>are living in motels, hotels, trailer parks, or camping grounds due to the lack of alternative adequate accommodations
To me it reads the following aren't adequate accommodations if they are by themselves (i.e. no other housing): motels, hotels, trailer parks, or camping grounds.
I personally don't think a trailer in a trailer park with an address should be categorized as homeless, I'm just trying to interpret the law as a layperson. Maybe trailer parks were different back in 1965 (i.e. no address).
Most facts are incomplete, it's almost impossible to give all the context to any given data point unless you just give people a URL and tell people to read for themselves.
For example, it's an incomplete fact to say that "if you live in a trailer park, you are considered homeless", but thankfully you provided the link to the complete fact!
From your source, a little more completeness for your fact:
"living in ...trailer parks... due to the lack of alternative adequate accommodations"
Thankfully, it is not true that everyone whose permanent residence is a trailer park is counted as homeless.
To clarify the clarification... I think this refers to people who are housed in "emergency housing" by some agency like FEMA because their regular home is no longer viable (e.g.: burned in a wildfire), and they have not been moved into something more permanent.
This does not refer to people who's only economic choice generally is trailer parks.
So it overflows the chart on desktop Firefox for me, but, the buttom axis caps out on the right at 22%. It looks like they hardcoded the graph axis, and so since other agricultural workers are at 23%, it overflows.
On that note, bottom axis is usually x, not y. Dunno if it displays differently on mobile; on desktop the bars run horizontally; y-axis is profession, x-axis is percentage.
1. What does gab have to do with "truth social"? From a skim of the article it doesn't look like they're related, aside from them both being right wing social media apps.
2. being a hypocrite is bad, sure, but I don't see how it's a "get out of jail free card" when it comes to having integrity. If your principle is "always tell the truth", and you encounter a pathological liar that calls other people out for lying, does that mean you can suddenly start lying to the guy and still claim you're a man of integrity?
> What does gab have to do with "truth social"? From a skim of the article it doesn't look like they're related, aside from them both being right wing social media apps.
It's a proto-fascist/full-blown fascist political movement that advocates the subversion of free and democratic elections to install a dictatorship, not to mention the prevalence of racism in their views and policies.
Also, I feel that labeling this particular political movement as merely "right-wing" is a blatant attempt to white-wash extremist views and push for a "us-vs-them" mentality. What this particular political group advocates has absolutely nothing to do with the typical right-wing political tropes of fiscal conservatism, small government, individual freedom. In fact, some of the policies they advocate goes completely against some of these core right-wing values.
>It's a proto-fascist/full-blown fascist political movement that advocates the subversion of free and democratic elections to install a dictatorship, not to mention the prevalence of racism in their views and policies.
That doesn't answer the question. Even they're both doing the same unsavory things, it doesn't follow that you can accuse one of them of being a hypocrite because the other is a hypocrite.
>Also, I feel that labeling this particular political movement as merely "right-wing" is a blatant attempt to white-wash extremist views and push for a "us-vs-them" mentality.
I feel like this violates the HN guidelines:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
For the record, I went with the generic "right wing" label because I wasn't sure whether a more precise label (eg. alt-right) would apply to both. A quick skim of wikipedia confirms this. The page for gab straight up says it's far-right/alt-right, but the page for truth social only has a passing mention of it being "alt-tech" in the reception section.
You're trying way too hard to ascribe malice where there isn't any.
> That doesn't answer the question. Even they're both doing the same unsavory things, it doesn't follow that you can accuse one of them of being a hypocrite because the other is a hypocrite.
You're being disingenuous if you're trying to pretend that Gab and Truth Social's targeted userbase, and the political movement driving their adoption, is not the same.
Just to make it very clear, Gab was the social networking service initially adopted by this proto-fascist/fascist political movement to serve as a stopgap solution to being kicked out of Twitter due to their prevalence of hatespeech and disinformation, as well as supporting a coup to overthrow a democratically elected government to install a dictatorship.
The same political movement is now organizing themselves to adopt their leader's Mastodon-based social networking service, Truth Social, as the official social networking service.
> For the record, I went with the generic "right wing" label because I wasn't sure whether a more precise label
It's not a matter of precision, it's a matter of trying to whitewhash extremist political movements by bundling them with mainstream innocuous political groups, particularly when they have barely any ideological common ground.
>You're being disingenuous if you're trying to pretend that Gab and Truth Social's targeted userbase, and the political movement driving their adoption, is not the same.
I am? What makes you think that?
>The same political movement is now organizing themselves to adopt their leader's Mastodon-based social networking service, Truth Social, as the official social networking service.
Okay, but what does that have to do with accusations of hypocrisy? If marxist group #1 is complaining about getting deplatformed/supressed, and why does marxist group #2's moderation policies invalidate their concern?
>Care to point out which guidelines?
I literally quoted them.
>It's not a matter of precision, it's a matter of trying to whitewhash extremist political movements by bundling them with mainstream innocuous political groups, particularly when they have barely any ideological common ground.
Again, you're ascribing malicious intent where there isn't any. Not every commenter who mislabels that political movement is doing so as part of a conscious effort to "whitewash extremism".
> What does gab have to do with "truth social"? From a skim of the article it doesn't look like they're related, aside from them both being right wing social media apps.
They were both formed as a response to prominent users being kicked off of other platforms, they both forked Mastodon, and they're both having bumpy launches for similar reasons. Regardless of what argument you're making, it seems perfectly reasonable to bring up Gab as part of the conversation. If we were talking about Rivian trucks, I don't think it would be off topic to mention Tesla.
[originally replied to the wrong comment; reposted here]
>Regardless of what argument you're making, it seems perfectly reasonable to bring up Gab as part of the conversation.
It is? I took the comment to argue something along the lines of "well they're hypocrites, therefore it's totally okay to censor them in return". For that to work, you'd need them to be the same entity. Having two sites that operate independently, and having separate policies doesn't seem hypocritical to me. In that context, bringing up gab is a total red herring.
I'm likely confused. The next parent above your question that mentions Gab is currently this one:
> Gab also used Mastodon but they don't anymore anymore. They did run as a Mastodon instance[1], but after being blocked from most instances and even at the software level by most Mastodon apps, they stopped using Mastodon and wrote their own new backend that does not federate.
...which seems like a pretty plain statement of facts? Is there some encoded animosity there I'm missing? The comment you replied to was a link to a Rolling Stone article that also doesn't mention Gab. (As an aside, I think Rolling Stone is a terrible source of news or information).
Whoops, I got the two companies confused. My original objection was with this comment[1], which was talking about the moderation policies of another company, truth social. That part seemed irrelevant to me, because the moderation policies of one site (truth social) shouldn't make the grievances of another site (gab) less valid.
There's an idea floating in some internet circles that because you aren't tolerant of some speech you disagree with, you're assumed to not be tolerant of all speech you disagree with. It is quite obviously fallacious.
Strong is not the same thing as absolute. One of my strong ethical values is that neo-nazis and fascists should be deplatformed to the greatest extent possible.
"strong" is a modifier for "moral and ethical principles and values", not for "consistent and uncompromising adherence". If you swore to support and defend the constitution, and then subsequently violated it to torture terrorists, I doubt you'd be called a man of integrity. This applies even if your other "strong ethical values" is "protecting the american people", or that you think that "terrorists are really bad people so they totally deserve it".
>One of my strong ethical values is that neo-nazis and fascists should be deplatformed to the greatest extent possible.
I have a feeling that's not the ethical value that OP was talking about, nor was it the ethical value f-droid founders had in mind when creating it.
Freedom of speech should include the freedom to not speak on behalf of others. And then there’s freedom of association, which one might consider far more fundamental — it’s what you lose when you go to jail.
Please don't post canned arguments to HN. They point to super-repetitive/generic places, and those usually get nasty, as indignation rushes in to fill the curiosity vacuum.
I think many people are perfectly content with being called intolerant, if that's what it takes for others to understand nuance. There is nothing wrong with not supporting hateful jerks and bigots.
> Toleration doesn't imply support. That's the whole point of toleration.
Except that in this case we're seeing people who feel entitled to everyone else's support demanding it under the guise of tolerance.
Think about it. We're talking about a federated self-hosting social networking service, and how a group renowned for a political leaning that lies somewhere between authoritarian and full-blown fascist, not to mention the significant amount of racism, is not benefiting from being able to freely connect to each and any node made available by anyone in the world. It's not tolerance that's being expected, but benefiting from having free access to everyone else's services.
Well yes. But if say Nazi Germany were annexing Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and finally France, should the USA do something about it?
Because popular opinion in the 1940s (even after France's collapse into pro-German "Vichy France") was "Stay neutral and don't join the war". That is to say, we were "tolerating" the events and trying to keep our hands clean of it, and we ultimately only joined after Pearl Harbor forced our hand.
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Its not hypothetical. There were other groups who "tolerated" the Nazis. IIRC, its a common criticism of the Catholic church for not going more anti-Nazi than they did (they were more neutral as well). Hard to criticize them IMO when the US tried to be neutral for so long though!
Eventually, there's a line that is crossed and we must become "intolerant" of other people's actions. Nazi Germany is perhaps the last example where the country truly unified itself against that threat, but... even as late as 1941 (well after the fall of France), USA was nominally neutral in the conflict. Was that the correct move? Should we have "Become intolerant" of the Nazis sooner?
---------
Don't believe me? Look up Charles Lindberg (yes, "Spirit of St. Louis" pilot for the first Trans-Atlantic flight). Look up the speeches he gave for the "American First Committee", a popular antiwar group in 1940 and 1941. USA was 100% willing to give up on France and Britain back then, and it was incredibly popular despite the atrocities that continued in Europe.
It all of course changed when Japan made a strategic blunder on December 7th, 1941. But remember: USA was largely reacting to Hitler's rise with a big "should we even care" ?? If it weren't for Japan, I don't think we would have joined the war in earnest.
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"Tolerance", keeping neutral, etc. etc. is the wrong answer sometimes. I think we can all look back with shame upon the US's reluctance to kick Hitler's ass. Like, we Americans make fun of Chamberlain's appeasement, but its not like our country did much about the situation until a few years later.
Funny note: under the Tripartite Pact, because Japan was the aggressor in Pearl Harbor, Germany didn't have to declare war on the USA.
Of course, politics overrides contracts. Hitler wanted close relations with Japan, and gave them his word that Germany had Japan's back on Dec. 4th. So Japan used that to attack the USA (knowing Germany would help). Germany, much like Japan, underestimated the strength of the USA and didn't expect them to be a big deal.
But WW2 could have just had US vs Japan, but kept "neutrality" vs Germany ... if circumstances lined up just right. Apparently there were many German advisors who were trying to push for this scenario, and didn't think Germany had anything to gain for keeping its verbal agreement with Japan. We can imagine an interesting parallel-world where maybe some Advisor managed to convince Hitler of this plan and Germany going down this path instead.
----------
USA wouldn't get first-hand witness accounts / pictures of the Holocaust for years. The Holocaust was happening, but US citizens wouldn't know about it. (The first whispers of the Holocaust were given to the US State department in 1942, but were written off/ignored)
New York Times had the Holocaust discussed on its 10th page in December 1942. (Not even front-page material). So once again, news of this genocide was largely met with a shrug. War-plans to bomb concentration camps were discussed, but pushed out as a low-priority. Some rescues happened, but it was clearly not a focus of the war effort.
I think people greatly underestimate the USA's capability to be isolationist. Yeah, we play the world's policemen at times, but we also don't like doing it.
In any case, by the time our soldiers found the concentration camps and gave first-hand accounts of them... the Holocaust was largely accepted as fact. But we weren't exactly proactive at stopping it.
Because there is no principled way to draw the line.
One side says not using someone's preferred pronouns is intolerant to their gender identity. The other side says being forced to use them is intolerant to their religious beliefs. Now what? Tie goes to the one with the most guns?
If you don't allow censorship, nobody gets censored. If you do allow censorship, there will always be somebody who wants to censor you.
> Because there is no principled way to draw the line.
In this case the line is pretty clear, and very crisp.
You're talking about a political group that advocates overthrowing the results of free and fair elections aimed at subverting a democratic regime by installing a dictatorship whose supporters are very adamant in their embracing of racist world views.
Challenging election results is not the same as “overthrowing elections”. The Democrats literally challenged the election formally in 2000, 2004, and 2016. For anyone keeping track, that is all the recent presidential elections in which they lost. They even had legislators voting against certification. Polls showed that after the 2016 election, most Democrat voters believed (and probably still do) that Russia literally altered the votes of the 2016 election. Hillary Clinton claimed for months that this election was illegitimate. Yet to you, challenging an election result is only a problem now? That seems oddly one-sided.
As for your claims about dictatorships, racist world views, and so on - all of these are vague attacks that generalize an entire half of the country. There’s little evidence to support such claims.
Well, I'd argue that the one imposing on others more loses.
Proselytizing religions have no moral leg to stand on from an imposition point of view.
Plus, let's be honest here, your example is just people being jerks with each other. The real debates are about physical harm, economic harm, etc., in which case it's far less fuzzy figuring out who's wrong.
> Well, I'd argue that the one imposing on others more loses.
For the preferred pronoun question, which one is more imposing? Getting other people to call you by your preferred pronoun, or refusing to call people by their preferred pronoun? You can make plausible arguments for either side.
>One side says not using someone's preferred pronouns is intolerant to their gender identity. The other side says being forced to use them is intolerant to their religious beliefs. Now what? Tie goes to the one with the most guns?
Except the paradox of tolerance clearly states that simple disagreement isn't intolerance, nor does it prefer censorship in all cases of disagreement, so your scenario isn't a refutation of it:
In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress
the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational
argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly
be most unwise.
What the paradox of tolerance considers to be intolerance, and thus open for censorship, are views which do not allow for rational debate, or respect the existence of opposing viewpoints, but which resort to violent suppression of those viewpoints and the people who hold them:
But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it
may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational
argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to
listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer
arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
This is a classic motte and bailey. The motte is that "intolerance" only means the denunciation of rational argument and calls to violence. The bailey is that this justifies blocking the entire opposition because they are declared to be violent criminals who have abandoned rational argument, or expanding of the definition of "violence" to mean (warning: irony) any rational debate about sacred cows.
>The bailey is that this justifies blocking the entire opposition because they are declared to be violent criminals who have abandoned rational argument, or expansions of the definition of "violence" to mean (warning: irony) any rational debate about sacred cows.
I never made or implied any such claim, you're not arguing in good faith here.
Then your response was a non-sequitur because the context here is that entire platforms are being blocked and the "paradox of tolerance" was put up as a justification.
You claimed the paradox of tolerance allowed no principled way to draw the line between what should and shouldn't be censored, I quoted the principle as stated verbatim. And rather than make an argument against the paradox of tolerance as written, you decided to switch to ad hominem.
If you want to actually convince anyone of anything, you're going to need to argue against what people actually say and believe, rather than strawmen.
Erm, we are talking here about virtual villages and whether intolerant people should have the right to have one. And since I am sanely tolerant, I say yes.
Even though there exist no tightly sealed boxes and everything is connected to everything in the long run - I do not want to impose my ideology on others, I can tolerate people I despise, as long as they leave me in peace. And my experience is, that they often think like that, too. Except for the fanatics with world conquering motives, sure. But planning for a coup d'etat is no longer free speech btw., but preparation of a crime.
>Any sane person would support free speech principles. Harm from restrictions of free speech far outweighs harm from hate speech, etc.
A reasonable position. And one I, for the most part, support.
However, the other side of that coin is that private actors (i.e., not the government, at least in the US) have free speech rights too. And that includes the right not to allow or support speech on their private property.
As such, if you attempt to force private actors to host/support speech they do no wish to host/support, then you are violating the principles you espouse.
There are no victims of hate speech. There are victims of hate crimes, like murders, rapes and beatings. Speech doesn't cause physical harm, violent actions do. Thus, violent actions must be stopped, not words.
Oh, and if you will claim that speech insites actions, i ask you one thing: who determines what hate is? In Russia, talking about corruption and opposing Putin is extremism and hate speech.
If you want to argue that some spoken words can be prosecuted in some jurisdictions, chose another opponent. I state my personal opinion that anything spoken should be protected under free speech rights, and even the death threats. Yes, because words do not kill. Killing requires action, and actions must be stopped, not screaming.
You didn't say "shouldn't be a crime" you said "is not a crime". And I'm not saying that words directly kill. I'm saying words have their own power that can absolutely hurt. Speaking words is an action and it can cause harm.
Politicians can declare anything a crime, and same act can be legal and criminal in places spaced 2 meters apart, that's why there is no point arguing about that. Regarding speech "crimes", see my earlier comment about Putin's Russia.
Thus, sane people MUST fight against criminalising any kind of speech, because speech is not a crime. Just like sane people fought against slavery, segregation and Holocaust, all of which were legal.
Are you of the belief that words can never hurt? It wouldn't bother you to have a crowd of protestors making untrue accusations about you loudly and vocally, where your family and employers could hear, ruining your reputations and relationships?
Nobody argues with that. Just don't call yourself tolerant if you fight Taliban for their views. It's perfectly normal to NOT be tolerant, but simultaneously claiming to be tolerant is hypocrisy.
I don't know, and in the airless vacuum of a message board debate, that's a good question to noodle about. But in the case of Gab, it's not hard to make the call. Maybe it's more difficult in the case of "Truth" or Parler or MeWe or whatever, but we can all be pretty clear on the intolerance baked into the site on which the Tree of Life shooting was planned and cheerled. Gab is a site where even the person who posts inspirational cat and landscape photos turns out, if you scroll down far enough, to be an overt white supremacist.
The laws shouldn't be different for sites like Gab than they are for sites like Twitter. But in communities based on free association, it's praiseworthy not to associate with Gab.
This whole thing about who draws the lines as to what's acceptable speech is like saying "who decides what a legitimate political party is?" It's a good question. But regardless of the answer to it, we can all agree that the American Nazi Party is not a legitimate political party (or, if it is, we need to change our definition of "legitimacy").
I think philosophers have done an amazing job [1] already but in the end each individual and community will have to decide for themselves; there's really no alternative.
This kind of thinking requires you to absolutely set aside the human ability to make "reasonable" judgments. That free speech is so unassailable that nobody is justified in declaring an expression or utterance to be dangerous. Our justice system is built on setting standards of proof like "reasonable doubt" with the implicit expectation that humans can, in fact, make reasonable judgments and those judgments can be of what is and isn't within their legally protected freedom.
As a reasonable person, I think that overt racism, opposition to public health measures, attacks on voting and democracy and unwillingness to accept responsibility for damage to the environment we all share are simply not reasonable points of view. I think the consensus for what is unreasonable is actually quite a bit narrower than that (no one has ever been deplatformed for climate denial). A lot of pro-Trump forums have devolved into exhortations to violence that lead to a deadly insurrection. No digital platform out there wants to be responsible for something like that and it's not just because of politics.
By all measures you are characterizing something like a 4chan. Why do we put up with 4chan? I suppose they are hilarious that’s why.
Look, the alt-right has a right to spew their bullshit on the internet. I really believe this, and it’s important we protect this right. Now, if we find a case where they coordinated something like the Jan 6 capitol riots, then we also expect places like Gab and Truth to cooperate with authorities.
I’m not sure what the big deal is here. I’m never going there, and I actually never go to 4chan either. If we come to a situation where sites like these don’t cooperate with the law, we’ll handle that. But, give them a chance to exist at least.
Incoming pretentiousness:
I know human beings a little bit. They are bored, and love gossip, and shit talking, and lamenting about something. Every subgroup, subculture, this kind of thing is a cheap escape that many many people enjoy. My own mother (getting super anecdotal now) can’t stop gossiping, her friends can’t, they looove to talk shit about this and that and who.
The alt-right, like the woke-left, love this fight, like a terrible couple that has great sex. And that’s all it is mostly, a bunch of shit talkers.
————-
The vigilance necessary is to see that it doesn’t spill into the streets. I know what I’m advocating for is the precursor to such an event, but I really hope it’s just plain old human nature at work here. A bunch of bored assholes, on both sides, picking on each other in a digital mma fight. Neither can exist without the other. The woke-left needs this Truth app to exist.
>As a reasonable person, I think that overt racism, opposition to public health measures, attacks on voting and democracy and unwillingness to accept responsibility for damage to the environment we all share are simply not reasonable points of view.
That's a reasonable position to take, IMHO.
However, that position is irrelevant to the law in the US. In the US, the government (except in very narrow circumstances[0]) may not censor or restrict speech.
However, private actors are not restricted from censoring or restricting speech on their private property.
That's how the law in the US works. If someone doesn't like it, they can try to get the law changed. For those who advocate that, good luck -- you're gonna need it.
Actually there are a lot of restrictions and requirements when it comes to speech on private property. For example telecommunication services are treated as common carriers and must allow speech to transit even if they disagree with it. It is clear that big tech platforms behave more like utilities and should be regulated like common carriers. In this case with an open source project restricting use via its license, maybe that’s not applicable. But I would argue that F-droid, as a platform with network effects, should be subject to the same requirement to not censor.
>It is clear that big tech platforms behave more like utilities and should be regulated like common carriers.
The operative term there is "should." I don't agree (and not for the reasons you probably think), but if you think that's how it should be, I respect that.
But that's not the law here in the US. As I said, [i]f someone doesn't like it, they can try to get the law changed. For those who advocate that, good luck -- you're gonna need it.
Edit: Clarified my thoughts about current law and the likelihood of changing it.
For one, exhortations to violence are an explicit exception to free speech. And secondly the amendment only prevents laws being passed to prevent speech. Not private businesses from disallowing content.
> As a reasonable person, I think that overt racism, opposition to public health measures, attacks on voting and democracy and unwillingness to accept responsibility for damage to the environment we all share are simply not reasonable points of view.
One of these things is extraordinarily not like the others.
You don’t think it’s reason to have debate about public health measures.
That is definitely something I strongly disagree with. Now look, I’m double mRNA vaccinated against COVID19, and I gently advocate for others to do so.
Do I think governments should mandate COVID19 vaccination? Absolutely not, and there’s a massive amount of health debate to back up my, what I consider, reasonable position.
I’m Australian, so found this podcast between Canadian psychologist Jordan B. Peterson and former Australian Deputy Prime Minister from 1999 to 2005 John Anderson, intellectual heavyweights railing against mandatory vaccination and lockdowns particularly relevant
At the beginning of the pandemic the Spanish authorities literally said that masks not only were not useful but they could be harmful because they gave a false safety feeling.
Since then it has been proved over and over again that masks, even when misused, stop the spreading of the virus.
So I absolutely agree with you. We should be able to question them.
The odds are that mandating covid vaccination starting in the first month of availability would have saved somewhere between thousands and hundreds of thousands of lives including vulnerable individuals who died despite vaccination.
I don't agree that you shouldn't be able to have that conversation but I don't think its a hard argument that people ought to have been forced to vaccinate. People would have freaked out and still be bitching today but they would be alive.
I think you’re deeply misunderstanding something here.
Nothing good can ultimately come from that sort of scenario.
What it directly results in is a massive mistrust of government authority.
Make the vaccine available at no cost to the individual, and it’s effectiveness data available for scrutiny. That’s the only justifiable course in my opinion.
This more forceful approach has considerable long term negative consequences on trust in government authority that will most certainly have arse-biting consequences for those who wield this power.
They are free. And the data is published. Been that way since the start. You're not accounting for the relentless disinformation being spread. That's the whole point of this thread.
My wife is vulnerable despite vaccination. I would venture to guess most people have a relationship with someone who is thus. I would happily sacrifice your freedom for her life. Given a completely free choice I would venture to guess we would ultimately have 60% of those over 18 and 35% under 18 by preference.
If 74% are over 18 the most we could reasonably hope for is around 53% of the population vaccinated despite the data being overwhelmingly in favor of vaccination. If we make it challenging to work or go to school we might hope for 80-90% ultimately based on only 9% being dead set against vaccination no matter what according to pew.
In such an environment my family will be vastly safer. When your health choices aren't a reasoned choice but an expression of political fealty I give it less weight.
No I'm not saying that. Obviously not all policies are above reproach but you know full well that a lot of opposition is based purely on disinformation. "Government mandate of COVID-19" is hopefully a typo but vaccine mandates for government employees is well within their right as are the myriad private mandates. The efficacy and safety of the various approved vaccines are well studied and the benefits to everyone far outweigh the dangers. Anyone spreading deliberately incorrect information like covid is fake or vaccines cause autism (remember that one?) are simply not reasonable.
And Jordan Peterson is a professional snowflake who makes fragile white males feel good about themselves. He is supposedly trained in psychology and has no idea what he's talking about when it comes to epidemiology but is unencumbered by his lack of expertise due to his monumental ego.
I’m arguing that forcible mandates (get it or lose your job) is a preposterous method to convince an already doubting person. Note, I’m not the person that needs convincing, I’ve already had two doses and am now actively asking when I can have a third.
The goal isn't to convince. It's to keep your workers safe. My company nearly revolted to get the CEO to put a mandate in place because the vast majority didn't want to be in an office with unvaccinated people.
I honestly think that is the cause of half of arguments that occur, not that the same people wouldn't disagree even if they paid attention to this, but it's certainly where they seem to get stuck.
Yikes, I hope you are well paid! (Re: 1 and 3. 2 is table stakes in this day and age. In fact re: 2, would you be willing to share a scenario that calls for sneakernet by courier vs a network storage/transfer?)
Based on political contributions, police officers have donated their money to Democrats and Republicans almost in equal proportion for quite awhile... until 2018, when they became overwhelmingly Republican.
What about based on internal beliefs and voting patterns? A "police" administrator at the city level is liable to donate a lot more money than a rural patrolman.
The 1930s was the Dust Bowl. The 1988-89 drought, while not as severe as the Dust Bowl, was the costliest in terms of economic damage and hit most of NA. As you can see by that chart, it took five or more years to recover from it.
It's also possible to see that the region never really recovered from the 2002 drought. Droughts are getting ever more frequent and the region isn't getting enough time between them to recover.
"Droughts are getting ever more frequent and the region isn't getting enough time between them to recover."
This doesn't seem to be true, it seems that CA has been a uncharacteristacally wet for the last 500 years or so. Before that the drought/wet swings were much wilder with much more severe droughts
From this chart alone, it appears that the water in the lake (or its sources) is drawn down much faster in modern times during dry years—the slopes of the downturns get steeper and steeper each decade.
As I recall, the watershed for Lake Tahoe is actually very small, because the surrounding ridges are quite close to the lake. The surface of the lake is the majority of the total collection area for precipitation.
To me, this suggests that evaporative losses may also be a significant portion of the draw-down you see each year, i.e. precipitation and evaporation on the same surface area. A trend towards more rapid reductions in water level may say something about climate shift, with hotter and drier summer conditions?
Perhaps also reduction of watershed area because of development and capturing of waste water? I know there are mitigation efforts around the usual farm and garden runoff (nitrogen etc.) for Tahoe; lack of such mitigation why Clear Lake[0] is a soupy green.
Yes, but probably due to increasing development and population increases... It's to be expected, as the region wasn't meant to support all the new people and companies watering their new lawns, cooling data centers, and people taking baths and washing their Ferraris.
Climate change is indeed real, but exaggeration about it's effects only drives profit up, fear often creates apathy and fatigue, rather than encouraging positive change in identifying and adjusting the root causes of the issue.
I expect you're being downvoted because agricultural irrigation is the primary use of water, not residential water use. Residential water use makes up a relatively paltry fraction of total use compared to agricultural.
Can't speak for tahoe, but here in Utah, I read that total residential water use accounts for about 2% of the total water use of the state, and individual households it's something like 0.02% ... so really it's like comparing an ounce of piss to the ocean.
Alfalfa farms (of which the governor is an alfalfa farmer) are the worse culprits as it's a water heavy plant, and we're also a top exporter of alfalfa to Asia, so essentially Asia's buying our water from us via alfalfa.. there's plenty of other corporate/industrial culprits, but farms are a huge one here..
I'm specifically asking about Tahoe. Down in the valley below, California uses a LOT of water for agriculture, no question. But I'm not sure ag-use is an issue for Tahoe water.
I ask because it's a high alpine lake surrounded by mountains. It has no significant water outflow. I'm not sure there's a path for water from the lake's watershed into agricultural land. Water is lost from the lake to evaporation in enormous amounts and to local uses in much smaller but probably still significant amounts, and that might be about it.
The statement was a pretty obvious insertion of humor to lighten the mood. I'll eat the downvotes because I don't want to be serious in a world that believes in punishing people for trying to have a sense of humor. :P
I think ClickBait is what is driving the drought, and even other cases of public anxiety more than anything else right now.
It's unfortunate that major news outlets feel the need to capitalize on fear to generate profit now more than ever. The anxiety drives people to flood supermarkets and over-buy goods, which pleases advertisers, and it's a constant cycle of fear that can lead to major safety problems for us all during a real crisis.
Fear mongering is now even present in major news sources, this constant process of sensationalizing issues without proper historical context diminishes the value of rational and trust-worthy news reporting that used to truly solve societal problems in the past... We should hold news outlets accountable for over-sensationalism like how CNN and others are reporting on this drought cycle... :/
The drought has some pretty obvious effects if you live out here in California. A small lake near me that I usually go hiking to with my little kids, Jewel Lake, dried up entirely this summer. That hasn't happened in years. (Well, I've never seen it dry up before, I don't know when the last time was.)
When I was a kid in the Midwest we had snow days sometimes and missed school. We don't have those here because it doesn't snow. But we have had smoke days in the past few years, where the air was too smoky for kids to go to school.
The California drought might seem like some exaggerated mainstream media junk to people on the east coast. But out here in California, drought vs non-drought is just a mundane, practical part of life. We root for it to start raining in the fall because that means fire season is over. We chat about the drought weather with people in town to make small talk the way I chatted about the Red Sox when I lived in Boston. I think you have just categorized this issue wrong - this is the sort of news that is actually relevant to normal peoples' lives.
I can attest to what @lacker has written. In twenty years I've been visiting Jewel lake, I have never seen it completely dry. The stream running in has gone dry. The marsh under the boardwalk is bone dry. The ferns are now kindling. The turtles are gone.
On the fog-ward side of the hill (the wet side; also known as Berkeley) the succulents are dying. Until this year, growing a jade plant (and many other succulents) required no watering. The mist in the air was enough. They're now red and their leaves are shriveled. They are dying from the drought. I see this every day.
The media is not making things up, and they are not sensationalizing this. If anything the media is under-reporting how bad things are.
Just as a footnote... Obviously clickbait doesn't cause droughts, that part was a joke about irresponsible news reporting on the water threshold being sensationalized.
If you look at the graph in OP's post, the lake has reached low levels like this in years prior to now, which is very telling about how much certain news agencies are over-embellishing on how current low levels are dire.
Lets keep sanity and practicality involved in this. I also did state that global warming is real. I do believe it is a real issue, faulty correlations are not real though.
Like the other replies here, I disagree. I am in coastal Southern California and we enjoy a fair degree of water independence, but even so up until recently drought conditions affected us greatly. I am thankful that my municipality got a desal plant up and running as that has relieved us of a lot of the 'please conserve water' messaging we used to get, which is now gone.
This is also a gentle reminder that the majority of water use here is agricultural, and that a large share of that usage goes to almond production -- which is one of the thirstiest (and most profitable) plants around. If our agribusiness switched to more economical crops the severity of the drought might be greatly lessened.
My partner is a civil engineer so I go to a lot of ASCE happy hours and it is common wisdom among civil engineers that for every $100 you spend on infrastructure, you get like $113 to $117 in economic activity. I also believe that almost all federal infrastructure spending has Buy American clauses.
The linked Reason article makes some libertarian arguments against Buy American clauses that if you know anything about libertarianism you can anticipate, but I am not a libertarian and personally think that more things should have Buy American clauses.
It isn't true that children whose permanent residence is a trailer park are counted as homeless.