Thursday, April 14, 2005

Daily Kos

Most recent post from the old site:

It is as if every time I mention Daily Kos on here, they manage to outdo themselves. Let's take a look at this post. Now, I don't know if the poor resolution is supposed to trick the reader or what. If you don't look closely, you might think that the first line is something like November 2 or 3, as a reference to when Bush was elected, as you would expect since this post is allegedly trying to show that Bush's election was actually bad for the economy. But no. That first line is March 11; the second one is March 31. I don't want to infer anything, but someone had to deliberately take out the other lines in the original graph, which you can see by clicking on the image. These graphs don't show anything. The first graph shows the last three months; but look at the graph for the last six months. Honestly, is this a joke, Kos? If this graph shows anything, it shows a strong RISE in the stock market after Bush's reelection. This is evidence of "mining." Are you trying to lose readers?

3 comments:

  1. Doesn't the stock market almost always rise (unless some other external event happens) after elections? Uncertainty = bad for stock market and all that..?


    Anyway, if the graphs are misleading, that's bad. On the other hand, no blog has a perfect batting average and Kos, who posted that entry, could either be the one trying to mislead people or be one of the people that were misled by some other original source of these graph and that analysis.

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  2. Hey Mikhail,
    I have heard that before, and it makes sense to me. You are one step ahead of me; I couldn't find a graph that looked at this, so I found some raw data. Although it's only from 1930 to 2000, there's still a good number of elections in there, and I'm currently working on doing something meaningful with the data. The data/graph can be found at http://www.princeton.edu/~abrett/DJIA

    To summarize, yes, I think it does, and I'm trying to show it. I wasn't saying that Bush's election was necessarily GOOD for the stock market, just that the data Daily Kos provided did not convince me at all that it was BAD. I might have been a little rough on Daily Kos, I admit, but I tend to expect a lot out of them given how prominent their name is.

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  3. Anonymous12:04 AM

    Whoa, Andy, I would just like to point out from my objective standpoint that you are starting to sound like a pretty damn serious blogger. Raw data? Graphs? Analysis? This is a good thing, but I thought I'd just make sure you were aware of the transition from LiveJournal amateur to /~abrett EXPERT.

    As far as MoveOn goes, I was surprised by the stuff today from Kos that seemed to imply that he likes the organization. I got the impression a while ago that he didn't; I thought I remembered hearing the argument about how the change wasn't going to work coming from these inside groups and that it had to come from within the party. Maybe it was ACT, but I thought he referred to at least one of the 527s negatively. Anyway, that's all. Cool blog.

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