techwooded

Idiocy, Actual

Telling too that the Democratic leadership said after the fact that one of the reasons they lost was that they relied too much on small donators instead of billionaire donators. Disgusting

Would like to point out that part of this bill includes a provision that makes it illegal for Courts to hold the Government in contempt for not complying with their past, present, or future injunctions:

H.R. _____, Title VII § 70302:

No court of the United States may use appropriated funds to enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c), whether issued prior to, on, or subsequent to the date of enactment of this section.

Fellow American convert to the metric system. Converting, in my opinion, won't get you very far in actually understanding the measurements. To this day, the conversion rate is something I have to dig through my memory for.

For me what helped with the temperature scale was breaking it into chunks based on what I would wear, 10°-15° would be a pullover sweatshirt, 15°-20° a track jacket, etc, which got me to stop focusing so much on the conversion. Eventually you just get a sense of these things, I think that most people can only really feel a difference in air temperature of about 1°C. 0° being the freezing point cutoff is super helpful for judging things like potential road conditions if it's wet.

For distances I first got the sense of how far things were in kilometers by being a runner and knowing distances around my neighborhood as to how they lined up with running a 5k, 10k, etc. For meters, at my height and gait, my stride length is about a meter long. A little bit on the shorter side of things, but it still helped me get an idea as to what a meter looked like in physical space, even if it's off a bit. Centimeters and millimeters are a different story. Hard to find perfect analogs in the world, but you'll find something eventually. I think for example long grain rice can be ~1 cm in length for example.

The biggest lesson in my own journey and seeing a lot of people online talk about trying to do the conversion is that people get overly concerned with precision when first making the switch. If you actually think about most of our daily interactions with measurements, they're much more approximate. For example, the difference between whether it's 71°F or 73°F is rarely pointed out. The temperature is just "in the low 70s". We say that something is "about 20 miles away" which is almost an implicit 7-8 mile range. I would guess 80% of the time, this is how we interact with the units we use, so focus on that. No one is going to get upset if they ask the temperature and you're off by a few degrees C.

In terms of mnemonics like US kids get in school for some of these things, everything in the metric system is a multiple of 10 from everything else, which is what makes it great. Also remember that at room temperature, water's density is 1 g/mL, so if one of capacity or weight is easier to visualize for you, it's a shortcut to the other. Standard disposable water bottle in the US is 500 mL or half a kilogram of water.

If only metric time had caught on too....

StoryGraph is my favorite for a Goodreads replacement

Unfortunately for Americans too, solidarity striking (the main premise behind being able to perform a General Strike), is also illegal (most citations I could find cite 29 U.S.C. § 158(b)(4) though I couldn't work out specifically what verbage outlawed it). Keep in mind to that this specific labor law only applies to private labor unions that are administered by the NLRB, federal unions have a different agency.

I know a few people, including a family member, that work for the federal government, and I think they want to try to weather the storm, but it's hard. Trump wasn't a fluke in 2016 and he certainly isn't one now. Just because he and his party might be out of power in 4 years doesn't mean much. Half the country still thinks their jobs and livelihood are superfluous at best and harmful at worst. And with four more years of the hack and slash mentality going, it may take a while to rebuild all of this. To get from the precursors to the New Deal through to the EPA was almost 50 years of slow progress.

One thing that I think doesn't get pointed out enough is that for the United States, the number of federal employees (pre-Musk) is basically the same as it was in the early 60s. The actual size of the federal government hasn't changed in 60 years by any appreciable amount. All that extra revenue and debt in the budget has gone to federal contractors.

There's a lot of risk to striking for a federal worker. First of all, it's against the law for any employee of the US Federal Government to do so according to 5 USC §7311

An individual may not accept or hold a position in the Government of the United States or the government of the District of Columbia if he-

...

(3) participates in a strike, or asserts the right to strike, against the Government of the United States or the government of the District of Columbia; or

(4) is a member of an organization of employees of the Government of the United States or of individuals employed by the government of the District of Columbia that he knows asserts the right to strike against the Government of the United States or the government of the District of Columbia.

There exists federal employee unions, but they don't have as much power because they can't strike. Additionally, there's another US code (18 U.S.C. §1918) that reinforces this idea, also noting that it's a felony that can carry the charge of a fine or jail time up to 1 year and prevents you from being employed by the Federal Government (using the exact same language).

Additionally, the Office of Management & Budget can name you "unsuitable" for Federal employment if you participate in a strike even without the felony conviction.

This happened in the 80s when a bunch of Air Traffic Controllers went on strike for higher wages and the President at the time (Ronald Reagan) just fired them all and hired new controllers at lower wages who wouldn't strike. There was no recourse for those fired workers.

Given all of this, I wouldn't even risk it with DOGE to strike right now. Under a more labor friendly administration, you might be able to get away with it. But with Musk running the country, the most likely outcome would be that they'd fire them all for striking, the courts wouldn't restore them like they have with others because they did actually violate the law, and Musk would spin it as locating and eliminating the "corruption"

P.S. - For those keeping score at home, both of the aforementioned US codes are the same codes that bar someone for working for the Federal Government for advocating for the overthrow of the government (that's what subsections (1) and (2) state). Yes that means the Federal Government, at least as far as its own employees are concerned, equate striking with revolution

You know it. I’ve found that most of the news sites still do RSS feeds for their stuff

Some other good ones are Semafor and 404Media

NPR, BBC, and RTÉ primarily. Subscribed through RSS

It’s funny because back in the day before Elon lost his marbles, I first heard of Signal from Musk on twitter as he was promoting it as a better alternative to WhatsApp

Seems like they don’t have federation turned on either, unfortunately