One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
There’s a serious school of (business) thought that airship could compete with, or even replace, the international cruise ship leisure market. Makes sense to me.
Airships are very, very power inefficient. They cruise at low altitudes, fighting the winds and requiring more fuel per passenger mile than a jet.
They are also rather fragile. Even ignoring the unfortunate incidents involving R38, R101, the Shenandoah and the Hindenburg, R100 suffered so many tears to its outer cover that they had to carry enough patches to make a spare one.
That’s the technology of almost a century ago, though.
Airships are playings of the wind. Which is the ultimate destroyer of airships.
With kevlar envelopes, and solar cell wraps, they could cruise for months,
Except they get smashed into the ground every now and again by the wind. Because they need to get near the ground to actually pickup/drop off passengers and cargo.
With modern weather forecasting, not a problem.
You’re mired in the last century.
Nope - the problem is the lack of really still days in most places. A breeze that a light aircraft will laugh at will wreck an airship - it’s surface vs thrust that is the unfixable problem.
You’ve got something the size of a large ship, which only weighs a small number of tons. The wind thrust on that cannot be countered by the engines at even quite low velocities.
Use helicopters to transfer passengers and supplies to the airship, then it can stay aloft.
A space elevator would be a great way for them to dock, and to get the passengers on an off. This transport design thingy is easy, innit?
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
It doesn’t try to explain anything. It just points out your inexplicable hard on for this one pollster. It’s for you and your therapist to explain.
RCP is multiple polls averaged (and their PA average poll includes the NYT poll)
So fucking what? The fact that every 4 years you jack off over Trafalgar with the stamina and regularity of a teenager given internet access and a credit card for the first time is the issue here.
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
There’s a serious school of (business) thought that airship could compete with, or even replace, the international cruise ship leisure market. Makes sense to me.
Airships are very, very power inefficient. They cruise at low altitudes, fighting the winds and requiring more fuel per passenger mile than a jet.
They are also rather fragile. Even ignoring the unfortunate incidents involving R38, R101, the Shenandoah and the Hindenburg, R100 suffered so many tears to its outer cover that they had to carry enough patches to make a spare one.
That’s the technology of almost a century ago, though.
Motor cars are older ... just go to Old Warden on one of their events days.
Edit: the Cardington airship hangars nearby are a *generation* later than hte motor cars, maybe one and a half.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
There’s a serious school of (business) thought that airship could compete with, or even replace, the international cruise ship leisure market. Makes sense to me.
Airships are very, very power inefficient. They cruise at low altitudes, fighting the winds and requiring more fuel per passenger mile than a jet.
They are also rather fragile. Even ignoring the unfortunate incidents involving R38, R101, the Shenandoah and the Hindenburg, R100 suffered so many tears to its outer cover that they had to carry enough patches to make a spare one.
That’s the technology of almost a century ago, though.
Airships are playings of the wind. Which is the ultimate destroyer of airships.
With kevlar envelopes, and solar cell wraps, they could cruise for months,
Except they get smashed into the ground every now and again by the wind. Because they need to get near the ground to actually pickup/drop off passengers and cargo.
With modern weather forecasting, not a problem.
You’re mired in the last century.
Nope - the problem is the lack of really still days in most places. A breeze that a light aircraft will laugh at will wreck an airship - it’s surface vs thrust that is the unfixable problem.
You’ve got something the size of a large ship, which only weighs a small number of tons. The wind thrust on that cannot be countered by the engines at even quite low velocities.
Obvious use case for electric VTOL aircraft, for embarking/disembarking, resupplying etc..
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
It doesn’t try to explain anything. It just points out your inexplicable hard on for this one pollster. It’s for you and your therapist to explain.
RCP is multiple polls averaged (and their PA average poll includes the NYT poll)
So fucking what? The fact that every 4 years you jack off over Trafalgar with the stamina and regularity of a teenager given internet access and a credit card for the first time is the issue here.
And in 2016 had you done that you would have been quids in as Trafalgar was the only pollster who had Trump winning the EC
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
There’s a serious school of (business) thought that airship could compete with, or even replace, the international cruise ship leisure market. Makes sense to me.
Airships are very, very power inefficient. They cruise at low altitudes, fighting the winds and requiring more fuel per passenger mile than a jet.
They are also rather fragile. Even ignoring the unfortunate incidents involving R38, R101, the Shenandoah and the Hindenburg, R100 suffered so many tears to its outer cover that they had to carry enough patches to make a spare one.
That’s the technology of almost a century ago, though.
Airships are playings of the wind. Which is the ultimate destroyer of airships.
With kevlar envelopes, and solar cell wraps, they could cruise for months,
Except they get smashed into the ground every now and again by the wind. Because they need to get near the ground to actually pickup/drop off passengers and cargo.
With modern weather forecasting, not a problem.
You’re mired in the last century.
Modern weather forecasting?
Still like astrology unless it's less than 72 hours in advance.
72 hours is plenty if you’re talking landing conditions for an airship.
More than 72 hours isn’t astrology. There is incredible accuracy in the main global weather models now - same accuracy at 5 data as there was at 1 day in the 90s.
My experience as a rather geeky model watcher several times daily is that there’s pretty good predictability of the synoptic pattern up to about 180 hours after which models start to diverge.
NVidia's new model which gives a forecast down to 10sq meters is quite something.
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
It doesn’t try to explain anything. It just points out your inexplicable hard on for this one pollster. It’s for you and your therapist to explain.
RCP is multiple polls averaged (and their PA average poll includes the NYT poll)
So fucking what? The fact that every 4 years you jack off over Trafalgar with the stamina and regularity of a teenager given internet access and a credit card for the first time is the issue here.
And in 2016 had you done that you would have been quids in as Trafalgar was the only pollster who had Trump winning the EC
Like clockwork. Did you go back to 2020 and copy/paste that irrelevance from your posts then? Because you made the same point again and again. I gave the same reply again and again. And ultimately was right. I’m not doing this pointless dance over and over again.
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
It doesn’t try to explain anything. It just points out your inexplicable hard on for this one pollster. It’s for you and your therapist to explain.
RCP is multiple polls averaged (and their PA average poll includes the NYT poll)
So fucking what? The fact that every 4 years you jack off over Trafalgar with the stamina and regularity of a teenager given internet access and a credit card for the first time is the issue here.
And in 2016 had you done that you would have been quids in as Trafalgar was the only pollster who had Trump winning the EC
Like clockwork. Did you go back to 2020 and copy/paste that irrelevance from your posts then? Because you made the same point again and again. I gave the same reply again and again. And ultimately was right. I’m not doing this pointless dance over and over again.
Confucius he say: if you have diarrhoea some of the turd is bound to hit the water.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
There’s a serious school of (business) thought that airship could compete with, or even replace, the international cruise ship leisure market. Makes sense to me.
Airships are very, very power inefficient. They cruise at low altitudes, fighting the winds and requiring more fuel per passenger mile than a jet.
They are also rather fragile. Even ignoring the unfortunate incidents involving R38, R101, the Shenandoah and the Hindenburg, R100 suffered so many tears to its outer cover that they had to carry enough patches to make a spare one.
That’s the technology of almost a century ago, though.
Airships are playings of the wind. Which is the ultimate destroyer of airships.
With kevlar envelopes, and solar cell wraps, they could cruise for months,
Except they get smashed into the ground every now and again by the wind. Because they need to get near the ground to actually pickup/drop off passengers and cargo.
With modern weather forecasting, not a problem.
You’re mired in the last century.
Modern weather forecasting?
Still like astrology unless it's less than 72 hours in advance.
I was in the local park this morning with the Met Office forecast happily telling me it was bright and sunny. While I was being heavily rained on with overcast cloud.
There are multiple Met Office weather stations not far from me - I really don't understand why it can actually be raining (and I assume picked up by their tech) and yet say 'sunny and dry!' on the forecast. I get predicting further into the future gets tricky, but 'now' and 'the past 30 minutes' I would assume was somewhat easier.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
There’s a serious school of (business) thought that airship could compete with, or even replace, the international cruise ship leisure market. Makes sense to me.
Airships are very, very power inefficient. They cruise at low altitudes, fighting the winds and requiring more fuel per passenger mile than a jet.
They are also rather fragile. Even ignoring the unfortunate incidents involving R38, R101, the Shenandoah and the Hindenburg, R100 suffered so many tears to its outer cover that they had to carry enough patches to make a spare one.
That’s the technology of almost a century ago, though.
Motor cars are older ... just go to Old Warden on one of their events days.
Edit: the Cardington airship hangars nearby are a *generation* later than hte motor cars, maybe one and a half.
The difference is that we didn’t abandon motor cars for the best part of a century.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
There’s a serious school of (business) thought that airship could compete with, or even replace, the international cruise ship leisure market. Makes sense to me.
Airships are very, very power inefficient. They cruise at low altitudes, fighting the winds and requiring more fuel per passenger mile than a jet.
They are also rather fragile. Even ignoring the unfortunate incidents involving R38, R101, the Shenandoah and the Hindenburg, R100 suffered so many tears to its outer cover that they had to carry enough patches to make a spare one.
That’s the technology of almost a century ago, though.
Motor cars are older ... just go to Old Warden on one of their events days.
Edit: the Cardington airship hangars nearby are a *generation* later than hte motor cars, maybe one and a half.
The difference is that we didn’t abandon motor cars for the best part of a century.
When I was there c. 1988 there was an airship moored there ...
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
There is nobody on this forum who does not believe it was leaked from the lab. Nobody. There are people who believe it, and people who believe it's their duty to argue against it.
Wait: you believe all the posters who suggest zoonotic origins actually know it came from the lab and are just arguing against it because they believe it is their duty to keep this untruth alive?
That is truly bonkers.
I think a lab leak is the most likely hypothesis, because it is an awfully big coincidence that Covid appeared in the same city as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
But SARS and MERS and AIDS and a bunch of other diseases made the animal-to-man jump without going via a lab. It's possible, if unlikely, that a decade from now, we discover a cave of bats 60 miles from Wuhan where CV19 is commonly carried; in which case, we'll need to revisit this.
Because absent a direct admission from someone at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that's where we are: there's strong circumstantial evidence for it being a lab leak, but there's no smoking gun.
So your contention is bizarre. Do you really assume that your fellow men just go around lying to each other all the time because...? Do you go around lying to people all the time just because...? If not, why do you assume that other people do?
Deep down we all know it is highly likely it came from the lab. But for some it is an article of faith that it didn’t. And faith is the best metaphor here
He didn't say "likely", he said "know".
Yes. And I note that whilst you offer the opinion in measured terms, you also believe it. You would have to be a first rate idiot not to believe it. And nobody here is a first rate idiot.
There's a very important difference between "thinking likely" (even very likely) and "knowing".
I know the earth is roughly cylindrical and that it orbits the Sun. It seems staggeringly unlikely that that belief could turn out to be wrong.
I think it is highly likely that Covid was released as a result of a lab leak of some kind (and I draw the definition of lab leak fairly widely). But if we were to discover a colony of bats 70 miles from Wuhan that were all carrying Covid-19 and who appear to have lived with it for a long time, we would clearly need to adjust the probability for a lab leak rather than a zoonotic event way down. Would it surprise me if such a colony was found? I think it unlikely, but not vanishingly so.
"Knowing" is more than even "reasonable doubt". It means, essentially, certainty. And I'm not certain, I merely think a lab leak fits the current facts better than an entirely zoonotic explanation.
I didn't say we were 100% certain - though it's as certain as many other accepted facts in life. I said everybody here believes it. Because we all do.
I don't believe or disbelieve. I really don't care one way or the other. Lab Leak is entirely plausible but there just isn't as far as I know the evidence right now to support it. i'm happy to call it for zoonosis because there is, to me, very compelling evidence on the early lineages as well as other evidence in that direction. I think it's reasonable to hold off judgement for now due to unknowns.
It's all a matter of interpretation. I don't force my interpretation on anyone else but I would gently suggest those who say they know, don't know what they claim to know.
Nothing in life is entirely certain, but the human brain takes certain things for granted. People who have been told that there are two opposing theories explaining the origin of Covid-19, leaking from a lab 300m away from the first outbreak, which was studying how to make bat viruses deadlier and more transmissible, or an accident of evolution in a wet market, coincidentally doing exactly the same work as the lab, in a freak accident. We all know which one we believe. There are none of us on here stupid enough to believe the second explanation. It's a silly pretence.
As a bit of a thought experiment, triggered by your comment “people who have been told there are two opposing theories”, what might a third origin theory be?
All I can think of are:
- deliberate act of bio-terrorism - Pre-existing human coronavirus that mutated without help from animals - It was actually a lab leak somewhere else. By sheer coincidence the first infected person travelled to Wuhan and spread it there
For what it’s worth I’ve always thought it was a lab leak. Occam’s razor and all that.
Nearly every outbreak of a novel infectious disease in humans has been originally from zoonosis. (Lab leaks have occurred, but have only involved previously known pathogens and have usually been small in scale, although the 1977 Russian flu was widespread, albeit still not that clear what happened in that case.) We’d had a novel coronavirus coming into humans from zoonosis in 2012 with MERS, and in 2002 with SARS. (There’d also been swine acute diarrhea syndrome coronavirus, which appeared in pigs in 2017, having come from bats.) Occam’s razor, or call it a Bayesian prior, would imply that COVID-19 was the same.
There have been conspiracy theories about laboratory leaks as the cause for numerous prior disease outbreaks (e.g., AIDS, swine flu, SARS). The next pandemic will probably be zoonotic and there will be some people claiming it’s from a laboratory leak.
Meaningless. There were not labs doing experiments on the exact same thing 300 metres away in the other cases - and going further back, such research wasn't even being conducted. I don't know why you prefer to make yourself look daft in this way - perhaps you have concerns about your employer. That's fine, but we cannot really debate unless we have a basis of a vaguely plausible take on the facts available.
To be clear there is zero evidence of labs working on the same virus in labs 300 metres away. Speculation yes; evidence none. If we don't get the facts right there's no point discussing this
You're almost begging Leon to enter the discussion here, aren't you?
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like - we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion. I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
Build ladders
I have a theory that a part of the problem is people for whom there isn't *progression*
In times past, work your whole life at a job. Get pay rises, sure. Maybe, if you were ambitious, the foreman's job.
The modern world sells the idea that you should be going *up*.
So you have people, who are in jobs, but they aren't going to progress. So they do their work. What's next?
There is also, as a part of this, a lot of people bumbling along on a mix of benefits and part time, poorly paid work. How are they ever going to retire? A pension that would pay for their rent is beyond them.
Can I ask a simple question, what size pension pot do you think is sufficient to retire on?
One that can provide accommodation, food and bills. As a start.
How are generation rent going to manage that?
That wasn't the question but the point I was trying to make which got lost is most people in the private sector are paying 5% plus 3% from employer even if we take todays minimum wage 22K pr so we get 1760 a year
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
It doesn’t try to explain anything. It just points out your inexplicable hard on for this one pollster. It’s for you and your therapist to explain.
RCP is multiple polls averaged (and their PA average poll includes the NYT poll)
So fucking what? The fact that every 4 years you jack off over Trafalgar with the stamina and regularity of a teenager given internet access and a credit card for the first time is the issue here.
And in 2016 had you done that you would have been quids in as Trafalgar was the only pollster who had Trump winning the EC
Like clockwork. Did you go back to 2020 and copy/paste that irrelevance from your posts then? Because you made the same point again and again. I gave the same reply again and again. And ultimately was right. I’m not doing this pointless dance over and over again.
Or look at RCP then if you want to ignore Trafalgar.
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
It doesn’t try to explain anything. It just points out your inexplicable hard on for this one pollster. It’s for you and your therapist to explain.
RCP is multiple polls averaged (and their PA average poll includes the NYT poll)
So fucking what? The fact that every 4 years you jack off over Trafalgar with the stamina and regularity of a teenager given internet access and a credit card for the first time is the issue here.
And in 2016 had you done that you would have been quids in as Trafalgar was the only pollster who had Trump winning the EC
Like clockwork. Did you go back to 2020 and copy/paste that irrelevance from your posts then? Because you made the same point again and again. I gave the same reply again and again. And ultimately was right. I’m not doing this pointless dance over and over again.
Maybe it just not worth arguing with he who is never wrong
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
It doesn’t try to explain anything. It just points out your inexplicable hard on for this one pollster. It’s for you and your therapist to explain.
RCP is multiple polls averaged (and their PA average poll includes the NYT poll)
So fucking what? The fact that every 4 years you jack off over Trafalgar with the stamina and regularity of a teenager given internet access and a credit card for the first time is the issue here.
And in 2016 had you done that you would have been quids in as Trafalgar was the only pollster who had Trump winning the EC
Is there any evidence that Trafalgar actually do polls? I thought it was one guy in his basement with a guessing stick and chicken entrails.
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
I admire your loyalty to Trump but it is over for him and Harris wil be the next POTUS
Astonishing levels of confidence BigG!!!
Not really
I am very confident that Harris not only has the momentum but Trump has nothing to offer
Indeed I expect it to be similar to our GE where Starmer won with some ease
Starmer had double digit poll leads consistently
At times the saying 'none so blind as those who cannot see' was invented for you
I think Harris is a weaker candidate than Biden 2020 but, fortunately, Trump is considerably weaker than Trump 2020 too. Just don't think Americans want to go back in time which is all the 77 yr old Trump offers. It could well be a shellacking.
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
It doesn’t try to explain anything. It just points out your inexplicable hard on for this one pollster. It’s for you and your therapist to explain.
RCP is multiple polls averaged (and their PA average poll includes the NYT poll)
So fucking what? The fact that every 4 years you jack off over Trafalgar with the stamina and regularity of a teenager given internet access and a credit card for the first time is the issue here.
And in 2016 had you done that you would have been quids in as Trafalgar was the only pollster who had Trump winning the EC
Like clockwork. Did you go back to 2020 and copy/paste that irrelevance from your posts then? Because you made the same point again and again. I gave the same reply again and again. And ultimately was right. I’m not doing this pointless dance over and over again.
Maybe it just not worth arguing with he who is never wrong
Mich nicer to discussi the railways of Porthmadwg.
When we were there the Welsh Highland was only just beginning - a few hundred yards of pretty manky track. But we had a nice wander along the old track bed for a bit before returning to our B&B opposite Harlech Castle - actually a restaurant with (then, anyway) hors d'ouevres served below a picture window opening onto Snowdon
But we did alkso stay in Bettws-y-Coed to see the Telford roads and bridge (and walk the pre-Telford road)and go to Conwy via Llandudno. Never did get to see the Great Orme or the Menai bridges, a treat for another time.
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
It doesn’t try to explain anything. It just points out your inexplicable hard on for this one pollster. It’s for you and your therapist to explain.
RCP is multiple polls averaged (and their PA average poll includes the NYT poll)
So fucking what? The fact that every 4 years you jack off over Trafalgar with the stamina and regularity of a teenager given internet access and a credit card for the first time is the issue here.
And in 2016 had you done that you would have been quids in as Trafalgar was the only pollster who had Trump winning the EC
Wait - in 2020, Trafalgar had Trump winning Arizona by 3 points, Georgia by 4 points, Michigan by 3 points, Nevada by 1 point, and Pennsylvania by 2 points.
Didn’t Trump lose all of those? So we’d be very much not quids in?
I do not have knowledge of US politics or actually much interest in them, other than an instinctive feeling Biden handing over to Harris is the game changer and I see nothing that makes me think Trump is going to win in November
A hidden tracking tool in the website for Reform UK collected private browsing data about potentially millions of people, often without consent, and shared it with Facebook for use in targeted advertising.
An Observer investigation has found that people visiting the website for Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration party had details of their activity captured by a digital surveillance tool known as a Meta pixel.
The tracker – active in the run-up to the election, and as recently as last week – was triggered automatically on loading the Reform site, regardless of whether the person gave consent. It then sent a package of data to Facebook’s parent company, Meta, with details of which webpages had been viewed, when, and the buttons that were clicked.
In some cases, this included sensitive information that could reveal a person’s political beliefs, such as details of those accessing forms to become Reform UK members, linked to a unique Facebook user ID.
A hidden tracking tool in the website for Reform UK collected private browsing data about potentially millions of people, often without consent, and shared it with Facebook for use in targeted advertising.
An Observer investigation has found that people visiting the website for Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration party had details of their activity captured by a digital surveillance tool known as a Meta pixel.
The tracker – active in the run-up to the election, and as recently as last week – was triggered automatically on loading the Reform site, regardless of whether the person gave consent. It then sent a package of data to Facebook’s parent company, Meta, with details of which webpages had been viewed, when, and the buttons that were clicked.
In some cases, this included sensitive information that could reveal a person’s political beliefs, such as details of those accessing forms to become Reform UK members, linked to a unique Facebook user ID.
'Reform UK has claimed that it prioritises privacy and resists “surveillance”, pledging in its manifesto to create a British bill of rights that would protect people’s “freedoms”. It says: “Our data and privacy must be protected. Surveillance of the public must be limited and those monitoring us held to account.”
But the Observer’s testing, checked by independent experts, suggests a failure to follow the rules, with the Meta pixel extracting information before consent had been given, and even if the person clicked “deny”
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
It doesn’t try to explain anything. It just points out your inexplicable hard on for this one pollster. It’s for you and your therapist to explain.
RCP is multiple polls averaged (and their PA average poll includes the NYT poll)
So fucking what? The fact that every 4 years you jack off over Trafalgar with the stamina and regularity of a teenager given internet access and a credit card for the first time is the issue here.
And in 2016 had you done that you would have been quids in as Trafalgar was the only pollster who had Trump winning the EC
Wait - in 2020, Trafalgar had Trump winning Arizona by 3 points, Georgia by 4 points, Michigan by 3 points, Nevada by 1 point, and Pennsylvania by 2 points.
Didn’t Trump lose all of those? So we’d be very much not quids in?
A hidden tracking tool in the website for Reform UK collected private browsing data about potentially millions of people, often without consent, and shared it with Facebook for use in targeted advertising.
An Observer investigation has found that people visiting the website for Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration party had details of their activity captured by a digital surveillance tool known as a Meta pixel.
The tracker – active in the run-up to the election, and as recently as last week – was triggered automatically on loading the Reform site, regardless of whether the person gave consent. It then sent a package of data to Facebook’s parent company, Meta, with details of which webpages had been viewed, when, and the buttons that were clicked.
In some cases, this included sensitive information that could reveal a person’s political beliefs, such as details of those accessing forms to become Reform UK members, linked to a unique Facebook user ID.
The facebook pixel has been around for a long while and been included on many sites including most government sites both here and in the eu and the guardian....its not news do keep up
A hidden tracking tool in the website for Reform UK collected private browsing data about potentially millions of people, often without consent, and shared it with Facebook for use in targeted advertising.
An Observer investigation has found that people visiting the website for Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration party had details of their activity captured by a digital surveillance tool known as a Meta pixel.
The tracker – active in the run-up to the election, and as recently as last week – was triggered automatically on loading the Reform site, regardless of whether the person gave consent. It then sent a package of data to Facebook’s parent company, Meta, with details of which webpages had been viewed, when, and the buttons that were clicked.
In some cases, this included sensitive information that could reveal a person’s political beliefs, such as details of those accessing forms to become Reform UK members, linked to a unique Facebook user ID.
A hidden tracking tool in the website for Reform UK collected private browsing data about potentially millions of people, often without consent, and shared it with Facebook for use in targeted advertising.
An Observer investigation has found that people visiting the website for Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration party had details of their activity captured by a digital surveillance tool known as a Meta pixel.
The tracker – active in the run-up to the election, and as recently as last week – was triggered automatically on loading the Reform site, regardless of whether the person gave consent. It then sent a package of data to Facebook’s parent company, Meta, with details of which webpages had been viewed, when, and the buttons that were clicked.
In some cases, this included sensitive information that could reveal a person’s political beliefs, such as details of those accessing forms to become Reform UK members, linked to a unique Facebook user ID.
The facebook pixel has been around for a long while and been included on many sites including most government sites both here and in the eu and the guardian....its not news do keep up
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
It doesn’t try to explain anything. It just points out your inexplicable hard on for this one pollster. It’s for you and your therapist to explain.
RCP is multiple polls averaged (and their PA average poll includes the NYT poll)
So fucking what? The fact that every 4 years you jack off over Trafalgar with the stamina and regularity of a teenager given internet access and a credit card for the first time is the issue here.
And in 2016 had you done that you would have been quids in as Trafalgar was the only pollster who had Trump winning the EC
Like clockwork. Did you go back to 2020 and copy/paste that irrelevance from your posts then? Because you made the same point again and again. I gave the same reply again and again. And ultimately was right. I’m not doing this pointless dance over and over again.
Or look at RCP then if you want to ignore Trafalgar.
The operative words being "final" and "current" you moron. The final projection is dated November 2020. We're not even in mid-August yet.
Oh, what's the fucking point? I've been on here five and a half years and had such joy as you explaining to me what the Oxford Union is. Debating you is like trying to teach a goldfish algebra—you can make the effort, but at the end of the day, you’re just yelling at a fish. Talking to you is a waste of breath because no matter how much logic you throw at you, it’s like pouring 5* petrol into a car that’s missing an engine.
If, by some miracle you understand what people on here are saying, you're not going to admit it. You twist their words, dodge the facts, and somehow, they'll end up looking like the idiot for engaging in the first place. It’s a lose-lose scenario.
So, why bother? I could spend that time doing something more productive—like rearranging my sock drawer or chiselling my own Channel Tunnel. At least with them I know I'm making making progress. So go to bed. Seriously, your presence is as useful and welcome as a screen door on a submarine
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
A hidden tracking tool in the website for Reform UK collected private browsing data about potentially millions of people, often without consent, and shared it with Facebook for use in targeted advertising.
An Observer investigation has found that people visiting the website for Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration party had details of their activity captured by a digital surveillance tool known as a Meta pixel.
The tracker – active in the run-up to the election, and as recently as last week – was triggered automatically on loading the Reform site, regardless of whether the person gave consent. It then sent a package of data to Facebook’s parent company, Meta, with details of which webpages had been viewed, when, and the buttons that were clicked.
In some cases, this included sensitive information that could reveal a person’s political beliefs, such as details of those accessing forms to become Reform UK members, linked to a unique Facebook user ID.
The facebook pixel has been around for a long while and been included on many sites including most government sites both here and in the eu and the guardian....its not news do keep up
But not asking permission? That's the issue here.
Nor do any of the sites using it, including the guardian, most government sites from the uk, nor the eu nor all the other papers sites. Thats why people use the pihole
A hidden tracking tool in the website for Reform UK collected private browsing data about potentially millions of people, often without consent, and shared it with Facebook for use in targeted advertising.
An Observer investigation has found that people visiting the website for Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration party had details of their activity captured by a digital surveillance tool known as a Meta pixel.
The tracker – active in the run-up to the election, and as recently as last week – was triggered automatically on loading the Reform site, regardless of whether the person gave consent. It then sent a package of data to Facebook’s parent company, Meta, with details of which webpages had been viewed, when, and the buttons that were clicked.
In some cases, this included sensitive information that could reveal a person’s political beliefs, such as details of those accessing forms to become Reform UK members, linked to a unique Facebook user ID.
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
It doesn’t try to explain anything. It just points out your inexplicable hard on for this one pollster. It’s for you and your therapist to explain.
RCP is multiple polls averaged (and their PA average poll includes the NYT poll)
So fucking what? The fact that every 4 years you jack off over Trafalgar with the stamina and regularity of a teenager given internet access and a credit card for the first time is the issue here.
And in 2016 had you done that you would have been quids in as Trafalgar was the only pollster who had Trump winning the EC
Wait - in 2020, Trafalgar had Trump winning Arizona by 3 points, Georgia by 4 points, Michigan by 3 points, Nevada by 1 point, and Pennsylvania by 2 points.
Didn’t Trump lose all of those? So we’d be very much not quids in?
In 2020 look at RCP as per my earlier post
So why did you quote Trafalgar earlier? Because predicting something requires not knowing what to cherry-pick in retrospect.
All we can conclude is your citation of Trafalgar has zero predictive power, yes? Otherwise you’d be able to rely on that for 2020.
Why should we believe that your citation of RCP from 2020 has any predictive power for 2024, when citing Trafalgar from 2016 had zero such predictive power for 2020?
A hidden tracking tool in the website for Reform UK collected private browsing data about potentially millions of people, often without consent, and shared it with Facebook for use in targeted advertising.
An Observer investigation has found that people visiting the website for Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration party had details of their activity captured by a digital surveillance tool known as a Meta pixel.
The tracker – active in the run-up to the election, and as recently as last week – was triggered automatically on loading the Reform site, regardless of whether the person gave consent. It then sent a package of data to Facebook’s parent company, Meta, with details of which webpages had been viewed, when, and the buttons that were clicked.
In some cases, this included sensitive information that could reveal a person’s political beliefs, such as details of those accessing forms to become Reform UK members, linked to a unique Facebook user ID.
The facebook pixel has been around for a long while and been included on many sites including most government sites both here and in the eu and the guardian....its not news do keep up
But not asking permission? That's the issue here.
Only if you are in step with the loony Eurocrats who devise such anti-profit-for-Nigel-British rules.
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
I admire your loyalty to Trump but it is over for him and Harris wil be the next POTUS
Astonishing levels of confidence BigG!!!
Not really
I am very confident that Harris not only has the momentum but Trump has nothing to offer
Indeed I expect it to be similar to our GE where Starmer won with some ease
Starmer had double digit poll leads consistently
At times the saying 'none so blind as those who cannot see' was invented for you
I always thought the expression was: "There are none so blind as those that will not see", i.e. those who refuse to see the evidence in front of them.
Which describes HYUFD perfectly in this case.
Or almost everyone else on this blog for whom Harris is apparently heading for the biggest Democratic landslide since LBJ beat Goldwater in 1964 rather than what actually looks set to be the tightest presidential election since 2000 or 2004.
Today, Celine Dion’s management team and her record label, Sony Music Entertainment Canada Inc., became aware of the unauthorized usage of the video, recording, musical performance, and likeness of Celine Dion singing “My Heart Will Go On” at a Donald Trump / JD Vance campaign rally in Montana.
In no way is this use authorized, and Celine Dion does not endorse this or any similar use.
There is nobody on this forum who does not believe it was leaked from the lab. Nobody. There are people who believe it, and people who believe it's their duty to argue against it.
Wait: you believe all the posters who suggest zoonotic origins actually know it came from the lab and are just arguing against it because they believe it is their duty to keep this untruth alive?
That is truly bonkers.
I think a lab leak is the most likely hypothesis, because it is an awfully big coincidence that Covid appeared in the same city as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
But SARS and MERS and AIDS and a bunch of other diseases made the animal-to-man jump without going via a lab. It's possible, if unlikely, that a decade from now, we discover a cave of bats 60 miles from Wuhan where CV19 is commonly carried; in which case, we'll need to revisit this.
Because absent a direct admission from someone at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that's where we are: there's strong circumstantial evidence for it being a lab leak, but there's no smoking gun.
So your contention is bizarre. Do you really assume that your fellow men just go around lying to each other all the time because...? Do you go around lying to people all the time just because...? If not, why do you assume that other people do?
Deep down we all know it is highly likely it came from the lab. But for some it is an article of faith that it didn’t. And faith is the best metaphor here
He didn't say "likely", he said "know".
Yes. And I note that whilst you offer the opinion in measured terms, you also believe it. You would have to be a first rate idiot not to believe it. And nobody here is a first rate idiot.
There's a very important difference between "thinking likely" (even very likely) and "knowing".
I know the earth is roughly cylindrical and that it orbits the Sun. It seems staggeringly unlikely that that belief could turn out to be wrong.
I think it is highly likely that Covid was released as a result of a lab leak of some kind (and I draw the definition of lab leak fairly widely). But if we were to discover a colony of bats 70 miles from Wuhan that were all carrying Covid-19 and who appear to have lived with it for a long time, we would clearly need to adjust the probability for a lab leak rather than a zoonotic event way down. Would it surprise me if such a colony was found? I think it unlikely, but not vanishingly so.
"Knowing" is more than even "reasonable doubt". It means, essentially, certainty. And I'm not certain, I merely think a lab leak fits the current facts better than an entirely zoonotic explanation.
I didn't say we were 100% certain - though it's as certain as many other accepted facts in life. I said everybody here believes it. Because we all do.
I don't believe or disbelieve. I really don't care one way or the other. Lab Leak is entirely plausible but there just isn't as far as I know the evidence right now to support it. i'm happy to call it for zoonosis because there is, to me, very compelling evidence on the early lineages as well as other evidence in that direction. I think it's reasonable to hold off judgement for now due to unknowns.
It's all a matter of interpretation. I don't force my interpretation on anyone else but I would gently suggest those who say they know, don't know what they claim to know.
Nothing in life is entirely certain, but the human brain takes certain things for granted. People who have been told that there are two opposing theories explaining the origin of Covid-19, leaking from a lab 300m away from the first outbreak, which was studying how to make bat viruses deadlier and more transmissible, or an accident of evolution in a wet market, coincidentally doing exactly the same work as the lab, in a freak accident. We all know which one we believe. There are none of us on here stupid enough to believe the second explanation. It's a silly pretence.
As a bit of a thought experiment, triggered by your comment “people who have been told there are two opposing theories”, what might a third origin theory be?
All I can think of are:
- deliberate act of bio-terrorism - Pre-existing human coronavirus that mutated without help from animals - It was actually a lab leak somewhere else. By sheer coincidence the first infected person travelled to Wuhan and spread it there
For what it’s worth I’ve always thought it was a lab leak. Occam’s razor and all that.
Previous outbreaks of similar diseases came from animals
As, probably, did this. But they may have been animals in a lab in Wuhan.
Only a few years ago we had a foot and mouth epidemic caused by a lab leak in Porton Down. That, and other examples, plus the coincidence the outbreak started in that one particular city, plus the very powerful factors weighing against any likelihood of honesty by the CCP if this were a leak.
I’m not convinced it was a leak, what would I know, but I’m certainly not convinced it was zoonotic.
There have been leaks of known diseases, as with foot and mouth, but there are no prior cases of a novel disease appearing through a lab leak.
China put its coronavirus labs mostly in the areas where outbreaks were more likely to start. That’s not coincidence: that’s good prediction!
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
It doesn’t try to explain anything. It just points out your inexplicable hard on for this one pollster. It’s for you and your therapist to explain.
RCP is multiple polls averaged (and their PA average poll includes the NYT poll)
So fucking what? The fact that every 4 years you jack off over Trafalgar with the stamina and regularity of a teenager given internet access and a credit card for the first time is the issue here.
And in 2016 had you done that you would have been quids in as Trafalgar was the only pollster who had Trump winning the EC
Like clockwork. Did you go back to 2020 and copy/paste that irrelevance from your posts then? Because you made the same point again and again. I gave the same reply again and again. And ultimately was right. I’m not doing this pointless dance over and over again.
Maybe it just not worth arguing with he who is never wrong
Mich nicer to discussi the railways of Porthmadwg.
When we were there the Welsh Highland was only just beginning - a few hundred yards of pretty manky track. But we had a nice wander along the old track bed for a bit before returning to our B&B opposite Harlech Castle - actually a restaurant with (then, anyway) hors d'ouevres served below a picture window opening onto Snowdon
But we did alkso stay in Bettws-y-Coed to see the Telford roads and bridge (and walk the pre-Telford road)and go to Conwy via Llandudno. Never did get to see the Great Orme or the Menai bridges, a treat for another time.
The development of the Welsh Highland Railway and merger with Ffestiniog Railway has been a huge success with the WHR travelling Caernarfon to Porthmadog and the Ffestiniog travelling from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and both sharing the same station, but the Ffestiniog approaching the station over the amazing cob which gave birth to Porthmadog as a sea port, and pre steel hulls over 300 ships built there with Welsh slate roofing the world
The WHR travels on the bridge over the River Glaslyn shared by traffic and near the centre of town, before meandering through Beddgelert and Waunfawr back to Caernarfon
They are both great experiences and if you get the opportunity I would recommend you enjoy at least one of them and maybe even stay in Llandudno and enjoy the Great Orme with its fantastic views, wonderful tramway, and the old copper mines
I sound like the head of tourism for Conwy and Gwynedd but we have a reason to promote North Wales - it is spectacularly beautiful
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
It doesn’t try to explain anything. It just points out your inexplicable hard on for this one pollster. It’s for you and your therapist to explain.
RCP is multiple polls averaged (and their PA average poll includes the NYT poll)
So fucking what? The fact that every 4 years you jack off over Trafalgar with the stamina and regularity of a teenager given internet access and a credit card for the first time is the issue here.
And in 2016 had you done that you would have been quids in as Trafalgar was the only pollster who had Trump winning the EC
Like clockwork. Did you go back to 2020 and copy/paste that irrelevance from your posts then? Because you made the same point again and again. I gave the same reply again and again. And ultimately was right. I’m not doing this pointless dance over and over again.
Or look at RCP then if you want to ignore Trafalgar.
The operative words being "final" and "current" you moron. The final projection is dated November 2020. We're not even in mid-August yet.
Oh, what's the fucking point? I've been on here five and a half years and had such joy as you explaining to me what the Oxford Union is. Debating you is like trying to teach a goldfish algebra—you can make the effort, but at the end of the day, you’re just yelling at a fish. Talking to you is a waste of breath because no matter how much logic you throw at you, it’s like pouring 5* petrol into a car that’s missing an engine.
If, by some miracle you understand what people on here are saying, you're not going to admit it. You twist their words, dodge the facts, and somehow, they'll end up looking like the idiot for engaging in the first place. It’s a lose-lose scenario.
So, why bother? I could spend that time doing something more productive—like rearranging my sock drawer or chiselling my own Channel Tunnel. At least with them I know I'm making making progress. So go to bed. Seriously, your presence is as useful and welcome as a screen door on a submarine
Yes because your left liberalism is always right of course and must never be counted with any other argument
Today, Celine Dion’s management team and her record label, Sony Music Entertainment Canada Inc., became aware of the unauthorized usage of the video, recording, musical performance, and likeness of Celine Dion singing “My Heart Will Go On” at a Donald Trump / JD Vance campaign rally in Montana.
In no way is this use authorized, and Celine Dion does not endorse this or any similar use.
There is nobody on this forum who does not believe it was leaked from the lab. Nobody. There are people who believe it, and people who believe it's their duty to argue against it.
Wait: you believe all the posters who suggest zoonotic origins actually know it came from the lab and are just arguing against it because they believe it is their duty to keep this untruth alive?
That is truly bonkers.
I think a lab leak is the most likely hypothesis, because it is an awfully big coincidence that Covid appeared in the same city as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
But SARS and MERS and AIDS and a bunch of other diseases made the animal-to-man jump without going via a lab. It's possible, if unlikely, that a decade from now, we discover a cave of bats 60 miles from Wuhan where CV19 is commonly carried; in which case, we'll need to revisit this.
Because absent a direct admission from someone at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that's where we are: there's strong circumstantial evidence for it being a lab leak, but there's no smoking gun.
So your contention is bizarre. Do you really assume that your fellow men just go around lying to each other all the time because...? Do you go around lying to people all the time just because...? If not, why do you assume that other people do?
Deep down we all know it is highly likely it came from the lab. But for some it is an article of faith that it didn’t. And faith is the best metaphor here
He didn't say "likely", he said "know".
Yes. And I note that whilst you offer the opinion in measured terms, you also believe it. You would have to be a first rate idiot not to believe it. And nobody here is a first rate idiot.
There's a very important difference between "thinking likely" (even very likely) and "knowing".
I know the earth is roughly cylindrical and that it orbits the Sun. It seems staggeringly unlikely that that belief could turn out to be wrong.
I think it is highly likely that Covid was released as a result of a lab leak of some kind (and I draw the definition of lab leak fairly widely). But if we were to discover a colony of bats 70 miles from Wuhan that were all carrying Covid-19 and who appear to have lived with it for a long time, we would clearly need to adjust the probability for a lab leak rather than a zoonotic event way down. Would it surprise me if such a colony was found? I think it unlikely, but not vanishingly so.
"Knowing" is more than even "reasonable doubt". It means, essentially, certainty. And I'm not certain, I merely think a lab leak fits the current facts better than an entirely zoonotic explanation.
I didn't say we were 100% certain - though it's as certain as many other accepted facts in life. I said everybody here believes it. Because we all do.
I don't believe or disbelieve. I really don't care one way or the other. Lab Leak is entirely plausible but there just isn't as far as I know the evidence right now to support it. i'm happy to call it for zoonosis because there is, to me, very compelling evidence on the early lineages as well as other evidence in that direction. I think it's reasonable to hold off judgement for now due to unknowns.
It's all a matter of interpretation. I don't force my interpretation on anyone else but I would gently suggest those who say they know, don't know what they claim to know.
Nothing in life is entirely certain, but the human brain takes certain things for granted. People who have been told that there are two opposing theories explaining the origin of Covid-19, leaking from a lab 300m away from the first outbreak, which was studying how to make bat viruses deadlier and more transmissible, or an accident of evolution in a wet market, coincidentally doing exactly the same work as the lab, in a freak accident. We all know which one we believe. There are none of us on here stupid enough to believe the second explanation. It's a silly pretence.
As a bit of a thought experiment, triggered by your comment “people who have been told there are two opposing theories”, what might a third origin theory be?
All I can think of are:
- deliberate act of bio-terrorism - Pre-existing human coronavirus that mutated without help from animals - It was actually a lab leak somewhere else. By sheer coincidence the first infected person travelled to Wuhan and spread it there
For what it’s worth I’ve always thought it was a lab leak. Occam’s razor and all that.
Previous outbreaks of similar diseases came from animals
As, probably, did this. But they may have been animals in a lab in Wuhan.
Only a few years ago we had a foot and mouth epidemic caused by a lab leak in Porton Down. That, and other examples, plus the coincidence the outbreak started in that one particular city, plus the very powerful factors weighing against any likelihood of honesty by the CCP if this were a leak.
I’m not convinced it was a leak, what would I know, but I’m certainly not convinced it was zoonotic.
There have been leaks of known diseases, as with foot and mouth, but there are no prior cases of a novel disease appearing through a lab leak.
China put its coronavirus labs mostly in the areas where outbreaks were more likely to start. That’s not coincidence: that’s good prediction!
See this is where you are talking absolute and desparate bollocks, there are wet markets all over china. The idea they thought wuhan....a 1000 miles or more from where these bats actually live was a good prediction.....yeah right
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
It doesn’t try to explain anything. It just points out your inexplicable hard on for this one pollster. It’s for you and your therapist to explain.
RCP is multiple polls averaged (and their PA average poll includes the NYT poll)
So fucking what? The fact that every 4 years you jack off over Trafalgar with the stamina and regularity of a teenager given internet access and a credit card for the first time is the issue here.
And in 2016 had you done that you would have been quids in as Trafalgar was the only pollster who had Trump winning the EC
Like clockwork. Did you go back to 2020 and copy/paste that irrelevance from your posts then? Because you made the same point again and again. I gave the same reply again and again. And ultimately was right. I’m not doing this pointless dance over and over again.
Or look at RCP then if you want to ignore Trafalgar.
The operative words being "final" and "current" you moron. The final projection is dated November 2020. We're not even in mid-August yet.
Oh, what's the fucking point? I've been on here five and a half years and had such joy as you explaining to me what the Oxford Union is. Debating you is like trying to teach a goldfish algebra—you can make the effort, but at the end of the day, you’re just yelling at a fish. Talking to you is a waste of breath because no matter how much logic you throw at you, it’s like pouring 5* petrol into a car that’s missing an engine.
If, by some miracle you understand what people on here are saying, you're not going to admit it. You twist their words, dodge the facts, and somehow, they'll end up looking like the idiot for engaging in the first place. It’s a lose-lose scenario.
So, why bother? I could spend that time doing something more productive—like rearranging my sock drawer or chiselling my own Channel Tunnel. At least with them I know I'm making making progress. So go to bed. Seriously, your presence is as useful and welcome as a screen door on a submarine
Yes because your left liberalism is always right of course and must never be counted with any other argument
Arguments are fine. Invincible ignorance is something else.
There is nobody on this forum who does not believe it was leaked from the lab. Nobody. There are people who believe it, and people who believe it's their duty to argue against it.
Wait: you believe all the posters who suggest zoonotic origins actually know it came from the lab and are just arguing against it because they believe it is their duty to keep this untruth alive?
That is truly bonkers.
I think a lab leak is the most likely hypothesis, because it is an awfully big coincidence that Covid appeared in the same city as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
But SARS and MERS and AIDS and a bunch of other diseases made the animal-to-man jump without going via a lab. It's possible, if unlikely, that a decade from now, we discover a cave of bats 60 miles from Wuhan where CV19 is commonly carried; in which case, we'll need to revisit this.
Because absent a direct admission from someone at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that's where we are: there's strong circumstantial evidence for it being a lab leak, but there's no smoking gun.
So your contention is bizarre. Do you really assume that your fellow men just go around lying to each other all the time because...? Do you go around lying to people all the time just because...? If not, why do you assume that other people do?
Deep down we all know it is highly likely it came from the lab. But for some it is an article of faith that it didn’t. And faith is the best metaphor here
He didn't say "likely", he said "know".
Yes. And I note that whilst you offer the opinion in measured terms, you also believe it. You would have to be a first rate idiot not to believe it. And nobody here is a first rate idiot.
There's a very important difference between "thinking likely" (even very likely) and "knowing".
I know the earth is roughly cylindrical and that it orbits the Sun. It seems staggeringly unlikely that that belief could turn out to be wrong.
I think it is highly likely that Covid was released as a result of a lab leak of some kind (and I draw the definition of lab leak fairly widely). But if we were to discover a colony of bats 70 miles from Wuhan that were all carrying Covid-19 and who appear to have lived with it for a long time, we would clearly need to adjust the probability for a lab leak rather than a zoonotic event way down. Would it surprise me if such a colony was found? I think it unlikely, but not vanishingly so.
"Knowing" is more than even "reasonable doubt". It means, essentially, certainty. And I'm not certain, I merely think a lab leak fits the current facts better than an entirely zoonotic explanation.
I didn't say we were 100% certain - though it's as certain as many other accepted facts in life. I said everybody here believes it. Because we all do.
I don't believe or disbelieve. I really don't care one way or the other. Lab Leak is entirely plausible but there just isn't as far as I know the evidence right now to support it. i'm happy to call it for zoonosis because there is, to me, very compelling evidence on the early lineages as well as other evidence in that direction. I think it's reasonable to hold off judgement for now due to unknowns.
It's all a matter of interpretation. I don't force my interpretation on anyone else but I would gently suggest those who say they know, don't know what they claim to know.
Nothing in life is entirely certain, but the human brain takes certain things for granted. People who have been told that there are two opposing theories explaining the origin of Covid-19, leaking from a lab 300m away from the first outbreak, which was studying how to make bat viruses deadlier and more transmissible, or an accident of evolution in a wet market, coincidentally doing exactly the same work as the lab, in a freak accident. We all know which one we believe. There are none of us on here stupid enough to believe the second explanation. It's a silly pretence.
As a bit of a thought experiment, triggered by your comment “people who have been told there are two opposing theories”, what might a third origin theory be?
All I can think of are:
- deliberate act of bio-terrorism - Pre-existing human coronavirus that mutated without help from animals - It was actually a lab leak somewhere else. By sheer coincidence the first infected person travelled to Wuhan and spread it there
For what it’s worth I’ve always thought it was a lab leak. Occam’s razor and all that.
Previous outbreaks of similar diseases came from animals
As, probably, did this. But they may have been animals in a lab in Wuhan.
Only a few years ago we had a foot and mouth epidemic caused by a lab leak in Porton Down. That, and other examples, plus the coincidence the outbreak started in that one particular city, plus the very powerful factors weighing against any likelihood of honesty by the CCP if this were a leak.
I’m not convinced it was a leak, what would I know, but I’m certainly not convinced it was zoonotic.
Surrey, not Porton Down. Important to get facts right!
Former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura endorsed Vice President Harris this morning, and angry Trump influencers are calling him a "beta male," which seems like a very odd way to describe a politically independent, former Navy SEAL. https://x.com/cmclymer/status/1822278835032748109
Former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura endorsed Vice President Harris this morning, and angry Trump influencers are calling him a "beta male," which seems like a very odd way to describe a politically independent, former Navy SEAL. https://x.com/cmclymer/status/1822278835032748109
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
It doesn’t try to explain anything. It just points out your inexplicable hard on for this one pollster. It’s for you and your therapist to explain.
RCP is multiple polls averaged (and their PA average poll includes the NYT poll)
So fucking what? The fact that every 4 years you jack off over Trafalgar with the stamina and regularity of a teenager given internet access and a credit card for the first time is the issue here.
And in 2016 had you done that you would have been quids in as Trafalgar was the only pollster who had Trump winning the EC
Like clockwork. Did you go back to 2020 and copy/paste that irrelevance from your posts then? Because you made the same point again and again. I gave the same reply again and again. And ultimately was right. I’m not doing this pointless dance over and over again.
Or look at RCP then if you want to ignore Trafalgar.
The operative words being "final" and "current" you moron. The final projection is dated November 2020. We're not even in mid-August yet.
Oh, what's the fucking point? I've been on here five and a half years and had such joy as you explaining to me what the Oxford Union is. Debating you is like trying to teach a goldfish algebra—you can make the effort, but at the end of the day, you’re just yelling at a fish. Talking to you is a waste of breath because no matter how much logic you throw at you, it’s like pouring 5* petrol into a car that’s missing an engine.
If, by some miracle you understand what people on here are saying, you're not going to admit it. You twist their words, dodge the facts, and somehow, they'll end up looking like the idiot for engaging in the first place. It’s a lose-lose scenario.
So, why bother? I could spend that time doing something more productive—like rearranging my sock drawer or chiselling my own Channel Tunnel. At least with them I know I'm making making progress. So go to bed. Seriously, your presence is as useful and welcome as a screen door on a submarine
Yes because your left liberalism is always right of course and must never be counted with any other argument
Arguments are fine. Invincible ignorance is something else.
At least he hasn't called DougSeal a beta male pinniped yet.
Former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura endorsed Vice President Harris this morning, and angry Trump influencers are calling him a "beta male," which seems like a very odd way to describe a politically independent, former Navy SEAL. https://x.com/cmclymer/status/1822278835032748109
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
It doesn’t try to explain anything. It just points out your inexplicable hard on for this one pollster. It’s for you and your therapist to explain.
RCP is multiple polls averaged (and their PA average poll includes the NYT poll)
So fucking what? The fact that every 4 years you jack off over Trafalgar with the stamina and regularity of a teenager given internet access and a credit card for the first time is the issue here.
And in 2016 had you done that you would have been quids in as Trafalgar was the only pollster who had Trump winning the EC
Wait - in 2020, Trafalgar had Trump winning Arizona by 3 points, Georgia by 4 points, Michigan by 3 points, Nevada by 1 point, and Pennsylvania by 2 points.
Didn’t Trump lose all of those? So we’d be very much not quids in?
In 2020 look at RCP as per my earlier post
So why did you quote Trafalgar earlier? Because predicting something requires not knowing what to cherry-pick in retrospect.
All we can conclude is your citation of Trafalgar has zero predictive power, yes? Otherwise you’d be able to rely on that for 2020.
Why should we believe that your citation of RCP from 2020 has any predictive power for 2024, when citing Trafalgar from 2016 had zero such predictive power for 2020?
As the most accurate pollster seems to be different with each election, is knowing which was right last time of any useful predictive value?
One good thing about the Farage Riots is that conservative commentators have suddenly noticed that there's an underclass of around 10%-15% who feel cut off from the rest of society. I'm not sure how they didn't notice that before but that's besides the point.
Given a bipartisan inclination to heal this divide in our society, what could this Parliament do to help this 10%-15% have a stake in our country again? Particularly asking PB_Tories here, what could Labour do that you would support them with?
Labour could start by not looking down their nose at them.
Sigh
You're doing it yourself now.
I know that the tone of this forum can be snarkily partisan and I'm not saying that Labour are perfect but I asked a serious question and you just blew right past it to make a cheap partisan jibe and a personal one that really annoyed me.
You've got no way of knowing this but I can't look down on these people because I feel like I'm part of them or at least I could have been. I grew up on the Lordshill and then the Freshfield estates in Southampton. They weren't bad places to grow up in, Lordshill was brand new and modern with lots of kids the same age as me, Freshfield was a prewar estate, smaller with a real mix of social types and ages. We weren't the poorest, I knew plenty of kids in tougher circumstances but I'm sure that we were poorer than most people on this forum.
I was lucky that I was noticeably quicker at school (I wouldn't say brighter but I would pick new things up more easily) which made me a project for some of my school teachers. I passed my exam to get a full scholarship to the local fee-paying school from age 11 but turned it down for preferring to stay with my friends and knowing my parents would struggle to pay for the PE kit. They would say things like "When you go to university" when I genuinely hadn't considered it. If I were a school child now I think I would consider going to university to be a complete fantasy but I got in on the very tail end of student grants with a little bit of student loan top up that I paid off very quickly.
If I had been born 25-30 years later than there is no way I would have climbed any rungs of the ladder because it looks like it's not there anymore. Who knows, I might be like half my Facebook feed and be really angry right now. Don't accuse me of not caring when I very much care.
Something Tim Montgomerie said stuck with me (it's from a Times Radio interview on Wednesday but I only caught it this morning). He said something like "we are a rich enough society to park these people on the edge of society, to pay their welfare, to police them and to keep them at bay but that's not compassion."
I think that's wrong, we've never been rich enough to waste the potential of people just because they were born to a poorer section of society, that's what Britain's always done except for the brief postwar period that allowed that little bit of social mobility.
So I ask again, if we all want this underclass to be reconnected to the rest of society, what do we do with all party support?
(Edit because it wasn't clear where Tim's thoughts stopped and mine started)
Build houses, push people back into the workforce, improve education and control immigration.
Affordable housing, training opportunities, invest in production instead of subsidising consumption, build roads not railways.
Building roads is a fools errands (sorry Bart, sorry Richard).
I have spent the last thirty five years plus covering a million and a half miles on Britain's motorways. I remember my excitement at the opening of the M25, I would no longer need to run the gauntlet of the North and South circs. Fantastic! But it's not fantastic and hasn't been for at least 25 years. I spend hours each week stationary on the M42, the M4, M6, M1, and if there is an accident on the M5 South of Weston Super Mare and one might ad well go back home.
Travelling on the motorway network is a nightmare and every year it gets worse. There are far too many cars and trucks on our roads, and don't get me started on Smart Motorways.
The future is public transport and canning HS2 was dereliction of duty.
Good evening
I am very pleased I am unlikely to venture much on our gridlocked motorway networks and found it very amusing when my daughter phoned last week to say she was at a full stop on the M5, so much so people were getting out picnic blankets and a white van man had opened the rear door of his van and shut himself inside
On public transport, we decided to do the 'quarryman' narrow gauge steam hauled journey from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog and return last week and left our car at Llandudno Station (10 hours for £2.50) and took the train to Blaenau and it was fabulous to sit back and enjoy the wonderful North Wales scenery on a lovely summers day and not drive for once
Interesting use of “public transport” to describe the narrow gauge railway.
Of course it’s public transport, as are cable cars in the alps, or aeroplanes. But we tend to think of public transport as being stuff people take to get to and from the mundane daily grind.
Plenty of people proudly state they don’t use public transport yet spend half their lives in airports.
Where do we draw the line? I’d say between scheduled and charter services. So for example Brittany Ferries to Santander is public transport, but a cruise around the med isn’t.
The more imaginative the mode of public transport the better.
It’s a real shame we don’t have scheduled airship journeys anymore.
There’s a serious school of (business) thought that airship could compete with, or even replace, the international cruise ship leisure market. Makes sense to me.
Airships are very, very power inefficient. They cruise at low altitudes, fighting the winds and requiring more fuel per passenger mile than a jet.
They are also rather fragile. Even ignoring the unfortunate incidents involving R38, R101, the Shenandoah and the Hindenburg, R100 suffered so many tears to its outer cover that they had to carry enough patches to make a spare one.
That’s the technology of almost a century ago, though.
Airships are playings of the wind. Which is the ultimate destroyer of airships.
With kevlar envelopes, and solar cell wraps, they could cruise for months,
Except they get smashed into the ground every now and again by the wind. Because they need to get near the ground to actually pickup/drop off passengers and cargo.
With modern weather forecasting, not a problem.
You’re mired in the last century.
Modern weather forecasting?
Still like astrology unless it's less than 72 hours in advance.
I was in the local park this morning with the Met Office forecast happily telling me it was bright and sunny. While I was being heavily rained on with overcast cloud.
There are multiple Met Office weather stations not far from me - I really don't understand why it can actually be raining (and I assume picked up by their tech) and yet say 'sunny and dry!' on the forecast. I get predicting further into the future gets tricky, but 'now' and 'the past 30 minutes' I would assume was somewhat easier.
Weather apps get data from the latest model run, which is likely up to 6-12 hours out of date. They are a classic example of false precision. Just because you can grid an output and put up numbers and conditions, doesn’t make it right.
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
It doesn’t try to explain anything. It just points out your inexplicable hard on for this one pollster. It’s for you and your therapist to explain.
RCP is multiple polls averaged (and their PA average poll includes the NYT poll)
So fucking what? The fact that every 4 years you jack off over Trafalgar with the stamina and regularity of a teenager given internet access and a credit card for the first time is the issue here.
And in 2016 had you done that you would have been quids in as Trafalgar was the only pollster who had Trump winning the EC
Like clockwork. Did you go back to 2020 and copy/paste that irrelevance from your posts then? Because you made the same point again and again. I gave the same reply again and again. And ultimately was right. I’m not doing this pointless dance over and over again.
Or look at RCP then if you want to ignore Trafalgar.
The operative words being "final" and "current" you moron. The final projection is dated November 2020. We're not even in mid-August yet.
Oh, what's the fucking point? I've been on here five and a half years and had such joy as you explaining to me what the Oxford Union is. Debating you is like trying to teach a goldfish algebra—you can make the effort, but at the end of the day, you’re just yelling at a fish. Talking to you is a waste of breath because no matter how much logic you throw at you, it’s like pouring 5* petrol into a car that’s missing an engine.
If, by some miracle you understand what people on here are saying, you're not going to admit it. You twist their words, dodge the facts, and somehow, they'll end up looking like the idiot for engaging in the first place. It’s a lose-lose scenario.
So, why bother? I could spend that time doing something more productive—like rearranging my sock drawer or chiselling my own Channel Tunnel. At least with them I know I'm making making progress. So go to bed. Seriously, your presence is as useful and welcome as a screen door on a submarine
Yes because your left liberalism is always right of course and must never be counted with any other argument
Arguments are fine. Invincible ignorance is something else.
At least he hasn't called DougSeal a beta male pinniped yet.
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
I admire your loyalty to Trump but it is over for him and Harris wil be the next POTUS
Astonishing levels of confidence BigG!!!
Not really
I am very confident that Harris not only has the momentum but Trump has nothing to offer
Indeed I expect it to be similar to our GE where Starmer won with some ease
Starmer had double digit poll leads consistently
At times the saying 'none so blind as those who cannot see' was invented for you
I always thought the expression was: "There are none so blind as those that will not see", i.e. those who refuse to see the evidence in front of them.
Which describes HYUFD perfectly in this case.
Or almost everyone else on this blog for whom Harris is apparently heading for the biggest Democratic landslide since LBJ beat Goldwater rather than what actually looks set to be the tightest presidential election since 2000 or 2004
The Trump campaign has a base vote that is solid but which they have not shown the ability or even the inclination to try to grow. To win they need people to have a serious problem with the rival candidate. They got that with Clinton in 2016 and would have had it with Biden in 2024. Otherwise they need a third party and the most prominent third-party candidate is taking votes from Trump and not from Harris.
Is the result certain? No. Trump could win. However, while his chances might fairly be put at 45% at the moment they are falling by the day. The mistakes and the stupidities are being noticed and are being amplified. The selection of Vance will impact very few votes but the decision-making behind it is another matter.
Harris is ahead now and she has the momentum and the enthusiasm. Her campaign looks professional and she seems to be listening to good advice. Her selection of V-P was a solid one - possibly rather better than that.
The most important sign of how things are going. Trump is seriously rattled and he is suddenly desperate for a debate. That means he knows that he is behind.
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
It doesn’t try to explain anything. It just points out your inexplicable hard on for this one pollster. It’s for you and your therapist to explain.
RCP is multiple polls averaged (and their PA average poll includes the NYT poll)
So fucking what? The fact that every 4 years you jack off over Trafalgar with the stamina and regularity of a teenager given internet access and a credit card for the first time is the issue here.
And in 2016 had you done that you would have been quids in as Trafalgar was the only pollster who had Trump winning the EC
Like clockwork. Did you go back to 2020 and copy/paste that irrelevance from your posts then? Because you made the same point again and again. I gave the same reply again and again. And ultimately was right. I’m not doing this pointless dance over and over again.
Or look at RCP then if you want to ignore Trafalgar.
The operative words being "final" and "current" you moron. The final projection is dated November 2020. We're not even in mid-August yet.
Oh, what's the fucking point? I've been on here five and a half years and had such joy as you explaining to me what the Oxford Union is. Debating you is like trying to teach a goldfish algebra—you can make the effort, but at the end of the day, you’re just yelling at a fish. Talking to you is a waste of breath because no matter how much logic you throw at you, it’s like pouring 5* petrol into a car that’s missing an engine.
If, by some miracle you understand what people on here are saying, you're not going to admit it. You twist their words, dodge the facts, and somehow, they'll end up looking like the idiot for engaging in the first place. It’s a lose-lose scenario.
So, why bother? I could spend that time doing something more productive—like rearranging my sock drawer or chiselling my own Channel Tunnel. At least with them I know I'm making making progress. So go to bed. Seriously, your presence is as useful and welcome as a screen door on a submarine
Yes because your left liberalism is always right of course and must never be counted with any other argument
Arguments are fine. Invincible ignorance is something else.
So apparently even suggesting Harris is not going to win a landslide now it seems is beyond the pale from some on this site.
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
I admire your loyalty to Trump but it is over for him and Harris wil be the next POTUS
Astonishing levels of confidence BigG!!!
Not really
I am very confident that Harris not only has the momentum but Trump has nothing to offer
Indeed I expect it to be similar to our GE where Starmer won with some ease
Starmer had double digit poll leads consistently
At times the saying 'none so blind as those who cannot see' was invented for you
I always thought the expression was: "There are none so blind as those that will not see", i.e. those who refuse to see the evidence in front of them.
Which describes HYUFD perfectly in this case.
Singer Ray Stevens is given credit for writing the phrase 'there is none so blind as he who will not see ' in a line from the song 'everything is beautiful' which was released in 1970
British Author, John Heywood, in 1546 wrote:
'There are none so blind as those who will not see'
I started early and today I have bet £50 on Kamala Harris for POTUS at 11/10 from one of Ladbrokes and Coral. If she wins my returns will be £105, a profit of £55. If she loses my returns will be 0, a loss will be £50
It's too early and I should have waited until the Veep pick. But it was a nice warm Saturday and I thought: "why not". We will find out in 94 days...
#bigboypants
Following my post of https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/4920016/#Comment_4920016 above, I have today August 10th placed another bet, this time of £60 on Kamala Harris for POTUS at 5/6 from Betfred. If she wins my returns will be £110, a profit of £50. If she loses my returns will be £0, a loss will be £60.
My total stakes from the two bets is £110. If she wins I get £215, a profit of £105. If she loses I get £0, a loss of £110.
Both bets were proof-of-concept, as it was the first time I used the betting shop's automatic betting machines, which require no human interaction. This is ideal for me, as it retains the advantages of in-shop betting (travel time imposing a period of reflection) without the disadvantages (having to talk to a person).
I will now pause for a bit and Do The Research as to whether it is worth me shovelling money in. I will let you know what happens.
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
It doesn’t try to explain anything. It just points out your inexplicable hard on for this one pollster. It’s for you and your therapist to explain.
RCP is multiple polls averaged (and their PA average poll includes the NYT poll)
So fucking what? The fact that every 4 years you jack off over Trafalgar with the stamina and regularity of a teenager given internet access and a credit card for the first time is the issue here.
And in 2016 had you done that you would have been quids in as Trafalgar was the only pollster who had Trump winning the EC
Like clockwork. Did you go back to 2020 and copy/paste that irrelevance from your posts then? Because you made the same point again and again. I gave the same reply again and again. And ultimately was right. I’m not doing this pointless dance over and over again.
Or look at RCP then if you want to ignore Trafalgar.
The operative words being "final" and "current" you moron. The final projection is dated November 2020. We're not even in mid-August yet.
Oh, what's the fucking point? I've been on here five and a half years and had such joy as you explaining to me what the Oxford Union is. Debating you is like trying to teach a goldfish algebra—you can make the effort, but at the end of the day, you’re just yelling at a fish. Talking to you is a waste of breath because no matter how much logic you throw at you, it’s like pouring 5* petrol into a car that’s missing an engine.
If, by some miracle you understand what people on here are saying, you're not going to admit it. You twist their words, dodge the facts, and somehow, they'll end up looking like the idiot for engaging in the first place. It’s a lose-lose scenario.
So, why bother? I could spend that time doing something more productive—like rearranging my sock drawer or chiselling my own Channel Tunnel. At least with them I know I'm making making progress. So go to bed. Seriously, your presence is as useful and welcome as a screen door on a submarine
Yes because your left liberalism is always right of course and must never be counted with any other argument
Arguments are fine. Invincible ignorance is something else.
So apparently even suggesting Harris is not going to win a landslide now it seems is beyond the pale from some on this site.
Insisting that the RCP polling average means anything is beyond the pale. Don’t put words into our mouths.
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
I admire your loyalty to Trump but it is over for him and Harris wil be the next POTUS
Astonishing levels of confidence BigG!!!
Not really
I am very confident that Harris not only has the momentum but Trump has nothing to offer
Indeed I expect it to be similar to our GE where Starmer won with some ease
Starmer had double digit poll leads consistently
At times the saying 'none so blind as those who cannot see' was invented for you
I always thought the expression was: "There are none so blind as those that will not see", i.e. those who refuse to see the evidence in front of them.
Which describes HYUFD perfectly in this case.
Or almost everyone else on this blog for whom Harris is apparently heading for the biggest Democratic landslide since LBJ beat Goldwater rather than what actually looks set to be the tightest presidential election since 2000 or 2004
The Trump campaign has a base vote that is solid but which they have not shown the ability or even the inclination to try to grow. To win they need people to have a serious problem with the rival candidate. They got that with Clinton in 2016 and would have had it with Biden in 2024. Otherwise they need a third party and the most prominent third-party candidate is taking votes from Trump and not from Harris.
Is the result certain? No. Trump could win. However, while his chances might fairly be put at 45% at the moment they are falling by the day. The mistakes and the stupidities are being noticed and are being amplified. The selection of Vance will impact very few votes but the decision-making behind it is another matter.
Harris is ahead now and she has the momentum and the enthusiasm. Her campaign looks professional and she seems to be listening to good advice. Her selection of V-P was a solid one - possibly rather better than that.
The most important sign of how things are going. Trump is seriously rattled and he is suddenly desperate for a debate. That means he knows that he is behind.
Yet on the actual polling Trump is polling better than he was in 2016 nationally and state wide and significantly better than he was in 2020. I am afraid Leon is looking increasingly right, what used to be a great site for all views is increasingly becoming a site where anyone with a view to the right of the LDs/ left of the Tories is an instant target of a pile on for being unacceptable to the agreed consensus.
If this site is going to remain viable it has to be more tolerant of all views and forecasts on politics at home and abroad, racism and hate filled rhetoric is not acceptable, having a view is even if not mainstream on here
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
I admire your loyalty to Trump but it is over for him and Harris wil be the next POTUS
Astonishing levels of confidence BigG!!!
Not really
I am very confident that Harris not only has the momentum but Trump has nothing to offer
Indeed I expect it to be similar to our GE where Starmer won with some ease
Starmer had double digit poll leads consistently
At times the saying 'none so blind as those who cannot see' was invented for you
I always thought the expression was: "There are none so blind as those that will not see", i.e. those who refuse to see the evidence in front of them.
Which describes HYUFD perfectly in this case.
Singer Ray Stevens is given credit for writing the phrase 'there is none so blind as he who will not see ' in a line from the song 'everything is beautiful' which was released in 1970
British Author, John Heywood, in 1546 wrote:
'There are none so blind as those who will not see'
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
It doesn’t try to explain anything. It just points out your inexplicable hard on for this one pollster. It’s for you and your therapist to explain.
RCP is multiple polls averaged (and their PA average poll includes the NYT poll)
So fucking what? The fact that every 4 years you jack off over Trafalgar with the stamina and regularity of a teenager given internet access and a credit card for the first time is the issue here.
And in 2016 had you done that you would have been quids in as Trafalgar was the only pollster who had Trump winning the EC
Like clockwork. Did you go back to 2020 and copy/paste that irrelevance from your posts then? Because you made the same point again and again. I gave the same reply again and again. And ultimately was right. I’m not doing this pointless dance over and over again.
Or look at RCP then if you want to ignore Trafalgar.
The operative words being "final" and "current" you moron. The final projection is dated November 2020. We're not even in mid-August yet.
Oh, what's the fucking point? I've been on here five and a half years and had such joy as you explaining to me what the Oxford Union is. Debating you is like trying to teach a goldfish algebra—you can make the effort, but at the end of the day, you’re just yelling at a fish. Talking to you is a waste of breath because no matter how much logic you throw at you, it’s like pouring 5* petrol into a car that’s missing an engine.
If, by some miracle you understand what people on here are saying, you're not going to admit it. You twist their words, dodge the facts, and somehow, they'll end up looking like the idiot for engaging in the first place. It’s a lose-lose scenario.
So, why bother? I could spend that time doing something more productive—like rearranging my sock drawer or chiselling my own Channel Tunnel. At least with them I know I'm making making progress. So go to bed. Seriously, your presence is as useful and welcome as a screen door on a submarine
Yes because your left liberalism is always right of course and must never be counted with any other argument
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
It doesn’t try to explain anything. It just points out your inexplicable hard on for this one pollster. It’s for you and your therapist to explain.
RCP is multiple polls averaged (and their PA average poll includes the NYT poll)
So fucking what? The fact that every 4 years you jack off over Trafalgar with the stamina and regularity of a teenager given internet access and a credit card for the first time is the issue here.
And in 2016 had you done that you would have been quids in as Trafalgar was the only pollster who had Trump winning the EC
Like clockwork. Did you go back to 2020 and copy/paste that irrelevance from your posts then? Because you made the same point again and again. I gave the same reply again and again. And ultimately was right. I’m not doing this pointless dance over and over again.
Or look at RCP then if you want to ignore Trafalgar.
The operative words being "final" and "current" you moron. The final projection is dated November 2020. We're not even in mid-August yet.
Oh, what's the fucking point? I've been on here five and a half years and had such joy as you explaining to me what the Oxford Union is. Debating you is like trying to teach a goldfish algebra—you can make the effort, but at the end of the day, you’re just yelling at a fish. Talking to you is a waste of breath because no matter how much logic you throw at you, it’s like pouring 5* petrol into a car that’s missing an engine.
If, by some miracle you understand what people on here are saying, you're not going to admit it. You twist their words, dodge the facts, and somehow, they'll end up looking like the idiot for engaging in the first place. It’s a lose-lose scenario.
So, why bother? I could spend that time doing something more productive—like rearranging my sock drawer or chiselling my own Channel Tunnel. At least with them I know I'm making making progress. So go to bed. Seriously, your presence is as useful and welcome as a screen door on a submarine
Yes because your left liberalism is always right of course and must never be counted with any other argument
Arguments are fine. Invincible ignorance is something else.
So apparently even suggesting Harris is not going to win a landslide now it seems is beyond the pale from some on this site.
No, I think most of us recognise it as a toss up, hence that is what the odds show, but all the momentum is for Harris/Walz.
Though for people who care about democracy that is massive progress on a month ago.
There is nobody on this forum who does not believe it was leaked from the lab. Nobody. There are people who believe it, and people who believe it's their duty to argue against it.
Wait: you believe all the posters who suggest zoonotic origins actually know it came from the lab and are just arguing against it because they believe it is their duty to keep this untruth alive?
That is truly bonkers.
I think a lab leak is the most likely hypothesis, because it is an awfully big coincidence that Covid appeared in the same city as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
But SARS and MERS and AIDS and a bunch of other diseases made the animal-to-man jump without going via a lab. It's possible, if unlikely, that a decade from now, we discover a cave of bats 60 miles from Wuhan where CV19 is commonly carried; in which case, we'll need to revisit this.
Because absent a direct admission from someone at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that's where we are: there's strong circumstantial evidence for it being a lab leak, but there's no smoking gun.
So your contention is bizarre. Do you really assume that your fellow men just go around lying to each other all the time because...? Do you go around lying to people all the time just because...? If not, why do you assume that other people do?
Deep down we all know it is highly likely it came from the lab. But for some it is an article of faith that it didn’t. And faith is the best metaphor here
He didn't say "likely", he said "know".
Yes. And I note that whilst you offer the opinion in measured terms, you also believe it. You would have to be a first rate idiot not to believe it. And nobody here is a first rate idiot.
There's a very important difference between "thinking likely" (even very likely) and "knowing".
I know the earth is roughly cylindrical and that it orbits the Sun. It seems staggeringly unlikely that that belief could turn out to be wrong.
I think it is highly likely that Covid was released as a result of a lab leak of some kind (and I draw the definition of lab leak fairly widely). But if we were to discover a colony of bats 70 miles from Wuhan that were all carrying Covid-19 and who appear to have lived with it for a long time, we would clearly need to adjust the probability for a lab leak rather than a zoonotic event way down. Would it surprise me if such a colony was found? I think it unlikely, but not vanishingly so.
"Knowing" is more than even "reasonable doubt". It means, essentially, certainty. And I'm not certain, I merely think a lab leak fits the current facts better than an entirely zoonotic explanation.
I didn't say we were 100% certain - though it's as certain as many other accepted facts in life. I said everybody here believes it. Because we all do.
I don't believe or disbelieve. I really don't care one way or the other. Lab Leak is entirely plausible but there just isn't as far as I know the evidence right now to support it. i'm happy to call it for zoonosis because there is, to me, very compelling evidence on the early lineages as well as other evidence in that direction. I think it's reasonable to hold off judgement for now due to unknowns.
It's all a matter of interpretation. I don't force my interpretation on anyone else but I would gently suggest those who say they know, don't know what they claim to know.
Nothing in life is entirely certain, but the human brain takes certain things for granted. People who have been told that there are two opposing theories explaining the origin of Covid-19, leaking from a lab 300m away from the first outbreak, which was studying how to make bat viruses deadlier and more transmissible, or an accident of evolution in a wet market, coincidentally doing exactly the same work as the lab, in a freak accident. We all know which one we believe. There are none of us on here stupid enough to believe the second explanation. It's a silly pretence.
As a bit of a thought experiment, triggered by your comment “people who have been told there are two opposing theories”, what might a third origin theory be?
All I can think of are:
- deliberate act of bio-terrorism - Pre-existing human coronavirus that mutated without help from animals - It was actually a lab leak somewhere else. By sheer coincidence the first infected person travelled to Wuhan and spread it there
For what it’s worth I’ve always thought it was a lab leak. Occam’s razor and all that.
Previous outbreaks of similar diseases came from animals
As, probably, did this. But they may have been animals in a lab in Wuhan.
Only a few years ago we had a foot and mouth epidemic caused by a lab leak in Porton Down. That, and other examples, plus the coincidence the outbreak started in that one particular city, plus the very powerful factors weighing against any likelihood of honesty by the CCP if this were a leak.
I’m not convinced it was a leak, what would I know, but I’m certainly not convinced it was zoonotic.
There have been leaks of known diseases, as with foot and mouth, but there are no prior cases of a novel disease appearing through a lab leak.
China put its coronavirus labs mostly in the areas where outbreaks were more likely to start. That’s not coincidence: that’s good prediction!
See this is where you are talking absolute and desparate bollocks, there are wet markets all over china. The idea they thought wuhan....a 1000 miles or more from where these bats actually live was a good prediction.....yeah right
There are wet markets all over China, but then there are coronavirus research labs all over China, dozens of them. They built tons after SARS.
We don’t know precisely what animal SARS-CoV-2 came from. It’s probably from a bat, but there may have been an intermediate animal. However, there are certainly plenty of bats and other animals in and around Wuhan carrying coronaviruses: https://academic.oup.com/ve/article/8/1/veac046/6601809 In that study, they found bats near Wuhan with viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2, although not directly ancestral to it.
By the way, no way am I leaving Twitter. This place is like a lovely pub, that got taken over by some soulless pub company and with a full on wazzock as a new landlord. But I was here first and I’m staying. https://x.com/timfarron/status/1822205555005436192
A hidden tracking tool in the website for Reform UK collected private browsing data about potentially millions of people, often without consent, and shared it with Facebook for use in targeted advertising.
An Observer investigation has found that people visiting the website for Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration party had details of their activity captured by a digital surveillance tool known as a Meta pixel.
The tracker – active in the run-up to the election, and as recently as last week – was triggered automatically on loading the Reform site, regardless of whether the person gave consent. It then sent a package of data to Facebook’s parent company, Meta, with details of which webpages had been viewed, when, and the buttons that were clicked.
In some cases, this included sensitive information that could reveal a person’s political beliefs, such as details of those accessing forms to become Reform UK members, linked to a unique Facebook user ID.
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
It doesn’t try to explain anything. It just points out your inexplicable hard on for this one pollster. It’s for you and your therapist to explain.
RCP is multiple polls averaged (and their PA average poll includes the NYT poll)
So fucking what? The fact that every 4 years you jack off over Trafalgar with the stamina and regularity of a teenager given internet access and a credit card for the first time is the issue here.
And in 2016 had you done that you would have been quids in as Trafalgar was the only pollster who had Trump winning the EC
Like clockwork. Did you go back to 2020 and copy/paste that irrelevance from your posts then? Because you made the same point again and again. I gave the same reply again and again. And ultimately was right. I’m not doing this pointless dance over and over again.
Or look at RCP then if you want to ignore Trafalgar.
The operative words being "final" and "current" you moron. The final projection is dated November 2020. We're not even in mid-August yet.
Oh, what's the fucking point? I've been on here five and a half years and had such joy as you explaining to me what the Oxford Union is. Debating you is like trying to teach a goldfish algebra—you can make the effort, but at the end of the day, you’re just yelling at a fish. Talking to you is a waste of breath because no matter how much logic you throw at you, it’s like pouring 5* petrol into a car that’s missing an engine.
If, by some miracle you understand what people on here are saying, you're not going to admit it. You twist their words, dodge the facts, and somehow, they'll end up looking like the idiot for engaging in the first place. It’s a lose-lose scenario.
So, why bother? I could spend that time doing something more productive—like rearranging my sock drawer or chiselling my own Channel Tunnel. At least with them I know I'm making making progress. So go to bed. Seriously, your presence is as useful and welcome as a screen door on a submarine
Yes because your left liberalism is always right of course and must never be counted with any other argument
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
It doesn’t try to explain anything. It just points out your inexplicable hard on for this one pollster. It’s for you and your therapist to explain.
RCP is multiple polls averaged (and their PA average poll includes the NYT poll)
So fucking what? The fact that every 4 years you jack off over Trafalgar with the stamina and regularity of a teenager given internet access and a credit card for the first time is the issue here.
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
It doesn’t try to explain anything. It just points out your inexplicable hard on for this one pollster. It’s for you and your therapist to explain.
RCP is multiple polls averaged (and their PA average poll includes the NYT poll)
So fucking what? The fact that every 4 years you jack off over Trafalgar with the stamina and regularity of a teenager given internet access and a credit card for the first time is the issue here.
And in 2016 had you done that you would have been quids in as Trafalgar was the only pollster who had Trump winning the EC
Like clockwork. Did you go back to 2020 and copy/paste that irrelevance from your posts then? Because you made the same point again and again. I gave the same reply again and again. And ultimately was right. I’m not doing this pointless dance over and over again.
Or look at RCP then if you want to ignore Trafalgar.
The operative words being "final" and "current" you moron. The final projection is dated November 2020. We're not even in mid-August yet.
Oh, what's the fucking point? I've been on here five and a half years and had such joy as you explaining to me what the Oxford Union is. Debating you is like trying to teach a goldfish algebra—you can make the effort, but at the end of the day, you’re just yelling at a fish. Talking to you is a waste of breath because no matter how much logic you throw at you, it’s like pouring 5* petrol into a car that’s missing an engine.
If, by some miracle you understand what people on here are saying, you're not going to admit it. You twist their words, dodge the facts, and somehow, they'll end up looking like the idiot for engaging in the first place. It’s a lose-lose scenario.
So, why bother? I could spend that time doing something more productive—like rearranging my sock drawer or chiselling my own Channel Tunnel. At least with them I know I'm making making progress. So go to bed. Seriously, your presence is as useful and welcome as a screen door on a submarine
Yes because your left liberalism is always right of course and must never be counted with any other argument
Arguments are fine. Invincible ignorance is something else.
So apparently even suggesting Harris is not going to win a landslide now it seems is beyond the pale from some on this site.
I’m very confident that either Harris or Trump will win. I am dubious of any certainty beyond that.
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
I admire your loyalty to Trump but it is over for him and Harris wil be the next POTUS
Astonishing levels of confidence BigG!!!
Not really
I am very confident that Harris not only has the momentum but Trump has nothing to offer
Indeed I expect it to be similar to our GE where Starmer won with some ease
Starmer had double digit poll leads consistently
At times the saying 'none so blind as those who cannot see' was invented for you
I always thought the expression was: "There are none so blind as those that will not see", i.e. those who refuse to see the evidence in front of them.
Which describes HYUFD perfectly in this case.
Singer Ray Stevens is given credit for writing the phrase 'there is none so blind as he who will not see ' in a line from the song 'everything is beautiful' which was released in 1970
British Author, John Heywood, in 1546 wrote:
'There are none so blind as those who will not see'
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
I admire your loyalty to Trump but it is over for him and Harris wil be the next POTUS
Astonishing levels of confidence BigG!!!
Not really
I am very confident that Harris not only has the momentum but Trump has nothing to offer
Indeed I expect it to be similar to our GE where Starmer won with some ease
Starmer had double digit poll leads consistently
At times the saying 'none so blind as those who cannot see' was invented for you
I always thought the expression was: "There are none so blind as those that will not see", i.e. those who refuse to see the evidence in front of them.
Which describes HYUFD perfectly in this case.
Or almost everyone else on this blog for whom Harris is apparently heading for the biggest Democratic landslide since LBJ beat Goldwater rather than what actually looks set to be the tightest presidential election since 2000 or 2004
The Trump campaign has a base vote that is solid but which they have not shown the ability or even the inclination to try to grow. To win they need people to have a serious problem with the rival candidate. They got that with Clinton in 2016 and would have had it with Biden in 2024. Otherwise they need a third party and the most prominent third-party candidate is taking votes from Trump and not from Harris.
Is the result certain? No. Trump could win. However, while his chances might fairly be put at 45% at the moment they are falling by the day. The mistakes and the stupidities are being noticed and are being amplified. The selection of Vance will impact very few votes but the decision-making behind it is another matter.
Harris is ahead now and she has the momentum and the enthusiasm. Her campaign looks professional and she seems to be listening to good advice. Her selection of V-P was a solid one - possibly rather better than that.
The most important sign of how things are going. Trump is seriously rattled and he is suddenly desperate for a debate. That means he knows that he is behind.
I would say that things are on a knife edge.
The things you mention are all positives (for the Harris/Walz ticket) and possibles. They haven't turned into actualities. Yet.
So far Harris has done very well - I think she has maximised the possible value so far, so to speak.
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
I admire your loyalty to Trump but it is over for him and Harris wil be the next POTUS
Astonishing levels of confidence BigG!!!
Not really
I am very confident that Harris not only has the momentum but Trump has nothing to offer
Indeed I expect it to be similar to our GE where Starmer won with some ease
Starmer had double digit poll leads consistently
At times the saying 'none so blind as those who cannot see' was invented for you
I always thought the expression was: "There are none so blind as those that will not see", i.e. those who refuse to see the evidence in front of them.
Which describes HYUFD perfectly in this case.
Or almost everyone else on this blog for whom Harris is apparently heading for the biggest Democratic landslide since LBJ beat Goldwater rather than what actually looks set to be the tightest presidential election since 2000 or 2004
The Trump campaign has a base vote that is solid but which they have not shown the ability or even the inclination to try to grow. To win they need people to have a serious problem with the rival candidate. They got that with Clinton in 2016 and would have had it with Biden in 2024. Otherwise they need a third party and the most prominent third-party candidate is taking votes from Trump and not from Harris.
Is the result certain? No. Trump could win. However, while his chances might fairly be put at 45% at the moment they are falling by the day. The mistakes and the stupidities are being noticed and are being amplified. The selection of Vance will impact very few votes but the decision-making behind it is another matter.
Harris is ahead now and she has the momentum and the enthusiasm. Her campaign looks professional and she seems to be listening to good advice. Her selection of V-P was a solid one - possibly rather better than that.
The most important sign of how things are going. Trump is seriously rattled and he is suddenly desperate for a debate. That means he knows that he is behind.
Yet on the actual polling Trump is polling better than he was in 2016 nationally and state wide and significantly better than he was in 2020
You are unfortunately very selective with the polling you chose to post. Now Cahally may wind up being right, but it will simply be the luck of pinning the tail on the donkey. Rasmussen too are Republican biased.
You seldom post anything implying Trump is behind. Although, you are not alone.
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
It doesn’t try to explain anything. It just points out your inexplicable hard on for this one pollster. It’s for you and your therapist to explain.
RCP is multiple polls averaged (and their PA average poll includes the NYT poll)
So fucking what? The fact that every 4 years you jack off over Trafalgar with the stamina and regularity of a teenager given internet access and a credit card for the first time is the issue here.
And in 2016 had you done that you would have been quids in as Trafalgar was the only pollster who had Trump winning the EC
Like clockwork. Did you go back to 2020 and copy/paste that irrelevance from your posts then? Because you made the same point again and again. I gave the same reply again and again. And ultimately was right. I’m not doing this pointless dance over and over again.
Or look at RCP then if you want to ignore Trafalgar.
The operative words being "final" and "current" you moron. The final projection is dated November 2020. We're not even in mid-August yet.
Oh, what's the fucking point? I've been on here five and a half years and had such joy as you explaining to me what the Oxford Union is. Debating you is like trying to teach a goldfish algebra—you can make the effort, but at the end of the day, you’re just yelling at a fish. Talking to you is a waste of breath because no matter how much logic you throw at you, it’s like pouring 5* petrol into a car that’s missing an engine.
If, by some miracle you understand what people on here are saying, you're not going to admit it. You twist their words, dodge the facts, and somehow, they'll end up looking like the idiot for engaging in the first place. It’s a lose-lose scenario.
So, why bother? I could spend that time doing something more productive—like rearranging my sock drawer or chiselling my own Channel Tunnel. At least with them I know I'm making making progress. So go to bed. Seriously, your presence is as useful and welcome as a screen door on a submarine
Yes because your left liberalism is always right of course and must never be counted with any other argument
Arguments are fine. Invincible ignorance is something else.
So apparently even suggesting Harris is not going to win a landslide now it seems is beyond the pale from some on this site.
I’m very confident that either Harris or Trump will win. I am dubious of any certainty beyond that.
There is a non-zero chance that either candidate doesn't make it to polling day. The actuarial tables suggest that Trump has a serious chance of not making it.
I am fairly confident that the next president will be either Harris, Walz, Trump or Vance.
Then again I am trying to find odds for a write in win by the Oldest Favourite
Abstract: How do dominant-group natives react to immigrants' political integration? We argue that ethnic minority immigrants winning political office makes natives feel threatened, triggering animosity. We test this dynamic across the 2010–2019 UK general elections, using hate crime police records, public opinion data, and text data from over 500,000 regional and local newspaper articles. While past work has not established a causal relationship between minorities' political power gains and dominant-group animosity, we identify natives' hostile reactions with a regression discontinuity design that leverages close election results between immigrant-origin ethnic minority and dominant-group candidates. We find that minority victories increase hate crimes by 67%, exclusionary attitudes by 66%, and negative media coverage of immigrant groups by 110%. Consistent with power threat and social identity theories, these findings demonstrate a strong and widespread negative reaction—encompassing a violence-prone fringe and the mass public—against ethnic minority immigrants' integration into majority settings.
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
It doesn’t try to explain anything. It just points out your inexplicable hard on for this one pollster. It’s for you and your therapist to explain.
RCP is multiple polls averaged (and their PA average poll includes the NYT poll)
So fucking what? The fact that every 4 years you jack off over Trafalgar with the stamina and regularity of a teenager given internet access and a credit card for the first time is the issue here.
And in 2016 had you done that you would have been quids in as Trafalgar was the only pollster who had Trump winning the EC
Like clockwork. Did you go back to 2020 and copy/paste that irrelevance from your posts then? Because you made the same point again and again. I gave the same reply again and again. And ultimately was right. I’m not doing this pointless dance over and over again.
Or look at RCP then if you want to ignore Trafalgar.
The operative words being "final" and "current" you moron. The final projection is dated November 2020. We're not even in mid-August yet.
Oh, what's the fucking point? I've been on here five and a half years and had such joy as you explaining to me what the Oxford Union is. Debating you is like trying to teach a goldfish algebra—you can make the effort, but at the end of the day, you’re just yelling at a fish. Talking to you is a waste of breath because no matter how much logic you throw at you, it’s like pouring 5* petrol into a car that’s missing an engine.
If, by some miracle you understand what people on here are saying, you're not going to admit it. You twist their words, dodge the facts, and somehow, they'll end up looking like the idiot for engaging in the first place. It’s a lose-lose scenario.
So, why bother? I could spend that time doing something more productive—like rearranging my sock drawer or chiselling my own Channel Tunnel. At least with them I know I'm making making progress. So go to bed. Seriously, your presence is as useful and welcome as a screen door on a submarine
Yes because your left liberalism is always right of course and must never be counted with any other argument
Genuine liberals will always see another’s point of view. Might not agree with it, but we always try to see it. Helps to understand.
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
I admire your loyalty to Trump but it is over for him and Harris wil be the next POTUS
Astonishing levels of confidence BigG!!!
Not really
I am very confident that Harris not only has the momentum but Trump has nothing to offer
Indeed I expect it to be similar to our GE where Starmer won with some ease
Starmer had double digit poll leads consistently
At times the saying 'none so blind as those who cannot see' was invented for you
I think Harris is a weaker candidate than Biden 2020 but, fortunately, Trump is considerably weaker than Trump 2020 too. Just don't think Americans want to go back in time which is all the 77 yr old Trump offers. It could well be a shellacking.
Yes the feeltone is forward with energy and hope vs angst and grievance and relitigating the past.
The NYT swing state polls are good for Harris but Insider Advantage (taken Tuesday - Thursday) is more mixed and Trafalgar (taken Tuesday-Thursday) has Trump ahead in 3 swing states.
It doesn’t try to explain anything. It just points out your inexplicable hard on for this one pollster. It’s for you and your therapist to explain.
RCP is multiple polls averaged (and their PA average poll includes the NYT poll)
So fucking what? The fact that every 4 years you jack off over Trafalgar with the stamina and regularity of a teenager given internet access and a credit card for the first time is the issue here.
And in 2016 had you done that you would have been quids in as Trafalgar was the only pollster who had Trump winning the EC
Like clockwork. Did you go back to 2020 and copy/paste that irrelevance from your posts then? Because you made the same point again and again. I gave the same reply again and again. And ultimately was right. I’m not doing this pointless dance over and over again.
Or look at RCP then if you want to ignore Trafalgar.
The operative words being "final" and "current" you moron. The final projection is dated November 2020. We're not even in mid-August yet.
Oh, what's the fucking point? I've been on here five and a half years and had such joy as you explaining to me what the Oxford Union is. Debating you is like trying to teach a goldfish algebra—you can make the effort, but at the end of the day, you’re just yelling at a fish. Talking to you is a waste of breath because no matter how much logic you throw at you, it’s like pouring 5* petrol into a car that’s missing an engine.
If, by some miracle you understand what people on here are saying, you're not going to admit it. You twist their words, dodge the facts, and somehow, they'll end up looking like the idiot for engaging in the first place. It’s a lose-lose scenario.
So, why bother? I could spend that time doing something more productive—like rearranging my sock drawer or chiselling my own Channel Tunnel. At least with them I know I'm making making progress. So go to bed. Seriously, your presence is as useful and welcome as a screen door on a submarine
Yes because your left liberalism is always right of course and must never be counted with any other argument
Arguments are fine. Invincible ignorance is something else.
So apparently even suggesting Harris is not going to win a landslide now it seems is beyond the pale from some on this site.
I’m very confident that either Harris or Trump will win. I am dubious of any certainty beyond that.
There is a non-zero chance that either candidate doesn't make it to polling day. The actuarial tables suggest that Trump has a serious chance of not making it.
I am fairly confident that the next president will be either Harris, Walz, Trump or Vance.
Then again I am trying to find odds for a write in win by the Oldest Favourite
The odds of Harris dying are low; Trump’s are higher. But if Trump dies, Vance is the candidate and I’m confident Harris beats him. And if Harris dies, the Dems having to move on to their third candidate looks bad, which helps Trump. So, yes, it’s not absolutely certain, but I’m very confident it’s Trump or Harris. 😃
I've gotten a number of DMs about Trump "freezing" last night in Montana from people who have seen a clip from the Fox News feed. But the C-SPAN feed makes clear that there was some sort of medical incident in the crowd. https://x.com/atrupar/status/1822347391405527161
Comments
Edit: the Cardington airship hangars nearby are a *generation* later than hte motor cars, maybe one and a half.
Possibly even accurate.
There are multiple Met Office weather stations not far from me - I really don't understand why it can actually be raining (and I assume picked up by their tech) and yet say 'sunny and dry!' on the forecast. I get predicting further into the future gets tricky, but 'now' and 'the past 30 minutes' I would assume was somewhat easier.
Bronze for GB through, after Femke Bol got the Dutch in to 2nd.
to get an annuity of 14k a year you need a pension pot of 300k (note non index linked) source https://www.legalandgeneral.com/retirement/pension-annuity/guides/how-much-does-an-annuity-cost/
To get to that someone needs now to have been earning that figure for last 40 years with a return on investments of 6%
source
https://monevator.com/compound-interest-calculator/
Now most people wont have been earning that consistently over the last 40 years
In 2020 their final EC projection was 319 Biden and 219 Trump. Very close to the 306 Biden and 232 Trump actual result, if anything fractionally overestimated Biden.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/2020_elections_electoral_college_map_no_toss_ups.html
Their current projection is 287 Trump and 251 Harris
https://www.realclearpolling.com/maps/president/2024/no-toss-up/electoral-college
They do though have the Democrats ahead in the House average
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/state-of-the-union/2024/generic-congressional-vote
When we were there the Welsh Highland was only just beginning - a few hundred yards of pretty manky track. But we had a nice wander along the old track bed for a bit before returning to our B&B opposite Harlech Castle - actually a restaurant with (then, anyway) hors d'ouevres served below a picture window opening onto Snowdon
https://www.google.com/maps/@52.8595921,-4.1076672,3a,59.2y,362.09h,92.93t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1slcKI5bVFqTvVlHxQUu2Z0w!2e0!6shttps://streetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com/v1/thumbnail?cb_client=maps_sv.tactile&w=900&h=600&pitch=-2.927583880891973&panoid=lcKI5bVFqTvVlHxQUu2Z0w&yaw=2.08857714174934!7i13312!8i6656?coh=205410&entry=ttu
But we did alkso stay in Bettws-y-Coed to see the Telford roads and bridge (and walk the pre-Telford road)and go to Conwy via Llandudno. Never did get to see the Great Orme or the Menai bridges, a treat for another time.
Didn’t Trump lose all of those? So we’d be very much not quids in?
Maybe that is why I am very relaxed about it
An Observer investigation has found that people visiting the website for Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration party had details of their activity captured by a digital surveillance tool known as a Meta pixel.
The tracker – active in the run-up to the election, and as recently as last week – was triggered automatically on loading the Reform site, regardless of whether the person gave consent. It then sent a package of data to Facebook’s parent company, Meta, with details of which webpages had been viewed, when, and the buttons that were clicked.
In some cases, this included sensitive information that could reveal a person’s political beliefs, such as details of those accessing forms to become Reform UK members, linked to a unique Facebook user ID.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/aug/10/reform-uk-tracked-private-user-information-without-consent
'Reform UK has claimed that it prioritises privacy and resists “surveillance”, pledging in its manifesto to create a British bill of rights that would protect people’s “freedoms”. It says: “Our data and privacy must be protected. Surveillance of the public must be limited and those monitoring us held to account.”
But the Observer’s testing, checked by independent experts, suggests a failure to follow the rules, with the Meta pixel extracting information before consent had been given, and even if the person clicked “deny”
Oh, what's the fucking point? I've been on here five and a half years and had such joy as you explaining to me what the Oxford Union is. Debating you is like trying to teach a goldfish algebra—you can make the effort, but at the end of the day, you’re just yelling at a fish. Talking to you is a waste of breath because no matter how much logic you throw at you, it’s like pouring 5* petrol into a car that’s missing an engine.
If, by some miracle you understand what people on here are saying, you're not going to admit it. You twist their words, dodge the facts, and somehow, they'll end up looking like the idiot for engaging in the first place. It’s a lose-lose scenario.
So, why bother? I could spend that time doing something more productive—like rearranging my sock drawer or chiselling my own Channel Tunnel. At least with them I know I'm making making progress. So go to bed. Seriously, your presence is as useful and welcome as a screen door on a submarine
Which describes HYUFD perfectly in this case.
Because predicting something requires not knowing what to cherry-pick in retrospect.
All we can conclude is your citation of Trafalgar has zero predictive power, yes? Otherwise you’d be able to rely on that for 2020.
Why should we believe that your citation of RCP from 2020 has any predictive power for 2024, when citing Trafalgar from 2016 had zero such predictive power for 2020?
[Continued on page 2, 3, 4, .....]
In no way is this use authorized, and Celine Dion does not endorse this or any similar use.
…And really, THAT song?
https://x.com/celinedion/status/1822347994223587506
Lordy, there’s a tape!
https://x.com/tribelaw/status/1822326202163446190
China put its coronavirus labs mostly in the areas where outbreaks were more likely to start. That’s not coincidence: that’s good prediction!
The WHR travels on the bridge over the River Glaslyn shared by traffic and near the centre of town, before meandering through Beddgelert and Waunfawr back to Caernarfon
They are both great experiences and if you get the opportunity I would recommend you enjoy at least one of them and maybe even stay in Llandudno and enjoy the Great Orme with its fantastic views, wonderful tramway, and the old copper mines
I sound like the head of tourism for Conwy and Gwynedd but we have a reason to promote North Wales - it is spectacularly beautiful
Invincible ignorance is something else.
GB currently third on total medals, yay!
https://x.com/cmclymer/status/1822278835032748109
If Trafalgar even do polls, that is.
https://x.com/pattonoswalt/status/1822079641705943549
https://x.com/LePapillonBlu2/status/1822284598077784094
Is the result certain? No. Trump could win. However, while his chances might fairly be put at 45% at the moment they are falling by the day. The mistakes and the stupidities are being noticed and are being amplified. The selection of Vance will impact very few votes but the decision-making behind it is another matter.
Harris is ahead now and she has the momentum and the enthusiasm. Her campaign looks professional and she seems to be listening to good advice. Her selection of V-P was a solid one - possibly rather better than that.
The most important sign of how things are going. Trump is seriously rattled and he is suddenly desperate for a debate. That means he knows that he is behind.
British Author, John Heywood, in 1546 wrote:
'There are none so blind as those who will not see'
My total stakes from the two bets is £110. If she wins I get £215, a profit of £105. If she loses I get £0, a loss of £110.
Both bets were proof-of-concept, as it was the first time I used the betting shop's automatic betting machines, which require no human interaction. This is ideal for me, as it retains the advantages of in-shop betting (travel time imposing a period of reflection) without the disadvantages (having to talk to a person).
I will now pause for a bit and Do The Research as to whether it is worth me shovelling money in. I will let you know what happens.
#bigboypants
Don’t put words into our mouths.
* I am joking!
If this site is going to remain viable it has to be more tolerant of all views and forecasts on politics at home and abroad, racism and hate filled rhetoric is not acceptable, having a view is even if not mainstream on here
Though for people who care about democracy that is massive progress on a month ago.
We don’t know precisely what animal SARS-CoV-2 came from. It’s probably from a bat, but there may have been an intermediate animal. However, there are certainly plenty of bats and other animals in and around Wuhan carrying coronaviruses: https://academic.oup.com/ve/article/8/1/veac046/6601809 In that study, they found bats near Wuhan with viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2, although not directly ancestral to it.
He did really well but it's the story of our Games
Just couldn't close out the gold 😡
By the way, no way am I leaving Twitter. This place is like a lovely pub, that got taken over by some soulless pub company and with a full on wazzock as a new landlord. But I was here first and I’m staying.
https://x.com/timfarron/status/1822205555005436192
He’ll be back next time.
U ok, hun?
The Mississippi Squirel Revival - Ray Stevens
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K16fG1sDagU
The things you mention are all positives (for the Harris/Walz ticket) and possibles. They haven't turned into actualities. Yet.
So far Harris has done very well - I think she has maximised the possible value so far, so to speak.
But the race is still very close and very open.
You seldom post anything implying Trump is behind. Although, you are not alone.
I am fairly confident that the next president will be either Harris, Walz, Trump or Vance.
Then again I am trying to find odds for a write in win by the Oldest Favourite
"Mr. Biden’s presidency has some ominous echoes of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s later years in office..."
https://x.com/RebeccaSolnit/status/1822026687909097811
We have been cheated out of a hatful of medals throughout the fortnight.
https://x.com/politico/status/1822356822595883100
Abstract: How do dominant-group natives react to immigrants' political integration? We argue that ethnic minority immigrants winning political office makes natives feel threatened, triggering animosity. We test this dynamic across the 2010–2019 UK general elections, using hate crime police records, public opinion data, and text data from over 500,000 regional and local newspaper articles. While past work has not established a causal relationship between minorities' political power gains and dominant-group animosity, we identify natives' hostile reactions with a regression discontinuity design that leverages close election results between immigrant-origin ethnic minority and dominant-group candidates. We find that minority victories increase hate crimes by 67%, exclusionary attitudes by 66%, and negative media coverage of immigrant groups by 110%. Consistent with power threat and social identity theories, these findings demonstrate a strong and widespread negative reaction—encompassing a violence-prone fringe and the mass public—against ethnic minority immigrants' integration into majority settings.
Trump isn't quite toast but he's in big trouble.
I've gotten a number of DMs about Trump "freezing" last night in Montana from people who have seen a clip from the Fox News feed. But the C-SPAN feed makes clear that there was some sort of medical incident in the crowd.
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1822347391405527161