I just worked customer service for a decade. After awile you just take it in stride when an adult is functionally illiterate. Leaving aside the people who think Democrat and Republican have to do with the dictionary definitions of Democracy and Republic and nothing else.

People still talk about litter boxes in schools for the furries - with a phone attached to their palms 24/7 that'll PROVE to them in seconds that it never happened...and, yet....

...yet they find that one thread on Nextdoor where one person claimed that it happened in their child's classroom and a lot of self-righteous pearl clutching. Therefore, that must be the truth.

Tell me about it. It's practically impossible to avoid american news and it's fucking infuriating. I'm so sick of hearing about trump and biden or democrats and republicans etc yet it's pretty much impossible to avoid unless you dont use social media at all. I get that a huge chunk of the English speaking internet is made up of Americans but holy fuck shut the fuck up, as a Canadian I'm fucking sick of their brain dead sports team politics, especially cause that bullshit is infecting Canada now. We even have Canadian trumpers ffs.

Fuck you and your dumbass politics america, hurry up and implode already so I can at least be entertained instead of annoyed.

To anyone thats gonna reply and tell me how I should care because it's gonna affect me blah blah blah I dont fucking care. Not even gonna read any replies this comment gets I just wanted to vent. So dont waste your time replying.

It's both the best and worst time ever to be alive for someone with a halfway functional brain. Science is making all sorts of incredible advances and we're learning different things about the universe. Then you turn around and there's large swaths of the population that are apparently purposefully ignorant about the most basic stuff that is integral to the running of the country, and we're dependent on these same people to go vote to help save democracy.

That requires effort, the TV tells people what to think and that is easy.

Depends on which side of the asylum wall is inside and which is outside

It's real easy to make polls go whichever way you like if you try and it may be in someones best interest to make sure only the 'correct' polls are widely known. We're spoiled in that we've been able to expect the organizations involved to be trustworthy and not do that, but I think a lot of us feel that that's been less and less true.

For the betting markets, their success relies almost solely on them predicting odds correctly and consistently. Our respect here is for the people who dedicate their lives to making sure the gamblers lose. Could obviously still be manipulated, but in this case doing so is at least contrary to the purpose of the organization instead of in the previous case potentially actually supporting it...

Not going to lie though, is a weird shift, I get it.

I think the justification is that people will be more honest/rational when betting their own money.

It's probably less irrational than stock markets, since there's a very clear time horizon people are betting on, and data like polls can be pretty good. But since they're looking at essentially the same data as pundits, it's unsurprising they tend to do about as well.

They don't know who Biden is?