Better Is Possible, November 2022 – Mastodon, Swifties, and Crime

Howdy. Due to holidays and life we are running a little bit behind this month, so expect The Dystopia Is Already in one to three days!

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[Article] Mastodon? What’s that? Let “The Markup” break it down for you

How Does Mastodon work? Find out here: https://themarkup.org/the-breakdown/2022/11/21/we-joined-mastodon-heres-what-we-learned-about-privacy-and-security

We have deleted our Twitter account. And it’s hard not to recommend you do the same. Musk is a ghoul (not to mention incredibly unfunny) and is already becoming (even more) buddy-buddy with the far-right. I would expect it only to get worse as he alludes to un-banning every account.

Follow us on Mastodon: https://mstdn.party/@blob.

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[Article] Good News! What you’ve heard in the news about Crime Rates is wrong. Bad News! What you’ve heard in the news about Crime Rates is wrong.

It’s a failure of our institutions, specifically media, that the perception of crime is so distant from reality.

“More broadly, the public often tends to believe that crime is up, even when the data shows it is down. In 22 of 26 Gallup surveys conducted since 1993, at least six-in-ten U.S. adults said there was more crime nationally than there was the year before, despite the general downward trend in the national violent crime rate during most of that period.”

Violent crime is a key midterm voting issue, but what does the data say?, Pew Research, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/10/31/violent-crime-is-a-key-midterm-voting-issue-but-what-does-the-data-say/

And no, police have not been “defunded”.

“ABC Owned Television Stations examined the budgets of more than 100 cities and counties and found that 83% are spending at least 2% more on police in 2022 than in 2019.“

Despite ‘defunding’ claims, police funding has increased in many US cities, ABC Newshttps://abcnews.go.com/US/defunding-claims-police-funding-increased-us-cities/story?id=91511971

A great antidote to these failures by our media is
the podcast Citations Needed: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/

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[Article] Can “Swifties” do more to take down a Monopoly than The Justice Department and FTC?

“Even before this week, Swifties were demanding that the Justice Department break up Ticketmaster, after the website to sign up for the presale crashed. It was even part of President Biden’s pre-election announcement that his administration would take on “junk fees” attached to consumer products. A 2018 GAO report found that Ticketmaster fees add about 27 percent to the face value of a ticket on average, and represent half of Live Nation’s total revenue.”

Swifties Go Berserk Toward Ticketmaster, The American Prospect, https://prospect.org/power/swifties-go-berserk-toward-ticketmaster/

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[Article] With the cost of living’s unprecedented increase, what can U.S. workers learn from labor actions across the world?

“In other countries, workers and unions have been walking off the job to demand higher wages to keep up with the cost of living. But in the US, where unions are weak and strikes are rare, the cost-of-living issue has been ceded to the Right.”

As Inflation Ruins American Thanksgiving, Look Abroad to Find the Right Political Response, Jacobin, https://jacobin.com/2022/11/thanksgiving-inflation-cost-of-living-protest-strike

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[Video] Are you at home, work, or a secret “Third Place”?

“The pub. The café. The town square. They’re not home. They’re not work. They’re something else. But these places are becoming more and more scarce. And in car-dependent suburbia, they’ve been erased almost completely … and that’s a problem.”

The Great Places Erased by Suburbia (the Third Place), Not Just Bikes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvdQ381K5xg

BONUS READING: How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult, Vox, https://www.vox.com/2015/10/28/9622920/housing-adult-friendship

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bye bye