WTF-Beta

I went in Maryland. Huge turnout. It was fun.

Once the baby arrives, the plan is to hire "one of those Chinese grandmothers" who will do everything for the first three months.

Dad will not be taking on the role of caretaker, that's for sure.

I don't buy that this is motivated by a feeling that it will hurt her career to be pregnant. Her employer is so progressive that they pay part of the costs of surrogacy. Back in my day, ambitious women worked through pregnancy and were back to work in 2 weeks. Couples take that much time off for a wedding and honeymoon.

I know a woman who is married, early 30s, healthy, no fertility problems. Ambitious and rising to the C suite of a major corporation if she keeps grinding. Husband is also corporate but not on the fast track; approves of wife's career goal. They have plenty of money.

The couple has decided they would like to have baby. The plan is to hire a surrogate to have the baby. The reasons are that wife think it is creepy to have an alien growing inside you. Also, husband and wife agree that wife needs to stay focused on career and can't lose time or productivity to pregnancy and childbirth.

I have many reactions.

Egg retrieval is no picnic, and the time to interact with lawyers and vet surrogates is not insignificant.

Surrogacy means you surrender control during the pregnancy and especially the delivery; what if the surrogate refuses a c section doctors advise to protect the baby?

Surrogates are in short supply, so it seems selfish to take a surrogate off the market when there is no medical justification for choosing this route.

Isn't the healthiest thing for the child to be created inside the mom rather than retrieved, frozen, fertilized, implanted? If you can't procreate otherwise, this route is a lifesaver, but otherwise?

Am I just being sexist? Men get to prioritize career over procreation all the time. Then again, if a husband just ejaculates once and then ignores the pregnancy and childbirth, that's frowned upon.

My last day at DOJ is this Friday. Everyone in my office (policing, prison conditions, disability discrimination) except maybe a handful are leaving. It's either leave or be required to do things that are antithetical to any notion of civil rights.

The job market is crazy bad, but I will be ok. I get paid through September.

It's sad for the country.

The way they are deciding who to fire is crazy.

My section of DOJ hires 1 or 2 law school graduates each year. Otherwise, you have to have at least four years of experience to be hired at all. The people we hire are crazy good because there is so much competition.

If they fire our probationary attorneys (those who have been on the job for less than 2 years), we will literally be firing the best and the brightest. This might include a person who hits 2 years on Feb. 27 and who is a rock star.

If you want to improve the federal workforce, why not do it on merit?

And why do they have to be so joyful and incredibly mean about it, taunting people in the worst moment of their career?

I finally got one of their dutch ovens. It's a real splurge, but I cook every day.

Yep, I’m still around, having survived so far. It has been . . . We have all these executive orders to be cheerfully implemented. Like, I spent time today going through our internal office site where people post a pic, their bio, and the names of their pets. My mission: delete offending pronouns.

And every day there is a media report threatening something or someone, not to mention the daily spooky email suggesting I should resign secure in the knowledge that I will be treated with dignity when I am eventually cast out. What next? Paper leaflets tossed out of helicopters?

Meh. I am almost at retirement age, so I will stick it out. I am management, so no union protection. There is actual work that needs doing, so I will do it. And if I get fired, I will take care of my grandchildren ‘cause these triplets aren’t going to raise themselves.

I love TikTok. And I don’t value national security. This country elected trump twice, so this country doesn’t value national security either.

I use shokz open run all the time. Ear buds generally won’t stay in my ears, especially during exercise. I like that they don’t plug my ear so I can hear traffic while walking.

Rory is going to be a productive, fascinating young man. You’re lucky to have him in your life.

Until people on food stamps can shop in places that have fresh, healthy options, I’m thinking we should leave them alone and let them buy what they want.

Matt Gaetz has withdrawn. Couldn't get the votes for confirmation. And since he resigned from congress, maybe we are well and truly done with him.

Let this be a lesson to all. If you are going to behave like a nasty piece of work to all the people whose support you need, do not also be a sex offender.

I decided to dig deeper into this issue of gender affirming care in prisons and detention centers. When Trump said this in the debate, I figured he was lying. He wasn’t.

When Harris ran her doomed 2019 campaign, her campaign filled out policy questionnaires from various groups. One question asked about support for trans care, and the response was that she supported it for prisoners and detainees, including undocumented people. She also said she was proud to have worked for these measures (paraphrasing). Apparently, at least two prisoners got surgery, but no one knows if any undocumented people did.

How can this be? Well, the law is well established that the state must provide medical care for prisoners and detainees. If the state imprisons a person who is on blood pressure meds, the state is keeping them from getting the meds on the outside, so the state has to provide them. Makes sense. It seems that a couple of judges used that reasoning for trans care, so Harris figured she would support it as required by law. But . . . Just because something is the law in the eyes of some judges does not mean a candidate cannot disagree.

Anyway, we need to figure out a way for candidates to be able to win primaries without adopting ridiculous positions. In my state, only party members can vote in the primary. That means independents (including moderate former Dems) can’t weigh in in favor of moderate candidates, so the fringe has more power than it should. Maybe the primary should be open to Dems and independents?

@pique Understood. My undergrad degree was in finance, so used to know how to evaluate stocks. I'm a little rusty, but I don't mind it. When we have some money, I think about what companies have a good product or service. I check a few basic pieces of data, like price earnings, and I check various analysts outlooks and news reports, looking for trouble.

I don't buy anything I don't understand, so no crypto or gold bars. I stay away from anything trendy because trends come and go. Buy and hold strategy doesnt mix well with the latest flash in the pan. In a way, buying a few of your own stocks is kind of fun, kind of like going to Vegas, except you usually make money over time.

Some of my.picks have done super well, and others have cratered. But . . . No taxes and no fees.

Someday I will compare my picks with my retirement mutual funds. For now, I don't want to know.

Planning to get it. Done with Twitter.

@pique There are many kinds of mutual funds. Stocks are one kind.

I try to avoid mutual funds. If I buy and hold an individual stock and its value increases over ten years, I will owe capital gains tax when I sell. No other taxes or admin costs.

Say I buy a successful mutual fund and hold for ten years. Each year, the manager buys and sells stocks within the portfolio. I owe taxes on my piece of the action each year, not just at the end. I think I also owe tax when I sell at the end. And there are administrative costs too.

That seemed to be the situation when I stopped buying mutual funds. There was one year in the 90s when our mutual funds threw off all of this taxable income. I was so annoyed that I now buy and hold individual stocks.

I still use mutual funds for retirement accounts because those don't have immediate tax consequences.

Everyone, please correct me if I'm wrong. I might be.

I use it constantly. It matches my level of cooking ambition. If I'm going to cook, I want whatever it is to get as close to restaurant level as I can get it, but without a lot of fussy or expensive ingredients.

Cindy -- who hardly ever uses any ingredient listed as "optional "

@wtg I'm not sure he's can stop local schools from mandating vaccines.

He can withdraw approvals, like abortion drugs and birth control. Where does he stand on that?

No, Dems haven't made it a campaign issue. Republicans have, by exploiting the fact that these are things Progressives champion. The Trans issues are one example of this. Dems love to get outraged about benign policies or actions that happen to disadvantage a group viewed as downtrodden.

I think we should champion the downtrodden. The downtrodden is everyone who has to sign away their right to sue a corporation that harmed them because they signed terms and conditions on a web site.

Allow me to share an experience that illustrates why Dems are losing.

I have a colleague, someone I supervise. This person uses a female name; has a short but feminine haircut; has feminine features; dresses in an ordinary way (meaning no dresses, wears pants and shorts and shoes that many women would wear but not many men ).

This person uses they/them pronouns. When I inevitably refer to this person as she or her, I get an immediate public correction, after which i mumble "them, sorry." So it is my responsibility to check my read of this person's clear gender expression AND ignore my lifetime of the importance of subject/verb agreement. All so this person doesn't have to hear she or her.

I fully understand the thinking that got us here. We want to be inclusive, got it. But this is very different from the civil rights struggle. Sure, the preferred name for black people morphed every few years. But no one had to grapple with it every day, and it didn't violate the rules of grammar.

Bottom line: Our inclusivity is killing us. It has us insisting that people get pregnant, not women. That Trans girls should compete with his girls. That Spanish would be better with out gender. It is signaling to the whole country that we care only about being the language police than in the real problems facing us all individually and collectively.

I think there is room for the Dems to become the party that protects the little guy. Regular people get mistreated all the time, on matters big and small. Let's fix that.