retroactively correcting myself here: the All-Electric Building Act is actually another thing NYC-DSA won and i just didn’t realize it. it’s pared down from our demand, which was “the state energy conservation construction code shall prohibit infrastructure, building systems, or equipment used for the combustion of fossil fuels in new construction statewide no later than December 31, 2023 if the building is less than seven stories and July 1, 2027 if the building is seven stories or more.”, but the actual law ensures the core of the demand is adhered to: going forward most NY buildings will be all-electric.

We are talking about the Democratic Party here.

i’m noticing that you’re refusing to engage with the points i’m making describing all the ways in which the Green Party–in contravention of your assertion that they “have to actually work to live”–fails to be a vessel for any sort of serious political action, electoral success, or winning radical demands that would help avert the worst effects of climate change.

anyways, did you know that one of those socialists in office i’m talking about in New York–Jabari Brisport, a guy i know pretty well and who really walks the walk (devout environmentalist and vegan)–ran as a Green Party candidate in 2017 with the backing of New York City Democratic Socialists of America? because he lost 70-30 when he did that (that was a “respectable performance” for a Green Party candidate) and the Greens reaped exactly nothing from him running besides a “moral victory” that they haven’t improved on or built off of since.

and strangely, when we ran Jabari again as a Democrat in 2020, he actually won. and because he won, he’s a big reason we got the Build Public Renewables Act passed–and a reason why bills such as the Clean Futures Act and the All-Electric Building Act get introduced and debated at all (because he helps introduce them and fight for them on behalf of the chapter). thanks to him, there are now material, working class victories that socialists can point to for why people should elect us over moderate Democrats who don’t care about any of this. if he just kept running as a Green, we probably wouldn’t have been able to do any of that. running as a Green was a quixotic strategy that accomplished nothing for the working class, and he’d be the first to admit that.

As opposed the tens of trillions thrown down the drain by Democrats, conservatively speaking.

we’re not talking about the Democratic Party here. we’re talking about whether the Greens are a vehicle for electoral success, and even a basic evaluation of the facts is that no, they aren’t. they lose 99.8% of their races above the local level–none of their ostensible local success, which itself is fleeting, translates above the local level.

again: there are more elected socialists in New York’s legislature currently–who caucus together on a shared radical platform–than there are Green Party candidates who were elected to a legislature total in the party’s now 30ish years of existence. those eight socialists got the Build Public Renewables Act enacted into law (which “will require the state’s public power provider to generate all of its electricity from clean energy by 2030. It also allows the public utility to build and own renewables while phasing out fossil fuels.”) and they’ve pushed for things ranging from the the Clean Futures Act that would “prohibit the development of any new major electric generating facilities that would be powered in whole or in part by any fossil fuel” to the All-Electric Building Act that would prevent “infrastructure, building systems, or equipment used for the combustion of fossil fuels in new construction statewide”. what do the Greens do that come anywhere close to this? where is their equivalent of the BPRA being signed into law?

That is why most of what they’ve achieved is at the local level.

the Green Party in my state is opposing a ranked-choice voting initiative because it’s not good enough for them and they want proportional representation–when they haven’t even run a non-presidential candidate in my state in at least the past four years despite liberal ballot access laws.

their best performing candidate in presidential history is a guy who thinks mom and pop capitalism is fine, and that the real issue with our country is “corporate capitalism” (“It’s corporate capitalism that I’m against. Not small business, Main Street, mom-and-pop capitalism. And the difference is far more than a difference in magnitude. It’s the difference in the quality of power.”). his theory of change is fundamentally progressive-liberal at best, but indistinguishable from what people like Elizabeth Warren believe.

there are more open socialists in just the New York state legislature right now (8, all caucusing together, will be 9 next year) than have been elected total above the local level for the Green Party (5). even accounting for party switching, this expands to just 9 people in history. this is not a party which is ever going to be a serious vehicle for left-wing organization, and i would argue it is genuinely detrimental to socialist and left-wing organizing to send people to organize with them. i would literally prefer people not electorally organize than organize with the Greens; they have thrown tens of millions of dollars down the drain for absolutely no benefit.

the issue isn’t really with federating messages per se (that’s actually quite easy afaik, at least in federation terms), it’s with how to display them and everything associated with them. my understanding–based off of the fact that i’m working on a project where we’re having to fight how ActivityPub works, and how to display things is a big problem–is that ActivityPub is structured in a way you can be fast and loose with the stuff you’re federating, and it’s not a super big deal necessarily. but how it displays is a big deal, and that’s a total mess. and a lot of that mess begins with how Mastodon does stuff and the need to accommodate its choices (which i think are mostly bad for anything that isn’t microblogging, so non-microblog platforms have to design around it). it’s then amplified by differences in front-ends and clients, none of which can agree exactly on how to display or handle things, and some of which can’t/don’t display certain things at all and create differing user experiences as a result.

how Mastodon handles content warnings, for instance, is a big problem. functionally it’s just a details tag and i think in ActivityPub it’s literally just a “summary” field. but the field is–in addition to being used as a details tag, a readmore, and a summary field–primarily used as the load bearing content warning functionality on Mastodon. so everything has to kind of assume the field will be used the way Mastodon uses it, which is… an issue, to say the least. obviously, not everything can handle that (or wants to handle that) the same way by design, so you get a bunch of differing ways to display the field that might not even contextually make sense for what’s in it.

that’s what the issue is with translating from Mastodon-to-Lemmy and vice versa, and likewise would probably be the difficulty with translating stuff from forum-to-Lemmy even in a best-case scenario. i’m not even sure what the best way to handle our conversation would be, for example, since forums are often chronological/basically never indent replies/exchanges, but Reddit-alikes like Lemmy allow for different ways of sorting thread replies and do indent exchanges.

interoperability is the problem with this. what “integration with the fediverse” means practically for novel forms of software is “handling a trillion really annoying edge cases that Mastodon created for every other thing that isn’t Mastodon.” Lemmy, for example, handles interoperation with Mastodon incredibly poorly (and vice versa). you can do it, but for meaningful interaction it’s not very good. and forums have their own sets of edge cases that would probably make, say, forum-to-Lemmy interoperation a giant mess.

i mean my first layer of contention is that Substack is even a “journalism platform” for “independent creators” and not just a gentrified blogging platform like Medium, with a corresponding lack of vision in who it exists for and what it should be good at doing.

like, there are some actual journalists on there, yeah, but a lot of them are literally paid to use the platform/overlook the fact that it won’t do basic moderation like “banning fascists” (because the owners believe in the same technolibertarian nonsense as every other major platform). they wouldn’t be there at all without monetary incentives, which induce network effect and lock people into the infrastructure. and the scope creep is already real with Substack’s features, just like with whatever the hell Medium was doing 5-6 years ago. it’s trying to be an Everything App―even though nobody asked for that―and still the only things it does well are things that are basic functionality it can lift from elsewhere.

we clearly took a wrong turn somewhere because “less a journalism platform and more a payment system for creators” is nauseating on like 5 different levels

there is a comment on the article to this effect, for what that’s worth:

Angel

Hello Kris,

A lovely idea, but I won’t be visiting any public bathhouse any time soon. For many of us, the pandemic isn’t over. It’s contagious, airborne, and still killing and disabling people (including healthy people who have previously been infected and been ok) every day. Some ways to address the transmission of covid in bath houses can include rigorous HEPA filtration; required testing (using LAMP tests, for example, which are €10/test once you have the machine to read the results (another few hundred euro), and you can pool several people in one test); and maybe masks (I’ve read that they don’t work if they get wet, but I also read an article where someone tested several and went swimming with them. From memory, a regular Aura (~€1) worked nearly as long as an intentionally waterproof model). None of these are cheap by my standards. Not sure what you do about warts, foot fungus, and many other common bath house diseases.

Thanks, Angel

yeah, chiming in to say i think this is an acceptable case of US news in the World News section. obviously don’t go overboard with edge cases, but there’s really no dilution of World News from stories like this which do have some multinational significance.

this thread is a disaster from front to back, so it’s being locked.

i’m very uninterested in relitigating your temporary silencing for getting into aimless slapfights with people on here on this subject. don’t bother bringing it up again. strictly speaking the silencing should probably also apply to this thread and just result in me deleting your comments without even responding to them like i am now–but i’m being generous in not doing that here and just calling them a cringe opinion you have the right to express. please do not make me regret that and start enforcing your temporary silencing elsewhere too.

one that very much isn’t as unambiguous as you’re trying to portray it as or have been led to believe through your little filter bubble (at least according to my little filter bubble - opinions, opinions, opinions).

no, it’s pretty unambiguous both internationally (where Israel has been rebuked time and time again for its apartheid system and systemic discrimination and abuse against Palestinians) and morally (Israel’s current conduct toward people in the West Bank in Gaza is almost one-to-one analogous to Jim Crow and apartheid, even ignoring Zionism and its contribution to the subject)–most people just don’t care that much about a foreign conflict that doesn’t affect them and a foreign ethnic group they can’t directly do much to alleviate the plight of.

fundamentally, though, this is an “i can see discrimination with my own eyes, and settlers from Israel will literally admit to doing the discrimination in casual interviews” and an “i don’t think 40,000 Palestinians^[1] are all Hamas militants who should be annihilated with indiscriminate bombing that has leveled the vast majority of Gaza’s already crippled infrastructure, i think that is very obviously morally wrong” thing.

It would have been much wiser of him to support his cause elsewhere instead of at and against the institution that he relies on for his degree and visa.

personally i think people should be allowed to exercise basic freedom of speech (especially for unambiguously morally correct causes) without being violently deported over it, but you have what i would consider consistently bad takes on this subject so i’m not surprised you’ve taken another bad line here.

this appears to be the first time anything like this has happened or been tried; unsurprisingly, students have been mobilizing against it and it’s been condemned by dozens of student groups. it’s also probably union busting, as Taal is a member of the Cornell Graduate Student Union and they have a memorandum with Cornell that any suspensions like this have to be mediated with the union–which of course was not done here.

basically, put it this way: if a cop stops you and asks you for your phone–what are you realistically going to do in that situation the moment they don’t respect your “no” and begin to pressure you, threaten you, and decide to throw the legal book at you (however dubious) for saying no? for most people, the answer is going to be “just give up the phone and start complying with the cop” even though that is not something the cop should be able to do. because at the end of the day they have a gun, and can put you in jail (or at least make your day hellish) more-or-less unilaterally, with very little recourse for you unless you want to do expensive litigation.

But if we’re talking about a law that actually says the cop cannot take your phone no matter what, and they do, then any public defender would be able to point it out and the judge would certainly have to enforce it. I can’t think of a way the cop would abuse their power because, in this case they don’t have it.

they can abuse their power because they’re a cop, with a badge and gun, and the right to maim or literally kill you with it (and probably get away with it even if it’s not strictly legal) if you don’t comply with their demands in the moment. again: cops consistently do not care about or follow legal procedures they’re supposed to, frequently fuck up those procedures even when they do, and most cops probably don’t even think of it as their job to secure some airtight case that stands up to legal scrutiny. it’s not a profession that lend itself to the kind of charitability that’s being given here, and the record of the profession makes it even less deserving of that charitability.

The MyColorado FAQ explicitly states that an officer cannot take your phone, even if they think your digital ID is fraudulent. This whole article is a ton of fear mongering.

no offense but: even if you were to grant the notion that this is an exaggerated problem–cops are not well known for their rigorous adherence to the law or proper legal procedure. they routinely fuck up and violate civil liberties, up to and including murdering people for arbitrary reasons. and unless police are held accountable (which they almost never are for a variety of systemic reasons), what a state says they cannot do is effectively meaningless. it’s just words on a screen, really.

In Riley v. California, the Supreme Court unanimously held that police need a warrant to search through cell phones, even during otherwise lawful arrests. But if you hand over your unlocked phone to a police officer and offer to show them something, “it becomes this complicated factual question about what consent you’ve granted for a search and what the limits of that are,” Brett Max Kaufman, a senior staff attorney in the ACLU’s Center for Democracy, told The Verge. “There have been cases where people give consent to do one thing, the cops then take the whole phone, copy the whole phone, find other evidence on the phone, and the legal question that comes up in court is: did that violate the scope of consent?”

If police do have a warrant to search your phone, numerous courts have said they can require you to provide biometric login access via your face or finger. (It’s still an unsettled legal question since other courts have ruled they can’t.) The Fifth Amendment typically protects giving up passcodes as a form of self-incrimination, but logging in with biometrics often isn’t considered protected “testimonial” evidence. In the words of one federal appeals court decision, it requires “no cognitive exertion, placing it firmly in the same category as a blood draw or fingerprint taken at booking.”

it’s unbelievable that there is a distinction in US caselaw between giving up your biometrics and giving up your password, and your essentially unchangeable biometrics are somehow the one you’re probably obliged to give to the cops if they ask. just an incredibly goofy system

These first serious restrictions on men have come as a surprise to many in Afghanistan, according to a range of Afghans, including Taliban opponents, wavering supporters and even members of the Taliban regime, who spoke in phone interviews over the past two weeks. In a society where a man’s voice is often perceived as far more powerful than a woman’s, some men now wonder whether they should have spoken up sooner to defend the freedoms of their wives and daughters.

“If men had raised their voices, we might also be in a different situation now,” said a male resident of the capital, Kabul, who like others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity or that only their first names be used due to fears of drawing unwanted scrutiny from the regime. “Now, everyone is growing a beard because we don’t want to be questioned, humiliated,” he said.

A 36-year old male driver in Kabul said the new restrictions feel “enormous” and pose a growing hardship for his work. His revenue has declined by 70 percent since late August, he said, partly because the Taliban has begun enforcing a rule that bans women from traveling alone in taxis.

Even in some government offices, a new sense of dread has set in. A former Taliban supporter recalled how a friend, who still works for the regime, recently had his salary withheld because his beard wasn’t sufficiently long.

“We are hearing that some of the civil servants, whose beards were shorter than the required length, were barred from entering their departments,” said a government employee, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to journalists.