The weather forecast for Sunday afternoon is 22C, with very little chance of rain. https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/2637827
Also the hard tyres that were the preferred option last time will not be available... which means presumably that no-one will be trying a one-stop strategy.
If they are going for 2 or even 3 stop, then we shouldn't have the situation where an early safety car means cars running huge stints on one set of tyres.

... which all goes to suggest a predictable race.

Is anyone betting against a Merc 1-2?

Wait until the lawsuit against Ripple is settled. If it is ever settled. The outcome of that could have a huge influence on price, up or down depending on the verdict.
At the moment we have no way of knowing; we can only speculate... but that is what we have been doing all along, in any case.

Indeed. If governments were interested primarily in the welfare of all of their citizens, then the world would be a very different place. Imagine if all data reported was unbiased truth, and not manipulated or carefully selected.  If everyone was working together, and scrupulously honest, then China would have alerted the world as soon as the first cases started arising in humans... and the rest of the world, instead of staying open and gambling with their people's health in order to not suffer some short-term economic damage, instead decided to quarantine all new entrants... the virus would never have spread.

But we are where we are. Perhaps lessons will be learned and countries will start acting with a bit more maturity from now on. Or perhaps not. At the least, we can hope that certain safeguards will be put in place to stop the same sort of thing happening again, the next time some deadly virus passes to humans.

It's difficult to determine objective truth in both number of cases of CV19 and number of deaths from CV19. Most countries I suspect are trying very hard to ensure they look as good as possible when compared against other countries, and will be adjusting their figures through careful control of who they test and when they test them. And it depends on your metric of comparison, too. 'Number of cases' is hugely variable depending on the extent of testing, and whether it's blanket testing or just people with symptoms. As for 'deaths from CV19' - you can well imagine countries trying very hard to ascribe other reason for death where possible.
Perhaps the best commonly-used figure we can use is excess mortality against the 5 year average, on the basis that whilst governments find it fairly easy to control official 'reason' for death, they find it much more difficult to hide the fact of the death itself.

Absolutely. The Ferrari super engine last year forced Mercedes to work extra hard. And then the Ferrari engine was declared illegal... but crucially, their 2020 car was designed to accommodate that now-banned engine. The new Ferrari lower power engine doesn't work so well with their 2020 car, with results that have been clear to see in the opening few races. And yes, the development freeze for 2021 means that it's almost inevitable that Mercedes will carry their current huge advantage into next year as well.

... and then 2022, with the new regulations that are supposed to level the field and allow closer racing, we start again with the dawn of a new era, where any team could come out on top. But if the rule changes have the desired effect, then the days of a single team dominating as much as Mercedes are at the moment will be gone forever.

It will be interesting to see how much farther ETH can go in this rally. It is perhaps not coincidence that price rises are stalling just below the $400 threshold. If you look back prior to the mega rise at the end of 2017, ETH bounced down sharply off $400 a couple of times prior to that. Also, on the other side of that, during the 2018 bear market, ETHs fall bounced back up a couple of times at the $400 point. Historically, this has been quite an important threshold for the coin, and it suggests that if ETH can break through and hold above that point for a short while, then $400 will provide some really solid support.

Thanks. It is interesting to get some technical information about the various approaches of the teams. Unfortunately, whatever minor tweaks Ferrari and Red Bull make, it won't be enough... they have both dropped back from their performance last year - in Ferrari's case largely due to the issue with the illegal engine - which Mercedes have moved ahead a bit. The gap between MErcedes and everyone else is now a huge gulf, as exemplified by the fact that Racing Point are now able to vie for podium places.

Unfortunately the best that Red Bull can hope for is a clear second place in the championship, and the best Ferrari can hope for is third - although that doesn't seem particularly likely, given that Vettel just doesn't seem interested and is just seeing out his contract.

This is indeed an important consideration. If a return rate sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. Crypto has had a number of projects offering outlandish percentage returns, none of which ended well. It is up to you in each instance to determine whether or not the proposed return rate sounds realistic and sustainable.

The reason Trump is against mail in votes is because he thinks the process benefits Democrats. This is because the received wisdom is that mail in votes increase turnout, and increased turnout generally means higher votes for Democrats. Whether or not this is true is moot. Trump has shown little interest in legality or fairness throughout his presidency so far. Because he is so far behind in the polls, he tried to use this as an excuse to postpone the election and remain in power, as I suggested might happen a couple of weeks ago...


Now that has been ruled out, Trump still has it as an excuse to explain why he lost. Can you ever imagine Trump admitting that he's been beaten fairly in anything?

This is true to an extent, one person one vote, but there are two issues shared by most democracies that do tend to make them undemocratic.
One is that the number of elected representatives is not representative of the share of the vote, in a 'winner takes the whole state' system. Proportional representation would be far more democratic - if for example you get 46% of the vote, you get 46% of the representatives.
Two is that capitalist democracies are naturally controlled by those who have money and influence. An everyday citizen has one vote. A TV channel boss has one vote. Mark Zuckerberg has one vote. But obviously these people do not have the same influence on how other people vote.
Obviously there are other issues as well, but these two for starters suggest that democracies may not be truly democratic.

It's difficult to know how much of what Trump says at the moment is something that he means to follow through with, and how much is just something that he thinks will sound popular with an election just around the corner.  I'm sure he thinks it looks good to sound tough over China, just as the Chinese like to sound tough over America. But a lot of it is empty posturing, and it can be hard to differentiate between this, and threats that are actually followed through on.

Certainly the economic effects are only just starting to be felt. A lot of the public seem to think that the economic impact comes at the same time as the CV19 lockdowns... and that once the economy is back running at 1005, then everything is fine again. Clearly this will not be the case; the economic effects are felt further down the line. Unfortunately, a lot of countries have hard times ahead.

They do have that release schedule from escrow, most of which gets returned. "In 32 months, Ripple has released 32 billion XRP, of which, 25.8 billion went back into escrow." Full table here: https://www.xrparcade.com/escrow

I don't think the number of coins is a problem, that is just reflected in the low 'per coin' price.

I think that countries that make crypto illegal will get left behind, and will soon realise their mistake and legalise it again. If we think about the potential of smart contract cryptos such as Ethereum, these can introduce huge efficiency improvements in society... any country that makes crypto illegal chooses to use a much less efficient system instead, and puts themselves at a disadvantage.

This whole bull run was started by ETH, which then dragged in other alts and finally bitcoin. I think there's a convincing case that it was the ETH surge that finally caused bitcoin to pass and hold over $10k.
ETC I'm not so sure.

The reason for the sudden interest in ETH are the FOMO around DeFi, and the expectation of staking rewards in the 2.0 upgrade. ETC I think is just along for the ride, and is moving as the whole market moves, not out of any real strength or weakness of its own.

I think ETH is probably the better bet at the moment... at least until the run goes too far and it gets over-priced and starts to tumble... but we're not there yet

Yes, this is true. Verstappen did say "The tyres didn't look great with 10 laps to go, they didn't look pretty." If he had carried on, he could quite easily have had the same issue. I take back my earlier comment:If he stayed out and not pitted for fastest lap, he may have easily caught the 3-wheeled Hamilton and won the race, or he may have lost a tyre and dropped some places.


The sad thing is the way this impacts the championship, Bottas is now so far behind Hamilton, in cars that normally finish 1 and 2, that it would now take 4 Bottas victories to undo the damage done today (25-18)*4 = 28.

The safety car caused everyone to make their stop a bit earlier than they would have normally, which is why the tyres were struggling so much at the end - they had run longer than they should have. That said, it's a surprise that we had 3 instances of total tyre failure, and Pirelli will need to look at that.

Absolutely ridiculous finish to the British GP just now... punctures for both Mercedes cars, Hamilton on last lap. Verstappen was so far behind Hamilton, he took an extra pit stop to get fastest lap... but as it turned out, if he stayed out and not pitted for fastest lap, he'd have easily caught the 3-wheeled Hamilton and won the race!

This from the official F1 twitter account sums it up:

Yes, I think you are correct. There is a chance of Mercedes winning every race until 2022...
I think Red Bull and Ferrari both gambled with development to try to come up with something brilliant that would beat Mercedes, but for both the gamble failed and they are left with cars that are worse than last year's. Add in a small Mercedes improvement, and the fact that Ferrari can't use last year's engine, and the gap becomes huge.
It's not just Mercedes getting better, it's also other teams trying to beat Mercedes and ending up making their own cars worse.

2,3 and 4 - yes.
1 - yes if we remove the 'all particles' bit.

If we look at quantum field theory, at what we perceive as 'waves' and 'particles' actually being manifestations of underlying fields, then it becomes more intuitive. All fields are everywhere, always. The electron field is a property of spacetime, and has a value everywhere within spacetime. Under certain conditions, in certain spatio-temporal instances, the excitation of this field is sufficient to manifest as an electron. But there is no 'electron', there is only the state of the field. We can see this is true if we consider the manifestation of virtual particles. A virtual particle is a more temporary excitation of the field, which does not quite manifest as a 'particle', but nevertheless can be said to exist and indeed is proven to exist, as for example the mediator of electromagnetism. Consider also quantum chromodynamics, and the mechanism by which a proton or a neutron is held together, by the strong force, mediated by gluons, which are virtual, which are a representation of the excitation of the gluon field. All fields can be said to exist everywhere in space and everywhere in time, nothing is created or destroyed, there is only a change in quantum excitation.

It does seem likely, if the way that spacetime fields manifest is discrete and quantised, that spacetime itself is discrete and quantised, and can have a minimum unit. However... we can't prove this, it may be just a mathematical convention to remove troublesome infinities. I doubt we will have an answer to this question until we have a proper unification of quantum theory and gravity.


Yes. The double-slit experiment is the essence of quantum mechanics and its implications are profound. The Copenhagen Interpretation may be the standard, but is not without its flaws. Your interpretation sounds closer to Everett's 'many worlds' view, which is perfectly legitimate.
The question of whether time can only flow forward is an interesting one. This obviously has implications for entropy. Obviously we have no way as yet to prove or disprove anything in this regard.

Again, we have no answer here. Is the world or the field more fundamental? If a quantum wave function can collapse to an outcome of 0 or 1, then in 'many worlds' both outcomes occur, we have a universe where the result is 0, and a universe where the result is 1. We have two universes. But can we say we now have two 'particles', one that gives a 0 and one that gives a 1, or is this the same 'particle', the same field, a single field manifesting across universes?


Thank you again for the discussion, by the way. And again - it is impressive that you are able to discuss this in a second language!

I think his best ever finish in a race is fifth. Weirdly, coming in as a reserve this season gives him a great chance of improving on that, and even getting a podium place in the Racing Point.