So I guess 2016 claimed its biggest victim yet - America

Maybe they know Ossoff? After he worked as a congressional staffer, he made documentaries, so it’s possible they know him from a film festival or something activist related with his films and screenings.

In any event, it’s a cute way to publicize that early in-person voting has started in the special election in the Sixth.

Ossoff seems comfortably ahead on the Democrat side, so the big race will be the runoff against the GOP candidate in June. That will be watched with insane intensity.

Insensity?

[Intensity intensifies]

If I call, will they drive to my house in Virginia and take me to vote there? They didn’t explicitly say only Georgia’s 6th district!

But of course! That’s how voter fraud works, duh! Didn’t you get your voter fraud manual?

I don’t know. I think most will shrug this off since it’s a special election and they know the Democrats are very focused right now & will be putting everything they can into any special election. Once we hit the general, things will go back to normal.

Why on earth would you believe that to be true? I’m trying to figure out if this is “Woe is us” Democratic sentiment speaking or false positive courage from a Republican stalwart.

I mean we already know historically that the midterm cycle for a party with a majority across the House, Senate, and also the Presidency is typically a rough sell. 1994, 2006, 2010, stand out as examples.

And all of that is without a president who’s agenda has already stalled and is historically low in popularity fronting the party as its face.

So let’s take this really slowly: the Georgia 6th is a district that the Democrats don’t win in, and often barely compete in. It is a fairly affluent, white, college-educated district. And despite that, Democrats are at least hanging tough, if not doing substantially better there.

And in November of 2018, 22 House Republicans will face re-election in districts that voted for Hillary Clinton. Another 10-15 face re-election in districts where she ran either a dead heat or within 2 points of Trump.

None of those are guarantees of the Democrats taking back the House in the midterms, but to dismiss a win or close finish in a Republican district as something that will be viewed as a “shrug this off” event is utter fucking nonsense.

I’m an independent who is neither. What does door # 3 contain?

A special election where a lot of people (including people like me) want to step up & help ANY effort to go against Trump is going to be met with piles of cash. They need an outlet & midterms are too far away. You quoted earlier - Democrats rarely get $10K in contributions - now they have $3M - money buys votes.

What I’m saying is IN MY OPINION, and you can do whatever you want, because you are a fervent democrat who, while is connected and is very read (and a great writer to boot), I think you sometimes get too caught up in the people around you and start ascribing fact to opinions.

So, for example, what kind of data do you have on special elections? Why would people start thinking this is going to translate into the midterms? I would bet, knowing nothing, that the losing party of the general elections, or who have fewer members in congress / senate, will be more focused on special elections than the other party.

This event just feels like people have a place to let off their steam and the memory of America is so fucking short, I don’t see it having legs or the temerity of keeping the pace going. In midterms, the money won’t be as focused nor as much as it is now.

And quit with the fucking labels already. Despite your good writing, you pissed me off during the general elections with that shit & it doesn’t do you any good. So stop it.

85% of the time being correct doesn’t sound that terrible to me. I am guessing that’s overall and not the software works worse with the black population. The collection of information all in a database without much to back that process is troubling though. This is the same Congress that’s complaining about privacy while stripping it away from the internet… right?

Great cause there are lots of planets we can live on

Ya, it’s not like they are arresting people based solely on the software. But it can help investigators find a needle in a haystack.

Yeah, policies like his EO reversing all the Obama-era environmental practices are the sorts of things that threaten Trump’s politics by eroding his support to just that 35-40% of MAGA diehards.

Meanwhile…

I’ve heard the claim that FR doesn’t work as well with darker-skinned people many times. I don’t know if it’s an artifact of just not having enough darker-skinned faces in the training set, or if there’s some other technical reason why it could be more difficult.

Modern FR systems use deep neural nets, but from the article the FBI isn’t using anything that new, so newer systems will be more accurate and reliable across the board.

I think the issues surrounding ubiquitous FR are fairly broad and concerning. I don’t think we are that far away from being able to track everyone everywhere they go in public in a city, if someone is willing to throw enough cameras and processing power at the problem.

This is why we need an empire/imperial government/Queen of England. People are too selfish and narrow sighted to see beyond the norms.

I will say though this is what happens when you have an opposition party that refuses to govern; by forcing Obama to work through executive orders the Republican’s foolish constituents feel slighted by these “undemocratic” expansions of executive authority - which is true as far as it goes but leaves out the reason things were done that way was because the Republicans refused to govern. But it also reinforces my belief that the Republicans are essentially a perennial opposition party whose only political worldview is tearing things down.

I’ve heard that the 85% success rate is because it gets confused when trying to distinguish a 6 pointed star from a triangle.

We’re trying that experiment right now. I’m not optimistic.