Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

[untermensche]

I pay attention to the people who know what they're talking about. Technologies simply aren't deployed that fast.

You believe a goal can't be reached so it's existence is bad.

When really reaching for the goal alone will be nothing but a positive.

Like a person training for a marathon has not harmed themselves when they can only run ten miles.

 

[Derec]

"Less than a decade after nuclear fission was first demonstrated" is an understatement. As late as 1939, key physicists like Bohr and Oppenheimer still did not believe nuclear fission was possible.

That was the year in which fission was actually demonstrated. So, less than a decade, yes.

The first "pile" to go critical was on December 2, 1942 at 3:48 pm. Think of that! Barely 2½ years before Trinity. And the first pile to produce power (and plutonium) in any quantity didn't go critical until September 27, 1944!! That was the first time the physicists became aware of "Xenon poisoning," a phenomenon in any uranium reactor which runs hot for more than a few minutes.

But that is my point. There is a huge difference between making a prototype of something and restructuring an entire energy and transportation infrastructure.

It shows great ignorance to minimize the challenges of the Manhattan Project

I have not minimized it. Quite the contrary - read my post again. But it is a very different kind of challenge. Decarbonizing US economy is more akin to the rural electrification and the interstate highway system taken together and times 100.

That can-do spirit seems forgotten by a new generation. "She wants to do it in ten years. I think it will take eleven years. So let's just give up now, before we even begin." Is that a valid paraphrasing of the poster untermensche quotes?

More like 30 years, especially if nuclear is considered verboten.

Those of us who remember the Apollo Moon Landings, or have read about the Manhattan Project, lament to see how right-wing lies and hypocrisy seek to destroy what's left of a once-great country and its healthy can-do spirit.

Apollo Moon landings are another "few off" thing, not comparable in scale to what is being proposed here.

 

[TV and credit cards]

Derec’s rabbit hole not withstanding.

Loren, in a deliberative body of 435, it is appropriate, necessary to have people advocating for the pie in the sky. This is not should we have Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders go up against authoritarianism, an either or situation. This is many ideas fed into the machine to obtain a composite. The more AOC pushes in her direction, the more likely she is to find the composite legislation appealing.

 

[Swammerdami]

I find the confused, willfully ignorant rhetoric in this thread quite annoying. Let's start with some simple points:

(1) Some people think climate change is the most important existential threat of our lives. They think measures to reduce CO2 emissions should have highest priority.

Some people, OTOH, think that climate change is a hoax, promulgated by the Illuminati as part of a plot to enslave more 14 year-olds for the enjoyment of Bill Clinton and other Democrats. Fortunately we have none of this ilk at TFT.

But some here are implicitly pushing a line which, exaggerated slightly, goes something like this: "AOC wants zero CO2 emissions in ten years. I think we'll be lucky to cut emissions by 80% in 12 years. Therefore, to Hell with AOC. Eat, drink and be merry!"

Most difficult tasks are not completed on schedule. If we want to complain about politicians not meeting their goals, why not start with the Cheney-Rove Administration which planned a quick in-and-out to banish Al-Qaeda from Afghanistan. That was almost TWENTY years ago ... and U.S. soldiers are still in Afghanistan.

Yes, that's TWENTY with a TW. For comparison, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker barely 5½ years after Britain's declaration of war, and 3½ years after America's declaration. Was defeating Hitler also "child's play"?

(2) Any details of AOC's plan are irrelevant. If the U.S. Government decides to act strongly, hundreds of expert scientists and engineers will get involved. It's not AOC's job to personally design a new battery. How far will battery technology advance in ten years? I have no idea. I do know that there were only slightly more than two years between the founding of the Los Alamos Lab and the Trinity A-bomb test. Anyone who thinks that was an easy task knows absolutely nothing about it. As just one example, the 'Fat Man' exploded for Trinity and later Nagasaki had its implosion designed by John von Neumann, perhaps the world's greatest then-living mathematician.

And so what if CO2 reduction is only 80% after 12 years instead of 100% in ten years? Humans will be applauding, and perhaps thanking AOC. The only ones going "Nanner nanner nanner; that bartender didn't meet her goal!" will be the hate-filled hypocrites on the right.

The Manhattan Project may be an irrelevant comparison, but the naysayers seem stuck on it, so ...

7 years from demonstrating the principles worked to being able to produce a trickle of equipment.

Hunh? Where did you pull "7 years" out of? I just got through telling you that as late as 1939 Niels Bohr did not think a fission bomb was viable. Do I need font-size 4 next time? Niels Bohr — in case you've never heard of him — was the undisputed #1 genius of atomic physics of that time. (BTW, "trickle" is a funny word to use: There was a 4th bomb almost ready to go, and the rate of bomb production was expected to double to seven monthly by December.)

This may be irrelevant to AOC's plan, but if you can't even grasp the post you were responding to, one has to wonder.

The Manhattan Project is child's play compared to what she's asking for.

Hyperbolate much?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I wonder. Conventional bombing of Tokyo killed almost as many people during the two day Operation Meetinghouse. Japan was on its last legs even without the nukes. And what could Japan hope for? Certainly not a victory - at most being able to hold on long enough for a couple more bombs to be produced.

Japan wasn't looking for "victory" at that point. They were looking for not being totally defeated. The strategy was to make the war as bloody as possible for us in the hope we would decide it wasn't worth taking Japan itself. Things like the bombing of Tokyo didn't change that--to accomplish much our bombers had to come down low and face alerted defenses and anti-aircraft fire.

The atomic bombs were different. They were dropped from way up high where Japan could not meaningfully do anything about them. The atom bomb "showed" we could destroy Japan with basically zero loss of life, their strategy went out the window and they surrendered. We couldn't build enough bombs to actually do that, though--thus it was a giant bluff.

Exactly. The scale is massive and the systems in question are designed to operate for decades. Even consumer equipment like furnaces and cars are designed to last more than a decade and industrial stuff like combined cycle gas turbine plants last much longer.

There are secondary things like that also, but I was simply addressing the primary one--power production. Renewables have to be backed by something, either gas plants or storage systems. Gas isn't carbon neutral, there's nothing coming down the pike that can handle the storage needs. Trying to go from nothing to that scale deployment in 10 years is a nine women and a month type situation.

At the start of the Manhattan project we already knew about fission and the possibility of a chain reaction. It was a question of engineering. That's vastly ahead of where we stand in her pie in the sky--we don't even have reasonable starting points for the amount of storage it would take to run society entirely on renewables. That is the absolute showstopper with her garbage. I do not know if industry could produce enough generation capacity in that timeframe but it is completely irrelevant because the storage is definitely impossible unless there's some Nobel-level breakthrough out of left field that changes the whole picture. (And "a miracle happens" is not a valid planning step.)

I think you are a bit too pessimistic here. There are certainly possibilities for grid-scale storage. Na+ and flow batteries are some possibilities. The question is one of engineering - improving the technologies, especially with regard to cost, rather than coming up with fundamental Nobel-worthy breakthroughs.

There are hypotheticals but nothing has been demonstrated that looks like a prospect for the scale of storage needed.

And of course, the really big challenge is deployment throughout the energy infrastructure.

Which is my point--we might develop suitable technology in 10 years. There's no way we are deploying it on that scale in 10 years.

The challenge of grid-scale batteries is very different than that of batteries for electric cars. EV batteries need to be compact and relatively light-weight. Grid storage applications are not space and weight sensitive, but need to be cost-effective, efficient and able to be charged and discharged frequently. But those are engineering challenges.

And they need to be able to store ginormous amounts of energy. Safely. Devices that are capable of storing a sufficiently high energy density tend to be prone to releasing that energy in an uncontrolled fashion.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Derec’s rabbit hole not withstanding.

Loren, in a deliberative body of 435, it is appropriate, necessary to have people advocating for the pie in the sky. This is not should we have Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders go up against authoritarianism, an either or situation. This is many ideas fed into the machine to obtain a composite. The more AOC pushes in her direction, the more likely she is to find the composite legislation appealing.

I disagree on this. Nobody should be advocating for a position that is obviously impossible. They accomplish nothing but make themselves look like nuts. Why should anything they say be taken seriously?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

7 years from demonstrating the principles worked to being able to produce a trickle of equipment.

Hunh? Where did you pull "7 years" out of? I just got through telling you that as late as 1939 Niels Bohr did not think a fission bomb was viable. Do I need font-size 4 next time? Niels Bohr — in case you've never heard of him — was the undisputed #1 genius of atomic physics of that time. (BTW, "trickle" is a funny word to use: There was a 4th bomb almost ready to go, and the rate of bomb production was expected to double to seven monthly by December.)

This may be irrelevant to AOC's plan, but if you can't even grasp the post you were responding to, one has to wonder.

7 years from demonstrating a chain reaction to using that chain reaction to go boom.

Whether some scientists felt it was viable or not is irrelevant. (The question of viability was how big a boom from how small a package--whether it would be militarily useful. There was not a disagreement about the concept.)

The Manhattan Project is child's play compared to what she's asking for.

Hyperbolate much?

I'm just recognizing reality. New technologies aren't developed and deployed on that scale in 10 years.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

7 years from demonstrating the principles worked to being able to produce a trickle of equipment.

Hunh? Where did you pull "7 years" out of? I just got through telling you that as late as 1939 Niels Bohr did not think a fission bomb was viable. Do I need font-size 4 next time? Niels Bohr — in case you've never heard of him — was the undisputed #1 genius of atomic physics of that time. (BTW, "trickle" is a funny word to use: There was a 4th bomb almost ready to go, and the rate of bomb production was expected to double to seven monthly by December.)

This may be irrelevant to AOC's plan, but if you can't even grasp the post you were responding to, one has to wonder.

7 years from demonstrating a chain reaction to using that chain reaction to go boom.

Whether some scientists felt it was viable or not is irrelevant. (The question of viability was how big a boom from how small a package--whether it would be militarily useful. There was not a disagreement about the concept.)

The Manhattan Project is child's play compared to what she's asking for.

Hyperbolate much?

I'm just recognizing reality. New technologies aren't developed and deployed on that scale in 10 years.

 

[Swammerdami]

7 years from demonstrating a chain reaction to using that chain reaction to go boom.

Whether some scientists felt it was viable or not is irrelevant. (The question of viability was how big a boom from how small a package--whether it would be militarily useful. There was not a disagreement about the concept.)

This is all tangential, but I don't like to let falsehoods stand ... especially when they're in response to me.

I suppose you're referencing Meitner's work in December 1938. This was 6½ years before Trinity, not 7. (Am I nitpicking? I think it's intellectually dishonest — and clearly confusing in this context — to round so as to exaggerate in favor of one's wrong position.)

And anyway, Meitner did not demonstrate a chain reaction.

And even if she had, this would not prove the possibility of a bomb. I don't know where you're getting your information but, if it's competent at all, you need to re-read it. Start by reviewing the difference between "fast neutrons" and "slow neutrons."

 

[lpetrich]

CNBC Now on Twitter: "Pfizer, Biontech, Novavax, Moderna shares plunge to session lows after U.S. backs waiving patent protections on Covid vaccines (links)" / Twitter
AOC responded with
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "Let’s do insulin next" / Twitter

From a hearing several months ago,
Eric Feigl-Ding on Twitter: "Insulin was invented ~100 years ago, and its patent sold for $1.

“Do you know the reason why [insulin is] $1,000 with insurance?” ~@AOC

There is no reason for insulin to cost $21 in Canada for a 10 ml bottle, while it costs a mortgage payment in the US. (link)" / Twitter

-

Oversight Committee on Twitter: "Tell 'em, @RepAOC! (vid link)" / Twitter

She slams "pro-lifers" for supporting punitive policies and racially discriminatory ones, and she then defends Planned Parenthood and notes that she is a "Planned Parenthood baby".
Yasmin Radjy on Twitter: "“If we want to talk about Planned Parenthood, let’s talk about how many lives PP has saved & how many babies have been born because of the prenatal care provide by PP. If you don’t believe it & you’ve never met a PP baby, I am happy to let you know that I am one.” - @AOC " / Twitter

 

[lpetrich]

Bloomberg on Twitter: "Jamie Dimon says if lawmakers plan to raise taxes he would want an itemized list of what the money would be spent on (link)" / Twitter
then
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "That’s funny, because Jamie Dimon didn’t give working people an itemized list of the school districts, public hospitals, infrastructure, or affordable housing projects he was helping defund when he pushed for the $2T GOP Tax Scam in 2017 w/ goodies for yacht and jet owners.

*" / Twitter

 

[lpetrich]

AOC retweeted
Cori Bush on Twitter: "I testified in front of Congress about nearly losing both of my children during childbirth because doctors didn’t believe my pain.
Republicans got more upset about me using gender-inclusive language in my testimony than my babies nearly dying.
Racism and transphobia in America." / Twitter


CNBC Now on Twitter: "U.S. Chamber of Commerce blames weak jobs report on enhanced unemployment benefit, kicks off lobbying effort
“One step policymakers should take now is ending the $300 weekly supplemental unemployment benefit,” the group said. (link)" / Twitter
then
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "Fun fact: the US Chamber of Commerce is a secretive business lobby that supported a $3M effort to primary me out of office last year bc I stand up to Wall Street. (They lost ) Wal-mart was outed as a secret client.

If UI > wages, the solution is to actually pay a living wage." / Twitter
then
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "If you’re interested in learning more about their secretive/bizarre lobbying operation, check out this archived piece from @MotherJones

“the Chamber had been routinely inflating its membership numbers by 900 percent” (link)" / Twitter
then
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "Moral of the story is that the US Chamber of Commerce is a corporate lobbyist group with 0 credibility in helping everyday people.

Huge, big-box corporations hire them to lobby Congress into prioritizing profits over people and planet.

Ignore them " / Twitter

AOC ran against Joe Crowley as someone too much in bed with big money. Wall Street moneybags responded by supporting a Latin American woman with a hyphenated name, Michelle Caruso-Cabrera -- MCC.

 

[lpetrich]

Manu Raju on Twitter: "AOC says of MTG: “I used to work as a bartender. These are the kinds of people that I threw out of bars all the time.”" / Twitter
then
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "Friendly reminder to keep generously tipping your bartenders, servers, delivery, venue, and hospitality workers. " / Twitter
then
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "(And no this is not intended for magic the gathering players, you’re cool w/ me)" / Twitter


A.O.C. Had a Catchy Logo. Now Progressives Everywhere Are Copying It. - The New York Times

The slanted text in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s logo, and its break from the traditional red, white and blue color palette, has formed a new graphical language for progressivism. Imitators abound.

...
Candidates across the country, and even internationally, have appropriated elements of its condensed and bold typeface and its upward-sloping, dialog-box design.

...
The trend is perhaps most intense in and around New York, where local races are littered with candidates who have tilted the text on their logos upward

...
“What A.O.C. did is she changed what it is to run for office,” said Amoy Barnes, a 34-year-old Black Democrat running for City Council on Staten Island. When Ms. Barnes’s consulting firm presented her a set of past political logos to provide inspiration, she immediately gravitated toward the Ocasio-Cortez design. “Being a young woman of color with her bright purple and the slant and her full name — she set a bar to say we don’t have to do things the same way.”

It's popped up in places like Sen. Bernie Sanders's Green New Deal T-shirt and Sarah Huckabee Sanders's "Let's cancel cancel culture".

All of which has been amusing to the design team that created Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s logo, and who have begun cataloging various duplications that pop up on the campaign trail and in popular culture. “They’re everywhere,” said Scott Starrett, who helped design her logo. “Finding them is actually quite fun now.”

Mr. Starrett socialized with Ms. Ocasio-Cortez before she was “A.O.C.” — in an interview he kept lapsing into referring to her as Sandy, as her pre-politics friends and family knew her — and said they had discussed her ideology long before he and Maria Arenas at the design firm Tandem sketched out her logo.

The color palette and speech bubble in the final design drew inspiration from Rosie the Riveter, Mr. Starrett said. The poster with her outward gaze was drawn from a Cesar Chavez stamp. And the overall look came from boxing, farmworker unionizing and luchador posters.

The inverted exclamation mark with a star punctuated her Puerto Rican heritage, and simultaneously turned her name into a rallying cry. “We wanted this idea that she was shouting her name to get attention, and also the idea that people were shouting her name,” Mr. Starrett said.

The slant and condensed font, though, was as much a typographical necessity as anything. Mr. Starrett said they had lobbied for not spelling out her full name, but Ms. Ocasio-Cortez held firm. She wanted her whole name. They tilted and stacked it to make it fit.

AOC used dark purple on yellow, and the article shows lots of other departures from red, white, and blue. Dark blue, dark cyan, dark green, ...

 

[lpetrich]

Endorsements - NYC Council - Courage to Change
CTC has a questionnaire for candidates who seek its endorsement.

The questionnaire is divided into seven parts; part I and part II are designed to inform on a candidate’s campaign practices, specifically, a candidate’s capacity to respond to movements and to fundraise ethically. Candidate responses to parts III-VII of the questionnaire provide a look into a candidate’s commitment to grassroot policies that prioritize working-class New Yorkers. These remaining questions are specifically designed to highlight real actions and decisions that New York City Council members can advance in the next four years.

On a more fun note, Ocasio-Cortez has a Taco Tuesday with Buttigieg | TheHill

The taco-filled outing comes just weeks after Buttigieg said he happened upon the famously initialed lawmaker while at the dog park with his and husband Chasten Buttigieg's pair of pooches.

"Buddy, our puggle, got to know this French bulldog," Buttigieg told host James Corden on "The Late Late Show" last month. "And then I looked up and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez was right there. So we had a nice chat."

 

[Harry Bosch]

Bloomberg on Twitter: "Jamie Dimon says if lawmakers plan to raise taxes he would want an itemized list of what the money would be spent on (link)" / Twitter
then
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "That’s funny, because Jamie Dimon didn’t give working people an itemized list of the school districts, public hospitals, infrastructure, or affordable housing projects he was helping defund when he pushed for the $2T GOP Tax Scam in 2017 w/ goodies for yacht and jet owners.

????????????*" / Twitter

What was defunded in 2017? I don't recall any government programs that were cut in the least. But I could be wrong...

 

[lpetrich]

I'm not sure what AOC was referring to, but it was likely the common belief among Republicans that the deficit is intolerably high for spending on anything but Republicans' favorite things.

Vijay Prashad on Twitter: "My kind of protest. Medellin, Colombia. #SOSColombia #FuckDuterte #FuckUribe (vid link)" / Twitter
- a classical-music concert

JCRC-NY Congressional Conversations with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - YouTube - Apr 5, before the recent strife in Israel/Palestine. JCRC-NY is the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York.

Host Michael Miller first asked AOC how she got started. She was long involved in community work, and after she graduated from college, she returned to the Bronx and she got involved in improving education. That didn't work out very well, so she became a bartender to support herself. She gradually got more interested in political issues, and there was never some big moment when she decided to get into politics.

She felt like a path was placed in front of her, and that she sometimes felt like the Universe is nudging her in some direction. She looked around and she thought that we could do better in Congress, and she got started. Her initial goal was to force a primary contest for someone who had not been challenged in a primary for 14 years, and to use that as a way of addressing issues important to the community. In effect, to build an activist movement. She feels "very blessed and lucky" that she got selected by her community to represent them in Congress, and it was a great surprise to her. "The Universe works in some ways". She feels honored to get to play a role in the causes of justice in the US and around the world.

What motivates AOC? She says that for her, it is a deeply-rooted moral calling, a spiritual sort of thing, a relationship to the world and to humanity. That's what makes her do what she does, even when her work is very difficult. That's why she thinks that healthcare is a human right, and that we have a moral imperative to care for the Earth and each other.

 

[lpetrich]

Continuing with the interview, AOC talked about restoring a sense of community as we move out of the pandemic. Social isolation can be as debilitating as smoking, she says. She says that her Texas-relief efforts were modeled on relief efforts in her district over the last year.

What can a legislator do about bigoted attacks? Like on Jews and Asians. She noted that the Trump Admin greatly reduced a program for deprogramming white supremacists.

She said that part of the problem is wanting to believe in one's collective innocence. I think that she's right about that. Consider how right-wingers have reacted to the 1619 Project. They have treated it as some sort of intolerable affront. It's important to recognize what horrible things that have happened in our past, so we can recognize that such things might happen again.

She recalled going to Yorktown Heights, alongside the Jewish community here, and she talked about Holocaust education. The Holocaust didn't come into existence in one big jump, and she's right about that. But instead, it was a culmination of a process of increasing nastiness. Nazi Germany's leaders were first content with their neighbors accepting all the Jews that had lived under their rule, but those neighbors didn't. The Nazis got worse and worse, only getting to their "Final Solution" in World War II.

She laments the poor state of Holocaust education, that many people can't name any of the Nazi extermination camps, like Auschwitz.

She also talked about the Jewish community in her district, and how well-organized it is.

Then a "prickly" issue, the State of Israel. Many New York City Jews feel a strong connection with Israel. AOC's host asked what to do about Israel and the Palestinians.

Unfortunately, AOC didn't say much more than generalities, like how we should respect human rights on both sides. Some people found that very embarrassing, much like what she said about the issue in her 2018 July 13 appearance on PBS Firing Line.

Then they got into Israel as a research center in water conversation, solar power, and the like. AOC agreed with her host, and she said that it's important for valuable technologies to be applied widely.

At the end, AOC said that she hoped that her next meeting can be in person.

 

[Derec]

What can a legislator do about bigoted attacks? Like on Jews and Asians. She noted that the Trump Admin greatly reduced a program for deprogramming white supremacists.

One good start would be to stop pretending that "white supremacists" are the only problem here. Many of the attacks against Asian-Americans have been committed by blacks and the recent anti-semitic violence is coming from the pro-Pali crowd.

She said that part of the problem is wanting to believe in one's collective innocence. I think that she's right about that. Consider how right-wingers have reacted to the 1619 Project. They have treated it as some sort of intolerable affront. It's important to recognize what horrible things that have happened in our past, so we can recognize that such things might happen again.

1619 Project is politically motivated and not good history. The whole purpose of it is "white people bad".
Just like AOC's response to anti-Asian attacks is "white people bad" no matter who the attackers are.

Unfortunately, AOC didn't say much more than generalities, like how we should respect human rights on both sides. Some people found that very embarrassing, much like what she said about the issue in her 2018 July 13 appearance on PBS Firing Line.

I think she is way out of her depth, not only on this issue, but in Congress in general. \
She is also obviously on the Palestinian side, but probably because of influence of her Muslim squad mates and general anti-Israel bent of contemporary socialists. I doubt she researched the issues for herself.

 

[Trausti]

One good start would be to stop pretending that "white supremacists" are the only problem here. Many of the attacks against Asian-Americans have been committed by blacks and the recent anti-semitic violence is coming from the pro-Pali crowd.

Curious how many lefties actually believe the wave of anti-Asian and antisemitic violence is because “White supremacists.” Completely at odds with reality.

 

[thebeave]

One good start would be to stop pretending that "white supremacists" are the only problem here. Many of the attacks against Asian-Americans have been committed by blacks and the recent anti-semitic violence is coming from the pro-Pali crowd.

Curious how many lefties actually believe the wave of anti-Asian and antisemitic violence is because “White supremacists.” Completely at odds with reality.

Recently, we had a huge lefty host on our local talk radio station interviewing an Asian anti hate crime activist about the recent uptick in hate crimes against Asians in the Bay Area. She asked him "Who are the people that are committing these crimes?". Following that question was about the longest pause I ever heard on talk radio. They guy finally responded, "We don't track that kind of information". You could almost hear the gears spinning in his head wondering how he was going to answer that without spoiling the left's narratives about race. Then she goes on to theorize on her own that its largely the white supremacists who have been influenced to do this by Trump. Had she any clue whatsoever that young black men had a major role in these crimes, she would have never asked the question in the first place, lest she spoil the narrative. Makes you wonder what sort of a bubble she lives in. It was all very cringe-worthy.