Political Discussion

RenegadeMonster said:
Wouldn't it be nice to be an executive, have a huge salary and still get huge bonus when things are bad?

The MBTA, public transportation in Massachusetts is under investigation for paying out huge bonus to it's executives after lousing billions last year due to COVID-19, laying off thousands of workers and cutting service for 2021.

I didn't know people in the public sector got bonuses.
Click to expand...
Jesus, they're giving bonuses out @ MBTA? Massachusetts must have some interesting laws governing the public sector.
MTA (New York) has never had bonuses and we are currently going on a 3rd year of a hiring and promotions freeze.
 
gregathon said:
Jesus, they're giving bonuses out @ MBTA? Massachusetts must have some interesting laws governing the public sector.
MTA (New York) has never had bonuses and we are currently going on a 3rd year of a hiring and promotions freeze.
Click to expand...

The MBTA justified it in an interview with the local news saying that retention has historically been really bad and they have lots of turnover for executives.

They are trying to attract good talent and retain them to turn the MBTA around.
 
RenegadeMonster said:
The MBTA justified it in an interview with the local news saying that retention has historically been really bad and they have lots of turnover for executives.

They are trying to attract good talent and retain them to turn the MBTA around.
Click to expand...
Translation: it’s been terribly mismanaged so we reward the managers.
 
Indymisanthrope said:
Question / bit of a thought experiment

Disclaimer: not intending to rekindle arguments about who *should* have been the nominee or to imply anything about Bernie or progressive politics in general. There’s no subtext here.

I was thinking about how the right has been foaming at the mouth about Joe Fuckin’ Biden, and how Bernie is generally spared from being the focus of a lot of the QAnon stuff (and I have a few thoughts about why that is, but that’s another post), and it got me wondering...

Assume, for the sake of argument, two things:
1. Bernie wins the nomination instead of Biden.
2. All other things being equal, the election itself largely plays out the same (set aside specific questions like whether Georgia goes blue for Bernie; insofar as the election was a referendum on Trump, just imagine a world where this happens the same way it did in ours).

Now: think about the events that transpired between Nov. 3 and Jan. 20, but with a genuine democratic socialist coming into office this time. How much of the election challenging stuff, leading all the way up to the Capitol riot, plays out the same, and how much happens differently?

Has the Q cult pivoted in this scenario to make Bernie the Big Bad and it all goes down the same way? Does the fact that he’s a socialist make it even worse? Or does Bernie’s election basically disrupt the system enough to conclude the psy-op elements of Q to the degree that none of this feverish denialism ever happens at all?
Click to expand...
A day late to this, but I think this would require the DNC getting 100% behind Bernie as the nominee. Something that they never wanted to do in this past primary or in 2015/16. Would they reluctantly back Bernie or throw up their own candidate? They did something similar against Ed Markey this election but he won in a landslide. I honestly don’t know. I like to think that Bernie would appeal to a lot of working class folks and maybe they can like his policies even if they don’t like the (D) next to his name. There would not be the whole Hunter Biden thing with the laptop, that’s for sure. Bernie really has zero baggage.
 
wokeupnew said:
A day late to this, but I think this would require the DNC getting 100% behind Bernie as the nominee. Something that they never wanted to do in this past primary or in 2015/16. Would they reluctantly back Bernie or throw up their own candidate? They did something similar against Ed Markey this election but he won in a landslide. I honestly don’t know. I like to think that Bernie would appeal to a lot of working class folks and maybe they can like his policies even if they don’t like the (D) next to his name. There would not be the whole Hunter Biden thing with the laptop, that’s for sure. Bernie really has zero baggage.
Click to expand...
Bernie has baggage, most of it is bullshit but the Right would act like it is a VERY big deal. His wife’s dealing when she was president of Burlington College comes to mind.


Jane Sanders and the Messy Demise of a Vermont College (Published 2019)
 
Last edited:
Bernie's more useful where he is; much like Elizabeth Warren -- who is an obviously stronger candidate than Hillary was, but strategically, Warren is best where she is now unless there's another firebrand who gets shit done that's going to replace her. Given that there isn't, it's best she stays there.

Kamala Harris honestly did not have the congressional bona fides and history, so in this regard it's an acceptable risk, her being removed from congress -- it's no big loss if she's not there, but moving her could (and did) lead to her returning as head of the senate as VP and having her as VP is a deterrent to Biden's removal. If you think the racist trump fringe hates Biden because Cheeto Mussolini told them to hate him, holy shit do they not need to be told to hate a brown woman in a white man's job.
 
Your life via algorithm.
I'm paying more and more attention to algorithms and how they are used every day in data driven decision making. They've slipped into our lives and have become a very big part of them, though we are barely aware of their existence. Our world is becoming more and more data driven, and this is a huge problem because without big picture thinking to go with the data, all you have is a set of arbitrary rules that defines people's lives. If we miss the why behind the data, then we open our constructs up to illogical conclusions based on correlations instead of figuring out what is actually causing patterns or behaviors.

For years, scholars and activists have critiqued the algorithms used in data-driven policing, arguing that they merely techwash bias by making sloppy investigative work seem objective. Leading the charge in Los Angeles is the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition. Through public records requests, the group’s activists have obtained documents on police use of data analytics, and in 2018, they successfully pushed the city’s Office of the Inspector General to audit the department’s use of technology. “Surveillance is basically the tip of the policing knife,” said Hamid Khan, a co-leader of the coalition. “When you look at policing and the history of policing, from our vantage point, it’s not about public safety when it comes to nonwhite folks. It’s about the content to cause harm.” Big data, he added, simply gives police more ways to do that.

One result was Operation LASER, which was funded with nearly a million dollars from the federal Bureau of Justice Assistance. When they came into contact with someone who seemed suspicious, officers filled out a card with the person’s name, address, physical characteristics, vehicle information, gang affiliation, and criminal history. Each new point of contact with police earned a person one additional point. “There are a lot of chickenshit violations you can stop someone for,” a sergeant explained to Brayne during a ride-along. “Yesterday, this individual might have got stopped because he jaywalked. Today, he might have got stopped because he didn’t use his turn signal or whatever the case might be. So that’s two points.” The sergeant went on to argue that even such minor violations could help police predict the next crime because, taken together, they show “who is out on the streets.”

Such a system means, of course, that individuals in overpoliced neighborhoods can easily get caught up in a vicious cycle where they are, as Brayne writes, “more likely to be stopped, thus increasing their point value, justifying their increased surveillance, and making it more likely that they will be stopped again in the future.” But some of the administrators whom Brayne encountered were apparently less interested in accuracy than they were in amassing more records. The goal, one captain told her, was simply to get people “in the system”: to capture larger and larger amounts of data on seemingly harmless individuals in the hope that the data would help solve a crime later on. Once an officer had a person in the system, they could set an alert to automatically track changes in that person’s profile.

theintercept.com

How the LAPD and Palantir Use Data to Justify Racist Policing

In a new book, a sociologist who spent months embedded with the LAPD details how data-driven policing techwashes bias.
theintercept.com theintercept.com
 
Melt Face Molly Drop said:
Are they opposed to the additional money entirely or just the $2k vs $1400 discrepancy?
Click to expand...
Manchin opposes 2k. And getting rid of the filibuster. and.., etc., etc.

Biden is meeting with 10 repub senators today to discuss their relief bill, which includes only $1,000 checks, so I think it's only a matter of time until they whittle it down to nothing.
 
I've been paying less attention to politics lately and it's increased my mood significantly. I hate that I've given up hope for another stimulus check. If it comes it comes, if not, I dunno... I'm still gainfully employed so I don't really need it. It sucks for those who do. It's just a abomination that we're arguing over such a miniscule amount and it's still not enough. Look at how other countries have given $2000/month. PER MONTH (!!!) since the start of the Pandemic. Our country is fucked.
 
The latest nonsense among some of the Trumpers via QANON is that Trump has videos of Obama, Pelosi and Biden killing children. He is going to present those videos on February 15th, then comes martial law, and Trump is inaugurated on March 3rd after the dems mentioned above are executed for their crimes.
Do people actually believe this? Come on.
 
wokeupnew said:
I've been paying less attention to politics lately and it's increased my mood significantly. I hate that I've given up hope for another stimulus check. If it comes it comes, if not, I dunno... I'm still gainfully employed so I don't really need it. It sucks for those who do. It's just a abomination that we're arguing over such a miniscule amount and it's still not enough. Look at how other countries have given $2000/month. PER MONTH (!!!) since the start of the Pandemic. Our country is fucked.
Click to expand...
Yeah, same. My expectations for the dem majority are as low as they can possibly be, and the pathetic internal bickering over pittance checks isn't doing anything to help that. Every time I see a new article about how they better not fuck it up because it'll clear the way for another authoritarian fascist, I die a bit more. Just stepping away for a bit, while pudding brains like Feinstein and Manchin continue theur campaign to fuck us forever. I need to focus more on state politics anyway.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top