token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
2mo 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
11mo 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.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
But there are things I’d say and do around men that I’d never say or do around women.
I think this is actually a core worldview difference here. I'm well aware that people act differently in single-gender vs. mixed-gender spaces, and in my teens and early 20s actively avoided being in male-only spaces because there's a subset of men that act like assholes in male-only spaces. I'm not entirely certain if I've stopped encountering that due to selecting friends better, older people just being more mature, or just rarely finding myself in male-only groups, partially because essentially all of my socializing is now in explicitly queer-accepting or queer-normative spaces.
The idea of anyone I know acting differently purely based on the gender distribution of the group they're in, strikes me as strange. Sure there's significant personality differences based on the size of the group and awareness of sensitivities of certain individuals (e.g. not making sexual comments around prudish people). But as I said, I also mostly socialize in queer spaces where gender is naturally going to be treated differently.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
We clearly have very different points of view on driving: I think "lack of agency" is not a terrible summary of why I so strongly dislike driving. It's hard to imagine a more intense instance of lack of agency in everyday life than being surrounded by dozens to hundreds of people any one of whom has a non-trivial chance at any moment to make a mistake that will kill or maim me. Sure, driving a car as opposed to riding in one increases the agency there, but most of the danger is other people.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
7.9% is an extremely low vaccination rate. Normally when people talk about being worried about "low" vaccination rates, they mean 95% or 90%. And COVID-19 is both more dangerous and more common than many of the illnesses we vaccinate children for. If you for some reason decided you had a limited number of vaccinations budget and were rationally optimizing which childhood vaccinations to omit to maximize wellbeing, COVID-19 would not be your first pick (not sure exactly what would be... probably chickenpox? They all suck, this is a terrible choice to be making.). But that's clearly not the optimization people are making; somehow they (and/or their pediatricians) haven't gotten the message that it's actually an important vaccination. And we're going to have a lot more children with long-term health consequences (some of them dead) because of that.
(I'm having trouble finding definitions on their website of what they mean by "up-to-date": the relevant thing to care about is getting the full 3-dose series; past that, for most people, additional doses at best give an ~3 month window of protection from infection, but no significant additional protection from severe disease/death, so the public health benefit is minimal.)
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
My understanding is that the best-practices as determined and accepted by education researchers have practically nothing to do with the standard practices actually used in schools. I regularly see friends in education complaining that grading (as opposed to mastery learning, for example), homework, and lectures (as opposed to project-based learning, for example) have pretty strong evidence against them but are nearly universal in actual schools.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
For my part, I remain puzzled over how some of their initiatives are termed anti-democratic. For instance, they want to allow businesses to reject certain customers/requests based on their faith.
I think from an American perspective, there's the idea that public spaces are for all* of the public because the alternative is segregation and we decided in the 1960s that that's bad. "Anti-democratic" doesn't quite fit, but I think the idea is that everyone is part of the same society is part of why it's important that everyone has a voice in how the society is run and there's some connection between being allowed to participate in society by being present in public spaces and being allowed to participate in society by voting.
*That is, businesses shouldn't exclude people by group/demographics; excluding individuals due to behavior (e.g. that specific person harassed the employees of that specific restaurant) is different.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
I think the steelman is that selectively excerpting the truth can be misleading. /r/politics certainly likes to talk about the supposed materials Russia hacked from the GOP and never released. Mind, I've never seen any evidence that actually happened, so this sounds a lot like a "both sides" cope. And, uh, even if both sides have skeletons in the closest, it seems like a stretch to argue that means both sides should get to keep them secret.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
16d ago
I'd say ProPublica, The Atlantic, and The Economist are all mainstream left-leaning news sources I expect to do a better job of analysis than NPR. With the "analysis" part, I'm intentionally excluding Reuters/AP which I expect to be relatively trustworthy on the facts (of course with some bias on which facts they report and precisely how they present them), but analysis just isn't what they're trying to do.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
3mo ago
Yeah, there's a reason "electoral reform" followed closely by "legislative reform" are at the top of that list and others like it. As far as I can see, the available levers to actually effect political change of this kind (i.e. movement on an issue other than what appears in the major party platform) are:
- Voting in primaries if there's some candidates running with oddball positions you might be able to push a major party towards. (State legislature is probably the appropriate level to target.)
- Running in primaries.
- Citizen lobbying groups. I don't like IRV but at least it's not FPTP and FairVote does seem to be making some real, albeit slow, progress in getting it adopted in various places in the US. That said, I'm not sure that generalizes as there's no real anti-FairVote interest group. The opposition is mainly inertia and not wanting to spend more money (and, cynically, elected officials not wanting changes to the system that got them elected, but at least they aren't going to say that). Basically every other issue on that list has an effective lobbying group willing and able to fight against changes.
Apparently, voting for a third party in a presidential election doesn't make the list. Sure, make your protest votes if you want, but as you say, the major parties will just ignore them unless they got a lot of the vote.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
These days there's no reason to be wearing low-quality masks, which were common in 2020 when there were shortages of medical-quality masks. N95 or equivalent masks are now cheap and plentiful. And much more comfortable than cloth masks. Also, I know multiple people who have better than N95 respirators (P100, I think?), mainly for plane trips, I think, which are likely plenty good for protection from someone unmasked and infected. While most of my friends have gotten COVID at least once by now, I've never heard of anyone who thought they acquired it while wearing a mask, including multiple stories of groups of people getting COVID and the people with them wearing masks did not.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
What do you mean by "evidence that masks work"?
Surely there's no meaningful doubt that COVID-19 is caused by SARS-CoV-2 virus particles, primarily entering through the nose and mouth, and the chance of infection increases with the number of virus particles (likely saturating at some point). Nor that N95+ or equivalent masks block the vast majority of such particles. Similarly, we also are pretty sure at this point that telling a population "wear a mask" has minimal public health benefits, since I hope we can agree that masks have no effect when not worn. To me, the non-obvious parts seem to be:
- Exactly how many virus particles are needed to infect. i.e. in a situation where you're exposed to a billion virus particles, if the mask reduces this a factor of a thousand to a million virus particles, but ten thousand are enough for 90% chance of infection, then the mask isn't very useful. This doesn't seem to be the case, but to get direct evidence would require some creative experimental design to study as the obvious study would be a titrated human challenge, which, uh, isn't going to get past a medical ethics board.
- If it's actually feasible for an individual to wear a mask at nearly all times they are actually in the presence of virus particles. This is difficult to answer because it varies greatly on the environment (how many people in their community have the virus, how carefully the people they come in contact test, ...) and the individual's behavior. If you live alone and never leave home and get everything via no-contact delivery, you can probably be pretty sure you're never exposed... but also, masking isn't relevant either. But I do know people who are medically fragile and extremely careful with masking whenever they leave their home, but still go out and travel, so it is possible. But, of course, nearly everyone is going to have a lot more human contact than that, but exactly what that contact looks like (lots of packed indoor concerts where everyone is screaming or just going to small restaurants and retail stores with very tall ceilings?) is going to greatly change the risk of exposure.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo ago
If having people living near you constitutes a reduction in your quality of life, city living might not be for you.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10mo ago
I'm just asking you to actually make an argument. I can think of plenty of (not mutually exclusive) steelmans for the lab leak theory:
-
Strong priors for lab leak, so evidence for market hypothesis not updating you very far in that direction. I'm guessing this is the one you mean by calling me "outright stupid"?
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The scientists saying the evidence points towards the market hypothesis are intentionally misrepresenting the data, presumably because the concept of lab leaks make scientists as a whole look bad, although maybe also the specific scientists are under pressure from various governments or institutions to help cover up a lab leak.
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The scientists saying the evidence points towards the market hypothesis are being misled and credulous. e.g., China's cover-up included releasing data that points in that direction and omitting the data that doesn't.
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Some form of "both": i.e., lab leak via the market, either by animals or humans infected at the lab spreading via the market, so the market spread science is all true, but not indicative of spread from a wild animal.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11mo ago
Is "Luxury Beliefs" just the right-wing version of "voting against their own interests"? @hydroacetylene makes this more explicit:
This is partly because living progressive values is an impressively dumb decision that takes real and quasi-religious commitment, but still.
Have you considered in your disagreements with your political opponents about policy the merest possibility that they might be right (or at least correctly accomplishing their own goals which may differ from yours)?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
letting teenagers vote will often not be ideal, but I think I would be in favor of such a policy?
While it's a very different policy than the one under discussion, I'm pretty strongly in favor of lowering the voting age to 16 as a way to encourage youth voting. The idea being that voting is habit; people who vote are a lot more likely to vote in the future, and building that habit seems much more likely to happen while living at home and having the influence of parents and high school civics classes than while 18-year-olds are adjusting to being out in the world on their own as adults (whether or not they're in college).
I'd consider the fact that 16-year-olds likely are heavily influenced by their parents and may just vote in line with their parents without really thinking about their own political beliefs and interests as a major downside of that idea. And I'd expect that effect to be significantly stronger the younger the child.
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
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.
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