"Will you shut up, man?" US Politics October 2020

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-biden-election-map/?cid=abcnews

re: "notindependent events."

In a recent 538 podcast they talked about that - that it's easier to imagine roughly similar states moving (or not moving) in the same direction. So if the numbers show a trend in both WI and MN, it's likelier that they're related - but you wouldn't do the same for Iowa and, say, Hawaii.

Personally (speaking as a Virginian here) I want to see more cracks in the ex-"solid south." NC, I'll be very happy. GA, ecstatic. Not daring to say anything about TX because that would approach miraculous.

If WI goes red, 62% chance of PA going red

I don't know how they're doing the math, I'm sure it's complicated, but on this new 538 tool you can see the colors of the states shift as you experiment with different outcomes:

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-biden-election-map/?cid=abcnews

In the absence of any other data/simulation:
If WI is red, PA goes to 62% Trump.
If PA is red, WI goes to 64% Trump.

So yea, I'd say the probability is pretty interrelated.

or, like symsymsym said.

xp I am no statistician but I assume caek's statement merely reflects that a situation where WI goes for Trump increases the likelihood that PA also goes for Trump and vice versa. In other words, they are independent but connected.

getting bent out of shape about cats being outdoors is so Nextdoor

Or maybe a better way to say it is that under a scenario where one state went for Trump it is likely those same events would impact the probability in the other state as well?

Thanks to these two continuing conversations I can think of nothing but Pennsylvania feral cats polling birds as to whether they should be eaten.

I'm allergic to ever living with a litterbox again so I have no skin in the game but concern about cats needlessly going outdoors to needlessly kill is entirely reasonable. It's not a neutral thing when wildlife is murdered en masse and cats will live longer/healthier lives indoors anyway.

To bring the political and the cat into conjunction, my wife an I once went to a local town meeting and while waiting for the topic we were there for to come up on the agenda, the town board began discussing an apparently ongoing feral cat problem and the language of the ordinance to address it. The town attorney kept outlining the changes to town ordinance using the phrases like "insert clause (x) before clause (y)" etc. and in the context of the feral cat discussion caused my wife to hear this as claws and she started giggling, quietly at first, then both of us, then louder, then literally crying, to the point where people in the packed meeting kept turning around to look at the two of us morons laughing uncontrollably.

i love this conversation.

apparently domestic cats are not really the problem.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/interactive-assets/nggraphics/ngm-1910-CatsVsBirds-chart/build-2019-09-04_11-29-43/ngm-assets/img/ngm-1910-CatsVsBirds-chart_ai2html-mobile.jpg

On the other hand, cats are absolutely essential to pest control, since, unlike dogs, they don't eat mouse/rat poop, just the innards, and therefore are not vectors for spreading the worst rodent borne diseases.

There was a fascinating, horrific story I read in a WWII book once. During the siege of Leningrad, people resorted to eating their pets. After they went through all the pets, they famously resorted to cannibalism, but at the same time, the bodies just kept piling up, since there was no place to put them. After a while the rats started showing up in huge numbers to feed on the corpses, further spreading disease and generally causing havoc, to the extent that after the siege was lifted they actually had to ship train cars of cats to repopulate the city to get rid of the rats.

Another intriguing use of killer cats is services that essentially rent out feral cats. The cats are captured, tagged, cared for, and, most importantly if counterintuitively, fed. Then when someone has a pest problem they rent the cats, which then hunt not for food (they've been fed) but for fun/pleasure, and when they do that they are likely to kill *more* mice, since they are not doing it for sustenance, just for sport. And then the service comes back and the cats return to their cages to be brought back to HQ.

I know it's just human nature but I always find it funny how people spend so much time trying to read the tea leaves of polls when we'll just have the actual election results soon.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-biden-election-map/?cid=abcnews

― Wayne Grotski (symsymsym), Friday, October 23, 2020 12:36 PM (thirty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

if trump wins both TX and GA his odds rise to 26%. makes me nervous!!!

I know it's just human nature but I always find it funny how people spend so much time trying to read the tea leaves of polls when we'll just have the actual election results soon.

― A True White Kid that can Jump (Granny Dainger), Friday, October 23, 2020 1:10 PM

Hating surprises is good and correct.

I mean I'm in that group who believes America & maybe the entire planet is totally fucked should he win another 4 years so what else can we do right now. there's a fucking plague and my city in particular is one of the hardest hit in the country, there's nothing for me to do but stay inside and worry about polls

Among other things, I genuinely worry about the suicide rates if Trump wins again.

fucking dying at this shit:

I forced a bot to read over 1,000 hours of QAnon theories and then asked it to write QAnon theories of its own. Here they are. pic.twitter.com/jpCkZJql0w

— Keaton Patti (@KeatonPatti) October 23, 2020

those are great!

those are all failing my anti-Turing test. clearly written by the author of the tweet

https://i.imgur.com/6mhE29h.png

this could have already happened! how would we know?

right. the outcome in WI and PA is correlated (quite strongly), so conditional on trump winning one of them, his odds of winning the other go up.

all states are correlated with each other at some level, but because demographics is a predictor of vote, states that are more demographically similar (eg. PA and WI) are more correlated.

this, btw, is why biden winning NC is almost exactly as good news as biden winning FL according to that 538 map. FL is worth more electoral votes, so it should increase biden's win probability more, but a world in which biden has won NC is also a world in which biden has won the midwest, because NC is more similar to the midwest than FL.

cats will live longer/healthier lives indoors anyway.

physically yes, but it's probably not true of their mental health. tigers live longer lives in zoos but they go nuts.

Those Q theories were all really good but I just about lost it at Eric Trump being arrested for bone crimes.

he had the bones INSIDE himself the whole time!

I forced a bot, at gunpoint, to read 1,000 hours of Qanon theories

not to mention that bones are his money. and his emails

those are all failing my anti-Turing test. clearly written by the author of the tweet

is this the first time you've encountered this Twitter account

Trump learning Bibi has the same understanding of loyalty as Trump does. You hate to see it https://t.co/dUUaHUQRuo

— 😱 Endless Zoom Meeting 😱 (@AdamSerwer) October 23, 2020

Tigers are not housecats

I mean house is right there in the name lol

you... you know that cats didn't name themselves "housecats", right?

I felt bad that my one cat loved to run outside but I wasn't ok with him being out there (if nothing else, he'd get 1000 cacti thorns in him). So I bought him a harness and leash. Put it on him wrong the 1st time and traumatized him. It's been many months so maybe it's time to try again.

They didn't??????

you... you know that cats didn't name themselves "housecats", right?

In most feline dialects, the name is Rrrooowurrr (or a close cognate). It translates roughly as "Claw-Demon."

I think if you have a decent sized abode your cat should be fine. my cat is definitely a little bit sad because he lives in such a small apartment, definitely liked it more when I lived a place with double the square footage. although he's so needy that now I'm working from home he's in hog heaven

Yeah and give them some mentally stimulating toys, play with them, etc. Though I feel like when I put treats in a treat ball my one dude is just like "ugh are you serious with this shit? This isn't a game, man. Just put them things on a dish, I'm not some dipshit bird pressing levers for rewards"

Since I'd rather talk about cats than the election, I'll add that I've lived with both indoor-only and indoor-outdoor cats, and my overall anecdotal assessment is that the cats who could go outside were a lot happier and less neurotic. (Allowing that all cats seem fairly neurotic from a human perspective, I'm sure their behavior makes sense to them.) We currently have an old-ish cat who is an indoor-outdoor cat and we would never take that away from him. BUT ALSO, he kills a lot of animals. We only know about the ones he brings inside or leaves lying on the doorstep, but I'm sure there are more. I'm OK with most of them — it's sad to see a dead baby bunny, but at the same time our neighborhood is overrun with rabbits so I'm not worried about the survival of that species. But the birds do make me feel bad. My wife and I have talked about making our next cat indoor-only, whenever our current fella moves on (hopefully not for a good while).

It's a hard call, and I think bird people/anti-cat people are way too cavalier about "Just keep them inside!," because that's basically keeping a living animal locked up in jail no matter how comfy the home is. But I do take the bird impact seriously.

Yeah and give them some mentally stimulating toys, play with them, etc. Though I feel like when I put treats in a treat ball my one dude is just like "ugh are you serious with this shit? This isn't a game, man. Just put them things on a dish, I'm not some dipshit bird pressing levers for rewards"

― A True White Kid that can Jump (Granny Dainger), Friday, October 23, 2020 12:14 PM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah, I play with my guy a lot, I chase him around the apartment, do the classic string dangling thing, make him run after me to receive his freeze dried chicken etc.

xposts that's a good explanation caek, thanks!

everyone knows cat's real names are shit like Jellybelly and Rum Tum Bastard and Ole' Heteronormativity

I built an outdoor cat lounge for a neighbor's aging indoor-only cats, it took them a while to not be scared by being outside but after a month they were happy to lounge in the summer heat and listen to birds.

My one guy is terrified whenever he's outside, crying and hiding by my legs. The other is like zoooom peace out bitch! At this point they're both too old to learn the new trick of being outdoors unsupervised. Maybe my next cat(s) I'd start from get-go as indoor-outdoor but man I'd be soooo nervous something would happen to them. That's selfish, I know.

https://i.imgur.com/yBsQERx.png

Now imagine the fun that happens should Biden win Omaha.

Cats are horrible for a ton of species that are part of ecosystems that cats don't belong in, they have no predators to keep them in check, and they've brought devastation to isolated ecosystems all over the globe. Down with (outdoor) cats.

Unless you literally have, like, a barn full of hay and need to keep the mice out.

almost every internet space i frequent is made up largely of, like, people with MAs in Library Science and fibromyalgia who are--it goes without saying--cat people, and usually it's great but I just can not get down with the "not MY outdoor cat!" bird-holocaust denialism. It's just like people whose dads are cops or landlords

Senate just voted 53- 43 Yea for Coney Barrett btw

A few years ago, when I was about to head upstairs to bed, I decided to check the back door to see if the cat wanted to come in, and he did. I opened the door and he meeped happily in greeting ... and in doing so released the live mouse that was clenched in his jaws. The mouse quickly ran around the mudroom in a panic, while the cat pounced in pursuit. It was maybe 1am and I'd had a couple of drinks and just wanted to go to bed, but I decided to just catch the thing myself and toss it back outside. I closed the door, got some container, cornered the mouse, and successfully trapped it. Then, against all good judgement, looked over at the cat who was eager to catch the mouse, and figured, what the hell, I'm in a small space, the mouse has nowhere to go ... I'll let it loose for the cat to catch again. The mouse races for the tiny broom closet off the mudroom, cat right behind it, and ... the mouse just vanishes. Me and the cat spend another 30 minutes searching this tiny, finite space for this stupid mouse that nonetheless outsmarted us both. I finally gave up and went to bed, but I could still hear the car rustling around in the closet, confused as I was.

(Cat not car)