Adolf Hitler takes office in Namibia

@Nzall I tutored a friend in physics 101 last year. I'll never forget his professor's name - Dr Sithole. Gotta say, Adolf Hitler beats even that.

It's quite a common Indian African name I think. Certainly not unusual.

Really? Wow. Showing my non-travelled-ass self.

I'm pretty sure it's somewhat common in India too, I definitely met at least a couple when I worked there.

Ah yeah, supposedly a name from Karnataka, which is where I worked. Wonder if it has anything to do with the migration of Indians to South Africa of which Gandhi was one

Of course, there is the first name ShiThead as well.

I'm pretty sure that Professor Sithole was from Nigeria.

Republicans attempting to undo U.S. President-elect Joe Biden's victory in Pennsylvania asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday to take up their lawsuit, three days after it was thrown out by the highest court in the battleground state. ctvnews.ca/world/america-votes/…

> They maintain that Pennsylvania's expansive vote-by-mail law is unconstitutional because it required a constitutional amendment to authorize its provisions.

Can't spell corrupt without GOP

Due to unexpected flooding on a flood plain, the Brexit Kent Lorry Park won't be ready until late February to late March

@Nzall Classic

UK got vaccine first because 'it's a better country', according to minister

It's like, how much more reductive could our nationalism be? None more reductive.

command and conquer cutscene ass country

That made me think of Tim Curry, which warmed my heart for a brief moment. Thank you.

@fredley Gotta out Trump the US

Yeah, except Trump is gone. Why keep doing this to ourselves?

Meanwhile, President Donald J. Trump is threatening to defund the US military, because he's upset that enough people mocked him on Twitter that it started trending.

destroy the military or destroy twitter either way: go off king

11 days until the Electoral College vote?

@fredley So close to the next phase of this nightmare

Whyyyy are people just... okay with this

@Elva Because half the country is just insane.

or to country madscientist directly:

It's been a sustained campaign of brainwashing over the course of decades.

Yes

totally sane thing in a totally sane and functional country with a totally sane and functionality democracy

twitter.com/AccuAstronomy/status/1334562916339765249 Footage of the Arecibo telescope collapsing

@Nzall Oh man. Thanks for sharing that

> A tiger at Carole Baskin-owned Big Cat Rescue mauled a volunteer on Thursday morning, nearly tearing off her arm, according to the Florida animal facility. The victim remains hospitalized with serious injuries

> The government has used Section 215 of the Patriot Act to collect logs of visitors to a website, according to an ODNI letter to @RonWyden

> WSJ reporting that Pfizer now expects it can only ship half of the Covid-19 vaccines it had planned this year because of supply chain problems. Says it can still hit a billion doses in 2021

Trump aide banned from Justice after trying to get case info

> The official serving as President Donald Trump’s eyes and ears at the Justice Department has been banned from the building after trying to pressure staffers to give up sensitive information about election fraud and other matters she could relay to the White House, three people familiar with the matter tell The Associated Press.

oh

> Stirrup had also extended job offers to political allies for positions at some of the highest levels of the Justice Department without consulting any senior department officials or the White House counsel’s office and also attempted to interfere in the hiring process for career staffers, a violation of the government’s human resources policies, one of the people said.

behaving as a good Trump lackey, then

This editorial from The Washington Post opposes student-loan forgiveness. I happen to agree with most of it.

@Jolenealaska Oh?

Forgiving student loans the wrong way will only worsen inequality

Sorry- slow fingers

Bah, stupid paywalls

Incognito mode. I'll pull some quotes too.

I'm just slow

Hm, that's a fair point

I hadn't considered that

> As it happens, a seemingly modest change the analysis considered would have the most progressive impact, including in terms of the racial wealth gap: making sure that everyone who qualifies enrolls in an existing plan that links debt repayment to a borrower’s income. Such plans, the study concludes, “are a useful tool for targeted loan forgiveness, and the benefits of this forgiveness largely accrue to middle-income individuals.”

I wonder if they could have it be either up to $50,000 of loan forgiveness or a $50,000 scholarship grant type thing

It's going to require coming at it from a lot of different angles.

Yeah

@Jolenealaska there is a real issue there. I mean I'm all for cheap university education, and I live in a country where it is essentially free. But this is also pretty clearly a policy that does benefit children from more wealthy families more.

The real enemy is the Wealth-Gap. And that is one sneaky, self-perpetuating, insidious adversary.

and loan forgiveness has the added problemt that you can easily create a situation where some people benefit a lot, and others don't get anything that just were a few years too late or early. These kinds of cliffs are extremely unfair, so I would expect some ways to smooth over the differences if anything like this happens

I mean, half of my income went to my loans until my latest time-extending refinance that'll keep me in debt until I'm 41

I think you have to very carefully weigh betweenpeople with high-paying jobs that don't need that forgiveness and people that simply don't make enough to pay off these loans (and everyone in between). And then you also need to honor those people that made sacrificies to pay off their loans, while still forgiving the loans for people that simply didn't have the ability to do so

I disagree that you have to consider people who have already suffered when deciding whether or not more people should suffer too

Other than in a "wow nobody else should have to do this"

@Unionhawk That's not what I mean, though it's close enough that it is really hard to keep my argument away from that simplification. I think loan forgiveness is a very reasonable policy for the US. But I think it is very hard to create rules that are anywhere close to fair for this.

It's complex but there definitely are people out there making that conclusion such as "most of the people in charge" which is fun

And the problem with full, unlimited forgiveness is that poor, disadvantaged people generally don't take up that much loans (I'm guessing here a bit, I don't know the details for the US). The people that accumulate the biggest student loans are likely from a privileged background

"can I have an extra $750 a month please" "have you thought about the people who have already gotten out of debt though how selfish"

There was a debate about changing university to charge some tuition in Germany (very low amounts compared to the US). This never got anywhere, and we kept the almost free university we had. But while I support that, I never had any real argument against the charge that free university mostly benefits the already privileged

I still think that it's worth it, as the cost would also deter poor students much more. But the statistics are really not good there, there is a huge effect of parent wealth/class on whether their children go to university

I mean, yeah I don't necessarily agree in that anyone who wants to get a higher education should be able to get one. The stats on who goes to college now with costs are of course skewed

The weird thing is that it is probably even more skewed here in Germany, and there are almost no costs to College. It's something like 200-350 EUR per semester

I did see a post yesterday like "wow what about the guy who makes $350,000 per year fixing air conditioners" and it's like. That guy is made up, or he has an MBA and runs an HVAC company hello

Wages in the US still confuse me, it's just so different from here. There are a lot more extremes

That'd be like, CEO numbers

depending

Ooo I should look up our C suite compensation packages

CEO numbers for big companies are much larger, for smaller ones the term is kinda meaningless

> Total Compensation: 5.5m

> Rank by title in same industry: 66

3m cash 2m equity

Hmm I should have looked up my career branch top salary but I think it's about 150k for a senior developer at top of salary band

twitter.com/Acosta/status/1334626615205240834 Fauci is staying on as the White House Coronavirus Advisor during the Biden administration

wouldn't have expected anything else

Wisconsin Supreme Court Denies Trump Election Lawsuit wpr.org/wisconsin-supreme-court-denies-trump-election-lawsuit

> The Wisconsin Supreme Court has denied one of President Donald Trump's lawsuits seeking to overturn the results of the state's November election, with a key justice ruling that the president should have filed the lawsuit in a lower court first.

> The 4-3 ruling presented a setback for Trump but did not mean an end to his Wisconsin legal fight, with two separate lawsuits still pending before the state Supreme Court and two additional lawsuits filed in the federal court system.