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Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

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Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#211
post #83

Interesting fact I noticed: If Biden is to take the presidency after the Electoral Collage voted that would make him the oldest president to take office yet, also interesting that wikipedia already marked Biden as president-elect [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_Unit...

There will be three, no, four living ex-presidents younger than the current president, Biden (77).

Barak Obama (59) Bill Clinton (74) George W. Bush (74) edit: Donald Trump (74)

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#212

On the data nerd side I continue to be shocked at how people misinterpret the certainty of polls/forecasts. Forecasts give us probability distributions based on historical polling error data. Not infallible predictions the expected value will 100% happen. It’s fairly revealing of society’s general innumeracy, just as it was 4 years ago when Trump won.

Statistics can be pretty unintuitive. On top of that, most people have never learned any statistics.

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#213

On the data nerd side I continue to be shocked at how people misinterpret the certainty of polls/forecasts. Forecasts give us probability distributions based on historical polling error data. Not infallible predictions the expected value will 100% happen. It’s fairly revealing of society’s general innumeracy, just as it was 4 years ago when Trump won.

Whats even more frustrating is recognizing the population difference in day of voters and mail in votes, expecting a "blue shift" as votes are counted, and then watching pundits chime in on Tuesday about surprising results.

As far as I can tell the most surprising result was Trump's popularity among Cuban Floridians.

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#214

I've always felt that the Trump presidency served as an effective form of "Chaos Engineering". Regardless of your views of Trump's politics, his administration and method of leadership has exposed a lot of flaws in how our government has been designed and engineered. The postmortem of the last 4 years should be analyzed deeply in order to identify the weak points in the infrastructure of our government in order to ma…

Yeah. The laws of the land largely assume the president is fundamentally a good actor with the nation's best interests at heart, which I think was sometimes the case with Trump and sometimes not.

We should require a fuller disclosure of a candidate's finances before we allow them to serve. Trump may be deeply in debt to foreign powers. He may not be. We do not know. That is a problem, and it should not be a partisan issue. It is mind-blowing that anybody is okay with not knowing. Let's not let that happen again. That should be the easiest law/amendment to pass, ever. (Of course it won't be)

We obviously have legal machinery in place to remove a president if the need arises, but it is necessarily slow and ineffective.

His term also (further) exposed big flaws in the way we put people on the Supreme Court. We should go back to the old system of a 2/3 majority required. No more 50/50 simple majority, as the Democrats instituted a while back. I find that a disaster.

The old 2/3 majority generally ensured that people who were competent centrists got onto the court. Both parties were equally happy with the candidates... or at least equally unhappy!

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#215

I've always felt that the Trump presidency served as an effective form of "Chaos Engineering". Regardless of your views of Trump's politics, his administration and method of leadership has exposed a lot of flaws in how our government has been designed and engineered. The postmortem of the last 4 years should be analyzed deeply in order to identify the weak points in the infrastructure of our government in order to ma…

He was chaotic and ineffectual and mostly focused on dumb peeves. But I do think he got some good ideas through the conventional “wisdom”. His execution on everything was poor.

  Good new ideas:    
Focus on China as an existential threat to US hegemony.

Just freaking get out of the Middle East already.

Globalization has not been good for the working and middle class.

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#217
We should trust but verify the results. The basis of facts should be settled in the following:

1. Select all ballots that were sent to the same address - or sent to the same Post Office (grouping all PO Boxes by post office). ^ Here you are trying to see if there is systemic voting behaviors out of the ordinary -- i.e. did 10+ ballots go to one address.

2. Select all ballots that were sent to an alternate address than the voter registration. ^ This is a general query -- select a sample set of these and confirm with the registered voter that they did indeed receive a mail in ballot.

3. If above is inconclusive, select all registered voters that requested a mail in ballot against the 2017-2018 Equifax Data to determine if correlations occur.

4. Select all ballots that were the voter did not vote in the last X elections (there are political consultancies that provide information on who NOT to waste your time on because they do not vote), did these people request a mail in ballot? Were these ballots sent to an alternate address?

For clarification [1], if one were armed with a SSN or DL and a previous address, one could request a ballot on behalf of another person AND have that ballot redirected to a location of their choosing... including a PO Box. The form is included here for reference.

[1] https://www.votespa.com/Register-to-Vote/Documents/PADOS_Mai...

EDIT: just so you know, I think both of them did things like this. I want my d%mn democracy back.

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#218

What is really keeping me up at night is the existential problem the US faces for the next 50 years: the ever increasingly large divide that is the polarizing of the electorate. We have to come together as Americans or someone will divide and conquer us.

The past four years and this election has exposed some deep problems within American Society.

If about 47% of your country was happy to kill democracy and reward immoral behaviour just to retain power, often justified by religious beliefs...

And Trump is not gone yet... Who knows what the Republicans will do with the stacked Supreme Court...

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#219

I've always felt that the Trump presidency served as an effective form of "Chaos Engineering". Regardless of your views of Trump's politics, his administration and method of leadership has exposed a lot of flaws in how our government has been designed and engineered. The postmortem of the last 4 years should be analyzed deeply in order to identify the weak points in the infrastructure of our government in order to ma…

That is a great analogy. I hope lawmakers patch all those holes, because you are right.

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#220

Does anyone feel strange about a 77 year old man being put under this much stress? Politics aside, I would not wish a stressful job on any 77 year old regardless of their health and well being - there are biological realities to being a human. I don't know what motivates these decisions but it seems to me the people of his own party either don't care that there is a non-trivial chance he will die, or they think the g…

The same can be said of Trump--he's 74 and obese, which I would say puts him and Biden at least around the same level of health. It would be re-assuring to have younger candidates, but you can't claim this is an issue for one candidate but not his heavy, three-years-junior opponent.

At the end of the day as long as the president has the ability to choose competent advisors / cabinet member I think they'll be successful, and I definitely have more confidence in Biden's ability to do this.

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