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Eastwood

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by Eastwood

  1. 538 has the odds, as of today, of Trump flipping a state Clinton won in 2016 at 26%. However, to put it into perspective how truly dire it is for Trump in the polls, flipping a former Clinton state has the highest odds for all of the positive election outcomes for Trump. Winning is at 12%, popular vote at 4%, winning more than 50% of the popular vote at 2%, and down and down the odds go. Therefore, Nevada can flip if it wants. It's the most likely positive thing to happen for him, anyway.
  2. The wife and I were talking about this the other night. She's brand new to politics and didn't start paying attention until COVID when she realized that the government actually can play a huge role in the day to day lives of its citizens. She asked if Trump supporters were typical of Republican support for past presidents. I think the honest answer, being a former Republican myself, is no. And it has only escalated as the presidency moved on to the point where just talking about common decency is enough to get some dander up because I think a significant chunk of Trump supporters know, deep down, that they're being assholes to family and friends. They do so out of a sunk-cost fallacy. "I've been backing this position for 3 years. If I turn back now, I'll look like an idiot." So, they'd rather be an asshole than look like an idiot. Then others take the all-in approach as a subconscious self-defense mechanism. If they are forced to question their judgment regarding Trump, maybe their judgment in other areas of friction in their lives was bad, too. They would have to accept that they lost friends and loved and they have no one to blame but themselves. Rather than do that, they cling to the belief that they're not wrong, everyone else that they pushed away was wrong. The majority of Trump supporters fit those two molds, in my opinion. They're all-in because they've burned all their bridges and there's no turning back or they're acting on a subconscious level of self-preservation. Then you have people like my grandparents. Small town folk from a small town congregation that has been slamming the podium twice on Sunday and once on Wednesday for 30 years about how this country is trying to make Christianity illegal, outlaw prayer, burn your bibles, and kill babies in the delivery room. In their eyes, Trump is a clown, but they hold their nose and pull the lever for him because voting for a Democrat in their eyes means voting for the end of Christianity.
  3. Also: https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-shifts-away-no-lockdown-strategy-amid-growing-case-numbers-2020-10 So, by your favorite metric, being death, Sweden is actually a failure compared to its neighbors who instituted a lockdown. Also, they are nowhere near as close to herd immunity as they thought.
  4. Cool. NYC is 38,242 people per sq. km and Sweden is 24.98 people per sq. km. Statistics mean nothing without context.
  5. Death rate is the wrong metric to go by and it drives me crazy that it continues to be used at the litmus test by certain groups for how the pandemic should be handled. There are people on this site who have given personal anecdotes as to how their COVID experience went and a lot of these stories involve multiple visits to health care providers, testing by health care providers, multiple days or weeks of illness and lack of productivity, and lingering effects. We're talking medical bills, loss of PTO, loss of wages due to lack of PTO, stressing an already thin health care system, etc. Death may be the ultimate toll that COVID may have on someone, but just because people aren't dying in droves like they were in April doesn't mean that a major wave of COVID won't be extremely disruptive to our lives and prolong the amount of time that we, as a society, have to deal with this horrible situation.
  6. Or intentionally infecting the citizens of Tuskegee with syphilis. Or the CIA trafficking cocaine into the US. Or the Teapot Dome Scandal....
  7. Biden has come right out and said he is a transitional candidate. He knows his role. He's the reset button. He probably won't even run for a second term. That alone is worth my vote compared to the alternative.
  8. To add something to the hope jar, my dad, who is an Old Army Aggie, flipped his vote to Biden. Trump slowly lost him over time, but the only specific example that he gave to me was the downplaying of the virus, being given medicine not available to the general public, exposing others for his mini-parade, and then continuing to downplay it after. My dad hasn't been infected with COVID, but his personal and professional life has been affected enough to where he knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that it's real and serious. I also know of two other Trump voters who flipped to Biden for 2020. The only Trump voters left in my family are the evangelicals and they are single issue voters.
  9. What happens here and over there, to piggyback off of this, is that both Europe and the US were so eager to spike the football on COVID. The moment numbers start dropping back down, people are screaming to open back up and eager to declare that it was overblown. Europe was way more strict than we were after watching Italy fell apart for a brief time and even they are having trouble again. What that tells me is that COVID is going to be a problem until a vaccine is available. Especially since it is beginning to be accepted that a person can have multiple infections AND we still don't have a conclusive reason as to why some healthy people have so much trouble with the virus. The medical community is pretty unanimous on which preexisting conditions greatly increase the risk of hospitalization and death, but when it comes to healthy people, it is still a mystery. They made some discoveries regarding blood type, but the medical community still isn't close to a consensus on it. The second wave in New Zealand should have been enough for a reasonable person to conclude that we can't beat this completely until it is eradicated with a vaccine. A small island with very restrictive points of entry with very restrictive protocols that had gotten their cases down to literally zero and held at zero for a long time after opening back up fully had a second wave. As long as a virus has a host, it will have the potential to spread. As long as there are people are running around like the last 7 months never happened, the virus will not only spread, but "innocent bystanders" who have been following protocols the entire time will continue to have a non-zero chance at getting it from someone acting selfishly. Our only hope is an effective vaccine that has an extremely low rate of side effects.
  10. Check out the volume on Hertz today. 1 billion shares. Up 142%. They had some news today, but I'm thinking the meat of the surge had to do with Robinhood increasing margin requirements overnight. Hertz was a Robinhood darling.
  11. Damn, they really went and dug up David Carradine and rolled him out to ask that question.
  12. Biden nailed the Green New Deal/fracking question and I say that as someone whose livelihood depends on fossil fuels. The reality is that the future is renewables, but to try to shoehorn a 100% transition in less than a decade would be an economic disaster. A smoother transition is needed.
  13. It wouldn't surprise me if we go green today. I guess it should stop surprising us if days like this do go green.
  14. Well, yeah. A good football coach doesn't tell his team that they're going to win when they're up by 21 with 5 minutes left in the 3rd.
  15. I don't want to garner a reputation here of being the short squeeze guy, but the short interest is 57% of float and institutional investors are 106%. Low share supply with a pretty high demand. Looking at the 5 minute chart, most of the pops this morning are when volume is low. It might be as simple as a supply/demand issue with shares. Any small amount of news that moves the needle creates issues for short sellers. Looking at the news feed, BBBY actually beat its earnings estimates on October 1, followed by a series of price target upgrades, performance rating upgrades, a partnership with Shipt for same-day delivery, and now a selling of non-core assets giving it more runway to right the ship before bankruptcy. That's a lot of upward pressure on a heavily shorted stock. I'm kind of bummed that I missed all that.
  16. Ptolemaic Dynasty also had a ton of inbreeding, so there's was no chance for Cleopatra to be any ethnicity but Greek. Anyone outraged by an olive skinned Cleopatra is just showing they don't know the history of Egypt like they thought they did.
  17. We're less than 12 hours away from in-person voting in Texas in the biggest election of our lifetimes and this thread has turned into an absolute disaster.
  18. No CR, but I'm seeing a lot of articles that are saying a Biden win will actually speed up the recovery. Even Goldman came out and said Biden would be good for oil prices, of all things.
  19. Eastwood

    Hate Week

    If this was a normal year, I'd be 3 beers deep and a turkey leg into the morning. But I'm stone cold sober in my own home on the best weekend of college football every year. The worst.
  20. I see it as an excuse to put an organized timeline of his erratic behavior into the center of the conversation at the government level and make Republicans defend the behaviors. Also puts an organized timeline into the congressional record for all eternity.
  21. Taking resumes from people who are set up to work 100% from home?
  22. The only thing more painful than a "bless their little hearts" is a gay man's "bless their little hearts." Savage.
  23. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2020/10/08/2105861/0/en/GameStop-Announces-Multi-year-Strategic-Partnership-with-Microsoft.html Gamestop just resumed trading after being halted due to volatility. Was up 21% on the day, back down to 17.5% as of now.
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