SomethingMusic
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User ID: 181
SomethingMusic
7d ago
My new head cannon is that Harry Potter's wealth comes from his parents both having taken level term life policies and used Voldemort to have a legitimate insurance claim. Voldemort spend the next 10 years trying to get his payout from Harry Potter. The unreleased book Harry Potter and the Insurance Claims Adjuster is about the lawsuit and encroaching poverty as Harry Potter is faced with ever increasing lawyers' fees.
SomethingMusic
16d ago
I'm not surprised. One of the most effective things Trump did to stabilize the middle east was cut off Iran's funding who is directly funding Hezbollah and anti-israeli sentiment in the middle east. When Biden reinstated Iran's nuclear deal and lifted sanctions on Iran, Iran then had funding to fund Palestine and Hezbollah which led to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict going on today.
With this background, I wouldn't be surprised that Iran sees Trumps rise as a threat to their economic stability and their anti-Israeli agenda. A dead Trump is much better for them than a Trump regime in the presidency.
SomethingMusic
19d ago
Agreed, I'm not a fan of political dynasty.
I really like Vance. His interview with Rogan showed that we think incredibly similarly on many cultural issues, almost to the word. Honestly, I think he will be an even stronger contender in 2028 than Trump was, especially if he gets down in the mud and actually does things as VP.
SomethingMusic
19d ago
I firmly believe the 2020 elections were the least secure ever and definitely opened opportunities for voter fraud, while 2024 has probably been one of the most secure elections due to the amount of R oversight funded by the Republican party and coordinated with modern R leadership.
That being said, 2020 was also a referendum on Trump and COVID response - something that was largely unpopular in how it was handled and was the worst administrative goof of Trump's previous tenure as president by far. On top of that, the multiple investigations, the constant drama and controversies of the Trump cabinet (and Trump himself) heavily motivated voters, including old school conservatives, to buck the party line in a hope old Joe would bring some semblance of 'normalcy' to the presidency.
So, the larger question which will never be answered is how many votes were potentially voter fraud, and how many were motivated by unpopular administrative actions.
SomethingMusic
19d ago
Supposedly they do not release results until all voters finish voting and all votes are tabulated. I expect 2-3am EST for NV to report.
SomethingMusic
19d ago
Also, the Antichrist is supposed to be universally popular, which pew research indicates Trump's appeal falters hugely on the international level.
SomethingMusic
19d ago
True, I wasn't thinking in probability.
SomethingMusic
19d ago
I certainly am in the 'it ain't over til it's over' crowd. If looking at statistics and probability, since Trump just needs to win one state he's more likely to come out ahead than Harris. That being said, I wouldn't be surprised of midnight shenanigans.
SomethingMusic
19d ago
I, too am not understanding county turn out.
SomethingMusic
19d ago
Willful blindness. Don't look at what you don't want to see.
SomethingMusic
19d ago
Polymarket is spiking to Trump at 90% Did something get called that I am unaware of? It looks the major swing states are still in play.
SomethingMusic
19d ago
Honestly one of the reasons why I am watching the site and the election results right now. A few theories:
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Someone published an outlying dataset without permission
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Someone paid someone else big $$
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Bad sample
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Recording error
Note that none of these truly excludes any other reason, but it was a confounding polling error.
SomethingMusic
19d ago
Ammo is probably more liquid and has less oversight as well.
SomethingMusic
19d ago
I'm also split 50-50. I know who I'd like to win, but I really do believe it's an overall tossup, even if polls are hedging.
SomethingMusic
25d ago
Even though I've seen people here claim the 2024 election doesn't have the energy of 2016, I disagree. No one does this unless they're willing to have fun with it, and Trump is definitely having fun with it. It is a way to political points, sure, but it just sparks joy seeing these kinds of antics.
SomethingMusic
26d ago
Monarch uses 3rd parties for authorization, so Plaid, MX, or Finicity will log into your account. Monarch itself does not store passwords. Whether you trust the 3rd parties, of course, is another discussion.
SomethingMusic
27d ago
I use Monarch. Having multiple commercial trackers is incredibly useful as a number of banks don't play nice with Plaid (including my primary bank). It's great as it is quite comprehensive, I can track all of my investment accounts on it quite easily from individual accounts to 401k, manage budget and expenses and add notes for purchases for reminders (very useful if you have multiple revenue streams and you need to match expenses to income for tax deductions). I find it fairly comprehensive.
I have a referral link here if anyone wants to try it.
There is no election fraud in Ba Sing Se.
Many words on The Motte have been spilled about the lack of any real election fraud in the US and about the security of modern elections. The arguments against election fraud can be summarized as there being no election fraud as all audits in the election process have found no notable fraud. On the other hand, the actions of election committees, the opaque processes, strange and unexpected results, last minute rulings, and statistical anomalies has convinced many people that election fraud is much more widespread and commonplace than we are led to believe.
Recent news in Pennsylvania has shown that an election committee has caught approximately 2500 instances of fraudulent voter registration., with another 1500 fraudulent registrations in another county.
A large number of suspicious voter registration applications were dropped off at the county elections office near Monday's deadline, county officials said. An investigation by the district attorney's office found incorrect addresses, false identification information, false names and names that did not match Social Security information.
Adams said her investigators found problems with 60% of the registrations they have so far reviewed. She did not say how many of the 2,500 registrations had been investigated. She said applications came from people living in the city, as well as Columbia, Elizabethtown, Akron, Ephrata, Stevens and Strasburg.
The problem about fraud investigations is that they largely focused on where the ballots end up and not on their creation and submission. Like laundering money, mixing real with illegal votes becomes impossible to distinguish when you might only need 5000-10000 fake ballots of 200000 people to flip a county. The more legitimate and illegitimate votes combine, the harder it is to prove that there were fake registrations to begin with.
Even if it is from a lazy ballot collector half-assing their work to get paid, extrapolating from this limited data set is concerning. These are just one or two counties of a 67-county state, and it is incredibly difficult to prove fraudulent registrations once these ballots pass through. Lancaster County and York are historically red counties who are probably more vigilant than, say, Philadelphia in regard to election integrity. Also, these registration submissions were quite obvious, a mass drop off of 2500 right before the deadline. What's the likelihood there were other registration submissions that weren't caught during the submission time period?
There are some real questions that need to be raised about securing failure points regarding election integrity, and there's finally some concrete evidence indicating that there are attempts to manipulate the vote through fake voter registrations. I doubt any of this would have been caught if it wasn't for Trump's fight regarding election integrity in 2020.
SomethingMusic
29d ago
Even if normies can only get through 15-20 minutes, for a voter who gets their information about only the most outrageous and bifurcating statements, any exposure to humanize himself is an incredibly positive move. Going on the podcast circuit was a genius idea supposedly pushed by Baron, and this type of forward thinking really sets himself as a trendsetter instead of an evil bogeyman. It's much harder for the media to discredit his personality when there's a 3-hour long form podcast, even if the interview is fairly benign compared to the interviews by legacy media.
I slightly agree with number 8, at this point the battlelines are largely drawn. I voted before the interview even came out.
Also, I'd like to point that the 18 million views with Rogan is just on Youtube. This doesn't include Spotify or any other media platform where this interview may have been shared.
SomethingMusic
1mo ago
It'd still be a valuable cultural commodity if people could open the NYT, or WaPo, or watch CNN or Fox News, and go "yeah, that's probably true enough".
Where do comedy podcasters get their discussion topics? When Joe Rogan goes 'Jamie, look that up' where do you think Jamie gets his links? All podcasters did is eliminate the middlemen of a team of writers between the personality and the news.
SomethingMusic
1mo ago
I'm not so sure about that. Most millennials and zoomers grew up on 'comedy politics' as their primary method of political indoctrination in high school through college, be it "last week tonight" with John Oliver, 'The Colbert Report' with Stephan Colbert, 'The Daily Show' with John Stewart, etc. Political comedy has been around for the past 70 years and has been an important part of at least informing, if not indoctrinating, the past few generations.
SomethingMusic
1mo ago
I haven't followed the DJT stock at all. It's pretty clear Truth social's constituents client base has been basically cannibalized by Elon buying X and making it a more open platform for a fuller range of political appetites. Perhaps Elon will use X to buy Truth, but it seems unlikely. To be fair, they could have many paths towards diversification, (Truth.TV?) (Truth.news?). The question is if they raised the capital requirements to make such a website, hire talent, and prevent hackers from attacking their platform.
I agree though, unless there is a clear plan going forward, I highly doubt DJT's long term profitability unless they can post some insane earnings.
SomethingMusic
1mo ago
I could never get into HPMOR. I've tried several times, but the author always gets caught in their own intellectual obsessions and forgets about characterization, the plot, and generally seems like an autist overanalyzing every situation. It reads like bad Frank Herbert, or a particularly bad Ender's Game with a need to articulate every thought an analysis of every situation.
SomethingMusic
1mo ago
The soul bending bit is by far the weakest part of the show and is the one thing I truly dislike about it (much more than season 1 starting clearly as a kids show). It undermines the roll of the Avatar and one of the most important lessons Aang has to deal with - to be the arbiter of justice, you must sacrifice your own spiritual needs to protect the world. In the same episode, they completely undermine this important lesson with the soul bending. I understand why they did it (it is a kids show) but it undermines an important parallel of the real world, that to be the arbiter of justice is to sacrifice your own humanity protect other peoples.
What makes avatar great is that there clearly is a power curve where characters get more powerful over time, but what's much more important and prominent is that the characters grow and have emotional and physical challenges over time. The avatar is stupidly powerful, yes, but in Shonen anime the character arc is about getting more powerful to defeat the bad guy, while in Avatar it's much more about the change from a kid to an adult, and the emotional and moral growth you have in that journey. Diminishing it to just a 'shonen anime' overlooks a lot of what makes it popular.
Just an FYI, inherited retirement accounts have a minimum required distribution (on which you pay taxes). Please look at the details with a financial planner or advisor, because if you don't take the RMD it will be taxed at ridiculous rates.
https://www.fidelity.com/retirement-ira/inherited-ira-rmd
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