Election Results

 

Hallelujah

Maybe there's a God above
As for me all I ever seemed to learn from love
Is how to shoot at someone who outdrew you
Yeah but it's not a complaint that you hear tonight
It's not the laughter of someone who claims to have seen the light
No it's cold and it's ever a lonely Hallelujah

Hallelujah!

The election in Pennsylvania has demonstrated that that the voters in that state have learned that love is not shooting at someone who outdrew you.  Hallelujah!!!! 

The elections in Florida and Texas show that the voters in those states still think that they still have to shoot first and ask questions later.  "What The World Needs Now (Is Love Sweet Love)"!

As to Arizona and Georgia?  Only time will tell!

Bad Behavior

 

It’s A Shame

It's a shame, the way you mess around with your man
It's a shame the way you hurt me
It's a shame, the way you mess around with your man
I'm sitting all alone, by the telephone
Waiting for your call, when you don't call at all

Have you no shame!

At the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, lawyer Joseph Welch replied with a question to Sen. Joseph McCarthy , “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”.  This was largely a rhetorical question directed at the audience of those hearings, the American people.  In his heart, I am sure that Mr. Welch knew the answer to his question, that Senator McCarthy had no sense of decency.  But the comment was directed to the American people, not to Senator McCarthy.

When we shame someone, it is not necessarily to get the behavior of the immediate offender to change.  It would be nice, but it is not expected.  What is expected is that the people have let it be know that they have a sense of decency and that this kind of behavior will not be tolerated by others in the future.  Shame is the expression by the group of what they will not reward, even if the recipient of the shame has no shame.  It is like the trial and punishment for murder.  The trial and punishment will NOT bring the dead  back.  The possibility of trial and punishment did not prevent this murder.  But that there is a trial and punishment might deter the next murder.  Sanctions on Russia for invading Ukraine won't necessarily get Russia out of Ukraine.  But they might keep Russia from invading Finland, India from invading Kashmir,  China from invading Taiwan, etc.  The punishment didn't prevent the current crime, but it hopefully changes the calculus for future crimes.  Shame is not about the past. It is about the future.

Election Workers

 To Sir, with Love

If you wanted the sky

I would write across the sky in letters

That would soar a thousand feet high

"To sir, with love"

To all of the election workers, with love!

It has been a hard two years for election workers.  These mostly part-time, underpaid, temporary or volunteer employees have shown their love of country by staffing the voting process despite hateful texts, emails, voicemails, and threats of violence.

 From those of us who voted early, those of us who voted by mail,  those of us who voted on election day.  To those who let the process be smooth and who will ensure that our ballots are counted,  Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.  Your country owes you a big debt of gratitude regardless of the results.

Twitter II

 

I Won’t Dance

I know that music leads the way to romance
So if I hold you in my arms, I won't dance
I won't dance, don't ask me
I won't dance, don't ask me
I won't dance, madame with you
My heart won't let my feet do things that they want to do 

I won’t Tweet, don’t ask me!

It is very amusing to watch the panic of the Twitter users that are trying to find a new home now that Elon Musk has bought Twitter and enacted policies that some users find distasteful. My favorite line was from Tom Bergeron who said “Hello, I Musk be going.” This was a Groucho Marx reference for the Gen Z-er’s in the crowd. Leaving Twitter has become the new moving to Canada. Because Elon Musk has taken Twitter private,  even those controls of a publicly traded corporation such as shareholder votes are not available.

Social media companies such as Twitter are an interesting economic class. They are not private goods which are rival, i.e. priced; and exclusive, can not be used by anyone else while they are being used. Twitter posts seem to be free, unpriced, and the whole point of Twitter posts is that they are the opposite of exclusive.  They can be read by anyone who is following the Twitter user. From the perspective of the user it is free, but from the perspective of Twitter it is not free. The information of those users is sold by Twitter to advertisers. To the users, buyers, they are a common resource, like clean water, while to Twitter, the seller, it is a private monopoly, like cable TV. However the value to the advertisers is the number of users. If the users vanish, the value to those advertisers also vanishes. Elon Musk may eventually discover that he paid $44 billion for a company that has no Tweeters and thus no value.

I was not a Twitter shareholder and I was not a Twitter user. While I may be dismayed by the demise of print newspapers, you young Padawans do not despair. Just as there was Usenet, before MySpace, before Twitter, somewhere there will be a new home. Follow away.

Facebook

 

I Won’t Grow Up

Cause growing up is awfuler
Than all the awful things that ever were!
I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up
No sir
Not I!
Not me!
So there!

I won’t Facebook

When I was a college freshman in 1969, there were still women’s colleges associated with Ivy League universities:  Columbia and Barnard; Harvard and Radcliffe; and in my case, Brown and Pembroke.  The freshman class had a book with head shots and names.  The Brown freshman book was informally known as the Beast Book, the Pembroke book as the Pig Book. Harvard had a similar thing. In 2003 Mark Zuckerberg developed a computerized version of the books called Facemash. The site used photos from the face books of the nine houses at Harvard, placing two photos next to each other and asking users to choose the "hotter" person. Sadly, this computerized version was a resounding success, the name was changed to Facebook and, as they say, the rest was history. It made a billionaire of Mark Zuckerberg and his early investor, Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel is arguably the most disgusting person on the earth and of course a self hater like Thiel would think that rating a person’s hotness was a great investment.

Facebook, and social media sites like it, have been used for good, but they are also have been used to spread hate and lies. Peter Thiel has used the wealth earned from this investment, to spread hate, bigotry and of course, the Big Lie. And as Paul Harvey once said, “Now you know the rest of the story.”  Post, if you must, to Facebook, but realize that by doing so, you are complicit.

Polling

                                                                     Family Feud

Yeah, I'll fuck up a good thing if you let me

Let me alone, Becky

A man that don't take care his family can't be rich

I'll watch Godfather, I miss that whole shit

My consciousness was Michael's common sense

I missed the karma, that came as a consequence

Niggas bustin' off through the curtains 'cause she hurtin'

Can't losin' the babies 'cause their future's uncertain

Nobody wins when the family feuds

Survey says!

One of my favorite podcasts, Planet Money, most recent episode was on polling.   As the episode highlighted, the mistakes in the Alf Landon and Tom Dewey polls were the problems of NOT being a representative sample.  Ironically, the Supreme Court will hear cases on representative samples which are being called  Affirmative Action.  https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2022/08/affirmative-action.html

The golden age of polling was in 2012 was because not only was robo calling in polling still allowed, and caller ID was not yet ubiquitous, but also because land line phones defined geography.  Today, a cell phone's area code means nothing.  My household cut the phone cord shortly after 2012. Now not only do we have cellphones with caller ID, this has been compounded by keeping your cellphone number when you move such that the area code NO LONGER means geography.  My colleague, who has lived in Tallahassee for almost 20 years,  has a (617) Area code because he obtained the cellphone when he worked in Massachusetts.  My cell phone has my work Area Code (617), not my suburban home Area Code, (508).  My son in LA cellphone has our suburban home in Massachusetts Area Code.  He got my wife her cell phone and thus she has a LA (310) Area Code.

Phone polling was not all that is cracked up to be anyway.  Phone ownership is highly correlated with income.  Lower incomes might not have a land line.  So phone polls have always been biased against low incomes.  And replacing phone polls with internet polls?!?  Don't get me started!

And even if it did work, there is this thing called spurious correlation.  As pointed out in https://www.amazon.com/Spurious-Correlations-Tyler-Vigen/dp/0316339431, despite the fact that pool drowning deaths are well correlated with the release of Nick Cage movies, Nick Cage did not cause pool deaths.  As we say in my profession, Correlation is NOT causation.

Personally, I hope that the wisdom of crowds is wrong in the vote.  What is in your heart is not always what you show or tell the world. Sometime you are pretending. https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2022/10/passing.html

And anyway,  polling for elections is wanting to know what  the future will be.  Push a pollster hard enough and you will find that they always wanted to be Hari Sheldon and discover psychohisotry.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4QYV5GTz7c But the future is not ours to see, Que Sera, Sera. That is why we vote, even though we poll.  

But when you vote, do so for the nation. As Jay-Z said in the song, "Nobody wins when the family feuds".

Vote II

 

When I Was Young

My faith was so much stronger then
I believed in fellow man
And I was so much older then
When I was young

If you want to grow old, you first have to grow up.

In 1963, comedian Alan Sherman’s song “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah (A Letter From Camp)” reached number 2 on the Billboard charts.  It won the 1964 Grammy for best Comedy Performance.  The song is a parody written to the tune of the Dance of the Hours .  Alan Sherman wrote the song because his son kept coming up with excuses as to why he did not want to be at summer camp.  In the song, the son invents fantastical lies to achieve his goal, leaving Camp Granada.  Those lies involve playing on the fears of his parents.  Joe Spivey did NOT have poison ivy, Leonard Skinner did NOTget Ptomaine poisoning.  His bunkmate did NOT have malaria, etc.  He also makes promises that he can NOT keep.  He of course will make noise and mess the house.  He will complain when Aunt Bertha hugs and kisses him. The song ends when the son sees other campers swimming, sailing and playing baseball. And the song ends with the line  “Muddah, Faddah kindly disregard this letter.”

When you don’t get your own way, telling lies and making false promises are NOT a grown up response.  Your own way may not even be what is best for you.  You may find out that another thing is actually better for you.

Remember this when you vote.  Don’t make up, or believe, lies, or believe false promises.  Grow up.