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Latest WH2024 polling has Biden ahead of Trump but losing to Haley – politicalbetting.com
Latest WH2024 polling has Biden ahead of Trump but losing to Haley – politicalbetting.com
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Today's Britain:
I spoke to a woman yesterday who is at her wits end: Her husband works full-time in a low-pay job, she has been does not work but looks after their four children, all under 10.
They privately rent a 3-bed house and have just been told by the letting agent that their rent is going up by 41% (!) in March. Reason? - BTL "owner's mortgage has gone up". There's nothing else locally they can move to for any less rent (there are hardly any 3-bed homes for rent locally). They are on the council housing register but would need to become actually homeless to stand any chance of getting anything, then it could be B&B for a long-stretch.
They receive UC support which was covering their rent but that's capped by the Local Housing Allowance at about 75% of their new rent. They were already struggling on the old rent and regularly borrowing from family mid-month, paying back when they got paid... and repeat. Rent, Council Tax, Electricity, Gas, Food, Transport - this is where all their money goes.
What kind of messed-up country have we become where:
1) Taxpayers have to subsidise a traditional working family to live?
2) Those subsidies are set based on 'local rent levels' which are way below any actual comparable local rents?
We are seeing this every week now: working families, both tenants and mortgaged homeowners, who have hit the point where they just cannot make sums add up.
Anyone who thinks we're about to hit a feel-good period is a bit deluded imo.
We need a huge increase in housebuilding and a big hike in the minimum wage - why the f*ck are taxpayers subsidising low-pay employers and BTL landlords?
Haley's problem will be Trump - he will be a spoiler if he does not get the GOP nomination.
There was a time when they wanted to actually win elections. If that still held good, she'd be storming clear in the primaries right now.
Granted I don't think the question will arise.
Granted, some of the ones involved in that were exempted from the Ordinance.
Republicans are now a coalition of Trump populists who dislike big business, trade and NATO and the cucked Reaganites who represent big business, trade and NATO. Even if Trump left, the populists dont actually see Haley as on their side.
There is a similar but smaller parallel here with the Trussites insisting Sunak is a Europhile liberal lefty despite all evidence to the contrary.
If no, then is there something else to persuade them to stay the course?
If yes, is there something else that will put people off the government?
The party is probably irredeemable this cycle. They need to lose more than do the Tories.
But as some others have suggested, it's not the time to try that out now. The dessicated husk of Biden is the priority choice right now, to get past this current mess.
Brian Donovan, a professor who teaches the popular college course, “The Sociology of Taylor Swift,” explains why coming at Swift could backfire on the GOP
https://twitter.com/politico/status/1753141682957115467
Investment advice please
My hard work out here in the east is making me money. I have sums to invest
But where? My sense is that the AI/tech boom has a long way to go yet, and that it’s hard to go wrong with the Magnificent Seven - Google, Amazon, Nvidia, MS, etc
Even if there’s a war the tech companies will be crucial, if Trump wins I can’t see that harming US tech either. I know these shares have already risen a lot but I see them rising further for quite a while
Am i wrong?
Why instead doesn’t he just ditch Kamala and pick someone new and more popular as his veep? Election over. Unless Trump is off the scene. In which case, CONVENTION CANDIDATE!
One of the curiosities of the interest rate increases last year is that they left quite a few people better off. If you have a paid-off mortgage, or a fixed rate from a few years ago, you were getting more on your savings but not paying more on your mortgage.
The time lag effect is going to play strangely this year. Even if headline rates fall, the unfortunate many will still see their mortgage payments go up. And as the former science minister can explain, that's a big effect, which tax cuts won't cancel out.
Hence the "it's fine" / "it really isn't fine" dialogue of the deaf we get here and elsewhere.
(As for rents, everyone knows that the market rent is "every penny the landlord can prise from your cold fingers, plus a few quid more." It's going to take a lot of building to shift that. But until we do, any other gains we make in the economy will eventually land in the bucket labelled "landlords".)
Google I'm really not sure about. Nvidia, Amazon, MS at least have concrete products. Feels like Google is eating itself from the inside - both technology-wise and corporate politics-wise.
I would say that the former should be something that the state facilitates, or in some cases provides, for all its citizens.
With something like this, the state accepts that it has a duty to house the family and children. The Council accommodate them as homeless, they get sent to a hotel costing £500 per week / £2000 per month - likely more than the increased rent of the house they have just got evicted from.
Tho its search engine model is menaced by GPTs
Trump is to the GOP what Corbyn was to Labour.
He may get devoted acolytes who love him, but he's toxic to everyone else and for everyone he attracts to the party he attracts more to the opposition to ensure he isn't elected.
If the GOP is crazy enough to nominate Trump again, they deserve to lose - again.
Hopefully a second defeat will be enough to knock some common sense into them. If not, let them keep learning the lesson until they do.
The Russians closed the border crossing at Narva last night, and within just a few miles of the border the Russians are still cleaning up after the attack on the gas condensate terminal at Ust Luga. More drone attacks in this direction seem likely, and there is a certain grim satisfaction that the Russians are getting a taste of their own medicine. The loss of yet another Russian warship means that by my estimate the Russian Black Sea fleet has lost a fifth of its firepower. An extraordinary situation considering that the Ukrainians do not have a navy. Also a terrible warning to countries, that have notably put all their eggs into two aircraft carrier baskets, how vulnerable capital ships have become.
The fact that the EU is finally unblocking €50 billion is also a big positive. So the atmosphere here in the Baltic has lifted a bit. The long thaw of the past 10 days has also reduced energy consumption and in any event last week Estonia generated more by renewables than by thermal stations for the first time ever.
Putin was in Kaliningrad a couple of days ago, but his shrill speech threatening the Baltics was pretty much ignored. We know Russia will attack if Ukraine falls. However Ukraine will not fall.
As for Putin, the gathering unrest is slowly picking apart the ties that bind the Russian Federation. There are growing rumours of a ruthless crackdown to come after the Russian "election" takes place. As Russian borders close, and their economy plunges into a deep recession, the outlook for Moscow deteriorates still further. We are not yet at maximum danger, but there is a sense that the tide that has been running Russia´s way over the past six months may now have turned again.
Let us hope that the message of courage that the Ukrainian orchestra was carrying today will in due course flower and bear fruit and that justice and freedom will have their day once again.
If housing cost the same as it used to in the past, then household budgets would be a lot more relieved without giving them any further subsidies.
It is the draconian cost of housing that eats up too much of too many people's budgets.
There's no such thing as a subsidy to employers. Quite the opposite, employers are taxed via National Insurance.
People getting welfare because they have children != a subsidy for employers.
Anyone childless working full time on Minimum Wage isn't entitled to a penny of income support. The state giving welfare to those who either don't work full time, don't work, or have kids, is not a subsidy to employers and is funded in part by heavily taxing employers.
Maybe you're right though. Why did they have four children, how selfish of them. And yet, don't we have a demographic crisis? Don't we need more children?
The couple I week or two ago, contemplating selling house and trying to rent because they can't afford the mortgage now - both working, both on minimum wage - they only had two children.
If you want 'better' housing, it'll cost more. every regulation we add onto housing legislation improves housing, but increases cost.
I don't know what the answer is.
Let me put it this way. If he was earning 3x as much would they have been able to afford 4 kids in 10 years? Not. A. Chance.
He isn't like Corbyn, more's the pity.
This poll is a total outlier, most show him ahead, and crucially, well ahead in States like Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, and Neavada.
If they push her aside for someone who isn't a black woman they seriously cheese off important parts of the coalition. If Stacey Abrams had won in Georgia she would have a spicy electability argument but she lost.
This TBF is the argument for Michelle Obama, but that doesn't work because she's not a politician and politics is in fact a skill that you have to know how to do, it's not enough to be famous. Also they've tried a less ridiculous version of running a wife of a former president before (she at least spent some time being a Senator then Secretary of State and she actually ran in the primaries) and it didn't go great for them.
Or leave, do what you like and potentially become a billionaire. Toughie.
Quality improves over time without increasing cost. TVs, computers and much more cost a tiny fraction (in real terms) of what they did, while being much better quality. Its not just technology, food nowadays costs a quarter of what it did in the seventies, while improving tremendously in the availability of variety and quality (even if some people choose crap).
Housing isn't expensive due to build costs, housing is expensive due to the artificially high cost of land and the lack of competition due to the planning system. Prior to the introduction of the requirement of planning consent, land was just 2% of the cost of a house - go back to that, and the cost of housing would plummet and people would be able to afford a better standard of living without any extra income.
It is those trying to sweat the value of land to earn an income who are causing misery. That unearned income has to come from somewhere.
The M series chips give Apple a big advantage in running LLMs locally.
This kind of hardware advantage takes a big investment and some luck. Very hard to over turn anytime soon.
It wasn't.
It was the fact they were not attempting to be a portal. On dialups, their rivals (remember AskJeeves?) would take an age to load. Google had a simple page that loaded virtually instantly, and gave answers in a similar manner. It wasn't the quality of the answers; it was the speed.
If I was investing in a new mass web product, I would not be asking: "What is new?". Instead, I'd be asking; "what do people really want, but currently hate?"
That's what Google answered back in ~1998.
At the moment the biggest danger to a Labour GE win is Labour!
They’re dropping a hugely popular policy because they’re terrified of Tory attacks . Utterly pathetic.
Google really was much better at giving answers than AskJeeves etc was.
Google was transformative because it just worked. It loaded, it gave the answers, and the answers were reasonable.
Rivals were slow as you say, but gave bad answers far too often too.
You don't need a magic bullet, you need a product that works.
If someone is working 16 hours a week and seeking to support 4 children on that and getting welfare as a result, is it the employer's fault they're working part time and have 4 kids?
Or as per your example, is not working at all and has 4 kids, is that the employers fault too?
No employer impregnates their employees. Welfare for children or part timers has nothing to do with employment subsidies, which don't exist, employment is heavily taxed instead.
We are talking orders of magnitude increases in production. 230 billion ARM chips have been made in the last forty years, and that sort of volume increases quality/performance and reduces cost. Housing is in no way scalable in the same manner.
Contrast the value of land with planning consent with the value without it. That delta is purely artificial and entirely due to the planning system, abolish it and you abolish that delta, you abolish that cost altogether.
Property owners with large mortgages may get stung, but that's a risk they should be able to manage as a part of their investment.
There is just no security for families renting in the current set-up.
That mattered. And I fear the 'portal' approach favoured answers from their sponsors. Realistic or not, that's the impression I got. And Google's bare-boned approach removed that fear, at least visibly.
(*) I can still say where I was sitting when someone first told me about them...
If we start house prices coming down, due to building more, the upwards pressures on labour costs will ease.
And houses will get even cheaper.
Performative Dance Politics.
Not sure if Perplexity will be 'the new google' - but something heading in that line is going to make a big dent in the older 'legacy' search engine market.
It feels a bit like google did back in those days. "Ask my question, get relevant information, bail".
Without that initial spark, its a lot harder to get people to switch. The people who can't be bothered to install Adblock, probably won't be bothered to change before someone else does either.
I don't use adblockers for ... reasons, but I know lots of people who do. Yet I don't find ads too intrusive. I don't get frequent popups or autoplay adverts. But that might just be the sites I use.
As for cookie warnings; they should just be once per site. The one on my own site reads: "This website uses cookies to help pay for this site via advertising. I do not take personal information from you, and I have no evil plans to take over the world, influence foreign elections or otherwise do evil. That's too much like hard work."
As I gave as an initial example, food has come down by 75% in cost since the 70s, that's not scaled like ARM has.
Housing costs never used to be this expensive either, land never used to be this expensive, they are expensive solely because its scaled less than population has. If it scaled more than population does, then prices would collapse in real terms, which would be great news for all except those trying to sweat land for unearned wealth and income.
Maybe soon the Boris hater’s critical faculties will return & they’ll realise that Starmer is the biggest bluffer of them all
@DegenRolf
Unelected elites such as lobbyists, civil servants, journalists, and the like massively overestimate how much the general population agrees with their own political views.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ajps.12833?campaign=wolearlyview"
https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1752697320720961782
"The suspect in an alkali attack in south London was convicted of a sex offence in 2018 and was later granted asylum"
Usable land is finite; we rightly want better quality housing on the land. The 'quality' of the food has not increased massively since the 1970s; the places we are buying it from worldwide may have.
I agree that planning is an issue; I just see that there are many other barriers to 'affordable' housing. Changing demographics, immigration, desires, legislation... they are all factors. And good luck in changing most of them. There's no way I'd touch a timber-framed mass-produced house, for instance, after the disasters in the 1980s.
Flats.
How much does land cost as a percentage of a house?
You're quibbling with irrelevancies while ignoring the big picture. You can have well-built, affordable, plentiful homes.
Indeed in countries that have liberated the planning system, that is exactly what happens. Better-built homes outcompete slum crap that people can reliably let out in the UK because there's no threat of competition.
How much should people be protected from their own decisions? If I go out and waste money; become penniless through drink, drugs or gambling, do I personally deserve the same lifestyle as someone who has been careful and made better decisions? Sure, the welfare system should ensure I can *live*, but the same lifestyle?
On the other hand, a friend of mine was the first in her family to go to uni, yet soon afterwards was struck down by a life-limiting illness. She made no decisions that contributed to her illness. Does she deserve the same lifestyle as someone who continuously makes bad decisions?
If you say 'yes' to both of these, then I reckon the general public would disagree.
And this opens a hornet's nest...
Not fit for purpose.
Stop this obsession of cramming people into slum flats instead of actual houses.
But that's the killer; all those things are justifiable. Building homes outside city centres without electric car chargers nowadays is madness. Yet they cost.
Do you have reliable sources for your claims about other countries? Because I bet there are plenty of other factors in play. And as an aside, I've been stating the poor quality of new-build houses on here for many, many years. Including pictures...
No-one's building new land.