• 16 Posts
  • 180 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • 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.












  • 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.








  • Don’t get complacent.

    This was a good start. But then you finished by giving loads of reasons to remain complacent.

    Polticial polls have to adjust for turnout and that is extremely difficult to get right. But it is a nailed on guarantee that Trump fans will turn out. Dems should be worried that the polls (in general, not just this one) are very close. Biden’s presidency has been somewhat better than expected from a progressive perspective but is still too beholden to the kind of Dem that lost it in 2016 by appealing solely to rich people instead of the tens of millions of voters with no one to vote for. They will struggle to enthuse the people they need to enthuse and that is showing up in the polls.

    Don’t get complacent. Don’t push narratives that encourage complacency.


  • Still haven’t had it

    You almost certainly have. A substantial minority never develop symptoms. It’s one of the things that makes it spread so easily. If it made everyone very sick they’d all be safely tucked up in bed and not spreading it.

    There is no useful answer to your question. Some people develop symptoms very quickly, some people are asymptomatic for a period, others remain asymptomatic throughout.

    If you think you’ve been exposed and you could put others at risk, do a test. False positives are common but they’re better at picking up people who are very infectious so that’s something.

    If you want to know if you’ve had it, there are antibody tests which check for antibodies from infection rather than vaccination. (Example for information, not a personal recommendation.) They’re not 100% accurate but a positive is most likely a true positive, given that the vast majority of people have had it by now. They test for two types of antibody, IgM and IgG. IgM should only show up during or immediately after recovery from an infection, IgG turns up later in the course of an infection and sticks around after recovery.