Pollsters are compensating for that undercount of unlikely voters. 2016 they were low, 2020 still low but pretty close. They will have scaled it up to be more accurate this go around.

Except there’s a few snags there. In between the 2020 election and now, there was an insurrection, Roe v. Wade was overturned, Trump was convicted of crimes and indicted for many more. These are things that a statistical process can’t really account for when putting weight on how likely a respondant is to actually vote.

Trump lost in 2020. Do all of these events incentivize more people will turn out for him this time than in the last election? Or will less people turn out for him?

Every time something unprecedented happens it negatively impacts the ability for a scientific statistical process to predict the outcome. Science can’t predict things there’s no model for, and how do you can’t have a model for something you haven’t seen before. And a hell of a lot of unprecedented shit has happened. Maybe next time a convicted felon that tried to overthrow democracy runs in an election there can be accurate polling, but it’s not going to be the case in this election.

There really is no way to know what will happen on election day. So there’s else to do other than maximum effort until election day.

It’s forecasting, not a prediction. If the weather forecast said there was a 28% chance of rain tomorrow and then tomorrow it rained would you say the forecast was wrong? You could say that if you want, but the point isn’t to give a definitive prediction of the outcome (because that’s not possible) it’s to give you an idea of what to expect.

If there’s a 28% chance of rain, it doesn’t mean it’s not going to rain, it actually means you might want to consider taking an umbrella with you because there’s a significant probability it will rain. If a batter with a .280 batting average comes to the plate with 2 outs at the bottom of the ninth, that doesn’t mean the game is over. If a politician has a 28% probability of winning an election, it’s not a statement that the politician will definitely lose the election.

You don’t have one in your Democracy Scrapbook?

Just warning y’all about the dark path you may be heading down with all of this hatred. Pretending like a warning about where you’re going is some kind of propaganda tactic is a sign you might be too far gone already. Not much anyone can do for you.

IMO it should even be hashed on the client side before being sent so that it doesn’t show up as plaintext in any http requests or logs. Then salted and hashed again server side before being stored (or checked for login).

But if someone got that hashed version they could hack the client to have client side hashing code just send that hashed value to the server. You’d want to have the server to send a rotating token of some sort to use for encrypting the password on the client and then validate it on the server side that it was encrypted with the same token the server sent.

Seems complicated to me… https is probably has good enough encryption, so eh, whatever.

You know Canada is always lobbying Congress for trade deals, right? Every country does these kinds of things with every country they have relations with. The term we usually use for it is “diplomacy”.

Your links are from nearly 6 months ago. There were concerns from people that don’t know what a war is. Yes, there were high casualty numbers when the IDF initially moved in, because there was a lot of combat happening between the IDF and Hamas. But after that the war became low intensity and the casualty numbers leveled off. If a country was committing genocide the civilian casualties would increase when there was no longer anyone there to defend them. We’ve seen the opposite trend in Gaza. High casualties in the initial stages when there was heavy fighting, casualties drop off when Hamas loses control of an area.

The UN expressed concerns about a potential genocide, but we haven’t heard much in the last six months. It’s because the genocide the UN had concerns about didn’t happen. Check your wikipedia link again. They may soon change the page from “Gaza genocide” to “Accusations of Gazan genocide in the Israel–Hamas war” because… well people are realizing the genocide narrative being heavily promoted didn’t actually materialize.

What do you suppose it would be like to be on the wrong side of history? What will historians say about people that wanted a war to be called a genocide in an obvious effort to foment hatred against a country? Only time will tell I suppose.

But at any rate the pattern of behavior is undeniable. The pro-Palestinian movement have the exact same behavior as the alt right. There’s a great many conspiracy theories shared between the pro-Palestinian movement and the alt-right, same distrust of media that doesn’t conform to their biases, same misuse of terms like genocide to create a violent fervor. At this point the only thing the genocide narrative is accomplishing is helping Hamas and friends recruitment numbers which will result in more violence in the future. Is this what you want?

I didn’t say you were. Though promoting a false narrative about Israel committing a genocide (the casualty numbers are consistent with urban combat in other conflicts) is an indication that you aren’t really questioning the narratives you’re seeing on the internet.

Given that you’re resistant to doing any kind of introspection on whether any of your views might be stemming from antisemitic biases you are more susceptible to antisemitic beliefs than those who are willing to stop and consider things carefully. I mean look at JD Vance making a joke about how him drinking Mountain Dew will probably be considered racist be Democrats. You’re going down that line of thinking. It’s not good to think like JD Vance thinks.

You can avoid these traps by actually considering the possibility that some of the things you see on the internet are racist in intent and designed to make you hate certain ethnicities. Not everything on the internet is that way of course, but there is a lot of content that is. Many times someone is unwittenly sharing something with racist dog whistles without know they’re doing so.

The whole “they’re probably going to say I’m racist for this…” mentality is preemptively dismissing any form of criticism of a position about it potentially being racist. You’re creating a permission structure to be racist because anything that contradicts you is “just them making up lies about me being racist.” Yeah it’s the internet, people do falsely accuse others of being racist, just as people falsely accuse nations of genocide.

The right wing is constantly using rhetorical tactics involving getting the upper hand by making extreme claims. Preemptively declaring any opposition over potential racism in their narrative is automatically disingenuous. Constant appeals to emotion, selectively promoting facts that promote the narrative while ignoring facts that run counter to the narrative. These are the tactics of both the alt right and the pro-Palestinian movement. In fact it’s becoming difficult to categorize the pro-Palestinian movement as anything other than an alt-right movement. Both are convinced that Jews are planning genocides, they just differ on who the Jews want to commit genocide on.

It’s a major talking point in the pro-Palestinian crowd too. Though I feel like that group is shifting towards being alt right for this and many other talking points they have in common.

Eh, they’re small potatoes. I think they need to go after the social media companies for allowing this to happen. You’re never going to get anywhere by trying to go after idiots that are just saying whatever they think will get them promoted in by the algorithm. It’s the companies that make algorithms that can be easily manipulated by bots from a foreign adversary that need to be shamed. And asked some hard questions about what they knew and when they knew it.

Yeah those intelligence estimates about being able to take over Ukraine in a couple of weeks and they’d be greeted as liberated was some top tier spycraft.

Really Putin is kinda shit at the spy stuff. Just that it’s super easy to acquire assets when there’s a lot of people that only care about making money and don’t ask a lot of questions about where it’s coming from.

Restore Iraq after fscking it up. Investigate war crimes and give some justice to their victims after that invasion. I guess the Marshall plan was for white Europeans only (it’s funny BTW, people in ex-USSR in 1991 apparently expected that something like that will be attempted, but USA worked to cement the ex-Soviet elites and to help them neuter actual grassroots movemen

Uh… the US tried to restore Iraq, it didn’t go well. Nation building is hard and the US isn’t particularly good at it. Calling on the US to do more nation building probably isn’t a good idea.

Protect Georgia against Russia.

Currently weakening the Russian military in Ukraine. Do you want to broaden the war?

guess the Marshall plan was for white Europeans only (it’s funny BTW, people in ex-USSR in 1991 apparently expected that something like that will be attempted, but USA worked to cement the ex-Soviet elites and to help them neuter actual grassroots movements instead), but at least fixing things that wouldn’t be broken without USA seemed logical.

Are you saying the Eastern Europeans aren’t white? Or that no money was spent in Afghanistan and Iraq? There’s a difference between rebuilding allies and rebuilding while engaging in combat with a a resistance.

It doesn’t seem to be a lot of thought in this particular “US bad” narrative. There are real criticisms to be made of US foreign policy but you’re missing them all by a longshot. Maybe consider that the US isn’t some nation of supermen that is capable of solving all of the world’s problems but it just doesn’t want to. It’s more accurate to say the US isn’t actually capable of solving many of the problems in the world, and tends to make a lot of messes by misunderstanding other countries and it’s own capabilities.

What about that pyramid with an eyeball on there? US money is weird as fuck and everyone is just all “yup these are completely normal things to have on our currency.”

It must be quieter than the sound of a leaf hitting the ground!

The point of trademarks is to avoid market confusion.

MTV didn’t instantly eliminate all of it’s programming and created new programming overnight. They had reality TV shows playing alongside music videos in the 90s. There are some people that might like a reality show that was on MTV when they were playing music videos, then suddenly the name of the company changes because they don’t play music and those people can’t find the show they like? Even though it’s still on, still being made by the same company, but under a different name because curmudgeons don’t think it’s appropriate that a company with the letter M in it’s name isn’t focused on music?

Trademarks are about people being able to know which company they’re buying from. The name of the company is relatively arbitrary. You could start a company making computers and give it an arbitrary name like I don’t know “Apple”. then people will associate the quality of the computers with that arbitrary name “Apple”. Well you could if someone didn’t do exactly that already. It’s not so much the name it’s the consistency that matters most.

And many names we just kind of forget their origins because they’re irrelevant to what the company now does. Does Motorolla have to change it’s name because they no longer make record players for cars? Does DC have to rebrand because very few of their comics are about detectives? KFC can’t call themselves that because a vast majority of their restaurants aren’t in Kentucky?

I’d actually go the other way if anything. Make it illegal for a company to change it’s name. Facebook promotes eating disorders to teenagers? Sorry you aren’t changing your name to Meta, you can’t do bad shit and erase that negative brand association by re-branding. You want your brand to be considered good? Then do better.

I like this. It’s stupid that LA has the Lakers… because LA is known for it’s lakes? They also have the Dodgers… yeah because people are always dodging streetcars in LA?

The MTV thing though… I think they’ve already made it so the M doesn’t stand for anything now. They removed the “Music Television” part off of their logo anyway.

I would go with: Remove expiration dates entirely. Because it’s not an expiration date, it’s a “best before” date. Which when you think about it, it’s true that food is “best before” literally any future date you put on the label.

Most of the factors that will cause food to spoil are things not under the control of the companies that package the food. How cold do you keep your fridge at? How long did it take for you to transport the food from the store to your fridge? What was the temperature that day? How long did you have it before you break the seal and start using it? How long was the food outside of your fridge? etc. etc.

Those things are just invented by a marketing department to encourage people to throw out food so they have to buy more. There are no regulations on it, they just put whatever date they think will maximize their profits.

You buy fresh fruit and vegetables (the things that will spoil faster than anything else you buy) there is no expiration date. How do you manage? Look at it, and maybe give it a smell test. The same applies for all food really.

“Best before” dates are a scam that results in food being thrown out prematurely. Grocery prices are too high, we shouldn’t allow these kinds of shenanigans to drive prices higher.

You know it is possible that both you and they are antisemitic?

A made up political spectrum doesn’t make it impossible for you to fall for the same politics of hate that they’ve fallen for.

Many in the pro-Palestinian movement have lost a sense of good judgment thinking their emotions justify anything they say or do. Others in the movement look the other way when this happens.

Take a good look at this Tucker Carlson drama unfolding. This is how most people see the pro-Palestinian movement right now. Rationalizing antisemitic shit. Does this help Palestinians? Nope. But that movement is going in a bad direction, and it’s starting to be more focused on hating Israel (and Jews in general) than on actually helping Palestinians. A lot of similarities to the MAGA movement, which claims to be about helping the middle class, but in actual practice is more about hating people. Right now the MAGAs are hating on the same people that people in the pro-Palestinian movement hate.

Many in the pro-Palestinian movement today will become the MAGAs of the future. Antisemitism is a hard thing to shake and has a tendency to take over all other thoughts by people infected with it.

In real life, Qaddafi got rid of landlords in Libya. It resulted in a lot of housing problems.

Some people don’t have wealthy parents that can buy them a place to live outright. There is a need to have housing available that doesn’t require someone to have wealthy parents or get out a large loan. The ability to rent a place is important.

The real problem is the high cost to own a place to live which results in people having to rent when they’d rather own a home.

Yeah a country has an ethical obligation to protect it’s citizens. Which is why countries issue travel advisories. If you ignore the warnings your country is giving you, that ethical obligation doesn’t apply because it was already fulfilled by the warning.

“Don’t go over there, it’s dangerous!”

“Screw you, I’m not listening to you!”

Problem happens.

“Why did you allow this dangerous thing to happen???”