Lai Ching-te wins the presidency; the legislature is divided.
The RSF win Khartoum.
Biden and the Awami league are re-elected, with smaller majorities.
Putin and the BJP are re-elected, with bigger majorities.
Ukraine loses ground (but not very much).

Actually the opposition is boycotting, so Awami will have a bigger majority.

Trump drags out sentencing for the important convictions until after the election, loses soundly, and then we're immediately treated to dozens of centrists and moderates complaining that whatever sentence he gets is vindictive, kicking him when he's down, unseemly political prosecution, etc.

I will probably retire, unless good work pans out in the next few months.

Public transit in US places I love will get worse.

I think we had a Trump-court-cases prediction thread somewhere, possibly back when he first got indicted. I'd go with convicted on some charges, but immediately appealling against them.

I'd agree that the most likely outcome is Biden winning with a larger margin. Wouldn't like to bet on it though.

Over here we have an election as well, now looking like May according to the rumour mill - the outcome isn't really in doubt, though there's the question of whether Sunak will still be PM by then.

Barbie will win the Best Picture Oscar.

I predict Trump will be convicted of at least one felony somewhere. Even if it eventually gets overturned, that will be hanging over him on Election Day.

7: agreed (and I think that was the consensus on the thread I mentioned). He will have at least one conviction and will be in the process of appealling it on election day.

Ukraine loses ground (but not very much).

This is a really tricky one because I have to be very aware of optimism bias and recency bias. Because we've just had a year of no major changes, we tend to overestimate the chance of next year seeing no major changes, just as the very kinetic 2022 skewed everyone's expectations about 2023. And because we (most of us) want to see Ukraine win, we overvalue evidence that suggests that will happen.

My best guess would be that Ukraine will continue to inflict heavy losses on Russia - Russian confirmed equipment losses have remained roughly constant through the year at between 10 and 20 tanks, AFVs and artillery pieces per day. (The big loss spikes were, unsurprisingly, Mar-Apr 2022 and Nov 2022). These equipment losses are heavy, but sustainable in terms of numbers (if not quality). (Same goes for their troops.)
Meanwhile, Ukraine's losses remained at about a third of those - and they are being replaced with more modern Western kit, rather than with older Soviet kit taken out of storage. There's still very widespread support in the US for Ukraine among the general public, which might make it more politically risky for Republicans to cut them off. And the US is only a large supporter, not the only one.
If the US reduces support, I think we see no real movement. If the US maintains support, I think continued attrition for the first half of the year followed by an operational-level breakthrough in, say, September.

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce will break up.

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce were secretly married four weeks ago and are a couple whose lasting love will be a model for all who come after.

9 and 10 could both be true.

Taylor Kelce and Travis Swift will decide they should have just exchanged rings instead.

Ukraine will remain an ugly stalemate as Republicans sandbag funding while Putin waits around to see if he can get Trump re-elected.

My concern about Ukraine is manpower - Russia has three times the population so it can replenish its ranks faster when it's a matter of years. Another recency bias is the bias that stasis will continue.

13 is right.

There will be a Florida-in-2000 situation in some key state or other. We won't know who the president-elect is on the morning of November 6, and the endgame will be played out via legal challenges in the Four Seasons Total Landscaping parking lot. Also, everyone will spend all year arguing about gender-affirming care for minors on national TV.

It will be revealed that every bad ex-boyfriend in an Olivia Rodrigo song was based on Dave Coulier.

Heh.

I enjoyed this set of predictions:

https://x.com/katiedimartin/status/1740426837648433269

"We won't know who the president-elect is on the morning of November 6"

Yes. Or, at least, the main TV channels won't have agreed who it is.

14: small countries beat larger invaders all the time. It isn't 1914, it isn't just manpower any more.

In my view, measuring the speed with which election results are announced is not just bullshit, but pernicious bullshit. It takes a lot of time, especially with various ballot issues that arise because, guess what, humans sometimes do dumb stuff.

Our county elections administrator send his staff home at 1 am in presidential years, and they won't be done. OK it doesn't matter to the presidential race -- even though the county is going to go 65% or so blue, the state will go red by a big margin -- but our big senate race is likely going to be close enough so that all the votes have to get counted before we'll know who won, and that takes a day or two.

Justin Trudeau won't be Canadian PM by the end of the year.

This year or 2024?

2024! That's far enough out on that limb. The next election isn't scheduled until Fall 2025 but he's in a minority government and the Liberals are way behind in the polls. So either he steps down willingly; gets forced out by the Liberal caucus; or loses NDP support, the minority govt falls apart, and there's an early election.

21: Of course it's not just manpower, but manpower can create an edge versus other disadvantages, and if Ukraine's ratio slips that could change the dynamic. Equipment attrition is probably a bigger deal than personnel attrition, but per your 8 the former trend is on Ukraine's side.

Does anyone know what happened with all the men who fled Russia to avoid the draft? Presumably, if you aren't rich, you can only hang out in Georgia or Kyrgyzstan for so long.

Ok, here's a prediction, the Supreme Court decides that Trump is barred from office if he's convicted for Jan. 6, but not without a conviction. Not because conviction is *necessary* for the 14th amendment, but it's sufficient, and whatever other sufficient conditions there were for confederate officers don't apply.)

I think 2024 will be dominated by munitions supply, in which Russia will have the advantage. I don't see operational breakthroughs for anyone in 2024, barring:
-political regime collapse (doesn't look likely on either side);
-catastrophic ammunition shortages (ditto);
-widespread mutiny/desertion (ditto).
-(just to cover myself) the Ukrainians pull off some Manstein-level gamble crossing the Dnipro and sprinting for Perekop.

28 I don't disagree. It's one of the easy ways to rule for him: not only has he not been convicted of a section 3 offence, he's not been criminally charged with one. He was charged with a section 3 offense in his impeachment -- one of the remedies available to Congress is barring his from holding office in the future -- and he was acquitted. At least 4 of them will find it easy to fold section 3 into the impeachment, I think.

I wonder if Trump really does smell that bad. I'm not going to be in a position to check.

2024 will be just the third warmest year of all time, causing climate deniers to assert that global warming is a figment of woke elitists' twisted minds.

Orioles in six games

In my view, measuring the speed with which election results are announced is not just bullshit, but pernicious bullshit. It takes a lot of time, especially with various ballot issues that arise because, guess what, humans sometimes do dumb stuff. Our county elections administrator send his staff home at 1 am in presidential years, and they won't be done.

Agree that there shouldn't be pressure to rush a result out at the expense of accuracy, but, you know, it is possible to count votes in a few hours and have a result by breakfast the next morning. We manage it and we count by hand.* And especially this time I think there is a public interest in getting a result as quickly as is compatible with accuracy; a long delay increases the risk of a violent coup.
Just sending the counters home at an arbitrary time whether they've finished or not is a very weird decision. Deliberately delaying the result? Why?

*yes, I know, you vote for a lot more offices at the same time. Well, don't do that. Or have separate ballot papers and ballot boxes for federal and state offices. It isn't an intractable problem and the cost would be minimal compared to the cost of a coup.

I think Biden will win, though I don't know by how much. I guess I should say that he'll win and be inaugurated, because winning doesn't mean what it used to mean. I think the intensity of Israeli atrocities in Gaza will ramp down over the coming eight weeks and the conflict will mostly slip out of the headlines in the United States by April or May at the latest. I think that if Biden is reelected, organized labor will make more major gains in the coming year, beginning a slow shift in the structures of the economy. I think, again pending Biden's reelection, the pendulum will swing toward a backlash against DEI activities in corporate settings and maybe also anti-racist activism more broadly. I think the wave of AI hucksterism--as distinct from the wave of AI utility--will continue to grow throughout the year, until it towers so high that it threatens to crush all of human civilization beneath its weight, an existential threat far greater than the singularity even will or even can be. Perhaps related, I think we'll see an increasing number of small colleges and universities close their doors, and even some elite (not the best of the best, but the next tier) schools show real signs of economic stress.

Perhaps related, I think we'll see an increasing number of small colleges and universities close their doors, and even some elite (not the best of the best, but the next tier) schools show real signs of economic stress.

This is interesting - what do you think will be driving that?
Just looking at the population pyramid, it looks like there will be fewer college-age children in the US every year for at least the next decade. (https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2023/04/us-demographics-largest-5-year-cohorts.html)

So at least one of these things is going to happen, just because of the demographics:
1. some or all existing universities are going to reduce their student numbers
2. some existing universities are going to close
3. a higher share of each year group is going to attend university, counteracting the decline in total group size
4. more foreign students are going to attend university in the US

There is no way that at least one of those things doesn't happen.

The enrolment rate seems to have been static or falling for the last decade, so 3 seems less likely. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cpb/college-enrollment-rate

Are there other factors as well as demographics?

Mostly demographics, yeah. But I'd add two additional factors: many states are sinking more money, as I think they should, into community colleges rather than four-year institutions, which is going to hurt that sector of the industry; and many institutions have become increasingly leveraged, for a whole bunch of reasons, many of them quite stupid, over the past few decades.

The first "even" in 35 should be an "ever," which is how you know a human wrote that comment. ChatGPT would never have made that error.

Sorry, I should have completed the thought in 37: unless interest rates come way down VERY quickly, servicing the debt that many institutions have accumulated in recent years will become a crushing burden. And now I'm going to see if I can get some sleep, because even though I'm in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, it's quite late.

I worry that the feeding frenzy set off by the right but mainstreamed by the fucking NYT will result in at least an attempted mass shooting at an Ivy.

I worry that the feeding frenzy set off by the right but mainstreamed by the fucking NYT will result in at least an attempted mass shooting at an Ivy.

I think you're supposed to call it "an attempted exhilarating challenge to the balance of power".

Election-related, I am a bit sorry that this challenge didn't go anywhere:

"Attorney Paul Gordon, a registered voter of Portland, argued that because Mr. Trump has expressly stated that he won the 2020 election, he is barred from office under the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which sets a two-term limit on Presidents."

https://www.maine.gov/sos/news/2023/Decision%20in%20Challenge%20to%20Trump%20Presidential%20Primary%20Petitions.pdf

It seems like a pretty fun challenge.
"Mr Trump, who won the presidential election in November 2016?"
"I did."
"And who won the next presidential election in November 2020?"
"I did."
"Disqualified. No further questions."

Deliberately delaying the result? Why?

People have been there all day. Early November in Montana can be pretty wintry, and some of the people are going to have a tough drive home.

I was a vote count observer for the 2021 municipal election here -- it took until 1:30 a.m. to get everything in the county counted, and that was just mayor, some judges, half the city counsel, and I think a couple of ballot measures. We have 52 precincts in the county, and while I don't think there were 52 different ballot forms, there were probably 25. City wards don't line up with precincts, because they have different criteria.

I was a count observer in a different county in 2020, and one of the machines was off-line for an hour or so. The elections administrator was able to get someone from the manufacturer on the phone -- this is at 9 or 10 pm -- to talk her through fixing it.

America is a land of chewing gum and chicken wire.

34: And even Florida can get a complete result on Election Night! It seems to be mostly down to more personnel, better equipment and training, and starting the counting work before Election Day. States that do have an excuse, however, are those that allow ballots to be postmarked by Election Day, like California and Nevada. That's a delay you can't solve managerially. (Although California may also be too slow counting Election Day ballots.)

I suppose lack of snow may also help.

43.1: even accepting the premise, that doesn't make any sense. They've been working all day, they're tired, they're not going to get the job finished tonight anyway, and the roads are dangerous because of snow etc. So you... keep them working till one in the morning, then put them out on the roads in the dark, exhausted from a nineteen-hour work day, to drive home? Rather than send them home at the end of the day and bring them back tomorrow?

Most of the counters are temporary staff anyway - hire them for a night shift?

(Maybe in Montana they're all volunteers, idk.)

This isn't news to anyone here, but the underlying problem here is America's enormously fragmented election system. It's not that it's impossible to count fast in our system, and some places do. It's that it's very very difficult to standardize any particular set of practices across the whole range of jurisdictions that run elections.

Not impossible! If the federal government really put the pressure on the states to standardize systems using the power of the purse they would fall into line. But that would require a lot of political will and drive that isn't really evident on this issue.

(There are other potential mechanisms than the power of the purse; Congress could refuse to seat members or recognize electors from states that don't conform, etc. But the power of the purse is the usual way stuff like this gets done.)

Good points. Given the hostility to enforcing the voting rights act, seems to me that it would take different Americans living under the laws we have here instead of the present set.

Bit late, but I'd very much like to commission a swarm of hackers to replace "All I want for Christmas is You" on mass playlists everywhere with Sharon Jones' "Aint no Chimneys in the Projects"

Given the hostility to enforcing the voting rights act, seems to me that it would take different Americans living under the laws we have here instead of the present set.

Yes, as always, the fundamental problem with America is Americans.

sorry for forgetting to post today! regular posting will resume next week.

46 Polls are open to 8 pm. Ballots get brought in from the far reaches of the county by 9:30 or 10, assuming good weather. By midnight, they'll have run the ballots received before election day through the machines -- you know, in batches of 25 or 50 at a time. 10% of batches have a ballot that won't run through right, for physical paper reasons, and one of the very skilled staffers can usually find a way to get it through, and kept with the batch. Then you have the misreads -- 100% voter error -- that have to be reviewed by a committee of 3. Is that half a percent? A quarter? Still takes time, and the people on those panels are either doing a lot of sitting around, or are busy doing something else. You could make it go faster if you spent a lot more money. Why? Someone elected in early November is almost never going to take office for 60 days or so. What's another day or two? Nothing. In fact, election results announced, whether in Florida or elsewhere, are always contingent on the final canvas, which might be a week away. So you're spending a bunch of money for an illusion.

Of course all the news organizations will call the presidential race in Montana at 8:05 pm, based on no votes at all having been counted, and no one will object. In 2006, I think our Senate race took 3 or 4 days to sort out. It was that close. Sen Tester will have another close one this time too, and we'll see. It's going to depend on turnout in Missoula and in Indian Country.

In 2022, I was a voting observer in Glacier County, most of which is the Blackfeet Nation. There are always issues with addresses and such, and the elections admin (an elected official in that county) was there in Browning running the polling place. They had to print new ballots for a number of people, and the printer was down for a while, which got lines pretty long. And some people went home, or to pick up kids or whatever. I think it was under 10F most of the day, maybe under 5? Anyway, she did a hell of a job, but still had lighter turnout than we hope to see in 2024.

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There's a lizard loose in my house. A tiny, cute one, but now I can't find it and this worries me. I don't know that it will find enough to eat. I don't want to buy food for it (what do they eat anyway, mealworms? crickets?) but I really don't want it to die in here. Can I just assume that it will let itself out the same way it came in?
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56: unless you have a cat or a mongoose, yes, it should find its way out.

Specifically, Republicans have worked really hard to make Pennsylvania count slowly because they think it undermines faith that the count is correct and means they have a better chance of stealing elections.

If only they knew that not letting us take off our shoes would double the time.

58 Exactly, and complaints from smart people about how long it takes just plays into this.

I'm happy for the Brits that they can do it really fast. I should know, but do you have primaries for national and local offices?

Republicans in our legislature tried to change our municipal elections from odd to even numbers, hoping that they could get more Republican turnout in urban areas. They fucked up the bill by moving the general election but not the primary, and it ended up dying. Chicken wire and chewing gum.

It's nice when their bad faith is foiled by their stupidity.

"Liquid Death" is just plain water? I don't get marketing.

I would not like to drink liquid death, it sounds excruciating.

61 We have both kind of Republicans here, and the bad ones are so bad that even a few of the less awful Rs will cross the aisle for particular bills. Their voters want all stupid all the time, though.

62: As marketing, it's genius. But yes, it's just water.

Back in the day, if we wanted death-branded products we would stick to cigarettes.

58: Yeah, it's an infuriating two-step.

60: Contrary to the Brits, the Irish do it really slowly and it's fine. STV is somewhat complex to implement in a non-electronic way, so it takes a while; amazingly, despite having to wait a few days for the news, the republic persists.

I think the really poisonous part is that if the count isn't in by 3am or whatever it's suspect. Which is weird; if you think about it, why do they think faking an election is a process that takes somewhere between eight and twenty-four hours? If somebody was going to fake it and had the capacity to do so, why wouldn't it be done quickly? I don't think the obviously fake elections from pseudo-democracies e.g. in Africa take particularly long. Must be a 24-hour cable news thing.

" I should know, but do you have primaries for national and local offices?"

We have many fewer elected offices anyway - local council, mayor, national Parliament, UK Parliament and that's it. They are not all elected at the same time and not everyone has all four. And we don't have primaries - the local parties decide who they want to put up as candidates. Voter registration is automatic and confirmed every year by post. Election campaigns last 3-6 weeks.

As you know, our founders were obsessed with the idea that parties are bad, while furiously organizing parties. One upshot is that we elect humans for a bunch of things.

My 2024 ballot will include races for
President
US Senate
US House
Governor
State Attorney General
State Sec of State
State Auditor (who is also the insurance and securities commissioner)
State Sup of Public Schools
Two State Supreme Court seats
State House
(My state senator is a holdover)
County Commissioner
2 County Judges
County Attorney (that's the prosecutor)
County Treasurer
County Court Clerk
County Clerk

We'll probably have a couple of ballot issues too. This gives voters a lot of opportunities to mismark something.

I'm probably forgetting someone.

No school board?

They just appoint the most heterosexual man in the county.

On Ukraine, the most important thing is simply that neither party has a path to a KO. The Russians ain't never taking Kyiv now, nor even Kharkiv, Dnipro etc, so that's ruled out, but even if the Ukrainians reach the international border all along the line it's not given that the Russians won't keep bombing and throwing in offensives every time they manage to drum up enough mobiks for another go.

One long term issue is that the Russians have been using up a stockpile of Soviet equipment, and at some point either their tax base will be called on in a scale it hasn't yet been to replace it, or they'll have to accept having a permanently smaller military. This means some combination of higher taxes/lower consumption/higher oil'n'gas exports. The last of those is the least troublesome but needs imports to happen.

70 We do that in May, so it's not the June primary or the November general.

I forgot the sheriff. There's probably another county position I'm not thinking of. Clerk of the State Supreme Court we do in even numbered off years. I'm sure there's some ancient custom behind that. (Like the 1950s -- I'm not looking it up, just guessing.)

72: well, most wars finish because the losing side decides to stop fighting, rather than because they are materially incapable. The moral is to the material as ten to one, like the man said. The US could still be bombing Hanoi today if they wanted to.

I forgot the sheriff
But I didn't forget no Clerk of the State Supreme Court

Our county Clerk and Recorder is also the Treasurer, and I left out the County Auditor. A shame, he's a good guy. Anyway, even as someone who knows most of the people in these offices to varying degrees, I lose track. The average voter unsurprisingly finds it impenetrable.

We don't get to vote for a prothonotary anymore. It's horrible.

they're given magic swords by the lady of the lake?

78: pretty sure dinosaurs can't stand for office anyway

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Locals have been hesitant to reclaim the head of Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of learning, after it was returned anonymously from the United States in 1999.

80: due to poor turnout in an off year election, Dippy the Diplodocus was Allegheny County Treasurer for four years in the 70s, playing a vital role in Renaissance II.

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My job might be willing to pay for me to get some training in data analytics. Our internal training department doesn't provide it. If you google SQL, there are a bazillion courses. Does anyone know of good courses or where to find them? I think the principles are the same, no matter what, but if it's relevant I'd be working with electronic medical records- based databases and health insurance claims databases.

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It's not actually data analysis unless you're using SAS.

83: I've been in a similar position, but the trouble is knowing how to do SQL queries only gets so far when your source is these horrendously complicated and proprietary duopoly systems Epic and Cerner. Specifically, you don't necessarily know which of the thousands of tables to query to get meaningful information, or what to exclude, and there will be a ton of red herrings. Epic, and I assume Cerner too, wants people to get its expensive multiday training before they start monkeying around in its system, and I can sort of see why based on how it's set up. (It took a lot of emails to even get me access to the data dictionary.)

That said, working for a health system that's a customer for one of these systems is the main way to get training in them at all, so you're better situated there.

I don't have the whole picture, I may misleading you in some way; I'm still nipping around the edges of our data structure, and it's kind of frustrating. Lots of "you can't hope to understand this without being fully one of us" roadblocks.

When my junior developers needed to learn SQL, this is the YouTube course I had them use, and they seemed to pick it up pretty well. SQL is not a particularly complicated language so it wasn't all that difficult for them. But its free and you said you want paid.

Also, that course is focused on MySQL, which until recently was my first choice for its simplicity and open sourced-ness. These days my first choice is SQLite, which is even more simple. Some people prefer PostgreSQL, which is more enterprisey but not actually nicer to use. Still you are going to want to figure out which version of SQL you are most likely to use in your job, and find a course that focuses on that flavor. It may well be Oracle - which is going to cost you - although career-wise is nice to have on your resume.

Pretend I closed my anchor tag at the appropriate place in that comment.

58: Specifically, Republicans have worked really hard to make Pennsylvania count slowly because they think it undermines faith that the count is correct and means they have a better chance of stealing elections.

That has improved quite a bit since 2020; most counties (including Allegheny) had the 2022 results substantively counted and posted in the early hours of the following day. This was despite several failures of efforts* to move up the start of canvassing. The one legislative hook was a state election slush fund for counties that required counties to count mail-ins "continuously" starting the morning of election day. All but 4 counties signed on. This was helped in many counties by learning how to better organize to do it, and investing in some equipment etc. In 2020 many counties did not even start on them until after all of the day-ofs were counted**.

Still not ideal, it varies a bit by county, and might be slower with the larger Prez year turnout, but if 2020 results had come in at rate of recent elections the morning after results probably would have shown Trump with a smallish lead that would have turned around over the next day or so. Philly always a bit slow overall, and some Philly suburb/exurb counties are still a bit slow with mail-ins , and they are overwhelmingly D.

*Rs attached various things like stricter Voter ID etc. to the bills; one passed but was vetoed by at the time Gov. Wolf.

**2020 was the first general with mail-in in PA***, and counties were not that prepared. In part because after the really effed up Primary there was decent bipartisan support to change it, but that quickly dissipated with the Trump campaign-led demonization of mail-ins that developed over the summer of 2020. One of the joys of the 2020 general were the significant number of people who came with mail-in to turn in (requires paperwork) because they had requested them back much earlier in the year and now did not trust them (as they generally explained in various assholish ways).

***Originally pushed as much by Rs as Ds because they thought it might be advantageous with older voters. But there were some prior inklings of the effect of shifts in R/D pops in PA such as 2018 Conor Lamb "upset" special election where Lamb won absentees (strict rules at that time) traditionally an R-leaning set of votes. Led to his opponent not conceding for a number of days due to R suspicions as to whether that could be correct, In the event the main concession Rs got to approve liberal mail-in in 2019 was getting rid of stright party-line voting.

One of the conspiracy-enhancing aspects of late mail-in counting is that changes in the mechanics of vote counting can hugely impact the R/D mix of when vote count timing. This was most dramatically shown in Arizona in 2020 where a change in processing different categories of ballots* meant that Rs gained after initial counts, unlike previous elections there where late counts (like almost everywhere else) had favored Ds. There is a pretty good argument to be made that the notorious very early Fox News call of Arizona for Biden rested on some inaccurate assumptions about remaining ballots because they did not adequately factor in that change. This has been trumpeted by many RWers (also Nate "Data McButtface" Silver) as vindication for Fox News hosts and execs undercutting that call on the air. But of course they were not undercutting it for that reason.

And of course none of this rises to the level of the most consequentially bad and premature Prez call which was Florida in 2000.

Absolutely helped frame the Sorehead Loser Gore narrative among the useless fuckdweebs of the mainstream media. The coverage of that campaign was dreadful, the recount coverage was worse. (and it did not help that you had Joe Lieberman basically undercutting his own side at every turn. Truly one of the most catastrophic VP picks by Dems ever. (Eagleton of course more dramatically wnet bad, but McGovern doomed anyway).

80: insert 2024 presidential election joke.

In part because after the really effed up Primary there was decent bipartisan support to change it, but that quickly dissipated with the Trump campaign-led demonization of mail-ins that developed over the summer of 2020.

Supposedly Trump and the GOP have finally been forced to move off this tack. Have you seen evidence of same in PA?

I'm in Georgia now, but I didn't see any before I left.

Mail in voting was a huge boon to Republicans here in 2020, but they're generally so far gone on national right wing media that they're stuck opposing it.

Utah has had great success with mailing voting and very little change politically, but now that's it's coded as helping Democrats they want to remove it.

85, i6, 87 - I used to ask our data analysts for stuff, but there was a big reorg. I know that one who started out with no data analytics experience after her MPH, got sent for training. The course was mostly aimed at librarians? Her old boss retired, because she did not want to get transferred to corporate.

Probably getting trained for the actual system you will use is key. There's lots of ways you could learn SQL specifically, as an abstraction, but then you'll be left to figure out where the SQL goes when you sit down to do your job, and what the data tables are, and whether you have access to them, and who you ask for access, etc. You want rudimentary domain-specific training up to the point where not understanding the query semantics is actually holding you back before you go in for a SQL course. (My apologies if you're already at that point. I haven't done such a course recently and don't have any good suggestions.)

Trump drags out sentencing for the important convictions until after the election, loses soundly, and then we're immediately treated to dozens of centrists and moderates complaining that whatever sentence he gets is vindictive, kicking him when he's down, unseemly political prosecution, etc.

That seems very plausible and, sad to say, that's the _good_ outcome. I am quite worried about the elections this year. I think Biden will win, but I'm not at all certain, and I expect it to be close.

I wish I had some interesting predictions for the year, but sadly, I mostly think I will be gritting my teeth through most of it.

It feels like forever until new year's. I have to stay up for another hour?!

99: I made it! You can do it too !

Happy New Year!

Is Unfogged on its own time zone?

I think it's been off-Mountain for a while.

Or right now we're in the half of the year where it's off-Pacific, maybe.

I'm still up only because jackasses as shooting off fireworks that are scaring my dog. Happy new year anyway.

as s/b are

Happy New Year reprobates!

106 was me. That's Safari starting the new year right by forgetting my name

Happy New Year Barry! Still a couple hours to go here.

Happy New Year.

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This is a good thread about the amount of simple, straightforward ideas that the IRA and infrastructure acts seek to implement: https://nitter.net/CostaSamaras46/status/1741564729628229973#m

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I appreciate this attempt at keeping predictions on the positive side, while still plausible: https://www.offmessage.net/p/predictions-for-2024

92: Supposedly Trump and the GOP have finally been forced to move off this tack. Have you seen evidence of same in PA?

Have certainly seen it pushed by some Republican political operatives, but looking at the data not much evidence of it in elections since 2020, %D votes by mail vs. % R votes by mail have been a little over 3:1 in all elections. (However, a significantly larger % of mail votes in 2020 (about 40%) vs. subsequent statewide elections (~25%). A slight uptick in R mail-in % in the most recent Supreme Court election.

We shall see.

I'd sign up for the 110 plan.

If the US reduces support, I think we see no real movement. If the US maintains support, I think continued attrition for the first half of the year followed by an operational-level breakthrough in, say, September.

Well well well.

(Admittedly my confidence that Biden would win the election in November seems now to have been completely misplaced. He not only won't win, he won't even lose...)