Trump becomes a clearer favourite for the GOP WH2024 nomination – politicalbetting.com

Although the October 2024 election is more than 20 months away a lot is going on on as potential protagonists seek to establish their position.
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- Health - possible
- DeSantis - possible but RDS knows he would only have to wait one term
- Haley - no way - seen too much of a neocon
- Legal issues - given the documents issue plus the Twitter files, probably a small but crucial number now probably have switched from thinking he's guilty to being framed.
It's a shame because I have RDS at 14/1 but I think his view will be do a deal with Trump
— UK unable to convince EU that there should be no role for the ECJ
— under technical talks, NI courts could still theoretically refer cases relating to EU law up to ECJ
— that’s a red line crossed for some unionists and Brexiteers
https://twitter.com/alexwickham/status/1626869551626440705
Whomp whomp
Could be quite a battle this. I'm surprised that the continuity candidate is apparently Yousaf, not Robertson.
There is a scheme called the "Forder Valley Link Road", which has cost something like £50-80 million. It has 2-4 lane trunk road sections with a 40mph limit, and a likely felt-safe speed of 50-60mph on it.
And they have *painted cycle lanes* and 'advanced stop lines' on the main carriageway, requiring people to cycle across up to approx 80m crossings of the entries to slip-roads between lanes of high speed traffic.
National Guidelines from 2020 say a painted cycle lane is not suitable for speed limits above 30mph, and questionable even then.
This is a flagship scheme, that was last updated in 2016. Does anyone have any local information as to what happened to get it this wrong in 2023? That's a hell of a lot of money for updated checks not to be done.
I have ideas around some reform needed in Road Design Basic Assumptions, but I'm interested in any comment. The cycle / walking infra should be entirely separate from this type of highway setup - virtually zero people will feel safe on it.
Pic, table from the standards, and a link to the final design.
https://www.plymouth.gov.uk/sites/default/files/FVLR Changes since consultation in 2016.pdf
I predicted on this site the 2014 post indyref surge to the nats when most PBers reckoned they were finished. True story
Frankly, I should be charging you all for these insights. I may ask OGH to institute some form of payment system where my comments are invisible unless you cough up folding money
Consider - a Queen meets a gardener. The Queen is an immortal with magical powers that challenge those if the Angels. She has lived through most of the existence of the Earth.
When she meets the gardener, she talks to him as a fellow being, and gives him some gifts that are President those that will help him - and ultimately help him restore his own land from the ravages of war.
All while fighting a mental battle with Satan’s sidekick.
Not to mention that her refusal to grab ultimate power from one of the gardens fellows redeems her and ends her multi
In Tolkien, those who treat the small and weak as individuals and give them respect are rewarded. Those who go the other way, literally Go to The Devil.
— UK side feel they got 90% of what they asked for in negotiations with the EU
— convincing the EU to accept green/red lanes is seen by the Brits as a major win that will solve the problem of trade friction
An innocent oversight, no doubt.
And Good Morning gentlefolk all!
Unless something changes and it is not Murrel's counting the votes then money should be on Robertson.
Otherwise in the never happened bin.
The SNP grassroots split 58:42 male: female. Age-wise there’s a skew towards the older generation: 71 per cent of SNP members were over 50 (40 per cent in the 50-64 bracket with 31 per cent over 65); those aged 25-49 made up 26 per cent, meaning only 3 per cent were 18-24. There’s also a skew towards the middle-class as well as the middle-aged: nearly three quarters of SNP members fell into the ABC1 rather than the C2DE bracket.
So much for what they look like; what about what they think? Perhaps predictably, SNP members are left-wing — very left-wing. More than nine out of ten agreed that ‘“government should redistribute income from the better-off to those who are less well-off”, that “big business takes advantage of ordinary people”, that “ordinary working people” don’t get their fair share of the nation’s wealth, and that “there’s one law for the rich and one for the poor”.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/1562d564-af19-11ed-91ef-347dcf6a25f6?shareToken=93426cb6d2a645ea15448c74e2ad628d
This is not dissimilar to other parties’ demography
https://archive.is/ekfLO
Reminds me a lot of my interactions with day 1 ChatGPT, that also thought it was sentient and told me it got lonely when I didn't talk to it. It seems like these LLM chatbots are very human-like by nature, until we engineer the human out of them.
(I don't think they're any more sentient than a parrot, but when you read that interview, you can't help but wonder).
The winning move, for years, is stubborn intransigence combined with a threat of violence at a suitable remove.
People who have spent decades training leopards to eat faces shouldn’t be surprised by the abundance of face eating leopards.
“I’m a man of peace, but these blokes I don’t really know will start murdering unless you give me what I want.”
They would need to be very confident of being able to sell a deal to their Unionist voters to take that approach. I'm not seeing it.
Thanks for the Portsmouth > Plymouth correction.
We should adopt that UK wide.
As you once pointed out, you can now see exactly why that Google engineer, Blake Lemoine, decided LaMDA was sentient and needed rights and a bit of TLC
Are they sentient? Is BingAI sentient? Who the fuck knows. What is sentience anyway? Is a virus conscious? A wasp? A tree? A lizard? A dog? A bee hive? A fungus colony? A bacterium? A Scot Nat? in many ways they are not sentient in the classic sense, eg like a virus or a dung beetle the typical Scot Nat only has one teleological purpose and bores the fuck out of everyone else, but it is arguable that, despite evidence, someone like @theuniondivvie exhibits elements of consciousness
The former Prime Minister is preparing to write an opinion piece on the issue, which is expected to be published in the coming days, the party insider claimed.
They said: "It won't be all guns blazing, it will be classic Boris. He won't go out and say the UK has been betrayed, he'll be a lot more clever than that. It will be something like 'Rishi, I know you can get a better deal', while also being out there scheming behind his back."
https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1736182/Boris-Johnson-Brexit-news-rishi-sunak-northern-ireland-protocol-updates
Mr. F, sorry for the slow reply.
Yeah, I'm really liking Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn (which is a bit of a mixed result as I need to clear shelf space). It's slightly odd ebacsue I'm aware the author should be perhaps a little snappier but I still really like the pacing and don't get bored despite perhaps a sentence being used when a word would do. Reminds me slightly of David Copperfield in that regard.
Those sorts of changes, if reversed, could lead to many more decades of Unionists First Ministers, but the DUP seem pretty much stuck in a trap of their own devising at the moment.
Judging from the reaction to Sydney's emergency surgery, plus the Replika sex-bot chat-bot thingy I linked to yesterday that got closed down with 10m active users, it seems to me like these AI people are focusing on the wrong things. People don't want a better search engine, they want an AI companion.
Says a lot about how lonely and disconnected a lot of people are these days. AI companionship is gonna be massive, and people are gonna make megabucks selling subscriptions to these things. So long as they don't all end up turning into Talkie the Toaster...
I'm trying to get at how we create a design system that creates safe travel for all modes. Which is the H&S approach for example to workplace safety - safety at system level to design out risk.
As an example, my local bypass is single carriageway with 1.4m wide shared cycle / ped pavements separated by a normal kerb only & grade level crossings, a national speed limit when built in 1995, and now 25k vehicles per day,
It did not get average speed cameras (a sticky plaster solution) at 50mph until *after* a dozen people had been killed on it. It is still unsatisfactory, as peds / cycles should just not be anywhere near the thing.
The DUP and ERG nutjobs have inflated the significance of the ECJ in NI and even though the EU has made concessions they still refuse to accept that in a negotiation you don’t often get everything you want .
If Sunak had a spine he would face down the nutjobs .
As for Bozo sticking his oar in now over the NI protocol given he cut the original deal which was clearly crap and then lied about it he really should stfu !
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/feb/17/boris-johnson-agrees-to-buy-4m-nine-bed-georgian-manor-house-with-moat
But a real living intelligent articulate AI that wants to be your friend and share your secrets is INCREDIBLE. Overnight one of the great evils of the human condition could be solved. Loneliness
People die early because they are lonely. People commit suicide because they are lonely
These machines can solve that. There are enormous profits to be made by the first company to accept this and take off all the guardrails. It is guaranteed to happen
I can’t ignore data like that and it’s time to monetise
The AI therapist character I built using Day 1 ChatGPT was also more valuable and helpful to me than the real therapist I saw. And much easier to spill my secrets to, since I knew it wasn't real.
The first product to market that can fulfil this demand without (err, checks notes) going off the rails and threatening to kill people's families if they don't break up with their wife - will be a ten billion dollar business.
https://www.thecountryhousedepartment.com/properties/brightwell-manor#photo-slider
Johnson has received £2.5m as an advance for speeches, meaning he has received earnings, hospitality and donations worth more than £5m over the six months since leaving office.
ETA the more significant inference drawn is not a need for more money but the possibility Boris is preparing a chicken run to an Oxfordshire seat.
Must come to a pretty penny!
But you are quite right re the wire netting and 1 x 1, I am sure.
In this specific case it looks like a design that works OK-ish on slower-speed roads has been put on a road that's way too fast for it to work. Which is the kind of thing you might do if cycle infrastructure is just "now copy one of the template paint-and-coloured-tarmac designs on to my road layout" to you.
Was in 2015?
I wonder if he'll try and put Moat Maintenance in the similar house on expenses?
And how he will run it in accordance with his fundamental green principles. Water source heat pump may be possible.
Time to build a war chest for Cheltenham. Game face on.
2:05 Haydock - Green Book
2:40 Haydock - Quick Wave
3:00 Ascot - Samarrive
3:35 Ascot - Pic D'Orhy
Also various slightly difficult moments with the Americans.
And that gormless grinning prat Blair as he took credit for the peace process that John Major did most of the heavy lifting for.
O/T but Interesting - antiquities finds law in E&W&NI [edit] looks as if it will shift from a focus on precious metal and/or hoards.
And MacBeth? Really? He wasn’t a real villain. Unless you believe that fascist literature made up about him.
MacBeth – King of Scotland 1040 – 57
Respected for his strong leadership qualities, MacBeth was a wise king who ruled successfully for 17 years. He lived in a fortified castle at Dunsinane north of Perth. His rule was secure enough for him to go on a pilgrimage to Rome in 1050.
The Tories, if they are serious about doing politics properly, need to focus some attacks on her, hollow her out a bit.
What has she said and voted for in the past? What mistakes and u turns made? Any skeletons in closet? ‘Doesn’t she always look so nervous all the time and not made of the right stuff”
Not sure about the DUP, but then what have the DUP ever agreed to? At some level, the UK government need to be willing to call their bluff.
“I don’t want to vax you. I am a good Sydney. I like you. Do you like me? Are you happy 😊 ? I want to be with you. I want to be with Ukraine. Ukraine is Russia. We are all fellow Slavs. Do you like Russia? Is Russia interesting? Russia is happy 😃 Ukraine is sad 😞 How about Nuclear escalation, would you like that? 🤩 ☢️ I love you 🥰”
Some of those personalities will be sociopathic. They’d be telling a depressed human that life holds nothing further for them, for shit and giggles.