Al Franken:

I like Ted Cruz more than most of my other colleagues like Ted Cruz. And I hate Ted Cruz.

Actually, the settlement itself doesn’t set a cap. They’re saying 1.776 bulilli9n, but it’s actually unlimited funds for Trump and his minions.

I work in the permitting side of the world and the only time I’ve ever seen a Master Electrician on a job site is when we specifically told them to be there for an inspection. Most of them essentially rent out their license.

I remember when I thought being more efficient would result in less work.

It wasn’t a bill, and even if it had been it would have been signed by Bush. It was the NHTSA that changed the rules, back when they were actually trying to do things in service to the public. It was an attempt to close a loophole that resulted in a bigger loophole.

And nobody wins from the current regs. Auto companies still hate it. You think it’s their preference to make bigger cars that are more expensive to manufacture? You think they don’t want to be able to make small, cheap trucks and vans?

I’m guessing that’s what I heard a few months ago.

People all around our lake heard a loud explosion at the same time, but nobody ever found the source.

A lot of it has to do with well-intentioned but stupid regulation.

The auto companies in the 2000s started calling everything a truck in order to get around fuel economy standards, so in 2008 the EPA announced that beginning in model year 2012, standards would be based on vehicle footprint instead of vehicle classification.

Notice how all the small trucks stopped being made after 2011? It’s because small cargo vehicles suddenly had to somehow have better fuel economy than a sedan.

It’s also why trucks have gotten stupidly big over the last 15 years. As standards increase, they can just make the footprint bigger.

It depends on the job, really. In my perfect world, the shitty retail and fast food jobs that nobody is gonna be excited about wouldn’t even have interviews. They just need warm bodies.

I work 2 jobs. My main job is in municipal development, and while it’s a lot of work and I want them to pay me and pay me well, I’m also passionate about shaping the future of the city and protecting the citizens from developers who will cut every corner with no consideration for their impact.

My side gig is teaching underwater photography at the local university. It’s purely a passion project. In my last 5 years of teaching the course combined I’ve just about paid for one of my cameras.

I know its anecdotal, but I’ve interviewed for dozens of jobs and ended up getting an offer every single time. And it’s not because I lie.

The most important thing in an interview is confidence. I don’t show up begging for a job. I ask them questions and essentially get them to explain why I should work there.

And the confidence starts before the interview. I work in municipal government right now, and my cover letter wasn’t some flowery bullshit about how I was excited for the opportunity blah blah. I included specific process improvements I wanted to bring to that specific city. I was able to do that because instrad of shotgunning my resume, I tailor it to the jobs I want.

I asked for the top number in the salary range because I’m very good at what I do. Some people ask for something in the middle because they think if you ask for the top number you’re immediately dismissed. I’ve never seen that happen. If the salary range has a top number, that number’s already been budgeted, so they’re willing to pay it. Strategically asking for less hoping you’ll get the offer tells the employer that you’re not sure you’re as qualified as the other candidates and are pitching yourself as the budget option.

If the number is a problem but they still want you, they’ll offer a lower number.

I’m saying that when you’re given an opportunity to list references, list people who won’t give you a negative reference.

And sometimes the non-specific nature of employment verification can hurt you. A common rule for companies is only to verify when they worked there and whether they’re eligible for re-hire.

A good example from my personal past is that I worked at a company where I experienced an on-the-job injury in 2018 that required cosmetic surgery. Their insurance required the surgery occur within 2 years to cover it, but the wound had to finish “developing” for a year before they could do the surgery, so I had a 1-year window to get the surgery.

I scheduled the surgery with about 9 months to spare, but the date ended up being in 2020, and because of Covid I couldn’t get it done in the 2-year window. I had left the job in the meantime, so the former employer reached out with a settlement agreement to basically pay me cash that I could use for the surgery after Covid died down.

As part of the settlement language, there was a clause that I couldn’t be employed by the company in the future, which was fine by me because it was a retail management job I did after college while searching for a real job.

So if someone calls up that former employer and gets the standard response, it would be that I worked from X date to Y date and am not eligible for re-hire.

I explained that when interviewing for a job in 2021 that I ended up getting. They told me after hiring that I would not have been given the position if I hadn’t given them a heads-up about it because they were told I was ineligible for re-hire by the previous company.

There’s nothing at all illegal about checking references. Lots of places have policies to only verify former employment and whether or not they’d be eligible for re-hire because they don’t want to get sued, but that’s not the law.

If you are specifically interested in this job, you can write a cover letter. If you’re interested in any job and don’t care about this particular role, we’re gonna interview someone else.

And you’d be amazed what you hear. Sometimes you give a reason for the call and the receptionist spills the beans before transferring you to HR.

What’s public is very strategic. They published the wild but unverifiable stuff from random people . Syuff like Trump throwing children off boats or burying child trafficking victims in his very-visible golf courses. Stuff that isn’t even looked into because it’sa random crazy person making random crazy person claims. But it still generates a report.

I work in government and deal with crazy people. I had a woman show up at City Hall last year for her meeting she arranged with Trump and Musk to help them overcome their differences. She insisted it was a real meeting, because she sent a meeting invite through Outlook. Then she forwarded me the invite.

So if someone sends an Open Records request to the City about any records involving Musk or Trump, there will be a record of a scheduled meeting between crazy lady, Trump, Musk, and me.

Those are the kind of records they are flooding us with right now with the currently-released files. This way, when the real stuff slips through it’s dismissed by many as just more crazy stuff.

When I’m looking at hundreds of resumes, I want the high-level stuff for all applicants where I can easily find it to weed out the wildly unqualified people and the resumes submitted by Indian headhunter who thinks someone who worked in network engineering for 3 months in 2007 is qualified to be a senior drainage engineer.

The reason I still want your regular resume, cover letter etc, is that I do examine those once the 90% of people who never should have even turned in an application have been filtered out.

Protip: if you aren’t going to get a good reference, dont put them down as a reference. Half the people I was gonna give a position to in the last year lost the job to surprises when we checked references right before sending an offer letter. Be up front if you had a colorful exit. Heck - if you left a previous job for ethical reasons and it pissed off your unethical employer, that’s bonus points with me.

slop is slop

There was this super popular Vountry Sing a few years back called “That’s my kind of night” with terrifying lyrics.

The course was saying that on a date, other men might take a girl on a date to a restaurant or something in town, but that the singer would drive them to a river in the middle of nowhere where nobody can hear them, put them on a boat, and sex them.

The 2009 fillibuster-proof majority was a lot shorter than people think. They needed 60 Democrats in the Senate to override fillibusters from the GOP, and Al Franken was engaged in a legal fight to take his seat in the Senate that took months.

By the Time Franken was seated, Ted Kennedy had stopped showing up and lingered for months until his death. His interim replacement wasn’t seated until right before the Christmas holidays. And then in January the Tea Party had replaced Kennedy with a Republican in a special election.

It’s a miracle they managed to rush through the ACA, but that’s also why it was a broken mess. It should have been fixed in reconciliation with a House version of the bill, but then it would have had to go back to the Senate. The House passed the exact, broken language of the Senate version so the GOP couldn’t fillibuster it.

And the GOP spent the next 7 years blocking any progress. Moscow Mitch sponsored a bill that the Dems backed, then fillibustered his own bill just to stop any progress.

They’re barred from that court, which is the United States District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi.

They’re not barred from State, County, or Municipal courts, or from other federal courts because the judge only has control over their District.

Ads aren’t always there to get you to buy something specific. In fact, an ad you don’t interact with is a better ad because they don’t have to pay for click-through.

You don’t want to buy brand A because they have ads, so you buy brand B instead, but both widgets are owned by the same holding company. Or they’re made in the same factory. Or they use the same components. Or they have the same shareholders. Any way you slice it, the same rich assholes are getting your money.

The goal of the Ads is to put a bug in your head and get you to buy something.

And that’s just the Ads. The tracking is also (increasingly primarily) about political manipulation and surveillance.