onfocus

Meanwhile, these same political journalists are also handicapping the 2022 and 2024 elections as if things were normal — as if it were still just a choice between two equally legitimate political parties, rather than a referendum on whether the government should be allowed to function, whether the people should be allowed to pick their leaders in the future, and whether white Christian nationalism formally replaces pluralism as the country’s organizing principle.

It seems like journalists everywhere aren’t allowed to accurately describe how the Republican Party is behaving. This article demonstrates what a more accurate description looks like.

"Since July, the reduction in family poverty has been mostly sustained by monthly payments worth as much as $300 per child. The payments have lifted between 3 and 4 million children above the poverty line each month. “The sheer magnitude of just that number is not what we normally see on a regular basis, especially from a single policy,” Megan Curran, director of policy at Columbia’s Center on Poverty, said in an interview."

[this is good] (But the sub-headline should be the big part and the headline should be the small part.)

The $1 trillion infrastructure plan that President Joe Biden signed into law Monday has money for roads, bridges, ports, rail transit, safe water, the power grid, broadband internet and more.

[this is good]

"Herschel Walker, the former professional football player running for Senate in Georgia, is accused of repeatedly threatening his ex-wife’s life, but won Mr. Trump’s endorsement and appears to be consolidating party support behind his candidacy."

When there are no legal or professional consequences for domestic violence, violent people get promoted to powerful positions. Republicans admire a history of violence in their candidates.

"Right-clicker-mentality is a value we should all aspire to. As Matthew Gault wrote on Motherboard: “Sometimes a word or phrase comes along that’s so perfect it almost makes you angry.” “To right-click is one thing, but to have a right-clicker mentality implies an ontological break between crypto-fans and critics.”"

I really like this turn of phrase. Right-clicking implies being a power user, being curious, using more than default settings. Right-clicking can lead to viewing a page source which can lead to all sorts of learning and control over what you're consuming. If everyone had right-clicker-mentality, features like blocking view-source in Chrome wouldn't be a possibility.



p.s. Here's a good NFT joke.

Oregon State’s online Ecampus program has seen a substantial increase — 14% this fall on top of an 18% increase last year.

Nice to see this positive news. I’ve been very fortunate to work at Oregon State Ecampus for the last five years. Ecampus is a dedicated group of people working hard to support remote students and help OSU faculty deliver existing programs online. I’m obviously biased but it feels like a unique part of the online education world that I’m glad I can contribute to.

"...Google and Facebook’s contract stipulated that they would “cooperate and assist each other in responding to any Antitrust Action” and “promptly and fully inform the Other Party of any Governmental Communication Related to the Agreement.” Antitrust is mentioned at least 20 times in the contract."

When you know what you're doing is wrong, but the money is too good: Jedi Blue.

"The movie more or less manages to skip over explaining either the Landsraad or CHOAM without much of a narrative problem, but I think they’re both important to understanding the complicated political forces at play."

Yeah! Some friendly nerd nitpicking here that catches a lot of my thoughts about what the movie missed, but much funnier!

About halfway through the delusional fever dream that was Facebook’s biggest product announcement of all time, Mark Zuckerberg said that “the last few years have been humbling for me and our company in a lot of ways,” as Facebook has nominally had to grapple with the harm it’s done to this world.

Just super normal company things happening at Facebook. Very usual, humble, and exciting.

"Facebook wants people to believe that the public must choose between Facebook as it is, on the one hand, and free speech, on the other. This is a false choice. Facebook has a sophisticated understanding of measures it could take to make its platform safer without resorting to broad or ideologically driven censorship tactics."

When a company is this fundamentally broken and amoral it needs to be removed. This latest round of stories has convinced me regulation will never be enough to reduce the harm Facebook causes to society.

"Within hours of formal approval, expected after the Food and Drug Administration signs off and a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory panel meeting scheduled for Nov. 2-3, doses will begin shipping to providers across the country, along with smaller needles necessary for injecting young kids, and within days will be ready to go into the arms of kids on a wide scale."

Finally. This will be a huge relief.

"Our CEO, from 2020 to 2021, has taken a twenty percent increase in his compensation, as well as the top executives, they've been taking increases. So this contract that expired on October 4th, we are currently on a two tier wage system. Thirty percent of employees are on a lower tier making eleven, twelve dollars an hour less, higher insurance premium, less vacation, lower vacation pay. So we're all about the equalization of wages, we want to bring those thirty percent up to the higher tier level of workers. The company's proposal was to eliminate that thirty percent cap and eventually get everybody on that lower tier while the company is making record profits."

Asking for a fair share of higher profits seems reasonable.