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When will this shit end?


Chrisp1986

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19 minutes ago, Mr.Tease said:

Yep, I haven't forgotten the awful experience on election night when George Bush Jr was running for his second term, and there was footage of huge last minute queues at polling Stations just before closing time, and everyone thought they were turning up to get shot of him, only to wake up to find--no they had turned up to enthusiastically vote him. Back in despite the Iraq war and his general complete idiocy! 

Even last election the polls were showing hillary had won. 

I'll believe trumps lost when I see it, until then, I'm preparing for another kick in the balls

Unless it is state specific polling it'll only predict the popular vote, which Clinton won. It wasn't some huge upset and his victory didn't come out of nowhere.

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12 minutes ago, Toilet Duck said:

It’s really not. Vast majority are being careful. Schools going back increased numbers a bit, colleges went back next and they increased again. CMO was on leave for compassionate reasons, came back last night and immediately recommended moving the entire country from level 2 (restrictions on numbers that can gather, but pubs, restaurants etc all open) to level 5 (WFH, pubs/restaurants take away only, no household visits, only move 5km from your house, but schools, universities and non-essential shops stay open). To put it in perspective, the rate per 100,000 nationally is the 16th highest in Europe (lower than the UK) and national lockdown of sorts isn’t being implemented anywhere else. Right call by the government on this. Use the surge capacity and escalation plans that were put in place over the summer rather than essentially locking down again. Acting CMO has been pretty calm over the last while and has been giving good advice. Dublin has been at level 3 for 2 weeks and numbers have stabilised in the last week. So moving the country to level 3 rather than from level 2 all the way to level 5 was sensible. Of course it might not work and we may need to tighten restrictions and go to level 4 and then 5, but the whole idea of having a living with COVID plan is to use it. Time will tell, but most people aren’t calling for another lockdown (neither do they want everything fully open, but are prepared to keep going as we are for the time being).

So basically the CMO cares only about public health whereas the government have to balance all the different factors in play: public health vs the economic impact and impact on mental health. It’s the same battle we see over here. If Chris Whitty could actually decide government policy we’d have locked down 2-3 weeks ago. 

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Someone posted the other day about not understanding how/why people not from the States, could care so much or be so impassioned by their elections. It's a strange one for me, America. I have a love for it that won't abate - no matter how fucked up it gets. My degree, whilst nominally in American Literature, was heavily padded in American Studies. I spent a year living out there.

The friends I made, and whom I still keep in contact with today, are all liberal and Democrat voters. They all come from Republican families (variously in Rhode Island, Long Island NY, Tennessee and Louisiana). Some of those Republican family members voted for Trump, and some did not, that they know of.

There are also people I knew in my time out there that I had wrongly pegged as "the type" to vote for Trump, who I've been pleasantly surprised by in their social media output more recently.

A few months ago I had already written it off. Trump would win again. More recently I've felt even the slightest bit of optimism that makes me think it might actually be worth staying up to watch the votes come in (as I have done for every US general election since 2008). That optimism is coming from the polls, so maybe I'm being taken for a fool, but I have to find hope somewhere.

When I was last catching up with my friend (in Louisiana) whom I facetime with twice a month, she was contemplating the best/safest time at which she might be able to flee the country. She was only half joking.

Tl;dr: I have no clue who is going to win the US election and nobody else knows either.

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Regarding polls in previous elections being wrong, I think that it's easy to take that view after an election you lost if you'd been focussing on polls that supported the result you had hoped for.  It's like believing that you know the mood of a nation based on the handful of people you know.  If I took that view I'd be surprised every time people didn't throw down their tools and seize the means of production from the kleptocrats. All the people I know tend to be people like me, not a broad spectrum of the population but various flavours of leftie with the occasional token tory thrown in because their just so likeable and all their friends hope that one day they'll realise that reading the Daily Mail is bad for your mental health.

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Just now, Fuzzy Afro said:

So basically the CMO cares only about public health whereas the government have to balance all the different factors in play: public health vs the economic impact and impact on mental health. It’s the same battle we see over here. If Chris Whitty could actually decide government policy we’d have locked down 2-3 weeks ago. 

Pretty much in a nutshell. We decided to go hard and go early first time. It worked to a degree, but we were operating in the dark like everyone else. Now there is better information, no PPE shortage, testing and tracing is working well (app has been used since the summer, 60% of smartphones in the country have it activated) and treatments are better (way more discharges from hospital and ICU being reported now compared to April, though we didn’t report them for a whole mind you!).
 

So yes, the government are trying to balance public health with economic considerations as well as some semblance of a functioning society. It’s not ideal, but it’s not intolerable (though that’s easy for me to say).

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12 minutes ago, Ozanne said:

I think it was the email hack. 

FBI director announced they were going to recommence investigation into Clinton about 8 days before the election iirc.  It gave the impression that new evidence against her must therefore exist.  Needless to say history shows that this was a ploy as no such evidence was forthcoming.

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14 minutes ago, Spindles said:

Thanks as ever for your insight Monseigneur Duck, that stat on the App use makes me wonder what kind of figure we have reached with the UK version.  

Think you guys are doing quite well with app uptake no? The key thing is what people do when they get a notification, and if testing is on its knees, then it’s difficult to make the best use of the info from the app.

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"Some people are saying that this virus is only killing the weak.  I don't know, that's what people are saying.  Now I was able to beat it, make of that what you will.  Maybe it's a positive, I don't know, maybe it's a positive if all the weak get culled.  Some people might say that.  I don't know.  STRONG leadership is what AMERICA needs RIGHT NOW.  VOTE TURMP"

etc...

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5 hours ago, zero000 said:

Polling is always going to offer more than anecdotal evidence and supposition. Yes polling misses people but it’s the best means we have of assessing the likelihood of the election outcome. Everything is pointing to 2020 being different to 2016. The margins are much more significant than before. 

And stable. The 2016 polls kept fluctuating, the 2020 have been very unusually stable - with a lead for Boden.

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I think it's interesting that there seems to be more and more petitions about opening up certain things or for government to change rules popping up.

Obviously a peaceful way of lobbying government at the moment but I honestly don't think we are too far away from things turning increasingly sour.

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4 minutes ago, JoeyT said:

I think it's interesting that there seems to be more and more petitions about opening up certain things or for government to change rules popping up.

Obviously a peaceful way of lobbying government at the moment but I honestly don't think we are too far away from things turning increasingly sour.

it's a race to rioting, to see which of covid or brexit can bring it about first. :P 

In all seriousness, the reaction to the restrictions is part of why I'm thinking they won't continue through next summer. 

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23 minutes ago, eFestivals said:

it's a race to rioting, to see which of covid or brexit can bring it about first. :P 

In all seriousness, the reaction to the restrictions is part of why I'm thinking they won't continue through next summer. 

At this stage, further restrictions can be named on government incompetence. Hence someone to blame

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