Ahh, I misinterpreted your post as a complaint. I’m not a hypermiler, but I do find the efficient routes are often the lowest stress routes as well.

That’s in your trip options “prefer fuel efficient route”. You can turn it off.

An alternate view for you, politicians can’t possibly be expected to know about everything, care about every cause, meet with every person. One of lobbyists roles is to educate and motivate where otherwise politicians may be complacent. The reason that education is currently problematic is because powerful people control much of the “education”. I think a well regulated lobbying system could remove some of the downsides while keeping the upsides. I’ve also worked in and around politics, that reality doesn’t make either one of us more or less correct.

I think you’re misattributing my intent. If you want to make corporate lobbying illegal or highly regulated I’m all for it. But lobbying overall is an inherently good and important part of politics. If you merely talk to a politician about a bill you want to pass you are lobbying. But you are likely very bad at it compared to a professional, so you pay an organization to do it on your behalf. Do you expect politicians to live in a black box completely disconnected from constituent issues as long as they are in office? Because that’s how you get laws passed that have nothing to do with human need. If I donate to the ACLU, HRC, or an environmental group, I expect that some of my money will be spent on lobbying congress. That is not bad or evil.

I absolutely read the question, accusing me of reading comprehension problems while having serious reading comprehension problems is some reddit level stupidity. Reread what I wrote, you read the first half and ignored the second half. I was merely illustrating that many paid lobbyist do very worthwhile things. From labor rights, to environmental justice, to human rights. The issue isn’t lobbyists, the issue is corporate lobbyists…

Let’s say you lose your job because a company lays you off without notice amid record profits. With your new found free time, you get so angry you go to your state senators and representatives and try to convince them to make a law limiting layoffs to a 6 month notice period for profitable companies. You are now a lobbyist. You are saying not to lobby the government full time. But for the sake of clarity let’s say your coworkers also got laid off and pooled their money to send you to lobby on their behalf, you are now a paid lobbyist.

I feel like most people that complain about lobbyists are really just complaining about corporate lobbyists or lobbying groups paid by corporations. Lobbyists are a good and necessary part of any democracy.

Absolutely, North America has a special level of stupidity. To clarify yes, the suburbs in the US mostly don’t even have a real town center, many are just residential, malls, and big box stores. The average property size and spread is also often much less dense than nearly any suburb in the UK. So the infrastructure and environmental cost is much much higher.

Most people suggesting we should densify are targeting suburbs, not rural areas. Suburbs are incredibly expensive and environmentally wasteful per square inch. They have all the utility of a city but spread out with more asphalt, cement, power, sewer, water, gas, cheap inefficient homes that leach heat/ac at an alarming rate, etc.

In rural areas the infrastructure isn’t always as expensive because some residents have their own septic and well, live on a dirt road, heat with a wood furnace, etc. A few of those things are also more renewable. Additionally, rural areas are still required for our way of living (farming, logging, mining, fishing), while suburbs have negative societal value (they take more than they put back into the system).

People can say whatever they want, no one can stop you. But people still have every right to judge your character. Being in a free society works both ways, you can say mean shit and I can think you’re mean.

People use “retard” to compare others or themselves to people they deem lesser than. It doesn’t work as an insult if you don’t look down on cognitively disabled people. You don’t have to use it on someone cognitively disabled, the implication is already there whether you have intended it or not.

For me, I think there are much worse words. While I don’t use it, I don’t waste my brain space judging people who do.

I think you’re missing the point of predictive modeling. It’s probability of separate outcomes is built in. This isn’t fortune telling, there is no crystal ball. Two predictive models can have different predictions and they both may have value. Just like separate meteorologists can have different forecasts, but predict accurately the same amount over time, all be it at different intervals. IIRC, the average meteorologist correctly predicts rain over 80% of the time. They are far over predicting by chance. But if you look at the forecast in more than one place you often get slightly different forecasts. They have different models and yet arrive at similar conclusions usually getting it mostly accurate. It’s the same with political forecasts, they are only as valuable as your understanding of predictive modeling. If you think they are intended to mirror reality flawlessly, you will be sorely disappointed. That doesn’t make the models “wrong”, it doesn’t make them “right” either. They are just models that usually predict a probable outcome.

His model has always been closer state to state, election to election than anyone else’s, which is why people use his models. He is basically using the same model and tweaking it each time, you make it sound like he’s starting over from scratch. When Trump won, none of the prediction models were predicting he would win, but his at least showed a fairly reasonable chance he could. His competitors were forecasting a much more likely Hillary win while he was showing that trump would win basically 3 out of 10 times. In terms of probability that’s not a blowout prediction. His model was working better than competitors. Additionally, he basically predicted the battleground states within a half percentage iirc, that happened to be the difference between a win/loss in some states.

So he has exactly one chance to get it right.

You’re saying it hitting one of those 3 of 10 is “getting it wrong”, that’s the problem with your understanding of probability. By saying that you’re showing that you don’t actually internalize the purpose of a predictive model forecast. It’s not a magic wand, it’s just a predictive tool. That tool is useful if you understand what it’s really saying, instead of extrapolating something it absolutely is not saying. If something says something will happen 3 of 10 times, it happening is not evidence of an issue with the model. A flawless model with ideal inputs can still show a 3 of 10 chance and should hit in 30% of scenarios. Certainly because we have a limited number of elections it’s hard to prove the model, but considering he has come closer than competitors, it certainly seems he knows what he is doing.

All prediction models only give you odds, not flawless accuracy. He has been closer in every election than most everyone else in the prediction market.

He’s not polling, he is aggregating all of the polls into a prediction model. Either way it is just a snapshot in time.

but it does mean that Boeing got something wrong.

Comparing it to Boeing shows you still misunderstand probability. If his model predicts 4 separate elections where each underdog candidate had a 1 in 4 chance of winning. If only 1 of those underdog candidates wins, then the model is likely working. But when that candidate wins everyone will say “but he said it was only a 1 in 4 chance!”. It’s as dumb as people being surprised by rain when it says 25% chance of rain. As long as you only get rain 1/4 of the time with that prediction, then the model is working. Presidential elections are tricky because there are so few of them, they test their models against past data to verify they are working. But it’s just probability, it’s not saying this WILL happen, it’s saying these are the odds at this snapshot in time.

Hopefully you mean ones still in construction… No need to cause an unprecedented environmental disaster after all.

Yeah I’m only 10 lbs more than my wife and she is 5’ tall. I was the last in a long line of tall, usually thin, men for her. It’s definitely a type for some.

I am 6’ 6" and most of my life I’ve been between 145 to 165. So incredibly skinny, always under weight. I never struggled with women as an adult, but I also didn’t chase too many shallow women. When I was young i certainly got told by a few that they weren’t into skinny guys, but it was almost always by people that were incredibly socially controlled people, the type to “keep up with the Joneses” so to speak. Once I stopped chasing after people for the wrong reasons things improved dramatically.

Do you have close friends that are women? I wonder if there is a communication aspect to this if not. Do you date outside your culture? I grew up around mostly white rural Christians and they were more judgy about being skinny than other cultural groups, in my experience. Maybe something about rural people doing a lot more hard labor and it being culturally homogeneous.

Arctic MUD?

Anything that says yiff in the title, this stuff is so popular in lemmy. Not kink shaming, but really doesn’t do anything for me.

Most officers don’t ticket for speed of traffic, the uniform vehicle code (federal advisory on traffic laws) literally advises them not to for obvious reason. Most cops will focus on cars exceeding both the speed of traffic and the speed limit. If you drive you whole life going the speed of traffic you are very unlikely to be ticketed ever.