Seriously, didn't anyone on the city council attend a US high school? In #California, we had to read the Constitution as part of a required "US Government" class.
#California Legislature bill would increase funding for school salaries by 50% within 7 years. It is supposed to go to teachers, aides, and specialists, but it doesn't require it.
I can see school superintendents and other administrators gobbling it up and leaving teachers underpaid.
That affects me as a "decline to state" a party voter, because there's zero chance for me to vote for someone whose views and agenda are similar to mine. (Not that I've seen any third party candidates whose views are similar to mine, but if such a candidate ever arose, they aren't likely to be in the Democratic or Republican parties.)
> At the turn of the 20th century, the eugenics movements captivated much of white America, fueled by a zealous faith that the burgeoning field of genetics could socially engineer away America’s “ills”, including poverty, crime and “feeblemindedness”. Thirty-two states had sterilization laws, but California’s program was unrivaled. It contributed to a third of total national sterilizations, and set an example for Nazi Germany’s sterilization laws.
> "California was the second state to pass eugenics laws in 1909," two years after Indiana made it legal to sterilize the "feeble-minded," according to University of Virginia bioethicist Paul Lombardo.
> Lombardo is an expert on eugenics, a school of thought popular around the turn of the 20th century. Eugenicists thought they could improve the human species through selective breeding, which meant preventing habitual criminals, inmates of insane asylums and sexual deviants from having kids.
> Many people who lived in state-run hospitals, homes and institutions through 1979 were sterilized, leaving them unable to have biological children. Additionally, many people who were in custody of a state prison or other correctional facility after 1979 were forcibly or involuntarily sterilized.
> The Forced or Involuntary Sterilization Compensation Program financially compensates survivors of state-sponsored sterilization. The California Victim Compensation Board (CalVCB) administers the program.
#California food company (companies?) warned after infestation found in their warehouse.
_Warned_ ? Based on what they describe in the article, the company should have been closed immediately and all their products destroyed. And a mandatory recall, of course.
This sort of thing is part of the reason we have federal regulatory agencies in the first place. Do your job!
@gnu2 Both #California (where I live) and #NewYorkState (where I'm getting benefits from) do have a call in option. #NYState has phone people Monday through Friday, but the reporting is due Sunday and I don't want it to be delayed after 5 months without income.
#StateFarm insurance hit with big racial discrimination lawsuit
Supposedly, the lawsuit is based on the company's own internal reporting ... if this is true, then the state attorneys general in #California and #New_York should also be suing to get vigorous restrictions placed upon State Farm and related companies.
I've said it before, but the whole country depends on those two states' attorneys to knock corporations in the head with a stick. #USDOJ is either too timid or too corrupt to intervene in most such cases, and smaller states don't have the clout even if they weren't also bought and paid for.
#California new home building undershoots need by highest number in nation, leading to increased homelessness and other societal ills.
> The housing crisis in the Golden State is not new. California lawmakers and Gov. Gavin Newsom have highlighted the state’s housing shortage and introduced legislation aiming to address it in recent years. So far, the efforts have had little effect.
> California’s housing prices have been higher than the rest of the nation for decades, but the gap started to widen between 1970 and 1980 when the prices went from 30% higher than U.S. levels to 80% higher, according to a 2015 assessment from the Legislative Analyst’s Office. In order to have kept California housing prices from growing faster than the nation between 1980 and 2010 would have required 70,000 to 110,000 additional units each year, according to the LAO.
They are trying to do some things, but not enough. Besides building more homes, how about taxing bank repos as long as they are empty? How about offering a break to apartment landlords who sell the rental property to a tenants-cooperative? How about pushing local governments to build apartments within walking distance of multi-business centers (such as office buildings and shopping malls) and public transit hubs?
I'm sure they're trying to do all of the above, but I'm not seeing any of it yet.
The site, besides having to give data to #id.me ( which by the way, the report about id.me was recently released, and it wasn't nice stuff ), also has some 3rd party security solution that dislikes my IP address ( either hotspotting on my phone or using a VPN ). Since they deal with people who are out of work and often on the edge of becoming homeless, they really need to relax about where people access their site from.
Anyway, calling the number puts one through a bunch of unskippable blah-blah, some "if you blah-blah-blah, press 1, if not press 2", and then usually ends with "we're receiving more calls than we can process; good bye" and hangs up. So every call is several minutes, only to find that you have to try again later.
I understand that EDD likely gave millions of dollars in unemployment and pandemic aid to people who were not eligible ( not a resident of California, not previously working in the state, prisoners, etc ) over the past few years. And I agree that they need to do a better job of ensuring that benefits go to people who are eligible as well as referring ineligible people to the proper agencies & programs. But EDD once had fully staffed offices all over the state, where actual employees saw your face and your ID, reviewed any documents you were submitting, and explained the process to you. Most of the problem with fraud is caused by their being too cheap to pay for employees.
This reminds me of a Christian denomination I once read about. They believe that salvation is only for people who are predestined, so they were attempting to disguise their churches so that people who weren't predestined would not wander in and accidentally be converted. (This was about 40 years ago, so I have no idea if the group still exists, or even what group it was.)
In Irwindale, the water came out looking like diluted milk ... and stayed that way several minutes later. It is an old rock quarrying town, so I suspect it was just rock debris suspended in the water.
In Mississippi, the water came out yellow for a few days before getting clear again. The same thing happened in #Baton_Rouge, but it was only one or two days and it only happened once.
While I am happy for whomever got the winning ticket (modulo taxes and all the real and fake relatives and acquaintances that will come crawling out of the woodwork hoping to get a slice of the pie), the odds of winning a jackpot are amazingly bad ... one in almost 300,000,000. At those odds, they're better off playing for the fun of it, or considering it a donation to whatever state agency gets the benefits (in #California, that's the schools).
I have only read one "rich dads" book, but I imagine that the author would say that rich dads don't play the lottery (and probably don't gamble at all unless they feel they have an inside track on winning). The odds of winning big are abysmal, and the odds of winning at all are probably about even--and that includes winning a free ticket or winning back your purchase price.
Don't jump all over me for this. I'm not saying don't play the lottery. I'm saying don't play the lottery thinking you're going to win money. Play it for fun, or to support the schools. If you happen to win, that's a bonus.
(As a plus, this will prevent you from spending the rent money on lottery tickets. You think I'm joking, but when California's state lottery first started, I saw an elderly man from down the street spend his entire Social Security check on scratch-off tickets. When he couldn't pay his rent, one of his neighbors took him in for a month, while he looked for a new place to stay.)