So the media should have hacked into the DNC... to uncover evidence that the media is cooperating with the DNC? Seems like they could have just released their own emails.
I've seen news articles about a lot of hate and violent threats towards Trump and others by people, but they aren't banned.
How do you know they're not banned, did you report the threats to Twitter and nothing happened? Do you have examples of the threats that you've reported?
Twitter really is as biased as I see in articles, even the ones posted to Slashdot.
Says the guy posting to Slashdot using his account linked to Twitter. Listen man, if you think there's a problem with certain Twitter accounts then report them. You can, you have an account there.
I know, it's kind of ridiculous. I remember going to all of those liberal political rallies where you could buy shooting targets with the opponent's face on them, or hear speakers talk about "second amendment people" needing to do their thing if the opponents win. It was pretty awful. At all of those liberal rallies.
*THAT* is the primary issue for you? When most people think of Nazis they don't think of censorship, they think extreme racism and nationalism, ethnic/religious cleansing, etc. But you hear the word Nazi and think "a group who censored people"?
Well, you changed my mind. Thanks for letting me know that the ultimate goal of the UNFCCC these past 25 years or so is to drain people of money. I thought it had something to do with the climate, but I appreciate your informed analysis.
When you call people stupid
In all fairness he did wonder aloud who collects temperature data. There's literally an entire profession for that.
Mexico has an economy that is only about 20% smaller than that of Russia. Should we now be afraid of them? After all, they're a lot closer to the USA
Well, Russia has around 7,300 nuclear warheads and is led by an ex-KGB guy who thinks that it's his duty to return Russia to the glory days of superpower status, at the expense of the US. I'm having a hard time figuring out how many nuclear warheads Mexico has, but I'm sure there's a comparison there somewhere.
If we're going to be fucked, we might as well have jobs in the meantime.
Why? Do people have some sort of right to work a harmful job? Coal miners in West Virginia - do they have some sort of right to always mine coal? For as long as it's there anyway, I imagine that once the coal is gone they'll want laws to put the coal back in the ground so that they can have a job taking it back out again. What about buggy whip manufacturers? We should also make sure that they always have jobs too, right? No reason to learn any new skills or move to a place that has work, no, if the only thing you're good for is taking rocks out of the ground then we have a responsibility to make sure that you can get paid taking rocks out of the ground. Because that's our responsibility, to make sure that coal miners always have jobs mining coal, right? That's our responsibility, right? It's not our responsibility to make sure we're not fucking up the planet, but it's definitely our responsibility to make sure that a coal miner always gets paid for taking coal out of the ground.
Listen man, if environmental protections mean that you can't find a job, then maybe you need a new fucking job.
'Undecided' is a valid response, along with 'Republican', 'Democrat', 'other', and 'no vote'.
Yeah, it sure is a valid response. So what happens when I'm planning to vote Democrat, but I tell them I'm going to vote Republican instead? Haven't I introduced an error into their data? What if I've made up my mind already, but I tell them I'm undecided? That's an error in the data, right? But they don't take that kind of thing into consideration, and how can they? How can they quantify lies in a data set when they look exactly like the rest of the data? It doesn't matter, because as long as they say what the sample size is, and calculate a margin of error, then everything sounds scientific and all of the reporters on the radio and TV will tell people exactly what's going to happen, and it's all wrong. That's my point, they try to make this stuff look scientific and it is not scientific at all. Take into account how many people are lying to you and maybe people will start to listen to "pollsters" again, but the news services are not doing themselves any favors by relying on this crap. Polls don't mean anything, and we saw that over and over again during the primaries and election, but for some reason everyone was so surprised that Trump won.
For example Clinton 47%, Trump 46%, margin of error 2%, means that the true values could be Clinton anywhere from 45% to 49%, and Trump anywhere from 44% to 48%, thus the confidence intervals overlap and the difference is not significant.
Well, significant how? To a statistician, or a reporter, or a voter? A reporter is going to look at those numbers and say that Clinton is in the lead. Reality could mean that Trump is up by 3 points. That's exactly the opposite of what the reporter said. I would say that's significant.
But to assume a priori that all those undecideds must be closet Trumpists - that would have been abandoning any attempt at science and just making up the results to suit a preconceived agenda.
Yeah, I know. I wasn't suggesting that. I was suggesting adjusting your margin of error to reflect the undecided count. If your margin of error is less than the undecided percentage then that's a problem. Maybe add another choice - "I don't want to tell you", that will also give you more insight.
Bernie would have been trounced in the general which is why no one seriously considered him as a nominee.
Oh, come on. Bernie WAS seriously considered by a nominee, do you want to compare the size of his rallies with those of Clinton? He's a democratic socialist in his 70s that hardly anyone outside of Vermont had heard of, and he was pulling in tens of thousands of people in any city. People were genuinely excited about his candidacy. Clinton had none of that excitement, she is as exciting as a wet pair of pants. The people who did not seriously consider him as a candidate were Clinton's team, the DNC, and the media that was sucking Clinton's tit since day one. They shaped the narrative to marginalize him and his supporters, and they pushed that narrative all the way. And it came back to bite them in the ass when fewer Democrats came out to vote than for the last 2 elections, and this against the single most disliked candidate in the history of presidential polling.
It's pointless to try and say what would have happened for Bernie vs. Trump. It's a stupid exercise. What we know is that Sanders polled better against Trump than Clinton did, we know that Sanders generated a tremendous amount of excitement that Clinton lacked, and we know that the DNC, Clinton's campaign, and the media worked to push out Sanders. Any other guesses about how badly Bernie would have beaten Trump are pure speculation. The election that we had was change vs. the poster child of the establishment. If it was change vs. other change it would have gone completely differently and none of us knows what the outcome would have been.
The DNC fucked up. They could have let Clinton get defeated in the primary, AGAIN, but instead they shoved her through so that they could hand the election to the single most disliked candidate in the history of presidential polling.
The problem is that people think that polls are accurate, because they use terms like "sample size" and "margin of error" to give the illusion that they are scientific. They aren't scientific. A poll is asking a bunch of people what they think, and assuming that all of them tell the truth. Guess what? They don't all tell the truth. When Nate Silver was publishing his numbers he showed 12% of people saying they were "undecided", but for some reason the margin of error was not +/- 12. How many of those "undecided" people do you actually think had already made up their minds, and didn't want to tell anyone because they wanted to avoid how people would react to their choice? How many of those "undecided" people walked into the polling booth and chose an actual candidate? Those polls are going to say that Hillary has a lead, and that the margin of error is low, and that Trump has a 16% chance of winning, and none of those things are correct but since they list the sample size and bother to come up with a number for "margin of error" then people whose job it is to talk or write for companies that say they publish news (pardon me if I don't want to refer to those people as journalists) will say that all of the polls show that Hillary is in the lead, and this is what's going to happen, and here are the states where there is going to be a real contest, and no one has any idea what they're talking about. But it sounds good, until none of the things that people predicted actually happen.
The real stupid thing is that this same crap happened over and over during the primaries and all of the news talking people still acted like they knew what was going on at the end.
I'm not talking about eligible voters, I'm talking about the percentage of the total population. If you want to find a list of the number of eligible voters in each city or metro area instead of the total population, then I can make a more accurate list of which metro areas you need in order to reach the number of votes to be elected. I didn't look for a list of how many eligible voters are in each city or metro area, and didn't think that one exists, so I used a percentage of the total population instead of a percentage of eligible voters.
According to this, there are just over 231 million eligible voters, and over 131 million voted, for 56.9%. That didn't matter for my analogy though.
Yeah, and it would be pretty unfair if the 80.7% of people living in cities had more say than the 19.3% who live in rural areas, wouldn't it? Those rural folks deserve just as much say as the other 80%, right? Half of our policies should be dictated by the 80.7%, and half of our policies should be dictated by the 19.3%. Half and half, that's fair, right?
If that's what you think then you're wrong on several levels. In 1790, back when they were creating the electoral college, about 5% of Americans lived in cities. There's your "majority". By 1870 it was still only 25%, and it reached 50% around 1920. It's over 80% now, but that was not the case for the majority of our history. That is not why the electoral college was created, so try again.
I disagree. If Bernie had the same level of support from the party that Clinton had, I think he would have had an easy victory. Clinton spent $1.3 billion to lose to Trump. If Bernie had $1.3 billion I think it wouldn't have been a contest. People didn't vote for Trump because they thought he was a great guy or would be a great president or has great policies, they voted for change. Bernie also represents change. The Democrats who voted for Trump would have had a better alternative, and all of the people who opposed Trump, including from his own party, would have had another candidate who does not have a 30 year history of being hated. Bernie would have also gotten a lot of the third party voters who didn't want to vote for either candidate, like myself.
I can't consider only eligible voters, I have to consider the entire population. The population of cities and metro areas isn't given in eligible voters, it's given in total people.
Yes, lets think about this. How many states are represented in the 100 most populated cities?
Are you leaving that question as an exercise for the reader? Let me help:
NY CA IL TX PA AZ FL IN OH NC WA CO MI DC MA TN OR OK NV MD KY WI NM MO GA VA NE MN KS LA
That's how many states are represented by the top 50 most populated cities, anyway. It's probably a good bet that the others are in the top 100 also.
So, what's the point? They can visit the top 22 metro areas, which represent a fairly wide cross-section of states and will cover a little under half of the total population of the US. Is that all they need to do? It sounds like you're assuming that if a candidate visits the NY metro area, then everyone in the NY metro area is going to vote for the candidate. That's exactly what they need to happen if they only visit those 22 areas, and no one who they have not visited votes for them. That sounds like a pretty stupid assumption though. It sounds like even if we switch to a popular vote then they will still campaign all over the country. The bad thing is that campaign ads will also be shown all across the country. I don't know where you live, maybe you're used to that, but I'm in a state that gets hardly any ad spending because they don't consider us a battleground state. I like that, I don't want to see ads for politicians every time I turn anything on. I watched game 7 of the world series streamed from another market and every commercial break had multiple political ads. It was awful. You can look at any map of campaign advertising and see a little bit of ad spending in most states, with the vast majority concentrated in places like Florida, Ohio, etc. That's what happens with the electoral college, which sounds like the exact thing you're suggesting would happen if we didn't have the electoral college. I think you're wrong, I think we would see campaign activity everywhere because we live in an age where anyone in any city can watch a political speech in any other city. They have cameras there, you know.
Do you want to go watch the primary debates again? There were 9 debates that featured both Clinton and Sanders (including 5 which only featured them). What do you think Clinton was doing during those debates? Her biggest complaint about Bernie was that his ideas weren't realistic. She didn't attack his character because it would not have done her any good, exactly like if Trump had attacked his character. It had fuck-all to do with Clinton not thinking he was worth attacking, in fact her campaign was definitely worried about him towards the end of the primary season but it didn't matter because the DNC had her back the entire time.
In a general election campaign, we would have seen a loud-mouthed bully with hardly a shred of any policy position, who gropes women and alienates anyone he can trying to attack someone who people see as trustworthy, honest, and having integrity. You're damn right things would have been different.
As for what Clinton thought was and wasn't worth doing, how did that work out for her? How did that work out for the Democratic party? They have the least amount of power since 1928, pretty fucking fantastic strategy they had, wasn't it? They have no leader, and no direction. They thought they could unite people by transparently adopting a few policy positions during the convention, as if that was enough. They wanted to coronate their queen, and look what happened. A lot of people thought that Clinton was not going to get elected any way. Instead of Sanders defeating her in the primary, now we're stuck with President Donald Trump because the DNC picked their nominee before the primary ever started. Yeah, great fucking strategy there, thanks Democrats.
Slashdot Mirror
So the media should have hacked into the DNC... to uncover evidence that the media is cooperating with the DNC? Seems like they could have just released their own emails.
What is an alt-right?
Colbert had a pretty decent explanation:
Think about what's right. Now think about the alternative to that.
It was trending because of people discussing and denouncing it, not because people were supporting it.
"The Left" is rioting? I guess I can be considered part of "the left" on certain issues, so why am I not rioting?
I've seen news articles about a lot of hate and violent threats towards Trump and others by people, but they aren't banned.
How do you know they're not banned, did you report the threats to Twitter and nothing happened? Do you have examples of the threats that you've reported?
Twitter really is as biased as I see in articles, even the ones posted to Slashdot.
Says the guy posting to Slashdot using his account linked to Twitter. Listen man, if you think there's a problem with certain Twitter accounts then report them. You can, you have an account there.
While the left openly make death threats
I know, it's kind of ridiculous. I remember going to all of those liberal political rallies where you could buy shooting targets with the opponent's face on them, or hear speakers talk about "second amendment people" needing to do their thing if the opponents win. It was pretty awful. At all of those liberal rallies.
*THAT* is the primary issue for you? When most people think of Nazis they don't think of censorship, they think extreme racism and nationalism, ethnic/religious cleansing, etc. But you hear the word Nazi and think "a group who censored people"?
Well, you changed my mind. Thanks for letting me know that the ultimate goal of the UNFCCC these past 25 years or so is to drain people of money. I thought it had something to do with the climate, but I appreciate your informed analysis.
When you call people stupid
In all fairness he did wonder aloud who collects temperature data. There's literally an entire profession for that.
I personally don't really understand
You could have just stopped typing there.
Mexico has an economy that is only about 20% smaller than that of Russia. Should we now be afraid of them? After all, they're a lot closer to the USA
Well, Russia has around 7,300 nuclear warheads and is led by an ex-KGB guy who thinks that it's his duty to return Russia to the glory days of superpower status, at the expense of the US. I'm having a hard time figuring out how many nuclear warheads Mexico has, but I'm sure there's a comparison there somewhere.
I realize that California does things a little differently, but it sounds like they used real money for these transactions:
The FBI seized a home in California, over $3 million from several accounts listed under the names of all four defendants, and several cars.
If we're going to be fucked, we might as well have jobs in the meantime.
Why? Do people have some sort of right to work a harmful job? Coal miners in West Virginia - do they have some sort of right to always mine coal? For as long as it's there anyway, I imagine that once the coal is gone they'll want laws to put the coal back in the ground so that they can have a job taking it back out again. What about buggy whip manufacturers? We should also make sure that they always have jobs too, right? No reason to learn any new skills or move to a place that has work, no, if the only thing you're good for is taking rocks out of the ground then we have a responsibility to make sure that you can get paid taking rocks out of the ground. Because that's our responsibility, to make sure that coal miners always have jobs mining coal, right? That's our responsibility, right? It's not our responsibility to make sure we're not fucking up the planet, but it's definitely our responsibility to make sure that a coal miner always gets paid for taking coal out of the ground.
Listen man, if environmental protections mean that you can't find a job, then maybe you need a new fucking job.
'Undecided' is a valid response, along with 'Republican', 'Democrat', 'other', and 'no vote'.
Yeah, it sure is a valid response. So what happens when I'm planning to vote Democrat, but I tell them I'm going to vote Republican instead? Haven't I introduced an error into their data? What if I've made up my mind already, but I tell them I'm undecided? That's an error in the data, right? But they don't take that kind of thing into consideration, and how can they? How can they quantify lies in a data set when they look exactly like the rest of the data? It doesn't matter, because as long as they say what the sample size is, and calculate a margin of error, then everything sounds scientific and all of the reporters on the radio and TV will tell people exactly what's going to happen, and it's all wrong. That's my point, they try to make this stuff look scientific and it is not scientific at all. Take into account how many people are lying to you and maybe people will start to listen to "pollsters" again, but the news services are not doing themselves any favors by relying on this crap. Polls don't mean anything, and we saw that over and over again during the primaries and election, but for some reason everyone was so surprised that Trump won.
For example Clinton 47%, Trump 46%, margin of error 2%, means that the true values could be Clinton anywhere from 45% to 49%, and Trump anywhere from 44% to 48%, thus the confidence intervals overlap and the difference is not significant.
Well, significant how? To a statistician, or a reporter, or a voter? A reporter is going to look at those numbers and say that Clinton is in the lead. Reality could mean that Trump is up by 3 points. That's exactly the opposite of what the reporter said. I would say that's significant.
But to assume a priori that all those undecideds must be closet Trumpists - that would have been abandoning any attempt at science and just making up the results to suit a preconceived agenda.
Yeah, I know. I wasn't suggesting that. I was suggesting adjusting your margin of error to reflect the undecided count. If your margin of error is less than the undecided percentage then that's a problem. Maybe add another choice - "I don't want to tell you", that will also give you more insight.
Money is not the solution. I don't know what the solution is, but I do know what the problem is. The problem is Clinton. Bernie is not Clinton.
Bernie would have been trounced in the general which is why no one seriously considered him as a nominee.
Oh, come on. Bernie WAS seriously considered by a nominee, do you want to compare the size of his rallies with those of Clinton? He's a democratic socialist in his 70s that hardly anyone outside of Vermont had heard of, and he was pulling in tens of thousands of people in any city. People were genuinely excited about his candidacy. Clinton had none of that excitement, she is as exciting as a wet pair of pants. The people who did not seriously consider him as a candidate were Clinton's team, the DNC, and the media that was sucking Clinton's tit since day one. They shaped the narrative to marginalize him and his supporters, and they pushed that narrative all the way. And it came back to bite them in the ass when fewer Democrats came out to vote than for the last 2 elections, and this against the single most disliked candidate in the history of presidential polling.
It's pointless to try and say what would have happened for Bernie vs. Trump. It's a stupid exercise. What we know is that Sanders polled better against Trump than Clinton did, we know that Sanders generated a tremendous amount of excitement that Clinton lacked, and we know that the DNC, Clinton's campaign, and the media worked to push out Sanders. Any other guesses about how badly Bernie would have beaten Trump are pure speculation. The election that we had was change vs. the poster child of the establishment. If it was change vs. other change it would have gone completely differently and none of us knows what the outcome would have been.
The DNC fucked up. They could have let Clinton get defeated in the primary, AGAIN, but instead they shoved her through so that they could hand the election to the single most disliked candidate in the history of presidential polling.
The problem is that people think that polls are accurate, because they use terms like "sample size" and "margin of error" to give the illusion that they are scientific. They aren't scientific. A poll is asking a bunch of people what they think, and assuming that all of them tell the truth. Guess what? They don't all tell the truth. When Nate Silver was publishing his numbers he showed 12% of people saying they were "undecided", but for some reason the margin of error was not +/- 12. How many of those "undecided" people do you actually think had already made up their minds, and didn't want to tell anyone because they wanted to avoid how people would react to their choice? How many of those "undecided" people walked into the polling booth and chose an actual candidate? Those polls are going to say that Hillary has a lead, and that the margin of error is low, and that Trump has a 16% chance of winning, and none of those things are correct but since they list the sample size and bother to come up with a number for "margin of error" then people whose job it is to talk or write for companies that say they publish news (pardon me if I don't want to refer to those people as journalists) will say that all of the polls show that Hillary is in the lead, and this is what's going to happen, and here are the states where there is going to be a real contest, and no one has any idea what they're talking about. But it sounds good, until none of the things that people predicted actually happen.
The real stupid thing is that this same crap happened over and over during the primaries and all of the news talking people still acted like they knew what was going on at the end.
I'm not talking about eligible voters, I'm talking about the percentage of the total population. If you want to find a list of the number of eligible voters in each city or metro area instead of the total population, then I can make a more accurate list of which metro areas you need in order to reach the number of votes to be elected. I didn't look for a list of how many eligible voters are in each city or metro area, and didn't think that one exists, so I used a percentage of the total population instead of a percentage of eligible voters.
According to this, there are just over 231 million eligible voters, and over 131 million voted, for 56.9%. That didn't matter for my analogy though.
Yeah, and it would be pretty unfair if the 80.7% of people living in cities had more say than the 19.3% who live in rural areas, wouldn't it? Those rural folks deserve just as much say as the other 80%, right? Half of our policies should be dictated by the 80.7%, and half of our policies should be dictated by the 19.3%. Half and half, that's fair, right?
If that's what you think then you're wrong on several levels. In 1790, back when they were creating the electoral college, about 5% of Americans lived in cities. There's your "majority". By 1870 it was still only 25%, and it reached 50% around 1920. It's over 80% now, but that was not the case for the majority of our history. That is not why the electoral college was created, so try again.
I disagree. If Bernie had the same level of support from the party that Clinton had, I think he would have had an easy victory. Clinton spent $1.3 billion to lose to Trump. If Bernie had $1.3 billion I think it wouldn't have been a contest. People didn't vote for Trump because they thought he was a great guy or would be a great president or has great policies, they voted for change. Bernie also represents change. The Democrats who voted for Trump would have had a better alternative, and all of the people who opposed Trump, including from his own party, would have had another candidate who does not have a 30 year history of being hated. Bernie would have also gotten a lot of the third party voters who didn't want to vote for either candidate, like myself.
I can't consider only eligible voters, I have to consider the entire population. The population of cities and metro areas isn't given in eligible voters, it's given in total people.
Yes, lets think about this. How many states are represented in the 100 most populated cities?
Are you leaving that question as an exercise for the reader? Let me help:
NY
CA
IL
TX
PA
AZ
FL
IN
OH
NC
WA
CO
MI
DC
MA
TN
OR
OK
NV
MD
KY
WI
NM
MO
GA
VA
NE
MN
KS
LA
That's how many states are represented by the top 50 most populated cities, anyway. It's probably a good bet that the others are in the top 100 also.
So, what's the point? They can visit the top 22 metro areas, which represent a fairly wide cross-section of states and will cover a little under half of the total population of the US. Is that all they need to do? It sounds like you're assuming that if a candidate visits the NY metro area, then everyone in the NY metro area is going to vote for the candidate. That's exactly what they need to happen if they only visit those 22 areas, and no one who they have not visited votes for them. That sounds like a pretty stupid assumption though. It sounds like even if we switch to a popular vote then they will still campaign all over the country. The bad thing is that campaign ads will also be shown all across the country. I don't know where you live, maybe you're used to that, but I'm in a state that gets hardly any ad spending because they don't consider us a battleground state. I like that, I don't want to see ads for politicians every time I turn anything on. I watched game 7 of the world series streamed from another market and every commercial break had multiple political ads. It was awful. You can look at any map of campaign advertising and see a little bit of ad spending in most states, with the vast majority concentrated in places like Florida, Ohio, etc. That's what happens with the electoral college, which sounds like the exact thing you're suggesting would happen if we didn't have the electoral college. I think you're wrong, I think we would see campaign activity everywhere because we live in an age where anyone in any city can watch a political speech in any other city. They have cameras there, you know.
You may not have been able to "stomach voting for Clinton" because of her stands on trade and banking regulation.
Um, no. Oh look, someone else who has no idea why people dislike Clinton. You're a strategist for the Democratic party, aren't you?
She never did anything worth bringing charges over
Is that the standard now? She's electable because she's not being indicted for anything she did?
Well, let's just fucking gear up for the Clinton '20 campaign, right? Because if people just *knew* her, maybe you'll win then.
Here's a news flash: she lost because people do know her.
Do you want to go watch the primary debates again? There were 9 debates that featured both Clinton and Sanders (including 5 which only featured them). What do you think Clinton was doing during those debates? Her biggest complaint about Bernie was that his ideas weren't realistic. She didn't attack his character because it would not have done her any good, exactly like if Trump had attacked his character. It had fuck-all to do with Clinton not thinking he was worth attacking, in fact her campaign was definitely worried about him towards the end of the primary season but it didn't matter because the DNC had her back the entire time.
In a general election campaign, we would have seen a loud-mouthed bully with hardly a shred of any policy position, who gropes women and alienates anyone he can trying to attack someone who people see as trustworthy, honest, and having integrity. You're damn right things would have been different.
As for what Clinton thought was and wasn't worth doing, how did that work out for her? How did that work out for the Democratic party? They have the least amount of power since 1928, pretty fucking fantastic strategy they had, wasn't it? They have no leader, and no direction. They thought they could unite people by transparently adopting a few policy positions during the convention, as if that was enough. They wanted to coronate their queen, and look what happened. A lot of people thought that Clinton was not going to get elected any way. Instead of Sanders defeating her in the primary, now we're stuck with President Donald Trump because the DNC picked their nominee before the primary ever started. Yeah, great fucking strategy there, thanks Democrats.