techwooded

The main crux of the “Biden is too old” criticism though wasn’t the actual age number, it was that he wasn’t mentally all there, which was on display constantly. Bernie always comes off as put together and his speeches are well executed. Biden’s issue was that he sounded less put together than Trump which was impressive in its own way

The problem with exit polling, as with the problem with polling in general (exacerbated by the modern age), is that they’re voluntary. The simplest explanation is that a higher percentage of women answered the exit poll than men. Or that women who voted for Trump were less likely to answer the poll. Or the people lied when they answered the poll.

There can also be statistics reasons for it too. Not knowing the methodology behind how this was collected, but you can also have selection effects. If I’m trying to run a statistical analysis on a population, I want as many respondents as possible to reduce the error and deviation, but I also have to operate with limited funds. Be much more efficient to post a few people up in higher density places like cities that tend to vote more blue anyways than having pollsters scour the backroads of Wyoming, for example, where I would wager a higher percentage of women voted for Trump.

In the end, don’t put too much stock in pre-election polls, and definitely don’t put too much stock in exit polls. Think about it like this, if you got a phone call from a random number, would you pick up and answer questions about how you vote in such a controversial election? If the answer is no, then you know why polls aren’t accurate

Not very up on biology, so not sure if this would even be a thing, but I would say some kind of internal structure like plants allowing animals to overcome the square-cube law

I may be one of these people. At least for the more obscure places, the highway pullouts and national forests and things, if I see another person parked there, I’ll typically park next to them. Safety in numbers, the more people parked in a turnout, the more legitimate it looks to park there

Don’t forget that these restrictions also apply to the Americans living in Guam, American Samoa, and the US Virgin Islands, as they all have the same status as Puerto Rico. It’s interesting too because citizens of the 50 states can vote absentee from other countries, and American Astronauts have voted from space. That would make Puerto Rico, Guam, US Virgin Islands, and American Samoa the only places in the universe an American can’t vote for President

As other have said, housing, at least in the US, has always been seen as an investment, and investments are supposed to appreciate in value. It is difficult to sell to political bases that one of two things must then be true: 1) People who bought houses 20+ years ago will have to lose equity on the house which they potentially were relying on for some amount of retirement, or 2) The government will have to step in and fill the gap (a la systems similar to agricultural subsidies). Neither of those things would you be able to sell to a wide enough base that they could be acted on.

In the end, this was caused by two things. On a practical level, prices continued climbing while wages stagnated over the past 40 years. On a more philosophical level, I personally don’t think that necessities such as housing should be commodified.

This also brings up the fact that single family homes, the predominant home type in the US, are not good from an environmental standpoint or an urban planning standpoint. It would be better to convert into duplexes and such. In the end, I agree that buying a home is way too much, but in the long run it may be good that the market is pushing more people towards lower impact forms of housing

This is interesting. I’ve been wanting to sign up for something like this, Incogni, or DeleteMe for a while, but haven’t done any research yet

I think I recently saw an article about a trial of the 32-hour work week in the UK that most of the companies ended up sticking with.

I work at a smallish company that has to be really precise with how much time is charged to specific (mainly government) programs, but there’s a lot of downtime. I think this would really help.

John Maynard Keynes, basically the founder of modern, macroeconomic theory predicted in 1930 that his grandchildren would only be working 15 hours a week. Ironically, up until the 80’s in the US, average work hours per employee per week was trending down and had it continued would have gotten as low as 15 by now (I think, can’t perfectly recall the trend line)

Depends on band somewhat for me. I guess preference overall is digital, but I’ve always bought Wilco albums in vinyl for some reason and I’ve always bought Mountain Goats albums on tapes due to his history with the format

Main problem with this is that unemployment isn’t handled by the IRS, it’s a program under the Department of Labor and administered by the States and federal agencies notoriously don’t talk to each other.

There’s also nothing wrong with just giving them unemployment benefits, but you structure your tax system so that the rich people, when they end up needing to claim unemployment, are paying more or equivalent in taxes paying into unemployment than they’re getting in the payout. You simplify both sets of laws, the IRS is in charge of collecting revenue and the subdepartment of Labor tasked with this only has to worry about dishing out your cash so the administration of the benefit is simplified, and you still get your desired result of exceedingly well off people not “dragging” the system

Would just like to pop in here and say that terms like “millionaires” and “billionaires” typically refer to net worth/wealth, not income. This is why Jeff Bezos was able to claim some of the federal COVID aide because, despite being a multi-billionaire, his income in that year was below the threshold (I think it was sub-$100k) as income from investments didn’t qualify under the structure of the plan.

While I don’t necessarily disagree with the sentiment of people whose net worths are upwards of a million being able to claim unemployment, actually calculating net worth is extremely difficult to do, especially among the wealthy. That would put an unreasonable burden on the unemployment benefit system that would probably end up costing more in administrative costs than the money saved by not including to the ultra-wealthy in the benefit. Preventing the latter is the main benefit of universal programs

About time in my opinion, but “later next year” sounds to me like this will be iOS 18. Hopefully I’m wrong with that though