Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
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User ID: 863
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
I'm not familiar with the rules in PA but my assumption is the plaintiffs just re-file/amend adding the appropriate parties (all 67 counties). Unless there are some rules I don't understand this is not an insurmountable procedural hurdle. I appreciate wanting to hear a case in the proper procedural posture but this does seem like it's going to come back to them, much closer to the election.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2mo ago
Taylor Swift has officially endorsed Harris/Walz. Specifically citing both the debate and various AI memes of her voting for Trump, even referring to herself as a childless cat lady. It's Joever for Orange Man.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2mo ago
What is the value in pretending that the reason people describe Cooper's perspective as "Nazi apologetics" is due to his criticism of Churchill rather than his statements like "Hitler is in heaven" or "Nazi Germany was infinitely preferable in virtually every way to modern France?" Your post is almost entirely about the former but I am very confident the reason people call Cooper a Nazi apologist are the latter!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2mo ago
I very specifically said that sex markers were a shorthand in the emergency room context you mentioned. That is not the only reason they are there!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2mo ago
What is the "treatment" in this context and what is the relevant biology? In the medical context treatments very straightforwardly interact with a patient's biology. That's the point. What's the app analogue?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2mo ago
It depends on the private service providers own policies and what kinds of obligations the government may have created for them.
The only reason the above case exists is because the government created a legal obligation for private service providers to treat people a certain way based on the mark on their official documentation. As far as I know there is no similar legal requirement to treat people a certain way based on their height. If there was, then a similar lawsuit against an amusement park may very well be successful!
In the emergency room context the only purpose a sex classification serves is as a shorthand for certain other biological facts that may be relevant for treatment. If you already know those other biological facts it's not clear to me what further information one is getting from someone's legal sex classification. In any case doctors should determine medical treatments on the basis of the relevant biology, not the legal sex classification. Indeed it's easy for me to imagine a scenario where a doctor denying someone treatment on the basis of their legal sex classification, rather than their biology, would be the basis for a sex discrimination lawsuit! Imagine a trans woman goes to a doctor and requests a prostate exam. Perhaps she has or hasn't had bottom surgery but in any case still has a prostate. The doctor refuses on the grounds her relevant identity document says she is female, though the doctor does acknowledge she has a prostate. I think such a doctor would likely lose a sex discrimination lawsuit. After all, if she had shown up as someone with "male" on their identity document and with a prostate the doctor would presumably have performed the exam. She was denied a treatment relevant to her biology because of her legal classification. Sounds like sex discrimination to me!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2mo ago
"Correct" and "incorrect" are relative to the government's purposes in having the mark on the document. Often this is to aid in identification of the person presenting the document but the marks can serve other purposes. In the case of height, having a listed one dramatically different than your apparent one would be a problem for using it to identify you. So they try to keep the height listed on your document close to your apparent height (as determined by yardstick).
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2mo ago
Maybe I am too law brained but this outcome seems obvious? When governments draw distinctions between people they need a way to adjudicate who is classified how. For demographic markers they often issue some kind of identification that contains those markers and are considered authoritative. Sometimes (often?) there is a general process for updating those documents and markers when they are incorrect. When one undergoes the process for changing ones markers then, legally, one has changed classification.
This case was not lost today it was lost when, in 1994, Queensland started permitting one to change one's legal sex (if I read the opinion correctly) and, in 2013, when Australia amended the Sex Discrimination Act to cover gender identity.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2mo ago
Interestingly partisan stratification by age is also (according to Pew's data) a pretty recent phenomenon. According to their partisanship of generational cohorts it basically didn't matter what age range you were in during the 90's, the distribution of Democrats and Republicans was very close. By 2009 the 20-29 cohort was significantly more Democrat but the others were still pretty even. Then by 2023 the 24-33 cohort was even more Democrat and all the 54+ demographics were significantly more Republican (proportional with age).
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2mo ago
Do you have a citation for that? According to Gallup men in the 18-29 age range as of 2023 (not quite entirely GenZ) break down their identification as 29/44/25 between Conservative/Moderate/Liberal. This is compared to women's 21/37/40 split of the same. A PRRI report purporting to be specifically of GenZ also has GenZ men as quite liberal (38% identify as liberal compared to 31% who identify as conservative) though not as liberal as GenZ women (47% liberal to 24% conservative).
I think the degree of gender polarization in the United States is quite overstated. According to Pew, from April 2024, there's a 5-8 percentage point gap between men and women in terms of party identification (men are 46D-52R compared to women's 51D-44R). Compare this to the 20 point gap in your example. The Pew article also provides a historical graph of this identification going back to 1994. It's hard to look at the graph and see a consistent trend of gender polarization. Instead it seems to me the electorate as a whole tends to move as one, men and women becoming more Democrat or more Republican in tandem. There are also periods where voters have been even more polarized by gender than they are today. That 5-8 point gap today was 10 points in 1994, mostly due to men being even more Republican then.
ETA:
Lest people think this is a young-person phenomenon the data Pew has shows precisely the opposite. Men and women under 50 are united in being majority Democrats, while men and women over 50 are the ones polarized by gender.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2mo ago
How does this even work with a privately traded company?
You're a founder and you (hypothetically) sell an initial 10% stake in your company for 100M, which gives your remaining 90% stake an imputed value of 900M. So now you owe 25% of 900M of this extremely illiquid asset?
Do private company fundraising rounds go down (you'll owe less in taxes) or up (investors cover the tax bill)?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3mo ago
Who decides when someone has "cease[d] to be of value of others?" What if the person in question doesn't want to die? Killing oneself is not that hard and probably easier as one gets older.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3mo ago
It depends on the year, but yes. If we have the Clinton-era tax code in many recent years (assuming no changes in spending) we would have had a budget surplus.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3mo ago
You're right, I misread my source which includes all revenue drops post the making permanent of the Bush tax cuts (in 2012). So that number is also inclusive of Trump's tax cuts and some similar measures.
Sounds like we should repeal the Bush tax cuts. Their permanent extension was expected to cost 16T over a decade. That, amortized, would have covered the federal deficit in its entirety every year since it was made permanent (in 2016), with the exception of 2020 and 2021.
See this comment.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3mo ago
Not sure I agree. Social Security existed in the same form it does now when we last had a budget surplus.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3mo ago
This idea fascinates me, and while I'm sure there are all sorts of reasons it may be terrible, I fear that financially the U.S. may need to do something dramatic like this in order to get the debt under control, etc etc
What does under control mean here? It's not that long ago (late 90's) the United States has a budget surplus. Our debt to GDP ratio could also be shrinking substantially if we repealed the Bush and Trump tax cuts (i.e. went back to the tax rates we had when we had a surplus). The growth of United States debt to some unmanageable level only seems inevitable because one of the primary ways of reducing it is implicitly off the table. This asymmetry also infects US political discourse. Any new spending must justify itself with how it is going to be paid for but the same is rarely asked of tax cuts.
The question for me is - how would this work? Which areas do you think would get cut the most? (education was mentioned here specifically) Which areas are critical and should remain mostly untouched? (post office?)
Any discussion here needs to start with the actual federal budget. About 60% of which is Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid/Military. Cutting the DOE down to 0 would cut ~10% off the deficit. You could eliminate a solid majority of federal government departments and still not arrive at a budget surplus. Most of them are tiny relative to the size of the deficit.
On top of that, if this were to happen, what would be the primary blockers?
The largest one is probably the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act. The Act was a direct response to executive branch employees (including the President) giving out government positions as a kind of patronage. The Act reformed the hiring process for large swathes of administrative agencies to be based on merit and competitive exams rather than political appointment. You might have heard about this in the context of Trump trying to create Schedule F to designate a bunch of positions in the executive branch as exempt from civil service protections.
Do you think Elon is the right man for the job without political connections?
I am not sure how Elon is "without political connections." He just hosted an interview with a candidate for President. His companies are government contractors. He has adversarial relationships with particular executive branch departments. He is not exactly someone with no personal financial interest in the operation of specific government departments.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3mo ago
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3mo ago
I don't know what Rasmussen is talking about. The 538 polling aggregator shows like a dozen polls coming out post-8/4. This includes ones from major pollers like NYT/Sienna, Ipsos, and Emerson. It's true that a bunch of these polls only included swing state numbers rather than national numbers but state numbers seem more useful to me anyway. That's where the election is actually won.
On the changing methodology, a bunch of pollers like NYT/Sienna and Ipsos publish their full crosstabs. If suddenly their sample was way more Democrats or Democrat leaning groups it would be pretty easy to check.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3mo ago
It doesn't explicitly permit it, but neither do it's terms forbid it.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3mo ago
I guess I view the explicit exemption for pedophilia as unnecessary. The definition of sexual orientation already precludes it. So it was removed for that reason. Rather than because the MN legislature wanted to prohibit discrimination against pedophiles.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3mo ago
I've seen this perspective a few times in other places and I'm skeptical. To my perception none of the people needling Republicans by calling them weird are using it in a derogatory way towards other groups often labeled weird (LGBT people, leftists, etc). To me the attack seems tactically deployed at Republicans due to their susceptibility to it as I articulated above. "Weird" is not itself bad, but calling Republicans weird is funny due to their insistence that they aren't. The reaction they have is the point. Not being derogatory to people who are weird in a general way.
The NLRB has a basic guide you might find informative.
The NLRB has two primary functions. First is to hear and adjudicate complaints about unfair labor practices by unions and employers. Second is to oversee union elections as a kind of third party arbitrator.
In the United States the relevant verbiage is a "collective bargaining unit." What makes up a collective bargaining unit is at the NLRB's discretion, subject to some statutory constraints. Generally the idea is that it involves a group of individuals with the same or similar economic interest who are sensible to group together for the purpose of collective bargaining. In the United States you probably often hear about the "UAW" or "Teamsters." These groups are not collective bargaining units as such but are made up of many groups (often called local unions) who are. From the perspective of US labor law the local unions are the "real" unions, with rights and obligations with respect to employers and others.
It is not really the NLRB as such but the National Labor Relations Act that imposes obligations on employers to negotiate in good faith with recognized unions of their employees.
Correct, there is no particular requirement that employees be "skilled" (whatever that means) for them to constitute a collective bargaining unit under US law.
Yes. The NLRB found that Starbucks closed those stores because the employees at those stores had voted to unionize, which is an unfair labor practice. One of the examples they give in the basic guide is an employer threatening to shut down a plant as a way of discouraging plant workers from organizing.
This is kind of like anti-discrimination law. It's not that businesses can't shit down locations without NLRB approval, it's that they cannot shut down a location because its employees decided to unionize. I agree ordering the business to re-open a location is not great, but I'm open to hearing what other remedy would be appropriate.
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