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Stupor Bowl

As an avid follower of both sports and excessive drawn out metaphors, it occurred to me that this election cycle is almost perfectly mimicking the 2016 playoffs and super bowl. On one side, we have a guy a lot of pundits dislike for being ‘childish’ and ‘immature’ but who seems to attract a great amount of support and fanbase from people sick of the stodgy, uptight culture of the NFL.  He has an unorthodox approach that works for him, but you’re not sure it’s going to be viable in the long term.  Still, he managed to get past the young faced pretty boy, and a guy that made a lot of plays from the gun while barking out strange phrases that could have hidden meanings.  The closeted gay man who everyone expected to beat him managed to completely fall apart before actually challenging him, and the process to get to this point has been full of hype but the actual contests have been one sided. 

Meanwhile, you have a team whose members are associated with a breed of equine.  This team has trotted out as their candidate a wizened veteran whom is trying to get a win at the end of their career.  This person had previously suffered from a very bad situation where they probably did something illegal, but we just don’t talk about it because at this point, we don’t really care.  This veteran seems more concerned with businesses paying them to say things than is probably healthy, but we can overlook it.  However, their ability to get the team to win column has been a little shaky, and it’s clear they’re not at their best anymore.  Meanwhile, an upstart second stringer managed to get the team fired up and even got some tough wins during the season when the veteran couldn’t compete in some of the contests.  A lot of people think this upstart has some potential and carry the team far into the future, but the powers that be are having none of it, and will go with the vet come hell or high water.  That vet has had a tough time getting here, with some contests being far closer than they should’ve been.

But now the big prize is on the line, and the game starts.  They both start making mistakes, with the ‘childish’ one making far more mistakes than seems possible.  Meanwhile, the equines have realized their veteran has no ability to move the team, and so they’ve decided that it’s going have to be an aggressive defense that will drag whats left of their leader across the finish line.  The one thing that they have going for them is they have an early lead, and can play it safe.  The other trams QB occasionally shows signs of life, but is hammered into the ground by their own mistakes and a level of attack that he has not previously experienced.  The veteran isn’t fairing much better, but they are so used to this level of attack that their able to avoid making many mistakes and occasionally get something right.

At the end of the day, the veteran will emerge triumphant, but only because the team carried them.  Days after getting victory, the team will implode, as all the costs of making this push come due. 

[fenrishero]

Ignore the mess, the party’s already over.

In 2008, a man named Nate Silver came up with a radical way to predict the results of elections.  He said that polling data, which had always been regarded unreliable, could be used like a scatter plot.  If you took enough political polls about a given race, he said, then looked at the trend all those polls pointed to rather than the numbers they actually showed.  So if a bunch of polls showed a candidate leading, that candidate was probably in the lead.  If it showed them leading by a lot, then they were probably leading by a lot.  The numbers will change over the course of the campaign as things happen, but you can see where the candidate generally stands in a race.

That down there is a snapshot from RealClearPolitics.  They track the various polls, and they show you the rolling average of the last several polls in a race between candidates. That poll is the gap between Hillary Clinton (Blue) and Donald Trump (Red).  That second chart underneath is the distance between the two candidates in that rolling average.  Do you notice anything?  Maybe that Hillary has /never/ trailed Donald Trump at any point.  That, despite everything thats happened, she’s still leading him by over 6 points?  And thats with a poll from a notoriously unreliable pollster mixed in. 

Here’s all the data

Scroll down, and you see a lot of blue numbers where each poll shows Clinton leading.  The ones where she’s not are usually Fox News polls, which are notoriously biased using a technique called ‘Push Polling’.  Rasmussen uses a very outdated polling system, skewing towards older people with landline phones.  The most accurate pollster in the last Presidential cycle was PPP, the Democrats in house polling firm. SurveyUSA was the most accurate last election cycle, FYI. And if you head over to Bernie’s numbers, the numbers are roughly the same.  Coming at it from an electoral college perspective, it doesn’t get any better for Donald Trump.  There’s not enough state by state polling data available yet, but PPP has him trailing in Ohio and Florida.  Losing those two states would give the democratic nominee more than enough electoral votes to win, as explained here.

As for the notion that somehow, Hillary will be damaged by something between now and election: the GOP has been trying to destroy Hillary Clinton since 1994, and she is still standing.  She has survived scandal after political attack after scandal after ‘-gate’ du jour after scandal.  At this point, most people literally hear the words ‘Hillary Clinton’ and ‘Scandal/Investigation’ in the same sentence and they just stop listening.  You cannot attack her in any way that hasn’t been played out.  Unless it is revealed that she is a reptiloid wearing a human suit, nothing will drive her poll numbers down.

If people just show up and vote, Donald Trump will not be our next president.  Period.  If you don’t want trump to be president, you don’t need to act like crazed resistance fighters. You don’t need to attack people who support him.  You don’t need to resort to drastic measures.  This isn’t a horse race, it’s a parade: it may be loud and obnoxious, but it’s headed to a very specific ending place.

[fenrishero]

I do have a spine

I’ve been car shopping for awhile, looking to replace my old but functional car with something new.  I found a model I liked, did the research, figured out what my payment should be, and went to the dealership.

I left 2 hours later, no new car, because I felt like it was a bad situation.  And It turns out, I was right.  Everything was going fine till they brought out this little worksheet (which I now know is called a foursquare), where there is a wall of numbers and they want you to circle your target payment plan length, amount, and cash down.  The 5 year monthly payment for my target cash down?  75 dollars more a month than my most expensive estimates.  This, in spite of the fact they were giving me nearly double what I’d expected for trade-in.  Warning bells went off.  They then started trying to make me say what monthly payment would be acceptable.  I knew at the time this was a BS move, but I just gave them one close to the number they were offering, to buy myself some time to look over the sheet.  Salesman asked me to initial the lower number on his sheet, then took the sheet with him.  Every alarm in my head and gut said this was bad. Manager came back with salesman.  He tried to sweeten the deal by adding 800 dollars to my trade-in value. At that point I just decided ‘I’m not buying a car tonight. Just refuse all offers and get out of her.’  Had to wait for them to give up and give me my old keys back, because they’d ‘borrowed them’ to appraise my car and never returned them. I got caught in a standard dealer squeeze play, but I managed to get out.  I’m not mad at the dealer, though I thought I conveyed to salesperson that i was not going to be a ‘laydown’ sale.  It was a valuable learning experience, as it was my first time buying a car without someone to negotiate for me.  Next time, I know that I’ll have to be more forceful and direct when dealing with the salesman, such as stating I am not going to pay 600 dollars for the ‘magic wax’ you smeared on the car when you got it, and that I know that nitrogen filled tires are not magically better.  I will make sure they understand that while I am a people pleaser, the people i have to live with the most is myself, and letting myself get taken for 3000 bucks is not going to please me. And if, at the next dealer, they break out that sheet of obfuscation, I will inform them that if they try to show me anything on that excel spreadsheet of deceit and ask me to circle it, I’m leaving that instant.  I’m willing to pay a fair price, one that’s fair to the salesperson, the dealer and myself; If that’s not good enough, I will take my business somewhere else.

[fenrishero]

The Condo Allegory

You live in a condo in a decent part of town.  The building is old but is fairly well maintained and everyone is alright with the way things are handled there.  Then, over in the poor section of town, a massive low-income apartment complex catches fire and burns to the ground.  Deciding to try and help, your condo board takes in three of the displaced residents.  The first one of them is a quiet guy who feels out of place, but keeps to himself and does what’s asked of him, though you get the feeling he’d like to move back over to the other side of town as soon as possible.  The second is a person who people in the condo like.  They’re nice, helpful, and have always wanted to live somewhere like your condo, and would like to find work nearby so they can stay there and be a part of the community.  The third is, to put it mildly, a real jerk. He keeps weird hours, plays music loudly, leaves trash out, has weird odors coming from his apartment and is generally not someone you would choose to be around.  What’s more, he sometimes makes statements that he really doesn’t like the condo or the way it’s run, and would like to see things handled more like they were in the old apartment complex.

Now it is several months later.  The quiet guy is still quiet and withdrawn.  The nice guy is still nice and has learned all the rules and has prospects for a job. Meanwhile, the jerk has only gotten worse.  He’s louder, more belligerent and still making a mess. You complain to the condo board about him, but they tell you that you’re being a jerk, claiming you don’t like the guy because he’s ‘from the poor part of town’. They point to the nice guy and say that he is what people from that part of town are really like.  In the meantime, it’s been revealed that the reason the massive apartment complex burned down was because of arson, aggravated by debris located in many of the apartments. Around this time, you and several of the other owners have noticed repairmen going in and out of the jerk’s apartment on a semi-regular basis.  It comes out that they have been repairing minor fire damage.  You personally have seen the jerk playing with matches, and another person claims to have seen him carrying a gas can into the building, though no one else corroborates this story.  You then find out that the condo board has had the fire alarms and smoke detectors in and around the jerks unit disconnected. You take your grievances to the board, but they refuse to evict the guy, saying he has nowhere else to go. At the end of the meeting to discuss this, a long time resident stands up and addresses the other residents.  You know this guy, he’s a real sanctimonious asshole and reminds you in a lot of ways of the jerk.  The asshole says that he’s decided to run for condo board in the next election cycle. He’s stated that he’s found a way to deal with the jerk, but it will involve kicking all three of the displaced people out.  People don’t want to get rid of the nice guy, but people are really frightened of the jerk, so they begin supporting the asshole.