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Jk23

Jk23's Journal
Jk23's Journal
December 4, 2024

Amazon says these areas of Washington, DC, are too dangerous for Prime delivery

The e-commerce giant faces a lawsuit from the District’s attorney general, alleging that Prime members in two zip codes aren’t receiving promised benefits.

Since mid-2022, Amazon has allegedly violated a Washington, D.C., consumer protection law by withholding benefits from Prime members in two zip codes, according to a civil lawsuit, citing “undisclosed internal policies,” that was filed Wednesday by the district’s attorney general.

Noting that Prime members pay $139 per year or $14.99 per month, the lawsuit states that Amazon “deliberately — and secretly — stopped providing its fastest delivery service to the nearly 50,000 Prime members who live in historically underserved communities east of the Anacostia River,” per court filings.

In an emailed statement, Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel called the claims “categorically false,” adding that the company “made the deliberate choice to adjust our operations, including delivery routes and times, for the sole reason of protecting the safety of drivers. And we’re always transparent with customers during the shopping journey and checkout process about when, exactly, they can expect their orders to arrive. What we’d like to do, and have offered, is to work together with the Attorney General and their office in an effort to reduce crime and improve safety in these areas.”

https://www.retaildive.com/news/amazon-washington-dangerous-prime-delivery/734555/

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I don't think Amazon should offer Prime in areas where they are forced to use third party delivery services due to safety concerns. (Or at least offer a discounted Prime that does not include delivery).

But if there are significant safety issues for thier employees I think that has to take precedent over the DA's concerns. I do recall a similar issue years ago with pizza delivery services redlining neighborhoods. I am curious where people land on this?

November 26, 2024

How a pro-Putin TikTok star topped Romania's presidential poll


https://www.ft.com/content/47b8b7f0-95d6-4fe0-aec9-ae28e3690d19?sharetype=blocked

The pro-Putin, far-right politician who surprisingly won the first round of Romania’s presidential elections on Sunday had recently gone viral on social media without pollsters registering his surge.

Călin Georgescu, 62, a former honorary member of the ultranationalist AUR party, had run as an independent and was credited with single-digit support for most of the campaign. But his campaign clips on TikTok depicting him as a horseback riding, martial arts fighting anti-establishment figure started trending in recent days.

“It’s a TikTok win,” said Romanian analyst and historian Ion M. Ionita. “You don’t need a party. You just need to go viral on social media, and he has gone viral for sure.”

Ionita noted that with mainstream parties struggling to stay credible after years of scandals and economic malaise, “voters are vulnerable to messages that have no connection with reality”.


See it is not just us...
November 26, 2024

Democrats should stop mocking Trump's ground game and start learning from it

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/nov/25/democrats-organizing-get-out-the-vote

(Note this is a very long piece and I found it very informative.,I highly recommend people read the whole thing.)

Since campaign season began, experts have assured us that Donald Trump had “no ground game”, a phrase that generally refers to a campaign’s effort to mobilize voters through local outreach offices, phone calls, text messages, and door knocks. Pundits, politicos, and partisan observers repeated this charge and scoffed at his ramshackle, amateur, and fraud-riddled efforts, with some seasoned Republican operatives even sounding the alarm.

A slew of articles and commentary unfavorably compared Trump’s “paltry” get-out-the-vote operation to the Democrats’ supposedly well-oiled and professionally managed machine. Alex Floyd, the Democratic national committee’s rapid response director, issued a confident statement in April: “Donald Trump’s Maga takeover of the [Republican national committee] has left the Republican party in shambles, lacking the ground game and infrastructure to compete this November.”

And yet many Democrats remain reluctant to reassess their views, both of Trump’s ground game and, perhaps more importantly, of their own. Soon after the election, Tom O’Brien, chair of the Democratic party in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, told the New York Times that Republicans “really didn’t have a ground game”. The Democratic strategist Christy Setzer went further, telling the Hill that “Trump had no ground game and ran only on rambling hatred”, while insisting that the loss “wasn’t the fault of Kamala Harris”, who had “the best campaign any of us has ever seen”. But if that’s true, why did Trump succeed where Harris failed?

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A few weeks before the election, in Greensboro, North Carolina, Nikki Marín Baena was outside her home when she was approached by a canvasser from Libre Initiative, a Koch-backed organization that targets Latino communities with a libertarian agenda. The canvasser told her about all the services the group offers: Spanish language workshops for parents on how to apply for scholarships, English language tutoring, computer classes and more. In Baena’s words, Libre’s goal is to get people in a room, help them meet their basic needs, and then preach the gospel of small government.

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Having people in the community help each other is much more effective than people parachuted in to knock on doors every two or fours years and endless texts begging for money. We are missing the effectiveness of what the Republicans are doing. They may mock community organizers on a national level, but they are using them in underserved communities and working class enclaves around the country. (And yes, I know one of the reasons the communities are underserved is Republican policies. The irony is not lost on me. )
November 26, 2024

I think the Guardian has turned on us...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/25/biden-turkey-pardon-thanksgiving

Headline in today's paper "Lame duck Biden pardons Thanksgiving turkeys as the world burns."

The article is somehow even worse than the headline... I wonder if foreign progressives will be as protective of Biden and his legacy as American progressives have been.


November 19, 2024

If fifty years of Star Trek stories have taught me anything

It is never trust anyone with a Brain Worm.

?si=yhsBFe5Q4a4R4aBc

November 10, 2024

Gen Z voters' signatures are causing problems for Nevada ballot counters

For many of today’s young adults, having a consistent signature isn’t much of a necessity – until it comes time to vote.

Thousands of voters in Nevada — many of them young — still need to verify their signatures on mail-in ballots before they can be counted by the Nov. 12 deadline, Nevada’s top election administrator said Tuesday.

Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar (D) said that since the passage of automatic voter registration in the state — where a digital signature created when a person applied for their driver’s licene is linked to their online voter registration — “more Nevadans than ever sign their names on digital screens that may look different than their pen-to-paper signatures.”

Young people especially “may not have a set signature developed yet,” Aguilar said in an emailed statement.

https://archive.fo/KFxMv#selection-775.0-784.0

I wondered about this myself. I developed my signature singing thousands of tickets as a 24 in the nineties. Young people simply don't have a reason hand-sign things that often.

November 9, 2024

So some good news about America

I was listening to a podcast from The Economist regarding the British prison crisis and they're pointing out that there were plenty of other European countries also suffering from horrible overcrowding and horrible prison conditions such as France Etc.

They then went on to talk about two countries that do prisons correctly and they started with the Netherlands which surprises no one and then they said that America has done very well over the last 10 years and is showing the way to Europe on how to run their penal system.

The introduction of drug courts and the reduction of overcrowding in prisons Etc so and so forth.

Now America is much richer than say England or France so they have more money to spend on things but either way it is nice to hear that we're doing something better and leading the way in the Civilized world.

November 7, 2024

Why Democrats Are Losing Hispanic Voters

(Article from November 3, 2022 feels like it was written yesterday)

https://archive.fo/ZjPXs#selection-739.0-748.0

Earl and Mary Rose Wilcox spent the morning juggling plates of chorizo and shouting orders in Spanish toward the kitchen behind them. Now they’re catching their breath in a corner booth at El Portal, the South Phoenix restaurant they’ve run for two decades. They point out the members of their family depicted in a mural on the nearby wall, retracing the mission that brought them to this place and wondering aloud how it all went wrong.

I came to Arizona looking to answer the question of why, over the past few years, so many Hispanics have fled the Democratic Party. This exodus is evident across numerous counties, congressional districts, and battleground states, but the stakes seem highest in Arizona, where Republicans are promoting a slate of extremist candidates and counting on Hispanic voters to help put them in office.

What I found is Earl and Mary Rose, a couple in their mid-70s and the twin bosses of a Phoenix political machine, reckoning with the same awful conclusion I have heard from so many Hispanics, both here and around the country. “The party doesn’t care about us,” Mary Rose tells me. “They pretend to care every two years.”

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To some extent, López said, the same principle applies to other issues she feels Democrats are enamored of—green energy and racial justice, individual pronouns and group identities. “What the hell is a ‘Latinx’?” she said, throwing up her arms. “Now we’re inventing language?” (This was but one of the many unsolicited rants I heard against the term Latinx.)

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