Posted by: nacho
« on: November 06, 2012, 07:58:50 PM »Corporate taxes will rule the day.
You mean, like, more corporate taxes? Or...?
You mean, like, more corporate taxes? Or...?
Posted by: monkey!
« on: November 06, 2012, 07:56:06 PM »Corporate taxes will rule the day.
Posted by: nacho
« on: November 06, 2012, 05:17:46 PM »I couldn't bring myself to type "DP" without super-imposing his face on Asa Akira's body.
Posted by: RottingCorpse
« on: November 06, 2012, 05:14:35 PM »He's the DP, no the AD.
GAWD!!!
GAWD!!!
Posted by: nacho
« on: November 06, 2012, 05:01:35 PM »Whatever the fuck you call that guy who does that shit when you make a fucking movie.
Posted by: RottingCorpse
« on: November 06, 2012, 04:58:03 PM »AD? I don't understand the lingo you kids use these days.
Posted by: nacho
« on: November 06, 2012, 04:31:27 PM »No, no. The Bolsheviks are controlling everything.
That, at least, would be entertaining. And, therefore, welcome.
I've been reduced to quoting PotA to your AD on Facebook.
Posted by: RottingCorpse
« on: November 06, 2012, 04:28:55 PM »No, no. The Bolsheviks are controlling everything.
Posted by: nacho
« on: November 06, 2012, 04:13:00 PM »What I find weird is that it's not made public knowledge that, when you have this problem, you should (1) call someone over and (2) if they're dismissive, like this guy claims, demand another machine and for them to take the problem one out of service.
I'm amazed at all the voter rights that we have along those lines, yet no one pipes up. It's basically the one day every two years where we each have more power than the authorities. For example -- you can verbally challenge someone and block them from voting. So, in a non-ID state, you can say, "That person is not who he says he is!" and that person has to fill out a provisional ballot and, if they want it to count, prove their identity in court at a later date. The judges cannot accept any forms of ID.
Endless shenanigans can go on.
Anyway...that's a tangent. My point is -- things like this are blown out of proportion. A miscalibrated voting machine is not a surprising thing, or the start of a conspiracy, and is easily fixed. And if anyone is stupid enough to not notice/let it slide/be bullied by the judges, they deserve what they get.
I'm amazed at all the voter rights that we have along those lines, yet no one pipes up. It's basically the one day every two years where we each have more power than the authorities. For example -- you can verbally challenge someone and block them from voting. So, in a non-ID state, you can say, "That person is not who he says he is!" and that person has to fill out a provisional ballot and, if they want it to count, prove their identity in court at a later date. The judges cannot accept any forms of ID.
Endless shenanigans can go on.
Anyway...that's a tangent. My point is -- things like this are blown out of proportion. A miscalibrated voting machine is not a surprising thing, or the start of a conspiracy, and is easily fixed. And if anyone is stupid enough to not notice/let it slide/be bullied by the judges, they deserve what they get.
Posted by: RottingCorpse
« on: November 06, 2012, 04:03:03 PM »I posted this less because of my liberal leanings than that I do believe the election should be a fair fight from a vote counting perspective.
I think we all believe that, but this article seems very sketchy on details...and heavy on the conspiracy.
It's MSNBC, but....
http://tv.msnbc.com/2012/11/06/machine-turns-vote-for-obama-into-one-for-romney/
Quote
Machine turns vote for Obama into one for Romney
A Pennsylvania electronic voting machine has been taken out of service after being captured on video changing a vote for President Obama into one for Mitt Romney, NBC News has confirmed. Republicans have also said machines have turned Romney votes into Obama ones.
The video was first posted on Youtube by user “centralpavoter.” It shows a voter’s finger repeatedly pressing the button for Obama, but a check mark coming up next to Romney’s name:
NBC News confirmed that the machine has been taken off line.
Underneath the video, the user gave an account of what happened:
My wife and I went to the voting booths this morning before work. There were 4 older ladies running the show and 3 voting booths that are similar to a science fair project in how they fold up. They had an oval VOTE logo on top center and a cartridge slot on the left that the volunteers used to start your ballot.
I initially selected Obama but Romney was highlighted. I assumed it was being picky so I deselected Romney and tried Obama again, this time more carefully, and still got Romney. Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney’s name and started tapping very closely together to find the ‘active areas’. From the top of Romney’s button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama’s name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein’s button was fine. All other buttons worked fine.
I asked the voters on either side of me if they had any problems and they reported they did not. I then called over a volunteer to have a look at it. She him hawed for a bit then calmly said “It’s nothing to worry about, everything will be OK.” and went back to what she was doing. I then recorded this video.
There is a lot of speculation that the footage is edited. I’m not a video guy, but if it’s possible to prove whether a video has been altered or not, I will GLADLY provide the raw footage to anyone who is willing to do so. The jumping frames are a result of the shitty camera app on my Android phone, nothing more.
Separately, the RNC last week sent a letter (pdf) to elections officials in six other states, including Ohio, Nevada, and Colorado, raising concerns that machines had wrongly counted votes for Romney as ones for Obama, and asking them to address the problem.
Late Update,2:35pm: A spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of State told Mother Jones a machine that showed that problem, likely the same one, is back online after being “recalibrated.”
Posted by: Reginald McGraw
« on: November 05, 2012, 10:33:52 PM »Nice!
Posted by: RottingCorpse
« on: November 05, 2012, 12:05:36 PM »Posted by: monkey!
« on: November 01, 2012, 07:44:21 PM »Then again, Romney does own those electoral machines.
Posted by: Reginald McGraw
« on: November 01, 2012, 12:50:44 PM »I agree with the stat guy. I don't see any way Romney can win.
Could he be close in the popular vote? Yes. Could he win the electoral vote? It's not even really close. If Romney wins Florida (he may) and Ohio (he won't), big electoral hauls, he will still likely lose the election.
I like to go here:
http://www.cnn.com/election/2012/ecalculator?hpt=po_c1#?battleground
You can play with different scenarios and predict a winner.
So it looks like Obama's ahead, but it's still undecided, right?
Now I add in this different CNN page:
http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2012/10/politics/poll.of.polls/index.html?hpt=po_r1
So yeah, not sure how accurate these polls are, but they update them and give you a little picture of how things are going in all those yellow undecided states from the first page.
You can see that Obama has a lead, sometimes sizable in every single one except Florida.
Why aren't they showing that on their big electoral map? Because they'd have to predict that Obama will win...almost a week before the election!! Can't lose all those page views between now and then!
So yeah, Obama wins.
Could he be close in the popular vote? Yes. Could he win the electoral vote? It's not even really close. If Romney wins Florida (he may) and Ohio (he won't), big electoral hauls, he will still likely lose the election.
I like to go here:
http://www.cnn.com/election/2012/ecalculator?hpt=po_c1#?battleground
You can play with different scenarios and predict a winner.
So it looks like Obama's ahead, but it's still undecided, right?
Now I add in this different CNN page:
http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2012/10/politics/poll.of.polls/index.html?hpt=po_r1
So yeah, not sure how accurate these polls are, but they update them and give you a little picture of how things are going in all those yellow undecided states from the first page.
You can see that Obama has a lead, sometimes sizable in every single one except Florida.
Why aren't they showing that on their big electoral map? Because they'd have to predict that Obama will win...almost a week before the election!! Can't lose all those page views between now and then!
So yeah, Obama wins.
Posted by: RottingCorpse
« on: November 01, 2012, 10:59:40 AM »We've all lamented about how polarized the U.S. has become and how destructive it is in the long run. This election shouldn't be nearly as close as it is because let's be honest, Mitt Romney is about as good a candidate as John Kerry was.
This article give me hope though.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/10/people-who-cant-do-math-are-so-mad-nate-silver/58460/
This article give me hope though.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/10/people-who-cant-do-math-are-so-mad-nate-silver/58460/
Quote
People Who Can't Do Math Are So Mad At Nate Silver
The New York Times' Nate Silver has created a model to predict the outcome of the presidential election that's watched by just about every pundit, and yet Silver's model refuses to perfectly reflect the conventional wisdom spouted by just about every pundit. The pundits do not like this! Silver's FiveThirtyEight model uses math to show that President Obama has a 74.6 percent chance of beating Mitt Romney, even though Romney has unmeasurable things like "momentum" as well as newspaper endorsements, plus a lead in several national polls. Obama's chances remain high, Silver explains, because he has a significant lead in enough swing states to win the needed 270 electoral college votes. The latest pundit outraged that Silver's model doesn't feel right is MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, who ranted Monday morning:
"Nate Silver says this is a 73.6 percent chance that the president's going to win. Nobody in that campaign thinks they have a 73.6 percent -- they think they have a 50.1 percent chance of winning.
.... Anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue [that] they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops, and microphones for the next ten days, because they're jokes."
Scarborough is very committed to defending what feels true to him, even when it's not true. In June, he railed that The New York Times kept writing stories making fun of Romney for being rich, but it never made fun of John Kerry and his ice chalet in 2004. When confronted with the fact that he was completely wrong -- The Times covered that ice chalet plenty, it turns out -- Scarborough stuck with his analysis, saying "the general impressions of people like myself … does count in the perspective that active news consumers have."
Now Scarborough wants his general impression of the polls to count, too. He isn't the only Silver-basher who is unable to use numbers to explain why the forecaster is so wrong. The Daily Caller's Matt Lewis wrote a couple weeks ago that despite Silver's model showing a likely Obama victory, "my guess is that, right now, it’s probably a 50-50 proposition." The National Review's Josh Jordan's critique is more related to numbers than feelings, saying Silver's polling average is different than the Real Clear Politics average, because Silver weighs polls, while RCP averages them equally. But Silver does this because some pollsters have a better track record than others, and some have a clear partisan tilt, left or right. If his weighting is wrong, we'll know next week. Update: Politico contributes its own math-free critique: "For all the confidence Silver puts in his predictions, he often gives the impression of hedging."
Perhaps the most telling critique of Silver's model comes from the people most deeply invested in it being wrong. Romney aides "laugh and roll their eyes when reporters tease them with mentions of the model," BuzzFeed's McKay Coppins reports. One adviser, though, offers an analysis more closely tied to real data, saying, in Coppins' paraphrase, "FiveThirtyEight could well give them a better chance of victory as the swing state polls tighten in the final days of the race." In other words, if the state polls change, so will Silver's model. Which is pretty much what Silver himself would say.