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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The current big UK betting market: Who’ll be next Shadow Chanc
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The current big UK betting market: Who’ll be next Shadow Chancellor?
This market from Ladbrokes about who will succeed John McDonnell as Shadow Chancellor is an intriguing market.
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The boredom of quarantine
https://twitter.com/asfarasdelgados/status/1241505838508003328?s=21
Did you know that if you rest one of your testicles on top of an empty beer bottle, and hold a flame at the base, eventually it gets sucked inside......If you've done this and know how to get it out, message me please...
Urgently!!
A few seconds when my brain manages to consider the possibility of Harris becoming POTUS is actually giving me a break.
Call it betting mindfulness.
https://twitter.com/clarkemicah/status/1241509523778670595?s=21
I am splitting the contest into two awards:
Boomer Remover Dead Pool Champion - first nominated sleb to cark it of confirmed Covid-19 infection or conditions caused thereby.
Marco Bielsa Award for Sporting Excellence - first sleb to die who wasn't just a really old person found on Wikipedia.
In all cases the adjudicator's decision is final and not accessible to appeal.
Extract from my brief to Council colleagues in other Authorities this evening...
One thing is for sure. Leaving this to Facebook is no solution. Social media focuses on those who shout the loudest. We need to support those with the quietest voices most of whom might never have heard of social media. That what the State is for.
It will be our task to knit the calls for help with those who are able to serve. But how?
This is what I have discussed with a fellow Council Leader when thinking how to do solve this problem practically and to get our Councils organised, so we don’t let our residents down.
We need to break the task into manageable chunks. We made some working assumptions together.
Of the 1.5m people to be super-served on the NHS list, let’s say 900,000 are in England. There are over 300 authorities here so let’s say 3,000 vulnerable people per authority. How will we serve these people over-and-above everyone else?
Let’s say a typical district has 25 wards. That’s 120 people per ward on the critical list. And, let’s say that there might be 3 times as many other families self-isolating or otherwise generally in need.
We can allocate 25 senior managers, one to each ward, perhaps supported by a Constable. We can divi-out out a share of the national volunteer base into 25 chunks.
So, that’s 25 ward with 120 people to be super-served + 360 others that’s 480 people to be served in total. Per ward. That is not an insurmountable task. It becomes manageable. And deliverable.
Bunnco - Your Man on the Spot
Why don't people want venison?
And this is a place with more than 10 million people - 25% larger than NYC.
So, while I have no doubt that it will be hit relatively hard, it will probably grow less quickly here simply because there are so many fewer contact points.
I hope the government has recruited the very best behavioural experts in order to deal with these sorts of potential problems.
https://metro.co.uk/2020/03/21/national-trust-close-parks-gardens-stop-spread-coronavirus-12436732
Article 107(2)(b) of the TFEU would seem to cover it:
"2. The following shall be compatible with the internal market:
(b) aid to make good the damage caused by natural disasters or exceptional occurrences;"
We shall see. But most likely file under Brexiteer arsewit propaganda.
That's a big file.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
Reeves is far too intelligent and centre-left to be Labour shadow chancellor, I'm not sure that Starmer will have enough credit in the bank with maomentum to appoint someone that could propose a credible platform.
If Labour were then to say, for the sake of fairness, we should also nationalise the pubs, BTL houses, the mobile network operators and Fred's fish-and-chip shop down the road, at what point do those demands go beyond the "credible"(!)
Post-crisis, the big debate for the rest of this decade is surely going to be the pace and means by which we return to the status quo ante, which aspects of national life we try to return to a semblance of "normality" first, and whether there are some aspects of the Olden Ways we decide never to return to.
I think someone who predicts where those fault lines will lie may have some profitable betting opportunities ahead! Clearly there will be people in Labour who will quite like the increased state intervention in the economy and will oppose the rapid reversal of those measures, but that's a case where old political rules still apply and there's so much more in play than that.
If we all get used to cleaner air in our cities and reduced carbon emissions on our conscience, and have experienced both the costs as well as the benefits of humanity's greater interconnectedness, will we return to so much car-based commuting or cheap mass air travel? We're going to get much better (both technically and managerially) at working from home, but also going to suffer whatever scars to the national and individual psyche an extended period of social distancing inflicts. How will that affect the way we live, our feelings, our goals for the country, our sense of togetherness, our political desires? Having experienced a period of unprecedented governmental control, will we be more, or less, comfortable with deep state intrusion into the structure of our lives?
All manner of possibilities have been blown wide open. The Overton window on so many different issues could shift quite rapidly, it's going to be like waking up inside Overton's conservatory and discovering primeval forces and animal spirits have combined to build Overton's kaleidoscope all around it. For now we're staring out disoriented while watching the patterns of our lives, everything we've ever known, mixed up and recombined then briefly reglimpsed and then shattered again, with new forms swirling around to replace them.
Even if you believe the nature of humanity is such that our fundamental wants will be the same (via some Maslowian hierarchy or whatever) it could well be that people hold a new set of assumptions about how food/security/love/esteem might best be delivered or achieved. There are a lot of long-term surveys about social and political attitudes that are going to make interesting reading, as we watch how they get reshaped in the 2020s...
I think that (for the moment) the Overton window is relatively static (although both big parties at the GE were promising big state spending), because there's an understanding that this debt fuelled spending is unsustainable, this is not the new normal.
I mix with an extremely young & left wing circle (which is why when they swung against Lab I twigged that Corbyn was screwed & profited handsomely), and while I could see a greater role of the state in the economy, the Govt's ineptitude at running non-essential services will ensure that the Overton window remains somewhat static.
In an economic sense the Overton window is an equilibrium, and a one off shock (like this pandemic) is not enough to cause long term shifts.
The flip side is the stuff we have got into the habit of taking for granted as part of the political, economic or social firmament: things we treat as unstoppable or inevitable forces, to which no alternative can be envisaged. Once we've seen they can, in extremis, be switched off, they will inevitably lose some of the power they held over us.
Of course there will be plenty of emergency measures that will be rescinded promptly and everyone will be glad to see the back of. But I'm not sure how easy it is right now to judge precisely what things will return almost exactly to the status quo, what changes might persist, and what things might revert for now but find themselves "in play" for further changes because the very possibility of change now seems a feasible prospect. Partly because we don't know right now how everything is going to play out, but also because the "us" in a few years who'll influence those choices, will not be the same "us" as today or a few months ago. There will surely be changes wrought upon us both individually and collectively by this unprecedented experience.
The experience of isolation is going to have psychological effects. Our close encounters with mortality - it seems likely most of us are going to know someone who dies of/with COVID-19 and almost all of us will know someone who contracts it - may change attitudes to life and health. I wonder whether the experience of one catastrophe shattering our previously largely comfortable lives might make us more sensitive to the prospect of another one doing so - if a virus can cause Western society to grind to a halt, does the threat of e.g. climate change seem more realistic too? (In which case we open ourselves up to arguments like: if we can stop planes for one thing, can't we for the other?) We are also not just going to be affected by the pandemic itself, but by all the things that spin off from its disruption (probably more driven by government responses than the virus in its own right) of the interconnected, complex systems that underpin our way of life. As David H pointed out in his excellent header, there is a non-zero probability of these spiralling out of control, and the influence of whatever that maelstrom conjures upon us might be even more dramatic.
But since that seems to have been Shadsy's train of thought too, these are the first three in the betting with a combined price of even money or 50 per cent (well, 51 per cent but let's hope for an odds boost to keep the arithmetic simple).
Before you look at candidates for the shadow CofE should you consider which of the labour MPs who are thought of as 'big beasts' will Starmer want to include in his shadow cabinet?
Will they demand one of the three big gigs? Will C of E be available for new talent?
I needed to do some food shopping yesterday (for bread, milk etc.). Decided to walk and avoid all the coughing fits on public transport. Very few people on street (like Christmas Day) and lots of weird social distancing - people crossing street to avoid close contact.
Elephant and Castle shopping centre was almost empty except for Iceland, where there was a queue to get in! Co-op opposite very quiet, some empty shelves but I got most of what I went for.
Finished Lancaster and York, by Alison Weir, yesterday. Good book for anyone wanting a single volume to cover the Wars of the Roses.
He has to be locked up indefinitely. Otherwise we will never get the fucker out of the Oval Office.
And that was about it.
German police arrest man over high-speed rail tampering
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-51992070
Quite right.
Broadway Market was still operating, albeit probably at reduced capacity.
I literally heard one girl mention to her boyfriend that they needed truffle oil.
The social distancing thing has not reached Hackney yet.
While the supermarkets ramp up supplies and people's cupboards fill, the shelves will remain sparsely filled. But when the two curves meet, the shelves will quite suddenly appear full again, as if by magic.
The fear must be what catastrophe awaits the US. New York State would already, on its own, drop into eighth place against countries on number of cases, and NYC itself will in a day or two have twice as many confirmed cases as the whole of the UK, and the US is still on catch up in terms of testing. Were it a country, NYC alone would drop into ninth.
Yet the airspace above the US is awash with internal flights.
Hoping this goes away soon.
Using the spo2 measure that Foxy recommended and her oxygen saturation is fine so. It's good to have one for those who haven't.
Boys seem ok just trashing my house.
Mr. Algakirk, probably not going to read any new histories for a little while shelf space etc, plus a to-read pile) but it was interesting reading about most of the 15th century.
Mr. Doethur, I did find it interesting that it ended there rather than in 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth Field (which I remember learning about in the first episode of Blackadder).
In the early days (and still) we were constantly told about the need to “flatten the curve”. But that was in the context of peak new and/or “active” cases (with the knock on effect on hospitals). Probably on a straight line scale. Hence cases rising to a peak and returning back to a low level (before potentially spiking again). Having drilled that into people we are now seeing all sorts of graphs with flattening (or otherwise) curves - but these are usually total cases (and complicated by whether they are log scales or not). And then the mistake is made of using the latter to assess progress towards the former objective. All very confusing.
What is further difficult to comprehend is how the gap gets filled between where we/other countries are now, and where the experts hope to see us in future. So in the U.K. we are currently at c230 deaths and 50 new per day. But the chief scientific officer talks about 20k deaths as potentially being a reasonably optimistic outcome (i’m not sure if that is this summer, this year, or in total). Which begs the question of quite how much worse the deaths figures are likely to get in coming weeks and months. Are we talking about daily levels of Spain and Italy now, or much worse than that? Do we have a graph of the distribution of the 20,000 in circulation? Etc etc.
Apologies for lengthy post, but I think it just shows how difficult simplistic graphical representations of the science are, and how difficult it is to imagine what is, or might be, to come.