VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
No bio...
User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6hr ago
"rape culture,"
You know, I feel like I haven't heard this one in a while now. Odd how fixations on these things fade, sometimes surprisingly quickly.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
7hr ago
And of course, the crime rate difference between men and women is gigantic.
There are plenty of ways in which The System™ very much accounts for this. I've never seen anyone in-ernest complaining that disparate conviction rates on the basis of gender being a sign of "Systemic Sexism". We got rid of all the exclusively-male spaces, but still allow women's-specific institutions: see the fervor on both sides of the trans issue, but the takes aren't typically "eliminate the women's restroom completely" or "repeal Title IX to have a single sports league again".
And honestly I think I'm okay with it that way.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
7hr ago
I think this is the only real answer to gerrymandering, so I think we agree.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
8hr ago
It's not hard to see that (some of) the "most progressive" areas are the most segregated in the country. Or sometimes just the whitest (Portland, Boulder). It's a weird dynamic that, say, Jackson isn't known for that.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
8hr ago
Because siblings with different amounts of African ancestry have the same family background
Is the claim this data was studied between siblings of the same parents? Because with enough genes at play this sounds like trying to divide by coinflips by heads count: easy for single-coin games (eye color, etc), but if you're flipping thousands of coins you're going to end up with about the same number every time.
But I'm not a geneticist, so feel free to tell me where I'm wrong.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9hr ago
I think a decent chunk of the popular opposition to gerrymandering is specifically being upset at majority-party sweeps or over-representation, so I'm not sure I feel better about that.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9hr ago
Is there even a good definition of "autism" at play? I have met enough cases that I kinda grasp it intuitively, but the lack of a concrete measurement for really any characteristic sometimes makes me wonder if in a slightly different world we'd be having the same arguments over "misanthropy" (including prefers things to people), or something like that. Imagine if we let people self-diagnose with something that caused irritability.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9hr ago
I think the steel-man of the class/subculture argument here would be to point out that clothes and posturing are also doing a lot of work here: we're talking about someone putting their feet on the seats (not a 'proper' behavior). These cases are never about someone in a suit, or even a collared shirt, or about someone quietly reading a book or using headphones. It's always about someone swaggering around like they own the place.
I will absolutely concede that this correlates pretty strongly with race, and I won't take a side here on whether there is causation and in which direction. You can try to do so in a colorblind fashion, but I think it'll look pretty similar to an outside observer regardless.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
Attacks on free speech have been coming from both sides for some time here: the Biden administration leaned on Facebook and others to censor user posts about COVID vaccines. Biden also nominated Gigi Sohn to the FCC, who had previously tweeted strong negative opinions about Fox News (the Senate did not confirm the nomination). We also had the short-lived "Disinformation Governance Board."
Separately: Is Fox News even broadcast OTA anywhere? They don't need an FCC license to exist on cable networks. I know Kimmel is/was, and the "official" statement said gave OTA channels pulling the broadcast as the cause.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
Have you heard of this group called "the Libertarian Party"?
Didn't the capital-L Libertarian Party have some rather ugly schisms and infighting in the last couple years? Did that ever get reasonably resolved? I stopped following them some time around then.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
Everyone always talks about gerrymandering at the level of congressional representation, but I think it's far more insidious at the city level: in the city I live in (and I suspect this is true of many cities in the country), the '24 presidential vote shares (which haven't changed much) were somewhere around 65-35 blue-red. But wouldn't you know it, every city council district voted for a blue candidate (even notionally "non-party-affiliated", but as far as I can tell everyone is aware of the alignment from the messaging), and there was no shortage of complaining when a single red candidate won a special election for a truncated term a couple years back.
As far as I can tell, this statement describes almost every moderate-size or larger city in the country.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
I've heard that's a tough field in terms of work-life balance. There does seem to be a lot of US interest in it of late (I guess I can't speak to the last 6 months), at least moreso than a decade or so back. I wish you the best of luck!
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
This is actually one of my first experiments in using chatgpt to educate myself on something,
If you haven't run across it yet, the late Sheldon Brown's website comes highly recommended.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
Networking
I don't know how common references are in your field these days, but it'd probably be good to trade non-work contact info with colleagues who would be willing to be references for each other if necessary. It's common to lose access to corporate resources immediately in these situations today, so it might be hard to get the phone number of the guy one desk over who you've worked with daily.
OP: it sucks, I've been through it. Take solace in that it's not about you as a developer, and doesn't reflect on your abilities.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
staunch belief in never discussing religion from.
You know, I have a couple of Gen X friends (women) who I'm quite sure voted for Harris express and then agree on the statement "so this is why our parents' generation had a rule against discussing politics or religion in polite company." I've always mostly abided by that myself, but it felt interesting to hear the sentiment voiced aloud.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
As a thought experiment, the Internet in some ways looks like large-scale direct democracy (literally upvotes). Beyond the tractability questions of direct democracy a few centuries ago, the form of government is also generally acknowledged to suffer from known issues like tyranny of the majority, or even by particularly motivated minorities. Which seems a lot like what we see going wrong in online culture, in my opinion.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
I would love to talk about theory, but I'm not sure interesting discussions of theory are available.
I do find myself thinking about abstract political questions (usually steeped down from current issues, but abstracted from the immediate contextual details) from time to time. Maybe I need to start a list and write a couple of paragraphs to make a top-level post occasionally.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
DHS Secretary Homan was alleged to have been caught on video taking a bribe from undercover FBI agents. In the fog of war politics, who knows if this is actually true, maybe eventually we'll see the video and can make an informed judgment.
This certainly sounds pretty sketchy. But at a meta-level, how often are undercover FBI agents running sting operations on current (or likely future?) cabinet members? This feels like it could go a lot like the Russiagate fiasco, which wasn't the slam-dunk Democrats thought it would be because the takeaway for at least some on the right was "Wait, you decided to wiretap your political rivals? On that basis?".
Give it a day or two, but I predict a lot of "Why did you spend $50K of taxpayer dollars to try to entrap a high-level Republican on the basis of 'an unrelated investigation'?" takes.
Maybe Mark Klein?
I'm not sure what would have been an equivalent excess to blow the whistle about before the Bush administration, just from a technical perspective.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
I think in some of these cases (I'm going to not express an opinion on the policy change itself at the moment) we're seeing the lawyers in the administration find the closest approximation that is (arguably) allowed by the text Congress passed. In this case, it seems to be that they're allowed to recoup the costs of the program via fees (and government accounting is famous for keeping costs reasonable). I suspect --- but would need to wade into far more details than I care to tonight --- that they weren't directly empowered to raise the salary floor. The first AI agent I asked suggests that the floor is set by Department of Labor statistics, which may not be easy to change without even larger side effects.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
"Congress has only authorized the government to set fees to recover the cost of adjudicating an application,"
On one hand, this sounds like a reasonable take, but I feel like getting into a "it can't possibly cost that much to do this" fight with the US government is inherently a losing one.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
The terms of an FCC broadcast license are more restrictive than straight 1A would imply (allowed on the basis that spectrum is a finite resource with not enough space for everyone to broadcast as much as they want). You may be right in this case, which certainly looks questionable for a few reasons, but there is a "public interest" requirement for broadcast that doesn't exist for newspapers and cable TV.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
Tangential question: How often do NFL owners directly interact with the players? It seems like it could be pretty hands-on or aloof and only talking to the coaches.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
Their bottom lines and viewers are still aligned with their platforms (yt, twitch). Reddit is a whole another discussion.
The House Oversight Committee has invited the CEOs of Discord, Reddit, Steam, and Twitch to appear at a hearing next month. I doubt anything directly comes of it, but I expect some embarassing hay-making from the right quoting posted site rules and asking if [the most objectionable moderator-approved posts] fall within them, and why [milquetoast removed by mods posts] didn't.
Also not sure about Steam on that list, but I don't use almost any of its social features.
Aren't there a few cases where "am I being detained?" is actually a reasonable/correct response? Pretty sure it's followed by "if no, leave, if yes, ask for a lawyer".
It's definitely overused, though.
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