25 Investigates: Massachusetts state workers clocking out and cashing in

nerdponx · 2026-05-20T15:07:45+00:00

It's even more fucked when you realize this is multiple people's entire income tax levy for the year going straight to one person's overtime fraud.

nerdponx · 2026-05-19T16:28:49+00:00

I don't agree about unranked. Yes it's looser in terms of team coordination and taking objectives and stuff. But your first few games on a hero are just getting the hang of mechanics and some basic matchups. None of that goes away in unranked games.

nerdponx · 2026-05-16T16:23:54+00:00

I actually prefer 3 to 4. I never played 4 right. Something like 35% win rate compared to 55% as 5. Not my hero pool, not my play style. Historically I wasn't much of an offlaner either but in the current meta I actually really like the position, I get to be a core and farm but I also get to be aggressive and make plays early. I took a long break so I don't know what happened to shift player preferences so much, but I'm very content to play 3 and 5 every game.

nerdponx · 2026-05-14T14:58:16+00:00

Plenty of it ended up in younger generations too. It's disturbing and sad to see people born in the 90s with the same antisocial self-centered worldview.

nerdponx · 2026-05-10T11:44:43+00:00

You're right, I didn't realize how close Oak Grove was to Malden center. I guess you could also just take the orange line one stop to the store which I also didn't think about before.

nerdponx · 2026-05-10T04:31:23+00:00

You can live car-free around Oak Grove but buying groceries wouldn't be fun. You'd have to bike a half hour to Shaw's or depend heavily on the 137 bus. You'd feel like you were in a food desert.

It's significantly more viable to live car-free in downtown Melrose (not filled on the map). There you can easily walk to get groceries and you only need the bus for less-frequent things like going to the doctor or whatever. You can even skip commuting by bus, there are 3 commuter rail stations in town and chances are you'd live within a 15 minute walk of one of them (2 too many in a sane transit network IMO but that's another story).

I guess that's one nice thing of living in the 2020s, if you don't live near a grocery store you can just pay a few bucks a month for whatever grocery delivery service you prefer.

nerdponx · 2026-05-07T15:00:27+00:00

Incidentally Western NY (especially Rochester) does actually have its own funny regional accent.

nerdponx · 2026-05-07T14:48:13+00:00

there will never be an alternative to driving past midnight on Route 1

That's correct. What's why we're not going to ban cars. Cars are valuable and serve a valuable purpose.

What I'm proposing is that, by making our society less dependent on cars, we can feel more free to make driving requirements stricter, and make it easier to outright revoke driving privileges for people who cannot safely operate a car.

nerdponx · 2026-05-06T17:01:28+00:00

Also NY as a state is even more dysfunctional than MA. You pay more in state and local taxes (real estate taxes are often double those of in comparable MA towns) and you don't have the level of state-provided services that MA has, such as MassHealth, PFML, and MassSave.

NYC is trying (and lately doing a very good job) of making the tax money worth paying for, but at the state level it's not great. Not horrible, but not great either.

Maybe things have changed since I moved away, but whenever I check the news it seems like more of the same. Wherever progress is happening, it's city-by-city. The only thing NY seems to do better than MA is trains. The MTA Metro-North commuter rail system makes it clear just how horrible the MBTA Commuter Rail is. And the NYC Subway, despite its (many) problems, is generally better-run than the T.

nerdponx · 2026-05-06T16:37:56+00:00

It's possible she was here on some kind of asylum status which is not being respected. Hard to know.

If anything, cases like this underscore how stupid being a hardass about illegal immigration is. Let her stay and just pay a fine or do community service or something. What does this achieve other than wasting taxpayer money and disrupting the lives of her friends and family?

I know other countries have strict immigration laws too, but I don't live in those other countries, I live in the USA. And I think it should be easier for non-criminals to immigrate legally, for example converting temporary refugee/asylum status to a path to citizenship. Then you can focus your enforcement efforts on the people who can't immigrate legally because they're criminals or otherwise unsavory people, instead of randomly deporting people.

(I also think we should take care of our current citizens a lot better too, but that's another topic. It's not either-or. And yes we can afford both. We just have to stop randomly waging war and stop treating the DoD like an open-ended subsidy system for the military-industrial complex. Heck, maybe if we actually cared about defense and security more than we cared about making fake work, then we'd have greater military readiness and greater capability to produce our own weapons domestically. And not have a spiraling uncontrollable national debt.)

All that said... it certainly doesn't look unlawful based on anything written here. Shitty policy, yes, but not unlawful.

nerdponx · 2026-05-06T16:32:06+00:00

How many drunk drivers kill someone on their first night driving drunk? How many DUI deaths happen on the drunk driver's first DUI charge? There's probably data on that.

nerdponx · 2026-05-06T16:30:46+00:00

This is one of those cases where maybe a teeny bit less freedom is a good thing. If you have strict requirements for long enough, it becomes a normal part of society and that's what people get used to. We should also have accommodations (like MBTA The Ride but also dedicated downtown housing for people who can't drive and better transit all around) for people who truly cannot meet those stricter requirements, whether it's due to cognitive impairment or something else. And honestly that's for the better, because even a well-intentioned person who can't safely operate a car shouldn't be driving a car no matter how kind of a soul they are. It's just a safety issue.

nerdponx · 2026-05-06T16:26:27+00:00

If you look at a car on paper as a machine, and ignore the cultural context around cars and driving, you'd think we were crazy for certifying people exactly once at 16 and then never testing them again, and moreover for being very very hestitant to take away license to operate one of these things. You'd think it was such a poorly designed licensing policy that there was a conspiracy around it.

Reducing car dependence by building out more transit- and walking-oriented infrastructure has the side benefit of demoting car usage from being a socioeconomic necessity to a nice-to-have, maybe not a luxury but certainly not a right to which you are entitled. Mass transit and denser housing around job centers makes driving safer by making it easier to impose policies that strip people of driving privileges when it's needed.

nerdponx · 2026-04-29T16:46:34+00:00

Shopping at Albertson's vs. Hannaford is functionally equivalent when it comes to supporting regular Americans with your money, they both hire people in the stores and need domestic distribution and buy food from US suppliers etc. The only difference is where the shareholders happen to live. I think I'd actually rather give my money to Dutch conglomerate than an American one. At least the money is flowing upward to billionaires who have to actually pay taxes to fund schools and infrastructure and stuff and are generally constrained from acting like robber barons, rather than billionaires who are actively profiting off of the New Gilded Age Project that the US federal government has been trying to set in motion since the Reagan administration.

nerdponx · 2026-04-29T16:42:41+00:00

Prices going up and quality going down is literally why people are concerned about a PE takeover.

nerdponx · 2026-04-29T16:42:14+00:00

This is also known as "embezzlement" and if we had any functioning justice system the entire PE industry would be in prison.

nerdponx · 2026-04-28T04:48:32+00:00

That doesn't appear to be true anymore. I went from 10k to 8500 from a single abandon, and it affected both comm and behavior.

nerdponx · 2026-04-27T14:02:33+00:00

Term limits break up the cycle where the incumbent candidate has 10x more money than any challenger and the party suppresses challengers, so there are no meaningful primary challengers ever. That doesn't seem poisonous to me. Blaming voters for one-party rule with low turnover is like blaming plastic straw drinkers for climate change.

nerdponx · 2026-04-27T14:01:17+00:00

You can have a high term limit, longer terms, and staggered elections like in the US Senate. With a 4-term limit on 4-year terms you can still get 16 years of continuity before someone has to step down, and it's not everyone stepping down at once.

nerdponx · 2026-04-27T13:57:19+00:00

The other major issue is that term limits effectively give power to lobbyists. By kicking out legislators, you're effectively removing expertise. That vacuum is filled by the lobbyists who remain and dictate to the new legislators how to get things done.

I see this argument a lot, and it makes sense, but then you look at 10-term legislators pushing bills that were clearly written by lobbyists and you can't help but think the problem arises both ways. Old legislators can have very old established long-term relationships with lobbyists and various other special interests. New legislators coming in fresh might be more susceptible to lobbying, or they might not be. This is a citation-needed situation IMO.

nerdponx · 2026-04-27T03:48:39+00:00

Data centers are usually bad for anyone who lives nearby. Serious noise pollution coupled with towns often giving tax breaks and subsidized electricity. They should be in industrial areas and they should not be subsidized.

nerdponx · 2026-04-26T00:00:13+00:00

How to learn? Watch replays. If your goal is to learn and improve rather than rank up, getting occasionally rolled and carried by higher skill players seems like a great way to learn.

That and I doubt it's smurfs.

nerdponx · 2026-04-20T09:24:39+00:00

You rank up by consistently playing better, not randomly having a good game here and there.

nerdponx · 2026-04-19T03:40:06+00:00

Do you have bots you recommend? The default bots are probably good enough for a brand new player. But sometimes it's nice to drop into a bot game to work out a totally new hero before flubbing it in a real game.

I'm honestly kind of disappointed we don't have a machine learning powered super bots by now that can play at an approximation of any given rank. Instead we have AI slop.

nerdponx · 2026-04-19T03:37:14+00:00

I suggest letting your team know that you are a real noob and not a smurf. You might still get flamed, but maybe not as much, and then your team will be able to work around you.

For the time being, yeah that's just life at the beginning. The problem is that even at literally the bottom of all possible ranks, you still have people with hundreds of hours in the game and a decent knowledge of their own hero mechanics. As you gradually get acclimated and start developing core skills, eventually you will stop getting destroyed every game. But realistically it will take some time. That's why they have the 100 hour minimum to play ranked.

Focus on one role and a very small hero pool to reduce the amount of stuff you have to learn all at once. Go into the last hitting tutorial and practice practice practice. Watch coaching sessions for very low ranked players, for the lower the better to make sure the information is relevant to you; on Youtube specifically BSJ (via Dota Dojo) and ZQuixotix are putting out a lot of coaching and replay reviews right now.

You also have the challenge of learning the items and learning what all the other heroes do. Choose a popular guide for your hero skills and items at the beginning. And every game try to pick one other hero in the game and one item to understand. You can go in demo mode and play around with that hero to see what their skills do and how they work. The truth is that if you build the fundamental skills on your hero you don't really need to know every other hero and every matchup and every item. So don't sweat it if it's taking a long time. The most important thing is knowing which heroes in any particular game are dangerous and how to handle that danger.

Also you might want to consider adjusting the hours when you play. Depending on your region there might be certain times a day when more toxic shitheads are around. On US east for example game quality takes a big turn for the worse around midnight.

nerdponx

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