So, affirmative action for the straights, guess MAGA no longer thinks AA is discriminatory lol

I think Graham Platner, if you take his word for what is in his past and present political mindsets, would be an example of a right-to-left swing, but not done as a politician. Shaun on YouTube is another one that comes to mind potentially, depending on how old he is for whether that qualifies as an under age 25. In the US at least, we don’t really have a strong left wing to draw in people looking for a change, so most of those conversions are happening less in the public sphere and more in corners of the internet, where it hasn’t been enshittified to ensure even those spaces are dominated by tight wing narratives

This was in May, Jan Schakowsky, the congresswoman for IL-09, announced shw would not run for reelection in 2026. So not really the past few weeks. Am I missing something? https://schakowsky.house.gov/media/press-releases/schakowsky-announces-she-will-not-seek-re-election-2026.

She running for an open seat though? Or is one of her opponents a congresswoman in a neighboring district or a state congresswoman?

I agree with your general point, but

“brown people killing each other” “things you can avoid” …by not being a brown person?

Chicago calls its downtown neighborhood “The Loop”, named after the loop of elevated heavy metro rail that runs around the core of said neighborhood. The eponymous Loop handles 45k passengers a day, probably an order of magnitude higher than the Vegas “loop” lol

Yes, but only because the ranked choice voting in the Democratic primary likely gave some voters/organizers/donaters confidence to back a longshot candidate like Mamdani, which eventually snowballed into a plurality win in the first round of the primary, a majority win after ranked choice took effect, and a polling lead in the first past the post general election. Still a success story, I’d say, but not a direct and unquestionable cause/effect chain

So is Tel Aviv, maybe he should bulldoze that to set up his “riviera”. Property being valuable does not excuse a genocide.

Narratives like this support DOGE’s actions. The GS-5 working for your local national park is not your enemy, it’s the multi billionaires that used their influence to kill the child tax credit in 2022 to fund a tax cut for them in 2025 that are the problem here. Ilhan’s bill focuses on government employees because it is a messaging bill in a government shutdown environment and because it keeps the bill simple, the government already has mechanisms for OMB to reimburse government employees for eligible expenses, so this is just directing that infrastructure to add a category to the list of eligible expenses as opposed to creating any new systems or changing the tax code. It’s not even close to a final step, but it helps some workers, and that’s better than the current trend of the government stepping on workers in favor of billionaires

I very much doubt you will find an example of Ilhan attacking Mamdani or childcare support. This is at least the second time she’s tried to pass this bill, the first was during Trump’s first term. A majority of federal workers are not furloughed during a shutdown, although it’s hard to find numbers on how many of those are working with pay vs. without pay. I’m positive she also spoke out when Republicans and Manchin and Sinema killed the childcare tax credits from the build back better bill that reduced child poverty to record lows, she’s pretty consistently one of the good ones.

It’s also worth pointing out that this is as much a messaging tactic as a real bill. There ain’t no way Republicans are passing this bill, but having this and other bills like it on the table makes them put up or shut up if they try to attack Democrats for holding government workers’ livelihoods hostage over the shutdown. Having it focus on government workers increases the strength of that message, even if broader relief would still be necessary if this passes.

Introducing bills like this, and thus establishing a counter narrative of “this is what the Democrats want for the country, as opposed to what you are getting today from the Republicans”, is miles better than the Schumer strategy to date of doing his level best to agree to all of the Republican demands in order to make living under the Trump presidency as unbearable as possible in the hopes that people will vote Democrat for change despite Schumer putting no daylight between Democratic and Republican positions.

I didn’t use this method as a kid, but I do use it or something like it pretty often to solve the math formula that my phone requires to turn its alarm off because that can go up to 15 and I don’t have above 10s 100% well memorized. I can get 10, 5, 1, and 2 of anything pretty quickly, so 11 is 10+1, 12 is 10+2, 13 is 10+5-2, etc. I don’t think it would have met the speed requirements of my times tables tests back in elementary school, especially because I was probably slower on my 2s, 5s, and addition back then, but 2-3 iterations is generally few enough that I can close the alarm before it gets too loud/annoying, even in a half-asleep state

D all of the above. Probably comes from a narrow conceptualization of privacy that ends at “do you know what my privates look like”, maybe stretching to “can you listen to me orgasm”. It wasn’t specifically the intent of the piece, but I remember when Last Week Tonight did a bit about data collection exposed by Snowden and demonstrated that Joe Public doesn’t conceptualize the loss of privacy well until it is placed in the context of “private parts”/peeping tom behavior, at least in the US context

If you refuse to answer the questions correctly because acknowledging facts about our system of government would undermine your weak justifications for your fascist behavior, the fact that you actually knew the correct answer deep down doesn’t change your score

Depends on whether you are buying insurance in the general marketplace or through your employer. The general marketplace might have several dozen options depending on your state. An employer might offer 1-6 options, the selection of which will be different per employer. They vary not just in level of benefits/cost but also where the risk/cost is (high deductible plans mean cost is paid largely as you use medical services. Traditional plans will tend to weight more of the cost in your monthly premiums for a generally more narrow band of potential total out-of-pocket costs, although there are plenty of exceptions to that rule). Different plan structures will also have different methods available for you to cover co-pays and deductibles with money that you put in tax-advantage accounts like HSAs and FSAs. Different employers will have different selections, so one company’s “basic” option might have coverage more in-line with another company’s “normal” option. They will also have different rates depending on the size of the company and the amount the company contributes to the plans, so a comparable pair of plans in terms of benefits could easily triple or more in price between the two of them if they are offered by different employers. Different companies will have different open periods where you can select your coverage for the year (also the time when coverage prices and benefits can be changed by the provider, so you have to pay attention even if you like your current plan). These open periods can range from a month-long with a month’s worth of notice to review the plan options for the next year to a week long with no prior notice (and that week is often scheduled right around the holidays when folks have lots of other thimgs going on). It’s a mess here, do not let your government do anything that makes your system more like ours

Yes

It’s might not be a payphone, it might be an emergency phone. Never been to Korea, but some really long bridges in the US will have these spread across the bridge span so that if you break down and don’t have access to a working cellphone, you can walk to them and call for assistance after pulling over. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel comes to mind

https://www.edweek.org/technology/u-s-students-computer-literacy-performance-drops/2024/12

It is difficult to find data comparing Gen alpha/“smartphone generation” to other generations, largely because definitions of computer literacy and methods for assessing it have not remained stable on that time scale in the face of evolving technology

Thanks! I’m an idiot, because I’m not the attorney general, so your explanation helped a lot!

There’s only one Dem to vote for in this race, and it ain’t Cuomo

Being pedantic about a good point, but I’m pretty sure you have an extra zero in that percentage. 0.016% of 3 trillion is 480 million, 0.0016% is 48 million