I haven’t seen the numbers. I have read that they do this for a few evil reasons.

• It makes their business look like it’s thriving.
• They can gather intel on who’s job hunting.
• They can use job application tasks to get free work out of candidates.

There are thousands of possible reasons and many of them won’t have anything to do with you. There are fake job postings. There are many jobs where the hiring manager already has someone in mind for the job (but they have to check the required boxes and pretend to open the position to any candidate). Another candidate may have gone to the same school or been in a frat with the hiring manager. The list goes on and on.

I have so little faith in polls anymore. I know Silver and others try to patch over the shortcomings by analyzing multiple polls and running weighted probability equations on them and so on. But I always think of GIGO: garbage in, garbage out.

And of course, probabilities are just that: probabilities. So if they say candidate X has a 75% chance to beat candidate Y, that means candidate Y still wins 25% of the time. Which is much higher than we intuit when we just look at the 75%. Anybody who’s rolled a 1d4 in D&D knows that 1 will come up more than we’d like.

Allan Lichtman’s analysis is more interesting to me. He’s been right 9 out of 10 times. Which certainly doesn’t mean he’ll be right this time. But I think it’s cool that he ignores polls. I wonder if his methodology, while very clever, may not be up to date for 2024 with all the weird shit going on with judges, electors, etc. The “meta issues”, if you will, around his “Keys to the White House.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Keys_to_the_White_House

I hope you’re right!

The Demiurge. Not that I like the Demiurge itself. But explaining the human condition as being a product of bad design appeals to me. I don’t believe the myth and I’m not religious. But as far as myths go, that one is my fave.

I’m not an expert by any means, but my understanding is there is a “tax accounting lobby” that works hard to prevent any measures to simplify it, because they would go out of business. Intuit and others.

Interesting that they are laying off managers while “moving towards more automation”. I’m guessing they mean draconian employee-monitoring hardware and software installed in the vehicles, warehouses, repair facilities, etc.

Love the meme but JFC I wish they would just send us a simple invoice (or refund) every year. You know, the way adult nations do things.

A lot of people made fun of those theories and sarcastically pretended to believe in them. Maybe that’s what you remember. Our human memories are not very reliable.

That’s a clever and funny way of putting it. It’s just one stupid moral panic after the other, and racism is frequently featured.