Ha, all good. I got it backwards; I thought you were saying the opposite. But yeah, makes sense.
Maybe I am just excited to argue with some internet "leftists" who for some reason have their leftism mostly restricted to activism about not voting for Biden, and nothing else. There are a lot of them here in general, but maybe they are absent currently in this thread, because they're afraid we will gang up on them
Wait, I am confused. Are we arguing? I thought Biden was doing great up until Netanyahu started killing Gazans by the thousands. He's been doing weird little half-hearted things like holding up the weapons shipments, but hauling Netanyahu to the ICC would have been a better idea.
But yes, in general, Biden's a huge improvement over the norm in a bunch of ways that for some reason aren't talked about real often, and Trump is the end of the world (for the Palestinians and other Arabs and Hispanics and a whole bunch of other minorities foreign and domestic, in addition to everyone else). I feel like we're on the same page on that, and I didn't realize when I read your first message.
Hi!
Biden tried to forgive half a trillion dollars in student debt, took the biggest action on climate change in history which is estimated to reduce emissions by 40% by 2030 if Trump doesn't undo it, strengthened the NLRB which has been giving legal backing to a lot of these union wins, grew wages at the bottom end of the pay scale even in the face of historic inflation, and a few other things.
It is also relevant that he doesn't want to end democracy in the Unites States, "finish the job" in Gaza, or fire on protestors with live ammunition, like Trump does. But if for some reason you've decided it's not allowed to make the decision on those bases (and I don't know why it wouldn't), there are also good things to say about Biden.
Oh, I mean, my bad. Rail strike worst president ever both sides amirite
Yeah, that's why I included "per unit of land." It is in practice a little more complex, and a lot of times the smaller farms are more labor-intensive.
My opinion is that modern farming is efficient enough that we can very obviously sustain the farmer, and sell the food at a reasonable price, and it all works -- the only reason this is even complicated at all and we have to talk about optimizing for labor (certainly in 1st-world farms) is that we're trying to support a bloodsucking managerial class that demands six-figure salaries for doing fuck-all, and subsistence wages for the farmers and less than that for farmworkers, and stockholder dividends, and people making fortunes from international trade; and if we just fixed all that bullshit then the issue would be land productivity and everything would be fine.
But yes, in terms of labor productivity it's a little more complex, and none of the above system I listed is likely to change anytime soon, so that's fair.
Fun fact: IDK about like a backyard vegetable garden, but small family-sized farms are actually more productive per unit of land than big industrial agriculture.
The farming conglomerates like to enforce big farming operations because they make things easier for the managerial class, and let them be in charge of everything. But if your goal is just to produce food and have the farmers make a living, small farms are actually better even economically (and not just for like 10 other reasons).
My personal opinion is that polling methodology may have overcorrected for 2020, and we're getting a picture now that's skewed right, versus left from beforehand.
I won't say that you're wrong about what the pollsters are doing -- but to me this strikes me as very obviously the wrong way to do it.
If you find out your polls were wrong, and then instead of digging into detail as to what exactly went wrong, and then fixing the methodology going forward, using non-phone polls, doing a more accurate calculation to make sure you're weighting the people who are going to vote and not the people who aren't going to vote, things like that … you just make up a fudge factor for how wrong the polls were last time, and assume that if you just add that fudge factor in then you don't have to fix all the things that went wrong on a more fundamental level, that seems guaranteed to keep being wrong for as long as you’re doing it.
Again I won't say you're wrong about how they're going about it. (And, I'm not saying it's necessarily easy to do or anything.) But I think you've accurately captured the flaw in just adding a fudge factor and then assuming you'll be able to learn anything from the now-corrected-for-sure-until-next-time-when-we-add-in-how-wrong-we-were-this-time answers.
You knew what the answers were and thats why you asked for those specific polls as a "got ya"?
Not even slightly, no. Not sure how you got from what I said. I just picked the most recent 5 elections that have happened, and invited you to find polls for them. I genuinely had no idea what the results would be (and I wouldn't have predicted that the polling results would have been so wrong, bordering on absurd.)
Not sure how you got from me being unable to use Google and you have to teach me, to now I knew the truth all along and I just withheld it from you to trick you and so that means that all of a sudden it's not the truth anymore. But good luck with things, in any case.
Dude you can't explore with me a question about the accuracy of polling and find out that the answer is that modern polling is objectively shit, which was my point all along even before I started even looking at the question, and then get all condescending about how I don't know what I'm talking about. 🙂
Well, I mean, you can if you want, I guess. I'm happy with my conclusions from the day, though, you being rude about it notwithstanding.
A million so far
But, I'm really not sure why you want to explicitly and only look at Special elections
It's fair. My point in looking at that, is to overall test the assertion that polls are indicative of how people vote. It kind of seems looking at the methodology for the OP article's poll, like if any accurate information came out of the poll about how the election would go, it would be more or less an accident (or a result of the fact that the poll and the election are both general measurements of how people feel politically overall, and not much more resolution than that.)
You could flip what you said around, and say that because the special elections are much less complex, and the polls were done much closer to the actual election than polls today about the election in November, I'd expect the polls to be much more predictive of how the election will go, than the OP article.
So, let's analyze. As you said, it's actually not that hard to find polls and results. I'll follow your lead and look at 538 (for the first three, which is all the effort I feel like investing in it).
Kinda looks like the polls have some methodology problems. I raised some plausible details for some of what those problems might be, and when we check, hey objectively do it seems like there are problems with the output? We find that, hey look, there are problems. Science!
(Incidentally, that poll for Utah claimed a margin for error of 4.26 percentage points, with the use of three significant digits of claimed resolution adding an extra layer of hilarity when it turned out their final answer was off by a factor of 267%.)
Every government in the world has good and bad in it, because every government is made of people. Different ones have different amounts; it's not like every country's government is the same or has equal good/evil levels. But sometimes people take it to the point of classifying "good ones" and "bad ones" and handwaving away the bad things that the "good ones" are doing. To me, that's not really a safe or sensible way to look at things. It's just not how things work. In my opinion.