4,855 true positives and 7,425 false positives = 40% chance person testing positive actually has disease.

    It's clearly great news that you've got a big proportion of the infected into isolation, but you are probably falsely isolating a reasonable number of people.

    https://abbott.mediaroom.com/2020-08-26-Abbotts-Fast-5-15-Minute-Easy-to-Use-COVID-19-Antigen-Test-Receives-FDA-Emergency-Use-Authorization-Mobile-App-Displays-Test-Results-to-Help-Our-Return-to-Daily-Life-Ramping-Production-to-50-Million-Tests-a-Month
    Then test all those people with a positive with a PCR, and release them if it comes out negative.
    "Release" ... yes

    How much do you want to bet that the only way to get 90% isolation involves dragging people off the streets?

    I guess those old plans fro interment without trial that Blair was interested in might come in handy.
    Now that Boris Johnson has screwed over the Northern Irish I can think of no better way of him showing his love for Northern Ireland by introducing internment in Great Britain for those people who don't self isolate.

    https://twitter.com/StewartWood/status/1323342287171178499
    A week on Monday I am going onto a UK government webinar to explain what my company must do to prepare for transition exit 6 weeks later. Currently the UK government hasn't established what the trading arrangements will be, hasn't built the computer system we will need to use nor hired the customs and standards officials required. So I have no idea what they will tell us because they themselves have no idea.

    You can imagine my bemusement when I see millions spaffed up against the wall on adverts telling me TIME IS RUNNING OUT and that I need to Check & Change arrangements that haven't yet been made. Not that it will be physically possible to switch said arrangements on should they unveil them tomorrow.
    The pharmaceutical safety regulations are still outstanding for NI. The pharmaceutical companies are sitting there pulling their hair out currently. I imagine it is now too late to meet them even if decided today. Every time I see those bloody adverts I shout at the television how are they supposed to prepare?
    Which is why despite the protests from hard Brexit frothers we will get a deal which continues along with the current open border arrangements we have now. It simply isn't possible to go WTO / Australia and the EU have known this for months.

    They will create a compromise name for it - "UKEA Free Trade Area" or something, let Shagger choose his pig lipstick colour, and then we carry on as defacto members of the EEA/CU
    So you're suggesting we will get free trade with Europe but without free movement, without paying membership subscriptions, without being tied down as members - but trade will continue uninterrupted?

    Sounds like a tremendous "cake and eat it" arrangement if so. Completely dividing the EU's "four freedoms" and cherrypicking.

    Are you that confident?
    Erm... no.

    We can have an open border, provided the rules of business and trade are the same on each side. Otherwise, how can you enforce different rules? How can the UK ever have higher standards than the EU on anything? You have to check somewhere, and checking anywhere other than the border is much more intrusive and bureaucratic.

    So open border = we're going to be following EEA rules. Without direct input. Maybe the EU will offer a joint consultative panel- 27 EU nations, 1 UK? Or 45:7, with 1 member per 10 million population.

    And obviously the UK isn't a nation of freeloaders, so it seems fair that we contribute to the costs of the trade area. If I were trolling, I'd suggest £300 million a week- that's a saving on before, isn't it?

    And, naturlich, the UK can walk out on this arrangement at any time. It just needs to work out how it will manage its borders and put the systems in place.

    Not such a deal would be terrible, and I'm not expecting anything that blatant. But it would very probably cost the UK less than what we're likely to end up with and be better for the British economy.

    And the lack of booths in Dover is still a massive giveaway.
    Hmm, what about the lorry park?

    The booths could be put in very quickly.After all, they'd just get in the way at present. And it's not as if there will be any computer systems to wire them up to.
  • Options
    NigelbNigelb Posts: 63,219
  • Options
    GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,117

    Vienna gunman, 20, who killed four and wounded 17 was released early from prison on terror charges because of his age, had wanted to join ISIS in Syria - but 'was deemed incapable of an attack'

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8906871/Shots-fired-near-synagogue-Vienna-police-say-major-operation-underway.html

    FFS this sums up European handling of the problem.

    Had they tried to keep him in jail I can imagine all sorts of human rights lawyers taking the government to the cleaners.
    You want to defend western democratic values against islamism by ripping up the rule of law, its very foundation?

    You my friend may want to think that through.
    I could have guessed that you would have supported releasing this bloke to allow him to go on a gun rampage.

    I don't want to rip up the rule of law, I want the law changed to stop people like this getting released for a very long time before being deported.
    Again, stop putting words in my mouth.

    If you want to change the law that's fine, but stop whinging about "human rights lawyers" who are simply ensuring that the Government operates within the law as it currently is.
    Why is it wrong to complain about lawyers using every trick to pervert the system?

    How is that any different to complaining about aggressive tax avoidance?

    Are lawyers perverting the system within the law any better than accountants doing the same?

    If someone is lawfully avoiding paying taxes by their accountants using every trick in the book - or if someone is lawfully avoiding deportation by their lawyers using every trick in the book - should governments, campaigners and voters just accept that? Or should they identify the problem and look to fix it by closing the loopholes?
    Because this isn't about money, this is about people's liberty.

    People like @DAlexander are very quick to criticise but very slow to produce any actual solutions.

    If you want to dis-apply the Human Rights Act to "terrorism" suspects you then are into the territory of what constitutes a "terrorist" - is it simply at the whim of the Government? The court? Are you comfortable that your human rights could be similarly taken away, almost on an arbitrary basis?

    You may be comfortable with that but people like @DAlexander never want to discuss the hard questions.
    Money and property right are part of people's liberty so that is not a distinction.

    I'm not suggesting disapplying the HRA per se but if Parliament overrides it by changing the law that should be debated on its merits. If the HRA is being abused and it needs tightening up that should be debated on its merits. Just the same as tax laws and tightening up on tax avoidance.
    You keep using the phrase "abuse of the HRA". What does that even mean? How can the application of people's human rights be abused? They are either rights or they are not rights.

    If Parliament wants to qualify the rights they should explicitly do so and face the awkward questions.

    The Conservative Party has been in power since 2010. They've had plenty of time to amend the HRA if they so desired. The criticism should be directed at the Government for not doing so, not "Human Rights Lawyers".
  • Options


    kjh said:

    RobD said:

    rkrkrk said:

    Nigelb said:


    Everyone you're detecting is almost certainly infectious, and is detected in real time, so there's no tracing to do. In a city of 500k, that might mean enforcing isolation for 5,000 people. How hard is that in reality ?

    .

    I don't think it's right that everyone detected is almost certainly infectious?

    If you use Abbott figures of: sensitivity (97.1%) and specificity (98.5%) on a population of 500k and assume 1% of population actually has the disease...

    Then you get 4,855 true positives and 7,425 false positives = 40% chance person testing positive actually has disease.

    It's clearly great news that you've got a big proportion of the infected into isolation, but you are probably falsely isolating a reasonable number of people.

    https://abbott.mediaroom.com/2020-08-26-Abbotts-Fast-5-15-Minute-Easy-to-Use-COVID-19-Antigen-Test-Receives-FDA-Emergency-Use-Authorization-Mobile-App-Displays-Test-Results-to-Help-Our-Return-to-Daily-Life-Ramping-Production-to-50-Million-Tests-a-Month
    Then test all those people with a positive with a PCR, and release them if it comes out negative.
    "Release" ... yes

    How much do you want to bet that the only way to get 90% isolation involves dragging people off the streets?

    I guess those old plans fro interment without trial that Blair was interested in might come in handy.
    Now that Boris Johnson has screwed over the Northern Irish I can think of no better way of him showing his love for Northern Ireland by introducing internment in Great Britain for those people who don't self isolate.

    https://twitter.com/StewartWood/status/1323342287171178499
    A week on Monday I am going onto a UK government webinar to explain what my company must do to prepare for transition exit 6 weeks later. Currently the UK government hasn't established what the trading arrangements will be, hasn't built the computer system we will need to use nor hired the customs and standards officials required. So I have no idea what they will tell us because they themselves have no idea.

    You can imagine my bemusement when I see millions spaffed up against the wall on adverts telling me TIME IS RUNNING OUT and that I need to Check & Change arrangements that haven't yet been made. Not that it will be physically possible to switch said arrangements on should they unveil them tomorrow.
    The pharmaceutical safety regulations are still outstanding for NI. The pharmaceutical companies are sitting there pulling their hair out currently. I imagine it is now too late to meet them even if decided today. Every time I see those bloody adverts I shout at the television how are they supposed to prepare?
    Which is why despite the protests from hard Brexit frothers we will get a deal which continues along with the current open border arrangements we have now. It simply isn't possible to go WTO / Australia and the EU have known this for months.

    They will create a compromise name for it - "UKEA Free Trade Area" or something, let Shagger choose his pig lipstick colour, and then we carry on as defacto members of the EEA/CU
    So you're suggesting we will get free trade with Europe but without free movement, without paying membership subscriptions, without being tied down as members - but trade will continue uninterrupted?

    Sounds like a tremendous "cake and eat it" arrangement if so. Completely dividing the EU's "four freedoms" and cherrypicking.

    Are you that confident?
    No, I'm suggesting that we will carry on as we are now. That means paying. Whats more our subs as UKEA members will look like a bargain compared to the disruption costs of trying to crash out in 2 months with literally no prep at all.

    We have zero options. We carry on as we are. Or we don't carry on. WTO or indeed ANY change to current arrangements is impossible to implement.
    Not an easy sell to Graham Brady and chums.
    I'd love to see how Brady et al plan to implement their alternative plan: WTO/Australia on 1st January
    We don't have a physical border infrastructure built
    We don't have the customs agents hired and trained
    We don't have the computer system developed, rolled out and integrated

    It quite literally cannot be done. Which means that we will continue on current arrangements whatever they think.

    @Philip_Thompson asked me about FoM - I expect this to "stop". We will implement new powers to arrest and deport any new EU migrants who after 90 days cannot show that they have a job to sustain themselves with. That these powers had always been available to us is irrelevant, they will be "new" and marketed as a triumph like when Apple invented copy/paste.
  • Options

    Vienna gunman, 20, who killed four and wounded 17 was released early from prison on terror charges because of his age, had wanted to join ISIS in Syria - but 'was deemed incapable of an attack'

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8906871/Shots-fired-near-synagogue-Vienna-police-say-major-operation-underway.html

    FFS this sums up European handling of the problem.

    Had they tried to keep him in jail I can imagine all sorts of human rights lawyers taking the government to the cleaners.
    You want to defend western democratic values against islamism by ripping up the rule of law, its very foundation?

    You my friend may want to think that through.
    I could have guessed that you would have supported releasing this bloke to allow him to go on a gun rampage.

    I don't want to rip up the rule of law, I want the law changed to stop people like this getting released for a very long time before being deported.
    Again, stop putting words in my mouth.

    If you want to change the law that's fine, but stop whinging about "human rights lawyers" who are simply ensuring that the Government operates within the law as it currently is.
    Why is it wrong to complain about lawyers using every trick to pervert the system?

    How is that any different to complaining about aggressive tax avoidance?

    Are lawyers perverting the system within the law any better than accountants doing the same?

    If someone is lawfully avoiding paying taxes by their accountants using every trick in the book - or if someone is lawfully avoiding deportation by their lawyers using every trick in the book - should governments, campaigners and voters just accept that? Or should they identify the problem and look to fix it by closing the loopholes?
    Because this isn't about money, this is about people's liberty.

    People like @DAlexander are very quick to criticise but very slow to produce any actual solutions.

    If you want to dis-apply the Human Rights Act to "terrorism" suspects you then are into the territory of what constitutes a "terrorist" - is it simply at the whim of the Government? The court? Are you comfortable that your human rights could be similarly taken away, almost on an arbitrary basis?

    You may be comfortable with that but people like @DAlexander never want to discuss the hard questions.
    The bloke tried to join ISIS, I think it's a fairly reasonable conclusion to draw that he should be behind bars.

    Funny how the same people defending releasing this bloke couldn't help contain their glee when Tommy Robinson was arrested for no reason at all the other day.
  • Options
    GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,117
    edited November 2020

    Vienna gunman, 20, who killed four and wounded 17 was released early from prison on terror charges because of his age, had wanted to join ISIS in Syria - but 'was deemed incapable of an attack'

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8906871/Shots-fired-near-synagogue-Vienna-police-say-major-operation-underway.html

    FFS this sums up European handling of the problem.

    Had they tried to keep him in jail I can imagine all sorts of human rights lawyers taking the government to the cleaners.
    You want to defend western democratic values against islamism by ripping up the rule of law, its very foundation?

    You my friend may want to think that through.
    I could have guessed that you would have supported releasing this bloke to allow him to go on a gun rampage.

    I don't want to rip up the rule of law, I want the law changed to stop people like this getting released for a very long time before being deported.
    Again, stop putting words in my mouth.

    If you want to change the law that's fine, but stop whinging about "human rights lawyers" who are simply ensuring that the Government operates within the law as it currently is.
    Why is it wrong to complain about lawyers using every trick to pervert the system?

    How is that any different to complaining about aggressive tax avoidance?

    Are lawyers perverting the system within the law any better than accountants doing the same?

    If someone is lawfully avoiding paying taxes by their accountants using every trick in the book - or if someone is lawfully avoiding deportation by their lawyers using every trick in the book - should governments, campaigners and voters just accept that? Or should they identify the problem and look to fix it by closing the loopholes?
    Because this isn't about money, this is about people's liberty.

    People like @DAlexander are very quick to criticise but very slow to produce any actual solutions.

    If you want to dis-apply the Human Rights Act to "terrorism" suspects you then are into the territory of what constitutes a "terrorist" - is it simply at the whim of the Government? The court? Are you comfortable that your human rights could be similarly taken away, almost on an arbitrary basis?

    You may be comfortable with that but people like @DAlexander never want to discuss the hard questions.
    The bloke tried to join ISIS, I think it's a fairly reasonable conclusion to draw that he should be behind bars.
    Forever?

    And please note I am not defending this bloke. I'm not defending him whatsoever. I am defending "human rights lawyers".
  • Options
    DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,459
    HYUFD said:
    I grow tired of saying this so I make the point again only once.

    Silver is a statistician. He assigns probability to events. He never, ever, says something will or will not happen. Thats not what statitsticians do. In fact he posted on his site how tired he was of that being assumed the other day. What he does is assign probabilities to events. Those assign a number to the amount of times, given a set of variables, something will happen if it is repeated enough times.

    The Sun has risen over the horizon every day since the Earth was created. So the probability of the Sub coming over the horizon tomorrow is as near to 100% as you can get - but not 100%. There is a greater than zero possibility that a cataclysmic event that has never happened before may happen later today.

    The odds on winning a Euromillions jackpot are 1 in 139,838,160. Yet people do. Roulette wheels usually have 37 slots. Yet people win at roulette. The odds on Trump winning the election, according to Nate Silver, are 1 in 10, meaning everytime a simulation is run based on the data he has, Trump wins once every 10 times. Those are not imposible odds. That is all Nate Silver is saying. He is not a pollster he is a statistician. If the pollsters feed him terrible polls then his outcomes will be terrible. However, his outcomes have been pretty good. Blame them.

    I think Trump will win a messy and contested election that will drag on for weeks and unfortunately involve violence. The USA was brought up on the idea that the majority rules. According to my American wife, the reality of a popular vote/electoral college split in 2000 came as a surprise to many (not everyone is a history/politics nerd) and, the more it happens, then the more divided the country will become as one side believes the system is rigged. Particulary if it's an 8-10 popular vote margin for Biden. By 2025 half the century will have seen presidential terms determined by the minority. That is not sustainable.

  • Options
    GaussianGaussian Posts: 793

    kjh said:

    RobD said:

    rkrkrk said:

    Nigelb said:


    Everyone you're detecting is almost certainly infectious, and is detected in real time, so there's no tracing to do. In a city of 500k, that might mean enforcing isolation for 5,000 people. How hard is that in reality ?

    .

    I don't think it's right that everyone detected is almost certainly infectious?

    If you use Abbott figures of: sensitivity (97.1%) and specificity (98.5%) on a population of 500k and assume 1% of population actually has the disease...

    Then you get 4,855 true positives and 7,425 false positives = 40% chance person testing positive actually has disease.

    It's clearly great news that you've got a big proportion of the infected into isolation, but you are probably falsely isolating a reasonable number of people.

    https://abbott.mediaroom.com/2020-08-26-Abbotts-Fast-5-15-Minute-Easy-to-Use-COVID-19-Antigen-Test-Receives-FDA-Emergency-Use-Authorization-Mobile-App-Displays-Test-Results-to-Help-Our-Return-to-Daily-Life-Ramping-Production-to-50-Million-Tests-a-Month
    Then test all those people with a positive with a PCR, and release them if it comes out negative.
    "Release" ... yes

    How much do you want to bet that the only way to get 90% isolation involves dragging people off the streets?

    I guess those old plans fro interment without trial that Blair was interested in might come in handy.
    Now that Boris Johnson has screwed over the Northern Irish I can think of no better way of him showing his love for Northern Ireland by introducing internment in Great Britain for those people who don't self isolate.

    https://twitter.com/StewartWood/status/1323342287171178499
    A week on Monday I am going onto a UK government webinar to explain what my company must do to prepare for transition exit 6 weeks later. Currently the UK government hasn't established what the trading arrangements will be, hasn't built the computer system we will need to use nor hired the customs and standards officials required. So I have no idea what they will tell us because they themselves have no idea.

    You can imagine my bemusement when I see millions spaffed up against the wall on adverts telling me TIME IS RUNNING OUT and that I need to Check & Change arrangements that haven't yet been made. Not that it will be physically possible to switch said arrangements on should they unveil them tomorrow.
    The pharmaceutical safety regulations are still outstanding for NI. The pharmaceutical companies are sitting there pulling their hair out currently. I imagine it is now too late to meet them even if decided today. Every time I see those bloody adverts I shout at the television how are they supposed to prepare?
    Which is why despite the protests from hard Brexit frothers we will get a deal which continues along with the current open border arrangements we have now. It simply isn't possible to go WTO / Australia and the EU have known this for months.

    They will create a compromise name for it - "UKEA Free Trade Area" or something, let Shagger choose his pig lipstick colour, and then we carry on as defacto members of the EEA/CU
    So you're suggesting we will get free trade with Europe but without free movement, without paying membership subscriptions, without being tied down as members - but trade will continue uninterrupted?

    Sounds like a tremendous "cake and eat it" arrangement if so. Completely dividing the EU's "four freedoms" and cherrypicking.

    Are you that confident?
    No, I'm suggesting that we will carry on as we are now. That means paying. Whats more our subs as UKEA members will look like a bargain compared to the disruption costs of trying to crash out in 2 months with literally no prep at all.

    We have zero options. We carry on as we are. Or we don't carry on. WTO or indeed ANY change to current arrangements is impossible to implement.
    Should be very easy to see if you're right or wrong then - if we are paying membership subs still post-transition then you're right on that. I would be very annoyed if we are.

    What about free movement?
    No services, no free movement?
  • Options
    dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 28,061

    dixiedean said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Sean_F said:

    Cyclefree said:

    While we wait on the US, I just want to praise Tim Farron. He has been very active fighting for the Lake District and its hospitality sector.

    I wrote to him last night about this new rule about pubs not being able to sell takeaway alcohol and got a substantive reply this morning and confirmation that he’s written to the PM about it.

    Meanwhile let’s see if Trudi Harrison, the MP in whose constituency we live, will respond. I doubt it - she is Boris’s PPS after all. Nice lady. But she’s been utterly feeble these past few months.

    Has anybody provided a rationale for allowing pubs to sell takeaway food but not takeaway alcohol, which is, after all, their core business?
    Not from government as far as I am aware.

    It favours supermarkets over all other businesses selling alcohol, even when - as you rightly point out - it is their core business.
    I mentioned the other day, that I was told by a local involved with the council and licensing, that the police had complained that several pubs were allowing selling over the wall to turn into out of control street parties.

    The political problem with cracking down on this and leaving the sensible places open was that this would mean, essentially, shutting pubs isn the poor areas. While the posh places sold champagne over the wall.....
    So because the police won't enforce license conditions every pub - even those who comply with the terms of their licence - will suffer.

    What is the effing point of having licence conditions, of having police if they won't do their bloody job, for Christ's sake?!

    Indeed, why should good licensees like my daughter comply? She may as well do what she wants since rural policemen are like unicorns round here.
    The problem of course being that there aren't enough police to enforce any of this should people rebel.
    The problem was that there was no enforcement from reopening.
    It would only have taken a couple of licences lost in an area.
    Some of these things are so simple it beggars belief. I understand that licensing resources are likely to have been cut through austerity and they don't have the time to do lots of random checks. Fair enough.

    But we had 750k volunteers. Use 10k (or whatever number is needed) of them to go round hospitality venues with a checklist, if its bad the first time talk to the proprietor initially and informally. Then the licensing official has a much smaller list of the worst offenders who have already had an informal warning, it puts them in a far better position to enforce the rules and do it fairly.
    Doesn't even really need that tbh. The Police and Councils know the layout, the landlords and the history of the premises already. I'm sure they could have drawn up a shortlist pretty swiftly.
  • Options
    MrEdMrEd Posts: 5,578

    This is remarkable (or maybe y'all knew about it already) - you can look at Florida voting patterns in real time. This for example is Pinellas country, which in 2016 split pretty much evenly Trump/Clinton. You can see the registered Dem early advantage, but more GOP-registered voting today:

    https://tqv.vrswebapps.com/?state=FL&county=pin

    With the caveat those are a guide only. Registered repubs sometimes vote dem, and vice versa.
    I did a quick back of the envelope calculation here. Note Pinellas did 77.4% turnout in 2016 and Trump won by less than 6K. I've assumed this goes up slightly to 80% but that might be conservative.

    Based on the in-person voting so far, the Republicans are winning nearly 52% of this, registered Democrats 22%. You have to take into account @contrarian's warning.

    If the same ratio continues, then there will be around 20K more registered Republicans voting in Pinellas at the end vs Democrats. Obviously that doesn't translate into votes but as a guide

  • Options
    brokenwheelbrokenwheel Posts: 3,352
    edited November 2020
    MrEd said:

    Scott_xP said:
    Won't that be something like 10% of all on-the-day votes in Florida this year?
    Doesn't actually look like that many people....
    Besides, Dade this year is probably going to be considerably less Democratic.

    Speaking of Florida, the Democrats' lead in registrations from EV has been cut in half in the first hour of voting.
  • Options
    Sean_FSean_F Posts: 36,013

    dixiedean said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Sean_F said:

    Cyclefree said:

    While we wait on the US, I just want to praise Tim Farron. He has been very active fighting for the Lake District and its hospitality sector.

    I wrote to him last night about this new rule about pubs not being able to sell takeaway alcohol and got a substantive reply this morning and confirmation that he’s written to the PM about it.

    Meanwhile let’s see if Trudi Harrison, the MP in whose constituency we live, will respond. I doubt it - she is Boris’s PPS after all. Nice lady. But she’s been utterly feeble these past few months.

    Has anybody provided a rationale for allowing pubs to sell takeaway food but not takeaway alcohol, which is, after all, their core business?
    Not from government as far as I am aware.

    It favours supermarkets over all other businesses selling alcohol, even when - as you rightly point out - it is their core business.
    I mentioned the other day, that I was told by a local involved with the council and licensing, that the police had complained that several pubs were allowing selling over the wall to turn into out of control street parties.

    The political problem with cracking down on this and leaving the sensible places open was that this would mean, essentially, shutting pubs isn the poor areas. While the posh places sold champagne over the wall.....
    So because the police won't enforce license conditions every pub - even those who comply with the terms of their licence - will suffer.

    What is the effing point of having licence conditions, of having police if they won't do their bloody job, for Christ's sake?!

    Indeed, why should good licensees like my daughter comply? She may as well do what she wants since rural policemen are like unicorns round here.
    The problem of course being that there aren't enough police to enforce any of this should people rebel.
    The problem was that there was no enforcement from reopening.
    It would only have taken a couple of licences lost in an area.
    Some of these things are so simple it beggars belief. I understand that licensing resources are likely to have been cut through austerity and they don't have the time to do lots of random checks. Fair enough.

    But we had 750k volunteers. Use 10k (or whatever number is needed) of them to go round hospitality venues with a checklist, if its bad the first time talk to the proprietor initially and informally. Then the licensing official has a much smaller list of the worst offenders who have already had an informal warning, it puts them in a far better position to enforce the rules and do it fairly.
    It was more, so I was told, of the political problem of being seen to target the problem areas. The actual number of problem pubs was quite small.

    Hence it is easier this time round to tell pull all the alcohol licenses.
    That is still a very weak justification. We don't generally impose collective punishment on people, based upon what a small minority of their number are doing.
  • Options
    MrEdMrEd Posts: 5,578

    MrEd said:

    Scott_xP said:
    Won't that be something like 10% of all on-the-day votes in Florida this year?
    Doesn't actually look like that many people....
    Besides, Dade this year is probably going to be considerably less Democratic this year.

    Speaking of Florida, the Democrats' lead in registrations from EV has been cut in half in the first hour of voting.
    I saw that. I suspect Florida will be going Trumpski by a fair old margin...
  • Options

    kjh said:

    RobD said:

    rkrkrk said:

    Nigelb said:


    Everyone you're detecting is almost certainly infectious, and is detected in real time, so there's no tracing to do. In a city of 500k, that might mean enforcing isolation for 5,000 people. How hard is that in reality ?

    .

    I don't think it's right that everyone detected is almost certainly infectious?

    If you use Abbott figures of: sensitivity (97.1%) and specificity (98.5%) on a population of 500k and assume 1% of population actually has the disease...

    Then you get 4,855 true positives and 7,425 false positives = 40% chance person testing positive actually has disease.

    It's clearly great news that you've got a big proportion of the infected into isolation, but you are probably falsely isolating a reasonable number of people.

    https://abbott.mediaroom.com/2020-08-26-Abbotts-Fast-5-15-Minute-Easy-to-Use-COVID-19-Antigen-Test-Receives-FDA-Emergency-Use-Authorization-Mobile-App-Displays-Test-Results-to-Help-Our-Return-to-Daily-Life-Ramping-Production-to-50-Million-Tests-a-Month
    Then test all those people with a positive with a PCR, and release them if it comes out negative.
    "Release" ... yes

    How much do you want to bet that the only way to get 90% isolation involves dragging people off the streets?

    I guess those old plans fro interment without trial that Blair was interested in might come in handy.
    Now that Boris Johnson has screwed over the Northern Irish I can think of no better way of him showing his love for Northern Ireland by introducing internment in Great Britain for those people who don't self isolate.

    https://twitter.com/StewartWood/status/1323342287171178499
    A week on Monday I am going onto a UK government webinar to explain what my company must do to prepare for transition exit 6 weeks later. Currently the UK government hasn't established what the trading arrangements will be, hasn't built the computer system we will need to use nor hired the customs and standards officials required. So I have no idea what they will tell us because they themselves have no idea.

    You can imagine my bemusement when I see millions spaffed up against the wall on adverts telling me TIME IS RUNNING OUT and that I need to Check & Change arrangements that haven't yet been made. Not that it will be physically possible to switch said arrangements on should they unveil them tomorrow.
    The pharmaceutical safety regulations are still outstanding for NI. The pharmaceutical companies are sitting there pulling their hair out currently. I imagine it is now too late to meet them even if decided today. Every time I see those bloody adverts I shout at the television how are they supposed to prepare?
    Which is why despite the protests from hard Brexit frothers we will get a deal which continues along with the current open border arrangements we have now. It simply isn't possible to go WTO / Australia and the EU have known this for months.

    They will create a compromise name for it - "UKEA Free Trade Area" or something, let Shagger choose his pig lipstick colour, and then we carry on as defacto members of the EEA/CU
    So you're suggesting we will get free trade with Europe but without free movement, without paying membership subscriptions, without being tied down as members - but trade will continue uninterrupted?

    Sounds like a tremendous "cake and eat it" arrangement if so. Completely dividing the EU's "four freedoms" and cherrypicking.

    Are you that confident?
    Erm... no.

    We can have an open border, provided the rules of business and trade are the same on each side. Otherwise, how can you enforce different rules? How can the UK ever have higher standards than the EU on anything? You have to check somewhere, and checking anywhere other than the border is much more intrusive and bureaucratic.

    So open border = we're going to be following EEA rules. Without direct input. Maybe the EU will offer a joint consultative panel- 27 EU nations, 1 UK? Or 45:7, with 1 member per 10 million population.

    And obviously the UK isn't a nation of freeloaders, so it seems fair that we contribute to the costs of the trade area. If I were trolling, I'd suggest £300 million a week- that's a saving on before, isn't it?

    And, naturlich, the UK can walk out on this arrangement at any time. It just needs to work out how it will manage its borders and put the systems in place.

    Not such a deal would be terrible, and I'm not expecting anything that blatant. But it would very probably cost the UK less than what we're likely to end up with and be better for the British economy.

    And the lack of booths in Dover is still a massive giveaway.
    We have already left the EU. But afeared of the Farage Tories persuaded people that the EU was the EEA. We have spent years trying to negotiate ourselves out of the EEA/CU without spending any money or time on the stuff needed to be out like a border and customs infrastructure.

    What is going to happen is exactly what happened to Norniron. Shagger will declare victory. Declare that we will no longer pay money to the EU and are free to do trade deals. Instead we will pay money to the UKEU FTA who will forward our money to the EU. We won't have free movement we will have reciprocal arrangements with a new much harsher 90 day window after which we can deport scroungers.

    Everyone's a winner.
  • Options

    kjh said:

    RobD said:

    rkrkrk said:

    Nigelb said:


    Everyone you're detecting is almost certainly infectious, and is detected in real time, so there's no tracing to do. In a city of 500k, that might mean enforcing isolation for 5,000 people. How hard is that in reality ?

    .

    I don't think it's right that everyone detected is almost certainly infectious?

    If you use Abbott figures of: sensitivity (97.1%) and specificity (98.5%) on a population of 500k and assume 1% of population actually has the disease...

    Then you get 4,855 true positives and 7,425 false positives = 40% chance person testing positive actually has disease.

    It's clearly great news that you've got a big proportion of the infected into isolation, but you are probably falsely isolating a reasonable number of people.

    https://abbott.mediaroom.com/2020-08-26-Abbotts-Fast-5-15-Minute-Easy-to-Use-COVID-19-Antigen-Test-Receives-FDA-Emergency-Use-Authorization-Mobile-App-Displays-Test-Results-to-Help-Our-Return-to-Daily-Life-Ramping-Production-to-50-Million-Tests-a-Month
    Then test all those people with a positive with a PCR, and release them if it comes out negative.
    "Release" ... yes

    How much do you want to bet that the only way to get 90% isolation involves dragging people off the streets?

    I guess those old plans fro interment without trial that Blair was interested in might come in handy.
    Now that Boris Johnson has screwed over the Northern Irish I can think of no better way of him showing his love for Northern Ireland by introducing internment in Great Britain for those people who don't self isolate.

    https://twitter.com/StewartWood/status/1323342287171178499
    A week on Monday I am going onto a UK government webinar to explain what my company must do to prepare for transition exit 6 weeks later. Currently the UK government hasn't established what the trading arrangements will be, hasn't built the computer system we will need to use nor hired the customs and standards officials required. So I have no idea what they will tell us because they themselves have no idea.

    You can imagine my bemusement when I see millions spaffed up against the wall on adverts telling me TIME IS RUNNING OUT and that I need to Check & Change arrangements that haven't yet been made. Not that it will be physically possible to switch said arrangements on should they unveil them tomorrow.
    The pharmaceutical safety regulations are still outstanding for NI. The pharmaceutical companies are sitting there pulling their hair out currently. I imagine it is now too late to meet them even if decided today. Every time I see those bloody adverts I shout at the television how are they supposed to prepare?
    Which is why despite the protests from hard Brexit frothers we will get a deal which continues along with the current open border arrangements we have now. It simply isn't possible to go WTO / Australia and the EU have known this for months.

    They will create a compromise name for it - "UKEA Free Trade Area" or something, let Shagger choose his pig lipstick colour, and then we carry on as defacto members of the EEA/CU
    So you're suggesting we will get free trade with Europe but without free movement, without paying membership subscriptions, without being tied down as members - but trade will continue uninterrupted?

    Sounds like a tremendous "cake and eat it" arrangement if so. Completely dividing the EU's "four freedoms" and cherrypicking.

    Are you that confident?
    Erm... no.

    We can have an open border, provided the rules of business and trade are the same on each side. Otherwise, how can you enforce different rules? How can the UK ever have higher standards than the EU on anything? You have to check somewhere, and checking anywhere other than the border is much more intrusive and bureaucratic.

    So open border = we're going to be following EEA rules. Without direct input. Maybe the EU will offer a joint consultative panel- 27 EU nations, 1 UK? Or 45:7, with 1 member per 10 million population.

    And obviously the UK isn't a nation of freeloaders, so it seems fair that we contribute to the costs of the trade area. If I were trolling, I'd suggest £300 million a week- that's a saving on before, isn't it?

    And, naturlich, the UK can walk out on this arrangement at any time. It just needs to work out how it will manage its borders and put the systems in place.

    Not such a deal would be terrible, and I'm not expecting anything that blatant. But it would very probably cost the UK less than what we're likely to end up with and be better for the British economy.

    And the lack of booths in Dover is still a massive giveaway.
    You don't need checks at the border, that is absolute codswallop. There are plenty of places you can have checks, for instance in a business. If a business domestically is breaking domestic law then it is breaking the law, regardless of what the law is overseas and without needing border checks.

    We already coped with that as EU members!

    I'll give you a prime example. Go please and pick up a bottle of spirits and have a look at it. Do you see on it a "UK" mark on the label? If so UK Duty has been paid on that bottle and it is lawful to be served or sold in the UK. If a restauranteur chose to drive to France or Italy to stock up on wine spirits and then serve those in their restaurant then they would be breaking the law. Without checks at the border.

    Same rules apply across the Schengen Area with literally no border checks whatsoever different rules can apply on different sides of the invisible borders.
  • Options

    kjh said:

    RobD said:

    rkrkrk said:

    Nigelb said:


    Everyone you're detecting is almost certainly infectious, and is detected in real time, so there's no tracing to do. In a city of 500k, that might mean enforcing isolation for 5,000 people. How hard is that in reality ?

    .

    I don't think it's right that everyone detected is almost certainly infectious?

    If you use Abbott figures of: sensitivity (97.1%) and specificity (98.5%) on a population of 500k and assume 1% of population actually has the disease...

    Then you get 4,855 true positives and 7,425 false positives = 40% chance person testing positive actually has disease.

    It's clearly great news that you've got a big proportion of the infected into isolation, but you are probably falsely isolating a reasonable number of people.

    https://abbott.mediaroom.com/2020-08-26-Abbotts-Fast-5-15-Minute-Easy-to-Use-COVID-19-Antigen-Test-Receives-FDA-Emergency-Use-Authorization-Mobile-App-Displays-Test-Results-to-Help-Our-Return-to-Daily-Life-Ramping-Production-to-50-Million-Tests-a-Month
    Then test all those people with a positive with a PCR, and release them if it comes out negative.
    "Release" ... yes

    How much do you want to bet that the only way to get 90% isolation involves dragging people off the streets?

    I guess those old plans fro interment without trial that Blair was interested in might come in handy.
    Now that Boris Johnson has screwed over the Northern Irish I can think of no better way of him showing his love for Northern Ireland by introducing internment in Great Britain for those people who don't self isolate.

    https://twitter.com/StewartWood/status/1323342287171178499
    A week on Monday I am going onto a UK government webinar to explain what my company must do to prepare for transition exit 6 weeks later. Currently the UK government hasn't established what the trading arrangements will be, hasn't built the computer system we will need to use nor hired the customs and standards officials required. So I have no idea what they will tell us because they themselves have no idea.

    You can imagine my bemusement when I see millions spaffed up against the wall on adverts telling me TIME IS RUNNING OUT and that I need to Check & Change arrangements that haven't yet been made. Not that it will be physically possible to switch said arrangements on should they unveil them tomorrow.
    The pharmaceutical safety regulations are still outstanding for NI. The pharmaceutical companies are sitting there pulling their hair out currently. I imagine it is now too late to meet them even if decided today. Every time I see those bloody adverts I shout at the television how are they supposed to prepare?
    Which is why despite the protests from hard Brexit frothers we will get a deal which continues along with the current open border arrangements we have now. It simply isn't possible to go WTO / Australia and the EU have known this for months.

    They will create a compromise name for it - "UKEA Free Trade Area" or something, let Shagger choose his pig lipstick colour, and then we carry on as defacto members of the EEA/CU
    So you're suggesting we will get free trade with Europe but without free movement, without paying membership subscriptions, without being tied down as members - but trade will continue uninterrupted?

    Sounds like a tremendous "cake and eat it" arrangement if so. Completely dividing the EU's "four freedoms" and cherrypicking.

    Are you that confident?
    No, I'm suggesting that we will carry on as we are now. That means paying. Whats more our subs as UKEA members will look like a bargain compared to the disruption costs of trying to crash out in 2 months with literally no prep at all.

    We have zero options. We carry on as we are. Or we don't carry on. WTO or indeed ANY change to current arrangements is impossible to implement.
    Should be very easy to see if you're right or wrong then - if we are paying membership subs still post-transition then you're right on that. I would be very annoyed if we are.

    What about free movement?
    Same issue the US has. Most illegal immigration isn't people sneaking over borders, it's people coming in through normal channels and (shocked gasp) lying about their intentions.

    (SCENE: Luton airport, early Monday morning. Flight from somewhere Eastern European has landed.)

    Border official: Good morning Sir. Are you here to work, that isn't allowed any more?

    Eastern European gentleman: No Sir. I am here for a holiday. A painting holiday. Look at my many paintbrushes. I love to paint. I come to England as often as I can to paint.

    Border official: Very good. Remember what the rules about employment are.

    Now, it's possible to clamp down on undocumented, cash in hand work. Of course, it's possible, But it's not very likely, is it?
  • Options
    TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 41,590

    Vienna gunman, 20, who killed four and wounded 17 was released early from prison on terror charges because of his age, had wanted to join ISIS in Syria - but 'was deemed incapable of an attack'

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8906871/Shots-fired-near-synagogue-Vienna-police-say-major-operation-underway.html

    FFS this sums up European handling of the problem.

    Had they tried to keep him in jail I can imagine all sorts of human rights lawyers taking the government to the cleaners.
    You want to defend western democratic values against islamism by ripping up the rule of law, its very foundation?

    You my friend may want to think that through.
    I could have guessed that you would have supported releasing this bloke to allow him to go on a gun rampage.

    I don't want to rip up the rule of law, I want the law changed to stop people like this getting released for a very long time before being deported.
    Again, stop putting words in my mouth.

    If you want to change the law that's fine, but stop whinging about "human rights lawyers" who are simply ensuring that the Government operates within the law as it currently is.
    Why is it wrong to complain about lawyers using every trick to pervert the system?

    How is that any different to complaining about aggressive tax avoidance?

    Are lawyers perverting the system within the law any better than accountants doing the same?

    If someone is lawfully avoiding paying taxes by their accountants using every trick in the book - or if someone is lawfully avoiding deportation by their lawyers using every trick in the book - should governments, campaigners and voters just accept that? Or should they identify the problem and look to fix it by closing the loopholes?
    Because this isn't about money, this is about people's liberty.

    People like @DAlexander are very quick to criticise but very slow to produce any actual solutions.

    If you want to dis-apply the Human Rights Act to "terrorism" suspects you then are into the territory of what constitutes a "terrorist" - is it simply at the whim of the Government? The court? Are you comfortable that your human rights could be similarly taken away, almost on an arbitrary basis?

    You may be comfortable with that but people like @DAlexander never want to discuss the hard questions.
    The bloke tried to join ISIS, I think it's a fairly reasonable conclusion to draw that he should be behind bars.

    Funny how the same people defending releasing this bloke couldn't help contain their glee when Tommy Robinson was arrested for no reason at all the other day.
    So starter for 10 - do you think everyone on the security services' watch list should be in jail?

    Next - as well as those, who else would you bang up?

    TIA
  • Options
    DAlexanderDAlexander Posts: 815
    edited November 2020

    Vienna gunman, 20, who killed four and wounded 17 was released early from prison on terror charges because of his age, had wanted to join ISIS in Syria - but 'was deemed incapable of an attack'

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8906871/Shots-fired-near-synagogue-Vienna-police-say-major-operation-underway.html

    FFS this sums up European handling of the problem.

    Had they tried to keep him in jail I can imagine all sorts of human rights lawyers taking the government to the cleaners.
    You want to defend western democratic values against islamism by ripping up the rule of law, its very foundation?

    You my friend may want to think that through.
    I could have guessed that you would have supported releasing this bloke to allow him to go on a gun rampage.

    I don't want to rip up the rule of law, I want the law changed to stop people like this getting released for a very long time before being deported.
    Again, stop putting words in my mouth.

    If you want to change the law that's fine, but stop whinging about "human rights lawyers" who are simply ensuring that the Government operates within the law as it currently is.
    Why is it wrong to complain about lawyers using every trick to pervert the system?

    How is that any different to complaining about aggressive tax avoidance?

    Are lawyers perverting the system within the law any better than accountants doing the same?

    If someone is lawfully avoiding paying taxes by their accountants using every trick in the book - or if someone is lawfully avoiding deportation by their lawyers using every trick in the book - should governments, campaigners and voters just accept that? Or should they identify the problem and look to fix it by closing the loopholes?
    Because this isn't about money, this is about people's liberty.

    People like @DAlexander are very quick to criticise but very slow to produce any actual solutions.

    If you want to dis-apply the Human Rights Act to "terrorism" suspects you then are into the territory of what constitutes a "terrorist" - is it simply at the whim of the Government? The court? Are you comfortable that your human rights could be similarly taken away, almost on an arbitrary basis?

    You may be comfortable with that but people like @DAlexander never want to discuss the hard questions.
    The bloke tried to join ISIS, I think it's a fairly reasonable conclusion to draw that he should be behind bars.
    Forever?

    And please note I am not defending this bloke. I'm not defending him whatsoever. I am defending "human rights lawyers".
    Until at the very least he's deemed no longer a danger to the public.

    The problem isn't lawyers who get involved when there is a clear case of the law not being implemented correctly, but that isn't what happens. There are a group of human rights lawyers who target these particular cases and use every legal loophole and trick in the book to get them out of jail.
  • Options
    MrEdMrEd Posts: 5,578

    MrEd said:

    Scott_xP said:
    Won't that be something like 10% of all on-the-day votes in Florida this year?
    Doesn't actually look like that many people....
    Scott was discussing the quote "the supervisor of elections expects about 200,000 people will vote in person today in Miami-Dade County" rather than the subjective length of the line.
    I know that but reference was made to the line in the tweet. It just didn't seem that many.
  • Options
    Carnyx said:

    kjh said:

    RobD said:

    rkrkrk said:

    Nigelb said:


    Everyone you're detecting is almost certainly infectious, and is detected in real time, so there's no tracing to do. In a city of 500k, that might mean enforcing isolation for 5,000 people. How hard is that in reality ?

    .

    I don't think it's right that everyone detected is almost certainly infectious?

    If you use Abbott figures of: sensitivity (97.1%) and specificity (98.5%) on a population of 500k and assume 1% of population actually has the disease...

    Then you get 4,855 true positives and 7,425 false positives = 40% chance person testing positive actually has disease.

    It's clearly great news that you've got a big proportion of the infected into isolation, but you are probably falsely isolating a reasonable number of people.

    https://abbott.mediaroom.com/2020-08-26-Abbotts-Fast-5-15-Minute-Easy-to-Use-COVID-19-Antigen-Test-Receives-FDA-Emergency-Use-Authorization-Mobile-App-Displays-Test-Results-to-Help-Our-Return-to-Daily-Life-Ramping-Production-to-50-Million-Tests-a-Month
    Then test all those people with a positive with a PCR, and release them if it comes out negative.
    "Release" ... yes

    How much do you want to bet that the only way to get 90% isolation involves dragging people off the streets?

    I guess those old plans fro interment without trial that Blair was interested in might come in handy.
    Now that Boris Johnson has screwed over the Northern Irish I can think of no better way of him showing his love for Northern Ireland by introducing internment in Great Britain for those people who don't self isolate.

    https://twitter.com/StewartWood/status/1323342287171178499
    A week on Monday I am going onto a UK government webinar to explain what my company must do to prepare for transition exit 6 weeks later. Currently the UK government hasn't established what the trading arrangements will be, hasn't built the computer system we will need to use nor hired the customs and standards officials required. So I have no idea what they will tell us because they themselves have no idea.

    You can imagine my bemusement when I see millions spaffed up against the wall on adverts telling me TIME IS RUNNING OUT and that I need to Check & Change arrangements that haven't yet been made. Not that it will be physically possible to switch said arrangements on should they unveil them tomorrow.
    The pharmaceutical safety regulations are still outstanding for NI. The pharmaceutical companies are sitting there pulling their hair out currently. I imagine it is now too late to meet them even if decided today. Every time I see those bloody adverts I shout at the television how are they supposed to prepare?
    Which is why despite the protests from hard Brexit frothers we will get a deal which continues along with the current open border arrangements we have now. It simply isn't possible to go WTO / Australia and the EU have known this for months.

    They will create a compromise name for it - "UKEA Free Trade Area" or something, let Shagger choose his pig lipstick colour, and then we carry on as defacto members of the EEA/CU
    So you're suggesting we will get free trade with Europe but without free movement, without paying membership subscriptions, without being tied down as members - but trade will continue uninterrupted?

    Sounds like a tremendous "cake and eat it" arrangement if so. Completely dividing the EU's "four freedoms" and cherrypicking.

    Are you that confident?
    Erm... no.

    We can have an open border, provided the rules of business and trade are the same on each side. Otherwise, how can you enforce different rules? How can the UK ever have higher standards than the EU on anything? You have to check somewhere, and checking anywhere other than the border is much more intrusive and bureaucratic.

    So open border = we're going to be following EEA rules. Without direct input. Maybe the EU will offer a joint consultative panel- 27 EU nations, 1 UK? Or 45:7, with 1 member per 10 million population.

    And obviously the UK isn't a nation of freeloaders, so it seems fair that we contribute to the costs of the trade area. If I were trolling, I'd suggest £300 million a week- that's a saving on before, isn't it?

    And, naturlich, the UK can walk out on this arrangement at any time. It just needs to work out how it will manage its borders and put the systems in place.

    Not such a deal would be terrible, and I'm not expecting anything that blatant. But it would very probably cost the UK less than what we're likely to end up with and be better for the British economy.

    And the lack of booths in Dover is still a massive giveaway.
    Hmm, what about the lorry park?

    The booths could be put in very quickly.After all, they'd just get in the way at present. And it's not as if there will be any computer systems to wire them up to.
    We've tarmaced over a few fields - its hardly the same as border infrastructure. As for putting booths in, how does that work? You pre-clear trucks at Ashford and then don't check them when they cross the border - so is all of Kent a bonded warehouse?

    Its no deal to No Deal. Can't be done. Which leaves deal - and that requires the continuation along the exact same basis as we already have. We will loudly champion our Sovereign Right to negotiate variance trade deals to the EU. And then tell people they take years and years, start discussions and quietly let it drop.
  • Options
    GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,117

    Vienna gunman, 20, who killed four and wounded 17 was released early from prison on terror charges because of his age, had wanted to join ISIS in Syria - but 'was deemed incapable of an attack'

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8906871/Shots-fired-near-synagogue-Vienna-police-say-major-operation-underway.html

    FFS this sums up European handling of the problem.

    Had they tried to keep him in jail I can imagine all sorts of human rights lawyers taking the government to the cleaners.
    You want to defend western democratic values against islamism by ripping up the rule of law, its very foundation?

    You my friend may want to think that through.
    I could have guessed that you would have supported releasing this bloke to allow him to go on a gun rampage.

    I don't want to rip up the rule of law, I want the law changed to stop people like this getting released for a very long time before being deported.
    Again, stop putting words in my mouth.

    If you want to change the law that's fine, but stop whinging about "human rights lawyers" who are simply ensuring that the Government operates within the law as it currently is.
    Why is it wrong to complain about lawyers using every trick to pervert the system?

    How is that any different to complaining about aggressive tax avoidance?

    Are lawyers perverting the system within the law any better than accountants doing the same?

    If someone is lawfully avoiding paying taxes by their accountants using every trick in the book - or if someone is lawfully avoiding deportation by their lawyers using every trick in the book - should governments, campaigners and voters just accept that? Or should they identify the problem and look to fix it by closing the loopholes?
    Because this isn't about money, this is about people's liberty.

    People like @DAlexander are very quick to criticise but very slow to produce any actual solutions.

    If you want to dis-apply the Human Rights Act to "terrorism" suspects you then are into the territory of what constitutes a "terrorist" - is it simply at the whim of the Government? The court? Are you comfortable that your human rights could be similarly taken away, almost on an arbitrary basis?

    You may be comfortable with that but people like @DAlexander never want to discuss the hard questions.
    The bloke tried to join ISIS, I think it's a fairly reasonable conclusion to draw that he should be behind bars.
    Forever?

    And please note I am not defending this bloke. I'm not defending him whatsoever. I am defending "human rights lawyers".
    Until at the very least he's deemed no longer a danger to the public.

    The problem isn't lawyers who get involved when there is a clear case of the law not being implemented correctly, but that isn't what happens. There are a group of human rights lawyers who target these particular cases and use every legal loophole and trick in the book to get them out of jail.
    Isn't that exactly what happened in this case? He was deemed no longer a danger to the public.

    See you don't actually have a solution at all. You just like to whine about "lefty human rights lawyers".
  • Options
    TOPPING said:

    Vienna gunman, 20, who killed four and wounded 17 was released early from prison on terror charges because of his age, had wanted to join ISIS in Syria - but 'was deemed incapable of an attack'

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8906871/Shots-fired-near-synagogue-Vienna-police-say-major-operation-underway.html

    FFS this sums up European handling of the problem.

    Had they tried to keep him in jail I can imagine all sorts of human rights lawyers taking the government to the cleaners.
    You want to defend western democratic values against islamism by ripping up the rule of law, its very foundation?

    You my friend may want to think that through.
    I could have guessed that you would have supported releasing this bloke to allow him to go on a gun rampage.

    I don't want to rip up the rule of law, I want the law changed to stop people like this getting released for a very long time before being deported.
    Again, stop putting words in my mouth.

    If you want to change the law that's fine, but stop whinging about "human rights lawyers" who are simply ensuring that the Government operates within the law as it currently is.
    Why is it wrong to complain about lawyers using every trick to pervert the system?

    How is that any different to complaining about aggressive tax avoidance?

    Are lawyers perverting the system within the law any better than accountants doing the same?

    If someone is lawfully avoiding paying taxes by their accountants using every trick in the book - or if someone is lawfully avoiding deportation by their lawyers using every trick in the book - should governments, campaigners and voters just accept that? Or should they identify the problem and look to fix it by closing the loopholes?
    Because this isn't about money, this is about people's liberty.

    People like @DAlexander are very quick to criticise but very slow to produce any actual solutions.

    If you want to dis-apply the Human Rights Act to "terrorism" suspects you then are into the territory of what constitutes a "terrorist" - is it simply at the whim of the Government? The court? Are you comfortable that your human rights could be similarly taken away, almost on an arbitrary basis?

    You may be comfortable with that but people like @DAlexander never want to discuss the hard questions.
    The bloke tried to join ISIS, I think it's a fairly reasonable conclusion to draw that he should be behind bars.

    Funny how the same people defending releasing this bloke couldn't help contain their glee when Tommy Robinson was arrested for no reason at all the other day.
    So starter for 10 - do you think everyone on the security services' watch list should be in jail?

    Next - as well as those, who else would you bang up?

    TIA
    Do you think he should have been in jail?
This discussion has been closed.