Trumps Presidency 2025

[chasfh]

5 hours ago, GalagaGuy said:

I said to eliminate districts, not redraw them with some generic grid pattern.  Let people vote for which party they want representing them and then divy up the reps to individual voters rather than a plot of land. Yeah, it would be a mess but at least everyone could say they were being represented by a member of the party they chose. 

I think we are well into the post-Congressional-Reps-Represent-The-People era.

Edited 15 hours ago by chasfh

[Motown Bombers]

Looking at the districts in Texas, there are 6 districts that Cook Political Index rates in the single digits. In California, there is 20. Both sides are not the same. 

[GalagaGuy]

29 minutes ago, Motown Bombers said:

Looking at the districts in Texas, there are 6 districts that Cook Political Index rates in the single digits. In California, there is 20. Both sides are not the same. 

There are 12 with a spread of less than 5 points and 5 of those are Republican leaning seats.  In total, there are 13 seats in the state that Republicans have a shot at winning and only 3 of them are +7 or more in favor of Republicans.  Democrats have 35 districts that are at least a +7 and most of them are +18 or greater.   Basically Democrats are guaranteed to win 67% of the seats before a vote is cast. 

Edited 14 hours ago by GalagaGuy

[ewsieg]

13 hours ago, Tiger337 said:

Yup, late data is generally the reason for revision of numbers in any agency.  It can't be avoided.  I suppose it could be avoided by ignoring the late surveys and never doing revisions, but would only be done if you are not interested in accuracy.  

They were giving examples of the steps that data goes through from the Survey until it hits the Jobs report or the revision and how it could be automated to provide real time data right to the BLS commish.

[GalagaGuy]

Funny that this explanation of the job numbers being revised showed up on Fox Business but not the main site from what I can find.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/why-does-labor-department-revise-jobs-reports-here-three-reasons

[gehringer_2]

2 hours ago, GalagaGuy said:

Funny that this explanation of the job numbers being revised showed up on Fox Business but not the main site from what I can find.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/why-does-labor-department-revise-jobs-reports-here-three-reasons

That's  "funny" as in completely predictable and par for the course, of course.

[Tiger337]

5 hours ago, ewsieg said:

They were giving examples of the steps that data goes through from the Survey until it hits the Jobs report or the revision and how it could be automated to provide real time data right to the BLS commish.

That is easier said than done for a lot of reasons and would probably result in less accurate data.  They would have to get the respondents ( households and businesses) on board.  Putting the burden on the survey takers could result in fewer completed surveys and less representative data. 

You need economists and statisticians to analyze trends, make adjustments, etc.    

Dating cleaning and validation are not as easy to automate as one would expect as different data issues come up all the time. 

In summary. They could automate everything to an extent, but it would give you less reliable results.  The delays and revisions might give the perception that the results are not reliable, but they actually make the results more reliable.   

 

 

 

 

[Motown Bombers]

9 hours ago, GalagaGuy said:

There are 12 with a spread of less than 5 points and 5 of those are Republican leaning seats.  In total, there are 13 seats in the state that Republicans have a shot at winning and only 3 of them are +7 or more in favor of Republicans.  Democrats have 35 districts that are at least a +7 and most of them are +18 or greater.   Basically Democrats are guaranteed to win 67% of the seats before a vote is cast. 

Dems are guaranteed to win 67% you say?  Sounds about right. 

[romad1]

[Motown Bombers]

Using the same logic, republicans are guaranteed 65% of the seats, but Texas is much closer and they want to guarantee more seats to republicans. 

[romad1]

Chuck Todd is interesting on the Bulwark pod.  

 

[romad1]

Hegseth is the worst...Eliot Cohen savages him here

 

[ewsieg]

4 hours ago, Tiger337 said:

That is easier said than done for a lot of reasons and would probably result in less accurate data.  They would have to get the respondents ( households and businesses) on board.  Putting the burden on the survey takers could result in fewer completed surveys and less representative data. 

You need economists and statisticians to analyze trends, make adjustments, etc.    

Dating cleaning and validation are not as easy to automate as one would expect as different data issues come up all the time. 

In summary. They could automate everything to an extent, but it would give you less reliable results.  The delays and revisions might give the perception that the results are not reliable, but they actually make the results more reliable.   

I spend most of my day trying to find a way to clean up data and you're not wrong (although I would offer pause on the less accurate data), even small changes to our process requires various verification checks making it a tedious project.  But overall, compared to reports that were auto generated once a day and then had to be processed by a person and moved to another system, just for another report to be generated for the next day, so on and so forth... it's been worth it to my company to find better ways to get data to a useful endpoint quicker.  In doing this, we've found different ways to spot patterns in near real time, instead of finding the patterns in hindsight when upper mgmt wants to know what changed a couple of months down the line and we've had to go back and do an analysis.

Overall my point on this BLS stuff though is Trump didn't like the numbers and used the revisions as 'proof' the numbers were cooked.  Yet his own demands to cut federal spending appears to have shut down efforts by BLS to improve on their ability to give more timely and accurate reports to the administration.

[Motown Bombers]

 

[pfife]

The fundamental reason they have to revise is because they operate under the assumption that the not received surveys would just reaffirm the surveys they did recieve.   This is not correct as there is non response bias in surveys.   However it is the only reasonable way to proceed on a monthly basis.

They could infer but thats still just a fancy way to assume what the non response data is based on the response data.

 

 

[Tiger337]

54 minutes ago, pfife said:

The fundamental reason they have to revise is because they operate under the assumption that the not received surveys would just reaffirm the surveys they did recieve.   This is not correct as there is non response bias in surveys.   However it is the only reasonable way to proceed on a monthly basis.

They could infer but thats still just a fancy way to assume what the non response data is based on the response data.

 

 

Yes, This was what I was trying to get at in the first part of my post.  You explained it better.  

Edited 1 hour ago by Tiger337

[Motown Bombers]

 

[Edman85]

6 hours ago, Tiger337 said:

That is easier said than done for a lot of reasons and would probably result in less accurate data.  They would have to get the respondents ( households and businesses) on board.  Putting the burden on the survey takers could result in fewer completed surveys and less representative data. 

You need economists and statisticians to analyze trends, make adjustments, etc.    

Dating cleaning and validation are not as easy to automate as one would expect as different data issues come up all the time. 

In summary. They could automate everything to an extent, but it would give you less reliable results.  The delays and revisions might give the perception that the results are not reliable, but they actually make the results more reliable.   

 

 

 

 

I had a former colleague who got a huge dataset and ran some quick code on it, promised our bosses it was a panacea and it was on me to validate it. I spent months trying to clean all the data his automated code missed and eventually rejected the database because the data was incorrect in far too many places.

[CMRivdogs]

18 hours ago, GalagaGuy said:

Sure you do and you'd still be able to do that by voting for reps of the party you support.  Right now it's all about which people they want to throw you in with and call it a district.   

I'd say this is infinitely worse. 

 

You realize this map was drawn by Republicans in 2021. When was the last time Democrats controlled the legislature in Texas

[GalagaGuy]

14 hours ago, GalagaGuy said:

There are 12 with a spread of less than 5 points and 5 of those are Republican leaning seats.  In total, there are 13 seats in the state that Republicans have a shot at winning and only 3 of them are +7 or more in favor of Republicans.  Democrats have 35 districts that are at least a +7 and most of them are +18 or greater.   

 

18 minutes ago, CMRivdogs said:

You realize this map was drawn by Republicans in 2021. When was the last time Democrats controlled the legislature in Texas

The Texas map sucks and they want to make it suck even more, I'm not defending what they're doing at all.  My point has been that independent redistricting doesn't seem to really work, at least in California's case.  We seem to be doing pretty well with it in Michigan but I think in our case, there isn't nearly as much overlap of Democrat and Republican voters and there are a lot fewer pieces of pie to cut up.