The moderators of last night’s ABC debate demonstrated why it’s a bad idea to fact check live in a debate.
▪️When a moderator fact checks, it gives the implicit notion to the audience that anything not fact checked is truthful. They become the arbiter of truth, which is not their role. Their role is to facilitate a civil and substantive debate.
▪️Fact checking invariably brings bias. What to fact check and how often? Many things politicians say are either false or on a spectrum of misleading, missing context, etc. Tasking a moderator to fairly police this is nearly impossible. In practice they’ll just stick to what stands out as false to them, which will be biased. That’s what happened last night.
▪️Fact checking is often complex. This was briefly shown in the exchange with Trump and the moderators over crime. What sort of crime are you referring to (violent crime, property crime, etc.)? Which cities or states? What time frame are we referring to, over the past year? Since 2020? FBI stats are limited by what local authorities report, so what are they actually telling us? In general, crime has fallen over the past couple years, but is still up since 2020, and in certain locales violent crime and thefts are up dramatically and haven’t declined. Moderators cannot and should not be parsing through this.
▪️Most fact checks cannot be done on the spot, you need to check sources and do research. On the spot fact checks rely on memory and the limited knowledge the moderators have. Which means they are also highly influenced by bias.
▪️So what to do when politicians shamelessly lie during a debate? It’s their opponent’s job to fact check and correct them! That’s why it’s a debate. If they are unable to do this effectively, then they’re bad at debating. But it’s not the moderator’s job. The moderator’s job is to allow each side a chance to get their voices heard and respond to their opponent.
▪️This is a proposal that pertains only to graduate level nursing degrees, not undergraduate ones (which were never considered professional degrees). The proposal will have a 30-60 day public comment period next year, where groups can object, before the DoE will decide on it.
▪️This is about how much federal student loans someone can take out for a particular degree. The cap on graduate degrees is $100k ($20,500/yr), while a “professional degree” limit is $200k ($50k/yr).
▪️Under the new rule proposal, professional degrees include:
🔹Pharmacy
🔹Dentistry
🔹Veterinary medicine
🔹Chiropractic
🔹Law
🔹Medicine (including osteopathic medicine & podiatry)
🔹Optometry
🔹Theology
▪️The nursing degrees excluded are ones like master of science in nursing (MSN), doctor of nursing practice (DNP) and PhD in nursing. These degrees would be limited to $100k in federal student loans, like all other graduate degrees.
▪️These changes came from the One Big Beautiful Bill’s...
▪️The left keeps using this meme but they don’t actually believe it. If you believe SNAP subsidizes companies to pay below a “living wage” this implies that if you take food stamps away they would suddenly pay a higher, “living” wage. So why not get rid of food stamps, then?!
▪️Except they know, and everyone knows, this isn’t true. Wages are set by supply and demand, not some mythical “living wage” metric. Absent food stamps there would actually be downward, not upward, pressure on wages, because the reality is food stamps subsidize the poor to not work as much as they might otherwise need to.
▪️Without SNAP, some low income people would need to work more hours to make ends meet, increasing the availability of low-skilled labor and lowering wages (all else being equal).
▪️Plus, we all know the left loves and supports food stamps. Which means, by this meme’s logic, they love to subsidize corporate profits. But they don’t really, they just think this ...
▪️Wait, this is the guy libertarians and the new right rave about being a great historian?! This sounds like a clueless meme from The Other 98%, except they wouldn’t add in the bizarre defense of feudal lords. Feudalism didn’t deprive peasants of their livelihoods for abstract goals? This is total fantasy.
▪️Amazon employs 1.55M, so this is less than 2% of their workforce, although these cuts will be to corporate, which employs 350k, so 8.5% of that. The CEO says there is an excess of bureaucracy at Amazon, and AI can automate certain repetitive tasks. Also, much of the cuts will be to HR, which is expected shrink by 15%, yay. Managers and HR are peasants now?
▪️I don’t know the inner workings of Amazon, and neither does Darryl, but this seems to be normal management practice to keep a company efficient and competitive. Given the immense size of Amazon the numbers look large, but far bigger shakeups happen all the time in the private sector. Apparently, under the new ...
