Trump 2016

[Saxon]

Corporations making profit isn't unfair. Dodging the tax they would rightfully owe, if they didn't exploit legal loopholes by basing their organisations in tax havens, is unfair.

I think you must believe that people who disagree with you accept this false black-and-white paradigm that any profit is inherently evil.

 

[Rassah]

Are you saying some corporate profit isn't taxed?

Or that it's not fair to tax corporate profit only once?

Edited December 30, 2015 by Rassah

[Taikugemu]

2 minutes ago, Rassah said:

Are you saying some corporate profit isn't taxed?

TAX  EVASION

 Did you get it now?

[Zeke]

3 hours ago, Taikugemu said:

TAX  EVASION

 Did you get it now?

It's a good thing because that means businesses can maximize their profits. Also, corporations are people :V

 

[Rassah]

9 minutes ago, Taikugemu said:

TAX  EVASION

 Did you get it now?

There is no tax evasion for corporate profits. At the least, ALL corporate profits are taxed at 15% to 27% (depending on use and country) as capital gains, paid by stock owners.

Here's how it works for corporations:

+ Sales revenue

- Expenses

= Corporate profit

- Corporate profit tax (this is the part that gets evaded)

= Leftover corporate profit reflected in stock interest or dividend

- Capital gains tax

= What stock holders (investors and retirees) actually get to keep to live off off.

 

Corporate profits are the only type of profit/income that gets taxed twice. Meaning people who are trying to save for retirement get taxed twice. How is that fair? And why are people fighting for having their own retirement income taxes at higher rates?

Edited December 30, 2015 by Rassah

[Saxon]

Whatever you're talking about, we're talking about companies which evade paying the tax they owe.

 

You said that Sanders' intention to catch those bad companies, and make them pay the taxes they owe, like every other upstanding company already does, amounted to discrimination and was a bad policy.

You're clearly alone in that belief.

[Zeke]

3 hours ago, Saxon said:

Whatever you're talking about, we're talking about companies which evade paying the tax they owe.

 

You said that Sanders' intention to catch those bad companies, and make them pay the taxes they owe, like every other upstanding company already does, amounted to discrimination and was a bad policy.

You're clearly alone in that belief.

Companies are good, you socialist filth. :V

[Rassah]

Sanders was talking about corporate profits. Since those are the types of profits that can do tax evasion by hiding it in other countries. Or more specifically, simply keeping the profit money in another country, refusing to repatriate it (bring it back into the home country), and thus not have to pay taxes on it. If you're just a regular business, your only options are to hide income to cheat on taxes, which is already highly illegal, or your actual profits happened with business done entirely overseas, in which case you don't owe taxes anyway (just to the country where you did the business).

The discrimination, in this case, is against responsible people who actually try to save in their pensions and retirement accounts, by making them have to pay higher taxes for doing so. Which could only lead to fewer people bothering, and more people deciding to try to live off of Social Security and other government social programs, since that's where their money is being siphoned off to anyway.

Edited December 30, 2015 by Rassah

[MalletFace]

That has nothing to do with tax evasion. That went off on a tangent I cannot even map.

In the U.S., there is a mix between worldwide and territorial systems of taxation. Without going into detail about these systems, a holding company can possess a subsidiary company that exists in another country. When the subsidiary makes a profit, it pays no U.S. tax - corporate or otherwise - so long as it does not return the profit directly to the holding company. The holding company can then compel the subsidiary to spend for the holding company without paying U.S. corporate tax.

How is that not evading a tax?

[Rassah]

Because that profit is reflected in the stock price, which is a sum of all company assets, including cash earned as that corporate profit, and that increase in stock value from that corporate profit cash is taxed at at least %15 in US, and higher in other countries.

It is evading one of the two taxes, yes, but how is being taxed twice "fair" and only being taxed once, like everyone else, "unfair?"

Edited December 30, 2015 by Rassah

[MalletFace]

18 minutes ago, Rassah said:

Because that profit is reflected in the stock price, which is a sum of all company assets, including cash earned as that corporate profit, and that increase in stock value from that corporate profit cash is taxed at at least %15 in US, and higher in other countries.

One pays capital gains taxes regardless of any other required taxes.

They will pay a higher capital gains tax if they do this, but the total amount the U.S. government receives from them will be cut.

Also, saying that it is higher in other countries is a little vague and dishonest. Capital gains taxes for corporate profits are lower or the same as those in the U.S. in Brazil, Bulgaria, the Cayman Islands, Cyprus, Egypt, Hong Kong, Jamaica, Thailand, Taiwan, the Philippines, Mexico, and many other territories and nations. Oddly enough, it seems to be places like these that large holding companies seem to create their subsidiaries.

Edited December 30, 2015 by MalletFace

[Rassah]

Oh, so the unfair part is that the US government doesn't get to take enough. I wonder if the feeling of it being unfair comes from those who already have way too much taken away, and instead of protesting that, they want others to have too much taken away too? Like, it's not fair unless we're all miserable?

Other countries in this case being places around Europe, where a lot of our outside of US members reside. But, I guess if capital gains taxes in US are even higher than in other places, then it's even less unfair with how much corporate profit eventually gets taxed at.

 

_______________________

By the way, why can't we have both Trump and Bernie in office at the same time? One can be the president, and the other the vice president (don't care which). Then we'll have a fascist nationalist and a socialist in charge. We can have a Nationalist Socialist presidential ticket. It'd be great!

Edited December 30, 2015 by Rassah

[MalletFace]

3 minutes ago, Rassah said:

By the way, why can't we have both Trump and Bernie in office at the same time? One can be the president, and the other the vice president (don't care which). Then we'll have a fascist nationalist and a socialist in charge. We can have a Nationalist Socialist presidential ticket. It'd be great!

It was the intention of the founding fathers that candidates running against one-another would act as president and vice president. It was believed that it would keep radical changes from being made in the government too quickly, and it worked too well; nothing got done as well as people had hoped.

It is likely that we would see little change in law happen over the course of the Trump-Sanders presidency.

[Rassah]

I dunno, man, Nationalist Socialists were able to make quite a ton of changes in the short time they were in power. They have a knack for it.

[MalletFace]

Just now, Rassah said:

I dunno, man, Nationalist Socialists were able to make quite a ton of changes in the short time they were in power. They have a knack for it.

They also had the Enabling Act.

[Onnes]

 

[Rassah]

If you got all the Bernie supporters, and all the Trump supporters together, with them all those two could probably pass the Enabling Act too. Especially if each gets his side to blame the opposite party in the Senate for being obstructionist.

1 minute ago, Onnes said:

 

This internet discussion practically started off with Goodwin's Law, considering the topic is an *actual* fascist.

[MalletFace]

1 minute ago, Rassah said:

If you got all the Bernie supporters, and all the Trump supporters together, with them all those two could probably pass the Enabling Act too. Especially if each gets his side to blame the opposite party in the Senate for being obstructionist.

Both parties in the legislature would never agree. Short of that, at least 2/3 of the states must agree to attend a constitutional convention to consider having 2/3 of the states vote to ratify it.

Hitler only had to get the president's signature. This was surprisingly easy considering he had just become president.

[Rassah]

[willow]

On 12/29/2015 at 6:08 PM, Saxon said:

This is still a fallacy, Butters. Being wrong about one subject doesn't mean everything else you say is automatically wrong.

The Daily mail reported the death of my Palaeobiology professor, and the ensuing prosecution of his killer, correctly. Obviously I'm not entitled to assume everything the Daily mail prints is wrong just because I may not sympathise with all of their political positions. I actually have to use my head to check reports for errors.

In the case of fox news's poll, I went to the data to find out who conducted the research [a third party, which fox contracted] and how it was conducted.

 

The poll results, that some Americans sympthise with Trump's views, but don't want to be associated with the man himself, isn't all that surprising. It does raise issues about people's sincerity, though.

I'm not entirely sure how that's that's a fallacy. If a source has a tendency to either report the news inaccurately or just straight up wrong (or with obvious bias) it's less likely to be taken as a serious source.

as for the poll itself, it seems a bit biased.

[evan]

1 minute ago, willow said:

I'm not entirely sure how that's that's a fallacy. If a source has a tendency to either report the news inaccurately or just straight up wrong (or with obvious bias) it's less likely to be taken as a serious source.

as for the poll itself, it seems a bit biased.

i think it's more to say that you can't discredit one statistic with proof that they were wrong elsewhere. that warrants skepticism, not valid proof of incorrectness. it's a slight but important difference. it would be like if i knew what you have gotten wrong before, and then pulled that out every time you made any other claim. whether or not you're right this time, my reference is conceptually irrelevant.

that said i don't trust fox news BUT this isn't "them", this is a subset of research groups. the ones they cite (anderson robbins and shaw) seem to conduct a number of their polls though. I'd need to look at those companies in specific. however, fox is not the site where you would assess the bias of those polls beyond how they're interpreted. would need to look at the original data.

[willow]

2 minutes ago, evan said:

i think it's more to say that you can't discredit one statistic with proof that they were wrong elsewhere. that warrants skepticism, not valid proof of incorrectness. it's a slight but important difference. it would be like if i knew what you have gotten wrong before, and then pulled that out every time you made any other claim. whether or not you're right this time, my reference is conceptually irrelevant.

that said i don't trust fox news BUT this isn't "them", this is a subset of research groups. the ones they cite (anderson robbins and shaw) seem to conduct a number of their polls though. I'd need to look at those companies in specific. however, fox is not the site where you would assess the bias of those polls beyond how they're interpreted. would need to look at the original data.

true and even that in itself is kind of a problem because unless you know or care about statistics, you're more likely to take it at face value. they do have a link to their methodology for the poll but I'm a little too lazy to look at it right now.

my main problem is that they apparently asked two different sample groups two "different" versions of the same basic question (do you favor/opposed banning Muslims from temporarily entering the US?). which is fine but the two versions weren't that different other than the fact that one mentions that it's Trump's proposal and the other one doesn't

[MalletFace]

I would lean towards trusting Anderson Robbins because polls they design are usually correct, but anything touched by Shaw tends to lean conservative no matter what fact is. This is why Fox using the both is frustrating.

This probably has nothing to do with Shaw & Company Research being less '& Company' than it is just 'Shaw' himself, a Republican professor that shoves his noisy head into politics all the time. I am not aware of any actual facilities behind the company, and attempting to reach its website just results in a blank browser.

That is without saying anything about the bias that all polls naturally hold.

Edited December 30, 2015 by MalletFace

[Kalmor]

The poll would be better if you split sanders/Clinton into two different options since both of them have really different schools of political thought when it comes to a lot of issues.

[Rukh Whitefang]

I am not voting for Clinton (ever) or Sanders, and as far as GOP, way to early to tell. I will say this about Trump, he is speaking on issues that need to be addressed. But how he is saying them is so crude it makes me cringe.

[Khaki]

21 minutes ago, Rukh Whitefang said:

I am not voting for Clinton (ever) or Sanders, and as far as GOP, way to early to tell. I will say this about Trump, he is speaking on issues that need to be addressed. But how he is saying them is so crude it makes me cringe.

He is a strange man, for every good statement he makes that you can agree with, he makes two more bad ones that make you cringe.

[Saxon]

11 hours ago, willow said:

I'm not entirely sure how that's that's a fallacy. If a source has a tendency to either report the news inaccurately or just straight up wrong (or with obvious bias) it's less likely to be taken as a serious source.

as for the poll itself, it seems a bit biased.

The fallacy is known as 'ergo decedo' to be specific: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergo_decedo

If you think that the poll is biased then you've got to explain what flaws in its methodology showed it was biased. 

'It was made by someone who has political affiliations that I don't like, therefore I can dismiss it as wrong automatically' is not good enough, especially since the poll was commissioned by fox, and undertaken by a third party. 

Those facts would have been emminent to anybody who had taken the bother to look up how the poll was carried out. 

 

A lot of young people continue to make ergo decedo fallacies, and behave as if making them means they are morally superior. :\ 'Oooh, this poll was commissioned by conservatives, must be wrong'. 'Oooh, this assessment of subsurface structure was undertaken by an oil company, they must have vested interested' and so forth. 

I've actually seen young people deliberately insist that people commenting on natural resource exploitation should be non-experts who know shit-all about geology, because they think that knowing about natural resources makes you affiliated with heavy industry, which of course wants to poison everybody by opening up an infinite lead mine in your back garden. 

11 hours ago, willow said:

true and even that in itself is kind of a problem because unless you know or care about statistics, you're more likely to take it at face value. they do have a link to their methodology for the poll but I'm a little too lazy to look at it right now.

my main problem is that they apparently asked two different sample groups two "different" versions of the same basic question (do you favor/opposed banning Muslims from temporarily entering the US?). which is fine but the two versions weren't that different other than the fact that one mentions that it's Trump's proposal and the other one doesn't

 

Das ist das point, Willow.

If the questions had other differences, then you would not be able to tell what the significance of Trump's association with policy was. 

In this poll, the people who weren't told the idea came from Trump were the control group. Those who were told the idea came from Trump were the treatment group. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treatment_and_control_groups

 

The poll would be better if you split sanders/Clinton into two different options since both of them have really different schools of political thought when it comes to a lot of issues.

 

Fortunately the fact being contested isn't related to this issue, is it? 

Edited December 30, 2015 by Saxon

[Rassah]

Sweet! I'm a start posting links to Libertarian sources, and link to that post when people complain!

Edited December 30, 2015 by Rassah

[willow]

5 minutes ago, Saxon said:

The fallacy is known as 'ergo decedo' to be specific: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergo_decedo

If you think that the poll is biased then you've got to explain what flaws in its methodology showed it was biased. 

'It was made by someone who has political affiliations that I don't like, therefore I can dismiss it as wrong automatically' is not good enough, especially since the poll was commissioned by fox, and undertaken by a third party. 

Those facts would have been emminent to anybody who had taken the bother to look up how the poll was carried out. 

 

I already explained why I think it's biased and it had nothing to do with the fact that I don't like FOX. just look up

[Saxon]

8 minutes ago, willow said:

I already explained why I think it's biased and it had nothing to do with the fact that I don't like FOX. just look up

Your reason for thinking it was biased was because there was only one difference between the control group and the treatment group questions.

That was a deliberate artifact of the test, which was essential to its fairness, willow. You would genuinely have been able to identify bias if there was multiple differences, and some of those differences were in the form of loaded questions.

 

For example if I wanted to tell whether people liked coca-cola because of its brand name, I could feed some test subjects coka-cola, branded as either as 'coke' or 'un-branded', and ask them whether they taste a difference. [subjects actually do claim to taste a difference when you perform this test].

In that example I used control and treatment groups properly. 

 

However, if I performed the same test, branding the samples of coca-cola as 'coke' and 'un-branded', but told the test subjects that the un-branded cola included a new additive, which made it taste sweeter, then I would be biasing the results. 

 

When you carry out an experiment, you only want there to be one difference, otherwise you can't tell which of the differences is responsible for the results. Do you understand?

 

Sweet! I'm a start posting links to Libertarian sources, and link to that post when people complain!

I fear that nuance has been lost, but oh well. 

Provenance is important, and I do want people to select sources which are widely recognised as reputable, because this means that we have to spend less time reading through methodology sections to check how the tests were carried out.

On the other hand, dismissing sources because of affiliation, rather than because of a demonstration that bias was found is a fallacy. This is why I took the time to read the methodology section, which Willow said she was 'too lazy' to do, before deciding to post and support the poll's findings. 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited December 30, 2015 by Saxon

[willow]

5 minutes ago, Saxon said:

Your reason for thinking it was biased was because there was only one difference between the control group and the treatment group questions.

That was a deliberate artifact of the test, which was essential to its fairness, willow. You would genuinely have been able to identify bias if there was multiple differences, and some of those differences were in the form of loaded questions.

For example if I wanted to tell whether people liked coca-cola because of its brand name, I could feed some test subjects coka-cola, branded as either as 'coke' or 'un-branded', and ask them whether they taste a difference. [subjects actually do claim to taste a difference when you perform this test].

In that example I used control and treatment groups properly. 

 

However, if I performed the same test, branding the samples of coca-cola as 'coke' and 'un-branded', but told the test subjects that the un-branded cola included a new additive, which made it taste sweeter, then I would be biasing the results. 

When you carry out an experiment, you only want there to be one difference, otherwise you can't tell which of the differences is responsible for the results. Do you understand?

Yes I got that. I still don't really agree with the wording but yeah.

[Rassah]

It's OK, I'll stock to things like Mises.org and Foundation for Economic Education. Nothing about flouride or chemtrails

Steel fuel doesn't beam jet melts!

[Saxon]

Just now, willow said:

Yes I got that. I still don't really agree with the wording but yeah.

Can you explain why you think the wording loads bias and how you think this bias affected the overall results? 

I suspect that if the poll was published in any other news outlet, like BBC america, that you probably wouldn't be making any complaints. 

[Rassah]

Regarding polls, there is one bias that can still exist, even with third parties: omission. Fox could have ordered a lot of these research polls, either all at once or over the course of some time, and simply dismissed any poll results that don't support their own agenda (which I would be willing to bet they actually do). Then when one of the results fit, they publish it. In this particular scenario we're talking about statistics, which are by definition rather random, and although the chances of scewed results are very low, they are possible. If you make 100 polls where you call completely random phone numbers, there's a good chance one of those results would have had a majority of republican participants, or ones with the view you wish to promote.

[Saxon]

2 minutes ago, Rassah said:

Regarding polls, there is one bias that can still exist, even with third parties: omission. Fox could have ordered a lot of these research polls, either all at once or over the course of some time, and simply dismissed any poll results that don't support their own agenda (which I would be willing to bet they actually do). Then when one of the results fit, they publish it. In this particular scenario we're talking about statistics, which are by definition rather random, and although the chances of scewed results are very low, they are possible. If you make 100 polls where you call completely random phone numbers, there's a good chance one of those results would have had a majority of republican participants, or ones with the view you wish to promote.

At a sample size of >1000, it becomes very difficult to achieve the results you want by omission. Fox would have had to commission about 10^5 phone call in your example. 

Your statement that there could have been 'a majority republican participants 'shows you haven't read the methodology; the test subjects were specifically asked whether they voted republican or democrat, and the fact being discussed applied only to the subset who identified as democrats. 

The fact being discussed is 'when polled, 45% of people identifying as registered democrats supported a moratorium on Muslim immigration, but the number dropped to 25% when Donald trump's name was mentioned'. 

 

You are correct that omission is a devilish tactic, though. Omission is frequently used by cosmetic companies who claim '77% of women agreed that olay makes your skin more desirable'. You can usually find that the sample sizes are below 100, because about 2000 women will have been surveyed in different replicates of 100. 

 

 

[willow]

Just now, Saxon said:

Can you explain why you think the wording loads bias and how you think this bias affected the overall results? 

I suspect that if the poll was published in any other news outlet, like BBC america, that you probably wouldn't be making any complaints. 

Depends on the poll. My other problem is that "until the US government can say for certain that they can identify terrorists" or whatever part because I think it plays to the whole war on terrorism thing.

Phone surveys themselves tend to only represent a few groups accurately since only a few select groups will actually complete the survey. Mostly people over 30 or 40 and I'm sure if there were more people age 18-30 doing these you'd get different results. That's not exactly bias but it does affect the results on a lot of these questions.

[Saxon]

Just now, willow said:

Depends on the poll. My other problem is that "until the US government can say for certain that they can identify terrorists" or whatever part because I think it plays to the whole war on terrorism thing.

Phone surveys themselves tend to only represent a few groups accurately since only a few select groups will actually complete the survey. Mostly people over 30 or 40 and I'm sure if there were more people age 18-30 doing these you'd get different results. That's not exactly bias but it does affect the results on a lot of these questions.

Have you read the methodology to check whether this hypothesis is correct, though? 

I think you're struggling to find any reason to reject the data, as if it plays into the hands of Fox's political affiliations. I don't think the poll's conclusion, that Trump's reputation is one of his biggest obstacles, supports any political affiliation. 

I think that it does show that insincerity in politics is a big challenge, and that we should think more carefully about whether we support or dispute ideas because we think they are good or bad, or just because they're affiliated with people we may or may not like. 

[willow]

Seeing as how they did some of these polls over a span of time, it wouldn't be that hard to have a larger sample group. The Muslim question though is still a relatively new topic

1 minute ago, Saxon said:

Have you read the methodology to check whether this hypothesis is correct, though? 

I think you're struggling to find any reason to reject the data, as if it plays into the hands of Fox's political affiliations. I don't think the poll's conclusion, that Trump's reputation is one of his biggest obstacles, supports any political affiliation. 

I think that it does show that insincerity in politics is a big challenge, and that we should think more carefully about whether we support or dispute ideas because we think they are good or bad, or just because they're affiliated with people we may or may not like. 

 

I've been reading it this whole time. The opposition from people under 35 ranges between 51% to 60% with a margin of error between +/-9%. (Overall -/+3%) The others aren't that much smaller but again, phone surveys aren't very accurate to begin with.

As a side note I'm not trying to reject the data.

[Saxon]

Most polls and trials have a sample size ~1000 subjects. That's pretty standard. 

I don't think any of the concerns you've raised are sufficient to justify doubt of the poll's conclusion; the margins of error are smaller than the overall trend that was identified and the method- phone samples, is used by a lot of highly reputed organisations, like Gallup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallup_(company)

Gallup usually predicts the outcome of presidential races correctly, so phone samples can clearly be useful. 

[Rassah]

Well cell phones used? Cause if not, this is a poll among older more conservative Democrats who still use land lines.

[evan]

2 hours ago, Rassah said:

Well cell phones used? Cause if not, this is a poll among older more conservative Democrats who still use land lines.

maybe i'm just an idiot, but...how exactly is one able to distinguish that without looking up that information in a separate index for every single number they call? in this day and age (well, 2013), 41% of households no longer use landlines. i understand what you're trying to do in mentioning this, but i don't entirely understand how that would be determined without actually using a lookup for every single number they call.

Edited December 31, 2015 by evan

[Saxon]

7 hours ago, Rassah said:

Well cell phones used? Cause if not, this is a poll among older more conservative Democrats who still use land lines.

Yes they were. 

Read the methodology http://www.foxnews.com/politics/interactive/2015/12/18/fox-news-poll-2016-gop-race-trump-muslim-ban-terrorism-isis/

I feel like I am the only person who actually bothered reading this? 

 

Some more comments on the results:

Republican responses to the question didn't change significantly, whether or not Trump was mentioned, showing that their convictions- whether or not you agree with them- are sincere.

Women, 'non whites' and people with college degrees were most likely to change their response based on the mention of Trump's name. In All cases a majority of these groups support the idea of banning Muslims without American citizenship, if Trump is not mentioned, and a majority oppose the idea if he is mentioned. This is probably because those groups are more likely to be democrats. 

Personally I find the 'college degree' response particularly frustrating, because you're meant to learn to judge arguments on their merit in college, rather than by who says them. 

Younger and richer people are also disproportionately more likely to hold views because of who they believe they are associated with, rather than because they think those views are good or not. 

 

Edited December 31, 2015 by Saxon

[MalletFace]

I think his problem is that the poll, like most others, has no solid way to deal with response bias and coverage bias - even their inclusion of cellphone users adds response and coverage bias.

• We know that Fox had to tell the people it called that it was a Fox News Poll being conducted under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991.
• We know that Fox had to make their calls from 8 A.M. to 9 P.M. under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991.
• We know that Fox had to avoid any lines on the National Do Not Call Registry under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991.
• We know that Fox had to avoid any lines that had previously requested not to be called by Fox News.

All of that is just legally mandated bias. Beyond that, the poll started the day after a Republican debate - one of the most-viewed - in which several other candidates gave their own proposals for barring Muslims before, during, or after. I would bet fewer people would have agreed with a Muslim ban before this simply because Trump was the only candidate with this plan; however, this debate and the coverage around it gave xenophobes - Republican and Democrat - some options.

Take political polls with a grain of salt whether or not you agree with them, though. The best money in making an accurate poll is in working for a campaign that never releases the results anyway, and even the best polls have been wrong for any number of reasons.

[evan]

at the least, i'd rather feel less inclined to believe a statistic for a number of reasons that are actually grounded in certain realities as listed here.

i feel like a majority of the people here (based on the original post that incited this discussion) would dismiss a poll by source and not by the content

that's actually been a really big issue lately; i've noticed that people feel the need to justify entire collections of sources, databases capable of fallacy at any point, instead of justifying singular data points that a database may have collected in a relatively intelligent fashion. it's frustrating, because there's not really any form of media that doesn't add spin to certain topics, but to mistake a collective bias for a proof of incorrectness is annoying at best. in my mind it detracts from the ability to 1) address data without being influenced by partisanship and 2) understand the difference between accurate and inaccurate information. 

that's probably been hit on before. it's just on my mind as it pertains to this topic.

Edited December 31, 2015 by evan

[Rassah]

12 hours ago, evan said:

maybe i'm just an idiot, but...how exactly is one able to distinguish that without looking up that information in a separate index for every single number they call? in this day and age (well, 2013), 41% of households no longer use landlines. i understand what you're trying to do in mentioning this, but i don't entirely understand how that would be determined without actually using a lookup for every single number they call.

Generally, in US, cell phone numbers are not listed, or are barred from solicitation calls. Of course, advertisers still ignore those. But they are usually clearly marked. For a while in the last decade there was an issue with telephone based polling, where the results always skewed conservative and older, but that was because only a small specific type of households still had landlines.

[evan]

3 minutes ago, Rassah said:

Generally, in US, cell phone numbers are not listed, or are barred from solicitation calls. Of course, advertisers still ignore those. But they are usually clearly marked. For a while in the last decade there was an issue with telephone based polling, where the results always skewed conservative and older, but that was because only a small specific type of households still had landlines.

gotcha, now i know.

[MalletFace]

1 minute ago, Rassah said:

Generally, in US, cell phone numbers are not listed, or are barred from solicitation calls. Of course, advertisers still ignore those. But they are usually clearly marked. For a while in the last decade there was an issue with telephone based polling, where the results always skewed conservative and older, but that was because only a small specific type of households still had landlines.

If you give your cellphone number to a company without reading their terms, you have likely contributed your cellphone number to a list of cellphone numbers that will be sold to other companies. Millions of cellphone numbers are listed this way, and access to the lists is actually cheap if I remember correctly.

Also, cellphones are only barred from solicitation calls if the call is automated or the user has decided to put their cell on the National Do Not Call Registry. The information for what is and is not allowed in telemarketing and telephone polling is all in Title 47, and most of it is in Chapter 5.

It is not difficult to get cellphones in a poll nowadays. There are actual problems with cellphones, though, and using them to fix the problems with landlines usually just emphasizes the problem.

[Saxon]

51 minutes ago, MalletFace said:

I think his problem is that the poll, like most others, has no solid way to deal with response bias and coverage bias - even their inclusion of cellphone users adds response and coverage bias.

• We know that Fox had to tell the people it called that it was a Fox News Poll being conducted under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991.
• We know that Fox had to make their calls from 8 A.M. to 9 P.M. under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991.
• We know that Fox had to avoid any lines on the National Do Not Call Registry under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991.
• We know that Fox had to avoid any lines that had previously requested not to be called by Fox News.

All of that is just legally mandated bias. Beyond that, the poll started the day after a Republican debate - one of the most-viewed - in which several other candidates gave their own proposals for barring Muslims before, during, or after. I would bet fewer people would have agreed with a Muslim ban before this simply because Trump was the only candidate with this plan; however, this debate and the coverage around it gave xenophobes - Republican and Democrat - some options.

Take political polls with a grain of salt whether or not you agree with them, though. The best money in making an accurate poll is in working for a campaign that never releases the results anyway, and even the best polls have been wrong for any number of reasons.

I'm not interested in the absolute rates of people agreeing with trump's policies. 

I'm interested in the affect that mentioning trump has on those rates. 

If I had posted a poll published on any other news out let, then this massive investigation that is desperate to prove the poll is biased, would not have happened. 

Unless people can actually identify causes of demonstrable bias in the poll, rather than 'the poll had to be conducted between 08:00 and 09:00...obviously true liberals tend to express their views after 9pm,' then can we actually move on to discussing the implications of the result?

[evan]

28 minutes ago, Saxon said:

I'm not interested in the absolute rates of people agreeing with trump's policies. 

I'm interested in the affect that mentioning trump has on those rates. 

If I had posted a poll published on any other news out let, then this massive investigation that is desperate to prove the poll is biased, would not have happened. 

Unless people can actually identify causes of demonstrable bias in the poll, rather than 'the poll had to be conducted between 08:00 and 09:00...obviously true liberals tend to express their views after 9pm,' then can we actually move on to discussing the implications of the result?

well then consider his third paragraph. that has demonstrable conclusions about how timing of events can create different responses in other people. consider the media reaction immediately following this debate. there was almost no "Republican debate is xenophobic" anywhere near as much as "Donald Trump is xenophobic". The media puts a highlighter spin on Trump-based situations, and no time spent on other candidates where they can afford to. 

What do you think would have happened should they have asked this question before the events of San Bernadino and Paris? This has the same residual prospect; the presence of an event centered around Trump's philosophy changes the way people want to be represented when addressing the topic in question.

 

I don't disagree that there's a push to find bias here; but I don't think it's a problem to bring up real factors. The two parties (people who want it to be wrong because fox news, versus people who want to investigate data critically to form a higher level opinion) are being mixed up as a result of the presence of them both existing in one thread.

Edited December 31, 2015 by evan

[Saxon]

10 minutes ago, evan said:

well then consider his third paragraph. that has demonstrable conclusions about how timing of events can create different responses in other people. consider the media reaction immediately following this debate. there was almost no "Republican debate is xenophobic" anywhere near as much as "Donald Trump is xenophobic". The media puts a highlighter spin on Trump-based situations, and no time spent on other candidates where they can afford to. 

What do you think would have happened should they have asked this question before the events of San Bernadino and Paris? This has the same residual prospect; the presence of an event centered around Trump's philosophy changes the way people want to be represented when addressing the topic in question.

 

I don't disagree that there's a push to find bias here; but I don't think it's a problem to bring up real factors. The two parties (people who want it to be wrong because fox news, versus people who want to investigate data critically to form a higher level opinion) are being mixed up as a result of the presence of them both existing in one thread.

The poll clearly took place after the debate because the news channel wanted to see what people's ideas on the debated subjects were. 

I mean, duh. 

You've expressed a hypothesis to explain the poll results; that a lot of voters were basing their response on the media reputation of candidates, instead of sincere (dis)agreement with their policies.  That's not a reason to doubt the results. 

 

I will reiterate, I am interested that about half of democrats agree with a moratorium on Muslim immigration, but that only a quarter continue to agree with this statement when it is associated with Trump. 

I am concerned that this shows a lot of people base their views on a candidate's perceived affiliation, rather than because of an honest assessment of their policies. 

I am particularly concerned that highly educated people are much more likely to do this. They should be much less likely to, if University degrees are worth anything.