token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
9mo ago
I'm not sure how much it makes sense to use polling data to predict other kinds of events. My understanding is that using polling to predict elections makes sense because you're essentially running the election early on a sample, so going from there to estimating the election results is what statistics is good at. And there are a lot of polls on elections people care about so you have enough data to do something with.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
I agree with your summary, although I'd argue Rory and Lorelei's fall from grace started in the last two seasons (I had to check the Wikipedia summary to remind myself of when stuff happened exactly) where it seemed like the writers had them just starting to act much dumber than usual in attempt to create dramatic tension. It felt like the writers were actively avoiding letting them be happy. And the reboot just turned that up to 11.
To be fair, although the show focuses on their point of view so it's not obvious at a glance, Rory and Lorelei are pretty terrible self-centered people, so it's hard to feel too bad for them.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Haven't watched a video yet. Is there a transcript somewhere by any chance? It's almost three hours long which will take a while to get through even at 2x speed and YouTube's transcription feature is disabled. I found this page which lists zero transcripts for this Congress, so maybe a transcript will appear there in the future?
He is now claiming that Covid was Trump's fault because Trump was being too nice to China, and was too nice to Xi.
Yes, China lying about and covering up COVID-19 is primarily China's fault. But part of the US CDC's job has been to try their best to keep China honest in part by having personnel in China so they can keep an eye on things more directly and maintain relationships so even if the Chinese government wants to lie the scientists might not*. And Trump did reduce CDC presence in China and specifically removed the person in charge of being on top of emerging pandemics from China... although those articles mention Trump using the trade war as part of the reasoning, so that seems like evidence that being "too nice to China" isn't a good explanation, although it is a regular claim on /r/politics that Trump is/was too credulous of foreign leaders.
*See the story of how the genetic sequence got released by a Chinese scientist going against orders allowing for an early start on vaccines, discussed in this TWiV episode.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
So, I want to talk about the REPUBLICAN PLAN TO DESTROY SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE. I went to look and see if this is something that anyone is actually talking about, but what I'm mostly finding is onion links in partisan outlets that link to stories that link to stories that link to stories that have that one time in 2010 that Mike Lee said we were going to have to do something about SS going insolvent. Are there any actual, current plans by actual Republicans to do anything that could reasonably be called "gutting SS/Medicare"? My impression is of desperate, disingenuous fearmongering, but I only have so much tolerance for digging through Dark Hinting from the outgroup, and I'm not entirely discounting the possibility that there is something serious in there.
(I had seen those headlines and hadn't dug deeper. Here's what I found with a quick web search.)
I think you're talking about New York Times articles like "Republicans, Eyeing Majority, Float Changes to Social Security and Medicare". For concrete proposals, it links indirectly to https://banks.house.gov/uploadedfiles/budget_fy22_final.pdf which includes details such as
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Increasing the Medicare/Social Security age and enshrining future increases in law by tying them to life expectancy.
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Privatizing Medicare/Social Security.
These (and a lot of other details I didn't read carefully nor am at all qualified to analyze) are framed as responsible ways to keep those programs running. And, of course, the minority party always proposes things when out of power that they never seriously try to enact when they think they might actually pass. But the House Republicans (well, the RSC which is apparently 156 out of 212 current House Republicans) really did publish a wishlist of what they want in a budget and it included those things.
The linked article "Entitlement, Spending Cap Plans Linked by GOP to Debt-Limit Deal" quotes Republican politicans talking about that plan in interviews for that article published October 11, 2022, and that the plan itself was published in June.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Cultural appropriation is an issue that involves more nuance than the media tends to give it. The part of those complaints that made sense to me is that they didn't know what the things they were baking were and making confidently wrong comments about how they were supposed to be. See this tweet about the s'mores challenge:
me: I feel no special attachment to my american identity
paul hollywood: you see, it’s essential to carefully apply the blowtorch around the edges of the s’more—obviously we don’t want a gooey mess
me: I must throw him into the boston harbor
with the follow-up
I should clarify that the dessert featured in the technical looked delicious, I would like to eat it, the ganache and meringue sound heavenly and the digestive biscuit is a good substitute for graham cracker
but it is at best a s’more-INSPIRED dessert, not a s’more
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
3mo ago
The people I know who are the loudest about health care all have Type 1 diabetes. That Wikipedia article says
Within the United States the number of people affected is estimated at one to three million.
so around 0.3-1% of the population. One I know says they very intentionally went the route of working for a big company to have a stable corporate job with health care because they've known since childhood that their choices were stable employment or death. The ones I know who didn't luck into such a stable career are pretty angry about it.
Women with significant period symptoms (which are fairly common, albeit not universal) also tend to care about health care to get access to the medication to manage their periods (aka birth control).
But also, catastrophic events resulting in high medical bills don't have to be all that common before a lot of people have a friend or acquaintance who had trouble with such a situation.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
This seems to be missing part of the feminist argument which is that the advice they complain is "victim blaming" is often tied to claims that the advice doesn't actually affect the chance of rape. Which is also related to redirecting the discussion to claims that stranger rape is rare, so advice geared towards avoiding it is a useless distraction.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11mo ago
I'm not familiar with local politics in Jacksonville past hearing from multiple people that the Florida State Democratic Party is incompetent, if not actively working against their stated ideals, including actively pushing away people wanting to help. Maybe the local party in Jacksonville is better or you can find some local politician you can connect with, but the other approach might be looking into local citizen lobbying groups that care about the issues you care about like a local branch of Strong Towns, a local transit organization, or something else. One way to find such organizations is looking for lists of endorsements of candidates with views you agree with, but other than that I don't have any ideas.
I don't think "blue politics" is a meaningful term if you're talking about policy on housing and public transportation. Most large cities in the US are dominated by the Democratic Party and there are major intra-party arguments over the appropriate policies, and to some extent they are issues that cross party lines (e.g. YIMBY free market arguments may appeal to some Republicans). Looking at Donna Deagan's campaign website, "zoning" is mentioned quietly in one section and transit isn't mentioned at all. My interpretation is that she's unlikely to make big changes on either, but maybe I'm missing some local details.
A few states have been making zoning law changes at the state level recently because the local levels haven't been willing to do anything. But some of that is that no one municipality wants to make a change while their neighbors don't, so zoning at the state level fixes some coordination problems. Jacksonville's weirdly large size (compared to other urban areas where the metro area is legally organized into many more municipalities) might make it easier for zoning changes to happen at the municipality level.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11mo ago
The fewer hours worked, the larger proportion of your working time is overhead seems like a sensible observation. But it doesn't lend itself to any specific choice of what amount of overhead is acceptable. And there's also a trade-off of the more hours worked, the larger proportion of your working effectiveness is lost to fatigue. And both of those trade-offs likely vary widely job-to-job. And possibly in non-obvious ways, given that as a knowledge worker, my time "not working" regularly includes having some work problem in the back of my mind.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Some of the (very left/progressive) authors I follow do talk about how sufficient representation is necessary for them to have more complex diverse characters, as opposed to aggressively averting tropes/stereotypes. To the point of one author saying they definitely were never going consider killing off $SPECIFIC_REPRESENTATION (in a book where the majority of the named characters died) because meeting those representation points was so rare. Having characters match stereotypes too closely is a lot less problematic if there's enough characters around in those categories that there's some around that don't match those same stereotypes.
This is part of why "token" representation is considered problematic, although calling representation "token" usually also implies that no real though has been put into the representation past sticking a label on a character that would otherwise be indistinguishable from a character without that label.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
For whatever reason, as of 2019, works are actually falling out of copyright in the United States. Maybe Disney is less powerful somehow? Or maybe copyright is long enough for them and they don't see the point anymore? Or maybe they missed the 20 year calendar reminder they set in 1998 and forgot and will get right on extending copyright soon.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2mo ago
I think you two might be talking past each other. Whether or not the losers should have good objections is a normative statement. Whether or not their objections are a problem is a descriptive statement. If the losers refuse to accept the result of an election no matter how fair and transparent it is, you don't have a functioning democracy.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
More than that, it's aligned interests. The places I've lived where I was renting and planning on only living there a few years, you better believe I didn't give two shits about the future of the place. Owning a home really changes the incentive structure.
I hear this and it's such a strange concept to me. I live in an expensive west coast city. The people I know with close ties and care about the place are locals who, for the most part, have parents who own houses because they got into the market so long ago, and they can't imagine ever being able to afford to buy instead of renting. The people who own houses are either the aforementioned older generation or the people who moved here for high-paying jobs and can actually afford to buy into the market, but will happily hop off to some other city if the opportunity presents itself because the cost of owning a home just isn't a big deal to them. Obviously, I'm generalizing and a lot of people fall into neither group, but those two are very common in my experience and make me quite suspicious of claims that "landowner" is a remotely good proxy for "cares about the local government".
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
I think Aurora is the only book of his I read after enjoying the RGB Mars trilogy (+ The Martians short story collection in that universe). Those books go a bit off the deep end into the environmentalism and Marxism towards the end... but basically just I recommend skipping Blue Mars or noping out of when you've had enough. I also thought Aurora was overly preachy (and mind, this is coming from someone who literally goes by "token progressive" on this forum; I may disagree with him less you than you do, but it's still not fun to read), so it's good to hear most of his other books are good.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10mo ago
Not sure gay marriage fits in that list. I think you might be misremembering just how unpopular it was 20 years ago (link to chart of Gallup poll results over time showing 35% support in 1999 and 42% in 2004 and apparently they didn't ask the question in the intervening time). In comparison, this article references a 2020 poll showing 34% support for "defund the police", although post-2020 the numbers go down.
(Other polling data I found researching for this comment: Support for abortion looks pretty flat at ~55%. Didn't find a good source on evolution, but actually teaching evolution increased from 51% in 2007 to 67% in 2019, whatever that means. I can't find any historical survey data on drag shows, but this YouGov poll says 25% of people said it's okay for children to attend them (which I'm guessing is the issue you meant) and a strong majority in all crosstabs for allowing them in general. Reparations are even more unpopular at 19% in 2021 according to that poll, although rising from 15% in 2014.)
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10mo ago
A couple quick thoughts:
I'm not sure if bullying exactly fits under the category of "hate crimes", but I definitely have seen people talking about moving away from trans-unfriendly states has greatly reduced or even eliminated the anti-trans bullying they / their children have encountered. These laws are seen as the government condoning that bullying, so the two aren't really considered separable. My understanding is that the danger to trans children is mainly suicide, and both bullying and the government denying them recognition of their identity or appropriate medical care contributes to that.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Another complaint is that Sanders relies heavily on feedback from focus groups, which tend to favor broad and less inclusive programming.
[...]
Still, several Amazon veterans believe the system remains too dependent on those same test scores. “All this perpetuation of white guys with guns — it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” says one. And another: “Relying on data is soul crushing … There’s never, ‘I know the testing wasn’t that great, but I believe in this.'” Graham declined to comment.
It sounds like the argument is that the pro-diversity people think the metrics are measuring the wrong thing. It's a common complaint, especially about older TV shows but also about high-budget movies, that they are targeted at the broadest possible audience so they end up being utterly inoffensive but also completely soulless. That may really be the most profitable strategy. But it's also possible the most profitable strategy is appealing to multiple narrower groups with different shows but getting them very invested. The creators of shows probably prefer the latter because no one wants to be part of a designed-by-committee production.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Actually, it's worse than that. Comcast refused to let Netflix reduce its bandwidth usage at any cost. And then managed to get Netflix to pay them extra for that bandwidth usage.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Just before seeing this post, I saw an article on social media arguing it was misleading: The Conversation: "Yes, masks reduce the risk of spreading COVID, despite a review saying they don’t". The summary of that article is that the review finds weak effects because it mixes together too many things that you would expect to have weak/no effect:
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"mask" includes cloth/surgical masks (as opposed to [K]N95+ or equivalent masks) that we don't expect to work except maybe as source control.
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Related, none of the studies look at masks as source control. i.e., they only study individuals wearing masks, not groups.
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Most of the studies only had people wear masks in "high-risk" situations (i.e. around known-infected individuals) as opposed to, say, all the time while at work. Any consideration of the claimed mechanism of airborne transmission often from asymptomatic cases would lead you to expect that to not work, especially where "work" means medical settings where you have higher expectation of infected people around.
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Bonus: none of the studies compare mask wearing to not masking wearing, only being advised to wear masks to not being advised to wear masks.
The articles claims if you pare down to only the studies looking at "Does wearing N95s all the time reduce COVID-19 transmission?" the answer is in fact "yes", the opposite of the headline.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
From my, non-American, understanding there is a corrupt relationship between TurboTax and US lawmakers which leads to this proprietery software being basicly required to file taxes.
Yeah, here's the latest Propublica article on the topic with back links to their earlier reporting: https://www.propublica.org/article/what-to-know-about-turbotax-before-you-file-taxes
Like other replies, I also do my own taxes. But I'm under no illusion this is a realistic option for most people.
One issue is that the IRS very threatening about any mistakes bringing very serious consequences, including jail time. In practice, they do tend to be understanding and work with people to correct mistakes. But many people don't know that... and that might not be the experience poorer people have. Tax prep companies provide legal guarantees that mistakes are their problem not yours.
There's no reason (other than lobbying by the makers of TurboTax) for the IRS to not send you everything they know, which should cover your entire tax situation if you just have W-2 jobs, investments through a brokerage firm, and a mortgage, all of which are already reported to the IRS and if you omit or typo any of the information that was sent to both you and the IRS, then you're in trouble. In practice, this "trouble" usually means the IRS contacts you saying you made a typo, they fixed it, and here's your recomputed tax amount, but you did have to sign saying they're well within their rights to throw you in jail instead.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Put frankly, nobody really cares about this man. Nobody really cares about the median CAF victims: poor people, strippers, general lower-class coded individuals. Nobody really cares about people jailed on bogus charges, put through the justice wringer for ill-conceived reason, or shot to death by trigger-happy psychopaths. It's the just world fallacy in full effect: they probably had it coming anyway.
I totally believe you're right about this, but it still frustrates me. Even from a purely selfish perspective, this should matter to people. Holding people in prison or putting them through the justice system for stupid reasons is a waste of my tax money. Ruining people's lives by sending them to prison for no good reason means they're likely not going to be contributing to the economy (or, worse, become criminals and contribute negatively). We do this at a really large scale in the US, so this isn't exactly a small effect.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
The priest was recommending $200 phones that were basically like iPhones that wouldn't let you install apps on them.
$200 will get you a perfectly functional smartphone. Whoever is selling a $200 dumbphone must have great profit margins.
(I do know a few people who intentionally chose to not use smartphones, but not many.)
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
China has another reason to play up the lab leak theory: the leading scientific theory (spillover resulting from improper handling of market animals) implies that COVID-19 is their fault. After SARS they clamped down on live animal markets, but over time, while they remained illegal, the government didn't seriously enforce the laws against them. In other words, they knew what they had to do to stop a pandemic, tried, and failed (or gave up). That makes them look culpable and/or incompetent, so they don't want too high a confidence assigned to that theory.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
It's way too early to make this computation. The national popular vote always trends Democratic in the weeks after election day, mainly because California has a lot of votes that they count slowly and they tend to be heavily Democratic, but also just more densely populated areas in general tend to count slower and tend to be more Democratic.
I'm certainly interested in these numbers, but come back in a few weeks to a month after the results are certified to do any kind of meaningful analysis on vote counts or turnout.
(I've seen a lot of talk on the left about how the Democrats would be holding the House if Florida and a couple other states hadn't been illegally gerrymandered (just passing along the Culture War vibes, I haven't looked into these claims in detail). Florida counts quickly, so it's possible there's enough data to do this analysis at the state level there.)
My understanding is that E-verify isn't changing any law; it's simply an enforcement mechanism for existing laws. While not enforcing a bad law may be better than enforcing it... it's still a bad situation. For employment of undocumented workers, the legal grey area means they get underpaid and poor work conditions because they don't have the legal recourse of reporting their employer for abuses. I think pushing for E-verify is about trying to corner the anti-immigration politicians into defining some official concept of a work visa so we don't have the current nonsense of de-facto work visas without labor laws. The actual result seems to be a complete lack of action on immigration because a compromise can't be reached but no one likes the status quo either.
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