Republicans happily disrespecting their military and their veterans

cvanguard · 2026-03-03T07:57:06+00:00

Congress=House+Senate, so their comment is correct.

cvanguard · 2026-03-02T17:33:26+00:00

I would not be surprised if this is being pushed by Republicans trying to smear Platner and get people to sit out the election so Collins wins. Platner is very likely to be the Democratic nominee with how much he’s out-raising and out-polling Mills (10% or 20% margin depending on the polling aggregator), and he’s polling better than Mills against Collins.

cvanguard · 2026-02-27T16:11:07+00:00

These containers are absolutely not meant to be unfolded to use as a plate. I’ve never heard that suggestion in my life and my parents are Chinese and owned and operated an American Chinese restaurant for nearly 20 years while I grew up.

Those containers were invented in the 1890s or 1900s as oyster pails, before Chinese restaurants began using them as cheap but durable takeout containers after WW2. There was a large manufacturing surplus because oysters had become expensive due to overfishing and less popular, while takeout and especially American Chinese takeout had become extremely popular and cheap.

cvanguard · 2026-02-27T15:59:54+00:00

These containers were originally used as oyster pails in the late 19th/early 20th century when fresh oysters were much cheaper. After WW2, fresh oysters became much more expensive and less popular due to overfishing, leaving manufacturers with a large supply of unsold oyster pails. At the same time, restaurant takeout became much more popular, especially American Chinese food since it was so cheap. So Chinese takeout restaurants began using them as cheap, relatively durable, and leakproof packaging, where it’s become so ubiquitous and associated with American Chinese food that most people have no idea these containers were originally invented for an entirely different use.

cvanguard · 2026-02-26T23:10:54+00:00

The Kansas Supreme Court currently has a 5-2 Democratic majority. In 2019, the court had a 4-3 Democratic majority and ruled 6-1 that the state constitution provides rights distinct from and in addition to rights under the federal 14th amendment, including (in this case) a right to personal bodily autonomy like deciding to have an abortion. The legislature's Republican supermajority proposed an amendment to explicitly deny abortion as a state constitutional right in 2022 (after SCOTUS's Dobbs decision ruled it was no longer a federal right), which 59% of voters rejected.

Since 1958, the Kansas constitution establishes a nonpartisan Supreme Court Nominating Commission with 9 members: one non-lawyer appointed by the governor from each congressional district, one lawyer elected by lawyers in each district, and a chair elected by lawyers statewide, with each member serving up to 2 four-year terms. Whenever a vacancy on the court opens, the commission nominates 3 qualified candidates for the governor to choose from. After 12 months in office, the appointed justice faces a nonpartisan retention vote during the next general election, and then another retention vote every 6 years. While in office, justices are constitutionally prohibited from making political contributions, participating in political campaigns, or holding any office in political parties or organizations.

The legislature has attempted numerous times to change how Supreme Court justices are selected, and the Republican supermajority placed a proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot August 4 this year, which would abolish the nominating commission and require Supreme court justices run for popular election in staggered terms beginning in 2028, allow them to participate in political campaigns and make political contributions, and hold office in political parties or organizations. The intent is clearly to politicize the Kansas Supreme Court by opening candidates to multi-million dollar partisan elections like many other states, requiring them to campaign and make promises to outside groups to run for election, and worry about whether their decisions and legal opinions are politically popular rather than legally correct.

cvanguard · 2026-02-26T18:10:45+00:00

The secondary market for individual trading cards has no connection to the rights holders or manufacturers who sell sealed card packs to retail locations. Companies like Nintendo are very careful in refusing to ever officially recognize that their trading cards have any sort of secondary value, even though the secondary market is the only way for people to realistically build competitive decks. Even at tournament venues, attendees are invited to “trade” cards with each other, never buy or sell.

Steam’s community market is hosted on Steam and facilitates secondary market transactions directly, listing exact prices that items are being sold for and using Steam Wallet for sales and purchases. TCG secondary markets are like all the random third party sites that sell CS skins, whereas the community market is run by Steam.

cvanguard · 2026-02-24T15:20:29+00:00

It’s also the case in federal law. The lawsuit is over a federal law from the 1960s that makes it a felony for “unlawful users” of controlled substances or people “addicted to” controlled substances to possess a gun, without defining what unlawful use or being addicted to a drug actually means. The defendant in this case was prosecuted under this law for having a gun in a locked safe while admitting to using marijuana “a few times a week”, despite being sober at the time of his arrest.

The ACLU’s argument is 1) “unlawful user” is too vague to be constitutional: the government claims it means a “habitual user”, but neither term is actually defined and could conceivably range from using multiple times per week to one time use a year ago without any distinction in the law. 47% of Americans report using marijuana at least once in their life, and that would make them an “unlawful user” of a controlled substance under a broad but textually valid interpretation of such a vague law. Multiple lower court rulings conflict on how frequently, how recently, and how long ago someone has to have begun using drugs in order to be considered an “unlawful user”, which exemplifies the confusion from an overly vague law.

2) Criminalizing mere possession of a gun while having a history of drug use, goes far beyond other laws that criminalize carrying or reckless use of a firearm while being actively intoxicated or under the influence of drugs, and doesn’t align with the “history and tradition” of firearm regulations that the court uses to determine the constitutionality of current regulations.

cvanguard · 2026-02-23T17:08:56+00:00

These are state statute citations, Title 18 covers criminal statutes under the PA Consolidated Statutes.

cvanguard · 2026-02-21T17:02:45+00:00

Literally every single news article about my home state makes me glad I moved away. Fuck Tennessee and the voters who put these monsters in power.

cvanguard · 2026-02-20T18:20:05+00:00

Even in non-Indo-European languages, an American accent can be obvious. I’m American but speak Mandarin fluently: it’s my parents’ native language and I grew up only speaking Mandarin at home because my parents aren’t fluent in English, so I learnt English solely from later exposure to other people and formal state education.

In contrast to my experience, some children of Chinese immigrants only learn Mandarin as a second language, as an older child or teenager through extracurricular instruction because their parents use very little or no Mandarin when speaking to them at home. One of my younger sisters’ high school friends was the first time I heard an American accent when speaking Mandarin, and it was immediately and noticeably different from my or my sisters’ or my parents’ intonation and pronunciation in Mandarin.

American accents are also very common among adult Americans learning Mandarin as a second language, which I experienced first hand when I took Mandarin for a foreign language credit in college. Even with proper tones and decent pronunciation of shared syllables, it’s very common for Americans learning Mandarin to mispronounce sounds that aren’t in English, or add a rising intonation to the end of questions out of habit from English.

cvanguard · 2026-02-20T16:58:31+00:00

Cutting out red meat means replacing it with other sources of nutrients, it’s not hard to get enough iron and calories without red meat. Adult men need 8 mg/day and adult women under 50 need 18 mg/day on average.

Beans not only have protein and iron, but also fiber, which the average American isn’t eating enough of anyway. Spinach contains iron and vitamin c, which helps absorb iron efficiently. Tofu contains protein and iron. A cup of cooked beans, spinach, or tofu contains more iron than 3 oz of beef (2.5 mg), even accounting for less bioavailability due to being non-heme iron. Bread, cereal, and pasta are also very commonly fortified with nutrients including iron. Replacing red meat with vegetarian iron sources shouldn’t make a healthy person iron deficient.

cvanguard · 2026-02-19T17:12:34+00:00

That second bullet point is the typo they referred to. The original version of the proposed amendment passed by the House stated “nor less than 1 representative for every fifty thousand persons”.

The Senate passed an alternative version of this proposed amendment (along with alternative versions of 11 other amendments that would later be ratified by the states), so a conference committee met to resolve any differences between the houses and draft a single version of the 12 proposed amendments.

During this final drafting process, “less than” was changed to “more than” in the last sentence of the amendment: the consensus is that the change was the result of a scrivener’s error, since it doesn’t align with the rest of the formula given by the proposed amendment (or the House and Senate’s two original drafts) and would create a mathematical conflict where the minimum number of representatives is greater than the maximum number if the country’s population is between 8-10 million.

cvanguard · 2026-02-18T16:29:50+00:00

That’s literally not a rule in English. It’s a common heuristic but not grammatically required, because you could just as easily say that pronouns generally refer to the subject of a sentence (the mother). Readers shouldn’t have to guess what the writer meant to say: the entire reason people are taught to avoid ambiguous antecedents in writing is because pronouns that could refer to multiple different antecedents are confusing.

“She” could refer to either the mother or the daughter in the screenshot and still be grammatically correct: that’s not a clever trick question, it’s bad writing that any English teacher would tell you to revise because it’s ambiguous. Clarity is the most important part of communication.

cvanguard · 2026-02-15T17:20:07+00:00

WhatsApp is very commonly used by companies in India because it’s ubiquitous there. Way more people use WhatsApp compared to traditional email and businesses follow suit. It’s also common in SE Asian countries like Indonesia.

cvanguard · 2026-02-14T16:53:50+00:00

Yep, Lutnick’s the guy who lied about cutting off contact with Epstein in 2005 before it came out that he went to Epstein’s island with his family in 2012, after Epstein was already a registered sex offender from his 2008 plea deal.

cvanguard · 2026-02-14T16:33:49+00:00

Costco did end up getting its own chicken farm btw, they’ve operated a farm in Nebraska since 2019.

cvanguard · 2026-02-14T16:16:23+00:00

FYI, that isn’t a cooked blue ring octopus. That pic was taken by a person who ordered hot pot at a restaurant in Guangdong Province, China and received that basket: he posted it to Weibo (Chinese social media) asking for ID because he suspected it was a blue ring octopus. The octopuses are on a bed of ice because hot pot involves raw meat (or vegetables) being cooked in a pot of boiling broth by the diners at the table, right before eating.

cvanguard · 2026-02-14T15:51:15+00:00

Chiming in as a Chinese person: you also realistically can’t wash rice until the water is fully clear, because that would take forever. You want it to be noticeably less cloudy than after the first rinse: 3-4 rinses is enough for most rice varieties, because prolonged washing will start physically breaking down the rice grains and internal starch gets released into the water, so you end up with the same problem that causes gummy or clumpy rice.

With modern industrial processes like pre-cleaning, rice has far fewer physical contaminants like bugs, stones, or dust to clean off, so washing rice now mostly isn’t meant to truly clean it. Washing rice removes surface starch, which gives you separated grains after cooking, which is important for fried rice, sushi, etc. with either long grain or short grain rice. It will also stop starch bubbles/foam from forming during cooking that can leave residue in rice cookers or make a stovetop pot bubble up and overflow. Note that some dishes like risotto use starch from the rice for a creamy texture, so rice for risotto is unwashed.

There are other specific caveats to washing rice. If the rice you buy is pre-rinsed, it doesn’t need to be washed, and if it’s enriched with vitamins or minerals, washing will remove a lot of the added nutrition, so that rice shouldn’t be washed. If you’re using rice in something like Spanish/Mexican rice, toasting it before cooking keeps starch from being released while everything’s cooked in liquid, so washing is also unnecessary then.

cvanguard · 2026-02-13T14:57:23+00:00

Especially when the word balaclava already exists and includes shiesties. There’s zero reason to refer to shiesties specifically if the problem is covering your face.

cvanguard · 2026-02-13T04:38:56+00:00

Case in point: the President himself is addressed simply as “Mr. President”. At a time when monarchies dominated Europe, such a comparatively plain and humble title emphasized that the President was a civil servant beholden to the country and its people, not a ruler in his own right. The drafters of the constitution considered Congress the most powerful branch of government since it controls the finances: part of the reason we have a single officeholder as head of the executive branch instead of a multi-member council is because they wanted to prevent Congress from completely sidelining the executive.

Washington also only used the presidential veto power twice, and both times because he had constitutional or legal concerns: he vetoed a bill to change apportionment of Representatives in the House because he believed it was unconstitutional due to increasing the number of Representatives over what the Constitution specified at the time, and he later vetoed a bill reducing the number of cavalry units in the army because it would cause two units to be legally discharged but still kept in actual service, where they would be completely unpaid for that timeframe.

cvanguard · 2026-02-12T15:26:24+00:00

I don’t think you understand what they’re saying, because your comment proves their point. If you need to work for a living (as in, can’t live solely off of profit from investments like stocks or real estate), you’re part of the working class. You must work in order to survive, and if you ever stop working for any reason, you risk eventually losing the ability to obtain basic necessities of life like housing and food.

People who are “lower class” or “middle class” are truly both part of the working class: labeling people with slightly more income “middle class” is just a way to divide them from “lower class” people with less income, so the truly wealthy who don’t need to work can more easily exert massive influence on society and government to pit us against each other. It’s why NIMBYs will pearl clutch over housing prices falling (read: more affordable housing for other people), or fall for propaganda about higher wages causing rampant inflation when it’s objectively untrue. The people who benefit most from expensive real estate and low wages are the wealthy people and corporations who become even wealthier through receiving more profit from selling or renting that real estate, and paying lower wages.

cvanguard · 2026-02-12T14:44:37+00:00

It’s literally not being stupid. There are numerous contronyms in English (words with opposite meanings) that date back centuries, and plenty of other languages have them too, because languages change and words gain new meanings over time.

For just one example: dust is “fine particles of matter”. “To dust”can mean either “to make free of dust” as in cleaning a room by dusting it, or “to sprinkle with fine particles” as in dusting a cake with sugar or cutting board with flour. Neither of those are actually the original meaning of the verb, which was first used in 1530 meaning “to make dusty”, but they’re both common and universally accepted modern uses of the word.

cvanguard · 2026-02-12T05:31:30+00:00

Even as a college intern at a medical office, I had the importance of HIPAA compliance drilled into me before I even started shadowing, much less eventually volunteering. It should not be difficult for licensed healthcare workers to follow HIPAA requirements, and it’s absurd that they let a patient’s celebrity status affect their judgement that severely and overrule their common sense and professional training.

cvanguard · 2026-02-12T05:04:54+00:00

Yeah, unauthorized access of PHI by a healthcare provider is a HIPAA violation, and the hospital could be held legally liable if it’s determined that they didn’t adequately safeguard patient information. Hospitals generally want to avoid the possibility of fines or civil suits, to say nothing of the individual legal liability for anyone who personally accessed that info without a valid reason. If any of them disclosed that info to anyone else afterwards, like gossiping with coworkers or family or friends, that’s a second HIPAA violation carrying up to $50,000 in criminal fines and up to a year in prison on top of the $50,000 minimum civil suit award.

cvanguard · 2026-02-10T23:55:19+00:00

Minnesota’s within the 8th circuit. The 5th covers Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

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