Lykourgos posted:stegosaurus posted:update: got the data to do my train econometrics project.
i asked for ridership data stretching back to 1999 and that caused a lot of problems at utah transit authority HQ it seems, they were only able to find it back to 05 which is fine, but, that's weird, because if some idiot student is going to do basic stats work on some simple data, and that data isn't available, then what kind of analysis are they doing in-house?uh easy, just find some low ranking people and tell them to get you the stats. if the stats seem unusually high or low, ask them if they're sure and tell them what you think the stats should be. then wait until they bring you the correct stats. in-house stats done, mission complete.
edit: because tonight is a full moon lunar eclipse, midnight central until about 4, prim viewing between 2 central and 3:30 central, the moon will be red and blood will pour from the
littlegreenpills posted:whats a fahrenheit
about 25 m (82 ft) above sea level 
c_man posted:its snowing here today
same
conec posted:damb it ok on my nightstand iv had this antique japanese piggy bank well it was a maneki neko not a pig anyway in my sleep i was tossing and turning nd this pushed my pillow further upward on my bed my pillow pushed the cat bank off my nightstand man iv had that thing since i was thirteen or fourteen i love that thing i hav some crafters glue i might glue it back together but this is no way to start off my easter sunday na mean its upsetting i might keep my eyes peeled for a whole new antique japanese lucky cat piggy bank thoe man im real toe up about this shid anyway happy easter everyone peace love
Kintsugi [wikipedia.com]
socialist alternative set up shop. the last trot flameout group here was allegedly the workers international league in the early 00s. start the timer folks. frso has been here since like 2008 or so i think? same people mainly and a lot of turnover outside of the core group but somehow longer lasting than other similar orgs. theyre (socialist alternative) taking over the student organizing at the university of utah that used to have an frso-affiliated RSU group. salt lake community college is main RSU territory now and uvu, in utah valley, which where the rsu originally started, also has its own sa group of unknown origins and composition.
my gf saw a bumper sticker for a group called the 'wasatch socialists' the other day so they exist. they have a blog and presumably a meeting but have been totally unseen otherwise.
the frso suffered a weird split of one here and the guy who was running the police brutality org took teh facebook page with him and is trying to set up a parallel organization with the same name as the one he was forced out of. there were apparently two anti-police brutality protests last night, the frso-affiliated one with 30 people and the split one with less, mainly Anonymous people. i saw pics of the anonymous one and it was literally that 4chan protest picture with nine people in masks standing next to a table in the middle of a courtyard. ive been to some tiny depressing shit but this was next level.
my own project, the newspaper, is stalling cos ive been working so much. the only thing we have to hash out is the mobile theme and then we can set up a meeting and start fuckin crackin on this bullshit. i hate web design so much.
i havent been involved in anything myself since starting a job although i want to go to this anti-injunction protest in ogden where the PD is trying to tell all poor people to stay inside all day basically. but weekly meetings are just out of the question for me now.
Edited by stegosaurus ()
After some discussions between the local branches, PSL, ISO and SA(who are brand new in the city - we'd never seen these people before last year) all formed an electoral organization (San Diego Socialist Campaign) to attempt to win a recently-created and newly-vacant city councilor seat.
Welcome to District 9
Kensington and Talmadge, aggressively conservative white+military homeowners and rich 20somethings respectively, have been placed into the same district as a university hungry for more campus housing and a majority Chican@ population with a large east african refugee presence. City Heights, previously both my home and the home of a number of small-time gangs, has had small sections occasionally demolished to build interstates and commercial districts following the standard gentrification tune that modern san diego has been following since the 90s. City Heights is also the location of Little Saigon, a business district run by South Vietnamese veterans and Operation Babylift refugees. It's a fun place to organize.
This is the current + outgoing city councilor, Marti Emerald.
Look at how representative I am
Previously the representative of a diverse district that largely voted democrat out of habit and rich guilt, when San Diego was redistricted in 2011 she found herself campaigning in City Heights, an area so ignored by the local machines that local party support structures were never created(as a result, the political power players in the District are the NGOs that serve the area and a few unions, whose endorsements are conspicuously absent so far). She's quite disliked locally for being responsible for City Heights' curfew law, which largely targets chican@ + black kids hanging outside after 8PM with a weekly police sweep every friday. local institutional policy wanks also dislike this policy, since city heights has a lower crime rate than many other majority-white parts of town, 'skewing' the 'disproportionate minority contact' stats the DOJ collects, making San Diego look bad. White people want their land occupations to be as invisible as possible I guess.
Meet Sarah Saez
Sarah Saez (previously a staff member of Marti Emerald and on ISO's local periphery) was considering running for office under the D, hoping for Emerald's endorsement. This ended up going to another staff member, her chief of staff. So, Saez joined SDSC with the declared intent to run for office regardless of receiving the group's endorsement or not. When we eventually chose a candidate we were more confident would use the campaign for building a local socialist base and not for personal gain, Saez left the organization. What we didn't expect was for Socialist Alternative to leave as well, deciding to back her campaign until she announced she would run seeking Democrat machine endorsements(city council is nominally partyless), at which point they decided not to support anyone.
At the end of the day the left field is crowded as hell(5 Dems + us), and the right field is meaningless except maybe as vote capture for certain candidates.
Notes for future work
More specific objectives for teams assigned specific geographic areas
More delegation
Timeline campaign progress/goals
Edited by Urbandale ()
also is it izzle-nair or aisle-nair
drwhat posted:also is it izzle-nair or aisle-nair
what
drwhat posted:i don't understand why you would call members of the american democratic party left
many leftists in the area end up voting for democrats in local politics because the local party is somewhat fractured, allowing genuine leftists to run for office under their banner. of course, the machine isnt accidentally built like this (confirmed in a rather interesting discussion with a local central committee member), but is designed to incorporate NGO-workers who would otherwise be depoliticized or 'link with the Greens'.
getfiscal posted:i guess it doesn't really need it's own thread so:
ontario froze the minimum wage at $6.85 / hour in 1995 because a right-wing government won the election that year. when the liberals took power in 2003 they began to increase the wage. there was then a large push by labour unions for a $10 minimum wage. the government agreed to it as part of a limited (joke really) "anti-poverty agenda". the minimum wage was therefore raised over a few years to $10.25 in 2010. because of weak employment numbers the province decided to freeze it for a few years. dalton mcguinty retired and recently a new liberal premier (katheen wynne) took office on a sort of progressive-rhetoric agenda.
wynne kicked the issue to a panel. during this period, social movements coalesced around a $14 demand, especially the unions. wynne announced (before the panel reported) that $14 was off the table. eventually the panel just said things should be indexed to inflation, and the government announced an $11 wage.
so the NDP leader (andrea horwath) announced a few weeks ago that her party would support a $12 minimum wage. this shocked the unions and leftists. some NDP MPPs had been working with minimum wage campaigners and had said they supported a $14 wage, so it was a surprise that they would call for a wage barely more than the liberals. there was a provincial convention since then and there were loud calls to back a $14 minimum wage, and the party bureaucrats essentially intervened to stop the debate from proceeding to a concrete demand for $14. i've seen a district NDP president write that he was outraged that the party had done this.
moreover, horwath said she would twin the increase in the minimum wage (which would happen over two years) with significant cuts in small business taxes, which she said would compensate the businesses for the impact of the additional $1 in wages. leftists have been complaining that this is terrible politics because it suggests that social policies have to be directly bought by concessions to business. i've seen NDP hacks defending the party, saying that a $1 increase is better than nothing, which seems like a pretty sad comment. i mean, a minimum wage worker at only 20 hours a week average would lose $2000 gross a year compared to a $14 wage, and that's the NDP's central poverty plank.
the NDP's basic response is: we're the only game in town. there's no real left party in ontario like there is in quebec, and the union bureaucracy is fused to the NDP in many ways. starting a left party could isolate labour from their shot at goodies from an NDP government, and they don't want to be shut out. the core of the NDP vote in toronto would see 'splitting the left' as crazy and most have a lot of affection for the party of jack layton. people who currently don't vote (or can't, like a lot of immigrants) probably wouldn't care that much about a left-social-democratic party anyways, and it'd probably have a lot of difficulty winning a single seat.
there are tiny countercurrents that suggest alternative modes of politics (the small maoist faction, the anarchists, the worker's assembly), but most of these don't have much weight yet. but it'll be interesting to see how far the union movement stretches again over NDP betrayals.
Update: the minimum wage is going up to 14 in January and 15 a year from then. The leftist countercurrents continue to be mostly weightless.
I think the Liberals did it because they more or less had to, since the 'fight for 15' was gaining a lot of momentum.
Getfiscal we miss u