Also, we're in the UK, it's Director of Operations, not Vice President of Operations.
Were we conquered by Les États Unis and nobody told me?
I love the way American companies do that. My friend who worked for an American bank once got arrested by Japanese police after throwing an egg at the nationalist sound truck outside his flat, which was opposite the Russian embassy. At one point his situation was looking pretty grim but their attitude changed when he whipped out is business card which would have said something like "$FAMOUS_BANK, Vice President (derivatives desk database backup tape archive management operations)".
Lol. A little standalone DLT drive on his desk to tape wrangle daily, probably, genuinely housed in a basement? VP, indeed!
Being on the systems admin side of the floor, I tend to be an occasional sellotape and string scripter rather than a serious coder using whatever language happens to be to hand for a few well chosen ines. However, one of the longest and most destruction tested scripts I ever produced was to correct and prompt men in vans and anticipate the multiple ways they could foul up ejecting tapes from different models of tape library. Fun times.
In one bank, the chap who came with a trolley to take away/replace dead PCs was the "Vice President of Desktop Support Operations". Really.
To make it perfect, they had taken away his two helper monkeys - and given hime the title. No more money.....
I have been offered a job which would have made me a Director. With no-one reporting to me (architecture role).
Apparently taken up by the Welsh Govt and supported by Plaid.
Fools the lot.
As somebody said downthread, to help control the virus Wales has banned buying socks and cornflakes at the same time.
Well that’s going to bring R crashing down isn’t it.
Presumably, if anything, it worsens R (very slightly) if people now order from Amazon, and the items are delivered by delivery drivers.
The average Welsh politician is not very bright. And the stupidity is pretty much constant across all the political parties.
In fact, Mark Drakeford and Paul Davies don't even have any charisma, as well as not being pretty or smart.
Whereas, although I grew to dislike them, I could see that Carwyn had an oleaginous charm and Rhodri a rough-hewn amiability.
Why would it worsen R, comparted to going to a supermarket and being cooped up for some time with assorted other people? Our delivery drivers aren't allowed in - and we certainly don't open the door: I talk to them from my office window. And if you treat the packaging with caution there's little risk from fomites.
Because you're going to the supermarket anyhow. In WelshOwl's picture, you are doing your food shopping (cornflakes) and buying clothing (socks). You have not made an extra trip to ASDA to just buy the socks.
There is little risk to you, in the scenario you sketch, but the delivery driver is making a number of deliveries & will encounter some people who are not so ultra-cautious.
Whatever, it is a small effect either way.
Thanks. I was just thinking of my recent purchase of socks (yes!), shirts and u/wear from M&S - did it online rather than take the bus into central Edinburgh and shop there (no car). Obviously better for me that way. But we don't go to supermarkets any more in any case.
I have lived in Havering almost all my life and in that time my address has always contained "Essex", and never London. @Stuartinromford is right, most people moved here from London and don't want London following them. It is though. We are probably going to move out to Non London Essex in the next few years. Our son was born in Broomfield Hospital in Essex but had to go to Queens in Romford after 4 days -the contrast was striking, enough to make me realise I was happier in Essex than London.
Yes, but the irony is that this process will (and already is) make Havering more like the rest of East London
Havering voted 69.7% Leave while London voted 59.9% Remain, Havering is culturally far apart from the rest of London and far closer to Essex.
In fact Havering was even more pro Brexit than Epping Forest which was only 62.7% Leave
It is true though that Havering is becoming more like London and less like Essex. I would say Brentwood is going the same way too.
Becoming more like London and less like Essex... So why are they complaining?
This is very hard to watch. Not very illuminating. Jumbled sentences from both of them. I don't think it will change many votes. I don't think Trump will actually lose votes this time, but nor will he gain them. It is not the game changer that Trump needs.
If you believe Trafalgar or Rasmussen and IBID/TIPP he does not need a game changer, just not to lose any support tonight
If you believe the poll modellers like The Economist or Nate Silver, he most certainly does need a game changer.
If Nate Silver was right in 2016 Hillary Clinton would have won over 300 EC votes and now be President
How many times.....? Nate Silver's group was 28% right, which was more pro Trump than any of the other groups giving probability predictions for the 2016 election.
Or to put it another way, Biden is in a much better position in the polling than Clinton was 4 years ago and has been for months. If HYUFD really believes Trump should be favorite it's not based on any evidence.
Experience. Few predicted 2016 result.
Experience should teach you not to fall into the normalcy bias mistake. It happened with me in 2019 when I assumed Corbyn would repeat 2015.
The circumstances this time around are vastly, viscerally, different from 2016. The polls don't lie. They didn't in 2019 and they're not in 2020. But it's much more than that. The GOP have distanced themselves from their President. They know they've lost.
And lost big.
I'm going to use 538 and compare Trump's popular vote forecast lead with that of the Republican candidate in the closest Senate races. IA Trump +0.3 GOP -1.0 GA Trump 0.0 GOP +2.6 NC Trump -2.3 GOP -2.9 MT Trump +10.2 GOP +3.0 ME Trump -12.1 GOP -3.0 KS Trump +10.6 GOP +4.9 SC Trump +7.9 GOP +5.2 AZ Trump -2.9 GOP -6.0 AL Trump +19.2 GOP +6.2 AK Trump +7.4 GOP +6.3 MI Trump -7.9 GOP -6.4 CO Trump -11.7 GOP -7.7 TX Trump +2.1 GOP +8.1 MS Trump +13.2 GOP +9.1 MN Trump -7.7 GOP -12.0 KY Trump +19.1 GOP +13.4 ---- Mean Trump +2.8 GOP +1.2
I don't want this to be true, but Trump still looks like he is an electoral asset for the Republicans. I want American voters to judge him so badly that he drags the whole GOP down with him. But the numbers don't show that story.
Otherwise Republican Senate candidates should be outperforming Trump.
Trump won the biggest electoral college victory for the Republicans since Bush Snr in 1988 and he won Wisconsin for the first time for a Republican presidential candidate since Reagan in 1984, in the rustbelt he is an electoral asset for the GOP compared to a generic Republican, in California he certainly is not (Hillary won California by an even bigger percentage than Obama did in 2008 or 2012 for example) but it is the former he needs for EC victory, he can afford to lose California heavily and the popular vote
There are only three Midwest states in the 16 that I looked at and Trump's advantage over the GOP was smaller in those (+1.0) than in the set as a whole (+1.6).
In Iowa Trump did better than the GOP candidate, in Michigan fractionally worse (though Trafalgar suggest the GOP will win both the Michigan presidential and Senate race) you provided no data for Wisconsin or Pennsylvania in the rustbelt both of which Trump won for the first time for a Republican since the 1980s and Trump won Ohio by more than even George W Bush did too
HYUFD - please don't reply to this post with Trafalgar did best last time because that is not going to be the question.
Do you believe Trafalgar is a pollster or pundit? I genuinely don't know, but @rcs1000 and @Alistair have both posted evidence that Trafalgar is not a pollster but a pundit. They may well be a very good pundit.
If Trafalgar is a pundit it should not be posting spoof polls. If it is a pollster how do you respond to @rcs1000 and @Alistair?
If Trump wins the EC again Trafalgar will definitely be a pollster and a goldstandard one at that, if Trump loses the EC it will just be a pundit, simple really!
Why would Trump winning or losing make them a pollster or not?
They are either engaging in legitimate polling or they are not.
If they get the correct result obviously a legitimate pollster, the whole point of polls is to forecast, correctly, election results and the views of the public otherwise they are worthless
On the day that GE19 was called I forecast a Con majority of 60 to 80.
So why is "kinabalu" not on your list of respected pollsters?
Well you were more use than Comres whose final 2019 poll was just a 5% Tory lead, so on that basis I would happily make you a pollster
I made toast this morning. I didn't burn it. I guess I'm a chef.
On that basis you could certainly be a chef at some local diners
Anyone who suggests Hungary could be suspended from the EU doesn't understand the EU.
It would require unanimous agreement to do it and there's enough other nations that would veto that. Especially other Visegrad nations won't allow one of their own to be picked off like that.
I would expect that the current Polish Government would be in the "no" column on that one, for starters.
@HYUFD - I really can't believe you are posting these posts. Firemen put out fires, train drivers drive trains and pollsters carry out polls.
If you don't drive a train you are not a train driver. Same goes for polls
Doctors are there to save lives, lawyers to win cases or complete contracts, architects to build bridges or buildings if they cannot do that then they can no longer do their job and should be sacked or made redundant.
If firemen are incapable of putting out fires or train drivers cannot drive trains they would lose their jobs.
Pollsters are just the same, they are there to forecast election results, if they cannot do that correctly they are worthless and should go bust and you may as well just pay Mystic Meg to forecast who will win the election
It’s a bit out of date but there are lots of causes of death which could be prevented if we completely stopped doing stuff
If we banned all motor transport there would be a significant drop in vehicle related deaths. A significant number of people die of medical complications - perhaps we should ban all medical procedures. Some people are electrocuted - are you proposing that we go off grid? A small number of women die in childbirth - should we prevent all births? Oh wait we’ve already cancelled all medical procedures above.
Locking down the economy was supposed to be a temporary measure to allow NHS capacity to increase, and to allow time to assess the impact. Before the initial lockdown, and part of the delay was the advice that people only have a certain capacity for being locked down, and the scientists didn’t want to start it too soon
Depends what you mean by "lockdown". Driving is highly regulated. There's a huge list of rules, you have to get your car checked for roadworthiness each year, and you aren't allowed to go whatever speed you like. In fact, the speed you're allowed to go depends on not just where you are, but what conditions are like. Similarly safety regulations on medical procedures, retail and industrial electrical goods are there to minimise deaths. In all of the above cases, we find a balance. Nobody is proposing banning all economic activity, and nor is anybody with the slightest shred of decency advocating just letting it rip.
So now that we've established where we are, somewhere between those two end members, we need to find the right place. And like the speed limit, it's perfectly sensible to suggest that as conditions change, so should the rules. Now, are the kinds of lockdowns experienced and/or proposed by some people going too far one way? Is the loosening proposed by others going too far the other way? Perhaps, you can make your own mind up. In truth, I can see both sides of the argument and I'm not ready to commit. I'm glad I don't have to decide. But please don't go around pretending that temporary lockdowns are the same as "banning all motor transport". That's attacking a straw man and doesn't help convince persuadables like me.
The current Welsh option has to be up there as pretty close to banning all motor transport for a fortnight. Its likely to have a similar effect on the numbers - transmission will probably fall, but as the fundamental state of play won't have changed at the end of it, it won't be long before the numbers are back where they are now again - very much like banning driving for a fortnight would cut road deaths for a couple of weeks, but won't make a lot of difference in the long run.
The fundamental problem with lockdowns is the total absence of a coherent endgame. Unless there is some way out of this which doesn't involve everyone getting the disease, lockdowns are pointless but expensive can kicking (rather like the endless Brexit extensions - they only postponed exactly the same issues as everyone started with).
There isn't a silver bullet on the horizon. A vaccine isn't going to be enough (you can tell this from the way that governments are starting to talk about this going on all next year).
At some point lockdowns will stop working entirely, if that hasn't already happened. Based on what's happened in say Boulton over the summer, where various levels lockdown have made almost no difference to case numbers, it's quite possible that point has already pretty much been reached.
People have had enough (I'm honest, I'm one of them), and aren't taking a blind bit of notice of the rules if they even know what they are, so the only practical outworking of the restrictions is the ruination of the businesses forced to close (mind you what a time to own an off licence! It's an ill wind... ).
I read a post on Facebook today which linked to a petition for partners to be allowed to attend scans and all of labour for pregnant women (I think it covered Wales - I don't know the current English rules). Some of the stories in the comments below the post were truly heartbreaking; Women having miscarriages and stillbirths alone with their husbands sat waiting in the carpark. It's hard to explain how angry I felt after reading a few posts, and how outraged I was at the sheer barbarity of the current rules. My sister is currently heavily pregnant and under these rules in Ceredigion, which has a case rate of something like 22 per 100k. Its utterly mad, the more so given that presumably as most women live with their partners, if one has it, they probably both do anyway.
I think we should shield the vulnerable as best we can, then let it go, because the reality is that otherwise its going to go anyway sooner or later, but with the vulnerable unprotected.
As someone else has posted upthread, by January (it's bleak enough in a normal year) the public will be in open rebellion everywhere (lots of them aren't far off now), and nothing the politicians can do then will allow them to regain control. All that's occuring now is just adding extra pointless misery to that which will come from the ravages of the disease when the public mood breaks.
The devil is in the detail. You say we should "shield the vulnerable" but provide zero detail. Vulnerable people still need to eat, still need to access medical care. How do they get to the supermarket if the bus is full of people spewing out virus particles without catching it? How can they sit in a waiting room at the doctor's with coronavirus in the air, and not die from it? And even if some unspecified measures are put in place that will magically keep the vulnerable separate, how do you stop that becoming overwhelmed with people who just don't really want to get sick?
The "shield the vulnerable" mantra reminds me of communism... nice in theory but it doesn't work.
As a side note, I've noticed a LOT that people read something on Facebook or Twitter and get outraged. When I used to be on both platforms I was permanently of the opinion that the country was about to break out into insurrection because LOOK AT THIS CUTE CHILD HE DIED BECAUSE OF AUSTERITY/MUSLIMS/VACCINES/ISRAEL. The sad truth is, it's always a mix of the chronically angry, distillations of real things that happened that may or may not share the context you're talking about, liars, propagandists, and well-meaning idiots. And it's all wrapped up into a nice newsfeed that specifically designed to maximise your outrage, because that's what keeps you coming back for more. You see it in some of the people on here. They've become furious ideologues, certain of the righteousness of their cause and their cause alone. Then they find themselves on here, one of the many interfaces between their clan and another, and they go absolutely mad because "here are some filthy apostates who have been duped by the other clan, how can they be so stupidly partisan all the time?!"
Ok, so my side note ended up longer than my main point. Sorry about that. Just to tie it up, I'm not saying you're wrong about lockdowns, but nor am I saying you're right. But I have a sneaking suspicion that you think it's more clear cut than it really is, and one clue to that is this: you replied to a post recommending we take better care when wielding rhetorical devices, and by the sixth paragraph you were talking about dead babies. That kind of escalation doesn't happen in conversations unless at least one of them is furiously certain about something that is so very clearly uncertain enough that they need to have a conversation about it.
Two thoughts, and I'm sure Big G had similar experiences. When my children were born I was shooed out of the labour ward; father's only arrived after the baby had been born and the mother cleaned up. I, and most of my age-group can tell tales of sitting outside, waiting for the midwife to appear and tell us what sex the child was. And when I was a student pubs closed at 10pm. We just started earlier!
I agree and it was only when my youngest was born in 1975, 9 years and 5 years after his elder brother and sister, that I was actually allowed to be present at his birth
I was present at the births of all my children in 1970, 1971, 1973 and 1975. I was a key part of the team as I was the only person my wife would listen to. I relayed the message "push now".
I wouldn't have missed the births of my three children for the world, the happiest days of my life - I still remember the feeling after the birth of our first, that feeling never leaves you. Like you I found that I was surprisingly useful. I also now know that my wife is basically superhuman.
He also said Austerity hadnt left health in a weaker position to respond
Did France have austerity?
If not, then how do you explain their shiteness?
Or is it simply because they are French.
It's part of the reason the EU is so worried about the UK after Brexit. We control so much of the health policy around the world, apparently - what else does Boris & Cummings control? If we can get the virus to go on the rampage in France, Poland and Brazil - we must be insanely powerful.....
Good for them but entirely logical, not simply charity.
I thought Tories liked private sector solutions and charitable activity? You can't win with you people! Good on these guys for stepping up when our mean-spirited government won't.
What part of "Good for them" made you think I disliked it?
When you say good on these guys it's the same thing as me saying good for them is it not?
If these companies can get some much needed publicity and win some business that's a win/win in my eyes.
@HYUFD - I really can't believe you are posting these posts. Firemen put out fires, train drivers drive trains and pollsters carry out polls.
If you don't drive a train you are not a train driver. Same goes for polls
Doctors are there to save lives, lawyers to win cases or complete contracts, architects to build bridges or buildings if they cannot do that then they can no longer do their job and should be sacked or made redundant.
If firemen are incapable of putting out fires or train drivers cannot drive trains they would lose their jobs.
Pollsters are just the same, they are there to forecast election results, if they cannot do that correctly they are worthless and should go bust and you may as well just pay Mystic Meg to forecast who will win the election
No. Pollsters has a specific meaning. It means someone who carries out polls. You can't just change the meaning of words because if you do nobody knows what you are talking about.
For clarity mystic meg is a pundit NOT a pollster.
The devil is in the detail. You say we should "shield the vulnerable" but provide zero detail. Vulnerable people still need to eat, still need to access medical care. How do they get to the supermarket if the bus is full of people spewing out virus particles without catching it? How can they sit in a waiting room at the doctor's with coronavirus in the air, and not die from it? And even if some unspecified measures are put in place that will magically keep the vulnerable separate, how do you stop that becoming overwhelmed with people who just don't really want to get sick?
The "shield the vulnerable" mantra reminds me of communism... nice in theory but it doesn't work.
As a side note, I've noticed a LOT that people read something on Facebook or Twitter and get outraged. When I used to be on both platforms I was permanently of the opinion that the country was about to break out into insurrection because LOOK AT THIS CUTE CHILD HE DIED BECAUSE OF AUSTERITY/MUSLIMS/VACCINES/ISRAEL. The sad truth is, it's always a mix of the chronically angry, distillations of real things that happened that may or may not share the context you're talking about, liars, propagandists, and well-meaning idiots. And it's all wrapped up into a nice newsfeed that specifically designed to maximise your outrage, because that's what keeps you coming back for more. You see it in some of the people on here. They've become furious ideologues, certain of the righteousness of their cause and their cause alone. Then they find themselves on here, one of the many interfaces between their clan and another, and they go absolutely mad because "here are some filthy apostates who have been duped by the other clan, how can they be so stupidly partisan all the time?!"
Ok, so my side note ended up longer than my main point. Sorry about that. Just to tie it up, I'm not saying you're wrong about lockdowns, but nor am I saying you're right. But I have a sneaking suspicion that you think it's more clear cut than it really is, and one clue to that is this: you replied to a post recommending we take better care when wielding rhetorical devices, and by the sixth paragraph you were talking about dead babies. That kind of escalation doesn't happen in conversations unless at least one of them is furiously certain about something that is so very clearly uncertain enough that they need to have a conversation about it.
Practical measures
Separation of Covid patients in hospitals for infection control purposes Control of staffing - no cross working on Covid and non Covid wards Assessment of staff working on Covid wards - priority given to those who will not mix at home, less people at home to infect Somebody described the old plague hospitals as being totally separated and that should be the aim even if that means paying full time wages to a cleaner porter even if not working full time hours
Similar measures as above at care homes. My wife’s Grandma is very ill in a home. Visiting is normally banned but they have allowed both daughters to visit when she had a stroke and looked like she would die. She has improved since and now visiting is banned again, Pragmatic and sensitive treatment at end of life where risks to health are limited.
Enforce priority system for online grocery shopping for over 70s Cover costs for pharmacies to undertake home delivery of medicines to those shielding Encourage shielding only hours in retail Free TV license / broadband for homes with shielding people
There's a lot of sense in there, but it doesn't address all of the issues, but I won't labour the point because I'm not trying to push towards any particular conclusion. Thanks for your response.
I was told at the Queen Charlotte/Hammersmith hospital complex that they were doing the "hospital within a hospital" thing for COVID. Separate entrances for staff, patients and visitors, separate staff. No intercommunication....
@HYUFD - I really can't believe you are posting these posts. Firemen put out fires, train drivers drive trains and pollsters carry out polls.
If you don't drive a train you are not a train driver. Same goes for polls
I do struggle a bit with the 'probablistic' thing when it comes to Presidential elections. Its not like rolling a over and over again because its one roll every four years and the dice is a radically different shape every time. What does it really mean to say Clinton would have won 70% of the time in 2016, that dice will never be rolled again. So any result that turns up the maths guys can say, well we never said that was impossible just unlikely. Silver talks about this stuff himself in The Signal and the Noise, how impossible it is to call the path of hurricanes etc. Having said that I would rather tell the time with a clock that was always wrong by say10 minutes slow or 10 minutes fast rather than a stopped one that was precisely right twice a day.
@HYUFD - I really can't believe you are posting these posts. Firemen put out fires, train drivers drive trains and pollsters carry out polls.
If you don't drive a train you are not a train driver. Same goes for polls
Doctors are there to save lives, lawyers to win cases or complete contracts, architects to build bridges or buildings if they cannot do that then they can no longer do their job and should be sacked or made redundant.
If firemen are incapable of putting out fires or train drivers cannot drive trains they would lose their jobs.
Pollsters are just the same, they are there to forecast election results, if they cannot do that correctly they are worthless and should go bust and you may as well just pay Mystic Meg to forecast who will win the election
No. Pollsters has a specific meaning. It means someone who carries out polls. You can't just change the meaning of words because if you do nobody knows what you are talking about.
For clarity mystic meg is a pundit NOT a pollster.
Paul the Octopus would be a pollster according to HYUFD.
I wonder if we'll see more crashes than average at the circuit. My knowledge of it is very limited.
I can tell you that the sim doesn't really prepare you for the reality of the elevation changes so anybody who has never raced there will struggle at first. Although most F1 teams probably have a better sim than me...
I have lived in Havering almost all my life and in that time my address has always contained "Essex", and never London. @Stuartinromford is right, most people moved here from London and don't want London following them. It is though. We are probably going to move out to Non London Essex in the next few years. Our son was born in Broomfield Hospital in Essex but had to go to Queens in Romford after 4 days -the contrast was striking, enough to make me realise I was happier in Essex than London.
Yes, but the irony is that this process will (and already is) make Havering more like the rest of East London
Yeah but if I don't live there anymore I don't care!
EastEnders demographic is Havering although it pretends to be East London. I happen to think this is kind of racist of the BBC, and my guess is that they dont think the rest of the country would believe it if they accurately represented Stratford/Walthamstow
Eastenders point is interesting. The show really couldnt work in most of the real east end as few know their neighbours let alone interact with them on that kind of frequency and familiarity. Its a fictional, nostalgic set so not sure they need to get the demographics matching the actual east end.
Mr. Ace, interesting. There have been a reasonably high number of crashes already this year, so I do wonder if the safety car will make yet another appearance.
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
@HYUFD - I really can't believe you are posting these posts. Firemen put out fires, train drivers drive trains and pollsters carry out polls.
If you don't drive a train you are not a train driver. Same goes for polls
Doctors are there to save lives, lawyers to win cases or complete contracts, architects to build bridges or buildings if they cannot do that then they can no longer do their job and should be sacked or made redundant.
If firemen are incapable of putting out fires or train drivers cannot drive trains they would lose their jobs.
Pollsters are just the same, they are there to forecast election results, if they cannot do that correctly they are worthless and should go bust and you may as well just pay Mystic Meg to forecast who will win the election
No, you are claiming that a doctor who has a patient die is worthless and should be struck off. A firemen who fails to rescue all the people in a builting is worthless and shold give up being a fireman. A lawyer who loses a case is not fit to be a lawer. These are all rediculous scenarios. The job of a pollster is to give *estimates* of Voting Intention (or what ever question is asked). They will not be right all of the time but they do much better at this than an individual sitting in Epping can.
@HYUFD - I really can't believe you are posting these posts. Firemen put out fires, train drivers drive trains and pollsters carry out polls.
If you don't drive a train you are not a train driver. Same goes for polls
Doctors are there to save lives, lawyers to win cases or complete contracts, architects to build bridges or buildings if they cannot do that then they can no longer do their job and should be sacked or made redundant.
If firemen are incapable of putting out fires or train drivers cannot drive trains they would lose their jobs.
Pollsters are just the same, they are there to forecast election results, if they cannot do that correctly they are worthless and should go bust and you may as well just pay Mystic Meg to forecast who will win the election
No. Pollsters has a specific meaning. It means someone who carries out polls. You can't just change the meaning of words because if you do nobody knows what you are talking about.
For clarity mystic meg is a pundit NOT a pollster.
The whole purpose of pollsters is to provide correct information as to who will win an election or on what the public thinks, that is what their customers pay them for, if Trafalgar ends up correctly forecasting Trump will win the EC again while most other pollsters again wrongly forecast he would lose the election then as a paying customer or media outlet I would go to Trafalgar and cancel contracts with other pollsters as clearly they have found the best method to do the job they are paid to do
A job advert posted on recruitment sites stated that the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) was looking for a temporary “VP of operations” with experience “in running call centres of 18,000”...
We are at the level of daily infections that it is surely infeasible for the trace system to now work.
23,000 cases on the 19th. How many contacts would that translate to to track down?
I’m not sure how simple it might be for even a tenth that number.
The PCR system, at the very best, takes 24hrs to return a result. The vast majority of people aren’t tested until symptomatic, and we know that they are most infectious for two or three days before symptoms appear. And for 30/40% of infected, symptoms never appear at all, so they don’t get tested. So even if you get a result in a day, and for many it’s two or three days, there are a potentially quite large number on contacts.
Contact tracing isn’t getting all those who are reported infected, and even fewer of identified contacts - let alone unidentified contacts.
So it’s an impossible task even if it were being run efficiently at the local level. Instead of badly, and mainly centralised.
That’s why I’m an advocate of mass antigen testing - which would get around all of the above.
FWIW, CDC have changed their definition of close contact from "within 6' of an infected person for 15 minutes or more" to "within 6' of an infected person for 15 minutes or more over a 24 hour period" - in other words to include those with cumulative shorter exposures to infected persons.
Stayed up late finishing an Australian noir novel ("The Dry") so tuned into the debate. Trump better than last time - host did a superb job corralling him back onto the topic or shutting up. Biden occasionally hesitant (stutter?) but overall no major gaffes despite Trump thinking that wanting to end oil by 2050 was one. With a bit of luck this is the last time we'll see Trump on a national platform.
In other news, Welsh ministers getting into predictable mess over what's essential.....telling Kay Burley that while alcohol is "essential", hair dryers are not:
Of course the BIG unanswered question is "What are the Welsh government going to do in the 17 days to change things when the lockdown ends?"
I quite liked "The Dry", but continue in my so far largely fruitless quest for a really good crime/thriller writer. There is a heck of a lot of mediocrity out there which, for me, is masquerading as good stuff (e.g. Rankin, McDermid, Connelly).
The best crime book I`ve read is Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin. I also enjoyed Mystic River by Dennis Lehane (though I was disappointed by another of his books). Koontz`s "Watchers" good in parts. I like all of Gillian Flynn`s books very much.
Any other suggestions? They`ve got to be good.
"My Sister the Serial Killer"
Not exactly a whodunnit as a who's next, and very well written, with interesting and quite sympathetic characters in a modern Nigerian setting.
Chris Hammer's "Scrublands" was very good. I also like the Paul Johnston crime series set in a dystopian future where the UK has broken up and Edinburgh is its own city-state.
Good for them but entirely logical, not simply charity.
I thought Tories liked private sector solutions and charitable activity? You can't win with you people! Good on these guys for stepping up when our mean-spirited government won't.
What part of "Good for them" made you think I disliked it?
When you say good on these guys it's the same thing as me saying good for them is it not?
If these companies can get some much needed publicity and win some business that's a win/win in my eyes.
Your "good for them" was followed immediately by a "but" and preceeded by you calling it "cheap publicity". The main thrust of your post was of grudging praise with a focus on their cynical motives. Plenty of people think the govt is wrong on this, including lots of small business people. I think the grudging tone reflects your embarrassment at your government’s line on this.
@HYUFD - I really can't believe you are posting these posts. Firemen put out fires, train drivers drive trains and pollsters carry out polls.
If you don't drive a train you are not a train driver. Same goes for polls
Doctors are there to save lives, lawyers to win cases or complete contracts, architects to build bridges or buildings if they cannot do that then they can no longer do their job and should be sacked or made redundant.
If firemen are incapable of putting out fires or train drivers cannot drive trains they would lose their jobs.
Pollsters are just the same, they are there to forecast election results, if they cannot do that correctly they are worthless and should go bust and you may as well just pay Mystic Meg to forecast who will win the election
The last paragraph is not necessarily true: wilfully inaccurate and methodology light pollsters may well provide a genuine service of monetary worth. But that service may be to provide copy / justification / ramping, under the banner of polling, rather than the quality of the polling itself.
Another example is the organisation that provided weather copy for the Daily Express in recent years. Actual meteorology was not high on their list of priorities.
Mr. Ace, interesting. There have been a reasonably high number of crashes already this year, so I do wonder if the safety car will make yet another appearance.
Safety car is IMO very likely. Track is slippery and has plenty of gravel traps to catch cars going off.
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
Hey man, you think Biden might win it?!! What about the singing canary?
In one bank, the chap who came with a trolley to take away/replace dead PCs was the "Vice President of Desktop Support Operations". Really.
To make it perfect, they had taken away his two helper monkeys - and given hime the title. No more money.....
I have been offered a job which would have made me a Director. With no-one reporting to me (architecture role).
Many years ago, my first job was working in a 'Department of Corporate Operations', which was basically a trouble-shooting/analysis group reporting to the Finance Director. (An interesting job, because we got to do lots of different things). After I'd been there about a year, they wanted to put our salaries up, but we'd hit the maximum salary available for staff who weren't managers - this was before Thatcher got rid of all that them-and-us nonsense. So it was proposed that we were all promoted to be managers, until someone pointed out that we didn't actually manage anything or anyone.
So I was promoted to be a 'Corporate Operative'. Not many people can claim that.
Stayed up late finishing an Australian noir novel ("The Dry") so tuned into the debate. Trump better than last time - host did a superb job corralling him back onto the topic or shutting up. Biden occasionally hesitant (stutter?) but overall no major gaffes despite Trump thinking that wanting to end oil by 2050 was one. With a bit of luck this is the last time we'll see Trump on a national platform.
In other news, Welsh ministers getting into predictable mess over what's essential.....telling Kay Burley that while alcohol is "essential", hair dryers are not:
Of course the BIG unanswered question is "What are the Welsh government going to do in the 17 days to change things when the lockdown ends?"
I quite liked "The Dry", but continue in my so far largely fruitless quest for a really good crime/thriller writer. There is a heck of a lot of mediocrity out there which, for me, is masquerading as good stuff (e.g. Rankin, McDermid, Connelly).
The best crime book I`ve read is Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin. I also enjoyed Mystic River by Dennis Lehane (though I was disappointed by another of his books). Koontz`s "Watchers" good in parts. I like all of Gillian Flynn`s books very much.
Any other suggestions? They`ve got to be good.
"My Sister the Serial Killer"
Not exactly a whodunnit as a who's next, and very well written, with interesting and quite sympathetic characters in a modern Nigerian setting.
Chris Hammer's "Scrublands" was very good. I also like the Paul Johnston crime series set in a dystopian future where the UK has broken up and Edinburgh is its own city-state.
It's probably still better than the dystopian future where the UK hasn't broken up.
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
They'll be thanking him when the US becomes completely emission free in 2025.
@HYUFD - I really can't believe you are posting these posts. Firemen put out fires, train drivers drive trains and pollsters carry out polls.
If you don't drive a train you are not a train driver. Same goes for polls
It seems that if you can imagine the 17:24 to King's Cross arriving in London, then you are a train driver.
I can imagine it arriving but not at the scheduled time.
If you are a surgeon you are paid to heal someone, not to merely carry out an operation.
If you carry out operations and end up making people worse then someone with alternative methods who does heal someone is clearly better.
It is no different with pollsters, they are paid to forecast elections not to simply carry out polls, if one has a better method of doing that than the other clearly it is the best and newspapers often cancel contracts with pollsters who have forecast an election wrong, Murdoch is famous for doing that with his papers as he correctly believes in judging by results
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
250,000 thousand jobs and 4,600 companies depend on oil and gas in Houston alone.
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
@HYUFD - I really can't believe you are posting these posts. Firemen put out fires, train drivers drive trains and pollsters carry out polls.
If you don't drive a train you are not a train driver. Same goes for polls
I do struggle a bit with the 'probablistic' thing when it comes to Presidential elections. Its not like rolling a over and over again because its one roll every four years and the dice is a radically different shape every time. What does it really mean to say Clinton would have won 70% of the time in 2016, that dice will never be rolled again. So any result that turns up the maths guys can say, well we never said that was impossible just unlikely. Silver talks about this stuff himself in The Signal and the Noise, how impossible it is to call the path of hurricanes etc. Having said that I would rather tell the time with a clock that was always wrong by say10 minutes slow or 10 minutes fast rather than a stopped one that was precisely right twice a day.
Ah yes, this has been discussed in many universities over the last 100+ years. You are using the frequentist approach to probability, which doesn't work well in this kind of scenario. Bayesian and De Fenetti probability works much better, but I don't have time to discuss the differences now.
In one bank, the chap who came with a trolley to take away/replace dead PCs was the "Vice President of Desktop Support Operations". Really.
To make it perfect, they had taken away his two helper monkeys - and given hime the title. No more money.....
I have been offered a job which would have made me a Director. With no-one reporting to me (architecture role).
Many years ago, my first job was working in a 'Department of Corporate Operations', which was basically a trouble-shooting/analysis group reporting to the Finance Director. (An interesting job, because we got to do lots of different things). After I'd been there about a year, they wanted to put our salaries up, but we'd hit the maximum salary available for staff who weren't managers - this was before Thatcher got rid of all that them-and-us nonsense. So it was proposed that we were all promoted to be managers, until someone pointed out that we didn't actually manage anything or anyone.
So I was promoted to be a 'Corporate Operative'. Not many people can claim that.
So you were Chiwetel Ejiofor?
The Operative : You know, in certain older civilized cultures, when men failed as entirely as you have, they would throw themselves on their swords. Dr. Mathias : Well, unfortunately, I forgot to bring a sword.
F1: late to this news, but Haas is dropping both its drivers. Apparently it's for financial reasons.
Yes. (a) their drivers are shit, (b) Haas aren't scoring enough points to generate sponsorship revenues from anyone who isn't a fraudster, so (c) hire better drivers
c) hire cheaper drivers (or even better, ones who will pay to drive the car).
@HYUFD - I really can't believe you are posting these posts. Firemen put out fires, train drivers drive trains and pollsters carry out polls.
If you don't drive a train you are not a train driver. Same goes for polls
Doctors are there to save lives, lawyers to win cases or complete contracts, architects to build bridges or buildings if they cannot do that then they can no longer do their job and should be sacked or made redundant.
If firemen are incapable of putting out fires or train drivers cannot drive trains they would lose their jobs.
Pollsters are just the same, they are there to forecast election results, if they cannot do that correctly they are worthless and should go bust and you may as well just pay Mystic Meg to forecast who will win the election
There's a really big difference, which sort of goes to the heart of the scientific process and how you might hope to make better predictions this time than last time.
Predicting the future is hard. And yet it can appear easy. In a two-outcome situation one of the outcomes has to happen, so a random guess will predict the correct outcome half the time.
Polling seeks to improve upon that by using statistical principles. By looking honestly at the data they can work out where they went wrong and attempt to come up with better solutions for the fundamental problem of not being able to observe a random sample from the electorate.
Simply guessing, or always giving the same answer, is competitive because prediction is difficult - but it can never improve. The polling can.
That's why it's important to distinguish between the two, and why you should pay more attention to one than the other.
This is very hard to watch. Not very illuminating. Jumbled sentences from both of them. I don't think it will change many votes. I don't think Trump will actually lose votes this time, but nor will he gain them. It is not the game changer that Trump needs.
If you believe Trafalgar or Rasmussen and IBID/TIPP he does not need a game changer, just not to lose any support tonight
If you believe the poll modellers like The Economist or Nate Silver, he most certainly does need a game changer.
If Nate Silver was right in 2016 Hillary Clinton would have won over 300 EC votes and now be President
How many times.....? Nate Silver's group was 28% right, which was more pro Trump than any of the other groups giving probability predictions for the 2016 election.
Or to put it another way, Biden is in a much better position in the polling than Clinton was 4 years ago and has been for months. If HYUFD really believes Trump should be favorite it's not based on any evidence.
Experience. Few predicted 2016 result.
Experience should teach you not to fall into the normalcy bias mistake. It happened with me in 2019 when I assumed Corbyn would repeat 2015.
The circumstances this time around are vastly, viscerally, different from 2016. The polls don't lie. They didn't in 2019 and they're not in 2020. But it's much more than that. The GOP have distanced themselves from their President. They know they've lost.
And lost big.
I'm going to use 538 and compare Trump's popular vote forecast lead with that of the Republican candidate in the closest Senate races. IA Trump +0.3 GOP -1.0 GA Trump 0.0 GOP +2.6 NC Trump -2.3 GOP -2.9 MT Trump +10.2 GOP +3.0 ME Trump -12.1 GOP -3.0 KS Trump +10.6 GOP +4.9 SC Trump +7.9 GOP +5.2 AZ Trump -2.9 GOP -6.0 AL Trump +19.2 GOP +6.2 AK Trump +7.4 GOP +6.3 MI Trump -7.9 GOP -6.4 CO Trump -11.7 GOP -7.7 TX Trump +2.1 GOP +8.1 MS Trump +13.2 GOP +9.1 MN Trump -7.7 GOP -12.0 KY Trump +19.1 GOP +13.4 ---- Mean Trump +2.8 GOP +1.2
I don't want this to be true, but Trump still looks like he is an electoral asset for the Republicans. I want American voters to judge him so badly that he drags the whole GOP down with him. But the numbers don't show that story.
Otherwise Republican Senate candidates should be outperforming Trump.
Trump won the biggest electoral college victory for the Republicans since Bush Snr in 1988 and he won Wisconsin for the first time for a Republican presidential candidate since Reagan in 1984, in the rustbelt he is an electoral asset for the GOP compared to a generic Republican, in California he certainly is not (Hillary won California by an even bigger percentage than Obama did in 2008 or 2012 for example) but it is the former he needs for EC victory, he can afford to lose California heavily and the popular vote
There are only three Midwest states in the 16 that I looked at and Trump's advantage over the GOP was smaller in those (+1.0) than in the set as a whole (+1.6).
In Iowa Trump did better than the GOP candidate, in Michigan fractionally worse (though Trafalgar suggest the GOP will win both the Michigan presidential and Senate race) you provided no data for Wisconsin or Pennsylvania in the rustbelt both of which Trump won for the first time for a Republican since the 1980s and Trump won Ohio by more than even George W Bush did too
HYUFD - please don't reply to this post with Trafalgar did best last time because that is not going to be the question.
Do you believe Trafalgar is a pollster or pundit? I genuinely don't know, but @rcs1000 and @Alistair have both posted evidence that Trafalgar is not a pollster but a pundit. They may well be a very good pundit.
If Trafalgar is a pundit it should not be posting spoof polls. If it is a pollster how do you respond to @rcs1000 and @Alistair?
If Trump wins the EC again Trafalgar will definitely be a pollster and a goldstandard one at that, if Trump loses the EC it will just be a pundit, simple really!
Why would Trump winning or losing make them a pollster or not?
They are either engaging in legitimate polling or they are not.
If they get the correct result obviously a legitimate pollster, the whole point of polls is to forecast, correctly, election results and the views of the public otherwise they are worthless
There is a bet on the throw of an unbiased six-sided die. If it doesn't come with a six, you get evens. A good value bet - yes? You take it.
Someone in the crowd, - let's call them Trafalgar - says "It's going to be a six!" The die is thrown. It comes up six. You lose.
Four years later, a similar bet is offered. Evens that it won't be a six. Analysis shows that that the chances that is won't be a six are 5/6 so evens is still a value bet.
But someone on a blog points out that Trafalgar got it right last time and is still saying it will be a six. Do you listen to them or rely on the analysis?
@HYUFD - I really can't believe you are posting these posts. Firemen put out fires, train drivers drive trains and pollsters carry out polls.
If you don't drive a train you are not a train driver. Same goes for polls
I do struggle a bit with the 'probablistic' thing when it comes to Presidential elections. Its not like rolling a over and over again because its one roll every four years and the dice is a radically different shape every time. What does it really mean to say Clinton would have won 70% of the time in 2016, that dice will never be rolled again. So any result that turns up the maths guys can say, well we never said that was impossible just unlikely. Silver talks about this stuff himself in The Signal and the Noise, how impossible it is to call the path of hurricanes etc. Having said that I would rather tell the time with a clock that was always wrong by say10 minutes slow or 10 minutes fast rather than a stopped one that was precisely right twice a day.
Ah yes, this has been discussed in many universities over the last 100+ years. You are using the frequentist approach to probability, which doesn't work well in this kind of scenario. Bayesian and De Fenetti probability works much better, but I don't have time to discuss the differences now.
I get the general principles of the Bayesian thing, priors etc, that is Silvers big driver too, but on here everyone hits HYFUD with the dice analogy and I just think that's kind of the wrong metaphor.
I have had all kinds of problems with the Monty Hall Goats thing too btw, so free tutorials always welcome
In one bank, the chap who came with a trolley to take away/replace dead PCs was the "Vice President of Desktop Support Operations". Really.
To make it perfect, they had taken away his two helper monkeys - and given hime the title. No more money.....
I have been offered a job which would have made me a Director. With no-one reporting to me (architecture role).
Many years ago, my first job was working in a 'Department of Corporate Operations', which was basically a trouble-shooting/analysis group reporting to the Finance Director. (An interesting job, because we got to do lots of different things). After I'd been there about a year, they wanted to put our salaries up, but we'd hit the maximum salary available for staff who weren't managers - this was before Thatcher got rid of all that them-and-us nonsense. So it was proposed that we were all promoted to be managers, until someone pointed out that we didn't actually manage anything or anyone.
So I was promoted to be a 'Corporate Operative'. Not many people can claim that.
So you were Chiwetel Ejiofor?
The Operative : You know, in certain older civilized cultures, when men failed as entirely as you have, they would throw themselves on their swords. Dr. Mathias : Well, unfortunately, I forgot to bring a sword.
[the Operative pulls out his sword]
*giggles*
Never mind non-manager managers, the one that really makes me laugh are non-director directors. Have seen (and worked for) several companies who get a bit giddy with the job titles and end up with Directors as subordinates of Directors. Only the guy at the top sits on the board and has the actual responsibility, the others just sound a bit daft.
Great new track for this weekend, Portimāo in Portugual. Few of the F1 drivers have ever driven there, and it's a rare track for featuring huge undulations and blind corners.
It's great fun on a bike but a setup challenge in a car as it's a very low friction and has variable radius corners. I've done a 1:53 there in my 996 so I'll put that fucking Haas on the box for them if they're short of drivers.
@HYUFD - I really can't believe you are posting these posts. Firemen put out fires, train drivers drive trains and pollsters carry out polls.
If you don't drive a train you are not a train driver. Same goes for polls
Doctors are there to save lives, lawyers to win cases or complete contracts, architects to build bridges or buildings if they cannot do that then they can no longer do their job and should be sacked or made redundant.
If firemen are incapable of putting out fires or train drivers cannot drive trains they would lose their jobs.
Pollsters are just the same, they are there to forecast election results, if they cannot do that correctly they are worthless and should go bust and you may as well just pay Mystic Meg to forecast who will win the election
There's a really big difference, which sort of goes to the heart of the scientific process and how you might hope to make better predictions this time than last time.
Predicting the future is hard. And yet it can appear easy. In a two-outcome situation one of the outcomes has to happen, so a random guess will predict the correct outcome half the time.
Polling seeks to improve upon that by using statistical principles. By looking honestly at the data they can work out where they went wrong and attempt to come up with better solutions for the fundamental problem of not being able to observe a random sample from the electorate.
Simply guessing, or always giving the same answer, is competitive because prediction is difficult - but it can never improve. The polling can.
That's why it's important to distinguish between the two, and why you should pay more attention to one than the other.
I would also say that another key characteristic of the scientific approach to prediction is having an idea of the "why".
This is very hard to watch. Not very illuminating. Jumbled sentences from both of them. I don't think it will change many votes. I don't think Trump will actually lose votes this time, but nor will he gain them. It is not the game changer that Trump needs.
If you believe Trafalgar or Rasmussen and IBID/TIPP he does not need a game changer, just not to lose any support tonight
If you believe the poll modellers like The Economist or Nate Silver, he most certainly does need a game changer.
If Nate Silver was right in 2016 Hillary Clinton would have won over 300 EC votes and now be President
How many times.....? Nate Silver's group was 28% right, which was more pro Trump than any of the other groups giving probability predictions for the 2016 election.
Or to put it another way, Biden is in a much better position in the polling than Clinton was 4 years ago and has been for months. If HYUFD really believes Trump should be favorite it's not based on any evidence.
Experience. Few predicted 2016 result.
Experience should teach you not to fall into the normalcy bias mistake. It happened with me in 2019 when I assumed Corbyn would repeat 2015.
The circumstances this time around are vastly, viscerally, different from 2016. The polls don't lie. They didn't in 2019 and they're not in 2020. But it's much more than that. The GOP have distanced themselves from their President. They know they've lost.
And lost big.
I'm going to use 538 and compare Trump's popular vote forecast lead with that of the Republican candidate in the closest Senate races. IA Trump +0.3 GOP -1.0 GA Trump 0.0 GOP +2.6 NC Trump -2.3 GOP -2.9 MT Trump +10.2 GOP +3.0 ME Trump -12.1 GOP -3.0 KS Trump +10.6 GOP +4.9 SC Trump +7.9 GOP +5.2 AZ Trump -2.9 GOP -6.0 AL Trump +19.2 GOP +6.2 AK Trump +7.4 GOP +6.3 MI Trump -7.9 GOP -6.4 CO Trump -11.7 GOP -7.7 TX Trump +2.1 GOP +8.1 MS Trump +13.2 GOP +9.1 MN Trump -7.7 GOP -12.0 KY Trump +19.1 GOP +13.4 ---- Mean Trump +2.8 GOP +1.2
I don't want this to be true, but Trump still looks like he is an electoral asset for the Republicans. I want American voters to judge him so badly that he drags the whole GOP down with him. But the numbers don't show that story.
Otherwise Republican Senate candidates should be outperforming Trump.
Trump won the biggest electoral college victory for the Republicans since Bush Snr in 1988 and he won Wisconsin for the first time for a Republican presidential candidate since Reagan in 1984, in the rustbelt he is an electoral asset for the GOP compared to a generic Republican, in California he certainly is not (Hillary won California by an even bigger percentage than Obama did in 2008 or 2012 for example) but it is the former he needs for EC victory, he can afford to lose California heavily and the popular vote
There are only three Midwest states in the 16 that I looked at and Trump's advantage over the GOP was smaller in those (+1.0) than in the set as a whole (+1.6).
In Iowa Trump did better than the GOP candidate, in Michigan fractionally worse (though Trafalgar suggest the GOP will win both the Michigan presidential and Senate race) you provided no data for Wisconsin or Pennsylvania in the rustbelt both of which Trump won for the first time for a Republican since the 1980s and Trump won Ohio by more than even George W Bush did too
HYUFD - please don't reply to this post with Trafalgar did best last time because that is not going to be the question.
Do you believe Trafalgar is a pollster or pundit? I genuinely don't know, but @rcs1000 and @Alistair have both posted evidence that Trafalgar is not a pollster but a pundit. They may well be a very good pundit.
If Trafalgar is a pundit it should not be posting spoof polls. If it is a pollster how do you respond to @rcs1000 and @Alistair?
If Trump wins the EC again Trafalgar will definitely be a pollster and a goldstandard one at that, if Trump loses the EC it will just be a pundit, simple really!
Why would Trump winning or losing make them a pollster or not?
They are either engaging in legitimate polling or they are not.
If they get the correct result obviously a legitimate pollster, the whole point of polls is to forecast, correctly, election results and the views of the public otherwise they are worthless
There is a bet on the throw of an unbiased six-sided die. If it doesn't come with a six, you get evens. A good value bet - yes? You take it.
Someone in the crowd, - let's call them Trafalgar - says "It's going to be a six!" The die is thrown. It comes up six. You lose.
Four years later, a similar bet is offered. Evens that it won't be a six. Analysis shows that that the chances that is won't be a six are 5/6 so evens is still a value bet.
But someone on a blog points out that Trafalgar got it right last time and is still saying it will be a six. Do you listen to them or rely on the analysis?
@HYUFD - I really can't believe you are posting these posts. Firemen put out fires, train drivers drive trains and pollsters carry out polls.
If you don't drive a train you are not a train driver. Same goes for polls
I do struggle a bit with the 'probablistic' thing when it comes to Presidential elections. Its not like rolling a over and over again because its one roll every four years and the dice is a radically different shape every time. What does it really mean to say Clinton would have won 70% of the time in 2016, that dice will never be rolled again. So any result that turns up the maths guys can say, well we never said that was impossible just unlikely. Silver talks about this stuff himself in The Signal and the Noise, how impossible it is to call the path of hurricanes etc. Having said that I would rather tell the time with a clock that was always wrong by say10 minutes slow or 10 minutes fast rather than a stopped one that was precisely right twice a day.
Ah yes, this has been discussed in many universities over the last 100+ years. You are using the frequentist approach to probability, which doesn't work well in this kind of scenario. Bayesian and De Fenetti probability works much better, but I don't have time to discuss the differences now.
I get the general principles of the Bayesian thing, priors etc, that is Silvers big driver too, but on here everyone hits HYFUD with the dice analogy and I just think that's kind of the wrong metaphor.
I have had all kinds of problems with the Monty Hall Goats thing too btw, so free tutorials always welcome
I understand the Monty Hall Goats thing each time I read the explanation, and then immediately forget it and have difficulty with it again.
This is very hard to watch. Not very illuminating. Jumbled sentences from both of them. I don't think it will change many votes. I don't think Trump will actually lose votes this time, but nor will he gain them. It is not the game changer that Trump needs.
If you believe Trafalgar or Rasmussen and IBID/TIPP he does not need a game changer, just not to lose any support tonight
If you believe the poll modellers like The Economist or Nate Silver, he most certainly does need a game changer.
If Nate Silver was right in 2016 Hillary Clinton would have won over 300 EC votes and now be President
How many times.....? Nate Silver's group was 28% right, which was more pro Trump than any of the other groups giving probability predictions for the 2016 election.
Or to put it another way, Biden is in a much better position in the polling than Clinton was 4 years ago and has been for months. If HYUFD really believes Trump should be favorite it's not based on any evidence.
Experience. Few predicted 2016 result.
Experience should teach you not to fall into the normalcy bias mistake. It happened with me in 2019 when I assumed Corbyn would repeat 2015.
The circumstances this time around are vastly, viscerally, different from 2016. The polls don't lie. They didn't in 2019 and they're not in 2020. But it's much more than that. The GOP have distanced themselves from their President. They know they've lost.
And lost big.
I'm going to use 538 and compare Trump's popular vote forecast lead with that of the Republican candidate in the closest Senate races. IA Trump +0.3 GOP -1.0 GA Trump 0.0 GOP +2.6 NC Trump -2.3 GOP -2.9 MT Trump +10.2 GOP +3.0 ME Trump -12.1 GOP -3.0 KS Trump +10.6 GOP +4.9 SC Trump +7.9 GOP +5.2 AZ Trump -2.9 GOP -6.0 AL Trump +19.2 GOP +6.2 AK Trump +7.4 GOP +6.3 MI Trump -7.9 GOP -6.4 CO Trump -11.7 GOP -7.7 TX Trump +2.1 GOP +8.1 MS Trump +13.2 GOP +9.1 MN Trump -7.7 GOP -12.0 KY Trump +19.1 GOP +13.4 ---- Mean Trump +2.8 GOP +1.2
I don't want this to be true, but Trump still looks like he is an electoral asset for the Republicans. I want American voters to judge him so badly that he drags the whole GOP down with him. But the numbers don't show that story.
Otherwise Republican Senate candidates should be outperforming Trump.
Trump won the biggest electoral college victory for the Republicans since Bush Snr in 1988 and he won Wisconsin for the first time for a Republican presidential candidate since Reagan in 1984, in the rustbelt he is an electoral asset for the GOP compared to a generic Republican, in California he certainly is not (Hillary won California by an even bigger percentage than Obama did in 2008 or 2012 for example) but it is the former he needs for EC victory, he can afford to lose California heavily and the popular vote
There are only three Midwest states in the 16 that I looked at and Trump's advantage over the GOP was smaller in those (+1.0) than in the set as a whole (+1.6).
In Iowa Trump did better than the GOP candidate, in Michigan fractionally worse (though Trafalgar suggest the GOP will win both the Michigan presidential and Senate race) you provided no data for Wisconsin or Pennsylvania in the rustbelt both of which Trump won for the first time for a Republican since the 1980s and Trump won Ohio by more than even George W Bush did too
HYUFD - please don't reply to this post with Trafalgar did best last time because that is not going to be the question.
Do you believe Trafalgar is a pollster or pundit? I genuinely don't know, but @rcs1000 and @Alistair have both posted evidence that Trafalgar is not a pollster but a pundit. They may well be a very good pundit.
If Trafalgar is a pundit it should not be posting spoof polls. If it is a pollster how do you respond to @rcs1000 and @Alistair?
If Trump wins the EC again Trafalgar will definitely be a pollster and a goldstandard one at that, if Trump loses the EC it will just be a pundit, simple really!
Why would Trump winning or losing make them a pollster or not?
They are either engaging in legitimate polling or they are not.
If they get the correct result obviously a legitimate pollster, the whole point of polls is to forecast, correctly, election results and the views of the public otherwise they are worthless
There is a bet on the throw of an unbiased six-sided die. If it doesn't come with a six, you get evens. A good value bet - yes? You take it.
Someone in the crowd, - let's call them Trafalgar - says "It's going to be a six!" The die is thrown. It comes up six. You lose.
Four years later, a similar bet is offered. Evens that it won't be a six. Analysis shows that that the chances that is won't be a six are 5/6 so evens is still a value bet.
But someone on a blog points out that Trafalgar got it right last time and is still saying it will be a six. Do you listen to them or rely on the analysis?
Barnesian nails it
I'd suggest the difference is that you don't know if the die is weighted. You couldn't work it out last time and you are not so sure this time.
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
250,000 thousand jobs and 4,600 companies depend on oil and gas in Houston alone.
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
250,000 thousand jobs and 4,600 companies depend on oil and gas in Houston alone.
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
Yes - and with a crashed oil price they are in the doldrums.
Wind power, on the other hand, is in the sell-me-all-you-have state. Firms that do the work are booked out.
Alot of the supply chain and contracting companies are grabbing the work with both hands. Rough necking is quite applicable to wind installation etc.
@HYUFD - I really can't believe you are posting these posts. Firemen put out fires, train drivers drive trains and pollsters carry out polls.
If you don't drive a train you are not a train driver. Same goes for polls
Doctors are there to save lives, lawyers to win cases or complete contracts, architects to build bridges or buildings if they cannot do that then they can no longer do their job and should be sacked or made redundant.
If firemen are incapable of putting out fires or train drivers cannot drive trains they would lose their jobs.
Pollsters are just the same, they are there to forecast election results, if they cannot do that correctly they are worthless and should go bust and you may as well just pay Mystic Meg to forecast who will win the election
No. Pollsters has a specific meaning. It means someone who carries out polls. You can't just change the meaning of words because if you do nobody knows what you are talking about.
For clarity mystic meg is a pundit NOT a pollster.
The whole purpose of pollsters is to provide correct information as to who will win an election or on what the public thinks, that is what their customers pay them for, if Trafalgar ends up correctly forecasting Trump will win the EC again while most other pollsters again wrongly forecast he would lose the election then as a paying customer or media outlet I would go to Trafalgar and cancel contracts with other pollsters as clearly they have found the best method to do the job they are paid to do
All that is true, but it still doesn't change the fact that you are using the wrong words to describe things. If I say my balloon is blue how are you supposed to know I am talking about my car (or am I?)
Anyway getting back to the original point do you think Trafalgar carry out polls (assuming we all agree what a poll is ie not a bowl of spaghetti).
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
250,000 thousand jobs and 4,600 companies depend on oil and gas in Houston alone.
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
Top ten states by oil production
Texas (1,609,075) North Dakota (461,531) New Mexico (248,958) Oklahoma (200,685) Colorado (177,817) Alaska (174,800) California (169,166) Wyoming (87,955) Louisiana (48,841) Utah (37,063)
I read somewhere that the US is looking at positive GDP growth for 2020??
That can't be right, can it?
Highly unlikely for 2020 as a whole, GDP likely down a bit over 3%. Still a lot better than the Euro Area, which will likely see a decline twice as big, or the UK (three times as big).
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
250,000 thousand jobs and 4,600 companies depend on oil and gas in Houston alone.
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
250,000 thousand jobs and 4,600 companies depend on oil and gas in Houston alone.
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
Yes - and with a crashed oil price they are in the doldrums.
Wind power, on the other hand, is in the sell-me-all-you-have state. Firms that do the work are booked out.
Alot of the supply chain and contracting companies are grabbing the work with both hands. Rough necking is quite applicable to wind installation etc.
"the sell-me-all-you-have state"?? Which one is that?
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
In the first Scottish Indy debate Salmond absolutely fucked it (Although Darling was poor in the second half) .
Never the less 45% of people thought Salmond had won.
A number not dissimilar to the eventual Yes vote.
Absolutely. Debate polls are heavily influenced by who the subjects want to win.
It'd be good if noone played that game, but everyone knows how those polls are spun out so even if you think your candidate had a poor night - best to say they "won".
@HYUFD - I really can't believe you are posting these posts. Firemen put out fires, train drivers drive trains and pollsters carry out polls.
If you don't drive a train you are not a train driver. Same goes for polls
Doctors are there to save lives, lawyers to win cases or complete contracts, architects to build bridges or buildings if they cannot do that then they can no longer do their job and should be sacked or made redundant.
If firemen are incapable of putting out fires or train drivers cannot drive trains they would lose their jobs.
Pollsters are just the same, they are there to forecast election results, if they cannot do that correctly they are worthless and should go bust and you may as well just pay Mystic Meg to forecast who will win the election
The last paragraph is not necessarily true: wilfully inaccurate and methodology light pollsters may well provide a genuine service of monetary worth. But that service may be to provide copy / justification / ramping, under the banner of polling, rather than the quality of the polling itself.
Another example is the organisation that provided weather copy for the Daily Express in recent years. Actual meteorology was not high on their list of priorities.
In fact, the Express itself is a case in point. A fair chunk of their output has as much of a relationship with the truth as I have with Bradley Cooper. But communicating truth is not their business model. And they aren't alone in that.
F1: late to this news, but Haas is dropping both its drivers. Apparently it's for financial reasons.
Yes. (a) their drivers are shit, (b) Haas aren't scoring enough points to generate sponsorship revenues from anyone who isn't a fraudster, so (c) hire better drivers
c) hire cheaper drivers (or even better, ones who will pay to drive the car).
Yay! Pay drivers! The good old days of F1. Yes Pastor Maldonado causes £100k's in damage by crashing every other race. But but brings Venezuelan oil money. So woohoo! And as the mangled remains of the pay driver's car gets hauled away its great TV coverage for the sponsors.
@HYUFD - I really can't believe you are posting these posts. Firemen put out fires, train drivers drive trains and pollsters carry out polls.
If you don't drive a train you are not a train driver. Same goes for polls
I do struggle a bit with the 'probablistic' thing when it comes to Presidential elections. Its not like rolling a over and over again because its one roll every four years and the dice is a radically different shape every time. What does it really mean to say Clinton would have won 70% of the time in 2016, that dice will never be rolled again. So any result that turns up the maths guys can say, well we never said that was impossible just unlikely. Silver talks about this stuff himself in The Signal and the Noise, how impossible it is to call the path of hurricanes etc. Having said that I would rather tell the time with a clock that was always wrong by say10 minutes slow or 10 minutes fast rather than a stopped one that was precisely right twice a day.
Ah yes, this has been discussed in many universities over the last 100+ years. You are using the frequentist approach to probability, which doesn't work well in this kind of scenario. Bayesian and De Fenetti probability works much better, but I don't have time to discuss the differences now.
I hestitate to put my tupporth in here, but IIRC opinion [pollsters are descended from people who dealt in opinions of products. And it really doesn't matter a lot whether 25% of people are prepared to buy a product, as against 23% or 27%. You're going to end up around a quarter of the market.And that level of accuracy is fine. IMHO it's highly unlikely that an opinion pollster is going to be able to be able to forecast with any degree or certitude that someone will get more than plus or minus 5 percent of a vote, and most of the time that doesn't matter too much. It's only when candidates are more or less (plus or minus 2.5 percent ) that it does.
What does matter is the trend, and the comparison with previous, assuming the electorate hasn't changed too much.
Biden won the first debate 60% to 28% for Trump with CNN so while Biden won Trump did better last night, Hillary of course won all 3 debates in 2016 and still lost the election
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
250,000 thousand jobs and 4,600 companies depend on oil and gas in Houston alone.
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
Top ten states by oil production
Texas (1,609,075) North Dakota (461,531) New Mexico (248,958) Oklahoma (200,685) Colorado (177,817) Alaska (174,800) California (169,166) Wyoming (87,955) Louisiana (48,841) Utah (37,063)
In one bank, the chap who came with a trolley to take away/replace dead PCs was the "Vice President of Desktop Support Operations". Really.
To make it perfect, they had taken away his two helper monkeys - and given hime the title. No more money.....
I have been offered a job which would have made me a Director. With no-one reporting to me (architecture role).
Many years ago, my first job was working in a 'Department of Corporate Operations', which was basically a trouble-shooting/analysis group reporting to the Finance Director. (An interesting job, because we got to do lots of different things). After I'd been there about a year, they wanted to put our salaries up, but we'd hit the maximum salary available for staff who weren't managers - this was before Thatcher got rid of all that them-and-us nonsense. So it was proposed that we were all promoted to be managers, until someone pointed out that we didn't actually manage anything or anyone.
So I was promoted to be a 'Corporate Operative'. Not many people can claim that.
So you were Chiwetel Ejiofor?
The Operative : You know, in certain older civilized cultures, when men failed as entirely as you have, they would throw themselves on their swords. Dr. Mathias : Well, unfortunately, I forgot to bring a sword.
[the Operative pulls out his sword]
*giggles*
Never mind non-manager managers, the one that really makes me laugh are non-director directors. Have seen (and worked for) several companies who get a bit giddy with the job titles and end up with Directors as subordinates of Directors. Only the guy at the top sits on the board and has the actual responsibility, the others just sound a bit daft.
Yes - when I was offered a banking "Director" level job with no reports, I was thinking this -
This is very hard to watch. Not very illuminating. Jumbled sentences from both of them. I don't think it will change many votes. I don't think Trump will actually lose votes this time, but nor will he gain them. It is not the game changer that Trump needs.
If you believe Trafalgar or Rasmussen and IBID/TIPP he does not need a game changer, just not to lose any support tonight
If you believe the poll modellers like The Economist or Nate Silver, he most certainly does need a game changer.
If Nate Silver was right in 2016 Hillary Clinton would have won over 300 EC votes and now be President
How many times.....? Nate Silver's group was 28% right, which was more pro Trump than any of the other groups giving probability predictions for the 2016 election.
Or to put it another way, Biden is in a much better position in the polling than Clinton was 4 years ago and has been for months. If HYUFD really believes Trump should be favorite it's not based on any evidence.
Experience. Few predicted 2016 result.
Experience should teach you not to fall into the normalcy bias mistake. It happened with me in 2019 when I assumed Corbyn would repeat 2015.
The circumstances this time around are vastly, viscerally, different from 2016. The polls don't lie. They didn't in 2019 and they're not in 2020. But it's much more than that. The GOP have distanced themselves from their President. They know they've lost.
And lost big.
I'm going to use 538 and compare Trump's popular vote forecast lead with that of the Republican candidate in the closest Senate races. IA Trump +0.3 GOP -1.0 GA Trump 0.0 GOP +2.6 NC Trump -2.3 GOP -2.9 MT Trump +10.2 GOP +3.0 ME Trump -12.1 GOP -3.0 KS Trump +10.6 GOP +4.9 SC Trump +7.9 GOP +5.2 AZ Trump -2.9 GOP -6.0 AL Trump +19.2 GOP +6.2 AK Trump +7.4 GOP +6.3 MI Trump -7.9 GOP -6.4 CO Trump -11.7 GOP -7.7 TX Trump +2.1 GOP +8.1 MS Trump +13.2 GOP +9.1 MN Trump -7.7 GOP -12.0 KY Trump +19.1 GOP +13.4 ---- Mean Trump +2.8 GOP +1.2
I don't want this to be true, but Trump still looks like he is an electoral asset for the Republicans. I want American voters to judge him so badly that he drags the whole GOP down with him. But the numbers don't show that story.
Otherwise Republican Senate candidates should be outperforming Trump.
Trump won the biggest electoral college victory for the Republicans since Bush Snr in 1988 and he won Wisconsin for the first time for a Republican presidential candidate since Reagan in 1984, in the rustbelt he is an electoral asset for the GOP compared to a generic Republican, in California he certainly is not (Hillary won California by an even bigger percentage than Obama did in 2008 or 2012 for example) but it is the former he needs for EC victory, he can afford to lose California heavily and the popular vote
There are only three Midwest states in the 16 that I looked at and Trump's advantage over the GOP was smaller in those (+1.0) than in the set as a whole (+1.6).
In Iowa Trump did better than the GOP candidate, in Michigan fractionally worse (though Trafalgar suggest the GOP will win both the Michigan presidential and Senate race) you provided no data for Wisconsin or Pennsylvania in the rustbelt both of which Trump won for the first time for a Republican since the 1980s and Trump won Ohio by more than even George W Bush did too
HYUFD - please don't reply to this post with Trafalgar did best last time because that is not going to be the question.
Do you believe Trafalgar is a pollster or pundit? I genuinely don't know, but @rcs1000 and @Alistair have both posted evidence that Trafalgar is not a pollster but a pundit. They may well be a very good pundit.
If Trafalgar is a pundit it should not be posting spoof polls. If it is a pollster how do you respond to @rcs1000 and @Alistair?
If Trump wins the EC again Trafalgar will definitely be a pollster and a goldstandard one at that, if Trump loses the EC it will just be a pundit, simple really!
Why would Trump winning or losing make them a pollster or not?
They are either engaging in legitimate polling or they are not.
If they get the correct result obviously a legitimate pollster, the whole point of polls is to forecast, correctly, election results and the views of the public otherwise they are worthless
There is a bet on the throw of an unbiased six-sided die. If it doesn't come with a six, you get evens. A good value bet - yes? You take it.
Someone in the crowd, - let's call them Trafalgar - says "It's going to be a six!" The die is thrown. It comes up six. You lose.
Four years later, a similar bet is offered. Evens that it won't be a six. Analysis shows that that the chances that is won't be a six are 5/6 so evens is still a value bet.
But someone on a blog points out that Trafalgar got it right last time and is still saying it will be a six. Do you listen to them or rely on the analysis?
Listen I have been posting about this bloody dice for days now and you now come up with this perfect example.
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
250,000 thousand jobs and 4,600 companies depend on oil and gas in Houston alone.
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
Top ten states by oil production
Texas (1,609,075) North Dakota (461,531) New Mexico (248,958) Oklahoma (200,685) Colorado (177,817) Alaska (174,800) California (169,166) Wyoming (87,955) Louisiana (48,841) Utah (37,063)
Fracking is very big in Pennsylvania. That's why Trump was in Eerie with the big screen showing Biden and Harris pledging to ban it.
And of course they have Annacott Steel.....
I think if Biden wins Pennsylvania it will largely be due to increased black turnout in Philadelphia and a swing to the Democrats and away from Trump in the Philadelphia suburbs and maybe a small hometown vote around Scranton, Trump will still win rural and small town PA comfortably
F1: late to this news, but Haas is dropping both its drivers. Apparently it's for financial reasons.
Yes. (a) their drivers are shit, (b) Haas aren't scoring enough points to generate sponsorship revenues from anyone who isn't a fraudster, so (c) hire better drivers
c) hire cheaper drivers (or even better, ones who will pay to drive the car).
Yay! Pay drivers! The good old days of F1. Yes Pastor Maldonado causes £100k's in damage by crashing every other race. But but brings Venezuelan oil money. So woohoo! And as the mangled remains of the pay driver's car gets hauled away its great TV coverage for the sponsors.
It's worth reading Joe Saward's comments as he has named the likely options - although it seems to be bad news for George Russell.
@HYUFD - I really can't believe you are posting these posts. Firemen put out fires, train drivers drive trains and pollsters carry out polls.
If you don't drive a train you are not a train driver. Same goes for polls
Doctors are there to save lives, lawyers to win cases or complete contracts, architects to build bridges or buildings if they cannot do that then they can no longer do their job and should be sacked or made redundant.
If firemen are incapable of putting out fires or train drivers cannot drive trains they would lose their jobs.
Pollsters are just the same, they are there to forecast election results, if they cannot do that correctly they are worthless and should go bust and you may as well just pay Mystic Meg to forecast who will win the election
No. Pollsters has a specific meaning. It means someone who carries out polls. You can't just change the meaning of words because if you do nobody knows what you are talking about.
For clarity mystic meg is a pundit NOT a pollster.
The whole purpose of pollsters is to provide correct information as to who will win an election or on what the public thinks,
Based on undertaking polls.
You're hilarious though. It's so childish to take a question like 'Does X actually do polls?' (which is not even a criticism of whether they are right or not - as people have said till they are blue in the face, somebody could be totally right even without doing polls) and just ignore it over and over again because you so obviously fear conceding anything, no matter how trivial (whilst paradoxically claiming not to care what people think), even if it is a point that doesn't even matter. If you were on fire and someone told you you'd probably refuse to accept it.
I don't think I've ever seen someone so terrified of not being omniscient. You're human, HYUFD, it's ok.
This is very hard to watch. Not very illuminating. Jumbled sentences from both of them. I don't think it will change many votes. I don't think Trump will actually lose votes this time, but nor will he gain them. It is not the game changer that Trump needs.
If you believe Trafalgar or Rasmussen and IBID/TIPP he does not need a game changer, just not to lose any support tonight
If you believe the poll modellers like The Economist or Nate Silver, he most certainly does need a game changer.
If Nate Silver was right in 2016 Hillary Clinton would have won over 300 EC votes and now be President
How many times.....? Nate Silver's group was 28% right, which was more pro Trump than any of the other groups giving probability predictions for the 2016 election.
Or to put it another way, Biden is in a much better position in the polling than Clinton was 4 years ago and has been for months. If HYUFD really believes Trump should be favorite it's not based on any evidence.
Experience. Few predicted 2016 result.
Experience should teach you not to fall into the normalcy bias mistake. It happened with me in 2019 when I assumed Corbyn would repeat 2015.
The circumstances this time around are vastly, viscerally, different from 2016. The polls don't lie. They didn't in 2019 and they're not in 2020. But it's much more than that. The GOP have distanced themselves from their President. They know they've lost.
And lost big.
I'm going to use 538 and compare Trump's popular vote forecast lead with that of the Republican candidate in the closest Senate races. IA Trump +0.3 GOP -1.0 GA Trump 0.0 GOP +2.6 NC Trump -2.3 GOP -2.9 MT Trump +10.2 GOP +3.0 ME Trump -12.1 GOP -3.0 KS Trump +10.6 GOP +4.9 SC Trump +7.9 GOP +5.2 AZ Trump -2.9 GOP -6.0 AL Trump +19.2 GOP +6.2 AK Trump +7.4 GOP +6.3 MI Trump -7.9 GOP -6.4 CO Trump -11.7 GOP -7.7 TX Trump +2.1 GOP +8.1 MS Trump +13.2 GOP +9.1 MN Trump -7.7 GOP -12.0 KY Trump +19.1 GOP +13.4 ---- Mean Trump +2.8 GOP +1.2
I don't want this to be true, but Trump still looks like he is an electoral asset for the Republicans. I want American voters to judge him so badly that he drags the whole GOP down with him. But the numbers don't show that story.
Otherwise Republican Senate candidates should be outperforming Trump.
Trump won the biggest electoral college victory for the Republicans since Bush Snr in 1988 and he won Wisconsin for the first time for a Republican presidential candidate since Reagan in 1984, in the rustbelt he is an electoral asset for the GOP compared to a generic Republican, in California he certainly is not (Hillary won California by an even bigger percentage than Obama did in 2008 or 2012 for example) but it is the former he needs for EC victory, he can afford to lose California heavily and the popular vote
There are only three Midwest states in the 16 that I looked at and Trump's advantage over the GOP was smaller in those (+1.0) than in the set as a whole (+1.6).
In Iowa Trump did better than the GOP candidate, in Michigan fractionally worse (though Trafalgar suggest the GOP will win both the Michigan presidential and Senate race) you provided no data for Wisconsin or Pennsylvania in the rustbelt both of which Trump won for the first time for a Republican since the 1980s and Trump won Ohio by more than even George W Bush did too
HYUFD - please don't reply to this post with Trafalgar did best last time because that is not going to be the question.
Do you believe Trafalgar is a pollster or pundit? I genuinely don't know, but @rcs1000 and @Alistair have both posted evidence that Trafalgar is not a pollster but a pundit. They may well be a very good pundit.
If Trafalgar is a pundit it should not be posting spoof polls. If it is a pollster how do you respond to @rcs1000 and @Alistair?
If Trump wins the EC again Trafalgar will definitely be a pollster and a goldstandard one at that, if Trump loses the EC it will just be a pundit, simple really!
Why would Trump winning or losing make them a pollster or not?
They are either engaging in legitimate polling or they are not.
If they get the correct result obviously a legitimate pollster, the whole point of polls is to forecast, correctly, election results and the views of the public otherwise they are worthless
There is a bet on the throw of an unbiased six-sided die. If it doesn't come with a six, you get evens. A good value bet - yes? You take it.
Someone in the crowd, - let's call them Trafalgar - says "It's going to be a six!" The die is thrown. It comes up six. You lose.
Four years later, a similar bet is offered. Evens that it won't be a six. Analysis shows that that the chances that is won't be a six are 5/6 so evens is still a value bet.
But someone on a blog points out that Trafalgar got it right last time and is still saying it will be a six. Do you listen to them or rely on the analysis?
Barnesian nails it
I'd suggest the difference is that you don't know if the die is weighted. You couldn't work it out last time and you are not so sure this time.
So Evens vs 5/6 might not be so great
Its not the same dice though is and it has millions of sides with some kind of lean towards either toward the many sides marked T or the many sides marked B and it will be rolled once. Lots of wonks are looking at other peoples analysis of this dice and telling you what they think the odds are. Mostly they are saying they worked it out the odds fall one way at the moment, but whatever turns out they wont be 'wrong'. I know why this analysis is making me feel its more likely Biden will win but its easy to assume someone in the room might have found out its loaded a bit more than the other wonks have realised, especially if they 'did' find that out last time one was rolled.
Good for them but entirely logical, not simply charity.
I thought Tories liked private sector solutions and charitable activity? You can't win with you people! Good on these guys for stepping up when our mean-spirited government won't.
What part of "Good for them" made you think I disliked it?
When you say good on these guys it's the same thing as me saying good for them is it not?
If these companies can get some much needed publicity and win some business that's a win/win in my eyes.
Your "good for them" was followed immediately by a "but" and preceeded by you calling it "cheap publicity". The main thrust of your post was of grudging praise with a focus on their cynical motives. Plenty of people think the govt is wrong on this, including lots of small business people. I think the grudging tone reflects your embarrassment at your government’s line on this.
There was nothing grudging about it.
I believe people acting out of enlightened self interest is a positive and a win/win.
And struggling businesses getting cheap publicity is a very good thing not a bad thing.
You may consider businesses acting smartly to be cynical, I do not. I hope they do well. If they give free food to children and get paid for custom from parents or others then all the better.
Couple of cutting edge thriller tips from me. Ruth Rendell. Barbara Vine.
Thanks - which particular books from those two authors?
Please try Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter.
Yes, I will.
My 2 are actually the same author. Rendell writes under Vine for her deeper 1st person narrative psychologicals.
What I like is the deceptively skillful prose and story telling. The horror creeps up on you without you noticing and you often end up relating to the deranged protagonist because she makes the weird seem oddly rational.
Also many are set in my part of London and you can read one in a couple of days.
Does anyone have a view as to medium-term GBP value post Covid-19 assuming a full FTA Brexit deal?
My thinking is GBP/EUR approaching 1.25 and GBP/UDS flirting with 1.40 but others may have better insight.
I think sterling and the UK market loves any sort of deal at this point. Even if it's suboptimal - and Boris is good at putting lipstick on a pig. Frost/The Gov'ts behaviour I can recognise as that of a party in a somewhat weak position who are pushing as hard as they can to get the best deal possible. I'm quietly optimistic about prospects for a deal right now.
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
250,000 thousand jobs and 4,600 companies depend on oil and gas in Houston alone.
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
250,000 thousand jobs and 4,600 companies depend on oil and gas in Houston alone.
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
Yes - and with a crashed oil price they are in the doldrums.
Wind power, on the other hand, is in the sell-me-all-you-have state. Firms that do the work are booked out.
Alot of the supply chain and contracting companies are grabbing the work with both hands. Rough necking is quite applicable to wind installation etc.
"the sell-me-all-you-have state"?? Which one is that?
I meant many supply chain and setup companies for wind power in Texas are working at 100% capacity. Literally having customers say "sell me all of x you can get hold of".
Biden won the first debate 60% to 28% for Trump with CNN so while Biden won Trump did better last night, Hillary of course won all 3 debates in 2016 and still lost the election
In one bank, the chap who came with a trolley to take away/replace dead PCs was the "Vice President of Desktop Support Operations". Really.
To make it perfect, they had taken away his two helper monkeys - and given hime the title. No more money.....
I have been offered a job which would have made me a Director. With no-one reporting to me (architecture role).
Many years ago, my first job was working in a 'Department of Corporate Operations', which was basically a trouble-shooting/analysis group reporting to the Finance Director. (An interesting job, because we got to do lots of different things). After I'd been there about a year, they wanted to put our salaries up, but we'd hit the maximum salary available for staff who weren't managers - this was before Thatcher got rid of all that them-and-us nonsense. So it was proposed that we were all promoted to be managers, until someone pointed out that we didn't actually manage anything or anyone.
So I was promoted to be a 'Corporate Operative'. Not many people can claim that.
So you were Chiwetel Ejiofor?
The Operative : You know, in certain older civilized cultures, when men failed as entirely as you have, they would throw themselves on their swords. Dr. Mathias : Well, unfortunately, I forgot to bring a sword.
[the Operative pulls out his sword]
*giggles*
Never mind non-manager managers, the one that really makes me laugh are non-director directors. Have seen (and worked for) several companies who get a bit giddy with the job titles and end up with Directors as subordinates of Directors. Only the guy at the top sits on the board and has the actual responsibility, the others just sound a bit daft.
Yes - when I was offered a banking "Director" level job with no reports, I was thinking this -
I think that's probably true but what a boring PB that would be.
Actually I think it would be a lot better. When do you ever read a comment on the lines of ‘Actually I hadn’t thought of that, what a thoughtful post’? It is the constant trolling, point scoring and refusal to agree with someone on any subject if they disagree on Brexit/Indy/Boris etc that is boring, because it’s the same every day, and doesn’t seem to me to be borne out of anything other than stubbornness or spite
I agree, and look forward to you cutting back on your relentless Starmer is boring/has no personality posts!
That’s not the same thing at all though. I looked into the personality ratings to see whether the public vote people they consider to be relatively boring as PM. The only one in the last 40 years they have is John Major, and never a LoTO. In my opinion that is relevant to betting on the next GE, it’s not trolling people on here, if there are any, who think Starmer is actually a right good laugh. In fact it’s an example of where people might say “I hadn’t considered that, interesting” but prefer to say “Boris is a clown” “This time it’s different” or “Will you stop going on about it?”
I’m not trolling Starmer, just reminding people that a boring LoTO doesn’t usually become PM, regardless of midterm VI and Leader ratings.
This place used to be full of analysis like that, now it’s just a partisan smart arse, point scoring fest, which is a shame
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
250,000 thousand jobs and 4,600 companies depend on oil and gas in Houston alone.
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
Saw some of the debate, Trump wasn't great, but I am amazed at the big win for Biden in the polls. He looked doddery, confused and very old.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
I'm sure those hundreds of thousands of people working in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania and Texas are happy to retrain as coders and wind farm technicians as soon as Biden tells them.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
In Texas, the crazy boom spending in energy is now on wind. Oil is largely dead/dormant - lots of firms pivoting from pump jacks to putting in wind infrastructure.
250,000 thousand jobs and 4,600 companies depend on oil and gas in Houston alone.
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
Yes - and with a crashed oil price they are in the doldrums.
Wind power, on the other hand, is in the sell-me-all-you-have state. Firms that do the work are booked out.
Alot of the supply chain and contracting companies are grabbing the work with both hands. Rough necking is quite applicable to wind installation etc.
"the sell-me-all-you-have state"?? Which one is that?
I meant many supply chain and setup companies for wind power in Texas are working at 100% capacity. Literally having customers say "sell me all of x you can get hold of".
Wind power is the future.
It is cheaper now, without subsidies to build and maintain wind turbines than it is to dig out and burn coal.
Plus wind is getting more and more economical annually as turbines become bigger and more efficient.
This is very hard to watch. Not very illuminating. Jumbled sentences from both of them. I don't think it will change many votes. I don't think Trump will actually lose votes this time, but nor will he gain them. It is not the game changer that Trump needs.
If you believe Trafalgar or Rasmussen and IBID/TIPP he does not need a game changer, just not to lose any support tonight
If you believe the poll modellers like The Economist or Nate Silver, he most certainly does need a game changer.
If Nate Silver was right in 2016 Hillary Clinton would have won over 300 EC votes and now be President
How many times.....? Nate Silver's group was 28% right, which was more pro Trump than any of the other groups giving probability predictions for the 2016 election.
Or to put it another way, Biden is in a much better position in the polling than Clinton was 4 years ago and has been for months. If HYUFD really believes Trump should be favorite it's not based on any evidence.
Experience. Few predicted 2016 result.
Experience should teach you not to fall into the normalcy bias mistake. It happened with me in 2019 when I assumed Corbyn would repeat 2015.
The circumstances this time around are vastly, viscerally, different from 2016. The polls don't lie. They didn't in 2019 and they're not in 2020. But it's much more than that. The GOP have distanced themselves from their President. They know they've lost.
And lost big.
I'm going to use 538 and compare Trump's popular vote forecast lead with that of the Republican candidate in the closest Senate races. IA Trump +0.3 GOP -1.0 GA Trump 0.0 GOP +2.6 NC Trump -2.3 GOP -2.9 MT Trump +10.2 GOP +3.0 ME Trump -12.1 GOP -3.0 KS Trump +10.6 GOP +4.9 SC Trump +7.9 GOP +5.2 AZ Trump -2.9 GOP -6.0 AL Trump +19.2 GOP +6.2 AK Trump +7.4 GOP +6.3 MI Trump -7.9 GOP -6.4 CO Trump -11.7 GOP -7.7 TX Trump +2.1 GOP +8.1 MS Trump +13.2 GOP +9.1 MN Trump -7.7 GOP -12.0 KY Trump +19.1 GOP +13.4 ---- Mean Trump +2.8 GOP +1.2
I don't want this to be true, but Trump still looks like he is an electoral asset for the Republicans. I want American voters to judge him so badly that he drags the whole GOP down with him. But the numbers don't show that story.
Otherwise Republican Senate candidates should be outperforming Trump.
Trump won the biggest electoral college victory for the Republicans since Bush Snr in 1988 and he won Wisconsin for the first time for a Republican presidential candidate since Reagan in 1984, in the rustbelt he is an electoral asset for the GOP compared to a generic Republican, in California he certainly is not (Hillary won California by an even bigger percentage than Obama did in 2008 or 2012 for example) but it is the former he needs for EC victory, he can afford to lose California heavily and the popular vote
There are only three Midwest states in the 16 that I looked at and Trump's advantage over the GOP was smaller in those (+1.0) than in the set as a whole (+1.6).
In Iowa Trump did better than the GOP candidate, in Michigan fractionally worse (though Trafalgar suggest the GOP will win both the Michigan presidential and Senate race) you provided no data for Wisconsin or Pennsylvania in the rustbelt both of which Trump won for the first time for a Republican since the 1980s and Trump won Ohio by more than even George W Bush did too
HYUFD - please don't reply to this post with Trafalgar did best last time because that is not going to be the question.
Do you believe Trafalgar is a pollster or pundit? I genuinely don't know, but @rcs1000 and @Alistair have both posted evidence that Trafalgar is not a pollster but a pundit. They may well be a very good pundit.
If Trafalgar is a pundit it should not be posting spoof polls. If it is a pollster how do you respond to @rcs1000 and @Alistair?
If Trump wins the EC again Trafalgar will definitely be a pollster and a goldstandard one at that, if Trump loses the EC it will just be a pundit, simple really!
Why would Trump winning or losing make them a pollster or not?
They are either engaging in legitimate polling or they are not.
If they get the correct result obviously a legitimate pollster, the whole point of polls is to forecast, correctly, election results and the views of the public otherwise they are worthless
There is a bet on the throw of an unbiased six-sided die. If it doesn't come with a six, you get evens. A good value bet - yes? You take it.
Someone in the crowd, - let's call them Trafalgar - says "It's going to be a six!" The die is thrown. It comes up six. You lose.
Four years later, a similar bet is offered. Evens that it won't be a six. Analysis shows that that the chances that is won't be a six are 5/6 so evens is still a value bet.
But someone on a blog points out that Trafalgar got it right last time and is still saying it will be a six. Do you listen to them or rely on the analysis?
Barnesian nails it
I'd suggest the difference is that you don't know if the die is weighted. You couldn't work it out last time and you are not so sure this time.
So Evens vs 5/6 might not be so great
You are stretching massively - Barnesian made it clear that it is an unbiased six-sided die.
@HYUFD - I really can't believe you are posting these posts. Firemen put out fires, train drivers drive trains and pollsters carry out polls.
If you don't drive a train you are not a train driver. Same goes for polls
Doctors are there to save lives, lawyers to win cases or complete contracts, architects to build bridges or buildings if they cannot do that then they can no longer do their job and should be sacked or made redundant.
If firemen are incapable of putting out fires or train drivers cannot drive trains they would lose their jobs.
Pollsters are just the same, they are there to forecast election results, if they cannot do that correctly they are worthless and should go bust and you may as well just pay Mystic Meg to forecast who will win the election
No. Pollsters has a specific meaning. It means someone who carries out polls. You can't just change the meaning of words because if you do nobody knows what you are talking about.
For clarity mystic meg is a pundit NOT a pollster.
The whole purpose of pollsters is to provide correct information as to who will win an election or on what the public thinks,
Based on undertaking polls.
You're hilarious though. It's so childish to take a question like 'Does X actually do polls?' (which is not even a criticism of whether they are right or not - as people have said till they are blue in the face, somebody could be totally right even without doing polls) and just ignore it over and over again because you so obviously fear conceding anything, no matter how trivial (whilst paradoxically claiming not to care what people think), even if it is a point that doesn't even matter. If you were on fire and someone told you you'd probably refuse to accept it.
I don't think I've ever seen someone so terrified of not being omniscient. You're human, HYUFD, it's ok.
I was thinking exactly this, although I doubt I could put it so entertainingly!
Comments
To make it perfect, they had taken away his two helper monkeys - and given hime the title. No more money.....
I have been offered a job which would have made me a Director. With no-one reporting to me (architecture role).
If you don't drive a train you are not a train driver. Same goes for polls
https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-people-told-to-self-isolate-stopped-from-claiming-500-grant-by-flaw-in-contract-tracing-app-12111795
I've got a 991.2 GT3 Cup now so if covid ever ends I'll go back there and smash it.
If firemen are incapable of putting out fires or train drivers cannot drive trains they would lose their jobs.
Pollsters are just the same, they are there to forecast election results, if they cannot do that correctly they are worthless and should go bust and you may as well just pay Mystic Meg to forecast who will win the election
When you say good on these guys it's the same thing as me saying good for them is it not?
If these companies can get some much needed publicity and win some business that's a win/win in my eyes.
I was reading that some reckon Perez will be off to Williams.
I wonder if we'll see more crashes than average at the circuit. My knowledge of it is very limited.
For clarity mystic meg is a pundit NOT a pollster.
But that was his last big hurdle, so it looks like he has it in the bag now.
"Winterwood" is sublime, one of the best fiction books I`ve ever read. The Butcher`s Boy excellent too.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/nov/04/fiction.patrickmccabe
Never the less 45% of people thought Salmond had won.
A number not dissimilar to the eventual Yes vote.
Black is white if it favours your candidate.
One New Mexico Democrat is already running away from what Biden said on energy.
A firemen who fails to rescue all the people in a builting is worthless and shold give up being a fireman.
A lawyer who loses a case is not fit to be a lawer.
These are all rediculous scenarios.
The job of a pollster is to give *estimates* of Voting Intention (or what ever question is asked). They will not be right all of the time but they do much better at this than an individual sitting in Epping can.
Another example is the organisation that provided weather copy for the Daily Express in recent years. Actual meteorology was not high on their list of priorities.
What about the singing canary?
Looking forward to the lockdowner remake of 'Sophie's Choice'.
So I was promoted to be a 'Corporate Operative'. Not many people can claim that.
If you carry out operations and end up making people worse then someone with alternative methods who does heal someone is clearly better.
It is no different with pollsters, they are paid to forecast elections not to simply carry out polls, if one has a better method of doing that than the other clearly it is the best and newspapers often cancel contracts with pollsters who have forecast an election wrong, Murdoch is famous for doing that with his papers as he correctly believes in judging by results
https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1319590708576223232?s=20
My geography isn't great, but I think that is in Texas.
The Operative : You know, in certain older civilized cultures, when men failed as entirely as you have, they would throw themselves on their swords.
Dr. Mathias : Well, unfortunately, I forgot to bring a sword.
[the Operative pulls out his sword]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AdArivRqXI
Predicting the future is hard. And yet it can appear easy. In a two-outcome situation one of the outcomes has to happen, so a random guess will predict the correct outcome half the time.
Polling seeks to improve upon that by using statistical principles. By looking honestly at the data they can work out where they went wrong and attempt to come up with better solutions for the fundamental problem of not being able to observe a random sample from the electorate.
Simply guessing, or always giving the same answer, is competitive because prediction is difficult - but it can never improve. The polling can.
That's why it's important to distinguish between the two, and why you should pay more attention to one than the other.
That can't be right, can it?
https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/1319410876609368065?s=20
There is a bet on the throw of an unbiased six-sided die.
If it doesn't come with a six, you get evens. A good value bet - yes? You take it.
Someone in the crowd, - let's call them Trafalgar - says "It's going to be a six!"
The die is thrown. It comes up six. You lose.
Four years later, a similar bet is offered. Evens that it won't be a six. Analysis shows that that the chances that is won't be a six are 5/6 so evens is still a value bet.
But someone on a blog points out that Trafalgar got it right last time and is still saying it will be a six. Do you listen to them or rely on the analysis?
I have had all kinds of problems with the Monty Hall Goats thing too btw, so free tutorials always welcome
Never mind non-manager managers, the one that really makes me laugh are non-director directors. Have seen (and worked for) several companies who get a bit giddy with the job titles and end up with Directors as subordinates of Directors. Only the guy at the top sits on the board and has the actual responsibility, the others just sound a bit daft.
*Why* does your method of prediction work?
Forgot all about the debate.
The poling is clear though I note – a big win for Joseph R. Biden Jr.
https://twitter.com/Politics_Polls/status/1319497720244162560?s=20
Banks is claiming is is another libel as he has never been convicted of anything.
I would delete if I were you.
So Evens vs 5/6 might not be so great
Wind power, on the other hand, is in the sell-me-all-you-have state. Firms that do the work are booked out.
Alot of the supply chain and contracting companies are grabbing the work with both hands. Rough necking is quite applicable to wind installation etc.
Anyway getting back to the original point do you think Trafalgar carry out polls (assuming we all agree what a poll is ie not a bowl of spaghetti).
Texas (1,609,075)
North Dakota (461,531)
New Mexico (248,958)
Oklahoma (200,685)
Colorado (177,817)
Alaska (174,800)
California (169,166)
Wyoming (87,955)
Louisiana (48,841)
Utah (37,063)
So I think last night will have ensured Trump wins Texas again but not much more than that
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/oil-production-by-state
What does matter is the trend, and the comparison with previous, assuming the electorate hasn't changed too much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_debates
And of course they have Annacott Steel.....
My thinking is GBP/EUR approaching 1.25 and GBP/UDS flirting with 1.40 but others may have better insight.
You're hilarious though. It's so childish to take a question like 'Does X actually do polls?' (which is not even a criticism of whether they are right or not - as people have said till they are blue in the face, somebody could be totally right even without doing polls) and just ignore it over and over again because you so obviously fear conceding anything, no matter how trivial (whilst paradoxically claiming not to care what people think), even if it is a point that doesn't even matter. If you were on fire and someone told you you'd probably refuse to accept it.
I don't think I've ever seen someone so terrified of not being omniscient. You're human, HYUFD, it's ok.
I believe people acting out of enlightened self interest is a positive and a win/win.
And struggling businesses getting cheap publicity is a very good thing not a bad thing.
You may consider businesses acting smartly to be cynical, I do not. I hope they do well. If they give free food to children and get paid for custom from parents or others then all the better.
My 2 are actually the same author. Rendell writes under Vine for her deeper 1st person narrative psychologicals.
What I like is the deceptively skillful prose and story telling. The horror creeps up on you without you noticing and you often end up relating to the deranged protagonist because she makes the weird seem oddly rational.
Also many are set in my part of London and you can read one in a couple of days.
It is cheaper now, without subsidies to build and maintain wind turbines than it is to dig out and burn coal.
Plus wind is getting more and more economical annually as turbines become bigger and more efficient.