…so, like, what’s the over-under on Dotardus T Dotard going off book & paying out on bets he forgets they had to clip the bits of his speech where he crowed like a rooster about that acquittal he was promised would be fully baked by now & not just oven ready?
…& who cares if the wheels fall off your argument anyway
…when it can just piggyback its way over the line on a lipstick smeared pig with wings courtesy of that infamous GOP boondoggle on the Island of Dr Moreau
…so what weird & wonderful conjectural trajectories do we suppose the garbled output of this fractured mind will corkscrew through?
…& how well will he stick to the sanitized basically-actual-sentences script as it scrolls by on the autocue?
…because there’s kinda two ways to take this headline…although at least one of them I could get behind
…the one that points to giving this guy the ticket?
…not so much…still, at least his bit of yesterday’s news has a passing claim to relevance to today’s headlines
…the fuck this tall streak thinks he’s playing at is anybody’s fucking guess…apparently Steyer & Bloomberg weren’t enough late white hopes for team bought-my-way-in?
…is it just me or does there seem to be a whole lot of not reading the room going on?
…it’s kind of a trip
JaaaaaysusmotherfuckingCHRIIIISTonabun!!!
Seriously, have y’all HEARD the damn names behind the firms & superPAC that fucked up the Caucus reporting last night?!?
FFS, they sound like some sort of terrible Bond/Marvel villain crew of henchmen!🙄🙄🙄
“Shadow”….
What GORRAM DUMBASSES thought a company named “Shadow” would be a GOOD idea,when there was SO much grousing about the damn DNC “rigging everything for Hillary” last time?!?!??????????????
For FUCK’s SAKE, people!!!
SHADOW?!?
when the damn party & process NEED more Sunlight.
(Facepalms self into the sun)
WHO.in.THE.fuck. comes up with this parody-level bullshit?!?
ACRONYM, and Shadow, and PACRONYM.
We’re goddamned doomed, aren’t we? Because the folx running the show are too goddamnedSTUPID to see the damned noses on their faces & recognize them as *a nose* rather than an ear…
😱😱😱😱😱😱😱
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/iowa-caucus-app-shadow_n_5e390191c5b687dacc722824
The fact that “Shadow” will somehow matter to some folks somewhere is why American politics is so fucking draining. I don’t have the mental energy to deal with this shit for another 10 months. I should just take my family back to Finland while the opposition still has freedom of movement.
Hey, give them a break! They wanted to use Fraud Guarantee but Lev is a little tied up right now with other things.
It really is almost as bad as Fraud Guarantee, name-wise, which is why it’s so baffling that no one apparently mentioned, “Hey, is there *any* way we can get mocked mercilessly about this?”🤔
I saw the figure of $60K paid to Shadow for developing the app, which is both crazy high and stupidly low.
$60K is a huge overspend for a simple task like reporting a few numbers on a single night. It’s like paying $60K to place a single call to the people in charge of all 1300 or so voting precincts. It can’t take a lot of hours to write.
But it’s also stupidly low because there is no way you get any serious testing for the app at that price. Assuming $200 an hour to deliver the app, that’s only 300 hours to develop, test, and bug fix. That leaves almost no time to test.
Which means they never should have used an app for this in the first place. If you want something secure and reliable across the crazy quilt of phones and OSes that are out there, you need to spend an insane amount of time testing and bug fixing.
The bottom line is no app will ever fix a complicated human process, and if you address the human issues, you don’t need the app.
…that bottom line is reading an awful lot like an epitaph just at the minute but that figure is new to me & I’d certainly agree with your conclusions about it
…the new way to do a thing can’t be a better way if it doesn’t actually do the thing, for a start…& the device fragmentation thing is no joke even if you were to get the basics locked down in the prototype stages…& if you don’t make it over that hurdle it’s a significant barrier to voters that’s bound to disproportionately effect those less well off…which I’m sure all concerned definitely consider a bug & not a feature on account of them being so pure of virtue & all
In my limited experience working with developers of pretty simple web apps, one thing I learned is that you can never underestimate how many different ways end users will have set up their systems.
With enough time you can adjust to 99% of them. But when it comes to the Iowa example, that would still mean a dozen or so of precinct results are borked, and in a race this tight, that doesn’t work. And in this case, they only had a couple of months to code the app, not nearly enough time.
Two months would have been plenty of time to set up a call center and train a bunch of people, and make sure the caucus tally takers knew how to transmit results. But no….
…why, it’s almost as if the people taking the decisions literally don’t understand the technology…much less care to
I’m choosing to stay un-outraged about the caucus until I’m sure there is a reason to be outaged. Even if the app failed (seems like it did?), they have paper backups and the results were publicly witnessed because that’s how caucuses work. Now, was it stupid to use an app? Yes. But if it takes longer for results to get reported and counted because they had to go to the backup system, I’m OK with that. I’m glad they did the back up with paper.
Happy Birthday Hello America!
Thank you!
I’m just frustrated that, after the dramas last cycle of “The DNC & party bosses can’t be trusted!” (Because of Donna Brazile leaking the questions, and the “Hillary was annointed & ‘stole’ the nom from Bernie”, etc.), that we’re making it SO easy for bad actors/shit stirrers/ trolls & folks like Parscale to do their work.
It appears (so far, very early) like the folks behind the app may have been (typically) overconfident in the computational capacity behind the app, ad that they’d be able to turn around the info quicker than they could.
If the D-party had been smart, they would’ve had Shadow running a parallel program *this* election (still also collecting data the old way, too), and then rolled it out in full for the *next* cycle, rather than trusting that a tech company could get this ALL up & running smoothly in s single year.
Yeah I’m already annoyed that it seems everyone has decided this is the DNC fucking with their favorite candidate. Can’t wait to be told Tulsi Gabbard actually won. (Or more likely, Andrew Yang). Like, they have earned a reputation for being untrustworthy, and now, even though I’m pretty sure this isn’t a big deal in the end, they’re going to take hits for his.
One of the most astonishing things about Brazile leaking the questions was that the debate was being held in Flint, MI, and one of Brazile’s helpful leaks was, “They’ll be asking about the water.” Thanks, Donna. Didn’t see that one coming.
I am already exhausted with “ThE DemS caN’t eVen GeT tHe cAucUs RigHt!” It’s not a big fucking deal. If anything, it proves the need to have a paper trail, which somehow is not standard practice. Every minute spent debating whether an app is a good idea, or debating whether the app is the issue, is a minute we don’t spend talking about healthcare, Roe, workers’ rights, (pick your)-phobia, children in cages, or “Christian” hypocrisy.
I have little tolerance for jumping straight to DEMS IN DISARRAY!!!1!!! That’s cable news sowing drama and us lapping it up. I’m annoyed and pissed off they keep trying to reinvent the wheel instead of just using goddamn paper in the first place, but I’m not going to be scandalized until the more logical explanation is sinister. This is just good ol incompetence, it would appear. And if you’ve ever worked with a tech developer, believing their work is immune to failure is pretty common.
Even calling it “incompetence” is playing into the narrative: “YoU ReaLLy waNt DeMoCrAts rUnnInG tHe CouNtRy wHeN tHeY CaNT eVeN rUn A cAUcuS?!?!”
The response should be: “Shit happens. It’s not a big deal.”
Or “this is the kind of thing that happens when you haven’t rigged the election!”
Fair enough!
I knew the whole thing was going to be a shitshow when I’d first read the article several months back about the handy-dandy new app, so I’m not even remotely upset about the consequences. Expect nothing and you shall receive it in abundance.
“I knew the whole thing was going to be a shitshow when I’d first read the article several months back about the handy-dandy new app…”
Having grown up in rural MN, I’ve been pretty sure there would be *some* issues with it, too (because too many folks both in Tech, and in larger/more urban political centers DO.NOT seem to understand that YES, even *now* in 2020, there ARE, in fact, stilllllll areas of the country–*not* in mountainous/difficult to drive-to areas–where one *DOES NOT* have reliable cell service.
The only reason the part of the state where I grew up *does* have good cell service, is because a local rural phone company (which was a co-op/rural telephone association) decided to start cellular coverage for their customers back in the 1990’s, and *they* then expanded all over West Central MN, and the cell service got bought out by Verizon (who has just kept upgrading the existing service/tower sites) back around 2000.
A couple towns over, there still *isn’t* reliable broadband, because folks in those towns didn’t see a need for the internet back in the mid/late 90’s, and I’d suspect similar things went on down in Iowa.
There are still areas in MN–and I’m sure IA, too!–where folks use dial-up. Today, in 2020. Because fiber was never laid.
And too many folks who *don’t* live in those rural places just.can’t.understand that.😕
At some point it would be nice if, generally speaking, people would come to the understanding that not everything needs to be “improved” with technology. Phone service? Great. Securing our electoral system? Not so much.
John Kerry, fer real? He couldn’t beat the second dumbest guy we ever put in office.
If his pal Lindsay Graham gets his wish Biden’s gonna find out soon what working with the GOP these days looks like.
Late night heads up from artiofab on DUAN
artiofab
FEBRUARY 4, 2020 AT 12:51 AM
Where do I leave tips. Where is the tip jar. ClickHole is OUT of the G/O Media conglomerate. Literally purchased with cash by Cards Against Humanity. Buzzfeed, of all places, reported on this first.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/cards-against-humanity-buys-clickhole
Haha wait what? Cards against humanity owns clickhole now? I mean, it makes sense but also doesn’t make sense. CAH seems to be good people though.
I unfollowed most media/corporate accounts on Facebook but I left two, and one of them is clickhole.
Per CNBC: “President Donald Trump’s approval rating has hit the highest level of his presidency — 49% — in a Gallup poll.”
Um, congratulations?
Jesus, even I thought that he’d cracked 50% at some point early in his term. Can’t wait for the inevitable bad cut-and-paste to report a 94% rating via Twitter.
WTF, How does he have that high of an approval rating?