StrangeSox

This one really hit home because my son has that same toy she's carrying Don't worry everyone, GDP is up for one quarter!!!!!!

FWIW, in the 2018 Senate races, they found that long-time Texas residents actually favored Beto O'Rourke slightly while more recent transplants voted for Cruz.

EU test positivity over the past week:

At least per NYT's breakdowns, Trump would need a larger polling miss in his favor than he got in 2016 at this point. Turnout continues to grow

Our structure does largely lock in a duopoloy, especially at the Presidential level. You need a majority of Electoral Votes, so if a 3rd party started regularly getting a few dozen, we'd regularly have the election being sent to the House (which then has it's own rules as for how they pick a new President). You could go to pure popular vote with a requirement of say 10% margin or simple majority in the first round (e.g. if you won 45%-10%-25%, you're president, or if you get 50%+1), or you could require majority in the first round and then it goes to a top-two runoff. Some states, such as Georgia, already do that for Representative and Senate elections. You could couple new structures like that with ranked choice voting, like Maine now does, where you pick your first and second candidates. So your 3rd party, longshot vote isn't "wasted." They implemented this after the centrist and liberal dem candidates kept splitting about 60% of the vote, allowing the far right governor to win with 40%. It came into play in the 2018 elections. If you want a multiparty democracy, you'd have to fundamentally reform our structure top to bottom I think. Here's a recent example of how a proportional representation parliamentary democracy might look like in America: e: potential downsides of structures like this may include situations like Israel's most recent elections, where nobody could form a governing majority in parliament and they had to have 3 or 4 elections before a temporary COVID coalition was able to be formed. There aren't too many Presidential republics compared to parliamentary democracies, and the structure of our particular one is unique given that it was created over two centuries ago. In a multiparty parliamentary system, I wouldn't be forced to support Biden, and a number of conservatives wouldn't reluctantly be voting for Trump. Our coalitions and politics would look radically different, so it's hard to know exactly how things would shake out.

Very solid follow for local Chicago news for sure!

Chicago doing some half-hearted "lockdown" of restaurants and bars again, starting Friday, because hey why not let things rage out of control for several more days before taking far from sufficient measures.

The only prediction I'm confident in is that turnout will blow 2016 out of the water. Early/mail voting in a number of places has already exceeded the total 2016 vote. We're at something like 67M votes already cast. Texas is already at 87% of their total 2016 vote.

We're rounding the corner. You won't hear anything about COVID after 11/4. It's all a hoax. Clearly, we all want the same thing.

This is the current Rt calculated for each state. Above 1 (red) means case rates are growing.

Public health policy is fundamentally both a scientific and political question. There's no way to strip the politics out of public policy.

Stories of overwhelmed hospitals are popping up across the country, and epidemiologists are warning that it's only going to get worse in the coming weeks and months.

Nature has an article on "The false promise of herd immunity" this week: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02948-4 It lays out what herd immunity is and why trying it as a "strategy" to combat COVID-19 has little to no scientific basis and is extraordinarily deadly.

How well does herd immunity work if reinfection is possible after 3-12 months? The hope at that point would have to be for better treatments of serious illness rather than a protective or sterilizing vaccine.

Stay safe, stay home

Wear your god-damned masks

Wear your dang masks

I don't think there's been a whole lot of correlation of viral loud vs. severity of disease from the infection.