NewCharlesInCharge
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User ID: 89
NewCharlesInCharge
10mo ago
The media will fact check Trump for stating opinions that they don’t like.
Walz gets a free pass. There’s about half a dozen of his previous colleagues in the military that have come out against him, but a viewer of the mainstream media wouldn’t know it. The media has decided that they’re not going to allow swiftboating, whether legitimate or not.
NewCharlesInCharge
9mo ago
why the fuck is the most powerful country on the planet apparently incapable of deploying world-class secured online voting?
As an industry professional, this is a terrible idea. We can’t even reliably secure private systems where the consequences of failure can be ruinous to their owners. These systems are too complex and the incentives are too great to find holes to exploit.
Even if we could somehow guarantee that the servers were bulletproof, attackers would still have a vast exploitable surface in the clients.
NewCharlesInCharge
11mo ago
I used to hold similar views to you, that laws against recreational drugs were a massive injustice.
Then I saw what happened in cities where drugs were de facto, or in Portland’s case de jure, legalized. The externalities from junkies got worse, not better. Regular citizens have to deal with more theft, more random acts of violence, more derelict homeless camp eyesores.
Now I think keeping certain drugs illegal just makes pragmatic sense. If you’re a sensible enough drug user you’re very unlikely to be caught, but if you’re not it gives society a good tool to lock you up. Maybe the evidence of your theft or violence is shaky enough that you’ll be let off. But “we found drugs in your pants” is pretty rock solid, notwithstanding your protestations that they’re not your pants.
It’s essentially giving cops discretion to arrest people they believe are up to no good just from their appearance, with the extra check that they need some pretext for the stop and must actually find some drugs.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
Years ago my big tech employer did a terrible job at planning restrooms in a new building we moved in. They didn’t accommodate for how male skewed we are and ended with a situation where the ratio of women to fixtures was something like 5:1 and for men it was around 50:1.
Every time I needed a toilet I found myself bouncing to different floors to find an unoccupied stall.
In one corner of one floor we had layout where there was a multi occupant men’s room with a urinal and a stall, and a single occupant ladies room. To try to ease the pain on overcrowded men’s rooms the company made the single occupant women’s room into a gender neutral bathroom.
A number of women raised hell about the message that sends to women. Never mind that women virtually never have to wait for a free toilet while the men constantly do. The women’s feelings on the matter were more important, and the sign was changed back.
NewCharlesInCharge
7mo ago
Me as well. One riot with one death, and on the rioting side. And then the winning side ultimately gets to govern without bureacratic hamstringing.
Compared to years of rhetoric and investigation into "Russian collusion" that turn out to have been sourced to a document paid for by the opponent's political campaign. And then a whole summer of riots all around the country with billions in property damage and many more than one death.
NewCharlesInCharge
8mo ago
The media had also successfully painted Trump's handling of COVID as inept, enough so that when Trump said the vaccine was likely to be out before the end of the year that was treated as just another lie.
In reality Operation Warp Speed did succeed, and it was only via shenanigans that vaccine approvals were delayed until after the election.
NewCharlesInCharge
11mo ago
I'm seeing a lot of rumblings in Catholic circles about the drag performance aping The Last Supper. A lot of "there's one religion in particular where they never would have engaged in this mockery."
Also for extra Culture War points they included a child.
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
I think the person you're replying to is referring to the whole language approach to reading. The popular implementations of this eschew phonics entirely, and instruct kids to use only context clues and pictures to figure out what word is on the page. The "Sold A Story" podcast dives deep into the origins of this and its many failures.
It's a great podcast, highly recommended. Among other things I learned that even this topic is culture war. George W. Bush's push for phonics based instruction was resisted hard by educators, apparently because it was coming from W.
Also very revealing in how much of education is driven by trendiness and personality cults. A dumb fad like Reading Recovery can damage a whole generation.
NewCharlesInCharge
6mo ago
Had it been universal it would have been very Catholic of him, which isn’t something you can often say.
Awhile back I learned from The Pillar that his marriage isn’t even canonically valid. He and Jill were married in some random non-Catholic chapel, and never obtained a convalidation.
Jill also has a still living husband from a previous marriage that was never annulled.
So forget the politically charged question of whether he ought to be denied communion for his many public statements that conflict with church teaching. He ought to be denied for the plain reason that many others are: he’s publicly living in sin.
NewCharlesInCharge
8mo ago
My politics went from “what policy is best for society” to “friend or enemy” as a result of the 2020 riots, censorship, and covid policies.
Harris went after the fraternal charitable organization in my church and every Catholic Church in America, the Knights of Columbus. She’s my enemy. I can’t in good conscience vote for such a person.
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
The Department of Education doesn’t tell states, districts, schools, colleges, or any other institutions how they have to educate anyone. But it has always insisted that they try.
Off the top of my head:
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Title I funding incentivizes concentrating impoverished students in great enough numbers to qualify for the funding. There’s a cliff where the funds just go away. I’ve seen this play out when our district was redrawing school boundaries, it was the top priority.
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Dear Colleagues
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Making funds contingent on keeping kids in or out of the proper locker rooms
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Throwing ESSR funds at districts that almost universally used them to fund new permanent programs and then begged for more funding when the always-temporary funds expired
There’s just a ton more strings attached funds that lead to administrative bloat and generally incentivize schools to chase things that aren’t all that useful except that they get rewarded with funds
NewCharlesInCharge
7mo ago
I don’t think you can. One of the most “institutions are untrustworthy” moments was public health telling us that gathering in the thousands to protest for racial justice was okay because racism was more pernicious to public health than COVID.
But if we weren’t protesting for racial justice then we had to stay home, not visit our dying relatives or attend their funerals, and certainly not gather for mere socialization.
NewCharlesInCharge
10mo ago
On the fake electors, I initially found this compelling, but not anymore. As far as I can tell the electors met, pledged their votes to Trump, and recorded this on paper on the appointed date. This was in anticipation that election results in their states could change, and if so there could be a problem if there were no elector votes recorded by the date specified in the Constitution.
There wasn’t a scheme to substitute these electors in place of the ones representing the state’s certified winner. On Jan 6th Trump’s ask of Pence was that he not certify the election, not that he count votes from the electors for Trump.
An alternate slate of electors also met and recorded their votes in Hawaii in 1968. Nixon was certified the winner, Kennedy’s electors met and recorded their votes anyway, and then later a recount went in Kennedy’s favor. Nixon, in his capacity as Vice President, counted the Kennedy electors from Hawaii.
NewCharlesInCharge
11mo ago
it's not hard at all for me to think that a white guy in his late 30s from the Midwest thinks the things Vance articulates.
My dad’s side of the family are West Virginia hill folk that moved to southwestern Ohio for factory work, and I spent the first half of my childhood in Ohio.
Hillbilly Elegy was the first book I read that sounded like stories I used to hear. There was the time the town got a cop car which was burned shortly after. There was the child molester that disappeared and for which it was strongly implied that an uncle had taken care of him. And then the relatives that had chaotic lives of drinking and drugs.
NewCharlesInCharge
11mo ago
That resonates with me, I used to buy the media narratives on Trump as well.
“You used to say bad things about Trump” is going to be true for a lot of Trump voters in this election.
NewCharlesInCharge
8mo ago
Am I misremembering how Presidential campaign losers tend to behave on election night? I think I remember Gore, Kerry, McCain, Romney, and Clinton speaking to their supporters on election night, delivering the bad news but giving some message of unity or thanking everyone for running such a great campaign and such.
Kamala has decided not to speak to all of the people that showed up for her party at Howard University. She's said that she'll speak tomorrow.
NewCharlesInCharge
8mo ago
Reminds me of the summer of 2020 when the mall a few miles from my home, closed for months due to the pandemic, was overrun with looters in broad daylight, and police were ordered to stand by and do nothing. We were less than week into the George Floyd riots. As night fell there were postings on social media that there were guys with guns breaking into shops just a few blocks from me.
I stayed up all night with my guns ready and my eyes on my security cameras.
NewCharlesInCharge
11mo ago
There’s reporting with confirmation from police sources on the motorcade detail in Las Vegas that Biden suffered a medical emergency on Wednesday: https://x.com/jenvanlaar/status/1815588805300084983
The cops got a radio callout that there was an emergency with the President and scrambled to clear the way to the hospital, but Biden ended up on Air Force One instead. The event he had for later in the day was canceled. Another source says he suffered a transient ischemic attack.
One additional detail from a reporter on Air Force One is that they made the trip from Vegas to Delaware in 3 hours 40 minutes, and said that the plane was going so fast it was shaking.
NewCharlesInCharge
8mo ago
One consistent thing about Trump is that he's of the belief that America has been getting a bad deal internationally and has had poor leadership. You can see this back in the 80's when he was on late night talk shows complaining about America's standing relative to Japan.
NewCharlesInCharge
7mo ago
The ACA mandates that insurers have to spend at least 80% or 85% (based on size of market) of premiums on actual provision of healthcare.
Cost cutting is of little use to them. If they take in $100M, currently spend $85M on medical, but are able to cut medical costs by 30% to about $60M, then they'd also have to cut that $15M allocated to other stuff down to about $10.5M. And give up about $30M in premiums.
With this regulation becoming more efficient hurts your bottom line.
But if they can grow the amount spent total, then the 15% or 20% they're allowed to use on other things also grows.
It's basically cost plus contracting, which is apparently popular when you're spending other people's money.
NewCharlesInCharge
8mo ago
My toddler had a massive blowout this morning and I’d like to think this is a Groundhog Day style prophecy.
It was on his right side.
NewCharlesInCharge
8mo ago
I would expect a bias against left wing accounts since the demographic they target for engagement performatively doesn't pay for premium.
NewCharlesInCharge
10mo ago
That's worse than China's VPN policy. There's no carrier requirement to block VPN apps, and the fine is far lower, apparently starting at 100 yuan, roughly $15. Also I've never heard of anyone actually getting penalized, all the enforcement appears to be focused on mucking about with the packets.
NewCharlesInCharge
11mo ago
woman can’t do X
We saw people twist Damore’s words on overlapping distributions into this statement, and fired on the rationale that women couldn’t work around him.
Not deporting a high profile person openly advertising their illegal status sends the message that you can be shielded from deportation by becoming a pro illegal immigration activist.
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