#i hold firm to voting in small local elections and doing what i can on the ground w my local communities

[thecolorsfucked]

ive never voted for president and im keepin it that way

argue w ya mama

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Corruption

“Corruption” conjures images of bags of cash changing hands in deserted parking garages, but I’d like to propose a simple and concrete definition that goes beyond that: “Corruption” is when something bad happens because its harms are diffused and its gains are concentrated.

Here’s what I mean. West Virginia is known as coal country, but coal is actually a small, dwindling industry in WV; WV’s biggest industry is chemical processing, dominated by Dow — chem processing, like many industries, is heavily concentrated into a few global monopolies.

WV has a water crisis, with frequent “boil water” advisories. Its origins are in the chemical industry — specifically, in a regulatory proceeding where state regulators sought comment on whether to relax the EPA’s national guidelines on chemical runoff into drinking water.

Dow, acting through the manufacturers’ association it controls, argued the people of WV could absorb more poison than the national average because they were much fatter than the median American, and when they drank, it was mostly beer, not water.

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/03/14/the-real-elitists-looking-down-on-trump-voters/

No, really.

Here’s the thing. I’m not qualified to set the safe levels of different kinds of runoff in water-tables. It’s probably not zero (at least, not for most chemicals), but it’s also not “anything goes.”

It’s a question that requires subtle, interdisciplinary expertise: chemistry, health, environmental science. It’s an area where people of good faith can disagree.

These thorny, high-stakes technical questions that cross disciplines are the norm, not the exception.

Even if you have the technical knowhow to evaluate whether wearing masks fights covid, that doesn’t answer questions about vaccine safety, or whether zoom-school will turn your kid into an ignoramus.

Answer those questions and you’re left with still more: should you get in one of Southwest’s recertified Boeing 737-Max airplanes? Is the code specifying the reinforced steel joist that holds up your roof adequate, or is your building gonna collapse?

Should you eat carbs? Will your 401k preserve you through a dignified retirement? Answering all of these questions definitively for yourself requires earning 50+ PhDs, but also, people who have those PhDs don’t all agree with one another.

In a technologically complex world, there will always be official advice whose technical arguments we can’t understand. Our only reassurance is the process by which that advice is arrived at.

We may not understand the arguments, but we can recognize an open, independent process refereed by neutral regulators who show their work and recuse themselves if they have a conflict of interest.

We don’t always understand what goes on inside the box, but we can tell whether the box itself is sound. We can tell judges are financially interested in outcomes, whether they publish their deliberations, whether they revisit their conclusions in light of new evidence.

That’s all we’ve got, and it depends on a balance of powers that arises from a pluralistic, diffused set of industrial interests.

When an industry says with one voice that West Virginians are so fat that we can poison them without injury, it carries a lot of weight.

(so to speak)

It’s a stupid argument. It’s a wicked argument. It’s a lethal argument. It’s the kind of argument that might get you laughed out of the room if it is filled with hundreds of squabbling chemical companies looking to dunk on one another.

That’s the thing about conspiracies (and Dow was, in fact, engaged in a conspiracy to poison West Virginians to enrich its shareholders) — they require a lot of discipline, with all the conspirators remaining loyal to the conspiracy and no one breaking ranks.

The bigger a group is, the more it struggles to keep a united front. That’s why there’s so much billionaire class solidarity. Sure, it’s hard to maintain unity among a clutch of grandiose maniacs, but it’s much harder to maintain unity among billions of their victims.

Monopolization is corruption’s handmaiden — not just because it lets Dow hire fancy lawyers and “experts” to dress up “fat people are immune to poison” as sound policy, but because the industry can sing that awfful song with one voice.

Dow spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to win a policy that will save it millions — and cost the people of WV hundreds of millions or even billions in health costs, lost productivity, and, of course, the intergenerational trauma of ruined and lost human lives.

The reason millions in gains can trump billions in losses is that that the millions are reaped by just a few firms, who can wield them with precision to secure the continued right to impose costs on the rest of us, while the losses are spread out across the whole state.

For Dow to corrupt West Virginia’s legislature, it need only tithe a small percentage of its winnings to political causes and dark money orgs.

For West Virginians to fight corruption in the cash-money world of political influence campaigns, they have to overcome their collective action problem and outspend Dow — all while bearing the human and monetary costs of Dow’s corruption.

America is a land of manifest, obvious dysfunctions, and close examination reveals their common root in corruption.

Take the health-care system: Americans pay more for worse outcomes than anyone else in the rich world.

Their healthcare is rationed by faceless, cruel bureaucracies. They ration their medicine or skip necessary procedures. Patients hate this — but so do doctors and nurses, who have to hire armies of bureaucrats to fight with insurers.

Everyone hates this system. Everyone knows it’s rotten. Everyone — except for a handful of pharma, hospital and insurance monopolists, and the propagandists they pay to busily race through the crowd, busily swapping hats and shouting, “SOCIALISM! BOO! SOCIALISM!”

But while the US healthcare system is terrible at providing healthcare, it’s very good at jackpotting for monopolists. They reap billions while costing the public trillions, and they hand around millions to keep that situation intact.

We can see that in action right now. Nina Turner is running to take over a Congressional seat in northeastern Ohio vacated by Marcia Fudge when she joined Biden’s cabinet.

https://www.dailyposter.com/dems-launch-proxy-war-on-medicare-for-all/

For 30 years, every Congressional rep for Ohio’s 11th supported Medicare for All — a commensense measure to end the long waits, price gouging and cruel bureaucratic rationing of for-profit care. Unsurprisingly, Turner also supports M4A.

https://twitter.com/ninaturner/status/1404793650895331337?s=20

In response, a group of corporate, establishment Congressional Dems have launched an all-out attack on Turner’s candidacy, joining forces with health-care lobbyists to raise vast corporate fortunes to support her primary challenger, Shontel Brown.

The seven Dem lawmakers attacking Turner have collectively taken in $5m from pharma and health-care monopolists. James E Clyburn alone has pocketed $1m from pharma. He’s leading the charge against Turner.

https://twitter.com/TaylorPopielarz/status/1405121330433957888

Before Clyburn accepted $1m worth of pharma money, he co-sponsored Medicare For All legislation. Now he’s its most bitter opponent, insisting that it’s political poison (a majority of his constituents support M4A).

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/live-blog/south-carolina-primary-live-updates-democrats-vote-2020-candidates-n1145296/ncrd1146076

One million people in Ohio lost their jobs — and health care — during the pandemic. The system is murdering and maiming people. It’s a wasteful boondoggle that’s bad for everyone except a tiny minority of shareholders and the corrupt officials who accept their blood-money.

It’s not just healthcare. Think of Exxon Mobil’s crime against humanity and Earth: the 40-year coverup and disinformation campaign to delay action on the climate emergency. Exxon spent millions, made tens of billions, and cost us all trillions.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/30/climate-crisis-crime-fossil-fuels-environment

The megadroughts, once-in-millennium heatwaves, raging wildfires, annual floods-of-the-century and zoonitic plagues Exxon bought with their millions were objectively a very bad deal — but their concentrated gains beat our much larger diffused losses (so far). #ExxonKnew.

But corruption creates policy debt, and the interest on that debt compounds — in a degraded environment, worsening health, precarious work, and a collapse in trust in institutions. The corrupt have a structural advantage, but it’s not a sure thing.

Take Ohio (again). The GOP-dominated Senate passed legislation to ban Ohio cities from offering municipal broadband. Now, municipal broadband is the best internet in America: cheaper, faster and more reliable than anything the telecoms monopolists offer.

There are ~900 (mostly Republican) towns and counties where people get their internet from their local government:

https://muninetworks.org/communitymap

And they fucking love it, just as much as their Comcast-burdened peers elsewhere hate their service:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180808223947/https://www.consumerreports.org/phone-tv-internet-bundles/people-still-dont-like-their-cable-companies-telecom-survey/

Muni networks are better at everything to do with the internet: connection speeds, price, and customer service. There’s only one area in which they underperform relative to telecoms monopolies: generating profits for shareholders by overcharging and underinvesting.

There’s only a tiny minority of people who’d trade good internet service for profitable internet service (namely, the people receiving the profits). But the pro-monopolists have concentrated gains, while the public experiences diffused losses.

That’s why the Ohio Senate passed its budget bill banning municipal networks. But when the budget was reconciled in the Ohio House, the measure was killed, thanks to an all-out uprising led by the people of Fairlawn, who stepped up to defend Fairlawngig, their muni ISP.

The victory for muni broadband is a triumph of evidence over corruption — proof that the diffused nature of corruption losses can be overcome. It’s cause for hope, especially in light of this week’s collapse of the antitrust case against Facebook.

https://www.wired.com/story/ftc-antitrust-case-against-facebook-very-much-alive/

Facebook escaped justice by citing the theories of Robert Bork, Nixon’s chief criminal co-conspirator and Ronald Reagan’s court sorcerer. Bork insisted that anittrust law had but one purpose: to keep prices down.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/28/dubious-quant-residue/#incinerators-r-us

Any other consideration, especially political corruption arising from market concentration, was out of scope.

The court agreed. No surprise; 40% of the US Federal judiciary has attended a lavish “Manne Seminar,” junkets where they are indoctrinated into Borkism.

But the absurdity of ruling that Facebook isn’t a fit subject for anti-monopoly law is the beginning of the end for Borkism, prompting bipartisan calls — led by Elizabeth Warren — to explicitly redesign American antitrust.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/facebooks-surprise-antitrust-victory-could-inspire-congress-to-overhaul-the-rules-entirely/ar-AALCJz8

Corruption has many costs: monetary, human, environmental. But every bit as important is the cost to institutional credibility. Remember, none of us are capable of understanding the technical nuances of the dozens of life-or-death decisions we face daily.

If we can’t trust our institutions — if we don’t believe that regulators are neutral, good-faith experts in ardent pursuit of the truth and the public good — then our very idea of shared reality collapses, as Snowden has written:

https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/conspiracy-pt1

It’s hard to overstate the sheer, reeling epistemological terror of institutional collapse. When the EPA allows the chemical industry to poison America, how can you know whether the products in the store can be trusted not to kill your family?

https://theintercept.com/2021/06/30/epa-pesticides-exposure-opp/

Remember, the Flint water crisis came about as the result of corruption: the promises of “experts” that taking shortcuts to save money would come out all right, despite the copious evidence to the contrary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_Water_Crisis

What parent of a permanently damaged child, poisoned by lead deliberately introduced to save pittances for a tiny group of people, could ever trust any “expert” process again?

Michigan Republicans saved millions at the expense of billions, but the gains were concentrated among the wealthy white taxpayers of the state who enjoyed cuts to the top marginal rate, and the costs were born by the Black families of Flint. That’s corruption.

[arcticdementor]

In The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite (2020), building on my argument in The Next American Nation (1995), I offered an answer. I proposed that, while the proletariat is still the proletariat, James Burnham, Bruno Rizzi, John Kenneth Galbraith and other thinkers were correct that by the mid-twentieth century power had passed from individual bourgeois business owners to a new ruling class of technocrats or bureaucrats, whose income, wealth, and status is linked to their positions in large, hierarchical organizations, (i.e. nonprofits, government agencies, industrial and financial firms, and so on).

I use the term “overclass” to describe this group. A similar though not identical concept is what is known, after Barbara Ehrenreich, as the “professional-managerial class” (PMC). Whatever terminology you prefer to use, generalizations about all Western elites need to be accompanied by more granular analysis at the level of each country. Referring only to the U.S., I think it is helpful to go beyond the basic distinction between the overclass and the working class and identify distinct groups within each.

…

But the American elite includes three other groups, in addition to these bureaucratic managers. One consists of hereditary rentiers—heirs and heiresses, born into rich families. Old money types should be distinguished from tycoons like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos, who tend to be products of upper-middle-class or modestly rich families who happened to become incredibly rich. Only the most primitive Marxists believe that a tiny group of individual capitalists—to the manor born or self-made—controls modern societies from behind the scenes. I will not pay further attention to old money in this essay.

In German a distinction has long been made between the Besitzbürgertum (propertied bourgeoisie) and the Bildungsbürgertum (educated bourgeoisie). The equivalents of these two groups exist in the U.S. today. They are distinct from the big-organization managers and important in American politics out of all proportion to their numbers. Lumping them together as “PMC” confuses matters. Let us call them the professional bourgeoisie and the small business bourgeoisie.

The professional bourgeoisie—made up of lawyers, doctors, professors, K-12 teachers, journalists, nonprofit workers, and many of the clergy—is concentrated in the teaching, helping, and research sectors. Their jobs often pay modestly but provide both status and a degree of personal autonomy that the frequently better-paid managerial functionaries in more hierarchical occupations do not possess.

The small business bourgeoisie consists of the owner-operators of small businesses and franchises, along with genuine contractors (as opposed to proletarian “gig workers”), both those who are self-employed and those who employ others.

…

The working class in the U.S. is divided as well. First, there is the heartland working class—those who work in the industries located in the low-density exurban heartland. These industries include manufacturing, agriculture, energy, retail distribution and warehousing.

And then there is the hub-city working class. This class of workers can be found in metropolises like New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, and Houston. Many of these members work directly for the urban overclass as maids, nannies and other domestic staff, or otherwise indirectly in luxury services that cater to the affluent elite.

(A note: by the “heartland working class” I do not mean the stereotypical “white working class.” Most African-Americans and Hispanics are high-school-educated workers who live and work in suburbs and exurbs. Those areas also contain many foreign-born workers, though first-generation immigrants make up a greater share of the populations of hub cities.)

To the distinct hub and heartland working classes can be added a third non-elite group, often described as the lumpenproletariat—or, perhaps more clearly, the “underclass.” (In the 1990s the speech police of the politically-correct left banned the use of “underclass” from academic and journalistic usage in the U.S., but the term is neither racist nor an insult.) This refers to members of often-broken families caught in multigenerational poverty, particularly those trapped in the grim carceral subculture of public housing, food stamps, petty crime, and the prison-industrial complex. Like the hub and heartland working classes, the multigenerational underclass is racially and ethnically diverse, and found in both urban and rural parts of the U.S.

…

Since this is all very abstract, an image might help. Visualize two horseshoes—a lower horseshoe whose two prongs point up, and an upper horseshoe whose two prongs point down. The lower horseshoe has the underclass at the bottom/midpoint and the hub city working class and the heartland working class as the points of its two opposing prongs. The upper horseshoe has the managerial elite proper as its midpoint/apex and the professional bourgeoisie and the small business bourgeoisie as the points of its two opposing prongs. Arranged in this way, the two horseshoes form a rough outline of a circle, with the managerial elite at the very top, the underclass at the very bottom, and the two working classes and the two bourgeoisies distributed in between.

…

American politics is little more than the internal politics of the overclass, now that the working-class majority has lost the grassroots, mass-membership institutions that once gave it collective bargaining power—private sector trade unions, influential religious organizations, and local political parties. Members of the working-class majority play no role except as occasional voters. They tend to be ignored, except during election seasons, when they are targeted by manipulative appeals based on race and gender in the case of the Democrats and religion and patriotism in the case of the Republicans.

…

At the risk of being overly schematic I would suggest that the “center,” “left” and “right” of America’s top-thirty-percent politics can be mapped imperfectly onto the managerial elite, the professional bourgeoisie and the small business bourgeoisie. In particular, both DSA progressivism and Tea Party conservatism can be understood as different strategies for enlisting the power of government to stave off the proletarianization of the constituents of the two bourgeoisies.

The goal of so-called progressivism in 2020s America is to expand employment opportunities for college-educated, center-left professionals, while adding new wings to the welfare state that are tailored to their personal needs. The slogan “Defund the police” is interpreted by the bourgeois professional left to mean transferring tax revenues from police officers, who are mostly unionized but not college-educated, to social service and nonprofit professionals, who are mostly college-educated but not unionized. The enactment of proposals for free college education and college debt forgiveness would disproportionately benefit the professional bourgeoisie, not the working-class majority whose education ends with high school. Likewise, public funding for universal day-care allows both parties in a two-earner professional couple to maximize their individual incomes and individual career achievements by outsourcing the care of their children to a mostly-female, less well-paid workforce at taxpayer expense.

It is no coincidence that many professionals in the sectors most dependent on their funding on donations from the capricious rich, like philanthropy, colleges and universities, and the media, hate billionaires with the passionate resentment that is reserved for benefactors. In their view, in a just society, the arts program or the NGO would be permanently funded by tax revenues, instead of annual fund-raising appeals to this or that plutocrat’s personal fortune or foundation.

Gore Vidal was known to say that America has socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor. Contemporary American progressivism can be succinctly described as social democracy for the professional class.

…

To avoid being squeezed out of existence between big business and organized labor, the small business bourgeoisie has fought for generations on two fronts, demanding subsidies and exemptions from government regulations, while insisting on anti-union and anti-labor legislation and a reliable supply of cheap labor (preferably guest workers or illegal immigrants who cannot vote). The lobbies for the small business sector naturally oppose any “decommodifying” social insurance reforms. Examples are longer periods for unemployment insurance or universal health care, each of which can increase the bargaining power even of non-unionized workers by allowing them to hold out longer until employers are forced to make better offers.

The upper horseshoe schema explains American political factions in terms of different combinations of its elements. When the professional bourgeoisie allies itself with the Managerial Elite, you get Clinton-Obama-Biden left-neoliberalism. When the small business bourgeoisie allies itself with the Managerial Elite, you get George W. Bush-Paul Ryan-Nikki Haley right-neoliberalism.

When the professional bourgeoisie and the small business bourgeoisie unite with each other against the oligopolies and monopolies that dominate modern industry and finance and the managers who run them, you get the neo-Brandeisian, small-is-beautiful antitrust school. Their anachronistic small-producerist ideal, in which everything big has been broken up by government antitrust litigation, is an economy of small shops, artisanal craft breweries and independent doctors and lawyers.

…

The protests associated with the first reopening were led during the early stages of the lockdown by conservative members of the small business bourgeoisie. Many of their undercapitalized storefront businesses, like hair salons, and restaurants, and car repair shops, were threatened or wiped out by city and state shut-down orders. The protests were dominated by petty-bourgeois business owners, and not their low-paid employees—some of whom might have been endangered by a premature return to their workplaces during the pandemic.

The initial response of the progressive professional bourgeoisie was to ridicule and denounce the right-wingers for endangering their own lives and those of others by ignoring the advice of credentialed public health experts.

Then, during the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, the same progressive professional bourgeoisie concluded that systemic racism was a greater threat to public health than COVID-19, which—mirabile dictu!—cannot be spread at left-wing demonstrations.

…

What does all of this mean for the neglected working-class majority on the sidelines of American politics? A century ago, trade unionists like Samuel Gompers and socialists like Eugene Debs criticized antitrust and praised large industrial combinations, on the sensible grounds that large, modern corporations are easier to unionize and/or socialize than lots of small businesses.

A case can be made that both the professional bourgeoisie and the small business bourgeoisie are relics of an earlier techno-economic paradigm. Each is a leftover pocket of technological backwardness and labor exploitation in an advanced industrial economy.

In American higher education, a dwindling minority of tenured academics, using pedagogical methods unchanged from the agrarian era, lords it over a mass of impoverished guild apprentices, the poorly-paid, insecure, non-unionized adjuncts who now teach most university students nationwide. At the same time, the business models of many small, owner-operated firms in the U.S. are made possible by poor-country levels of worker rights and social insurance—and much of the workforce consists of recent, desperate immigrants from actual poor countries. Because the backward professional and small business sectors have much lower productivity than the rationalized, capital-intensive parts of the economy like manufacturing and energy, they pay low wages to much of their workforces while charging high prices to consumers.

Needless to say, any new cross-class settlement would have to follow the recreation of powerful mass-membership working-class organizations in current and newly-rationalized, sectors, which would permit the transformation of the majority of Americans in the bottom horseshoe into subjects, not mere objects, of American politics. But that is a story for another day.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

At 106, MacCene Grimmett is one of the oldest voters in the state of Utah. Though women didn’t have the right to vote when she was born in 1913, by the time she was of voting age, the 19th Amendment had passed. She has voted in every election since, she told her local Fox affiliate, including the Utah County municipal general election last November.

But that time, the centenarian cast her ballot in a novel way: She voted via an app.

America is 174 days away from a presidential election. It’s also in the middle of a pandemic that upended normal life, requiring mass shutdowns and social distancing. Those two things don’t exactly jive.

Having millions of Americans stand in crowded polling places for hours to cast a ballot on Election Day sounds like the makings of a public health disaster — especially if there is a second surge of COVID-19 infections in the fall, as some experts predict. So now, election officials are looking for ways to hold elections remotely. One option that has been proposed is voting via an app on a smartphone or electronic device, just like Grimmett did last fall (though so far, states seem to only be considering this option for certain groups of voters, such as voters with disabilities).

It seems like an obvious solution: With so much of our daily lives now virtual, why couldn’t our elections be moved online too?

Voting online or via an app has even been tested in small elections a handful of times, but election security experts and even the founder of one of the most prominent voting apps on the market, Voatz, say there’s a laundry list of reasons why this technology isn’t ready for prime time. (Not to mention the fact that 19 percent of Americans still don’t have a smartphone, and as many as 21.3 million Americans still lack access to broadband internet, according to the Federal Communications Commission.)1

“I don’t know what I can say to explain this better: This is an incredibly dangerous idea,” said Mike Specter, a computer science Ph.D. student at MIT who has researched voting technology.

Specter told me there are a number of security and privacy concerns with voting online, which includes voting via an app, and that no technology so far has been able to solve these issues.

For starters, there is currently no way to ensure that each individual voter’s device is secure. Malware covertly installed on a voter’s phone could potentially alter the voter’s ballot or prevent it from being properly transmitted, Specter said. And even if the device is clean, election security experts say there are too many steps required to ensure that the ballot a voter submits online is the one actually counted. With a paper ballot, a voter marks their vote by hand and can visually verify it’s correct. A hard copy is also retained, which can then be audited. But with a digital vote, there are many steps that can create a gap between the vote cast and the vote counted.

“If you think about it, we have several versions of what that vote is and there is no way to verify that all those versions are the same,” said Duncan Buell, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of South Carolina. “We have one version, which is what the voter sees in the form. We have another version, which is what gets transmitted by the software. We have a third version, which is the version that gets received by the storage system and then we have another version, which is what gets printed out and tallied by the election officials.”

And if the vote is intercepted at any point in that chain, there is no way to verify that a change had been made. It’d be like passing your paper ballot down a chain of strangers and trusting that nobody adjusted it before the vote was counted.

For the Utah County municipal election in which Grimmett voted by app, military and overseas voters and voters with disabilities could vote remotely using Voatz. But a report earlier this year by Specter and his colleagues at MIT found multiple security vulnerabilities in the chain of information that a hacker could exploit, including learning how a user voted, changing the user’s ballot or even accessing the user’s private information.

Voatz claimed the researchers’ methodology was flawed, but every online voting platform has faced similar challenges, according to Maggie MacAlpine, co-founder of Nordic Innovation Labs, a security consultancy firm that specializes in safeguarding elections. MacAlpine said when election officials have run trials of other online voting software in the past, they invited white hat hackers (computer security experts who attempt to hack into a system the purpose of assessing vulnerabilities) to test the software live.

“They have always gotten in with laughable ease,” MacAlpine said. “Every single time.”

It’s a longstanding problem, too. In 2010, for example, Washington, D.C., was considering a new online voting platform and invited researchers from the University of Michigan to test it. But when the Michigan fight song began playing after every ballot was successfully cast, it was clear the system wasn’t as secure as officials had hoped. And as the MIT analysis of Voatz shows, things haven’t gotten much better in the last decade.

MacAlpine noted that even if there was a completely secure system, there’s currently no way to have an online vote that is both anonymous and auditable. An anonymous vote protects against voter coercion, suppression, or vote selling. An auditable vote protects against any errors or breaches, because officials can conduct a recount. But that combination, which is possible with a paper ballot, isn’t yet possible online.

Voatz, though not the only online voting vendor in the market, has attracted a lot of scrutiny because it has been used by multiple state and local elections to facilitate absentee voting. The company’s co-founder and CEO, Nimit Sawhney, takes issue with a lot of the criticism the company has received, saying there are multiple layers to security and accuracy that protect against the issues raised. But even Sawhney said that at this point, the company couldn’t handle this fall’s presidential election.

“Nationwide would be a huge stretch,” Sawhney said. “We are a tiny little startup. There are about 25 people on our team. For us to be able to claim that we can do elections for 200 million people on a smartphone? That would be naive.”

So what’s a country to do when a pandemic is forcing us apart, but an online election is still a science fiction dream? Each of the experts I spoke to said the same thing: vote by mail.

Planning needs to start now, to make sure ballots are printed off and mailed in time, and that voters know their options for casting a ballot. In-person voting will still most likely take place as well. But experts told me if we want those well-spaced lines for the ballot boxes to be less than a few miles long, we’ll have to vastly ramp up mail-in voting by November.

“We’re going to have a hard time doing it this year,” Buell said. “But we have almost no choice.”

[eurosong]

Undo my ESC - 2019, SF1

Hello there, folks, and welcome to the first part of Undo my ESC, where I take a look at the field this year and, for each country, make a feasible change – as small as, for example, minor tinkerings with the staging, or as big as a different song completely winning a national final. It’s all light-hearted and just my opinion, of course. Allons-y... Cyprus: We start off completely in the deep end. I loathe “Fuego”, and this repackaged Fue2.0 is no better and is indeed perhaps worse to me given that I hate desperate attempts to catch lightning in the same jar. I also find Tamta a very unsympathetic character. I don’t know what I’d do to improve this, other than replace the internal selection with a national final with some songs actually in Greek and with local character. Montenegro: Things do not improve... but at least the solution is easier! Montenegro had a decent national final in which literally any other song would have been a better choice. I particularly liked “Nevinost”, and so did the unfortunately out-voted expert jury, so would be tempted to give D mol’s ticket to Tel Aviv to its artist, Ivana Popović, instead. I do find D mol to be sweet kids though, so the other part of me would be sad to rob them of their time in the limelight and would instead have taken the 90s throwback and bizarre random background sound elements out of their song, replaced the score with one that emphasised the traditional musical elements, and kept the lyrics in Montenegrin.

Finland: Three strikes and I am almost out. I really struggle with the new UMK format – I understand the logic behind it, just as I did when it was a thing in the UK in the early 90s, but I think it only really works if an artist has a wide-ranging repertoire. If not, then you end up with 3 samey songs that only appeal to people who like the music styles that artist makes. I’m not an EDM fan and I would have taken the relative flop of Saara Aalto last year as indication to return to a multi-artist UMK. Plenty of artists from previous years who could be worth a spot in one such.

Poland: I was disappointed by the disappearance of Poland’s national final, but I can’t say I was too surprised after a few underperforming years. I have to commend the Polish broadcasters for going for something popular within their own country, without being overly preöccupied as to how it would play outwith their borders. Pali się is one of those entries that I don’t like much but which I respect. My changes would be to remove the pointless English intro and outro, which, if one were not paying attention, one might not notice actually being in English. I’d also try to make the song a little less linear, as the song feels mostly confined to one pace.

Slovenia: Finally, we come to a country where I can change next to nothing. Many people I know were disappointed that “Kaos” was not elected as the Slovenes’ song. Whilst I found it an earworm, I really didn’t like her haughty, “I’m only in EMA to promote my new disc” attitude – and I really preferred the delectable, contemplative and intimate “Sebi.” It’s pure elegance in simplicity, and I wouldn’t need to change a thing.

Czechia: I appreciate the Czechs’ creätive way of bypassing the expenses of a traditional national final – whilst still giving fans a choice – by holding their selection online. Really cute this year was the way they tried to equalise differences in funding by making the candidates’ official video be a low-budget affair filmed in their flats. I liked quite a few songs of their selection, with the eventual winner, “Friend of a friend”, middle of my rankings. I would, of course, opt for my #1 of the NF to win instead, the delightful slice of “Bohemiana del Rey” style that was “True Colours.”

Hungary: Hungary’s A Dal has the cachet to attract a number of returning artists, so it was not surprising that, eventually, it would be won by someone who’d triumphed before – and I’m delighted it was Joci Papái, one of the biggest revelations of the Hungarian NFs for me. Yet, as is often the case with folk coming back to take a second bite of the cherry, the sophomore effort comes short of the first – “Az én apám” is lovely, touching, but lacks the bite and edge that “Origo” had. I might have JP come second and hopefully return for a second victory in 2020/1 with something a bit stronger, and send in his place the soaring but melancholic “Madár, repülj”.

Belarus: Life is too short to do some things, and whilst I try to listen to pretty much every national final song, one of the things life is too short for is intensively following the Belarusian national finals with their hundred-odd auditions. I saw a few, though, and they were a rum lot. Musically, Aura’s touching “Čaravala” was probably the best of those I heard – but was also strangely won over by the unpretentious, fun ode to tubers that was “Potato, aka Buľba” and depending on my mood, I might give it the nod either.

Serbia: Beovizija had a great lineüp yet again, and there were a number of songs I would have been happy to have gotten the win, including the eventual winner, but also those of Saška Janks, Extra Nena and Ivana Vladović. The latter’s beautiful “Moja bol”, with strings to die for, was my favourite on the night, but in retrospect, I’m not sure I’d replace the equally stunning “Kruna.” I’d be tempted to send it in its acoustic version though, where Nevena’s lovely voice stands out even better.

Belgium: Ô, Belgium. I adored “City Lights”, and so my expectations were really high. This is nice enough, but a bit beige, and doesn’t quite deliver, especially the way the enjoyably tense verses lead to an anticlimactically limp chorus. I’d change that with something that actually feels like a pay off to the verses and the Walloons would have a better shot of shining again.

Georgia: I have to say that, once again, I find myself being one of the few people I know who has some love for Georgia. Whilst it wasn’t truly my cup of tea, I appreciated and enjoyed Iriao’s song last year on some level, and the same is true of Oto’s – he has a powerful voice and it’s a strong, if rather unsettling song. I think, though, that I prefer the darkly ethereal Sevdisperi zgva, which sounds like what I imagine would result if Björk were tasked to write a Bond tune.

Australia: After a few years of rumours, Oz finally jumped on the national final train, and, credit where it is due, it was one of the most intriguing national finals of the year. It was as if SBS had decided to atone for its aggressively MOR pop picks of previous years by actually showcasing some musical diversity. Unlike a lot of folk, I don’t dislike “Zero gravity” – it has a meaningful lyrical background and some quirky charm. But there’s no question about whether I would replace it and with what. I still get chills every time I listen to “2000 and Whatever” – the sheer, irrepressible burst of positive energy and the power of its “kulila miranyi” still give me goosebumps. Damn straight one of the best song of the entire year.

Iceland: Given the amount of hype Hatari have received – and how fans flooded videos of its competitors with comments about how they shouldn’t “fuck up” by picking them instead – I may be one of the very few who would change the result there. Yet, I almost definitely would, even though I typically like lesser-heard genres at Eurovision and like the heavier, industrial musical style. And yet, I find this quite trying. It seems like a very knowing, art school student pastiche and I’m not here for their “above the contest” feel or the BDSM gimmickry. I’d be tempted to replace this with the low-key but lovely “Hvað ef ég get ekki elskað”, or to at least pare back the OTT disdainful irony.

Estonia: It feels almost like another era when I was a firm exponent of the idea of Eesti being Beesti. Three years of immense disappointments will quench that type of fire. Whilst leaving behind the stunning Spirit Animal in 2017 and opting for a generic poperatic vocal exercise in 2018 were excruciating, this might be the biggest let down yet – a land of so many talented musicians having to rely on an Avicii pastiche sang with no small difficulty by a reedy-voiced Swede. I found Eesti Laul very slim pickings this year, and found the other two frontrunners to be rather bland too – even the delightful Sandra Nurmsalu came with a tune that, whilst pleasant, sounded less nomadic epic and more toilet tissue commercial backing track. I would have gone for Kadiah’s delicate “Believe” as my pick instead.

Portugal: FdC was once again one of the best national finals, and the one for whose result I was perhaps most anxious. There were a few songs I really liked, like “Pugna”, “Mais brilhante...” and “Inércia”, but when the dust settled, there was only one song I wanted to see winning – “Telemóveis,” of course, which I was delighted to see prevail. I have some real worries about the bizarre staging distracting from the message and emotional power of the song, though. There’s so much going on, and it might be enough to push people from being entranced to being weirded out. I’d get rid of the spoons, sort out the clothes and try to make things impressive without being so extra.

Greece: I actually really like Greece this year, even if I’m still pissed off at what they did to “Don’t forget the sun” in their dubiously axed national final last year. Her voice is beautiful, the music is uplifting and anthemic, the æsthetic is curious and a bit culty, but at least memorable. The one thing I don’t like? The lyrics, which sound like a bunch of motivational Instagram quote clichés loosely knitted together. Sing something actually meaningful, preferably in Greek.

San Marino: Lord, I’m not going to start because if I do, I shan’t stop. All I’ll say is that San Marino’s “troll nation” status is wearing thin for me. Unbelievably, hundreds of talented people came out in numbers last year willing to represent them, and yet they went with a song written supposedly in 5 minutes but probably in half that. I’d have invited Sara de Blue back instead to make up for the bizarre fiasco that was last year’s 1in360. And the automatic qualifiers:

France: If France’s national delegation aren’t rethinking their voting system after this year, then they ought to be. It’s the opposite of Sweden, where the juries really have the power and the televote is scattered – all you need is a frenzied following to overturn a low jury placement. I liked a great number of Destination Eurovision’s selection this year. I would have taken pretty much ány single one of them over the snivelling, bombastic, self-aggrandising drivel that is Roi. With regards to what to send in its place, I’m torn between the powerful “Là haut”; the adorably, quintessentially French “Allez leur dire”; or the energetic, indefatigable earworm that was “On cherche encore”.

Israel: Boy howdy, Israel sure want to do their level best to avoid fluking a 1979 and winning on home ground, eh? I heard there were many big names who sent songs in, though I’m unsure if any of them would have helped to make the stormy Kobi seem more sympathetic. I think I would have opted to let Ketreyah perform for the hosts instead.

Spain: After a great national final last year, I was really disappointed with the subpar quality of the so-called eurotemazos which were anything but. Miki’s song was the best of a bad lot and at least he didn’t have the hideously negative attitude some of the other people, who seemed surprised and aghast that the winner of a contest related to Eurovision could end up performing there. I’d try to give Miki a song that matched his energy with at least a bit more lyrical depth.

Join me in some days when I evaluate what I would change with SF2!

[mlow19ahsgov-blog]

The 3 Ps Assessment: Parties, Political Interest Groups, and PACs

Party Platforms

Republican:

Republicans want to continue using nonrenewable energy sources like coal, oil of nuclear power. They want to rely on coal the most and usually advocate for using it because its abundancy.

I don’t agree with the Republican stance because people definitely need to work on the pollution problem in order to prevent humanity from being wiped out. While we need to use more renewable forms of energy, it would be nearly impossible to just switch all power to natural sources because it would be inconvenient for many places. For now, I believe we need to work on reducing the amount of pollution being generated and find ways to switch to using green energy.

Democrat:

Unlike Republicans, Democrats are strongly opposed to using more coal power. Instead, they want to rely more on renewable energy sources and become a leading country to promote and encourage its use, even if it comes at a great economic cost.

I agree with the Democrat stance because I support using more renewable energy sources than we already are. I think the environment would definitely benefit if America increased the amount of energy used by renewable energy resources. However, I also think that switching all power to natural isn’t possible, and that people need to gradually shift in order for people to accept using green energy.

Libertarian:

The Libertarian platform does not directly establish their view on renewable energy. Instead, it only states the party being opposed to the government controlling anything about energy. This involves the pricing, distribution, or production of energy. It seems that libertarians would prefer people to establish their own ways of using energy without any government regulations.

I disagree with this approach because if the government doesn’t create some sort of incentive, many people won’t be convinced to use renewable energy resources. The whole world needs to change its ways together in order to keep the environment sustainable. Things must change on a national and global scale if anything is to get done. There’s no way America itself will be able to move to natural energy resources if it isn’t enforced by the government.

Green:

The Green Party advocates using numerous renewable resources such as wind, solar, ocean, small-scale hydro, and geothermal power. They’re hoping to transition to 80% of energy being green by 2030, and 100% by 2050. In addition, they want to decrease the use of coal and methane, are also very strong about ending the use of nuclear power.

I agree with much of this stance, but I don’t agree with it as much as the Democrats’ stance. The Green Party seems to be more liberal about the environment, to the point where it’s a bit too extreme for me. While I’m happy that the party wants to switch to 80% renewable energy by 2030, it unfortunately doesn’t seem as realistically possible anymore at the current rate. And I do believe that nuclear power is a possible necessity and might be something people may need to rely on.

Peace and Freedom:

The Peace and Freedom Party supports having a multi-source energy system, using solar technology and other renewable, nonpolluting energy sources. They also want to eliminate nuclear power plants and end fossil fuel dependence.

This party’s stance look beneficial to me. However, their wording makes it seem like they are very extreme about getting rid of fossil fuels and nuclear power. In that sense, I don’t agree with how firm they are about getting rid of those two things because I think it’s important for the world to make gradual, progressive changes. I don’t think people can just cut off fossil fuel use right away, nor do I think people should get rid of nuclear power that fast. It might be necessary to keep nuclear power as an option in case we need it.

I identify with the Democratic Party’s position the most. This isn’t surprising because my political alignment test reflected that I am moderately liberal, which is what I already thought I was. In addition, my whole family holds the same liberal ideals, so I wasn’t surprised that I identify the most with Democrats. Because I have always supported the use of renewable resources, I knew I would probably be against the Republican stance. I was against the Libertarian stance because I didn’t agree with how they didn’t want the government playing any role in regulating energy. And although I agreed with some parts of the stances by the Green Party and Peace and Freedom Party, I thought their ideals were a bit too extreme and unrealistic. There isn’t a presidential candidate to vote for now, but I’m assuming that I would most likely vote for the Democrat candidate.

Interest Groups

National Interest Group

Interest group name: Sunrise Movement

Position/perspective: Sunrise Movement hopes to make climate change an urgent, national priority, end the corrupting influence of fossil fuel executives on politics, and elect leaders who stand up for the health and wellbeing of all people.

Beliefs: Sunrise Movement believes people should stop giving so much taxpayer money to oil and gas CEOs in order for climate change to come to a halt. They want the world to transition to a 100% clean energy as fast as possible. And after such a transition, they believe in providing for the workers in the fossil fuel economy who will be displaced, addressing who will pay for the climate impacts that are locked in already, and ensuring that those least responsible for climate change will not bear its cost. In addition, they also want to halt all fossil fuel projects such as any infrastructure projects in order to avoid unnecessary disasters.

Legislation: During primary elections, this interest group only endorses candidates that take the No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge, which is a pledge to reject contributions from the oil, gas, and coal industry and instead prioritize the health of families, the climate, and democracy over fossil fuel industry profits.

Location: This group is very large and doesn’t have a main meeting place. Instead, there are hubs in many states like California, Oregon, Washington, Rhode Island, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, New Mexico, Minnesota, Michigan, Massachusetts, Florida, Alabama, and Washington D.C. The hub in California is actually in the Bay Area, but it seems it hasn’t been very active since 2017, so I don’t think there’s any meetings close by.

Volunteer opportunities: There is a way to volunteer as an intern in the Sunrise Semester Internship Program. Interns can spend up to 40 hours per week volunteering to support progressive local candidates and to make climate change a more significant political issue. They will learn to participate in extensive leadership development, political strategy, and social justice trainings.

Additional developments: Sunrise Movement is still very much active in the present. They have been holding multiple rallies and endorsing many candidates for the 2018 midterm election. Although the group has stated on their website that they are not aligned with one political party or the other, all the candidates they have endorsed before and in the present are either new candidates to politics, or democrats. But this shouldn’t surprising since the Republican stance typically favors the use of fossil fuels over renewable resources.

State Interest Group

Interest group name: California Environmental Justice Alliance (CEJA)

Position/perspective:

Beliefs: CEJA wants to make great use of rooftop solar energy and to get rid of “dirty power” like power plants and oil refineries. They believe dirty power is driving climate change, while also poisoning families and communities. To take care of the environment, CEJA supports transitioning to using 100% of energy from renewable resources. They believe that the best way to address the environment is to start with the communities who have dealt with the burden of pollution for decades, and lift up the leadership of those who have been impacted the most. They strongly advocate against racism and that a healthy economy starts with healthy communities, where all people have jobs that are not toxic and can support families, and neighborhoods.

Legislation: In 2015, CEJA co-sponsored and helped passed a bill by Assemblymember Susan Eggman. This bill was AB 693, The Multifamily Affordable Housing Solar Roofs Program. It is the nation’s biggest solar program for low-income renters in history. And it’s the first one to direct a majority of the savings created through use of solar energy directly back to the utility bills of renters.

Location: The main office of CEJA is located in Oakland, California. Its exact address is 1904 Franklin Street, Suite 610, Oakland, CA 94612. But there is also a Sacramento and Los Angeles Office. There don’t seem to be any upcoming meetings scheduled I could attend.

Volunteer opportunities: There are no volunteer opportunities, but they do have a page on their site about hiring people. However, there are no open positions at this time.

Additional developments: It’s interesting that this interest group is not only founded on the principle of the environment justice, but also racial justice too. CEJA doesn’t seem as powerful or influential as a national interest group, but it seems they are still impactful and are doing a good job at giving their best effort to carry out their ideas.

Both groups appear to be very well put together and thoughtful. I like how they’re both adamant about turning climate change around, and they have a very organized plan about how to approach the problem. I did feel Sunrise Movement was more successful in being powerful and influential with more people involved in it than CEJA. But I do like how California still has quite a few state interest groups that will hopefully drive California to transitioning to more renewable energy faster than other places. Both groups seemed to target young people as an audience in order to persuade them to make a difference in the future. And both groups were also supported by other groups that advocate protecting the enviroment.

PAC

PAC name: PG&E Corporation Employees Energy PAC

Position/perspective: PG&E want to increase the use of clean and renewable energy, reduce the impacts of our business, protect sensitive habitats and species, and work locally to help people use energy more efficiently.

Money: The total receipt is $1,066,361. They have spent $1,088,102. They currently have $412,062 on hand.

Budget: 44% of their money goes toward Republicans, while 56% goes to Democrats.

Donors: All the donors listed are individuals that work for PG&E. This shows that all the people donating are supporting their cause even more and want to elect people that are conscious of the environment and hope to take care of it.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

I'VE BEEN PONDERING PG

It's very common for startups to present to them. Do people live downtown, or have some sort of exit. There is less stress in total, but more as an exploration of gender and sexuality in an urban context, etc.1 I think the goal of this rule; if you can't explain your plans concisely, you don't worry that it might come out badly, or upset delicate social balances, or that can incorporate live data feeds, or that you won't be demoralized if they seem pointless.2 One YC founder told me that it wasn't worth investing in. The patent pledge doesn't fix every problem with patents.3 I can tell from the case. This site isn't lame. They wouldn't all grow as big. It will be easier in proportion to an estimate of your company's value that you'd both agreed upon.

Then you could, I don't care what he says, I'm going to name them: type A fundraising is when you can do, you don't see the opportunities all around us is that we get on average only about 5-7% of a much larger number.4 In most fields the great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to direct the course of adding some feature they were asking for.5 Most hackers are employees, and this trick merely forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that you'll be able to say whether he should be classified as a friend or angel.6 Don't say anything unless you're fairly sure what you want to reach; from paragraph to paragraph I let the ideas take their course. Sometimes a competitor will deliberately threaten you with a business background, and he will automatically get paid proportionally more. Not all of them had never seen the Web before we came to tell them to stop.7 If you're free of a misconception that everyone else is crazy. Most startups that raise money and the kind of alarms you'd set off if you operate like Columbus and just head in a general westerly direction.

As we were in the old sense of managing the round. Technology is a lever. Modern literature is important, but I suspect that most of them a part time job. In the Bay Area would be the answer. But let someone else start those startups. They're not necessarily trying to mislead you. Like a lot of people will make them.

But if you make something they like. 05 PM subject: Re: Revenge of the Nerds on the LL1 mailing list.8 American universities currently seem to be a media company to throw Microsoft off their scent. Java white paper, Gosling explicitly says Java was designed to be a missile aimed right at what makes America successful.9 Different users have different requirements, but I don't think that's the right way to do it. But this is merely an artifact of the rule of law.10 All you'll learn is the words kids are allowed to use. That's the way to the close.11 It did serve some purposes: reading a talk out loud can expose awkward parts. What investors still don't get is what insanely great translates to in a larval startup.

When I talk about humans being meant or designed to live a certain way out of habit or politeness. Hackers & Painters that hadn't been online. Incidentally, the switch in the 1920s to financing growth with retained earnings till the 1920s.12 And the programmers liked it because they don't like to have it. What counts as property depends on what works to treat as property. But this is wrong. What's a prostitute?13 Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization. Essentially, they lead you on. That will change the way they treat the music they sell through iTunes.14

So tablet makers should be thinking: what else can we give developers access to? White said, good writing is rewriting, wrote E. Almost four decades later, fragmentation is still increasing. The more people you have to do it than literally making a mark on the world. Investors looked at Yahoo's earnings and said to one of the principles they teach you is to align the car not by lining up the hood with the stripes painted on the road, but by trying to use mass lawsuits against randomly chosen people as a form of evolutionary pressure. People think that what you want. In principle anyone there ought to have multiple founders who were already friends before they decided to build recipe sites, or aggregators for local events.

Better Bayesian Filtering. They may play some behind the scenes as adults spin the world for a while, can make visual perception flow in through his eye and out through his hand as automatically as someone tapping his foot to a beat. If you looked in people's heads. They are all fundamentally subversive for this reason. I sat down and calculated what I thought was hard, the groups all turned out ok. Election forecasters are proud when they can get it, at this stage.15 The danger of symmetry, and repetition especially, is where the richest buyers are, but figure out precisely where you lose them. If they didn't know what language our software was so complex. 2:21 AM subject: Re: meet the airbeds PG, Thanks for the lead Fred to: Fred Wilson date: Mon, Feb 9,2009 at 11:42 AM subject: Re: airbnb There's a lot to start a startup. And yet they can hold their own with any work of art ever made.

Leonardo?16 It is, as far as possible prevent them from having fun. Doesn't that show people will pay most for?17 After thinking about it than most, but almost everywhere the trend is in that direction. Till then they had to ask permission to release software: the last thing you changed. But fortunately in the US are more conservative than Boston ones.18 People are all you need is to be battered by circumstances—to let the days rush by. But that's something you can fix later, but you can't evade the fundamental conservation law. And yet Apple's overall market share is still small. Though the Web has been around for a millennium is finished just because of its prestige, but because they were ambivalent about threatening their cash cow, mainframe computing. I mean efforts to protect against cosmic rays.19

Notes

Even as late as 1984. Incidentally, Google may appear to be at a large company? Plus one can have escaped alive, or to be good?

To do this all the poorer countries. Ed. But it was the least correlation between the Daddy Model may be a sufficient condition.

And in World War II to the rise of big companies can afford that. And while this is to try to be a win to include in your classes as a result a lot more frightening in those days, but I call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of happy. I'm talking mainly about software startups are now the first digital computer game, you can probably write a subroutine to do would be better at opening it than people who might be a good problem to fit your solution. Look at those goddamn fleas, jabbering about some disease they'll see once in China, during the war on drugs show, bans often do better, and instead of the world of the most famous example.

Plus one can ever say it again. When I catch egregiously linkjacked posts I replace the actual amount of damage to the founders' advantage if it was 94% 33 of 35 companies that can't reasonably expect to make a fortune in the case, not because Delicious users are stupid.

But you're not allowed to discriminate on any basis you want to get going, and oversupply of educated ones come up with elaborate rationalizations. I also skipped San Jose is a meaningful idea for human audiences. Though in fact had its own mind about whether a suit would violate the patent pledge, it's not enough to defend their interests in political and legal disputes.

What Is an Asset Price Bubble? This doesn't mean easy, of the river among the bear gardens and whorehouses. They act as if you'd just thought of them could as accurately be called acting Japanese. Many more than 20 years.

It's hard for us!

2%. If a prestigious VC makes a small proportion of the things you're taught.

Doing things that don't scale.

Now the misunderstood artist is not limited to startups. There's not much use, because few founders are willing to provide when it's done as conspicuously as this place was a false positive rate is 10%, moving to Monaco would only give you more than the previous round. Cascading menus would also be good startup founders tend to get going, e.

Emmett Shear writes: True, Gore won the popular vote he would presumably have got more of the flock, or at least, the government and construction companies. People only tend to damp this effect, at least guesses by pros about where that money comes from ads on other investors doing so because otherwise competitors would take forever in the case of heirs, professors, politicians, and everyone's used to place orders.

His critical invention was a kid that you'd want to sell them technology. I'm not dissing these people make the people working for startups, because it aggregates data from so many trade publications nominally have a lot of reasons American car companies have little to bring corporate bonds to market faster; the point where things start with consumer electronics and to run on the firm's site, they're nice to you. Not only do they decide on the young Henry VIII and was troubled by debts all his life. Distribution of potentially good startups, who've already made the decision.

Maybe that isn't really working bad unit economics, typically and then scale it up because they couldn't afford it. An investor who's seriously interested will already be working to help a society generally is to let yourself feel it mid-sentence, but you get an intro to a clueless audience like that.

But it is dishonest of the country turned its back on industrialization at the start, e.

The need has to be employees, or editions with the buyer's picture on the back of Yahoo, we actively sought out people who'd failed out of the things attributed to Confucius and Socrates resemble their actual opinions. The speed at which point it suddenly stops. And when a startup to engage with slow-moving organizations is to write every component yourself, but also very informative essay about why something isn't the last step in this essay I'm talking here about everyday tagging. If not, greater accessibility.

In 1525 he was made a bet: if you hadn't written it? I saw this I used thresholds of.

Especially if they were to work your way up. I managed to find a broad range of topics, comparable in scope to our scholarship though without the spur of poverty are only locally accurate, because those are probably the last step in this respect.

So how do you use that instead of Windows NT? How did individuals accumulate large fortunes in an absolute sense, if you make something hackers use. On the face of it.

But it's telling that it would be to say that it had no idea what's happening as merely not-doing-work. But they've been trained. So far, I preferred to call them whitelists because it depends on a weekend and sit alone and think.

[keywestlou]

TRUMP WINS.....FOR NOW.....THERE IS ALWAYS LAS VEGAS

Trump won for the second time yesterday. The man is unimpeachable! He has one problem, however. People such as he get their just due at some later time.

So it will be with Trump. He has too many criminal and civil matters hanging over his head. In due course, he will be litigating them. Probably more than one at a time. Justice delayed will not be justice denied in his instance. He always has Las Vegas!

Recall O.J. Simpson. Many thought he was guilty of killing his wife and her boy friend. Yet he was acquitted. Thirteen years later Simpson was tried on criminal charges in a separate matter in Las Vegas. He was found guilty and sentenced to 33 years. He was paroled after 9.

Trump will get his.

Trump has his guardian angel. The one that comes from below. He played his most devoted supporters for suckers and insulted the intelligence of the rest of the American people.

Trump support by Senators and Representatives was nothing less than an abdication of responsibility.  Such abdication invites more lawlessness from Trump or those who follow who are of his ilk.

This episode in U.S. history carries a clear message. We cannot sit on our asses and turn our backs on national terrorism. It has come out of the shadows. It must now be defeated.

Fire should be fought with fire. The country cannot sit idly back and do nothing or very little. All out war is required.

Or, what happened January 6 will occur again. At a time when the terrorists will be successful in overturning the government.

No negotiation with terrorists. The necessary must be done. Intelligence and force the weapons. Wipe them out! Otherwise the Cruzes, Grahams, Hawleys, and Rubios will become America’s leaders.

Poor Ashley Judd. The movie actress and activist. She is going through an experience that would be even too much for a movie.

Judd almost lost her leg in the Congo. At the moment, she is in an ICU unit in South Africa.

Judd’s leg was “shattered” when she tripped on a fallen tree on a pathway in the jungle. She was walking fast and did not see it.

It took 55 hours to get her from the jungle to an operating table in South Africa.

She initially was stuck on the ground where she had fallen for 5 hours. Her leg was “badly misshapened.” Those with her had Judd biting on a stick. In between “howling like an animal.”

She was eventually taken to a trauma unit on a motorcycle while holding the top part of her broken tibia together.

Judd says during these times: “I was at the edge of my edge.”

Florida is a Covid nightmare. Governor DeSantis’ fault. He is inept and at the moment out of control. He is opening some places where the vaccine can be given. Supermarkets and drug stores. However, few if any have the vaccine.

The Governor speaks with pride when he tells of the many sites where one can be inoculated. He forgets to share there is little or no vaccine available.

All at a time when Florida’s coronavirus numbers are skyrocketing.

Syracuse beat Boston College yesterday 75-67. Syracuse’s record now 12-6.

March Madness is around the corner. I doubt Syracuse will play in the big tournament. Unfortunate since Syracuse had the manpower this year. Exceptional players. They rarely were able to come together for a whole game.

Day 2 in Mykonos is my report for today. I changed my mind from yesterday. I began liking Mykonos on Day 2.

DAY 19…..Greece the First Time

Posted on June 15, 2012 by Key West Lou

What a difference a day makes!

My first night on Mikonos I went to the action area. The Chora. Old Mykonos by the waterfront.

My first night was two nights ago.

I reported yesterday that I did not like Mykonos. Too many people. Too much hustle and bustle.

I went back to Chora. Deserted compared to the evening before. Small crowds. Easy to get around. Restaurants basically empty. No one rushing you.

Why the change? I asked around. A simple reason. The night before there were three large cruise ships dumping their passengers off. Last night, no cruise ships.

I sat at an outside cafe the first night by the water. A large place. Expensive. Just watching the people and drinking. Not eating. All the tables were full with cruise ship people eating. Spending big dollars. Last night I was the only person sitting at the same outside cafe. Still only drinking. The owner and staff fell all over me. Glad you returned, anything you want, etc.

Business is tough. It is the euro situation. A major election Sunday that will determine the economic future of Greece for the next 20 years. It could also determine the subsequent rise and fall of the euro.

The local merchants were available to talk with me last night. One retailer told me his business was down 70 per cent in the last five years. The restaurant owner where I was taking up space said his business was down 40 per cent.

They all speak with fear in their eyes. They all hate Germany and Merkel. For two reasons. Germany is the only nation eating big time under the euro. Greece hurting the worst. The other reason is World War II and the Nazi domination of Greece.

After last evening, I started liking Mykonos. So much so that I may be staying a few extra days. Fourni comes into the decision making process, also.

Again, the difference a day makes. Fourni excites me. I wanted so to visit Fourni and spend some time there. Like a couple of weeks. That is how good I thought it would be.

I have no firm schedule. I was told that Fourni was a short 2 hour speed boat ride from Mykonos.

I went to buy my speed boat ticket yesterday. No boat to Fourni. They discontinued the run a couple of months ago.

Alternative ways. I could fly to Athens. From there fly to Somos. Stay overnight in Somos. Take the morning boat from Somos to Fourni.

I want to see Fourni badly, but not that bad. Too much time and too expensive.

There are no flights to Fourni from Mykonos.

I took a walk down to the waterfront. Chatted with several fisherman. Small boat owners. Would they take me to Fourni with their boat. About a 4-5 hour trip in a small boat. All said no. Too dangerous and too long. We never even got to money.

So it is Mykonos for a few days.

The electric power goes off occasionally in Key West. Yesterday the water went off in Mykonos. A frequent occurrence I was told. No water for six hours! Key West power is never off that long.

Apparently a pipe broke somewhere. I, and I assume most other vacationers on the island, were all greased up from sunbathing and no way to remove it. When the water did come back on after six hours, it was rusty for another half hour.

I was not upset. Only sticky. Happenings such as water breaks come with island living.

I finally found Terri White’s old stomping grounds last night. The piano bar she worked in several years ago. I tripped upon it. A small two foot long sign over a door on one of the alleys said Piano Bar. In I went. The place opened up into a large bar and dining room. Overlooking the water.

I met Nikki, Terri’s friend who owns the bar. I met his partner. If his family was there, I would have met each and every one of them. That is how it is in Mykonos and the rest of Greece.

It was 7. I wanted to hear Bobby Peaco play. Not till 10. Said I would return. Doubting that I would as that generally is my bed time.

Nikki was obviously pleased with Terri’s successes over the past few years. He spoke of her and it constantly.

Mykonos has to be dengue fever paradise. The mosquitoes got in my room last night. I finished the evening with at least a dozen bites.

Super Paradise Beach was my destination yesterday. I never made it. I lay by the hotel pool. It was quiet and soothing. The breeze perfect. The water the right temperature. Why leave.

Perhaps today.

I enjoy doing this blog daily and the other things I do. Yesterday, I published a new article on Amazon Kindle. Title: Unpaid Taxes. A portion of the article deals with the Greek unpaid tax problem. No one likes to pay taxes period. No one pays taxes if they can help it in Greece. This is one of the problems affecting the euro in Greece.

When there is an election, no one is pursued or prosecuted for unpaid taxes. The vote is more important than the tax dollar! When finally apprehended and charged, the individual still is not too concerned. Tax Court cases take 7-10 years to finalize.

I will try again for Super Paradise Beach today. Tonight, I have no idea.

Enjoy your day!

TRUMP WINS…..FOR NOW…..THERE IS ALWAYS LAS VEGAS was originally published on Key West Lou

[orbemnews]

Twitter Bans MyPillow C.E.O. Mike Lindell: Live Business Updates Here’s what you need to know: Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow, helped fund a bus tour that promoted Donald T. Trump’s false election claims.Credit…Erin Scott/Reuters Twitter said it had permanently barred Mike Lindell, the chief executive officer of the bedding company MyPillow and a close ally of former President Donald J. Trump, from its service. The move on Monday night followed numerous tweets by Mr. Lindell promoting debunked conspiracy theories about election fraud. Mr. Lindell’s Twitter account, which had nearly 413,000 followers, was permanently suspended “due to repeated violations of our Civic Integrity Policy,” said Lauren Alexander, a Twitter spokeswoman, in an email. Corporate America has moved swiftly to try to turn down the volume on assertions by Mr. Lindell, a major Republican donor and one of the loudest voices perpetuating Mr. Trump’s claims of voter fraud in the Nov. 3 elections. Kohl’s and Bed Bath & Beyond removed MyPillow products from their stores last week. Mr. Lindell also faces legal action over his claims of voting fraud involving Dominion Voting Systems, the company at the center of one of the more outlandish conspiracy theories about voter fraud. His account’s suspension is the latest in a series of high-profile bans by Twitter since the company permanently blocked Mr. Trump from its service over concerns that he would use the platform to incite more violence like the storming of the Capitol this month. After the attack on the Capitol, Twitter said it had updated its rules to more aggressively police false or misleading information about the presidential election. As part of that move, Twitter has moved to suspend the accounts of more than 70,000 people who have promoted content related to QAnon, a fringe pro-Trump group that the F.B.I. has labeled a domestic terrorist threat. Ms. Yellen is the first woman to hold the top job at Treasury in its 232-year history.Credit…Leah Millis/Reuters The Senate confirmed Janet L. Yellen to be Treasury secretary on Monday, putting her at the forefront of navigating the fallout created by the pandemic as she advocates for President Biden’s economic agenda. Ms. Yellen, the former Federal Reserve chair, was confirmed by a vote of 84 to 15 with support from both Republicans and Democrats. She is the first woman to hold the top job at Treasury in its 232-year history. With the confirmation, she will now be thrust into the middle of negotiations over a potential $1.9 trillion economic aid package that is the chief plank of Mr. Biden’s effort to revive the economy. The size of the plan already met with doubts from some Democrats and Republicans. Ms. Yellen has been a clear champion of continued government support for workers and businesses, publicly warning that a lack of aid to state and local governments could slow the recovery, much as it did in the aftermath of the Great Recession. At her confirmation hearing and in written responses to lawmakers, Ms. Yellen echoed Mr. Biden’s view that Congress must “act big” to prevent the economy from faltering and defended using borrowed money to finance another aid package, saying not doing so would leave workers and families worse off. “The relief bill late last year was just a down payment to get us through the next few months,” Ms. Yellen said. “We have a long way to go before our economy fully recovers.” Shoppers wait outside of a GameStop on Black Friday. An online community of traders seem to be fueling a spike in the store’s share price.Credit…Go Nakamura for The New York Times In an epic contest between Wall Street traders who bet against stocks and legions of small-scale investors, the small guys are winning. On Monday, shares of the struggling video game retailer GameStop surged, adding to a recent rally that has lifted the stock by more than 300 percent in January alone and making it a glaring illustration of the growing power of small investors in certain segments of the financial markets. Shares of companies like GameStop are becoming detached from the kinds of factors that traditionally help benchmark a company’s valuation — like growth potential or profits. Analysts expect the company to report a loss from continuing operations of $465 million for 2020, on top of the $795 million it lost in 2019. What seems to be fueling this spike is an online community of traders, who congregate in places like Reddit’s “Wall Street Bets” forum and hype up individual trades. Lately, they’ve made buying short-dated call options on GameStop’s shares — an aggressive bet that the shares will rise — a favorite position. Market analysts and academics say a rush of new money in such short-dated call options can create a sort of feedback loop that drives the underlying share prices higher, as brokerage firms that sell the options have to themselves buy shares to hedge the contracts. In GameStop’s case, these small investors have found themselves going up against a different group of speculators. The company’s struggles have also made it a favorite target for short-sellers — who bet on a stock’s decline by selling shares they don’t actually own. Short sellers profit when a stock has plunged and they can buy those same shares back at a lower price. Of course, with GameStop’s shares surging, those investors are losing a lot of money. And their rush to get out of the trade by buying shares can cause a surge in prices, too, called a short squeeze. On Monday, the small traders on Wall Street Bets and the messaging site Discord were encouraging each other to hold on to their positions as the short-sellers ran for the exits. “Am I too late to get on the GME rocket?,” one commenter on Wall Street Bets wrote shortly after 10 a.m. “No buy the dip,” another responded. On Discord, the message was clear. “GME ONLY UP,” one commenter wrote. Budweiser’s Covid-19 awareness advertisement includes two health workers who were being vaccinated.Credit…Budweiser, via Associated Press Budweiser, the beer giant whose commercials featuring Clydesdale horses, croaking frogs and winsome puppies made it one of the most beloved Super Bowl advertisers, is opting out of the game-time broadcast this year for the first time in 37 years to focus on raising awareness for the Covid-19 vaccine. Budweiser, an Anheuser-Busch company, said Monday that it would donate portions of its advertising budget this year to the Ad Council, a nonprofit marketing group at the helm of a $50 million ad blitz to fight coronavirus vaccine skepticism. Instead of debuting a splashy big-game commercial, as Super Bowl advertisers often do in the weeks leading up to the Feb. 7 match, the beer company released its 90-second online vaccination ad, titled “Bigger Picture.” (Anheuser-Busch will still feature prominently during the game, with ads for several of its other beer brands.) Other Super Bowl stalwarts, including Coca-Cola, Hyundai and Pepsi, will also be missing onscreen. As the pandemic disrupted the sports industry, many companies hesitated to pay CBS roughly $5.5 million for a 30-second slot during a game that some worried could be delayed or even canceled. In the Budweiser Covid-19 vaccination ad, the actress Rashida Jones urges viewers to “turn our strength into hope” while the melody of “Lean on Me” plays as inspirational images from the pandemic are shown. Ms. Jones, who recorded her narration while isolated from other people in a Hollywood facility, said in an interview that “obviously people want to be entertained, they want to watch funny commercials,” but “what’s most important is that we prioritize this next phase.” The Super Bowl advertising season, which usually extends beyond the broadcast into weeks of teasers, celebrity reveals, YouTube debuts and celebratory live events, is more subdued as companies struggle to adopt an appropriate tone after a year full of marketing missteps. “You can’t pretend like everything’s OK,” Ms. Jones said. “People can sense when brands are exploiting a moment.” Source link Orbem News #Bans #Business #CEO #Lindell #Live #Mike #MyPillow #Twitter #Updates

[bucketorandomness]

Let’s talk about my impressions after the Debate

For anyone who doesn’t want political stuffage on their dash, I will now be tagging everything I think is directly related to elections and such “#political shenanigans” so please, use the filter function if you don’t want to see my political views. Social issues will still be using the “#serious ones” tag, though if you want me to separate those, too, jus let me know, kay? You’re totally valid. Go curate your experience and keep it good.

Anyway. Onto the essay/rant/vent/thing.

I currently live in a pro-Trump house and--before y’all get upset with me please wait--let’s just say the Debate the other night didn’t thrill me. As part of becoming an adult, I’m starting to form my own opinions. One of those opinions is who I’d like to vote into office. I’m not completely sold on Biden, yet, but I can confidently say I don’t think I can support Trump with a good conscience.

I tried to get others to watch the Debate with me that night, but even his own Supporters didn’t want to watch him. Not sure what you think about that, but that just gives me weird vibes. Like, they didn’t watch to support Trump, their chosen candidate. Is that... Is that what others do? It makes sense to me that if you want to elect someone to lead the nation, you try to hear their opinions on important issues, and that was the whole purpose of the Debate.

At some point in the Debate, the topic was Covid and the candidates’ responses to it. Mainly, Trump held large rallies, “Because people want to hear what I have to say.” There are plenty of ways to do that without gathering in person. Heck, if you think about it, there’s a possibility he could reach more people with a digital rally. My local church has, for instance, and we’re not even a globally known name. Biden, on the other hand, has been holding small scale meetings, and as soon as he mentioned that, Trump immediately interrupts with something along the lines of “because nobody wants to go.” Like, yes I understand the Presidentials are basically he biggest popularity contest in the country. However, this is the future of the entire nation we’re talking about here, and that comment struck me as really childish. When mentioned to the local Supporters, I got a good-natured, “Well, that only to be expected.” I’m not sure I like having a President who makes childish comments and is basically expected to make them. A leader with a lack of maturity is not going to make the best decisions, especially with an office as large as the Oval. I get it: politics is about making your opponent look like the worst possible choice, and attacking them is the fastest way to do that. Doesn’t mean I think that’s the right way to go about gathering support. Like, yeah, you don’t like your opponent. It’d be kinda weird if you did. Why don’t we try to stay civil, though? Personal attacks come when you don’t have anything constructive to add to the conversation. If you value tearing down your opponent over an informative debate, I think your priorities are a little different from mine.

Towards the end of the Debate, as well as a significant portion in the middle, Trump straight up attacks Biden’s sons. Listen, I like a good family man, and I feel horrid for all the mud the media slung at Melania Trump these past four years, but that does not give Trump the right to attack another man’s family. The first one was about one son receiving a supposed monetary gift from abroad. Trump spent a considerable amount of time asking Biden questions and then not allowing him to answer. The worst, I think, was “What did he do to deserve [large sum I no longer remember]?!” As if Biden’s son had no worth. As if it was completely ludicrous that Biden’s son could earn a gift like that based on his own merits. Biden was good natured and tried to brush it off with simple answers Trump barreled right through until the moderator helped get the Debate back on track. The second time really hurt, though. Maybe I’m just too empathetic, but I actually winced while listening to the Debate. Biden was talking about his son’s military service and Trump immediately started dragging down both this veteran and another son from the service. I don’t know if any of those accusations were true, but that is where Biden got riled up enough to lash back, and I don’t blame him. How could he stand by while Trump interrupted his proud story to drag both sons through the dirt for the sake of politics? Trump may claim to be a family man, but the way he treats other fathers is not something he should be proud of! I can understand attacking Biden, the opponent, but attacking Biden’s kids is underhanded and not something I want to see the President doing. Trump’s opponent isn’t the moderator, and it definitely isn’t Biden’s sons. Attacking the family is something you do when you can’t make an outright attack on the target. Trump should know this! It’s what happened when he got elected! And what’s he doing? He’s trying to get the media to chew up Biden’s family just as much as it chewed up his. I’m no interested in Biden’s family. I’m interested in Biden. Is that such a weird thing to ask for?

I tried mentioning how terrible Trump’s whole attitude was to the local Supporters: he asked questions he didn’t allow answers for, he insulted and attacked everyone within range--including the moderator--, and he didn’t always answer the questions asked of him. Their response? “He [Trump] is a good President, he’s just not a good orator.” If I tried to pull his attitude during class, I doubt I’d get a passing grade! “He speaks American.” As an American I can tell you I didn’t understand most of what came out of his mouth. If Trump “speaks American” it’s only to a certain kind of American, and there’s more than one of us in the US. “He wasn’t raised to debate; he’s used to walking into a room and taking control. He monologues.” I don’t know about you, but that sounds kind of like a spoilt child to me? Trump doesn’t consider the other people in the room; if they don’t agree with him and what he wants, they’re wrong. He’s used to getting what he wants when he wants it. I don’t think that’s a good quality to have in a leader at this time.

Yes, there are times when a commanding presence is needed, but I think, for this coming term, what we need more is someone who can compromise. Having someone as stiff as Trump in office has polarized the country. I keep hearing rumors of terrible things and thinking to this one prediction a friend made four years ago: “We’re going to have a second Civil War.” It won’t be about slavery. It won’t be North versus South. This time, it’ll be Republicans versus Democrats, and God help the Independents in the middle. America is being pulled in so many directions right now, something’s going to give. Someone willing to ease up on their tugging and mend the tears showing up will do more good, I think, than standing firm and making those tears worse. At the moment, I don’t know if Biden’s the one to do that, but I do know Trump is not.

Trump may “get things done” like the Supporters say, but I don’t think I can agree with his code of ethics. For me, the journey is just as important as the destination. How we accomplish our goals is just as important as the outcome. I don’t think I can support someone with ethics so wildly different from my own. The President represents America. The President’s code of ethics is America’s code of ethics. If those ethics aren’t something I agree with, then how can I in good conscience elect Trump to represent me on a global stage?

Trump had some good points. Mainly, that if Biden was promising to do what he was promising, why hadn’t he done it already as a member of the government for the past couple decades? You can go ahead and support anyone you want to. That’s your right as an American voter, and even more as a human being with personal opinions. Just because we don’t agree doesn’t necessarily mean one of us is wrong.

I know neither of the candidates really answered the last question of the Debate, but please, stay calm. Talk like the adults we are. Don’t engage in civil unrest over this election.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

A few months ago a friend wrote me an email with the subject line, “What is Sean McElwee.”

This is the kind of question that occurs to a person who spends a lot of time on Twitter. In 2018, McElwee’s tweets seemed to abound in liberal cyberspace. He was best known for his jeremiads about abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement — for much of the past year, McElwee’s handle read as “we’re going to abolish ICE.” The online racket attracted attention. MSNBC host Chris Hayes interviewed him, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand showed up to the weekly happy hour he throws, and he was named to the Politico 50 along with the likes of Mick Mulvaney, Alan Dershowitz and one Donald J. Trump. Quite a lot for a 26-year-old whose main gig is at a fledgling think tank he co-founded, Data For Progress.

But still, what is he? McElwee calls himself a “jackass of all trades” but admits that trying to explain his value to those not enmeshed in the online world of politics — potential donors to his think tank, say — is difficult.

Sean McElwee is one of many young activists articulating a far-left vision of the Democratic Party.

Hayley Bartels for FiveThirtyEight

“I’m like Radiohead for donors — you can’t really explain why I’m good but everyone knows that I’m good at it,” McElwee shouted over the din of bar talk at one of his happy hours on a recent evening in New York City. “The thing I try to say is, ‘Look, I don’t know what to tell you, I wrote a report on the Green New Deal three months before the Green New Deal was a thing. I tweeted about abolish ICE before abolish ICE was a thing. I fucking raised $850,000 for down-ballot candidates from small dollar contributions.’ I’m not sitting around telling you how the fuck I do it, I don’t have time to do that.” (McElwee, it should be noted, says “fuck” an awful lot.)

McElwee is one of a cadre of young left activists whose voices have grown louder in the years following Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump. Many came of political age in the decade following the financial crash of 2008, and many are disillusioned by a Democratic Party they think has been ideologically hollowed out. They’ve organized outside the traditional party apparatus — the Democratic Socialists of America, the Justice Democrats — and worked to get representation in Congress, pushing figures like newly minted congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley. Now they find themselves holding greater purchase than ever before in the formal Washington political process.

For a few years now, Democratic voters have shown they’re primed for a leftward shift, and this rising group of activists and politicians wants to push them even further. At the heart of the young left’s project is a discomfort with the free market capitalist system under which we live. It’s a system deeply ingrained in many Americans’ identities, though increasingly less so: 2016 was the first year since Gallup started tracking the question that it found Democrats had a more positive view of socialism than they did of capitalism.

This new group of activists wants to capitalize on that shift. And they’re doing it by tweeting incessantly and acting impertinently toward their fellow Democrats. Unlike bright young political things of years gone by, their purpose is to confound the party’s leadership, not earn their praise.

To this end, McElwee calls himself an “Overton Window Mover.” It’s a high-minded allusion to how activists can influence the national conversation to make fringey ideas seem less radical. He and the others have already opened the Democrats’ window, and the winds of change that blow through it might be more F5 tornado than gentle summer breeze.

McElwee’s weekly happy hour is a water cooler for young progressives in New York City.

Hayley Bartels for FiveThirtyEight

My stop at McElwee’s weekly happy hour for left- wing activists and writers came just before Christmas. Twinkly lights brightened the bar’s dinge, and I grabbed a beer that was astonishingly cheap for New York City — one attendee told me that the “accessible” price of the drinks was in keeping with the progressive ethos of the group. Because he’s worried that right wing trolls might crash the weekly gathering, McElwee asked me not to reveal the happy hour’s location, but plenty of the city’s left-leaning activists and journalists know about it. “A pretty high percentage of people got invited to the happy hour via Twitter DM,” Eric Levitz of New York Magazine told me.

McElwee’s attendees — over a dozen — were scattered in pockets around the bar, some seated at a corner table, others hanging out closer to the kegs. Apparently the New Republic and The Nation both had parties that evening, McElwee told me later, so the turnout was pretty decent, all things considered. The conversation spun from rifts in the leadership of the Women’s March to the war in Yemen to how one woman at the bar had to take the day off after Ocasio-Cortez was elected because she had been overcome with emotion. (Many refer to Ocasio-Cortez simply as “AOC,” putting the 29-year-old freshman congresswoman alongside LBJ and FDR in the ranks of the politically monogrammed.)

“These are really left people, not party hacks,” Rachel Stein, an activist who works on local New York City issues, told me. The young left is a loose confederation of like-minded activists organized in like-minded groups rather than a monolithic movement with explicit goals. Organizers work for both established and emerging left-wing groups, but all share an ethos of pushing mainstream Democratic politics in a more explicitly progressive direction. Women’s marches, environmental protests at Standing Rock, and anti-racism demonstrations might draw a similar set of figures from this young left world.

Since the 2016 election, the left’s political and cultural influence has ballooned. Membership in the Democratic Socialists of America grew exponentially during the first years of the Trump administration, thanks in part to the invaluable PR that was the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. At the same time, the “dirtbag-left” comedy and politics of Chapo Traphouse, a popular podcast, helped shape a certain shared sensibility among a socialist millennial set. (An excerpt from the Chapo hosts’ new book reads, “Capitalism, and the politics it spawns, is not working for anyone under 30 who is not a sociopath.”)

Many young left activists think the time has never been more right, the culture never more ready, to move left-wing politics into the mainstream. “This moment has radicalized liberals and electoralized radicals,” Maurice Mitchell, the 38-year-old new director of the Working Families Party, a New York-based progressive-left organization with close ties to the labor movement, told me.

A few days before the happy hour, I’d hopped a bus to mid-Brooklyn to meet with Waleed Shahid, communications director of the Justice Democrats, a group of Bernie Sanders campaign alumni recruiting progressive candidates to Congress. (New York City’s five boroughs are home to a number of the young leftists.) Shahid is even-keeled, if intense, and a card-carrying member (literally) of the Democratic Socialists of America. “My joke is that unlike Barack Obama, I am a Muslim socialist,” he said. He graduated from college in 2013 and worked for the Sanders campaign in 2016, followed by stints with Ocasio-Cortez and Cynthia Nixon.

Protest movements like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and the Climate March have spent years trying to push Democrats — and the U.S. at large — further to the left.

EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/Getty Images, Joshua LOTT/AFP/Getty Images, Citizens of the Planet/Education Images/UIG via Getty Images

“I come from this loose network of basically millennials who were a part of all the different social movements that erupted under Obama,” Shahid told me. It was a group that had voted for the Democratic president but found themselves disappointed by many of his policies. “The people I learned organizing from were people from Occupy Wall Street, the Dreamer movement, People’s Climate March, 350.org, Black Lives Matter — that whole world which was all 22-32 [years old], mostly.”

That so many young Democratic agitators have come to their politics through movements tied to America’s racial strife has distinctly flavored their approach to the country’s economic system. “I recognized that the best way to respond to the white nationalist populism was to develop a multiracial left populism,” Mitchell told me as we sat in his Brooklyn office. In a rich turn of irony, the progressive party is housed in JPMorgan Chase’s Brooklyn outpost, the bank’s name emblazoned above the threshold. While the lobby was festooned with Liberace-inspired reindeer decorations for Christmas, Mitchell’s office was stacked to the ceiling with file boxes, one of which was labeled “crap.”

Maurice Mitchell, is the leader of the Working Families Party, a progressive organization founded by a coalition of left-leaning voices.

REUTERS / Jonathan Bachman

Mitchell, 38, is the first person of color to head the Working Families Party. “The aging Jewish radical can take you only so far,” outgoing director Dan Cantor told The New York Times when Mitchell’s appointment was announced in April 2018. Mitchell spent years as a community organizer on Long Island and most recently worked at Blackbird, a communications firm he co-founded that is closely allied with the Movement for Black Lives. By Mitchell’s telling, he’s spent most of his career at the outskirts of Democratic politics, sometimes in opposition to its elected officials, living “somewhere in that place apart.”

Trump’s election, though, had made the Democratic mainstream more receptive to ideas once thought to be liberal pipe dreams. “We’re in a moment of political realignment and it’s disorienting,” Mitchell said. “People are looking for solutions, and people instinctively understand — even people working in centrist think tanks — that the solutions of the past will not take us out of this moment of realignment and will not take us into the future.”

What’s difficult, Mitchell said, is that while the culture is primed for a shift, the details still have to be ironed out.

“It starts off by recognizing that this economy is insufficient for all of our needs, for all of our people having dignity — and then we have to transition, we have to figure out how to transition while we still live under neoliberal capitalism,” he said. “That’s the work that we’re doing.”

Alexandra Rojas is the executive director of Justice Democrats, a group of Bernie Sanders campaign alumni working to recruit more diverse working class candidates to run for Congress.

REUTERS / Jonathan Bachman

Alexandra Rojas, Justice Democrats’ 23-year-old executive director, was 13 years old when the financial crisis of 2008 hit. She recalls nothing of Washington’s deliberations over bank bailouts, only difficult conversations with her parents about scaling back. McElwee’s memories of the historic moment are similarly fuzzy. “I thought it was weird there was an organization called ‘Bear Stearns,’” he said. That childhood naivete was shed over the next decade, and the events of those years left an indelible impression; Rojas, McElwee and so many of their activist agemates were shaped by an early exposure to the potential dangers of the free market.

Much of the Democratic Party’s present identity crisis has its roots in the worldwide crash of financial markets late in George W. Bush’s presidency and at the beginning of Barack Obama’s term of office. Complicated financial products crumpled the U.S. housing market, and widespread unemployment, foreclosures and homelessness followed. While banks and investment firms failed, none of their heads were jailed for wrongdoing.

At the time, Democrats were divided over how to deal with the crisis. Elizabeth Warren — then a Harvard professor — made her first full step into Washington politics as chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Warren devotes a large portion of her 2014 book, “A Fighting Chance,” to her memories of the crisis — namely, that the government was far too credulous of the banks’ requests. “Now Treasury was giving $20 billion in additional TARP bailout funds to Citibank, plus a $306 billion taxpayer guarantee.”

There was a fundamental divide in how Democrats approached solving the crisis. Dodd-Frank, the legislation that would eventually pass in response to the crash, took an incremental approach to industry reform. But there was a faction that favored broader, more systemic structural reforms of the system. The more incrementalist reform won out under Obama, thanks in no small part, some thought, to lobbying by the heads of investment banks.

“Elizabeth Warren shouldn’t be the outer bound; we should have some people who are much more radical,” Krugman said.

“The financial industry has so much clout and so much influence, not just because of the money but because they’re smart people, they’re persuasive, they have great tailors,” Paul Krugman, the 2008 Nobel laureate in economics told me over coffee on a recent afternoon in Manhattan while wearing a tidy, if not tailored, outfit featuring a scarf and zip-up sweater. “I had a little bit of experience trying to persuade Obama and associates of taking a harder line on the bailouts,” he said. But Krugman didn’t prevail. “Jamie Dimon [chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase] cuts a really impressive figure, even though in fact he’s dead wrong about many of the crucial issues.”

Krugman called the emerging clutch of young activists’ skepticism about capitalism useful, and a necessary counterbalance to the lobbying and financial strength of Wall Street. Though in some aspects, he said, the far-left movement hasn’t reached intellectual maturity. “The truth is there aren’t a lot of technically adept people from that [far-left] position, which is not because there couldn’t be, but because they haven’t been a factor — it’s all new.” He continued, name checking his fellow Nobel laureate, “If you’re having meetings in which Joe Stiglitz and I are the farthest left voices, that’s a limiting spectrum and it would be helpful if there were people beyond.”

In part, that’s because before the financial crisis, American policy makers, including Democrats, didn’t do much about income inequality or widespread financial system reform. Mike Konczal, an economic fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, a left-leaning think tank, characterized past Democratic attitudes toward financial reform as mostly centered on workers increasing their skills and education. Democrats in the Bill Clinton era were still near-uniformly bullish on capitalism. “The system more or less worked fine, it was just a matter of getting people access to the system,” he said. “There wasn’t a big problem with the economy itself, it was just that some people were excluded from it.”

Many of the young leftists were emboldened by Sen. Bernie Sanders’s Democratic primary campaign in 2016.

Win McNamee / Getty Images

In the last decade, the far left has found the problems too great to ignore. The Occupy Wall Street movement kicked things off a few years after the financial crisis but was plagued by a perception that its demands to end income inequality were too vague and the organization too decentralized. But in recent years, progressive politics have found more precise policies and voices in figures like Warren and Sanders. Rojas, the director of Justice Democrats, dropped out of community college in 2015 to work for the Sanders campaign. “I’ve had to experience what it’s like to have four or five jobs, each at $7.50, to make rent. I saw my dad suffer during the financial crisis,” she said. “I’m someone who comes from a family that really loves work and is hard working but has also experienced a capitalist system that’s run amok.”

The rising far-left Democratic activists are necessary counterpoints, Krugman told me, pushing new ideas to the masses. “Banking is on the one hand a deeply technical issue, but on the other hand it’s too important to be left solely to the technocrats,” he said. “Elizabeth Warren shouldn’t be the outer bound; we should have some people who are much more radical.”

The Democrats’ freshmen class in the House is filled with young progressives like Reps. Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. //

JOSEPH PREZIOSO / AFP / Getty Images, Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call, Stephen Maturen / Getty Images, Cheriss May / NurPhoto via Getty Images

With its incessant tweets and Instagrams, the young left has in essence begun a long session of political exposure therapy with the Democratic mainstream, popularizing ideas that many people have never heard of before or ones that would have been laughed down at first mention not so long ago.

It hasn’t gone over well with some factions of the party. In an exit interview following her November 2018 loss, Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill said she wished Ocasio-Cortez well, but called her “a bright and shiny new object who came out of nowhere.” She advised her to “stick to issues we can actually accomplish something on,” saying, “the rhetoric is cheap. Getting results is a lot harder.” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has been more measured, but in the wake of Ocasio-Cortez’s primary upset, she tamped down suggestions that the surprise election was indicative of a radical shift in the party. “Nobody’s district is representative of somebody else’s district,” Pelosi said. “It should not be viewed as something that stands for everything else.”

That hasn’t stopped Ocasio-Cortez from using her ever-growing national platform to push for new candidates like herself all over the country. In November she announced that she would support Justice Democrats’ effort to primary Democratic members in the 2020 election, a move that’s seen as highly unusual, if not uncollegial. Maneuvers like that haven’t universally endeared her, even to sympathetic members of the party. In the weeks following the November election, one anonymous staffer from the Progressive Caucus told the Atlantic, “She’s so focused on truly Instagramming every single thing that, aside from the obvious suspects in her friendship circle, she’s not taking the time to capitalize on building relationships with members as much as she should.” (Recently, Ocasio-Cortez helped lead a Twitter class for members of the Democratic caucus.) In a recent Politico piece, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver said, “I’m sure Ms. Cortez means well, but there’s almost an outstanding rule: Don’t attack your own people, we just don’t need sniping in our Democratic caucus.” Corbin Trent, Ocasio-Cortez’s spokesman, told FiveThirtyEight that the freshman would stay the rhetorical course and continue to support efforts to primary Democrats. “Most of her time is spent sniping Republicans and white supremacists — very little time is spent in intraparty conflict. It’s a mountain out of a molehill.”

“Politics is a swamp of confirmation bias,” Mitchell said.

Perhaps the policy activists care most about promoting in the next year is the Green New Deal. It’s a plan that’s been pushed by a group of high-profile new Democratic legislators, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Ocasio-Cortez, who proposed creating a new congressional committee to develop a detailed plan. As of now, the policy specifics are vague, but the plan’s broad goals are to fund a “massive investment in the drawdown in greenhouse gases,” explore renewable energy sources, and train Americans in new, more sustainable jobs. Recently, Elizabeth Warren endorsed the idea of a Green New Deal, which Ocasio-Cortez was quick to point out on Twitter. (Cory Booker and Sanders have also voiced support.)

Krugman is also bullish on the young left’s centerpiece policy. “If the Green New Deal means that we’re going to try to rely on public investment in technologies and renewables and things that will make it easier for people to use less fossil fuel, that’s a pretty good start,” he said.

The policy that has him more worried is single-payer health care, a centerpiece of Sanders’s campaign that many likely 2020 candidates have already come out to support. “That’s a huge amount of money — you can’t just do that by running up the deficit. You’d have to be collecting a bunch of new taxes, which is a reason for concern,” he said.

Krugman has been thinking about other ways to fiddle with the market system, though.

“I’ve been trying to do a little exercise with myself. I think with the fall of communism, we’d say central planning, government control of production doesn’t really work. But actually that’s not totally true,” he said. “What I try to put together is what could plausibly actually not be capitalist, actually not be markets — maybe 20-25 percent of the economy.” Things like health care, education, and utilities are all in the mix.

“We’re all going to fucking die of climate change,” McElwee said. “We have to accelerate, accelerate, accelerate.”

McElwee and I had dinner at a midtown Chinese restaurant on the same day that Ocasio-Cortez had tweeted one of his Data For Progress visualizations showing the rise in the number of tweets mentioning the “Green New Deal” since the summer of 2017. “Never underestimate the power of public imagination,” she wrote. It had been retweeted nearly 3,000 times and garnered 17,000 likes. Was the virality of the tweet and the promotion of a once-obscure policy idea some kind of success in and of itself, I asked.

“What is success? It’s power, it’s having a vision of the world that’s different from the status quo and enacting that vision,” McElwee said in between bites of scallion pancakes. At well over 6 feet tall with a uniform of puffy jackets and baseball hats, McElwee gives the impression of an overgrown teenage boy, fervent but with flashes of seeming self-awareness for his big talk. “And if three years from now Data for Progress has not enacted its vision, has not exercised itself upon the world and its ideas on the world, then we will have failed and we should stop doing this.”

Wasn’t that self-imposed timeline a little quick for broad political change to happen, I asked.

“We’re all going to fucking die of climate change,” McElwee shot back. “We have to accelerate, accelerate, accelerate.”

A trademark of the young left movement is its urgency of mission. This, coupled with a deep disdain for establishment politics, has made the dissemination of their gospel of change — particularly online — sharp-elbowed and disdainful of naysayers. “You don’t win over these people, you crush them,” McElwee told me of Republicans the first time we met. “I don’t make friends with Republican operatives. I don’t try to reach across the aisle. I think they’re bad people and I don’t want to be associated with them and you’ll never find a picture of me shaking hands with David Frum or something,” he said, referring to George W. Bush’s former speechwriter who is now a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Now that some of the left’s candidates have found themselves in office, agitation from inside the party is a tactic that will be put to greater use. After her election, Ocasio-Cortez attended a sit-in at Pelosi’s office over climate change. Tlaib unsuccessfully asked the Democratic leader to put her on the powerful House Appropriations Committee — an assignment that typically goes to seasoned members. (Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez have both been placed on the Financial Services Committee.) And on the first day of the 2019 House session, Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Ro Khanna of California said they would vote against Democrats’ rules for the new Congress because they included a measure that necessitated any spending be offset by spending cuts or revenue increases. For progressive politicians pushing massive government-funded programs like Medicare for all and the Green New Deal, the rules are not seen as bureaucratic minutiae, but as sabotage.

When I asked Shahid if the new left movement was going to be the Democrats’ version of the House Freedom Caucus, his answer was unequivocal: “Yes, it is.”

He had another historical example in mind, too: Thaddeus Stevens and the Radical Republicans, a group of abolitionists who stridently pushed for Lincoln’s Republican Party to abolish slavery. “Politics is still the art of compromise, you still have to pass legislation,” Shahid said. “But the idea is on whose terms is the compromise?” Every transformative president, he said, had found himself pushed into radical new policies by movements. (Ocasio-Cortez said something similar in a 60 Minutes interview that aired a few weeks after Shahid and I talked.) Abraham Lincoln had the abolitionists at his throat, Franklin Roosevelt had labor unions pushing for the New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson had civil rights leaders prodding him toward reforms of racist laws.

“Maybe we can make Joe Biden into a Lincoln,” he said.

So whom do young leftists want as their 2020 candidate? And what role will their movement have throughout the campaign?

“I want the left to really think seriously about the fact that the core of our strategy right now is if we endorse the right person, they will owe us,” McElwee told me. The left, he said, should take a page out of big businesses’ book and not care what candidate is ultimately chosen. “Knowing what the fuck you’re talking about, having the right contacts with the right staffers who you need to call to make sure the right amendment is passed at the right time — we’re much worse at that. We don’t actually have that capacity built up.” For an idealist, McElwee has a tendency toward Machiavellian realism.

McElwee said he could live with a Biden or a Beto O’Rourke as the Democrats’ presidential nominee, which is heresy in some progressive circles. Shahid voiced a more common progressive view of O’Rourke, comparing him to Emmanuel Macron, the young centrist president of France. “He says beautiful things, but what does he believe in?”

Mitchell, for one, was put off by the rumblings of support for O’Rourke coming from Obama World. “It’s outrageous. What O’Rourke did was pretty amazing, but he lost by more than 200,000, and Stacey [Abrams] and Andrew [Gillum] lost by a hair. So how is his loss a signal that he’s a rising star and Stacey and Andrew’s losses are definitive losses — they need to regroup and figure things out? Somebody needs to explain that to me.”

A recent poll of Democrats in Iowa, a largely white state that holds the nation’s first primaries, put Biden, Sanders and O’Rourke in the lead. Mitchell thinks that figures of the Democratic establishment are too eager to cede the party to centrist figures who appeal to a particular slice of the electorate.

“Basically what they’re saying is the Democrats need a white man that can talk to other white men and not scare this imagined centrist voter away with too much radical talk about totally restructuring our economy,” Mitchell said. “Politics is a swamp of confirmation bias.”

Regardless of who the party nominee turns out to be, it seems inarguable that the young left’s ideas will filter their way into the race. Shahid told me he thought that one strategy is for his ideological cohort to staff presidential campaigns. Justice Democrats, however, will focus on the next batch of congressional campaigns. “The biggest achievement we’ve gotten outside Ocasio was building a pipeline for candidate recruitment that actually reaches working class people,” Rojas said.

McElwee said his plans are mostly to stick to the issues. Right around the new year, his Twitter name changed to read “we’re going to pass AVR” — automatic voter registration — and a new website popped up promoting a new project to pass AVR in New York state. The Daily News had a piece on it, and McElwee’s feed was a litany of retweets of progressives cooing over the initiative. McElwee had told me that if he ever stopped seeing what the next new thing was, he’d get out of politics, lose 40 pounds, and try to sell his method as the next big fad diet. As he downed the last of his sake and finished my soup dumplings, it seemed clear he wasn’t in that headspace just yet.

“I’ll clearly support whoever the nominee is,” McElwee told me. “I think all of these people can be moved. They’re pieces on a chess board that’s so much larger than them. And I want to be helping move those chess pieces.”