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Rick Santorum's Fake Donation Meter
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- FaceKicker 14y agoThis is used to decide what dollar amount to display on the donation meter on this page: https://www.ricksantorum.com/stillneedhelp/ https://www.ricksantorum.com/stillneedhelp/ You can infer from the Javascript, but it just displays a dollar amount equal to the number of seconds elapsed since a certain time (edit: whoops, see below), according to your computer clock. If you refresh every second it will go up by $1 each time. If you set your clock back a year, the donation meter will read $-17 million. Edit: Actually, this isn't quite accurate, it's closer to one dollar per two seconds. 1/(vchange*1000) = 1.7976923076923077 seconds to be exact...
- paulbjensen 14y agoMark-to-market accounting, or window-dressing as the accountants refer to it.
- d0mine 14y agoLargest DOUBLE value: 1.79769E+308
- sikhnerd 14y agoLooks like they took the page down Forbidden You don't have permission to access /stillneedhelp/ on this server.
- paulgb 14y agoIn case they change it, here is a copy: http://pastebin.com/3Wv4AJSF http://pastebin.com/3Wv4AJSF
- wizzard 14y agoThis is awesome. I know of scammy companies that have gone out of their way to use actual live subscriber counts on their sites, yet this idiot uses a fake one.
- Osiris 14y agoI find it most disturbing that they are polluting the global namespace with all those variables and functions. Don't JavaScript developers these days understand how to properly scope their JavaScript?
- adrianparsons 14y agoI like that bad namespacing is what you find disturbing here.
- hrabago 14y agoI can't help it. It's just the way I'm wired.
- shaggyfrog 14y agoAre you really asking why a developer tasked with creating something intentionally deceptive didn't use best practices? I'm thinking not a lot of care or attention to anything was paid that day.
- zerostar07 14y agoProbably wanted to make it more readable, it's not even minified.
- artursapek 14y agoI don't think a JSLint-compliant, file-minifying developer would need to resort to this kind of work.
- zerostar07 14y agoI 'm implying s?he did it on purpose to shame his/her bosses.
- artursapek 14y ago
- erreon 14y agoThough I have no idea how much has truly been donated to Rick Santorum, but I would bet that growing thermometer did help contribute to that. Perception is an incredibly strong tool that can be used to elicit reactions like donating "because everyone else seems to be". Sad that they're using such a tacky tactic.
- caseydurfee 14y ago"The right to private variables is not the right to a common good. It’s a me-centered right, that obviously started in the sexual revolution with contraception and obviously quickly evolved to abortion, and now has found its way into the marriage debate. And all those acts that were self-giving acts, self-sacrificing acts, have been polluted by this right to privacy." -- Rick Santorum
- Canuteson 14y agoI'm pretty sure PEP 8 makes a sImilar argument for why privacy of underscore variables isn't strictly enforced in python.
- thomasluce 14y agoWhat? A politician being disingenuous? I'm shocked! SHOCKED!
- dangoldin 14y agoPretty amusing. Google actually does something similar on the Gmail homepage to indicate the amount of free storage but they're doing an actual estimate using linear interpolation. You can view the source on the gmail home page and look at the updateQuota method.
- brackishlake 14y agoAlso funny: "We ran a strong race and practiced fiscal discipline." For a fundraising drive to fix their debt problems.
- hodgesmr 14y agoAren't there rules about political candidates disclosing donations? And doesn't this violate those rules?
- jlgreco 14y agoIs he technically still a candidate? Maybe he's getting around those rules by not being a candidate anymore.
- mc32 14y agoI think he suspended his campaign. Suspending means that while for all intents and purposed but one, the campaign is ended. The exception is that it allows the candidate to raise money (usually to pay off campaign debt). Ending a campaign means you hold the bag, if you're in the red, as I understand it. So, technically, yes, still a candidate.
- btilly 14y agoActually your candidacy is its own separate legal entity, so you're not legally holding the bag. However your reputation is at stake, if you ever want to run for public office in the future, nobody will lend you money if you've proven to be a bad credit risk in the past. See http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-04-19/the-business-of-ending-a-presidential-campaign http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-04-19/the-business... for more.
- mc32 14y agoAh, good distinction. Thanks for the explanation.
- luigi 14y agoThey have to accurately disclose itemized contributions to the FEC, but a public website counter ain't the FEC.
- nikcub 14y agowait, did anybody actually think those donation counters were real?
- encoderer 14y agoHonestly in other cases they are. I had personal experience developing tools used for Howard Dean's 2004 primary campaign (as a volunteer not staff) and in that case it was certainly real. I'd be very, very surprised if the ones used by Ron Paul and Obama weren't real. They have good engineering talent there, and (in the case of Obama at least) good political talent. This runs contrary to both.
- cbr 14y agoI was going to check and get back to you, but I can't find one on either of their sites.
- encoderer 14y agoThey run them during specific fund-raising drives. You can also see them on peoples personal MyBO pages.
- yahelc 14y agoCan confirm that the thermometers on Obama fundraising pages (MyBo and others) are real (not simulated and not manipulable). It's a feature of the donation software they use. (My employer develops it.)
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ashconnor 14y agoIt wouldn't be impossible to implement. Maybe it would only reflect online donations but still...
- barrkel 14y agoI don't think there's anything wrong, in principle, with this approach, so long as the simulated rate is calibrated frequently to the actual average donation rate. Having it all wired up properly would require a whole lot of infrastructure, particularly for donation mechanisms that aren't online and aren't all tied in to a single system.
- thebigshane 14y agoThere doesn't appear to be anything in this code to calibrate to the actual average donation rate. In fact it's not tied to any real amounts or rates at all. It's just a function of the current datetime. UPDATE: They took the donation page down... Forbidden You don't have permission to access /stillneedhelp/ on this server.
- artursapek 14y agoThat was a fast response. Does someone on HN work for Santorum?
- Havoc 14y agoHow does one tell when a politician is lying...
- shane_armstrong 14y agoI would assume his mouth was ajar?
- noomerikal 14y agoNICE! Looks like he's giving back - http://imgur.com/PeVdv http://imgur.com/PeVdv
- VikingCoder 14y agoFor comparison, does someone want to post the source code to GMail's meter: "Over 10250.602608 megabytes (and counting) of free storage."
- duskwuff 14y agoGMail's meter is fine -- it's displaying the state of a value which Google has decreed will increase at a set rate. Unlike Santorum's donations, it's not an unpredictable measurement.
- artursapek 14y agoIndeed. It looks like they have their goals set for a long time. http://i.imgur.com/WvYcq.jpg http://i.imgur.com/WvYcq.jpg It finds the closest entry in there to the current value of "new Date().getTime()". Then it just adds (what roughs out to) .000004 for every second's difference between the 0 value and the current getTime() value. So today it reads 10250 MB, which must come from index 2 of that array + enough seconds to add 10 MB and some. Definitely more legit than Santorum's. Here's the code for the counter (it's embedded in that HTML file) http://pastebin.com/8tebjT79 http://pastebin.com/8tebjT79 The actual subtractions of the current time from the one in the array seem to be more detailed than what's put on the page, which is being rounded. A sample of input for format(): 10250.60874337952 10250.608747448896 10250.608751518273 10250.608755583586 10250.608759652963 10250.608763722339 10250.608767787651
- duaneb 14y agoIIRC GMail's meter is updated at a rate which is actually accurate, and is simulated so that the page doesn't need to keep asking google for the capacity.
- ejesse 14y agoTo be fair, it's not any less accurate than prayer.
- luigi 14y agoI just donated $17.99 so that they can buy Crockford's JavaScript: The Good Parts.
- zem 14y agosomeone seems to have thrown a hasty 403 atop https://www.ricksantorum.com/stillneedhelp/ https://www.ricksantorum.com/stillneedhelp/
- evolve2k 14y agoIt fascinates me that Americans might see this as acceptable or even that it is regarded as most likely to be totally legal and hence acceptable in nature. In Australia I would be very confident that this type of falsified campaign disclosure would be illegal or at least fall foul of a whole range of parliamentary and governmental standards.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- JohnQPasserby 14y agoNothing about Rick Santorum is acceptable, the idea that he was even considered for the position probably violates most of the Bill of Rights. Fake counters are pretty far down my list of grievances.
- derleth 14y ago> Americans might see this as acceptable Do you have any evidence we do?
- IDisposable 14y agoSame thing as the Google GMail "space available" counter. As long as you back it up by real numbers and adjust the rate appropriately no harm, no foul.
- lightyrs 14y agopander.js
- ChuckMcM 14y agoWhat? You mean a politician was using a simulation and presenting it as definitive? I'm shocked I tell you, shocked! (with apologies to Captain Renault :-) You could just read the quarterly reports he files with the FEC if you actually wanted to know how much he was bringing in. I suppose you could get him in hot water as an ethics violation for campaign reporting but outrage? A bit over the top I think. There are billboards that had a running total of the California state deficit, does anyone think they were repeatedly reading some sort of get_balance() api at the state treasury and putting it up? No, its a prop, a gimmick, an illustrative tool, and nothing more.
- ryguytilidie 14y agoSeems a like a bit of an exaggeration to peg the OP as "outraged". They simply provided a link to an untruth.
- RollAHardSix 14y agoActually this raises some interesting questions when you think about how the average person is going to think when they see something like this. First impressions to normal people are that they would be real-time given the instantaneous nature of the internet. Regardless, it's almost certainly false advertising which as you mentioned is ethically questionable especially since this is supposed to be a 'leader' of citizens.
- grobot 14y agoCiviCRM (which appears to be Santorum's campaign tool) comes with a fundraising thermometer out of the box.
- paulhauggis 14y agoI bet there are left-wing politicians that do the same thing...but we won't ever see them here because republicans are the only ones that are bad.
- joshuahedlund 14y agoWasn't there a post on HN recently about YouTube's viewcounts being extrapolated and not actually real-time?
- ravloony 14y agoWitch hunt anyone?
- rsanchez1 14y agoAlright, we got our Santorum fix for the month. Thanks, Reddit.