Defund the Police

no I don't wine - I quit drinking two years ago.

whatever he says his handlers will say he is being misunderstood, and what he meant to say was blah, blah, blah.

Incumbents automatically have a built in advantage for starters.

You mean like people do with Trump?

That's never stopped the left!

then again the actual official police academy might train the cadets okay. But when a lifer (career guy) takes them under their wing they teach them their way of doing things. By this I mean things the academy doesn't teach, and that only come with experience or under experienced tutelage. I'm sure it has similarities with the military:
"hey kid forget that shit they taught you in basic training - here's how it's really done!" and thus bad methods and attitudes get perpetuated.

Also if lifers have to be retrained they will play along in a formal setting and learn what they need to learn, then when they are out from under the flagpole they will go right back to doing things as they used to.

Granted Elwood could confirm if this is the case or not - I was never a cop but it seems that there may be quite a few cop and military similarities. I could be wrong!

most of the time but not all the time. What if this is the one time out of three the incumbent advantage doesn't pay off? My point is in a two man contest any candidate will either win or lose - that's a 50/50 chance at the end of the day. Hillary and Trump each had a 50/50 chance of winning despite Trump being the official underdog according to polls, surveys, expert analysis, etc. One way Biden will win is if I bet on Trump to win, because I have a terrible track record for betting on elections.

Complete bullshit. The voter fraud that has happened in recent history has been mainly republican.

I'll try to make this simple:

Suppose you are doing target practice with a target like the one shown above. Provided you don't miss the target completely, there are only two outcomes: you hit the red, or you hit the blue.

Can't you see that the chances of hitting red are much greater than the chances of hitting blue? Chance has relatively little to do with how many options there are, and a whole lot to do with the comparitive size of the options.

Let's put it another way: there is no way California is going to vote for anyone for president, in November, other than Donald Trump or Joe Biden. So for all practical purposes we can say there are only two choices. Do you really think Donald Trump has a 50% chance of carrying California? Do you really think that Joe Biden has a 50% chance of carrying Idaho?

It has nothing to do with the metric system, and there is no need either for vulgarity or insults. They add nothing at all to your argument, and in fact detract from it to a great extent.

In one sense, yes they do: the ability to set the agenda. But there's also a potential disadvantage: a track record that includes (rightly or wrongly) everything that happens on their watch. Usually the former outweighs the latter, but this time it might be different, like it was for Herbert Hoover. (Not comparing Trump to Hoover, who was a decent man, with numerous accomplishments, including helping Europe avoid mass starvation after two world wars.)

Jesus. Fucking. Christ.

And you just admitted you don't drink so you don't even have THAT excuse.

I fight Mike Tyson. Just the two of us. You seriously think it's a 50/50 chance I could win? There are thousands of bookmakers willing to take your money right now.

You race Usain Bolt over 200m. 50/50 chance you win?

Fucking THINK.

Interesting point to make, since it is Trump who was just this week reported for voting fraud.

You are kidding, right? @Asyncritus and @matthunter to the rescue if you're not, but... you can't be serious about this, can you?

It's OK, OF's whole worldview is binary.

I'm British.

Now, where did I make ANY statement in the above exchange which even remotely touches on the election?

Where did I mention Biden?

Where?

Please tell me because you keep responding to posts with "But Biden wouldn't be any better"....I wasn't even talking about Trump, much less Biden.

I was talking about what I believe to be a fundamental failing of the 2A, the fact that it results in an arms race between the public and the authorities who are supposed to protect them. What has that got to do with the 2020 election?

If each candidate has a 50/50 chance, why bother with all that campaigning malarky? Why not just flip a coin?

Because the system in which they are running is not determined by random chance, but by the mindset of the voting population and other similar factors, as filtered through the results of the Electoral College. So you can have situations where more people vote for a candidate who ends up losing, for example. Or you can have situations where the combination of a candidate's policies, charisma and other factors means that they are much more likely to win.

Perhaps this will make it clear to you:

McGovern did not have a 50/50 shot at beating Nixon, though they were the only two major party candidates.

Mondale did not have a 50/50 shot at beating Reagan.

McCain did not have a 50/50 shot at beating Obama.

P.S. One of my pet peeves is how on Survivor, host Jeff Probst routinely talks about someone being guaranteed a one-in-X shot of winning if they get immunity. That is not how statistics/reality work. There are some contestants who are all but guaranteed to win if they make it to the final three and there are some contestants who are all but guaranteed to not get a single person in their corner if they make it to the end, and then there are people in between. It is never one-in-X. GRRRRRRRRRRRRR!

As to your graph - keep in mind that depending on the source the percentage of the advantage might favor Trump, or it might favor Biden. In other words if all the sources gave Hillary a much greater than 50/50 chance of winning then what happened? Sorry, I'm not budging on two candidates, one winner is a 50/50 chance. BTW the metric system comment was a joke - again a 50/50 chance of landing.

So you are saying there's no such thing as a stronger candidate or prevailing political conditions? Just a coin toss?

not unless every single source analyzing and calculating the odds is pretty much in agreement.

Depending on who's defining the term "defunding," what this spokesman is saying is pretty much in line with the conservative version of the term. Increase funding for education, mental health and drug treatment so that those types of agencies can work out solutions that are presently only being addressed by cops. The main difference is that (as I understand it) most people who advocate defunding think that the money for that increase should come from the police department budget. At least in this statement, Biden's flack isn't saying how we will pay for the increased funding to education/social services/etc. or why cops should retain 100 percent of the funding they are currently receiving if they are no longer going to be expected to do those aspects of policing for which traditional policing is not particularly well-suited.

Not sure what to say here. Clearly candidates do not campaign with a 50/50 chance of winning, that much is obvious, but I'm not sure how to explain that any more than how to convince you the sky is blue (assuming it i there too).

Then you're a fucking idiot who makes me ashamed to share even a genus with you (dumb down: that means same evolutionary branch, not even species) because even monkeys have mastered probability theory better than this.

Even a coin toss can land on the edge, you hopelessly stupid fuckpot.

You're one of those arsewombles who thought a 1/3 pounder beefburger was a worse deal than a 1/4 pounder, aren't you?

My mother thinks I can take Godzilla in a fight. Everyone else in the fucking universe says no.

I have a 50/50 chance?

You. Literally. Cannot. Be. This. Fucking. Stupid. And. Not. Choke. On. Your. Own. Saliva.

not even close....

Then please don't ever, ever, ever try to get a job that involves statistics. You have just shown that you don't understand anything about statistical analysis.

Of course, if you want a practical lesson in statistics, use @matthunter's idea, but do it yourself: set up a boxing match with Mike Tyson. There are just the two of you, so you should have a 50/50 chance of beating him, right?

I'm betting that you will get a painful lesson that just because there are only two, that does not mean that they are equal.

That's not going to satisfy the crazies.

#YOUGUYS

Yep. '6' and '9'