fishbane

Seniors at least in wrestling only missed one date. They competed essentially a full season. I think it was also a multi sport decision and the post season is more limited or less important in other sports. Spring athletes who missed the entire season got their eligibility extended.

You wrote "A wrestler may compete in 5 post seasons if one of those were the 2021 championships unless they competed in the 2020 championships." As I said that isn't exactly right. The way it's written it gets the right answer for Hall and Joseph, but the incorrect answer for Steven and Brooks. Both Brooks and Steveson wrestled in 5 post seasons INCLUDING the 2020 postseason. By your statement that would not be allowed.

It makes less sense looking at it retrospectively. The thinking at the time was that very few athletes would choose to compete in 2020-2021 if they were risking a year of eligibility to do so. The season could have been cancelled midseason or an untimely positive covid test result could prevent a wrestler from taking part in the post season. It was done to incentivize competition that year. Starocci was able to take advantage that year. Unfortunately Brennan was not.

That's not fully correct. You should change "unless they competed in the 2020 championships" to "unless he competed in 4 postseasons prior to 2021." For example Gable Steveson wrestled at the 2020 Big Ten Championships, which he won. This is Mr. Stevenson's 5th postseason. He won 4 titles in 5 tries at the Big Ten championships. Aaron Brooks is similar, but without the Olympic redshirt. He won 4 Big Ten titles in 5 tries including a win in 2020. Mark Hall however competed in 4 Big Ten championships the 4th of which was in 2020. He was not eligible to wrestle in 2021. The same was true of Vincenzo Joseph. My opinion on Brennan is that he must be deemed ineligible and disqualified. The Pac 12 Runner-up should replace him and Little Rock should be stripped of the PAC 12 team title.

They could. Many companies put ads for other companies/services in their packages. If you place an order with Kohl's you are likely to receive a couple printed ads for other companies in the package. I think Hello Fresh and Doordash are common inserts in Kohl's packages. I think Amazon has done something similar before. They have also put ads on the outside of their boxes. If they are no longer doing either of these I don't think it's to avoid the reputation hit of sending junk mail. Amazon loves ads. They sell their devices (fire tablets, kindle e-readers, and fire tv sticks and devices) with an ad supported model. The device will show the user ads on the lock screen and is sold at a lower price point. Amazon has ads on their home page. Amazon sells ads that play during their streaming service. I don't think Amazon thinks all that is okay, but putting ads inserts in their packages is too intrusive. It's either because they can't compete with the USPS in physical ad delivery, their other ad forms are more popular/effective/cost effective, or they fear that doing this could delay order fulfillment which is their priority. They may also struggle to find advertisers for whom they are not competitors. Amazon is so big and has their hands in so many places that their competitors are legion. For example it wouldn't really make sense for them to put Doordash ads in packages like Kohl's because they already partnered with Grubhub. All Prime members get Grubhub+ for free.

I don't believe a majority of the Department of Education's budget goes to K-12. Federal student work $$ is another way it goes to colleges. The DOE processes the FAFSA and many programs that go through it. Eliminating it would have a huge impact on colleges and probably college athletics. I think Trump was able to ban trans athletes from woman's NCAA sports by threatening to cut federal funding. The president does not have the power to do this directly. I am sure many other agencies (DOD, DOE, NSF, NASA, ect) give research grants to universities, but a bulk of the funding probably comes from programs from the department of education.

I don't think privatization would decrease mailed ads. It might because the price would go up and then it would make for fewer businesses. On the other hand, I am pretty sure the USPS uses junk mail in much the same way Intermat uses ads. Delivering the ads keeps the price down of everything else. Every door direct mail doesn't really add much cost to the USPS operations - they are going to every door anyway and its not like that stuff is being transported across the country. I think EDDM is profitable for the USPS. If I'm wrong and they lose money on it then it will disappear. I suspect the average American loses more time dealing with online ads than junk mail. Junk mail doesn't waste more than a couple minutes/week of my time. The US government also needs to use mail to contact residents. Right now that is free or at lease very low marginal cost. Privatize it and the IRS, SSA, Medicare, ect will be paying to send mail through Fedex, UPS, or whoever buys the USPS to a large fraction of Americans. But maybe DOGE will cut costs and have the IRS switch to email. Might as well outsource their call center too for additional savings. Nothing could go wrong with that, right?

I'm not sure completely. I think they providing federal funding to state programs and loans and grants for students pursuing hire education. Anyone that received a federal Pell grant or stafford loan those are through the DOE. If you don't think any of that is worthwhile it was the threat of eliminating federal funding to state and private higher education institutions that Trump was using to persuade them from eliminating DEI from admissions. That threat wouldnt have much bite if the DOE is eliminated.

It's a joke, but it also likely isn't as straightforward as it seems. Do you only want headcount cut by 50%? That could result in payroll not being cut by 50% either because low earners are cut or because part time employees are let go so the hours being charged are not cut by 50%. Also the retained employees could end up working overtime as they may have more responsibility after the 50% layoffs. Willie kind of made this mistake with the USPS earlier in this thread. He was complaining about this USPS saying they hired unnecessary employees and called it socialism. Setting aside that he was totally wrong about the the timing of the hires the number he was pointing at was career hires, however the total number of USPS employees and hours worked by those employees fell during the relevant time period.

Just amusement at the irony of a man who pays his bills by serving unwanted ads complaining about the USPS delivering unwanted ads.

Lol. Yes privatize it like Intermat then 65% of the USPS website can be taken up by ads too!

From the pension perspective if I were an employee and needed to pay any more or received any less I'd just assume invest the 4.4% or whatever it is. The retirement prefunding that was hamstringing the USPS prior to the 2022 repeal was related to medical benefits more than pensions. I don't really see many pensions at all in the private sector. Maybe at the c level they have sweet retirement benefits. I more often see out of control pensions from local/city/municipal/state police. The top three years thing is similar although some places it could be top year or top 5, but the % is way more (70-80%) and the calculation often includes overtime. A USPS employee couldn't work enough years to get 70-80% and these guys get it after 20-30 years. More over places with the top 3 or 1 year calculation that include overtime. This can be exploited as often overtime is assigned with priority to seniority - if two officers want to work the same OT shift the more senior officer gets it. Officers near retirement can rack up tons of OT resulting in lifetime pensions in excess of the base salary.

The FERS pension calculation is very reasonable. The calculation is 1.1% of the average of the top three earning years(not including overtime) times the number of years of service. Employees hired after 2014 contribute 4.4% of their pay to the plan. Unless someone received a significant salary bump late in their career their own contributions should cover most of the benefits.

The big downward spike starting near 2007 is in part due to a law that required the USPS to prefund retirement benefits for a period of 10 years. This was not required before that and retirement benefits were just paid out of the operating budget previously. It was the only agency required to do this. I think they made the payments in full for the first 3 or so years and then had to start defaulting on the prefunding. Eventually this requirement was repealed in 2022. If not for this requirement they would have had a surplus for several more years. Today Amazon delivery 90% of the stuff I order themselves and largely don't use Fedex, UPS, or the USPS. They've sent me a handful of items through USPS and UPS in the past year, but none via Fedex. Ten or so years ago before they started ramping up their own delivery fleet I used to get a lot of stuff delivered from Amazon through Lasership. I believe that company goes by Ontrac today. In any case I think Amazon has stopped using them at least in my area.

I don't think Khalil was among the students that entered Hamilton Hall though he did take part in negotiations. What would his actions amount to from what you've listed? Not leaving a quad? That's what? Criminal trespass? When has anyone had their green card been revoked for that? They also cannot revoke the green card without a hearing. Yet they picked him up and shipped him to Louisiana. The law under which the Trump administration is attempting to use to deport Hamas supporters forbids providing "material support or resources." That sounds like more than a protest in a quad to me.

Because it's a public service and allows for businesses to do business and connects people. If USPS had to make money they wouldn't deliver to everybody and wouldn't visit every house every day like Fedex, UPS, ect. Postal treaties for international mail wouldn't work. USPS delivers international mail essentially for free. For years and years Americans have found value in the postal service and I don't see that changing anytime soon. USPS being subsidized with congressional appropriations is nothing new.

What is the point of this graphic?

Mail delivery once a week is an awful idea. Today you can mail a letter and it gets delivered within two days to a large part of the country. This would significantly slow that down. It would also cripple the USPS package service. UPS and FedEx delivery 5 days a week. Why would anyone use the USPS when it could take a week or more? No such thing as next day or expedited service.

I think you are mistaken here. The USPS had 525,000 career employees in 2023. There is no way they hired 192,000 new career employees in Dec. That didn't happen. I have seen the number 190,000 pre-career employees transitioned to career positions, but that was over the entirety of Postmaster DeJoy's term, not last year like the tweet you initially quoted seemed to imply and definitely not the month of Dec. The fact that career employees only increased by less than 30k from the start of DeJoy's term in 2020 until 2023 probably means that the 190,000 pre-career employees that transitioned were largely offset by retirements and other forms of attrition. https://federalnewsnetwork.com/workforce/2025/01/usps-offers-up-to-15k-in-early-retirement-buyouts-to-cut-mail-handler-staffing/#:~:text=During DeJoy's tenure%2C USPS has,net loss in fiscal 2024. That is the relevant portion of the article. Simply pulling out the fact that 190k pre-career employees transitioned to career positions even over the correct time frame misses the fact that overall staff and work hours decreased during the same period. The tweet and AI summaries you are relying on are misleading and/or incorrect. I've already pointed out what was wrong with the job numbers. The mail volume has not decreased by 80% as indicated in the tweet even using the number in your post - 116.5 is not 20% of 213. Though mail volume has decreased during DeJoy's service package volume is up which is bulkier per item and requires more employees per item. I get why American's may doubt the value in foreign aid and agencies like USAID, but the USPS provides a very tangible service 6 days/week. Sure it has some problems, but we get quite a lot even for $9.5 billion.

Is it not settled law that the bill of rights extends to non citizens? I thought the rights apply to persons more generally and not citizens.

But what does it say about fraud and abuse when the person leading it owns companies with billions of dollars in government contracts some of which are years behind schedule and are carrying out these moves outside of normal channels? Not and example to be followed in my mind. Space X is years behind schedule on HLS and just blew up another starship yesterday. Musk is heading up the department that is leading cuts at NASA the agency paying for HLS and the FAA the agency that has yet to conclude ita investigation of the last starship explosion.

They both say "less than a month." It appears the title was edited at some point presumably within 20 minutes of posting. I don't know what it read before that. The point is that it was widely optimistic and now this topic is a month old and DOGE is nowhere near that mark even by their own generous accounting.

Not the post topic. That said $1 trillion in 1 month. If we are going to go by Elon Musk stated goals instead wasn't that "at least $2 trillion"?

Isn't it? It's been a month since you started this thread and the DOGE website is only reporting $105 billion in savings. So if that is to be believed you were only off by a factor of about 10.

If they are discussing something so important that it is risking WWIIi then it's incredibly dumb to demand thank you from one side as Vance did.