Why Starmer might be more popular than Labour – politicalbetting.com
Why Starmer might be more popular than Labour – politicalbetting.com
Latest YouGov Westminster voting intention (9-10 Nov 2025)Reform UK: 26% (-1 from 2-3 Nov)Labour: 19% (-1)Con: 18% (+2)Green: 15% (-1)Lib Dem: 14% (-1)SNP: 3% (=)yougov.co.uk/topics/polit…
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We are not becoming a post literate society. On the contrary the proliferation of texting means people are probably writing more than every before.
Of course, much of it is dumb, incomprehensible or both. But you can't have everything.
• Matches will not be broadcast live, but will be edited before airing.
• Any footage featuring South Korean players will be removed. Players include Kim Ji-soo (Brentford) and Hwang Hee-chan (Wolves).
• Each game will be shortened to 60 minutes instead of the regular 90 minutes.
• All English text visible in the stadium through the broadcast will be covered with North Korean graphics during editing.
• Any scene displaying LGBTQ+ symbols will be edited out.
https://x.com/TouchlineX/status/1988940536481186234
Whats with the 60 mins ?
Have you seen how much time they waste on the long throw ins?
As a precedent - how long before the Fruit and Nuts demand all Israeli citizens are AI removed?
Personally I advocate the removal of all players & the spectators. The ball will just move itself around, watched by an empty stadium and some officials.
https://x.com/DPJHodges/status/1988976312267206821?s=20
Liverpool’s front on shirt sponsorship deal is ending soon and Japan Airlines sponsor Liverpool at the periphery at Anfield, what happens if it becomes South Korean Airlines?
https://x.com/skalskip92/status/1986474429832921224?s=20
https://x.com/skalskip92/status/1986474432055882205?s=20
#pbfreespeech
It doesn't absolve the BBC of editorial mistakes, obviously.
But along with the fact that it was leaked to a paper with an animus against the BBC, and one with similar beliefs (justified or not) about editorial bias, renders it of little more evidential value than any other complaint submitted by anyone else.
"We’re seeing the end of the long 20th century", James Marriott, January 06 2025, The Times
"...To future historians the most distinctive cultural feature of the 20th century will not be cinema or jazz but the mass literacy that flourished after late-Victorian education reforms abolished what HG Wells referred to as the social “gulf” that once separated readers from the “non-reading mass”. The long 20th century was the greatest age of reading the world has ever known: newspapers, magazines, self-help books, popular classics, airport bestsellers.
[But] Literacy is now declining for the first time on record.
A recent OECD report finds that adult reading proficiency is falling around the world. The crucial moment may not have been the arrival of the smartphone but the more recent dominance of short video. The first iPhone customers often used their 21st-century technology in a 20th-century manner — to read articles and news stories. But the advent of apps such as TikTok has created a new video-based culture that is truly indigenous to digital technology. As a consequence, Gen Z may be the first generation since the middle of the 18th century not to produce a bestselling literary novelist..."
Note: James Marriott did the rounds of podcasts on the subject, a sample of which is below
Less than half of Lab 24 voters want Starmer to continue as PM, so in the region of 16% of the electorate. The other 11% of his support would include Con, Reform LD and ither voters. They probably have mixed views, but include some who want Starmer to stay on as he is more beatable than the alternatives.
The polling makes it clear that it would otherwise be pointless.
The corollary of that is surely that IF they are going to make a change, then it would be better done sooner than later, to give any replacement sufficient time to make a difference.
I don't think anything else is likely to help them much electorally; voters are exhausted with the bait and switch of replacement PMs not greatly better than the one they replaced.
*I'm pretty certain that Ed Miliband would not be that person.
https://x.com/SkyNews/status/1988964879852584998
'I've been assured that no briefing against ministers was done from No. 10'
Sir Keir Starmer says his advisers have told him they aren't responsible for briefing against Health Secretary Wes Streeting.
@Keir_Starmer
·
15m
We are bringing an AI Growth Zone to Wales.
This will boost jobs and help Welsh businesses grow.
https://x.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1988987397464629471
MoD prepares plan if £2bn army training contract scrapped
The project has been dogged by controversy including a former brigadier allegedly sharing information with bidder Elbit Systems UK
https://www.thetimes.com/article/114b5a53-9cd2-4641-b167-86c354ca2454?shareToken=066ced2c6fd352560e4b1c75ebb04724
Military officers are working on a contingency plan in case a £2 billion army training contract fails or is cancelled altogether, The Times can reveal.
Under the plans being developed inside the Ministry of Defence, neither Elbit Systems UK nor its competitors will win the 15-year deal.
Instead the British Army will develop its own training so soldiers are ready for war, it is understood.
The decision will not be taken on the contract until “sometime next year”, Luke Pollard, the procurement minister, disclosed on Wednesday. The defence industry had expected a decision this autumn and the apparent delay follows a chaotic response by the MoD to claims surrounding the bidding process.
The option to scrap the contract emerged weeks after The Times revealed the MoD was investigating whether its business appointment rules were breached when a former brigadier allegedly shared information with Elbit Systems UK after he left the army...
"There you go lads - Pokrovsk is just over there."
Cheap as chips alternative.
Government source: "Pippa Crerar, Chris Mason, and Alex Wickham must have all been tricked by several imposters posing as No.10 staff."
@DPJHodges
Er...what?
@KevinASchofield
They were being sarcastic
https://x.com/bohuslavskakate/status/1988954154161889309
There’s a few more smoking incidents too, Ukraine General Staff daily report.
In occupied Crimea, hits were recorded on the “Morskoy Oil Terminal” fuel storage facility, a helicopter parking area, UAV storage and preparation sites at the Kirovske airfield, and an air defense radar station near Yevpatoria.
In the occupied territory of Zaporizhzhia region, strikes targeted an oil depot near Berdiansk and forward command posts of Russia’s 5th Combined Arms Army and the 127th Motor Rifle Division.
Additional strikes were carried out on targets inside the Russian Federation. The extent of the damage is being assessed.
The attacks involved strike UAVs, rocket drones, and various types of missiles. Last night, several long‑range weapons were launched, including domestic developments such as Flamingo, Bars, and Liutyi.
https://x.com/bohuslavskakate/status/1988966032191422812
(Here's a whole new world for me.)
Please let it happen....
https://x.com/visegrad24/status/1988681357568958847
Russia’s oil giants on the brink: shares plummet nearly 20% amid sanctions
Sanctions on Lukoil and Rosneft have triggered a crisis in Russia’s oil industry. Bloomberg reports that almost one billion barrels of oil are currently stuck in tankers worldwide with no buyers, most of it Russian.
Investors also fear that sanctions will prevent the companies from offloading foreign assets without losses.
Globally, countries are rejecting Russian oil products. Brazil sharply reduced imports of Russian diesel, while Indian and Chinese oil companies have significantly cut or almost completely stopped buying Russian crude.
In Finland, Lukoil’s Teboil fuel network announced it will cease operations due to the sanctions.
Recently, Lukoil declared force majeure at one of the world’s largest oil fields in Iraq after Baghdad halted payments over sanctions.
BREAKING: Odds Trump is impeached again rise above 50%
MOD Promised us 3 years ago that these problems had been fixed!
For anyone on the outside with 2 brain cells, this has been screaming sunk cost fallacy from the initial problems years ago!
To put this all in context, for the development costs of AJAX alone, the British army could have been fully kitted out with CV-90 the best IFV bar none.. Let that sink in..
https://x.com/DMBrookfield/status/1988580394753466376
https://x.com/devanaukraine/status/1988673684748607582
Igor Girkin — the same Russian commander who started the occupation of Crimea and Donbas in 2014 — now openly says that Russia’s catastrophe is inevitable, even if it wins the war.
He wrote:
“Time to find any way to ‘exit the war.’ The economic situation is catastrophic. The catastrophe is inevitable — even in the form of victory. It will not lead to the dissolution of the state, but to deep consequences. The peoples of Russia are removed from responsibility — it lies entirely on the Kremlin.”
This is more than despair — it’s a rare moment of truth from one of the regime’s own monsters. Girkin admits that even a “victory” will destroy Russia from within.
When the architects of aggression start warning about the doom of their own empire, it means the rot has reached the core. Like all totalitarian systems before it, Russia will collapse not from outside blows, but from its own decay — corruption, fear, and the moral emptiness that no “victory” can fill.
The fall has already begun.
Maybe it’s just me?
On 23 August 2018, Ruemmler emailed Epstein a link to a New York Times opinion piece that mentioned hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels to buy her silence before the 2016 White House election about her alleged affair with Donald Trump, which he denies.
Trump was convicted in Manhattan last year of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in relation to those payments.
"I thought you'd find interesting," Ruemmler, now chief legal officer and general counsel at Goldman Sachs, wrote to Epstein.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c2dr3z9egljt
I am starting to feel like I am the only person who wasn't regularly emailling with Jeff. Randy Andy and Mandy must be feeling pissed to find they losed their job when every other f##ker was also chatting away with their mate Jeff.
A novel cooling valve which is claimed to enable much faster EV charging times at relatively little cost.
https://insideevs.com/news/778799/dectravalve-ev-battery-cut-charge-time-boost-range/
It's apparently applicable to all manner of thermal management problems.
Developed in Nottingham.
(Again, I’m not claiming anything intrinsic about either of them, just what impression they make at a screen’s remove.)
The move will mean restricting heat pump subsidies so that only those receiving certain benefits will be allowed to claim them, sharply bringing down costs to the government.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/nov/13/hundreds-of-thousands-to-lose-heat-pump-subsidies-in-reevess-budget-plan
Weirdly the one person who is certain that the red on red briefings were nothing to do with him is Keir himself. His short-term memory is shot to pieces. He can now only remember the good bits of his life. And as there currently aren’t any, he can now remember nothing at all. Each day, each hour, each minute comes as a total surprise to him. He keeps having to be reminded who McSweeney is and what he does. Sometimes he doesn’t even know he’s the prime minister. There again, neither do all of his cabinet. Miliband was just sure that Keir would have to sack whoever did the briefings. Keir. Meet Keir. The first man to fire himself.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/nov/13/keir-starmer-labour-downing-street-game-of-no-cluedo
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366628066/The-UK-governments-AI-Growth-Zones-strategy-Everything-you-need-to-know
"What is an AI Growth Zone?
According to the government, AI Growth Zones are designated sites that are well-suited to housing AI-enabled datacentres and their supporting infrastructure. Ideally, these zones should have “enhanced access” to power supplies of at least 500MW and sympathetic planning support. This is because datacentres are notoriously power-hungry entities, and siting them in areas where energy is in short-supply could slow down the time it takes to bring one of these new AI server farms online."
Targeting, in part, poor areas eg deinustralised ones, which are less likely to complain planning wise. Not sure how much it will do for long term employment of the actual locals, or their leccy bills once regional pricing comes in, though (which may be one reason Labour don't like the latter).
These announcements remind me a bit of HS2 was always sold as speed, when it should have been capacity. The nuclear power as part of securing future energy supplies particularly with much more renewables in the mix, absolutely, going to be loads of local AI jobs, bullshit. Even if datacentres are constructed nearby in 2035, they require about 5 mole people to operate.
Seems unlikely
"100-Year-Old WWII Veteran: The Country Is Worse Than It Was When I Fought for It
Good Morning Britain"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2LTcqnFXY0
Mole people?
Of course if the AI falls through then BigG is in the spondulicks.
(I was taught they made bromine with spare leccy up there, maybe on Mona?)
That said, Russia must surely be getting extremely overextended by now. Even if they weren’t getting refineries ignited every day, they’ve been fighting an expensive war for 3 and a half years. Trouble is the same’s true of Ukraine. That’s why it needs the deep pockets of the West to keep it going.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8KXXJH8Zy4
Dig deeper though, and you realise AI is just a new word for tech. These are all largely standard tech companies most of which would have been doing 98% of the same stuff 5 years ago when Gen AI wasn’t a thing, and calling it something else. Back then the fashionable things were cloud, and blockchain. Same billboards but just substitute the word AI.
We do need to invest in tech infrastructure. If that requires us to use the AI word to drum up excitement then fair enough.
@JenniferJJacobs
Scoop: Senior military officials on Wednesday presented Trump with updated options for potential operations in Venezuela, including land strikes, sources tell @JimLaPorta and me. Hegseth, Caine were at White House yday afternoon for briefings. No final decision made, two of the sources told @CBSNews
.
The question is will these services actually be found to be worthwhile across all sectors in the way that money is gambled on building insane amount of datacentres.
This should put the Epstein files on the back burner for a while.
Previously a custom pipeline would take a data engineer 2-3 days to code, test and merge. Now it's half a day to review, test and merge. LLMs are the real deal, but their success rates will depend hugely on what kind of jobs they are being applied to. Anyone working a desk job in front of a monitor should start making plans to not have the same career in five years.
Am I unduly pessimistic?
The simple truth is that everyone in the press knows who briefed. They are just watching as various people tie themselves in bizarre knots about it.
https://youtu.be/a8yZKMow0ME?si=GcCu-x2FbCGph1Ra&t=46
Inevitably there comes a string of syllables sounding like a Welsh Railway Station which has been fed through a woodchipper, followed by "But I've been practicing all morning" or "Aaaargh. Sorry".
The Europeans have been hoping they could get away with spending the minimum to keep Ukraine going and that Russia would call it quits for three years now. I don't think it's a winning strategy. It encourages the Russians to hope that the Europeans will give up. And it maximises Ukrainian losses in the short-term.