US Politics- Mute-iny on the bounty

[Mindwalker]

This is hilarious: Someone hacked DT's twitter account (sadly, without making good use of it). His pw: maga2020. Not satire.

[Fragile Bird]

15 minutes ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

 

Yeaaah...I don’t know anything you just said...

I mean, the radio station I listen too apparently uses Twitch now.  It dosen't help me.

My nice lawn!  Why are you all on it!

I couldn’t have said it better!  

[Ran]

7 minutes ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

 

Yeaaah...I don’t know anything you just said...

Twitch is basically Youtube, but instead of posting pre-recorded videos you broadcast ("stream") live, and can chat with people watching you as you play games or music, or just chat with you to hang out or while you're traveling around or eating a meal or whatever. It's mostly gaming focused. That's it, really. It's owned by Amazon and is the biggest live streaming site in the world, with about 90-95% of the market

 

7 minutes ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

I mean, the radio station I listen too apparently uses Twitch now. 

What that means is that they probably have a camera or two set up at the station to show you the DJs or hosts and their guests as they do their programs. Like this.

 

[Zorral]

52 minutes ago, Ran said:

Borrowed from a staffer, but yeah, nice clean build and decent specs.

Also proving, they can walk and chew gum >AHEM, lawns< at the same time, unlike the howling monkeys who claim to be governing who can't do anything at all.

Contrast yet again what Biden's up to -- which again, I'm all in favor of, you betcha, for all kinds of reasons, not to mention jobs!  It's run-up to election and Biden and their people are planning stuff that will be good for the country generally, better than cars for the environment, and give people real jobs.  Who ever heard of such a thing from politicians or even from a POTUS?

 

[Ormond]

52 minutes ago, Ran said:

Twitch is basically Youtube, but instead of posting pre-recorded videos you broadcast ("stream") live, and can chat with people watching you as you play games or music, or just chat with you to hang out or while you're traveling around or eating a meal or whatever. It's mostly gaming focused. That's it, really. It's owned by Amazon and is the biggest live streaming site in the world, with about 90-95% of the market

 

While "traveling around"? Just what we need, another dangerous source of distraction for drivers and pedestrians, 

[Argonath Diver]

Apologies for nerd chatter. Twitch is a fascinating place.

I often have Twitch in the background on one of my open tabs. A few years ago I'd have mocked myself, but hey, I'm not working or going into bars anymore. There are some nice communities there, and I generally watch pros playing games I can no longer compete in - pretty much the same as my passion for watching baseball, though I haven't put a glove on in 20 something years. I understand the Get Off My Lawn logic, but I'm a nerd, and it's really fun to watch the best nerds in the world do stuff at a level I don't have the time or skill to do. There are some other fantastic musicians who create content live, which is loads of fun.

Anyways, I had Twitch on somewhere when I heard AOC was on playing Among Us. It's somewhat like watching a 10 player game of Clue, where you play in silence then have recesses to accuse your friends of lying to your face. It's great. I bet it's ended relationships. I have never played it, though in theory if I had 9 other nerd friends it'd be a total blast. It's certainly a lot of fun to watch if you somewhat know the personalities of the players. Ilhan went on a murderous spree early, and yes her accidentally cackling during the silent portion of play had AOC and the rest of us in stitches. AOC was too nervous as a killer, though she was pretty good at picking out her suspects. Ilhan was fearless, but needed a better mic attached to that massive rig she was playing on.

Honestly both women had a ton of fun, as did the other pro streamers playing alongside. A couple hundred thousand fellow nerds all had a blast watching two rookies acquit themselves just fine against the veterans. I was delighted. As an added bonus, a whole lot of young people got to see some politicians having fun in 2020, something we've hardly seen at all.

[Guy Kilmore]

5 minutes ago, Ormond said:

While "traveling around"? Just what we need, another dangerous source of distraction for drivers and pedestrians, 

Are we being facetious and I am missing it?

I took Traveling Around to be like, hey, I am going to X place for a couple of weeks, while I am there, I can enjoy twitch.  Or maybe I am on a flight/train/bus, and I can watch it while I am in transport.

[Guy Kilmore]

6 minutes ago, Argonath Diver said:

Apologies for nerd chatter. Twitch is a fascinating place.

I often have Twitch in the background on one of my open tabs. A few years ago I'd have mocked myself, but hey, I'm not working or going into bars anymore. There are some nice communities there, and I generally watch pros playing games I can no longer compete in - pretty much the same as my passion for watching baseball, though I haven't put a glove on in 20 something years. I understand the Get Off My Lawn logic, but I'm a nerd, and it's really fun to watch the best nerds in the world do stuff at a level I don't have the time or skill to do. There are some other fantastic musicians who create content live, which is loads of fun.

Anyways, I had Twitch on somewhere when I heard AOC was on playing Among Us. It's somewhat like watching a 10 player game of Clue, where you play in silence then have recesses to accuse your friends of lying to your face. It's great. I bet it's ended relationships. I have never played it, though in theory if I had 9 other nerd friends it'd be a total blast. It's certainly a lot of fun to watch if you somewhat know the personalities of the players. Ilhan went on a murderous spree early, and yes her accidentally cackling during the silent portion of play had AOC and the rest of us in stitches. AOC was too nervous as a killer, though she was pretty good at picking out her suspects. Ilhan was fearless, but needed a better mic attached to that massive rig she was playing on.

Honestly both women had a ton of fun, as did the other pro streamers playing alongside. A couple hundred thousand fellow nerds all had a blast watching two rookies acquit themselves just fine against the veterans. I was delighted. As an added bonus, a whole lot of young people got to see some politicians having fun in 2020, something we've hardly seen at all.

That pretty much.  If you are into the gaming scene too, the amount of interaction you can have with some of the gaming pros is pretty awesome.  When they are streaming, a ton of them are taking public matches.  So imagine being a huge basketball fan and getting to just....shoot hoops with Lebron or something.   And not only that, after the game Lebron will give you some pointers.

[Zorral]

Does anyone know whether Vegas is making book that shoggoth walks off the 'debate' tonight, for the same reasons given for him walking out on the Stahl interview: "He didn't like her tone."  Which is a constant whine from him about any woman in a position of strength -- "She has a nasty tone.  She's angry.  She's ugly. And etc."

[Ran]

13 minutes ago, Ormond said:

While "traveling around"? Just what we need, another dangerous source of distraction for drivers and pedestrians, 

Twitch discourages and bans people for doing illegal stuff like streaming while driving. In fact, a Korean streamer who has been in Europe was informed that she was getting a ban because she showed herself accidentally running a red on a pedestrian crossing while using an electric scooter.

What I meant about traveling around was people livestreaming and interacting with chat while walking in their city or some foreign city, or hanging out in a park or restaurant, etc.

[Argonath Diver]

I had totally forgotten we're actually getting a debate again - and this time with a mute button. Will there be on-screen or audio effects added to Welker's Mute Button presses, a la Around the Horn on ESPN? I'd like a cartoony screen shake and change of tint on the window when a candidate is muted. Maybe she could have a soundboard with "Whomp Whomp", a rimshot, the Lenny Bruce theme, and some other nice audio memes? 

In all seriousness, I hope Trump's combative outbursts are responded to early and consistently. I hope she somehow gets each candidate to at least somewhat acknowledge her questions. We all know Trump won't actually dictate anything specific about his plan to replace the ACA (that big book is still all blank pages, seems like). I'll be interested if Biden explicitly responds to adding to the Supreme Court, or if he manages to deflect that also. 

I think there's a tiny chance that Trump actually ends the debate early if Welker continues to corral his blinded, cornered bull style of 'debate'.

[Mindwalker]

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/10/21/1988505/-Michigan-tries-to-ban-guns-at-polling-places-but-some-far-right-sheriffs-say-they-won-t-enforce-it

The threatening rhetoric by Michigan militiamen directed at state officials fueled a decision to ban open carry of firearms at polling places in the state this year. Some law-enforcement officers are saying they won't enforce it.

[Maithanet]

6 minutes ago, Argonath Diver said:

I had totally forgotten we're actually getting a debate again - and this time with a mute button. Will there be on-screen or audio effects added to Welker's Mute Button presses, a la Around the Horn on ESPN? I'd like a cartoony screen shake and change of tint on the window when a candidate is muted. Maybe she could have a soundboard with "Whomp Whomp", a rimshot, the Lenny Bruce theme, and some other nice audio memes? 

In all seriousness, I hope Trump's combative outbursts are responded to early and consistently.

The mute button is only for the first four minutes of each topic, so that Trump and Biden each get two minutes uninterrupted.  Then for the remaining 11 minutes of each topic, Trump can interrupt at will. 

[GrimTuesday]

1 hour ago, Zorral said:

Also proving, they can walk and chew gum >AHEM, lawns< at the same time, unlike the howling monkeys who claim to be governing who can't do anything at all.

Contrast yet again what Biden's up to -- which again, I'm all in favor of, you betcha, for all kinds of reasons, not to mention jobs!  It's run-up to election and Biden and their people are planning stuff that will be good for the country generally, better than cars for the environment, and give people real jobs.  Who ever heard of such a thing from politicians or even from a POTUS?

 

Maybe Biden is a far left Marxist, I hear those folks really like trains.

Twitch is actually really interesting right now when it comes to politics. There are a number of political commentators who have substantial followings and while a few of them are conservatives, the majority of them are decidedly on the left. The biggest one is Hasan Piker, formerly of The Young Turks, who on a regular day has between 15-25 thousand viewers depending on the time of day, and it can get well over 50k during big events like debates. It is actually kind of a interesting contrast between Twitch and Youtube where Twitch, with it's younger audience, is dominated by liberals and leftists vs. Youtube has a algorithm that acts as a right wing rabbit hole.

[Zorral]

As shoggoth hows at the moon, it would be so cool if at some point Biden could ask, "Is this what you did to the piano dealer?"

But nobody will probably know what that refers to --a guy who sold pianos -- long time family business -- who had the misfortune to be the one who they picked to put pianos in the Taj Mahal.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/09/28/i-sold-trump-100000-worth-of-pianos-then-he-stiffed-me/

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Let's by all means keep politics outta covid-19.

https://bismarcktribune.com/news/state-and-regional/govt-and-politics/state-looks-to-put-16m-in-federal-virus-funds-toward-fracking-grants/article_7cd51055-3ff9-5b8d-907b-decf31617b85.html#tracking-source=home-top-story

Quote

State officials say there isn’t enough time left to clean up every abandoned oil field well site they had intended to this year using federal coronavirus aid, so they want to repurpose $16 million and put it toward grants for fracking....

It's a long story, but does it need to be said this plan evolved during 'discussions' of state officials and oil industry representatives.

[argonak]

1 hour ago, Zorral said:

Also proving, they can walk and chew gum >AHEM, lawns< at the same time, unlike the howling monkeys who claim to be governing who can't do anything at all.

Contrast yet again what Biden's up to -- which again, I'm all in favor of, you betcha, for all kinds of reasons, not to mention jobs!  It's run-up to election and Biden and their people are planning stuff that will be good for the country generally, better than cars for the environment, and give people real jobs.  Who ever heard of such a thing from politicians or even from a POTUS?

 

South Dakota shouldn't even be a state.  Why the heck do we need two Dakotas.  Their combined population if half the population of Los Angeles.

[DMC]

4 hours ago, Maithanet said:

I would also just caution against using the 538 predictor on clearly edge cases like Trump winning Oregon.  It is hard to calibrate what exactly is going on nationally if there's a polling miss as huge as that.  We would naturally assume it's "Trump landslide!", but there's definitely a chance that it is something unique to Oregon that has been missed by pollsters. 

Yeah Silver cautioned against using the interactive for unrealistic scenarios - and Trump winning Oregon would certainly qualify - yesterday, specifically saying this:

Quote

The model will still spit out an answer, but it’s hard to know how reliable it will be — very few of the 40,000 simulations we run in our forecast will have Biden winning Ohio but Trump winning Michigan. In cases like this where there are few simulations that match the map you’ve chosen, the interactive instead uses a regression-based technique and essentially runs some new simulations on the fly. Still, that could lead to a “garbage in, garbage out” problem.

Emphasis mine.  What this basically means is there's no real "logic" to why Trump losing Oregon would boost Biden's chances in Mississippi - and I wouldn't describe the output as an "error" either.  Putting in such unlikely parameters simply confuses the model so you're going to get some confusing output.  If anyone has ever run very complicated models, such confounding outputs should be familiar to you based on slightly changing any part of the model specification and/or including volatile variables.  Silver refers to it as "garbage in, garbage out," my friends/colleagues/advisors and I just call it slop.

3 hours ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

Lots of new polls coming out and it will make your head spin looking at it all, I suggest Nate Cohn's analysis (NYT, Upshot) snapshot every night about what the polls say for the entire day. For instance, a snippet from last night:

I'm sure today will bring new analysis, as the PA numbers seem modestly better.

At least for the presidential race, I'd say almost all the polls today look pretty good.  His national numbers are ticking down, but that actually reassures me as the disparity between the national and swing state numbers was beginning to suggest there was something systemically off.  Only bad poll I can think of is Morning Consult having Trump up 1 in AZ.

3 hours ago, Simon Steele said:

I do think that until Trump is gone (please let it be just two months instead of four years), it's hard to get over that 2016 trauma. Trump subverts every expectation. 

Yeah, as if on cue, John Harris has an article out on how The 2016 Trauma actually has led to comparatively "favorable coverage compared to traditional media depictions of campaigns in such situations - 

Trump is doing worse than it seems — but reporters are afraid to say so:

Quote

But there’s something easy to miss in the barrage of negative stories: By historical standards, Trump’s coverage is actually favorable, in one critical respect.

It is giving generous allowance for the possibility that things aren’t as bad as they seem for the incumbent, and that he may yet have another surprise in store for anyone who thinks that conventional dynamics of politics apply to him. The reason is simple: Journalists and the political professionals who are their sources emerged from Trump’s 2016 upset doubting their own instincts and believing that familiar analytical prisms aren’t a reliable way to view this politician.

Any previous campaign in Trump’s circumstances — bad polls nationally, behind in multiple must-win states, coming after four years of low favorability ratings and steady off-year and midterm losses for the party he leads — would be facing coverage that would be the political equivalent of a hospital vigil for a very sick patient.

43 minutes ago, Argonath Diver said:

I'll be interested if Biden explicitly responds to adding to the Supreme Court, or if he manages to deflect that also. 

I imagine he'll pivot to calling for a bipartisan commission that it just came out he's advocating for.  In fact wouldn't be surprised if the Biden camp encouraged CBS to leak that right before the debate so he didn't have to blatantly refuse to give a solid answer on the question.

On this Twitch discussion, I'm pretty much in the "get off my lawn" camp - just as my students had to explain to me what Tiktok is - but I do know my brother (who's spent most of his waking life gaming) watches old episodes of WWF Raw that are (presumably illegally) streamed on the platform.

[Mindwalker]

Bipartisan commission?! When the other party consists of raging trumpists and fascists who've packed the courts to the brims? You've got to be tucking kidding me..

"The last thing we need to do is turn the Supreme Court into just a political football"... well, newsflash: That ship has sailed a while ago.

 

[Ran]

3 hours ago, Mindwalker said:

Bipartisan commission?! When the other party consists of raging trumpists and fascists who've packed the courts to the brims? You've got to be tucking kidding me..

It’s a commission to study and make recommendations, not one that will set policy, and there are small-c conservative jurists and legal scholars out there who are not big fans of what the GOP has been doing who can be tapped.

 

[DMC]

8 minutes ago, Mindwalker said:

Bipartisan commission?! When the other party consists of raging trumpists and fascists who've packed the courts to the brims? You've got to be tucking kidding me..

What Ran said.  "Bipartisan" in this context simply means a group of legal scholars with a variety of perspectives.