by my estimate, biden needs 57% of the remaining less than 13000 non-military votes to get 1 more vote than trump and will need much higher than that to avoid a recount - especially considering that the 8000 military ballots coming in afterwards are far less likely to swing overwhelmingly to biden.

again: georgia is much closer than i expected. but, i still think trump has the edge.

why is it closer than expected? i know the narrative is about black and latino voters, but if you check the data you'll no doubt see that these demographics decreased their support for biden overall, not increased it. that's a longstanding trend. my analysis was that the polling error was a systemic bias that overestimated the effect of educated voters swinging away from trump in the south, and that seems to be broadly correct. i expect it to hold in arizona, in the end, too. so, why was georgia different enough that it almost swung?

when you're talking about small margins like this, you can essentially pick and choose. if trump wins by 800 votes in the end, you could assign that to anything - there may be 800 transgender voters in georgia, for all i know. there may be 800 executives for companies making steroids that compete directly with hydroxychloroquine. there may be 800 people in the georgia chapter of the ivana trump fan club. and, if anybody is going to defeat donald trump, it really ought to be fans of ivana trump.

and, i'm sure there would certainly be 800 white evangelical christian seniors that turned on him as a phony christofascist.

so, we can play this game in multiple different ways, but if we're to ask "what changed the most?", i suspect the right answer in the end will be that biden pulled enough christians to give trump a run, even if he didn't actually win. that doesn't make it a better or worse tactic than trying to win black voters if both tactics fail, in the end. however, it's worth pointing out which tactic involves swinging voters and which doesn't.

but, i'm surprised that it almost worked, if my intuition works out to be correct.

so, if biden pulls ahead by a few hundred votes, don't get too excited. you still have to wait until they're done.

take a deep breath, this update from arizona is going to be painful.

there's something like 2-3x as many votes left in arizona, and the spread is smaller than it is in pennsylvania.

if arizona, pennsylvania and georgia all end up in recounts - an increasingly likely truth - then this is going to drag on for weeks.

and, biden should now officially be worried about pennsylvania - because it looks like it's going to a recount, too.

you're waiting for biden to catch trump in georgia.

but, georgia is going to a recount - the closer they get, the further a decision gets.

sometimes, trump is dishonest.

more often, he's just wrong.

i suspect this is more the latter than the former.

my point is simply that if you want to understand who is going to win the election and make accurate predictions with your models then you need to pull your head out of your ass, recognize the ubiquity of corruption in the system and adjust for that absolutely clear reality in your projections.

otherwise, you're just producing nonsense that has no existence outside of a fantasy reality and are just wasting everybody's time doing it.

it's a part of the game....

and, i apologize if you misinterpreted my tone.

in politics, cheating is a part of the game; i'm not here to preach to you about morality, i'm here to analyze things as they are. if you're too aloof or morally pristine to get your hands dirty, you're going to lose and might as well stay home. a prince needs to manipulate situations to his or her advantage as opportunities arise, not sit around and worry about what's right and what's wrong.

biden outcheated bernie in the first place, as hillary did four years earlier. as an advocate of universal health care, amongst other things, i don't want to "clean up the system"; what i want is a candidate that knows how to win. as a climate activist, i'm not concerned about counting every vote; what i want is a candidate that will ram through systemic change, without bothering to gather opinions.

so, it seems like trump got outmanoeuvred and lost to a more corrupt foe.

sad.

i mean, the difference in wisconsin is twice as wide as the difference in nevada, right now.

percentages can be deceiving.

wait.

12,000 votes is never callable. 

wait.

so, these guava seeds are just...

i don't want to waste the nectar in the middle, so what i'm going to do is throw the seeds with the nectar into the freezer and wait until they build up enough that i can't grind them all up.

....and, i would suggest that a serious model should attempt to compensate for corruption.

nonononono.

when i make a forecast, efficiency at cheating is a part of the process - i explicitly, purposefully, soberly weigh how i think the cheating will happen, and what will work itself out in the end.

and, a big part of the reason i gave the south to trump and the north to biden was a perception on how the cheating will work itself out. 

so, were the polls wrong? no - the polls weren't wrong. but, not every vote gets counted. so, when the polling suggests that biden is ahead by a certain amount, you have to balance that out with the amount of cheating that's going to happen on the ground - is that enough to act as a buffer for all the democrats that will try to vote by mail and just have their ballots thrown out? well, that's the question i'm asking - that's what my projection is about.

i decided that biden was far ahead enough in the north that the cheating couldn't undo it, but he wasn't in the south, that the republican advantage on the ground (meaning: republican corruption) would be decisive, in the end.

and, right now, it looks like i nailed it - but the margins are very small.

we can ask more specific questions and get more precise answers.

do i believe that joe biden got more votes than any other candidate in history, except donald trump? well, population growth is a thing - those numbers are going to come up. but, flatly - no, i don't believe that at all. 

they're saying it's the highest turnout in over a hundred years...

...or maybe they both stuffed a lot of ballot boxes, in places where the authorities can and have and will cook the books.

and, maybe biden cheated more effectively than trump in the end - and trump needs to deal with it.

but, we're not there, yet.

fwiw, do i think that the democrats cheated?

i think it's fairly uncontroversial to point out that they unquestionably both cheated. and, i'm not in the camp that argues it tends to balance out.

you may claim there's no evidence, and while that evidence may be useful in prosecuting a case or getting a judge to agree with you (but might not be, depending on the judge), it doesn't really answer the question. these guys are pros - they're very good at cheating. they do it all of the time. they don't just leave incriminating evidence lying around. so, arguing that you can't find any evidence isn't really much of an argument for anything except the talent of the cheaters.

but, we tend to look the other way, and what trump is really up against here is a precedent - if trump decides he's going to go after the democrats for any cheating that they no doubt did, he's opening the floodgates for the democrats to go after him and his own party for their own no good behaviour. and, it's for that reason that this is unlikely to go much of anywhere beyond the lowest hanging fruit available.

what bush did to gore was just too easy to not do it, but gore dared not escalate. call him up and have a talk to him about that.

likewise, if giuliani sees an easy kill...

i don't see that happening, though - trump's comments should be interpreted politically, rather than legally.

but, are they all a bunch of liars and cheaters and thieves? 

yeah. they are.

so, i've put some hot sauce in the pasta bowl, and i'm almost satisfied with it just like that.

what is casear dressing?

wiki provides the following list of ingredients:

olive oil fortified soy milk

lemon juice fresh lime

crushed garlic, salt, Worcestershire sauce frank's red hot sauce

grated Parmesan cheese cheddar cheese (for retinol)

raw or coddled eggs yogurt

that leaves:

Dijon mustard yellow mustard

black pepper ground pepper

anchovies eww. 

my old dressing had the following ingredients:

water, soybean oil (contains citric acid) soy milk

parmesan & romano cheeses cheddar cheese

white vinegar, salt, garlic red hot sauce

frozen egg yolk yogurt

lemon juice lime

that leaves

sugar, corn starch pasta water

mustard

anchovy paste

i guess one could sub mayo instead of yogurt, but that would be daft. you'll get far more vitamins from good yogurt. i just wish i had a more fortified choice.

so, here's my caesar recipe:

200 ml of highly fortified soy milk

1 chopped fresh lime (with pith)

60 g of chopped medium cheddar cheese

65-70 ml (2 tbsp) of astro biobest yogurt (amidst pleas to refortify)

+

1-2 tbsp of yellow mustard [experiment]

25-30 ml of frank's red hot sauce (original) [experiment]

some pasta water (1/4 cup?)

a dash of celery salt [experiment]

a healthy amount of black pepper [experiment]

anchovy paste for omega-3

and, here's my total bowl:

- red peppers (200 g) 

- carrots (110 g)  

- beets (82 g)  

- pasta (55 g, dry)

- nutritional yeast (1 heaping tsp)

- sunflower seeds (raw, hulled) (1 tbsp) <---for b5, mostly, but other things too

- hemp seeds (raw, hulled) (1 tbsp)

- cheddar cheese (60 g)

- pro-biotic yogurt (2 tbsp)   <------b5, mostly

- full fatted soy milk (200 ml)    <-----d, b12, b7, b16

- lime  (1, ~37 g)

+

- 1-2 tbsp of yellow mustard [experiment]

- 25-30 ml of frank's red hot sauce (original) [experiment]

- some pasta water (1/4 cup?)

- a dash of celery salt [experiment]

- a healthy amount of black pepper [experiment]

- anchovy paste for omega-3

georgia has admittedly ended up closer than i thought. it will be interesting to see what the factor there is.

but, biden needs to get over 70% of the remaining vote, and it still seems like too much.

i still think arizona might flip, though - there's still a lot of votes, there.

and, at some point, biden needs to get worried about pennsylvania, too.

the numbers still look ok for biden, but my gut is telling me we're heading into a crises.