If Congress had not demonetized silver in 1873, the metal’s decreasing value would have curbed the deflation of the time. I believe that this was one of the US Government’s greatest mistakes ever, because the reaction to the economic crisis in the 1870’s had a profound effect on the failure of Reconstruction. Friedman wrote a paper on this, called “The Crime of 1873.”
I’ve tried using LLM’s to do the same exact thing (turning precinct-level election results into a spreadsheet) and in my experience they worked rather poorly. Less accurate than traditional OCR, and considering how many fixes I had to make, altogether slower than manual entry. The resolution of the page made an outsized difference. It’s nice that you got it to work, but I am skeptical of it as a permanent solution.
Tangentially- I appreciate what OpenElections does- however, I wish there was a similar organization that did not limit themselves to officially certified results. There are already other organizations who collect precinct results post-2016, and using only official results basically limits you to 2008 and afterwards, but historical election results are the real intrigue. Not to mention that I have noticed many blatant errors in election results that have supposedly been “certified” by a state/county government. The precinct results Pennsylvania publishes, for example, are riddled with issues.
Skepticism is a necessary trait in this type of work, for sure. I will say that the performance has improved substantially in the past year, and there are still PDFs that require a lot of work.
We went with official precinct results for two main reasons: there are differences between election night and final results (some of them non-trivial) and to make the work more manageable. Agree that historical results are a real problem, and as a PA native I know only too well the errors that the state data contains, which is why we go county-by-county there.
Try getting the 32768 tile in 2048. Yes, it can be done somewhat consistently, but it requires a deep and somewhat subtle strategy. Furthermore, the “snake” formation that every player learns at the beginning stops being optimal at a certain point, and thus the late game has much more variety than the early game. I do think that Threes is more complex, but I’m not sure if this complexity is really necessary.
It would have been better if they looked for the densest circle with an area of 1 square km. Although a square shaped area has its tangible benefits - you "feel" population density more when it’s on your own street obviously, and since square areas provide more information along a few axes (the ones containing the corners), you can get an idea of the population density in an area by placing a square’s corners on the street. A square is probably not the best shape for this, though.
I don’t save articles often, but maybe one time in a few months I see something I know I will enjoy reading again even after 1 or 2 years. Keep up the great work OP!
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