token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11mo 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.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Yeah, it makes perfect sense for Jews to be prejudiced against the guy [...] who moved the American Embassy in Israel to Jeruselam.
I believe the line "this, but unironically"? I think it's safe to say many people are unhappy when people take active steps to fulfill a prophecy when a popular version of that prophecy includes, among other undesirable effects, the destruction of their faith:
Many also believe that as this occurs, there will be an ongoing and mass conversion of Jews to Christ.
A lot of the Christians beliefs of what the "second coming" will look like are not great for the Jews. Or, really, any non-Christians, but the Jews in particular get used as pawns and then screwed over.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2yr ago
Wait, the BBC is pro-caring about COVID now? The people in the UK I follow on social media are pretty annoyed at them for being part of downplaying COVID, similar to how I see people on the left in the US annoyed that US media is downplaying COVID. I guess they're annoying both sides.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2yr ago
Why would a 19 year old ever get an mRNA injection, when they could get a shot of Covaxin?
Why is your example alternative vaccine Covaxin, which is not available in the US, and not Novavax, which is actually available in the US? Do you think the protein subunit technique used by Novavax is also not a sufficiently old-fashioned way of making vaccines? My understanding is that it looks to be on par with the mRNA vaccines for effectiveness while having much less in the way of side effects, while the inactivated vaccines like Covaxin work significantly worse.
Percent of New Yorkers ages 0-4 with completed vaccine series - 7.9%
This makes me think the vaccine could be seen as dangerous to parents. Keep in mind that all high-risk (on ventilator) children have probably been vaccinated, but some likely have not.
This is an incredible failure of public health messaging. While risk goes down for older children, COVID-19 is significantly more dangerous for children under 4. This CDC table shows triple the rate of hospitalization on somewhat fewer cases.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2yr ago
Not sure what you mean by "proven true" here. As you mention in (4) most of those are culture war-y enough that you're going to have difficulty getting anyone to admit they were wrong, so it's unclear who you could even reasonably accept as the arbiter of truth. Obviously you're not attempting to be precise in your list of claims here, but especially thinking of (1) and (7), I could see coming down a semantic argument of your claims being true but the other side claiming they never disputed exactly that claim. I haven't been following (1) past the posts about it here, but for (7) there's a pretty clear difference between "veterinary Ivermectin is dangerous for human use due to it being too easy to get the dose way wrong" and "Ivermectin is dangerous"... and then you get into arguments about which claim was actually made. Similarly, I expect the mainstream response to (1) will involve a lot of "of course Twitter cooperated with law enforcement, what's wrong with that?".
The only news in 2022 on (2) I know of is the papers discussed on TWiV 876: Spillover market with Michael Worobey (paper links and podcast audio at that link), which were relatively strong evidence against the lab leak hypothesis (mapping early cases strongly suggests the market as the epicenter; details of the multiple spillovers strongly suggest wildlife origin... for reasons I'm not qualified to defend but that make sense to the scientists), so I don't know why you think it's gotten stronger over the past year.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2yr ago
IQ predicts a lot, like which countries tend to have more innovation and dollar-adjusted GDP, real estate, and stock market growth and appreciation.
Okay.
Investing in high-IQ countries and regions , like Silicon Valley real estate, is almost always better than low/average IQ ones.
This assumes those countries and regions are intrinsically high-IQ as opposed to being high-IQ because they're already wealthy. Otherwise, maybe it's much cheaper to raise the IQ of currently low-IQ regions than to get some marginal amount of additional productivity out of high-IQ regions. This is basically the Stephen Jay Gould* argument for EA directing resources towards poor countries in Africa.
*Quote:
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2yr ago
it wasn't the Russians and that the linked emails were likely genuine
You're still trying to smuggle in this claim. "email were likely genuine" and "it wasn't the Russians" are two separate claims. You've provided evidence for the first but not for the second.
AcocadoPanic's link does go as far as claiming the data appears to have really come from an actual laptop that Hunter Biden used, at which point Occam hints pretty strongly at the laptop in question really having been Hunter Biden's (as opposed to some more complicated plot where Hunter Biden's laptop was hacked by Russians, its contents copied onto a sufficiently similar laptop and that laptop laundered through the repair shop). But you didn't provide that evidence, you just claimed you did and linked to something else.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
23d ago
Sure, that's the way they act for the middle class when who are just buying enough stock to fill out a retirement account. But for the wealthy making investments large enough, they are buying power.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo ago
Starbucks closed more than a dozen locations, primarily located in downtown spots, citing safety concerns.
The universal response on local comment threads whenever this is mentioned is to laugh at the audacity of the claims that Starbucks closed their coffee shops due to "safety concerns" that somehow don't affect the multiple other coffee shops on the same blocks as the ones they closed. Specifically due to those coincidentally being the same Starbucks locations that were pushing to unionize.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
It’s a global analysis of how transgenderism is part of a larger, coordinated agenda to reshape human society. Howard isn’t just writing about what’s happening now—he’s looking ahead to where things are going. And the picture he paints is not pretty. He discusses the corporate interests backing this movement—multinational companies, big tech firms, and global NGOs—and how their financial power is being used to push this agenda on a global scale: Microsoft, PepsiCo, and the World Bank funding LGBTQ initiatives, pushing transgender policies in schools, and influencing national governments to adopt more inclusive laws. This is a big-money, top-down movement that’s being sold as “justice,” but at its core, it’s about control.
Don't leave us in suspense. What horrible things is the shadowy cabal pushing for faux-“justice” going to enact upon society?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2yr ago
I see. And that along with the US Dept. of Energy's "low confidence" assessment of it being a lab leak does suggest there's some classified information that hints in the direction of a lab leak that can't be made public.
Who's "engaging in misinformation" now.
I'm pretty conformable pinning that one the newspaper publishing a detailed article doing lots of hinting at facts they can't support that contradict published research they ignore. Maybe they know something they can't share, but they haven't provided much reason to believe them in that article.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2yr ago
Another thing that seems to be missing from all those analyses, that I think about more and more as my parents get older, is the effect of forcing an aging population that relies on cars to use mass transit for all their daily needs. Eliminate the cars, and you're suddenly trapping millions of reasonably active older people in "deserts" of various kinds, because it's one thing to take the subway to see a play or the bus to go to a park on the weekend, and quite another to have to lug around bags of groceries (or a pathetic little cart) on mass transit day in and day out to meet your basic needs.
For the old and disabled, a system with zero cars clearly doesn't work. Those too old/disabled to use transit probably (although not always) shouldn't be driving their own cars either, so taxis of some kind are needed. Paratransit does exist in some places, and it's really bad (as in, 2-4 hours extra waiting/travel time over using a car); as that Wikipedia article mentions, some places are subsidizing taxis (sorry, "ride-hailing services") instead which makes sense (assuming you've worked out the issues of whether your old users can use a smartphone needed to access ride-hailing services).
While I'm very pro-transit, there are definitely edge cases where cars are necessary, so literally zero cars is not a reasonable goal, and any pro-transit person arguing for such is either confused or being misunderstood.
Rereading your comment, I see
quite another to have to lug around bags of groceries (or a pathetic little cart) on mass transit day in and day out to meet your basic needs.
Trying to discourage car usage in an area so not-dense that people can't walk to a grocery store is nonsense. No one would ever take transit to do their grocery shopping if they had another option (except for maybe occasional trips of a specialty store of some kind); that sounds awful. Work on improving density first.
Urbanists may want to discourage people from living in single-family-home suburbs in favor of denser areas; they certainly don't want to leave suburbs exactly as they are except deleting all the cars and putting in buses and trains.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2yr ago
"Seattle" is in the title of the article. This is about a city, not the suburbs.
The article is vague about suggestions but they include
In some neighborhoods, including Loyal Heights, Mid-Beacon Hill, and South Park, walkability is one well-placed library or grocery store away.
and
Blocks with 15-minute walking access to basic amenities extend far beyond the boundaries of the “Urban Villages” targeted in Seattle’s previous Comprehensive Plans. These pockets of walkability could be the starting point for targeting more inclusive growth across the city.
The former seems to be suggesting some targeted commercial zoning (or perhaps just encouraging commercial use on land where it's already allowed) while the latter is suggesting allowing more housing to be built within 15-minutes walk of a grocery store.
If you want to live by a grocery store, then do it.
Only works if there's places where it's legal to build housing near grocery stores / grocery stores near housing.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2yr ago
This is nonsense resulting from trying to apply macroscopic intuitions at a microscopic scale. Completely unintuitively, N95 masks filter particles smaller than 0.3 microns better, even though the macroscopic intuition is that smaller particles would more easily fit through the holes. Here's a pop-science explanation from Wired.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2yr ago
No vax booster has ever been able to explain to me what the proposed mechanism is for exposure by blood to a small subunit of the virus providing better immunity than exposure by mucous membranes to the whole actual thing; this makes no sense whatsoever when you think about it.
One possible intuition for the reverse seems pretty straightforward: the full virus contains countermeasures against the immune system; the vaccine does not (and has a stabilized version of the spike to make sure it's visible to the immune system). On blood vs. mucus membranes, there's research into nasal vaccines, but there's yet to be one that actually shows better protection from severe disease, possibly because the protection from infection just will never be that great because of the way coronaviruses and the human immune system interact and severe disease happens when the virus gets into more into the blood/internal organs.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2yr ago
The Wikipedia article sorta explains where those numbers come from. But given that it's essentially a numerical summary of how people voted, it seems like it would be greatly affected by what exactly they were voting on (which the Speaker of the House has a lot of control over). That is, it's a measure of how liberal/conservative an individual's voting patterns are, not their politics, and the choice of what to put up for votes could significantly change the interpretation of those two relative to each other.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2yr ago
BLM wanted less police-as-we-know-it, not less money/effort put towards public safety and law enforcement. One of their commonly repeated complaints is that the militarization of police is expensive leading to less money to hire actual people who they believe would be more effective than expensive equipment at improving public safety.
See Campaign Zero, for instance, which lists:
- Public Safety Beyond Policing: "Campaign Zero builds and sustains efforts that support communities to redefine public safety and create solutions that do not involve police."
- Shrink the Reliance and Power of the Police: "Diminishing the power of police requires a targeted and multi-faceted approach. This involves reducing when law enforcement can be deployed, what actions they can take when interacting with individuals, and defining when and how they are permitted to take those actions."
as their first two policy goals.
(EDIT: That list formats correctly as "1." and "2." in the preview, but not in the post...)
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2yr ago
If the system can just arbitrarily decide to not protect them, that seems like pretty good evidence it's not acting in their interests.
The BLM movement's main issue is that they believe police-as-we-know-it is a bad (and in particular systematically racist) way to handle public safety / law enforcement and that those issues should be handled by different organizations than what we currently call "police" (or at least that the current police should play a smaller role). The police murdering black people directly and the police deciding to do nothing about others murdering black people are both reasons for black people to not like the police.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2yr ago
If they cared that much, I would have expected a bill on the floor of the House the next day
I definitely saw social media comments on the left annoyed at this... but also, this is all about noisemaking, not policy. No one was under any illusion that such a bill would pass the Senate, so it's just a question of whether it was good politics to force a (virtual filibuster) vote in the Senate. Maybe the Democratic Party made a tactical error by not forcing a vote (i.e. maybe making Republican senators commit to their abortion views would have been bad for them in the midterms... but I'm guessing the Democrats would have held the vote if they believed that), but they lacked the power to pass a bill so it seems strange to blame them for not doing so.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2yr ago
People change their opinions in response to new information. Elon Musk's public image has gotten both a lot harder to ignore and a lot more explicitly right-wing recently.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
24d ago
The FairTax would make it so the truly rich couldn’t spend money without the government getting a quarter of it.
The FairTax proposal does not tax anything rich people spend a lot of money on.
The section of Wikipedia page on FairTax titled "Taxable items and exemptions" says:
Also excluded are investments, such as purchases of stock, corporate mergers and acquisitions and capital investments. Savings and education tuition expenses would be exempt as they would be considered an investment (rather than final consumption).
It also says that rent would be taxed. It's not specified there, but reading into the sources, I see buying a house would not be except for new construction (unclear exactly what that means if most of the price of the house is the land it is on? Is that amount re-taxed every time a new building is built on it?).
Sure, rich people spend more on food and other everyday expenses than poor people, but not a lot more. Many more expensive purchases (housing, education, companies) are exempt from the tax or could easily just be made in a different country (yachts, private planes) and carefully never "imported". Those purchases are currently made with money that's at least theoretically taxed as income.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
I can't imagine there being another round of top-down enforced lockdowns. Although H5N1 could be bad enough that a lot more people would be isolating voluntarily.
But, really, your assumption would be conspiracy, not the much simpler explanation that public health is bad when you cut funding for public health?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
(1) would require cooperation from the people running the election. But (2) and (3) do not as they only involve looking at publicly available information (depending on state may require an explicit request, but in many states you can simply go to the Secretary of State's website and click download). Why haven't the groups claiming election fraud done them? Or maybe they have?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2yr ago
This is one interpretation I see proposed in left-leaning comment spaces. But it also makes sense to me: children take cues from the adults around them, and adults are talking about these laws and the culture war around them.
While I'm all for better sex ed and better access to contraception, the comment you replied to is talking about very-late-term abortions. These are almost certainly not unwanted pregnancies or they would have been aborted earlier. They are wanted but failed pregnancies which are some combination of non-viable and dangerous to the mother. The risks here are made significantly greater by "pro-life" policies which discourage administering medical care to pregnant people if there's at all some way to squint at it and pretend refusing that care could have resulted in another baby being born.
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