token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2mo ago
The FAQ page includes the chart you asked for (up to December 2020), which shows there was a pretty big jump in early 2020, but nowhere near as large as it looks on the official chart (i.e. around 2x instead of around 10x).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10mo ago
While I agree it's not the mainstream narrative, I have definitely seen pushback on the framing of Chinese "wet markets" being the source of pandemics being racist with the clarification that
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"Wet market" is defined by Wikipedia as being the Singapore government invented term for what in the US we would call a farmer's market or public market. By using the Asian term for it that we don't use, it artificially sounds more distant and exotic. And ignores the actually important part: live animal markets without proper health and safety protocols, letting us pretend we don't need to ask whether our handling of live animals carries pandemic risk.
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Related, there's no particular reason to think that there's anything special about China here other than China being really big so an outbreak at a completely random market across the world has a good chance of being in China. That said, the specific animals and local viruses in the local ecosystem may also have more pandemic potential in that region (coronaviruses seem to come from bats in Asia... but maybe that's just where we've been looking for them post-SARS)... although currently scientists are keeping an eye on H5N1 avian flu and live animal sales of chickens happen everywhere and sound a lot less exotic to a US audience.
Monitoring live animal sales everywhere (and which probably extends to keeping up with surveillance of pandemic-potiential viruses in wild animals), and making sure they're conducted safely is a massive, expensive project. Which means there's a massive demand for thought-stopping narratives for why we don't need to do it.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11mo ago
I've regularly heard the joke that part of what you're paying a restaurant for is not knowing how much butter/sugar they added.
I had seen calorie counts in some chain restaurants and apparently calorie counts are required in US chain (20+ location) restaurants as of May 2018. Of course, calorie counts is the bare minimum amount of nutritional info.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11mo ago
I wonder if 8 hours of work a day for the 5 workdays managed to become a popular standard due to it cleanly cutting in half the 16 hours a day that most adults are expected to be awake. It's just easy to wrap your head around the idea of cutting up the day into thirds of 8 hours each.
This was explicit in some of labor movement arguments for the 8 hour workday. For example, Wikipedia has this banner reading
8 hours labour
8 hours recreation
8 hours rest
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2mo ago
Legalizing gay marriage was seen as a radical leftist movement, but the actual result was that all the gay people - and most importantly, gay artists and icons and culture warriors - stopped living as radical counter-culture outsiders challenging every pillar of the nuclear family, and switched to being respectability-politics-first normies living quiet lives in the suburbs with 2.5 adopted kids.
I don't think this really changes your point, but "all the gay people" is definitely an exaggeration here. I definitely know people whose queerness is central to their counter-culture identity of "down with heteronormative patriarchal capitalism" or whatever, including speaking out against nuclear families. And queer artists who joyfully include the same themes in their work.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2mo ago
It certainly wasn't that bad pre-2020, but probably a large part of why it got so bad is that Seattle's downtown has never been a place normal people went very often. Away from the touristy waterfront (which doesn't have many tourists in the winter, hence your lack of wait at the "original Starbucks" which I assure you was quite packed this past summer), it's pretty much just office buildings. Outside of 8-6 on weekdays, pre-2020, it was completely empty other than where the public transit transfers are. You could go blocks without seeing another human, even in the summer at mid-day. A lot of restaurants didn't bother opening for dinner or on weekends because they were only for office workers, and the nearby nightlife neighborhoods (Belltown and Capitol Hill) are not that far a walk (or short transit ride).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2mo ago
A quick google overdose deaths topped 112k in 2023 an all-time record.
[...]
I believe an order of magnitude bigger problem than COVID.
Trying to put some actual numbers to this:
According to the NYT COVID data page, weekly COVID deaths in the past year have ranged from 490 (July 2-8) to 2,462 (Jan 7-13) or 0.9%-3.6% of all deaths. Of course, this is deaths from acute COVID, actual COVID deaths is somewhat higher than the official numbers, but hard to get good data on how much higher, so let's stick to these numbers. Also, going back further the numbers are a lot higher and less regular, I'm assuming the past year is a much better approximation of what to expect going forward than including any older data. (Also, I'm not seeing an official 2023 death count... looking I found this 2022 report published in May 2023 so it's probably just too early for finalized 2023 numbers.)
112k/52 = average 2,153 deaths/week from overdose deaths, doesn't seem hugely different from number of COVID deaths, although since overdose doses are mostly young and COVID deaths are mostly old, measuring in QALYs would likely paint a different picture... although if you're measuring QALYs, not trying to measure the impact of post-COVID conditions seems unfair, and I'm not sure how that would affect the conclusion.
There's also the obvious issue that COVID is practically unavoidable, although there's ways to reduce the impact (vaccination, antivirals, not getting old being healthier), while avoiding an overdose is straight forward: Don't Do Drugs(tm). Or, at least, that's the oversimplification in the popular conception of the two.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2mo ago
Opioids definitely do affect different people differently. I've had them prescribed once to take after a surgery. I took one dose immediately after the surgery and decided I'd rather no pain medication at all than a second dose. (Pretty sure I took ibuprofen, not nothing.) I've discussed this with others and gather this isn't an entirely uncommon reaction, although certainly far from a majority opinion.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
Is she actively trying to conceive and having trouble? I guess the pregnancy test is more concrete confirmation, but a late/missed period is hope even without that, and it hurts to have that hope and then lose it.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo ago
Apologies, a bit late to the thread, but I think this is missing an important aspect of the liberal POV.
I have multiple times seen essays* by people advocating for consent-based frameworks of acceptable behavior explicitly highlighting that consent and bodily autonomy isn't limited to just sex and that thinking that it is is missing the point. The examples given are using things like kids getting hugged or kissed by relatives should be allowed to say no to that physical contact and that kids should be able to opt-out of play-fighting at any time (I've seen multiple explicitly mention safe words for this purpose).
I think there's a very real chance that your ideological opponents when presented with your tennis hypothetical would think it was obvious that being forced into a non-work-essential tennis game with your boss would be unacceptable.
*Sorry, it's physically impossible to locate old Tumblr posts. I tried.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
9mo ago
Spoilers for a 21 year old anime but in .hack//SIGN,
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
9mo ago
I still haven't heard a remotely sane answer for why vaccines had to be agonisingly slowly tested while the bodies piled up, because mumble mumble bioethics consent
It sounds like you think the vaccine trials could have gone faster by doing challenge trials? I'm not sure that's true, but even if we could have gotten the vaccines approved faster, I'm not sure that would have sped up the rollout much: for several months after approval, they were hard to get because there just weren't enough doses manufactured (first doses in around December 2020, took until May or June to really get everyone access (so by then the prioritized high-risk groups had gotten access); and that was with throwing money at ramping up manufacturing before approval). Maybe there was some way to throw even more money at manufacturing them faster, but my understanding is that really wasn't the case since there were supply chain issues like suddenly needing a lot of specialized machines for vaccine manufacturing, and ramping all of that up could only happen so fast.
And that's not even accounting for the potential absolute disaster of rolling a vaccine out to everyone that didn't actually work, or worse, actually was dangerous, which, in addition to the first-order effects, could have super-charged the anti-vaccine movement.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
10mo ago
There's a lot of different interpretations of that going on in this thread. Let me attempt to summarize/categorize them (I'm probably missing some options?):
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["Pedophilia"] They are literally going to rape children.
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["Encouraged transition"] They are going to convince children to become gay/trans.
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["Acceptance"] They are going to convince children it's okay to be gay/trans, resulting in more of them behaving as such.
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["Liberalization"] They are going to convince children to have liberal values, including being accepting of gay/trans people, but also things like not attending church.
(Giving these names to try to be less confusing than referring back to the numbers.)
I think the people chanting meant the some mixture of the last two. It sounds like the right is most vocal about being concerned about (2) "encouraged transition". Which the left generally believes is not really a thing ("born this way"); of course, whether the chanters believe it's a thing and whether it actually is are two separate questions. Although there's some wiggle-room there for (3) "acceptance" for things like bisexuals deciding whether to engage in homosexual behavior or not.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
23d ago
I assumed the bump in construction costs around 2020 was due to increased demand for home renovation projects because people were spending more time in their homes and had fewer other things to spend money on. But that doesn't explain why they didn't go back down.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
3mo ago
Surely both parties are in favor of reducing poverty, although they are in great disagreement over the appropriate government actions in that area. That is, the Democrats are generally more in favor of transfer payments of some sort while the Republicans are generally more in favor of economic levers to make it easier for them to be employed (and perhaps also a longer-term view of a faster rising GDP lifts all boats), including reducing immigration to reduce competition for jobs. Both may think the other's approach heartless and/or ineffective, but it seems misleading to claim either party doesn't have "reduce poverty" as a goal.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo ago
Sometimes at least. I definitely know some people vaguely on the periphery of my friends group that talk a lot about being autistic and at least one of them mentions an autistic partner who doesn't really socialize with anyone else because they don't have to mask around their partner.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo ago
Most relationships require a draining amount of social performance (autistic masking) and it just doesn’t feel like it is worth the effort anymore.
If you want to socialize but not with people who expect autistic masking, perhaps try to find some friends who don't expect autistic masking. i.e., other autistic people or people who socialize with them regularly.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
9mo ago
Mathematical logic is a pretty wide field of which boolean algebra is only a small part of the basics.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11mo ago
For the most part, movies/TV have a long pipeline (the main exception being talk shows like Last Week Tonight), so you wouldn't expect to see a lot of immediate impact. The previous writer strike lasted 3 months and 8 days and resulted in several TV shows having shorter seasons and some getting cancelled entirely, and I often see it credited with contributing to the rise in reality (i.e. unscripted, so no union writers needed) TV... and that was twice as long without all that huge of an impact. Wikipedia has a vague list of shows "impacted" by the current strike; it currently looks like at least some of those will have delayed or omitted episodes this season.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
15d ago
I'm not sure how the current precedent is worded, but any rule along the lines of "you can only ban sleeping on the streets to people whom you offer 'acceptable' shelter" of course is going to have a lot of arguments over what constitutes "acceptable" shelter. Which should probably be below a studio apartment and might be below what is acceptable to rent out (although the laws setting overly high minimums on what's acceptable to rent out are a non-trivial factor in the rise of homelessness, so, uh, those should probably be lower, too).
But we should definitely set the line somewhere and actually enforce public camping laws if a reasonable attempt has been made to get the person into "acceptable" housing. And I thought that was more or less what the precedent said.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2mo ago
Presidential primaries are not just about who wins the nomination and general election. They're also about policy. While it's obfuscated, the primary selects actual people to attend the nominating convention which both selects the candidate and negotiates exactly what appears on the party platform.
I doubt most of the pro-Gaza agitators honestly think they are going get Biden off the ballot, but they might think they can put enough pressure on him and the Democratic Party to change their official position on Gaza. They're probably wrong, but I'm sure there's people inside Biden's campaign watching this and considering what threshold of protest votes would make them consider what changes in policy. I suspect that threshold is much higher than we're seeing, but I'm really not sure.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2mo ago
The question of who is the aggressor in the culture war comes up here every once in a while. As every other reply seems to be certain that the Blue Tribe is the aggressor against the Red Tribe, I feel like I should point out that the Blue Tribe believes the opposite. From the Blue Tribe point of view, they want equality and rights for everyone regardless of identity, and they believe that's the default if only the Red Tribe would stop discriminating.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
3mo ago
This feels to me like he's going for embodying the "No, it's the children who are wrong." meme. Millennials (who aren't remotely "children" anymore but make up the plurality of Swift's fans) and younger are mostly wondering what is wrong with Republicans constantly going on about the existence of hair dye and queer people; those are normal to most of those age groups. And just maybe it's a hard sell to women looking to date men and/or intentionally have children to vote for the party who has state officials making national news for actively trying to prevent women from getting medical care to prevent infertility due to pregnancy complications; that seems a lot more likely to be popular with older women who can feel ideologically pure about opposing abortion without being worried about it affecting themselves directly.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
3mo ago
I'm not even sure what you (and whoever "several of us" is?) are accusing me of.
I've been posting here since the /r/SSC days (mods here theoretically know what username I was using back then) without ever drawing the attention of the mods and try to keep to citable facts / widely held (within the left) opinions.
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.
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