In my previous job, I was asked to break focus every 15 minutes to check my email and see if one of my coworkers was falling behind on dealing with a queue of tasks, then pitch in if he was. I hated the job in general, but that in particular just ruined any possibility of productivity. Hard for anyone, near impossible for someone with ADHD. Then I got blamed for falling behind on my work. And for being disorganized (we didn’t have a ticket tracker, hmmm).

I figured it was something like that. :)

Probably at the dot marked “Broccoli”

I can, but the history is a little gorey.

I remember a few months ago talking to my husband’s uncle about the various indictments. His immediate reaction was “if that isn’t abuse of power [by Democrats], I don’t know what is.” I dearly wish I had read up on the indictments beforehand so I could have quizzed him a bit. Maybe he would be a little less hasty about abuse of power accusations if he knew the FBI had a recording of Trump saying he shouldn’t be in possession of certain classified documents or that he knowingly hid documents marked as classified for months in unsecured areas. Alas.

Just like there are a not insubstantial number of people who are okay voting for Biden at the end of the day, but would like someone who isn’t quite so old. Just, you know, without the felony conviction.

Schools have libraries, and those libraries are naturally segmented by age because of being attached to a specific school (elementary, middle, high). Kids have to know the book is there and seek it out, so that puts an additional buffer.

Books are also delivered via the classroom. Teachers, of course, exercise judgement there on what is age appropriate, both for content and for reading level. The bar should be higher there because students have little to no choice on the book.

The Grim Perl Reaper?

Most private education in the US is nonprofit. The for profit institutions are generally not well thought of.

Yup, that’s often going to be a tradeoff when increasing a price floor (minimum wage) or when there is a labor shortage. In Oregon when the legislature passed the current minimum wage law, it anticipated that effect. The state’s cost of living (COL) varies widely, with some parts of the state struggling more with COL and others more with unemployment. To alleviate that, there are tiered urban, semi-urban, and rural minimum wages based on the population density of each county.

Personally, I think the apps and self-service kiosks were going to happen anyway. It’s just too tempting from a business perspective when you’re putting in a sales computer system anyway. Versions of self-service restaurants like the automat have been around for over a hundred years. Now with computer systems able to handle orders from multiple sources (app, website, cashier, self-service POS, delivery service) it just kind of makes sense that businesses would want to minimize cashiers. And it’s not like with grocery stores where the self checkout is kinda garbage.

Actually, yes. Part of the reason that fast food was so inexpensive was that fast food workers were criminally underpaid. Wages are up because of a combination of a tighter labor market and improved minimum wage laws. I’ve always been in favor of this, but in talking to restaurant owners I understood that they would have to pass increased labor costs on to their customers.

Continuing supply chain disruption from COVID-19 seem to also be a contributing factor, but I’m not sure what a recovery there will look like.

Python does allow this with NewType. Type checkers see two different types, but it is the same class at runtime.

Thanks, I remember at least one model that was indeed spitting out ludicrous numbers that should have given any statistician pause.

Nate (or rather, the 538 model). didn’t make a 96% chance of victory prediction. It at most went up to around 88% right after the debates where Trump made a fool of himself and the Hollywood Access Tapes were released. But even then, Silver cautioned in an interview that Hillary’s support among certain groups was soft.

I’m honestly not sure when the Democrats will have a solid win again. Recently the electoral college has tilted against us and Trumpian populism has taken grip over a large portion of the country. Fewer and fewer voters are up for grabs. It took the unpopular Iraq War for Obama, who was also a very gifted candidate and campaigner, to get a 7.2% lead. I expect a lot more repeats of 2020, where Biden only got a 4.5% lead despite Trump’s poor leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic. A slightly closer race would have had Biden losing key swing states and the election.

She was going to win it. Comey dropped his letter saying that an investigation would be reopened right before voting. That probably cost her the election.

From what I understand, the West has specialized more in precision ammunition, whereas Russia leans far more on dumb bombs. The industrial capacity is there, but the specific capacity needs adjusting. The West is seeing the first war in a long time involving a near-peer adversary running itself as a war economy, so this is also about getting production lines and supply chains up to the task. During WW2, the US was involved in production on the side of the allies via the Lend-Lease Act before it officially entered the war, so there was time for it to specialize. Not that I am in favor of a world war or escalation, but I don’t think it’s good to be a sitting duck.

But at the same time, a lot of those deaths and shattered defensive lines were because of a lack of supplies. I’m not going to make any claims on how much, but when the Russians are firing 5 shells for every 1 shell the Ukrainians fire off, that changes things.

Much of that was because the US House of Representatives was sitting on its ass for the past how many months? There have been widespread reports of Ukraine rationing ammunition, effectively forcing them to cede ground. The recent passage of aid will start getting basic supplies in quickly. Don’t write them off yet.

So I’m going to put that on a really low probability. Even Texas, which has long had a political faction that talks big about succeeding, isn’t close to majority support, let alone the necessary overwhelming support. Compare that with Ukraine’s 90% approval of independence in 1991. Social, economic, and foreign relation factors just make it a tough sell here. People move around a lot, so even someone like me with a medium number of connections knows people across the US. The single market provides US businesses an enormous market of hundreds of millions of people without having to deal with trade barriers, so the business community would be dead set against it. And of course a large country has more luck throwing around its weight on the international stage than 50 small ones.

So you might have a non-negligible minority approval rate for succession when people are poking buttons in a survey app. Even less so when they have to actually make a tough decision and are shown the pros and cons.

Eh. “A Majority of <Party> Voters” is not that impressive. According to Gallup’s running poll, Democratic Party affiliation is currently at 28%. A slim majority of a minority is… nice? It needs to be reflected strongly among independents and perhaps the opposite party to be reflected in the general population. For comparison, the majority of Republicans think the 2020 election was stolen. This view is not reflected among the general population.

I actually think a more notable statistic in this poll is the Republicans at 23%. That tells me that reactions to what is happening in Gaza has had a bipartisan effect, which has often not been the case with Israel.