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When That Poll-taker Calls, Answer!
In the past week, I have taken at least three political polls; two online, and one over the phone. Seeing as the upcoming midterm elections are extremely important to us, shouldn’t our opinions get registered? But it seems like a large number of my Ricochet family members have a policy of not answering polls. I would like to recommend that you change your policy. How else are we going to get on the scoreboard, if our fellows don’t know that there are a large number of conservatives out there, who register their opinion?
In my retirement, I decided to sign up with a couple of websites that specialize in market research (I’ve always been a sucker for market research); they pay for your time, albeit a low amount, but it’s more than nothing. I just last week participated in an online focus group, for which I stand to be paid $175. Anyway, I ended up on YouGov’s panel, and they now send me regular surveys to fill out. I get to state my political preferences directly, and I’m happy to be that kind of statistic. I think that refusing to answer poll-takers makes it look like we aren’t there, and we need to make our opinions known. I had a delightful half-hour conversation with a young Hispanic lady last week, and I got to register my preferences for our local candidates. I even helped her with some name pronunciations; I think I made her day by being willing to talk to her, instead of just not answering.
Another benefit of taking the online surveys is I get to evaluate the political ads of the Leftist candidates. I learned that our state congresspersons from the Democrat side are lying with every statement they make about the Republican candidates. I never would have seen those ads, if I hadn’t been doing those surveys. I am pleased to get my preferences out there, perhaps to encourage others to vote, who might have been discouraged by the poll results. We all know that a lot of political polls skew Democrat, but can’t we change that by not hanging up on the poll-takers? Give it some thought, and register your opinions when the poll-takers call. If nothing else, you can make them mad when you support Donald Trump!
Published in Elections
The only effective way to deal with polls like that would be to answer “yes” to such a question.
Lots of parents should be beaten. Not just for that, though.
I think the “potential spam” thing is more complicated than that, especially for cell phones because of the technology available. The way I’ve read about it, especially for cell phones because of having some more advanced technology in those systems, they can – at least sometimes – figure out that the supposed number calling, that would be displayed on your Caller ID, is not actually the number calling: it’s being “spoofed.” (You can find out a lot of those yourself by calling back the number that supposedly called you, and you get “this number is not in service” or you get Grandma Smith in Arkansas who is tired of people calling her about their extended warranty on whatever.)
My favorite examples for bad girls names are Bertha and Hortense.
And if I were Peter Robinson’s son, I would change my name from “Pedro” at the earliest opportunity.
Except you can’t tell neighborhoods from phone numbers any more.
I believe Peter’s wife is of Cuban antecedents, so Pedro may not feel the need.
When Homer and Marge were trying to come up with a name for their first child, and Marge suggests “Bart,” Homer tests it: “Bart, Cart, Dart, E-art… nope, no problem!”
You mean like Jason Lee and then-partner Beth Riesgraf, who named their son Pilot Inspektor?
Oh, and some other names…
It’s the same issue mentioned by others, though, and they aren’t in Cuba.
Noted, but this being the first or second question, I didn’t realize there weren’t follow-up questions teasing out the details. Hence why I don’t bother with polls. If they can’t be bothered to design an intelligent set of questions, I’m not interested in spending my mental energy trying to come up with the least-misleading answers to their idiocy.
I guess I’ve just learned to expect less from polls, and so act accordingly. :-)
I have been called by English, French, Italian, and Spanish versions of my given names, all here in the United States. Could Pedro go by “Pete” as Pierre Samuel du Pont, IV has done? Of course he can. On the other hand, Gerald Riviera goes by Geraldo, right here in America. Go figure. Pedro could also go by “Rocky” or any number of other things. And he doesn’t have to change his name to do that. Also, Pedro is from California. I’m betting Pedro is not such an unusual name out there.
Sure you can. Just not in the immediate way you used too. We used to call this merge purge back in the day. Basically you purchase a variety of list / databases from different sources and collate and eliminate data to you get your call set. With the proper lists and databases they can tell much about you, including home, work, favorite sites, favorites stores, friends, credit records, salary, close friends and voting record. What do you think Google, Facebook and about every app on your smartphone or every web site you sign up for is doing? What do you think the Census is about? They are building databases and selling them for people to use.
I doubt that most polling places are using data that way.
No, but I will look him up. Thanks.
A quick search finds that Pedro is still in the top 50 names in Spain, and top 100 in Mexico, but in the US it’s about #400, with an estimated total population (of people named Pedro) in the US of only about 150,000.
C0mpletely missing the point.
It used to be area code gave you general region, and the first digits of the number gave you a much more local area. (When I was growing up, all the phone numbers in our community started with 78, and you could get even more granular by knowing if a number was 781 or 782 (for example).
Now, we have four cellphones in our house, and the numbers bear absolutely no relationship to each other.
“Ask not for whom the poll calls, it calls for thee!”
And how many kedavises are there?
I have a friend whose job title working for an internet company was “Data Harvester.”
Without going into too many details, while living in a small town in Arizona for a few years, for several months I lived NEXT DOOR to another person with my same name. Granted, that was her married name, but still… How often do you think it happens, in the US, that a Pedro lives next door to a Pedro?
Okay, perhaps in Guadalupe, Arizona. (Although with a name popularity of 400, maybe not even there…) But that’s the exception that proves the rule.
One job I worked at, there were four offices in the hallway where my office was located. Three of them were occupied by someone named “Jeff”. And there was a 4th Jeff in a cube around the corner.
This was not a large department either. Maybe 20-30 people.
Maybe. But they are collecting data selling that data to somebody that can and will correlate that data into their database for their purposes. The government does this, the parties are doing this, most companies are doing this. There was a whole scandal about Trump doing it for the 2016 election since this was normally a Democrat thing and Jared Kushner understood this data was there and used it to help Trump get elected. The whole Cambridge Analytica scandal was about this type of thing.
Next question: How many “Pedros” have you ever worked with?
No, I understand the point. It is just that I understand how computers use data. Our phone numbers tie us together, our email addresses do the same. These are unique identifiers that change little and can be used to track us. I can take the phone numbers that are called and buy a few databases on social media that require you to enter your phone numbers to sign on and do some fairly standard database operations and have that information you think is lost. Not only will I now have the data of where you live based off your phone number I will also have a much better profile of each person depending on the data I can purchase. As I keep adding to my database I will get a more and more complete understanding of the people in my database.
But does every little podunk polling operation – especially those maybe run independently by political campaigns – bother to get that information, assuming they can afford it? Why do I keep getting calls to my 602 area code cell phone about politics in Arizona, and from we-finance-anyone car dealers etc, when I left Arizona two years ago?
No they do not. Why would they? They are the creator / originator of data they package and sell to others that will use. The polling is just the excuse to collect the data they are selling. Or maybe the list is fed to them from who is ordering it. It is those that get that data and have the power that act on it that is the issue.
But when they only ask what I think of President Trump’s performance etc, they never find out that I no longer live where they think I live.
Cleaning the database of bad/obsolete data is much more expensive than collecting it. Collection is automated. Cleaning it often requires at least some level of human judgement be made. It often ends up cheaper to leave the obsolete data there. The odd wasted call costs less than cleaning the data.