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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.

#231

Post by kqvamxurcagg »

deftnerd wrote: post #179

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…

I would disagree on this point. I believe the constitution and judiciary have been very effective against Trump's attempts to go around Congress. Lots of people are criticising the USA's political system but remember it is the UNITED STATES. The federal system of government and the electoral college system are by built-in features. The senate system of 2 senators per state and the electoral college are fantastic features to provide additional stability across a vast and diverse geography.

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

#232

Post by js2 »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #59

Completely independently of who won/will win this election, I find it massively irresponsible that media outlets are calling it before actual states are. The media should report the news, not make it.

You must also find it massively irresponsible for Trump to state he won the election as early as Wednesday morning.

Fortunately, his statements, like those of the media, aren’t how the winner is determined. Rather, all the votes are counted and then certified. The media waits until the unofficial counts are outside of the reach of recounts. Trump’s legal challenges are contradictory: he’s arguing to continue counting in states where he is behind and stop counting in states where he is ahead. It doesn’t work that way.

After 2000, the media has been very conservative in waiting to call elections. In any case, they’ve twice miscalled a presidential election but it didn’t impact the ultimate winner, because at the end of the day, we follow the rule of law.

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

#234

Post by devit »

It's pretty remarkable though that almost half of the US voted for someone who is clearly unsuitable to be president based on his first term.

It might be time to consider letting go of the democratic ideal that every person's vote has the same weight, and figure out some criteria for either voting eligibity or vote weight that would mostly exclude or give little weight to the votes of people who voted for a clearly unsuitable candidate.

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

#235

Post by pjbk »

gigatexal wrote: post #138

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.

Perhaps that is happening already, and some of the events we have seen in the last months are not by our own making but fabricated?

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

#236

Post by adrianmonk »

deftnerd wrote: post #179

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…

For example, in impeachment trials, you might expect partisanship to affect the final vote but for the trial itself to still be thorough, complete, etc. In practice, apparently this doesn't happen if the party is still basically loyal to the president.

I guess it's not surprising. If they already know how they're going to vote, it can only damage the president and the senators to expose any facts that go against that.

Maybe in a case where the president did something even more extreme, it wouldn't work this way. But the sequence appears to be that the president's party would first decide they want him out, then do the trial to make it happen, not the other way around.

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

#237

Post by lvs »

gigatexal wrote: post #138

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.

This divide is a business plan, not an organic phenomenon. If you want advertising revenue, you must build a cult of fanatical viewers/clickers. We won't solve this until we deal with advertising as a revenue stream for media.

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

#238

Post by dragonwriter »

sdfhbdf wrote: 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...

> also interesting that wikipedia already marked Biden as president-elect

It has long been standard to refer to candidates as President-Elect once one the results of the election of electors is reasonably clear. One might argue that it is not technically accurate until after the Congress tallies the votes of the Electoral College and announces the result of that tally, but it is the long accepted usage and the use of it to refer to Biden at this point is in no way noteworthy or a deviation from what long-established practice.

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

#239

Post by evgen »

jayd16 wrote: post #213
softwaredoug wrote: post #81

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.

Once Biden's team let Trump paint him as socialist I was not surprised to see the Cubanos go Trump (or the Venezuelans for the same reason) but I will be interested to see some of the breakdowns of the Puerto Rican vote in FL and some of the Central American Latino vote in Texas; I am betting there is going to be a reasonably large gender difference in some of those groups.

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

#240

Post by jonstewart »

bra-ket wrote: post #196

it's a projection, tens of thousands of provisioned and military ballots are still not counted. Recounts are still to happen in most swing states. Lawsuits are pending.

It’s unlikely a recount will happen in Pennsylvania, as Biden’s margin of victory now exceeds the recount threshold of 0.5%.
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