Wow, if they spending money on ballot curing, those internal Trump polls must have scared the crap out of them.
Yeah, these are popping up all over the place - all from different users with newly created accounts and no other post/comment history. Most definitively sus.
In addition to the point about Western mythologies dominating because of cultural exports, I think there is also the undercurrent of England's original mythologies having been "lost" and so the English were always fascinated by the mythologies of the Norse (due to being invaded) and by the Greeks and Romans (as previous "great" civilizations they aspired to be).
Combine that with America's obvious English influences and the influence of England as a colonizer around the world, and those mythologies gained a huge outsized influence.
I really enjoyed it. The cast was great, the writing was fun, and the production quality was really good. Not an "action" show by any means. It does solid service to the comic books and lore, but not a paint by numbers of an existing story.
I'd say yes, but he's so much of a narcissist and so self-obsessed, I doubt it would've occurred to him. Especially as back then he was 90% tech bro and 10% weird idea guy. Those values, of course, have since fully flipped.
He's pushing spurious claims of illegal voters while facing prosecution over his own "illegal" election scheme.
> Musk has returned to a set of ideas he’s been preoccupied with for much of the year: the threat of voter fraud, the necessity of voter ID laws, and his persistent concern that “non-citizens” will somehow vote. The timing of this push to build outrage over alleged illegal election activity might strike some observers as ironic, given that the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office has just sued Musk for running his own “illegal…scheme” to entice conservative leaning voters with the prospect of cash.
I think that's sort of the point - if 2016 was our last "normal" election and early voting wasn't prognosticative of election results then, there's no hope it would be anything other than more variable and chaotic now.
The point wasn't about a "return to normal" or else he would be saying it was an indicator.
Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. There's no way to reconcile what he's saying with the video evidence.
Several citizens were permitted to run “test” ballots through machines assigned to their county, including Savage, who was spotted on camera folding the ballots into his pocket while confirming with an election official that they were “absolutely, totally real ballots.” Although they weren’t official ballots, the ballots did not say “fake” or “sample” and were being tracked and counted by the state.
He literally talks about that at several points. 2020 is a horrible baseline for looking at anything analytically because it was such an outlier because of COVID. Too many other variables in 2020 for it to be applicable for anything
What an odd take, and so orthogonal to what the article was about.
4 reasons why you’re better off ignoring it.
> On average, the D less R margin in the early vote mispredicted the final Clinton/Trump margin by 14 points! Pollsters get yelled at when their polls are off by even 3 points, and anything more than that is considered an absolute disaster. Imagine if a poll was off by 14 points: no one would ever listen to it again! And yet we get the same frankly amateurish analysis of the early vote in every election.
America PAC door knockers were flown to Michigan, driven in the back of a U-Haul, and told they’d have to pay hotel bills unless they met unrealistic quotas. One was surprised they were working to elect Donald Trump.
> America PAC door knockers were flown to Michigan, driven in the back of a U-Haul, and told they’d have to pay hotel bills unless they met unrealistic quotas. One was surprised they were working to elect Donald Trump.
The failed candidate couldn’t even interfere in the election right.
> “If you go to Payless, or go wherever, it says sample and you usually can take a sample,” Savage said, according to Fox59. “So that is the way I took it. I thought they were fake fucking ballots.” > >Speaking with Fox59, Savage claimed that he was an elected official and that he was “just trying to fight for our country.” (Savage, a businessman, came sixth out of eight candidates in the Republican primary.) > > Madison County Prosecutor Rodney Cummings said that Savage’s act was a deliberate attempt to “undermine our election process.”
I probably didn't explain well enough. Consuming media (books, TV, film, online content, and video games) is predominantly a passive experience. Obviously video games less so, but all in all, they only "adapt" within the guardrails of gameplay. These AI chatbots however are different in their very formlessness - they're only programmed to maintain engagement and rely on the LLM training to maintain an illusion of "realness". And because they were trained on all sorts of human interactions, they're very good at that.
Humans are unique in how we continually anthropomorphize tons of not only inert, lifeless things (think of someone alternating between swearing at and pleading to a car that won't start) but abstract ideals (even scientists often speak of evolution "choosing" specific traits). Given all of that, I don't think it's unreasonable to be worried about a teen with a still developing prefrontal cortex and who is in the midst of working on understanding social dynamics and peer relationships to embue an AI chatbot with far more "humanity" than is warranted. Humans seem to have an anthropomorphic bias in how we relate to the world - we are the primary yardstick we use to measure and relate everything around us, and things like AI chatbots exploit that to maximum effect. Hell, the whole reason the site mentioned in the article exists is that this approach is extraordinarily effective.
So while I understand that on a cursory look, someone objecting to it comes across as a sad example of yet another moral panic, I truly believe this is different. For one, we've never had access to such a lively psychological mirror before and it's untested waters; and two, this isn't some objection on some imagined slight against a "moral authority" but based in the scientific understanding of specifically teen brains and their demonstrated fragility in certain areas while still under development.
That is simply not true. Initially the replies to him were not antagonistic - he started taking that tone when the community asked him about the disparity between his professed beliefs and what he was posting and asking why he was supposedly voting third party. He then ran the table on the mods by engaging in a constant stream of spammy, low effort comments and you all did nothing. And the more you did nothing, the more frustrated and angry everyone became about him.
The mods should at least be able to recognize your hand in how UM played out, instead of blaming it only on the users engaging in "slap fights". The mods chose to moderate per post/comment instead of also considering an account's overall pattern of behavior.
The rules - as written - seem to indicate a level of judgement and assessment that has not been taking place, and user frustration is evident as many of us see how a pattern of behavior of trolling was allowed to continue for much too long because the user in question almost never went too far in any individual message but was quite clearly outside the rules when looked at as a whole.
I admire your stance on not doing a fast-and-loose approach to bans to protect individual voices, but your job as mods also involves protecting these communities from intentional and purposeful bad actors
This is sort of hilarious that he didn't know who he was replying to.
Recent video purportedly showing a man destroying ballots marked for Trump is a disinformation campaign, say officials
> Recent video purportedly showing a man destroying ballots marked for Trump is a disinformation campaign, say officials > > Russian actors were behind a viral video falsely showing mail-in ballots for Donald Trump being destroyed in the swing state of Pennsylvania, US officials said on Friday, amid heightened alert over foreign influence operations targeting the upcoming election. > > The video, which garnered millions of views on platforms such as the Elon Musk-owned X, purports to show a man sorting through mail-in ballots from the state’s Bucks county and ripping up those cast for the former president.
Same! And if anyone disagrees, feel free to get in the comments! 😉
Donald Trump just got a big boost from a shady new super PAC.
> A shady new super PAC named for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg just spent nearly $20 million on efforts to help Donald Trump appear more moderate on abortion, but the group won’t reveal where its money comes from until after the election. > > The pro-Trump RBG PAC (a massive insult to the late justice, who hated Trump) is attempting to use the liberal justice’s legacy to try and boost Trump ahead of the election. Its website even features photos of Ginsberg and the former president, captioned “Great Minds Think Alike.”
Americans’ opinions on immigration are more complicated than any one question can capture.
> This spring, an eye-opening poll from Axios suggested what once seemed unthinkable: Four in 10 Democrats were open to the idea of the US government deporting undocumented immigrants en masse. Though that share of support might seem high, other polls conducted since have found something similar, suggesting Americans at large are open to harsher, more Trumpian immigration policies. > > And yet, as attention-grabbing as some of the headlines on support for mass deportations have been (and as Donald Trump and his allies continue to talk about his plans for such), those polls may not accurately capture the mood of the American electorate. Support for a policy of mass deportation, while superficially high, rests on two related complications: substantial confusion among voters about what it might actually entail, as well as a generalized desire to do something — anything — on immigration, which polls frequently report to be among Americans’ top issues. > > That disconnect is because standalone polls and headlines do very little to capture the complexity of many Americans’ feelings about immigration, which often include simultaneous, and apparently contradictory, support for more immigrant-friendly policies alongside draconian ones. The real answer, more specific polling by firms like Pew Research Center suggests, lies somewhere in the middle: A good share of voters, it seems, are fine with increasing deportations. Some might even want the kind of operation Trump is floating. But many also want exceptions and protections for specific groups of immigrants who have been living in the US for a while, or have other ties to the country.
I guess that's at least a little better, but goddamn I still don't understand it.
I understand what you mean about the comparison between AI chatbots and video games (or whatever the moral panic du jour is), but I think they're very much not the same. To a young teen, no matter how "immersive" the game is, it's still just a game. They may rage against other players, they may become obsessed with playing, but as I said they're still going to see it as a game.
An AI chatbot who is a troubled teen's "best friend" is different and no matter how many warnings are slapped on the interface, it's going to feel much more "real" to that kid than any game. They're going to unload every ounce of angst into that thing, and by defaulting to "keep them engaged", that chatbot is either going to ignore stuff it shouldn't or encourage them in ways that it shouldn't. It's obvious there's no real guardrails in this instance, as if he was talking about being suicidal, some red flags should've popped up.
Yes the parents shouldn't have allowed him such unfettered access, yes they shouldn't have had a loaded gun that he had access to, but a simple "This is all for funsies" warning on the interface isn't enough to stop this from happening again. Some really troubled adults are using these things as defacto therapists and that's bad too. But I'd be happier if lawmakers were much more worried about kids having access to this stuff than accessing "adult sites".
Really appreciate their coverage of pretty much everything - lots of detail, no fluff, and no over the top headlines.
And yep, fuck insurance. Helped make the entire point of US healthcare providing profit for big corps and not actually patient wellness.
Had the same thought :)
When companies like Aetna or UnitedHealthcare want to rein in costs, they turn to EviCore, whose business model depends on turning down payments for care recommended by doctors for their patients.
> When companies like Aetna or UnitedHealthcare want to rein in costs, they turn to EviCore, whose business model depends on turning down payments for care recommended by doctors for their patients.
There's also advantages to the DC metro area being a "company town" in that it attracts interested public servants with particular skill sets. The DC metro area has a huge number of folks not from here, so it's not like there's a "DC mindset" at the individual level. And the feds have been pretty good on telework (fed contractors, not so much)
No idea on the song, may have better luck identifying the singer, and working backwards from there? Maybe something by Fine Young Cannibals? Certainly the most notable falsetto that comes to mind for that era for me.
Yep, he's creating yet another false equivalence (it's what he does after all) comparing individuals personally going on their own time to publicly volunteer and whatever shadow-interference-and-misinformation campaign that Putin's stood up for Trump. I just loved that Trump's campaign couldn't even be bothered to spell "Britain" correctly - the worst combination of venality and incompetence.
Allegation references LinkedIn post saying 100 party staffers were headed to US to campaign for Harris
> Citing the American revolution while misspelling “Britian”, Donald Trump’s campaign has filed an extraordinary complaint against the UK’s Labour party for what it claims is “interference” in the US presidential election.
> "The intelligence community assesses that Russian influence actors created and amplified content alleging inappropriate activity committed by the Democratic vice presidential candidate during his earlier career," an official from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told reporters at a briefing on Tuesday. > > "Vladimir Putin wants Donald Trump to win because he knows Trump will roll over and give him anything he wants. We condemn in the strongest terms any effort by foreign actors to interfere in U.S. elections," said Morgan Finkelstein, a spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign.
Despite status pages not showing any issues, I'm seeing serious lag in federation I think. Checked both on mobile (Voyager for iOS and web) and when compared to viewing via web on other instances (namely Lemmy.world), posts and comments for the last day seem to be missing?
The Republican presidential candidate ridiculously claimed that Biden is "trying to hold" Bibi back, as the Israeli prime minister continued to ruthlessly bomb Lebanon and Gaza.
“He’s doing a good job,” Trump saidabout the Israeli leader. “Biden is trying to hold him back, just so you understand, Biden is more superior to the VP. He’s trying to hold him back, and he probably should be doing the opposite, actually. I’m glad that Netanyahu decided to do what he had to do, but it’s moving along pretty good.”
It's unclear what happened to the anonymous X poster pushing baseless charges.
> The now-missing account, which posted under the name Docnetyoutube, has a documented history of promoting fake stories. But even with his profile gone, the seeds of the lie had already been sown and spread across the conspiracy ecosystem, driven by right-wing activists and self-styled conservative journalists.
From 2023 until September 2024, the Republican National Committee and affiliates have filed or are involved in 72 cases – and what stands out is their subject matter
> “The underlying claims in the suits are based on totally unreliable data, shoddy methodology, and basically the claims are garbage,” said Ben Berwick, a lawyer at the non-profit group Protect Democracy. “They are also, in this case, brought by election deniers, in an attempt to spread a false narrative to mislead the public and undermine confidence in elections.
I’m a well-informed Hobbit—a Boffin from Overhill, thank you very much—who is in a kerfuffle about whom to throw my Hobbit-sized support behind. Fo...
> I’m torn. Both Galadriel and Sauron say the other is a threat to Middle-earth. One has to be wrong, so whom am I to trust? Should I trust the Dark Lord who attempted to topple the White City of Gondor, dominate all life, and attempt to stay in power for eternity? Or do I trust the Elf Queen representing the coalition of Men and Elves who defeated Sauron when he tried to enslave the Free Peoples… but could maybe do more meet-and-greets?
“Fake news”-style misinformation is only a fraction of what deceives voters. Fighting misinformation will require holding political elites and mainstream media accountable
> Platforms can also respond to misleading content that does not violate official policies using community-based moderation that adds context to misleading posts (like X’s Community Notes and YouTube’s new crowdsourced note program). Larger platform changes such as ranking content based on quality, rather than engagement, might hit at the root of the problem rather being than a Band-Aid fix.
*Statistically* biased, we mean. A guide to house effects in the Silver Bulletin model.
Edit: had no idea “poll” was such a four letter word, especially when talking about them in the abstract. Anyone want to chime in on the downvotes? Is it just “all polls are bad” or is it Nate Silver? Honestly had no idea talking about poll weighting would be so unpopular.
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Since there’s always a lot of interest in the validity of polls, I found this to be interesting. It’s Nate Silver’s explanation of how they do weighting of polls when aggregating based on the pollsters track record. He makes it clear that the bias is often a result of the methodology and not necessarily a “thumb on the scale” and how the pollster executes a poll can introduce bias - and how they account for that.
Many folks have issues with Nate, but he’s at least very transparent in how they account for bias based on previous performance, not just the poll source. So while you may disagree with his decisions, you can at least look at his numbers and know how they got there.
“Federal Election Commission records show Stein paid $100,000 in July to a consulting outfit that has worked with Republican campaigns, as well as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent presidential bid. The firm, Accelevate, is operated by Trent Pool. The Intercept reported that he appeared to be part of the mob that breached the grounds of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6., 2021. The Journal hasn’t independently verified the reporting.”
In disjointed Washington speech, nominee tells audience low numbers are because of ‘the Democrat curse on you’
> Donald Trump has complained bitterly to Jewish donors that a majority of Jews vote against him in US presidential elections, suggesting that the Democratic party has a “curse on you”.
This is more Laura Loomer bullshit, isn’t?
geekwithsoul @lemm.ee I coalesce the vapors of human experience into a viable and meaningful comprehension.…