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If it's snowin' in Brooklyn....
Apr. 20th, 2011 02:51 pm
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 7, which is pretty far from the 19 EC was calling for a couple of days ago. Accuweather actually scores a rare win today; it has consistently had a lower high than both EC and the Weather Network--but nobody had it that today would actually not be appreciably warmer than the last few miserable days. We had ice pellets and snow briefly yesterday afternoon, a bit of slush on the ground a couple of days ago....
Going by this poll (PDF) from Ekos, you could say that the NDP is currently the least unpopular party in Canada. Here are the totals if you add up first-choice and second-choice preferences:
NDP: 46.7
Conservative: 44.5
Liberal: 43
Green: 20.7
Bloc: 11.4
Other: 3.6
Of course, there is an obvious problem with giving second-choice preferences the same weight as first-choice preferences. But in the case of the NDP, you have to assume that many people who say that they intend to vote for the Liberals and that the NDP is their second choice would actually prefer to vote for the NDP, all other things being equal, but intend to vote for the Liberals because they believe that the NDP can't win (whether in their riding or overall).
I keep wondering how different our election results would be if there were no polls ... and then, every time you're talking about polls, you have to say that for all we know, this poll is wildly wrong. Not just that it might be that twentieth poll out of twenty, but that this polling company's methodology might produce systematically wildly wrong polls. The same day as that Ekos poll came out (Apr. 18) with the NDP at 20%, Angus Reid put out a poll that had the NDP tied with the Liberals at 25%, and Nanos's 3-day rolling average had the NDP at 17.3%. The strange thing is, Nanos doesn't ask which party you would vote for if an election were held today like Ekos does; it just asks you to "rank your top two current local preferences". (Nanos doesn't seem to openly publish second-choice preferences like Ekos does.) You'd think (assuming that anyone actually listens to the question, however it is worded, rather than just taking it as a prompt to name their favourite parties) that wording would give the NDP an advantage, but it doesn't show up in the numbers. But that brings us back to the issue of methodology: the polling companies have to weight their data according to how they take their samples to be skewed, and nobody can be sure what's the right way to do it.
If I were some sort of political satirist, I would write something like the following:
A RUBBISH PROPOSAL
One might suppose that Rob Ford's City Hall is moving in the right direction in privatizing garbage collection in Toronto. But this privatization plan doesn't go nearly far enough. The problem is not that only half of Toronto's garbage collection will be privatized, or that the wages of private garbage collectors will be only 15-20% lower than those paid currently. (Surely garbage collectors ought to pay us for the privilege of taking away our things. Have you seen all the televisions people are throwing away these days? Garbage collectors must be living in television-lined palaces! And I for one would be itching to collect all the futons that regularly appear at the curb of a building a few doors down from mine.) No, the problem is that there will still be garbage collection at all. Friends, it is clear that the time has come not to privatize but to abolish garbage collection. The benefits would be overwhelming:
1. It will be another victory in the war on cars, as all those massive, traffic-clogging, diesel-exhaust-spewing garbage trucks are taken off the road, so that drivers can quickly transport their own garbage to the dump, at their own convenience and as frequently as they wish....
Oh, one more thing. Over the last week we have had slews of media complaints about both the prices of things in Canada relative to prices in the US and the price of gasoline. I love both of these kinds of complaints, because they show that people by and large hate free markets, and the principle that free markets are based on, identified by Hobbes: justice in exchange consists in agreement between exchangers on the terms of exchange (which is to say: the "fair price" of anything is the price anyone is willing to pay for it).
Going by this poll (PDF) from Ekos, you could say that the NDP is currently the least unpopular party in Canada. Here are the totals if you add up first-choice and second-choice preferences:
NDP: 46.7
Conservative: 44.5
Liberal: 43
Green: 20.7
Bloc: 11.4
Other: 3.6
Of course, there is an obvious problem with giving second-choice preferences the same weight as first-choice preferences. But in the case of the NDP, you have to assume that many people who say that they intend to vote for the Liberals and that the NDP is their second choice would actually prefer to vote for the NDP, all other things being equal, but intend to vote for the Liberals because they believe that the NDP can't win (whether in their riding or overall).
I keep wondering how different our election results would be if there were no polls ... and then, every time you're talking about polls, you have to say that for all we know, this poll is wildly wrong. Not just that it might be that twentieth poll out of twenty, but that this polling company's methodology might produce systematically wildly wrong polls. The same day as that Ekos poll came out (Apr. 18) with the NDP at 20%, Angus Reid put out a poll that had the NDP tied with the Liberals at 25%, and Nanos's 3-day rolling average had the NDP at 17.3%. The strange thing is, Nanos doesn't ask which party you would vote for if an election were held today like Ekos does; it just asks you to "rank your top two current local preferences". (Nanos doesn't seem to openly publish second-choice preferences like Ekos does.) You'd think (assuming that anyone actually listens to the question, however it is worded, rather than just taking it as a prompt to name their favourite parties) that wording would give the NDP an advantage, but it doesn't show up in the numbers. But that brings us back to the issue of methodology: the polling companies have to weight their data according to how they take their samples to be skewed, and nobody can be sure what's the right way to do it.
If I were some sort of political satirist, I would write something like the following:
A RUBBISH PROPOSAL
One might suppose that Rob Ford's City Hall is moving in the right direction in privatizing garbage collection in Toronto. But this privatization plan doesn't go nearly far enough. The problem is not that only half of Toronto's garbage collection will be privatized, or that the wages of private garbage collectors will be only 15-20% lower than those paid currently. (Surely garbage collectors ought to pay us for the privilege of taking away our things. Have you seen all the televisions people are throwing away these days? Garbage collectors must be living in television-lined palaces! And I for one would be itching to collect all the futons that regularly appear at the curb of a building a few doors down from mine.) No, the problem is that there will still be garbage collection at all. Friends, it is clear that the time has come not to privatize but to abolish garbage collection. The benefits would be overwhelming:
1. It will be another victory in the war on cars, as all those massive, traffic-clogging, diesel-exhaust-spewing garbage trucks are taken off the road, so that drivers can quickly transport their own garbage to the dump, at their own convenience and as frequently as they wish....
Oh, one more thing. Over the last week we have had slews of media complaints about both the prices of things in Canada relative to prices in the US and the price of gasoline. I love both of these kinds of complaints, because they show that people by and large hate free markets, and the principle that free markets are based on, identified by Hobbes: justice in exchange consists in agreement between exchangers on the terms of exchange (which is to say: the "fair price" of anything is the price anyone is willing to pay for it).
