Not at you! I’m so broken that I recoil in horror at jman simply posting facts, it is just a function of absolutely everything going wrong for 4+ years. I agree with you completely.
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The upshot needle is going to do serious psychological damage itt on election night. Myself included.
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That’s our disadvantage though. As poker players we really super remember all the times we’ve lost those 90/10’s, but we forget all the much more frequent times our 90/10’s have held.
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Speak for yourself, I used to have a HEM database that showed I had run 350 BI’s under EV over 1.5m hands. Really should have put that on the cloud so it didn’t die with that hard drive lol.
Thankfully it was a lot of hands and I was still profitable. Still, when you’ve had the experience of running like shit over the long run…
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AI EV? If so, that’s brutal.
Yeah it wasn’t a good time. I wasn’t sad when BF ended it all. I wasn’t playing on FT at the time thank fuck.
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This is where I’m at, I think.
I remember reading once that human beings aren’t meant to process suffering on such a grand scale. We didn’t evolve the mental tools for it - why would apes ever know/care about what is going on in a different forest?
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They got rid o[f the needle. Live-modeling the election night results is going to be basically impossible. There are no priors for an election where the vast majority of one candidates votes are coming in at a different (but variable) time for the vast majority of another candidate’s votes. With no priors, there is no way to model.
Yup. I don’t know if this is the thread for it, but I’m going to post 2 election night memories. One from 2016 and one from 2008 (that I actually wrote in 2008). Going back and reading the 2008 memory was very pleasant.
2016:
I was ramped up and thought a Clinton win was in the bag. The difference between me and many people here is that I actually believed she’d be a good president - I wasn’t just a reluctant supporter. I had a bottle of fancy beer (Cantillon Fou Foune) chilling in the fridge, ready to be popped when the race was called.
One of my kids had gymnastics that night, so I was sitting on some metal bleachers inside a smelly gymnasium.
I had the Needle open on my phone, and it was just jittering away. I don’t remember what the number was when I sat down, but I do know that the jittering wasn’t symmetric. It was just relentlessly bouncing around with a downward trend. And I was getting more worried and worried and disgusted as the practice went on. And I didn’t have anyone to talk to or complain to, I just sat there slowly accepting that things were going to shit. By the time I got home, I’m guessing that the Needle was in the range of 30-50% (no idea really), but I was convinced that only a miracle was going to result in a win. And I just sat there miserably watching results come in. I can’t remember ever feeling as shell shocked as I did the next morning.
2008:
[I wrote this on another site in 2008, just after the election. Grant Park is the Park in Chicago where Obama gave his victory address. Earlier in the evening, I had taken my 2-year old daughter into the voting booth with me to vote for Obama.]
I went to Grant Park Tuesday night [Election night]. As background, I hadn’t planned on going at all. We live just a few blocks south of the park and in the days leading up to Tuesday had been told that street parking would be eliminated due to the rally. [Fortunately, this turned out to be untrue.] Additionally, we were told that the gas lines would be shut down due to bomb concerns. So it was clear that this was expected to be a big deal.
On Tuesday, I was a little concerned about how I’d get home from work. I work near Hyde Park (quite close to Obama’s house) and live near Grant Park, so it seemed that I’d be trying to move between two very active locations. The major road connecting these locations is Lake Shore Drive (which, by the way, provides a beautiful view of the Chicago skyline on the way home), which was scheduled to shut down between 6 and 7 pm. When I got on Lake Shore Drive, I was very underwhelmed – traffic didn’t seem unusually high. When I got off Lake Shore and got within a mile or two of Grant Park, I was surprised that there didn’t seem to be much activity. Street parking was crowded, but I still found a spot. So all signs pointed to this not being a big deal. Certainly not in comparison to other Grant Park events, like the Taste of Chicago or Lollapalooza.
After dinner, I was watching the election results on TV and chatting with a friend via email. He basically suggested I was an idiot for not walking down to Grant Park to see what was likely to be a historic event. So I decided at around 9:45 that I’d take the dog for a walk to see what was going on. At this point in time, street parking was completely unavailable. [As I was walking out the door, someone parked in front of the fire hydrant directly in front of our house.] As I started walking north, it was soon evident that something was going on – there was consistent foot traffic going in the same direction I was. Not mob-like, but there were substantially more people walking on the streets than there normally are when I walk the dog at night. And they were all headed in the same direction.
We passed a condo building at 13th and Indiana, just south of the southernmost part of Grant Park, and heard some hooting and hollering coming from the balconies. When we got to Roosevelt (12th street, and the southern border of Grant Park), things started getting crowded very quickly. Michigan Avenue (running North-South and providing the western border of Grant Park) was open to traffic, but it was moving very slowly. There was an enormous number of people walking around and standing and talking. It seemed that people were generally moving north, but at this point I wasn’t headed anywhere in particular, so I just moved with the flow. I should point out that it wasn’t uncomfortably crowded and I was still letting the dog walk around rather than carry him. (He’s a small dog.)
A few blocks further north, I got to the Hilton Hotel, which seemed to be the focal point for a ton of people. The front of the building had Red, White, and Blue beams of light pointing upward and there were a lot of black, official-looking vehicles in front. I suspect this was where Obama and/or Biden were staying before they came out in public, but I never saw any actual confirmation of this.
At this point, I was just standing there, taking everything in. It was unlike any crowd I had ever experienced. My wife expressed concern about safety when I told her I was going (and I was initially concerned, as well), but it didn’t feel remotely unsafe when I was actually there. People were just… happy. I didn’t see any evidence of anger or irritation, even though people were bumping into one another all over the place. (I only saw one obviously drunk person, but he seemed good-natured and didn’t seem to bother too many people.) A substantial percentage of people were just walking around and taking pictures (I was, too, but they all turned out crappy.) For whatever reason, several people wanted to take pictures of my dog. There were spontaneous outbursts of “Obama” and “we did it” all around me. It was great just to be in an environment where so many people were so outwardly pleased. [This happiness was occasionally prompted by someone else. For example, one car drove slowly up Michigan Avenue with a well-endowed woman standing up through the sunroof, shaking her rump. That got some cheers.]
I ultimately didn’t see Obama or Biden. I was able to catch bits and pieces of Obama’s speech, but I didn’t hear the whole thing, nor did I see any big screen TVs showing him. So that part was disappointing. But I did get to see the crowd react. Again, this was a happy crowd with an attitude of “We won and we’re proud of our guy”, rather than “We beat the other guy and we’re happy because we hate the other guy”. [I don’t want to overstate this, though. When Obama mentioned McCain’s service in his speech, the crowd near me was mostly quiet. Some of the news reports I saw suggested that they were cheering for McCain, which I think is a stretch. I think it’s more accurate to say the crowd showed respect for McCain rather than enthusiasm.]
I saw one comment (maybe on TMF?) that suggested that some were irritated by television coverage of the event, specifically the focus on the black population in Grant Park. The demographics were mixed, both in terms of age and race. If the comments are correct and you were watching television, you might have gotten the impression that the crowd was primarily black. That would be a mistaken impression. However, in my opinion and in my experience around me, the story was black. The younger college-aged white kids were happy, yes, but when I think of the individuals that I saw, the ones that will leave a memory were black, especially the older black people. They didn’t just have smiles on their faces – everyone was smiling. The people that I’ll remember had tears in their eyes. They were the ones on their cell phones saying, “ We did it.” There seemed to be another layer of emotion in addition to just “we’re happy”.
Being there was such a great feeling, even though I never got close to seeing Obama or Biden. I wasn’t sure how to characterize it, but when I saw what Nate Silver wrote on fivethirtyeight.com, I thought it captured my feelings pretty well (he is writing about his experience in DC):
“What I actually found upon leaving the studio, however, was a spontaneous display of joy in the Nation’s Capital. Mere blocks from the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, in a buttoned-down section of America’s only remaining buttoned-downed town, horns were honking in a ticker-tape stream until three in the morning, and strangers black, white and otherwise were hooting and hollering and giving one another thumbs-ups and high-fives as they passed each other on the street.
There was no sense of anger, or rivalry, no sense that the enemy had been vanquished. There was, rather, a tremendous sense of empowerment in the notion that someone more like them was going to take up residence down the street: someone younger, someone blacker, someone poorer, someone who knew that the majesty of America exists not just in the tranquility of its small towns but also in the bustle of its cities.”
I ended up spending about two hours walking around and I’m pretty glad I went. My dog was pretty damn tired, though.
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Philly definitely isn’t Midwestern. Western PA, sure.
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I mean if 2016 and 2018 don’t convince you about Florida I don’t know what will. Especially 2018. Dems should have cruised easily that year. Deshitface should not be Governor. Rick Scott should not be a senator and our path to retaking the senate this year should have been that much easier. Yet literally the only statewide election that went to a Dem in a blue wave year was Ag Commissioner and here we are.
It’s been said before but it bears repeating: Repubes have pounded “SOCIALISM!” and “COMMUNISM!” into the heads of enough Cuban and Venezuelan expats for long enough that it’s stuck. It was bound to happen. Polling bears it out. And we won’t fight back. We won’t paint them as fascists even when they walk around with actual swastikas and other Nazi paraphernalia and scream “White power!” right into the camera because we are a bunch of goddamned eunuchs down here and deserve what we’ve gotten since we gave Jeb! a second term.
The sea can’t claim this peninsula soon enough.
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I was the one who made the new thread title, and it was done sarcastically FYI.
Not sure if it has any effect this late in the game, but also:
The DJIA is down 1800 points in the last two weeks.
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SEE OBIDEN SOCIALISM IS BAD FOR THE ECONOMY HERP DERP
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I think Trump is gonna get curbstomped on Tuesday (literally, with any luck.) Let me enjoy my last 6 days of optimism. Enough unskewing the polls itt. Leave that to the deplorables.
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Watching the FL returns go to shit in 2016 was gut wrenching, topped only by PA collapsing. I think PA was the first rust belt state to fall apart or was MI first?
Did you still drink that beer on election night 2016?
But I came here to panic 
Eta Iowa is going blue imo
Nah, I don’t think it’s that, a Biden win has been priced in for months. It’s COVID and no stimulus.