Housekeeping

1. I’ve gotten a little communication expressing dissatisfaction with the loss of the TIE comment feature. But I think some people may not quite understand what we’ve done. Yes, we’ve turned off comments for all of the ~6,000 (and growing) posts and pages on TIE. That alone saves us a lot of work as they were mostly flypaper for spam and trolling. But, as you may have noticed this past week, we are turning on comments–though for a time-limited period (7 days, by default)–when we specifically want feedback (here, here, and here). In all but one case, we have indicated in the posts that comments are welcome (author’s choice). In another case, a vigorous conversation about a post broke out elsewhere and I pointed to it, as I will try to do whenever I notice such things. Speaking for myself, I think this is working great. Speaking for the spammers and trolls, I think it’s working great for them too. They might disagree, but they have no voice here, which is as it should be.
2. Until recently, we had a link to Sitemeter in the footer of every TIE page. There, one could learn a great deal about TIE’s traffic and what information is automatically collected and made public when you visit TIE (the same that is so for any website). I believe this transparency is important, if not interesting, but we had to dump Sitemeter because they were being evil and unresponsive. We switched to StatCounter. I haven’t found a good way to put a link to that in the footer, so, for the time being, here’s where you can find TIE traffic stats. Have fun!
3. For the record, anyone who thinks Medicare is a good example of single payer doesn’t understand Medicare or single payer or both. Consequently, “Medicare for All” is not a good slogan for single payer. (See Aaron’s second footnote here.) This is not a criticism of single payer or of Medicare.

@afrakt