jocanib @ jocanib @lemmy.world

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16

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214

Joined

2 yr. ago

The criticisms of these polls is broadly correct. But I'm not sure I agree with the conclusion.

Nate Silver was bitterly attacked for weeks before the 2016 election for giving Trump a 20% chance of winning when most other (mainstream) pundits were giving him ~1%. It was bizarre to watch; they might as well have straight up told people not to bother voting.

It was Dem complacency that lost that election and thinkpieces like this do little but encourage more complacency. Trump fans will turn out. Biden-haters will turn out. People who would otherwise be holding their nose and voting for Biden will only turn out if they believe it matters. As they would have in 2016 if they'd known Trump had a realistic chance of winning.

Dems should be thanking biased Republican pollsters because Biden will only win this if a big chunk of eligible voters realise that they're going to have to hold their nose and vote for him.

Cork insulation would usually be skimmed over with plaster. You could have a look at insulatiing plaster too, but I think that needs to be thicker than cork to work well. Less munchable by critters though.

In an old building, you need to use breathable insulation, breathable plaster, and breathable paint (and breathable mortar, if you're repointing the outside). The moisture needs an escape route.

Jewish fascism, not Nazism.

Nazism is, in part, defined by its anti-semitism and, while many of Israel's supporters are anti-semitic (notably Christian Zionists but also those who insist that 'real' Jews support Israel regardless) it's just not appropriate to identify Nazism as the form of fascism practiced by Israel. It is authoritarian and supremacist but it is not specifically Nazi.

Ur-Fascism is a good read.

It's not supposed to help you spell the word? It's a comment on the danger of assuming things.

Executives likely to use such a device aren’t using public transit.

Yes they are. Probably not in the country that calls it transit, mind. And lots of people would like to be able to have more private conversations in public, whether or not they're travelling at the time.

Plus, I've seen a lot of threads over the years from gamers, or the people who have to live with them, looking for something exactly like this.

They vote for nobody. Electoral turnout in the UK plummeted from 1997 on.

Low turnout is a feature (not a bug) of neoliberalism.

Install HP Smart without permission.

I checked when I saw this story a few days ago, and there it was. I uninstalled it. Today it asked for permission to install itself again. I suppose at least this time it asked and could be refused.

Stochastic terrorism is spreading hatred and fear that is likely to make someone, somewhere, commit a violent act against the targets (or individuals within the targeted demographic). In this case, specific eBay employees were told to target this specific couple to shut them up. I don't know how precise the instructions were but the targets, and the people told to target them, were not random.

The fact that there was invisibilised third party access to the accounts used as the basis for prosecutions is important in and of itself. But I'm not seeing much about the underlying reasons for it.

Fujitsu knew that Horizon didn't work properly before it was rolled out to the Post Office. They were told by their own engineers that parts of it had to be rewitten because they were so shoddy. They chose, instead, to have a team of people correcting errors in the background, without disclosing this to subpostmasters or, apparently, the Post Office.

The concern is not that Fujitsu's trouble-shooters might be deliberately falsifying accounts, there is no obvious motive for them to do so. But it does make it clear that the ramshackle system did not work properly, that Fujitsu knew that it did not work properly, and that the only errors which could be corrected were the ones that got picked up centrally, with the process for correcting them creating the potential for more human error.

Fujitsu bosses knew about Post Office Horizon IT flaws, says insider

There's an interesting report on the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance site also: Origins of a disaster (and long form version).

It is well-documented that the Post Office’s Legacy Horizon was a reconfigured version of a disastrously flawed parent project, the Benefits Payment Card. The impression given by three Secretaries of State to a Parliamentary Select Committee in July 1999 was that, once the BPC was thought to be irredeemably faulty by autumn 1998, all efforts were then focused on the reconfiguration into the Horizon project as we know it. But their evidence was far from complete. In late 1998 the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who had been warned of the system’s instability, was asked to decide the future of Horizon. The No.10 Policy Unit had advised on cancelling the BPC and the Law Officers had given a clear view on how the public sector might terminate the project. Blair’s steer, however, paid no heed.

Many extremely well-paid heads need to roll.

Thank you! Surprised the report didn't mention that (I was too lazy to do a search).

If he were said to be omnipotent, this would be an interesting conundrum. But he isn't so it doesn't really work?

The subhead misses out the worst stuff. How on earth?

Criminal charges still in the works, I would hope.

"Secretly"

Is this another thing that the rest of the world didn't know the US doesn't have?

Why could that possibly be?

(Hint: The answer is in the article you didn't continue reading the moment you found an excuse for inaction.)

In primary school?

The drivers in these two cases were 60 and 23, respectively. I'm not sure why this rant fits here?

Every driver was once a new driver. They all have to learn to drive on real roads. There's no way around that. The stickers are intended to encourage other cars to not harass them in situations they may already be finding stressful. They exist precisely because not-new drivers are often impatient and are prone to making the situation worse because of it. If the stickers raise your blood pressure, take a step back and give yourself a good talking to.

Driver training should be better, of course. A compulsory 1000 miles by bicycle and another 2000 on a motorbike before being allowed behind the wheel would be the simplest place to start. Cyclists and motorcyclists make safer drivers.

I'm not sure it's ever legit for the job-hunter to be paying the recruiters. It would normally be the employer.

A % commission doesn't give that much incentive to find you the very best job as opposed to the first one that will do. You're paying them a percentage but they're looking at the return per hour of work they put in. You'll come under a lot of pressure to accept the first job on offer simply because that job gives them the best return even if it is a smaller cash amount than the best job they could possibly find (if they put the time in).

Their incentives do not align well with your incentives. So best avoided, IMO.

I'm not telling you to lose hope. I'm asking people to avoid the same lazy complacency that handed Trump the presidency in 2016. Trump fans will vote. Dems have got to get the turnout to beat them.

Might be your browser.

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