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.

There is a sizeable gap between “beyond a reasonable doubt” in terms of a very specific law, and things that are gross/immoral.

People keep questioning the timeline as a defense… They might not have known until 2020. It’s normally against internal company policies to just look through people’s DMs. It’s not like someone’s job is to rifle through them. They probably were made aware of it, and then took action.

That’s speculation on my part, but if Twitch sat on it for 3 years, shame on them too, but that doesn’t so shit for this guy. It was still not ok.

The monetary incentive was to pay out his contract so they didn’t have a VERY public story about a VERY high profile streamer inappropriately messaging a minor with their service. That could be super damaging for Twitch. So they likely paid it out to try and bury the story.

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.

This hurts to read.

I know it’s satire, but this is like… 5% more satirical than actual beliefs on the topic at some points. The helping the poor section in particular.

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.

I read the first few words as soft candles and was so confused.

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.

Honestly… They can all be called bars where I’m from (Central US). It’s very annoying not knowing what you’re walking into sometimes.

Depends on where you are from. For a lot of Americans, bars are super loud places that play music super loud until 2am. The concept of a “bar” has so many different applications, I think most people think of a noisy place that they’d have to deal with.

Because of car culture you often get big groups of bars all near each other, which feeds the stereotype of loud ass bar with loud ass people outside of it.

What time zone is that minute in?!

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.

I mean… Just to be clear, he’s very obviously advertising something that will benefit him and being upfront about it.

The people in the video are allegedly telling people they are donating money and then just keeping it.

Equating the two of them only serves to minimize what he’s talking about. There’s really no need to compare and contrast the two here. You can hate them both, but one certainly deserves a lot, lot, lot more hate.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/5/23712440/gmail-ads-more-annoying-middle-inbox

It's mostly on the mobile app for me.

Yeah… unless you pay Google. Then they hand deliver "promoted" emails which somehow always fill the top few slots in my email. Funny how that works.

I hate to say but the poll is biased because you asked two questions that are not the same.

I currently have a phone without a jack, so the first question is obviously no. But the second question, would I prefer it, is a yes.

So there’s a group of people who would prefer it, but it’s not a deal breaker for them in your data, but they answered a different question than the headline.