Hello, the office I work with shares a parking lot with a planned parenthood office and for the 12 years I've worked here they have protested directly in front of our small, professional, super boring office as the planned parenthood doesn't get any cars or foot traffic passing by 🙄🙄🙄I've recently moved to a new office near the front of the building and now if I open the window I can hear them chanting and praying THROUGH MY HEADPHONES. I asked them nicely to quiet down, got ignored, threatened to call the police, screamed obscenities out the window, then actually called the police, all to no avail. I just found out my boss has even called city hall over the years and as long as they are on the public sidewalk nothing can be done. This is so annoying on any level but I'm furious as I'm working and trying to provide for my two actual alive not hypothetical children and they're fricking it up, making life worse for people not better, and I'm so opposed to everything they stand for. Any suggestions, any help?

Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/ConservativeMemes/comments/1fn6d7t/white_dudes_for_harris

@WayOut broke into my house and forced me to make these state flag marseymojis at gunpoint

Coming soon to a :marseyflagXXthumbsup: near you

!burgers !americas !flagheads

RIP Booberry. You were a good girl and I'll miss you

In Canto 20 of Inferno, Dante confronts a pit where the sinners have had their heads twisted around backwards; they trudge, naked and weeping, through puddles of cooling tears. Virgil informs him that these are the fortunetellers, who tried to look forwards in life and now must look backwards forever.

In a completely unrelated subject, how about those election pollsters, huh?

Writing for The American Prospect, historian Rick Perlstein takes a hard look at characteristic failure modes of election polling and ponders their meaning:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-09-25-polling-imperilment/

Apart from the pre-election polling chaos we're living through today, Perlstein's main inspiration is W Joseph Campbell 2024 University of California Press book, Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in US Presidential Elections:

https://www.ucpress.edu/books/lost-in-a-gallup/paper

In Campbell's telling, US election polling follows a century-old pattern: pollsters discover a new technique that works spookily well..for a while. While the new polling technique works, the pollster is hailed a supernaturally insightful fortune-teller.

In 1932, the Raleigh News and Observer was so impressed with polling by The Literary Digest that they proposed replacing elections with Digest's poll. The Digest's innovation was sending out 20,000,000 postcards advertising subscriptions and asking about presidential preferences. This worked perfectly for three elections - 1924, 1928, and 1932. But in 1936, the Digest blew it, calling the election for Alf Landon over FDR.

The Digest was dethroned, and new soothsayers was appointed: George Gallup, Elmo Roper and Archibald Crossler, who replaced the Digest's high-volume polling with a new kind of poll, one that sought out a representative slice of the population (as Perlstein says, this seems "so obvious in retrospect, you wonder how nobody thought of it before").

Representative polling worked so well that, three elections later, the pollsters declared that they could predict the election so well from early on that there was no reason to keep polling voters. They'd just declare the winner after the early polls were in and take the rest of the election off.

That was in 1948 - you know, 1948, the "Dewey Defeats Truman" election?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Defeats_Truman

If this sounds familiar, perhaps you - like Perlstein - are reminded of the 2016 election, where Fivethirtyeight and Nate Silver called the election for Hillary Clinton, and we took them at their word because they'd developed a new, incredibly accurate polling technique that had aced the previous two elections.

Silver's innovation? Aggregating state polls, weighting them by accuracy, and then producing a kind of meta-poll that combined their conclusions.

When Silver's prophecy failed in 2016, he offered the same excuse that Gallup gave in 1948: when voters are truly undecided, you can't predict how they'll vote, because they don't know how they'll vote.

Which, you know, okay, sure, that's right. But if you know that the election can't be called, if you know that undecided voters are feeding noise into the system whenever you poll them, then why report the polls at all? If all the polling fluctuation is undecided voters flopping around, not making up their mind, then the fact that candidate X is up 5 points with undecided means nothing.

As the finance industry disclaimer has it, "past performance is no guarantee of future results." But, as Perlstein says, "past performance is all a pollster has to go on." When Nate Silver weights his model in favor of a given poll, it's based on that poll's historical accuracy, not its future accuracy, because its future accuracy can't be determined until it's in the past. Like Dante's fortune-tellers, pollsters have to look backwards even as they march forwards.

Of course, it doesn't help that in some cases, Silver was just bad at assessing polls for accuracy, like when he put polls from the far-right "shock pollster" Trafalgar Group into the highly reliable bucket. Since 2016, Trafalgar has specialized in releasing garbage polls that announce that MAGA weirdos are way ahead, and because they always say that, they were far more accurate than the Clinton-predicting competition in 2016 when they proclaimed that Trump had it in the bag. For Silver, this warranted an "A-" on reliability, and that is partially to blame for how bad Silver's 2020 predictions were, when Republicans got pasted, but Trafalgar continued to predict a Democratic wipeout. Silver's methodology has a huge flaw: because Trafalgar's prediction history began in 2016, that single data-point made them look pretty darned reliable, even though their method was to just keep saying the same thing, over and over:

https://www.ettingermentum.news/p/the-art-of-losing-a-fivethirtyeight

Pollsters who get lucky with a temporarily reliable methodology inevitably get cocky and start cutting corners. After all, polling is expensive, so discontinuing the polls once you think you have an answer is a way to increase the enterprise's profitability. But, of course, pollsters can only make money so long as they're somewhat reliable, which leads to a whole subindustry of excuse-making when this cost-cutting bites them in the butt. In 1948, George Gallup blamed his failures on the audience, who failed to grasp the "difference between forecasting an election and picking the winner of a horse race." In 2016, Silver declared that he'd been right because he'd given Trump at 28.6% chance of winning.

This isn't an entirely worthless excuse. If you predict that Clinton's victory is 71.4% in the bag, you are saying that Trump might win. But pollsters want to eat their cake and have it, too: when they're right, they trumpet their predictive accuracy, without any of the caveats they are so insistent upon when they blow it:

There's always some excuse when it comes to the polls: in 1952, George Gallup called the election a tossup, but it went for Eisenhower in a landslide. He took out a full-page NYT ad, trumpeting that he was right, actually, because he wasn't accounting for undecided voters.

Polling is ultimately a form of empiricism-washing. The pollster may be counting up poll responses, but that doesn't make the prediction any less qualitative. Sure, the pollster counts responses, but who they ask, and what they do with those responses, is purely subjective. They're making guesses (or wishes) about which people are likely to vote, and what it means when someone tells you they're undecided. This is at least as much an ideological project as it is a scientific one:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-09-23-polling-whiplash/

But for all that polling is ideological, it's a very thin ideology. When it comes to serious political deliberation, questions like "who is likely to vote" and "what does 'undecided' mean" are a lot less important than, "what are the candidates promising to do?" and "what are the candidates likely to do?"

But - as Perlstein writes - the only kind of election journ*lism that is consistently, adequately funded is poll coverage. As a 1949 critic put it, this isn't the "pulse of democracy," it's "its baby talk."

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

I like to find videos of cats that have little to no views/comments and i try my best to give them praise.

1k subs community post

3k subs community post

This one is kind of sad and i was so excited to share this page with you, but then i was reading through their community notes.

I will explain:

This is Luna, a Maine coon brand cat

This orange(tabby?) Is McCoy

They were taking care of a cat that seems more of a special rescue kitty but unfortunately it passed away.

I was so sad when that hit me, as i understand these people were trying to share their kitties over gaining monetary value and shame ful videos exploiting their animals, that seems like the opposite of their true intentions, so it always gets to me personally when i take notice of whats going on in their videos.

They spent '2.5 years' taking care of Luna before she sadly passed away.

The orange cat, McCoy, is still star og the videos and i wanted to share them with toy.

Here is their first short video:

Im sorry if this was kinda sad, my intention was onky to share the cat video and i had to do a little reasearch first.

I feel like i missed something so i will edit it if i find out what it is, thank you!

#NewProfilePic pic.twitter.com/VLqJvFkrSQ

— Atlanta Falcons (@AtlantaFalcons) September 25, 2024

Poor /u/queennpink she doesn't understand what she's unveiled.

Realizing what trump did on January 6th as treason, has nothing to do with hate.

Forgiving them of their sins doesn't mean I should vote for them. I can only for one and that requires judgement. I will ask God's forgiveness on that.

I mean, one of those real humans is literally a male feminist who stole money from kids with cancer, but go off.

Sure, but forgiving someone doesn't necessarily mean trusting them again. For example, Trump plausibly SOLD NUCLEAR SECRETS TO FOREIGN ADVERSARIES and should not be trusted anywhere near the White House again

If I say Trump is a wicked ruler I'm using the same terminology that David used in the psalms. It's no virtue to be unable to name evil.

I believe that the choice is between mean tweets Trump and war crimes Kamala.

The thread is filled with way more removed comments you can probably find.

!g*mers

Another great week has come and gone. It's time to get ready for week 4.

Get ready for what could very well be a return to TNF being an boring game. Followed by 8 Early Sunday games, 4 Afternoon games, and what should be a good primetime matchup. Then we have 2 MNF games again (is this just the thing they're doing this season), which not going to lie, I don't mind having 2 games especially if one's a blowout like last week.

Thursday, a test to see if the Cowboys can lose to even one of the most mediocre teams

!mensfootball

!goomblers

@carpathianflorist

@Freak-Off

@BasicallyADoxxer will have the college slate of games as usual

Finally for anyone interested, here's a excel spreadsheet I've been using to track gambling wins/losses. Column A has the winner of their matchup (listed in the same order I list them for this thread, B is the gross Payout , C needs to be filled with a 1 if you won that bet, and a 0 if you lost. So it will be easy to track your weekly and seasonal gains/losses. Prior threads: week 1, week 2, week 3.

closed

R/Detroit Sneeding

Local TV Article/Clip: Super fans furious after Detroit 'Bridgerton' ball is a bust

Hollywood Reporter Writeup

Xitter Thread By One of the Scammed Attendees

Video of the Stripper They Inexplicably Hired as Entertainment

Two TikToks Sneeding About It

Gunshots fired into Kamala Harris' campaign office in Arizona.

Follow: @AFpost pic.twitter.com/DpPqX6FdHF

— AF Post (@AFpost) September 25, 2024

!goyslopenjoyers

Biden says Harris handled 'everything from foreign policy to domestic policy' under his administration

'Still not convinced he's not purposely trying to tank her,' one user posted on X

President Biden praised his Vice President Kamala Harris for handling "everything from foreign policy to domestic policy" under his administration as her campaign struggles to cast her as a "change" candidate and not an extension of the Biden presidency.

In an interview on "The View" Wednesday, Biden discussed Harris' credentials as his potential successor after "The View" co-host Sunny Hostin asked what advice he gave the vice president to defeat former President Trump in November.

"Be herself. Look, she is smart as heck. Number one, she's tough. She was a first-rate prosecutor…and as vice president, there wasn't a single thing that I did that she couldn't do. And so I was able to delegate [to] her responsibility on everything from foreign policy to domestic policy," he said.

https://old.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1fqt8s6/biden_says_harris_handled_everything_from_foreign/

!chuds loool

I've noticed a lot of chuds on Twitter have recently been talking about how ugly tattoos on women are and how it "ruins" them. So it made me think maybe more women should get visible tattoos to ward them off. Almost like a magic rune to scare off evil spirits

Or maybe she's giving other women bad advice on purpose idk what to think at this point

!neolibs, come and see.

Do they not realize that this will only aid people who dont really need it and only drive prices up for everything particularly housing/rental costs?