Posts by Eddy Ito

Re: Time for Washington to get involved

You are of course aware that you can't legally buy a gun on the internet regardless of what the ban everything¹ crowd says, right? The sale still has to go through a FFL in your state and you still have to fill out form 4473. That's been true for quite some time since interstate sales were tightly regulated as a result of the JFK assassination.

^{1 Bloomberg and company have tried to ban everything from guns to large sodas to plastic bags and EPS fast food containers. He'd much rather give folks a list of what they are allowed to do or have.}

Re: ...and the proof is...

I haven't seen any evidence there was a monetary motive for the various DDoS attacks on the post office and Talk Talk, Dyn, or Russian banks. I also don't see them as being state sponsored. I suppose it's possible they were attacks for hire but then it's a question of who benefits from them.

Re: As far I can understand

2) The actual republican gain was +2.72%, the drop in margin didn't reflect a republican gain, it reflected votes moving to a category that they chose not to report.

Or am I completely misunderstanding this?

Seems to me that you understand perfectly. That map is pretty bogus. Have a look at York County, Virginia. It seems a bit of a stretch to say there was a Democratic shift of +3.56% when Hillary actually got a smaller percentage of the votes than Obama did in 2012. It's clearly an indicator of a shift to third party candidates but the MSM likes to pretend they don't exist.

Romney: 59.51% - Obama: 38.83% - Margin :+20.68% R

Trump: 55.22% - Clinton: 38.11% - Margin: +17.11% R

Shift since 2012: +3.56% Democratic

Re: Hmmm ...

The question is whether the it's known the cam has failed in the field. If it's discovered after the end of the shift it doesn't matter as it will have a substantial placebo effect on both the cop wearing it and the people interacting with said cop. On the other hand if it's visibly broken or flashing a "not working" signal then it's an open invitation for abuse.

Re: Push???

Undoubtedly it's someone who thinks they can fix it by doing to Sandler what was done to Jar Jar in The Phantom Edit.

Re: Talk Talk Spokesperson

Sadly the response from 98% of users is likely to be;

"Did someone mention ice cream?"

Re: @Eddy Ito - gerrymanding

Sure, there are several algorithms currently available like Brian Olson's and splitlines to name a few. It wouldn't be hard to tweak them to keep existing things like town or county boundaries stay reasonably intact.

I also didn't notice until just now RLyons comment about open primaries like we have in Cali as an attempt to minimize partisanship so I'll address it now. It's probably the worst system out there since the two top vote getters move forward to the general election as it doesn't take into account the numbers of people running and their parties. In short you could theoretically have the two least wanted candidates in the general election because the votes of the others get split. For instance, party A has 6 candidates and party B has 2 candidates. Consider what happens if each A party member gets 12% while the two B candidates get 14%. The resulting general election is between the two B party candidates even though they only amassed 28% of the vote in the primary and the other party got 72%. Hardly what one would call a non-partisan system as it would behoove party A candidates to come to an agreement outside of the electoral process about who runs which artificially limits voter choice albeit in a different manner than the current Cali system does now.

Re: why

If you're only going to listen to your own music wouldn't it be easier to just use your phone and use the usb to top up the charge?

Re: You deserve everything you vote for.

Yes this electoral race was heavy on the name calling and very light on actual policy. Sure there was some hand waving on an extremely limited number of hot button issues but otherwise there was little distinction between the two major party candidates or even the major parties themselves.

Re: Not much of a chemist then?

If it's in there accidentally it's possible the machine that makes the pellets uses a tallow based lubricant. That could be because a lubricant with a different base might have a negative reaction with the polymer, they save a nickel, or any number of other reasons like better yield, less maintenance, etc. Either way it's all speculation at this point and most importantly they've already been made so simply tossing them in the bin won't make the animal the tallow came from any better off.

I wonder if they are using E120 dye in those bills.

Re: From the article:

The problem with the polls is many don't accurately reflect the electorate and report raw numbers. Many polls I've seen lack some fundamental data such as education level. Of the polls I've seen with that data clearly over represent people with at least a bachelor's degree. For instance, the latest Emerson poll showed 47.7% of Michigan voters polled had at least an Bachelor's degree when only about 26% of Michigan residents over 25 have attained that level. The polls don't normalize for the discrepancy and this particular one had Clinton leading by 7 percent. Similar problems arise when looking at race as the poll shows 10% of respondents in NH being black but the demographics of the state show that Black or African American only make up 1.5% of the population.

It's pretty clear to me that the polls are far from the mark and any that were close are likely to be so only by chance.

Re: Texting while driving banned in 46 states

Does this help?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d8/Cell_phone_use.gif

Re: Trade War

So what's the average GDP of the USA without the "dainty snowflakes in California and New York" and large coastal cities?

It's much easier to just drop whole states rather than trying to cherry pick "large coastal cities" so if you remove the states of CA and NY as well as DC (because numbers are reported for it) the GDP per capita is $53K which is less than a 5% drop. Funny story, if you actually look at the list you'll see states like Alaska, North Dakota, Wyoming making the top 10 while California only makes 10th place if you exclude DC. If oil goes back up it wouldn't be hard to imagine California being bumped down the list, maybe not as far as 17th like it was in 2012 but certainly lower than now.

Of course it's hardly a proper metric as Florida is fairly loaded with pensioners fleeing the cold weather of places like New York which likely drags Florida's numbers down and boosts New York's up. Plus you wind up involving all sorts of things that probably shouldn't contribute due to entanglements with Federal funds like does a military base raise or lower the number. Worse it doesn't normalize the value of a dollar based on purchasing power parity which would bring some of the lofty numbers of DC and other "large coastal cities" down substantially as a dollar in DC goes only about 80% as far as it does in the nation as a whole and about 65% as far as the cheapest places in the country.

Re: That video . .

has been edited for the amusement of some people. It's clearly not Trump's voice.

Re: Gimme A Break

You may want to check your #'s.

Hillary actually won the popular vote, but lost the electoral college, and thus the election.

You may want to check what I wrote. To wit, nobody won a majority of the popular vote. Yes, Hillary may have gotten a plurality but not a majority. But this also means that more Americans voted against Hillary than for her so clearly they aren't exactly in love with her either.

Re: There is one error in that article

So badly, you'll be pining for the days of Bush 2.0. Of course that assumes that one can tell the difference since there will still be troops and fighting in, near, and around Syria/Iraq, the world economy will continue to muddle along with spurts of tepid growth and periods of contraction, more refugees will flee the war torn regions in the Middle East and Africa, and some politically minded people will get disjointed because they didn't get their way. So pretty much same shite, different day regardless of whose monkey wins.