https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/its-way-too-soon-to-count-trump-out/

«Nor has it been that uncommon, historically, for polls to shift fairly radically from mid-August until Election Day. Furthermore, there are some reasons to think the election will tighten, and President Trump is likely to have an advantage in a close election because of the Electoral College.

That, in a nutshell, is why the FiveThirtyEight presidential election forecast, which we launched today, still has Trump with a 29 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, despite his current deficit in the polls. This is considerably higher than some other forecasts, which put Trump’s chances at around 10 percent. ….

If these numbers give you a sense of deja vu, it may be because they’re very similar to our final forecast in 2016 … when Trump also had a 29 percent chance of winning! (And Hillary Clinton had a 71 percent chance.) So if you’re not taking a 29 percent chance as a serious possibility, I’m not sure there’s much we can say at this point, although there’s a Zoom poker game that I’d be happy to invite you to.»

https://twitter.com/AndyRichter/status/1293341784894869504?s=20

This seems right.

Andy Richter (@AndyRichter) Tweeted: Not only will Senator Harris be the first Black, Indian, and HBCU-educated woman on a national major party presidential ticket, according to my time line she’ll also be the first anarchist-communist-socialist-centrist-corporatist-cop

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10158574357532179&id=698227178

Someone in Facebook points out that our grandparents lived with infections disease and maybe we should, too.

Thing is, (a) this was entirely preventable, and (b) living w/the threat of death from polio, flu, smallpox, mumps and actually losing loved ones to those was terrible, and people took steps to avoid it. Like not swimming or going to theaters during outbreaks.

«If there were a concerted push to REALLY clamp down for a month or so to snuff this thing out, I’d be 100% on board.  But it’s not looking like that’s going to happen due to lack of leadership and a widespread misunderstanding of what “freedom” means, so the risk seems likely to just stay high here in the US until there’s a vaccine.»

https://twitter.com/generativist/status/1292187008194891777?s=20

Yiiikes.

🤔 (wannabe) Ƀreaker of (the Bad) Loops 🤣 (@generativist) Tweeted: If you rebooted The Minority Report but dropped the magic psychics and replaced them with really high variance computational models, you would need to change very little else.

Sina (@rejectionking) Tweeted:
@generativist i would love to see what hacking looks like in that type of world – a weird blend of data science, machine learning, and exploitation https://twitter.com/rejectionking/status/1292276314037075969?s=20

🤔 (wannabe) Ƀreaker of (the Bad) Loops 🤣 (@generativist) Tweeted:
@rejectionking Shhhh

https://twitter.com/QasimRashid/status/1292279431101390855?s=20

Agree.

Qasim Rashid for Congress (@QasimRashid) Tweeted: This is a horrid take. USPS isn’t “losing billions” annually—its burdened w/paying for 75 years of future retirement benefits USPS has a 91% favorability b/c Americans recognize its the lifeblood for millions of small businesses & tens of millions of people in rural America

https://www.thecut.com/2017/03/the-reason-comic-sans-is-a-public-good.html

Interesting. The best commonly-available font for dyslexic readers, which includes 15% of Americans.

(Another link from the Twitter conversation (thank you, @elizaorlins, @nadinevdVelde) I got the above from: https://bdatech.org/what-technology/typefaces-for-dyslexia/.)

https://apnews.com/7e660cd8c172fca5cd49e703d74f92fc

«The felony criminal mischief charges are more serious because they carry a gang enhancement.»

Well, THAT set off some alarm bells. (1990s-era law, aimed at… “gangs”, of course, which, in the 90s, were composed mostly of… Black people, right? Because cracking down was seen as the way to solve the problem.)

https://twitter.com/chinchilla1970/status/1289538896720781313?s=20

Ruby Bridges is on Instagram. 🙂

(That’s awesome.)

Hannah Beachler (@chinchilla1970) Tweeted: A Thought: Can we stop showing Black and White pictures of the entire decade of the 1960s so people stop thinking it was 1000 years ago. I’m two years younger than the Civil Rights movement. And Ruby Bridges lives down the street from me and is on Instagram. https://t.co/fSehcODE3d

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(20)30228-5/fulltext

Hippocampus. We’re all going to be like that guy in Memento, aren’t we, just tatooing ourselves with ballpoint pens just to get through the day.

Wait. Shanghai Sailing Program? WTH is THAT?? Sounds so innocuous it’s scary, like “Mandela United Football Club”

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/2020/08/05/iowa-governor-kim-reynolds-signs-felon-voting-rights-executive-order-before-november-election/5573994002/

So. Even some Republicans can get on board with the concept of fair play.