ShittyBeatlesFCPres

Which was basically a coincidence of one close election night and the TV networks trying to act objective. Parties don’t have official colors in the U.S. and every network was using red, white, and blue for their maps. To use red for Democrats would have implied a connection to communism and white was obviously for states without results yet. So, they all, independently, chose blue for Democrats, red for Republicans, and white for states whose polls hadn’t closed.

The poll in the article was in the field before the storm(s) but no Florida poll will be reliable for the foreseeable future. Half of the Tampa-St. Pete region is going to be evacuating this week should the Hurricane Milton develop according to forecasts. Parts of the state are dealing with Helene.

Voting isn’t even going to be predictable, much less polling. Committed voters will do anything to vote but a lot of people are detached from politics and are going to be busy with home repairs, insurance companies, or just not coming back.

I’m not defending modern Nate Silver as a person — he seems to have become a bit of a gambling addict — but in 2016, 538’s model had Trump’s chances at like 33% and the competing models had his chances at 1-2%. It wasn’t a bad model so much as a “when polls are off, they tend to be off in the same direction” situation. The 2016 538 model at least took that into account.

Well, in the U.S., it’s written 4/20 and everyone associates it with getting mega high. It was successfully reclaimed by stoners.

Also, I’ll protest war and genocide on September 11th. It doesn’t mean I’m somehow pro-terror. This may shock you but most people who are anti-war don’t like Hamas or the Israeli government and are mostly concerned about the civilian carnage that’s inevitable in war. You might want to look in the mirror if you have a rooting interest in a dumbfuck, brutal war that’s making everyone worse off.

Maybe she’s just annoyed that Billy Joel wrote a song about how everyone in the bar sucks but him.

Just in time!

You guys can hate on this but I, for one, have always dreamed of unreliable search results with links to relevant businesses embedded within the text. If only a voice assistant could read them out loud and also remind me to drink Pepsi every other paragraph, we’ll finally have achieved the promise of the Internet.

We always say Katrina was a man-made disaster. I worry with climate change, that other places will be testing their infrastructure. Katrina should have been the canary in the coal mine and a lot of people just said, “Don’t live below sea level.” Old river damns can break just as easily as neglected levees.

Yeah, I’ve lived in New Orleans or on the East Coast my whole life and don’t recall that sort of movement speed. Usually, you want a fast moving storm so no one area takes on all the rain but Helene was going so fast and was so massive that it’s probably unprecedented.

Helene’s size shocked me but the storm surge for Katrina was unusually extreme. It was a well organized Category 5 and then weakened to a strong 3 right before landfall. 

To compare with Helene, which was similar in terms of (east to west) diameter but covered much more area overall, with category 4 winds at landfall: the Weather Channel was making a big deal out of the 8ft storm surges. During Katrina, the Mississippi Gulf Coast had a 28 foot storm surge. (The Miss. Gulf Coast isn’t that geographically different from the Fla. big bend region but that plays a role too.)

Helene’s unusual movement speed kept it strong very far inland and caused massive issues in places that rarely see tropical weather. Harvey was the opposite: it stalled over Houston and dumped days of rain on a major metropolis.

I wish we could update the Saffir Simpson scale to something that takes into account more variables. There are other measurements but no storm is identical in terms of damage potential. A category 5 can not even make landfall whereas something like Hurricane Sandy was a category 1 (or equivalent since it wasn’t technically still a hurricane) when it hit NYC and caused massive damage and flooded subway systems. Sometimes, a storm hitting a place that isn’t used to them can knock over all the trees or flood rivers while a similar storm would be nothing to Miami or New Orleans.

If I woke up and wrote a whole article and got told the headline, I’d never come back into the office.

And one day we’ll have democracy in the South. I have no intention of defending the South. But get you a copy of an old Green Book or ask black people about Boston. There are racists everywhere. There were sundown towns in Oregon. Idaho is still like 30% white supremacists. C’oeur D’alene harassed Utah’s women’s basketball team last year.