The criticisms of these polls is broadly correct. But I’m not sure I agree with the conclusion.

Nate Silver was bitterly attacked for weeks before the 2016 election for giving Trump a 20% chance of winning when most other (mainstream) pundits were giving him ~1%. It was bizarre to watch; they might as well have straight up told people not to bother voting.

It was Dem complacency that lost that election and thinkpieces like this do little but encourage more complacency. Trump fans will turn out. Biden-haters will turn out. People who would otherwise be holding their nose and voting for Biden will only turn out if they believe it matters. As they would have in 2016 if they’d known Trump had a realistic chance of winning.

Dems should be thanking biased Republican pollsters because Biden will only win this if a big chunk of eligible voters realise that they’re going to have to hold their nose and vote for him.

Cork insulation would usually be skimmed over with plaster. You could have a look at insulatiing plaster too, but I think that needs to be thicker than cork to work well. Less munchable by critters though.

In an old building, you need to use breathable insulation, breathable plaster, and breathable paint (and breathable mortar, if you’re repointing the outside). The moisture needs an escape route.

Jewish fascism, not Nazism.

Nazism is, in part, defined by its anti-semitism and, while many of Israel’s supporters are anti-semitic (notably Christian Zionists but also those who insist that ‘real’ Jews support Israel regardless) it’s just not appropriate to identify Nazism as the form of fascism practiced by Israel. It is authoritarian and supremacist but it is not specifically Nazi.

Ur-Fascism is a good read.

It’s not supposed to help you spell the word? It’s a comment on the danger of assuming things.

Executives likely to use such a device aren’t using public transit.

Yes they are. Probably not in the country that calls it transit, mind. And lots of people would like to be able to have more private conversations in public, whether or not they’re travelling at the time.

Plus, I’ve seen a lot of threads over the years from gamers, or the people who have to live with them, looking for something exactly like this.

They vote for nobody. Electoral turnout in the UK plummeted from 1997 on.

Low turnout is a feature (not a bug) of neoliberalism.

Install HP Smart without permission.

I checked when I saw this story a few days ago, and there it was. I uninstalled it. Today it asked for permission to install itself again. I suppose at least this time it asked and could be refused.

Is this a troll?

Stochastic terrorism is spreading hatred and fear that is likely to make someone, somewhere, commit a violent act against the targets (or individuals within the targeted demographic). In this case, specific eBay employees were told to target this specific couple to shut them up. I don’t know how precise the instructions were but the targets, and the people told to target them, were not random.

The fact that there was invisibilised third party access to the accounts used as the basis for prosecutions is important in and of itself. But I’m not seeing much about the underlying reasons for it.

Fujitsu knew that Horizon didn’t work properly before it was rolled out to the Post Office. They were told by their own engineers that parts of it had to be rewitten because they were so shoddy. They chose, instead, to have a team of people correcting errors in the background, without disclosing this to subpostmasters or, apparently, the Post Office.

The concern is not that Fujitsu’s trouble-shooters might be deliberately falsifying accounts, there is no obvious motive for them to do so. But it does make it clear that the ramshackle system did not work properly, that Fujitsu knew that it did not work properly, and that the only errors which could be corrected were the ones that got picked up centrally, with the process for correcting them creating the potential for more human error.

Fujitsu bosses knew about Post Office Horizon IT flaws, says insider

There’s an interesting report on the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance site also: Origins of a disaster (and long form version).

It is well-documented that the Post Office’s Legacy Horizon was a reconfigured version of a disastrously flawed parent project, the Benefits Payment Card. The impression given by three Secretaries of State to a Parliamentary Select Committee in July 1999 was that, once the BPC was thought to be irredeemably faulty by autumn 1998, all efforts were then focused on the reconfiguration into the Horizon project as we know it. But their evidence was far from complete. In late 1998 the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who had been warned of the system’s instability, was asked to decide the future of Horizon. The No.10 Policy Unit had advised on cancelling the BPC and the Law Officers had given a clear view on how the public sector might terminate the project. Blair’s steer, however, paid no heed.

Many extremely well-paid heads need to roll.

Thank you! Surprised the report didn’t mention that (I was too lazy to do a search).

If he were said to be omnipotent, this would be an interesting conundrum. But he isn’t so it doesn’t really work?

It does not matter whether he personally knew. The prosecutions were “so egregious as to make the prosecution of any of the “Horizon cases” an affront to the conscience of the court”.

The CPS are responsible for the vast majority of prosecutions in this country and they brought at least three “egregious” Horizon cases. It raises into question how they proceed against other defendants, most of whom are not sympathetic, middle-class pillars of the community and have even less chance of fighting it that the subpostmasters did.

Starmer headed up the CPS and he was responsible for prosecutorial conduct at the time. He cannot claim ignorance as a defence. He should be committing to finding out what the hell went wrong and making sure it can never happen again, to anybody.

The subhead misses out the worst stuff. How on earth?

Criminal charges still in the works, I would hope.

“Secretly”

Is this another thing that the rest of the world didn’t know the US doesn’t have?

In primary school?

He actually made that demand before they illegally demolished it, when the facade was still mostly intact. I don’t think it would have been very practical but still, they absolutely cannot allow the developers to profit from this vandalism.

They should build a mining museum on the site, with a modern but still wonky design (and coins rolling uphill). And force the crooked developers to donate the site as part of a plea deal. It may have been impossible to prove they were behind the arson but a piece of piss to prove that they were behind the illegal demolition.

Comfortably-off customers casting aspersions on “minimum wage workers” are the absolute pits.

There is lots to say here but you are too clueless to say any of it. FFS

The article was about poverty wages as well as those who cannot work. Setting poor people at each other’s throats is missing the point (and doing free PR for the rich people who have taken all the money).