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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • … 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.



  • 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.



  • 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.




  • 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.



  • I'm pretty sure the ball landed in

    C3.

    Albert is very sure that Bernard doesn’t know either. Bernard would know the location if it was in 5 or 6, indicating to all of us that Albert was told a row that isn’t A or B.

    Now that Bernard can also deduce that it’s not A or B, he’s narrowed it down to one possibility. That means all of us now know it can’t be column 1 either, because if it were, he wouldn’t have gotten anything from that new fact.

    Finally, now that column 1 is eliminated, Albert has deduced the location. Row D would’ve left two more possibilities, but row C leaves just one. Albert must know it is in row C.

    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.



  • More specifically, they’re borrowing the more mathematical meaning of variables, where if you say x equals 5, you can’t later say x is 6, and where a statement like “x = x + 1” is nonsense. Using “let” means you’re setting the value once and that’s what it’s going to remain as long as it exists, while “var” variables can be changed later. Functional languages, which are usually made by very math-y people, will often protest the way programmers use operators by saying that = is strictly for equality and variable assignment is := instead of == and = in most C-style languages.


  • Thinking through a problem yourself, or taking an idea and putting it into words, is like exercise for the brain. You may think you understand a thing from reading or hearing about it, but it’s only when you do it for yourself that you discover what you really know and what you don’t. It’s the difference between learning what a square root actually is and how to press the square root button on the calculator. It’s the difference between learning to drive and learning to turn on self-driving mode. Even if the outcome is the same, the learning experience is day and night.

    Once you understand a concept well enough, then using an LLM to get some busy work done or just get a starting point that you can improve isn’t all that bad, much like using a calculator after learning pen-and-paper division, but trying to use one while learning is almost certain to hurt your understanding, even if the LLM doesn’t outright make a bunch of stuff up.


  • Some states do it this way. Other states do it all electronically (fewer now than in the past, thankfully). Other states do it all on paper and do the counting with offline counting machines, then spot check some precincts at random. Some do it by mail entirely on paper.

    And that’s the big reason why this line of inquiry is nonsense. The entire country showed a huge shift to the right, not just the swing states or the states that are more vulnerable. That’s 51 entirely separate election systems that you’d have to manipulate, make sure public information about the election matches exactly, and also not go so far that any independent exit polls show anything fishy either. The scale of conspiracy to do it in even one state, make no mistakes, and have no one leak is hard to believe. Doing it across the entire country? You’re going to need a lot more than “I feel like the numbers are fishy” to be convincing. The conservatives were wrong when they said 2020 was rigged, and anyone saying 2024 was rigged is equally wrong.



  • Data that makes no statistical sense. A clean sweep in all seven swing states. The fall of the Blue Wall. Eighty-eight counties flipped red—not one flipped blue.

    “When the hurricane blew through, every single window of my house was broken. Surely you’d think at least one would survive through sheer chance. I refuse to believe my windows could’ve been that breakable, so this is evidence that my house was sabotaged.”

    Donald Trump outperformed expectations in down-ballot races with margins never before seen—while Kamala Harris simultaneously underperformed in those exact same areas.

    It couldn’t possibly be that lots of low-information voters who don’t give a shit about the rest of the ballot didn’t like Kamala and decided to take another flyer on Trump because he was at least promising to shake things up and take action, obviously it’s a conspiracy. We made it very clear that the economy was fine, and that if you were feeling financially stressed, no you weren’t.

    If one were to accept these results at face value—Donald Trump, a 34-count convicted felon, supposedly outperformed Ronald Reagan.

    And this is obviously impossible because the author doesn’t feel like it could happen. Surely the United States would never elect a bad person, that’s not like us at all.

    Look, the results were pretty uniform across all 50 states, across all 50 completely isolated and different voting systems. The country took a big swing to the right, in swing states and uncompetitive ones, in states with paper ballots and electronic ones. We told the right this same stuff in 2020, it was true then, and it’s true now. Rigging so many elections on the scale it would take to swing the overall results requires an insanely huge conspiracy with no leaks and no mistakes and perfect accounting for the massive number of public statistics and results surrounding elections. If it happened, we’d have more than a handful of conspiracy theorists saying “but these numbers look funny” and until that happens, pay this whole thing no mind.