The “old idea” is actually baked into one of the parameters of the new model. It’s why I said the old hypothesis “was not in line with observation” rather than being “wrong”. It predicted some trends correctly, but failed to predict many others. Like all science, it needed to update as we gathered more info.

The “new” hypothesis also isn’t perfectly predictive of viral evolution, but it’s more accurate with the observed spread of other diseases. Like all models, it’ll get replaced eventually by something more powerful. Likely sooner rather than later specifically because COVID put a spotlight on a lot of holes in the idea.

If this had a soundtrack it would be dial-up tones

Certainly not as egregious as some of the news coming out of Thomas’ and Alito’s camps, but this is still not a great look. Seriously, how hard is it to at least maintain the appearance of impartiality as a SC Justice? Can’t they write books to enrich themselves after their tenure?

Cat.

So I hope I don’t come off as too aggressive or anything here, I just want to combat as much of the classic Reddit misinformation while this space is still small

the huge number of independents is everyone saying that they don’t want to be pigeon holed into anything online

That isn’t how a Gallup poll works. It’s a randomized phone survey with elected participation. Now obviously there’s inherent self-selection bias with any such survey, but it’s still at least an indicator of trends. This type of poll is the best for assessing party sentiment, which is what the subject of the article is about and what my original comment was addressing.

We’ll never know how many Rs we’ve lost to the pandemic either

I don’t understand why people started thinking this? States may have done a bad job reporting cause of deaths, but the death still gets reported. Like… do people think there are a ton of unmarked graves in Florida or something?

Excess deaths modeling over 2020-22 means it’s pretty easy to figure out how many people died in the pandemic. Whether those people were R voters can be reasonably predicted from county/demographic makeup, such as this study here..

But to your point, if all we care about is who votes for whom in 2024, we can just survey that too. And surveys from basically every site, R or D funded, have the race at a dead heat with Biden only slightly edging out Trump.. Now as we learned in 2016, polls can be very, very wrong, but they’re really all we’ve got at this juncture.

Again, hope you don’t read this as aggressive, I just want people to be better informed and stop listening to blog posts like they’re legitimate truths.

I like the enthusiasm, but the easy legal argument here is that he was never convicted of any of these crimes. I don’t think there’s a single justice who would entertain this notion without that backing.

I like how Knowing Better went from “general history” to the “slavery and cults” guy. Dude has found his calling.

Love FTL- one of the most unique takes on rogue-lites I’ve ever seen.

Nothing was more frustrating than trying to win hard with Stealth C

For the uninitiated, check out this YouTube channel to really see just how horrid blockchain games can get.

Biden has had a couple victories, but they’re difficult to conceptualize into headlines. Things like confirming federal judges and jobless rate reductions. Many people, left and right, see his presidential accomplishments as lukewarm at best. Compare that with the current R headlines, striking down affirmative action, student loan forgiveness, and abortion, expanding the “right to refuse service” based on orientation, and future hearings which will likely further strip protections for LGBT people. These are MASSIVE conservative platform victories that have been campaigned on for decades, literally since the civil rights bill. I don’t think it can be stressed enough just how much red meat is in these few rulings for the conservative base. Couple that with stubborn inflation and negative real wage growth, Dems are looking at a very steep hill next year. Counterpoint, Dems have managed to embolden their younger base to mitigate midterm damage. But morale for this base is likely low given the student loan fiasco, LGBT rights, and a difficult economy.

Trump specifically is looking at two major challenges: legally, he has to avoid sentencing before the election. This will likely be something of a cakewalk for the guy. His federal case is currently being overseen by an openly biased judge who previously ruled in his favor on no basis other than “he’s a former president and should get special treatment”. Even with higher courts excoriating this particular justice, they are not likely to change their rulings this time. State charges are more difficult to dodge, but ultimately he will have fall guys and plea deals to fall back on in most if not all of these cases. A majority of Americans see these cases as political attacks anyway, not unbiased justice, so it’s unlikely these even hurt him in the polls.

The more poignant challenge in my opinion is in winning back independents and moderate Rs. He’s the front runner currently for the nomination, but it’s undeniable his antics wore thin on independents. He ran a divisive campaign and a divisive presidency and, well, it divided people. There’s no walking back some of the horrid opinions or outright lies he espoused. And there’s no hiding how ravenous hard conservatives have become in general for extremism and he and DeSantis are in a race to the bottom on appealing to this base. Time will tell whether independents hold their noses again and vote for him over Biden or another conservative in the primary.

Personally, I don’t see a world where he doesn’t win the primary and face off against Biden in the general. No world where the courts actually pin something to him either. If you don’t want to see another Trump presidency, swing state independents are gonna be your best shot.

Who is this woman and why is she always right about everything

Fair enough- losing a whole platform is the reason a lot of us are here.

Though I do think that smaller instances with flightier admins are going to experience this issue more frequently. This leaves exclusive communities in the lurch for discoverability if the admin pulls the plug. I’m no server admin expert so I have no idea if this is even a thing, but it’d be cool if communities could choose to be hosted under multiple instances at once. Even just one “secondary” instance that only retains a portion of the activity would help, both with engagement and keeping reposts low.