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Cake day: August 16th, 2023

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  • 538 is not a reliable source since Nate Silver left. He’s written about why, but that’s not the point here.

    Michigan and Wisconsin are still very much up in the air. Most polls have them within the margin of error. That means they could very easily turn out red, even without anything being wrong with the polling method. The other states are even closer.

    It’s a terrifyingly close election, and even the smallest influence could change the result. What does the weather look like on election day? How did your portfolio do the day before? How long are the lines?

    These could alter the course of history, even if we ignore things like more hurricanes in swing states.

    Harris still has a slight edge, but it’s barely above 50/50. Get out and vote (even in a safe red/blue state), vote the whole ballot, and do whatever you can to get others to vote as well. Ideally, vote early so nothing can interfere at the last minute.



  • I feel like you’re downplaying the part about it being amplified for profit, and overemphasizing the part about it being genetic.

    “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

    That describes a large part of our entire society for the past 50 years. As we’ve noticed our pockets being picked, they’ve had to up the distractions.







  • It’s very much the Oracle model.

    A long time ago, Oracle DB could handle workloads much, much larger than any of their competitors. If you needed Oracle, none of the others were even a possibility. There are even tales that it was a point of pride for some execs.

    Then Oracle decided to put the screws to their customers. Since they had no competition, and their customers had deep pockets (otherwise they wouldn’t have had such large databases), they could gouge all they wanted. They even got new customers, because they had no competition.

    Fast forward and there are now a number of meaningful competitors. But it’s not easy to switch to a different DB software, and there are a ton of experienced Oracle devs/DBAs out there. There are very few new projects built using Oracle, but the existing ones will live forever (think COBOL) and keep sucking down licensing fees.

    VMware thinks they are similarly entrenched, and in some cases they’re right. But it’s not the simple hypervisor that everyone is talking about. That can easily be replaced by a dozen alternatives at the next refresh. Instead it’s the extended stack, the APIs and whatnot, that will require significant development work to switch to a new system.




  • Why are we looking to a Newsweek article about Nate’s blog, instead of the blog post directly?

    Last update: 9:30 a.m., Friday, September 20. The theme of the week remains mostly strong state polls for Kamala Harris, like this batch from Morning Consult, which helped her even though Morning Consult has consistently shown some of her better numbers.

    Indeed, today marks the 3rd time so far in the election that the streams have crossed in the forecast — Harris is technically the favorite in the model for the first time since Aug. 28 — but the race is a toss-up and that will happen a lot when the forecast is so close to 50/50.

    Source

    Note that these margins are still razor thin. Voter turnout (and related factors) will be absolutely critical to the final results.


  • No, it was absolutely a Mafia-style threat. Here is the entire article, emphasis added:

    Politico reporter Adam Wren, while reporting on potential Trump attorney general Mike Davis, was subjected to ominous threats and intimidation from an unidentified Trump ally.

    As part of his lengthy profile of Davis, Wren wrote about an experience he had writing down notes about Donald Trump Jr. telling Davis that he wanted Davis to be Trump’s next attorney general for the next four years.

    At this point, an unidentified woman accosted Wren and demanded that he hand over his phone and delete the notes he had taken.

    Wren then tried to leave the area – but was subsequently blocked from the exits by four men who similarly demanded that he hand over his phone.

    Davis tried to explain to the woman that he had to catch a flight to meet up with his family, to which she replied, “You should have thought about your kids before you did what you did.”

    “After roughly 15 minutes of this standoff, I searched for another exit,” Wren continued. “I ran down a hallway into a stairwell. Two people followed me. When I was out on the street, Davis called me. By this point, Davis had confronted the aide near the elevators and dressed her down. You don’t ask a reporter to delete their notes, he told her, according to both Davis and a second person he recounted his remarks to briefly after. This isn’t North Korea.”

    The Trump campaign subsequently investigated and claimed to Wren that the woman in question was not formally involved in Trump’s campaign.

    5 people believed that they had a right to do any of that, on any level. It had nothing to do with a flight.