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Two NYC bets you should be making – politicalbetting.com
Two NYC bets you should be making – politicalbetting.com
The New York mayoral election has garnered a lot attention with Zohran Mamdani winning the Democratic Party who many on the GOP have dubbed a communist. The state of moral turpitude of the current iteration of the GOP is that elected officials want Mamdani deported and in fact President Trump has indicated he would arrest him.
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But I think Mamdani will win anyway.
Trading bet/value loser ?
White House confirms it has halted weapons that Ukraine was scheduled to receive, including PAC3 Patriots, 155mm artillery rounds, GMLRS, Stinger, AIM-7, and Hellfire missiles...
https://x.com/nickschifrin/status/1940158711772979533
https://x.com/tripgabriel/status/1940205005472243769
Make a car that's not slow.
Bottas, unless he still has freedom to pursue a Cadillac seat, should refuse.
In terrible news, Domenicali's meeting Starmer:
https://www.bbc.com/sport/formula1/articles/c8d66203q1no
If the PM's recent performance is anything to go by he'll compromise with Ed Miliband and throw F1 out of the country to reduce carbon emissions.
Why does the parasite country of the western world never receive any criticism ?
Ditto Austria.
It is not America's traditional geopolitical enemies, who actively work against the USA's best interests.
It is the 'enemy' within. The people who do not agree with them; who look or act differently. The poor. Those with no voice or power.
Nice to see my local MP getting plenty of mentions in the media. Sir Stephen Timms has been MP for East Ham (in its various guises) since 1994 and is a very good constituency MP - I was slightly surprised he agreed to do another Parliament but that's the nature of the man. Whether, after this, he will want to do yet another Parliament is debatable and who Labour might find as his successor is another matter.
We've been here many times before under both Labour and Conservative Governments with contentious legislation watered down or scrapped just before a vote. It reminds us governing coalitions are just that - this isn't North Korea - and sometimes the leadership reads the mood of the party badly.
It "weakens" Starmer after a fashion - it reminds me a lot of Labour MPs are sitting on very small majorities (as are a lot of Conservative MPs too) and not wanting to obviously antagonise a segment of the electorate for whom there is wider sympathy seems good politics in the present.
The problem, as always, is the future when it becomes the present. If there are to be no savings on welfare reform (or at least this part of it), where and how are the public finances are to be brought under some kind of control? Rises on income tax, NI and VAT ruled out again this morning by Pat McFadden, the John Reid de nos jours, so it'll be other taxes which will have to rise or other parts of Government (local?) which will take the hit.
Significant and substantive welfare and social care changes remain elusive and the fundamental problem of dealing with an ageing society remains largely unresolved. It doesn't help when you get Badenoch-style exaggerations of the scale of the problem but the problem itself, multi-layered and nuanced as it is, remains in the "too difficult" tray and the poor can braces for another kicking.
- opening the window at 30c+ does next to nothing.
- Natural ventilation can help, but can’t go all the way.
- Increasing numbers of deaths are associated with heatwaves.
- The American movie style of air conditioning, the rattling, roaring box badly attached to your window, is ancient history.
- Even a small amount of solar can run the A/C for a whole house.
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I have asked a pollster to carry out a poll on how Brits would vote under FPTP and AV at the next GE.
We are likely to see radically different results.
Likewise many Dems also view the enemies as internal - internal within their own party and internal within their country.
The real 'enemy within' for them is the Democrats. Worse those who use their voices and power to speak for, or contribute towards, the Democrats.
In any even, it's close to irrelevant whataboutery. While it doesn't absolve them from quite justified criticism, Ireland's contribution, or lack of it, will make almost no difference to the outcome of the invasion.
The idea a marginal saving doesn't matter is practically blasphemy in F1-land.
What you say about the Dems can be said about 'many' in the political parties in other countries, including here. What the GOP are doing is orders of magnitude greater.
Yet.
The GOP and ICE are deporting - and that's a kind term for it - the groups I mentioned.
Latvia is sending a new military aid package to Ukraine, which will include 42 Patria armored personnel carriers, according to the country’s defense minister. The package will also include spare parts, ammunition, and other weapons.
https://x.com/NOELreports/status/1940288385727570415?ref_src=twsrc^google|twcamp^serp|twgr^tweet
It all adds up.
F1 is a series of businesses run as a members-only club. Success in the 'sport' relies not only in good management, or quality engineering, but also how well you get on with the others in the club, even when they are your opponents. Also in the club, and setting the rules, is a top-level organisation whose power also relies on those other members.
IMV none of the current crop of team bosses would make good top-level politicians, because the required skills are very different. That's not a criticism of them.
https://www.finegael.ie/irish-left-sinn-fein-vote-against-support-for-ukraine-burke/
The first is that the lack of engagement with MPs, and the silly games that have been played with concessions, means the government has now been exposed as having no backbone and no appetite to deliver “difficult” policy. If you pull the plug on pretty much the whole thing at the 11th hour, it isn’t edifying, and it shows you’ll crumble when the heat is on. They should never have taken it to the brink in the first place if they were afraid of following through with putting it to a vote.
But the other thing it does is expose, once again, the exceptionally poor political tactics being played by Reeves and the Treasury. These were cuts generated to restore an exceptionally tight amount of fiscal headroom, and it feels like tax and spend policy, rather than having a vision or an end goal, is purely reactive now to the whims of parliament and any small economic shock or other indicator. This is an exceptionally short termist way of running government, it doesn’t bring MPs along with you, and I think the approach is quickly running out of road. The experiment failed, and Reeves should be out on her ear.
Many might view that as treasonable action or at least as a deliberate attempt to wage a socioeconomic war against internal opponents.
That leads to a feedback reaction and the MAGA response - which will also lead to a feedback reaction and the Dems turning more extreme and flouting normal practices.
Where it all began we can debate, where it will all end we don't know but its unlikely to be a good place.
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/nicola-sturgeons-husband-peter-murrell-35482891
I'm struggling to see the value in betting Sliwa who would surely do much better if Cuomo and Adams weren't running.
I can see the possibilities around Cuomo who is at least tied with Mamdani and 12s looks a decent price at this stage.
The question is whether, absent the Democrat party machine, Cuomo can get enough Independent and possibly Republican voters to back them against Mamdani.
Has Kendall resigned yet?
*Goes back to sleep*
An alarming number of people employed as professional political strategists by the Democratic party do not seem to understand what “politics” actually means. If this sounds too cute to be true, think of it another way: if all of the professional political strategists employed by the Democratic party do understand what “politics” actually means, they are negligent and willing to do harmful things for short-term gain. Either way, it ain’t good.
The most glaring manifestation of this in the current election cycle is the fact that Democrats across the country spent millions of dollars to boost the candidacies of right-wing Maga candidates in the Republican primaries, on the theory that those extremists would be easier to defeat in the general election.
The Washington Post found that Democrats had spent close to $20m in eight states on ads meant to elevate the profile of far-right candidates and election deniers running for governorships and for Congress. A number of those candidates, like the maniacal Christian zealots Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania and Darren Bailey in Illinois, did in fact win their primaries, setting up, in theory, easier races for the Democrats in those states to win, because, in theory, swing voters prefer not to vote for lunatics.
A common objection to this strategy is, “What if one of those lunatics wins? And you helped him? Wouldn’t you feel stupid?” Sure. But that objection, reasonable as it is, accepts the underlying premise that the rightness or wrongness of spending millions of dollars to boost the support of dangerous religious fascists within one of America’s two main political parties comes down to whether or not those dangerous religious fascists win the 2022 elections. The Democratic strategists who engineered this will say: “They won’t win, so the strategy was sound.” And that is where their blinkered view of the nature of politics begins to show its true futility.
Because – my god, it’s hard to believe – politics is more than the next election.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/03/the-democrats-are-purposely-boosting-far-right-republicans-this-will-backfire
I suspect that the unwillingness of the Biden administration to bring Trump to justice was because they thought he would be easy to beat in 2024.
And so we now have MAGA in control.
My lazy assumption is the kind of person with that level of immediate international mobility has they income protected from HMRC; indeed, that the reason they live in London in the first place is because they can avoid tax here, no property taxes etc etc.
It used to be said that other languages like phrases badmouthing people for being too intelligent was a peculiarly English phenomenon. This isn't quite true, but nevertheless it's a sinister trait, and maybe partly explains our excessively socialistic leanings.
Or maybe people just don't like being made to feel stupid themselves. In which case, of course, they develop some knowledge and wit of their own.
But I'd still back him over Cuomo or Adams.
£5 billion is a trivial sum in terms of state TME, and I am sure hundreds of Labour back benchers told themselves that the rebellion was therefore trivial.
Suppose the original provision took £5000 from 1 million recipients. In media and voter terms this is massive - the BBC can without effort find any number of worthy claimants who will starve in the gutter without it, and some of it may be true.
But the same sum is also 1 million people paying £5000 more in tax. And this goes without mention.
And if you are trying to cool somewhere down you need air to air, you can use water and radiators to heat areas up..
Telling people they've got to accept illegal immigration because their own ancestors migrated legally two centuries earlier is not going to get you support.
Instead it suggests you're not on the side of those 'little people' negatively affected by illegal immigration - so why should they worry about your concerns about Trump ? Perhaps the people who Trump regards as enemies might also be the enemies of the 'little people'.
And yes, previous GOP administrations did tolerate too much illegal immigration.
And that's what allowed Trump to run against the GOP establishment.
"Issues at an electrical substation which caused a fire that resulted in Heathrow Airport closing were first detected seven years ago but not fixed, a report has found.
The National Energy System Operator (NESO) said moisture entering electrical components at the North Hyde substation caused the blaze at the site that supplies the UK's biggest airport with power.
It revealed an elevated moisture reading had been first detected in July 2018, but that the issue went "unaddressed", with basic maintenance by National Grid cancelled."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly22eelnxjo
Although even if this is the main cause, there will be other important causal factors...
Netanyahu is a case in point.
I suggest you are not on the side of decent, hard-working *legal* immigrants who are getting swept up in this mess - and that would be your attitude if similar shits came into power in this country.
I suspect the recent hot spell has been more akin to Leon's current knapping trip for many. We don't all like the heat - indeed, there's plenty of evidence protracted heat can be serious for the elderly and for those with respiratory problems.
With climate change, however, summer heat in London and the South East is a fact of life and we live in dwellings supremely ill-suited to heat but very good for cold and with insulation the oven effect is intensified.
We need to be building properties with regard to future climate and that means better protection against damp (it's going to get wetter) and better suited to prolonged heat. We also need to be thinking about how an increasingly older population is going to cope with long periods of extreme heat and the impact on services.
Even in this short-lived hot spell we've seen infrastructure such as roads and rail start to be affected as well as, I believe, power supplies in local instances (our local Tesco's lost power and by the time I got there yesterday evening, all the fridges and freezers had bene emptied and the contactless payment system wasn't working).
It's all about transport links, health, education, and access to markets. That must be apparent from the last 14 years.
Let’s assume they have structured their taxes so well they aren’t paying any personal tax on income, cap gains. Your thought process is that they aren’t paying taxes so no loss.
These people buy, regularly, new expensive cars. Say just half of them pay £10k in VAT to underestimate, that’s £25m gone. Yes it’s small in terms of the tax take but how many nurses or teachers salaries is that?
They aren’t obviously just buying cars each year. They are buying ordinary goods and luxury goods. Think of how much VAT 5000 very wealthy people spend in the shops of London each year.
It’s not just the VAT, if you remove 5,000 customers from a focussed area of London there are certain shops that will close because they don’t have the custom to justify the rent, staff etc. so the UK loses, on top of the VAT, the corporate tax from those businesses and the income tax paid by the staff.
These 5000 people also don’t need their cleaner anymore, they don’t need the gardener, they don’t need their London tax planner or solicitor and many other service personnel.
I haven’t even bothered to go into property taxes lost as they buy and sell properties.
Again, in the big picture these aren’t huge amounts of money in the big scheme of things but it’s all money that pays for things the country needs/uses.
Whilst I started out from the basis that they have organised their finances so they don’t pay personal taxes, this just isn’t the case so you do lose those taxes but the worst thing isn’t just the taxes lost, it’s the fact that these people often control existing businesses and when they decide that the UK isn’t a wealth friendly environment and their senior employees are also finding it unfriendly, they move key parts of their business so the UK loses the jobs and the tax take.
These people are also often investors in new business or creators and so, as they are leaving London they are less likely to place new businesses in the UK so we lose potential new industries and the tax takes.
It’s not just rude oligarchs and obnoxious Middle Eastern princes, its business people who are a key part of the organism that is wealth creation and they are being removed for ideological not economic reasons.
Every little helps. I bet there are those in Ireland who know of a fair few undisclosed weapons stashes that were never put past use. Send them.
If you want a world-beating NHS - welcome wealth.
Austria is in a slightly different situation, since Neutrality was written into their constitution as a condition for the country regaining its unity and independence after post-WWII occupation.
And the one after that, most likely before the general election.
But as ever, it is a compromise. We won't get that world-beating NHS if the 'wealth' don't pay any taxes.
So it becomes a balance between having a tax level where the wealthy are attracted, and one where they actually help the economy. It's pointless having them if they don't help the economy.
Where should that balance be set?
An army of the undead would be quite handy. They could start with all those buried by the IRA whose bodies have never been found.
1️⃣After a year in Government, our weekly voting intention finds Labour 5pts behind Reform UK, with Tories 5pts behind them in third
➡️ REF UK 29% (+2)
🌹 LAB 24% (+1)
🌳 CON 19% (-1)
🔶 LIB DEM 12% (-2)
🌍 GREEN 9% (nc)
🟡 SNP 3% (nc)
N=2,532 | Dates: 27 - 30/6 | Change w 23/6
Denmark has a population of 5.9 million and a GDP of ~$400bn
Ireland has a population of 5.1 million and a GDP of ~$550bn (albeit distorted by tax haven shenanigans)
While Ireland matching Denmark's contribution would not, on its own, make a large difference, in combination with the Nordics and Baltics it would help to add up to a substantial amount.
I understand but if we reduce our economic and social policy simply to appeasing a very small number of very rich people, I can't help but feel we have a significant problem.
Wealth is fine and all but excessive inequality is not.
Yet, sadly, you would rather scream waycisstttt than open your mind.
And what I would like to have is competent centrist government in both the USA and UK.
Unfortunately no party in either country is capable of providing that.
Oddly I can't see Mrs Thatcher, Nigel Lawson or Javier Milei doing so.
But maybe that's just me.
There is absolutely no loss to greater UK society if the UK was to introduce a special tax rate that benefitted and attracted the world’s wealthy.
If the UK set a specialised rate of income tax and zero CGT and IHT for those with a certain level of wealth and minimum levels of tax paid under this system you would bring in people who would not be here otherwise, and therefore paying Zero tax, and they would be now paying tax - a low percentage but still large amounts in £ terms.
As I wrote, these people, who were not living here before but have now been attracted in would be spending, employing and frankly using next to nothing from the state - private medical and education for example.
So you get a net increase in tax take for zero real cost.
The only real argument against it is envy. They are not competing against you in the race for Knightsbridge and Mayfair houses, places at your local comprehensive, in the queue for NHS ops or making you wait longer for your Ferrari.
They are bringing in tax - and they might just bring in new businesses too which is even more important.
I note that the “Big Beautiful Bill” delays the painful provisions until 2028 so that the Democrats get the blame if they win then. That’s good politics but pretty shameless. Nobody is interested in good governance.
If people feel so little connection to this country that they resent making such a contribution, well maybe they had better go elsewhere.