Midweek Meh-Ness [DOT 27/12/23]

27/12/23 MegMegMcGee 29

Hi everyone! Hope everyone had a nice Christmas/long weekend/cheese eating extravaganza. I’m technically off work this week, but it’s year-end so there’s no way to log off from work completely. Looking forward to a few more days of sleeping in though, especially since I’m getting over a cold.

Updates here:
Ukraine’s top commander calls for mobilizing more soldiers
https://wapo.st/41DZ3BT [Gift Article]

I feel like “fine” is a relative term here. They also located Alexei Gorinov at a prison hospital!
Alexei Navalny: ‘I’m fine’ says Kremlin critic from remote Arctic penal colony
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/27/alexei-navalny-im-fine-says-kremlin-critic-from-remote-arctic-penal-colony

Sprots(?)
Chinese chess champion stripped of title after defecating in hotel bathtub
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/27/chinese-chess-champion-stripped-of-title-after-defecating-in-hotel-bathtub

Stonks!
S&P 500 futures are little changed as index nears all-time high: Live updates
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/26/stock-market-today-live-update.html

LOL

Have a great day!

avataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravatar

29 Comments

  1. I have a friend who…well, she’s many things. She doesn’t like to just yell out the occasional “Jesus Christ!” out of anger or frustration. No. Instead she will say, “Cheese and rice!” That’s good to keep in mind when you’re around children.

    If I may, and this is especially aimed @manchucandidate, our latest episode of Hawaii 5-0 concerns a charismatic professor of psychology. McGarrett senses that something is up, and a young woman on the force volunteers to infiltrate the University of Hawaii and take his class. He’s nobody’s fool, however, so he gets his hooks into this young woman, hypnotizes her, and now she’s under his command, not McGarrett’s.

    I will say no more, except to observe that there’s a two-story motel-like structure that stands in for an apartment building. Maybe it really is/was an apartment building. It shows up in half the episodes I’ve seen so far. It is fab, as you would expect, with an outdoor staircase and a second-story building-length balcony/terrace thing from which you access the apartments. It plays a fairly prominent role in this episode.

    • I don’t know the episode you are talking about but most older apartments/condos on Oahu (where 99% of Hawaii 5-0 was filmed) are accessed from an outside patio with stairs (no elevators).  I lived in one, not this one but this is the standard from the 60s-80s…

      Most are made of cinder blocks, louver windows and have private balconies on the backside.  I may have told  this story but we were approached by Hawaii 5-0 to use our home as a set for an episode.  We lived high in the mountains in a track home with a nice view.  They were going to pay my parents a pretty good chunk of money but my mom had a friend that had allowed them to film at her house and they trashed it.  They move out all your furniture and put it back but the wear and tear is pretty tough.

    • The standard warning still applies that the polls this far out do no matter.

      There’s a weird twist, though, that I think this year is the opposite of 2016, where Trump very much needs a narrative that the polls matter a lot.

      • I haven’t kept up with the last 20 years of polling methods.  Is this because they are still using antiquated methods like calling landlines, which no on under 40 has anymore?

        • That’s definitely a factor. I had a link that I can’t find at the moment to a really solid discussion of the limitations of polling today. Working from memory:

          1. Republicans are a third of the electorate. Independents and Democrats are each another third (roughly). Independents and Democrats don’t answer their phones. There’s no reliable way to reach those two segments. Pollster will weight the limited number of responses they get from under-represented segments to get their “results.” So if they poll 1500 people and manage to contact 10 Democrats and 10 independents, they’ll multiply those 10 results by 148 to get “equivalent” representation. So three people that say they’re “concerned about Biden’s age” is turned into “One-third of Democrats say Biden is too old.”

          2. Of the 20 Democrats/independents that pollsters reach, virtually all of them are white and older. Young people and minorities do not participate in polls. So even the 10 people they reach aren’t representative of, well, anything except older white people. Which works great for the pollsters because …

          3. The vast majority of pollsters are partisan. They’re not looking for the truth — they’re selling a narrative to a buyer. So they will work to deliver the results that the people paying them want. The much-ballyhooed NYT/Siena poll showing Trump in the lead was paid for by the NYT which is a right-wing publication (let’s not mince words here). And one of the ways this works is …

          4. Word choice matters, and you can get wildly different results by how you phrase the questions and how you parse the answers. In my example above, the three Democrats may have responded “Yes, I’m concerned about Biden’s age because he’s doing a wonderful job and I want to vote for him and make sure he’s my president for another four years.” But they only report the first six words.

          TL;DR: Polling is a business selling a product and they going to sell you the product you want to buy. Supposedly FiveThirtyEight was the “antidote” for this because it aggregated polls, but they got caught including polls from college kids in garages and weighting them equally with other polls to skew their results. That’s how you got the “red wave” that turned out to be absolutely nothing. More and more independent observers are saying that polling is dead, but if you’re running a polling company, what are you going to do? Close up shop or just keep making things up?

          • I think another factor is a sort of Yelp effect, or another form of the 3.5 star Chinese restaurant effect.

            People have gotten so blasted by survey requests that they’re not giving honest answers anymore. They’re trying to game the system, and pollsters aren’t adjusting.

            I think they know that Fox News viewers expressing dissatisfaction with Biden and liberals expressing it are two very, very different things.

            But pollsters committed long ago to using a single variable which allows them to show results over years, and if they change the definition of the variable, they lose the old data.

            The 3.5 star Chinese restaurant effect isn’t really a literal fact, but it digs into the ways in which ratings and measurement can quickly go wrong when you’re trying to push a single model on diverse populations.

            https://www.today.com/food/trends/chinese-restaurant-3-5-star-rule-rcna47900

            • There are a lot of other nuances to biased polling, too. Since old white Republicans are vastly over-represented (and as an aside, I should reiterate that people who have investigated the flaws in polling agree it is nearly impossible to get anyone but old white Republicans on the phone — my numbers were exaggerated but not by that much) there’s a multiplier effect that cuts both ways. So yes, support is strong for Trump among old white Republicans. But if support drops, it’s almost certainly far, far worse than polling shows. So a “softening” of support for Trump is probably closer to “catastrophic plummet” than “softening.”

              And as BDC points out, applying a specific model to an inaccurate population causes other problems. One example: Yes, respondents to the poll may well be “likely voters.” And I’m sure all the old white Republicans fully intend to vote. But you know what happens to old people? They get sick and eventually die. If you’re talking to an elderly or even senior population, the percentage of them that won’t actually make it to the polls over a year from now is not insignificant.

              Similarly, if you’re only talking to old white Democrats or independents, they may very well feel much less strongly about abortion access than young women do. So you get stuff about “the economy is the biggest issue for the majority of likely voters” but they’re not really talking to all the likely voters. If they could, they’d quickly discover that the economy is not an issue with people who aren’t on fixed incomes, and people of reproductive age have much different priorities.

               

              • Yes, but as old Democratic dinosaurs like me die off people’s tolerance of other Democratic elected dinosaurs dims considerably. Try to find someone under 40 who thinks Joe Biden is a good idea, except as a bulwark against Trumpism. If we have to inflate our way out of the $37 trillion (that’s $37,000,000,000,000) debt so be it. It’s risky, but even the euro is a less desirable currency to hold than the good old US dollar. Never mind the pound, the ruble, the renminbi, the Japanese yen…

          • Thing is, so many of those right wing states, like Georgia, immediately changed their election laws to allow them to cheat more effectively next time.  So a 1 or 2 point lead isn’t going to cut it.  Biden needs at least a 5 point or higher lead to make the cheating look like actual cheating and not just a rounding error.

            • …there’s a podcast that for a fair spell was actually pretty informative about the mueller report stuff…it got a little messy & maybe isn’t all it once was depending on who you ask…but the host of that used the phrase “vote, in numbers too big to manipulate” a fair bit in a decidedly similar vein

    • Speaking of LA, this is why I love that city so much. This is Venice Beach (or maybe Santa Monica, which is its own small city, but you can’t really tell when you move from one into another. Same with Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. But I’m 90% sure this is Venice Beach, which is part of the City of Los Angeles.)

    • Something I didn’t know until recently is that Hollywood Blvd. Stars are pay to play — you could be the #1 box office draw for a decade but you don’t get a star unless you or your fans put together the cash.

      I think the organizing committee will weed out the truly trashy applicants, but the standards are incredibly low.

      • Oh, yes they are (the low standards, I mean), and that’s why some people have multiple stars. I can’t remember where I read this, or when, but when Trump was elected, or he was in the Presidency, Hollywood’s considerable homeless population used his star as a public toilet. So much so that they had to put fencing up around it, like we do for tree pits here so that dogs don’t pee and defecate on the roots of the trees and, possibly, kill them. I think the barriers are gone now, though.

  5. This: “I’m technically off work this week, but it’s year-end so there’s no way to log off from work completely.” I’m working today and tomorrow, so that my direct staff with children can enjoy the full week off. It isn’t saintly of me; I’d be logging in every morning regardless do to some time-sensitive daily stuff, and Q4-end stuff, and year-end stuff, so it is little bother to stay on. But it does matter to – a lot – to people with young ones at home.

    • Revenge should be in 72 point font.

      Trump makes me question my own personality at times. It’s not a great thing for me, but I know I have some of the dark personality traits that need to be calmed down or monitored.

    • What many of us didn’t realize us that they have always been the same assholes we’ve fought. From Europe to North America to Asia to South America and gosh darn it Oz

      We’ve always been at war with the 1%.

      Even the MAGAts except they’re blinded by their own racism and greed to see that.

    • What that listing doesn’t tell you is “One Central Park South” is the vulgar realtor name for the condo portion of the Plaza Hotel. If I lived in that penthouse I would say, “You can contact me at the Plaza. Plaza 6-5555. The operator will put you right through.”

        • The hotel went into bankruptcy. Or close to it. It was a huge mess and a few buyers and then finally the owners revamped some of it to be condominiums, and the idiot developers decided to call that One Central Park South, because the foreign buyers shifting their ill-gotten gains to American assets might not have known what the Plaza Hotel is/was, but they probably know what Central Park is.

Leave a Reply