PB Predictions Competition 2024 – Reminder – politicalbetting.com
PB Predictions Competition 2024 – Reminder – politicalbetting.com
Just a quick reminder that entries for PB Predictions Competition 2024 must be posted by 23:59 on Saturday 6th January at the latest.
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My entry:
1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. = 5 points.
2. Date of the next UK General Election. = 9 May
3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called = Sunak, Starmer, Davey, Yousaf, Tice
4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%). = Lab, majority 36
5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. = Trump and Biden
6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. = Trump
7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. = 3.5%
8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 3.9%). = 2.6%
9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). = £134bn
10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). = 57
https://twitter.com/petemuntean/status/1743487804133253264
An exit 'door' blew out in flight at 16,000 feet; there were no fatalities. The plane was only ten weeks old.
"On the 737-9 MAX, Boeing includes a rear cabin exit door aft of the wings, but before the rear exit door. This is activated in dense seating configurations to meet evacuation requirements. The doors are not activated on Alaska Airlines aircraft and are permanently “plugged."
https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/alaska-airlines-737-9-max-exit-door-separates-in-flight/
So they lost a door that was not even supposed to be a door on that aircraft; just a plug in the fuselage.
1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. = 13
2. Date of the next UK General Election. = November 14th 2024
3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called = Same as current leaders
4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%).= Lab + majority 10.5% - 31
5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. = Trump > Biden
6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. = Biden (v. narrowly
7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. = 3.4%
8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 3.9%). = 2.9%
9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). = £125 billion
10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). = 59
Any clues?
Edit: Nostradamus?
Thanks for organising . I don't think my entry will even be close. It is such an unpredictable year.
I’m surprised they’ve even put back the Max name . Some carriers try and dupe the public by putting on just the serial number but the engine design is the give away .
If the door had blown out at a higher altitude and when the passengers might be moving around it would have led to loss of life .
https://twitter.com/MeidasTouch/status/1743384856002748782?t=KGqaxBQkrvPmOfTVdmJQFw&s=19
While Trump rambles on about magnets in water in Iowa.
https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1743473561837179153?t=U52IE-T89PqYtMtWo064bw&s=19
And tells the parents of a school shooting in Iowa to get over it.
https://twitter.com/VABVOX/status/1743495544096292986?t=j4qzZEQJLfr2gqNFG9df0g&s=19
Boeing are in deep trouble. They can no longer economically or safely make aircraft.
https://twitter.com/chipgoines/status/1743494254733754382?t=w5yQJe_gRMiwAwg2ccZN1g&s=19
Under no circumstances would I fly on a 737 Max .
https://unherd.com/thepost/keir-starmer-is-wasting-his-time-attacking-populism/
Trump responds to Biden’s speech by claiming that Biden stuttered through it. He then does his impression of people who stutter
https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1743405503030624762
At least one of the history books is on his side.
New Russian history book for 11th graders says Trump lost the 2020 elections "as a result of obvious electoral fraud by the Democratic Party"...
https://twitter.com/marcbennetts1/status/1739414300119208076
Meanwhile, it’s not just the doors, but nacelles as well. The anti-icing heaters can potentially cause overheating and breakup of the structure if left on by accident.
https://www.gmtoday.com/business/boeing-wants-faa-to-exempt-max-7-from-safety-rules-to-get-it-in-the/article_060478ca-ac0c-11ee-b0fa-7fe6fbf1124d.html
Straw in the wind, methinks.
Although to be fair, recent straws amount to an entire stack.
Edit - to be fair though, the rest so far is very good.
Also worth noting how fluent it is, despite the claims of Trump.
I'd expect all 737 Max's of this configuration to be grounded. As it was only ten weeks old, it'll be a manufacturing error, and they'll need to work out why it happened, inspections, and how to prevent it happening again, before they fly again.
I'm betting they don't, though.
The ancient 737 design has been pushed well beyond where it should have been, they really need to make a start on a clean-sheet replacement. Oh, and have the engineers - rather than the MBAs and bean counters - run the project.
Best line - “We all know who Donald Trump is. The question is, who are we ?”
Best fill in the blank - "He's a sick .. [long pause]" ... crowd applauds.
Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
..“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace,” Foster joked*. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”
*Not sure why the Guardian thought she was joking ?
Yes, it’s either a design or manufacturing problem, either of which will ground them all until they’ve worked out the issue.
Another reminder to always wear your seat belt when you can, as if the hundreds of passenger injuries every year caused by turbulence weren’t enough reason.
1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. = 14%
2. Date of the next UK General Election. = 9th May
3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called = Same as current leaders except Tory is Penny Mordaunt
4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%).= Lab + majority 10.5% - Labour majority 52
5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. = Haley > Newsom
6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. =Haley
7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. = 3.2%
8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 3.9%). = 2.7%
9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). = £120 billion
10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). = 56
Imagine that you replaced a steel door in your house with a non-standard cardboard door; on a windy day that cardboard door is now the weak point, whereas the steel door would be an over-engineered but heavy solution that would stay standing in its frame, as the wood and brick wall disintegrated around it.
Boeing has inadvertently replaced a steel door with a cardboard door, or at least a door with a cardboard frame.
After reading Rick Perlstein's latest article, I'm still considering whether or but to put in a contest entry.
https://americanprospect.bluelena.io/index.php?action=social&chash=f83630579d055dc5843ae693e7cdafe0.2515&s=7444c8a201ed3d5c335900b1332485a4
...Another waaaaay too well-worn journalistic groove is prediction. I have probably read thousands of newspaper opinion column prognostications going back to the 1950s. Their track record is too embarrassing for me to take the exercise seriously, let alone practice it myself. Like bad polls, pundits’ predictions are most useful when they are wrong. They provide an invaluable record of the unspoken collective assumptions of America’s journalistic elite, one of the most hierarchical, conformist groups of people you’ll ever run across. Unfortunately, they help shape our world nearly as much, and sometimes more, than the politicians they comment about. So their collective mistakes land hard...
But facts aside, the winter at Valley Forge is part of the foundation myths of the USA. Its not about historical accuracy, it is about invoking the Founding Fathers of America..
We are trying to teach cats to dance. Someone with an IQ of 102 will not benefit in anyway, intellectually, from a proper degree level education. All they will accrue is debt
https://twitter.com/larisamlbrown/status/1743373293929828667?t=JkxqV_O0B_Erj2eahIFXUw&s=19
In large part due to bodged privatisation of recruitment. There are plenty of enquires it seems, just an inability to turn them into sailors.
https://navylookout.com/royal-navy-failing-to-get-enough-recruits-into-basic-training/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_32
Incidentally, a brilliant exercise in teamwork. There were five pilots in the cockpit that day, three of them Captains (thanks to a long flight, the plane being a relatively new type, and line training being undertaken), and they used every one of those five brains to reach a safe conclusion to the flight.
It's odd that the opposite is generally true.
As @RochdalePioneers points out, not a problem that Ryanair will ever have!
[Looks at Starliner and forecasts about affordability of SLS]
Oh.
It will be a bit like the Liberal/SDP merger. He will get a seat in a by-election post the GE and be elected leader.
Farage is majority owner of Reform so he's the key decision maker, but he is keeping his distance from Reform as he doesn't want to upset Tory members with the confrontation at the next GE.
He schmoozed with Tory members and MPs at the Tory conference and is popular with many of them.
He is a visionary and expert political manipulator.
Watch this space. Farage next but one leader of the Conservative Party renamed "New Conservative" or "The Conservative and Reform Party".
But yes, I take your main point.
Also, never been a starry eyed admirer of George Washington but Biden did make a very good point that his voluntary departure from office (which not only established a tradition of two terms honoured until 1940 but led to the first contested election) was absolutely vital in establishing the democratic traditIon in America. Probably his most significant contribution to it, indeed.
https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1739555642308755756?t=0Dc-UIQaHBI_XY5rRYdOXA&s=19
They used to use semi-retired and invalided ex-service personnel to do this, and they did it well - holding the hands of recruits from start to finish.
We are giving expensive university education to people who cannot truly benefit from it (unless you think the social bonds and opportunities offered by uni are THAT valuable - and this I doubt). Yes, the Flynn Effect meant kids got smarter for a while, but they didn’t get vastly smarter, and anyway now the Flynn Effect is in reverse, so the mistake of trying to universalise university is graver
It’s a fundamental error. We are conning these kids, and saddling them with debt, for no reason whatsoever other than it makes us feel good that “50% of our young people are at university” - and it funds a large education sector. A great proportion of these youngsters would be far better off doing vocational courses, some kind of national/international service, or going straight to work
Historical Irony :
The Comet failure wasn’t square windows - it was multiple issues. One of the chain of problems was that *someone* changed the manufacturing process from punching rivet holes and then drilling them out to size to just punching them.
Punching a rivet hole in aluminium creates an area around the hole of stressed, cracked metal. Drilling them out takes time but removes this issue.
Someone took the cheap route, to save time and money.
Boeing, which had enormous expertise in pressurised skin airframes, did this right in the 1950s. Indeed, one of their employees invented a special drill bit shape for creating beautifully polished, crack free holes in aluminium and made a fortune from the patent.
1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. = 13%
2. Date of the next UK General Election. = 6th June
3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called = Same as current leaders
4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%).= Lab + majority 7.5% - NOM
5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. = Trump > Biden
6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. =Biden
7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. = 4.7%
8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 3.9%). = 3.7%
9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). = £170 billion
10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). = 28
1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. 5%
2. Date of the next UK General Election. 2 May 2024
3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called Sunak, Starmer, Dave, Tice
4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%). Labour, 45
5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. Trump, Biden
6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. Biden
7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. 2.7%
8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 3.9%). 5.2%
9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). £105 bn
10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). 42
Of did I misunderstand your entry ?
Look at any "take" on this conflict and whenever the British appear they darken the screen, play baddie music and portray the redcoats as villainous proto-nazis, despite the fact the Patriots inflicted far more atrocities on American civilians than the British ever did and were supremely racist.
As for weight: you also need to exclude the weight of the opening and securing mechanisms and escape chute, as it isn't an overwing door.
A quick calculation tells me that a May 2nd election needs to be called on March 26th.
How else do we explain Simon Case as Head of the Civil Service, Spielman as a former Head of OFSTED, Vennells at the Post Office and Johnson and Sunak as PM?
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1309142
Frontiers In... do have a bit of a reputation...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontiers_Media
No link to the paper yet. Two questions I have right now;
1 The authors are all Canadian; is it Canadian students they are writing about? How many institutions do IQ tests anyway?
2 If the average IQ is really 102 (and a meta-analysis is only as good as the data fed into it), that implies either that all young people are a lot dimmer, or that students include people with IQs well below average. Or a mix. Is either of those plausible?
Finally, the usual reminder that Peer Reviewed doesn't mean right, it just means "someone reasonably expert has read this and not found obvious holes".
I can see the appeal of this headline to some- for example, sixtysomethings who would love to retire from the stage really, but simply can't because the generation below simply aren't up to it. But this article is going to have to work hard to pass the sniff test.
There have been critiques of both over the years, but the central myths persist despite the obvious flaws in the Constitution, and the increasing ethnic diversity of the USA. That teaching is a core part of assimilation to American values. I see the symbolism of why Biden kicks off the year with such a speech, and at Valley Forge.
A few years back I saw the musical Hamilton in London, and despite its multi-ethnic cast, and innovative rap and staging it is a very traditional and conservative presentation of American foundation theology.
I have always loved and been interested in history, and have an inclination to revisionist history that challenges accepted ideas. These revisionists are often wrong but it does stimulate the brain to think more deeply.
In many ways though myth is more important than fact in politics.
The T45 fleet is in particularly shit order at the moment: 2 broken, 3 in refit, 1 working.
"The War with the Americans is memorable as being the only war in which the English were ever defeated, and it was unfair because the Americans had the Allies on their side. In some ways the war was really a draw, since England remained top nation and had the Allies afterwards, while the Americans, in memory of George III's madness, still refuse to drink tea and go on pouring anything the English send them to diink into Boston Harbour.
After this the Americans made Whittington President and gave up speaking English and became U.S.A. and Columbia and 100%, etc. This was a Good Thing in the end, as it was a cause of the British Empire, but it prevented America from having any more History."
You enjoyed your three years at University College in what you have suggested was a glorious drunken, drug addled paradise, where in your moments of cogence you sired beautiful former public schoolgirls. And all as a freebie from HMG.
You are nonetheless demanding generations following you are deprived of this life, even if they have to pay for it themselves. They can toil down the coalmines!
It’s just that Boeing haven’t done that. They’ve either designed or manufactured a plug that’s the weakest point of the entire pressurised structure.
Either way you will have to work harder to dismiss it than just “Oh I don’t like It, take it away”
Of course, he also liked slaves rather more than some conservatives like to discuss.
1. Working at a phenomenal level of acuity as I reach peak ketosis and my entire focus is on the tasty gazelle that I hitherto missed
Or
2. Shutting down in a final flurry of surreal, disorganised paranoias
2. Date of the next UK General Election. 14 November 2024
3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called Sunak, Starmer, Dave, Tice
4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%). Labour, 145
5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. Haley, Biden
6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. Biden
7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. 4.25%
8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 3.9%). 3.3%
9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). £124 bn
10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). 52
Meanwhile we have a number of skill shortages, for well paid jobs, in the U.K.
So by Conference season 2025 I expect the following:
Labour: Starmer
Conservative: Badenoch
Liberal Democrats: Cooper
SNP: Yousef
Reform: Tice
Green: Denyer/Ramsey
Interesting
No? Come on, some of you? One of you?
If everyone can have the experience I had at UCL then fabulous, let them do it (and mine meant I emerged debt free, as HMG paid for me). But that is not what we are offering kids today, is it? We are saying: do this degree which you are not going to benefit from, intellectually, rack up massive debt to do it, worry so much about the debt you don’t really enjoy it, either, and do it all in some ludicrous non-university in West Bromwich
I get that bleakly middlebrow drones like @Stuartinromford are deeply and personally invested in the continuance of a grossly bloated higher education sector, I am entirely unsure why we should fuck with young people’s futures to keep his ilk happy
The Tories accuse everyone else of "the politics of envy" but are adamant fun should be the reserve of the right sort of elite, and the peasantry should know their place and conclude their Shelf Stacking Apprenticeship whilst working nights at Tesco.
I've gone to the minimal trouble of finding the source article, and it's raised some questions- which students are they talking about, and how have they done the meta-analysis. They're pretty important, aren't they?
Better that than "I saw a headline on TwiX and jumped on it because it confirms my opinions."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/04/uk-government-admits-rosebank-oil-will-not-be-kept-in-uk-to-boost-energy-security
'The UK government has admitted that oil from the controversial Rosebank field will be sold on the international market rather than to UK consumers.
Ministers have repeatedly claimed developing the huge oilfield off Shetland will improve UK energy security and help UK consumers, overriding concerns from climate experts and their own advisers.
In a written answer to a parliamentary question, however, the government appears to accept that the private companies extracting the oil will sell the vast majority internationally, saying: “It is not desirable to force private companies to ‘allocate’ oil and gas produced in the North Sea for domestic use”.'
It's the hidden curriculum that is the significant one. A degree is the key entry point to being in the white collar middle class, rather than the blue collar artisan class. It isn't just about education, job opportunities or earnings it is about how our youngsters want to live, and their aspirations.
On another point, is the American Revolution really the country’s first civil war?
But by implication that raises worries about all doors of that type, whether operating or not. Unless there is something specifically wrong with the bolting of the latching system? So it must affect all planes of that general model?