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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Democratic Socialists had a pretty serious recruiting campaign for the 2018 midterms. Cold-called potential candidates, offered training for both speechifying and organizing. Put up actual progressive candidates against incumbent dems in carefully chosen districts. That’s where “The Squad” came from.

    Then they just kind of disappeared.

    My point is that there are people out there willing to step up, but probably not thinking that they could be a “real” candidate and win, put up with the hassle and harrasment. People who would answer if called, but aren’t ready to jump in unasked. Bernie’s asking.


  • Yup.

    Listen, I understand that numbers are scary, but the difference between ‘ordinary rich’ and ‘problematic rich’ is entirely in the numbers. I’ve probably got 10x as much cash in bank as you, but I’m not rich. My grandma, retired with a paid-off house and a bit of 401k, probably - technically - a millionaire, but still not rich. Billionaire who gets stopped for speeding or DUI can drop $100,000 on lawyers, the way I might drop a penny in the Take-a-penny dish, not just fighting his ticket but investigating and suing the PD that stopped him. That billionaire can pay a politician $1M for special treatment the way I might buy lunch.

    Your grandma with $1M ain’t problematic rich. Billionaire is problematic rich. The threshold is somewhere in between, and probably closer to $100M than $10M. Estate tax starts at $14M. Most of the proposals for wealth tax start somewhere around $50M.







  • tburkhol@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldNo no no
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    8 days ago

    Show me a third option. If there’s beef and chicken on the menu, you can’t get a Mercedes.

    All those people out in the street protesting for civil rights, fighting the Pinkertons, and refusing to work like inmates? they fucking voted. They got their people into office, and those people fixed the laws.


  • tburkhol@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldNo no no
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    8 days ago

    So, I guess your argument is that ACA is bad because all it “really” did is enroll poor people in Medicaid? Or that the extent of their insurance coverage depended on the insurance they got?

    You’re comparing your idealized plan with what got implemented, rather than what got implemented with what came before.


  • tburkhol@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldNo no no
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    8 days ago

    It’s not like Democratic administrations gave us the voting rights act, gay marriage, interracial marriage, and abortion. Medicare & Medicaid. Ended Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell. The ACA may not be very close to universal healthcare, but it is a huge improvement on what we had, and it decreased the uninsured population by 15-20M.

    There’s a lot more to want from a progressive party, but they have, slowly, made things better. Sometimes, the wing nuts claw those improvements back, and “Ratchet Effect,” “Both Sides,” etc are great propaganda for cowing opposition to the wing nuts.


  • I have 8 Z-wave devices now, including a couple “long range” devices. With the first couple, I would sometimes have trouble with the farthest, battery-powered device dropping out of the network occasionally, but that hasn’t happened as I’ve added more devices. I fought with pairing the initial devices - clicking the right series of buttons at the same time as telling HA to look for devices to join - but all the recent devices have just has a QR code - scan it into HA, and the device just shows up when I turn it on. I don’t know how much of this difference between new and old is my learning curve vs better product support, but I am really happy with my Z-waves now.

    Z-wave rather than wifi so I know they aren’t phoning home.


  • I haven’t looked closely enough to know, but I recall medical image analytics being “better than human” well before the current AI/LLM rage. Like, those systems use machine learning, but in a more deterministic, more conventional algorithm sense. I think they are also less worried about false positives, because the algorithm is always assumed to be checked by a human physician, so my impression is that the real sense in which medical image analysis is ‘better’ is that it identifies smaller or more obscure defects that a human quickly scanning the image might overlook.

    If you’re using a public mushroom identification AI as the only source for life-and-death choice, then false positives are a much bigger problem.


  • Trump 45 was happy to let his appointees work as interim this-or-that or acting whatchamacallit, and those people seemed to have exactly as much authority as confirmed appointees. Maybe they didn’t get the full paycheck? but senate confirmation seems to be completely unnecessary to the exercise of power when everyone just goes along anyway.

    I’d be pretty happy to see Dems grind congress to an halt with investigations of absolutely everything, filibusters of everything else, and red card holds, or whatever other magical Senate traditions allow single Senators to completely stifle government activity.