Fact check: true.

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Evergreen in local politics.

In fairness, if I recall my time living within the city limits, Ed Flynn is often wrong about a lot of things. So expecting him to consult just maybe one housing expert on this is probably asking too much.

have there been similarly culturally pervasive “everyone needs to start using this tech right now” pushes over such a relatively brief time frame as we’re currently seeing with LLMs? (This is a very genuine question)

It will never stop pissing me off how much trump is going to walk away from this presidency as a “real” billionaire in a way he never was before, and it is going to be solely because of the public office

It’s incredibly refreshing to have a select board race where 3 out of 4 candidates have clearly stated that MORE housing will be good for the town. A select board does not directly change zoning by laws, but they do push the town to explore those opportunities.

Ironically, you can replace colleges with main stream media in this headline and the glaring omission is still that there are concerted and organized efforts to attack the credibility of these institutions.

You expect newspapers to have certain biases about broad topics like “democracy is good”, “politicians should be held accountable”, etc, but things like the socially acceptable things to say on college campuses or limits on healthcare for trans people…are not that.

I think “guy who only posts things that confirms his priors about somewhat niche things” is fine as your social media personality, but it’s weird to see the NY Times adopt this personality over the past decade.

Leonard Criticizes Fletcher’s Conduct as ‘Unacceptable’ Amid Upcoming Censure Vote Select Board Member Danielle Leonard said fellow member Mary Ellen Fletcher’s apology for violating the board’s code of conduct was “a big move for her,” but argued it was undermined by Fletcher’s …

Continually baffled that the criticizer here supported the criticized for re-election (even put her sign in her yard!) when this was a known pattern of behavior and there was a perfectly viable candidate as an alternative.

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Theory and Society Aims and scope Submit manuscript James Manzi 24k Accesses 553 Altmetric 6 Mentions Explore all metrics Abstract This study analyzes approximately 600,000 English-language social science abstracts published between 1960 and 2024 to estimate the long-run ideological orientation of disciplinary research output. Large language models (LLMs) were applied to each abstract using a fixed 2025 U.S. ideological spectrum, enabling consistent coding across six decades. Five key findings emerged. First, roughly 90 percent of politically relevant social science articles leaned left 1960–2024, and the mean

I just can’t believe we’re doing this.

Screenshot 1 from the article: During Sunday's virtual meeting, Spritz discussed the need to support residents in their 20s and 30s and make Swampscott attractive to bring in more people of that demographic. He raised the idea of having "owner-occupied places," as opposed to apartments for rent, to ensure that the younger age group is able to create a "foothold" and start to "build equity and move up." "Right now that's impossible in Swampscott and frankly most of the North Shore," Spritz said. "They're trying to juggle everything from having kids and finding a welcoming place to live. When we see how much costs have gone up, particular property values, that becomes more and more and more out of reach. If we push it off for another ten years we're not going to be able to keep the character of town for our kids."

Screenshot 2 from the article: Spritz also expressed concern about overdevelopment in Swampscott, calling for a "balance of development and keeping the town's character." "I'm concerned about overdevelopment as well. One of the treasures of living in Swampscott I think is the neighborhoods," Spritz said. "Those become your lifelong friends...l think that's a very unique thing about Swampscott."

This is all super NIMBY coded stuff coming from this Swampscott Select Board candidate. Wayne has done some nice stuff for the town, the little given here on housing policy leaves A LOT to be desired. We barely have any rental housing. It’s not your enemy.

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In order to have truly productive discussions you have to agree on a certain set of facts. If you don’t, these platforms just spawn unproductive dialogue and the cynical would say that’s intentional.

“Oh, we got people talking!” Yeah…congrats; you made the worst of social media IRL.

“Voting against housing & citing its absence to oppose funding is not fiscal prudence; it is avoidance. We cannot continue to vote “no” on every change, every investment & every long‑term solution, while expecting schools, services, roads & community character to remain intact.”
-Marblehead resident

Elected officials are obviously a different story, but the amount of times people will project evil motives onto town employees is a bit wild.

There are exceptions of course…

kentuckylantern.com/2025/03/06/t...

I’m sorry, but most local government employees get into their positions because they LIKE the public service aspect of it. Few actually get paid what they’re worth and the actual amount of power most of them have isn’t enough to seduce the ego too much.

I think the biggest divide in people who care about local politics is between those that think their local government employees are generally good people trying to do the right thing and those that think those employees are trying to impose their will on the people.

Serious question: is Twitter YIMBY these days anything more than people commenting on like Matt Y’s tweets and maybe two others? If that’s the orbit, I can kind of see how’d you’d draw that conclusion there.

“You have to pay for news if you want it to be better.” Is a fine complaint too if you ignore that right-wing media is all free to access and its entire purpose is to distort and obfuscate real news.

“You have to read the whole article” is a fine complaint, but it ignores the fact that most people don’t/can’t because it’s behind a paywall and social media reacts on headlines.

If I was a newspaper that operated under the hypothesis that most people only read the headlines on social media and I wanted to downplay the US/Israel role in something while still trying to remain factually accurate, this is how I would do it.

Fewer people should own dogs.

Screenshot of an Instagram post swampscottmass Don't park during street sweeping. Where Stormwater Flows, Everything Goes ФЕРА 2 Q1 swampscottmass Stormwater Matters in Swampscott 1 of 5 Small actions we take every day help protect our waterways, and ultimately, our ocean. Here's one easy way you can make a difference: Move your car for street sweeping Sweeping removes debris before it reaches storm drains. No parking during scheduled sweeping (now-April 23!) 1 hour ago

Just kind of stunned right now that the Town of Swampscott came up with a good PSA post. We want more of this!

This is 2 things:

1.) A perhaps overreaction to a mild technical violation of the policy.

2.) An overreaction because said Select Board member has violated this principal in many more egregious ways prior to the policy being put in place bc of those incidents.

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Wooo! Can’t wait for BERDO FEst in the fall! It’s my favorite fest named after me and that’s definitely a true fact.

😂😂😂

The former Marblehead assessor is probably high right now on the amount of “I told you so” she is able to rightfully give out.

marbleheadcurrent.org/2024/06/26/m...

Was probably part of the “Salem is not for sale” campaign too. It’s always the same group of people.

Honestly starting to respect those that do bad photoshop over those who go straight to AI though.