No thank you, I have all of Russia/China/Belarus's normal IP space blocked at the router in both directions. I don't expect it will protect me from anything, but it's a great way to not accidentally step into bullshit.
This question shows a fundamental misunderstanding of predicting presidential elections. There is no value in predicting New York would go blue or Alabama would go red. Most states are easy to predict and the states that are more difficult are correlated.
Especially in an election like 2024 when all the swing states went the same way, getting them all right isn't much of an accomplishment. These weren't 51 independent coin flip predictions. There was one prediction, Donald Trump would do slightly better than polling indicated (or really more accurately Harris would do worse), and the results all flowed logically downstream of that.
Your hubris would be justified had every media outlet and pundit been talking ad nauseam about how Trump was absolutely going to sweep the field, but they didn't. Harris losing was a shock to many, many informed people.
Claiming "guessing every state right isn't much of an accomplishment" is a joke and absolutely, categorically not true. Otherwise I hope you made a lot of money on the prediction markets!
> Your hubris would be justified had every media outlet and pundit been talking ad nauseam about how Trump was absolutely going to sweep the field, but they didn't. Harris losing was a shock to many, many informed people.
My own sense is a fair number of people were predicting Harris to win because that's what they wanted to be true – people on the centre-left who said she was in trouble would be attacked for dragging their own side down rather than taken seriously – and other people saw that and didn't want to be attacked so they kept quiet. And it was a "shock to many, many informed people" because journalists and pundits were subject to the same phenomenon. Polling averages showed a race which was either 50-50 or with Trump slightly ahead, yet many Democrats were confident Harris would win.
I don't think it was always like this. I think if someone on the centre-left said in 2008 or 2012 that they thought Obama was in trouble, people may well have disagreed (correctly, as it turned out), but their opinion would not have received the same strong negative emotional reaction.
I knew the minute I saw Obama pull frozen Biden off a podium at some random event in early '24. It was no surprise he bowed out later, and it was downhill from there doubling down on the 2016 mistakes. Oh well.
Once again, this is not an accurate description of presidential elections or even what I said for that matter. I did not say that everyone knew Trump would win in the manner in which he did. But once we take Trump winning as a prediction, the results of the individual states mostly fall in line.
For example, a standard path to victory for Harris was to win Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. But those states are pretty similar to each other and their results are correlated. If you think Trump is going to win, you could have just awarded him one of those states, but that isn't actually a likely outcome due to their similarity. Whatever hypothetical reason that would explain Trump being underestimated in Michigan likely also applies to Wisconsin. The reverse is also true, if Harris won one of those, it was likely she would win the other. Therefore predicting Trump winning both Wisconsin and Michigan is not nearly as bold of a prediction as winning one and not the other. Considering the way that every swing state went to Trump makes it very easy to predict all 50 states, because the only actual prediction you need to reach that conclusion is that Trump will outperform his polling (or like I said before, Harris to underperform).
It seems like ABC has wiped the full 538 predictions from the web, but look at this chart of their predictions[1]. They have Trump winning by roughly his margin of victory as the most likely of any individual outcome. It doesn't mean he was favored, it is just the way all these state results are correlated to each other. If Trump were to win, the manner in which he did is not surprising.
I’m not sure how that, specifically, is Apple’s fault. Maybe I’m missing something obvious but I think disabling that in the UK was Apple’s least abhorrent option. They also put down their foot rather firmly on not providing a backdoor.
Maybe people think that was all for show but I’m struggling to think of other examples of massive companies saying that so publicly/firmly. See also, all the times the police/FBI/etc have complained or even tried to force Apple to provide a backdoor.
All that said, I guess a, very legitimate, argument could be made that if Apple provided ways to swap out iCloud for whatever service you wanted then there might be an escape hatch of sorts even if iCloud was compromised/limited.
Change to the IKEA site of a different country (via what comes immediately after `ikea.com/`).
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