I’d say yes, but he’s so much of a narcissist and so self-obsessed, I doubt it would’ve occurred to him. Especially as back then he was 90% tech bro and 10% weird idea guy. Those values, of course, have since fully flipped.

I think that’s sort of the point - if 2016 was our last “normal” election and early voting wasn’t prognosticative of election results then, there’s no hope it would be anything other than more variable and chaotic now.

The point wasn’t about a “return to normal” or else he would be saying it was an indicator.

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. There’s no way to reconcile what he’s saying with the video evidence.

Several citizens were permitted to run “test” ballots through machines assigned to their county, including Savage, who was spotted on camera folding the ballots into his pocket while confirming with an election official that they were “absolutely, totally real ballots.” Although they weren’t official ballots, the ballots did not say “fake” or “sample” and were being tracked and counted by the state.

That would be “ornithological” :)

Weirdly antagonistic tone and not sure when Silver pissed in your Wheaties, but you obviously have a hang up about him. No desire to go tit for tat, other than to say he’s been more reliably accurate over time than anyone else when it comes to politics. It’s like baseball - if you lifetime hit for .300, everyone is going to know your name.

Also, the whole point of the article is that early voting patterns are not indicative of final results. That’s not polling analysis or data modeling, that’s just historical fact. I don’t think Silver is perfect, and he’s got problematic issues, but on this point he’s just pointing out the thing the media ignores because it gives them headlines galore for the last two weeks before the election.

2008

Silver’s final 2008 presidential election forecast accurately predicted the winner of 49 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia, missing only the prediction for Indiana.

2010

His 2010 congressional mid-term predictions were not as accurate as those made in 2008, but were still within the reported confidence interval. Silver predicted a Republican pickup of 54 seats in the House of Representatives; the GOP won 63 seats. Of the 37 gubernatorial races, FiveThirtyEight correctly predicted the winner of 36.[71]

2012

At the conclusion of that day, when Mitt Romney had conceded to Barack Obama, Silver’s model had correctly predicted the winner of every one of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.[79][80] Silver, along with at least three[81] academic-based analysts—Drew Linzer,[82] Simon Jackman,[83] and Josh Putnam[84]—who also aggregated pollsfrom multiple pollsters—thus was not only broadly correct about the election outcome, but also specifically predicted the outcomes for the nine swing states.[85]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nate_Silver

I’d list others but I doubt you’d read it anyway

He literally talks about that at several points. 2020 is a horrible baseline for looking at anything analytically because it was such an outlier because of COVID. Too many other variables in 2020 for it to be applicable for anything

What an odd take, and so orthogonal to what the article was about.

What the hell is this shit? Well, I guess rather than trying to link to Fox News, linking to where they get their bullshit talking points from is a choice.

Thanks! I’m not sure how much is patience and how much is just being resigned to the mods making the wrong decision on this one. I think the rule change is just punishing the community for their own past failings, but I don’t really see anyone being able to change their minds on this one. And being a mod - especially on /politics - is by definition a thankless and difficult job, so I do understand where they’re coming from in part. Unfortunately they seem to have learned all the wrong lessons.

Yeah, thanks! I saw it but unfortunately buried in work this week and last, so haven’t been very active lately. But I did just reply in that thread to counter some revisionist history from the mods. :)

That is simply not true. Initially the replies to him were not antagonistic - he started taking that tone when the community asked him about the disparity between his professed beliefs and what he was posting and asking why he was supposedly voting third party. He then ran the table on the mods by engaging in a constant stream of spammy, low effort comments and you all did nothing. And the more you did nothing, the more frustrated and angry everyone became about him.

The mods should at least be able to recognize your hand in how UM played out, instead of blaming it only on the users engaging in “slap fights”. The mods chose to moderate per post/comment instead of also considering an account’s overall pattern of behavior.

The rules - as written - seem to indicate a level of judgement and assessment that has not been taking place, and user frustration is evident as many of us see how a pattern of behavior of trolling was allowed to continue for much too long because the user in question almost never went too far in any individual message but was quite clearly outside the rules when looked at as a whole.

I admire your stance on not doing a fast-and-loose approach to bans to protect individual voices, but your job as mods also involves protecting these communities from intentional and purposeful bad actors

<fistbump>

I do have to admit to feeling at least a little validated for having called him out way more for his pattern of behavior when it came to interactions with other users as opposed to his posts. His posts were bad but the way he engaged with anyone and everyone was downright toxic. /politics is a better place with him banned, and now Lemmy will be a better place for him being gone. I’m sure he’s still out there on some platform playing the poor victim, as I doubt this was a “teachable moment”, but I sincerely hope he gets help somewhere. It’s cliché, but that dude had issues.

There’s also advantages to the DC metro area being a “company town” in that it attracts interested public servants with particular skill sets. The DC metro area has a huge number of folks not from here, so it’s not like there’s a “DC mindset” at the individual level. And the feds have been pretty good on telework (fed contractors, not so much)

Yep, he’s creating yet another false equivalence (it’s what he does after all) comparing individuals personally going on their own time to publicly volunteer and whatever shadow-interference-and-misinformation campaign that Putin’s stood up for Trump. I just loved that Trump’s campaign couldn’t even be bothered to spell “Britain” correctly - the worst combination of venality and incompetence.

I think some study came out that said something like 20% of black men owned crypto and now we have this. No idea how it was measured.

Okay - a little digging and it does seem backed up by self-reported surveys. Best explanation I could find is https://www.kansascityfed.org/research/payments-system-research-briefings/the-cryptic-nature-of-black-consumer-cryptocurrency-ownership/

Basically, from the surveys, it would appear that Black adults own more crypto than whites, with Black men edging slightly higher. It looks to be on the order of 20% with other groups trailing by a few percentage points.

Disappointed in the Harris campaign for leaning into this, as it seems to be all self-reported survey data and hardly something to build a policy on. Also crypto is stupid, but that’s just my opinion.

Ha! Yeah - in fact it evolved and expanded to the extent of almost all of his interactions being simply copying and pasting his responses ad nauseum. Very rarely saw him say anything he hadn’t already parroted back dozens and dozens of times. I kinda get why some people accused him of being a bot, because it’s hard to imagine a human deriving anything out of those sorts of interactions.

I want to second this. I understand the mods prefer a case-by-case approach, but I think that leaves a very specific pathway for bad actors to exploit. Monk was posting a purely insane amount of comments along with a very high but not as insane number of posts, and almost all of it was low-value, and often copy-pasted from a previous comment.

Do the mods even have easy access to the kind of data your script was pulling? I think that may be part of the issue is that the mod tools with Lemmy are lacking/limited.

https://lemmy.world/comment/12991836

Or maybe your community dedicated to creating fan fiction about the users you don’t like? https://lemmy.world/c/talesfromthecrypticlemmy

Negative, creepy, and weird.

Excerpt:

"In tonight’s tale of terror, we follow a man with a mission—a mission to get rid of the mysterious figure known as Universal Monk.

Our brave hero thinks he’s just battling a keyboard warrior on the interwebs, but after a little trip, he’ll learn that hunting sea lions isn’t as easy as he thought.

Someone needs to go outside and touch all the grass.