Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2022 August 11

= August 11 =

Liz Cheney election ad
It's three o clock in the A of M here in sunny California (Bay area), and I just saw a TV ad on Fox News (never mind why the TV is on that channel) for Liz Cheney's re-election. She is a Representative from Wyoming. So why is she running ads in California? It looked like a generic ad, not aimed at out of staters. Is it to drum up donations or what? I didn't notice it asking for donations. Does this have something to do with her rehabiliation with the Democrats due to her activities on the Jan 6 committee? The region here is heavily Democratic, though of course Fox is a GOP channel. Thanks. 67.164.114.199 (talk) 09:58, 11 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Individual voters are less important to candidates than donors are. The potential to raise money is more important than the ability to change the mind of a few local voters, especially when those minds are more resistant to persuasion than ever before.  In the past 30 or so years, politics has become tribal, with most voters blindly voting for their party without regard for individual issues, campaigns are mainly about raising fundage.  There's a lot more money in San Francisco than in Cheyenne.  -- Jayron 32 14:22, 11 August 2022 (UTC)
 * It's odd then that this was the first time I've ever seen an ad for an out-of-state politician here. I'd think they'd all do that.  The TV sound was thankfully off but this ad didn't seem specifically like a donation pitch either--just "re-elect Liz Cheney".  We don't even get ads for presidential candidates during general elections here, since CA is not a swing state.  Of course we are slammed with them during primaries. 2601:648:8201:5DD0:0:0:0:34C5 (talk) 17:41, 11 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Was this on the local Fox affiliate, or the national channel? Blueboar (talk) 18:00, 11 August 2022 (UTC)


 * 67.164.114.199 --
 * Unless they got something wrong, "Fox News" is a cable/satellite channel. This is not "Fox news" on a Fox Broadcasting affiliate channel. --47.147.118.55 (talk) 04:37, 14 August 2022 (UTC)

This story mentions a Liz Cheney ad which "appeared aimed as much at a national audience as at the Republican primary voters in Wyoming"... AnonMoos (talk) 21:47, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

The straightforward answer is that Fox News is not broadcast TV. If you want to run an ad on a "cable/satellite" channel, either you buy an ad with the channel itself, in which case everyone viewing the channel sees it, or you buy one with cable/satellite TV providers, which will run in a commercial slot where carriers are allowed to "overlay" different ads. You've probably noticed these occasionally when a commercial finishes and then it cuts right into a different commercial already in progress. Since the providers are the ones sending the TV feed to end customers, they can if desired target them to certain customers. Some channels may also have different "feeds", such as West/East Coast, which can allow cruder targeting. Anyone with insider knowledge of the biz would be welcome to share it here. So she's not really running the ad "in California" as such—she's probably running it nationally. --47.147.118.55 (talk) 04:37, 14 August 2022 (UTC)

Ben Franklin oldest in the US at time of death?
Was Ben Franklin the oldest person in the United States at the time of his death?Naraht (talk) 12:59, 11 August 2022 (UTC)
 * This question may be unanswerable.  I don't know that Native Americans had a system of registration of births, marriages and deaths at that time. 92.23.217.220 (talk) 13:19, 11 August 2022 (UTC)


 * While Benjamin Franklin enjoyed a longer-than-average lifespan - dying in 1790 at 84 years old - octogenarians were far from unheard of in the late eighteenth century. Unfortunately, the 1790 U.S. Census (the first decennial Census) did not record the age of its subjects, so we're denied an easy counterexample there.
 * Possibly someone has jumbled up the fact that Franklin was the oldest of the U.S. Founding Fathers (70 years old in 1776)? TenOfAllTrades(talk) 13:46, 11 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Franklin was definitely the oldest among the group we call the Founding Fathers of the United States, by quite a margin, being 70 years old when he signed the Declaration of Independence. The Average age of the signers being 44, and a dozen were younger than 35.  However, to say that Franklin was the oldest among a specific, fairly small well documented group is very different than saying he was, among the salmost 4 million Americans at the time of his death, the oldest of them.  At 84 years old, he was older than the average life span, but centenarians were well known in the world, even in his day.  Indeed, at the upper end, people in his time did not live all that shorter than modern people do; life span improvement has been largely due to two factors: reducing childhood mortality and reducing motherhood risks (many women died in childbirth at the time).  Indeed, a person's life expectancy for a male at, say, 25 years old has not moved all that much since the 1700s.  Which is to say that I would find it very unlikely that an 84-year old was the oldest American at any point in history.  -- Jayron 32 14:07, 11 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Speaking of mothers and fathers, even Franklin's own reached 84 and 87, respectively. InedibleHulk (talk) 20:02, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Apparently Abiah means "God is my father". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:07, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
 * He still had 64 years left in 1790 (but good luck finding His birth year). InedibleHulk (talk) 20:30, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
 * On August 25, 1900, God told St. Peter, "Guess what? Nietzsche is dead!" ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:37, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
 * That's the ghost with the most, in name recognition and reported sightings, for sure. But did you know Gérard de Nerval got his holy comeuppance in mere mortal months (if not weeks)? 26 janvier, 1855 AD. InedibleHulk (talk) 23:09, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
 * No. --Amble (talk) 20:55, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Naraht -- You could do a Wikidata search to intersect categories such as Category:American centenarians with an appropriate range of dates of birth to try to find really old people at that time. AnonMoos (talk) 22:26, 11 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Here's the Wikidata query I ran: . A lot of the birth and death dates are incorrect or generic, but I found Hannah (Metcalf) Huntington (1702 - 1791) as one example. --Amble (talk) 22:39, 11 August 2022 (UTC)