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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • Yep. I love high quality food and spend a lot of time learning to copy from chefs I like. I’m very selective about ingredients (e.g. fish, only so much is flown in daily and accessible to normies), often make my own sauces, and have a pretty large collection of dinnerware and lacquerware for accurate plating.

    Yet like clockwork, several times a year I will eat multiple McRib patties in a single sitting. That shit has presumably the worst ingredients, the same sauce as every other year slathered inconsistently, and is presented in a cardboard box that has definitely gotten thinner. It is in no way worth anywhere near the price but I do it anyway.

    Sometimes slop hits the spot. Plus I can’t make my own heavily processed slabs of… whatever those things contain.




  • From Nate Silver’s write up on this poll:

    Yesterday, I complained about how so many pollsters are “herding” by publishing results that are almost an exact tie in a way that is incredibly statistically improbable given the unavoidable sampling error from surveying a small number of voters. I also noted a handful of prominent exceptions — rouge pollsters like the New York Times/Siena College that practically exist in an entirely different universe and imply a much bigger political realignment.

    Another such maverick is Ann Selzer of Selzer & Co. (Selzer and NYT/Siena are our two highest-rated pollsters.) As my former colleague Clare Malone wrote in 2016, Selzer — like NYT/Siena — has a long history of bucking the conventional wisdom and being right. In a world where most pollsters have a lot of egg on their faces, she has near-oracular status.

    Emphasis mine. While polls were decently off in 2016 and 2020, Selzer’s were not, and reflected a significant underestimate of Trump by nearly every other pollster. This poll suggests Harris is being underestimated. If Selzer is correct, Harris wins very comfortably.

    It’s hard to explain how unexpected this result is. Harris proponents like myself were hoping for Trump +8-9 or less, which would correlate to a Harris win in the electoral college. You can still see this on r/fivethirtyeight from the bad site. I’m not optimistic and my best hope was Trump +7. People misread this as Trump +3 and were still celebrating. Headlines aren’t exaggerating here: this is a truly shocking poll. If the real result is even Trump +5, he is likely to have lost handily. If this is as accurate as Selzer has been since 2012, he will have lost in a true landslide. (Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, of course.)

    I’ll link again Silver’s article on herding because it makes a strong case that most polls are not currently reliable due to self-preservation. Selzer releasing these results is not a self preserving move and would be a large pockmark on her otherwise “near-oracular” record.

    You can scroll through my history and see that I am not an optimistic person. I initially assumed a Harris loss before Biden dropped out because RFK was still polling too well, a traditional indicator of loss when dropping incumbent status. I was pleased with her upward momentum— and still am, she deserves a great deal of credit for an excellent campaign— but she has always been the underdog in my mind. This is the most positive sign I’ve seen all season. It helps that Siena’s most recent PA poll was also quite positive at Harris +4 if I recall.

    I’m too worried to be hopeful, but this has made it harder to doom. It’s so unexpected that I take it with a grain of salt, but if she’s even half right, things are a lot better than they feel.







  • Okay so I haven’t heard about her before this but, from this thread and a quick google search, I feel like I know enough. Anyway. I’m hopeful then that the fame will pass— lots of internet fad celebrities fade and become more or less normal people again soon— but she pockets enough money to live a good life and keep paying it forward.


  • Good. I don’t know why they picked someone as likable as Walz if not to get him doing media appearances.

    While cringey, Trump’s appearances on podcasts or with young YouTubers is likely a part of his grip on young men. The left doesn’t reach out to them much and demographics don’t like feeling ignored.

    Walz is an excellent communicator and should be on TV and such as often as he can. Hell, get him on Rogan. That moron seems so malleable that Walz will have him nodding along in the first 30 seconds.





  • Recorded speech about engaging in crimes is often acceptable evidence. It’s probably the same with written messages.

    I guess it’s up to the accused to prevent law enforcement from acquiring what they said, whether it be preventing recording, preventing police from sifting through mail or unsecure communications, or preventing police from acquiring the accused’s copy of potentially illegal communications. Which he is currently attempting.

    I don’t blame him for trying, and would agree on a lesser extent that he is right to prevent self incriminating now. But copied communication as acceptable evidence is pretty settled in law by now.



  • Long Covid and chance of severe illness/death each time. Yeah, it sucks to feel like shit for a day or two, but I would regret trading that for long covid.

    There’s so many places to go, incredible food to try, relationships to keep, new and old experiences in general. Long covid or death impacts every single one. So I always just sigh and get it.

    Finally, it’s better societally as we could keep transmission low. There is always the chance that you get it and unknowingly spread it to someone with a compromised immune system and they die. That death impacts their family, friends, and the economy if that particularly matters to you. The social contract asks us to sacrifice a little for the sake of the greater good, but it does not demand it.

    Still, I don’t terribly fault people for skipping it these days. That kind of risk is often accepted with non-covid things. Humans don’t like discomfort for the sake of a future maybe. If I wasn’t so concerned about my own quality of life, perhaps I’d skip it too.

    Edit: I was scrolling through my calendar and realized another massive reason I always get the vaccine. It allows you to choose your own window of feeling like shit. For example, I travel a lot and wouldn’t want to miss any of it by getting covid. Choosing a couple random days to tank the shit feeling means a lower chance of feeling like shit in another country when I’m not prepared. Truly I envy those who feel fine after the shot.