token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo ago
The seemingly now-universal popular habit of calling Instant Runoff Voting (a term that specifies one particular voting system) by the name Ranked Choice Voting (a term that applies to IRV, but also Condorcet methods, STV in multi-winner elections, a ton of other methods, and I guess technically even plurality voting), is weird to me. How did that get started?
It's an intentional propaganda campaign by FairVote, which is the only at all effective organization pushing for alternative voting systems in the United States. They actively fight against any voting system other than Instant Runoff Voting (or Single Transferable Vote for multi-member districts, but the US doesn't really do those) and intentionally use that language to obscure the discussion.
It's a little hard to take FairVote as good-faith actors given they're acting exactly how you'd design an organization to prevent the adoption of any alternative voting systems by pushing the worst choice for an alternative voting system and bad-mouthing all of the others.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo ago
Oh, counting votes by sorting ballots never even occurred to me. American elections almost always have several races on the ballot, so that's not really a feasible way to organize the counting. The counting is almost always done by machine anyway, with hand-counting only for recounts.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
5mo ago
Ranked Choice Voting describes a kind of ballot design where candidates are preferentially ranked, Instant-Runoff Voting describes one way to decide a winner from such ballots.
True, but the only vaguely effective lobbying/activist group for alternative voting methods in the US is FairVote and they are strongly against any voting method other than IRV and one of the ways they actively try to confuse the issue is by using term "Ranked Choice Voting" to refer to Instant-Runoff Voting, as you can see on their website.
it's dead simple to administer and tally compared to otherwise better methods such as approval/range.
I'm confused: IRV is notable for being one of the only voting methods that fails the summability criterion making it by far the hardest to tally. Does this issue just not appear in practice because there just aren't ever that many candidates so the factorial of the number of candidates stays manageable? Or is it handled some other way?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
You're smuggling in the assumption that the reaction to paying out tax instead of having it withheld is the more "correct"/rational reaction. I could just as easily assert voting conservative for that reason is letting their heart and wallet override their mind.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
Great! Then you can have the police deal with the criminals and you'll get rid of the drug addicts and bums for free. Why do you need separately send the police at the bums, then?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
drug addicts, criminals, and bums
One of these is not like the others.
This is a recurring problem in the discussions around what to do about the homeless: mixing up aesthetic dislike of visible poor people with not wanting people committing crimes around you. I'm generally of the opinion, although I realize many city police departments seem to disagree, that being homeless should not prevent you from being charged with a crime. But that's different from simply being homeless alone being illegal.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
I'm not sure how the current precedent is worded, but any rule along the lines of "you can only ban sleeping on the streets to people whom you offer 'acceptable' shelter" of course is going to have a lot of arguments over what constitutes "acceptable" shelter. Which should probably be below a studio apartment and might be below what is acceptable to rent out (although the laws setting overly high minimums on what's acceptable to rent out are a non-trivial factor in the rise of homelessness, so, uh, those should probably be lower, too).
But we should definitely set the line somewhere and actually enforce public camping laws if a reasonable attempt has been made to get the person into "acceptable" housing. And I thought that was more or less what the precedent said.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
I'm confused; notification settings aren't controlled within the app on Android, they're on the app info settings page which is identical for every app and allows you to disable types of notifications or all notifications for an app. Of course, the app might have overly coarse categories or lie about its notification categories, so you might have to disable more notifications than you intended, I guess.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
I'd say ProPublica, The Atlantic, and The Economist are all mainstream left-leaning news sources I expect to do a better job of analysis than NPR. With the "analysis" part, I'm intentionally excluding Reuters/AP which I expect to be relatively trustworthy on the facts (of course with some bias on which facts they report and precisely how they present them), but analysis just isn't what they're trying to do.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
I honestly cannot even fathom being unable to see NPR's shift in the past 8 years. Someone has to have a bare minimum of observational skills and long-term memory, and then it should just be patently obvious.
I've never had a car commute, so I haven't listened to NPR on radio regularly since I was a child. My exposure to their current slant is mainly by reading articles and occasionally listening to podcasts. So I don't know what their day-to-day news coverage is like for the most part, which makes it harder for me to notice a change. But my interpretation of their bias is from articles of theirs I've read in the past few months.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
I assumed the bump in construction costs around 2020 was due to increased demand for home renovation projects because people were spending more time in their homes and had fewer other things to spend money on. But that doesn't explain why they didn't go back down.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
NPR is too far left? That's certainly a take.
I have the impression of NPR as their spin being similar to NYT: representing the most milquetoast "centrist" corporate Dem position possible, with token discussions of "diversity" or minority rights while completely eliding any structural issues or suggestions for real leftist/progressive reform. Often so blatantly that it feels like the editor deleted the paragraph discussing them and immediately hit publish.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo ago
Well, that explains Bruce Schneier's most recent blog post "Improving C++". I'm generally a fan of Rust, but acknowledge there's a lot of existing code in C/C++ and rewriting code that works is asking for trouble; we should be making sure we have the tooling to retrofit the appropriate checks into existing code. That is, updating to C++29 or whatever is almost certainly going to be easier and less error-prone than porting to Rust.
Tivoization is the term for the problem you're talking about. And free software advocates have been raging against it since, uh, you could actually find someone who could remember the last time they saw a TiVo. With the recent EU fight with Apple and the Right to Repair movement in the US, it looks like there's a small push in the other direction at the moment. But that's not very reassuring.
It is weird to see an anti-government anti-Tivoization rant given that I've always seen it as an anti-corporate position.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo ago
Presidential primaries are not just about who wins the nomination and general election. They're also about policy. While it's obfuscated, the primary selects actual people to attend the nominating convention which both selects the candidate and negotiates exactly what appears on the party platform.
I doubt most of the pro-Gaza agitators honestly think they are going get Biden off the ballot, but they might think they can put enough pressure on him and the Democratic Party to change their official position on Gaza. They're probably wrong, but I'm sure there's people inside Biden's campaign watching this and considering what threshold of protest votes would make them consider what changes in policy. I suspect that threshold is much higher than we're seeing, but I'm really not sure.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo ago
Eliminating the people in charge of keeping China honest on containing pandemics only a few months before China proceeds to not even try to contain a pandemic and blatantly lie about it seems like it might be a little related. Sure, they may have failed to contain it if they did try.
To be fair, the more important line of defense would have been keeping China honest on enforcing the rules about live animal markets they implemented after SARS and then stopped enforcing after a few years; I'm having trouble finding a hard timeline on that, but that's definitely primarily Obama's fuck up.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo ago
The FAQ page includes the chart you asked for (up to December 2020), which shows there was a pretty big jump in early 2020, but nowhere near as large as it looks on the official chart (i.e. around 2x instead of around 10x).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo ago
This is where the narrator voiceover comes in to correct me that 2020 was not in fact a fairly normal year lacking in chaos or bad things for Americans.
I'm really not sure how we got the narrative that the liberals were crying wolf over the bad things Trump was doing, and then an actual catastrophe happened as a result, and somehow you still think they were crying wolf?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo ago
Legalizing gay marriage was seen as a radical leftist movement, but the actual result was that all the gay people - and most importantly, gay artists and icons and culture warriors - stopped living as radical counter-culture outsiders challenging every pillar of the nuclear family, and switched to being respectability-politics-first normies living quiet lives in the suburbs with 2.5 adopted kids.
I don't think this really changes your point, but "all the gay people" is definitely an exaggeration here. I definitely know people whose queerness is central to their counter-culture identity of "down with heteronormative patriarchal capitalism" or whatever, including speaking out against nuclear families. And queer artists who joyfully include the same themes in their work.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8mo ago
I don't understand how this is possibly the court's fault. I haven't heard of this challenge before, so maybe the article you linked about it is misleading somehow, but it sounds like the sequence of events was:
- Lindell proposes a challenge claiming he has evidence related to cheating on the 2020 election, offers a $5 million prize to the first person to prove him wrong to the satisfaction of him or an arbitrator he chose.
- Someone in fact convinces the arbitrator they have fulfilled the requirements of the prize; Lindell doesn't pay out.
- Just now, a court confirmed that, yes, the arbitrator really was convinced and that means Lindell has to pay out.
The court very explicitly did not look at the election claims; they only said "this was the terms of the bet; they were fulfilled, so you have to pay out".
It’s a remarkable situation. Evidence of election interference should be investigated by law enforcement agencies, with no need for a bounty to disprove the validity.
I'm really not sure why you think evidence of election interference isn't investigated by government authorities (reworded because I'm not sure if law enforcement or the secretary of state's office / election board is the appropriate authority, probably depends on the exact case). It sounds like Lindell didn't have any evidence and just threw together some unrelated obfuscated numbers and didn't expect anyone to call him out on it.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
9mo ago
Sorry, being sick sucks. Having to work while sick really sucks. I definitely see people blame forcing people to work while sick on US-specific idiocy so it's interesting to hear the same from another country.
I thought doing flu/RSV PCR along with any COVID PCR was standard? Maybe just in the US?
I guess he hasn't mentioned it in a bit, but for a while Daniel Griffin in the TWiV clinical updates was harping on the fact that COVID+flu happened enough and had a sufficiently different treatment plan that flu tests should always be done for COVID patients (I'm guessing he meant hospitalized ones?).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
9mo ago
The question of who is the aggressor in the culture war comes up here every once in a while. As every other reply seems to be certain that the Blue Tribe is the aggressor against the Red Tribe, I feel like I should point out that the Blue Tribe believes the opposite. From the Blue Tribe point of view, they want equality and rights for everyone regardless of identity, and they believe that's the default if only the Red Tribe would stop discriminating.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
9mo ago
It certainly wasn't that bad pre-2020, but probably a large part of why it got so bad is that Seattle's downtown has never been a place normal people went very often. Away from the touristy waterfront (which doesn't have many tourists in the winter, hence your lack of wait at the "original Starbucks" which I assure you was quite packed this past summer), it's pretty much just office buildings. Outside of 8-6 on weekdays, pre-2020, it was completely empty other than where the public transit transfers are. You could go blocks without seeing another human, even in the summer at mid-day. A lot of restaurants didn't bother opening for dinner or on weekends because they were only for office workers, and the nearby nightlife neighborhoods (Belltown and Capitol Hill) are not that far a walk (or short transit ride).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
9mo ago
A quick google overdose deaths topped 112k in 2023 an all-time record.
[...]
I believe an order of magnitude bigger problem than COVID.
Trying to put some actual numbers to this:
According to the NYT COVID data page, weekly COVID deaths in the past year have ranged from 490 (July 2-8) to 2,462 (Jan 7-13) or 0.9%-3.6% of all deaths. Of course, this is deaths from acute COVID, actual COVID deaths is somewhat higher than the official numbers, but hard to get good data on how much higher, so let's stick to these numbers. Also, going back further the numbers are a lot higher and less regular, I'm assuming the past year is a much better approximation of what to expect going forward than including any older data. (Also, I'm not seeing an official 2023 death count... looking I found this 2022 report published in May 2023 so it's probably just too early for finalized 2023 numbers.)
112k/52 = average 2,153 deaths/week from overdose deaths, doesn't seem hugely different from number of COVID deaths, although since overdose doses are mostly young and COVID deaths are mostly old, measuring in QALYs would likely paint a different picture... although if you're measuring QALYs, not trying to measure the impact of post-COVID conditions seems unfair, and I'm not sure how that would affect the conclusion.
There's also the obvious issue that COVID is practically unavoidable, although there's ways to reduce the impact (vaccination, antivirals, not getting old being healthier), while avoiding an overdose is straight forward: Don't Do Drugs(tm). Or, at least, that's the oversimplification in the popular conception of the two.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
9mo ago
Opioids definitely do affect different people differently. I've had them prescribed once to take after a surgery. I took one dose immediately after the surgery and decided I'd rather no pain medication at all than a second dose. (Pretty sure I took ibuprofen, not nothing.) I've discussed this with others and gather this isn't an entirely uncommon reaction, although certainly far from a majority opinion.
The failure mode of IRV looks more like 45% D, 10% R, 25% L, 20% C where the Rs are the voters sufficiently disengaged and ignoring third parties to not put down a second choice or write D as a second choice.
In other words, if almost everyone selects different obscure third-parties they really want first and the realistic choice second, then IRV gets nonsense results because the realistic choice gets eliminated even though everyone expected their votes to get reallocated to them. In practice this isn't a real problem because no one proposing IRV seriously expects any meaningful votes outside of the two-party duopoly.
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