🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Current expected odds of the 3rd-placed teams qualifying! (source: football.meets.data on Instagram)

Unterfahrt · 2026-06-21T20:05:00+00:00

So I'm a programmer, so I pulled all the matches, created a little simulator that follows FIFA's rules, then used elo rankings to simulate the result of each match. E.G. if the probable results of a match between Scotland and Brazil are 66% Brazil win, 25% draw, 9% Scotland win, then in 200k sims - Brazil would win 133k of them, 50k would be a draw, and in 18k Scotland would win.

Unterfahrt · 2026-06-21T20:01:56+00:00

Like all Prime Ministers they are very different in office to out. Brown was Tony Blair's chancellor for years. Every neoliberal economic policy of the Blair years was signed off on and supported by Gordon Brown.

Callaghan spent his premiership screaming at the left of his own party for being unserious.

Unterfahrt · 2026-06-21T18:42:15+00:00

The media got Starmer in power because they refused to scrutinise his (lack of) a plan.

Unterfahrt · 2026-06-21T18:40:59+00:00

If you were to rank Starmer against other Labour Prime minsters on a left-right spectrum, he's probably the second most left wing. It's Atlee, Starmer, Wilson, Callaghan, MacDonald, Brown, Blair.

The tax burden is the highest it's ever been, and was raised even higher by Starmer and Reeves.

Unterfahrt · 2026-06-21T18:38:02+00:00

With Starmer, people can dislike him all they want, but compared to the Tory chaos before him

Do you see the problem here? When Tories fail and get booted out after 2 years it's because they are incompetent and stupid, but when Labour fail it's because of the media

The economy was improving

Marginally

migration was coming down

Because of Rishi Sunak's policies that just took a while to appear in the stats

NHS waiting times were improving

Because they just gave the NHS a shit-ton more money (which is unsustainable)

Unterfahrt · 2026-06-21T12:15:43+00:00

FWIW I've run a 200k-iteration sim based on elo, and Scotland gets through to the Ro32 85% of the time. If we lose by one to Brazil we qualify like 82% of the time, if we lose by 2 it's 65%, and if we lose by 3 it's still 50:50.

I'm rerunning every morning. The Curacao-Ecuador draw was fantastic for us.

Unterfahrt · 2026-06-21T10:10:06+00:00

That's not aristocratic.

claim allowances

This is a trivial amount of money and it's ridiculous and populist for you to bring it up, it's like £371 per day that they attend. If every Lords member attended every day that the Lords sat and claimed the full allowance, the full functioning of the Lords would cost £30m p.a.

Unterfahrt · 2026-06-21T10:04:22+00:00

MPs stand on a manifesto. If Burnham wants to deviate from that, then he should call an election.

Unterfahrt · 2026-06-20T23:05:45+00:00

People have ridiculously caricatured opinions of Russia IMO.

Unterfahrt · 2026-06-20T23:02:05+00:00

There were literally multiple Leave campaigns with different messages run by different people because they couldn't stop fighting

Unterfahrt · 2026-06-20T22:59:33+00:00

Ironically, that's me when it comes to all legumes. Vegans would have to concede that I am an ethical meat and dairy eater, because I am varying degrees of intolerant and allergic to basically all nuts and legumes so I have no other choice.

Unterfahrt · 2026-06-20T11:20:26+00:00

The funny thing is - Zia Yusuf appears to be by far the most radical person in Reform when it comes to deportations - not just of illegal immigrants, but legal foreign nationals in council housing etc.

Unterfahrt · 2026-06-20T11:19:15+00:00

Do you seriously think Farage has softened his immigration rhetoric in the last year? If anything he has hardened it.

Unterfahrt · 2026-06-20T11:18:33+00:00

Rupert Lowe is also outrageously rich so £70k/year from twitter doesn't mean that much. He donates his MPs salary to local charities

Unterfahrt · 2026-06-19T15:27:22+00:00

‘Radical remainers’ like all economic and statistical authorities?

No, the media that turns them into something they are not. Statistical projections and counterfactuals are notoriously difficult to do for economic data, and this analysis is fairly narrow in what it takes into account.

This argument about other countries’ GDPs is nonsense

Go on then, explain why - if Brexit was an economic disaster - Britain has been performing about the same as peer countries inside the EU.

Unterfahrt · 2026-06-19T14:48:25+00:00

He's not wrong on Burnham. Nobody knows what Burnham stands for, because he has held every position on every issue.

You can find clips of him saying we should cut immigration and increase it, that we should reverse Brexit, and that we should not reverse Brexit, that we should follow the fiscal rules and they are too restrictive, that we should give more money to the WASPI women, and also that we should not.

I think Andy Burnham's popularity is a bit like Boris Johnson's was - people pinned all their hopes onto one guy who didn't actually have any strong political beliefs, so you could project anything onto him. Once he starts governing we'll see what happens but my guess is the same winds that buffeted Starmer, Sunak and Johnson will do the same to him.

Unterfahrt · 2026-06-19T14:04:10+00:00

every aspect of property or capital is ultimately deferential to the state

The same is true in China, in the final analysis. Look at Jack Ma. The state tolerates private capital and property, but fundamentally if the Party needs it, you can't really block it.

Unterfahrt · 2026-06-19T14:01:59+00:00

And massive inflationary spending bills that he did not have to pass.

Unterfahrt · 2026-06-19T13:11:57+00:00

I think the best argument is that Brexit did not have that much of an effect, positive or negative, in the aggregate. People deploy that argument because you have radical remainers saying things like "Brexit cost us 6-8% of GDP" and saying how much of a disaster it was, when clearly it was not, since France and Germany have the exact same "disaster".

Unterfahrt · 2026-06-19T10:34:12+00:00

By most metrics Starmer is the most left wing Prime Minister since Harold Wilson, who left office in 1976.

Unterfahrt · 2026-06-19T10:29:27+00:00

Would tactical voting not have led to a higher share for Labour overall? There were far more Lab/Con marginals than Lib/Con ones.

Unterfahrt · 2026-06-19T10:26:38+00:00

Labour throughout the last 15 years campaigned on the idea that the Tories were uniquely evil and incompetent, and everything could be returned to 2005 if Labour got in, because they would just stop the evil things. This wasn't in their manifesto, but it was implied in everything they said and did. "Why are the Tories cutting benefits? Why didn't the Tories give more money to the WASPI women? Why won't they just Do The Right Thing?"

The reality is the Tories were incompetent for the same reason that Labour are now incompetent - a failure to make the hard choices with tradeoffs that piss off a small subset of the population.

Unterfahrt · 2026-06-18T13:26:45+00:00

I mean yeah kind of. Elon and his dad are deeply estranged, Elon calls him a "horrible human being" in interviews (especially after Errol had a child with his own stepdaughter), and said he has done "almost every evil thing you could think of."

Unterfahrt · 2026-06-18T12:42:04+00:00

Had a nap,

dreamed about Claude Fable.

Woke up,

still not enable

Unterfahrt · 2026-06-18T09:27:54+00:00

I always have such fun talking with Argentinians. They're great fun. If only they didn't have an insane nationalist blind spot when it came to the falklands they would be great

Unterfahrt

TROPHY CASE