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Desert Bus For Hope 18 has begun!

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Very thankful for Stardew Valley as my selfcare game this week. Been playing for a little bit each day to just help me relax.

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Governor-elect Ferguson gives press conference about Trump and Plan 2025

I watched yesterday's press conference and was glad to hear that the Washington State Attorney General office have spent much of the past year preparing for the possibility of a Trump campaign.

One of the first questions during the Q&A inquired about how Ferguson thought about the possibility of the National Guard being utilized in the deportation strategies. In answer, Ferguson outlined their three key points they use for considering if they could legally challenge during Trump's first campaign:

  1. Is the action illegal?
  2. Are Washingtonians being harmed?
  3. Does the Washington AG have legal standing to go to court?

He explains that if the answer was yes to all three, they always filed in court. If there was a no then they didn't file. A very disciplined approach to strengthen their cases and fight what they knew they could win.

Overall this did a lot to reassure me of what it could. I am still eager to see the state move some things it had taken for granted into the state constitution, but that isn't on the AG office.

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November 7th, 2024

Automated Archives for November, 7th 2024

11/7/2024 11:45 pm | : 1 min.

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Articles To Read

The following are articles that I saved today. Substance and quality will vary drastically.

Chess For the Day

Record: 3-0-1
Net Elo Change: +11

Games Played

Blog Posts On This Day

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We don't build trust by offering help. We build trust by asking for it. - Simon Sinek

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Bluesky Starter Pack Directory

Starter Kits are the best innovation on Bluesky.

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The idea that I could care about breakdancer Raygun retiring this, of all weeks, is honestly offensive. I can't believe the amount of headlines I've seen about it.

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Digital Archiving

11/7/2024 11:42 am | : 3 mins.

Even before this election I had been thinking about digital archiving. Decades ago I had an idea for a tool that would download my web history and maintain a local archive for me to easily recover and find things I had come across. I am very prone to the "I know I saw something about this recently..." and having to google and search my history to figure out where I had seen it.

I never followed through on that project myself, for a few reasons. The primary reason was that the search tools we had were strong enough the majority of the time.

Now, I'm thinking about digital archiving again for the same reason I have most recently - the threat of the content going away and also just as an ongoing resource in case of not having Internet access. I started playing around with Archivebox yesterday. Archivebox is very close to what I envisioned with Datacomb, short of the automation process. It seems very interesting and robust, I just need to figure out how I would use it. Whether it would build off of my self-hosted Wallabag (a selfhosted Pocket-like reader app, which grabs articles for offline reading.)

I also have a homebrew Python app I created that I called 'Wikindle.' It downloads articles from Wikipedia and converts them into Markdown, though it doesn't download any images. The idea I have for that is to eventually get an E-reader device which can store the entirety of what it downloads (which isn't the entirety of Wikipedia.) As of last night's run, it was roughly 300 megs of text, though there are a lot of articles I want to filter out still.

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Bob Ferguson plays chess

11/7/2024 8:26 am | : 1 min.

I randomly discovered that the incoming Washington state governor (and current Attorney General) Bob Ferguson plays chess. He was rated as an International Master, though he doesn't compete anymore. He did do a fundraiser in 2019 where donors could compete with him in a "simul" event.

At a fundraiser last Sunday, Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson took on 18 chess players at one time in a special tournament known as a "simul." (Twenty people had paid money to play against him, but two people didn't end up making it.) After three-and-half hours of play, Ferguson had lost one game, taken three draws, and won the rest. Fourteen out of 18 isn't a bad showing for an AG who hasn't played the game seriously in almost two decades, and who only ever ran a simul once during his career as an internationally ranked chess master.

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Washington State's gains and losses from other states

11/7/2024 8:18 am | : 2 mins.

Relating to the graphics I shared yesterday about the shifts of voters and states politically, this is a well timed fluff piece which basically regurgitates some stats from the Census Bureau's report on state-to-state migration data.

First take away is that currently the state seems to not have seen a huge direction of immigration, it's basically flat between those who moved into state and those who moved away.

About 212,600 Washington residents in 2023 had lived in another state one year earlier. The estimate for those who left for another state was slightly larger, at 215,300, but the difference between those two figures is well within the margin of error, so let’s just call it a wash.

These numbers look very different from the previous decade, when Washington was growing rapidly from in-migration. Take, for example, the year 2015. Washington gained about 231,000 from other states and only lost 179,000.

Top states Washington gained people from:

  1. California
  2. Oregon
  3. Hawaii

And for states gaining the most population from Washington?

  1. Idaho
  2. Texas
  3. Kentucky

These all track as part of why Washington didn't see a red shift. Our opportunities attracted from those leaving even worse real estate markets for similarly political ideological Washington, and those who dislike the deep blue reality of Washington fled for those other states.

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11/7/2024 8:06 am | : 1 min.

I was wondering this morning about how much of the current greedflation for food and other essential items is a byproduct of peoples' inability, or unwillingness, to price shop outside of single stores. In a world where you can now go to one store to get nearly everything, or even just purchasing online, the exercise of "competitive" price shopping has largely been left by the wayside.

It, honestly, feels silly to think about the work of going to multiple stores and comparing prices, then going back to the stores to get the desired items. The only time I do serious price comparison shopping are online for bigger purchases, or for the select differences my wife and I spot in pricing and value between Fred Meyers (our primary grocery chain) and CostCo.

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I've been storing my cheese all wrong

11/7/2024 7:57 am | : 2 mins.

"Cheese is alive," said Kyra James, a food educator and certified cheese professional. "And needs oxygen and humidity to stay alive."

Experts across the field agree that cheese paper — that is, opaque paper covered with a thin layer of wax or plastic in varying compositions — is ideal for wrapping everything except fresh cheeses like ricotta, feta and mozzarella (which should stay in their original packaging with their brine). And yes, for cheeses cut in pieces that you buy wrapped in plastic, it's a good idea to re-wrap if you'd like them to last longer.

"You can keep cut wedges of cheese in these papers for literally weeks at a time with very little change to the quality and flavor," Ms. Saxelby wrote. For sustainability and economy, there are now reusable and compostable cheese papers, and you can even reuse the wrapping from the cheese counter after a rinse and dry.

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Alright Washington state. As one of the two states which didn't move right this election, it's time for us to enshrine rights in our state constitution post haste.

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November 6th, 2024

Automated Archives for November, 6th 2024

This post was automatically generated.

Chess For the Day

Record: 0-0-1
Net Elo Change: -6

Games Played

Blog Posts On This Day

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From Nov. 2021 - "Democrats’ Betrayals Are Jeopardizing American Democracy"

11/6/2024 8:30 pm | : 5 mins.

Go read the full article, I implore you. The following is the opening paragraphs and then an excerpt of Franklin Roosevelt. But the entire article is excellent and it was written in 2021.

American democracy is in the midst of a meltdown — the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and Republicans' intensifying crusade to limit voting rights and deny election results make that abundantly clear. Conflict-averse Democrats in Washington, D.C., are on the verge of letting this turn into a full-fledged nightmare. Torn between their corporate donors and the electorate, they are studiously avoiding the two key questions: What is really fueling this crisis? And how can it be stopped?

The answer to the first question can be seen in headlines this week about billionaires growing their fortunes by $2 trillion during the pandemic, and now creating an overheated market for luxury yachts, all while one in five households just lost their entire life savings. Americans keep voting to change this crushing dystopia and yet they continue being force-fed more of the same — most recently with Democrats threatening to side with their financiers and abandon their whole economic agenda. Such betrayals from both parties have been telling more and more of the country that democracy is a farce.

It was the following insight about Roosevelt's observations that made me want to capture it here:

Once elected, Roosevelt championed a then-radical program of government investments and interventions in the economy, directly employing millions of the jobless, investing in public infrastructure, and subjecting powerful financial institutions to tough regulations. Though the New Deal was hardly perfect, the agenda was an unprecedented investment in America's working class, helping restore some faith in democratic government as a force for good.

The year before a fulminating Nazi rally in a packed Madison Square Garden in New York, FDR warned that the global rise of fascism was the result of democratic governments doing the opposite of the New Deal and protecting an economic status quo enriching a tiny handful at the expense of everyone else.

"Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations, not because the people of those nations disliked democracy, but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and government weakness through lack of leadership," he said in a 1938 radio address. "Finally, in desperation, they chose to sacrifice liberty in the hope of getting something to eat."

To know Roosevelt's analysis was correct is to look at how his investments ultimately rescued the economy, beat back fascists, got him re-elected in landslide elections, and created a 40-year epoch we now call the New Deal era. His prescience was also confirmed by what concurrently happened in Germany, where leaders imposed spending cuts.

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Bernie shares his thoughts on the democratic loss

11/6/2024 7:11 pm | : 4 mins.

Bernie tweeted the following:

It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.

While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change.

And they're right.

Along with it, there is the following statement.

NEWS: Sanders Statement on the Results of the 2024 Presidential Election

November 6, 2024

BURLINGTON, Vt. Sen. Bernie Sanders (1-Vt.) today released the following statement in response to the outcome of the 2024 presidential election:

It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they're right.

Today, while the very rich are doing phenomenally well, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and we have more income and wealth inequality than ever before. Unbelievably, real, inflation-accounted-for weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were 50 years ago.

Today, despite an explosion in technology and worker productivity, many young people will have a worse standard of living than their parents. And many of them worry that Artificial Intelligence and robotics will make a bad situation even worse.

Today, despite spending far more per capita than other countries, we remain the only wealthy nation not to guarantee health care to all as a human right and we pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. We, alone among major countries, cannot even guarantee paid family and medical leave.

Today, despite strong opposition from a majority of Americans, we continue to spend billions funding the extremist Netanyahu government's all out war against the Palestinian people which has led to the horrific humanitarian disaster of mass malnutrition and the starvation of thousands of children.

Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not.

In the coming weeks and months those of us concerned about grassroots democracy and economic justice need to have some very serious political discussions.

Stay tuned.

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"Forget 'Why?', it's time to get to work."

I remember reading this from Anil eight years ago. He reshared it today and it's still a good read.

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I am not going to say today is a good day. But I did just snag the 9 cd set of the dramatization of the Lord of the Rings book trilogy off the free table at work.

Do I have a working CD player? Not at the moment.

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The Red Shift

The image comes from the New York Times, and I was looking to find this but for the 2020 election but cannot find it. This election highlights the illusion that was 2020 due to Covid, the decrease in voter turnout is also extremely telling.

The next four years are going to be harrowing.

Added Later

Just found this image online and this is very interesting to see as another visualization of the shift in this election. Fascinating that the only two states to shift more Blue were Washington and Utah.

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November 5th, 2024

Automated Archives for November, 5th 2024

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Chess For the Day

Record: 1-0-2
Net Elo Change: -6

Games Played

Blog Posts On This Day

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