techwooded

Auburn

I don’t think that schools (at least in America) teach enough about Eugene V. Debs. Despite his failed presidential runs, this guy was one of the most popular politicians of his day. His imprisonment for sedition caused literal riots across the country. His release from prison was attended by over a million people. He founded the Industrial Workers of the World. Some of my favourite quotes of his that stick with me:

I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, someone else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition.

While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free

Goodhart’s Law:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure

Corollary to this is the “I want to be able to choose my doctor” line. If there’s only one health insurance provider, then every doctor will have to accept it, ergo you get more choice in your doctor

Impossible! Trump has lowered prices 600%! [sarcasm]

Glad I renewed mine early. Now if only I had a work visa from somewhere else to put in it…

“Citizen I.C.E.” - Dropkick Murphy’s

“Solidarity Forever” - Old trade union song to the tune of Battle Hymn of the Republic, here performed by the Mountain Goats

The people essentially have been demanding it. As several others have mentioned in this thread, 70-80% of the public supports universal healthcare in some form. For the nitty-gritty, basically 50 years ago and earlier, extremely wealthy people realised that their preferred policies weren’t especially popular with the general public. They identified that their main issue was that what they had was money, not people. So they embarked on a decades long quest to give money the same (or greater) political power as individuals, culminating in the Citizen’s United Supreme Court case. I bring this up because it essentially means that the People demanding it doesn’t matter, because while there may be a couple hundred million people asking for it, there’s a couple hundred billion dollars asking to never do it. It’s gotten so bad that there’s a kind of perverse, Stockholm Syndrome effect starting to happen to. In 2016 there was a big dust-up during the Democratic Primary where the Culinary Union in Las Vegas/Nevada didn’t want to endorse Bernie Sanders, the most pro-Union candidate in decades, essentially because medicare-for-all would remove health insurance as a bargaining chip

Just wanted to pop in to point out that this was Border Patrol, not ICE. Not that it makes it better or anything, just a bit more vanilla than the president’s secret police

I think Libertarianism is incompatible with the way that humans operate as a society. Almost all flavors of libertarianism puts an individual’s right to live as they choose as long as that doesn’t violate the rights of others through force or fraud. Humans like to associate themselves into groups, and in almost any group there will be an imbalance in power, whether that’s economic power, physical power (strength), or even something as abstract as eloquence or how outgoing you are. The issue then becomes that someone somewhere has to enforce the right to not be forced into giving up rights. In the classical construction of how libertarians view government, it is very easy to become more powerful than those meant to enforce limits on power. Even in our current political system, you see this when companies will spend more on their anti-trust court cases than the entire FTC spends total in a decade. Libertarianism has no mechanism to keep the enforcer the most powerful party involved

For audiobooks, I personally use Libro FM, though audiobooks.com is also an alternate source. Unfortunately if you’re looking only at price, you won’t be able to move past Audible because they employ so many shady and bad-for-authors practices that their prices are artificially low. If you’re only interested in getting DRM-free Cory Doctorow books, Craphound.

“You should know there’s an effort in Congress to ban [insert democratic principle here]”

Basically any headline right now

Telling too that the Democratic leadership said after the fact that one of the reasons they lost was that they relied too much on small donators instead of billionaire donators. Disgusting

Would like to point out that part of this bill includes a provision that makes it illegal for Courts to hold the Government in contempt for not complying with their past, present, or future injunctions:

H.R. _____, Title VII § 70302:

No court of the United States may use appropriated funds to enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c), whether issued prior to, on, or subsequent to the date of enactment of this section.

Fellow American convert to the metric system. Converting, in my opinion, won’t get you very far in actually understanding the measurements. To this day, the conversion rate is something I have to dig through my memory for.

For me what helped with the temperature scale was breaking it into chunks based on what I would wear, 10°-15° would be a pullover sweatshirt, 15°-20° a track jacket, etc, which got me to stop focusing so much on the conversion. Eventually you just get a sense of these things, I think that most people can only really feel a difference in air temperature of about 1°C. 0° being the freezing point cutoff is super helpful for judging things like potential road conditions if it’s wet.

For distances I first got the sense of how far things were in kilometers by being a runner and knowing distances around my neighborhood as to how they lined up with running a 5k, 10k, etc. For meters, at my height and gait, my stride length is about a meter long. A little bit on the shorter side of things, but it still helped me get an idea as to what a meter looked like in physical space, even if it’s off a bit. Centimeters and millimeters are a different story. Hard to find perfect analogs in the world, but you’ll find something eventually. I think for example long grain rice can be ~1 cm in length for example.

The biggest lesson in my own journey and seeing a lot of people online talk about trying to do the conversion is that people get overly concerned with precision when first making the switch. If you actually think about most of our daily interactions with measurements, they’re much more approximate. For example, the difference between whether it’s 71°F or 73°F is rarely pointed out. The temperature is just “in the low 70s”. We say that something is “about 20 miles away” which is almost an implicit 7-8 mile range. I would guess 80% of the time, this is how we interact with the units we use, so focus on that. No one is going to get upset if they ask the temperature and you’re off by a few degrees C.

In terms of mnemonics like US kids get in school for some of these things, everything in the metric system is a multiple of 10 from everything else, which is what makes it great. Also remember that at room temperature, water’s density is 1 g/mL, so if one of capacity or weight is easier to visualize for you, it’s a shortcut to the other. Standard disposable water bottle in the US is 500 mL or half a kilogram of water.

If only metric time had caught on too…

You know it. I’ve found that most of the news sites still do RSS feeds for their stuff

Some other good ones are Semafor and 404Media

NPR, BBC, and RTÉ primarily. Subscribed through RSS

It’s funny because back in the day before Elon lost his marbles, I first heard of Signal from Musk on twitter as he was promoting it as a better alternative to WhatsApp

The main crux of the “Biden is too old” criticism though wasn’t the actual age number, it was that he wasn’t mentally all there, which was on display constantly. Bernie always comes off as put together and his speeches are well executed. Biden’s issue was that he sounded less put together than Trump which was impressive in its own way