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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.

#251

Post by lettergram »

charliemil4 wrote: post #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 tha…

In Michigan there were ballots sent by dead voters:

https://austingwalters.com/the-dead-vote-in-michigan/

I found probably 10 of these, some invalidated, some supposedly had the wrong birthdate in the system (which probably should be validated anyway)...

Gov of Michigan apparently took the site down, but feel free to see the video

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

#252

Post by ColanR »

devit wrote: post #234

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 u…

That's the way it was originally, when only people who owned land could vote (not the men-only part). It was a basic test of responsibility, similar to the 501-karma downvote requirement on HN. Holding land wasn't that hard, but it did indicate a baseline.

Unless you're thinking of only allowing certain political or moral viewpoints to vote? That sounds fairly dystopian, no matter what one believes.

Edit: we used to have something else like that - a certain subset of the population only got 3/5 of a whole vote. But I really doubt that's what you want.

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

#254

Post by putlake »

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.

I feel like a big reason for the divide is the filter bubbles[1] the public has trapped themselves in. I wanted to force myself to read news from both sides of the divide rather than simply NPR, which was my go-to source for several years. In spite of RSS readers being essentially dead, there are still RSS feeds available. So I mashed up feeds from 10 left and right leaning sources each and created Smash the Bubble[2], mostly for personal consumption.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble

[2]https://smashthebubble.com/

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

#255

Post by louwrentius »

3np wrote: post #96

What I’m really curious about now is how the GOP are going to position itself wrt Trump and his rhetoric and claims when he’s no longer in office.

Maybe it's not true, but I feel as a whole that basically everything the GOP stands for is 'out of fashion'.

I feel that Trump and the current GOP was a last ditch effort to let the old traditions grab control by any means (even illegal or immoral) necessary to kill abortion, put the gays back in the closet, and so on.

I can't imagine that younger people, for who things like homosexuality, transsexuality are totally fine, who are not encumbered with religious traditions, can even contemplate voting for that kind of worldview from a bygone era.

But maybe I'm wrong.

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

#256

Post by jayd16 »

fullshark wrote: post #93
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.

What % chance did the polls/forecast give the republicans gaining seats in the house (I actually don't know but from reading pundits it sounds like very little)? I think the interesting thing this cycle is betting markets were pretty much also at odds with pollsters/forecasts on Trump's chances, basically baking in a pro-trump (R?) polling error. Perhaps there really are issues with some of these forecasts / uncertai…

It wasn't that little at all. Eyeballing the 538 graph it was about a 38% chance of Republicans gaining in the house? Over a one in three chance.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/...

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

#257

Post by jseliger »

A big problem that divides us is property renters versus owners: owners have spent the last several decades restricting access to property, and that's now raised the cost of the most productive metro areas to unacceptable levels: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/the-ren... Many millions of people, especially but not exclusively the young, have in effect been gated out of prosperity.

Matt Yglesias's new book One Billion Americans has a good discussion of the issue: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/08/one-billion-american..., even if you don't buy his population-based premise.

Until we can free our land markets, we're going to have a lot of political problems caused by people who (correctly) feel they can't afford to live.

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

#258

Post by throwaway894345 »

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've actually had a related but perhaps converse opinion: it's demonstrated the resilience of our government. A lot of people have been noting his authoritarian tendencies and expressing concern that he might refuse to acknowledge election results, and while that appears to be the case, there's no indication that he will have his way (apart from legal proceedings, which are a perfectly democratic [albeit petulant] way to contest election results). In some countries, a president demanding a stop to vote counting might get their way, but that didn't happen here, and it's good to know that for the endless flack (some fair and some not) America and Americans get, we still have a robust political system.

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

#259

Post by mhh__ »

devit wrote: post #234

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 u…

Maybe move to a system instead where some people's vote have any weight instead, rather than abolishing democracy.

The EC means people's vote not only get put down the drain, but also they get to vote for candidates nominated with knowledge of this (swing states might not vote for a candidate popular everywhere else)

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

#260

Post by read_if_gay_ »

louwrentius wrote: post #218
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.

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...

> If about 47% of your country was happy to kill democracy and reward immoral behaviour just to retain power

And these 47% would say exactly the same thing about the others. That’s the divide GP was pointing out and ironically your response is perpetuating it. Stop dehumanizing people.

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