frankPodmore

frankPodmore, 1 day ago

You do. I don’t know why, really. Sounds like the German system is better!

frankPodmore, 1 day ago

Too late, I’ve already changed it to say VOTE BINFACE.

(I am, of course, kidding.)

frankPodmore, 1 day ago (edited 1 day ago)

I mean, it should get sent in plenty of time, without you having to do anything! There should be more info on precise timings on gov.uk.

frankPodmore, 1 day ago

If you’re already registered for a postal vote at your current address, you should be fine!

frankPodmore, 5 months ago

The government is currently running a consultation on the new guidance which you can respond to here.

frankPodmore, 5 days ago

Y’know, I understand why the Canary publish this kind of misinformation. Their whole business model is based on inciting directionless outrage. What I can’t understand is why people, like everyone else in this thread, keep falling for it.

frankPodmore, 4 days ago

Yes, it’s like some sort of horseshoe theory of spin. The Tories say Starmer breaks all his pledges and some people on the left reply, ‘Yes, Tories! Please tell me more!’ As though that’s… helping?

frankPodmore, 5 minutes ago

We’re going to get a lot of polls, I’m sure, during the campaign so I just want to give some hot tips for reading the polls to people who haven’t followed a GE that closely before.

• Changes within 3 points or so aren’t statistically significant on their own. The thing to do is to look for overall trends. If this company does another poll tomorrow showing Labour on 42% or 47%, that really wouldn’t mean anything much.
• This also means that, if a poll the day of the election looks like this, then any actual election result with Labour between 42% and 48% would mean that hypothetical poll was accurate - or no more inaccurate than expected. Obviously, that is a very wide margin, which should tell you something about the predictive power of individual polls this far out from election day!
• Don’t look for whatever headline caught your eye lately as the ‘cause’ of the any shift in the polls. Almost nothing makes much of a difference to polling and it’s almost certain that large chunks of the population missed whatever you thought was important. Things like partygate and Trussonomics really did move the dial: it’s stories of that kind of magnitude that have a real impact.
• A corollary of the above is that almost nothing parties do during election campaigns makes a difference - 2017 was very unusual in that respect.
• You can’t straightforwardly compare polls by different companies. If some other company releases a poll tomorrow with Labour on 41%, that does not mean Labour’s lead has in any sense fallen over that 24-hour period. Again, you need to look at overall trends to have any understanding of what’s going on.
• Always look at the dates of the fieldwork and the dates of the changes (which OP has very rightly posted here). Some companies publish polls more often than others. Sometimes you’ll see a poll with a massive change, but it turns out to be comparing with the last election, where many of the very frequent polling companies are comparing with last week.
• On a similar note, look at where the polling was done. Polls of, e.g., just London, which some companies do, tend to show massive Labour leads, which people sometimes get very excited about because they wrongly think they’re national polls.

frankPodmore, 6 days ago

I’ve not tried the Ocúns, so I can’t compare, but I can definitely recommend the Veloces for wide feet. Definitely the most comfortable climbing shoes I’ve worn!

frankPodmore, 7 days ago

Yeah, Tories have definitely given up winning. I wouldn’t put too much faith in their ability to mount a nefarious scheme, as you describe. They’re flailing around, it’s pure panic.

frankPodmore, 7 days ago

He could, but it would be mad. But he is mad. So, maybe?

frankPodmore, 19 hours ago (edited 18 hours ago)

Now, this is an absolutely terrible idea with no redeeming features whatsoever but before we dismiss it just because of it’s total lack of merit, we should also consider that it would be really, really funny.

frankPodmore, 6 days ago

Best to look at primary sources. Here are the 10 pledges.

Now, there’s not a conveniently straight forward answer to all of this, so bear with me. But for my money, in terms of the headline of each pledge, all of them still stand. If things were simple, I’d be 10 for 10. Unfortunately for my argument, things are not so simple.

Starting at the top, with pledge 1: Economic Justice. Starmer is still pledged to economic justice, it’s the raison d’etre of the Labour Party, but the devil is in the detail:

Increase income tax for the top 5% of earners, reverse the Tories’ cuts in corporation tax and clamp down on tax avoidance, particularly of large corporations.

The only one of those three policies that still stands is the tax avoidance clampdown. However, things are, again, not so simple. The income tax pledge has been dropped, but the money that was going to raise has been replaced with a different tax on the rich (VAT on private schools and, till the Tories nicked it, abolition of non-dom status). So, is that a ‘broken pledge’? Or has he found a better way to achieve the same goal? Should he really be held to a policy if he thinks it won’t work and he can do it better in a different way?

I’m not going to go through all the pledges like this. But, 3, 7, 8, 9 and 10 all still stand, I would argue in pretty much every detail. That’s 5 out of 10. For the others, #2 and #5 has been scaled back, but replaced with I would argue similar policies that achieve similar goals. #4 and #6 are very different in all but the headline. I think the changes are justifiable, but it’s perfectly understandable if you don’t.

Now, my questions to you is: Should Starmer stick to promising to deliver all ten things in every detail, even if: he sincerely changes his mind (which people do); the circumstances genuinely change (which they have); or he sincerely thinks some of those things, good ideas or not, will lose him the election? Should he keep promising ten things at the risk of delivering none of them? Or, should he stick to five of them, and modify the other five, in order to deliver some of them?

For me, not getting elected would actually, definitively break all ten pledges, because it would mean he’d categorically failed at his job.

frankPodmore, 7 days ago

That doesn’t follow. The 10 pledges, many of which in fact still stand, despite what the Tories would have you believe, were not the only possible way of changing things.

frankPodmore, 6 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

I did mention all of those things indirectly, because they were all in the pledges, and I mentioned all of the pledges. Those changes were all contained within the changes I acknowledged. Your argument was that the 10 pledges had been all but scrapped. I’ve shown that 5/10 still stand exactly as they were. Of the five remaining, three of them at least partly stand. So, at least half, at most 8/10, still hold up. In either case, they haven’t been all but scrapped, which is what I was asked to show.

frankPodmore, 3 days ago

This is another version of the comment people are mocking. ‘Ah, but in this incredibly extreme situation, bikes are inefficient!’ Yeah, I know, mate. I wasn’t planning on biking to the south pole with a fridge on my back, was I? The point is not that bikes are the best solution for every single journey any human has made or will ever make, but that cars aren’t the best solution the vast majority of the time.

frankPodmore, 1 month ago

The ‘world was safer’ argument is an especially bizarre one to make this week, of all weeks, when the Middle East is ‘on the cusp’ of a wider conflict that was partly caused by Donald Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from a treaty with Iran. And Trump also inflamed tensions in that same region by moving the US’ Israeli Embassy to Jersualem. As to conflict in ‘the West’ specifically, he also endorsed and continues to endorse the very people pushing the West towards conflict, and himself caused violent conflict in the US, which was part of ‘the West’ last time I checked.

frankPodmore, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

It all depends, really. As other people have pointed out, you can allay the problems of car traffic by giving trams right-of-way, dedicated lanes or both.

I’ve tried to summarise what I understand are the key pros and cons of trams vs. buses below. As you can see, I’ve come up with more positives than negatives, but it really does depend on the particular situation in each town or city. Mixed modes are always best, IMO!

Upsides

• Trams are generally easier to electrify than buses, so they can be more eco-friendly in that sense, though this is changing with better charging infrastructure, hydrogen fuel cells, etc., for buses.
• Trams can also be built with very low clearance, making it near impossible for them to run someone over, which is a good safety feature.
• They’re generally quieter than buses, too.

Mixed

• Trams cost more to build compared with buses (because you need to lay tracks) but then cost less in the longer term (because rails and metal wheels are more efficient than tarmac roads and rubber wheels, and wear out more slowly). So, which is best from a cost POV depends on your exact situation.
• Tram rails can be laid with grass underneath, which is more eco-friendly for numerous reasons. Of course, this also entails a downside if you want to use that space for other vehicle types. Again, another one where a planner would need to weigh costs and benefits.

Downsides

• The key downside is that they need tracks: this makes them much harder to divert around some kinds of temporary obstructions which buses can easily manoeuvre around.