I remember during covid watching all of the ads for gambling and knowing it was going to be a huge problem down the line. I was worried about kids, but data analysts in early middle age.
My kids were betting over/under with each other on props in their sister's hockey game (icing calls, penalties). We're going to look at widespread acceptance of gambling like we view cigarette advertising.
Not as important for Karpf's review, but I always like to remind people it's was the near-current Supreme Court that took the initiative to "legalize vice"*, by overturning a law preventing states other than NV from allowing sports betting. And then lobbying to state legislatures did the rest. Predictable race to the bottom. (I was going to blame Republicans at the state level, but most states red and blue have legalized - the two biggest holdouts, interestingly, are CA and TX.)
Interestingly, the lawsuit had some merit in that the standing law barred states from loosening their existing laws against sports gambling which were near-universal at the time (everyone agrees that's commandeering), but the more avoidable part, which the majority based on tea-leaf reading of Congressional intent, was to say that provision was inseparable from other parts of the act that banned the same sports gambling on federal authority.
*I can think of some better forms of vice that remain illegal.
Bah, this is the sort of thing that keeps me on Twitter. Smug, smug, smug*. Not to say that he's wrong about gambling though.
X/Twitter, famously low on moral superiority?
Silver is so annoying, and also I miss all of his models so much. (The election one of course, but the sports ones maybe even more.)
This critical review is good:
https://thepointmag.com/politics/the-bookmaker/
6: it's the tone, dammit. Nice Liberal does Internet Tough Guy. I'm also unconvinced by the idea there are lots of investors with literally infinite capital.
This is good: https://x.com/Aelkus/status/1830902170591408205 (you may need to follow him)
The thing that the review in 8 forgets (which to be fair, pretty much everyone's forgotten) is that what put Silver on the map wasn't his 2008 general election forecasts (which as the review points out, wasn't that hard) it was his 2008 *primary* forecasts where he was able to use correlations between states to forecast the results in under-sampled states. This really did require using some non-trivial mathematics and not just poll aggregating.
After that he differentiated himself from all the competitors by correctly modeling a larger tail of unexpected outcomes in 2016 giving Trump a good chance of winning the EC (while losing the popular vote) while all his competitors were saying that was essentially impossible. He actually has some real accomplishments here where he has been better than the poll averages or other modelers.
10 is unfortunately private.
10 4 is unfortunately private.
7: His models are still there for you? 538 has a model up that presumably has continuity from before his firing, and then his new Substack talks about the model he's branched off for himself.
The new 538 model is absolutely not the same one Silver used. He owned the rights to his model, and the new 538 has been a hot mess and they had no idea how to react to Biden leaving the race and hid their model for like a month before totally changing it. It's genuinely embarrassing.
I really don't want to pay for his substack because he's so annoying. Sigh.
I have thought about doing so, but at the end of the day it's probably good for me not to have the model around to distract me. He's talked about bringing back the sports models, which might get me to pay, but he said he probably won't bring back the soccer ones, so maybe not.
they had no idea how to react to Biden leaving the race and hid their model for like a month before totally changing it
This seems... understandable? It was a pretty unprecedented situation.
Either they hadn't thought about how to handle a race without an incumbent (which seems crazy, that's a pretty common scenario), or (more likely) they designed their model so badly that they didn't want people to see how wildly it changed when they removed the incumbency advantage. At any rate, none of the other models (Silver, The Economist, etc.) went down for nearly as long as 538 did.
Nate, my man, in what sense is *Brooklyn* between *Manhattan* and *New Jersey?*
This seems like a very silly criticism. Yes, Brooklyn doesn't fall on a straight line between Manhattan and NJ. But you can go from Manhattan to Brooklyn and then continue on to some parts of NJ on the best route without having to go back to Manhattan, which is a perfectly common use of the word "between". I'd be happy saying that London is between York and Cornwall in this sense, even though a straight line route from Cornwall to York doesn't pass through London.
it's the tone, dammit. Nice Liberal does Internet Tough Guy.
Barely distinguishable from 95% of commenters here, in the broad scheme, I think. But okay, gusty bus.
I'm also unconvinced by the idea there are lots of investors with literally infinite capital.
I know there are people out there who have hazy ideas of practical limitations that hurt their discourse, but if you mean where he says "private equity gamblers keep winning b/c they have infinite freerolls", I think you can stand to be charitable and read it as "so much larger than the bets being made it might as well be infinite in this context," because that makes sense. And builds on this other post of his about how Elon Musk could keep going all-in over and over because he could keep buying more chips when he lost his stake.
but if you mean where he says "private equity gamblers keep winning b/c they have infinite freerolls", I think you can stand to be charitable and read it as "so much larger than the bets being made it might as well be infinite in this context,"
Additionally, Nate himself says, in the linked interview (emphasis mine).
There's a question, too, about is it a self-fulfilling prophecy at this point. The top venture capital firms have access to the best founding talent in the world. It's really hard to lose when you have infinite capital and you make these investments and some of them hit 100x big. I'm not super woke, but there are problems in Silicon Valley with a lack of money for anyone who's not a white man or an Asian man of a certain type. There are inequity issues, too.
I'm often struck by how much the amount of wealth that relatively normal people have depends more on "gambling" decisions than on their job performance. The bet I made on what neighborhood to buy a house in has netted me about as much wealth as any merit raises or merit-based summer salary has, and that's in a place where real estate isn't that valuable. But in addition to Real Estate speculation, just betting on what company to work for has a crazy impact. I have two friends who had very similar career tracks through college into working for Microsoft, and one of them left to become employee like 50ish at Facebook and the other is still at Microsoft. They're both doing well for themselves, but obviously the one who made the good bet got a lot more money despite not being any better a programmer. But then I'm sure there's lots of people who left Microsoft for other companies and lost money out of it.
In any thread on Silver I feel compelled to repeat what I've said before: There is an identifiable moment when he lost the thread. When he started the 538 official news service, he cited the fable of the fox and the hedgehog, and -- bizarrely -- identified himself as a fox.
This is the root of all the stupid things he has said since.
The thing he knew -- the hedgehog thing -- is that the methods of social science are widely adaptable to things that people, and especially the media, were doing badly. If he were aware of his hedgehog-ness, I bet he could have written a fine book on risk analysis and poker. But he thinks he's a fox, and falls prey to the kind of foolishness that is common currency on the NYT op-ed page.
Silver's insight and influence ought to be taken seriously, especially by Silver himself. And while I share people's concerns about the social utility of legalized gambling, I think that Silver is right that there are lessons about life contained in poker (and in games in general).
If I were SP in 2, I'd be proud of those kids. (And yes, worried about the broader problem for society.)
The opposite of Tolstoy:
"Turning to Leo Tolstoy, Berlin contends that at first glance, Tolstoy escapes definition into one of the two groups. He postulates that while Tolstoy's talents are those of a fox, his beliefs are that one ought to be a hedgehog and so Tolstoy's own voluminous assessments of his own work are misleading. Berlin goes on to use this idea of Tolstoy as a basis for an analysis of the theory of history that Tolstoy presents in his novel War and Peace."
18: One of the inherent problems of journalism is people's expectation that the news have answers right now. In dealing with an unprecedented situation, all of the stats guys spent some time trying to work it out -- and they all wanted to make sure they didn't rest their models on something that would turn out to be foolish in hindsight.
Of course 538 didn't want to rely on a model that "removed the incumbency advantage" because it seemed unlikely that this was the correct lens through which to view the problem. And there's no shame whatsoever in not wanting to present a model that you believe is a bad model.
19: Yeah, I thought some of Karpf's nitpicking was off-base. But the big one -- Silver's peculiar choice in identifying one of his groups as "The River" -- was dead-on.
I found this comment from the interviewer to be strange: "You spend a lot of time in the AI chapter talking about John von Neumann, who I am fascinated by, and I'm super interested in how you got him on your radar for this book..."
The interviewer clearly knows who von Neumann was, so why would he be surprised that someone writing a book about gambling would have vN "on their radar"
The IQ weirdos are *obsessed* with von Neumann, but for reasons that have nothing to do with any of his particular work.
28: She really was a great part of SNL's initial cast.
I thought for sure someone would give me shit for using the word "tweet" to describe "bluesky" and I was going to argue that the word has been set free to describe the whole class of microblogging that occur naturally in the wild.
As long as you pronounce the site blueski, go ahead and call them tweets!
There's too much vibes-based manual adjustment in Silver's models. For example in Harris' recent run-up of a polling lead, suddenly Silver's model flipped back to 53% chance of Trump winning. Turns out it was because of a single PA poll that had Harris up by 2, but his model decided that was due to a convention bump so adjusted it back to a Trump lead, thus giving him an overall advantage.
And to another discussion happening via skeet, there's no way to falsify Silver's approach to this. Was the bump adjustment correct or not? It is completely unknowable and almost totally irrelevant. It's sheer entertainment for obsessive at this point.
23 - You saw some of this with his plot-losing about the lab leak theory, where he first-principled himself into asserting that a lab leak was more likely than not and that epidemiologists who said otherwise were either succumbing to groupthink or simply lying. (You see some more of it with his recent fulminations about misinformation activism, including his claim that France arresting Pavel Durov for, among other things, Telegram being a CSAM distribution center is "authoritarian".) I'm not sure what group chats he's on, but I bet the Venn diagram overlaps with Bill Ackman's some.
The convention bump thing is pretty tricky, and I'm not sure what you mean by "vibes based"? It's undoubtedly the case that in the past you'd get a better forecast by using a bounce adjustment. The problem is that as we've moved into an era where you usually have both candidates at negative approval rather than both candidates well above water it seems like the bump phenomenon might be shrinking or going away. But especially due to covid we don't have much good data on it. I think it's fine that he has a convention bump, explains it's there, and also explains why you might be skeptical of it this year even though it has a good empirical basis in the past.
33: The original beef between Silver and Elliott Morris, when Morris was still at the Economist, was that Morris was loudly saying that inclusion of bad polls in the 538 model led to bad results that couldn't be corrected by weighing and partisan adjustment. (Just today, I saw from Lakshya Jain, whom I've been following for this sort of stuff, that Silver is no longer going to be including the online panel Activate, because they do no validation about whether you live in the state you claim to live in.)
In particular, I disagree strongly with 34. It's not unknowable, in fact if you wait like another week or two we'll probably know whether there was a convention bump or not!
I disagree with both 34 and 38!
34: It's entirely reasonable to make educated guesses based on incomplete data.
38: But no, we won't really know in a week or two the impact of the convention. We'll have more data, true, but I think Silver himself is generally clever enough to understand the existence of confounding variables. Models are necessarily efforts to assemble the knowledge that we have to make inferences about the information we lack.
Me, I think there was a sui generis euphoria that accompanied Harris's elevation to nominee (and Trump's scattered and inadequate response), and that this is wearing off. I could cite poll numbers that support that view, but in the end, it's still just an educated guess.
I will never not worry about polling because Pennsylvania is too important and I know how many, but not which) polls have me in them.
Before I catch up on the day's comments (so maybe pwned) but If Dave Karpf's name sounds vaguely familiar to you as it did to me: he's the academic lifted from complete twitter obscurity by a very weird NYT columnist: he's the Bretbug guy.
I'm not sure how much we disagree, I said "probably know" and not "know." At any rate, we will have much better info than we do now, and it's not a complete black box.
Election forecasting is hard because you just have so few data points so to some extent you have to wing it a little bit. Especially when there's been a recent big change (like we see with negative polarization driving all approval ratings down, but only in the Trump era) or a weird one-off phenomenon (like the Biden/Harris switch) you're going to have to make do with less information than you'd really need to feel at all certain.
37: Silver is definitely a "throw it all in there even if it means your model is a complicated hot mess"-guy, which is very different from people coming from academic research where you want to have clearer simpler models because then you learn more when you see how accurate (or not) the model is. He's more interested in trying to get this election right than learning as much as possible. I wonder if this is what he meant by the whole fox nonsense. So it is a real difference between him and most other people. That said, I'm pretty skeptical that it's the important difference. Weighting and correction may not be perfect but it's good enough. The important differences between Silver and other modelers have almost always been about modeling uncertainty (fatter tails, and especially allowing for more regional and nation-wide correlated errors) and not about how you deal with polls. Pretty much everyone serious ends up at a pretty similar place in terms of the polls, even if they disagree a bit around the edges.
If he were aware of his hedgehog-ness, I bet he could have written a fine book on risk analysis and poker. But he thinks he's a fox, and falls prey to the kind of foolishness that is common currency on the NYT op-ed page.
That seems like a good way of putting it. I would also mention; I appreciate the implicit question asked by Karpf, "Given Silver's identification as a degenerate gambler, do we have any reason to assume that he is *trying* to provide the most accurate description in his book or should we think of the book as him making a certain sort of play." It's a somewhat insulting question to ask of any author but it fits the description of the book in this case.
Here's what Karpf says:
It strikes me that...
(1) Nate is playing in some high-stakes, pillow-soft poker games.
(2) he could get uninvited from those games if they're offended by his book.
(3) VCs are famously thin-skinned.
(4) he can make more money, and have more fun, staying invited to those games than otherwise.
I think academics are more careful about what goes in the model because they know they have to write up the model and with some journals limiting you to 2,500 words, parsimony is great.
20. I don't know that eve the toughest guys here would write I don't need the down-on-his-luck sports bettor. I've probably reminisced about seeing who bought horse-racing tip sheets on rainy weeknights decades ago when I sold newspapers as a kid. I'm appalled by both Silver's embrace of gambling and also the marketing that the supremes allowed.
do we have any reason to assume that he is *trying* to provide the most accurate description in his book
I'll generally only accept this sort of explanation as a last resort, and I don't think we've reached a last resort with Silver. I'm much more partial to Upton Sinclair's explanation: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
Sinclair here is talking about failed efforts to understand, not deliberate efforts to mislead. Silver has spent a lot of time in a sincere search for accurate methods to assess reality, and I think we ought treat his errors charitably -- as mistakes.
And yes, those mistakes are probably informed in an important way by the identity of the people who shovel money in his direction at poker tables -- and the people who pay for his substack, etc. But I am all to aware of the influence that my own milieu has on my views, and would likewise ask to be treated charitably for my errors.
47: Isn't that a Silver quote? My 20 was about Karpf.
44: I found Morris' detailed criticism of 538 from back when he was running The Economist's model.
2: I buy the occasional lottery ticket, but I am super angry about Maura Healey pushing for online lottery. You should have to pay cash. Letting people run up credit card debt to gamble is predatory behavior on the Commonwealth's part.
I find the argument in 50 reasonably compelling, but I'm surprised by what it lacks, namely any indication that this philosophical difference led to a genuine difference between the predictions of the two models or any estimate of the size of that difference. He does complain that Silver should release a version which shows that difference, but he could at least compare Silver's model to The Economist's model and give us some idea of the scale of what we're talking about here. I find the argument compelling enough, but it seems likely to me that at the end of the day it barely matters.
The kids just learned check kiting from TikTok this week. Now they have to learn about retail pornography. Thanks North Carolina.
Campos has a post about this over at LGM, including a link to a blog post by Andrew Gelman. iiuc Gelman concludes inter alia that predictive models are almost certainly better than a coin flip, and disagrees with several academic colleagues on the value at this time of such models.
Which reminded me of Silver's point that he knows how to bet better than any/all of his critics. Which almost certainly is true - the guy is a professional gambler - but also of tremendous significance if your objective is to make a profit over many bets over time rather than be right each time. It's not betting Trump versus Harris [or whoever] at what odds, it's the myriad side bets that allow gambler's arbitrage, figuring out which situations are most mis-matched for price versus what your model indicates. And I suspect that political betting markets are sufficiently inefficient to make them profitable for pros like Silver.
Thanks for the link, NickS. I liked the thread, although I freely admit that may be due to confirmation bias because I find Nate Silver annoying and mildly dangerous.
I absolutely agree that in not too many years we will see the shift to gambling-all-the-time-everywhere as equally as problematic as cigarettes. I have been a baseball fan all my life, and I'm stunned at the sheer number and variety of sports betting ads that appear in every line of sight at the ballpark, every radio commercial break, and even on screen DURING THE GAME.
Gambling companies are making the experience so omnipresent and so frictionless that anyone who has the slightest problem with impulse control is vulnerable in a way that they just weren't even a few years ago.
Given what we know about markets for other "vices," most of the industry's profits are doubtless coming from the subset of problem gamblers. It's really contemptible that they're trying to create more, especially when none of this should be a surprise. Asian Americans have been raising the alarm for at least 20 years about cynically targeted marketing toward their communities.
Yes, Brooklyn doesn't fall on a straight line between Manhattan and NJ.
Brooklyn does fall on a straight line between Manhattan and New Jersey. Draw a line from the Flatiron Building to Asbury Park. It passes through Brooklyn.
Hoboken is the only place worth knowing in New Jersey.
Of course, neb is wrong, because competent speakers of contemporary American English understand that "straight line" means "the most direct driving route, as determined by popular mapping software."
Asian Americans have been raising the alarm for at least 20 years about cynically targeted marketing toward their communities.
I've read moving individual stories with this conclusion-- do you (does anyone) know whether any of these impulses have led to organized action-- a group asking for and maybe getting less advertising or some kind of legal traction?
59: I believe you will find that ajay is no American.
You're right. As usual, I've been too charitable.
Asian Americans have been raising the alarm for at least 20 years about cynically targeted marketing toward their communities.
Can someone please elaborate?
There does seem to be a lot of attention paid to attracting Asian American and Asian gambles. Though I haven't been to a casino in over a decade. But it might not be cynical if we can assume that the casinos are sincerely interested in money.
59: Of course, neb is wrong, because competent speakers of contemporary American English understand that "straight line" means "the most direct driving route, as determined by popular mapping software.
Google maps does not have Flatiron to Asbury Park going through Brooklyn, but a variety of other Manhattan locations to Asbury Park, are routed through Brooklyn. Who this makes "right" or "wrong" in this instance left as an exercise for the commentariat.
60, 64: Philadelphia Chinatown residents have organized and successfully fought back against two attempts to locate a casino in the heart of Chinatown in Center City Philadelphia. Here's a good summary post from 2009 on the Angry Asian Man blog, and here are some other articles from 2008 as the fight was underway.
Here's a longer oral history interview from one of Chinatown's longtime activists, Mary Yee, which touches on one of the casino fights.
I couldn't immediately find photo images of some of the casino marketing flyers, but suffice to say they were gross.
Oh, here's a job ad for an "Asian Marketing Executive" from one of the casinos that eventually opened (several miles north of Chinatown).
And a 2010 article on problem gambling in Philadelphia (content warning: discussion of self-harm), and a 2011 NY Times article on marketing to Asian American gamblers (more friendly than I think the casinos deserve).
I wonder if the new emphasis on sports betting isn't changing things?
This 2021 article from Philadelphia Magazine is still way nicer than it should be, but has some substantive data on where the gambling revenue goes. (I had somehow blocked out that a percentage of casino money goes to the horse-racing industry -- talk about insult to injury:
[T]he Pennsylvania horse-racing industry collects 11 percent, which means I've donated $5.17 directly to people who are already rich enough to breed racehorses. (Never mind that horse-racing in Pennsylvania is at best a dying industry and at worst one that facilitates widespread animal abuse.)
Commentary in the article notwithstanding, I can say with authority that the casinos give jack!&(#%# to support crime victims in the vicinity of their venues and that at least pre-pandemic a number of their jobs paid even worse than the $12/hour quoted in the article.
I'll stop serial posting now, but I take this stuff seriously because it's socially horrible AND because it personally affects people I know and care deeply about.
"competent speakers of contemporary American English understand that "straight line" means "the most direct driving route, as determined by popular mapping software."
Look at you, getting all non-Euclidean.
70: possibly better than greyhound racing? I'm totally grasping at straws here.
Anyway, Itgought Maura Healey was a terrific Attorney General, but I've been prett disappointed in her performance as Governor.
Pro online gambling, because the Commonwealth is losing out to Keno. Cutting taxes for the richest right after we voted for a 10% marginal rate on those who earn more than 1 million a year.
But actually, here's a question ai'm trying to think through. I'm basically pro legalization of all drugs. Many are not as harmful as they've been made out to be. (Preaching to the choir, ai know). And I just don't think that treating substance abuse as a crime is either effective or humane. Again, not controversial. But I also feel that it would be better to have a safe, regulated supply of most street drugs. That said, I don't recommend that anybody take up heroin recreationally. A couple of towns here are making it illegal to sell cigarettes to younger consumers, effectively making sales illegal over time.. Our previous Republican governor signed legislation raising the age to 21 in Mass. Brookline has said that nobody born after 2000 can buy tobacco.
If gambling is completely illegal, I think it's more dangerous, but I'm really uncomfortable with wide-spread promotion of gambling. Likewise, I've got no problem with lots of types of alcohol, but the industry knows that they make the most money off of the cheap stuff they sell to people who are addicted. What's a sensible regime that's intellectually consistent? I'm not sure that banning cigarette sales is the way to go, but it's probably good if it's not super easy to buy them.
10, 12: here's the guts of the thread:
i have no interest whatsoever in reading silver's new book and find the generalized premise of it totally infantile
at the end of the day, someone has to actually assume responsibility for making things work. its not really glamorous business, but its the business of keeping planes in motion, making sure employees get paid, and keeping government running
No one really *wants* to do this, but they assume on some implicit level that it will be done by someone else. Which is part of why there's been an seemingly endless stream of boosterism about the maverick, the gambler, the outsider, etc
This sort of thing feels increasingly hollow after close to a decade of the political consequences in the US and UK.
"I still feel more at home in a casino than at a political convention" that's the problem
[screenshot of Silver saying this]
maybe on some level this is an overcorrection to the technocratic "competence porn" that preceded it, but it feels actively childlike in 2024.
the book supposedly has a chapter on SBF as the dark side of it, but arguably Trump, post-Brexit UK politics, Musk's mismanagement of Twitter, or even the generalized effects of Jack Welch thinking (Boeing!) are the real ones.
Enron ffs, that was a quarter of a century ago
74: No one really *wants* to do this, but they assume on some implicit level that it will be done by someone else. Which is part of why there's been an seemingly endless stream of boosterism about the maverick, the gambler, the outsider, etc
At times I've tried to use the "free-loader" concept to attack this mode of thinking/governance. Rs and their ilk are free-loading on an ongoing substrate of rationality, science, engineering, infrastructure, and institutions to keep the modern world and lifestyles going while simultaneously attacking the drudges doing the drudgery of making it so. Mavericking is fun! And profitable for some!
And it can work for a long while*. Adam Smith got it right with "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation."
It's surely too abstract of a concept to catch on.
*Or forever for some.
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There used to be a no-call list. Does anyone know if there's a "no-text" list. I got some kind of polling text.
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seconding 74, 76.
Plan for maintenance and operations first! Get all mavericky with the leftovers!
Bostoniangirl, 73; I thought legalizing the addictive things but making it illegal to advertize them was about as good as we could get, actually. Government-providing a cheap safe and slightly boring version of the addictive things, maybe, even.
Government-providing a cheap safe and slightly boring version of the addictive things, maybe, even.
I generally agree with 55, 74, & 76.
To flagrantly violate the analogy ban, it occurred to me that the quoted sentence would almost describe public schools.
Education is a good rather than a vice, but there is still a situation in which some people would naturally want much more of that experience and one of the ways that public schools try to push towards a more standardized and equal level of consumption (of learning activities) is by making it cheap, safe, and slightly boring.
What's a sensible regime that's intellectually consistent?
I've said here before, but I think the regime where you had to go to places that were out-of-the-way to most - Nevada, New Jersey, or reservations - was an accidentally decent harm-reducer. You can do it, but you have to travel. And sure, limit or ban advertising, like we did for cigarettes.
I could envision broad legalization if we could reliably cap how much people could gamble in a year, but as long as cash and cash-bought-cards are a thing that probably won't be feasible.
Aren't barbers supposed to be bookmakers too?
Speaking of gambling, I never did understand how numbers running worked until I moved to Pittsburgh.
I've seen several ads on busses and billboards anout seeking help for problem gambling and now that I think about it the models were mostly Asian. Tagline "problem gambling can make you miss out on life" and it's an Asian mom and kids and there's an outline of the missing dad.
He said he was just going out for cigarettes.
My manager posted a link about Durov being arrested to our internal chat and it immediately got likes from everyone on the team. Because we are all so sick and tired of Telegram and Bitcoin facilitating 80% of the fraud we have to try to get ahead of somehow. The other 20% is the fault of dating websites and retailers of gift cards.
If the IRS would stop accepting Olive Garden gift cards, it would solve a lot of problems.
I think the only people who still bother with trying to pass bad checks are the literally mentally incompetent.
Check kiting had a (very) brief resurgence because of Tik Tok.
The Justice Department is releasing so much stuff they know about the Russians that I'm starting to wonder if the pee tape isn't going to come out soon.
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Moby, do you opinions/recommendations regarding backpacking tents? (2p)
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My main opinion is that a two person tent works much better for one person and that if you have two actual persons, you should try a three person tent.
Fall temps with lows in the 40s. 2p tent as it's just me and the Calabat (4'7")
94 is truth. A two-person tent is large enough to contain two normal-sized people in the sense that an eggshell is large enough to contain the contents of an egg.
re: 94/96
Yeah, we went camping in northern France* a couple of weeks back, and bought a new tent as we didn't have one and all of our friends' tents are way too big for our tiny car. A four person tent is just begin enough for 2 adults and one "tween" child.
* it pissed with rain for 4 out of the 5 days we were there.
I contain multitudes.
No matter how openminded you are when you start reading a blurb about independent voters, they inevitably sound dumb as rocks by the end:
In 2020, Travis Ross voted for Biden mainly to get Trump out of the White House, but he wasn't happy when Biden decided to run again for president. It also bothered him that Biden withdrew from the race in July and then immediately endorsed Harris. He felt as though his vote in the Democratic primary, for Marianne Wilson, was wasted.
95: It probably matters more how much of the day you will spend walking as opposed to in camp, since the trade-off is space for weight (or $). I usually use a tarp, instead of an actual enclosed tent. But that's a bad idea if it is really buggy or rainy or windy.
Gotcha. I need something enclosed ("monsoon" winds, rain, bugs, and Pebbles and I are super reactive to mosquitos.). I have a 3p tent that works for overnights/Basecamp style bikes with me & both kids but it's huge. The weight isn't an issue and it's overkill for 2 small people.
The bigger concern for me w.r.t. is packed volume. Tarp with a mesh inner or trekking pole tent would be okay.
Maybe Tarptent then? Six Moon Designs has a good line of tarp with mesh inners that are for trekking poles, a bit cheaper.
Pretend that was grammatical. Too early to type.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/article/2024/sep/05/fyre-festival-tickets-founder
The festival organiser, Billy McFarland, came up with the idea for Fyre Festival II while in solitary confinement in prison, serving his sentence for multiple frauds connected with Fyre Festival I. Some tickets for Fyre Festival II have already been sold.
I think at this point McFarland shouldn't be prosecuted if FFII turns out to be a massive fraud as well. These people only have themselves to blame.
Also, you're right about 2p/3p tents in general. My longer term plan is to move the kids to a 2p and get my own space as they get bigger. The Calabat's best friend is a kid who has been backpacking since age 2 and they want to have longer adventures now, but they're still little enough that the moms are the pack mules.
I've been sewing my own tarp from a kit with pre-cut fabric. What I've learned is that I'm not very good a sewing and that the Michael's by me is out of sewing machine oil.
You people are always talking about the housing crisis, but I didn't realize it was as bad as 105.
We see the first signs of Unfogged splitting into two incompatible and ultimately inherently hostile factions: stationary farmers living in cob houses, and nomadic pastoralists living in lightweight hiking tents. It is deeply ironic that both of these factions will ultimately claim Moby as their progenitor.
104: Fraudsters are more likely to reoffend than nearly any other category of criminals.
108 three if it's near a large body of water and you include the ekranoplan squadron.
The settled vs nomadic division ran through the heart of this civilisation; it even overlaid the apparently seismic distinction between the primitivistic and the futuristic factions. While the one was divided into Cob People and Tent People, the faction that chose to double down on technological modernity was split between the monorail sex grotto colony and the ekranoplan squadron - a clear binary between settlement and nomadism.
This is very timely as I'm hosting a RPG evening in a couple of weeks and I need something novel in the way of a post-apoc setting.
I prefer pre-apocalyptic Pittsburgh, but I think someone set a video game in post-apocalyptic Pittsburgh.
114: if you set it Wyoming part of the fun could be that no one knew the apocalypse happened for a while
Wyoming's just another word for no more Pittsburgh to lose.
I just got my 6th or 7th covid shot. I'm not dead but I can see cellular signals.
Can you stick spoons to your body?
I mean, if I stopped bathing, I could.
That's why it was a problem in Ohio.
