I don't think this is correct. The US has dramatically expanded its oil production recently, and is the world's major producer by some distance. Whilst there is still a dependency on the Middle East - not least because the US can't control global prices by itself - there is much less reliance than in the past.

Top 10 oil producers in 2020
United States: 19.51 million bpd
Saudi Arabia: 11.81 million bpd
Russia: 11.49 million bpd
Canada: 5.50 million bpd
China: 4.89 million bpd
Iraq: 4.74 million bpd
United Arab Emirates (UAE): 4.01 million bpd
Brazil: 3.67 million bpd
Iran: 3.19 million bpd
Kuwait: 2.94 million bpd
https://www.ig.com/uk/trading-strategies/world-s-biggest-oil-producers-200722


I'm not convinced by this, either. Some countries might have the military strength to give the US a hard fight, but no-one can crush them. More relevant, no-one who could give them a fight would want to do so. Modern economics means that the nations of the world are inextricably intertwined; a big nation can't attack another big nation without hurting itself. Globalisation, despite its many flaws, does at least work to prevent wars between major countries. US adventurism overseas is a different subject.

This is my perspective, too. Rosberg was second best to Hamilton, and he knew it. The only reason he became champion was because Ham had a succession of bad luck that season that cost him the title. Even so, Rosberg only just won it. He knew if he stayed, then Ham would continue to beat him. So he chose to leave as reigning world champion instead.

Rosberg was definitely a better driver than Bottas, although Bottas is more of a team player, and helps to get the best out of Hamilton.

I'm going to get that made into a t-shirt. Along with "the plural of anecdote is not data".

I see we've had a load of new voters in the poll. Thanks for your participation, but unfortunately we already have a winner and these late ballots cannot be counted because you didn't vote for my preferred option.

Yes, that definitely happens during races!
This time it sounds different. Bit of a weird one, but apparently the track was resurfaced only a couple of weeks ago, and is leaking bitumen which is making the surface a bit greasy and causing loss of grip and some spins. Sounds like the sort of thing that isn't going to get rectified in time for the race. Could be chaos on Sunday!

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It's not just Toto saying it. Ferrari have said so themselves, and have brought in a new designer specifically to focus on 2022.

The reason that they have no chance (or very little chance) in 2021 is that the Covid pandemic pushed the rule changes back a year to 2022, and means that next year has only very limited and restricted development permitted. All teams are limited in the changes they can make for 2021, and given that Ferrari are so far behind this year, it seems unlikely given those constraints that there is any possibility they can catch up.
The other side of this is the speculation about whether Hamilton will sign a new contract - the development limits next year means he's likely to have the best car again, and a clear run at an 8th world title... surely he'd not turn down that chance.

Yeah, I appreciate it hardly constitutes conclusive evidence - maybe I'm a credulous fool, but I still take the responses at face-value, and I'm surprised that it appears that some people want Trump out more than they want fair elections.

Meanwhile... the final results in my own poll are in, and I can reveal there was a surprise late swing!

Well, the results are in:



I had to remove some of the votes for the second option, because they were fraudulent.
Also I received a lot of late postal ballots for the third option. I didn't check the postmark, and counted them all anyway.

By a weird coincidence, my preferred choice is the winning option.

OP's decision is final. Margin of victory is sufficiently large that there will be no possibility of a recount.
I'll leave the poll unlocked, because now that I've achieved victory I have zero interest in the democratic process.

I would have disagreed with this statement, however I'm surprised to see that the results of the poll - so far - do suggest that you might have a point. It's only 2 out of 17 who think that, but still, it's non-zero. We could do with some more respondents to see where this leads.

It's also worth noting that whilst we are talking about the possibility of illegal fraud to manipulate election results, the democratic process as it is is some way from perfect. Media outlets and public figures manipulate voters hugely with selective truths, willful misrepresentation and outright lies. Even if that were somehow solved, we still have the unfair 'winner takes the whole state' approach, which should more ideally be replaced with proportional representation - if everyone gets a vote, then every voting preference (above some minimum % threshold) should be represented in government. A broader spectrum of representatives might also work to mitigate the oppositional and factional nature of the current two-party system.

He doesn't even need to win. All he needs is to finish within 7 points of Bottas. So if Bottas wins the race and Ham comes second, he's champion (provided Bottas doesn't get fastest lap).
Ham is 85 points ahead with 4 races left.
There will be max 78 points available for the final 3 races (win + fastest lap).
So long as Ham is at least 78 ahead after Turkey, he is champion again.

This isn't really relevant. Remember that Trump claimed in 2016 that although he won the election, 'fraud' had robbed him of winning the popular vote. The commission he set up to investigate his own lies the 'fraud' found zero evidence of fraud. My favourite quote from the linked article, which sums up the situation quite eloquently: "The plural of anecdote is not data".

He claimed fraud in 2016, and couldn't find any evidence despite being the most powerful man in the world, with all doors open to him.
Now he claims fraud again, without supplying any evidence. His attempted subversion of democracy didn't work last time, and won't work this time. The idea of someone who has been POTUS for four years positioning himself as a valiant outsider fighting against a corrupt system is absurd.

Evidence or didn't happen.

It's never okay to lie or cheat to steal an election. If you're going to do that, then why bother having an election in the first place?

Even before voting started, Trump's two possible outcomes were:
a) I won.
b) I won but was cheated by the other guy.

There was never going to be an 'I lost' outcome.

In this instance, the 'fraud' was a pre-determined excuse. If he lost, Trump was always going to challenge the results, no matter whether they were close or not (they're not close). There was never any way that he would accept that he had lost, no margin clear enough. Even 90% to 10%, he'd cry fraud.

And he still hasn't supplied any evidence.

It's a truism that crisis accelerates change. However in this instance we need to make the distinction between "digital because it's better" and "digital because it's necessary".
There is no doubt for example that after the pandemic is over, some degree of remote working will continue. It is more efficient that way, eliminates the daily commute, workers are (generally) happier, bosses will be happier when they can remove the costly overhead of maintaining a large physical office. Win-win.
However some digital changes may well revert back to the old way of doing things once the pandemic is over. Online shopping for example, whilst it will likely remain higher than before the pandemic, will no doubt drop away significantly from the current levels as people will want to get out and back into physical spaces.

The shift to more remote working could well help to level employment opportunities between (as well as within) nations. If you are in London, why pay £10,000 to someone who is remote-working from within the UK, when you could pay £1,000 for the same quality of work to someone who is remote working from a poorer nation?

I always think these historic charts make more sense on a log scale, because we have seen several order-of-magnitude changes over the years. Whereas with a linear scale, the first half of the orange area is effectively zero, as is the second half of the green line.

There is of course a chance that bitcoin drops to $0. It does seem unlikely though. As for what happens in the aftermath of the pandemic, there are two conflicting trends and either could win out in the medium-term:

• Bail-outs and money printing have brought the deficiencies of fiat into stark focus, as happened in 2008. The case for bitcoin grows stronger.
• Bitcoin has the potential to be a store-of-value asset. However many people currently view it as a highly-speculative asset, which is generally the first thing to be sold when the economy hits trouble, as it will once the delayed economic effects of lockdowns and bail-outs start to be felt.

But long-term, yes, bitcoin has never looked stronger.

The fact that election fraud is even being discussed is absurd. All we have is one man shouting "fraud!" whilst supplying zero evidence. The fact that he is POTUS is irrelevant; he still needs to supply evidence of fraud, or of rules not being followed, or even of suspicious behaviour. He had representatives at the count. They need to explain why they think fraud was committed. Less shouting and foot-stamping, more facts, please.

If you claim something happened, and then fail to explain why you think it happened, then your claim should be dismissed. Doesn't matter who you are.
The fact that this 'fraud' is even being discussed is quite revealing of the way that society functions, and how powerful people operate, and how the democratic process has been eroded.

Apparently, on the basis of nothing, we now have a situation where 70 percent of Republicans don’t think the election was free and fair. This is farcical.

Money does talk, yes. For a country to get a Formula 1 race is a huge achievement, and is seen by corrupt regimes as a way to improve their PR and gain some measure of legitimacy in the world. Same for other events such as the World Cup or the Olympics. Certain countries will pay vast amounts of money to get an F1 race, and F1 just holds its nose and says 'yes'.
People have been waiting for Lewis Hamilton to speak out against the Saudi GP, but I don't think that's fair. We can't expect one driver - however prominent - to be the conscience of an entire sport. He's already pulled BLM into prominence in a sport that would otherwise have disregarded it. It's time for the F1 leaders themselves to take a stand here... but this seems hugely unlikely to happen.

It's certainly a huge challenge for both production and logistics, but if we are talking about ending the pandemic, then we don't need to vaccinate absolutely everyone. It would be sufficient to vaccinate a large enough proportion of the population that we reduce the effectiveness of the transmission vector, such that r<1. If say 0.8 people are infected by every person who has the virus, then after a time the spread stops almost entirely. I think this will be the aim, and would indeed need to be done globally to prevent pockets of new outbreak. Whilst ideally everyone would be vaccinated, it is, as you say, a difficult target, so I think the practical solution will be 'enough people' rather than 'all people'.


No, it's not fake. The only way you can become immune without drugs is by catching the virus. Even then there is no conclusive evidence that immunity is permanent.

It makes sense, yes. However in this instance I don't think that's the reason. The rise coincided exactly with the start of the election results in the US. We saw traditional stocks and shares surge as well. If they are moving up at the same time as bitcoin, this points to an external 'non-crypto' driver. In this case, the US election.

As with everything, predicted outcomes are factored into price ahead of time. The general expectation was that Biden would win, and the Dems would gain control of the senate. What happened was a Biden win, but likely Rep controlled senate (depending on the GA run-offs in January).

This means that there was 'breaking news' that Biden wouldn't be able to force through his expected stimulus packages and tax hikes in the face of a Rep senate. This new information is I think is the main cause of the price rise across both crypto and non-crypto assets.

Apologies if I've misinterpreted your post, but I'd disagree. It can and does change reality, all the time. Take the recent news of the potential Covid19 vaccine. The scientists who devised and tested the vaccine have years of education behind them, starting with basic maths, biology, chemistry, statistics, and have built on this foundation to discover and prove new information, which can then be used to educate in turn. This is how science progresses. Have theory, test theory, document findings. Repeat. Science advances, technology advances, society advances, the world changes. If this was based on lies, no, it wouldn't be useful.

I'd also take issue with your three examples:
1. Neolithic people couldn't build cathedrals, medieval people could. Because, over generations, they had learned how to do so, and that education had been passed on.
2. Slaves do as they are told, regardless of personal belief or education.
3. Because he has learned that the action evokes a positive response.