This comment says it better than I could. The debate was a disaster for Biden. Which sucks.

ITT: People not understanding probabilistic forecasts.

Nate Silvers models are not perfect, but pretty close. You can do retro analysis on them to see. If someone with a 5% chance to win actually does win, that doesn’t mean the model was wrong… That just needs to actually happen only 5% of the time.

Getting elections"wrong" as people are talking about here shows they don’t really know how these models work. If you haven’t looked at the retrospective analysis on these results, then you are likely unqualified to declare that they are useless or wrong.

Saying polls are garbage is a straight bad take. The differentiation between polls is immense, and people treat them like they are just one thing.

They do adjust, and if you don’t know that I’m not likely to believe you have the knowledge to say they are bad.

Polls are still very indicative. Democrats are not magically beating them by 9 points. That’s just flatly untrue, unless you are just rolling every poll together with no regard for methodology, funding source, sample size, or track record.

Starting with a declaimer of being fairly far left…

Biden is not looking like he has a winning chance. He’s barely leading in national polls, but those polls are misleading, as, because of the senate, democrats typically need to win by 2.5-3 points in order to have a shot at the electoral college. So he’s behind there.

He’s behind in several key states where he needs to win. If you count states where he’s down 2 points or less, he BARELY has enough to win. Can’t miss a single state.

The debate hurt Biden. This is not a logical contest, it’s a popularity one, and Biden is not doing well. I think he’s done some great policy things, but that’s not how people vote. Democrats have to learn that it’s not enough to be “right” if you’re going to lose elections.

Mountain Goats right?

I’m never sure how to approach crypto on these platforms, because it’s rare to get a nuanced take.

I’ve moved past bitcoin to ethereum, I think it answers a lot of the criticisms.

I try not to get caught up on whether or not it’s a currency, store of value, or most other definitions. I just approach it from, is it a good product?

I’m in the middle on things such as money laundering or criminal activity. On one hand, the ledger system makes it incredibly easy to trace back transactions if someone ever messes up. On the other it serves a similar function as cash except you don’t have the physical weight, which is non trivial to transport. I know some criminals have to have used it successfully.

Crypto is hard. There’s so many goddamn scams and stuff like NFTs that could be a good idea if they got the weight of enforcement, but there’s no real enforcement mechanism. We have silly slips of paper that say whether we own things, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say we could make them digital with the right implementation. But those silly slips of paper hold the weight of law behind the. NFTs have no one to enforce anything, thus are useless.

I’m always afraid to open this up on this platform because there’s so many non nuanced takes, and people writing just the same criticisms. I’m hoping to have a good discussion, and I’m open to other opinions on it. But I haven’t found an argument that makes me think Ethereum is a problem or something to avoid. It’s certainly risky, but I think that risk is justified to the level of which I hold it.

They’re not perfect, but they’re not complete bullshit.

I can’t explain it all in a comment, but, like most things, there are good polls and bad polls. Saying polls are bullshit is like saying car mechanics are incompetent because some of them are.

If you read up on polls and their methodology, and read more then headlines, you can start to discern good ones from bad ones.

Most people don’t realize margin of error and how close elections are. There hasn’t been that large of polling errors in the last several elections. 2016 was larger than normal, but still within pretty explainable ranges.

Good polls are worth paying attention to, and proclaiming they are all bullshit is just a flatly bad take. There are a lot of shit polls that are politically motivated to make candidates look good or bad, but there are good pollsters doing good work. But you have to know what to look for. Not all polls are equal.

Not a lawyer, but I really doubt it. As has been used before, his lawyers can argue that he really does believe he’s being treated unfairly, so of course he would speak out. Or the route that it’s protected political speech meant to rile up his base. I mean if January 6th wasn’t stochastic terrorism, it leaves space for this kind of thing.

I don’t like Trump either, but anything legal around speech is pretty difficult. I’m quite shocked the Carroll case actually landed against Trump, but you can see how egregious it had to be. He’s talked about jailing all kinds of political people for all kinds of reasons. If you don’t do something the first time, then it can be used as justification that he’s not doing anything different. Is it a shitty argument? Sure. But in court, it’s effective.

I agree… Trump also has a superpower of gathering attention. The dude loves it even when it’s all bad. It’s a massive gift to Republicans because they can do crazy shit but Trump takes all the air time.

Trump is very skilled at absolutely wrenching attention away from everything else, even if he looks like a baffoon. Haley does not have that gene.

Corruption, demeanor, and leadership.

She doesn’t have dozens of lawsuits, she’s not a loose cannon who will say anything at any moment (I can only imagine how awful Trump is in meetings with foreign leaders, and his lawyers don’t even let him speak in court because he’ll get himself in even more trouble), and she can get people around her to believe in things more than her own selfish means.

I get that you wanted policies, but things like this are important too. Haley wouldn’t be headlining every day with some dumb shit she said on Twitter.

I feel oddly like I’m defending Haley… I’m not. Her border policies suck, she’ll seek to pardon Trump if elected, and I don’t see her doing shit on gun control either. Economically she’ll do the same as Republicans in that she’ll grossly underfund programs and then use their underfunding as justification for closing them, and do nothing to help the average person with tax breaks (those are for companies and upper class only).

I hear you in terms of her policies being shit, but calling the worst President in our lifetime the same as a below-average Republican candidate is just equivocating and makes people less likely to hear what you have to say. There’s a lot of Republicans who are sick of Trump and do believe he’s a threat to Democracy, but when they hear that people think Haley and Trump are the same, it reinforces Trumps worst messages.

I think this take is pretty bad. You can disagree with Haley and Trump on a lot of pretty core issues, but trying to say they are completely equal is just plain wrong, in my opinion.

If Haley was elected, I’m positive that I wouldn’t like the direction of the country at all, and think things would regress. It also encourages Republicans to run the most extreme candidates, because there’s no pull to anything rational when all candidates are treated the same.

With Trump, I’m genuinely concerned about our core institutions surviving again.

I don’t view Haley as Moderate, but I don’t think Trump is on a politicians spectrum. The man is just chaos and ego incarnate.

What time zone is that minute in?!

… He can’t run at all if he’s kicked off the ballot.

And he won’t rally people against Haley or she’ll pull the “I Won’t Pardon You” card.

Trump always operates in his own selfish best interest. And his interest will quickly become do what he can to get Haley elected. It’ll be his only out.

I would add to this… I’m not convinced they would lose in 2024. If they kept Trump off the ballot, Haley could naturally step in and say she would pardon Trump (wouldn’t get him reinstated or anything really, but I don’t think his supporters would read past “pardon”).

Then all of the sudden you might actually get a revved up MAGA crowd behind someone like Haley, who appeals way more to the center.

It’s not far fetched that she could give Biden a hard time, particularly now that they’d play the age card as much as possible. I’ve been saying this from the beginning… This is the Trump off-ramp in a way that doesn’t damage any elected officials. They can all be outraged and angry publicly, and they fits their narrative very nicely.

If Trump gets kicked off the ballot, the road for Democrats in 2024 gets harder, not easier, in my opinion.

Probably

From everything I’ve seen, this race is over. New Hampshire was one of the highest populations of Haleys base and she still lost by 10 points.

She would need a very seismic shift in the race to have any prayer of a chance.

And just to be clear, I’m quite liberal. But whenever I write these comments people think I’m for Trump. I just look at the data.

I think you’re applying your own viewpoint here to the general public.

I don’t enjoy wrestling. I also don’t enjoy reality TV, teen dramas, horror shows, or European Football. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have value.

If TV needs to provide some infallible, logical benefit to be worth something, then every show is in trouble. It’s practically all made up stories about nothing that matters.

This is one of the narrow times that “the customer is always right” applies correctly. It doesn’t matter if it’s “good” by any one person’s definition. If people watch, it has value.

I’d pay good money to see high quality Starcraft 2 tournaments on TV. I doubt many other people would. That’s how value is determined.

Yeah it’d be ideal if all of them had perfectly cooked and prepared meals with well researched nutritional balance and a balanced food and flavor profile.

But somehow Republicans want small government that leaves people alone except when it comes to their genitals, bathroom habits, access to books, or apparently what kind of food they get.

I guess we can continue to judge the poorest among us for what we view as poor choices with their social benefits.

I’m not even against some of the ideas, but denying people what they have because it’s not your perfect idea of what they should have is just cruel. Work towards better, don’t use people’s suffering as leverage.

For sure… But $0 a month isn’t going to buy much protein either

Not in Iowa. I live here. They will absolutely remove the Satanic symbol and proclaim that it is because of religious freedom.

…it will make sense to them.