Blackbeard

Late in Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) dodged a question about whether he and running mate Donald Trump would accept the 2024 election results by pivoting to a favorite topic: what he called the “censorship” of Americans by social media companies, terming it “a much bigger threat to democracy.”

His statement drew on a years-long Republican contention that Silicon Valley tech giants have suppressed conservative views on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. That narrative has underpinned congressional hearings, Republican fundraising campaigns, the dismantling of academic research centers, Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, state laws seeking to restrict online content moderation, and multiple lawsuits that reached the Supreme Court this year.

But is it true? Well, yes and no, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Conservatives and Trump supporters are indeed more likely to have their posts on major social media platforms taken down or their accounts suspended than are liberals and Joe Biden supporters, researchers from Oxford University, MIT and other institutions found. But that doesn’t necessarily mean content moderation is biased.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20457749

Over the past 15 years, North Carolina lawmakers have rejected limits on construction on steep slopes, which might have reduced the number of homes lost to landslides; blocked a rule requiring homes to be elevated above the height of an expected flood; weakened protections for wetlands, increasing the risk of dangerous storm water runoff; and slowed the adoption of updated building codes, making it harder for the state to qualify for federal climate-resilience grants.

Those decisions reflect the influence of North Carolina’s home building industry, which has consistently fought rules forcing its members to construct homes to higher, more expensive standards, according to Kim Wooten, an engineer who serves on the North Carolina Building Code Council, the group that sets home building requirements for the state.

“The home builders association has fought every bill that has come before the General Assembly to try to improve life safety,” said Ms. Wooten, who works for Facilities Strategies Group, a company that specializes in building engineering. She said that state lawmakers, many of whom are themselves home builders or have received campaign contributions from the industry, “vote for bills that line their pocketbooks and make home building cheaper.”

Over the past 15 years, North Carolina lawmakers have rejected limits on construction on steep slopes, which might have reduced the number of homes lost to landslides; blocked a rule requiring homes to be elevated above the height of an expected flood; weakened protections for wetlands, increasing the risk of dangerous storm water runoff; and slowed the adoption of updated building codes, making it harder for the state to qualify for federal climate-resilience grants.

Those decisions reflect the influence of North Carolina’s home building industry, which has consistently fought rules forcing its members to construct homes to higher, more expensive standards, according to Kim Wooten, an engineer who serves on the North Carolina Building Code Council, the group that sets home building requirements for the state.

“The home builders association has fought every bill that has come before the General Assembly to try to improve life safety,” said Ms. Wooten, who works for Facilities Strategies Group, a company that specializes in building engineering. She said that state lawmakers, many of whom are themselves home builders or have received campaign contributions from the industry, “vote for bills that line their pocketbooks and make home building cheaper.”

North Carolina’s chief administrative law judge and former head of the state’s environmental regulatory agency has eliminated a state cap on the amount of a chemical solvent some municipal wastewater treatment plants discharge. Chief Administrative Law Judge and Director of the Office of Administrative Hearings Dr. Donald van der Vaart revoked permit limits of 1,4-dioxane for wastewater treatment plants that discharge the chemical substance, one the federal Environmental Protection Agency classifies as a likely human carcinogen, into the drinking water sources of tens of thousands of people.

North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality officials did not follow the letter of the law written in state statutes when they calculated discharge limits and established an enforceable water quality standard for 1,4-dioxane, van der Vaart ruled. In his Sept. 12 decision, van der Vaart also said DEQ erred by considering the chemical substance a carcinogen. “The [Environmental Protection Agency] has characterized 1,4-dioxane as ‘likely to be carcinogenic to humans,’” he wrote. “The EPA has not characterized 1,4-dioxane as ‘carcinogenic to humans.’”

DEQ has 30 days to appeal van der Vaart’s decision.

The highest peak at Great Smoky Mountains National Park is officially reverting to its Cherokee name more than 150 years after a surveyor named it for a Confederate general.

The U.S. Board of Geographic Names voted on Wednesday in favor of a request from the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians to officially change the name Clingmans Dome to Kuwohi, according to a news release from the park. The Cherokee name for the mountain translates to “mulberry place.”

A dredging company launched with $15 million in state money must cease its work in the Oregon and Hatteras inlets after digging deeper and wider than permits allowed hundreds of times, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said Wednesday. EJE Dredging Service is led by an influential North Carolina Republican who is under scrutiny by a federal grand jury.

EJE Dredging was formed by Judson Whitehurst, a Greenville business owner, three months after state lawmakers provided the $15 million to Dare County for dredging. The following year, company documents showed Jordan Hennessy, a former legislative aide who helped convince lawmakers to provide funding for the dredging, working on behalf of EJE Dredging. He’s been the CEO for at least two years.

Hennessy has been named in two subpoenas linked to a federal criminal investigation for his work on another project funded by state lawmakers in 2020. Subpoenas issued over the past three months show a grand jury seeks information about Hennessy and one of his businesses as it investigates a domestic violence prevention program funded with $3.5 million also appropriated by state lawmakers.

Dare County is a hub for commercial and recreational boating, and has struggled for decades to keep navigational channels open. The Corps operates dredges, but its resources are stretched thin. The federal government, meanwhile, in 2003 decided against a plan to build jetties in the Oregon Inlet that would limit the shifting sands, according to the National Park Service. The $15 million from state lawmakers in 2018 appeared to provide a solution. Then-state Sen. Bill Cook, a Beaufort County Republican, persuaded lawmakers to include the money in the budget that year. Hennessy and Marion Warren, a former director of the state Administrative Office of the Courts, co-wrote the legislation that provided the money. The federal subpoenas also seek information about Warren. Hennessy could not be immediately reached on Wednesday.

After a bit of discussion with @laverabe, we've agreed to update the sidebar with a more specific rule set. We have about 2 decades of moderation experience between us, and we're more or less on the same page about how to kick-start the community and get things rolling.

To put it simply, we are significantly less interested in enforcing our rules on opinions or content than we are on behavior and your treatment of others. Barring truly horrific opinions (which probably violate Lemmy's ToS in the first place), we're open to any and all perspectives, no matter how tasteless, crass, or toxic other people may believe them to be. There is no shortage of people on the left who think people on the right should be censored, just as there's no shortage of people on the right who think people on the left should be censored. We will not censor opinions because they're liberal, conservative, libertarian, egalitarian, utilitarian, humanitarian, Rastafarian, muggle, sith, Borg, etc. We will remove content that's abusive. So just don't be an asshole and everything will be peachy.

This forum is not meant to be focused on any particular topic or region, but we reserve the right to remove content on the rare occasion that it doesn't suit the purpose of the community. Given that nearly everything is political nowadays, that might be an entirely moot point, but just in case we ask that you not post lasagna recipes, driving directions, product reviews, or other unrelated stuff.

Content Rules:

1. Self posts only.
2. Opinion pieces and editorials are allowed on a case by case basis.
3. No spam or self promotion.
4. Do not post grievances about other communities or their moderators.

Commentary Rules

1. ~~Obey the golden rule: treat others as you would like to be treated.~~ Don't be a jerk or prevent honest discussion.
2. Stay on topic.
3. Don’t criticize the person, criticize the argument.
4. Provide credible sources whenever possible.
5. Report bad behavior, please don’t retaliate. Reciprocal bad behavior will reflect poorly on both parties.
6. Seek rule enforcement clarification via private message, not in comment threads.
7. Abide by Lemmy's terms of service (attacks on other users, privacy, discrimination, etc).

Please upvote/downvote based on quality of contribution to the discussion, not based on whether or not you agree with the post or comment.

Since our rules are new, we'll probably issue a lot of warnings in the early stages. We're not expecting to issue any bans unless something is truly out of bounds and unproductive. We're also just humans who have actual jobs, so we just don't have time to babysit folks who can't be cooperative.

Please provide your thoughts on anything you think should be more or less specific, as well as added or removed. We can't promise that we'll see eye to eye, but we'll make every effort to help you understand where we're coming from and how we see the community developing.

Edit: Updated rule 1 to be more specific, in case someone decided to be rude because they get their rocks off by fighting.

The Federal Reserve is ready to cut interest rates, confident that inflation is easing to normal levels and wary of any more slowing in the job market.

“The time has come for policy to adjust,” Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell said Friday, in his most anticipated speech of the year. “The direction of travel is clear.”

Powell did not specify a timeline, or forecast how much Fed leaders were preparing to lower rates. But his remarks came as close as possible to teeing up a cut at the Fed’s next policy meeting in mid-September. Rates currently sit between 5.25 and 5.5 percent, where they have remained since July 2023. The open question now is whether officials will opt for a more aggressive cut next month — a half-point instead of a more typical quarter-point.

On the final, and most anticipated, night of the four-day Chicago convention, Harris, 59, promised to chart a "New Way Forward" as she and Trump, 78, enter the final 11 weeks of the razor-close campaign.

After days of protests from Palestinian supporters who were disappointed at not getting a speaking spot at the convention, Harris delivered a pledge to secure Israel, bring the hostages home from Gaza and end the war in the Palestinian enclave.

"Now is the time to get a hostage deal and a ceasefire deal done," she said to cheers. "And let me be clear, I will always stand up for Israel's right to defend itself and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself."

"What has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost, desperate hungry people fleeing for safety over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking," she said.

They said tens of thousands of protesters would be here. They claimed they would “shut down the DNC for Gaza.” Like the Chicago riots during the 1968 Democratic convention, their demonstrations would snarl the city, shake the party and doom the candidacy of “Genocide Joe.”

Then came Kamala Harris — and the protest fizzled.

Organizers anticipated there would be 30,000 to 40,000 protesters on hand for Monday’s kickoff. But only a few thousand showed up; police estimated 3,500

In December 2022, early into what he now describes as his political journey, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut gave a speech warning his fellow Democrats that they were ignoring a crisis staring them in the face.

The subject of the speech was what Mr. Murphy called the imminent “fall of American neoliberalism.” This may sound like strange talk from a middle-of-the-road Democratic senator, who up until that point had never seemed to believe that the system that orders our world was on the verge of falling. He campaigned for Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders during the 2016 primaries, and his most visible political stance up until then was his work on gun control after the Sandy Hook shooting.

Thoughtful but prone to speaking in talking points, he still comes off more like a polished Connecticut dad than a champion of the disaffected. But Mr. Murphy was then in the full flush of discovering a new way of understanding the state of the nation, and it had set him on a journey that even he has struggled sometimes to describe: to understand how the version of liberalism we’d adopted — defined by its emphasis on free markets, globalization and consumer choice — had begun to feel to many like a dead end and to come up with a new vision for the Democratic Party.

...

Mr. Murphy is a team player and has publicly been fully supportive of Ms. Harris, but he also wants Democrats to squarely acknowledge the crisis he believes the country is facing and to offer a vision to unmake the “massive concentration of corporate power” that he thinks is the source of these feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. Only by offering a “firm break” with the past, he believes, can Democrats compete with Republicans like JD Vance, who, with outlines like Project 2025, have a plan to remake American statecraft in their image and who are campaigning on a decisive break with the status quo.

Academics, think tanks and magazines are buzzing with conversations about how to undo the damage wrought by half a century of misguided economic policies. On the right, that debate has already spilled out into the public view. But on the center-left, at least, very few politicians seem to be aware of this conversation — or at least willing to talk about it in front of voters.

Since 2008, Congress, with bipartisan support, has spent billions on rental aid for unhoused veterans and cut their numbers by more than half, as overall homelessness has grown. Celebrated by experts and managed by the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the achievement has gained oddly little public notice in a country in need of broader solutions.

Progress in the veterans program has slowed as rising rents displace more tenants and make it harder to help them regain housing. But while homelessness among veterans rose last year, the increase was smaller than other groups faced. Admirers say the program’s superior performance, even in a punishing rental market, offers a blueprint for helping others and an answer to the pessimism in the debate over reducing homelessness.

As concerns about returning service members grew during wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Congress in 2008 revived a pilot program, called HUD-VASH, that pairs vouchers from the housing department with case management from the veterans department. Voucher holders pay 30 percent of their income for rent, while the federal government covers the rest up to a local ceiling.

After expanding the program every year, Congress has created about 110,000 vouchers, meaning veterans have much shorter waits for rental aid than other homeless groups. The vouchers cost more than $900 million a year.

“The fundamental reason why homelessness among veterans has fallen so much is that Congress has provided resources,” Mr. Kuhn said.

Notably, the rental aid comes with no conditions: Services like drug treatment or mental health care are offered but not required. That approach, called Housing First, once enjoyed bipartisan support but has recently drawn conservative critics who say it promotes self-destructive behavior.