Notices by Sharon Machlis (smach@masto.machlis.com)

@bcdavid @mekkaokereke I've already seen a couple of posts on Bluesky saying there should be a way now for people to give money to the project. How often do you see that in a for-profit project?

The monetization plan is some kind of premium membership. What if 10% of a future 30 million user base is willing to pay $100/yr for a membership - same price as individual Github Copilot? That's a $300 million/yr business.

@violanders @mekkaokereke I posted about the bridge between Bluesky and Mastodon both here & there. Some enthusiastic response here *but* also the “don't post that stuff here” guy. No negative response there.
It doesn’t seem fair to blame “Mastodon” for one user - except that kind of thing seems to happen a lot. And it gets tiring. It's nice not to have to worry about the “I'm a long-time user and you should all do things the way I say” crowd.

@ajsadauskas @mekkaokereke @mistergibson It's blasphemy here to want to track how much traffic gets driven back to your website from social media posts. You're also not supposed to care about likes and boosts. But most people who write for a living or represent the public want some idea whether what they're posting is resonating.
I came here because the R community did, and I like it! But I still need other platforms for other topics & likely always will

@mistergibson @ajsadauskas @mekkaokereke I created my own searchable, sortable table of work-topic-related posts, including likes and boosts, back when I was still working to easily see which of mine were most popular. It's still running 😃

https://www.machlis.com/mastodon.php

Didn't bother trying to track traffic to my articles here, I knew adding tracking code or using short links would bug people.

@lerxst @mekkaokereke We seem to have normal local elections here still, where all the library trustee candidates love books and libraries, and School Committee candidates seem to all favor the idea of education, and apparently I live in a freaking bubble, and I'm very sad tonight.

@mekkaokereke @Colinvparker @Alon @mavu @Radaghaz Absolutely, I’m not arguing that point. But if the attention on a minority of white women who don't feel like they control their own votes, helps a few women feel like they can vote how they want when they didn’t before, I’m all for it. That's not meant to pretend most women aren’t making their own choices.

@mekkaokereke @Alon I doubt many women *who are afraid* are showing up in that 1 out of 8 statistic. Of course they're still not a majority! But the guerilla campaigns to get women who want to vote differently from their husbands but are afraid are not focused on the majority of WW who want to vote GOP of their own accord. They are unlikely to be persuadable at this point. It's focused on the potentially persuadable.

@mekkaokereke @Alon Many public women's restrooms have flyers about domestic abuse also. No one thinks that a majority of women are being abused.

@mekkaokereke @Colinvparker @Alon @mavu @Radaghaz If Harris has truly increased her support among college-educated white women nationally to +23 from Biden's +9, as ABC Ipsos says, that's a lot of voters. An estimated 29% of all Biden voters were college whites, meaning at least 15% college WW. I don't know how that will play out in GA, of course, but this appears to be a cycle for unusual voting patterns.

@Alon @mekkaokereke Arguing “women didn’t tell exit pollsters they voted differently than their husbands” to push back on “some women would be uncomfortable if their husbands knew their real votes” is pretty odd. Such women are unlikely to tell a stranger in public outside a polling place what they wouldn’t tell their husbands!
Would you use an exit poll to see how many women are in abusive relationships as they walked out of a polling place with their partners?

@mekkaokereke @jupiter Jesse Owens is a real hero in my eyes, not only for what he achieved at the Olympics and elsewhere, but for being such an ally to his Jewish teammates in Berlin in 1936.

Glickman later recalled Owens saying: ”Coach, I’ve won three gold medals. Let Marty and Sam run. They deserve it."

Owens tried to give up his chance for his 4th gold medal in the 4 x 100 relay race to be an ally for his teammates. What an incredibly selfless act.

@mekkaokereke @jupiter Not much history of Americans who supported Hitler is taught in the US.

* Henry Ford, a virulent antisemite, was an inspiration to Hitler and received the Nazi regime's highest honor for foreigners. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/henry-ford-anti-semitism/675911/?gift=Vw7jowAt4TJWcg2vvOSAndW9IYjhKgBbwPuzrmkBZIc&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

* Many know of Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympics. Fewer know that the US replaced 2 Jewish runners at the last minute (Owens objected but was overruled) https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/31/sport/germany-berlin-jewish-olympics-maccabi/index.html

* There was a big pro-Hitler rally in NY in 1939 https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/americans-hold-nazi-rally-in-madison-square-garden

@mekkaokereke @jupiter Ford's pro-Nazi activities does not seem to have diminished his reputation much in America. I learned about Ford's factory assembly lines in school. The Nazi stuff I learned elsewhere.
There's still a major hospital bearing his name in Detroit.

@n1xnx @mekkaokereke Lawsuit filed in Georgia re purging eligible voters from their voting lists

https://www.democracydocket.com/cases/georgia-voter-roll-maintenance-challenge/

#USPolitics #USPol

@n1xnx @mekkaokereke

US Justice Dept today says it's suing Virginia over voter purges "too close to the Nov 5 general election in violation of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993"
https://nationalzero.com/2024/10/11/justice-department-sues-virginia-for-voter-purge/

#USPolitics #USPol

“Feels like it should be a bigger deal that Nate Silver is employed by Polymarket, a site that allows you to bet on political outcomes, and also runs a ‘prediction model’ that has the ability to directly affect betting behavior.” - Brett Meiselas, cofounder of MeidasTouch

From Axios https://www.axios.com/2024/07/16/nate-silver-polymarket

Peter Thiel's Founders Fund has invested in Polymarket. Thiel is also a mentor to JD Vance.

Oh, and Silver charges for his ‘forward-looking forecast.’

#USPolitics #USPol

The {ghibli} #rstats 📦 provides “colour palettes inspired by Studio Ghibli films, ported to R for your enjoyment. . . . ghibli provides 9 unique palettes, with a light, medium and dark variant for each.” By Ewen Henderson. On CRAN.

https://ewenme.github.io/ghibli/

#DataViz @rstats

@mekkaokereke I thought I was prepared for this. You called it. But my head is still exploding at these "complaints" about Kamala Harris's management style in today's Washington Post.Maybe I missed their merger with The Onion? 😡

Anyone know if it's possible to hide (not display) a Quarto blog's page footer on one specific post? I've been fiddling around with CSS for the last half hour but not getting what I want. Putting a new footer in the post YAML doesn't seem to work either. Thanks!
#QuartoPub

Covid can now look like food poisoning - no cough, fever, sore throat, sneezing.

“Many of us associate Covid with respiratory issues. But some people who get sick with the virus never experience a sore throat, coughing or body aches, said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. Certain people end up feeling more like they have food poisoning than anything else.“
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/05/well/covid-symptoms-stomach-pain-diarrhea.html?unlocked_article_code=1.5E0.v2R_.VAILnYXYO11i&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb

#COVID19 #COVIDisNotOver #GiftLink