Automated Transcript
Sam:
[0:00]
| Hello.
|
Ivan:
[0:01]
| Hello.
|
Sam:
[0:04]
| So where are you? Where are you now today? You're traveling again?
|
Ivan:
[0:09]
| Yeah.
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Sam:
[0:09]
| Gotcha. Okay. Okay. Shall we? Let me make sure I have this thing here. Blah, blah, blah. Not quite yet. So tomorrow you'd be traveling home. You'd be on the way home. Okay. I understand. I understand. And not going somewhere tomorrow. You'd be going back.
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Ivan:
[0:32]
| No, I'm going home tomorrow. And so therefore it'd be more, yeah.
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Sam:
[0:36]
| Yeah, I understand.
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Ivan:
[0:38]
| And we may not be home on Saturday at all. So I, you know, because Monday is a holiday. So I don't, you know.
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Sam:
[0:45]
| Monday is a holiday?
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Ivan:
[0:47]
| Yes, Monday is Columbus Day. I don't know if your company celebrates it.
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Sam:
[0:51]
| Oh, hell no. We get like five holidays all year long. They do absolutely nothing.
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Ivan:
[0:58]
| I'm not even sure if my company celebrates it, but regardless, I'm taking it off. I mean, I, I, I, I mean, I, I, I do have, I operate or we have unlimited PTO. So, and the thing is that where all my customers are, they're going to be on holiday on Monday, which is otherwise I would be coming back. I'm coming back here on Tuesday. i would be flying back on monday if they would be working but they're not so i am just like well because.
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Sam:
[1:32]
| All of your customers in latin america are are all about celebrating the conquistadors.
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Ivan:
[1:37]
| Well no in puerto rico specifically which which is where my my current like just the focus of my deals right now is in puerto rico that that's that's where but remember that because puerto Rico, it's Columbus, Columbus Day or Indigenous People's Day, whatever the hell it's called right now. I'm not even sure. Is it still Columbus Day?
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Sam:
[2:01]
| Because i got it it depends like in in in the mainland i think it depends on state i don't even think it's a federal holiday no.
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Ivan:
[2:11]
| It's because it's a federal holiday.
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Sam:
[2:13]
| My question.
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Ivan:
[2:14]
| Is is yes it is banks are closed on monday there is no school on monday.
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Sam:
[2:21]
| Okay national holiday yeah yeah in many countries in october.
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Ivan:
[2:27]
| Observed in the united states yes.
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Sam:
[2:30]
| Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Since 1971, federal holiday, generally observed by banks, blah, blah, blah.
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Ivan:
[2:40]
| Yes.
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Sam:
[2:41]
| And I think some states then have overridden and said, we're going to be indigenous people's day or whatever, but I guess the federal holiday is Columbus day. Okay.
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Ivan:
[2:53]
| So it is observed in a lot of other places. Like I see that in Argentina, Columbia, Peruvian, But yes, in the U.S. It's, you know, second Monday of October. Yes, it's a holiday. There is no school for my son on Monday.
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Sam:
[3:09]
| Okay.
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Ivan:
[3:09]
| Yeah.
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Sam:
[3:10]
| Cool. Shall we start?
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Ivan:
[3:13]
| Mm-hmm.
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Sam:
[3:14]
| Okay. Here it goes. Blah, blah, blah, blah.
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Break:
[3:20]
| Blah, blah, blah.
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Sam:
[3:41]
| Welcome to Curmudgeon's Corner for Friday, October 11th. It's just after 2 UTC as we are starting to record. I'm Sam Minter. Yvonne Bo is with me. And yeah, we're going to do another one of these show things. Show thing thing.
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Ivan:
[3:57]
| Thanks. Hello.
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Sam:
[3:59]
| And as usual, our agenda is Yvonne and I will both have something a little bit less newsy or at least less serious newsy.
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Ivan:
[4:07]
| So do I sound better today on the road since I found the microphone?
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Sam:
[4:12]
| Yes, you do. Yes, you do.
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Ivan:
[4:14]
| Okay.
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Sam:
[4:14]
| Like last week, I don't know if anybody could notice because I edited out the part where I told Yvonne he was screwed up. But like the first couple minutes of the show, he was on his Apple ear thingy, bopple thing.
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Ivan:
[4:27]
| AirPods.
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Sam:
[4:28]
| AirPods. That's what they're called. And so I paused. I said, Yvonne, before we continue, are you on your AirPods instead of your actual microphone? and he's like, ah, crap, and we switched it over.
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Ivan:
[4:39]
| And for some reason, and the thing is that, you know, it's weird because usually it just uses the last settings I used.
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Sam:
[4:49]
| Okay?
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Ivan:
[4:51]
| And for whatever the hell reason, last week it didn't. It just decided it was just connected to something else. So, you know, but yeah.
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Sam:
[5:01]
| But you have found the missing small portable microphone that's the the the lav kind that attaches to your shirt that i gave him like theoretically paid for out of their the patreon the curmudgeon's corner patreon i haven't actually like logged everything and kept track of it since i did that but whatever and yeah so yeah it's yeah.
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Ivan:
[5:23]
| I i i did find it it was for whatever the hell damn reason i i i am it was, It the the the little baggie that it's in looks like some other baggies that I used to store some other stuff and gifts and stuff and some of their like gift bags and stuff. OK.
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Sam:
[5:45]
| Oh, not the baggies for your drugs.
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Ivan:
[5:47]
| No, not the baggies for the drugs. No, that's a separate stash. OK. And so and so it looked it looked like that. And so I think my my cleaning lady was cleaning and she put it together with those bags. And so the other day i was looking i i couldn't find because i remodeled the office earlier this year and i had reorganized where my stuff was i was having difficulty finding some documents i needed i was about to do my taxes and i couldn't find my tax folder and um and so i started just going through the whole office to find some stuff and lo and behold, together with these bags.
|
Ivan:
[6:32]
| Wait I saw damn it find oh here it is I thought actually because I couldn't find it that I must have it must have fallen out of my bag and stayed at a hotel something I don't know right right for a bit but but no no no it just got mixed up with some similar looking bags that had nothing to do with it and so that's why I couldn't find it and so but this time i made sure i grabbed it immediately and i put it back in its proper location and so i i was carrying it with me and since i'm going to be traveling today we're recording today because the next day i'll be traveling and then because like i said i i am noticing that it's not an official company holiday but it doesn't really matter to me because i'm like like i mentioned And I think it was interesting to say, I mean, we have an unlimited PDO policy and Monday is not a day that I can really do a lot of work. I've been working very hard on a couple of things with customers that I know that are going to be on vacation.
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Ivan:
[7:30]
| I mean, I know they're out. So I'm like, what am I going to do? I mean, that's my focus right now that I've been here. So I will get on a plane again on Tuesday morning and try to sort it out because Monday is not going to be really much productive.
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Sam:
[7:48]
| Well, you know, you mentioned you have unlimited. I don't have unlimited. I have an amount that accrues and all this. Well, this is what I was going to say. Well, I save it up. Like I am about to take three weeks off.
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Ivan:
[8:02]
| Oh, that's right.
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Sam:
[8:03]
| I've got one more week at work and then I'm going to take three weeks off for the stupid election stuff because like, and, and, you know, we'll talk like polls and crap at the, at the end of the show, I'm sure. But like right now at this very moment, I counted and I already forgot whether it was 30 or 40, but like on the order of 30 or 40 data points that came in over the course of the day to day. But I was at work doing my actual job. And so I didn't put those data points in yet. And and now I'm doing this show. So I'm not putting them in. So some and after we're done here, I'm undoubtedly going to have to pay attention to my son for a little bit. And then it's going to be like 10 or 11 o'clock at night. And then I'm going to have to spend the next four or five hours putting these damn data points in. And you're going to be like, why does it take you four or five hours? That's probably an exaggeration. It probably doesn't actually take that long. But also the way I have it set up is very much a sequential one at a time thing. Like I put in one data point. And then I tell my system to process it and it updates a bunch of stuff and it sends out a toot and it does this stuff. And then I check all of it to make sure it all works properly before I enter the next data point. So it's like, yeah, actually typing it in takes like a minute or less. But like, then I wait for it and blah, blah, blah.
|
Ivan:
[9:30]
| You're just a slacker.
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Sam:
[9:32]
| And I know people keep telling me, well, not people keep telling me, I keep telling myself. I could switch. There are a couple of sources where I could just ingest polls automatically and just have this stuff happen without human intervention. But the problem is, like, I make different decisions about which polls to include and which not to include than the various sources I could use. And so I'm still doing it by hand because I, like, look at each one and decide what I want to do with it and blah, blah, blah, and enter it or don't enter it and blah, blah, blah. And I know I could probably build something that made like, looked at those other sources and then said, do you want to include this one? Yes or no? And would still save me time, maybe for 2028. We'll think about it again. But like, at the moment, I do a lot of manual stuff. But it also the manual stuff, make sure I am paying attention to it with every data point that goes in. I'm like, what was the effect of this data point? You know, anyway. But yeah so so yeah i have but my point is the maximum vacation time accrual is four weeks and i'm going to use up three and i'd already used a little bit on one thing or another so it means actually after i come back from this i'm gonna have very few days left so like if something comes up i'm gonna be like oh i'm out of time i can't do whatever now that you know if something did like if something major came up right they would let me go negative but you know but yeah because i.
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Ivan:
[11:01]
| I actually you know that was one thing i i i was at a place where i i know that for stuff like that they could let me go negative on on time off and i could i would have.
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Sam:
[11:10]
| To make it back up it's not a you wouldn't go negative because like i want to go to the bahamas for a week but if you if you like had you know like you went you had an emergency.
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Ivan:
[11:20]
| Because your mom your mom was sick you have to go take care of her for a couple of weeks so you need to take time off yeah you could go.
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Sam:
[11:26]
| Negative something yeah yeah exactly and uh so but yeah it's kind of annoying because like normally like i keep getting the notices that i'm like you know you're at you're at or near your maximum you better use some time or you're not gonna you're gonna be wasting it because you won't accrue anymore and uh but this year i knew i'm taking the three weeks off at the end of the year so i'm like okay whatever but this is exactly why like way back in the day when i did random trips it was exactly because i realized i was never using my vacation time and i was like i should use my vacation time i'll i'll do one random trip every quarter no matter what and i used up my vacation time but yeah since then i haven't been doing that, I should do it again.
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Ivan:
[12:09]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[12:10]
| Were these things our butt firsts, or do we have something else to say for our butt first? I really should catch up on my movies. I should keep up with, I should catch up, like log all my movies and TV and books and stuff so I have something to talk about.
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Ivan:
[12:25]
| What's your butt first? You're going to go with a movie?
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Sam:
[12:28]
| No, because I haven't logged them, so I have no idea. I don't have nothing to talk about.
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Ivan:
[12:33]
| Okay. All right. Well, I don't, I don't have anything else to say.
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Sam:
[12:37]
| So are we going to jump out? We're going to take a break and jump straight into newsy stuff. Okay. Whoa. It is. It's amazing. Like, uh, you know, I'm trying to think any quick, cause, cause you know, I, I've, I've become so used to the fact that I always had a book or movie to talk about that. I haven't been bothering to log the little goofy things that I might want to talk about.
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Ivan:
[13:00]
| And so a lot of things that I'm like, you know, the, we're all news.
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Sam:
[13:04]
| Time like usually here's the.
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Ivan:
[13:05]
| One thing because like the.
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Sam:
[13:06]
| Weather the weather is news yes right, so oh i can't i will mention one thing except except it's it's it's i haven't actually done it yet but i'm seeing all over my social media feeds the people talking about the geomagnetic storm and how the the aurora the northern oh yeah.
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Ivan:
[13:29]
| Yeah yeah and it's going to extend for what.
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Sam:
[13:31]
| It's It's going to be very, very far south, nowhere near where you are in Puerto Rico.
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Ivan:
[13:34]
| No, no, no.
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Sam:
[13:35]
| But I, yeah. But like as far south as the Carolinas, you know, on the East Coast and as far south as, you know, Central California on the West Coast. And, you know, earlier this year, I think it was in May, there was one of these. And Alex and I, I don't know if I talked about it on the show. I probably did. But Alex and I actually went out, like we left home at like one o'clock in the morning, drove like an hour east. So we were away from the city lights in sort of the darkness in the mountains and, you know, went and watched the roar for a little bit. And it was one of those things where, yeah, you could see it with the naked eye, but you could see it so much better with your phone camera.
|
Sam:
[14:17]
| And it's supposed to be almost as good tonight as it was back last May, maybe in some places just as good and i don't know i i on the one hand i'm sort of like it would be cool to see again but on the other i'm like did that in me like maybe like if i walk out the front door and i can actually see it from my house then maybe i'll take a few pictures but i don't know if i'm gonna like wait until the middle of the night and then drive out an hour you know to find a really dark place and all that, which, which was cool. Cause you could like last time when this happened in May, you could see it from my front door, but barely. Yeah. And you really needed the camera assist. Like you couldn't really tell with the naked eye, but you could tell with the camera. But whereas when you really went out to a dark place, you could tell with the naked eye and it was spectacular with the camera, you know? And so, but I'm like, you know, I did that. Do I really have to do it again? I don't know. But it is really cool. And my social media feeds are right now. Like I'm just, I'm, I'm looking at the screen on Mastodon over here and like every other thing is like a picture of the Aurora from somewhere in the country. You know, and they're, and they're looking cool, you know? So I don't know.
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Ivan:
[15:46]
| Okay. I was wondering if I had seen it.
|
Sam:
[15:49]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[15:49]
| I was wondering if I had seen it and I finally did find some pictures that I took of Aurora Borealis when I was flying like one night going, when I was flying, I'm not sure which leg, but on the trip, it was going to London, I think, to Asia. Well, I was ending to Asia for some or something. And, you know, we were doing and yeah, and I actually did find that it was like in 2019 that when we flew that I was able to see it out the window. So it's like rubbering if I saw it. And it was I managed to grab some pictures of it. It was like really bright it was it was it was it was cool i mean it was it was it was so yeah so so i have seen it i was like trying to remember the ice i've seen it i'm like shit i've seen it right yeah and i was like i i did find the the the picture so it was like yeah i was like uh on one night overnight like going doing the circle route thing yes you know how planes.
|
Sam:
[16:49]
| Go over the northern areas because it's shorter.
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Ivan:
[16:53]
| It's shorter yes because unlike what some people.
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Sam:
[16:58]
| Think it you know it's it's a flat plate sitting on a turtle or something whatever you know.
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Ivan:
[17:04]
| Right but yeah anyway.
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Sam:
[17:06]
| Okay anything else shall we uh take that break and and and hit the.
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Ivan:
[17:11]
| More yeah let's take the break let's let's go yeah here we go here.
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Sam:
[17:14]
| Here it comes.
|
Break:
[17:19]
| Do you want to understand what is really going on with the presidential election cycle? Then go to electiongraphs.com right away. There you'll find charts and graphs covering the nomination processes in both parties and the general election race for electoral college votes. For the delegate races, we track not just delegate totals, but also the ever-important analysis of how each candidate has to do with the remaining delegates in order to actually win. For the Electoral College, we track state-by-state poll averages to categorize which states are actually in play and which are not in order to show you the range of likely electoral results and how that changes over time. Sure, you can get some of this stuff elsewhere, but not in exactly the same way. And not for me, Sam, your prime curmudgeon. I think my election trackers are better than the rest, so come look at mine. Electiongraphs.com.
|
Sam:
[18:19]
| Yeah so anyway that's you know i i was just thinking as that was playing that that may well be like the.
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Ivan:
[18:28]
| Last time i.
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Sam:
[18:29]
| Well i may it may be the last time i played a break before the actual election.
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Ivan:
[18:34]
| Uh because.
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Sam:
[18:35]
| Because it only comes up like one out of every 10 times i play the break and we've only got like a few weeks left and you know maybe maybe it will maybe it won't it's random but i made that break in 2016 i've just used the same one ever since even though i've changed some stuff since then but i just pull it out every four years you know it's fine it's fine fine god damn it anyway.
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Ivan:
[18:59]
| Your your.
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Sam:
[18:59]
| Turn you want to talk about hurricanes for yours and then elections for mine or you want to do something different.
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Ivan:
[19:03]
| I mean we've got the hurricanes you know what i mean all right let's talk about let's talk about the storms so we we you know, so florida i'm not in florida i'm in puerto rico you.
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Sam:
[19:19]
| You skipped out and left your family to fend for themselves.
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Ivan:
[19:23]
| Yeah yeah yeah look i looked at the i looked at the maps, on sunday i was talking to my mom i'm looking at my wife and i said look this is not coming down here but i i did have like a contingency plan i had actually even like i saw that i could hold a ticket if i needed to in order to fly back early and i was like well at first i did i saw that i saw there were plenty available coming the thing is that to go the tickets that were i realized i didn't even need to hold it i went and i and i looked at who was available and the prices were cheap, and I realized, look, people aren't flying to go there. They're wanting to fly out. So I saw, look, if I need to get back, it's not a big deal. I can get on the next available flight. It's no big deal. If the track changes, but I looked at the track. I was booked to fly on Monday. I had checked the flight the night, checked the track the night before. I looked at the track on Monday and I'm like, listen, this is, it's, we're 48. The computer models are very good at 48 hours out.
|
Sam:
[20:34]
| Right.
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Ivan:
[20:34]
| Okay. It's really when it's longer than 72 hours plus where they really are not good. But 48 hours out, they're really good.
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Sam:
[20:42]
| And by the way, even at 72, they're much better than they used to be. There's still a lot of room for error.
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Ivan:
[20:49]
| Yeah, even at 72. But at 48 hours, what the track that was forecasted was within 100 miles of where it went. 100 miles total north-south, okay? So it was very, very accurate, okay, in that sense. So, look, the storm was forecast to be well north of 200 miles, north of where I live, at least. And so I'm like, look, the worst we're going to get, which we just got with Helene, some blustery winds and some rain or whatever. There was a whole bunch and far more than we have ever gotten before. Strong tornadoes.
|
Sam:
[21:31]
| Yes.
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Ivan:
[21:32]
| There were quite a lot of them. We had never gotten so many simultaneous tornado warnings at once. This was a record. There was 125 active tornado warnings that popped up at once.
|
Sam:
[21:48]
| Across the whole state.
|
Ivan:
[21:49]
| Across, yes. That was a nutty number. We've never had that many at once. And actually, those tornadoes that did touch down in certain places caused significant damage in quite a number of places. And far away from where landfall was, okay? And so that was something that was a little bit unnerving because my wife called me and said, hey, we got a tornado warning. What do you do? I'm like, well, there's nothing you could do. I mean, you stay inside. I mean, our property is as protected as it can be. You know, so, you know, we have, you know, we have hurricane impact glass. We have, we have roofs that were built within the last 10 years. That means that, you know, if you, you, you do a new roof, you, you, you don't go and you can't build it to whatever standard it was built before. They have been like raising the standards of what hurricane protection you got. So it's got to be built to whatever the hell the current, the current standard is. Okay. And so they're built for at least a Category 4 hurricane, you know, so basically 155-mile-an-hour wind resistance.
|
Sam:
[23:02]
| Of course, the wind in an actual tornado can be significantly higher than that. It can be significantly higher. If you have a direct hit from the tornado.
|
Ivan:
[23:09]
| If you have a direct hit from the tornado.
|
Sam:
[23:10]
| But tornadoes are much smaller.
|
Ivan:
[23:12]
| But tornadoes are much smaller. You know, it really is, you know, I mean, you can't do, you know, there's not much you can do. You know about a tornado i did see a number of the houses that were similar to to to mine that got hit by a tornado for the most part what happened was that they lost the the for the most part most of them just lost the decorative coverings right which is you know which i don't understand why fucking i actually have decided that the next time i'm fucking doing one of these roofing projects i'm gonna go with metal roofs okay the hell with this okay you know fuck this shit. They're actually, I've seen a whole bunch of companies now, they got these metal roofs, they go with Stam'd, 250 mile an hour winds you know fucking yeah you know whatever i'm like what the hell am i doing you know and i saw that it's maybe like 20 more money i'm like what the fuck am i what the hell am i fucking around with this thing no the next time just fucking put put up a metal roof the hell with this shit okay they actually look cool by the way and so so it's not bad so but anyway i so we had that happen okay that was like happening as the as the storm was approaching and you know Well, the thing is that, as everybody is saying, the landfall with Tampa was always, Tampa was the one that everybody was scared about. And it really was.
|
Sam:
[24:31]
| For years and years and years, people have always talked about, like, there are several worst case scenarios that people talk about. They talk about Tampa. They talk about Miami, New York, and New Orleans. And we came close to the worst case in Katrina for New Orleans, but not quite. Right. It actually was better than the worst case. It veered at the last minute. And as bad as Katrina was, it was not the worst case scenario. But for Tampa and New York has dodged a couple as well. They had that that super storm Sandy a while. But but Sandy was also dodged a little bit away from the worst case scenario. And Tampa is one where, as they talked about a lot this time around, it hasn't had the kind of direct hit they're really worried about for over 100 years. And it's had a few near misses. And this time was once again a near miss, like coming in, you know, a couple dozen miles further south than what would have been the worst case scenario.
|
Ivan:
[25:32]
| But even the thing is that Tampa is far more susceptible than Miami or Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach to the flooding because of how the Tampa Bay is and how people built around the Tampa Bay. Because on the on the east coast in miami even though you can get store you get storm surge it's not as big as a storm surge that you get on on the tampa bay area part of it is because of how the the the ocean shelf and how it is and how shallow it is coming into miami it makes it that you do get surge, but it's not at not 18 feet of surge, okay? You get a lot less. The problem in Miami has been more that there's been so much more construction in recent years, and there are many areas that man, they just flood regularly right now because the drainage and some things haven't been done. The reality is that I think I've mentioned before, look, I.
|
Ivan:
[26:40]
| Okay, I know I have information about what the plans are, which actually they've been made public by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and I've had direct, you know, I've directly seen these plans. They have a great plan to avert that in Miami, and they have the money assigned to it. The complaint was, the last time it was presented, is that it involved a lot of seawalls, and the people thought they looked ugly.
|
Sam:
[27:09]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[27:10]
| And the frustration expressed to me is, like, these idiots are worried about how it fucking looks instead of the fact that we've got a plan that we have worked on for over a decade so the fucking place doesn't flood in case of the worst-case fucking scenario. Okay?
|
Sam:
[27:32]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[27:32]
| The worst-case scenario of climate change, the worst-case scenario of a hurricane, the worst-case scenario of whatever the fuck. We already made the fucking plan. And you assholes are all dicking around because you think the walls look ugly. And they're like, they want to just fucking like, you know, they want to just kill themselves. Okay. All right. Because it's just stupid. You're engineers. You figured out how to fix the problem. And then you've got politics, which Florida, unfortunately, has been flooded with politics infiltrating into this shit right now a lot over the last decade. More so than ever, because before it wasn't as bad. But the hurricane went and hit straight onto Sarasota, which is not the worst case. And what it did is actually drained the Tampa Bay instead of actually pushing the water into the Tampa Bay. So Tampa Bay did not get hit. They actually had more flooding from Helene as it went by. And they actually had this one because of the way it went through. And thankfully, because the water was cooler as it was approaching there, strength did go down. But, you know, the places there on the shore, they had been hammered already by by by storm surge, you know, from Helene. And so they got it again.
|
Ivan:
[28:43]
| You know, and a lot of the structures in the path of the storm, there's still a lot of people that have built homes that basically are just not built for hurricanes.
|
Ivan:
[29:00]
| And, you know, somebody was asking me the other day, and I did share an article explained a little bit. So why is that? Why so many people in Florida? And why they build these houses? And part of it is that, you know, Florida had a very, very, very long streak of not getting hit by a lot of storms, okay? And even in the west coast of Florida, too, look, we're talking about Tampa Bay. Tampa Bay has not been hit by a major hurricane in 100 years. This is one of the ones that has come the closest, okay, in recent times. And so, you know, Florida had a very long streak of that. And then in the early 90s, they got hit by Andrew. Okay and when they got hit by Andrew what happened was okay Miami South Florida Miami Palm Beach and Broward adopted much stricter construction codes but the rest of the state didn't they like acted like ah that's just Miami we you know we that's not gonna happen here which is just idiotic okay so the rest of the state has operated and like South Florida had I kept never understanding this We would get like, I was talking to somebody that just bought a house in Jacksonville two years ago, which, by the way, is also on target to be able to be hit by our hurricane. It's had close calls. And they were paying like $2,000 in insurance. Well, I'm paying $8,000 in insurance.
|
Sam:
[30:24]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[30:25]
| And I'm like, and their house is not, they just bought a new house that's built with wooden walls. It was just built recently. And I'm like, this thing in a fucking Cat 3 hurricane, forget about four or five. Cat 3 storm, this thing is gone. There's nothing left here. Okay. Pitching up matchsticks. And we're building these. They're still building these new. You have so many people that came from the south, moved into Florida, built houses like they were building houses in Tennessee, in those areas, built them especially in the northern part of the state. It really makes no sense. So many of them moved. And because there was such a lull in storms, you still have a lot of this construction around.
|
Ivan:
[31:11]
| Now, in a lot of cities, like I know that my nephew just moved into a new place in Orlando. And I had been worried about, is he going to be okay? And he told me, actually, no, this new place that I went into Orlando, which is not close to the coast, which actually, you know, one of the things is a hurricane moves inland. It pretty quickly loses strength in terms of wind and whatever, whatnot. If you're in an area that is not prone to flooding, he told me, hey, it was windy, whatever, but everything was fine. It's no problem. And they had impact glass. They've got, you know, structure is solid. It's not made out of wood. And he was like, okay, so he was fine. But in Central Florida, for example, those people in those more modern areas that I'm around, I talked to a couple of people, they were fine. But there was one person specifically that I knew lived somewhere further south close to Sebring, Florida. And I knew that all those houses there were basically pre-manufactured houses, which is almost like a trailer on top of a fucking slab of concrete. And I am like, this person's saying, well, I'm going to ride it out. I was looking at that map this fucking storm was going straight for them, And I'm like, I tried to call him. I said, you're out of your mind. Get the hell out of there. No, no, no. We're going to ride this out. Okay, look, these people are not island people. They were from Indiana. They've never lived through this.
|
Sam:
[32:32]
| Right, right, right.
|
Ivan:
[32:33]
| Okay, so today, fine. They posted today. They were alive. Yes. But they posted that all their, half the houses around them were destroyed. And I'm like, okay, how could you just, you know, How could you just, I mean, do you realize, you know, I don't know about you, but if I'm somewhere where the house next to mine or a few, several of them got destroyed and I lucked out, I'm not feeling very good the next day. And I'll tell you something that that night had to be horrible because my wife still from the one big hurricane that we had in 2004, Wilma, still has is is petrified from them. She's got post-traumatic stress from it.
|
Sam:
[33:20]
| In the in the short time I lived at Florida was like one of the years that we got a whole bunch of hits.
|
Ivan:
[33:26]
| Yeah, we had a whole bunch.
|
Sam:
[33:27]
| And for the first one, like we picked up the whole family, all the pets, everything, and we evacuated all the way to New Orleans. The second or third one, we're like, this one's not that bad. We'll hang out. And like, it was scary. You know, we were all fine. The place was fine, whatever. This was when we were staying in like your relative's place. Yes. And, and, you know, it was, it was fine, but there were, there was lots of damage in the neighborhood. We, we stayed in like the noise of the storm going over.
|
Ivan:
[34:01]
| The noise.
|
Sam:
[34:02]
| Cause we'd boarded up everything. So you couldn't see outside.
|
Ivan:
[34:06]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[34:06]
| It was just the noise of, like, destruction obviously happening all around.
|
Ivan:
[34:11]
| Happening outside, yes.
|
Sam:
[34:12]
| Things creaking, things slamming, things whatever. And, yeah, it was a little scary. And we were like, okay, if there's another one.
|
Ivan:
[34:22]
| We're not standing.
|
Sam:
[34:23]
| We're going. We're going.
|
Ivan:
[34:25]
| And, look, here's one thing. Look, my family, I, you know, like me and my parents or whatever, you know, sort of these things, right? I, you know, people are like, oh, my God, Florida is like, you know, nobody can live in Florida, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, fuck, man, I've lived with this shit since I was a little kid. I mean, you know, this is what happens when you live in the Caribbean, in the tropics. This is what it is. Florida had gotten lucky for many years. But look, I still remember when I first went to Carnegie Mellon the first year, okay, two weeks later, okay, Hurricane Hugo hit Puerto Rico. Hurricane Hugo didn't hit Florida, but it hit South. I think it was like Charleston, okay? South Carolina. It destroyed Charleston, South Carolina. And it was, it got up to a category. I think it was like category three, four, five. It was, listen, that was brutal, okay? And when it hit, it destroyed. It hit San Juan. And that was, and look, I, when it hit Puerto Rico, hours before the storm hit, Back then, telephone to Puerto Rico, to here, was not on Fiverr underwater. It was satellite.
|
Ivan:
[35:38]
| And so, damn it, the satellite signals started, the satellite stopped working. I don't know if the dish, whatever, but I couldn't place a call out. And, man, I spent two weeks that I had no idea what the fuck happened. I could read the newspapers. But but in terms of and and even you know it was a lot of coverage because you know what happens when you're in the u.s like whatever happens something in puerto rico i mean they'll mention it but they're not going to be covering it in depth especially back then and so you know i'm making calls i actually talked to some people in san juan finally i was able to because then what happened was it was forget the satellites satellites come back up the phone lines to where my parents lived got knocked out. Okay. And so the power lines got knocked out. Everything got knocked out, but it was, it was several weeks until I found out they were okay. But, but the thing is that, you know, we had that, you know, my mom endured her first hurricane when she was, you know, five, six years old, you know, we, we lived through them like the forties, fifties, sixties.
|
Ivan:
[36:46]
| Seventies, eighties, you know, every year. I mean, I don't know to me, it's like, Look, it's something that from where we are, that you live, that you prepare for. OK, yeah, that's just the way it is. And you prepare for properly and it's and it's usually OK. Yeah. Puerto Rico was before Hurricane Maria had never had a lot of problems with recovering from a storm. The circumstances surrounding what happened like here with that hurricane in 2017 had to do first with the fact that the the island government had been in bankruptcy and that had been something that had been going on and that had caused that the electric grid had been left in a state of total disrepair that it was just it was just a story you know everybody knew look if a major hurricane hits it there electric grid is in such bad shape it's it's it's not going to work and you know as you talk to people here the it wasn't the storm itself the the storm itself the winds it's not like the wind knocked out people it wasn't it wasn't that it was the aftermath unfortunately that killed people because when you had so many people that depended that couldn't get.
|
Ivan:
[38:05]
| More specifically medical treatment aid people that needed medicines oxygen that people that you know that they could get the help for that it was the the post storm and the lack of recovery and the fact that i mean it's been shown right now already that the trump administration actually blocked aid to puerto rico post hurricane he didn't want to send the aid he was like fuck fuck you. I mean, he actively sabotaged recovery.
|
Sam:
[38:33]
| There was more about that just this last week, that more revelations of the Trump administration still coming out, more details about how not just for Puerto Rico, but for California, for other places, he absolutely was like, hey, did they support me? If the answer is no, then why should they get aid? And specifically the example that came out this week for California was related to the fires and everything like that. And somebody actually had to go and show him the, the number of Trump voters in the specific County that was having the fire issue and show him that yet, even though it was California and even though there was a, it was a blue state.
|
Ivan:
[39:18]
| It's a red area of the state.
|
Sam:
[39:20]
| It was a red area of the state. And not only that, the population density was such that the number of Trump voters in that one county was bigger than the number of Trump voters in some entire states, you know? And then he's like, okay, fine, send them some aid.
|
Ivan:
[39:36]
| But this is the thing. And so the reality is, is we approach this election again. It's, is how that really impacted. Now, in what happened right now in Florida with Milton, as he had to go through- Yeah.
|
Sam:
[39:50]
| Let's talk about this one.
|
Ivan:
[39:51]
| No, no, no. Yeah, no, no, no. And, you know, it's just, so many people are talking about, look, we're getting more storms, and they're like, oh my God, you know, it's just, listen, unfortunately, Florida had been lucky for a long time, not getting hit with storms. People got lulled into complacency, okay? And so that is why I think, and you've got a lot of newcomers that just aren't used to storms.
|
Sam:
[40:12]
| Yeah, I was going to say that there are a few things here. One, there was a period that was a lull, like you said. Two, just in general, because of climate change, they're going to be more and bigger and the effects are going to be stronger. Three, you do have huge population increases since the last time there were big stuff. And lots of new people who've never experienced blah, blah, blah. And you were talking before, in some places, the people who are doing the regulation are not all in on the idea that, okay, you build something new, it has to meet these newer standards. And of course, you've also got a wide variety of incomes out there as well.
|
Ivan:
[40:59]
| Oh, God, yes.
|
Sam:
[41:00]
| There are some folks that can afford all the fancy, super protective stuff, and there are some folks that can't. And what do you do there?
|
Ivan:
[41:08]
| But listen, Puerto Rico has showed that you can afford, you can build, you know, it doesn't have to be just a rich people. You know, we got houses over here that are built for less than $100,000 that can withstand a storm better than houses that I know in the States, in Florida, for a million dollars.
|
Sam:
[41:25]
| Well, a big part of it is just use the right construction materials for the area that you're constructing. Like, we're in an earthquake zone. In an earthquake zone, wood is better than concrete.
|
Ivan:
[41:40]
| 100%, yes.
|
Sam:
[41:41]
| But if you're in a hurricane zone.
|
Ivan:
[41:44]
| You want concrete!
|
Sam:
[41:45]
| Yeah, you don't want wood.
|
Ivan:
[41:47]
| No, exactly. You don't want wood. And, you know, talking about climate change, now it sparked a different thing in terms of hurricanes. This was a very strange hurricane. And this is a hurricane that was definitely, absolutely, one that climate change spurred, that in the past would not have happened. because it formed off the Yucatan Peninsula, okay? Right there in the Gulf of Mexico. And that is not, that didn't happen before. You didn't get a storm. The water used to be colder there. So you never got these storms forming there and then strengthening that quickly because it gathered steam and strengthened super quick, okay? And then go in this west to east route, which is not I don't know it's not the way you usually think of hurricanes going no they don't do that it's the reason why Tampa never got hit.
|
Ivan:
[42:47]
| And so all of a sudden you've got Gulf of Mexico that is a lot warmer that all of a sudden can fuel a storm and have it go from tropical storm to cat 5 and like, this in a snap of a finger. So, yeah, I mean, it's it's creating a different threat that what you were seeing. And so we I think that's one thing where we used to be preparing for a different threat. And now because of climate change, you're getting a totally different new one at this point. And the whole damn state of Florida has to adopt the same damn frickin building code. That takes into account, storm surge hurricanes what the fuck the strength is and so forth and so on you can't because right now it used to be that the panhandle west coast north florida ah whatever man the panhandle has gotten hammered by three hurricanes in the last couple of years three three of them okay and well at this point one thing about it is that because insurance companies have basically said fuck you, we're not.
|
Ivan:
[44:07]
| Insuring you. We're not, you know, either, you know, so let's push some people to not build. However, you know what we've gotten also is a whole bunch of people that have decided to rebuild there with no insurance and no mortgage, no nothing, and a place that got obliterated already. And I'm just like, you know, I mean, it's, Listen, the storm surge shows that that place is just not a good place to build. Yes, I know you love your ocean view, but it's just not survivable. And so... I don't know. I will say this. No significant change to this stuff is going to happen to this governor. I will say that, thank God, that the worst-case scenario of this storm did not happen. However, regardless of that, the damage has been quite extensive, especially in the west coast of Florida, because they got storm surge from two storms back to back. And, oh, by the way, the hurricane season ain't over. We've still got a few more weeks. And last year we had a hurricane in november so um so so what's not like it's not like the hurricane season it's not like you know oh closing time okay yeah no more hurricanes november 1st ha ha ha see ya no no no it's not it's not you know it doesn't work that way yeah.
|
Sam:
[45:34]
| There was that one year where they had to like go into the greek letters right.
|
Ivan:
[45:39]
| Yes that happened more.
|
Sam:
[45:40]
| Than once actually i think but.
|
Ivan:
[45:42]
| Yes you.
|
Sam:
[45:42]
| Know and if i.
|
Ivan:
[45:44]
| Remember we haven't actually gone through that many letters the the thing is you know some people and i know like the.
|
Sam:
[45:51]
| Time frame like that that time that that happened i it it also just stretched so there essentially wasn't an end like you had like the new the new season started picking up before the there was just there was no month that had nothing.
|
Ivan:
[46:05]
| Yeah and so i look the one thing about it is that you know predicting how many hurricanes you're going to get in a season obviously you know people it's like oh they predict this is going to be the most active season blah blah blah and look the one thing is that look you can't predict how many hurricanes you're going to get because you have to get the conditions however what has been clearly demonstrated by the storm is that the conditions are there that once you get something spooled up, it's spooling up in places that you don't expect to an intensity so quickly that you wouldn't have gotten before.
|
Sam:
[46:43]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[46:45]
| And that's that's your current climate reality. And oh, by the way, the other thing is that I don't care how many people would argue with me about this. There is no safe place from climate change. It doesn't fucking matter. It's pick your poison. OK, all right. And there it doesn't exist. OK. Yeah. You know, I was talking about was having dinner lunch in California. Is that these people, they were telling me about how that auto dealership that was in Kansas that got completely obliterated by tornadoes like a couple of years ago. Okay? Just gone. $100 million business. Just completely destroyed. Okay? You know, with the wildfires, with the flash floods, with what happened in North Carolina and Tennessee like right now with that tropical storm that went and churned all the way inland, all the way over there, and caused all that damage. I had somebody argue with me? I don't know if you remember that last year they had these crazy flash floods in Las Vegas.
|
Sam:
[47:46]
| Vaguely. Vaguely.
|
Ivan:
[47:47]
| There was a ridiculous rain event in Las Vegas. Once again, one of these things that never happened where they had this massive rain event in Las Vegas that caused crazy flash floods where everything was like, I mean, the streets looked like rivers, cars were being dragged. It was just crazy. Somebody was trying to argue with me that that's not That's not a natural disaster. And I'm like, um, that's not, okay.
|
Sam:
[48:17]
| Unless you're going to argue it's a man-made disaster instead.
|
Ivan:
[48:20]
| Well, you could say that.
|
Sam:
[48:22]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[48:23]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[48:24]
| So what?
|
Ivan:
[48:25]
| Well, we could argue that all of these are right now or, you know, man, they're influenced. They have been influenced by our influence on the planet.
|
Sam:
[48:36]
| Humanity has made it worse.
|
Ivan:
[48:38]
| Humanity has made it worse. But but Sam, is that do you have the joystick hiding over there in that shelf over there where you control the storms?
|
Sam:
[48:45]
| Wait a second. Yes, I do.
|
Ivan:
[48:48]
| Oh, OK. There you go. So that's how you steer it into the. i steer the storm.
|
Sam:
[48:52]
| With this little joystick yep yep.
|
Ivan:
[48:54]
| Yeah and.
|
Sam:
[48:55]
| You know i push the button a few times if i want to make it.
|
Ivan:
[48:58]
| Stronger tornadoes that that makes the tornadoes yeah exactly yeah yeah you click the button when you click it a whole bunch of times that's why they got so many tornadoes you're just non-stop clicking the button exactly so so.
|
Sam:
[49:10]
| Real quick before we move on from this subject do you have a quick summary of like what the actual damage looks like as of.
|
Ivan:
[49:18]
| What we know right now they're still going through they you know i will say this i expected worse i talked to people in central florida and a lot of the people there that i expected to have no power, they had power they had water they had power i saw that disney is opening tomorrow again right okay and so so that means that they didn't get that now i will say that disney does definitely prepare their parks. I'm surprised by how well they have designed those parks to withstand storms. Because they've gotten hit by several. And it's like, eh, it's fine.
|
Sam:
[49:57]
| They're closed for like a day.
|
Ivan:
[49:58]
| Yeah, they're closed for like a day and then they're like, eh, we're cleaned up, it's fine.
|
Sam:
[50:02]
| You did have that stadium lose its roof, right?
|
Ivan:
[50:05]
| That stadium lost its roof, but I realize that I don't understand why it talked, you know, we're talking about shitty construction, man, I mean, that stadium was just, the roof was like cloth. I mean, it would have come off by just me blowing hard. It's just ridiculous. I don't understand how they, they thought that that was like a great place to, Stage people. I mean, I realize that I see Tropicana Field, and that's the stadium that had, and it looked like it was just barely a cloth roof.
|
Sam:
[50:38]
| Well, I heard some people talking about it saying that, at least theoretically, even though, yes, it was some sort of special fabric or whatever, it was supposed to be rated for winds that were greater than what this hurricane sent through. So something was wrong, or somebody cheats out.
|
Ivan:
[50:55]
| It was somebody screwed up. Okay, all right, fair enough. Because the one thing is that the roof on the... Because I think both of these were built relatively, you know, not that far apart, the baseball stadium in Miami. The roof of this baseball stadium in Miami is like a steel structure. It's like super, like, you know, very, very sturdy looking at least. And, you know, this thing is just a, looks like a flimsy piece of cloth. But I guess that they said, okay that's what i was checking that i was wondering what it was rated for and so i guess somebody just screwed up okay that happens you know we'll we'll find out about a structure like that but one thing about a structure like that is that it it it takes just a weak spot right that they screwed up for the whole thing to fail and so it may it may have just been that they made you know wherever where it was installed they left a weak spot that nobody identified and that's why it failed so that could be that but yeah you know how other than that i.
|
Sam:
[52:02]
| Know i know we're not very far in and people are still searching and stuff but how are we on death toll compared like helene ended up with like 240.
|
Ivan:
[52:11]
| No nothing like that no you know you know what people because helene just happened even though i talked about a couple of people that didn't take it seriously and whatnot man people really evacuated and they evacuated early they really took it seriously they saw what happened with helene people got the fuck out right and so so yeah i i do think that the fact that yeah that unfortunate incident just happened recently with helene made it that yeah i mean people really did evacuate early the one thing that was amazing was that usually sometimes in these evacuations like the day before it hits people are still jam-packed in traffic and the reality was that the day before it hit and the hours before, the roads were clear because everybody had already evacuated.
|
Sam:
[52:56]
| There were all kinds of pictures of the traffic jams but they were earlier. They were like more than a day before.
|
Ivan:
[53:02]
| More than a day before, yeah. They were already cleared out and so it wasn't really you know, I think that that absolutely, saved lives and so far i haven't heard of any reported deaths yet from the storm i i know that not even from the tornadoes or whatever but so far i i haven't heard i.
|
Sam:
[53:22]
| I've seen some reports of deaths from the tornadoes uh.
|
Ivan:
[53:25]
| That's the one that from the tornadoes is the one that i think that that there may be some i hadn't heard any because from from the others but but at this point i still had not seen any any reports of that yet but but i know from the tornadoes they were still digging through because man the tornadoes it was just so many different places and it hit people just unexpectedly like they just didn't expect that that was going to happen well now they're saying okay first count 11 dead that i'm looking at right now and.
|
Sam:
[53:55]
| It is still early they're going to be finding people.
|
Ivan:
[53:57]
| For a while like people who didn't leave.
|
Sam:
[54:00]
| And were in flimsy buildings and all that kind of stuff.
|
Ivan:
[54:04]
| That that i do think that thank god that so many people went and like evacuated early thank god because it would have been a lot worse i think it would have been and that so that's the main thing that we've got thank god so.
|
Sam:
[54:16]
| Right okay shall we take a break and then start talk see what it is start talking politics before i do that though i just want to do a.
|
Ivan:
[54:27]
| Call out for.
|
Sam:
[54:28]
| Most of this last segment sean has been watching us live so.
|
Ivan:
[54:34]
| Welcome so.
|
Sam:
[54:37]
| Welcome sean and glad to have you here and yeah hope you're enjoying watching live very exciting.
|
Ivan:
[54:45]
| Live yeah.
|
Sam:
[54:47]
| Exactly okay here we go we're going to take a break and when we come back we'll do the uh the election 2024 politics thingy thingy boo blop here we go yeah boop If.
|
Ivan:
[55:02]
| My mouse works.
|
Sam:
[55:03]
| Why is my mouse not working? You know, I sometimes things are stupid. Like, let me try the other mouse. Like for some reason, I was unable to click with the one mouse. But here we go.
|
Break:
[55:18]
| Supposed to say do do do do do do do alex emzilla alex emzilla is awesome its videos are fun and today once again we have one of our most loyal subscribers here to tell you how awesome alex emzilla is i'd say on a rate from one to ten alex emzilla is awesome at i don't know 37 82 too. He's pretty radical. His videos are phenomenal. They're full of creativity. And they're so funny and exciting to watch. Wow. What happened to your voice then, Amy? Was that dad pretending to be you because the audio was distorted when it really wasn't because I told him to? Yes. Good job on remembering, dad. Do, do, do.
|
Sam:
[56:16]
| Okay. Okay. We are back. Very exciting. Back, back, back. So I guess I will start as I have the last few weeks with the whole election thingy. And specifically, I'll start with polling and election graphs. I mentioned at the beginning of the show, how many new polls are coming in. And this is why I'm taking off the last couple of weeks before the election, because this just becomes out of control. OK, I'm counting right now. Today, state level polls only, not the national. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Oh, wait. I'm counting wrong. And these are data points. Like some polls have multiple data points. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23. Skip the national ones. 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40. There were 40 state-level polls released today that I have not yet put into the system. I will do it soon.
|
Sam:
[57:35]
| But here's the deal. The bottom line summary is very similar to when we talked about it last week, that we are still in a situation where really it is too close to call. There are so many states. And these 40 polls that I just mentioned, I scanned through them. I don't think they're going to change the big picture here. These seven key states are all really, really close and probably beyond the ability of polling to tell the difference of who's ahead or who's not and which way will the polls be wrong this time. However, having said all that, for about the last week and a half to two weeks.
|
Sam:
[58:19]
| Harris has had a string of really bad swing state polls. I am really bad. What do I mean by really bad? They're still really close, but more that have narrow Trump leads and less that have narrow Harris leads. They're narrow regardless. But, you know, with my current averages out without those 40 new polls that I just mentioned, you know, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are both on the Trump side of the line. Barely barely like we got pennsylvania at 0.3 percent and wisconsin at 0.4 percent trump leads in my in my five poll averages these new polls will change that they will toss up it's basically a toss-up but like they're they had spent most of the time for the last couple months on the harris side of the center line right now they're on the trump side of the center line but Just barely.
|
Sam:
[59:15]
| Okay. Now, let me say this. Let me say this. First of all, like last week, we talked about how a bunch of them are low quality pollsters. There are a couple higher quality pollsters that weighed in like Quinnipiac and Emerson and a couple others. And they're all those sort of agreed with the smaller pollsters that have less reputation. But like the latest things that I saw like I scanned through the 40 even though I haven't put them in yet I think Pennsylvania is going to look look a little bit more blue after I put them in but Michigan and Wisconsin are going to look a little bit more red after I put them in the bottom line is they're so so close but like.
|
Sam:
[59:59]
| I want the trend to reverse. We absolutely know, like, look, you know, exactly. First of all, the bottom line is it's too close to call. It's too close to call. A little bit on the red side is not all that different from a little bit on the blue side. However, coupled with the last few elections have underestimated the Republicans a bit. I really would feel much, much, much better if we had a situation where the tipping point was on the Harris side of the line.
|
Sam:
[1:00:29]
| By like one or 2% than right now where the tipping point is on the Trump side of the line by about 0.4%. And, you know, again, this, when I enter the latest set of polls, it'll change. And then there'll be more polls on Friday and more polls on Saturday and more polls on Sunday. This is going to all wiggle around. The bottom line is just too close to call, but I still like I, a month ago, Harris was looking stronger than she does now. And I would prefer to be back there than where we are now. Like, you know, it's sort of like we were, yeah, for most of the time since August, if you looked at everything, it's been a very narrow Harris lead when you do all the state by state poll averages like I do. So it makes me nervous when right now it's a very narrow Trump lead instead. Either way, it's very narrow, but I'd rather it be on the other side. And that's roughly where we are.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:33]
| One of the things, so we've been talking about the polls and the quality, and there was this article from the Tilt in the New York Times that I'd shared, like it was October 6th. And the headline on it was, how one polling decision is leading to two distinct stories of the election.
|
Sam:
[1:01:48]
| Yes, yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:49]
| And it talked about the methodological decisions that seem to have produced two parallel universes of political polling. And, And it's, it is this thing about weighing on recalled vote.
|
Sam:
[1:02:03]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:02:04]
| Which means that you're trying to account for how voters say they voted in the last election.
|
Sam:
[1:02:07]
| Yeah, basically what you're doing is you're asking everybody how they voted in 2020, and then you wait all of your responses to try to get it to match the actual election results in 2020 because you sort of are taking that as a baseline that like if you wait that, then everything else should wait. Then you're sort of measuring who changed their mind since last time, and maybe that'll be more accurate than other ways of waiting. And part of what Nate Cohn discussed in this article you're talking about is most of the time in the past, waiting this way has been considered to be a very, very bad idea and would get wrong answers a lot. But a lot of but a lot of pollsters are doing it this time basically because they're like, hey, we got the Trump thing wrong two elections in a row. Maybe this will fix it. Can I summarize that correctly?
|
Ivan:
[1:03:11]
| Yes, that is correct. And, you know, and that's exactly what it is. The reality is that, well, it's a big decision, okay, all right, and it does make a lot of, and it does impact the poll significantly. And so, what it would do is that if you went and you shifted from that methodology to actually doing it based on the result, I mean, it moves a lot of things towards the Harris side of the ledger, substantially.
|
Sam:
[1:03:45]
| Well and so yeah except that example in florida you know where it went the other way.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:52]
| I don't even understand what the.
|
Sam:
[1:03:54]
| Hell there was a sienna poll that nate conant the new york times also used as an example of this effect that ev like all the not counting this poll the polling average in florida had trump ahead by just under five percent four or five percent right four yeah Yeah, the low end three, if he got lucky.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:16]
| Yeah, it was about 4%.
|
Sam:
[1:04:17]
| Or if Harris... Yeah, I mean, my averages had dipped down as low as three, but had been back up to four or five by the time this Siena poll came out. But the point is, the range things were going on was... Was under five, but all of a sudden Sienna comes in as like, Trump's ahead by 14.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:42]
| 14. And we're all like, come on.
|
Sam:
[1:04:47]
| And it's like nowhere near the rest. Like I'm, I'm looking at my, my chart for Florida right now. I mean, before this came in and, and, and I say 14, but actually They released like five different versions of the poll, depending on likely or registered, whether you include leaners or you don't, whether you include third parties or not. They ranged from 11% to 14%, depending on which view you looked at. But before that, the previous polls were 4%, 6%, 2%, 3%, 4%, 4%, 5%, 2%, 1%. There was one poll that added down to 1%. You know, and so like, it's like, and this supposedly is the poll that Nate Cohn was using as an example of not doing this waiting that everybody else is doing. And it moved everything in the opposite direction. So I don't know. The other thing that Nate Cohn also did in the New York Times last time around in 2020, I think it was 2020, maybe it was even 2016, but I think it was 2020, where they took one actual poll and they shared the raw data.
|
Sam:
[1:06:04]
| I think it was three different polling companies to use their own weighting methodologies on the same data.
|
Sam:
[1:06:15]
| And there was a massive spread between what, and I don't remember the numbers because this was years ago, but there was a massive spread of variation based exclusively not on the poll data itself, not on the random sampling they did, nothing like that. But on the analysis that they did to wait it before coming to a conclusion, because all pollsters these days have to they can't just like call a million people, get a thousand to actually answer the phone and then just divide and do the math. Like because the people who are responding to the phone aren't necessarily representative of the electorate and you have to adjust it to try to match them up but that's like that's i mean i i i want to use a nicer term but it's guesswork you are guessing what the final electorate is going to turn out, you're guessing what turnout is like. You're guessing questions like, does the youth vote actually turn out this time around? Or do they go back to like they used to be in previous years? Because the youth vote was really high in 2020 and 2022. Abnormally high. Is it abnormally high again? Or is it low again? Like it was in previous years. And you're guessing.
|
Ivan:
[1:07:39]
| Well, part of the problem is that that is the thing about this. And that's what makes this, because we don't have large margins. Is why this damn thing makes it that it's so fucking unpredictable.
|
Sam:
[1:07:54]
| Right. Like, yeah. And it's because it's so close that you, like, polling can tell you, like, if somebody is winning 60-40, okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:04]
| Oh, you know, whatever, fine. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:08:06]
| You know who's going to win. And polling can give you a really good idea about that. But if it's really damn close to 50-50, polling just doesn't know. And like, yeah. And like the kind of probabilistic stuff I do on my site tries to like compensate for that a little bit by how much they've been off by in the past. But it's still like, you know, okay. If you, if you have like, like right now, you know, okay. I have, you know, Harris having like a 30% chance, but a 30, 70% chance is still like, oh, sorry.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:47]
| Sorry, that was, I was trying to, I was trying to find a robo-taxi launch. I have that ready. I'm sorry. Shut up, phone.
|
Sam:
[1:08:57]
| Anyway, no, a 30% chance is, yeah, okay, Trump at 70% is favored, but 30% is, easily happens. It's not like, it's not like, if the underdog wins in that situation, nobody's surprised. Yeah, it was the underdog winning, but it was, it was a conceivable thing. It's not like, yeah, you're, you're going to be shocked at it. Oh my God, they, they won. And also because everything's so close and dependent on like this week's polling. And what was in the field, like things are moving around. Like it could, it could be radically different in a few days. And so, I don't know. And this is why like the big pollsters often like their trend lines are very smoothed out. So like things don't move very quickly on election graphs. I'm set up so that things do move quickly and that the pros and cons of that. The con is, of course, a few outliers can throw me way off for a few days until they age out of my averages.
|
Sam:
[1:10:00]
| The pro, though, is I can pick up changes faster than the people who are averaging over long periods of time. It's one of the reasons why election graphs was one of the few places that saw the last-minute move towards Clinton in 2016. But whatever. On polling, one thing I saw – I don't know if I mentioned this on the show before. I was having an out-of-show conversation.
|
Sam:
[1:10:24]
| But i saw an article and i won't be able to remember the reference but there is a group that has had a huge amount of success in predicting some they they're not involved they're not trying to do the u.s presidential election right now but they've done some local elections in like europe okay yeah and they have gotten some predictions that were super super close to the actual answer like not only within like a percent or two but within like a couple hundred votes of the actual answer and they're not doing polling at all the way they are doing it is they are doing they they They do a demographic model and then they do a simulation where they make a little AI model of every human and try to predict based on everything they can find out about that user or user about that person. Because, you know, these are actual people and you can find out information about them online.
|
Sam:
[1:11:34]
| You can find out, you know, by scanning their social media, do they seem to lean Republican or Democrat? You can find out their age and their race and their sex and where they went to school. You can find out all kinds of information about these people. And basically, they build a simulation of each actual individual voter and try to predict how that voter is going to vote. And then they run this simulation, and they've apparently gotten very, very close to the real answers. Because they're predicting not only how they're going to vote, but if they're going to vote as well. Okay and so i don't know i i just think that's that it's interesting cool and a little bit scary you know because they're basic you know because you know look at yvonne's social media you know he's voting for harris, If they could listen to the podcast.
|
Ivan:
[1:12:28]
| Fuck. I mean, if they thought I was voting for Trump, then Jesus Christ, they need to take some psychedelic drugs.
|
Sam:
[1:12:34]
| Okay. So that's it for polling. Still too close to call. Although, again, the summary, things have been a little too Trumpy in the last couple of polls. I'd really rather them do something else.
|
Ivan:
[1:12:46]
| There was one comment.
|
Sam:
[1:12:47]
| And I was going to move on to other politics. Yeah, go ahead.
|
Ivan:
[1:12:49]
| But before, there was one comment that you made online, if I remember correctly. He said something that if they waterboarded you yes you would you you would you know you would confess that you think that you think that based on all of this mathematical shenanigans that we're talking about that you think that they're underestimating no not.
|
Sam:
[1:13:15]
| On the mathematical shenanigans. On the mathematical shenanigans. On the mathematical shenanigans.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:21]
| On the methodology.
|
Sam:
[1:13:23]
| My just gut feel about looking at everything. And I have no rigorous logic behind it at all. It's just a gut feel.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:32]
| Right, right, right.
|
Sam:
[1:13:33]
| And I think I said this on last week's show, actually. I believe that it is more likely that they're underestimating Harris than they're underestimating Trump. And a big part of that is, first of all, there's all the shenanigans we just talked about, about like how they're doing weighting and methodology and blah, blah, blah. But also just the enthusiasm gap that seems to be really obvious. Like, you know, it's not you can a you can compare the rallies and that's not really you can't really tell. But also so many anecdotal stories that I've been hearing about how places that four years ago were coated with Trump flags and Trump posters and whatever and are just empty right now, which is not saying those people aren't necessarily going to vote for Trump, but they're not as excited about it as they were. And the same thing is true.
|
Ivan:
[1:14:33]
| A more factual thing, which is totally true, difference between 2016 and now.
|
Sam:
[1:14:39]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:14:39]
| I think that leading up to 2016, we've been talking about how Trump has emboldened all the racists. Okay?
|
Sam:
[1:14:48]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:14:49]
| You know, we talked a lot about how a lot of people said that, oh, when they asked me about it, I really don't want to admit that. You know, that I was supporting Trump. Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:15:01]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:02]
| But we have gone from that to where these guys basically just, you know, we'll paint it on their chest and, you know, whatever, and carry around a flag and stickers and, you know, tattoo their ass with Trump's name. I'm sure somebody tattooed Trump. I'm sure on his ass and, you know, on everywhere in their body, because I've seen a whole bunch of them.
|
Sam:
[1:15:28]
| It's just, They're probably a whole bunch doing the Roger Stone treatment like he has Nixon on his back.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:33]
| Nixon on his dick. Exactly. Well, yeah. Well, no, I thought it was Nixon on his dick.
|
Sam:
[1:15:38]
| Roger Stone has Nixon on his back. Now, he may have Nixon other places, too, but he certainly has it on his back.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:44]
| I thought he said he... I've seen pictures. No, no, no, but I thought it was a tattoo on his dick, too.
|
Sam:
[1:15:50]
| I have not seen pictures of that. I've seen pictures of the one on his back.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:53]
| I have not seen pictures of that either, and I don't want to, by the way. Let me be clear. If anybody has it, don't send it to us.
|
Sam:
[1:16:01]
| You can just show up at one of the Roger Stone swinger parties, too.
|
Ivan:
[1:16:05]
| Oh, God, no. Jesus. Well, actually, if I showed up to one of those, just punch him dead in the face. Would that be OK? I think if there is a guy that I would meet that I would probably risk getting arrested for assault, it's Roger Stone.
|
Sam:
[1:16:19]
| You should punch him in the Nixon instead. Yeah. One of them.
|
Ivan:
[1:16:24]
| That's not a bad idea. I could start there. First kick him there and then punch him.
|
Sam:
[1:16:28]
| There you go. Anyway, so what were you saying? You were saying the more data-driven reason why you think it's blah, blah, blah.
|
Ivan:
[1:16:37]
| No, what I was mentioning is that before the 2016 election, I think that there was definitely an effect of people not wanting to, you know, not publicly wanting to declare their love of Trump. Whereas now you're on the other end where people that are Trump's have no problem declaring it loud and proud, wearing it on their head, wearing it on stuff. I mean, I still keep getting shocked by people that I think it's I will say that I think I've got 90 plus percent of people that I think that that that I that I knew that or Trumpy like Trump. But still, I occasionally get surprised by this one person that I.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:22]
| You know, actually, I probably was on the fence. I wasn't sure that also just recently goes and puts themselves in a fucking picture on social media with a Trump hat on. And I'm like immediately at that point where I'm just like, OK, I never want to see your fucking face again. Thank you. Just just because I don't even have that many friends on social media. So, you know, I got maybe a couple under 500. so what i don't i don't need i don't need that guy there so i but but but this is something that happens now where i got yeah i see people like going to like fucking like beach parties wearing trump hats i'm just like what the fuck is with these people but well like i said although i think those people but my point is that they are loud and proud now so i don't think that there is something that...
|
Sam:
[1:18:10]
| Do you think they're less so now than 2020, though? Like, what do you mean?
|
Ivan:
[1:18:15]
| So what?
|
Sam:
[1:18:16]
| Like, then 2020, like, I know you were saying 2016 and the shy voters, they came out and were much more vocal in 2020. Do you think that's receded a little bit at this point?
|
Ivan:
[1:18:28]
| No.
|
Sam:
[1:18:28]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:18:29]
| Nothing. No, no.
|
Sam:
[1:18:31]
| So then you think, I think, I think you think they're less like the people who are loud and proud are still loud and proud, but there are a lot of people who are sort of like, yeah. And I think that's, I think that's the case. I mean, and again, I keep hearing these anecdotal stories and the reason you'd have to waterboard me for me to say this, well, I guess I've said it, but like the reason I don't like put it on my election graph.
|
Ivan:
[1:18:54]
| Yeah, I didn't have to do that. There you go.
|
Sam:
[1:18:56]
| You did have to walk.
|
Ivan:
[1:18:56]
| I'm actually happy that I didn't. I'm really happy that I didn't have to waterboard you for the answers. Okay. I am glad. Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:19:02]
| The reason why I won't inject this into my election graphs analysis, where I'm going to stick to the numbers on election graphs and with the range of variation that the polls have had historically, is because, again, and we've mentioned this briefly before, but there's so much room for motivated thinking here. Like I, I see all these anecdotes of like, oh, people who are like, you know, they were diehard Trump supporters and now they're either sitting it out or they're going for Harris. And I hear more of those stories and I hear people like making questions. Making TikToks or whatever about how their previous Trumpy neighborhood now no longer has lots of flags and signs like it used to. And I'm like, yeah, okay. But am I seeing these because that's what I want to see? And meanwhile, there are plenty of neighborhoods where that stuff is just as strong as it used to. And even in the neighborhoods where it's less strong, maybe those are, maybe they didn't put that on the sign, but they're still going to vote for it. You know, and look.
|
Ivan:
[1:20:09]
| I think that the thing is how to empirically measure this. Right.
|
Sam:
[1:20:13]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:20:14]
| And it's and it's very difficult.
|
Sam:
[1:20:16]
| Well, that's where you get to the polls have it too close. Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:20:21]
| And it goes because even when we, you know, because you could take data from 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022. And you can see the shifts, you know, in voting and in locations. But one thing that we know from past experience is that midterm election voting doesn't necessarily directly translate into general election voting.
|
Sam:
[1:20:45]
| It's a different group of people who show up.
|
Ivan:
[1:20:47]
| It's a different group of people, you know, and you've seen trends and sometimes those trends do translate, but you can't, but there isn't a track record where that is the case. And so it's tough to go and look and say, okay, look, we know what's happened since 2020. We've seen every special election. We know the details. We know how Democrats have won consistently. But historically, that hasn't directly translated into presidential. It doesn't mean that it's not an influencing factor. And it's why I think that you and I keep speculating that maybe we're undercounting. But at the same time, we can't really say that, that that data those data points actually translate into something something that directly correlates to the general election.
|
Sam:
[1:21:33]
| For we won't know till we won't know till they start counting the votes you know and and that that we won't know that's the bottom line with this scenario right now and and i we spent a lot of time last week talking about that doesn't necessarily mean the actual result of the election is going to be super close it might be but the problem is it might be Within the data we have now, it could also be a really healthy Trump win. It could also be a really healthy Harris win. And it's even possible that one or the other would have a landslide. It's just that we don't know.
|
Ivan:
[1:22:11]
| We don't know.
|
Sam:
[1:22:13]
| And I really would feel so much better if in these last few weeks, how many days now is this stupid thing less than.
|
Ivan:
[1:22:24]
| 30 20 something.
|
Sam:
[1:22:25]
| Yeah it is as of this moment 25.8 days as we're recording till we're done and and yeah i would feel so much better if some if harris was able to like pull out like another four or five percent out of her ass or something but i don't i don't think it's gonna happen yeah you know uh is.
|
Ivan:
[1:22:49]
| And here's the thing, like we've talked about again, it's not a popular vote thing. I mean, even like the consistently, the national popular vote polls show that Harris is ahead.
|
Sam:
[1:23:01]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:23:02]
| You know, by what margin is the question? But she's ahead. She's ahead. She's ahead. She's ahead. She's ahead.
|
Sam:
[1:23:07]
| It has declined a little bit in the last couple of weeks, but she's ahead.
|
Ivan:
[1:23:12]
| She's ahead. Okay. She's solidly ahead. So, but you know.
|
Sam:
[1:23:17]
| So let's move on. Let's move on from polling and stuff and talk about some of the, the other things that are going wrong. They're going wrong, going on, not necessarily wrong. Like I did want to mention one of the things Harris has been doing. People have been complaining. Oh, you're not doing enough interviews. You're not talking to the press. You're not answering hard questions, blah, blah, blah. This week, she went on an interview blitz. She was all over the place. She's been on Howard Stern. She's been on this Call Her Daddy podcast thing, which I'd never heard of before, but is apparently really, really popular with under 35 women.
|
Ivan:
[1:24:01]
| Another thing we don't know about.
|
Sam:
[1:24:02]
| She was on 60 Minutes. She was on...
|
Ivan:
[1:24:06]
| And Trump declined to be on 60 Minutes.
|
Sam:
[1:24:08]
| Trump declined. she was on Colbert she was on she was on all over the place right now I still heard complaints that she's on the wrong places like she's not doing serious news blah blah blah now come on 60 minutes 60 minutes really but but okay fine but all these others she was like those are fluffy those are soft those are whatever and I'm like come on you you fucking asshole people like first of all like, When she has been on serious news things, for the most part, I think 60 Minutes was a little bit better. But some of the other ones she has done, it's been trying to ask her to respond to Trump nonsense. Or it's been trying to do gotchas on like, hey, your position eight years ago was slightly different than your position today. What do you have to say about that? And stuff like that. And it wasn't, it's not really, I don't, you know, people are like, make her talk about the issues and detail and policy and blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, okay, look. If you really want policy, it's all out there. You can go find it. Okay? But this is not how people decide elections. What you want to know about, you want to know about her values and you want to know about her character. That's what you want to know.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:36]
| Every day, the policy doesn't matter. Every fucking day Trump comes out.
|
Sam:
[1:25:42]
| Maybe competence.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:42]
| With some, well, but yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:25:45]
| And none of it applies to Trump, of course. Yes. Yes. Like, because he's, he's a battling moron with no, with no competence whatsoever, with no character whatsoever. And he's, and it's still a goddamn toss up election, but like, but what, what gets people about Trump though, the people who do like Trump like him because they like that kind of personality and they like that. They feel like they like he idiots. They like idiots, but they also feel like he hates the same people they hate, you know, and that matters to them. And he's going to poke the liberals in the eye and—, Let's be clear about this.
|
Ivan:
[1:26:33]
| We're talking about, you know, yeah, yeah, these guys are complaining this week about Trump policy. Bob Woodward came out with a apparently or is coming out with a book with a new book right with a new book and let's see, Trump was shipping fucking COVID tests to Putin.
|
Sam:
[1:26:53]
| Now, and I want to be very careful when we say this, because everybody, when the first headline comes out, you think, oh, you send in the little boxes of the home tests. No, he was sending the really expensive, large hospital quality tests that were in very short supply at the very beginning of the pandemic that governors and hospitals were fighting to try to get so they could do real-time quick analysis of who had COVID and who didn't in the early stages of the pandemic. This was before the little home tests. This was before all that he was sending. Go ahead.
|
Ivan:
[1:27:32]
| I mean, let's see. What else did he do? Oh, he's been calling Putin all the time, like right now, ever since we...
|
Sam:
[1:27:40]
| Hey, buddy! Now, Putin, by the way, Putin's spokesman confirmed the thing with the tests, but said the phone calls haven't been happening. Now, take what you want out of Putin's spokesman said.
|
Ivan:
[1:27:56]
| Exactly. Thank you very much. I mean, what the hell else? I mean, it's just...
|
Sam:
[1:28:05]
| The double standard is amazing.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:07]
| You know, an entire range of egregious fucking bullshit. I mean, this motherfucker was shipping critical medical equipment that we needed to a thug that is out to destroy this country.
|
Sam:
[1:28:24]
| Now, Yvonne, you could say it was an important sort of diplomatic way to improve relations and get some trust and try to work a deal with him.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:38]
| Uh-huh.
|
Sam:
[1:28:39]
| Now, Putin, apparently, the other thing that Woodward reported is Putin specifically told Donald, don't tell anybody about this.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:46]
| Yes. I wonder why. Why?
|
Sam:
[1:28:52]
| Um i mean.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:53]
| I mean and they mentioned how going to mar-a-lago is like going to north korea i actually i don't know if i mentioned this i i was this.
|
Sam:
[1:29:03]
| This was a lindsey graham quote.
|
Ivan:
[1:29:05]
| Yeah i i actually got somebody invited me to mar-a-lago like about eight months ago, somewhere along that and i looked at him like are you out of your no i looked at him i said this are you out of your fucking mind i wouldn't be caught dead in mar-a-lago but i i hear people you know the man people that are it's like a magnet for grifters right now it's like a magnet for grifters let me change that it's a magnet for grifters it is the ultimate grifter magnet i mean you know as we're talking about this i don't know he was selling some other shit this week i can't remember what the latest one another scammy thing this week it wasn't what the fuck what did the yeah we talked we talked about.
|
Sam:
[1:29:55]
| The watches last week there were there were the coins there were the coins.
|
Ivan:
[1:30:01]
| Yeah we had the coin uh there's there's a crypto thing um so there was another there was another scam this week i can't remember what the hell it was right well there's so many it's like it's like you keep losing track every fucking week it's like some other fucking you know scam thing that he's selling i just i don't and and you know you talk about the double standard thing i mean what fucking president that every week announces like selling bibles made in china for three dollars okay so he's got those okay mister i hate hate the china bibles what we had elon paying 47 per person to register to vote was that that was another another scam thing is that is that legal i.
|
Sam:
[1:30:54]
| Think so actually because you're you're not paying them to vote a particular way you're just trying to get them to register.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:01]
| Okay well.
|
Sam:
[1:31:02]
| And but wasn't Elon actually, he wasn't, he was paying to get the information of other people to try to influence.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:10]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:31:11]
| Like, it wasn't, there was some level of indirection in there. I forget the details. But there's also, there's a liberal organization, Cards Against Humanity, they have a game, but they're also lobbying in various things. They're doing something similar in the other direction, too.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:27]
| I'm like, I don't know. I know that he announced, I saw that there was some other things It's just, it's just every week there isn't, I mean, I go and I turn and I'm like, oh, well, you can go and buy the new Trump, you know, whatever, like, you know, dick measure or whatever. I don't know. I don't know. That would be, yeah, exactly. It's a tape measure. You could measure your dick against Trump's to see if you have the virility of the greatest president that we have ever had. I mean, I'm sure that he would fucking sell that if I fucking told him that we could get like $59.99 for each one of those. And he gets 50%.
|
Sam:
[1:32:07]
| Well, that's lovely. I looked up the Cards Against Humanity thing just to put it out here. Here's an article in The Hill. Cards Against Humanity, to pay swing state non-voters to make a plan to vote.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:20]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:32:21]
| And so this came out October 10th. Cards Against Humanity is jumping into the 2024 White House election by offering to pay blue-leaning non-voters in swing states to create a plan to vote. They rolled out a website on Tuesday to encourage people who did not cast ballots in 2020 to vote this November. They are looking to pay some battleground state voters up to $100. The payment could be received if the eligible voter writes an apology for not casting a ballot in 2020, makes a voting plan, and posts on social media, Donald Trump is a human toilet. So, anyway.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:07]
| I mean, that sounds, okay, that's an interesting plan. And, you know, I just, it's the double standard thing, man.
|
Sam:
[1:33:18]
| I mean, it's amazing. I mean, Donald Trump is practically drooling on the floor at his campaign rallies at this time.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:26]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:33:27]
| And meanwhile, like Harris is intelligently answering questions to all kinds of interviewers. And by the way, just getting back to it for a second, these non-serious interviewers, I've listened to part of the Howard Stern interview and I've listened to part of the.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:47]
| Howard Stern has turned into a very good interviewer as he has aged, okay, by the way.
|
Sam:
[1:33:53]
| Yes, yes. But what I was going to say is both the Call Her Daddy interview and the Howard Stern interview were miles above other interviews I've heard in terms of actually asking interesting questions that elicited interesting answers that weren't just talking points that I'd heard a hundred times before. That gave you insight into Harris as a person, not just as, you know, now some of the stories I'd heard before, because I've paid attention, but they were actually asking interesting questions, whereas the traditional journalists asked bullshit crap. You know, like, what do you think about Donald Trump saying that you only recently turned black?
|
Ivan:
[1:34:44]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:34:45]
| You give her a chance to like dismiss that, but like that doesn't tell you anything, but you know, instead, you know, some of these other interviews are like actually, and I apologize, I'm not prepared. I don't have an example on the top of my head. I'm just telling you the general impression. And I didn't listen to all of either interview, but I listened to enough of both interviews to be like, this is what an interview of a presidential candidate should sound like yeah yeah you know and i i managed to get myself completely distracted from whatever point i was actually making before that but we're.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:21]
| Talking about the we're talking about the you know the double standard.
|
Sam:
[1:35:25]
| Oh yeah the double standard because because like harris is answering intelligently about all this stuff has depth to her answers clearly knows what she's talking about. And Donald Trump makes, what was the latest example? It was another person ragging on the New York Times. And I know people like to do that. But here's what it was. Donald Trump made some comments this week about immigrants and how, basically saying the old racist trope about them being inferior because of their genes and they are polluting the gene pool and all of this kind of stuff. The New York times headline was in remarks about migrants. Donald Trump invoked his long held fascination with genes and genetics.
|
Sam:
[1:36:20]
| It's like this gets back to the sane washing that we talked about a couple weeks ago. It's like, you know, There's this really strong desire to paint this election as a normal election, as a choice between two policy ideologies with normal candidates who behave normally. And like pretend this is, you know, Gore versus Bush, you know, or Obama versus Romney or whatever. It's not. No. But there's this this super desire to seemingly pretend that it is. And so on the one hand, you try to take whatever the hell Donald Trump is doing and try to present it in a more normal light. And at the same time, as Harris is already talking intelligently about something, so you try to play gotcha and be like, oh, but that's different than what you said six years ago.
|
Sam:
[1:37:34]
| And can you explain there's this one hole in what you're talking about and can you go into more detail on this and how have you explained how you're going to pay for this and all this kind of stuff where you know again donald trump has no idea about fucking anything you know and here we are yeah other than hate other than you know he's all in it for himself and there are a whole bunch of people he hates and he wants revenge for all the people who've taken him who have treated him badly over the years and i mean how companies i mean voters he directly talks about how this campaign is all about retribution you know is not even hiding it it's like right there it's one of the main themes of the campaign and and there you go anyway what else we got we had a request on the curmudgeon's corner track track slack from uh from pete to talk about how shockingly trumpy generation x is and i know you exchanged some articles with him on the slack but i didn't have a time to look at him so well.
|
Ivan:
[1:38:44]
| I i did share the article and the one thing is you know because there's been several analysis of this and and one of the things that keep happening that's why i shared that article you know about it is that a big part or a problem is how you measure generation X, okay? And what the range of years that you take for Generation X, and how you measure it. And once you dig through the data, it's not borne out that way. I just... I mean, it's, I guess it's, it's a little bit more.
|
Sam:
[1:39:20]
| At this point, haven't people pretty much standardized around like what?
|
Ivan:
[1:39:25]
| 1965 to 80. The problem is no, no, no, nobody uses the same range. Part of the problem is a lot of the polls, a part of the polls that when you listen, when you add people and you go like, well, we're going to go up to 60, you know, the problem is that a lot of people do the surveys and they take an age range that they did and they use that as a proxy for generation x right because when that's not because.
|
Sam:
[1:39:49]
| The the age ranges and surveys are usually like 50 to 55 you know or.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:55]
| Yeah you know 20 to try to use that as a right and then they try to use that as a proxy for a generation when then they're not actually asking.
|
Sam:
[1:40:02]
| Those generational ages yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:40:04]
| No no and a whole bunch of the times almost every time that you dig into it then you find that you know generation x is is probably like 50 some odd it's never the majority of Generation X that's Trumpier. It's a lot, you know, there's a lot more people that I would like in the 40s, in the 40s, but it's still majority not, Trumpy is what a lot of the data analysis shows once you dig under the hood of the numbers. But yeah, I will admit that it's, I would like it to be better than that. But I think that, and that I think also varies by region, you know?
|
Sam:
[1:40:50]
| Oh yeah. Well, generations are really a made up concept anyway. You know, there, it's not really as like straightforward, like people ascribe all of these qualities to, you know, this generation is like this and that generation is like that. And, and really, no, there are some societal trends that the general concept that what is going on during your formative years has an effect on people's personalities. Oh yeah, of course. That's, that's almost a obvious, you know, like, did you grow up? During a time of recession? Or did you grow up in a time of economic boom? What was going on in politics at the time that you were first paying attention to politics? Of course, that stuff makes a difference. But actually chunking it up into defined generations is kind of bogus to begin with. And like you said, even when people talk about boomers, right? I mean, the whole thing with boomers, there was a whole sort of culture war thing going on that, you know, if you were talking conservative boomers versus liberal boomers, whole different universe. Oh God.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:03]
| Yes. They are very, very different. And even like in that analysis that I, that I showed, it was like, kind of like it showed hell. It showed that in the last election, the majority of like the really older Americans voted blue. Yeah. It was like the group in between, it was like really like, it was just interesting how, how trends have, have moved in that way.
|
Sam:
[1:42:32]
| How things are really more complicated and not, don't fit the simple explanations that people try to put on them.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:39]
| Yeah. I will also say that, look, there are patterns depending on where you were, I mean, like where you were educated. Look, I will say that if you look at our cohort of people that I, for example, went to school with us, I mean, it's not a hundred percent, but vast majority of us are definitely not MAGA.
|
Sam:
[1:43:03]
| Well, yeah, some notable exceptions, but we know the high, you know, if you actually look at this stuff, yes, there are correlations with age. Yes, there are correlations with generations, which are based on age, but the biggest correlations in American politics right now are educational level and rural versus urban. And, and, and there, there, there's some correlations to sort of demographics and income and things like that, but rural versus urban and education are the two biggest correlations to political orientation right now. And gender. The gender gap is getting huge, bigger than it has been in a long, long time.
|
Ivan:
[1:43:51]
| Oh, by the way, women are getting more educated, by the way, versus men, which that also has an influence, okay?
|
Sam:
[1:43:58]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:43:59]
| I will say that there was a bumper sticker that I saw that somebody showed a picture that I think more clearly explained this entire thing. And what they said is that the less you understand how things work, the more likely you are to believe in conspiracies. And that's just reality. You know, when you don't understand how anything the fuck works, some idiot comes out and tells you that fires were created by space lasers, you know, that the wildfires in Hawaii were started by space lasers, you know, and you don't know shit about nothing, you might believe that. Okay? Well, you have more of a probability to believe that.
|
Sam:
[1:44:47]
| Or people are steering, or Joe Biden is steering the hurricane with a joystick on his desk in the White House.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:52]
| With a joystick, yes. But, you know, because they don't understand that you have the joystick.
|
Sam:
[1:44:56]
| Right, exactly.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:58]
| Right, I mean, that's very clear. And I think that that's the biggest fucking divide, I think, that we have. You know, it's this whole thing, like I mentioned recently about the conversation I had.
|
Sam:
[1:45:13]
| The one caveat I'll put on that is there are plenty of MAGA people who actually do understand in quite a lot of detail exactly what is happening, but are going to use it for grifting and manipulating.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:28]
| Well, that's the other. But that group, wait, that group knows what the fuck is going on.
|
Sam:
[1:45:35]
| Yes. those.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:36]
| Guys are just trying to profit off whatever the fuck it.
|
Sam:
[1:45:39]
| Is they're they're trying to profit yes correct and that's the only thing they care about and i don't want to underestimate too there is sort of this fundamental cultural divide going on as well that is being taken advantage of all these forces of this huge group of people who feel like they're losing control and that their vision of America is losing out and all of this grifting and influence control, influence control, all, all, all of this MAGA stuff that's building on top of this is taking advantage of those feelings in order to gain power. And money.
|
Ivan:
[1:46:23]
| No, and I think that, yes, and I think that's the thing. Is this, I found the data that we're talking about in splits in generational voting. And no matter how you cut it in like, and this is a Washington Post article that I shared that was actually digging into the data.
|
Sam:
[1:46:41]
| Give the title and the date so people can find it if they want.
|
Ivan:
[1:46:45]
| The title, this was last year. Gen X is not the Trumpiest generation, period. Washington Post. This is by Philip Bump. This was one year ago because he decided to dig into the data because, you know, people were had been saying this. OK, and, you know, he did go and did the deeper analysis and trying to to to to understand what was going on. It actually showed like in 2016 that silent generation voters, for example, they were they have been clearly on the on the Trump side of the ledger, no matter how you slice the data. I think it was like, you know, it was, there were definitely significantly there. Boomers less so, okay?
|
Ivan:
[1:47:28]
| It was more silent generation more than anything else. But no matter how you slice the data, 2016, 2020, whatever, Gen X wasn't, okay? Now, the one, I will say one thing that you noticed about the vote between 2016 and 2020, that no matter how you slice the data, was that there was a lot of other in Gen X in 2016. And a lot of what happened there is that a lot of those others actually moved to vote Trump, the ones that were others, but still by a majority, still not Trumpy. So it showed that definitely the Trumpiest generation, for sure.
|
Ivan:
[1:48:18]
| Simon, those guys definitely are the ones that are that really are the Trumpiest of all in the analysis of the data. So there you go. You know, so that's that's the bottom line. It's, you know, you look at it, you dig into the numbers.
|
Sam:
[1:48:36]
| So in other words, the Trumpiest people in American government right now, Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi.
|
Ivan:
[1:48:43]
| Basically yes okay gotcha gotcha but i you know but once we go back to this thing you know it oh look it's what we were talking again look like i mentioned man i i think you know you the education either like you said winds up working in two ways either you understand what the fuck is going on and you're just a prick and you just want to fucking profit off of it and you don't give a fuck. Or, you know, You're like us. I was just, you know, the other day calculating my taxes again, and I have to pay again. And, you know, I thought about it for a second and I realized it's my fucking what I got to do. Yeah. As much as people hate on Bill Gates the other day, he was saying, hey, you know what? I should be taxed more. As a matter of fact, I think my estate should be taxed like almost double what it is or triple something like that. He was advocating for an estate tax that would basically take two thirds of what he has and that that would be OK. And so because he understands how important that is for society. Recently, there was an interesting case. I'm talking about estate tax.
|
Sam:
[1:50:02]
| OK.
|
Ivan:
[1:50:02]
| There was a guy in Texas, OK, who some people have been sleuthing to find out who the hell he was. And they found out he was some obscure billionaire that nobody knew he was a billionaire after he died that did not do anything on purpose to avoid the estate tax and wound up paying the biggest estate tax bill by almost like seven to 10 times more than anybody had ever paid. It was a seven billion dollar estate tax payment when he died once people started digging into around the guy what they found out that the guy was just a pretty decent guy and he'd left some money to his kids and what he said is well i could create a charity or something or whatever maybe my money just just go to the government so they can do what we need you know for people and his estate when he died wound up being the largest estate tax bill ever. I was like, and this guy was an investment manager, find out. So this is not a guy that was unsavvy about money or whatever. This guy apparently had been managing investments for other people.
|
Sam:
[1:51:15]
| He could have avoided the taxes if he wanted to.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:17]
| No doubt about it. He just decided not to.
|
Sam:
[1:51:21]
| Paid the ticket okay shall we wrap this up yep okay thanks everybody for joining us for another curmudgeons corner you can go to curmudgeons corner.com or curmudgeons hyphen corner.com i should say because some asshole took curmudgeons corner.com so i always have the hyphen oh fuck you yeah not you i.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:42]
| Mean the guy who took it not not you i have to keep screaming this recently i keep saying fuck you without saying no not you.
|
Sam:
[1:51:48]
| Them well and just like on youtube there's like there's like three curmudgeons corners or something like that at this point you know like and we're the last one to the party of putting it on youtube youtube but and and speaking of which thank you sean for watching live he watched for one segment and then he dropped off but you know okay all.
|
Ivan:
[1:52:11]
| Right well thank you thank you.
|
Sam:
[1:52:12]
| Thank you sean that's that's plenty that's plenty yeah but yeah curmudgeon-corner.com you can find all the ways to contact us you can find our archives transcripts blah blah blah importantly you can find our patreon so you can give us money so if bill gates is listening you do not have to give that money to the government you can give it to us instead we are fine with that yes we're okay then we will pay our taxes issues. If, if, if you do that, so anyway, anyway, on our Patriot at various levels, you can, we'll mention you on the show. We will ring a bell. We will send you a postcard. We will send you a mug, all that kind of fun stuff at $2 a month or more. Or if you just ask us, we will invite you to our curmudgeons corner slack where Yvonne and I, and a bunch of listeners are chatting and sharing links throughout the week. And yeah, Yvonne, do you have any highlights from the curmudgeons course slack you'd like to share today.
|
Ivan:
[1:53:10]
| Ah let's see i'm i'm trying to figure out none of the cobalt programming stuff i think you know we we decided to go overly geeky on on on programming and and i'm like you know i realize that you know i'm even on the low low end of the totem pole on my programming skills, oh here we go this so football game this weekend at stanford university and the Stanford Band's halftime show had some girl dressed up in a cardboard Cybertruck that keeps losing control and running into things.
|
Sam:
[1:53:49]
| You know, this morning when I was heading to work, I saw, I've seen many Cybertrucks.
|
Ivan:
[1:53:55]
| I've seen many.
|
Sam:
[1:53:56]
| There are a variety of them around there. I mean, I actually don't know if it's many or if it's the same one I'm seeing over and over again, but I've seen a bunch, okay?
|
Ivan:
[1:54:05]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:54:05]
| But for the first time this morning, I saw a Cybertruck with the back open, you know, where the cargo is.
|
Ivan:
[1:54:14]
| Were they parked or were driving?
|
Sam:
[1:54:16]
| Driving. Driving. With the back open. Like the cargo area was open instead of having that little bit on it.
|
Ivan:
[1:54:23]
| Yeah, well, that's, okay, but that's not.
|
Sam:
[1:54:25]
| I mean, it is supposedly a pickup truck, right? You should, like, you open the back and you can put stuff there. Now, I didn't see something.
|
Ivan:
[1:54:32]
| Well, was there.
|
Sam:
[1:54:33]
| I mean there might have been but it wasn't big enough that it was sticking out or anything but the back was open and i was like i haven't seen that before.
|
Ivan:
[1:54:41]
| I haven't seen i i must admit that i haven't seen that before either it's probably i'm gonna guess it's unintentional, right oh and uh well i did i did find this and posted lately talking about cyber trucks that Tesla has finally revealed its CyberCab. And it looks like a smaller, sleeker Cybertruck. And he had a whole bunch of them, prototypes. However, deliveries are to be in three years. I mean, and given how he has missed deadlines, Bob already mentioned probably 2030. And I think he may be right. But this thing is about the most impractical, like, robo taxi i've ever seen because it could only fit two people right i i i mean i guess there are a lot of people that are single passenger rides but is it isn't a proper.
|
Sam:
[1:55:37]
| One that where like it really is truly complete like there is no steering wheel you're only a passenger.
|
Ivan:
[1:55:44]
| No i saw that there is a i think i i i don't know i i think i wasn't oh god i.
|
Sam:
[1:55:51]
| Gotta look because i don't i don't really truly believe these are truly doing what you like what you would want on a fully autonomous vehicle in unless there is no manual override the person inside the car can only specify the destination.
|
Ivan:
[1:56:07]
| Well here's the thing i will say that the the ones that waymo has been driving around do have a wheel but there is no manual override right i mean you you can't i mean even though the wheel is present there you it's you can't use it.
|
Sam:
[1:56:19]
| So wait if you hop into the front you can't take over.
|
Ivan:
[1:56:22]
| That's correct yeah it has to be if somebody needs to do it it's remotely so um i i know that's that that's been an issue because i've seen these like get stuck somewhere and like the people inside getting yelled at by somebody outside and they're like you can't do anything i can't do anything i'm like you know so yeah so so i know that that's been the case even if they've they've left that but i know that there was a video now that you you know you're saying this there was a video of of him driving around so now let me pull up and there's a whole bunch of robots and more robots and i don't know stupid robots dancing and i don't know who gives a shit about the fucking robots dancing so let me see here's a video and i'm looking and there was a video with elon writing inside one and they did it inside hollywood studio like and so it's in it's in a controlled area they didn't do this like demo like out on the road but i see elon sitting behind a wheel but not behind a wheel because he's in the passenger seat but i i saw him there but i can't you could i couldn't see inside so i can't tell if okay but he was sitting there looking like an idiot well i guess looking like himself and anyway well we didn't.
|
Sam:
[1:57:40]
| Mention like his appearance at the trump rally where he was jumping around.
|
Ivan:
[1:57:44]
| Yeah looking like a complete fool i mean i i i mean i don't understand how he just didn't lose pennsylvania with that stroke.
|
Sam:
[1:57:54]
| Yes well anyway let's wrap it up i will say i'm i'm trying to post blog posts on electiongraphs.com as well as the updates so check it out periodically i'll probably do one over the weekend, just to get another one out there. And yeah, I don't know. We'll see. We'll see. We have an election coming really, really freaking fast at this point. So we'll see you all next week. I guess this is it.
|
Ivan:
[1:58:25]
| Okay. Oh, well, one more thing.
|
Sam:
[1:58:27]
| Just a quick thing. One more thing.
|
Ivan:
[1:58:28]
| One more thing. I don't know if I mentioned last week that the provider of our car chargers for our, and I don't remember if this happened before the last show, that the provider of our car chargers went and announced that they were shutting down their North America operations. And then at that moment said, oh, we're shutting off all the software.
|
Sam:
[1:58:45]
| The car charges for your condo.
|
Ivan:
[1:58:48]
| For a condo. And they just went, oh, and software won't work. And I think that they must have gotten like, because the problem is that this isn't a small company. This is their U.S. subsidiary that we're shutting down. But this is a large global company. It's still planning to sell these in other countries. I mean, and it's used by a lot of companies. I know that Florida Power and Light, our energy provider, was putting these in people's houses for God. Sakes so and they were saying they were shutting down the software well i'm guessing that enough people yelled at the company loud enough that today there was this day that was shutting down everything said well we're not really gonna shut down the software and make all your chargers not work which is like jesus you think i mean so so at least i i got that message now there won't be any customer service but we're not shutting down the software you you say we're saying hey we're shutting down all the software we're pulling it we're pulling the apps from the app store where i'm like but wait a minute you're still running this in europe but why the fuck are you shutting down the fucking service and just letting everybody out a little lurch you'd.
|
Sam:
[1:59:55]
| Think in that scenario at the very least you'd like sell it off to somebody else to manage or something.
|
Ivan:
[1:59:59]
| Well that's i guess what finally somebody screamed in their ear and that's what they said today that they were going to find how to do that because the first way they did it just made no sense whatsoever i mean I mean, it was just, and you know, the thing is, it's like, I mean, it's NL, which is a very large Italian, like, energy company. So, I mean, they were really giving themselves a black eye. They got some other big companies that bought this shit from them in North America, and they were, like, screwing them. And I'm guessing that a couple of those picked up the phone and said, what the fuck are you doing? Oh, yeah, I guess that wasn't such a great idea. Sometimes executives make decisions. I'm just, well.
|
Sam:
[2:00:44]
| Okay, okay. Let's wrap this sucker up.
|
Ivan:
[2:00:46]
| All right.
|
Sam:
[2:00:47]
| Hey, everybody, as usual, stay safe. Have a good week. We'll talk to you next time. Goodbye.
|
Ivan:
[2:00:55]
| Bye.
|
Sam:
[2:01:28]
| Hey, before I shut this off, have you heard the Cybertruck song that's on TikTok and stuff? Cybertruck? Okay. I will include it for our listeners at the very end of the show. I do not have it ready. You can imagine what the word Cybertruck rhymes with that would be part of the lyrics of that song. Anyway, I will find the audio and I will include it right here at the end. And so listen to that bye everyone bye.
|
Break:
[2:02:03]
| One two three four cyber truck driving out some stuff and then it's stuck always driven by a stupid fuck it is the cyber truck it is the cyber truck.
| |
|
