Read, watch TV/movies/YouTube, play video games, take the dog for a walk, work on one of my many hobbies that I’ve been neglecting, see if any of my friends wants to do something, take a nap, listen to music,

And if I get really bored, there’s probably something I’m supposed to be cleaning or some other chore that needs attention

“home” by Edward Sharpe and the magnetic zeroes

it’s gotta be just about the most banal, saccharine, faux-folksy bullshit I’ve ever heard.

And it certainly doesn’t help that when it came out I was living at home still and my sister played it to death.

I work in 911 dispatch

During COVID we had to ask all of our callers some extra questions if they were going to be in contact with any of our units

Something along the lines of “has anyone there had or been in contact with anyone who has had flu-like symptoms recently?”

And if they did we added a note to the call indicating that.

One night I got a call from one of our off-duty officers calling in an accident he witnessed.

I get all the usual information and start asking our COVID questions

And he gets really indignant about it “why are you asking me this?” “This is stupid.” Etc.

Like dude, you’re one of our officers. We’ve been advising you about potential COVID exposures on your own calls, where do you think we were getting that information? This shit is for your benefit, not ours, I can’t catch COVID from someone over the phone (the disease vectors sitting the consoles adjacent to me could be another story)

And that’s pretty typical of how cops act towards us, the people they rely on to give them information they need to do their jobs, send them backup when needed, etc. blows my mind that so many of my co-workers are absolute bootlickers.

Philly: A cheesesteak, hoagie, or Italian roast pork (with broccoli rabe, roasted hot peppers, and sharp provolone cheese) sandwich, and a citywide special (traditionally a 12oz PBR and a shot of Jim Beam for $5)

Yuengs & Wings (which rhymes) would be another solid choice

For the kids, maybe a birch beer and a soft pretzel

My dude, I think someone needs to tell you, Russia is part of the imperialist west now. Has been for a while. They’re maybe not always in agreement with the rest of the West, but the disagreement is only over who should be the top dog, not over any deeper philosophical/sociological/political/economic/etc. differences.

They’re not championing communism and haven’t for decades, arguably they haven’t since well-before the USSR officially fell apart.

They drank deep from the capitalist kool-aid, to the point that they’re almost a parody of crony capitalism taken to its most ridiculous extreme. You know all the talk of oligarchs and Putin’s yachts, and all of that? What part of that sounds like redistributing the wealth and seizing the means of production for the working class to you?

I’m sorry you have to find out this way comrade, I can only assume that you spent most of the last half century or so in a coma to not know this. I know the revolution must go on, but for now you should really focus on your physical therapy, and maybe catch up a bit on all that has happened. If you’re going around this uninformed, you’re not going to be able to advance the cause in any sort of meaningful way.

Funeral rites and traditions vary a lot around the world. I don’t know the specifics in Russia, but I know in some places traditionally family has played a big part in preparing the body for burial- cleaning it and dressing it and such, . There may also be additional religious rituals and such that would be performed.

But at the very least, I’m pretty sure that almost anywhere in the world would normally give the next of kin che opportunity to see the corpse if just to confirm that it is in fact their relative they’re about to bury.

Not that I particularly like this, but this isn’t exactly something new.

For most of my life, my mom worked a clerical job at a local elementary school, so I got some decent glimpses behind the curtain of my local school district.

Our district was all-around pretty well-regarded, some nearby districts, put bluntly, were not, and it wasn’t unheard of for parents in those other districts to try to send their kids to our schools. Maybe they moved out of the district and didn’t update their address, or they listed a friend or relative’s address in our district as their home address, etc. and every day their parents would drop them off at a bus stop in our district.

And I certainly don’t blame those parents for trying.

But our district did have someone whose job was to verify residency in those kinds of cases, they’d interview people and stake out bus stops and such. I imagine that a lot of districts do something similar.

Now they weren’t doing random checks on students based on nothing, they only investigated if they had some credible reason to believe the student didn’t live in our district- they received a tip from someone, or a student told someone that it was happening (sadly a decent amount of them came from younger elementary school students who didn’t get what was going on and they let it slip that they lived in another town)

Now of course, this article could be about something a lot more creepy and invasive, the article doesn’t really have much for me to go on.

It’s a shitty situation all-around. Every kid of course deserves to have the highest-quality education possible. Unfortunately, educating children isn’t cheap, in general you’re looking at in the neighborhood of about $10-20k per student per year at a public school in the US (paid for out of taxes and government funding and such, we’re not that bad of a capitalist hellhole that you need to shell out 10+ grand out of pocket every year to send your kids to public school.) A handful of extra students in a district can add up to some pretty significant extra expenses, I can certainly think of a few things I wish my school could have thrown a few thousand at back when I was in school, and maybe they could have if we had less kids attending our school who didn’t actually live in our district (although I don’t exactly have great confidence that our district would have allocated those extra funds appropriately if that were the case, as always, the issues at play are many and complicated)

Currently, which US politician is serving as president?

Also if we want to split hairs, the presidential election was 7 months ago, but you specified “this last election”

Which for about half of US states means a 2025 primary election. Not to mention all of the non US lemmings who might have had more recent elections in their own countries.

And I sure hope none of them voted for Trump because he wouldn’t have been on any of those ballots.