kaamrev they/them This user has been selected for targeted YouTube ads on third party sites! 20d ago (image post) Edited 20d ago 627 thread views #282277

EFFORTPOST Free State Province Burning Down in Winter Drought and High Winds

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Greetings Dramatards, it's fricking cold in South Africa currently, and it's snowing in Sutherland, in the Northern Cape Province.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=458233760502109

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1147243579819012

And snow is extremely rare in south africa, so this is an especially cold winter :marseyfrozen: At least for all of the inland provinces, record low temperatures, and all following on the tailcoats of the last El Nino weather phenomenon, means while the 2 years prior were abnormally wet, this year has been aggressively cold

https://snowreport.co.za/best-snow-photos-from-south-africa-lesotho-early-june-2024/

It's a running meme/steriotype that boers are immune to cold, or allergic to longpants

Which is where the gay boy shorts uniforms of the 1980s came from.

Lesotho (the country in the middle of SA) is also more prone to snowing, compared to the rest of the surrounding nation, due to its high elevation, and numerous mountain ranges.

Even high mountains in provinces not at all prone to snow, has light snow coverage on their peaks.

Anyways point is it is abnormal conditions in SA currently, even though SA is usually already pretty cold at this stage of the year in its climatic history.

All except the Free State and much of the Eastern Provinces of South Africa, in which regions are currently combatting some of the worst and most intense wildfires of the past 5 years.

https://www.earthnews365.co.za/update-of-fires-in-the-free-state/

This is because places like the Free State are very arid Semi-Deserts in large portions of the province, and the winter counter-intuitively has higher rates and risks of forest and veld fires than in the Summer. This is because while summer's heat definitely aggravates circumstances to high risks of literal spontaneous combustion, it is also the raining season for inlands in most of the country, and consequently there would be a watering of the earth to combat the heat.

In Winter, especially in the Free State and KwaZulu-Natal provinces, despite the cold, the velds and forests are much more prone to combustion. This is because of the hyper drought which yearly besets southern africa, and the Cold counter-intuitively aggravates dry circumstances. The cold means less evaporation and less clouds, and the freezing of water which prevents the evaporation of whichever water mediums remaining even further.

When Cold Fronts arrive, they can bring massive freak winds with them, and it is in high wind situations where veld fires really thrive. This recent Sunday a massive Cold Front froze the whole center of the country over :marseyill: :marseyflagantarctica: and brought with it 70km/h consistent winds, which are abnormal in their strength and consistency.

Several thousand small wildfires have been breaking out hourly for the past 3 days, and several hundred fires continue to burn in the Free State and KwaZulu-Natal whom were both hardest hit.

https://www.facebook.com/FSUFPA/

The fast sustaining winds meant that even the flicker of embers would explode into roaring flames :flamethrower2: as the extreme drought made every leaf and blade of grass a tinderbox

i was helping my father and some other boers here in the province driver hydrant and fire-firefighting vehicles around yesterday afternoon and night.

Which is a lot less heroic than it sounds, basically I was driving a water-trailer around for the real men to do the hard work.

Farmers have organized into Brandwag, or burning vigilance since forever, and a smoke trail on the horizon usually has bakkies scrambled to come to the aid of your neighbours, even as out of sheer interest it is in your desire to extinguish such flames in their cradle, before they become an uncontrollable firestorm spreading outwards everywhere, additionally the wind can always always change.

The biggest r-sluration is that most farmers and municipal teams working are usually all amateurs and most commercial farmers of even the small type usually has a shitty fire-fighting wagon in their store-house of 5 years old and only once tested, as per regulations,

and thus the 1st responders always being the most untrained farmers who've never even held a firehose in their lives is always comical in our ineptitude, before the Provincial Professional Firefigting response squads arrive which usually can be hours if not half a day late as the country is large.

There's this one 80 year old grandma lady who still works for the Municipality whom have been dousing flames since sunday afternoon - she says the perpetual amateur mistake municipal workers and boers not used to fighting fire makes, is not to totally overdose simmering flames,

as perpetually the teams had to go back and re-extinguish fires because they had failed to completely douse embers in their totality, and certain carbon remains, even surrounded by water, eventually dries in the extremely dry Free State, and literally fricking begins anew!

Here is a professional rural firefighting vehicle unit, if it looks unprofessional because it's not a classic Euro/American city firetruck then realize that a regular 4x4 vehicle with a trailer is by far the superior required vehicle for transporting water over seldom tread rural dusty dirtroads in the Free State and KwaZulu-Natal. Since the potholes, underdevelopment, extreme isolation and offroad rugged terrain conditions, means that fire-lorries meant for cities, are completely unsuited for the velds of South Africa.

there are however sometimes special dedicated water transporting vehicles used, but these often are too specialized for poor municipalities - a provincial Toyota 4x4 with a water-trailer works just as effectively as fancy crap.

anyways just telling you strags this, cuz i haven't responded to the shitload of comments of yesterday, will fix that soon :marseywave2:

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pippy sneed/feed Bitch why you mad? Because my pussy pops severely and yours don't? 14d ago (image post) 1,346 thread views #284141

Breaking: Thomas Matthew Crooks got bullied into shooting trump! (real evidence)

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MinecraftBee bad/bitch Woman Believer 5d ago (text post) 582 thread views #286696

Reddit Moment

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w1n5t0n NE/GER 1d ago (businessinsider.com) 146 thread views #287651

Russia would lose up to 1.8 million troops and take 5 years to capture the 4 Ukrainian regions it wants

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/h/kino

nuclearshill gau/cho 7d ago (image post) Edited 7d ago 846 thread views #286273

Dragonslop S2 episode 6 drops to a 6.4/10 IMDB rating. Redditors blaming the homophobes and Saudis

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NotCoryDoctorow he/him 4d ago (pluralistic.net) 160 thread views #286865

Pluralistic: FTC vs surveillance pricing

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I asked ChatGPT to summarize this article in a single paragraph, single apparently your average dramagoblin is too dopamine-friend to read more than three sentences without being distracted by bussy.

"In economics, "prices" are crucial signals that guide the market, determining what gets produced and consumed efficiently. When supply of a good falls short of demand, prices rise, prompting sellers to produce more until equilibrium is reached. Neoclassical economists argue that prices aren't fixed but discovered through market interactions. Antitrust laws prohibit companies from setting prices to exploit market power, which distorts competition. Prices act as information carriers in the market, influencing decisions from production to consumption. Attempts to manipulate prices, whether by monopolies or through surveillance pricing, undermine market fairness and efficiency. Regulatory efforts, like the FTC's inquiry into surveillance pricing, aim to curb such distortions, recognizing their threat to consumer welfare and economic stability."

——

In the mystical cosmology of economics, "prices" are of transcendental significance, the means by which the living market knows and adapts itself, giving rise to "efficient" production and consumption.

At its most basic level, the metaphysics of pricing goes like this: if there is less of something for sale than people want to buy, the seller will raise the price until enough buyers drop out and demand equals supply. If the disappointed would-be buyers are sufficiently vocal about their plight, other sellers will enter the market (bankrolled by investors who sense an opportunity), causing supplies to increase and prices to fall until the system is in "equilibrium" - producing things as cheaply as possible in precisely the right quantities to meet demand. In the parlance of neoclassical economists, prices aren't "set": they are discovered.

In antitrust law, there are many sins, but they often boil down to "price setting." That is, if a company has enough "market power" that they can dictate prices to their customers, they are committing a crime and should be punished. This is such a bedrock of neoclassical economics that it's a tautology "market power" exists where companies can "set prices"; and to "set prices," you need "market power."

Prices are the blood cells of the market, shuttling nutrients (in the form of "information") around the sprawling colony organism composed of all the buyers, sellers, producers, consumers, intermediaries and other actors. Together, the components of this colony organism all act on the information contained in the "price signals" to pursue their own self-interest. Each self-interested action puts more information into the system, triggering more action. Together, price signals and the actions they evince eventually "discover" the price, an abstraction that is yanked out of the immaterial plane of pure ideas and into our grubby, physical world, causing mines to re-open, shipping containers and pipelines to spark to life, factories to retool, trucks to fan out across the nation, retailers to place ads and hoist SALE banners over their premises, and consumers to race to those displays and open their wallets.

When prices are "distorted," all of this comes to naught. During the notorious "socialist calculation debate" of 1920s Austria, right-wing archdukes of religious market fundamentalism, like Von Hayek and Von Mises, trounced their leftist opponents, arguing that the market was the only computational system capable of calculating how much of each thing should be made, where it should be sent, and how much it should be sold for.

Attempts to "plan" the economy - say, by subsidizing industries or limiting prices - may be well-intentioned, but they broke the market's computations and produced haywire swings of both over- and underproduction. Later, the USSR's planned economy did encounter these swings. These were sometimes very grave (famines that killed millions) and sometimes silly (periods when the only goods available in regional shops were forks, say, creating local bubbles in folk art made from forks).

Unplanned markets do this too. Most notoriously, capitalism has produced a vast oversupply of carbon-intensive goods and processes, and a huge undersupply of low-carbon alternatives, bringing the human civilization to the brink of collapse. Not only have capitalism's price signals failed to address this existential crisis to humans, it has also sown the seeds of its own ruin - the market computer's not going to be getting any "price signals" from people as they drown in floods or roast to death on sidewalks that deliver delivery second-degree burns to anyone who touches them:

https://www.fastcompany.com/91151209/extreme-heat-southwest-phoenix-surface-burns-scorching-pavement-sidewalks-pets

For market true believers, these failures are just evidence that regulation is distorting markets, and that the answer is more unregulated markets to infuse the computer with more price signals. When it comes to carbon, the problem is that producers are "producing negative externalities" (that is, polluting and sticking us with the bill). If we can just get them to "internalize" those costs, they will become "economically rational" and switch to low-carbon alternatives.

That's the theory behind the creation and sale of carbon credits. Rather than ordering companies to stop risking civilizational collapse and mass extinction, we can incentivize them to do so by creating markets that reward clean tech and punish dirty practices. The buying and selling of carbon credits is supposed to create price signals reflecting the existential risk to the human race and the only habitable planet known to our species, which the market will then "bring into equilibrium."

Unfortunately, reality has a distinct and unfair leftist bias. Carbon credits are a market for lemons. The carbon credits you buy to "offset" your car or flight are apt to come from a forest that has already burned down, or that had already been put in a perpetual trust as a wildlife preserve and could never be logged:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/18/greshams-carbon-law/#papal-indulgences

Carbon credits produce the most perverse outcomes imaginable. For example, much of Tesla's profitability has been derived from the sale of carbon credits to the manufacturers of the dirtiest, most polluting SUVs on Earth; without those Tesla credits, those SUVs would have been too expensive to sell, and would not have existed:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

What's more, carbon credits aren't part of an "all of the above" strategy that incorporates direct action to prevent our species downfall. These market solutions are incompatible with muscular direct action, and if we do credits, we can't do other stuff that would actually work:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/31/carbon-upsets/#big-tradeoff

Even though price signals have repeatedly proven themselves to be an insufficient mechanism for producing "efficient" or even "survivable," they remain the uppermost spiritual value in the capitalist pantheon. Even through the last 40 years of unrelenting assaults on antitrust and competition law, the one form of corporate power that has remained both formally and practically prohibited is "pricing power."

That's why the DoJ was able to block tech companies and major movie studios from secretly colluding to suppress their employees' wages, and why those employees were able to get huge sums out of their employers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation

It's also why the Big Six (now Big Five) publishers and Apple got into so much trouble for colluding to set a floor on the price of ebooks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Apple_(2012)

When it comes to monopoly, even the most Bork-pilled, Manne-poisoned federal judges and agencies have taken a hard line on price-fixing, because "distortions" of prices make the market computer crash.

But despite this horror of price distortions, America's monopolists have found so many ways to manipulate prices. Last month, The American Prospect devoted an entire issue to the many ways that monopolies and cartels have rigged the prices we pay, pushing them higher and higher, even as our wages stagnated and credit became more expensive:

https://prospect.org/pricing

For example, there's the plague of junk fees (AKA "drip pricing," or, if you're competing to be first up against the wall come the revolution, "ancillary revenue"), everything from baggage fees from airlines to resort fees at hotels to the fee your landlord charges if you pay your rent by check, or by card, or in cash:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/07/drip-drip-drip/#drip-off

There's the fake transparency gambit, so beloved of America's hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/13/a-punch-in-the-guts/#hayek-pilled

The "greedflation" that saw grocery prices skyrocketing, which billionaire grocery plutes blamed on covid stimulus checks, even as they boasted to their shareholders about their pricing power:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-12-war-in-the-aisles/

There's the the tens of billions the banks rake in with usurious interest rates, far in excess of the hikes to the central banks' prime rates (which are, in turn, justified in light of the supposed excesses of covid relief checks):

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-11-what-we-owe/

There are the scams that companies like Amazon pull with their user interfaces, tricking you into signing up for subscriptions or upsells, which they grandiosely term "dark patterns," but which are really just open fraud:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-10-one-click-economy/

There are "surge fees," which are supposed to tempt more producers (e.g. Uber drivers) into the market when demand is high, but which are really just an excuse to gouge you - like when Wendy's threatens to surge-price its hamburgers:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-07-urge-to-surge/

And then there's surveillance pricing, the most insidious and profitable way to jack up prices. At its core, surveillance pricing uses nonconsensually harvested private information to inform an algorithm that reprices the things you buy - from lattes to rent - in real-time:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

Companies like Plexure - partially owned by McDonald's - boasts that it can use surveillance data to figure out what your payday is and then hike the price of the breakfast sandwich or after-work soda you buy every day.

Like every bad pricing practice, surveillance pricing has its origins in the aviation industry, which invested early on and heavily in spying on fliers to figure out how much they could each afford for their plane tickets and jacking up prices accordingly. Architects of these systems then went on to found companies like Realpage, a data-brokerage that helps landlords illegally collude to rig rent prices.

Algorithmic middlemen like Realpage and ATPCO - which coordinates price-fixing among the airlines - are what Dan Davies calls "accountability sinks." A cartel sends all its data to a separate third party, which then compares those prices and tells everyone how much to jack them up in order to screw us all:

https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/

These price-fixing middlemen are everywhere, and they predate the boom in commercial surveillance. For example, Agri-Stats has been helping meatpackers rig the price of meat for 40 years:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

But when you add commercial surveillance to algorithmic pricing, you get a hybrid more terrifying than any cocaine-sharks (or, indeed, meth-gators):

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tennessee-police-warn-locals-not-flush-drugs-fear-meth-gators-n1030291

Apologists for these meth-gators insist that surveillance pricing's true purpose is to let companies offer discounts. A streaming service can't afford to offer $0.99 subscriptions to the poor because then all the rich people would stop paying $19.99. But with surveillance advertising, every customer gets a different price, titrated to their capacity to pay, and everyone wins.

But that's not how it cashes out in the real world. In the real world, rich people who get ripped off have the wherewithal to shop around, complain effectively to a state AG, or punish companies by taking their business elsewhere. Meanwhile, poor people aren't just cash-poor, they're also time-poor and political influence-poor.

When the dollar store duopoly forces all the mom-and-pop grocers in your town out of business with predatory pricing, and creating food deserts that only they serve, no one cares, because state AGs and politicians don't care about people who shop at dollar stores. Then, the dollar stores can collude with manufacturers to get shrunken "cheater sized" products that sell for a dollar, but cost double or triple the grocery store price by weight or quantity:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

Yes, fliers who seem to be flying on business (last-minute purchasers who don't have a Saturday stay) get charged more than people whose purchase makes them seem to be someone flying away for a vacation. But that's only because aviation prices haven't yet fully transitioned to surveillance pricing. If an airline can correctly calculate that you are taking a trip because you're a grad student who must attend a conference in order to secure a job, and if they know precisely how much room you have left on your credit card, they can charge you everything you can afford, to the cent.

Your ability to resist pricing power isn't merely a function of a company's market power - it's also a function of your political power. Poor people may have less to steal, but no one cares when they get robbed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/19/martha-wright-reed/#capitalists-hate-capitalism

So surveillance pricing, supercharged by algorithms, represent a serious threat to "prices," which is the one thing that the econo-religious fundamentalists of the capitalist class value above all else. That makes surveillance pricing low-hanging fruit for regulatory enforcement: a bipartisan crime that has few champions on either side of the aisle.

Cannily, the FTC has just declared war on surveillance pricing, ordering eight key players in the industry (including capitalism's arch-villains, McKinsey and Jmorgan Chase) to turn over data that can be used to prosecute them for price-fixing within 45 days:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/07/ftc-issues-orders-eight-companies-seeking-information-surveillance-pricing

As American Prospect editor-in-chief David Dayen notes in his article on the order, the FTC is doing what he and his journ*listic partners couldn't: forcing these companies to cough up internal data:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-07-24-ftc-opens-surveillance-pricing-inquiry/

This is important, and not just because of the wriggly critters the FTC will reveal as they use their powers to turn over this rock. Administrative agencies can't just do whatever they want. Long before the agencies were neutered by the Supreme Court, they had strict rules requiring them to gather evidence, solicit comment and counter-comment, and so on, before enacting any rules:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

Doubtless, the Supreme Court's *Loper" decision (which overturned "Chevron deference" and cut off the agencies' power to take actions that they don't have detailed, specific authorization to take) will embolden the surveillance pricing industry to take the FTC to court on this. It's hard to say whether the courts will find in the FTC's favor. Section 6(b) of the FTC Act clearly lets the FTC compel these disclosures as part of an enforcement action, but they can't start an enforcement action until they have evidence, and through the whole history of the FTC, these kinds of orders have been a common prelude to enforcement.

One thing this has going for it is that it is bipartisan: all five FTC commissioners, including both Republicans (including the Republican who votes against everything) voted in favor of it. Price gouging is the kind of easy-to-grasp corporate crime that everyone hates, irrespective of political tendency.

In the Prospect piece on Ticketmaster's pricing scam, Dayen and Groundwork's Lindsay Owens called this the "Age of Recoupment":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/03/aoi-aoi-oh/#concentrated-gains-vast-diffused-losses

For 40 years, neoclassical economics' focus on "consumer welfare" meant that companies could cheat and squeeze their workers and suppliers as hard as they wanted, so long as prices didn't go up. But after 40 years, there's nothing more to squeeze out of workers or suppliers, so it's time for the cartels to recoup by turning on us, their customers.

They believe - perhaps correctly - that they have amassed so much market power through mergers and lobbying that they can cross the single bright line in neoliberal economics' theory of antitrust: price-gouging. No matter how sincere the economics profession's worship of prices might be, it still might not trump companies that are too big to fail and thus too big to jail.

The FTC just took an important step in defense of all of our economic wellbeing, and it's a step that even the most right-wing economist should applaud. They're calling the question: "Do you really think that price-distortion is a cardinal sin? If so, you must back our play."

——

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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haggis mar/sea 6d ago (video post) Edited 6d ago 483 thread views #286408

Video footage of the beginning of the most destructive forest fire in Nova Scotia's history, which caused $165 million in damages, including burning down a friend of mine's house with their dog inside.

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/h/redscarepod House Racist

ReeTardyOswald mon/key pls be patient 2d ago (image post) 88 thread views #287625

so true

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/h/meta

X ching/chong :marseymaidgeisha:

Anarcho-Syndicalist-Trotskyist-Stalinist Cuban Revolutionary :marseyrevolution:

4d ago (image post) 374 thread views #287011

xhe detransitioned

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Impassionata3 they/them 1d ago (twitter.com) 104 thread views #287749

SFBA Rationalist Cultist (you can tell because his commentators flatter him comparing him to Scott Alexander lmao) misses the point of why the leftists are freaking out about the fascism in Spectacular Absurd fashion.

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DEIShill diver/sity :marseydiversity:

Diversity Is Our Strength :marseydiversity:

8d ago (reddit.com) 940 thread views #285870

If Kamala Harris Is a D.E.I. Candidate, So Is JD Vance

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!chuds yts are now DEI candidates :marseychuddance:

NYT is now unacceptable :marseyxd:

Ever since speculation began that Vice President Kamala Harris might replace President Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, there has been a steady, ugly chorus on the right. The New York Post published a column that declared that Harris would be a "D.E.I. president," and quickly the phrase ricocheted across the conservative media ecosystem.

The invocation of diversity, equity and inclusion programs meant to bring people from underrepresented backgrounds into institutions of power and influence clearly implied that a Black woman got power because of racial preferences. Black achievement, in this narrative, is always unearned and conferred without regard to merit.

Listening to JD Vance's speech at the Republican convention on Wednesday night, as he laid out his remarkable biography --- a young man with roots in an economically devastated backwater who scaled the heights of the American elite --- I couldn't help thinking to myself: If Harris is a D.E.I. candidate, so is Vance. It just depends on what kind of diversity you mean. It depends, indeed, on how you understand the role of identity in shaping the opportunities that define anyone's life.

All politics is, at some level, identity politics --- the business of turning identity into power, be it the identity of a candidate or demographic group or political party or region of the country. For modern presidential and vice-presidential candidates, one of their most valuable assets is their life story. Some elements of that story are bequeathed at birth, but what makes politicians successful is their talent at narrating that story in a manner that allows voters to see some version of themselves and their own aspirations in the candidate. This kind of storytelling, embedded in American archetypes and ideals, has shaped our politics.

Vance's entire business and political career has flowed from his life story, which is embedded in identities he did not choose: Born a "hillbilly," of Scotch-Irish descent, he grew up in poverty, son of a single mother who was addicted to drugs. Overcoming this adversity, these disadvantages, lies at the core of his personal narrative. His ascent would hardly be so remarkable if he started from a life of middle-class comfort. But no one is portraying Vance's elevation to the Republican ticket as the outcome of some kind of illegitimate identity politics, nor is Vance perceived as having benefited from a political form of affirmative action.

And yet he almost certainly did. Race is not the only kind of diversity that gets noticed and embraced. Elite institutions love up-by-your-bootstraps Americans, and that archetype is all over Vance's life story. A promising white candidate from a county that sends few students to an elite college like Yale would get a strong look, even if that person's grades and test scores were less impressive than other applicants'. (To be clear, I have no idea what kind of grades or scores Vance had.) Regardless of race, applicants from working-class backgrounds, especially if they were the first in their family to attend college, are deemed to add class diversity.

Natasha Warikoo, a professor of sociology at Tufts University whose scholarship focuses on affirmative action and ideas about meritocracy, told me that race is a highly visible identity and the one that is most likely to be associated with unearned advantage. Yet race is not the only kind of identity that excites elite institutions looking for diversity. "We want a variety of perspectives and lived experiences," Warikoo said.

The labor historian Gabriel Winant, who crossed paths with Vance at Yale, wrote of him last year: "If you spend enough time at elite universities, you should be able to recognize this as a type: conservative white men from outside the WASP elite who have figured out how to present themselves as persecuted minorities and be rewarded for it. Although Vance no doubt did feel out of place at Yale, elite universities love promising young conservative men like him. Institutions often seek them out and do them favors; doing so makes faculty and administrators feel broad-minded."

Vance benefited from one of the most powerful forms of affirmative action that elite universities practice to attract low-income students: need-blind admissions. Like many elite schools, Yale pledges to help cover the cost of attending for poor students, and Vance wrote about receiving generous financial aid for law school, not "because of anything I'd done or earned --- it was because I was one of the poorest kids in school." I am familiar with this phenomenon --- my much less elite college had a similar policy. Our family was penniless, so I received aid that covered nearly the entire cost of my expensive education.

The sort of affirmative action that helped Vance gets easily overlooked --- it's less visible than race, making it easier to ascribe the achievements of white men to merit alone. The playing field is never tilted to help white men, the theory goes. If anything, it is tilted against them, in favor of women and minorities, we're told by the right. And if there are any advantages for white men, they exist only to help elites remain elites --- legacy admissions, preferences for athletes and players of expensive sports like sailing, old-boy networks.

In truth, it is pretty common for white men to get a leg up for some special part of their identity. Yet these men do not get labeled D.E.I. beneficiaries. No one worries that their surgeon or pilot or president was a "D.E.I. hire," even though he might have gotten his spot at an elite college because he was the son of a wealthy alumnus, or because he happened to come from a state that is historically underrepresented in elite higher education. Indeed, he may have impressed an admissions officer with an unusual story of overcoming obstacles --- a family rived by poverty and addiction in a forgotten corner of the country.

I wonder: Why do people look at Vance's life story and achievements and see a vice president, and they look at Vice President Harris's life story and achievements and see a "D.E.I. candidate"?

You have to look pretty far into history to find a vice-presidential nominee with a slimmer résumé than Vance. In fairness, he is only 39. Before he entered the Senate 18 months ago, his public service experience consisted of a stint in the Marine Corps, which is a solid early entry on a political résumé. This champion of forgotten America made his fortune by writing a best-selling book that portrayed the rural white community he came from as lazy and undisciplined, responsible for its poverty and misery. He got even richer working as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, hobnobbing with the billionaire fleece-vest crowd at invitation-only conferences among the uber elite. He is clearly a person of talent and drive. But it is hard to imagine that he could have gotten this far were it not for the value that elite institutions place on biographies like his.

Affirmative action of a kind is built into our political system. The drafters of the Constitution did not have the term "diversity, equity and inclusion" at hand, but how else do you describe a system that gives two senators and at least three Electoral College votes to a state that based on population qualifies for only one member of the House of Representatives? Our Constitution does not lecture Wyoming, Alaska, the Dakotas, Vermont and Delaware to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and do a better job of competing for residents with states like California and New York in order to earn their disproportionate representation.

Some of the earliest settlers of the United States were religious minorities fleeing persecution, and protection of the rights of certain minorities lies at the core of our founding documents. For better or worse, our Constitution finds value in tempering the power of the majority, though that has worked out in ways no one fathomed in the 18th century. It is telling that these kinds of preferences, the valuing of geographic and religious diversity, are so deeply embedded in our history and do not read to most people as unearned or unjust.

Personally, I think powerful institutions should value this kind of diversity. Over the course of my career I have hired and promoted many people, and diversity in the broadest sense has always been important to me. I have found that the best leaders I have worked with are eager to build teams from as wide a range of geographic, religious, class, ideological and, yes, racial and ethnic backgrounds as possible.

Kamala Harris and JD Vance, despite their political differences, have a few things in common. They were raised by tough, charismatic matriarchs. They both pursued legal careers. They both sought and won high elected office. They both come from backgrounds that are underrepresented in the halls of power. And now they are both engaged in the core work of politics --- translating their stories into power. We would do well to ask why only one of these two remarkable Americans stands accused of getting where she is based on D.E.I. The answer, I fear, is written on their faces.

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Emoji Award given by @boogiecat: "marseybased"

starry boy/mode i am box the fat frick 10d ago (text post) 997 thread views #285410

why im voting for joe biden/joe biden's replacement

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economy

idiotic tax cuts for the rich. here is an accountant (knows more than I do) bitching about plans (before it was passed), here is the wikipedia, here is a summary about why it sucks. Note that it expires in 2025, at which point taxes will shoot back up. the US eroded its tax base with the law, and making the cuts indefinite would mean the us loses even more money. its not sustainable. the law was designed with the assumption that it would frick over the 2025 administration (which in 2017 republicans assumed would be Dems) because taxes will shoot up (and thus be their fault). the net result from all of this? +$500 to net household income, considered statistically insignificant. but the 1% got a nice cut.
under trump, the federal reserve overplayed its hand. they had QE running even though the markets were good (bad idea), then when markets went to shit (covid) they had no recourse (because they hand was already played) except inflating the shit out of everything. Biden became president during the midst of this, but it's a well-known economic fact that there is Nothing You Can Do during an inflationary recession. I will repeat it for those of you in the back: economists don't have cowtools to deal with inflationary recessions. the outcome we got was the best we could have, inflation was a lot worse in other countries.
trump wants to put a blanket tariff over ALL imports (terrible idea), wants a weaker dollar (say hi to inflation)
absolute disaster for the national debt (source)

military and global affairs

abused the state dept to fabricate and push anti-vaccine propaganda in the Phillipines (reuters) in an effort to combat the Phillipines buying vaccines from China (the US's were too expensive). Biden shut it down after he found out about it (was kept on the dl)
a long, long list of ways that trump has fricked over us troops
the whole first indictment
always lets putin get what he wants

social issues

i will reference project 2025 in this section

trump set up concentration camps for immigrant children, then "lost" 1488 of them... where i have i seen that number before? (ap news)
make abortion flat-out illegal
rollback trans ppl in the military
roll back s*x discrimination protections on gay and transgender people (page 584)
define trans people as child s*x pests: "Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women." (page 5)
"It should also pursue the death penalty for applicable crimes—particularly heinous crimes involving violence and sexual abuse of children" (page 554)
taken together, it seems as though they are paving the way to outlaw existing as a transgender person (possibly through the death penalty)
redefine public transit as to include ride sharing: "A better definition for public transit (which also would require congressional legislation) would be transit provided for the public rather than transit provided by a public municipality." (page 635)
reduce funding for public transit (more for personal automobiles) and remove federal funding for city transit -- instead, funding would have to go thru state govts who then do what they want rather than straight to the cities
get rid of the dept of education, fda