The mask always slips.

How do you define ‘large percentage’? Musk owns 22% of Tesla shares whereas small business owners may own 100% of their business. Do you think Musk is more working class then the latter?

Shares are just an asset just like cash. Some people choose to hold their savings in cash. Some people choose to hold them in bonds, some in shares, some in property, and so on.

When I was younger and poorer than I am today, I owned a larger value of shares than I do now because I was still saving up for a deposit on my house. Then I took out my mortgage, bought the house and the value of my ISA dropped to almost nothing as I sold most of the shares to fund my deposit. Do you think I was a capitalist when I was poorer and didn’t own a house, but working class now that I have a mortgage but fewer shares?

The form in which you hold your assets is irrelevant. It’s how much assets you have that counts.

Yes, in many ways it’s so much dumber. If I’m taking home a salary from Company A, my livelihood is dependent on Company A, and then as part of my pay package I get given $1000 of shares in Company A, then I would cash them in as soon as l could and buy a diversified portfolio of shares in Companies B, C, D, E, etc instead.

Keeping all your eggs in one basket is a bad idea. But keeping all your eggs in a basket whose performance is directly correlated with your risk of getting made redundant seems an exceptionally bad idea!

Also, you realise that everyone who has a pension is an indirect owner of shares in hundreds of different companies? Part of the problem of Starmer using this sort of idiotic language is that it willfully plays on and exacerbates voters’ lack of awareness of the world they live in and where their pension savings are going…

Non-paywall link: https://archive.ph/fx3ug

Such a damningly poor and out-of-touch judgment from Starmer.

3 in 10 Britons own shares directly (i.e. not counting the many more who own them via their pension funds), the vast majority of them being very much working people who bring home most of their income through their salaries. The ISA system directly incentivises people to invest up to £20k a year tax free.

Most generally, at a time when the government claims to interested in boosting investment in the UK, it is a mad decision for the prime minister to come out against share ownership at a time when he should be encouraging Britons to invest more in shares and less in cash savings products.

How the turntables…

Whether he wins or loses, I still cannot fathom how a candidate like this can poll 45%+ in a country purporting to be a modern democracy.

Will the clocks still go back and forward an hour to help the farmers get up early though?

It does seem extraordinarily naive.

The state’s case rested on testimony from Allah’s friend and co-defendant, Steven Golden, who was also charged in the robbery and murder. As their joint trial was beginning, Golden pleaded guilty to murder, armed robbery and criminal conspiracy and agreed to testify against Allah. Golden, who was 18 at the time of the robbery, said Allah shot Graves.

But on Wednesday, two days before the scheduled execution, Golden signed a bombshell affidavit recanting his testimony, saying Allah “is not the person who shot Irene Graves” and “was not present” during the robbery. Golden’s declaration said he was high when police questioned him days after the robbery, and that he was pressured into writing a statement blaming Allah.

“I substituted [Allah] for the person who was really with me,” he wrote, saying he concealed the identity of the “real shooter” out of fear that “his associates might kill me”. He did not identify this person.

Golden said he agreed to plead guilty and testify when prosecutors assured him he would not face the death penalty or a life sentence if he cooperated – a deal that was not disclosed to the jury.

I feel sick reading this.

Ed maxed out on ‘centrist fun uncle’ energy. Genuinely one of the most effective 3rd party campaigns I’ve seen in British politics - hence resulting in the largest number of 3rd party MPs in a century.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting responded to her post: "No, I do not think the post-war confessional of Martin Niemöller about the silent complicity of the German intelligentsia and clergy in the Nazi rise to power is pertinent to a Smoking Bill that was in your manifesto and ours to tackle one of the biggest killers.

“Get a grip.”

Yes - that was the next sentence I wrote?

In 2017 his name was mentioned as a visionary comparable to the Wright Brothers and Zefram Cochrane (inventor of the warp drive) on a Star Trek episode set in the 2250s. It felt at the time that this line risked dating the episode but I don’t think anyone could have expected just how much he would go on trash his own reputation.

The only thing that saves this line is that we found out a few episodes later that the character who spoke it secretly came from the Mirror Universe - where he grew up Musk’s embrace of Nazism was probably seen as a virtue.

Non-paywall link: https://archive.ph/Gt4z1

Having watched Joe Biden retain most of the tariffs he inherited, America’s trading partners have been fond of complaining the US president is “continuity Trump” and wondering whether Kamala Harris will be continuity Biden. The first epithet was never entirely fair: Trump’s focus was on closing trade deficits and gaining negotiating leverage, Biden’s mainly about industrial policy. Now Trump is threatening a massive and damaging escalation of trade protection, Harris only has to keep Biden’s policies in place, as she probably will, and she will look positively free-trade Clintonesque (Bill not Hillary) in comparison.

[…]

At any rate, her launch of the price control plan last week was accompanied by an explicit repudiation of Trump’s new tariffs: “These actions stand in stark contrast to Trump, who would increase costs for families by at least $3,900 with what is, in effect, a new national sales tax on imported everyday goods.”

The consumer-focused critique is not new from this administration — Biden made similar comments about Trump’s 10 per cent across-the-board proposal — but it does illustrate the gulf in policy and messaging opening up with the Republicans.

[…]

Let’s be clear: Harris hasn’t repudiated the trade and industrial policy elements of Bidenomics, and is unlikely to. But the Democrats are at least charting a steady course that balances their desire to protect industries they deem strategic with the need to hold down economy-wide inflation. Meanwhile, Trump is sailing off towards areas of the trade policy map marked “Here Be Dragons”. Clear blue water is emerging between the Republicans and Democrats, and the idea that second-term Trump trade policy would resemble that of a Harris administration is rapidly receding.

When asked about Trump’s attitudes to climate change and the environment, literal tumbleweed emerged from the mouth of famed environmental lawyer and lifelong environmentalist RFK Jr.

Sky invented football in 1992.

It’s YouGov. The partisan split of the polling industry in the US is an unusual feature for me as a Briton. It comes up as a note of caution in political betting communities as it’s not something we really have here - all the major UK pollsters (including YouGov, who I assume subject their US operations to the same standards as they do at home) have been signed up to the British Polling Council for decades and have to adhere to various standards of transparency around their questions and methodologies. (Unusually, YouGov are the one UK polling outfit that sometimes get claims of partisanship thrown at them, but that’s because their founder later became a senior Conservative politician rather than because of any genuine evidence of partisan bias in their numbers!)

I was amazed by this for example:

But this thread is a reminder that without the equivalent of the British Polling Council some American pollster have a partisan skew which means when analysing the polls and betting on them that should be taken into consideration.

It is possible for an American pollster to ask this question

‘Are you planning on voting for the man God wishes was his son Donald Trump or the whore of Babylon Kamala Harris?’

and all we’d ever see from the pollster is ‘Trump 50%, Harris 50%’ as they don’t have to publish the question or data tables

I too predict that the election will be won by either the Democrats or the Republicans :)

I would expect the same, and yet the polling shows that Trump was consistently leading Biden on the economy. The random person on the street probably sees the guy is rich and ostentatious with his money, and assumes that means he knows something about the economy.

The fact Kamala is leading on this seems like a big deal given the state of the US economy was perceived as the Democrats’ most vulnerable issue going into this election.

Non-paywall link: https://archive.is/XVcL6

I am grateful to the people, institutions and nations that supported the democratic aspirations of the Bangladeshi people during the dark years under Sheikh Hasina. Human-rights organisations such as Amnesty International and the Clooney Foundation for Justice have been especially helpful. Citizens around the world have made their voices heard in advocating justice, democracy and freedom of expression for our people. Members of the Bangladeshi diaspora, especially students and other young people, have worked tirelessly from abroad to bring justice and liberation to their native land. I hope some of them will return to help revitalise our democracy and build our economy.

Although some countries, such as India, backed the ousted prime minister and earned the enmity of the Bangladeshi people as a result, there will be many opportunities to heal these kinds of rifts and to resume bilateral alliances and close friendships soon. In fact, I hope that our liberation can revive the suspended South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation and make it a powerful force for integration in our region and beyond.

For too long, Bangladesh’s politics have been backward-looking. Starting today, let us focus on building a future together that springs from the second liberation that occurred on August 5th. A new generation of young leaders should emerge from among those who led us to this important new victory. Their energy and vision for the nation can help sanctify the sacrifices of those who gave their lives for this new opportunity—an opportunity that we must not squander.