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A dangerously illiberal idea – politicalbetting.com
A dangerously illiberal idea – politicalbetting.com
Should the U.K. ban polling for a period before an election? Other countries do — and top Tory & Labour strategists both see the case for it. Latest story from my book Landslide with @REWearmouth here https://t.co/1P1fiTS4RK
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So we need to ban voting. To protect democracy.
We won't be taking punts any more if polling is banned.
And Ford's to cut 4,000 jobs over 3 years, 800 in UK
#New 2028 Dem primary poll
Kamala Harris - 43%
Pete Buttigieg - 9%
Gavin Newsom - 8%
Tim walz - 7%
Josh Shapiro - 5%
Ocasio-Cortez - 4%
"Am I so out of touch? No, it's the electorate who are wrong!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYAuR5bkIlQ
I'd probably rank the recent Dem candidates as follows:
08 Obama
12 Obama
20 Biden
16 Clinton
24 Harris
24 Biden
On Ukraine:
- Neither Russia, nor Ukraine has an unlimited supply of soldiers. As always, some people seem to note one side's losses without noting the other's.
- Like the First World War, losses in offensive operations have been utterly horrendous. Casualty ratios of 6-1 are the norm here. This makes a successful Ukrainian offensive exceptionally difficult, but it also largely removes Russia's population advantage as they will use up at least as high a % of the population as Ukraine if they're attacking.
- Defenders will always have more people who will fight. If London was under attack by the Russians, every man, woman and child (except perhaps Malc) would grab arms to defend it. It's much harder for the invader.
- Putin has been much better at clamping down on internal dissent than I would have expected. Russian losses have been something like 700-750,000 dead and wounded, which is 50x higher than Afghanistan. Given how few young people there are in Russia, I would have expected mass demonstrations from mothers, but that's simply not happened.
- Early on in the conflict, the impact on the Russian economy was relatively modest. That is not the case any more. Inflation has started rising, with the price of vegetables and onions soaring (+70% this year) due to a lack of workers on farms (because they've all been shipped off to Ukraine).
- I've been surprised by the lack of trouble in other part's of Russia's empire. I would have expected the Chechens to kick off, simply because troops from Moscow can't come running any more.
- Can North Korea make a difference? Well, there are lots of North Koreans, but they are likely to be extremely poor and how well equipped will they be?
https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-war-latest-putin-trump-zelenskyy-live-sky-news-12541713
But these proposals are out of a mindset from pre-social media. I know other countries have these rules. I doubt they're very enforceable either.
The Democrats - as Nate Silver noted in his post election write-up - have a pretty strong slate of new, youngish popular moderates, with people like Jon Ossoff and Andy Bashear.
You just don't tend to see them, because Clinton's generation has been at the fore for so long.
***Innocent Face***
But then again, the Republicans have put up some pretty awful candidates over the years too.
Year,Democrats,Republicans
1972,29173222,47168710
1976,40831881,39148634
1980,35480115,43903230
1984,37577352,54455472
1988,41809074,48886097
1992,44909806,39104550
1996,47402357,39198755
2000,50999897,50456002
2004,59028444,62040610
2008,69498516,59948323
2012,65915795,60933504
2016,65853514,62984828
2020,81283501,74223975
2024,71900000,77200000
2024 is estimated, of course.
The west's policy of slow timing weapons deliveries has cost Ukraine a serious amount of both people and territory. Assuming that Trump turns off the tap completely, which seems likely, they probably have sufficient resources to survive next year. But it gets pretty uncertain beyond that.
Or have any idea what it means?
I hope it doesn't mean that Dale Vince gets to cover 10% of farmland with solar panels, to make our food "sustainable"
Half an hour yet, at least
Clinton was woeful
The gap is nearer 2.5 million now.
74,232,401 votes Harris 24
76,789,287 votes Trump 24
They cut HS2 for no reason other than spite.
Are you going to post this at 4pm every day?
BREAKING: The UK will scrap five warships, dozens of military helicopters and a fleet of drones to save money despite growing threats from Russia and a war raging in Europe.
John Healey, the defence secretary, announced the dramatic move in parliament on Wednesday, saying it would save up to half a billion pounds over the next five years. The defence secretary described the equipment being axed as “outdated” and said the “common sense” decision to retire them was long overdue.
He signalled the decision was part of a plan to restructure and modernise the armed forces, which have already been significantly reduced in size following decades of cost-saving cuts, with new capabilities due to come on line to replace the gaps.
Guaranteed to be politically popular with no pushback whatsoever. /ahem/.
(It probably is the right thing to do economically - if you’re going to have CGT & IHT then really what you’ve done is implement a very lumpy wealth tax.)
It doesn't bother me excessively, although it's not my preference: I view it as a quid pro quo for the very long summer evenings we get in May, June and July.
Or rather, they've taxed the parts of employment and education that they can't control
They've kind of helped the people earning minimum wage, but they've screwed the people (like me) earning a bit over it, and completely completely shafted the people employing us
The reason that they've only "kind of helped" the people earning minimum wage is that many of those jobs will inevitably be lost
The Solstice is just the day on which the combination of the two gives the shortest day
The real waste was the waste of building this expensive half, then deciding to ditch the cheap half that actually made the whole thing worthwhile. Thanks to Sunak we’ve built a very expensive railway to no-where that achieves nothing.
Anyway, I quite like winter. An decent walk, finishing in the gloaming, followed by fireside tales. None of this 40C nonsense.
Because it amuses me, the inane and pointless repetition
THAT SAID, there is a tiny tiny chance I might not be in the UK in Jan and Feb, so you'll be spared at that point
Was HS2 a waste. No.
And he's still on here to argue with tim.
Your daily reminder that we are spending £3.5 BILLION, yearly, just to house asylum seekers in hotels and make sure they have nice private health care and Egyptian cotton pillowslips, and this bill rises every week
She didn't even touch the crucial States and called half of her opponents deplorable.
Very arrogant.
& the asylum backlog is the fault of the last government. Does anyone have any current figures? Is it going up or down?