- 03:43:56 Retweeted @dansinker 03:09:28 Facebook doesn't care about you. It doesn't care about your business. It doesn't care about the internet. It only cares about Facebook.
- 04:33:22 Retweeted @WeeLaura 2015-03-22 18:59:34 *Rubs temples*
No, @CNN. It's Richard III. King Richard III. Google him. Holy fucking shit already. http://t.co/GL01wuA7PL
- 05:11:25 On WSJ. Thanks for the tip! -> RT @Green_Footballs: Google the title and click from the search results – bypasses the paywall.
- 05:41:07 Reading – Israel Spied on Iran Talks (@adamentous) http://t.co/9BhTxb7C0Z (or https://t.co/xFPbxJn6zc )
- 19:10:16 New polls from @ppppolls, @QuinnipiacPoll and @GravisMarketing in FL, NY and NH added. Details at http://t.co/jPCd6lJHdd and @ElecCollPolls.
- 22:51:35 [Abulpost] Electoral College: New Hampshire swings away from Paul again http://t.co/tRYPWMO0jl
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A bunch of new polls were added to my site today, but there was only one notable change. With a new Gravis Poll, Clinton’s lead in New Hampshire against Paul once again goes over 5%.
Easy come, easy go I guess. This decline happens as the only poll so far showing Paul in the lead here falls off the average. That poll is looking more like an outlier at this point. Even without that one poll though, if you squint there does seem to be a general trend in Paul’s direction over the last year or so. As usual, we’ll have to wait for more polls to see if Paul resumes closing the gap in the average, or if this is actually a reversal of the trend. With New Hampshire now at a 6.0% Clinton lead in the average, it gets taken out of Paul’s “best case” scenario…
Looking at Paul’s “best case” as compared to the rest of the “5 best polled” combinations tracked here:
Since the November elections, Paul has improved his “best case” position from losing by 96 electoral votes, to losing by only 84 electoral votes. Bush, Christie and Huckabee meanwhile have actually all had their best cases get worse in this timeframe. (Ryan has held steady, but has said he isn’t running and hadn’t been polled much.) What about Cruz you say? Didn’t he just announce? And Walker? He’s still getting lots of buzz! Or maybe even Rubio? Well, the polling on those combinations still isn’t that great and don’t make my top five. But they are improving. Right now Clinton vs Cruz is the 6th best polled combo, Clinton vs Rubio is at #7, and Clinton vs Walker is at #8. You can click through on those links if you want to see what those look like at the moment. But the amount of state level polling on those guys still isn’t that great, so take what you see there with a big lump of salt. (And if you go even deeper and look at combos with non-Clinton Democrats, bring a whole wheelbarrow of salt.) Note: This post is an update based on the data on my 2016 Electoral College Analysis Site. All of the charts and graphs seen here are from that site. Graphs, charts and raw data can be found there for the race nationally and in each state for every candidate combination that has been polled at the state level. In addition, comparisons of the best polled candidate combinations both nationally and each in each state are available. All charts above are clickable to go to the current version of the detail page the chart is from, which may contain more up to date information than the snapshots on this page, which were current as of the time of this post.
Standard Into: This is the latest in a series of quarterly posts on congressional legislative output. I started these in June 2013 in response to a flurry of commentary about how the 113th congress was lagging behind in output compared to previous congresses. Now, it is fundamentally debatable if passing fewer laws is a good thing, a bad thing, or just a completely meaningless number since of course the impact of laws varies widely. I’m guessing in reality, it is a pretty meaningless number. But I noticed that in many of these debates, there was a lack of rigor in the ways these numbers were used. For instance, it seemed common to compare the current number of laws passed in the 113th, to the TOTAL passed in the 112th or 111th. Or maybe talking about the “pace” at which legislation was being passed as if there was an expectation that this would continue linearly. Never did I hear a comparison that actually looked specifically at where the previous congresses had been at the same point in the cycle. So I made one. Now the new stuff: The 113th congress is over. No new laws were signed after my December update. So the 113th ended up with 294 bills signed compared to 239 in the 112th and 249 in the 11th. But now the 114th congress is in session. How is that going so far? As of March 20th, the 76th day of the new congress, 6 bills have been signed into law:
At the same time in the last few congresses, the 113th had 5 laws, the 112th had 6 laws, and the 11th had 10 laws. So for this time in the cycle, we’re pretty much right in line with the last two congresses, and just a tad behind the 111th. Here are the graphs:
In addition to swearing on Curmudgeon’s Corner, IvГЎn and I apparently just like to run our mouths. In her comments on our March 12th show my mother also asked “Why are you doing shows near 2 hours in length now?”. Well, to quickly answer the question in the title, yes, our shows have been getting longer. Here are some graphs. First, since we just completed our 400th show, here is a breakdown of the length distribution of the show, split up 100 shows at a time, grouped into 10 minute wide intervals:
There is a lot of interesting stuff here if you look into it. Our first 100 episodes were a bimodal distribution. We did a bunch of “short” shows, between 10 and 50 minutes, and then we did a bunch over an hour, mostly just over an hour long. Basically, when we first started, we targeted shorter shows, perhaps averaging 30 minutes, then we decided to make the jump to an hour. Between the two modes, we averaged 51 minutes per show (rounding to the nearest minute). The second and third 100 shows were a more typical near “normal” distribution. The second hundred we averaged 53 minutes per show. The third hundred we averaged 63 minutes per show. In the fourth hundred, shows under an hour became extremely rare (only 4% of shows). Our distribution was moving toward longer shows, and thus we had a longer tail to the right, including two shows that were actually over two hours long. Our average jumped to 80 minutes. A full 25% of our shows were over 90 minutes long. You can also see the trend toward longer shows in a chart showing show lengths vs episode number, along with a 10 episode moving average:
You can sort of see that although there has been tons of variability for our whole run, we started out averaging around 30 minutes per show, then we decided we could go longer, jumped up to averaging a bit more than an hour through episode 100 or so. We then started cutting back, getting down to just over 40 minutes per show on average right before episode 150. Then ever since we’ve slowly been getting longer and longer. We just stopped bothering to shut up, and just keep talking until we don’t have much left to say. As we’ve thought about it, IvГЎn and I agree that while under an hour sometimes seems a bit cramped now, over 90 minutes is really getting too long, unless perhaps there is a LOT of very interesting news that week… which there usually isn’t… and maybe not even then. So we are going to be working on tightening things back up again. Maybe not all the way back to averaging 60 minute shows, but probably cutting back quite a bit on the number of shows that end up stretching over 90 minutes. Of course, this is all subject to feedback from our listeners. What length would you prefer? 30 minutes? 60? 90? Or are you one of those folks who really like 2 or 3 hour podcasts? There are many of those out there of course. I don’t think IvГЎn and I will make podcasts of that length a habit though. :-)
Of course, I had to check this out with numbers. Our March 12th show was 102 minutes long (plus a few seconds). In that time by my count IvГЎn swore 99 times, and I swore 33 times. That gave us a total of 132 times, or on average once every 46.5 seconds. Of course, that’s if you listen to the whole show. As part of our March 20th show where we respond to my mom’s comments (and give some additional stats), I compiled a “supercut” of JUST the swearing from the episode she was reacting to. In this version, the March 12th show is reduced to JUST the bits with swearing. You get all 132 instances, compressed into 7:38, or an average of once every 3.5 seconds… for almost eight minutes. Now, if you are offended by such things, don’t hit play. But we actually found this rather amusing, and on the podcast I promised to make this also available independently from the podcast itself. Here it is: As amusing as this was to listen to once or twice, IvГЎn and I actually agree that our use of “bad language” was excessive in that episode. Quite a bit so. And that is not necessarily out of the norm for the episodes we have done in the past. We are going to try to clean it up a little bit in future shows. We sometimes don’t even notice we are doing it, but it seems like putting in a bit of effort here is probably worth it. We’d like to get a few more regular listeners, and we know from previous comments from other folks that my mother is not the only one turned off by this kind of language. We won’t try to avoid it entirely… it is a normal part of how normal people talk, especially when they get emotional about what they are talking about. But, yes, averaging more than once a minute is a bit too much. Maybe we can get it down to one every five minutes. Or maybe even ten? Tune in to find out. :-) Edited 11:57 UTC to add a link. Edited 2017-04-15 17:09 UTC to fix audio player, which had stopped working at some point. In the latest Curmudgeon’s Corner Sam and IvГЎn talk about:
Length this week – 1:35:27
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