This comment says it better than I could. The debate was a disaster for Biden. Which sucks.
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.
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.
Totally agree with others about therapy. When I went, I used it as a sort of emotional dumping ground. My therapist helped me through some pieces but honestly listened a lot. I know the payment part of therapy is viewed negatively... I viewed it as a huge positive. I'm paying this person and so it doesn't have to be an equal conversation. If I need to vent for 45 minutes straight, I can do that, and they are compensated for that time.
In reality, I was doing the same thing to friends and family, but I'd only get 30% out at any given time, and so I just spread it around. Getting therapy helped me lessen the amount I needed to vent (some techniques help you work through things) and also have me a central location. It made me a far better husband and friend.
You are correct. Nate Silver is actually looking to publish his own models, he's writing about it on Substack.
He said the 538 models are cool, but he hasn't worked on anything since June 2023.
Yeah but they had the choice to sell the seat or not. I'm having a hard time feeling bad for a company, who set their own price, being upset because they realized later they could have set it higher.
No worries my dude, I had a stressful day today too. Better days ahead for both of us.
Hey fuck you buddy
(Thank you buddy, I hope you're doing well - I'll make sure to bring a better version of myself next time. Have a good weekend)
Your mom is a prolate sphere.
(I am embarrassed and am now lashing out with baseless personal attacks)
Not a professional, but studied it in college. It's mostly to either fill in gaps or loud noises.
One thing you can often do is get a "noise print" of the room, and you can isolate someone's audio basically perfectly. From there you can create a room tone and slap it under the entire track. Now if you need to mute or something you just cut the talking track and the room noise carries over.
If you don't get a good room tone, say you want to use someone looking at the camera, but the director was talking. If you try to filter out the directors voice, it's likely going to sound weird because some of the tones overlap with the room. So you mute it and slap the room tone over and you're good. They often get too much, because room tones vary ever so slightly. If you get a tiny half second sample, unless you get very lucky you'll pick up that something is repeating or sounds weird. If you have 10-20 seconds you can loop that no problem.
Because he's so smart and good at throwing the oval ball that his opinions must be true and relevant and he deserves the platform to spread his views.
I think it's a great example of how media outlets can seed certain ideas. If you read the headline then the context, then it's like yeah I see how he said that. But I'm not sure you arrive there if you read the quote then the headline.
I'm about as liberal as they come, but holy shit the amount that this is done in politics is insane. It drives me nuts. Republicans often have so much wrong with their platform (in my opinion) that we don't need to just make shit up about them.
A particularly good example that stood out to me was Trump's "Muslim Ban". Do I think it was profile-y in its application? Yes. But if you looked at the detail, the justification used was vague "national security". Why couldn't we just attack how bullshit that was? But no, media had to run with exclusively the Muslim Ban line and it was so easy to deflect for Republicans. All they had to say was "this isn't about race stop being racist". But because of that, no one asked the better questions, like saying "you say this is specifically about national security... How is this immigration program specifically being exploited in ways that harm us?" Were we blocking work visas from those countries? Because I can tell you refugee status is a fuck of a lot harder and has more screening than work visas.
There were just so many glaring issues, but we decide to side step into an alternative reality.
None of this frustration is pointed at you by the way, it's awesome that you just said hey I think I got this one wrong. That's an admirable quality on forums these days. I just hate the media apparatus.
Alright... Nuance time. Everyone please stick with me.
I don't like Rodgers, but this is kind of a dumb headline. THIS IS NOT A DEFENSE OF RODGERS. I think what he's saying is that the "pandemic response" was the thing manufactured, not the virus itself. I think people are misreading it, because I don't think I really see how he's saying they manufactured the virus. THIS IS NOT A DEFENSE OF RODGERS. Like the government gave all this money and tried to make people reliant on the government to save them, which has been his whole position with COVID.
It's still flatly wrong. But borderline purposeful misreadings like this only embolden Rodgers and others, because it's inaccurate, and people are attacking something he didn't say. And this gives him more of a platform because people are talking about it again.
If you're going to criticize someone, it's important to be accurate and understand what they're saying, so you can appropriately shut them the fuck up with the right facts.
One more time, THIS IS NOT A DEFENSE OF RODGERS.
Yeah this doesn't seem like a great take. I think there's severe selection bias.
I like a narrow band of crypto projects. I think the vast majority of things you hear about are scams. There's a ton of bad actors in the space. My advice to people is just to be careful, but I don't promote crypto because I don't promote things that you should have a good understanding of before investing in them. I'm not in the business of risking other people's money. I'll talk about the tech, but usually uninterested in a specific token.
I don't think your brand of zero tolerance will work on such a broad scale. I do think you should aggressively shut down any specifics about [token or project], but it's not inevitable that people go towards shilling.
I was one of the top users of a crypto subreddit, and it got over run in the way you are talking about. Shills and people talking about price, etc. I wanted to have real conversations about the tech and implications. I left because it wasn't what I wanted anymore.
There are people who can talk about those topics with the nuance required, but I agree many cannot.
Aggressive moderation? Good idea.
Zero tolerance policy? Bad idea.
Given the above you'll retreat to "so a little Nazi-ism is OK?" - and if you can't figure out the difference between the two and your view is that polarized, I don't think we'll really find any common ground here.