

Peter Norvig's Election 2008 FAQ - logjam
http://norvig.com/election-faq.html

======
robg
Yes, we hate politics here....except this is a fantastic summary that has
nothing to do with technology aside from the author. Still, if he had included
technology issues in the analysis, Obama "wins" hands down, especially in
specifics:

<http://www.barackobama.com/issues/technology/>

[http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/Issues/CBCD3A48-4B0E-486...](http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/Issues/CBCD3A48-4B0E-4864-8BE1-D04561C132EA.htm)

~~~
tfinniga
Just the URLs are pretty telling.

~~~
robg
Facebook co-founder runs his web op:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/technology/07hughes.html?_...](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/technology/07hughes.html?_r=1&oref=slogin)

Gotta say, that's pretty cool. From dunce of the ranch to black technocrat...

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patrickg-zill
It is TREMENDOUSLY biased, as Norvig has been in previous elections when he
wrote about the topic.

One example: he mentions McCain receiving Fannie Mae money - but, Obama
(despite his much shorter stint in the Senate and indeed, politics at the
national level) is #2 on the list of those receiving the most money from
Fannie Mae (McCain is about # 50 on the list) .

Source: [http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2008/09/update-fannie-mae-
an...](http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2008/09/update-fannie-mae-and-
freddie.html)

~~~
DarkShikari
All the claims from both sides about "receiving money from" X corporation are
rather misleading, since those numbers include employees. What, do you expect
the candidates not to accept money from people just because they work for a
given corporation?

If I worked for Fannie Mae and gave a hundred dollars to McCain, does that
somehow affect what McCain thinks of Fannie Mae? I don't think so.

~~~
robg
Well, not more than McCain's _campaign manager_ receiving $15k/month from
Freddie since 2005 and ending _last_ month.

~~~
DarkShikari
I never said that there weren't other influences going on, I was just saying
that such (un-broken-down) numbers were rather misleading.

On a side note, I'm an Obama supporter ;)

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hugh
No, no, no, no, no. Bad upvoters!

Seriously. This is a politics piece. Worse, this is a partisan politics piece.
Worser, this is a partisan politics piece masquerading as a FAQ.

~~~
rms
<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

>Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate
for the site. If you think something is spam or egregiously offtopic, you can
flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users
will see this; there is a karma threshold.)

~~~
hugh
Is that a new guideline, by the way? It wasn't there in the old days --
presumably it postdates the "flag" feature.

In any case, I don't like that guideline much. Complaining about offtopicness
is, in my opinion, the best substitute for downvoting. Sure, it means that
every political story acquires a boring "!HN" thread, but that's exactly the
point: the boring thread is the punishment for the story, and is designed to
suck out all the oxygen from the _actual_ political debate which would
otherwise ensue.

I know I post rather a lot of comments complaining about political stories.
This isn't because I'm not interested in politics -- it's actually because I'm
very interested in politics and have to actively stop myself from getting
involved in internet-based political arguments (something I swore off many
years ago as a waste of time).

------
maxwell
I should write a Greasemonkey script that switches #FF00FF to... any other
color.

~~~
hugh
I should write a Greasemonkey script that switches politics links to... I
dunno, blog postings about wrapping bacon around things which one would not
normally wrap bacon around.

Greasemonkey can do that, right?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Yes.

I'll even be glad to write the RegEx for you -- that's something I don't
normally volunteer to do.

It'd be like that old George Carlin skit, where he says we should replace the
word "kill" with the word "fuck" -- Changes everything. Picture an old
Western. The bad guys are all standing around the sheriff, who is tied up.
"We're not just going to fuck you sheriff. We're going to fuck you slow....."

You could substitute "Election" with "bacon". "2008" with "Weasel-like", and
maybe FAQ with "Nosehair"

"Peter Norvig Bacon Weasel-like Nosehair"

(Apologies for the profanity. Kinda hard to do Carlin without it)

------
rplevy
'The words "Nobel", "Economics" and "Scientist" do not appear on McCain's
page.'

LOL, very telling! :)

~~~
jmatt
_"Nobel", "Economics" and "Scientist"_

When was the last time any of those words were used to describe a great
business leader? Someone like Jack Welch, etc
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch>). Maybe the Google founders... but
I rarely hear them described as great from a business sense.

As for counter examples from McCain... it wasn't hard to find:

[http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/News/PressReleases/c9068...](http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/News/PressReleases/c90681b9-5dfe-4de4-8057-ceedb30c228d.htm)

300 economists, including multiple Nobel winners, that agree with McCain on
his "Jobs for America" plan.

------
tdavis
I thought there was "NotHackerNews" et. al. for a reason.

~~~
icey
This is more evidence of the bizarro universe taking ours over. For the first
time I can recall, Peter Norvig is being labeled "NotHackerNews"

~~~
tdavis
It's a hacker writing about politics. Unless he developed some algorithm to
determine the winner based on number of lies and non-answer-answers, I don't
really give a damn about his "objective" analysis.

~~~
brent
Well, then it fits as well as any of PG's essays that don't explicitly discuss
'hacking' and those never get this complaint.

~~~
pchristensen
That's the benefit of owning the keys to the server room :)

------
DanielBMarkham
So what the heck are we supposed to do with this?

I can say something like "Heck yes! This is a good article" I would supposed
that would generate very little discussion.

Or I could say, "Gee. I disagree with a lot of these points. I think the
author oversteps in many instances." and immediately were arguing politics
again.

So this is an article that I think is a worthless waste of time on this site.
It exists only so that like-minded people can upvote it.

POS posting.

~~~
mattmaroon
Might I recommend <http://nonhackernews.com> ?

------
boredguy8
"FF00FF means maximum red and maximum blue in the naming convention for web
colors and is the magenta/purple background here. It is garish, but that's
what you get when you combine two extremes."

OK, that is WAY too funny on at least three levels and deserves it's own
comment.

------
netcan
Surprised by the tax charts.

They are are actually sticking to their left/right positioning.

------
natch
Anyone able to access the link? Seems to have been down for the last couple of
hours, even though the main site norvig.com comes up just fine.

~~~
dimitar
I also had trouble at first but its okay now. You can always use the google
cache of course (note that it looks the same way):
[http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:WpuLq6wYdewJ:norvig.com...](http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:WpuLq6wYdewJ:norvig.com/election-
faq.html+site:http://norvig.com/election-faq.html&hl=bg&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=bg)

BTW, why doesn't Norvig use googlepages or blogger? Research?

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chaostheory
all I'm going to say is aside from presentation there's very little difference
between Obama and Mccain (both support the bailout, the Bush doctrine, FISA, -
need I go on?).

I'm going to have to agree with PG on this one:
<http://www.paulgraham.com/charisma.html>

------
qqq
Biased. On the list of supposedly conservative people who don't like Palin it
has Andrew Sullivan. He abandoned the war bloggers years ago and went kinda
lefty.

