token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5d 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
8d ago
Sure, that's the way they act for the middle class when who are just buying enough stock to fill out a retirement account. But for the wealthy making investments large enough, they are buying power.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8d 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
17d 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
17d ago
I thought the general consensus was that it was a lab leak
The overwhelming scientific consensus is that SARS-CoV-2 spilled over at the market (twice), but that determining that with certainty is impossible without more evidence that likely can never be collected (i.e., too much time has passed and SARS-CoV-2 is everywhere).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
17d ago
That argument is equivalent to noticing that airplane crashes almost always happen near air traffic control towers and considering eliminating the air traffic control towers as a possible solution.
Of course, a lab for studying zoonotic coronaviruses is located near where zoonotic coronavirus spillovers tend to happen. You'd need a really good reason to put it somewhere else. You should be slightly surprised if a spillover happens far away from such a lab, not the other way around.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1mo 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.
Why is it so important to you that middle and high schoolers do not learn about gender and sexuality? Understanding those things is important for children and adolescents to understand what abuse looks like and how to avoid it and report it. And for them to know what a healthy understanding of themselves looks like and what healthy relationships look like, which is important for any person's happiness and wellbeing.
I believe that you honestly want what's best for your children and somehow think keeping them away from such information is better for them, but I read your posts and just hope your children against the odds manage to become well-adjusted adults despite your efforts.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo ago
I'm sorry, I don't understand the question. Wikipedia tells me "debanking" in the United refers to banks freezing crypto assets dropping Muslim clients? Neither of these I'm familiar with and I'm not seeing them mentioned in the top-level comment I replied to, although there's a lot of links, so I may have missed something.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
Are you implying there's some objective definition of "the country's goals", distinct from its democratically elected leadership? Where does that definition come from?
... yes? Sorry, I'm not even seeing how there could possibly be disagreement on that point unless you completely do not believe in the concepts of corruption or embezzlement.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo 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
4mo ago
Surely the question is whether those political goals are aligned with the country's. The claim is that Biden was furthering the US's political goals while Trump was furthering Trump's political goals. Needless to say, there's some room for interpretation on exactly which political goals are in favor of the US vs. only the president, but that distinction is essential to determining whether an act is corrupt. That fuzziness is a contributing factor to why corruption is often just an accusation against political opponents purely in the realm of public opinion and not actually tried in a court of law.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
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.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
(although by that measure, 2000 is way more likely)
The plurality of voters cast votes in favor of Gore in sufficient states to pass 270 electoral votes, and yet Gore did not get 270 electoral votes or become president. "Stolen" seems like an accurate descriptor.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo 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
4mo ago
How? I don't see how it prevents you from getting a passport that states your biological sex.
Trans (or intersex) people may not have or be able to acquire identity documents that state their "biological sex". And if they do, photo IDs showing a mismatch between the sex marker on the ID and the gender presentation in the photo (or in person) are at risk of being rejected as valid ID.
The other effects you list also have some pretty awful consequences, but I don't know anyone directly affected by them, while I do know people who failed to renew their passport in time and will be left without one, and therefore be unable to leave the country, at some point in the next 4 years.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo 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.
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.
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