token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
This seems like a strange perspective to me. Or maybe I'm missing your point. The Culture War isn't about the positive and beautiful because, and maybe I'm stretching the metaphor here, war isn't positive and beautiful.
Plenty of people are making beautiful arts and crafts of various kinds to enrich their lives and the lives of those around them. That's just not Culture War material.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
There was no gay sex in Lawrence. Indeed, there was no gay couple in Lawrence.
The plaintiffs were gay men, charged under Texas' anti-sodomy statute.
I'm not a lawyer, so maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not sure I see your point. The plaintiffs in Lawrence had a harm to bring a case over: they really were charged with sodomy. Is your assertion that the facts of the case didn't support the charge so it was dishonest of them to take a legal strategy of "that shouldn't be illegal" instead of "we didn't do that"? (I don't know, maybe they did try the "we didn't do that" line of defense in a lower court and failed? I can't imagine a case based on the word of a few gay men vs. the word of police officer eyewitnesses going well for the gay men.)
That seems different from the claim that no gay marriage website was ever ordered, so the whole case was actually about a hypothetical harm, which I thought was grounds for throwing a case out, as otherwise the courts would be flooded with hypotheticals and they already have trouble keeping up with the concrete cases.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
20d ago
Not to pick on you since this seems like a common category of problem... but the task is entirely artificial. There's no technical reason renewing a prescription requires you to do anything more than log into your pharmacy somehow and click a "renew" button. Any further complexity is because the pharmacy decided to waste your time.
I feel like I often hear people suggest using AI to navigate some unnecessary complexity like that, when what you actually need is systems that don't suck. Or at least being allowed to have third-party systems exist that work around them sucking. AI doesn't really have anything to do with it. If someone comes up with an AI bot that works around the poor design, people will come up with even worse designs to counter that.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
But back to NIMBYism, building more affordable housing would actually make living here worse and it can be argued mathematically: median income in Eugene is $30k. In the US, the top 10% of taxpayers provide about 70% of government funding. If you invite people who make less than the top 10% into your town, you make your town poorer.
Municipal budgets don't work like that. The vast majority of cities are funded nearly entirely by property taxes. More density nearly always results in higher property valuations and therefore higher tax revenue; density dominates building quality: a very nice single family home will still be significantly less valuable than however many mediocre townhouses you can squeeze onto the same plot of land. I guess the non-obvious part is how the cost of infrastructure like roads (cheaper per household with higher density) compares to the cost of services like schools (which should approximately scale proportional to the number of students), which you get into elsewhere in this thread talking about the cost of public school per student.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10mo ago
Yeah, the Harris 2024 campaign website literally doesn't have a "platform"/"policy" section. The closest you get is the Meet Kamala Harris and Meet Tim Walz pages discuss policies they have implemented in the past, so we get a vague idea of the kinds of things they're in favor of. But the most concrete policy discussion is the Tim Walz page links to a page about Project 2025 explaining what policies they're against.
I understand the strategy: any time you give a concrete policy, some of the people that would otherwise support you are going to be against that specific policy, so the less you say, the fewer people you alienate. Harris/Walz have decided there's no upside for them to be talking much about policy right now and they may very well be right. But it's frustrating that just vibes is the level of political discourse we're at when theoretically elections should be a time to have a national conversation about the future of the country. Although realistically that mostly happens in primaries, not the general election.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
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.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2mo ago
it really does seem like ardent lefties have to discard a lot of fundamental fairly obvious facts about baseline reality to maintain their ideological commitments.
This is a common assertion for people to make about their ideological opponents. People on the left constantly make the same claim about people on the right. And the intellectuals on the left and right both do so with detailed receipts about why their own side is working with facts and their ideological opponents are basing their ideology on lies.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
Chuck Schumer no doubt is theoretically very progressive
Said no one, ever.
Chuck Schumer is a generic liberal who has repeatedly acted to limit the influence of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
What do you think they'd be accomplishing by such protests? Surely protesting Trump shutting down the Department of Education by occupying the Department of Education so it can't function would be counter-productive. Are you suggesting the individual federal employees that are fired... keep working, treating their firing as illegal and asserting they still have jobs?
There's certainly been calls from the left for the Democrats to do more. But obstruction and destruction of the federal government is what their opponents want; it very unclear what they could do that wouldn't just be helping the Republicans. Maybe physically obstructing DOGE employees and thereby forcing arrests, to make it look more serious? That's still just handing more power over to the Republicans (by reducing Democratic congressional votes), as discussed down-thread.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
The immediate question I have is how are Korean universities funded? My understanding is that research grant overhead is a significant chunk of the total funding of US universities. Do Korean universities get more funding for their general administration and capital costs from other sources?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
An amusing theory, albeit unlikely. But actually burning down the Democratic Party is probably the biggest gift Biden could give to the left (i.e. the leftist wing of the Democratic Party + those disenchanted due to being even further left), since they've been claiming for decades that the Democratic Party is too far right and the "real people" want a leftist party. Of course, building up a new political party from the ashes of the Democratic Party would take several years, and would likely just be filled with leftist populist grifters and not actually make anyone happy. And it's much more likely the Democratic Party just limps along continuing to not leave enough air for another party to take its place opposing the Republican Party.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
Everyone does have to cast their vote by the time polls close on election day. Just some states think it's good enough for the ballots to be in the custody of the postal service (i.e. requiring a postmark by election day) as opposed to requiring ballots to be in the custody of the elections organization by that time. The argument is approximately that in a mail-in voting system, the postal service is effectively part of the elections organization.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
Speaking of which- the really incredibly blue counties in Atlanta illegally extending early voting hours, what’s going on with that? Is there any way to stop the illegal votes from counting? Of course not.
AP News "Georgia judge rejects GOP lawsuit trying to block counties from accepting hand-returned mail ballots" says a judge has already reviewed the issue and said they're not violating the law. Apparently the law says that after a certain deadline, the drop boxes have to close and absentee ballots can only be accepted by handing them to an election official... so they kept the offices open so people could hand their ballots to election officials without having to do so on election day when presumably anyone could go to their polling place and hand in an absentee ballot, but at that point they might as well just vote in person (modulo rules about letting you hand in an absentee ballot for someone else; not sure what Georgia's laws say about that).
It is a bit disorganized that they would be deciding to do that last minute... but early voting is new enough and significantly more popular this year, so it's not surprising the election offices were caught off guard by its popularity and needing to increase resources.
There's also the related issue that apparently Cobb county messed up and sent out ballots late, which would be a reason for them to attempt to do their best to make up for their mistake so people could still return their ballots.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11mo 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.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11mo 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.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr 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
1yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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.
Well, that explains Bruce Schneier's most recent blog post "Improving C++". I'm generally a fan of Rust, but acknowledge there's a lot of existing code in C/C++ and rewriting code that works is asking for trouble; we should be making sure we have the tooling to retrofit the appropriate checks into existing code. That is, updating to C++29 or whatever is almost certainly going to be easier and less error-prone than porting to Rust.
Tivoization is the term for the problem you're talking about. And free software advocates have been raging against it since, uh, you could actually find someone who could remember the last time they saw a TiVo. With the recent EU fight with Apple and the Right to Repair movement in the US, it looks like there's a small push in the other direction at the moment. But that's not very reassuring.
It is weird to see an anti-government anti-Tivoization rant given that I've always seen it as an anti-corporate position.
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