801–810 of 889 posts
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> it's well documented that GOP voters are wealthier on average Is it? I could not find a proper reference documenting both the average and median wealth of voters of both parties.
This is based on exit polls and there are better studies out there. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016...
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Trump was referring to the Drug, Weapons, & Human trafficking that was occurring due to the border policy at the time. This illicit trafficking and violence against civilians & journalists is well documented in many sources.
That doesn't accurately describe Trump's comments. This wasn't some onetime only type of comment. Remember when he said a US judge couldn't rule on a case where Trump was losing, because the judge was of hispanic origin. That's another racist comment. Trump has continually made these types of comments, made references to shithole countries. You can't just dismiss that with a claim that he was saying something else, b…
You brought up a non-sequitor, re Judge Curiel. He has provided legal representation for a hispanic-supremacist organization named La Raza (meaning "the race" in Spanish), which has a public political opinion on matters such as the wall on the southern border. Perhaps Trump should have mentioned the group "La Raza", however the point stands that Judge Curiel has racial-supremacist political affiliations, was in-explicitly hostile in the lawsuit, & Trump called it out as a theory.
https://thenewamerican.com/judge-in-trump-university-case-ti...
For many, the "Orange Man Bad" & "all white people are racist" narrative will probably kick in & they will reject what I'm saying outright because it does not fit their narrative; however this interpretation better fits Occam's razor, considering that Trump has also worked with certain people of all ethnicities in a harmonious fashion, while having rocky relationships with certain people from all ethnicities. The differences have to do with political worldview rather than ethnicity. Unfortunately, the political left has a habit of editorializing worldviews according to race, so other explanations are rendered moot according to the worldview of the political left, which views the world according to race.
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There is a lot more to it than that. There had already been a machine recount in Florida, and Bush won that one as well. What Gore did was use a loophole in Florida law to pursue a dubious recount strategy. He demanded hand recounts only in four counties he had won by large margins. That tilted the recount in his favor: hand recounts will find more discernible votes than machine counting, and by only requesting recou…
> He demanded hand recounts only in four counties he had won by large margins. That tilted the recount in his favor: hand recounts will find more discernible votes than machine counting, and by only requesting recounts in counties that where the base rate of Gore votes was very high, most of those newly-counted votes would be for Gore So recount all the counties. But that's beside the point, which was that we know th…
There was a statewide machine recount, and Bush won that too. Gore never asked for a statewide recount. He pursued a selective recount strategy, and in the process burned half the time available to certify the results. https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/05/bush-v-gore-fake-news...
> But that's beside the point, which was that we know there were severe problems with the 2000 Florida vote due to a large number of dimpled or hanging chads, meaning that votes were being counted by the machines as being omitted where the voter intended to and thought they had voted
That sort of thing happens in every election. An MIT analysis found that about 2% of ballots in a large sample set from 1988-2000 showed no vote for President: https://news.mit.edu/2001/voting1
Normally that doesn’t matter. As long as you apply a uniform standard, like the machine count, the error affects all parties equally.
What Gore did was turn that fact of vote counting into an election strategy. He realized that by demanding hand recounts under subjective standards, he could gin up more votes from that pool of 2%. And by demanding hand recounts only in Democratic counties, he could ensure that these new votes would disproportionately go to him. And even when the Florida Supreme Court smacked him down and ordered a statewide recount, he vigorously pursued a strategy of convincing Democratic counties to adopt looser counting standards, and indeed standards that shifted mid-count: http://electoralcollegehistory.com/electoral/florida/00837-2...
See also: https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/partisanship-my...
> In Palm Beach, if the hand counters saw a card with several punches on it, and a dimple near Al Gore’s name, the election officials did not count it because that voter knew how to punch a card and did not punch a hole next to Mr. Gore. The machine worked correctly when it did not read it.
> Not so in Broward County. If some of the vote counters saw several clean punches for Democrats and no punch for Gore, not even an indentation, but they saw a “scratch” near his name, they called it for Gore
> The state attorney general, a Gore elector, argued that “never before the present election had a manual recount been conducted on the basis of the contention that ‘undervotes’ [ballots with no punches on them] should have been examined to determine voter intent.”
That’s why all this stuff about hanging chads and pregnant chads and whatnot mattered at all. Ordinarily, those errors should cancel out. It’s only when you try to get a selective recount, or pursue different counting standards in different counties, that this matters.
Ultimately, Gore handed the Supreme Court a giant mess. The Justices agreed 7-2 that the recount that was ongoing at Gore’s request was unconstitutional.
> and poorly designed butterfly ballots that appear to have led to many people to mix up the Gore hole and Buchanan hole (and led about 19k people to punch both holes, since both were next to Gore).
The butterfly ballot could have been better designed, but there was an arrow clearly pointing to what hole voters were supposed to punch: https://static-propublica-org.cdn.ampproject.org/ii/w820/s/s...
The thing I saw even then was selective enforcement, I'd get death threats all the time from various tough guys over posts where I'd mocked them for being socialists or whatever, which I'd report, they'd never get banned. I didn't care that much because it's the internet and I wasn't posting under my real name, what were they going to do. But then I'd see people getting banned for telling others threatening them that they were strapped and it wasn't a good idea to make those threats. There's a hierarchy on Twitter when it comes to following the rules, and if you draw the ire of the people in the protected upper echelons you'll be threatened and bullied without any recourse.
It’s worth noting that the first thing Parler did was start censoring anyone unsupportive of their form of conservatism. They’re not offering freer speech, they’re offering a safe space. Maybe that’s a seller, maybe it’s not, but it’s an important distinction. This is really just /r/conservative taken to its logical conclusion.
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Just to expand a little - If you are the moderator and both sides think you are biased, you are probably in the right zone. The problem is do we as society, really want a handful of private companies deciding what the rules are - deciding for example if a Philipino politician can use FAANG to talk to his electorate (because the electorate is all on facebook, say de facto facebook are garejeeping this) Society does no…
So if those that think the world is round and those who think it is flat both think the moderator is biased he must be doing something right? Both sides are wrong because technically the earth isn't exactly flat? What about climate change deniers vs climate scientists?
The problem is not the obvious cases. Child porn is a crime in every country, it can be hunted down online. Society generally agrees on that. Similarly for flat earthers. 99% of people in a pub or street will roll their eyes at this shit. It's only because it's all over youtube and so are we that we think it's big. Problems where most societies mostly agree are not the issue.
We could build some kind of rebuttal system - a distributed URL based downvoting system. This would help with the labelling / tagging of dubious posts - at the prominence level of the original post. (ie some W3C tagging for fact checking)
But this is also not about agreeing the same set of facts - people rarely disagree over facts unless facts lead to different political positions. And that's the real issue.
Climate change is probably too huge to cover but let me try - Climate change does not have a solution - the bomb has dropped we are just waiting for the shockwave to hit. Now we can stop pouring fuel on the fire (metaphor breaking sound) by moving off fossil fuel, but also we need to handle the massive changes involving water rights (hello India China) immigration as people get displaced by flooding (hello everywhere).
Denial of this is a human response - because otherwise you have to welcome massive change and people who are not confident their needs will be looked after by the establishment.
This is the real reason for the disparity in numbers of deniers in US and canada / europe - if US built a welfare state tomorrow it would see a massive drop off in climate change denial.
So I think I lost my thread - but fact checking is only part of the politics problem - rapid rebuttal for every stupid online statement is a fine thing to aim for - something good recommendation algorithms could really help with !
But it stops there. Yes it is fine to mandate Ford and GM build cars with airbags and seatbelts - but it is crazy to ask them to build more parking spaces or solve rush hour.
Same goes for online political discussions - YouTube must "fix" (god knows what how) recommendations and facebook must fix the newsfeed and twitter must something. But it has to stop somewhere around the point that someone reading a post is informed - that it is clear and obvious there is debate around what is being said.
After that it is about human biases and cognitive failures - ie politics.
We should work to ensure everyone has the same set of facts. Yes.
But the same set of facts when run through different mental models come up with different actions.
And I don't think it is right to have FAANG ensure everyone has the same mental model. That's what politics is about - and the fact that two people can have the same facts but use different mental models is basically the difference between every political party ever - and is why everyone thinks they are being censored - because if they weren't censored then obviously everyone would vote their way.
On a side note this is something software gives us hope for - I can conceive of building a politics observatory - a sort of version of that UK economy coloured water experiment - where you can view the economy globally - the shows made in China shipped to Fermany and sold - and see how immigration or welfare changes the model.
I think it's possible to have people build up a real software model - to try and reflect in software what their own biases are. I think if this was an app everyone had it would have interesting repercussions- would everyone tend towards a common model? Could you ask for explanations why your model on (prejudice dunjoir) was wrong?
Hang on - I just described a university education.
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The problem is not on HN. Making changes here will have precisely zero impact on society.
I'm curious: how does one know such things? Is there no possibility that you may be somewhat mistaken? Note: - your first statement references the entirety of HN; it is plausibly likely that you have not consumed (and comprehensively perceived with complete accuracy , and remembered) the entirety of forum discussions on HN - your second statement involves events in the future - as far as I know, the ability to accura…
Look up a Fermi problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem
That's a good place to start with these kinds of questions.
I figure this is true simply because of the remarkably low population of Hacker News compared to society at large; there's simply not enough people here for changes to this specific site to make an impact on the larger social media ecosystem.
To be more realistic, I'll estimate that getting the social media platform Hacker News exactly perfect from a systemic standpoint might have an impact on around 0.001% of the societal social media problem. We've then got 99.999% more to impact.
And if you believe that people reading Hacker News are somehow more influential to society than the average social media user or something... well, we would not then have that belief in common.
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“The couple initially gave $250 million to the nonprofit Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which has set up a grant program that funds local government efforts to expand voter access, including drive-through voting, temporary staffing support, equipment to process ballots and applications and nonpartisan voter educations” God forbid people be able to exercise the right to vote. “A conservative legal group, Thoma…
So let me get this straight, your response to my criticism of left-wing censorship is to quote an article from a major left-wing media outlet who actively participates in censorship & altered-framing of news topics? And on top of that, you provide a smug response that misses the underlying point? This thought-cycle is common, and is deepening the divide in America. I urge you to diversify your news sources, and think…
Curiously, the right (and you) have no problem with 42 other states having access to those grants, but god forbid any purple states get that money. The fact that Joe Bob lives in a rural parish that wont apply for grants is on your team, not those sneaky lefties.
“800 polling places”
Why do people loathe making voting accessible? What does it matter how many there are? That’s the best you can do on a site that loathes Zuck?
Has the Moonie Times found Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate yet? See, I do read it, and I have a very long memory. Thx for playing.
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I miss those days too! I used to spend a lot of time in #efnet and #dalnet, speaking to strangers about things like #skateboarding and other random topics. It was kind of cool because back then most people didn't know what irc was, nor did they have the prowess to download, install, and configure a client. Mirc was the jam. I'm working on a new open chat site, https://sqwok.im , and hoping to recapture some of that e…
Great idea! When trying to create an account, it wouldn't let me chose a password over 20 characters. Why the limit?
hmm, that seems like a bug! the username limit is set at 20 but maybe I accidentally copied that validation onto the password field, I'll remove it, thanks for reporting!
