This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

The legal discussion is not exactly the same as US politics. I would imagine that we have people who would like to follow it and people who prefer strongly to avoid it.

For example, today we had these two events and I didn't even look hard.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/barricades-go-up-around-fulton-county-courthouse-as-trump-indictment-looms

Superceding indictment filed in Florida documents case
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653.85.0_1.pdf

Edit: I'm just gonna list the recommendations I found interesting for my future reference

Proudhon - One of the first anarchists. Wrote a lot about mutualism and tried to come up with mechanisms to share resources based on usufruct

The Dispossessed -Describes an alternate society. Supposedly written more like an anthropological study than a narrative

No God's, No Masters - Written by David Graber, who also wrote the 3 Problems with the Revolution

The Dawn of Everything - Talks about the organization structures of early societies

Participatory Economics - Talks about economic organization without compulsion

Walkaway - Recommended when I mentioned stealth anarchism

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I'm gonna be honest, I'm pretty sick of all the existing forms of politics. Conservatives, liberals, progressives, libertarians, I dont feel like I jive with any of them.

The closest thing I've found to a philosophy I can get behind is anarchism, but I'm not really a fan of revolutionary anarchism either. I'm interested in just discussion of the constructive aspects of it. Like how the alternative vision of the world they advocate for works in practice, and what different options there are for implementation.

I find it hard to really get into, because whenever I try to read up on any kind of political philosophy I run into the people who are trying to evangelize and it just really turns me off to the whole thing.

Does anyone have some good reading recommendations that skip past trying to recruit people, and just is a good discussion?

1. What do you think of popular figures like Noam Chomsky, Jason Hickel, Richard Wolff, David Graeber, and Bernie Sanders?

2. Why does grotesque inequality persist? Will the lot of the downtrodden and the oppressed ever improve?

3. What do you think of Anarchism?

Just looking to learn from the community members here. Thanks.

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

https://youtu.be/vodNabH5qoM
But some important context:

Earlier this month I saw a post regarding a Misinformation Susceptibility Test and was curious how 20 binary questions could be an indicator of someones media biases.

I started digging into the related paper and while the methods and analysis was interesting, there was still a lot of questions. So I reached out to Dr Rakoen Maertens who headed the study and we agreed to a discussion on the assessment and his experiences in social psychology.

The video above is an unlisted, unedited cut of the interview and I'd love to get some feedback:

Firstly: I have offered the Dr a tildes invite and he may engage with any questions or discussion. Time was limited and there were a lot of topics that was only briefly touched on or overlooked. Here is the original paper and supplementary resources if you want to see some of the language model work and bigger 100 question tests.

Secondly: I am going to do a more through edit and posting this on a dedicated channel. Since cutting off reddit, twitter and tiktoc; I've sort of rediscovered a love learning and investigations. I'd like to know if people like this form of engagement and discussions. No fancy production, just simply engaging with the research and academics behind topical and interesting ideas.

I'm already reading into fandom psychology, UV reflective paint, children's TV and CO2 scrubbing technology.

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/nonprofit-hospitals-tax-breaks-community-benefit/

POTTSTOWN, Pa. — The public school system here had to scramble in 2018 when the local hospital, newly purchased, was converted to a tax-exempt nonprofit entity.

The takeover by Tower Health meant the 219-bed Pottstown Hospital no longer had to pay federal and state taxes. It also no longer had to pay local property taxes, taking away more than $900,000 a year from the already underfunded Pottstown School District, school officials said.

The district, about an hour’s drive from Philadelphia, had no choice but to trim expenses. It cut teacher aide positions and eliminated middle school foreign language classes.

“We have less curriculum, less coaches, less transportation,” said Superintendent Stephen Rodriguez.

The school system appealed Pottstown Hospital’s new nonprofit status, and earlier this year a state court struck down the facility’s property tax break. It cited the “eye-popping” compensation for multiple Tower Health executives as contrary to how Pennsylvania law defines a charity.

The court decision, which Tower Health is appealing, stunned the nonprofit hospital industry, which includes roughly 3,000 nongovernment tax-exempt hospitals nationwide.

“The ruling sent a warning shot to all nonprofit hospitals, highlighting that their state and local tax exemptions, which are often greater than their federal income tax exemptions, can be challenged by state and local courts,” said Ge Bai, a health policy expert at Johns Hopkins University.

The Pottstown case reflects the growing scrutiny of how much the nation’s nonprofit hospitals spend — and on what — to justify billions in state and federal tax breaks. In exchange for these savings, hospitals are supposed to provide community benefits, like care for those who can’t afford it and free health screenings.

More than a dozen states have considered or passed legislation to better define charity care, to increase transparency about the benefits hospitals provide, or, in some cases, to set minimum financial thresholds for charitable help to their communities.

The growing interest in how tax-exempt hospitals operate — from lawmakers, the public, and the media — has coincided with a stubborn increase in consumers’ medical debt. KFF Health News reported last year that more than 100 million Americans are saddled with medical bills they can’t pay, and has documented aggressive bill-collection practices by hospitals, many of them nonprofits.

(article continues)

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

Child labor is making a comeback with a vengeance. A striking number of lawmakers are undertaking concerted efforts to weaken or repeal statutes that have long prevented (or at least seriously inhibited) the possibility of exploiting children.

Take a breath and consider this: the number of kids at work in the U.S. increased by 37% between 2015 and 2022. During the last two years, 14 states have either introduced or enacted legislation rolling back regulations that governed the number of hours children can be employed, lowered the restrictions on dangerous work, and legalized subminimum wages for youths.

Iowa now allows those as young as 14 to work in industrial laundries. At age 16, they can take jobs in roofing, construction, excavation, and demolition and can operate power-driven machinery. Fourteen-year-olds can now even work night shifts and once they hit 15 can join assembly lines. All of this was, of course, prohibited not so long ago.

Legislators offer fatuous justifications for such incursions into long-settled practice. Working, they tell us, will get kids off their computers or video games or away from the TV. Or it will strip the government of the power to dictate what children can and can’t do, leaving parents in control — a claim already transformed into fantasy by efforts to strip away protective legislation and permit 14-year-old kids to work without formal parental permission.

In 2014, the Cato Institute, a right-wing think tank, published “A Case Against Child Labor Prohibitions,” arguing that such laws stifled opportunity for poor — and especially Black — children. The Foundation for Government Accountability, a think tank funded by a range of wealthy conservative donors including the DeVos family, has spearheaded efforts to weaken child-labor laws, and Americans for Prosperity, the billionaire Koch brothers’ foundation, has joined in.

https://tomdispatch.com/caution-children-at-work/#:~:text=The%20Covid%2D19%20pandemic%20of,distinct%20sign%20of%20social%20pathology.

Here is a Robert Frost poem related to the subject of the article. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53087/out-out

I'm GenX and I worked as a teen, but my earliest jobs were babysitting, not industrial labor.