token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo ago
To illustrate my point, there was a Chinese national in Michigan that voted because LOL apparently? And when he went out of his way to report that he shouldn't have been allowed to vote... well he's in trouble but the vote is still going to count.
Wait, what? Why are same-day registrations not given provisional ballots in Michigan like they are in other states?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2mo ago
Depends on exactly what you mean by "no sexuality". Age-appropriate sex ed is important for children to know how to report sexual abuse (and to know that they should). Here's one organization's "Sexuality Concepts for Children (Ages 4-8)" (just what I found on a quick web search, the group's Wikipedia page doesn't even have a "controversies" section; exactly what should be on that list is not something I'm an expert on).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
Sure, men tend to be more conservative than women. But community organizer types are mainly women not men.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
That sounds like nonsense. The Democratic organizational base has been Black women for decades. That's why the party hasn't moved left as much as the very-online contingent of progressives want it to. Those Black women are a lot more conservative (both in the "further right politics" sense and in the "less willing to shake up the status quo" sense).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
You can expect to wait months for an office visit. And if you need something more than the primary care physician can do, that’s another couple of months to see whoever can fix the problem, and another couple of months to actually get anything done about it.
Is this supposed to be a description of the worst case under a theoretical cheap system? Because this describes a process faster than what I went through this year in the US with top-tier employer health coverage in a major city. While at the same time I regularly see stories online from people in Europe paying for health care through their taxes being astonished about the concept of waiting for a specialist. Are they lying? Is the care they are getting really that much worse? Surely any place other than the US has health care that counts as "cheap" compared to the US?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
But how does adding yet another pro-Harris post to a sub-reddit that is already 100% full of pro-Harris posts drive turnout? It makes no sense.
Yeah, not quite sure what the strategy is here. Targeting non-politics subreddits / the global top posts to get exposure to Reddit users that aren't looking for political news could possibly be doing something. Maybe they're expecting Reddit users to repeat the messages to non-Reddit users, and giving them more talking points increases the chance that will happen / it will be effective? Or maybe they're concerned that even /r/politics posters might be too apathetic to vote?
Of course, there's also the possibility they're looking for their keys votes under a streetlight. That is, it really is the waste of effort it looks like; they're targeting Reddit because they know Reddit, not because it's actually a good target.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo ago
That's a good point that those are not easy to distinguish. We'll have to wait for the statisticians to get their hands on all of the data (both the precinct-by-precinct results and exit polls) and see what they can come up with. Possibly there may be a way to try to collect some more data by polling, but asking people who they voted for in the past is notoriously unreliable.
The extreme case would be if there were zero votes in cities and all the votes came from rural areas, you could be pretty sure the effect of Democratic voters staying home was a stronger effect than people switching parties. Obviously the effects will be a lot smaller and less obvious than that, and the final vote totals won't even be completed for another couple weeks, so it will take time for people who know what they're looking for to have any kind of educated guess on the matter.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo ago
The Republicans in the legislative branch have purposely thrown away their majority, and caved on every significant issue the Uniparty truly wanted. FISA courts stayed, endless money for foreign wars stayed.
So you're annoyed Republicans have not used their legislative power to vote against the policies initiated by the Republican Party under GWB in the 2000s? Why exactly did you expect them to do so?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10mo ago
Here we have an article about a guy who has acknowledged using fake data.
He very explicitly did not admit to using fake data:
A spokesman for Poldermans told the paper he admitted not keeping to research protocols but denied faking data.
Sure, there's a good chance he's lying about that. But it seems like an important distinction.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
14d ago
Pikmin 4 was definitely a major disappointment. I did complete it, although in my defense I was sick at the time and didn't have the energy to do anything but sit on the couch and play video games. Especially after Pikmin 3 Deluxe (the Switch release) having full 2-player co-op support, the "little brother" mode in Pikmin 4 manages to even further trivialize the difficulty.
I feel like it had a ridiculous amount of hand-holding and railroading. I understand having a little of that for a tutorial section at the start, but it never felt like there was a lot in the way of choices to make, which is especially weird for a game series where one of the main interesting mechanics is splitting your party and exploring.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1mo 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
1mo ago
China wants the "lab leak or not" debate because it draws attention away from the post-SARS rules that China instituted on wet markets that would have prevented a spillover at the market if China had continued to enforce them.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
Of course the other hole I've dug myself is I purchase most of my games on GOG first, then Epic, and lastly Steam. Because my top priority is how easy it is to check out without saving my credit card number, and Steam is by far the most odious, wanting my full address and phone number, and always attempting to greedily save it all by default. But Steam also has the best Linux compatibility, so fuck me I guess.
I've gotten to the point that I sometimes forget to check ProtonDB before checking a Steam game without a Linux native build because I just never run into problems anymore. I hear that's not always true for the latest AAA games. For GOG/Epic, Heroic Games Launcher is only a little less smooth than Steam, and will handle WINE/Proton for you (it also has an option to list the games in the Steam interface).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
I agree people don't tend to do it here, but in general these days I mostly see people use "content note" instead of "trigger warning" to specify topics that the reader might not want to read without implying that it's specifically about triggers, which are often too random and personal to tag. For instance, I see a lot of posts on Mastodon (which has explicit support for warnings so a post with warnings shows only the warning until you click on it to unfold the full post) with the warning field mentioning "us pol" because enough people on social media don't want to hear about US politics. Additionally, social media generally has a way to filter on keywords (either explicit warnings or just anywhere in the text), so including a straightforward warning can be a way to hope you hit a keyword filter so people who don't want to read something never see it.
But also, it's definitely possible to reference undesired content without describing it in detail. "Gore" or "abusive relationship" gets the point across well enough warn someone without eliciting the response they might have to the actual content. And depending on the warning and the person, it may be sufficient to know it's coming / maybe a part they might want to skim over.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo 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
7mo ago
Omicron ended the pandemic.
While I agree that Omicron as an event, i.e. the infection wave around January 2022, was the end of any real mainstream concern about COVID, there's pretty good reason to believe the apparent increased transmissibility of Omicron was an illusion: there's no significant differences in transmissibility between COVID variants (the technical term in that paper is "SAR" for "Secondary Attack Rate").
In other words, we would have seen a much smaller wave in the winter of 2021-2022 if everyone acted like they did in the winter of 2020-2021 (when vaccines were new enough that only the highest priority/luckiest had gotten them), but they didn't. Probably due to people worrying less about being careful due to vaccines, although probably also a good amount of people feeling like they had had enough of isolating after several months.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo ago
Trump is supposedly pro-choice as well. It's not really relevant if the Republican majority and think tanks that select the legislation and judicial appointments for him aren't and he just goes along with whatever they want. It may very well be the case that gay marriage is in less danger from Trump than it would be from a different Republican president, but it seems unlikely to make a big difference.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo ago
Just a few days ago I was reading multiple posts on this forum about how the $44 billion Elon spent on Twitter was worth every penny to the Trump campaign and now the Harris campaign spending $1 billion is a sign the big money is on the side of the Democratic Party?
I have no idea how much was spent by whom on each side (and quite possibly no one does), but the war chests of the official campaigns seems like at best a weak proxy for estimating that. (I'm sure there was also quite a bit of money spent on trying to get Harris elected that's not being accounted for in the $1 billion her official campaign touched.)
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo ago
Your suggestions don't sound terribly different from how it worked pre-1926. There's wording about people "who have declared their intention to become citizens of the United States". I don't have strong feelings about exactly where to draw the line at what counts, but in the current system, the best case requires living in the US for 5+ years and excludes plenty of people who end up living in the US for the rest of the lives. Describing those people as not having put down roots in the United States feels misleading to me.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10mo ago
I got a rental agreement for a 4 square meter space in an atic written by chatgpt.
I feel like I'm missing something here. I don't know much about law, but every rental agreement I've signed has been the locality's standard rental agreement. I don't think they were technically required to use it, but there was just no reason not to. Why aren't all of those simple boring contracts that are so trivial ChatGPT could do it just a standard contract that you fill in the blanks on like those rental contracts? How does the LLM help?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
Thanks. I do remember hearing about that now that you mention it. I don't have anything to add past the links you provided, though.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo ago
Surely too much debt is a problem, but cashflow issues be solved by either reducing spending or increasing revenue. And when you're talking about a government's budget, increasing revenue can be some combination of increasing tax rates and increasing tax base/GDP. Obviously, much of political disagreement is over exactly which policies will maximize GDP, and Republicans routinely state they believe things like DOGE will increase economic productivity by getting the federal government out of the way. On the other hand, the Democrats believe better regulations, which require funding the federal government, will maximum GDP. And they're in favor of raising taxes.
Additionally, it's unclear the current situation is "too much" debt. The Total Public Debt as Percent of Gross Domestic Product and Federal government current expenditures: Interest payments charts don't look great. On the other hand Federal Outlays: Interest as Percent of Gross Domestic Product looks high, but nowhere near a historical high.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo ago
I too wonder why prostitution or sex tourism is still so shunned. It's clear why the far left and far right hate it
Does the far left hate it? Maybe I just don't have any exposure to the group you're calling "the far left". I understand it's not a normie view, but I somewhat often see pro-sex-worker sentiment in places as diverse as the leftist Tumblrs I follow, my IRL friends' Facebook posts, and Ars Technica comments (mostly when in comes up in the context of anti-sex-worker laws like FOSTA-SESTA).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
Sorry, I don't get the reference. I clicked your link and have no idea what it has to do with my post.
I constantly see claims that modern elections are 99% about turnout, not convincing swing voters, since politics is too polarized for there to be a significant number of swing voters. Maybe those takes are completely wrong, but it's certainly the received wisdom in any at all mainstream election analysis. Not sure that targeting redditors in particular is useful way to get out the vote of Democratic partisans, but the Democrats definitely believe that winning elections is about getting their own partisans to actually vote and discouraging Republican partisans from voting (e.g., by spreading negative news about Republican candidates). I say Democrats simply because that's the media bubble I'm in; I have no reason to believe the Republicans don't believe the same with the parties flipped.
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