Marc Ambinder, professional silly Very Serious Person, tells his readers at The Week that “Team Obama Knows Too Much“:
… They know if you’re registered to vote or not. They know, because of the magazines you subscribe to, what you like to do in your spare time. They know, because of their Facebook friends, the types of people you associate with. Me: I am not a volunteer for the campaign. But they know how much money I make. They know my age. They know how long it takes me to open an email they send to me. They know which words are likely to make me open an email more quickly. They know what images make me click on a link more quickly. They’re able to associate my name with my public online identities and make predictions about my behavior based on keywords they mine from the data.
Somewhere in Chicago, and elsewhere in a secret data center, a computer has come up with a score that projects the likelihood that I will vote for Obama. This number will help the campaign figure out how much of its finite resource store it needs to devote to getting me to the polls. The fact that I live in California means that I probably will not get a lot of personal attention from Team Obama. If I lived in Florida, I’d be getting regular contacts. The campaign will have figured out what types of people are more likely to get me to make a decision; they consciously and deliberately aim to manipulate me…
Heck, I might’ve been worried the intern using Erica Sackin’s name was disappointed that I never ask for any of the very cool bumper stickers or other campaign swag OfA offers me approximately 83 times a week, but I’m in Massachusetts, so I already know how much my vote is (not) worth.
On the other tech-end of the Meaningless Prognostication scale, here’s a report from NYMag:
Family Circle has announced the results of its First Lady cookie recipe contest, a quaint and charming tradition that has its roots in the 1992 hazing of Hillary Clinton. After more than 9,000 people weighed in, Michelle Obama’s white and dark chocolate chip cookies beat Ann Romney’s M&M cookies by just 287 votes, the smallest margin ever. The magazine notes that the bake-off has correctly predicted the results of four out of five elections (and cheating accusations marred Cindy McCain’s 2008 win). We should probably go through with the election for the sake of formality, but this thing is essentially over.
White and dark chocolate chips versus rainbow-colored M&Ms! Let a thousand paranoid images bloom, wingnut wurlitzer!
MikeJ
Speaking of predicting the future, a blogger dug up what Focus on the Family predicted the US would be like in far off 2012 after suffering through four years of Obama.
amk
shorter ambinder whine – why is obama campaigning ?
He has always been an ass.
Nick
Is Ambinder only now realizing that this sort of thing gets done. Corporate America has been doing this shit for years, and way more sophisticated. I mean, he thinks it’s weird that the Obama campaign can guess how much he makes and whether he’s a valuable vote? Target can tell you women’s delivery dates (and has been doing it so long they’re not only a) good at it, but b) have figured out how to exploit it without making the creepy obvious).
It’s not like this shit is news either. It got like a pages long spread in the New York Times like 6-8 months ago. I’d give Ambinder some slack if this was some obscure technology, but jeebus, the Times has coughing up the pre-digested version for the blue-hairs already. Is it too much to ask of our failed fourth estate to read the damn paper once in a while?
Groucho48
Our corporate masters know all of that about us plus much, much more. And they aren’t elected or in any other way vetted by we citizens.
Heck, Balloon Juice and several other site know I was looking at cell phones earlier.
JGabriel
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Anne Laurie @ Top:
If it makes you feel any better, my Democratic vote in NYC is worth even less.
.
JGabriel
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Groucho48:
Only because you were giving them that pervy lustful look that makes cell phones nervous.
.
Alison
@JGabriel: I see your NYC Dem vote and raise you not just my Democratic vote in California, but its previous qualification as a Democratic vote in Santa Cruz, CA.
I still voted when I lived there, of course, but it was sort of like asking a room full of toddlers to vote between ice cream or liver and onions for dinner. You kinda knew what the consensus was going to be…
Mike S.
oy vey, if one objects to such micro-targeting, all one must do is to refuse to play the game to the greatest extent possible.
facebook account? never had, never will.
credit card purchase tracking? lol, cash only.
supermarket saver cards? fictitious name/phone.
cookies? nope, no 3rd parties accepted, an extensive list of blocked cookies, and all cookies cleared upon closing the browser.
commenting on sites requiring active registration? nope, never.
commenting on sites requiring email address? utilize accounts created for no other purpose.
email from political campaigns? never opened/never answered.
IP address? Behind 7 Proxies.
the list goes on…
weak sauce Ambinder, weak sauce
MikeJ
@Mike S.: Don’t forget to run noscript so that tracking scripts that add no value for you don’t run. Even if you don’t have a facebook account, a huge number of sites still load javascript from facebook. They get a huge amount of information about you even if you’ve never had an account.
Mike S.
@MikeJ:
JS disabled long ago for security reasons, but sage advice nonetheless.
slightly_peeved
Marc Ambinder finally found a metric by which Romney is better than Obama.Given his recent appearances, Romney’s not even trying to get most of the American public to vote for him.
wasabi gasp
gettoknowmarcambinder.com
Another Halocene Human
Not to give away the game here or anything, but back in early summer when I was doing phone calls for OfA, the ALLKNOWINGEMPEROR had a ton of dud phone numbers, including multitudes who had moved out of state.
So much for “Every move you make, every step you take”.
hhex65
Meanwhile Rmoney’s COBOL85-driven computing machines have been sending me sh&t once a month– and I think so little of the man that it would be too much effort on my part to tape the postage-free return envelope to a brick and send it back.
John Revolta
Ebony and Ivor-ee
Side by side on my chocolate chip cookie
Guaranteed to create much discord
At your
Tea Parteeeee
arguingwithsignposts
@John Revolta:
Isn’t it obvious? Michelle’s cookies are racially divided into black and white. Anne Romney’s cookies celebrate a color blind America.
Wake up sheeple! Obambi is the real racist!
Chyron HR
So has the Whitey Tape torn America asunder yet?
Maude
Raven, if you read this. Arne Duncan was talking about electronic textbooks and how paper textbooks were going away. He didn’t explain how students are going to afford this.
There’s a Florida school where the kids are tossing the vegetables. They won’t eat them.
Teacher, leave those kids alone.
PeakVT
@Groucho48: BJ doesn’t know, but cross domain scripts do. Almost no web page consists of content from a single site anymore. If you install the “View Dependencies” add-on in Firefox you will see what I mean.
MikeJ
@Maude: ereaders are as cheap as one textbook[1] now and you can carry every book you need from kindergarten to grad school in one hand.
[1] $69 seems to be the standard entry level price, but Walmart has one for $39.
arguingwithsignposts
@Maude: lots of kids these days have to pay textbook “rentals” on top of property taxes. If it eats into that, I’d be for it. Knowing enough about the publishing industry, I have my doubts.
Shalimar
If paper textbooks go away, are the textbook companies still going to get $1000 a semester per student for college digital textbooks?
JoyceH
If Hillary is the nominee in ’16, will Family Circle be asking Bill for HIS cookie recipe?
MikeJ
@Shalimar: What most do now is tie the book to a web site for practice questions, etc. They do add some minimal value, but not as much as the book prices would suggest, and you can’t even sell your books back at the end of the semester.
Ideally more schools will go over to something like what MIT is doing and use/produce open source materials. It’s not possible for everything (lit classes should teach at least some stuff published after 1920), but it could certainly cut costs dramatically.
jibeaux
@Nick: Hell, Target notified one dad that his teenage daughter was pregnant.
cmorenc
Team Obama definitely sends me WAY too many emails, nerly always around either of two themes: 1) if I don’t donate $$ to some designated campaign committee by an imminent deadline only 24-48 hours away, a cute cocker spaniel will die, and maybe some kittens too! 2) some latest political story (most often yet another outrage some GOP hack has committed) which I’ve already heard about, courtesy of Balloon Juice, DKos, MSNBC, etc, and BTW send $$$.
Svensker
@JGabriel:
LULZ
hueyplong
You really get the impression that the last 30 days, the right wing PAC money will inundate us with the theme, Throw Off the Yoke of Incompetent Negro Rule to Live White and Free.
And its corollary, Anyone Who Dismisses This Is The Real Racist and other assorted whines that poor whitey is never allowed to criticize a black man.
The head says we should be happy that they think this is all they’ve got left, but the dark heart worries that it will narrow the polls.
raven
@MikeJ: We’re workin on it.
jeremy
@hueyplong: It won’t narrow the polls. People don’t like outright racism, even those who might harbor those feelings aren’t comfortable with this kind of rhetoric. It backfired and didn’t work in 2008 and it won’t work now.
Boudica
I will now be singing this all day. P-P-Paul Ryan I love you, I ain’t lyin’.
jeremy
@hueyplong: And I might add that the right wing have been doing this since 2008. Most people aren’t buying what the right wing is selling because people don’t see Obama as a scary black man. Actually he is liked and gets high marks for his character.
The Gop continues to attack him personally and that stuff just doesn’t work.
Or something like that.Suffern Ace
Sad. I got a e-mail from James Carville on the behalf of the O-Team a month or so back. Who the hell do they think I am? They don’t understand me at all. Unlike Marc Armbinder, who I’m sure was easy to figure out.
hueyplong
Glad to see a strong belief that overt racism is a losing strategy.
There is a reason I said that worry comes from the dark heart and not the head. I’m old enough to remember a time when that stuff was a guaranteed winner in a place where restaurants had signs announcing the owner’s reservation of the right to refuse service.
jeffreyw
@JoyceH: Yes, and while you are reading his published response you will be certain that it is the best cookie recipe ever.
Eric U.
a drug company rep once asked my wife why she wasn’t prescribing as much of their drug of the day as she had in the past. It’s really frightening what they know about us if they put their mind to it
TK-421
WHO CHEATS IN A BAKE-OFF? WHO DOES THAT? WTF IS WRONG WITH SOME PEOPLE?
jeffreyw
Breakfast? Kitteh?
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Alison: I raise you a Democratic vote in Texas. I’m not even on a winning team.
hueyplong
Speaking of overt appeals to race, if you’re in MASS, your vote might be worth control of the Senate. So those of us in southern states fight the involuntary eyeroll when reading that you’re not in a place where you get the impresion you can influence things.
owlbear1
“Get RICH QUICK!!!” suckers you in every goddamn time doesn’t it, Marc?
mingo
@hhex65:
sadly, the one repub mailing I get that does NOT supply a previously-paid-for stamped envelope is – you guessed it – Mittens. Otherwise, he would have gotten a lot of very nice stones from me by now, since I am that sort of caring, giving person.
Ash Can
@mingo: That makes me wonder if Mitt’s campaign got tired of paying for bricks through the mail, and wised up. :)
Kirbster
@TK-421:
Sadly, people will cheat on anything. I just finished taking a free, non-credit course online that had a short, peer-graded essay assignment. There were many complaints from students who graded essays from fellow students that were plagiarized from easily identifiable sources. The only reward for passing this course is a congratulatory e-mail and one’s own sense of achievement, yet some felt compelled to game the system.
Steeplejack
@Boudica:
That’s girl group gold!
amk
@hueyplong: Bingo. They should realize that their vote counts towards the PV at the minimum.
raven
Are all the front pagers in a fucking snit or what? Get on the goddamn stick.
gelfling545
@Maude: If you have internet access you’ve got the text. My Jr. High granddaughter has access to texts for 3 of her classes (at no cost to us) online. This is a great convenience for us. Textbooks are a major cost for schools running about $100 per text per student and loss/damage rates are high. This would be a much more cost efficient approach plus there is no “I didn’t do my homework because I forgot my book”
mingo
@Ash Can:
You know, I think it is because he is just that sort of mean, stingy person. I am not sure why I get so many right-wing mailings, but I suspect that my on-line giving to dems might have resulted in my name being sold at some point. I can’t even complain about that because, win-win: repubs pay for the list and pay for sending me wasted mail (except for the nice rocks!).
JGabriel
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Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Not even close to the worthlessness of our Dem stronghold votes. It may not feel or seem like it, but TX is trending Democratic and might be a Dem-leaning state in as little as a decade — which means your vote: counts.
.
mai naem
So I was listening to MSNBC yesterday and they were talking about Mitt’s offshore accounts in the Bahamas, Bermuda etc. and I started thinking, sheet, that sounds like the Beach Boys song Kokomo.
Bermuda,Bahama, ooo I wanna take ya
Cmon may pretty money
Geneva, in my Swiss account
Baby why don’t we go
Tax free, off the Florida Keys
There’s a place called Grand Cayman
That’s where you wanna go to get away from not paying at all
Companies in the sand
Lotsa money sitting in your hand
We’ll be falling in love
To the rhythm of a sweet sweet cac$$hing cac%%hing
Down in Bermuda
Anyhoo, I don’t think the wingnut Beach Boys would allow that. Hee hee.
jibeaux
@TK-421: People who have never baked anything in their lives, e.g. Cindy McCain.
Lojasmo
@hueyplong:
It won’t narrow the polls. Anybody who judges Obama without watching the video was voting for RMoney anyway. Anybody who actually watches the video will recognize it as the compassionate, positive speech it is.
The Other Chuck
People still read Family Circle? Maybe their long-decomposed great aunt had a perpetual subscription or something…
RSR
fwiw, ProPublica is running a program “Reverse Engineering the 2012 Campaign”
Instead of whipping up paranoia, ProPublica is sifting through data (campaign emails received and forwarded by the public) to understand who receives various versions of emails and why.
You can help, too. projects.propublica.org/emails/
The Romney camp should know all that about voters too, if they know anything about campaigning.
Also, too, the Ambinder rant sounds suspiciously like a rallying cry for a privacy law or amendment.
Maude
@MikeJ:
Ereaders come in different display qualities. The Nook display is excellent. I want to see if the Nook HD 9″ is for textbooks. The ereader display needs to show charts and graphs. The screen has to be big enough.
Nook study is helpful to students.
Textbooks aren’t cheap. That’s why Raven and Co. are working on it.
Persia
@gelfling545: This is exactly why my kid’s class just switched to e-readers for classroom reading. Also, the teacher ran a test and the kids actually scored higher on comprehension and retaining knowledge with the e-readers – she suspects it’s because there’s fewer video and audio distractions from a classroom full of kids turning pages.
ThresherK
I won a second-place prize (gourmay chocolate made by the sponsor) with a white and black chocolate bread pudding a number of years ago. The different chips melted together, oh my! Didn’t know I was a trailblazer, but it’s nice to see I’m in good company.
And does anyone else (cleverer than me) want to make a joke about Republicans being able to remove the brown M&Ms while making cookie dough, but it can’t be racist because they don’t see color?
befuggled
Of course people still read the Family Circus.
Maude
Steep
If you read this.
I just got my new NST with Glow light.
It’s charging now.
Wow. So light and small.
I have to take it to wifi to register. I will be side loading library books later.
I really, really want this Nook and I am glad I got it on sale.
Jay in Oregon
@Kirbster:
I took an online course that specifically did not offer any kind of certificate of completion and people were complaining that they would be unable to “monetize” the experience as a result.
Um, it was a computer science class. I would think that being able to demonstrate that you know the performance characteristics of a quicksort, or how to use a kd-tree to efficiently search geometric data, would be sufficient to “monetize” the experience.
Another Halocene Human
@cmorenc: Totes. There was a great rant about fundraising emails by feminist groups last year.