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ndawg

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by ndawg

  1. 29 minutes ago, Chrispy said:

    It’s been quite a few years, so his physical attributes have been rendered nonexistent. I’m an unabashed Republican and will remain so after this president, that means far more to me than protecting Trump. 

    Trump runs Team R. You are trying to sound as if you would be willing to put Team R ahead of Trump, but in reality, you're just admitting that you'll willingly follow wherever he leads you.

  2. At this point any conservative pretending their point of view stems from some set of principles that should be evenly and fairly applied should just be laughed out of the room.

    Rational discourse? Nope, not only do you not deserve it, you were never really capable of it to begin with.

    • Like 1
  3. 37 minutes ago, Incredulity said:

    laughably retarded.

    Selective enforcement of the laws is the fucking problem.  It leads to chaos.

     

    And save the fucking trope about a ticket every time someone jaywalks.

    Careful there, cowboy, selective enforcement of drug laws helps disenfranchise minorities that would completely vote against you on most issues.

  4. Everyone knows that Eisenhauer warned us about the military industrial complex. What most don't know is that later on that night, he drunkenly coined the term "military intelligence industrial infrastructure," which oddly enough never stuck.

    • Like 1
  5. She's obviously got actual feelings and a conscience... which makes her support of the POTUS even less excusable. Trump is a narcissistic psychotic shitbag. There's no hope or possibility of redemption for people like that. They don't have consciences, they don't feel remorse, so your only hope is to marginalize them and keep them out of positions of power. For Sanders to have gotten in this deep with Trump required her to compartmentalize and rationalize an incredible amount of evil and harm. She's exactly the kind of person that is a key ingredient to actually putting assholes like Trump into power. She took her sense of humanity and stuffed it in a dark corner of her mind so that she could be a willing tool of a despot.

    • Like 3
  6. 52 minutes ago, Js1 said:

    We remember the whole "replace Sessions with Pruitt" thing, right?

    The Federal Vacancies Reform Act allows Trump to install anyone who holds a Senate-confirmed position within the government to be acting Attorney General for 210 days in the event of resignation, death or incapacitation.  DOJ has already ruled in the past that the Federal Vacancies Reform Act supersedes the DOJ successor chain.  The whole point is to get him to quit so literally anyone else more loyal and sympathetic to Trump can walk in, fire the DAG and shut down Mueller.

    Sessions has to resign or die in order for Trump to shuffle an already-confirmed individual into the temporary role of acting Attorney General (instead of Rosenstein automatically serving as acting AG).  I believe the OG plan was to shame Sessions into quitting so he could move Pruitt into the role in order to fire Rosenstein and shut down Mueller's investigation.  I'm curious who would be the new Pruitt in this situation.  

    Again, though, why hasn't Trump fired Sessions. I mean, I can see the dubious legality raising furrowed brows, but we're way past the point where Trump gets to make up his own rules and everyone else gets to rationalize it.

  7. 1 hour ago, Cacti said:

    I know I’m going to regret asking but maybe I’ll learn something about probability. If a 98% chance of winning was “bullshit” but a 75% chance was "accurate" (not bullshit), then at what % between the two did the transition occur?

    Remember that we're only evaluating the models against one single prediction (the election itself). Because we now know that the election was very close, we also know that either candidate probably had a reasonably strong chance at winning. That means that for the 98% model to be accurate, voter turnout on election day would have had to have been an astoundingly improbable statistical aberration -- as in, likely tens or hundreds of thousands of voters would have had to have behaved differently than the data would have suggested. On the other hand, the prediction of a 75% chance of victory is also a prediction of a fairly close race. So, 538's model was more consistent with the results, by far.

    As far as when that transition would occur, I'm not sure that can be known. We'd need to be training these statistical models against far more predictions. My only point here is that not all the predictions were off base, and the talking point that all the predictions were wrong is a lie. 538 didn't predict that Hillary would win, they predicted she had a 75% chance at winning.

    • Like 1
  8. 19 minutes ago, slorch said:

    the Trump win is up there with the Miracle on Ice?  That probability was realistically in the 98 to 99% range.

    Nice double down, my friend. 

    Can you set aside your biases in order to consider this objectively? I believe you completely misunderstood the analogy.

  9. Your bias directly caused you to misunderstand the substance of my post.

    It might be the case that Trump had a 99% chance of winning. Or a 1% chance of winning. What matters is that the outcome cannot disprove any statistical prediction, but we can assess the extent to which the outcome and the prediction jive with one another. Guess what? Winning with a 25% of victory is extremely unsurprising.

  10. 17 minutes ago, David Dennison said:

    No they were right because they accurately predicted what they measured, the popular vote. 

    I believe Fivethirtyeight made an electoral vote prediction. Either way, it doesn't matter. @slorch either lacks the understanding of probability needed to recognize my point, or else he's so biased towards the narrative that liberals still aren't over Hillary losing that he flat out won't recognize it.

  11. 28 minutes ago, slorch said:

    that's aggy as fuck.

     

    She barely lost, so they were right... LOlz.  75% right, at least.

    Huh? That's an absurd conclusion to leap to, isn't it? I'm talking about the soundness of a prediction that has to account for a high amount of variability. Imagine someone just won the lottery. If someone else predicted, before the ticket was purchased, that the person playing the lottery was extremely unlikely to win it, they would have also made a sound prediction.

  12. I believe fivethirtyeight.com predicted that HRC had about a 75% chance of winning. Based on how close the electoral race was, and HRC winning the popular vote, the actual outcome suggests their prediction was accurate. I can't believe how many people I've had to explain that to over the last year and a half.

    Now, I do recall that some news outlet predicted HRC had a 98% chance of winning. That was some bullshit.

    Anyways, carry on...

    • Like 1
  13. 19 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:


    And those people vote. And there are lots of them. Like, enough to have a real role in electing a president.

    It’s time to nuke ourselves and do the world a favor.

    It is like an ocean of stupid, and I fear the rational among us will all die of exhaustion trying to boil it.

  14. As I said, after thinking about it more, simply labeling people who are not verified and are likely to be non-Americans might strike a better balance. I think there's a pretty reasonable case for at least a discussion on regulation. Social media is a brand new medium, and there are vulnerability vectors here that can't be addressed.

    It's understandable to believe that the truth can ultimately win on its own merit, without intervention. That idealism is a powerful comfort for those who'd prefer the simplicity of a hard-line, absolutist stance, but to me it doesn't seem realistic.

  15. 16 minutes ago, Aphelion said:

    So I'm assuming that when using sites that do not require one to give their personal identity or in the case that someone prefers to remain anonymous, then they will not be required to give their identity under your proposed measures.  Is this correct?

    Regarding US based IP, what about when one travels abroad?  Also, would folks outside the US simply not be allowed to participate in US social media?  For point 3, are you saying that one has to tag any user profile on social media as a parody account if that is the intended purpose?  

    Right, if someone wants to post anonymously, there is no problem. Also, if they don't claim to be Americans, no big deal. The problem here is paying people to pretend to be someone on the other side of the world's metaphorical neighbor.

    I'm imagining that anyone who pretends to be a citizen of our country but probably isn't (based on IP or VPN usage) could be labelled or distinguished with a warning that they may not be who they say they are. Verifying obviously removes the doubt.

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