I agree with much of that (I think buses should be free, but I'd accept massive social spending in return for having to pay for the bus).
I think the gentrification discourse in this country is completely broken, both because the "neocololnialism" side become anti-development absolutists, and because the "Can you believe they're preventing supply with this 'neocolonialism argument?!" side aren't pushing development in the SFH neighborhoods where the rich white people live (in Austin, e.g., this is a much larger and closer-in portion of the city core than the traditionally black and Hispanic East Side, but YIMBYs get way more pissed about anti-gentrification than they do about wealthy white NIMBYs who could hit high rises with a football from their yards... their yards, I repeat), and I think YIMBs are cavalier about displacement, but that's a long conversation.
For tranmission lines, those protests are mostly small, right? And largely occur when they are high voltage lines going through suburbs? Which, I get it, I wouldn't want those lines going near my home either (I grew up with high voltage lines near my home, and standing under those things was an experience). Which also reminds me, one of the biggest problems we have as a country is the suburbs.
How do environmental impact studies stop power plants from freezing?
I dunno, but stronger safety and reliability regulation (e.g., weatherization requirements) does, which is something Texas had pretty much none of in 2021 (and has little of in 2024).
It also helps that the vast majority of Texas land is privately owned, but those mesas aren't good for much except looking at, so one of the best ways for those landowners to make money is to put wind or solar farms on it.
It further helps that Texas makes a lot of wind units itself. My gym is off one of Austin's major US highways, and at least once a week when pulling in or out of the parking lot, I get stuck behind a wide load carrying blades for wind turbines. This makes putting them in West Texas a lot cheaper, though of course having so many windfarms in West Texas makes building them here profitable.
'Tis true that Texas doesn't do environmental impact stories. This is also why Tesla, the Boring Company, and Space X can operate so cheaply (and so damagingly) here.
Texas does have its own dangers for renewables investors, though. You might recall that in 2021, about a third of the state was without power for as long as a week (we were without power for 3 1/2 days), mostly during the state's longest recorded streak of below freezing temperatures (almost 100 hours in Austin). The main culprit during that disaster, which likely killed hundreds of people, was frozen natural gas plants, but the governor, legislature, and at least one of our Senators, were quick to blame solar and wind (much of the latter also froze). This is because the safety and reliability of energy production of all types in Texas is also poorly regulated (if it was at all, back then).
On the bright side, during that massive power outage, some producers make a fortune.
There was a day, sometime in October or November, when 80% of Texas' power came from either renewables (70% solar and wind) or nuclear (10%). There are obvious environmental advantages for Texas when it comes to renewables (e.g., a huge area full of giant mesas that get a sh*t ton of wind, and whole weeks where there are no detectable clouds over the entire state), but it's weird that a state with an economy still heavily built on oil (and now natural gas) is doing so well compared to the rest of the country.
Yeah, I've known people with H1-Bs who were able to line up jobs before quitting one, and were fine, but I've known others who were laid off and had to find a new job in a panic, or who were stuck in shite jobs because they couldn't easily find a new one. At least some employers clearly recognize their leverage, as well.
Fair enough. I say this as someone who has harbored a deep, abiding dislike of Biden since I first became aware of him in the 90s: I would not be surprised to learn than the people making decisions on his behalf have more malleable principles than he, to the extent that they have any.
Given that Biden campaigned on abolishing the federal death penalty, stating that he believed that if the federal version was abolished, states would follow, I think it's possible to see this as a betrayal of his stated principles. The question is why: has he found wiggle room in those principles for "terrorists" (a term that we should absolutely banish from our political and criminal lexicons, but I digress)? Or is the betrayal of principles based on political calculations? I am inclined to believe it's the latter, even though he is a lame duck president who'll never run for office again, because ultimately he's a team player.
Still would have been better if he'd commuted them all.
I agree with you on people's reactions to Nassar's stabbing and similar cases. I think people are very inconsistent in their application of their principles in such cases, because they let their understandable disgust for the individual guide their moral judgment, which is always a mistake.
I dunno about where you live (wait, your in San Fran? Then yes, I do know about where you live), but liberals are some of the most ghoulish people when it comes to the homeless. Hell, the Democratic governor of California, whom many believe to be a likely top candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, is about as bad as it is possible to be on the issue.
I currently live in one of the most Democratic-voting areas of Austin (I think we've had the highest percentage Democratic vote share in the city in the last two presidential elections and the midterm in between). We have the currently most liberal city council member (though another district just voted a likely more liberal one in), and the neighborhood is filled with "In This House" signs, but the neighborhood Facebook and Nextdoor pages were full of pure, unadulterated hatred for the homeless during the city's homelessness debates and votes over the last few years, including the 2022 election.
So yeah, I don't think "they didn't vote for Democrats even though they want to humanize the homelessness" is the gotcha you think it is.
And again, this isn't idle speculation. There is an entire empirical literature on how labels affect the way we represent people and things, and specifically about their essentializing tendencies.
I realize the ghouls and members of the political peanut gallery may not care, but we're talking about one of the most vulnerable populations in the country, and every tool to further humanize them is important.
Language plays a big role in how we see and treat people. If you don't believe that, it's unlikely I'm going to convince you, but I've got some studies and books I can point you to. You can also see the post I linked discussing the importance of labels.
In a past life, I was a cognitive psychologist who studied kowledge representation, including analogical reasoning, concepts and categories, and long-term episodic memory, and one of the projects I worked on back then was the role of labels in concept/category representation, so yes, I know.
I mean, of course I know that changing a label to reduce essentializing homelessness is not going to fix the homelessness crisis, or immediately and on its own make everyone stop treating people who are homeless like they're less human, but it's one tool in the arsenal, and it's something that people who work with the homeless take very seriously, so I'm all for including it in the language the government uses when working with the people who work with the homeless.
Again, no one's telling you that you need to stop calling them "homeless people." This is about the language service providers use at the local level, and most of them are probably already using this language (most of WIOA, previously WIA, language changes over the years have been driven by field staff and local/state policy folks).
I definitely understand that language is part of the power game, and I get why people would fight against some kinds of language changes, because language is itself quite powerful. In this case, it seems to be people who've gotten used to getting upset about everything as though it were woke power move. I mean, getting upset about "opportunity youth," which might be the most corporate-ass language in the bill, is very silly. Getting upset about language designed to humanize the homeless is, well, it's sick.
What's particularly funny is that this language wasn't put in there by bleeding heart liberals. While it's true that a bunch of the writing came out of the Senate HELP Committee, chaired by Bernie Sanders (to the left of the Democratic Party, but not aligned with the "woke" wing), this wasn't a Bernie bill (and the ranking member was at least as involved), with language largely from the Department of Labor, which isn't a bastion of liberalism.
Furthermore, the language in the bill had to go through the hands of every state, and I promise you the labor/workforce people in states like Alabama, Tennessee, or Texas, aren't the least bit woke. I know even some red states have already adopted this language (and similar changes in other areas covered by the bill).
That a bunch of online trolls have now latched onto it is a pretty good example of how messed up our political discourse is.
This is just silly. This language doesn't affect clear thinking in any way, and as I mentioned (and wrote about here, once upon a time), labels do matter. There's a reason people in the field say "experiencing homelessness" instead of "homeless," and there's a reason Federal agencies would want to align with that language, and it's not language policing. Literally no one is policing your language here. You are the language police in this case, and you look as utterly unserious, but many times more ghoulish, than the people pushing "latinx" a few years ago.
It's not a focus. It's literally just the change of some terminology in the definitions section of the sort that you'd find in literally any bill. Y'all are just being utterly ridiculous.
It was a real bill. They added it to the CR as a sort of consent agenda item.
Sounds like there's a non-trivial chance it'll go independently now. If the anti-woke keep it from passing because of this sort of thing, it will be a pretty clear indication that y'all are wholly unserious people.
You can also find this language in federal work on the old bill going back to at least 2015 (the current version of the bill passed in 2014): https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2015/04/16/2015-05530/workforce-innovation-and-opportunity-act-notice-of-proposed-rulemaking
That's not true (I know for a fact), but if it were, it would suggest that we live in a truly dysfunctional country, that the words "Opportunity Youth" and "Experiencing Homelessness" would tank a bill.
(I've been reading drafts of and comments on the reauthorization bill for more than a year.)
If you want a more pragmatic reason for the change, it better aligns the language of the bill with the language of service providers and others in the field.
The way we talk about things changes the way we think about them. The labels we use have a pretty significant effect on how we represent people and things. This is not just me, a lefty, talking about it, but decades of research in psychology. For example, instead of labeling someone a carrot eater, saying they eat carrots, changes the way we think about them, specifically making us less likely to see eating carrots as an immutable property that says something about who they are as a person. It's possible that doing the same with homelessness will similarly encourage people to think of people who are homeless without essentializing the homelessness.
Man, you're old enough, smart enough, and well-read enough, to know that language changes constantly, and official language frequently. No one's telling you use "people experiencing homelessness," or "the houseless," instead of "homeless," but people actually working with such people new terms in order to better humanize a population that a huge portion of the country, liberals and conservatives, pretty consistently dehumanizes. Objecting to this is straight up ghoulishness. Seriously, it's just downright disturbing how hard y'all are looking for reasons to be angry. You don't have to look hard: shite is fished up, and it's not because we're calling homeless people something new.
As for the awesomeness of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunities Act, I think that it is awesome enough to be voted on as something standalone rather than part of a silly CR to get us to February.
My impression is that it got attached to this out of laziness: it was unobjectionable, and they didn't want to work a moment longer than necessary, so they attached it to the larger deal instead of having to go through the process separately. It'll probably get passed separately now, assuming the language police don't object to "opportunity Youth" as a service distinction.
Section 111, Page 958: Redefines “out of school youth” to “opportunity youth.”
These are all, I believe, part of the reauthorization of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunities Act, and I find it very odd that anyone would single them out as bad. On the one hand, "experiencing homelessness" is pretty standard language now, and "out-of-school youth" is a distinction primarily concerning the sorts of services states are required to provide people within a certain age range, and I believe the label "opportunity youth" is a phrase in long use meant to define them not merely by their school status.
I believe WIOA reauthorization got attached to this bill primarily because enough support from both parties that it was just assumed it would pass without objection. It's so weird that anti-woke people are so obsessed with finding wokeness that they'd object to something because they don't like the word "experiencing."
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Open Mic for the week of 12/30/2024”
I agree with much of that (I think buses should be free, but I'd accept massive social spending in return for having to pay for the bus).
I think the gentrification discourse in this country is completely broken, both because the "neocololnialism" side become anti-development absolutists, and because the "Can you believe they're preventing supply with this 'neocolonialism argument?!" side aren't pushing development in the SFH neighborhoods where the rich white people live (in Austin, e.g., this is a much larger and closer-in portion of the city core than the traditionally black and Hispanic East Side, but YIMBYs get way more pissed about anti-gentrification than they do about wealthy white NIMBYs who could hit high rises with a football from their yards... their yards, I repeat), and I think YIMBs are cavalier about displacement, but that's a long conversation.
For tranmission lines, those protests are mostly small, right? And largely occur when they are high voltage lines going through suburbs? Which, I get it, I wouldn't want those lines going near my home either (I grew up with high voltage lines near my home, and standing under those things was an experience). Which also reminds me, one of the biggest problems we have as a country is the suburbs.
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Somehow misthreated this reply to James K.
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How do environmental impact studies stop power plants from freezing?
I dunno, but stronger safety and reliability regulation (e.g., weatherization requirements) does, which is something Texas had pretty much none of in 2021 (and has little of in 2024).
"
It also helps that the vast majority of Texas land is privately owned, but those mesas aren't good for much except looking at, so one of the best ways for those landowners to make money is to put wind or solar farms on it.
It further helps that Texas makes a lot of wind units itself. My gym is off one of Austin's major US highways, and at least once a week when pulling in or out of the parking lot, I get stuck behind a wide load carrying blades for wind turbines. This makes putting them in West Texas a lot cheaper, though of course having so many windfarms in West Texas makes building them here profitable.
"
'Tis true that Texas doesn't do environmental impact stories. This is also why Tesla, the Boring Company, and Space X can operate so cheaply (and so damagingly) here.
Texas does have its own dangers for renewables investors, though. You might recall that in 2021, about a third of the state was without power for as long as a week (we were without power for 3 1/2 days), mostly during the state's longest recorded streak of below freezing temperatures (almost 100 hours in Austin). The main culprit during that disaster, which likely killed hundreds of people, was frozen natural gas plants, but the governor, legislature, and at least one of our Senators, were quick to blame solar and wind (much of the latter also froze). This is because the safety and reliability of energy production of all types in Texas is also poorly regulated (if it was at all, back then).
On the bright side, during that massive power outage, some producers make a fortune.
"
There was a day, sometime in October or November, when 80% of Texas' power came from either renewables (70% solar and wind) or nuclear (10%). There are obvious environmental advantages for Texas when it comes to renewables (e.g., a huge area full of giant mesas that get a sh*t ton of wind, and whole weeks where there are no detectable clouds over the entire state), but it's weird that a state with an economy still heavily built on oil (and now natural gas) is doing so well compared to the rest of the country.
On “Open Mic for the week of 12/23/2024”
Yeah, I've known people with H1-Bs who were able to line up jobs before quitting one, and were fine, but I've known others who were laid off and had to find a new job in a panic, or who were stuck in shite jobs because they couldn't easily find a new one. At least some employers clearly recognize their leverage, as well.
On “The Immigration Thing”
Interesting to see you and Musk joining Bernie on the H1B reform. He's been trying to pass similar reforms for years.
On “Joe Biden Agrees that Some People *DO* Deserve the Death Penalty”
Fair enough. I say this as someone who has harbored a deep, abiding dislike of Biden since I first became aware of him in the 90s: I would not be surprised to learn than the people making decisions on his behalf have more malleable principles than he, to the extent that they have any.
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Given that Biden campaigned on abolishing the federal death penalty, stating that he believed that if the federal version was abolished, states would follow, I think it's possible to see this as a betrayal of his stated principles. The question is why: has he found wiggle room in those principles for "terrorists" (a term that we should absolutely banish from our political and criminal lexicons, but I digress)? Or is the betrayal of principles based on political calculations? I am inclined to believe it's the latter, even though he is a lame duck president who'll never run for office again, because ultimately he's a team player.
Still would have been better if he'd commuted them all.
I agree with you on people's reactions to Nassar's stabbing and similar cases. I think people are very inconsistent in their application of their principles in such cases, because they let their understandable disgust for the individual guide their moral judgment, which is always a mistake.
On “Open Mic for the week of 12/16/2024”
I dunno about where you live (wait, your in San Fran? Then yes, I do know about where you live), but liberals are some of the most ghoulish people when it comes to the homeless. Hell, the Democratic governor of California, whom many believe to be a likely top candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, is about as bad as it is possible to be on the issue.
I currently live in one of the most Democratic-voting areas of Austin (I think we've had the highest percentage Democratic vote share in the city in the last two presidential elections and the midterm in between). We have the currently most liberal city council member (though another district just voted a likely more liberal one in), and the neighborhood is filled with "In This House" signs, but the neighborhood Facebook and Nextdoor pages were full of pure, unadulterated hatred for the homeless during the city's homelessness debates and votes over the last few years, including the 2022 election.
So yeah, I don't think "they didn't vote for Democrats even though they want to humanize the homelessness" is the gotcha you think it is.
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Precisely.
And again, this isn't idle speculation. There is an entire empirical literature on how labels affect the way we represent people and things, and specifically about their essentializing tendencies.
I realize the ghouls and members of the political peanut gallery may not care, but we're talking about one of the most vulnerable populations in the country, and every tool to further humanize them is important.
"
Language plays a big role in how we see and treat people. If you don't believe that, it's unlikely I'm going to convince you, but I've got some studies and books I can point you to. You can also see the post I linked discussing the importance of labels.
In a past life, I was a cognitive psychologist who studied kowledge representation, including analogical reasoning, concepts and categories, and long-term episodic memory, and one of the projects I worked on back then was the role of labels in concept/category representation, so yes, I know.
I mean, of course I know that changing a label to reduce essentializing homelessness is not going to fix the homelessness crisis, or immediately and on its own make everyone stop treating people who are homeless like they're less human, but it's one tool in the arsenal, and it's something that people who work with the homeless take very seriously, so I'm all for including it in the language the government uses when working with the people who work with the homeless.
Again, no one's telling you that you need to stop calling them "homeless people." This is about the language service providers use at the local level, and most of them are probably already using this language (most of WIOA, previously WIA, language changes over the years have been driven by field staff and local/state policy folks).
"
I definitely understand that language is part of the power game, and I get why people would fight against some kinds of language changes, because language is itself quite powerful. In this case, it seems to be people who've gotten used to getting upset about everything as though it were woke power move. I mean, getting upset about "opportunity youth," which might be the most corporate-ass language in the bill, is very silly. Getting upset about language designed to humanize the homeless is, well, it's sick.
"
What's particularly funny is that this language wasn't put in there by bleeding heart liberals. While it's true that a bunch of the writing came out of the Senate HELP Committee, chaired by Bernie Sanders (to the left of the Democratic Party, but not aligned with the "woke" wing), this wasn't a Bernie bill (and the ranking member was at least as involved), with language largely from the Department of Labor, which isn't a bastion of liberalism.
Furthermore, the language in the bill had to go through the hands of every state, and I promise you the labor/workforce people in states like Alabama, Tennessee, or Texas, aren't the least bit woke. I know even some red states have already adopted this language (and similar changes in other areas covered by the bill).
That a bunch of online trolls have now latched onto it is a pretty good example of how messed up our political discourse is.
"
This is just silly. This language doesn't affect clear thinking in any way, and as I mentioned (and wrote about here, once upon a time), labels do matter. There's a reason people in the field say "experiencing homelessness" instead of "homeless," and there's a reason Federal agencies would want to align with that language, and it's not language policing. Literally no one is policing your language here. You are the language police in this case, and you look as utterly unserious, but many times more ghoulish, than the people pushing "latinx" a few years ago.
"
It's not a focus. It's literally just the change of some terminology in the definitions section of the sort that you'd find in literally any bill. Y'all are just being utterly ridiculous.
"
It was a real bill. They added it to the CR as a sort of consent agenda item.
Sounds like there's a non-trivial chance it'll go independently now. If the anti-woke keep it from passing because of this sort of thing, it will be a pretty clear indication that y'all are wholly unserious people.
"
You can also find this language in federal work on the old bill going back to at least 2015 (the current version of the bill passed in 2014): https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2015/04/16/2015-05530/workforce-innovation-and-opportunity-act-notice-of-proposed-rulemaking
"
That's not true (I know for a fact), but if it were, it would suggest that we live in a truly dysfunctional country, that the words "Opportunity Youth" and "Experiencing Homelessness" would tank a bill.
(I've been reading drafts of and comments on the reauthorization bill for more than a year.)
If you want a more pragmatic reason for the change, it better aligns the language of the bill with the language of service providers and others in the field.
"
The way we talk about things changes the way we think about them. The labels we use have a pretty significant effect on how we represent people and things. This is not just me, a lefty, talking about it, but decades of research in psychology. For example, instead of labeling someone a carrot eater, saying they eat carrots, changes the way we think about them, specifically making us less likely to see eating carrots as an immutable property that says something about who they are as a person. It's possible that doing the same with homelessness will similarly encourage people to think of people who are homeless without essentializing the homelessness.
On “From The Wall Street Journal: How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge”
I mean, he had to, right? They seemed pretty tight, so Obama would definitely have noticed the difference.
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I find it hard to see a guy whose entire brand is Ultrarich leads a peasant revolt, but meh.
On “Open Mic for the week of 12/16/2024”
Man, you're old enough, smart enough, and well-read enough, to know that language changes constantly, and official language frequently. No one's telling you use "people experiencing homelessness," or "the houseless," instead of "homeless," but people actually working with such people new terms in order to better humanize a population that a huge portion of the country, liberals and conservatives, pretty consistently dehumanizes. Objecting to this is straight up ghoulishness. Seriously, it's just downright disturbing how hard y'all are looking for reasons to be angry. You don't have to look hard: shite is fished up, and it's not because we're calling homeless people something new.
As for the awesomeness of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunities Act, I think that it is awesome enough to be voted on as something standalone rather than part of a silly CR to get us to February.
My impression is that it got attached to this out of laziness: it was unobjectionable, and they didn't want to work a moment longer than necessary, so they attached it to the larger deal instead of having to go through the process separately. It'll probably get passed separately now, assuming the language police don't object to "opportunity Youth" as a service distinction.
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Section 102, Page 947: Redefines “homeless individuals” to “individuals experiencing homelessness.”
Section 102, Page 947: Redefines “homeless children” to “children experiencing homelessness.”
Section 111, Page 958: Redefines “out of school youth” to “opportunity youth.”
These are all, I believe, part of the reauthorization of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunities Act, and I find it very odd that anyone would single them out as bad. On the one hand, "experiencing homelessness" is pretty standard language now, and "out-of-school youth" is a distinction primarily concerning the sorts of services states are required to provide people within a certain age range, and I believe the label "opportunity youth" is a phrase in long use meant to define them not merely by their school status.
I believe WIOA reauthorization got attached to this bill primarily because enough support from both parties that it was just assumed it would pass without objection. It's so weird that anti-woke people are so obsessed with finding wokeness that they'd object to something because they don't like the word "experiencing."
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.