token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
18d ago
My understanding is that the traditional way is that it's fairly common to just accept that if you get pregnant from pre-maritial sex, you get married and everyone agrees to not do the math on the wedding date compared to your first child's birthday. While there's certainly been a change in the past few decades of whether it's acceptable to not get married in that situation, I'm not sure there's any real reason to believe the prevalence of unmarried people having sex has gone up.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
I was confused reading your post because I was thinking "surely there's browser extensions to do what you want" until I got to
And I could always go for a dumb phone.
I'm one of those weird people who doesn't install social media apps on their phone. (Don't worry, I'm plenty capable of wasting my time scrolling on a mobile web browser.) And, yeah, I'd support legislation to ban companies from blocking third-party apps / pushing users to apps instead of web sites. That is, companies should not be allowed to take technological measures to prevent users from controlling their experience of social media (defined broadly) websites.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1mo 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
8mo 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
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
7mo 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
8mo 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
8mo 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
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
9mo 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
5mo ago
Pidgin is what you're thinking of. It does that for instant messaging services, including apparently having a plugin for Facebook Messenger that has recent issues on GitHub, so it seems to still be working for some people. There's also XMPP and it's modern competitor/replacement Matrix which have a concept of bridges which means you log into your one Matrix account but have that account bridged to other protocols (so similar concept, just putting the multi-protocol support in a different place in the architecture).
Needless to say, none of this is terribly user-friendly, largely because none of the companies running these services want third-party clients to work, so there's a continual arms race of protocol changes. For similar reasons, there will never be a commercial product because third-party clients are likely explicitly against the terms of service. Back when MSN and its ilk were popular, the arms race was less heated and they were more usable.
Also, this is all about instant messaging. Maybe that's all you care about, but if you want to keep track of non-chat-structured posts, then the closest I know of to a similar multi-protocol client for social media posts is setting them all up in an RSS reader. And for similar reasons, social media companies make it difficult to access posts that way, although it works for some / has worked for others in the past (e.g., I used to follow Twitter feeds via RSS).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo ago
Looking at just the effects of the executive orders Trump has made so far:
-
Direction to State Department to not recognize trans gender identities. Unclear exactly what this means in practice, but this will likely make it difficult or impossible for many trans people to get/renew passports. I know many trans people renewed their passports early expecting this (and the Biden State Department literally worked overtime to fulfill those requests before January 20th).
-
Less serious, but Return to In-Person Work at best inconveniences many government workers. The intention is almost certainly to encourage federal workers to quit (just like tech company RTO policies are interpreted as stealth layoffs).
Those are the only two that I see that have immediate impact on the lives of people I know, but many of the others will likely lead to noticeable effects.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo 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
8mo 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
7mo ago
While there seems to be a real effect of Trump pulling more of the non-white vote than the Democratic party apparatus thought possible (although it's still too early for quality demographic analysis of the 2024 election), Florida Cubans have been a reliable Republican voting bloc for decades. The narrative I've always heard is that the Cubans that live in Florida are the self-selected to be the mainly the ones that saw the socialist government in Cuba as their enemy ruining their lives and therefore the Republican line of calling the Democrats socialists is very convincing to them.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo 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
5mo ago
It's interesting to see this written from the opposite perspective since it's a constant complaint on /r/politics that Republicans falsely accuse Democrats of doing $BAD_THING and then later actually do $BAD_THING themselves claiming they're just reacting. Of course, that interpretation relies on the belief that Republicans were actually lying.
To be concrete, you mention the example of the IRS targeting conservative organizations under Obama. The Democrats' narrative on that is that it's a misinterpretation of the facts: there was no targeting of conservative organizations, those organizations were just bad at doing their taxes due to a combination of the grassroots part of the Tea Party movement just legitimately being new to running organizations and getting things wrong and anti-tax advocates unsurprisingly not being the best at actually paying their taxes. I'm sure there's been plenty written about which side is right, but my point is that the author of the article probably actually believes that those examples are not symmetric.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo ago
Yeah but who would buy cures that have waivers?
Probably approximately the same proportion of the population that uses software and websites with terms of service saying you promise to hand over your first-born have no privacy? i.e., nearly everyone because that's just every product on the market.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1mo ago
That isn't quite what I meant. Sure I believe an LLM-based agent may be able to accomplish that task. But if the intention were to make the task automatable, then you wouldn't need one. Since the point is to make the task not automatable, this is just a step in an arms race of making the task more frustrating.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
Games having increasing delays is a very common feature. I'd argue that MMOs are a good example of this because while you may continually get loot, there's increasing delays in getting useful loot. Basically all video games have very quick rewards at the beginning in the "tutorial" section (which might not be explicitly set out as a tutorial, often just the early game introducing the mechanics via clearly intentionally easy levels) when teaching the mechanics followed by more spread out rewards. Which isn't necessarily exploitative: a more interesting, difficult challenge will of course take longer than the tutorial of "here's what the A button does".
But for a more pure version, you can look at "incremental games" or really any game with a gacha/loot box mechanic, which I understand is standard in generic modern mobile free-to-play games. Basically, there's a whole type of games where increasing the delay is combined with the option to pay real world money to shorten the delay.
Not sure why you think there aren't checks and balances. The Republicans just control the majority of the House, Senate, and Supreme Court in addition to the Presidency. Balances don't impact consensus policies. There's some court cases about things the Trump administration has done so far and maybe that will have some impact. But it's misleading to claim Trump is doing anything without the approval of Congress. Congress can't pass legislation quickly, sure, but also they would rather stay out of sight and let Trump take the fall for anything that goes wrong.
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