lordvon

It's sarcastic.

Have you talked to anyone who is familiar with Qanon (e.g. investigative reporter, member, etc.)? They believe they are exposing wicked people in high places behind human trafficking rings. I don't think anyone would admit to being a 'servile Trump worshipper', neither a 'servile <insert political figure> worshipper'. Whether they are on to something is another issue. I am not part of Qanon, but I know characterizations such as yours are just wrong.

You really believe Trump is a traitor? Can you name 1 or more specific pieces of evidence? I do not think Trump is a traitor, in fact I think he has been a great president by his merits (in 2016 I was neutral). I love how he talks about specific issues and solutions rather than vague platitudes. He is a breath of fresh air, and that is why he was voted for (though I did not see this in 2016). If he is a traitor, I would love to be enlightened of this and obviously I would not support him. I think most people (such as yourself) don't spend time looking into the claims by his political opponents that he is a traitor. Also, if you support Trump you risk being fired.

Usually I do that, but in this case the title was almost meaningless ('How the Media Could Get the Election Story Wrong'). I wanted to highlight the bit I found interesting.

My other post was flagged for sensationalism, so I slightly modified the title. This title actually does describe what is actually in the article (at the end).

As unfortunately expected, I cannot find this on 'mainstream' news. In fact, I found this HN post on the third page of Google without seeing it covered by any other major news outlets.

Why not take the next step and vote by email? XD

You have to make the distinction between violent rioters (namely antifa) and genuine protestors. this is the 2nd high-profile time this attempted hijacking has happened. there is even a meme: look up "bike lock guy" (Internet Historian's video on YouTube is pretty funny). anyways the federal agents are not pulling out random genuine protestors (how would that make sense?). they are pulling out the violent ones.

You misunderstand. Do not conflate protestors with violent rioters, who are taking advantage of the protests (as many protestors on the ground can attest). The state government has refused to do anything about violent rioters, even releasing those arrested for felony crimes. Federal agents are picking up where the state government has refused to take action.

I had to resubmit this because an almost identical submission was flagged for having a 'misleading' title, when the quote is LITERALLY FROM THE MAN who quit.

Looks like the link is broken in the article, but looks like it is this one: https://publicinterestlegal.org/files/Mail-Voting-2012_2018-...

That's quite a jump from 'broken link' => 'must be propaganda'.

Rebuttals should be analyzed just like the target of the rebuttal. Just as you say the original article should not be taken as gospel, the rebuttal should not be taken as gospel either. The author's accounting of the 28M votes breaks down into 2 categories:

1. 12M voluntarily not cast from the 3 states that auto-send to every registered voter. The author arrives at this calculation by taking an average vote percentage of those states, and applying it to the mail ballots. You can't just apply general vote rate to the mail ballots, then further assume the EVERY SINGLE ONE of the 12M remaining vote was due to people just not bothering to vote. Baked into the author's calculation is that none of the mail ballots in those 3 states could have been involved in fraud...

2. 16M (building on the previous flawed calculation) the author just assumes were people who manually requested the mail ballot, but just decided not to send it in. Why? because there were a total 120M mail ballots sent and 16M / 120M amounts to 13% not voting, which is way lower than general population 50% not voting. This is an assertion with no evidence, and we would expect the percentage of people who do not vote when they MANUALLY request a mail ballot to be much lower anyways. Even a fraction of 16M should raise eyebrows.

So as I understand it, the author's calculations are very hand-wavy and unjustified. But you say this is a 'clear' rebuttal. Can you share how you interpreted the article?

I don’t think it ‘proves’ your point, because: 1. Absentee ballots are similar if not easier to detect, e.g. you might expect mail-in voter fraud if you see absentee voter fraud or vice-versa. For example, in Pennsylvania right now, the only difference in requirement for getting an absentee vs mail-in ballot is that you need a reason for the absentee, which gives one avenue of verification. Mail-in ballots don’t need any reason. 2. there are a number of categories that could have been done on mail-in votes, because it’s harder to detect with mail-in votes. It may just be a matter of how the convictions were categorized.

I think your distinction is valid and correct, but somewhat pedantic.

You said the only reason to oppose mail in voting is to rig the vote. That’s a pretty strong implication. But I would say an open mind would ask the other direction: why is anyone opposed to increasing voter integrity? You can’t simply ignore that. Voter integrity appeals to me as a normal-ass American with 1 vote.

You may have noticed I haven’t been political, and stay on principle. We as a society should be able to talk openly about principle without corrosive contempt for those with differing viewpoints.

I do care, but maybe our current views differ. Can you be specific about what you think the lies are? I believe mail in fraud is a real concern, and here is a list of convictions for mail in voter fraud (and other forms): https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p...

You are the first person to engage me with intellectual honesty, so thank you.

I don’t care who commits the fraud. I want my vote to count as it should. So that’s a why I believe we should be vigilant about mail in voter fraud.

Your Native American example is an example of a corner case that should be addressed properly. Indeed it is unfair if there were no other ways for Native Americans to vote (surely they could vote in person? If not, I’d classify that as a violation of rights). But this doesn’t extend generally, not does it nullify general mail vote fraud concerns.

And I would add more evidence under the claim ‘majority of fraud committed by Republicans’ in order to be more convincing.

Rules around mail in votes vary by state (some disallow entirely for legitimate reasons). My imagination can not determine what you mean by ‘hardly a handful of convictions‘, but here is a list of quite a few specific convictions for fraudulent absentee voting (along with other forms of voter fraud): https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p...

That is some evidence that mail-in votes can be abused. And you should consider how hard it is to detect such abuse. I’d love to see some evidence on why the benefits of mail-in voting outweighs the risks.

Also some evidence on your claims that mail-in voting favors one particular party would be enlightening.

Fraud should be prevented. Inaccuracies should be improved.

It’s not interference in the scenario you’ve described, because there’s no way to tell such a person would have voted against him. And you can’t ignore the main point, which is voter integrity, which I as a normal American agree with.

Those are the ones that just got caught. (And first page says it is a sampling not a comprehensive list...) It shouldn’t happen at all. And it will get worse with less stringent forms of mail-in voting, wouldn’t you agree?

Hmm. It is a rather arbitrary condition that we should be able to prove that voter fraud swung an election before we should be worried about it. There are a lot of recent convictions, which should not happen at all. And I don’t see how a ‘small‘ amount of evidence can prove the point against the evidence.

It should be worrying that this is happening at all. Our vote is one of our most precious forms of expression. This list of convictions is just the ones the author knew of, the ones that just got caught.

Oh and I would love see any evidence on the disenfranchisement you mentioned to update my worldview with. Don’t worry, if you give me a little bit of evidence, I won’t take it as proof that you are ‘wrong’.

Well, take a look at the following examples of convictions made for ‘fraudulent use of absentee ballots’ (and other forms of voter fraud): https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p...

I suppose the pandemic is a valid point for wanting to vote by mail, but concerns for voting integrity are still there. I think there should be an easy-to-implement contactless yet in-person way to vote (maybe similar to how you get a coronavirus test), which would avoid the rather drastic action of allowing universal mail-in voting. Know that there are many states who ban / regulate it for good reason.

As a US citizen, I would prefer to have 0 such convictions. I would not belittle these results, as these may not be all convictions, and these are just the ones that got caught.

And of course even if the sheer number of votes is not on the same order of magnitude as all votes cast, we should still worry because a relatively small number of votes can have an outsized effect when placed appropriately.

Edit: as the first page states, this is not a comprehensive list, but a ‘sampling’.

Hmm. I don’t think that is evidence. He is not admitting to trying to unfairly influence The 2020 election, but stating a symptom of his belief (incorrect or not) that fraudulent votes tend to be for the party opposing his, which is a legitimate, provable view.

It seems like most people here believe there is no evidence of mail-in voter fraud (for some reason...). Here’s a huge list of convictions for ‘fraudulent use of absentee ballots’: https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p...

Edit: some might think this list is comprehensive, but the first page says it is a ‘sampling’, a 400-page sampling.

Is Trump lying though? Here’s a list of tons of convictions on fraudulent use of absentee ballots (and other forms of voter fraud): https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p...

I think news organizations are unfortunately choosing to do non-news for ratings, though. And how is Trump interfering with the election? In principle, there are real risks with unjustified mail-in voting, and I think restrictions would protect the integrity of my vote. Do you have evidence Trump is doing this to interfere with the 2020 election?

This ‘fact check’ makes unfair biases way too easy. It is not a soulless algorithm or natural law that chooses the target and contents of these ‘fact checks’, but unaccountable individuals. Like communism, good in theory, but hard to implement. I hold my vote to be extremely precious, and would like to protect its value, and we should be vigilant about ways to do that. Mail-in voting seems too easily hackable, especially considering almost half of Americans don’t even vote (e.g. lots of opportunity for illegitimate mail-in voting).

I am saddened by seeing such a flippant characterization. Patent troll is literally defined to be "a company that obtains the rights to one or more patents in order to profit by means of licensing or litigation, rather than by producing its own goods or services.".

Inventing a successful aircraft at the time required getting many things right at once, which they tackled one at a time over several years. They invented the modern wind tunnel. They were the first to systematically test and accurately measure lift-to-drag ratios for a variety of airfoil shapes. They built an aluminum engine from scratch (the first use of aluminum in aircraft), to deal with the lack of engines with sufficient power-to-weight ratios. They don't get much credit for this, but they invented modern propeller theory!!! They were the first to realize the importance of control, when most others prioritized power. They invented the first viable aerodynamic control scheme. There might be even more I am omitting, but know that they did this all on their own. In fact, they were offered financial support from Octave Chanute, but refused, as they did not want to be tempted to quit their successful bicycle business. Even Samuel Langley, a highly reputed, generously-funded, government-backed contemporary, failed. Flight was a really hard problem that required getting many things right at once.

What's more, they shared their early successes and discoveries with an un-powered glider with others at an aeronautical conference that Octave Chanute invited them to speak at. It seems no one actively attempting to build flying machines took advantage of their discoveries, because they did not realize what was at the heart of the problem (controls), which is just one of the reasons (but a big one) of why the Wright brothers succeeded first.

A lot of people do not realize that although their first flight was in 1903, most did not know flight had been achieved until several years later. Of course, the Wright brothers' claims and some pictures were made public, but people did not believe, and even accused them of being frauds. Especially in France, where nationalistic pride in being leaders in aeronautics was high. By 1908, some French aviators (e.g. Santos Dumont, Henry Farman) had achieved simple flights maybe similar or even slightly better than what the Wright brothers had achieved in 1903. But by then, the Wright brothers had far advanced from their 1903 machine. In 1908, in Le Mans, France, Wilbur Wright made the first public demonstration of their flying machine, staying in the air far longer than anyone else, and performing acrobatics never before seen. It was stunning and utterly sensational in global press, and all accusing the Wrights of being frauds (essentially all prominent French aviators) immediately retracted their accusations, and admitted that the Wrights were in fact the first to fly in 1903.

The point of the previous paragraph is to say that before the Wrights' public demonstrations, flying machines were not practical. After the Wrights' public demonstrations, although they made and continued to hold world records for some time, machines made by others improved rapidly. The Wrights were at the very least hugely influential to all aviators. I recommend the highly entertaining and informative biography on the Wright brothers written by David McCullough. I really think it could make for an excellent modern biopic!

Edit: more to the point, as rayiner points out in his comment, ailerons were actually covered in the Wrights' original patent.

Potential flow simulations are not very practical these days (maybe for quick back-of-the-envelope), and I highly doubt Formula One would be interested at all. But my theory touches on what is taught to every aerospace engineer, and I think the value of it would be better understanding of the relationship between lift and drag, rather than practical purposes (though it is possible).

Just curious, how did you find this question? I assumed it would have been buried by now.

I am thinking of just releasing it publicly on GitHub and asking random people to vet it...

I took a look at registering for arXiv, and since I am not currently affiliated with a University it seems like I wasn't able to proceed. And then there is the question of whether it is beneficial for me, like you said.

I would love to go to conferences, though it might be expensive for the ultimate aim of getting professional second opinions. Will look into it!

Thanks for the great advice!

My first thought was reaching out to former professors by email (can't visit in person), but I wanted to see if there was a more appropriate way, like an online pre-print vetting community or something.

I will definitely tone-down my description of the current state of drag prediction; definitely don't want to offend or be considered a crackpot before anyone even looking at my derivation and results.

I am not sure what you are trying to say. Thin Airfoil Theory and Vortex Panel Methods all predict zero drag. XFOIL predicts drag by tacking on a wake momentum thickness method.