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History today – politicalbetting.com
History today – politicalbetting.com
As 2025 approaches, we asked the public to tell us in their own words what has been the single most significant historical event to have occurred since 1 January 20001. Covid: 26%2. 9/11: 24%3. Queen dying: 11%4. Ukraine war: 7%5. Brexit: 5%https://t.co/XNYRKP1Xym pic.twitter.com/vG9aLJCY2B
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Slava Ukraini 🇺🇦
Quite an important piece from the BBC, about Russia murdering ("executing") Ukrainian POWs.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c7ve11lr247o
Anyone who follows knows the story, but it's good to see some more generally prominent coverage.
https://x.com/BristOliver/status/1870606580695339371
https://youtu.be/TxnmMl7-k7E?si=LeTLzXHPnBvAiXZY
The queen's death the most significant event of the past 24 years - is ludicrous.
One good quote from last night:
Think for how many years British boxing fans talked about Joshua v Fury as the dream fight, well guess who beat both of them - twice.
Trump to reverse decision to allow Ukraine to use long-range missiles against Russia.
Nothing has more cemented the Ukranians national identity and view that they are not Russians, and that their future lies with the rest of Europe more than the actions of the invaders.
The economic calamity of 2008 has been known by various names - the credit crunch, the subprime crisis, the very anodyne and non-specific "great financial crash". No single name has stuck, and so the specific event slips from the collective consciousness, although I agree with TSE on its paramount importance.
(He says, typing on his smartphone...)
Betting PostF1: just had a small sum on Lawson, boosted each way on Ladbrokes at 29 to win in Australia.
The car matters most. In the first five races of 2024 Perez was 2nd three times and 3rd once. Yes, Australia was their iffy track, but that was a bit weird (2023 Singapore was the same and in 2024 Verstappen did perfectly well, finishing 2nd to Norris there).
9/11 was certainly the most significant day of my life. I was having coffee in the Dirty Shirt Mess somewhere off the coast of India when all of a sudden all of the dept. heads disappeared into the carrier's CIC and didn't come out. Our boss was actually in the air at the time. He landed, went into the CIC still wearing full survival rig without saying anything. The tension was phenomenal. I can still remember every detail of that day like it was yesterday.
Covid, was incidental in comparison. I did loads of DIY and ignored all of the rapidly changing and ultimately stupid rules.
The thing I remember is how very different the world was. Cellphones had no internet coverage, so no tw@tter to see video clips etc, they barely worked for phone calls out in rural America. We heard on the radio planes had hit the twin towers but very confused picture. It was hours before we stopped at a bar / restaurant and were ushered in to watch the pictures with all the patrons just sat there in disbelief, nobody on their phones, no tw@ttering, etc, just lots of people sat watching the moving picture box.
Also it was hugely significant, as it set off a chain reaction of the west actions in the middle east, the reactions of ISIS, etc etc etc.
But I think we can now see, with the Taliban back in charge in Afghanistan, that the impact from 9/11 has now largely dissipated.
A sprawling property portfolio and the sale of its lucrative European arm could reap huge rewards for the Czech billionaire — and his posties
https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/companies/article/how-royal-mail-can-deliver-billions-to-new-owner-daniel-kretinsky-hpxchhss7 (£££)
Selling England by the pound. Once again the government opens the door for British assets to flow abroad.
Could this be one of many to come ahead of this law coming in.
https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/401475/
But in the longer term, that accolade would surely have to go to the development of powered aircraft, which began either in 1903 with the Wright brothers or with either Brazilian or German pioneers (depending on what you call a 'powered aircraft' and which account you believe). That changed the whole planet in innumerable dramatic ways, including its weather systems.
I wonder if we're also overlooking something because the pandemic, 9/11 and financial crises are all blocking our view. Answer - very probably, but we won't know what it is (and I do hope that's not triggered a certain Multiple ID poster).
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/Wv61pmtwjARPfoum/
Assets will go abroad for as long as we run a trade deficit.
What have I got wrong?
If you want assets to flow into this country, rather than out of it, we need to save more than we spend.
Yes its a vicious circle as assets going abroad mean we then need to pay rent/profits abroad which aggravates the deficit, but that is a consequence of the prior deficits just as interest is a consequence of prior deficits.
I agree that the GFC is too low, and the rise of China - whilst not an "event" - is hugely significant.
I'd definitely put 9/11 ahead of Covid. The former was horrifying terror that forever changed how we do things.
Perhaps building a million new student housing units and boarding school places reserved for overseas students is the way to go.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR5F_8dSjOw
"Have a kid or we'll demolish your house" - it should be mandatory viewing for anyone tempted by socialism or other totalitarian ideologies.
Lara Trump, daughter-in-law of US President-elect Donald Trump, has withdrawn her name from consideration for a seat in the Senate.
She stepped down this month as co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), fuelling speculation that she might replace outgoing Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, whom Trump has nominated for secretary of state.
But in a post on X, she said she had removed herself from consideration "after an incredible amount of thought, contemplation, and encouragement from so many".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c20npx58nnxo
Which is spot on, as usual, and rather shows the pointlessness of this kind of polling. Covid and 9/11 both changed the world in different ways too, neither for the better sadly, but trying hard to set aside my bias, I still think 2008 changed our world more than anything else. If only our political class would stop pretending otherwise. It was, in many ways, the point where Keynesian economics ran out of road.
Maybe we ned a header when the mods and OGH have had a chance to consider it all.
They’ll then use that precedent to go after Facebook, Google, and X.
They really don’t want the test cases and appeals to be against companies with unlimited legal budgets and a point to prove, they want the law to be ‘settled’ within a year or two.
It will be interesting to see if Zuckerberg and Musk see what’s coming, and get their lawyers lined up behind those early test cases.
It wasn't in the 2024 Manifesto.
(And no - that's not support for Rayner.)
They lead to the imagination of a chain of intention and even a deliberate chain of responsibility.
Things happened and because they happened other things happened. There is no chain of intention. History is a series of independent events and their dependent consequences, events and consequences.
Let us take an example. The UK has the most dangerous deluded ruler for several hundred years, fact. By cause and effect then logically you go back to AJP Taylor as the cause of Keir Starmer being Prime Minister. No in a free and fairish election Labour party candidates got more votes than their opponents in over 400 seats. That is the only cause of him being PM. A disaster, yes, but not the fault of AJP Taylor, objectionable as he undeniably was.
I’ll take a guess that they put all of their eggs in the Chinese and Russian baskets, only for those countries to go horribly tits-up.
Without going into too much detail, you need to differentiate between financial and non-financial assets. Financial assets, like a company or a bond, are those held for the stream of cashflows that will ultimately result, and if the pound falls, the asset will be cheaper, but the stream of cashflows will also be worth less. So the asset will be neither more nor less attractive to foreigners overall.
And, more importantly, if the pound is projected to continue to fall, the future stream of cashflows will fall in value more than the immediate reduction in the asset price, so the asset will actually be LESS not more attractive to foreigners.
So much for financial assets. If we're talking about non-financial assets like fine art or a house you're going to live in, of course you will spot bargains when the exchange rate falls, unless you expect it to fall further. But they're a very small part of the total in practice - most assets by value that are bought across borders are financial.
Incidentally, trade flows don't impact the value of the currency much compared to financial flows, which are set by interest rates and interest rate expectations. The very basic undergraduate models were made in the 1930s and postwar when financial flows were much smaller than today. We've been running a trade deficit for decades, but the pound now is roughly where it was in trade weighted terms in 2010. Japan has been running a trade surplus for decades, but the yen is notably weak. The US has been running a deficit even longer than we have but the dollar is strong. But ours and America's economies are expected to have higher long-term growth than Japan's, which will lead to higher expected interest rates which will lead to stronger currencies, whatever the trade numbers show.
OK, Sunday morning economics lesson over. But it's always a delight to recall my international economics classes from decades back ...
https://undercutters.podbean.com/e/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle/
(If the big tech giants had any sense, they’d put every specialist media barrister in London on a retainer, therefore preventing the CPS from instructing them because of a conflict of interest).
That link indicated there was an onerous amount of admin and management for those runnjng/moderating online forums. Risk assessments, trained moderators etc.
The Internet is proving very hard to manage/contain /police - there's such a lot of good stuff but attempts to control the downsides, eg scams, fake news, illegal/immoral content, etc inevitably impact on all the good stuff.
It's a worry that smaller websites might be targeted by law enforcement in order to show that the new laws are working, while the big companies that can afford legal assistance are left largely unfettered, and potentially meantime the dark underworld parts of the ineternet just carry on as normal.
For the UK, for the same criterion I'd say the death of QEII, as it marks the end of an era for a lot of countries.
IMO Brexit and the Ukraine War cannot really be assessed yet.
But from what I have heard, I would actually suggest the most likely left-field candidate is the vaccines developed for Covid - which appear to be promising in many other fields of medicine to the extent they may be genuinely revolutionary.
Two crew members ejected successfully and were picked up from the sea.
The conspiracy theory is that the Houthis shot it down, and the Americans think that admitting to a blue-on-blue is less embarrassing!
https://x.com/geiger_capital/status/1870674221484871690?
I have absolutely zero capability at languages, but Latin should be encouraged for those who have willing and talent. Even state school pupils.
There are very few* 'revolutionary' events which are stand-alone. The Covid experience facilitated the development and especially the use of the likes of Zoom and Teams. Quite a lot of elderly people of my acquaintance, who would once have relied on their own physical social circles now routinely meet up with like minded people across the globe.
And, going back a century, would airplanes have developed in the way they did but for WWI.
*Edited for sense, due to finger failure.
If you don't want to look foolish, don't join the bloody circus.
The danger for Labour comes if they are seen to have followed the LibDem path of promising (even if only implied) one thing but reversing once in power.
The danger for government generally is that it is added to the list along with contaminated blood and subpostmasters of things that deserve compensation but we'll drag our feet until they're all dead and forgotten.
Just as atomic energy and weapons would have been developed, but it would have taken more time.
Or indeed, in medical terms again, penicillin.
War injects massive capital resources into things that expedites what would otherwise be slow development hampered by lack of cash.
Of course, it can go the other way. The Nuffield aero engine, which offered a power-weight ratio far in excess of any other internal combustion engine, was abandoned due to the Air Ministry's obsession with secrecy which annoyed Lord Nuffield so much he cancelled the programme. Equally, that made jet engines a more attractive option than they would otherwise have been.
Oh, you don't mean the International Cricket Council?
The pension age had to be equalised at some point, and this cohort had the misfortune to be the ones affected, but that doesn't mean they deserve big handouts.
The issue here is that they expected to be allowed to claim a pension whilst men of the same age continued to have to work, and threw a wobbly when they were told no. Demanding gender equality so long as it works in your favour and then throwing a strop when it doesn't engender much sympathy.
Their Russian “allies” lifted not a finger in their defence.
To paraphrase Kissinger, it might be dangerous to be Russia’s enemy, but it’s lethal to be Russia’s ally.
GFC probably didn't make much difference to lots of people around the world who had their own financial crises on different timelines.
Sept 11th I suspect will be seen (as I think Singapore President suggested) as a strategic blunder the US made, taking their eyes off Asia Pacific and focusing on dead end wars in middle east.
Or the moon landing, if you want a narrower parallel.
But ask me where I was when Challenger exploded, when I was eight years old, and I can recall it in significant detail.
I hope the Captain enjoys his next draft as Officer, IC Latrines in American Samoa.
*To foreign asset strippers.
A nation votes to impose economic sanctions on itself.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
And for the same reason I’d put THAT technological change at number 1, much much higher than Covid and 9/11 (equal second)
However, it is true that notification was inadequate, and it is not absurd to suggest that compensation for that and that alone might be in order, or that the normal pension requirements (other than age) can be waived in these cases. The ombudsman has already ruled this is so.
But the merits are irrelevant to the point, which was Labour's apparent volte face on reaching Downing Street. This is compared to the LibDem handling of tuition fees, again without debating the merits of that decision.