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1. Better days are coming, indeed. This is a pretty comprehensive good news roundup, if you can overlook the typos.

   18 Reasons To Be Bullish About The Election

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2. Former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff calls Trump a fascist to the core:

   https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-fascist-general-woodward-book-b2627972.html

   As a reminder to anyone who doesn’t understand Godwin’s Law, Mike Godwin wants people talking openly about Trump’s fascism.

   https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/20/godwins-law-trump-hitler-comparisons/

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3. A follow-up to another article about the single word that’s going to rule the election. This one is a more in-depth analysis of why polls are so fucked up. The basic reason is the one that I’ve been harping about, which is that pollsters don’t reach a representative sample of … well, anything. There’s also a section about what does provide more accurate results — campaigning.

   Another single word describing why polls are wrong

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   • The weighting issue is real, and there is very little transparency by pollsters on how it’s done. Some people don’t realize though how easy it is to manipulate models so that a particular subsample can get tweaked to go from a 40% turnout to 50% turnout and change the overall result by 1% in one direction, but it’s not hard at all. There is no need to resample, you can just play with variables to alter results.

     Josh Marshall has brought up an issue that consciously or subconsciously a lot of pollsters don’t want to be outliers. If the conventional wisdom has it that the race is within a certain margin, they are going to reconsider how their models work.

     None of this means that polls are necessarily wrong, or that they favor one candidate or the other. But it increases the odds that they will either be wrong or miss important factors, and as the article points out, campaigns will be much more clued in to what those factors are – at least the competent ones.

     And the article also points out how much cost savings drive sampling problems (time is an issue too). The press is far too focused on churning out more, cheaper polls, and then overreporting the results. Because of course they’ve committed to horserace reporting.

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4. Right now, management is on a kick to speed up all the manufacturing processes because they’re trying to save their jobs.

   1. It’s not. Our overlords are bumping off the biggest idiots in management right now and soon they’ll go after the lessor idiots who hired them. Might as well just take a fucking package when the time comes.

   2. They don’t get the iron triangle. Cost/Scope/Time. You can’t have it all, but these idiots believe they can because they’re fucking stupid and desperate.

   3. They think we workers are the biggest obstacle. In a sense we are because we are resisting change that puts our jobs at risk (of being fired if we make a mistake.) Also because we know the changes are fucking stupid. The actual biggest obstacle is that management created systems so clumsy and awkward that it doesn’t take much to gum up the works. I became a pariah to them because I pointed this out several times in meetings and it was not well received aka the little emperors have no fucking brains. I kind of get it because if the shoe were on the other foot I would get pissed off with me, too. Some mouthy fucking know it all thinks they can change the fucking world telling me, an experienced engineer, what the fuck I SHOULD DO? However, I’ve gotten over my initial emotions and looked at things before dismissing them outright. Sometimes those know it alls have a fucking point, you know?

   This just stirs up some old emotions from the past which landed me in trouble. Instead of frothing at the mouth, I say my piece and sit down. In 11 months I won’t be here.

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5. More extremely positive news.

   State of the Race: Here’s your first look at the early vote

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