US US Politics General 2 - Discussion of President Trump and other politicians

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Should be a wild four years.

Helpful links for those who need them:

Current members of the House of Representatives
https://www.house.gov/representatives

Current members of the Senate
https://www.senate.gov/senators/

Current members of the US Supreme Court
https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/biographies.aspx

Members of the Trump Administration
https://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/
 
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I actually understand the Iraqi Sesame Street show somewhat. Obviously, it's meant to instill liberal values in young Iraqis and make them easier to conquer. But what is the point of mutilating mentally ill Guatemalans?
Come on guys, think like a fed.
If you get the mentally ill Guatemalans on HRT, now they're dependent on you for that HRT. You've made lifelong medical patients, just like here in the US, and now they're loyal to you and will do whatever they need to do to keep getting their fix.
The surgeries, too, funnel money to the Guatemalan versions of Sidhbh Gallagher.
 
34% of this cohort was born outside the US. An additional fun fact is that 33% of all adults in the US have literacy below a 6th-grade level (54% if we include the illiterates).
To follow up a bit (I love this stuff, lol) New Hampshire (88.3% white non-hispanic population 2022) had the country's highest literacy rate. The state with the lowest literacy rate - a real, real shocker here, honestly, I'm stunned - is California, whose 2020 white non-hispanic population was 41.2%. Just a coincidence, of course.
 
Okay gonna PL here: I worked as a teacher for 2 years cause nobody hires political science majors. It's useless.
I'm so fucking glad I realized this into my first year and switched my major to something fucking useful.
Come on guys, think like a fed.
If you get the mentally ill Guatemalans on HRT, now they're dependent on you for that HRT. You've made lifelong medical patients, just like here in the US, and now they're loyal to you and will do whatever they need to do to keep getting their fix.
The surgeries, too, funnel money to the Guatemalan versions of Sidhbh Gallagher.
I dunno man, it seems easier just to get them hooked on less severe drugs like fentanyl.
 
Every now and then I run into someone who is actually or functionally illiterate and it's always some fucking boomer born in the 40s or 50s and more likely a woman who never needed that shit because she only needed to cook and clean and her husband would handle the rest (I wish this was a joke I have had multiple old women explain this to me) like paying bills/anything that required reading.

Anyone under the age of 30 who can't read is either an illegal who can still read Spanish but not English or literally retarded. Even the most mentally deficient zoomer can read (unless they're black, I guess) because so much of everything is online or via text/etc.

The biggest issue with the DOE is that they constantly push stupid shit as lesson plans and not basics like Home Ec that let the burnouts stocking shelves understand how to function as adults. Understanding a budget and how credit cards work should be mandatory and it's a way more deficient skill set across young people I've met than reading.

That being said we need to do better on funneling actually smart and successful kids up the ladder like other countries do while weeding the dumb ones into trade schools because we need both more scientists and more skilled mechanics. Killing the DOE will help with that, because the DOE fucking hates trade schools for some reason. Just let kids who can't go into STEM of useful degrees go to trade schools because it both pays well and is a necessary skill set for people to have.
 
Searchers are looking for a Bering Air plane that was reported missing Thursday on its way from Unalakleet to Nome with 10 people aboard, Alaska State Troopers said.

The Bering Air Caravan, which is carrying nine passengers and a pilot, was reported overdue at 4 p.m. Thursday, troopers said in an online statement.

 
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  • WSJ is reporting that Trump is getting ready to fire thousands of HHS employees
  • Climate justice division of the EPA is gone, 168 people have been fired
  • NGOs are shuttering migrant facilities across the country as federal funds dry up.
  • USAID moved under Rubio and 9,700 employees are put on administrative leave.
  • Termination of all federal funds going to media.
  • DOGE has cut 751 million in federal contracts and 45 million in leases.
  • No men in women’s sports.
  • Pause of federal funding to sanctuary cities.
  • Federal audit of all NGOs
Just a reminder of where we're at. It hasn't even been a month yet.
 
COBOL was designed to be a human readable language that could be used by people with business degrees to develop programs (which is part of the reason that it's so prevalent in financial systems even to this day) without needing to literally understand how a CPU works. If you're moderately intelligent you can probably read and understand some parts of a COBOL program even if you're not a programmer. Here's some example COBOL code from an article about it.

Code:
COMPUTE-GROSS-PAY.
IF HOURS-WORKED > 40 THEN
MULTIPLY PAY-RATE BY 1.5 GIVING OVERTIME-RATE
MOVE 40 TO REGULAR-HOURS
SUBTRACT 40 FROM HOURS-WORKED GIVING OVERTIME-HOURS
MULTIPLY REGULAR-HOURS BY PAY-RATE GIVING REGULAR-PAY
MULTIPLY OVERTIME-HOURS BY OVERTIME-RATE GIVING OVERTIME-PAY
ADD REGULAR-PAY TO OVERTIME-PAY GIVING GROSS-PAY
ELSE
MULTIPLY HOURS-WORKED BY PAY-RATE GIVING GROSS-PAY
END-IF
.
The hard part for a large COBOL program isn't understanding the code, but rather all of the business logic behind the code, which is likely not documented well. This example is easy enough to anyone who has worked an hourly job, or at least it makes sense to me and I've never looked at COBOL code before in my life.

Meanwhile here's some example code for an NES game that someone made. Maybe without enough time I could come to understand what the fuck any of that does, but I have a newfound appreciation for the poor Japanese bastards that made Super Mario and why it's probably impossible for anyone to make a game that even more autistic speed runners can't find ways to exploit.

Code:
play_a220:
pha
lda #%10011111
sta SQ1_VOL
lda #%11111011
sta SQ1_LO

lda #%11111001
sta SQ1_HI

pla
rts
Yeah, COBOL is a programming language that attempts to be understandable by non-programmers. BASIC is another example. This ends up creating a language that hurts programmer brains because the "normie logic" clashes with Computer Science "autism logic".

The NES assembly code looks like hieroglyphics, but it is just a bunch of really simple calculator-like instructions written in 3 letter acronyms. Mostly dealing with moving 8bit values around and doing basic math on them.
Registers hold a value temporarily, and have nicknames based on the most common thing they do. The stack is a bunch of values you can only access from "the top" (think of a deck of cards)
PHA Push accumulator on stack
Take the value from the accumulator register and move it to the top of the stack.
LDA #%10011111 Load accumulator
Put a value in the accumulator register. In this case the binary value 10011111 (the number 159).
STA SQ1_VOL Store accumulator
SQ1_VOL is the nickname given to memory address $4000, which is actually part of the NES sound system. It controls the volume of the sound.

... Load value, push value to sound...
PLA pulls the value back off the stack.
RTS returns from subroutine. Go back to the code that we jumped to this code from.
Summary: it plays a sound.
 
Anyone under the age of 30 who can't read is either an illegal who can still read Spanish but not English or literally retarded. Even the most mentally deficient zoomer can read (unless they're black, I guess) because so much of everything is online or via text/etc.
Nice of you trying to hang these failures on the boomers. 66% of 4th-grade children in the U.S. could not read proficiently in 2013. Do you really think things have improved since then?
 
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