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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • This poll tracking is showing Harris barely ahead on national polls. This millennium, Republicans have won the presidency in 2000, 2004, and 2016.

    In 2000 and 2016, the Democratic candidate won the popular vote.

    Winning the popular vote doesn’t mean shit. The electoral college is what matters.

    That same NYT poll link lists 9 tossup states: Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Minnesota, North Carolina, Nevada, and Virginia.

    You’ll notice all but the first three are in alphabetical order. That’s because all but the first three don’t have enough polling to make a prediction. Of those first three: a statistical tie in Wisconsin and Michigan with a Trump lead in Pennsylvania.

    If you include Kennedy, Harris is ahead by 1% in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania but still tied in Michigan.

    National polling trends are going in the direction I want, but they really don’t matter.

    I write this from a state whose electoral college votes have never gone for a Democrat in my lifetime and won’t ever before my death. I’ll be voting for Harris, but that vote is one of those national votes that won’t actually help my preferred candidate.

    The only way I can help is via monetary donation.

    And if you’re a Harris voter in a solidly blue state, your vote means as much fuck all as mine does. Yes, it actually makes it to the electoral college, but, like mine, that’s a forgone conclusion. You should be donating money too and hoping it’s used wisely to affect those swing states.



  • Except it’s not that they are finding the expansion rate is different in some directions. Instead they have two completely different ways of calculating the rate of expansion. One uses the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang. The other uses Cepheid stars.

    The problem is that the Cepheid calculation is much higher than the CMB one. Both show the universe is expanding, but both give radically different number for that rate of expansion.

    So, it’s not that the expansion’s not spherical. It’s that we fundamentally don’t understand something to be able to nail down what that expansion rate is.