token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2yr 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
8mo ago
There's been a few stories like that hitting /r/politics the past couple week. By "like that", I mean, some reiteration of some vague bad-mouthing of Trump over something that's not actually very important and was reported on years ago. As someone who is no fan of Trump, I also am unhappy with this news coverage, albeit for different reasons: there's actual bad things to say about Trump; no need to report on irrelevant gossip. Actually talk about his policies and fallout from what he did during his term. But news organizations don't want to do that because it involves talking about regulating business (e.g., the FDA regulating food production) in a positive light and their owners don't want that.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
Do you want to know why LA, San Fran, Portland, and Seattle are drowning in homeless while New York isn't?
Ah, yes, definitely a mystery for the ages. The following data is from this page. I included the "# homeless" for completeness and I understand the source has an incentive to overstate it. But I actually wanted to highlight is the large difference in number of shelter beds.
| State | NY | CA | OR | WA |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total Pop | 19,571,216 | 38,940,231 | 4,233,358 | 7,812,880 |
| # homeless/night | 74,178 | 171,521 | 17,959 | 25,211 |
| /10,000 pop | 38 | 44 | 42 | 32 |
| Temp Beds | 65,899 | 24,033 | 2,953 | 7,342 |
| /10,000 pop | 34 | 6 | 7 | 9 |
| Permanent Beds | 36,480 | 33,660 | 7,895 | 9,359 |
| /10,000 pop | 19 | 9 | 19 | 12 |
| (Temp+Perm) Beds | 102,379 | 57,693 | 10,848 | 16,701 |
| /10,000 pop | 52 | 15 | 26 | 21 |
New York has way more shelter beds (I'm assuming all of these numbers are dominated by the cities... because I wasn't able to find finer-grained data easily). They're not getting in legal fights over their refusal to build shelters because they're not refusing to build shelters.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
The seemingly now-universal popular habit of calling Instant Runoff Voting (a term that specifies one particular voting system) by the name Ranked Choice Voting (a term that applies to IRV, but also Condorcet methods, STV in multi-winner elections, a ton of other methods, and I guess technically even plurality voting), is weird to me. How did that get started?
It's an intentional propaganda campaign by FairVote, which is the only at all effective organization pushing for alternative voting systems in the United States. They actively fight against any voting system other than Instant Runoff Voting (or Single Transferable Vote for multi-member districts, but the US doesn't really do those) and intentionally use that language to obscure the discussion.
It's a little hard to take FairVote as good-faith actors given they're acting exactly how you'd design an organization to prevent the adoption of any alternative voting systems by pushing the worst choice for an alternative voting system and bad-mouthing all of the others.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr ago
I'm confused; notification settings aren't controlled within the app on Android, they're on the app info settings page which is identical for every app and allows you to disable types of notifications or all notifications for an app. Of course, the app might have overly coarse categories or lie about its notification categories, so you might have to disable more notifications than you intended, I guess.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr ago
Square the circle for me. Why are women, especially the college educated ones, voting for policies that make women less dependent on men and further remove authority for men if they prefer a man who takes charge?
Being dependent on men in general is very different from being dependent on one particular man the woman has vetted.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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.)
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2yr ago
It's standard practice in elections to never do anything without both a Democrat and a Republican present. I assume the laws don't mention those parties by name, but I'm not sure exactly how they are worded. And by "a Democrat and a Republican", that probably means an election official attesting they are of that party, not, say, someone who currently or has held elected office for that party.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2yr ago
The linked article says the "security" was someone remotely watching a camera feed:
Capitol Police are conducting a full review of the incident at Pelosi’s home and its protective services division and sharing updates with lawmakers, according to a GOP aide. The department is considering any short- or long-term changes to protocol that need to be made.
The review will also include the Capitol Police’s command center, which was monitoring the security camera feed from Pelosi’s home, according to a person familiar.
Unclear where the camera (cameras? or just one) were pointed. I think the story is that the attacker broke a window in a side/back door, so maybe there was no camera pointing at it? But also, security cameras don't help a lot in this kind of situation; I guess they could have called the police a little sooner? I would think home security cameras are mostly useful for identifying intruders when the residents aren't home.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo ago
This isn't the sort of thing that people are likely to be "wrong" about, because their evaluation of the economy is based on metrics that impact them directly.
That makes sense. Unfortunately, it's demonstrably false. Polls ask both "how are you doing economically?" and "how's the economy doing in general?" (but, erm, worded better by people who know how to ask poll questions). While the former doesn't exactly track the stock market minute-by-minute, the latter is consistently (at least in the past several years) strongly affected by partisanship. I totally believe that people's feelings about their own economic situation is difficult to judge from top-level economic statistics, especially ones biased towards measuring how well the economy is working for rich people, but people's assessment of the economy of a whole is strongly influenced by their political leanings over any observation of the facts.
Also, to be clear, this isn't a "Republicans are lying" claim. Both sides are heavily influenced by partisanship here. Look at the first graph in the first link I gave above: at Biden's inauguration the answer to "is the economy getting better?" flipped from around 50% of Republicans/10% of Democrats to around 10% of Republicans/50% of Democrats. That chart seems more useful for determining who is president than anything else.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1yr 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
2yr 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.
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.
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