The Gaming Den

Duly noted.

Koumei wrote:Mind you, given how said polls told us that Brexit wasn't going ahead and Trump also wasn't going to be a thing and for that matter that RMoney was going to beat Obama, they probably DO have a margin of error of something in the 60-70 range.

That's not really true. We want to believe that 70% probability means it is certain, but it really just means that 7 out of 10 times, it happens. That's still 3 times it doesn't. I'm pretty sure that if we ran Trump's election 3 times (and people knew how it went each time) he would have lost the other two. I think that people were confident enough in a Clinton victory that they overcompensated the other way - especially in trying to create a divided government.

Koumei wrote:Mind you, given how said polls told us that Brexit wasn't going ahead and Trump also wasn't going to be a thing and for that matter that RMoney was going to beat Obama, they probably DO have a margin of error of something in the 60-70 range.

Not really. Both of those votes were absurdly close- 2.1% more for Hillary, 3.7% for Brexit.
A 5% margin of error on the polls covers both of those results.

In one of 538's recent podcasts, Nate Silver commented that he disliked telling people the odds when one side is in the ballpark of 85% likely. Their eyes see 85% and their brain thinks it's a sure thing, and that's intensely frustrating because it really really isn't.

My bosses forecast anything we call 70%+ as a sale. And that's crazy! They should forecast 70% of it (at best) but if you have three opportunities at 70% (say $100k, $50k, and $10k) odds are that you'll close two of them. If they count all three as 'sure things' you'd forecast $160k in revenue; if you forcecast at 70% you'd forcase $112k - but assuming you're equally likely to close 2 out of the three your real number is going to be either $150k; $110k; or $60k. Better hope you close the big one!

deaddmwalking wrote:

Koumei wrote:Mind you, given how said polls told us that Brexit wasn't going ahead and Trump also wasn't going to be a thing and for that matter that RMoney was going to beat Obama, they probably DO have a margin of error of something in the 60-70 range.

That's not really true. We want to believe that 70% probability means it is certain, but it really just means that 7 out of 10 times, it happens. That's still 3 times it doesn't. I'm pretty sure that if we ran Trump's election 3 times (and people knew how it went each time) he would have lost the other two. I think that people were confident enough in a Clinton victory that they overcompensated the other way - especially in trying to create a divided government.

Pretty sure these weren't "I predict a 52% chance of X (but when I roll the percentile, we leave it in the hands of the cosmic RNG)" but were "52% of people indicated they were voting for X and as such, the further the results stray from this 52%, the worse my prediction is." Now yes, they were close enough that an acceptable margin of error is indeed "the results are flipped", but that doesn't reflect well on polls when their stats differ just enough from the final results as to not predict things.

So Zimbabwe seems to be suffering from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Coup.

Sure, the military has taken over and imprisoned the leader of the country, but apparently it can't officially be called a coup yet.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-42004816

The Mad Katter has gone viral:

http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/tv ... 12ba4f9a5f

Just found out that my local water company openly admits to having sorcerers on staff.

Dowsing in 2017.

-Username17

Obviously magic isn't real, but if she's better than blind luck and claims it's due to magic that doesn't necessarily mean that you can't use her. Wasn't there a detective series where the guy pretended to be a psychic but he was just a normal detective - it was just a schtick to avoid making police feel like they were doing their job poorly?

deaddmwalking wrote:Obviously magic isn't real, but if she's better than blind luck and claims it's due to magic that doesn't necessarily mean that you can't use her. Wasn't there a detective series where the guy pretended to be a psychic but he was just a normal detective - it was just a schtick to avoid making police feel like they were doing their job poorly?

Psyche.

He was trained to notice small detailed his entire life by his obsessive cop father. When he called the police and told them who committed a high profile crime, which he deduced only from clues that were shown on television, they assumed that he was an accomplice and wouldn't belive him when he claimed that he had extremely astute observational skills. Then he claimed to have psychic powers in order to avoid prison, and got a consultant job out of it.

Minor correction: Psych. Because he was being honest about fooling people.

Here we go again.

Russia's denials are basically like Nixon's denials. When Nixon went on TV to deny that the US was bombing Cambodia, you knew that the US was bombing Cambodia. When Russia denies that there was a nuclear accident, you know there was a nuclear accident.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:Just found out that my local water company openly admits to having sorcerers on staff.

Dowsing in 2017.

Man, they're gonna get in trouble for breaking the masquerade.

erik wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:Just found out that my local water company openly admits to having sorcerers on staff.

Dowsing in 2017.

Man, they're gonna get in trouble for breaking the masquerade.

It's linear magic, so there's no paradox.

FrankTrollman wrote:When Russia denies that there was a nuclear accident, you know there was a nuclear accident.

To be fair, there might not have been an accident - Putin could have just had a whole heap of people he needed to assassinate.

The Russian Orthodox Church and the Investigative Committee (the top prosecution office) have launched an investigation into whether the execution of the royal family in 1918 was a Jewish ritual blood sacrifice sealing the Bolsheviks' deal with Satan. (They're convinced it was.)

What in the actual fuck?
More details, please. That kind of insanity needs more information

Telegraph article on the subject. Or more directly from the horse's mouth, an RT article.

So the government is reviewing the known history of the deaths based on the bodies having been recently recovered, and is pointedly not looking into the "jews did it" theory while doing so.

And thus a branch of the church has decided to check the "jews did it" theory anyway, by another name so as not to be saying that shit out loud, on account of them Bolsheviks are totally into funny shaped buildings, which is totally spooky. Church people are ultimately very credulous, in that they happily believe stupid shit without evidence.

D&D was, after all, totally a satanic ritual, amirite?

This is actually the third time this investigation is happening, because ROC refuses to accept the results since they haven't been invited to participate in the investigation before. The first two times were in the 90s, when the USSR fell and it became possible to investigate the murder, and in 2007, when new remains were found.

Ritual murder theory is more or less Sympathetic Magic 101 with the idea that the evil bolshevik homojews killed the head of the state to destroy the state. It appeared among the monarchists almost immediately after the murder and has been bouncing around ever since. It is like the Kennedy Assassination of Russian conspiracy theorists (and some foreign ones) and crazy shit gets invented all the time. I don't much care what ROC is doing, but it's a shame that the investigative committee gets dragged into this.

tussock wrote:So the government is reviewing the known history of the deaths based on the bodies having been recently recovered, and is pointedly not looking into the "jews did it" theory while doing so.

The Investigative Committee is. Putin may be a run of the mill kleptocrat, but there are plenty of full-blown Nazis. Off the top of my head: Mikhalkov (the movie and copyright parasite), Yakunin (former railway boss), Rogozin (DoD / aerospace leech), Kolokoltsev (Minister of the Interior, chief cop), Milov (head of security), Tokarev of Transneft, a bunch of them in the parliament including Milonov the ex-ex-ex-ex-ex-ex-ex-gay and Poklonskaya the tsar's heavenly bride, a number of pet oligarchs, Belykh (the ex-governor of the Kirov region, currently under investigation), Tkachyov (the ex-governor of the Krasnodar region who turned it into a Nazi state over 15 years), Kirienko (vice-head of the Presidential Administration, oversees two Nazi paramilitary orgs), Utkin (leader of Putin's private army) and of course Bastrykin, head of the Investigative Committee.

The church has been a Nazi org since its post-Soviet revival. It has no power of its own and is fully and illegally funded with tax and extortion money, so everything the church does has been pre-approved by Putin.

tl;dr tussock, you're a fucking idiot as always.

Starmaker wrote:The Russian Orthodox Church and the Investigative Committee (the top prosecution office) have launched an investigation into whether the execution of the royal family in 1918 was a Jewish ritual blood sacrifice sealing the Bolsheviks' deal with Satan. (They're convinced it was.)

That's it, guys: They're onto us. Contact your demon handler for further instructions.

On a more serious and somber note, in this current political climate a full rehabilitation of Nazism is quickly becoming "a terryfing possibility" instead of "Stormfront's wildest pipe dream". I already had Internet fights against morons calling FDR "the President who almost destroyed USA with Communism" and it's despairing that this bullshit can simply become an accepted "alternative fact" in a few more years of this massacring of Truth. Here's a proposed timeline:

a) Communism is LITERALLY SATAN (being pushed right now, as demonstrated)
b) Therefore, Fascists are like modern crusaders
c) The allies were tainted by evil (Keynes in England, FDR in America, RussiaLITERAL SATAN)
d) Decades of post-war prosperity and progress brought by equalitarian politics erased from public consciousness thanks to people who were alive them dying.
e) We need Nazism back because Jews Muslims Jews!

Fuck this bullshit.

Pixels wrote:Telegraph article on the subject. Or more directly from the horse's mouth, an RT article.

Huh, thanks. That's both more and less weird than I expected.

It always gets me right here when churches are dismissing DNA evidence.