token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
23hr ago
I think the MAGA base genuinely cares about seeing justice come to the children and young women victimized by this pedophile cabal. This sentiment runs deep among social conservatives.
I have a pretty hard time believing anyone with any real power cares about child sexual abuse qua child sexual abuse. And I don't mean this as a partisan claim. The Catholic Church of course had a big visible scandal, but left and right organizations alike prefer protecting power over protecting children. On a smaller scale, it's a common story (and I personally know examples, which, due to my social circle, likely all vote Democrat) for children to report their own parents covering up their abuse at the hands of an adult their parents apparently cared more about protecting than their own child. While reducing the abuse of children sounds like a great goal to, well, probably nearly everyone, in practice calls for it seem to only actually get used as a cudgel against the outgroup, and even then rarely to any significant effect.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
23hr ago
"The products are the same but they charge more for the ones marketed toward women!" "So if the products are the same, buy the one marketed toward men." "...No I like the pink one better."
This is a complete misrepresentation of the claim. This is the equivalent to
"It's hard to unsubscribe. The link is hidden in small white-on-white text."
"Ah, so you admit there is an unsubscribe button! Why are you complaining?"
Misrepresenting your product to trick consumers into paying more or buying something worse for the same money is bad. The companies that do it should be at least shamed, if not addressed with legal action, even if savvy consumers can manage to spend extra time to work around those tricks.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2d ago
Thank you for your in-depth reply. That makes sense.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
3d ago
I happened to luck out and eventually find one of the few remaining friendly, docile, feminine women left and married her.
I understand wanting to marry a woman who is friendly and feminine. But docile? Not to imply anything about your sexual proclivities, but the only time I see that used as a positive descriptor of a relationship partner is when talking about sexual submissiveness. And wanting your partner to act docile in bed is different from wanting them to be docile in normal life. So I'd like to understand why you list that as a desirable trait in a life partner.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
22d ago
Pikmin 4 was definitely a major disappointment. I did complete it, although in my defense I was sick at the time and didn't have the energy to do anything but sit on the couch and play video games. Especially after Pikmin 3 Deluxe (the Switch release) having full 2-player co-op support, the "little brother" mode in Pikmin 4 manages to even further trivialize the difficulty.
I feel like it had a ridiculous amount of hand-holding and railroading. I understand having a little of that for a tutorial section at the start, but it never felt like there was a lot in the way of choices to make, which is especially weird for a game series where one of the main interesting mechanics is splitting your party and exploring.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
22d 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
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
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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
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.
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
2mo 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
4mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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.
Wake me up when it's been independently verified that OpenAI didn't train on the test set again.
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