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[Dunamisdeos]

Not sure if you've seen the responses from gamers on those advertisements, but it didn't work out very well for the military.

[MrRoboto75]

Christ, Twitch is so last decade, we need the army Onlyfans.

[delphonso]

I'm dumb founded by the seeds. If it's fake reviews, why send anything at all? Wouldn't it be easier to make spoof accounts, pay and then not deliver but give a review anyway?

[hector13]

I was watching a Call of Duty tournament last weekend, and was wondering why the armed forces would actually want CoD players to apply.

I’m not sure how teabagging would translate to actual warfare.

[delphonso]

Right, but also imagine this; an international treaty that bans the Fortnite dance and 360 no scope.

[Greiger]

I'm dumb founded by the seeds. If it's fake reviews, why send anything at all? Wouldn't it be easier to make spoof accounts, pay and then not deliver but give a review anyway?

I'm not 100% sure about this but I've heard that Amazon and sites like it will sometimes require a seller to send them proof of shipping and various other things at random to prove they are legit.  If they get audited and all their shipping is to the same address, or they can't provide proof of shipping at all, I imagine Amazon would get suspicious.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I'm dumb founded by the seeds. If it's fake reviews, why send anything at all? Wouldn't it be easier to make spoof accounts, pay and then not deliver but give a review anyway?

To the kind of petty trade networks that do this? I think it's more than worth it, especially when they're using stolen credit cards to buy the stuff in the first place.

I was watching a Call of Duty tournament last weekend, and was wondering why the armed forces would actually want CoD players to apply.

I’m not sure how teabagging would translate to actual warfare.

Because without poaching kids in as young and in as in deceptive ways as possible, nobody would join them. They're actually not meeting recruiting quotas anymore.

I'm most disgusted by how I've seen centrist libs reacting to this though, chastising AOC for being "irrationally anti-military like the other leftists". Yeah, you fucking think? I can't even imagine why someone would have an issue with the US military, totally out of left field that one.

[hector13]

Politicians do need a steady supply of wounded veterans to roll out when they need a bump in the polls, and then completely ignore otherwise, unless they can blame their opponents for the complete failure to look after vets when they return home, I guess...

[Reelya]

I'm dumb founded by the seeds. If it's fake reviews, why send anything at all? Wouldn't it be easier to make spoof accounts, pay and then not deliver but give a review anyway?

To get around site security designed to prevent the fake reviews.

'According to the Better Business Bureau, foreign, third-party sellers use your address and Amazon information to generate a fake sale and positive review to boost their product ratings,'

They lie about what's in the package, the seeds are there as a convenient material to make up the weight. Obviously Amazon and co are already onto the simpler methods so they require tracking codes from valid packages before you can post the reviews.

[Starver]

(Has anybody else played America's Army, though? Recruiting/advertising/stealth-bootcamping game that came out in the early 2000s, IIRC. Basically DoD sponsored, or similar.  Not sure how it satisfies 'hardcore' gamers, though its sort-of-promise of permadeath (unlike Doomguy, Duke Nukem, Master Chief, etc) surely gives it a certain niche.)

[Eschar]

Is it actually a good game?

I suppose by default they had to sacrifice some gaminess for the sake of realism.

[Reelya]

Googling reveals it got decent enough reviews at the time. Interestingly:

The game was developed by Colonel Wardynski who recognized that a video game might be helpful to the U.S. Army in the strategic communication efforts by providing more information to prospective soldiers and to help reduce the number of recruits who wash out during the nine weeks of basic training.

So, part of the goal wasn't actually to get more recruits, it was intended to reduce the amount of no-go recruits. The army wants to ensure they get the best value for money for the expense of putting people through training, so you want to encourage some people while also discouraging the type of person who does in fact wash out in basic training. For that reason, they had an incentive to keep it pretty realistic in terms of expectations.

EDIT:

As for the polls for Trump, they're looking pretty bad for November. It's worth comparing 2016 to 2020. The final polls for Clinton put her as getting 3.2% more votes than Trump, but in the end she only got 2.1% more votes than Trump. So, while the call was wrong, that's only a difference of 1.1% from what the polls said to what actually happened, but that was enough to swing the election the other way. 1 fucking percentage point off. So the whole "the polls were rigged" thing seems a bit exaggerated. They were pretty close actually, but the election itself was really too close to call.

For Biden vs Trump however, the gap is 8-9% to Biden. For that to be the wrong call would take a fucking miracle that's far outside the error range on any polls. Unless something major happens in the next couple of months I can't see how this goes well for Trump. Also his side has now abandoned anything resembling engagement with reality, so they also have a decent helping of complacency born from not believing the polls that say Trump is in danger. That bravado and dismissal of the data could further backfire on Trump.

[Starver]

As I recall at the time, polls kept showing Clinton easing apart the comparable popularities in her favour through (as I would see it) pretty traditionally proving that she was the better/not-worst candidate, only for something to periodically disrupt the whole process and sharply re-narrow/slightly-reverse the gap. Then it'd ease back into her favour again.

It's entirely possible that someone's got a "Biden's Emails!" equivalent set of flingable-poo ready[1] to scissor the polling lines back across each other at a key moment. Though maybe their opposition has the same idea, this time, or at least now more prepared to use it than the prior encounter when (outwardly at least) they tried to 'aim high'.


If/when we get to the Presidential Debates stage, I expect we'll see more about what to expect. Up 'til now, it still seems to be more at the 'I'm the disruptive outsider' stage (by the disruptive outsider currently sitting/yelling in the very focal point of the 'inside' zone, so needs some contortionism[2] to attempt/believe). And I'm already aghast at how it's going.


Here from not-even-the-sidelines[3], this seems to be a pattern mostly evolved and repeated this entire century, with the possible exception of Obama's years - for which I may have rose-tinted biases. I'm not sure I could say it was so much like that in the prior post-Nixon years and really couldn't say much about pre-Nixon times.



[1] Currently, the background rumble seems to be just a general murmur of Soviet-Style Socialism being in control of him, and suggestions about his having dementia. Both of which seem to me to be projection, and I can't even say the latter is wrong but their man has made his demented ramblings part of his 'appeal' so I don't think they can press on that too much.

[2] Simultaneously claiming that "AOC is trying to make you dependant on the State" and "Pelosi is trying to stop me mailing you your checks", for example.

[3] I'm in a separate stadium across the street, but listening in on your baseball game via a streaming feed while my game of cricket is mostly not looking in danger of dismissals or sixes happening.

[scriver]

What's the secret behind the cursive k?

[Reelya]

As I recall at the time, polls kept showing Clinton easing apart the comparable popularities in her favour through (as I would see it) pretty traditionally proving that she was the better/not-worst candidate, only for something to periodically disrupt the whole process and sharply re-narrow/slightly-reverse the gap. Then it'd ease back into her favour again.

It's entirely possible that someone's got a "Biden's Emails!" equivalent set of flingable-poo ready[1] to scissor the polling lines back across each other at a key moment. Though maybe their opposition has the same idea, this time, or at least now more prepared to use it than the prior encounter when (outwardly at least) they tried to 'aim high'.

Articles point out that Clinton and Trump did periodically narrow the gap to nothing.

But that's totally not happening this year, 2020 isn't a repeat of the polls in 2016 by any stretch, and that's what that expectation turns out to be when you look at the polls. Trump is just consistently behind this year rather than the yo-yo like behavior of the polls in response to short-term events of 2016. So there were big swings over the year in 2016, and Clinton got hit by one right at the end, so lost. There are no large swings happening this year at all, so for one to hit Biden at the end, that's just gotta come out of the blue completely.

2016 is just the most recent year on record. It's a data point of size one, and there's actually no reason to expect that the situation this year is going to be a repeat of 2016. Is 2020 a repeat of the situation in 2016? Well, not by any reasonable analysis.

In 2016 it was the end of a presidency, so you had two unknowns coming in, much less certainty. In 2020, it's the end of the first term for the president with the lowest polls of any sitting president of the modern era. For example, Jimmy Carter and Bush I were both polling better in the run up to their defeat that Trump is.