I spent some of today investigating how I could, from Canada, take my funds in my US bank account and turn them directly into Euros. I have failed to find any reasonable solution. I fear that the US dollar will (continue to) plummet. This evening Google pointed me to an article entitled “Canadian Dollar Gains the Most in Almost 3 Months as Bush Wins” telling how the Canadian dollar rose 1.5% against the US dollar today. Tomorrow I’m writing myself a cheque and converting all my funds to Canadian dollars. I don’t think I should wait the two months until I move to Europe.
Slashdot has talked a lot about Tanenbaum’s election website; however Prof. Sam Wang’s election website is much better. He calculated the mean of the number of Electoral College votes each candidate would get, rather than the mode of the number of Electoral Collage votes. More interestingly he has helped confirm my suspicions that there was massive voter fraud in Florida (and Missouri?) this year. It is somewhat less clear whether or not Kerry would have won Florida even if the election there wasn’t rigged. Prof. Wang is more cautious that me and says, The z-score is a measure of how anomalous the real result was. Note that Missouri (MO) and Florida (FL) have very different results, suggesting that some extraneous factors were at work in these states, either in polls or voting.
During election night, my friend was doing a better job covering the election than any of the news networks. He was giving far more interesting what-if scenerios. Near the end of the night we were frusterated by Ohio, and we cut the tables from CNN’s election page to extrapolate the per county results from Ohio in order to see if Kerry would have a chance. At 1:30-0500 there were 80 to 90 percent of precincts reporting and we predicted Bush would win by slightly over 150 000 votes, so I went to bed.