token_progressive's profile

token_progressive maybe not the only progressive here 17d ago

This seems completely backwards to me. Preferred pronouns are if anything more useful when interacting between cultures because I often don't know what the implied gender of foreign names is. Sure it's also useful if gender-non-conforming people prefer "they" or not, but that's certainly not what I'm learning from the gender labels in my work directory info.

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token_progressive maybe not the only progressive here 22d ago

I know far more than I'd like about the lab leak conspiracy nonsense. But it's also not actually relevant: whether the virus came from the market or the lab, the US position in the Chinese CDC is about the cover-up afterward.

Remember we only got the sequence used to make the vaccines because an Australian scientist, Eddie Holmes, had a personal connection with a Chinese scientist and convinced them to defy the Chinese government to release the sequence (interview with Eddie Holmes about that). Having people in the Chinese CDC is to have enough visibility in what's going on there so they won't cover things up / have those personal connections so they won't. With those connections, we wouldn't have needed that Chinese scientist being willing to light their career on fire to get that information. And would have known about the outbreak sooner.

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token_progressive maybe not the only progressive here 23d ago

But the world did not literally end because he typed the wrong number into a computer terminal like in LOST

As president, Trump literally fired the guy whose job that was and we did have a worldwide catastrophe.

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token_progressive maybe not the only progressive here 23d ago

Not necessarily. I've seen multiple commentators assert that Kamala is the only possible alternative. They might be wrong, but it's not unreasonable the betting markets might buy that.

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token_progressive maybe not the only progressive here 23d ago

Michelle Obama's name always comes up on these things because she's one of the few prominent people that the Dems could unite behind easily.

Looking at the "Career" section of her Wikipedia page, while Michelle Obama has been involved in politics plenty, she's never even run for an elected position herself. I really can't see the Democrats going for her, in addition to her being pretty clear about not wanting the job.

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token_progressive maybe not the only progressive here 23d ago

I often have the same reaction. But to add some nuance, you don't need to budget for market-rate housing. You do need to budget for below-market-rate housing. Of course, it's probably a lot more cost effective to fix the regulations so market rate is lower so there's a lot less need for below-market-rate housing.

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token_progressive maybe not the only progressive here 27d ago

I’m not sure how this plays out with regards to state budgets and central funding though.

This is pretty core to the problems with housing and the homeless in the United States. Housing is handled at the very local level, often effectively even below the city level due to the impact of public meetings. There's been some pushback on that in the past few years with some amount of state-level zoning overrides happening in a few places, but I'm pretty sure most places do homeless services funding at the county or city level, so sending the homeless to another city is a cheap and popular solution for the source city.

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token_progressive maybe not the only progressive here 27d ago

And, honestly, New York probably has more homeless in shelters than coastal California at least partially because there are times of year when you'll die if you sleep on the streets in NYC.

Yes, as unpopular as homeless shelters are, letting them all die of exposure is even less popular. But the political consensus in west coast cities seems to be on the side preferring people sleep on the streets over building homeless shelters.

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token_progressive maybe not the only progressive here 27d ago

I'm fine with requiring people to use shelter beds (although I gather some of the debate is on what constitutes an acceptable shelter bed) and as far as I can tell, so is the Ninth Circuit. I assume there's some technicality making their ruling not actually do what it appears to? I thought this whole fight was because Grants Pass didn't have enough shelter beds.

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token_progressive maybe not the only progressive here 27d ago

Your point holds true for OR and WA but unless I’m misreading the graph, California has 100k extra homeless but only 40k fewer beds. Even if they build as many beds as New York they’d still have a homeless problem.

That's a strange way to look at the data. I gave the per-capita numbers because I thought it was much more fair to norm on the size of the state. What you said is equivalent to saying that if California built as many beds as New York, a state half its size, then it would still have a homeless problem. Which when put that way seems completely unsurprising.

On a more meta level, you seem be presuming that homeless people have a right to a bed in the major metropolis of their choice.

I made a descriptive claim, not a normative one. There being shelter beds available to sleep in seems like a more immediate cause of fewer homeless people visibly sleeping on the streets than the police forcing homeless into beds, which doesn't seem like a workable strategy if there aren't enough beds.

You seem to be implying an alternative strategy of forcing the homeless to move elsewhere, which unlike forcing them into shelters that don't exist is at least physically possible. It's unlikely to be very popular with either the homeless or the elsewhere, but it's possible you could come up with an option some of them would find acceptable. One difficulty is that in the US outside of urban centers, you usually need a car, which is part of why homeless shelters are usually in fairly dense areas with transit.

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token_progressive maybe not the only progressive here 27d ago

Do you want to know why LA, San Fran, Portland, and Seattle are drowning in homeless while New York isn't?

Ah, yes, definitely a mystery for the ages. The following data is from this page. I included the "# homeless" for completeness and I understand the source has an incentive to overstate it. But I actually wanted to highlight is the large difference in number of shelter beds.

State	NY	CA	OR	WA
Total Pop	19,571,216	38,940,231	4,233,358	7,812,880
# homeless/night	*74,178*	171,521	17,959	25,211
/10,000 pop	38	44	42	32
Temp Beds	*65,899*	24,033	2,953	7,342
/10,000 pop	34	6	7	9
Permanent Beds	*36,480*	33,660	7,895	9,359
/10,000 pop	19	9	19	12
(Temp+Perm) Beds	*102,379*	57,693	10,848	16,701
/10,000 pop	52	15	26	21

New York has way more shelter beds (I'm assuming all of these numbers are dominated by the cities... because I wasn't able to find finer-grained data easily). They're not getting in legal fights over their refusal to build shelters because they're not refusing to build shelters.

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token_progressive maybe not the only progressive here 29d ago

As I said, I'm here to understand, not to win arguments. Not that I won't respond, just that my goal here is not to convince you that I am right and you are wrong.

Are there major wins from Biden over the last four years that you could point to that are better than the pre-COVID state of things? (E.g. reducing inflation, crime, a better economy: those don't count unless they're better than 2019.)

The short version is: of course there aren't any major wins. As long as the Democrats don't control Congress (and there's no realistic way of that happening in 2024; not sure what the 2026 Senate map looks like, but generally mid-terms aren't great for the president's party), they can't really pass any significant legislation outside of whatever they can squeeze into a budget reconciliation bill. The downside of a Republican presidency is much higher magnitude than the upside of a Democratic presidency because the Republicans have the goal of breaking things, which is a lot easier to do without legislation (the Republicans are also unlikely to get 60 votes in the Senate).

Improvements on anti-trust: [...]. I'm inclined to think people hate on corporations too much, so I don't know that I would be in favor of antagonism towards the largest and most successful companies.

... do you think anti-trust is just lawfare against entities the government doesn't like? Monopolies result in high prices and bad service for all of us. The government doing something about them makes life better for everyone except the monopolists. Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy by Matt Stoller is a good book on the history of the politics around monopolies. The Biden administration is the first in a while to take monopolies at all seriously.

Somewhat related, Trump actively weakened the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has been actually doing things under Biden. I'd rather the financial system actually be restructured around smaller banks, but I don't see any political appetite for that.

Improvements on climate/energy

Geo-engineering isn't a real solution to this problem. Even if we somehow knew how to do it and were confident we had all of the unintended consequences covered and well understood, the geo-political implications of fossil fuel dependence are still bad, as is the fact that fossil fuels getting increasing expensive to extract has been a drag on our economy for 50+ years and response for most of that time was to put our fingers over our ears and say "LA LA LA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU". The US government likes that they understand the geopolitical situation resulting from the importance of fossil fuels and the fact that the US has a lot, so they don't want to change, but that's playing with fire and it's stupid.

Improvements on environmental regulations

The only real headline here is the EPA press release "Biden-Harris Administration Announces $3 Billion for Lead Pipe Replacement". I don't have any other details here; mostly worried about a Republican president discouraging the EPA from enforcing existing regulations, but I assume there's always new things for the EPA to worry about.

Improvements on transportation: Like, interstate highways?

The received wisdom on transit blogs is that a Republican administration probably kills, or at least significantly reduces, federal grants on bus/rail improvements. And probably kills any meaningful discussion on improving passenger rail in general. Inter-state rail seems more obviously the federal government's purview, but in practice a lot of projects that stay within a state are partially funded by federal grants.

Improvements on voting: How exactly? I wouldn't mind requiring IDs. It'd be cool if we let children vote, and parents vote on their behalf, but no one serious would do that. Anyway, overall, how does the administration affect this?

If the Democrats could pass legislation, they could at least try to reinstate the Voting Rights Act. There's the For the People Act, although, of course, what politicians are willing to put in a bill they know will never pass may be different than what do would do once in power. I'd like to go further and uncap the House (perhaps with multi-member districts to have easier minority party representation), but I don't really see that happening, especially as it would likely be seen as a power grab by the Democrats since it would make winning the presidency without the popular vote basically impossible in practice.

Public health/healthcare: Yeah, our system isn't great. Not sure what's better.

Uh, single payer? Privatized medical billing is incredibly expensive and a complete waste of everyone's time. Everyone I know in health care complains that so much of their time is spent on billing instead of actually helping patients, and it's completely unnecessary except to employ a bunch of clerical workers doing nothing useful and funneling cash away from actually providing health care.

I trust Republicans better in a pandemic

Don't get me wrong, Biden's handling of COVID (and H5N1 for that matter) has been awful. But his policy has been to do nothing while Trump's COVID policy was to actively sabotage everything except funding the vaccine development. Trump's pandemic plan is to disband the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (Biden's plan seems to be to shrug his shoulders and say testing cows for H5N1 is too hard, so not a lot better). A sensible COVID policy would have involved prioritizing research on transmission (after vaccines and treatments, of course, but it's not like the same scientists would be studying all of those) and what it's effected by and both communicating that information clearly (e.g. "gathering inside/inside with HEPA filters/outside is fine without masks is fine a X density, with N95s that are actually available at Y density") and providing the relevant equipment (HEPA filters, N95s, etc.). Instead we are watching another possible respiratory pandemic develop and no one's bothered to so much as put some HEPA filters in our ~~germ factories~~ schools.

USPS: I don't see why you care about this much?

I'm not sure where you got the idea that I care about this much. It's one of several items that get mentioned in news articles regularly. There's the obvious problem of it looking a lot like a plot to make mail-in voting work worse to reduce turnout and possibly swing elections. But also, it's an example of Republicans trying to destroy a cheap public sector solution so they can replace it with an expensive private sector one, costing everyone more money.

IRS: Is direct file a democrat thing? I hadn't realized it was polarized.

This is the point in reading your reply that I'm pretty convinced I'm just being trolled, but I'll respond with charity.

Yes, Republicans have proposed defunding Direct File. They didn't want it funded in the first place: the IRS creatively interpreted the funding bill letting them "study" the possibility to run a functional, albeit very limited, pilot program. Republicans are consistently against anything that makes filing taxes easier. They have openly stated their goal is to make the process of paying taxes painful to garner political support for reducing taxes. This makes them a political ally in Intuit and H&R Block who want paying taxes to be painful so they can sell you their products that should be unnecessary.

Also, the Republicans are consistently against funding for the IRS to actually be able to enforce tax law, which in practice results in rich people paying significantly less in tax than even what they are legally obligated to pay. Which is good evidence that they don't actually want to reduce the deficit because actually collecting taxes owed would help there.

Foreign policy: I'm not sure. I agree that Trump is a little more likely to be unpredictable, but not terribly so. I think he's viewed as more competent

Wait, what?! What possible evidence do you have that anyone thinks Trump is competent in foreign policy? The fact that his acting like an idiot didn't accidentally start any wars, so it must have been more calculated than it looked?

Oh, I'd love a Republican department of education. A significant reform in how universities are funded would be great. I have no interest in spending large amounts of federal money on a bunch of radicals.

Really not sure how to respond to that. College has clearly gotten too expensive. The Democrats don't seem to really be trying to address the root causes and the Republicans just want to reduce the public funding to make it even more expensive.

School choice probably is more a state thing, but that would be great too.

School choice is a scam. Private schools that are better than public schools may exist, but they're the really expensive ones that school vouchers won't meaningfully cover, so they'd effectively be bleeding public school budgets to subsidize sending upper-middle-/upper-class children to private school. For the most part, private/charter schools are worse than public schools and the rare statistics showing otherwise are misleading because they're choosing their students. An important part of the scam is that school funding per student is not actually the marginal cost to educate a student in such a way that the funding for gen-ed students effectively subsidizes the much more expensive per-student special-ed programs. Charter schools don't accept special-ed students, so school voucher programs effectively defund special-ed through subtle accounting.

I don't expect any restrictions on IVF besides a few states. It's electoral suicide. Abortion restrictions are not nationally popular, and IVF restrictions less than that.

Not popular, and yet they happen anyway. Maybe the Republicans would keep their religious extremists from passing such policies if they ended up with a trifecta, but it's definitely something I worry about.

Social security will run out within ten years, on current trends.

And Biden wants to raise cap on the payroll tax that is causing this problem.

This will eventually turn into a sovereign debt crisis[...]

The debt crisis is entirely artificial and it has been Republican policy to intensify it for decades because they want an excuse to kill welfare and other government spending. We could just not cut taxes and fund the IRS enough to collect the taxes that are officially owed.

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token_progressive maybe not the only progressive here 30d ago

My general perception of the trials was that the document one was real, but the others were mostly politically motivated, conviction notwithstanding.

The documents trial definitely seems like the most clear-cut case. And there's been drips of really bad-for-Trump-sounding headlines like yesterday "Special counsel probed Trump Mar-a-Lago trip that aides 'kept quiet' weeks before FBI search: Sources". The /r/politics commentariat is pretty convinced Trump and Kushner literally sold classified information to foreign adversaries, but I'd like to think if the government had anything resembling proof of a crime of that magnitude they'd actually indict them on it.

I haven't looked at project 2025, really. I should. Any concerns you find particularly worrying?

I'm not sure how much to read into it as really different from his first term, but it sounds like a more organized attempt to destroy the functioning of the federal government, so possibly even more effective at stopping a lot of important government functions. Not sure exactly how this interacts with the Chevron Deference case that presumably will get a Supreme Court opinion in the next day or two.

What are the reasons that you would point to voting for Biden/not voting for Trump?

The above bleeds into the general policy issues that are more Republican Party related than Trump-specific: a Republican Party controlled federal government effectively means a 4-year pause on any chance to make improvements in anti-trust, climate/energy, environmental regulations, transportation, voting, public health, healthcare, USPS, IRS (e.g. Direct File), and I'm sure more areas that didn't come to mind writing this list. I don't expect to fully agree with Democratic Party policies, but I can generally expect them to not be actively trying to make things worse and there's a possibility of convincing them to do things better.

Trump's foreign policy in practice didn't seem to be majorly different, but he seems a lot more likely to do something stupid. And with the active wars in Ukraine and Palestine there's more opportunities for him to do real damage.

There's also some culture war-y issues that I'm likely shielded from living a Blue state, although could cause problems if I ever travel to/through a Red state. But a Republican Department of Education following Florida's lead could make it difficult for many of my friends to keep their jobs as people who are both teachers and queer. And many Red states making it difficult for people trying to have children to access healthcare and some national level politicians talking about want to make federal laws along the same lines make me worry about friends who want to get pregnant in the next few years. Also, more Republican appointments to the Supreme Court, among other problems, possibly results in Obergefell being overturned, although I'm not sure how that interacts with the Respect for Marriage Act.

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token_progressive maybe not the only progressive here 30d ago

Hmm... I definitely remember thinking that multiple times, but I don't remember specifically about what. Some general categories:

Various bits of news from Trump's trials. There's been some discussion here, but not a lot.
Project 2025. Also has been mentioned here, but not taken seriously.
Aging-related gaffes. It seems like both sides think the other candidate is obviously senile and theirs is fine. I'm curious what the debate will look like, but it seems likely both sides will think the debate proved their candidate is great and the other is incompetent.

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