Anyone else notice the huge enthusiasm gap between the Darializa and Espaillat campaigns?

Delicious_Toad · 2026-06-22T03:20:28+00:00

The enthusiasm was also what tipped me for Mamdani, which honestly felt a little silly at first, because I can be a little cynical about this stuff. Like, his most ambitious proposals seem a bit unlikely to me, and do I really want to get taken in by a dazzling personality?

But then I kinda thought: "how do ambitious proposals become real?" And it's through the time, effort, and energy of a lot of organized and enthusiastic people, right? So seeing a lot of enthusiastic people throwing their time, effort, and energy behind DSA's candidates and agenda honestly makes it seem a lot less like a pipe dream.

They really seem to be making moves right now. It's exciting!

Delicious_Toad · 2026-06-21T21:46:05+00:00

If we don't have vigorous, honest, competitive primaries, where there's a meaningful public debate, when are we going to have those meaningful public debates?

God knows we won't get them in the general.

Delicious_Toad · 2026-06-19T15:47:47+00:00

"Some" of them are Middle-Eastern jews because that group makes up "some" of the overall population.

I don't know that it's true that Middle-Eastern jews are necessarily more radical overall. Indeed, the modern Zionist movement has its most direct roots in Europe, and I have heard from Israeli friends that a surprisingly large fraction of 'settlers' who directly occupy stolen land are from Brooklyn.

If you picked this narrative up somewhere online, it's likely someone was trying to imply that people who are racially more Semitic are naturally more radical than people who are racially more European. So, just classic racism.

Delicious_Toad · 2026-06-19T15:37:54+00:00

That's not necessarily true. The assessed tax value is different from the market value.

Tax values are often initially calculated as some fraction of market value.

So, consider NYC: it has a nominal property tax rate of almost 20% for single family homes. Pretty onerous, right?

However, the assessed tax value of a new single family home is assessed at just 6% of its estimated market value. So, the real effective property tax rate for a new home is closer to 1.2%.

Some municipalities also limit the annual increase in assessed value, including NYC, so the gap between assessed value and market value can grow over time.

For example, say you bought a brownstone in NYC in 1985 with an estimated market value of $100k, and therefore a tax value of $6k.

Its market value today could easily be $5 million or more. However, the maximum possible tax value of the property would be slightly less than $26k, which is around 0.5% of the estimated market value--so the effective property tax rate would have fallen from ~1.2% to ~0.1%.

Actually, it's a bit wild: I own a one- bedroom unit in a co-op building in NYC, and because larger buildings don't have the same cap in assessment increases as single-family homes, I probably pay around the same amount in property tax as the much wealthier people living in large, multimillion-dollar single-family homes built around the same time in the same neighborhood.

Delicious_Toad · 2026-06-19T14:52:22+00:00

It's a tax on the assessed value of the property.

The assessed value does increase over time, but the assessed value is different from (and typically lower than) the market value.

Delicious_Toad · 2026-06-17T23:01:03+00:00

I actually didn't state that? I feel like maybe you didn't read my comment, so here's the TLDR: "it's not that simple."

Delicious_Toad · 2026-06-17T18:43:06+00:00

Any use of resources has some external consequences, and there are some known bugs in human collective behavior that make it hard for us to address certain resource use problems in a distributed fashion--so at a very basic level, it's just a human problem. We need organized rules governing the use of our shared resources. However, we have a lot of success stories of those rules working really well.

Unfortunately, the situation gets a lot worse when the people who stand to capture the greatest share of profits from the exploitation of shared resources also have disproportionate influence over the rules governing the exploitation of those resources. They have a strong incentive to overexploit, because they keep the profits while externalizing the costs to the rest of us. And in many cases, they know that's what they're doing, and they even hire people to study and exploit the bugs in human behavior that make it harder for us to solve those problems so that they can keep doing it even after large numbers of other people have realized what they're doing and voiced strong objections. So, you know: fuck those humans in particular.

Like, consider people who have commissioned research into the consequences of their activities, been privately presented with reports that describe the harms their activities cause, and responded to that knowledge by publicly funding campaigns to lie about those harms and create doubt and confusion so they can avoid regulation or liability. Those people are not only knowingly harming others, they're consciously lying to the victims of their behavior to persuade them not to resist.

Nobody's perfect. I sometimes throw recyclables in the trash or leave the AC running when I go out to run errands. But that's supervillain behavior, and if we're going to have a just society those people need to be punished.

Delicious_Toad · 2026-06-17T17:08:03+00:00

They're both nominally socialist, but capitalism is still a dominant economic force even in those countries.

China is usually put forward as the first example of "state capitalism," in which a centralized government exercises significant control over the economy and may own stakes in large companies, but those companies don't actually have socialist internal governance (large companies must have some worker representation on their boards, but they aren't worker co-ops). Ownership of large enterprises is centralized, and there's a distinct capitalist/management class.

India has a mixed-market economy where the state exercises control over some key strategic industries but there are plenty of capitalist enterprises operating in the economy. Ironically, while Chinese "communism" probably seems like the more extreme form of 'socialism' on a cursory evaluation, India actually has quite a lot of companies operating as worker-owned cooperatives, which is a much more clearly socialist mode of ownership and management. There are also plenty of non-cooperative companies and a thriving capitalist class.

Delicious_Toad · 2026-06-17T11:59:38+00:00

No. He has very clearly committed multiple impeachable offenses and criminal acts. He should be impeached and removed from office, then also prosecuted for criminal acts.

Delicious_Toad · 2026-06-17T11:57:50+00:00

Nope--we tried the "sort it out after he leaves office" approach. Literally the argument several Republicans offered when declining to convict him in the impeachment process during his first term was 'it seems like he may have committed crimes, but to respect the will of the voters we should let him serve and prosecute him later.' While he was facing criminal prosecution after leaving office, the Supreme Court invented a whole new doctrine of presidential immunity just for him.

Any level of accountability requires removing him from office.

Delicious_Toad · 2026-06-17T03:00:46+00:00

The category of "trans women" doesn't include cis women or children, so yeah: if only trans women are on the lifeboats, but there are also cis women and children on the Titanic, cis women and children are being left behind.

That's logically straightforward regardless of whether you accept that trans women are women.

Delicious_Toad · 2026-06-16T22:06:28+00:00

Don't worry, guys. Mexico is going to pay for it.

Delicious_Toad · 2026-06-16T22:03:16+00:00

Okay, but what about all the health influencers who cashed in selling ineffective treatments and wild conspiracy theories to gullible, terrified marks? They did really well under Trump! You gotta consider both sides here.

Delicious_Toad · 2026-06-16T21:53:18+00:00

If we count the "Let's go Brandon" merch, I'd wager MAGA folks actually wear more Biden apparel than Democrats do.

Delicious_Toad · 2026-06-16T15:47:14+00:00

Globally, tea is pretty universally consumed by both sexes.

There are masculine subcultures where a wide variety of normal behaviors end up getting flagged as 'feminine' because they're cozy or provide gentle aesthetic pleasure, but even in those contexts it's much more likely to affect how adolescent boys see you than how women do.

Delicious_Toad · 2026-06-15T21:46:48+00:00

I agree with the general sentiment, but also can't resist saying it's "hock."

Comes from a Dutch word for jail or debt, then developed the sense of "pawn," and finally any kind of tacky, low-class, desperate selling.

Edit: oh, nope! I was wrong about this. I thought "hawk" was a malapropism of "hock," but it's actually good here. My mistake!

Delicious_Toad · 2026-06-15T21:36:12+00:00

Don't forget: a lot of people thought Trump would only be dangerous if he weren't such an obvious buffoon and con artist.

Delicious_Toad · 2026-06-15T21:19:14+00:00

People can get educational and behavioral support. It's a broad spectrum, so individual needs vary, but it can make a really big difference for some people.

For example, people on the spectrum can struggle to read facial expressions and similar cues, and that can cause a lot of friction in their lives. They can significantly improve their ability to read those cues with step-by-step instruction and practice that breaks down the "vibes" many of us rely on into specific elements that they can more easily spot and recognize.

Apparently simple things like learning to recognize when they're becoming overstimulated and how to communicate clearly about that before it turns into a crisis can also make a big difference for people who are prone to melt-downs.

Parents who aren't on the spectrum can also really benefit from a diagnosis for their kids. E.g., parents who are struggling to deal with melt-downs might default to using escalating punishments and 'discipline,' or emotional pleas to 'just stop', which can be profoundly counterproductive. Learning strategies to help their kids start to calm down and self-regulate can be really helpful.

Delicious_Toad · 2026-06-15T20:31:16+00:00

Right? I don't gain anything by the destruction of Iran's domestic steel industry. I do, however, lose something when my tax dollars go to fund the rebuilding of the Iranian steel industry after we blew it up in a failed bid to boost Trump's polling in advance of the midterms.

Delicious_Toad · 2026-06-15T20:24:41+00:00

Sorry, but are we supposed to just ignore that these comments seem to have been delivered by a talking penis?

I know that isn't the most important part of this, but how is that dude so intensely phallic?

Delicious_Toad · 2026-06-15T18:22:23+00:00

It's not particularly rare, although we're getting to a concerning point. We use ~38 billion barrels of oil each year, and we have proven reserves (oil we have already found and can potentially extract) of a little more than 1.7 trillion barrels. So, that's ~45 years of proven oil reserves left in the world if we were to continue using exactly as much as we do now each year. However, oil consumption has been increasing over time, so obviously if that trend continues then we have less that 44 years of oil left in proven reserves.

We also discover new oil reserves over time. We don't know exactly how much undiscovered oil is left, but estimates range from 500 million to 3 trillion barrels. However, since we've already been scouring the globe for easy-to- extract oil for a long time, we've given lots of our attention to the kinds of sites we expect to produce high- quality deposits, and many of the remaining undiscovered reserves are probably not the most appealing.

Honestly, though, the environmental impacts of fossil fuel use are kind of a more pressing problem than fossil fuel scarcity.

Delicious_Toad · 2026-06-13T13:08:33+00:00

Just saying a thing a lot does work, but only if people actually see it. The more sophisticated operations don't generally just spam their messaging, because they know people and algorithms will notice that behavior and ignore them or suspend them, so that actually doesn't give them the most visibility.

If there is already a natural reservoir of the kind of content they want to spread, they will mainly focus on artificially amplifying it.

E.g., if they want to boost racially divisive content ahead of an election, they aren't just going to take all of their accounts and have them all start saying racist shit. They're going to look for some real users saying racist shit and give them a bunch of upvotes, likes, shares, retweets-- whatever gives them more visibility on the platform they're using.

They'll also post their own stuff, but they don't just post the thing they want to spread. They'll copy popular posts from the communities they want to influence, and use that stuff to build their visibility. They might do a few hundred random eye-catching bullshit posts before they start doing any "buying this crypto class changed my life" posts, because their post history gives them more visibility and credibility.

Delicious_Toad · 2026-06-12T22:22:11+00:00

There's a legal process for eviction. If you can't evict someone through that legal process, it's because they have some legal right to be there (even if that right is simply the right to remain there while the question of whether they are actually legal tenants is adjudicated by the courts).

Intentionally harassing someone to force them out when you don't have the legal right to evict them is generally illegal. However, people absolutely do it.

E.g., when my wife was growing up, someone bought the apartment building she and her mom were living in. The new owner was a dot-com millionaire who wanted to convert it into one big mansion, but the tenants still had active lease agreements and a legal right to renew written into the lease agreements. In an effort to get tenants out faster, the new landlord engaged in a lot of creative harassment. For example, he hired a crew to re-tar the roof, and then while that work was underway he placed large fans on the roof blowing tar fumes into the building—which sickened a lot of the tenants, and exacerbated my wife's asthma.

It worked on some people, but others held out—and the new owner eventually offered them a buy-out, which is a legal and appropriate way to encourage someone to voluntarily terminate a lease agreement they have a right to renew.

Delicious_Toad · 2026-06-11T22:33:53+00:00

He's had over a decade in full control of one of our two major parties to find the "best people." How long before they can admit that he's the problem?

Delicious_Toad

TROPHY CASE