At times it is good to review the Declaration of Independence. When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth

The real Xmas miracle is thinking Katherine Murphy is one of the nation’s best political writers, and that The Guardian is left-wing.
She’s not.
It’s not.
Confusing #ScottyFromHillsong with the PM shows how effectively the PMO spins stuff to the Gallery.

Like her colleagues on #Insiders, Murphy laps up the spin and regurgitates it as her special sauce insight.

It’s not insightful, it’s just stenographic repetition of a failing ideology.
It starts from the false premise that our game of mates system is a democracy.
It’s not.

Journalists love to separate base and superstructure as if the political sphere operates independently from the economy.
It doesn’t.
Capitalism requires a veneer of political democracy built on commodity fetishism to mask the economic inequality that is endemic.
Gallery is blind

to this glaring contradiction because they buy into the systemic lie that a formal equality of opportunity exists and that through application of the Protestant work ethic anybody can become a member of the wealthy elite.
They can’t.
Class inequalities are an essential feature

of capitalism and papering them over with idealist gibberish about democracy just perpetuates class divisions.
Journalists don’t see it because they are incapable of critical, independent, materialist analysis.
They cling to the Fourth Estate delusion of objectivity and balance

Hello everyone arguing about the #minimumwage! Someday I'll post a thread about the evidence our @UW team compiled in Seattle.

Today let's talk about hours.

Raise the wage on most low-paying jobs & workers still don't have enough to live on. Because they can't get enough hours.

The graph above is based on data from WA: one of only 4 states that collects systematic data on hours worked. It shows information for anyone earning under $11/hr in 2014-15, when the minimum wage was no more than $9.47.

The data have some important limitations:

-No information on gig/contractor employment
-No "informal" employment
-No jobs outside WA

However if a worker is holding 2+ job we can "see" all of them and include them all in calculating how many hours they work.

The median low wage worker works ~800 hours per year.

With a $15 minimum wage, working 800 hours/year, your annual income works out to $12,000.

That's below the poverty line for a single person, and less than half the poverty line for a family of 4.

Whereas if you could get full time hours (2,000/year) your income would be $30k.

The problem with low wage work (aside from low wages): these jobs tend to be unstable, seasonal, or offered by employers that need a large workforce for a limited number of hours per week.

Since the minimum wage is specified in dollars/hour, it can't guarantee a living income.

Well, UCP supporters, are you happy NOW? What is it going to take, for you to open your eyes, and realize that @jkenney & the @UCPCaucus is f***ing incompetent?
Good god you bunch of drooling idiots.
You threatened the lives of @RachelNotley @SPhillipsAB & other NPD officials>

2/ , their staffers, & their supporters, for passing legislation to protect employees (HOW DARE THEY want people to be safe! The HORROR!) and protecting natural areas of this province.
You SCREAMED about not enough consultation on BigHorn. So you tell me - where the F*** was >

On this day of (mis)/remembering MLK, I think about the promise of Latin America’s pink tide (into which I was born and which molded me politically) to deliver economic redistribution and socialism by peaceful means, a version of MLKs dream. 🧵

In the past 20 years, various spots in Latin/Central America have been the murder capitals of the world. It remains the most dangerous place in the hemisphere to be a journalist or a politician. A half century of coups and counter-coups have beleaguered the continent

Collapsing global economies have left many countries behind, and almost all are struggling to find an economic path forward, including Vnzla which now under US sanctions and dwindling reserves must construct a post-petrol economy to survive and has failed to begin to do so.

MLK’s peaceful vision for racial and economic transformation in the US made him into an enemy of the state for whom racial and economic violence is both foundational and necessary for its hegemony and he was murdered by those complicit in that mission of domination.

Allende, MLK’s contemporary, succeeded in achieving part of MLKs vision by winning a democratic mandate for social justice and transformation at the ballot box and without firing a single bullet. This made him into an enemy of a faraway State, the US, and he was murdered for it.

@ADuvsLife He's ignoring everything, essentially. In the short-term, we're already seeing delays at the ports, which has a very basic impact on getting stuff into distribution centres in the first place. Every DC has a limited number of loading bays for in & outbound ...

Trucks have defined delivery slots for drop-offs and pick-ups - think of it like a doctor's appointment list - they must be there in their 30-60 minute window, or else the haulier gets fined. And DCs operate 24/7. So if 10 trucks miss their slots because of a logjam at the ports

It's not just a case of squeezing them into another window - there *is* no spare slot (or hardly any). So you can't easily catch up. And once a delivery slot at the DC is missed, that has a knock-effect. A missed inbound delivery means outbound trucks leave without their stock

And stores don't receive their orders (which are placed on a just-in-time basis anyway - your average Tesco actually has a very small warehouse space, as almost all of its stock goes straight to shelves)

Now Tesco can mitigate this for tinned/dry food by forward-ordering stockpiles, but this is a squeeze to fit extra delivery trucks in, and there's only so much extra space in their DCs, so they can only forward-buy so much

@spyrosmakrid and his team listen to the community's feedback and offer, within a window of three years, two fantastic, insightful and impactful forecasting competitions, the M4 and M5. I am tired with all the "sceptics" that try to dismiss the competitions' results.
1/8

First, the ongoing discussion on error measures. It seems that everyone in the forecasting community has devised their own measures, and if someone is using another one then s/he is doomed. The real question is: does the chosen error measure fit the purpose of the exercise?
2/8

Second, the disbelief on the results especially from people that did not participate in the competitions. I have said that before, but skin in the game is important in forecasting (if you want to call your self a forecaster).
3/8

The fact that a method won a competition does not mean that it will win all future competitions. But, there are important lessons to be learnt. In the case of M3 and Theta: the value of information decomposition. In the case of M4 & M5: the value of cross-learning.
4/8

Such insights should be taken into account when designing future methods and algorithms. Since 2000, I have seen many new implementations of the Theta method that have improved on the original proposition. The same will surely be the case with the top methods of M4 & M5.
5/8

Today Gardaí pepper sprayed, tasered and shot dead a young Black man with mental health issues. There will be an ombudsman inquiry, as there always is in the case of a death at the hands of Gardai. Some thoughts...

There have been many such deaths at the hands of police in the UK over the years. So many of them involve mental health issues. The @IRR_News has recorded many of those.

Police are rarely disciplined for the use of lethal force in the case of mental health issues, because the decision is based on the balance of threat versus force.

Butp police are not mental health specialists, and they make a judgement on the perceived safety of officers. Those judgements on threat are often based in biases that perceive ethnic minorities, particularly people of African descent, as more aggressive.

Policing of Black communities worldwide suffers from this bias problem, as do investigations into lethal force by police.
Police services rarely acknowledge these biases, nor do those bodies that investigate them.

Outside the Capitol now. A crowd is starting to gather. Definitely larger than the previous ones I've seen.

Signs spotted so far:

'Knucklehead Gordon's
'Legislature must convene, fix election fraud.'
'Masks don't work.'

One counter protestor on the corner.

It's started.

Clem: "we are here because we love our freedom, and because the man in that building is a tyrant."

Several hundred people here. Shouts of 'RINO' in the crowd. A few rifles on display.

"Only legislators can make law," he said. Said there was no public input on the health orders.

1/
May 12, 2020, is when about 1/2 million Orthodox Jews, said enough is enough.

It was Lag Baomer, the day we celebrate Rav Shimon bar Yochai (Rashbi).

It's been said on him in the Talmud so many unbelievable statements.

2/
”The WHOLE WORLD can be saved on his merit”

"Rabbi Shimon should be trusted in times of distress"

He was the holiest of holy, his Kabbalistic teachings, are the only Jewish teachings, that is been studied around the world, I always wondered why.

3)
May 12 came, and we saw what was happening.

Our kids were starting to go crazy.

We couldn't do this anymore!

His day was the day we did it!

There were bonfires all over NY and NJ...

With crowds of thousands dancing and singing in honor of Rashbi.

4/

We all felt like doing it for Rashbi, we are in good hands.

And nothing happened!

No one got sick.

People started coming out of their holes.

It was working, so why not do it?!

And now I believe the world is ready to move on!

5/

I believe 1/2 million humans, for 7 months challenges Covid from the ground up; in a capacity where it's impossible to deny the facts.

We thoroughly challenged the masks, social distancing, dining, capacity, schools, and everything that goes along with it.

1/ #TERF From my friend, Jodi Mae F. who understands #IDPol and what it does. This trans issue is not exempt, but part and parcel of it. It is a divisive tactic. THREAD!

I was involved in getting the #oxfordvaccine @JennerInstitute manufacturing process and consortium up and running. Here is a thread of why there is an issue with doses, with some science and #sciencepolicy. The EU looks in the wrong to me.

To make the vaccine, you need to grow up a huge volume of cells, they make the vaccine, then the vaccine is purified. The manufacturing process is new. It relies on elements used before, but each new process has its own parameters.

That means each manufacturing site has to on board the exact process and get it running. Usually this takes many months, but is being done urgently for COVID.

When you book manufacturing capacity, you are booking the manufacturing slot. It might take 2 weeks to make a batch of vaccine. With a new process, you always get the same vaccine, but the yield can vary.

Maybe a good yield is a million doses per run (in reality, it depends on how big your cell culture is). But maybe the first few runs only yield 250 thousand doses.

Beginning to learn and understand that my "inner critic" - the voice that harshly criticizes and shames me - is only and has always only been attempting to protect me, to act to curtail or stop behavior that in the past has gotten us harmed - has made dealing w/it much easier.

Not "easy" or "pleasant," because the inner critic still shows up only when it wants to yell that we need to stop doing something immediately b/c of how we have previously been hurt. As a protector it still attempts to mostly communicate with goads of fear and shaming.

But understanding the roots of that fear and shaming, that self-policing behavior, has allowed me to respond to it with compassion, and that has been transformative. Being able to hear and endure the shaming as what it is - a protective reflex born from a child's fear & pain;

has enabled me to view it in that proper context, the same way I would view a child screaming in fear, and receive it gently and warmly, thank it for trying to protect me, and attempt to de-escalate the fearful predictions of catastrophe.

Not having to receive these still-aversive messages from a place of anger and hurt - from a place of "why is this voice saying such terrible things, I am so angry at this piece of myself that wants to protect me," has reduced the stress of inner critic interruptions considerably.

We are live for the Kevin Clinesmith sentencing hearing.

Clinesmith is charged with altering an email - falsifying a document - in an effort to get the 4th Carter Page FISA warrant.

Judge Boasberg has entered the hearing.

Follow this thread for updates.