(Postal worker or mail carrier)

The squabbling process moves the law toward meeting the needs of more people. If a dictator just gets to decide what the law is, they’ll likely be self-serving to the dictator, or even outright harmful to entire categories of people.

Stake through her heart and garlic 'round her neck

:(){ :|:& };:

And doesn’t understand LLMs, which don’t “learn” a damn thing after the training is completed. The only variation after that is random numbers and the input it receives.

I only have so many minutes to spend on this plane of existence, so if I look through something and decide “this isn’t enough to go anywhere”, then no, I’m not going to spend more time on it. I’d be happy to be wrong and see Trump and his cronies get brought down by a ragtag group of statisticians who found the truth and didn’t give up until justice was served, but I really don’t think that’ll happen.

… did you read the update to that last link? Kinda undermined quite a bit of this.

I’m open to the idea that a conspiracy happened. We know they aren’t above things like sending an alternate slate of electoral votes and then hoping to override the legitimate results in Congress, because that absolutely did happen. But stealing seven separate elections in all the swing states is a hell of a tough job, and harder to do it without being caught for months. If it did happen, there’d be more evidence than just statistical anomalies within the official results. You’d see people recorded as voting who say they never did, you’d see exit polls that don’t make sense, you’d see an audit reveal missing paper ballots, there’d be something more. And even if it was the perfect crime, you’ll need to find a flaw to actually get anything done about it anyway. There isn’t enough here to say it happened. There’s enough to look into some suspicious stuff in a few places, and go ahead and check those out, but don’t get your hopes up or say that it’s the only conclusion. The simplest and most obvious answer remains the most likely: the country elected Trump by choice.

When did I say I don’t trust math people? I do, but not when they’re saying “these numbers don’t look quite right, so here’s an entire story about how maybe they used satellites to steal an election.” I’ve said repeatedly through the thread that this stuff should be looked at, but we need to keep in mind that stealing an election is very hard to do and not immediately dismiss contrary evidence like the fact that many elections that absolutely could not be manipulated the same way showed a similar result of a giant swing to the right, or that independent exit polls didn’t report anything unusual.

ITT: people saying “the US and China both seem bad” and being told that they obviously just want to kiss America square on the lips because China has never done anything bad ever

I’m open to the idea that there might be something here, I just haven’t seen anything particularly compelling, it’s all been very typical conspiracy theory stuff. The Trump lawyer thing I did hear about, I don’t remember anything about actually changing results though, just unauthorized access. Trump saying something suspicious, well, he says a lot of stuff. The drop off rates being different between the two candidates seems sensible to me, I’d expect quite a few Trump voters to just care about Trump and not the rest of the races, and less so on the Democratic side. It’s the reason turnout now seems to help Republicans, they’ve won over a lot of unreliable voters and Trump brings them out better than most. A coordinated, multi-state conspiracy to rig the election seems very unlikely to stay completely airtight for over a year.

Is there a source that specifically claims that these anomalies are happening in states using the same voting system and not in others? I haven’t seen that in anything linked to me so far, and that would be at least interesting.

The breathless reporting and big numbers immediately set off my BS detector. Usually, when a stat says something like “the odds of this happening purely by chance are 1 In a hojillion!” it’s just bad statistics, for example saying “even if each of my windows had a 75% chance of breaking in the hurricane, the odds that all of them would break is less than 1%, so clearly someone sabotaged my house!” No, they were all in the same hurricane, not independent random hurricanes, you can’t just multiply the probabilities like that. It’s very easy to do bad stats and come up with wild results.

It also looks like this is mostly focused on Pennsylvania, where there’s actually more to look at. Again, sure! It’s worth looking into. Let’s see evidence that this crosses state lines and isn’t just Pennsylvania. Let’s see evidence that the machines really were vulnerable and not just that they could’ve been. Let’s find someone who will name names and give specifics about this conspiracy. If this stuff is true, it’ll get picked up by more sober voices that aren’t yelling “it was stolen, it was stolen, don’t you all see???” and then it might be worth tuning in.

Okay, so where’s the massive exit poll discrepancy between who voters say they voted for and the official results? That would be a red flag worth paying attention to, if it showed inconsistent results between down ballot and top line races but only in states that used these supposedly compromised voting machines.

This is why Trump was so convinced the dems cheated. The people outvoted a vote shifting algorithm.

See, this is exactly what the conservatives say when you ask “well, how did Trump win in 2016 and 2024 if the elections are rigged?” Obviously, the sheer power of True American Patriots overwhelmed the Democratic rigging. It’s not any more sensible when we do it.

I can’t say I read everything here, but what I did looked mostly like “these numbers seem funny to me.” Which is reason to look further, sure, but far short of definitive proof. Is there any reason to believe the vote tabulators were running this compromised code, or had default passwords set? Is there an independent statistics expert saying “they’re right, this is suspicious”? A confession by one of what must have been hundreds of co-conspirators in this, apparently, multi-year project that has perfectly evaded scrutiny until these folks found the truth? It’s an extraordinary claim, and the bar for believing it hasn’t even come close to being met.

Okay, sure. That’s one thing in one election that should be looked at, and if more comes up, great, chase that down too. There is a massive gap between that and “zomg the national election was totally stolen!”

I don’t think this is true. There’s no mechanism for correcting a fixed election other than impeachment as far as I know, and that would require Republicans to play ball, and obviously they won’t. Not to mention that nothing in this post is backed up by any evidence, just “this could have happened.”

There is basically zero actual evidence here. The argument basically goes “this could’ve happened, then this other thing could’ve happened, then a third thing could’ve happened, someone said something vaguely ominous in a group chat, and then something we all know is impossible happened: Donald Trump was elected President despite being obviously bad. There’s only one conclusion: the election was stolen and now we just need to track it down.” Read the article again and try to pick out the things that are shown to have actually happened and weren’t just suspicions or possibilities.

It doesn’t hold up for the same reasons the 2020 doubts didn’t hold up. Did they do this in every state? Because the results were pretty uniform across the country, it was a big swing right. It’d be the biggest and most successful conspiracy in history, getting away with rigging a wide variety of completely separate voting systems, many of which are heavily or entirely paper-based, many of which are run by blue states or weren’t even competitive, with no leaks and no discrepancies in any of the public records.

Or, maybe, just maybe, Biden was incredibly unpopular and Kamala didn’t run a good campaign, while Donald “I’ll fix everything and everyone will be rich” Trump promised to take action and not just continue the same policies for another four years, so people gave him another shot. “Oh, but he had felonies! Surely the electorate would never!” Yeah, they would. We elect terrible people all the time. He won. This isn’t productive.

Computers only have one language and one data type. Everything else is a construct, which we can build up into a beautiful thing: a mathematics that exists in the real world instead of the pure realm of axioms and symbols, and because it’s purely our own creation and not the universe’s, we know it from the fundamentals and don’t have to struggle with all the unknowns of physics, which presents us with very different, more mysterious mathematical objects to interact with instead.

Yeah, TypeScript has to integrate with JavaScript for practicality’s sake, which pierces a hole in its ability to do proper, rigorous type checking. It’s closer to machine-readable documentation that helpfully flags some errors than an actual type-checked language, which will make you get your types right instead of gently suggesting that there might be an issue the way TypeScript does.

For the rest, well, there isn’t even actually a question, I suspect you’d open a door and pick a box and hope that you’ve got a gold ball to pick, and it’s not clear that he’s following Monty Hall rules and always opening a bad door, but I think knowing which ball got thrown would make the rest of the odds fall into place.

I’m not saying they were right, I would’ve voted to impeach too, I’m saying it will have zero effect on the world so there isn’t much sense in getting upset about it.