mozz

I wasn't paying close attention and read "librarian helmets"

Like, even Obama's campaign healthcare plan was more conservative than FDRs. Their goal for tax rates were way lower, their minimum wage was lower after inflation

Seriously, take you pick of them and make a single economic issue you think they're more progressive than FDR on.

Out of quite a long time that I've spent arguing with the shills, this is the first time that I've had a strong suspicion that any specific shill was specifically not from the US.

Accusing a politician of being less progressive than literally the single most progressive president in US history, as some kind of gotcha, is such a weird nonsensical flex that it seems like it might come from a position of not actually having a native understanding of US history. Evaluating FDR with this anachronistic modern-day political analysis, is such a weird confusion of ideas that I have trouble seeing an American doing it whether they are liberal or conservative. E.g. I have literally never heard from any other person who thinks that moderates and Republicans "kicked out" FDR, or talks about FDR's "healthcare plan."

This article is weird. It spends a long long time hand-wringing over whether Tim Burke is a journalist, while not at all explaining whether he committed a crime.

Whether he did is slightly muddled -- it sounds like he used a username and password he didn't have permission to use, to log in to a web site, which sounds illegal (whether or not he's a journalist), which would make this whole article an exercise in creating a narrative that didn't happen to drive clicks. But, the credentials were sloppily exposed by a third party and were "demo credentials" in the first place, and the URLs that it gave him when he authenticated himself maybe weren't themselves password protected. So maybe there's some wiggle room. But I thought everyone prosecution and defense was in agreement that he used credentials that weren't his to log in to the web site to get the links to the videos in the first place (albeit in pursuit of a noble goal, embarrassing Fox News by airing something true about them.) I don't think being a journalist enters into it.

From a little bit better article:

According to Burke, the video of Carlson’s interview with Ye was streamed via a publicly available, unencrypted URL that anyone could access by typing the address into your browser. Those URLs were not listed in any search engine, but Burke says that a source pointed him to a website on the Internet Archive where a radio station had posted “demo credentials” that gave access to a page where the URLs were listed.

The credentials were for a webpage created by LiveU, a company that provides video streaming services to broadcasters. Using the demo username and password, Burke logged into the website, and, Burke’s lawyer claims, the list of URLs for video streams automatically downloaded to his computer.

And that, the government says, is a crime. It charges Burke with violating the CFAA’s prohibition on intentionally accessing a computer “without authorization” because he accessed the LiveU website and URLs without having been authorized by Fox or LiveU. In other words, because Burke didn’t ask Fox or LiveU for permission to use the demo account or view the URLs, the indictment alleges, he acted without authorization.

Where are you getting this? To me it looks like household size dropped precipitously between 1947 and 1990, and then stabilized around 2.6 in 1990, and now it's around 2.5. I think rent has gone up a little more than 4% since 1990 though.

I actually would guess that you're probably right about an increase in single people or couples or empty nesters as compared with big families, but that it's been offset by a rise in young or semi-young adults living with roommates. That's just me guessing though.

You should watch the whole series if you haven't yet; it is phenomenal. There's another one on calculus (in addition to videos on all sorts of great stuff) but the linear algebra one is just especially mind blowing.

It doesn't say, which is a little weird. This article explains it better.

Basically as I understand it, before the 1980s, the government owned a lot of the housing and rented it to people at fixed prices. This meant that renting your property out purely for profit was tough, and a lot of landlords actually sold their property to the government as council housing. That changed under Thatcher, who enabled private sales of the council housing, which originally sounded like a good idea (you can own the home you're already living in instead of renting it from the government), but increased privatization led to rent for profit led to inflation of monthly rent led to oh no.

The simple fix I suspect, is for the government to start buying up properties again for rent-at-reasonable-prices to tenants, competing with private landlords and poking a hole in the bubble of ever-increasing rents (with popping the bubble giving a lot of extra leverage of societal benefit as compared with the amount of money they're actually putting into the system.)

Boy howdy, yes it is, absolutely

Not to mention Biden actually got a ton of stuff done. The shills tend to move the goalposts seamlessly from "he did only terrible things and all on purpose" to "well okay he tried to do tons of good stuff but the Republicans blocked him and that's his fault" to "well okay never mind your 10 good things he got done what about this 1 bad thing" to "the 1 bad thing definitely was the worst thing in the world and I refuse to listen to your qualifications to it" to silence or insults, as the conversation progresses. This "did nothing on purpose" is just the first stage from the first account in the conversation.

It's a weird little quirk of human psychology that if someone's not paying all that much attention, that kind of kettle logic actually works quite well to produce the engineered result. It hits the "Biden bad" button from multiple angles and the "System 1" part doesn't really notice that the different falsehoods contradict each other. It just knows they come from multiple sources and angles.

Ah yes, the famous propagandist's trick of saying "Oh hey you're right, let me edit my comment to reflect the new reality I just learned about." I see them do it all the time, it's a hallmark.

Quitting while you're ahead for the moment, instead of being willing to delve into any of the other issues surrounding the claims you were making, does seem pretty wise though. I'd probably do the same in your position. Have a good one.

Oh, yeah, I definitely 100% agree that it wasn't Biden's fault, for that among a couple of different reasons. But that's a separate topic from, did it even happen in the first place.

Oh shit -- yeah, you're 100% right on homelessness, I hadn't seen that. Mostly I look at sources that haven't been updated for 2023 yet. But yeah that's 100% accurate, I edited my comment.

So your railroad story is from December 2022 -- i.e. right after the strike broke, but before there had been time for the labor department to secure sick days for the workers, including at the exact union that guy's a member of.

Here's another story about it.

Joseph McCartin, a labor historian at Georgetown University, said: “It’s a significant set of quiet victories. It shows that it really makes a difference to have a pro-labor president.”

Here's another from early on, and then here's the update from June when 60% of workers had their sick leave.

Is that enough? Not really. I agree with Tormey's anger about how he's being treated, especially in December 2022 when the wounds would still have been fresh, and I'm sure on the whole balance he's still getting fucked. It's a goddamned shame. My point was more that Biden had the chance to break strikes on behalf of around 450,000 striking workers in 2023, and he didn't. Why do you think he didn't break any of those strikes?

It will surprise no one to know that 2/3rds of this is ~~total factual bullshit~~ (edit: grossly misleading). I touched elsewhere on some of the big substantive things like wage inequality or emissions reductions that have improved dramatically under his presidency, but the homelessness I don't think had been brought up. So:

• ~~Homelessness has been going down steadily, and we're nowhere near the 647,000 people record set around 2007. There was, recently, a big jump up between 2018 and 2020. I guess Biden really fucked up letting it get away from him during that time before we leveled off the growth again just recently?~~ (Edit: This is 100% wrong -- homelessness did in fact spike to record levels in 2023 after the end of that chart, when Covid aid ran out)
• 2023 was, as far as I know, the biggest year for strikes in history. If Biden's a strike breaker he's doing a real shitty job at it. He did break the rail strike which would have done some amount of damage to the wider economy (you know, the inflation that some people like to blame Biden for?), but after that happened his labor department kept working the issue with the railroads and got the workers the sick days they were striking for in the first place.

Record oil production is accurate. I would balance that against the war in Ukraine, record inflation, his positive action on the emissions side which is the biggest single action a US president has ever taken on the climate... but yes there's some amount of actual nuance and judgement there. The other two bullet points are ~~respectively purely made up and~~ grossly unfair, though.