20+ out of 34 Senate for Democrats and narrow lead in the house.
That'd normally be exceptionally good news for the Democrats nominee. So I'm with the big theory that something funky is going on with the polls.
We are about to see the most split ticket voters of all time (Vote Democrat for Senate and House.... But vote for Trump in the Presidency), or people have been lying to pollsters somehow.... On a mass scale.
And I don't believe that split ticket voters exist in this election.
I'll be happy enough if its "just" Elon who loses out.
Pascal programmers are confused.
American voting game is one of turnout.
For Republicans, they are in the minority. But their will to vote is much higher. Pandering to his own supporters encourages the get out the vote effort in ways that Democrats are simply unable to do.
Puerto Rico has no electoral votes. But everyone born in Puerto Rico is a US Citizen.
Meaning Puerto Ricans who are currently living stateside (ex: studying at a university and staying enough months of the year to qualify for residency) can vote.
Similarly, a.... Californian.... who is living in Puerto Rico has no electoral votes. Because USA assigns votes by land.
Every Puerto Rican is a USA citizen who has the right to vote. As long as they're living in the correct area (ie: inside the 50 fully accepted states).
Haitian migrants were legal btw.
Puerto Ricans likely remember the more racist times decades ago. And secondly, they are a much larger group than Haitians. So this is a much bigger mistake than the Haitian thing a few weeks ago..
No offense to any Haitians around here. Just talking about sizes and demographics. It's awful that we have a candidate who is so openly racist. But I'm happy that they're showing their colors while we can still defeat them at the ballot box.
The endorsements come from the writers, not from leadership.
If a conservative owner owns a liberal set of writers, muzzling your writers and stopping endorsements is to the conservatives advantage.
Florida also has the Abortion ban on its ballots, so Women are likely going to vote in huge numbers.
Kinda sad that the Presidential election is riding on the coattails of other issues, but that's the nature of today's politics.
Florida is considered solidly red though. But all elections in the USA are a turnout issue.
So yeah. LA Times, Washington Post and now Gannett conglomerate all made the same decision at roughly the same time.
This was preplanned.
I don't think this media takeover strategy is going to go as they hope. This makes the Democrats cause more real and heightens the stakes.
Oil futures were down. Not actual oil.
An oil future in WTI makes you legally obligated to pickup the oil in West Texas or along its pipe network (most common pickup point is Arkansas IIRC).
So let's say you bought an oil future for $0 at $0 a barrel. And now 10,000 barrels of oil are waiting for pickup. And let's say you are a New York speculator and not actually someone with storage.
How do you get rid of the contract before you are penalized? Well, you sell it at -$10. But the guy who bought it for -$10 was also a New York speculator who thought the price couldn't go any lower.
By the end of the day, the speculators were selling the contract for -$40 a barrel, because the penalty for missing the pickup date is very heavy.
Eventually, some trucker 'Bought' the contract at -$40 and made free money as the trucker just had to go there and pick up the oil.
J Lo and Bad Bunny?
At least I hope they helped. The Latino vote is stubbornly in the middle right now. Encouraging their vote looks like it'd help....
Just working on my recent electronics project and I needed two temperature sensors for it. This time around I didn't feel like making a full PCB from KiCAD and wanted to keep things simple with a 1/2 size solderable breadboard.
As usual, I'm using an AVR DD (this time: a curiosity nano devboard) for simplicity. (I expect to need the 32768 Hz clock crystal, so a PCB with said clock would be nice. Otherwise, the DIP package is available). The overall circuit is pretty simple, but the topic of discussion today is the MCP970X series temperature sensor.
https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/mcp9701a
At this point I do recommend people to read the documentation.
The gist is that you simply apply 3.1V to 5.5V between Vdd and Gnd. Vout will have some amount of startup time, and eventually output 400mV + (Temperature-in-C * 19.5mV). For example, my room temperature is ~24C right now and the voltage output is ~920mV.
(There's clearly errors in my ADC but I'm saving that for later... this device is supposed to be outputting 876mV given the room's temperature)
With a ~6uA expected current, this device is power-efficient enough to run from most MCU pins. AVR DD's 50mA-per-pin is overkill, but more importantly, a through-hole design like mine seemingly has substantial inductance on all wires.
The datasheets claim a startup time of 0.8ms. Alas, when I soldered on the MCP9701 and turned on the GPIO-pin, it took over 20ms (!!!) before the oscillating signal finally calmed down and settled upon the room temperature reading.
To counteract this parasitic inductance, I've added a 10kOhm resistor and a 10nF capacitor out of my through-hole kit. (E12 resistor kit and E6 capacitor kit). With 220us of startup time now on the GPIO pin and with only 500uA max current going to Vdd... there is no more "ringing" anymore and life is good!
EDIT: I should probably note that my goal was to return to 0.8ms startup time, like the documents suggest. 10kOhm was chosen as 500uA (5V) to 250uA (after charging to 2.5V) is a magnitude more current than I need and is a decent starting point. 10nF was chosen to pair-up with this to give me startup time in the 100us range but not over 800us (I don't want to be "slowed down" by the charging capacitor, so I want the Vdd charge to be faster than 800us claimed startup time). It should be noted that a 5V over 1000us curve was claimed as a 800us startup in the MCP970x documents if you read all the graphs.
Moving forward, my last task is that of calibration. The on-board ADC of the AVR DD is apparently quite accurate, but the Vref of the microcontroller is +/-4% (!!). With a +/- 2% accuracy of the temperature sensor, there is some calibration I should do.
The ADC errors + Vref errors are expected to just be linear. The temperature-sensor's error is quadratic however. In both cases, I don't want to overcomplicate things, so I'm planning on just adding a constant-offset to the mV reading to shift it to the correct spot.
All in all: pretty standard Analog-to-digital conversion issues here. But I figured it'd be a good discussion topic for beginners.
What really interests me about this design is the ~~buck~~ Boost-converter
So this ~~buck~~ boost-converter is 100% core-independent. The Analog Comparator, TimerD, CCL, and Event-System are all active while the AVR DB sleeps, meaning that the microcontroller can run this simple ~~buck~~ boost-converter without any cost to CPU time.
An incredible design that demonstrates the flexibility of AVR DB's combined peripherals.
The #1 pain point for pollsters is the prediction of the election demographics.
Polls and statistics are such that a general simple random sample has too little power / weak error bounds (I'm talking like +/-10%, nearly useless).
The easiest way to improve your error bounds is to make assumptions about the electorate makeup. IE: if you know the election will be 50% male and 50% female, you can poll 50 men and 50 women (rather than 100 random people, which might end up as 60 men and 40 women due to randomness).
Lather rinse repeat for other groupings (Latino, Asians, black, 18Y olds, 55Y olds, Rural, Urban, etc. etc.) and you get the gist of how this all works.
Alas: the male / female vote this year is completely worked because abortion is on the ballot. All pollsters know this. Their numbers are crap because the methodology is crap this year. It's impossible to predict women turnout.