Labor is strongest when it ruins the capitalist economy. That’s the fucking point. It’s a class war and the enemy is winning, we need to hit back. Make the markets scream!

I think wanting this to happen sounds great. Like I say, I agree.

Waiting for a president who will provide it before you take any political step, even if what happens while you’re waiting is that you go into a concentration camp for being queer or communist, while the genocide in Palestine actually accelerates and starts being replicated in a lot of other places across the world; I don’t think that is a good idea. Do you think that is a good idea?

Michelle Obama, why not?

I asked you a serious question. Who should win the election in November? If you were running the Democrat’s strategy, who would you nominate instead of Biden?

I feel pretty aggressive about Biden aiding and abetting genocide, supplying Israel with enough bombs to turn Gaza into a death camp.

Agreed

I feel pretty aggressive about Biden just coming out against gender affirmation surgery for minors for no fucking reason.

Sure

I’m also still feeling pretty fucking aggressive that he broke the railroad strike, but that was years ago so you probably forgot about it.

He strengthened the NLRB for the first time since any president that I can remember to the point where it’s backstopping all this historic union progress at Starbucks, UAW, Amazon, all this shit that union people are fighting for finally has some legal backing behind it which is a pretty key force multiplier which in my book is a win.

He did break the rail strike, because it would have fucked up the economy for everyone in ways that led to inflation that actually was sort of his fault, and given how incredibly aggressive everyone is about blaming him for inflation that wasn’t his fault, I don’t think that’s trivial. And, his labor dept. kept working the issue afterwards and got the workers the sick days they were striking for anyway, when there was nothing for him in it.

I realize that the rail strike is a pretty good talking point, because I actually sort of agree with you that in a perfect world he should have let the strike happen and fuck up the rail companies and if the price of bread goes up then oh well treat your workers better America. But trying to extrapolate from that to that he’s a bad labor president when on every non economy ruining strike he’s been 100% on the side of the workers which is incredibly rare for a US president, I think is unfair.

But at least it’s something I can shove in your fucking face so maybe you’ll pressure the Democratic Party to replace their nominee.

Who would you want them to replace him with? If you don’t want Trump, then I think it’s fair to ask what is the course you would want to chart instead of Biden?

I actually have an answer in mind that I like, far more realistic than some that I’ve heard, but I’m curious what your solution would be.

Biden and his blue MAGA cult.

Fascinating

I have yet to meet IRL a single left-wing politically engaged person who says anything other than that Trump will be such an objectively guaranteed catastrophe for everyone in the world that we should vote for whoever’s running against him, whether that person is Biden or Kamala Harris or a blind dog dressed up in a business suit. All the people who say Biden’s old and so they can’t vote for him are fairly un-politically-aware types who aren’t especially left wing in their personal beliefs.

And yet the internet is full of these super left wing people who feel real aggressive about not voting for Biden, like even more aggressively about that, apparently, than they do about any particular left wing cause, about immigration or going to the Palestine protest or what have you.

It is curious

That part, I won’t say you are wrong about. The American electorate is wrong enough in how they set their priorities that I think Biden’s performance at the debate was a massive problem.

What I am saying here is that it’s weird that the stories are “why Trump’s felonies are not important” and “why Biden’s elderly nature is hugely important,” when the data points the exact opposite way. Honestly, I think maybe people’s understanding of what is important in politics may be quite a few ticks ahead of the media is giving them credit for when they publish stories like this.

1. I’m as surprised as anybody, but the non loaded-to-elicit-a-particular-answer framing of the question showed basically no change after the debate. Polls from the day after the election which asked, who do you want to vote for for president, showed basically no change in the answer (respectively, 45/43 for Trump, and 45/44 for Biden). I will continue to be surprised if that keeps happening but definitely that’s how it actually objectively happened, so far.
2. It is highly notable to me how unanimous in the media is the narrative “Biden’s in trouble because he fucked up the debate” - which, however much of a very real problem it is that he’s old as fuck, isn’t borne out by polling data - whereas they didn’t write too much about “Trump’s in trouble because he caught a bunch of felonies”, even though that was reflected in a few percentage points’ drop in his polling (remember? that was when Biden started ticking higher than Trump in national polls every now and then, which he’s still doing, which he hadn’t been able to do before?). As a good example check out this lapdog bullshit

It seems very clear to me that the media is, as they often do, pretending that they are reporting on trouble for the Democratic candidate, when actually what they are doing is finding a way to frame a legitimate story to do their best to create the trouble that are pretending they are reporting on.

The potential energy of the spring is “stored” in individual molecules that are pushed into some configuration that they don’t quite want to be in, and they exert force on each other trying to push themselves back apart / back together into being the way they like. As the spring disintegrates, you could model those individual forces, and molecules exerting force on each other would release it into kinetic energy one by one or in groups, as the spring gradually lost its integrity to exist as a singular entity.

(I think that in practice, metals are made of grains, big groupings of molecules which stay pretty much as rigid bodies unless something really crazy happens, so most of the potential energy is force of the grains wanting to go back into their preferred arrangement in relation to other grains. I.e. not in practice at the level of molecule to molecule. But I’m not 100% on that part.)

It’s honestly most akin to an AI model over optimizing for the trained outcome even when it turns out it was misaligned from the good outcome we wanted.

They certainly don’t want their grandchildren to inhabit a barely-livable hellscape instead of the paradise world they were born into, but they’ve been optimizing for money for so long that it’s baked in now, and it’s so so easy to just say, well it’s probably not a big deal, or I don’t think the science is really all that dire in its predictions, or oh well someone else will probably figure it out. And so, every year, we keep setting records for “production”.

Greta Thunberg talks about it in her book - if the bathtub is overflowing in your house and water is spilling across the floor everywhere, step 1 for most people is to turn off the water. Yes sure it is fine to look for towels and buckets to try to contain the damage (and I don’t even disagree with you that it’ll be needed), but that also assumes that they’ll work and there will be political support to deploy them at scale, instead of mustering up the political support to turn the fucking taps down since at this point that’s clearly needed and is relatively speaking much much easier.

Newtonian mechanics are not wrong, just simplified. That is fine. What I’m saying is wrong is picking an example which specifically violates the exact parameters of the simplified model you’re teaching. It’s like if you’re teaching Newton’s laws and you decide to model a space probe traveling at 10% of light speed as your example. Just pick another example. For Punnet squares, you could talk about the bean plants, or blood types in people, or whatever you want that is pretty well abstracted as a single gene. Idk, for me I was never told in school that the blue/brown square was any simplified model of what was really going on. It was just, it’s a single gene, it’s brown and blue, that’s what’s up.

So this book actually goes into quite a lot of detail about why I think this is a problem. Page 110-112 talk about the original conclusion by adult scientists that blue and brown eyes work exactly in this simplified model. Pages 114-131 go into the incredible level of genetic and environmental and perceptual factors that actually determine eye color and what the actual spectrum is and why.

What I think is interesting is the pages between, where the author cites a bunch of scientists who had clearly modified their data to get the “right” answers (e.g. swearing confidently that two blue-eyed parents could never produce a brown eyed child, when the actual tested number was 12%). Just kind of clinging to the simplified model because it’s what you were told.

I don’t think we need to give the full hugely complicated model in a genetics class, although I actually think eye color would be a great way to introduce the idea that it’s a lot more complicated than just the Punnet squares in some light touching on it way. But to me, teaching the kids the page 110 explanation is a mistake because it’s teeing them up to commit the same kinds of mistakes from the following pages.

It’s not the only “what passes for science curriculum in schools in the United States” factoid that is inaccurate.

The thing about genetics and blue / brown eye color was obviously false to me even as a child. I can look around and see that there are green eyes and that there’s some disagreement about what is “hazel” versus “brown” or light brown or whatever. To me it was obviously wrong that it was as simple as a single gene that was dominant / recessive in exactly the way it was described – like if there are two people with brown eyes, there is a 0% chance that they have anything recessive going on other than that single blue gene – and it pissed me off that they were teaching us something in school that was wrong, just because it was sort of approximately true, and if we pretend it’s always true, it lets us make the point we were trying to make.

There are surely other examples you can draw from; I am sure there are plenty that really do work the way they were telling us eye color did. You don’t need to teach the kids to believe the textbook when it doesn’t line up with what they can directly observe, and not to ask questions but just say it was how it was described in the book, and ignore counterexamples they can see and interact with on a daily basis.

If you can’t tell, I’m still to this day a little pissed off about it. 🙂

That one looks right to me (or, “right” meaning consistently using period LEB) - it’s a little hard to compare because of the difference in granularity but it shows about a 20-year drop for WW2 which is what I would expect.

I edited my comment above; I think what’s happening is that the OP article is mixing different metrics for different parts of the chart. I think this one you’re sending is consistently using period LEB which is why the size of the dips is different.

I am suspicious of this

So Russia’s death rate was pretty much unchanged from 1930 to 1935 to 1945, and then things got way better in 1950?

Maybe I could see, they are counting only Russia (not the USSR), so the holomodor is largely absent from 1930, and then Russia advances in living standards meant that there was a huge underlying boost that masked the unprecedented deaths during WW2, and then after WW2 the apparent life expectancy shot up because a lot of the vulnerable or old people were already dead. But I don’t buy it. Idk what’s going on with their data, but China looks fine and Russia looks simply wrong; it is missing some big dips that it should have.

Edit: Hm, I guess there is a 6-year divot in 1932… I guess I just expected the Holomodor to show up bigger and less spread out over surrounding years. But yeah maybe it is showing up.

Edit 2: Okay, I looked more and I am confident that this isn’t exactly right. It says “the remaining average lifespan for a hypothetical group of people, if they experienced the same age-specific death rates throughout the rest of their lives as the age-specific death rates seen in that particular year.” There’s no possible way that extrapolating out the death rates people were experiencing in the middle of a famine or war would lead to these gentle dips and small divots.

I suspect that by combining data from different sources, they wound up using cohort LEB for the distant past and period LEB for the more recent past. That would explain why e.g. the dip in Russian life expectancy because of the Ukraine war shows as the same size as the dip for WW2. If they were doing the calculations the same for both, the WW2 dip would take away half the chart or more. So maybe it’s not really wrong per se but just mismatching their metrics in a way that makes it hard to draw anything of precision from the chart beyond “things getting better”.

Stop, stop. It hurts, it’s too real.

If we were planning to do anything about it, this would be relevant information, but as it is, it’s more or less like those air crash investigation videos where the plane starts saying “TERRAIN. PULL. UP.” and the pilots keep going with the turn they were doing, and you can watch the video and think, Jesus Christ what the fuck were they even thinking.

Link to Extinction Rebellion if anyone wants to get involved in trying to at least mitigate the damage

Might be worth reaching out to the addon authors. Hard to say whether the page or the addon is at fault, but they might be interested to know it even if it’s the page’s fault.

It’s set to fade in from 0 opacity, for some sort of unnecessary “ooh look it’s fancy” effect. My guess is that if you check the console you’ll find that it hit some exception before it completed its little fade-in effect.

Yeah agreed. In particular I really like that feditest exists even if I haven’t done anything to check it out / learn about it for myself yet.

Akkoma and Pleroma are two popular “Mastodon style” Fediverse apps, I think born out of exactly this type of complaint about Mastodon, which you could get involved with if you wanted to be involved with better software without it being a one-man show.

I think it’s made needlessly difficult by how sloppy a protocol ActivityPub is, such that different Fediverse apps can’t really interoperate with each other except at a pretty rudimentary level, so you kind of have to pick one of the leading ones and imitate it, in order to be a citizen in its community and not have to build your own little community from scratch. But that’s a problem without a real easy solution, I think.

I KNEW IT

I think there are individual spots that are bright or dim for no reason because of random noise, up in the no-particular-pattern wilderness