@token_progressive's banner p

token_progressive

maybe not the only progressive here

0 followers   follows 0 users  
joined 2022 October 25 17:28:07 UTC 

				
User ID: 1737


				
				
				

			

		

	














	


		


			



	

		

			

			

				

					

						

							
						

						

							
							

								
token_progressive


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
maybe not the only progressive here

				
				
				

				

					0 followers  

					follows 0 users  

					joined 2022 October 25 17:28:07 UTC
				


				
					

					
No bio...

				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
User ID: 1737


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
‎

			

				
				

					Hour
					Day
					Week
					Month
					Year
					All
				

			


			
‎

			

	
	

	 Hot Bump Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
	



		

	






	

		
		

		
		
	

	

  







		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm not entirely certainly this post is just straight up trolling giving how far I had to read into it before it being clear whether you were pro- or anti-trans.




What are you going on about? Gender-affirming surgeries on trans minors are exceedingly rare (that data does show a small upward trend, even controlling for population). That data gives under 30/year genital surgeries and under 300/year top surgeries on a population of about 40 million children. In comparison, gender-affirming surgeries on cis minors are about 20 times more common.


I'm not sure why any children are getting cosmetic surgeries; that seems like it's probably best left age-gated to adults. But they're rare enough that it sounds to me more like there's a handful a weird special cases, not that there's an epidemic of unnecessary harmful surgeries.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Do you mean after filling out a VBM ballot before it's been counted? It goes into a county-maintained ballot box. Or I could hand it off directly to a county elections official if I wanted to go out of my way (I think the closest place to do that is out of walking distance). I guess in rural areas, getting to a ballot box might be not worth the effort, so it would go to the mailman instead, so not in the hands of an election official. But that's why there's a notification when your ballot is received; then you can submit it sufficiently ahead of time to try again in the unlikely event it failed to reach the elections office.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for November 8, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Stay away from nonsense like band work (there are applications for this, but not general fitness).




"band work" = resistance bands?


What's wrong with them? They seem like a minimal equipment way to do strength training. Maybe they just are only functional at weights too low to be useful? Or is there some deeper issue?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for November 8, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Echoing self_made_human, not telling you the reason doesn't mean they don't know the reason. They might not, but, also, it's standard advice to never give a reason in such a situation. Among other problems, giving a reason makes some people think the reason is a problem to be fixed and then the relationship will happen after all, not merely an explanation.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 15, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think Aurora is the only book of his I read after enjoying the RGB Mars trilogy (+ The Martians short story collection in that universe). Those books go a bit off the deep end into the environmentalism and Marxism towards the end... but basically just I recommend skipping Blue Mars or noping out of when you've had enough. I also thought Aurora was overly preachy (and mind, this is coming from someone who literally goes by "token progressive" on this forum; I may disagree with him less you than you do, but it's still not fun to read), so it's good to hear most of his other books are good.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm very confused. How it is not the exact opposite? This seems like a fairly central example of "don't teach women to not get raped; teach men to not rape". The advice can be paraphrased into "if you see a woman at a party and you think she's not in the right headspace to meaningfully consent to sex, don't try to have sex with her". It fits very cleanly into a sex-positive consent-focused framework.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 15, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm amused that most of the replies answer a slightly different question than you asked: they answered about knowing people who don't own a smartphone and you asked about people who don't carry a smartphone everywhere. The implication being that the idea of owning a smartphone but not carrying it everywhere isn't really an option.


Not that I'm trying to claim any kind of moral high ground here: I'm definitely in the "carry smartphone everywhere" category. The only exception is leaving it in a bag when I'm doing something active enough that having a smartphone in my pocket would be annoying. I don't have a smartwatch, but some people I know use them for that situation (I think only people who are on call).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
While I'm sure any American version of this would give the voting power to the same investment companies that get the voting power on the shares held by pensions and 401(k)s (e.g. Vangard, etc.), and not the government, it certainly would be amusing if the "free market" reworking of social security ended up being a very socialist policy.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 25, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


More out of curiosity than anything else, what queer spaces do straight people want anything to do with?




I'm just relaying the (a?) classic gentrification story: the weirdos make good art / make the place "cool", more mainstream people notice and eventually overrun the place, outnumbering the people who made it cool in the first place, the vibe is dead. When it happens to a neighborhood, it's (negative connotation) gentrification. But the same pattern happens to social spaces. I've heard people talk about it in relation to kink communities and music subcultures.


That is, straight people aren't drawn to the space because it's queer, from their point of view the queerness is coincidental and often invisible. Of course, this is also the story queer people tell themselves; maybe the queer people aren't actually as cool as they think they are.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 25, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Part of the problem here is that the optimal number of men (from the point of view of the organizers of the conference) is not zero. Having some allies that get their messages about gender discrimination out of the conference is very much so a goal of the conference, albeit not a primary one. Even if they could devise a rule that banned men but not "real" non-binary attendees, it's not actually what they want.


It seems like the actual solution probably looks like getting rid of the recruiters and thereby removing that incentive to attend from people not interested in the supposed main point of the conference.


(This feels parallel to discussions I've been involved in about non-queer people in queer spaces. Although I haven't personally seen such a space get overrun with non-queer people, my understanding is that they generally either have to fight hard to stay queer by being very explicit about being a queer space or end up splitting off and creating a new Really Queer This Time(tm) space every once in a while.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This seems to be missing part of the feminist argument which is that the advice they complain is "victim blaming" is often tied to claims that the advice doesn't actually affect the chance of rape. Which is also related to redirecting the discussion to claims that stranger rape is rare, so advice geared towards avoiding it is a useless distraction.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm going with Poe's law here. From the abstract, I assumed that paper was a joke, but I can't find any clear evidence either way.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for August 4, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Mathematical logic is a pretty wide field of which boolean algebra is only a small part of the basics.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Spoilers for a 21 year old anime but in .hack//SIGN, which takes place almost entirely inside a video game, in the final episode, it's revealed that the male main character who is stuck inside the video game and has amnesia and is actually female. This is partially played as surprising because there's a romance subplot between him and a female character, so surprise same-sex relationship. But also, it's just shown in the final scene, there's no follow-up. May even be after the last dialog in the show.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				In which I pine for a monastic escape from the sexual rat race
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Does this only apply to women's attire? i.e. is a man dressed sexy (whatever qualifies as such for this context... shirtless and showing muscles, wearing an expensive suit, etc.) in public also advertising himself as open to advances from any women he might encounter while out and about?


I understand interpreting attempts to appear attractive as an invitation to interact in a context like a bar or a party, but even there, I'd think the more relevant signal would be being at the bar or party without a visible date. Them being more attractive of course would increase your desire to interact with them, but I don't see why it necessarily is a signal of their desire to be interacted with.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Would you mind at least translating the headline? So far I got


    

  • HISD = Houston Independent School District. I think that's saying it's the public school district covering Houston (and some of its suburbs?) and the "Independent" part is just part of how school districts are named/organized in Texas?
    • 

  • NES = New Education System... whatever that is?
    • 

  • SD = School District
    • 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 23, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is enough of a problem that GitHub Codespaces exists, advertised as solving exactly this problem, so it's not just you.


Some of this is just experience / familiarity with the tooling. While I agree with other comments in the thread that for professional development, I'm usually working on the same codebase for a while (and when I do spin up on a new codebase, they're sufficiently used to getting new hires set up that they have written instructions), for working in random open source repos, getting set up is usually a few quick rounds of installing whatever packages it complains are missing at most. And while not universal, a lot of GitHub repos do have instructions in how to get started working in the repo.


For a Python project, it's surprising you need anything more than the latest Python and pointing virtualenv at the requirements.txt file. I assume there were some dependencies that couldn't be installed that way for some reason.


(You mention in another comment that you're on Mac... which I've never used for development but I've fairly frequently heard of Linux devs switching to Mac saying the dev support is close enough to Linux and they like the rest of the OS better... so I assume it's plenty usable as a dev platform.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This seems like a strange perspective to me. Or maybe I'm missing your point. The Culture War isn't about the positive and beautiful because, and maybe I'm stretching the metaphor here, war isn't positive and beautiful.


Plenty of people are making beautiful arts and crafts of various kinds to enrich their lives and the lives of those around them. That's just not Culture War material.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Seemingly-unrelated-but-actually-quite-relevant question: Why do you find the Chinese vaccine efficacy statistics untrustworthy?




Multiple comments in this thread were taking for granted that all official information out of China is a lie. I was assuming we were including their vaccine studies in that. It seemed simpler to just cut out that part of the discussion.






Why are other vaccines not like this?




There's at least two things going on here:


    

  1. Coronaviruses move really fast and cause noticeable symptoms and transmission very soon after exposure. A major factor in their success is outracing the immune system.
    2. 

  2. We only very recently got the testing technology to easily test for infection, so we simply don't know the impact on infection of most vaccines. We tested that people don't get noticeably sick and we observed that herd immunity / ring vaccination seem to work in practice, so they're apparently reducing transmission, but it's not something we've tested for historically. Fun fact: IPV (the inactivated Polio vaccine which given by injection and used in most countries including the US) doesn't prevent infection or transmission; it's just extremely effective against severe disease. We have no clue if it's effective against mild disease because no doctor has ever seen a patient with a mild cold and thought "I better run a PCR test for Polio".
    3. 





Why does this aspect not work anymore with Omicron? Why does the updated vaccine not work the same way?




Because the protection from infection was always a misinterpretation of the data (I haven't actually listened to them but there's TWiV T cell episodes dated August 2020 and they've been patting themselves on the back for getting the story right from the start). It's a little complicated because there's two separate things going on at the same time that can be difficult to disentangle: the virus is changing over time and protection from infection (which only applies to a sufficiently similar virus anyway) decreases over time.


Antibodies are the reason why once you've gotten a virus, your immune system actually clears it out completely (for most viruses, if your immune system is actually functioning right) and you don't get that virus again soon. But antibody levels fall quickly (on the order of months). Maybe not to zero, but to low enough that within about 3-6 months, they're no longer high enough to protect you from infection by a coronavirus. A likely evolutionary explanation for this is that many viruses mutate fairly quickly, so keeping the antibodies around for an old version of a virus is not super useful (it's also possible antibodies against coronaviruses specifically go away faster because the immune system somehow recognizes it as virus likely to mutate, but that's purely speculation my part). The balance is that the immune system keeps around memory B cells which can ramp up production of known antibodies if a sufficiently similar infection is detected, but that takes on the order of days to produce a significant level of antibodies.


For the first about two years of the pandemic (i.e. pre-Omicron), SARS-CoV-2 didn't mutate to evade immunity much, probably because it had plenty of naive hosts to target, so there was limited selection pressure for immune evasion, so antibodies against the original strain in the vaccine remained fairly effective, but, importantly, this was irrelevant 3-6 months after a person's most recent vaccine dose / significant virus exposure, since those antibodies would have gone away by then. So the initial 90%+ protection from infection numbers were on people who were very recently vaccinated with a strain closely matching the circulating strain. Now there both are multiple circulating strains and they are changing too quickly to develop and distribute a vaccine before it changes enough that the vaccine effectiveness against infection would be significantly reduced. Additionally, Omicron seems to actually be better at evading the immune system, not just better at evading immune memory from insufficiently similar strains of SARS-CoV-2, so the best case is not as good.


The bivalent vaccines did provide some protection from infection: see this study (mentioned briefly in this episode of TWiV) which found it reduced the chance of a PCR positive when BA.4/5 (i.e. the strain it was targeted against) was dominant by 29%, when BQ was dominant by 20% (but with the 95% confidence interval going down to 6%), and when XBB was dominant not at all. So, uh, it's doing something, but nothing to write home about, even if you were somehow able to come up with a new vaccine every 3 months, 29% protection from infection just isn't worth it, especially when protection from severe disease remains strong.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yes, science has an answer for that: protection against severe outcomes appears to be mainly due to T cells, which take too long to react to an infection to clamp it down enough to never be detectable. T cells react to infected cells so there's no mechanism for them to prevent an infection, but when we say "prevent infection" we actually mean "prevent detectable infection", so it's imaginable that some T cell-virus interaction could fit that definition, although that does not seem to ever be the case for SARS-CoV-2 and other human coronaviruses. (I haven't listened to the episode yet, but a recent paper found that some people's T cells are effective enough to significantly decrease the chance they will get symptoms from SARS-CoV-2.) Antibodies and memory B cells (which produce antibodies after detecting a previously seen infection) are also involved and may be more important in other viruses---and are easier to study so they get more press---but do not appear to be the primary part of the immune system preventing severe disease from SARS-CoV-2, although the short boost in antibodies from the vaccines are what caused the temporary protection from infection that was observed with the vaccines.


My information comes from listening to the podcast This Week in Virology, which is a group of virology researchers discussing papers. Specifically, you can look in their archives for episodes tagged t cells. Although it's a podcast, each episode has a summary page of what was discussed and links to the papers. They recommend using the YouTube speech-to-text feature if you want a transcript.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is false. Needless to say, we don't have studies (at least not ones we trust) on the effectiveness of the vaccines China used. But we do have studies showing the ones the United States used remain highly effective against severe disease and death.


There's actually some weak evidence the Omicron-updated vaccines are worse against Omicron because we made them a half dose of the old vaccine and a half dose of the Omicron-adjusted version, which might be more similar to giving the vaccine at a half dose. (There is evidence the updated vaccine did a better job of protection against infection for Omicron... but it was never very high, never lasted very long, and the study suggested the currently circulating variants have drifted far enough that there's no measurable protection against infection anymore... probably will see a slight bump with the next formula update, but that's mostly a research curiosity.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


continued to have prominent "Thank you for wearing a mask!" decals on the door




I see a lot of those signs around and very few people wearing masks. At least that wording doesn't imply that you're required to wear a mask, but it's still weird and annoying to have those signs up if they don't mean it. Especially since some spaces actually do require masks, but the signs are everywhere, so they're meaningless.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I still haven't heard a remotely sane answer for why vaccines had to be agonisingly slowly tested while the bodies piled up, because mumble mumble bioethics consent




It sounds like you think the vaccine trials could have gone faster by doing challenge trials? I'm not sure that's true, but even if we could have gotten the vaccines approved faster, I'm not sure that would have sped up the rollout much: for several months after approval, they were hard to get because there just weren't enough doses manufactured (first doses in around December 2020, took until May or June to really get everyone access (so by then the prioritized high-risk groups had gotten access); and that was with throwing money at ramping up manufacturing before approval). Maybe there was some way to throw even more money at manufacturing them faster, but my understanding is that really wasn't the case since there were supply chain issues like suddenly needing a lot of specialized machines for vaccine manufacturing, and ramping all of that up could only happen so fast.


And that's not even accounting for the potential absolute disaster of rolling a vaccine out to everyone that didn't actually work, or worse, actually was dangerous, which, in addition to the first-order effects, could have super-charged the anti-vaccine movement.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm confused. I didn't reply to your comment and I don't see how your other comments in this thread relate.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Despite your woke-as-religion argumentation, you seem to be missing the "Original Sin"-analogue: a major part of the woke worldview is that everyone has internalized biases and everyone should be a work-in-progress of improving themselves by trying to reduce those biases but they will never be 100% successful. From this assumption, they conclude that attempts to ignore group identities will inevitably fail and that creating an unbiased system out of biased individuals requires explicit attention to bias.