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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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      The raw nature of a livetweet thread makes it suitable for playback. I think once I compile and blog this (which I plan to) I’ll be able to relive this by reviewing. Those of you followed along live and know me well enough may be able to use it the same way.

      1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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      Jake Tapper: we’re pretty sure where this is going not just because Biden’s ahead in all 4 states but because with one exception Trump’s promised legal challenges are frivolous or even preposterous (rough quote)

      1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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      They’re now talking about how Trump is mad his legal team (Giuliani, Bondi) isn’t “effective” and demanding more effective “killer” lawyers. Tapper wonders out loud whether Trump has considered that that’s because there’s no real case, not because his lawyers suck.

      1 reply 1 retweet 6 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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      The one non-frivolous case I think Tapper is referring to is the Pennsylvania vote segregation procedural thing which apparently is a rounding error in terms of votes affected. Alito just sorta threw them a bone in that.

      1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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      GOP legal eagle Ben Ginsberg came on and made the point that a real all-star legal team cane out to bat for GWB in 2000 (including current scotus justices Kavanaugh and Barrett apparently) but nobody is coming out to bat for Trump. Ben says it’s because there’s no there there.

      2 replies 0 retweets 5 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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      Dana Bash points out that tTrump’s legal team is not just second rate but that a lot of good GOP lawyers like Ben himself simply dislike Trump and don’t want to fight for him anyway. Interesting if true. How much do you have to suck to not get even lawyers to take your money?

      2 replies 0 retweets 12 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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      Venkatesh Rao Retweeted James Musk

      Ah so electoral college vote is match play but popular vote is stroke play.https://twitter.com/muskjames/status/1324887755378184192?s=21 …

      Venkatesh Rao added,

      James Musk @muskjames
      Replying to @vgr
      In stroke play tournaments (you add up your score on each hole and get a total - lowest total wins) players don't concede putts. In match play tournaments you compete against an opponent in a head to head match and try to win the most holes - your opponent can concede your putt.
      2 replies 0 retweets 3 likes
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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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      This damp squib legal full-court press is possibly the farce to 2000’s Florida tragedy.

      3 replies 0 retweets 8 likes
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    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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      Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Kelly Digges

      This is now a golf thread. The best part of this story is the name of Trump’s opponent: Ted Virtue. Cannot make this shit up.https://twitter.com/kellydigges/status/1324893347018764289?s=21 …

      Venkatesh Rao added,

      Kelly Digges @kellydigges
      Replying to @kellydigges @vgr
      This is my favorite Trump golf story. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-golf-cheating-10-year-old-boy-mar-lago-a8909011.html …
      2 replies 0 retweets 8 likes
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    10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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      Trump’s missing his putts in AZ. New batch only whittles Biden’s leas by ~7000pic.twitter.com/Pf0DTpnuEc

      1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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      The geographic segregation of voting patterns is utterly remarkable. What is it about cities that makes people reliably Democrat past a critical size/density? And to what extent is coastal blueness explained by greater urbanization (almost entirely I suspect)

      7:29 PM - 6 Nov 2020
      • 27 Likes
      • Saki jeffery Comrade Benny 🌲tristan b☔️ Spencer Weston John Gaffney Mike D vidy thatte A
      15 replies 0 retweets 27 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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          Waiting for Bidenot to come out an speak. In the meantime,... Commercial break: this portion of the live tweet is brought to you by Covid19, the world’s favorite pandemic.pic.twitter.com/eSZlmFwQuW

          3 replies 0 retweets 10 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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          Bidenot speaketh! He seems tired.pic.twitter.com/gkWZFOro7s

          1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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          He’s basically giving the victory speech and Covid and stuff without explicitly claiming victory.

          1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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          Aaaand update from the White House is that Mark Meadows has Covid 🙄 This is a damn telenovella. Expect a long-lost twin to appear and someone to get amnesia 125k cases today. Fatalities are under some control due to better treatment knowledge but a surge will still kill night.

          1 reply 1 retweet 18 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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          CNN speculating that the campaign war room might have been a superspreader event

          2 replies 0 retweets 11 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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          Screenshot for the highlights reel: TV screen showing simultaneous Covid and election data, with Covid data helpfully coded red-scale. The Trump virus. Biden said cases could cross 200k/day in the next surge. Hold on to your ventilators. Winter’s gonna be rough.pic.twitter.com/sEjboHJYqy

          1 reply 1 retweet 10 likes
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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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          Okay calling it a night. I’m guessing the networks will call it sometime tomorrow and Biden will do an actual victory speech and Trump will tweet “see you in court.” I’ll be able to end this interminable counting-for-Godot thread. We will then start a transition hell thread.

          1 reply 0 retweets 13 likes
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        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 6
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          Back to the hydrogen sonata. What are the Gzlit really up to?

          3 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
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        10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 7
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          Day for of Counting for Godot. The news headlines are Cauchy converging on a Biden victory projection via Zeno’s paradox. Wish I’d taken screenshots. CNN is currently on “Biden nears victory.” Fox is on “America (still) waits.” NYT is on “Biden edges closer to victory.”

          1 reply 0 retweets 9 likes
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        11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 7
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          * Day four Trumps Twitter feed right now is a flood of RTs of sketchy allegations of ballot fraud, plus a bunch of flagged tweets. He really thinks there’s a way out via some loophole. I suspect he’s applying intuitions from tax or real estate law which have way more loopholes.

          3 replies 2 retweets 16 likes
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        12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 7
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          Strikes me there are two kinds of games: 1. games designed by idealists to make cheating hard 2. games designed by self-dealing elites to make cheating easy He’s used to type 2 and elections are type 1. It takes a lot long-term more work (eg gerrymandering) to cheat in type 1

          2 replies 5 retweets 45 likes
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        13. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 7
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          Thing about electoral processes is that it’s not hard to cheat but it’s very hard to hide that you’re cheating. You have to resort to something blatant that people will spot to have a sufficiently big effect.

          3 replies 2 retweets 15 likes
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        14. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 7
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          I suspect all the minor attack surfaces from Florida 2000 (hanging chads era) have been closed off but there’s probably a bunch of new ones. But at best there’d be opportunistic/reactive room to cheat at the margins. Florida worked because it was one state and a ~500 vote margin.

          2 replies 0 retweets 11 likes
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        15. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 7
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          Trump’s got a fairly common personality trait (assuming everyone is cheating if you can’t see what they’re doing), coupled with an uncommon one (using that as justification to cheat wildly yourself). I know tons of people with the first trait, but very few with the second.

          2 replies 7 retweets 34 likes
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        16. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 7
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          Most suspicious types merely end up as angry, depressed cynics, not as cheats themselves. It’s heartening that the median person in a reasonably prosperous society is in fact NOT a cheat. The average cheating level is raised to cynicism inducing levels by fat tail of big cheats.

          1 reply 3 retweets 28 likes
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        17. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 7
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          Having hair-trigger cheater-detection brain wiring is not surprising. All apes probably have that hard-wired. Recall behavioral economics results that biases often disappear when a problem is framed in cheater-detection terms. In scarcity-shaped ape societies, cheating is endemic

          2 replies 0 retweets 13 likes
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        18. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 7
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          But in a more prosperous society, runaway cheater-detection cognitions turns into an autoimmune disease because it triggers reactionary cheating as in Trump. And since everybody is NOT cheating and the exceptions are NOT worth policing, they enjoy huge success.

          2 replies 0 retweets 19 likes
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        19. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 7
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          And so they conclude all huge successes are from cheating, like their own. The zero-sum mercantilist mindset is so deep-rooted they literally can’t see the most common way to be a huge success in low-scarcity environments, which is actually doing something non-zero-sum.

          2 replies 5 retweets 32 likes
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        20. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 7
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          Putting a pin in this topic for potential future analysis. I lost interest in this stuff 10 years ago, but it’s gotten important enough again, if I can get interested again I’ll think it through.

          1 reply 0 retweets 11 likes
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        21. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 7
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          Okay CNN has called it.pic.twitter.com/Spsvg09TZf

          1 reply 0 retweets 12 likes
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        22. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 7
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          Though the front page still shows a *new* counting-for-godot headline. You have to click through to see the call.pic.twitter.com/s4gSZkzxOX

          1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
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        23. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 7
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          The NYT is reporting that AP and TV networks have called it 🙄 News that other news outlets are now sure there will be news. How much more meta can this get?pic.twitter.com/5fLsdhpKew

          1 reply 1 retweet 12 likes
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        24. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 7
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          All but Fox have called itpic.twitter.com/VIwxiIRiIc

          4 replies 2 retweets 10 likes
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        25. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 7
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          This is a very smol and cute availability cascade

          2 replies 1 retweet 10 likes
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        26. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 7
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          Santorum is putting up a rather sad defense on CNN. It’s like speaker-for-the-dead. Bunch of disingenuous rationalizations but they’re humoring him.

          2 replies 0 retweets 10 likes
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        27. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 7
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          Fox calls it too. Trump is now the loneliest man on the planet. I imagine even Rudy is looking for a good moment to slink away.pic.twitter.com/J9uacKL2mw

          2 replies 3 retweets 30 likes
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        28. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 7
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          Obama must be the happiest guy on the planet now. This is *deep* redemption that his veep was the one to end what was effectively an “undo-Obama” 4-year-run of pure resentment. Undo/redo. Makes me think hard right will be auto-saving their own revert point here. Dueling forks.

          1 reply 3 retweets 47 likes
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        29. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 7
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          Fox coverage now is Bret Baier and Chris Wallace, the known reasonable moderates Trump is known to hate. They read out a WH press release verbatim but are otherwise firmly reinforcing that this is a solid call.

          1 reply 2 retweets 10 likes
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        30. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 7
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          Screenshot for the memory bookpic.twitter.com/T53oTty1J7

          2 replies 2 retweets 29 likes
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        31. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 7
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          NYT finally joins inpic.twitter.com/IrqohiGCdd

          1 reply 2 retweets 15 likes
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