edbob

> Of course, voter ID proponents have let out the private partisan internal logic lots of times when they thought only people aligned with their faction were listening

Can you give a good source or two please?

Property tax rates are higher on a percentage basis, but property values can be much lower, so you can still come out ahead on the property taxes.

larsiusprime had a good analysis [0] that gets into some of the details.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28793851

It's not the best use of statistics that I've ever seen by a long shot, but I just wanted to point out that your claim that it was "bullshit madeup" was inaccurate flamebait.

He didn't say which subset of universities he saw that statistic for. The group of "most liberal universities in the country" includes what, all of the most wealthy and important ones? It's certainly a reasonable subset to consider. The 98% figure is pretty close here (for the group as a whole, not just one like you claim).

You need stronger evidence to attack someone like that, and you don't have it, partially because we don't even know what exactly the scope of the claim was. You could certainly criticize the vagueness of the statement without being toxic.

Disclaimer: I got two shots of Moderna some time ago.

Your source shows just how strongly anti-vax Biden was, making the case that the vaccine can't be trusted because of political influence. Since Biden can't give us any credible assurances that politics aren't involved in FDA approval or CDC recommendations, nor can he address his own concerns about the vaccine's development being politicized, then, by his argument, the American people should not have confidence.

> The following week, Biden restated his concern about politics intervening in vaccine development:

> "Americans have had to endure President Trump’s incompetence and dishonesty, when it comes to testing and personal protective equipment. We can’t afford to repeat those fiascos when it comes to a vaccine. … Let me be clear: I trust vaccines, I trust scientists, but I don’t trust Donald Trump, and at this moment, the American people can’t either. Last week, Senator Harris and I laid out three questions this administration’s going to have to answer to assure the American people that politics will not play a role whatsoever in the vaccine process. If Donald Trump can’t give answers and the administration can’t give answers to these three questions, the American people should not have confidence."

PolitiFact is one of the most biased outlets I've seen.

The statistic is on the high side of the range, but it is accurate.

> When exploring the makeup of Ivy League institutions and universities in New England, results, such as the case with Brown University, were as high as 60:1 in favor of registered Democrats among professors.

As chuckee linked a bit down the page:

[0] https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/02/study_liberalto...

I keep seeing this brought up on HN. Isn't it telling that you have to go back 70 years to find a good example? At that time, the Democratic Party was still in bed with the KKK. It's not relevant to today's politics.

Here's hoping that D'Andrea was the biggest part of the leadership problem. He certainly represented himself as having too much power.

This is substantially misleading. Due to the 2011 outage, the Texan regulations are stronger and more strictly enforced than the federal regulations. Additionally, the primary issue with natural gas was due to suppliers not being able to get gas to the generators. The natural gas suppliers are federally regulated.

The ERCOT projections I've seen are short-term [0], which means that after the most dismal days, the slightly less dismal 15-30% days "exceeded expectations". The fact-checkers reported this supposedly great performance without mentioning a single one of these details. I don't think these short-term projections are very useful for our analysis. It's as if your team finished the season 6-6, and all anyone mentions is how they won six games in a row so they're actually the best team in the league.

If you want to know "normal" output, you'll find that wind is very inconsistent. (I probably did find the mean at some point, but I don't have it at hand, and honestly don't feel that it matters). Wind is not "supposed" to carry the winter load, but ERCOT's record day for wind generation was set in February. Investors don't want to build power plants that could serve the expected winter load but will bleed money when wind has a good winter. Texas has built nothing but wind and solar for years because that's where all the profit is. ("Nothing but wind and solar for years" is according to D'Andrea's leaked phone call that got him fired, but I don't doubt his account of his own crony capitalism).

Wind is not "supposed" to be at fault for outages because it's expected to drop to as little as 1% output for short periods, but the reality is that we have built a power grid that does rely on wind. Our population is increasing dramatically, but we are not building any more reliable capacity because it's unprofitable compared to its subsidized competitors.

I'm happy that Texas is a world leader in wind generation, but we need a reality check. We have to build reliable capacity too. Winterization will help, but it's not going to do a thing to fix our problems during the spring and summer. We actually need more than that, because we occasionally have winter demand that matches peak summer demand. If we keep building so much wind, that will never happen unless wind happens to have a record winter in just the right year.

[0] http://www.ercot.com/gridinfo/generation/windandsolar

How would we fix it without building nuclear plants? I don't think building a bunch of fossil fuel plants is going to go over well. Even Texas hasn't built anything other than wind and solar in years.

Maybe we tolerate it because fixing it is politically impossible.

Consumers were insulated from this because they only pay the price in their contract, not the wholesale price. There was one provider that offered lower rates in exchange for not giving that protection, which did not work out very well.

Could this be due to France's high use of nuclear energy (~70%)? I wish we had that, but it's nearly impossible to build here.

It's nearly all wind, whose output fell all the way to 12.5% of installed capacity over a three-day period when homes were freezing (February 15, 16, and 17). [0] Output consistently stayed in the 15-30% range while I was watching it in ERCOT's live stats. Solar plants are nearly a rounding error. Every other source maintained 60-75% of capacity even with insufficient winterization.

[0] http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/181766/IntGenbyFuel20...

"Article 35. Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration."

"Article 36. Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of religious belief..."

"Article 37. The freedom of person of citizens of the People's Republic of China is inviolable..."

"Article 49. Marriage, the family, and mother and child are protected by the state..."

Just meaningless words on a page. To be completely fair, the text does imply that the above isn't worth a wooden nickel in practice:

"Article 51. The exercise by citizens of the People's Republic of China of their freedoms and rights may not infringe upon the interests of the state, of society and of the collective, or upon the lawful freedoms and rights of other citizens."

The European Convention on Human Rights has a similar clause (which you quoted) that allows the state to eliminate one's rights "for the protection of health or morals". It seems that "human rights" are mainly there to make the state seem legitimate. They "protect" humans against the state for exactly as long as the state allows.

Houston is controlled by progressive Democrats. Plano is more even but voted for Biden by a 9 point margin, hardly representative of "right-wing politics".

Plano, like many Texas cities, is racially diverse, while Irvine has hardly any black population at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irvine,_California#Demographic...

This is absolutely disgusting. Google has appointed themselves the unaccountable police of the Internet, secretly blocking websites for unspecified "compliance issues".

> It is highly significant that—after more than three years of stonewalling and refusing to answer any questions or respond to a single demand—CEO Pichai has admitted that the technology firm controlling nearly 90 percent of worldwide search traffic has been suppressing WSWS content all along.

Political censorship is equally harmful whether done by the government or by a megacorp. When the megacorp becomes more powerful than government, it's time to either break them up or make them a public utility.

What specific posts did Parler refuse to delete, and what is the evidence that they refused to delete them? IIRC, Parler was deleting posts that AWS complained about as they reviewed them, but had a large backlog, and AWS decided they were moving too slowly. I haven't seen any sourced claims that Parler refused to remove "posts calling for the mass killing of politicians", only unsupported allegations. If it really is so very clear-cut, do you have a very good source for those claims?

Or a fireball.

My larger complaint was about rich people who don't care about the several dozen deaths, uncounted injuries, and billions of dollars of property damage caused by the riots because it doesn't affect their class. I don't watch conservative media, so I don't know anything about the portrayal of major American cities therein.

> Those links are being/have been broken. No amount of added rigor will fix that. I don't know what will.

The institutions could start telling the truth once in a while. Statements like "27 police officers injured during largely peaceful anti-racism protests in London" (BBC) and "Fiery but mostly peaceful protests" (CNN) with the city burning down in the background account for why trust in media is rapidly approaching zero. It makes it clear that the violence and devastation is just a curiosity to the upper-class elites that control these institutions, but normal people who actually have to live with aftermath are not amused.

Fauci is another huge contributor. First don't wear masks, they can actually hurt. Then you have to wear masks. Now wear two or three! But earlier he was ridiculing people who wore multiple masks. Along with all the knowingly false statements about how long lockdowns would last. Clearly Fauci should not be allowed to speak in public, but unfortunately the blast radius of his mistakes extends beyond him to the government and media institutions that defend him and amplified his misinformation.

Oh, you are correct. It seems that mcBesse chose their wording extremely poorly there, as "force" is indeed indefensible. I apologize for misreading that.

Perhaps you cannot, but I can.

> Why do you believe a slider would force people not to share misinformation? There must be some basis for that opinion.

"Force" is a strawman, but there is a clear basis for thinking that an accuracy slider could cause people to be more thoughtful about sharing: the results of this study, which found that "subtly inducing people to think about accuracy" resulted in "participants in the treatment group were significantly less likely to consider sharing false headlines compared to those in the control group, but equally likely to consider sharing true headlines". The effect found was quite significant.

This is an extremely dangerous conception of truth. Even when practically everyone believed that the sun revolved around the earth, the one guy that didn't was still correct. Yet he was pretty likely to be oppressed or killed for having heterodox views and had best keep his mouth shut. I'm sure there are many popular ideas now that are believed by a supermajority (or even 95%+) of the population which are actually incorrect, although I can't say what the correct ideas are or whether they will ever become popular.

Do you have any thoughts on the cause of "the absence of other civil rights leaders"?

He's not the governor, and I don't know anyone here (in Texas, not HN) that cares what he says.

However, you did not paraphrase him so much as lie about what he said. "you deserved it because you'd rather die than have the feds involved in your energy grid" is not at all what Rick Perry said. The actual quote is “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business. Try not to let whatever the crisis of the day is take your eye off of having a resilient grid that keeps America safe personally, economically, and strategically.” [0]

[0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/rick-perry-texans-should-endu...

It also doesn't explain why "black" was preferred for a time, then it was verboten, and now it's preferred but you have to capitalize it. Nor does it explain why "African-American" was required for a time even though many Black people don't identify as African, and it's obviously completely inappropriate to apply to a Black person who has never left the UK, but that's what was required nonetheless.

Scott Alexander's hypothesis explains all of that. Constant change is what makes fashion fashion, and fashion is a very effective way to discriminate between the in-group and the out-group.

> If it is just users, why ban them and not browsers or anything that can access Facebook?

Because Facebook is controlled by the right people, and Gab is not.

Consider the unbelievably offensive and sometimes illegal content (including child porn) that's been hosted on Reddit. They've cleaned up significantly recently to be more advertiser-friendly, but they were able to host all that content for years without getting deplatformed or facing any real consequences. Because Reddit is controlled by the right people. It's all about power.

Jan 6 is proof that 0.001% of the "election was stolen" crowd has stopped listening and would make their argument with pistols. We're talking about people expressing heterodox opinions on social media. They are not the same group. Particularly since the LARPers are in jail.

Off-topic, but I really enjoy products whose packaging I can dispose of well because it's all paper and/or metal. I buy Celestial Seasonings tea because there's no foil, and I can compost the tea bags. But there are still plenty of products that I only find in plastic, like frozen fish. I mainly shop at Wal-Mart because I'm poor. Does anyone have any tips for someone on a low budget?