Bad comparison. With Russian roulette each of the chambers is (in theory, and played wrong) equally likely. And one of them kills you. In an election you’ve got thousands of possible outcomes, none of them equally likely. And many of them reliant on each other. The fact of the matter is that the scenarios leading to a Trump win are far less likely than those leading to a Clinton win. The number of those scenarios are shrinking, and their likely hood is getting less. And how you predict the election is highly contingent on certain assumptions and how you weigh things. Most other agregators doing a FiveThirtyEight style prediction have Clinton at 90% or above to win. And FiveThirtyEight’s prediction has been slower to change for the whole election season.
So the chances of Trump winning aren’t a “Holey shit if this spinning thing stops in the right place we all die” situation. Its an “if this spinning thing stops in the right place, and voter turn out is low, despite record new registration, and all those undecided voters break the right way, and all this happens in one or two key states where it currently looks unlikely, and they’res some bad news for the other guy, and demographics haven’t shifted as much as expected, and there’s no more news for this guy, then we might all die”. Situation.
Russian roulette is usually played with one bullet in a six chamber revolver, isn’t it? That’s about 16.7%. Not that far off. (Just for reference, for a seven chamber revolver, the chances of the bullet being under the hammer is about 14.3%.)
For the first round. You don’t re-spin after the first, simply hand off to the next guy. And so on. Till some one gets shot. In Russian Roulette it’s a certainty that some one gets shot, but the chances of the shooter are reduced with each trigger pull. The point is to kill some one, but to keep them hanging as to whether its certain to happen right now. You know for torture.
Like I said bad comparison. Given what I said about reducing likely hood for good-for-Trump outcomes on multiple steps needed for a win. The more accurate metaphor is Clinton as the bullet. With ever more likely chances of getting a face full of HRC as Trumportinies safely pass.
“I’d love that. I’d love that. Mr. Tough Guy. You know, he’s Mr. Tough Guy. You know when he’s Mr. Tough Guy? When he’s standing behind a microphone by himself,” Trump said.
Trump is waddling, textbook example of psychological projection. What a scrotum.
“I’d love that. I’d love that. Mr. Tough Guy. You know, he’s Mr. Tough Guy. You know when he’s Mr. Tough Guy? When he’s standing behind a microphone by himself,” Trump said as he stood behind a microphone by himself.
Yet FiveThirtyEight is distilling all those factors down to a single quantity: “Chance of winning,” expressed as a percentage, meant to be interpreted as a simple probability. Yes, other models are producing lower chances for Trump, (Princeton Election Consortium has it as low as 1%) but I think FiveThirtyEight’s is capturing more of the real uncertainty, and is likely more accurate. Not that I don’t hope you’re right.
What if you were convinced that the universe was out to get you and the only for sure way you could think of to get a real answer was to do exactly that?
It’s really f’n sad when political discourse is at the level of junior high kids saying “after school,at the bike racks”. What the hell happened to this country?
The Belgians made some really crazy pinfire revolvers. There’s a 20-shot double barreled one covered in gold and pearls that Forgotten Weapons did a video review of.
I’m an advocate of gun control, but I still find firearms pretty interesting artistically and mechanically. Considerable engineering goes into making a gun that works reliably.
