I wanted a primary, we didn’t get that, and the media is pushing Harris hype really hard right now, just like they pushed for Clinton.

To me, this feels like 2016 all over again, that’s MY visceral reaction. Fucking weird to accuse some one of being an AI because they disagreed with your assessment.

I’d really like details on the kind of policy she would support.

Clinton did win the primary (even without super delegates), so “forced on democrats” is only true in a sense. She was certainly the preferred candidate of party leadership, and they did everything they legally could to help her win. Major center and center left news outlets also seemed to do everything they could to help her win.

But I don’t think harris is any better in that regard. She has not won a primary, Clinton at least managed to win the primary. Arguably Harris has been even more forced upon Democratic voters.

I suspect that this is going to become a huge issue and talking point later on.

I’ve seen Harris put out plenty of her own BS. equivocating and avoiding question she doesn’t want to answer. Again, I want to see real commitment to policy I care about. Not showpersonship, Fingerspitzengefühl or rhetorical capability.

I don’t care much for good personality in politicians, plenty of politicians with great personalities have gone on to do awful things, plenty with awful personalities have done great things. I care far more about the issues they campaign on and policies they’ve pushed through in the past.

Haris seemed to drop and pick up policy positions during the 2020 primary purely based on what her team thought would advance polling numbers. Which makes me skeptical of any claimed positions without concrete evidence of commitment.

I will vote for Harris in that case, but I will not be happy about it. I’d rather be voting for Biden, my mind could be changed on Harris, but she has not earned that yet. After the threat of trump is off the table, the party has a lot of work to do if they want my support and Participation again beyond that.

Honestly, I prefer Biden to her. Haris’s historical political positions are questionable at best to me personally and I don’t trust her in the slightest to implement progressive policies or challenge corporate power. She has co-signed a lot of letters, and sponsored a few bills that sounded good, but never when there was a real chance of them passing, and I’ve seen very little from her that would convince me that was anything but performative.

I’m not crazy about Biden and I think he gave up far to much on a lot of the bills he managed to get through, not to mention that his foreign policy had been a mixed bag, to say the least. But, I’d still rather him be in charge of things.

This is my biggest reservation about the whole replace Biden thing. Suddenly the party is worried about Biden’s electability now? Not when they could have run primaries and had voter input? To me it feels like they always wanted to pick another candidate, but they didn’t want to run a public primary campaign. Perhaps it’s because they wanted to give the right wing propaganda machine less time to demonize the chosen candidate, or maybe insiders at the party were worried the voters in primaries might choose someone they didn’t approve of.

The first seems… I dunno, somewhat reasonable? The second ticks me off though. This all stinks, especially because most of the left of the party is still voicing support for keeping biden. If the party wants to replace Biden with Harris’s they should have had a primary about it, and not just slipped it in last moment.

They talk a lot about the housing crisis in California as the result of over regulation of development, but I think that’s only part of the problem. Even if you stripped out all of the regulations that slow down the process, I doubt we’d be in a much better place in a few years.

Rather we’d have a bunch of new shiny buildings sitting nearly empty because they were built as assets more than as homes, and filling them would depress the price of housing and thus decrease the value of them as assets.

We see this in places like Vancouver, and all over china. China built housing like mad, way to much even, and yet, the cost to buy a house or rent is still sky high in the places people need to work for their jobs.

There is a shortage of housing, and we do need to build more capacity, but, we need to choose how and where we build based on a larger number of metrics than what traditional for profit developers are willing to consider.

I mean, yah, there’s no libs to trigger on right wing sites. And what’s the point of spouting right wing rhetoric if you’re not making someone visibly angry about it?

Also, twitter and Facebook let them all back in, so why go to the shitty knock offs?

News outlets make a fraction of the money they did 3 decades ago, people having previously payed directly for a newspaper. Now they basically have to rely on web page ad revenue and subscriptions which most people won’t sign up for since they can get the news for free somewhere else.

So news outlets understaff to cut costs, leading to more mistakes and less due diligence. journalists get under paid, so independently wealthy people have an easier time taking the positions and pushing personal agendas. And news outlets need outside funding to stay afloat, making them beholden to the interests of those outside interests.

So yah, the quality is worse, objectivity is down, sensationalism is up to drive clicks, and they’re pushing agendas and world views way harder than they used to.

When metrics become targets they cease to be useful metrics.

Worth adding that “unemployment” in this context just means people who are claiming unemployment benefits, a things that runs out, and when they run out, they no longer are counted by it.

Also difficult to claim unemployment if you lose a gig economy job. So many people who lost their “job” doing something like uber eats are not represented.

A better metric is workforce participation rate which is at an all time low. There are a lot of factors to that, including a higher rate of retirement, but that alone does not account for the record low number.

See, it isn’t new and it isn’t AI, but it’s the same line of development as modern LLMs. They’ve just rebranded existing projects and lines of development as “AI technology” to be marketable.

Might be that information about when you do and don’t use the output is helpful for training. Like, if you use the output, good sign the output is good.

That is also for NG plants is the bigger win TBH, coal is such a minor part of power generation in the US these days. Methane powered NG plants also have a worse heating effect as, although it produces less CO2 per BTU, it also has between 5-12% leak rate with in the supply chain, depending on who you ask, and that methane has about 40 times the GHG power as co2.

I do not think any but a slim minority on here seriously believes that Trump is preferable, but being better than trump does not make one immune to criticism and doesn’t entitle Biden to enthusiastic support from people who didn’t want him as the candidate in the first place and only settled on him in the primaries as a compromise.

If a second trump term is as bad as we fear, then the democratic establishment should probably work harder to speak to the concerns of disaffected voters. A failure to make real commitments to pursue significant policy changes is tantamount to voting for trump at this point.

Doing better than trump is a low damn bar.

The consumer confidence index has been on a down ward trend over all since an initial jump with vaccine rollouts. If you pick small parts of the graph and focus on fluctuations that support your argument you can make it look good but if you map it all the way back to the end of lock down, the trend is clear.

There are also other metrics beyond the consumer confidence index, such as Gallup’s economic confidence index which shows the same over all downward trend.

This is just the reality the number show, people are not happy with the sate of the economy and they don’t expect it to get better. Telling people they should be happier because unemployment is low is an awful political strategy.

There are many different metrics that can be used, in politics and campaigns we’ve focused on one set for a while now because it generally gave us an accurate idea of how people were going to feel. If it no longer accurately predicts that, then we need a new set for political discussions.

This is not a case of online spaces filtering experience, nation wide polls and indicators suggest that people are generally unhappy with the economy. To turn around and tell people their wrong for not liking the state of the economy because one set of metrics looks good is tone def at best and political suicide at worst.

This is a serious issue with the Democratic Party right now, they’re relying on metrics and measurements that do not properly reflect the realities of the average voter. It goes beyond just misreading economic numbers, they are struggling to even understand what voters will respond positively to in general.

Many of the questions they ask in polls are somewhat obtuse and don’t touch on what voters think the issue is. They ask “how important is X to you” but be it, immigration, environment, healthcare, or guns. All that question does is tell the party how much to talk about certain issues, not how the voters want them to be addressed or treated.

Decision makers with in the party apparatus have a strategy of working with in narratives that are accepted by the voters they’re trying to court. Narratives crafted and popularized by traditional media/news/journalistic sources. Ideally these narratives would be crafted to best reflect reality, a difficult task that requires a lot of talent and large dedicated staffs. Right now though narratives are being crafted by under staffed, underfunded teams, at the behest of powerful moneyed interests who are keeping news sources afloat; revenues from digital distribution having failed to match that of old print and cable distribution. These same interests provide the bulk of funding for political campaigns.

So narratives are crafted that are divorced from reality the public is experiencing, in a shallow effort to control public opinion, making the public increasingly distrustful over time of these traditional news sources. The party relies on these narratives to communicate with voters. They also takes ques on what policy to support based on how the voters identify with the narratives and what the campaign donors want. But increasingly voters do not identify with the narratives at all, so the party is left speaking past voters trying to speak to narratives that voters ether haven’t seen or are baffled by.