token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo 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
5mo ago
I can't imagine there being another round of top-down enforced lockdowns. Although H5N1 could be bad enough that a lot more people would be isolating voluntarily.
But, really, your assumption would be conspiracy, not the much simpler explanation that public health is bad when you cut funding for public health?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo 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
5mo ago
Robert F Kennedy, one the most vocal critics against the pharmaceutical and processed food industries. [...] In Trump’s victory speech, Trump proudly stated that RFK will “go wild” with his blessing provided he doesn’t touch fracking or the oil industry. [...]
Rumors of Thomas Massie being tapped for agricultural secretary. [...] He wants the legalization of raw milk[...]
I assume Trump voters want a return to the economy prosperity they recall from 2017-2019, not to the whole having a pandemic thing of 2020. Hopefully we get lucky and H5N1 doesn't jump to humans (and my understanding is it's more likely it won't than it will), but if you wanted to maximize the chance of another pandemic, these are the policies you'd enact. Not that Biden has exactly been pro-active in doing anything about H5N1.
Although if we get a sufficiently anti-vax federal government we can just have some old-fashioned polio and measles epidemics.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo ago
Trump still carried roughly 90% of the black vote.
Given context, I assume you meant Harris.
I’m very intrigued by one of the counter-narratives I’ve already seen congealing: Kamala ran too far to the right,
Obviously there's a lot of different takes on what happened in the election. One of the narratives is around Trump talking about the economy being bad and Harris not doing so. And for a certain segment of the left, running to the left would involve talking about left-leaning economy policies (antitrust/breaking up monopolies, stronger regulations, etc.), and Harris was avoiding doing so. So people who believe in those policies and believe they are popular are upset that they aren't being proposed (and think this is a plot by wealthy interests to keep pro-business policies around).
While I support such policies and wanted Biden (yeah, I know he wasn't on the ballot) to win because I think that was the best chance of such policies being enacted, I really don't believe they are broadly popular. If you directly ask the American people if they want food poisoning and monopolies raising prices, I assume you'd get a lot of "no"s, but if you bring them policy proposals to do something about it, they'll vote it down as wonkish and anti-freedom.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo 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
5mo ago
As Rov_Scam mentioned, opposition to federal ID has primarily come from the right in the past (see religious-coded claims that ID cards are the "mark of the beast"), although both sides have expressed privacy concerns about the existence of IDs and/or the corresponding database (after all, that link I just gave was to Huffpost, not exactly known for their right-wing slant).
I have a hard time really caring about the supposed privacy concerns both because the IRS does a perfectly fine job not telling anyone my tax info that shouldn't know it and because my identity isn't private anyway: every registered voter's name/address is public information already. (And, honestly, I'm not sure I see the point of my tax info being secret either.)
There's not even really a need for the physical card. The whole point of a photo ID is to present a photo verifiable by a human along with a counterfeit-proof claim of some information about the person that's a photo of (for voting, the information that matters is name, address, and citizenship status). There's no reason other than the implementation complexity for requiring each person to carry around a plastic card instead of having the verifier look up that information in a database, which could alleviate fears of the cost of replacing an ID card.
That said, there's at least two separate issues that ID is being proposed to solve:
- Verifying the voter is who they say they are. That is, preventing the voter from voting as someone else who they know isn't going to vote, possibly because that someone else is a fake name they registered. Voters trying to vote multiple times does happen (I've already seen some news stories about people getting caught doing so this election), but it's difficult to get many additional votes this way, partially because it requires having voter registrations that you know will not get used legitimately.
- Verifying the voter is allowed to vote. i.e., they are a citizen and a resident at the address they claimed. This is the issue I think you're talking about; as there's a lot of non-citizens around, a significant percentage of them voting would be a lot of votes.* This could be verified by ID at time of voting, but it could also be verified by maintaining the voter rolls by some combination of requiring ID to register and checking the local voter database against some database of citizens. Election organizations already try to do this, but they are limited by the lack of a federal database of all citizens. I think some states collect social security numbers in attempt to approximate the "federal database of all citizens", but I'm not sure exactly how that part of the verification works.
*(Personally my preferred solution is to repeal the laws against non-citizen voting. The requirement to be a citizen to vote was added in most states as part of the wave of anti-immigrant legislation in the early 1900s. Before then, a stated intention to settle permanently in the United States was sufficient. Having a category of residents that don't get to vote is undemocratic.)
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo ago
Looking at "Who Gets Abortions in America?" (NYT article dated 2021)... 60% of women who have abortions already have children, although only 14% are married, so "happily married women with children" aren't getting a large percentage of all abortions. That said, about 25% of women get an abortion at some point in their life, so it's not exactly rare.
Of course, that's not counting "spontaneous abortion" (better known as miscarriage). I was having trouble finding statistics for how many women will ever have a miscarriage, probably partially because it's tricky to define since well, I'll let Wikipedia explain:
Among women who know they are pregnant, the miscarriage rate is roughly 10% to 20%, while rates among all fertilisation is around 30% to 50%.
I bring up miscarriage because some of the concern over abortion bans has been over healthcare for miscarriages getting lumped in with abortions.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
In the absence of a 'none of the above' option...
I don't think anywhere in the US puts an actual bubble labeled "none of the above" on the ballot, but you can leave it blank or write in Mickey Mouse.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
Oh, yeah, /r/politics has always had a lot of nonsense bad-mouthing of Trump. The difference I'm calling out is that the past few weeks, there's been a lot of re-runs of such stories from years ago.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo ago
Approximately no one dates based on politics.
"If I get pregnant, will my partner support me in getting an abortion?" is definitely something (some) women consider in their dating prospects. Although, there's certainly some amount of filtering by living in a city/more liberal area and assuming that's sufficient.
I do have friends who are single women in more conservative areas for job reasons who have pretty much given up on dating until they move elsewhere because their possible dating pool of non-conservative men is basically just their coworkers (since any liberal not stuck there by the job moves to a bigger city).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
This is such a strange take. Those women didn't want to go on a date with men like you (conservative) and you didn't go on a date with them. Sounds like their filtering is working and you just don't like that it's a filter they care about.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo 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
7mo ago
While I'm all for better sex ed and better access to contraception, the comment you replied to is talking about very-late-term abortions. These are almost certainly not unwanted pregnancies or they would have been aborted earlier. They are wanted but failed pregnancies which are some combination of non-viable and dangerous to the mother. The risks here are made significantly greater by "pro-life" policies which discourage administering medical care to pregnant people if there's at all some way to squint at it and pretend refusing that care could have resulted in another baby being born.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo 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
8mo 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
8mo 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
8mo ago
Blue Tribe deliberately generated the largest increase in violent crime ever recorded, explicitly in pursuit of partisan political advantage.
This is an extraordinary claim. It's normal to think your political opponents' policies with respect to crime are sub-optimal, but an explicit goal of increasing crime sounds like cartoon villainy.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
9mo ago
This seems completely backwards to me. Preferred pronouns are if anything more useful when interacting between cultures because I often don't know what the implied gender of foreign names is. Sure it's also useful if gender-non-conforming people prefer "they" or not, but that's certainly not what I'm learning from the gender labels in my work directory info.
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.
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