To the surprise of absolutely no one, bigots are not standing on their Supreme Court win: they are pushing backwards to even more extremes.
Night Shift is a mod that adds evening and night shift, and an early morning part time shift. Currently:
Most janitors now work after business hours.
The high school is now offering night classes on the evening shift:
The French restaurant has started offering freshly baked pastries:
And they have some live entertainment at dinner:
Not to be outdone, the fancy restaurant is adding entertainment for their supper club:
The astronomy1 shop got a grant to do actual research of the stars:
And to better serve the town's health needs, the hospital is adding some extra shifts:
Because of the way the game handles occupation selection, most of these will not be visible on day 1 of a new game: if you have your heart set on a particular job, you will have to check the want ads daily.
This is still a work in progress. Not all of the occupation domains are represented, so if you have suggestions on how to expand this, I would love to see them. If you find bugs, please post them to the mod's comment section on Steam.
As in full time jobs with full time income? It would make sense for an astronomer to work from, say, 8pm to 4am, or for there to be a night janitor, things like that. I am thinking that this would work very nicely for players who want vampire or goth paras, and quite useful for households with infants that cannot be left alone: the adults can work different shifts so there is always someone at home without sacrificing income. I'm thinking:
Service - night clerk
Science - astronomer
Maintenance - night janitor
Healthcare - night nurse
Healthcare - ER doctor
Music - lounge performer
I have been working on an extended jobs mod, and would be interested in feedback.
Quakers: Most Asked Questions
How Much Do You Know About Quakers?
Quakers Explained in 2 Minutes
What is the Evangelical Friends Church?
Anglicans, Mennonites, Quakers & Methodists - What's the Difference?
Ready To Harvest is an interesting YouTube channel that looks at a very wide range of Christian denominations. His approach is fair and he focuses on facts, even when he seems uncomfortable with the topic.
In these video, he talks about Quakers. I thought y'all (thee all?) might find them interesting. Yes, he makes the expected jokes about oatmeal and parrots, which actually fit in with the information he is giving.
I have to say, some of the townie requests are just odd. A local woman posted for two fly agaric mushrooms for a "recipe." Umm... have you ever eaten those shrooms? I have to wonder who she's trying to off.
I was notified yesterday that my current position has been offered to a more senior employee who was facing a layoff. The net result is that I am now the one facing a layoff if the person accept the position. Do I have a right to know who was involved in the decision to target my position, and the rational that was the basis?
I'm asking because the position is a rather arcane IT position working on our agency's response to OneWA. Our IT division is small and I am not aware of anyone who has the technical skills to handle this work. So presumably the person is coming from another agency; that means they will need at least a month or two to get up to speed on how our agency is responding as everyone is taking their own unique approach to mesh the new central systems with the agency's own. Bringing in an outsider right now will greatly foul up the timeline that OFM has been pushing hard for us to keep.
I know that layoffs are happening and I can accept that. But I still want to know why, of the technical positions in my department with several now held by less senior staff, mine is the one being targeted. If the answer is "Talk to your union rep," I'm already on that, but I won't get an answer until Monday at least.
I got this message from the AFSCME this morning. Sharing to increase bandwidth.
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Over the coming weeks, you may receive messages from Opt Out Today claiming that WFSE is “raising dues again.” We want to make sure members have the facts.
Opt Out Today is a project of the billionaire-funded Freedom Foundation. They've spent decades trying to cut your wages, raise your healthcare costs, dismantle your retirement security, and privatize good-paying union jobs.
Now they want to save you money? Don't fall for it.
Workers win when we stand together.
Key Facts
The WFSE dues rate is not changing.
WFSE membership dues remain 1.5% of base wages. That rate has not changed and can only be changed by delegates elected by members at a WFSE Convention, the largest decision-making body in our union.
What is changing?
In 2019, delegates to the 48th WFSE Biennial Convention adopted a resolution to gradually phase out the union’s dues cap.
At the time, some members at higher salary levels paid less than 1.5% of their wages because their dues were limited by a cap. Meanwhile, members at lower salary levels paid the full 1.5% rate.
The convention resolution noted that this meant some members at lower salary levels could pay a higher effective dues percentage than members at higher salary levels. After debate and discussion, delegates voted to gradually phase out the cap so that all members would ultimately contribute the same percentage of wages to support their union.
Rather than eliminating the cap immediately, delegates approved a gradual implementation that increases the cap $5.00 incrementally each year.
What does this mean in practical terms?
Effective July 1, 2026, the monthly dues cap will increase from $134.43 to $142.12. This adjustment will occur for two reasons:
Members who are already paying dues at the standard 1.5% rate will see no change.
Only members whose earnings are high enough to reach the dues cap may be affected. Based on current calculations, a member would generally need to earn approximately $9,475 per month, or about $114,000 annually, before the cap becomes relevant.
Close to 90% of WFSE members do not reach the dues cap and will see no change as a result of this adjustment.
Who decides dues policy?
WFSE is a member-run union. Dues policies are determined by members through delegates elected to represent them at convention. Neither WFSE staff nor officers can unilaterally change the dues rate.
The gradual phase-out of the dues cap was adopted by delegates at the 2019 WFSE Convention and has been implemented according to the schedule approved by those delegates.
We believe members deserve complete and accurate information about how their union operates and how decisions are made. If you have questions about your membership dues, please contact the WFSE Member Connection Center (MCC), your Local leadership, or a WFSE staff representative.
In Solidarity,
Kurt Spiegel
Executive Director
WFSE/AFSCME Council 28
To be clear: I hate generative AI with a deep passion. Please do not mistake this post as an endorsement of creative theft or the environmental and economic destruction related to AI and data centers.
That said, I spent an interesting hour and half working with Google's AI to craft a conlang. Mostly, I was curious whether it could come up with anything competent. I started with the prompt "I want to create a conlang using this language family as a model" and described what I wanted with cases, alignment, word order, and the like. As expected, it spit out very simplistic, idenifiably AI crap.
What I was not expecting was that it then prompted me on what to look at next. Typically there were three prompts starting with "I can..." for things like "define verbal aspect" or "develop a syntax tree to show how to integrate complex clauses." I threw out weird prompts like "Using stative adjectives instead of a copula verb, how might I say 'the tree is green' or 'the antique silver that has been in my family for generations is tarnished'" and danged if it didn't integrate those two model sentences into the effort. It even prompted me for concepts I don't think I had ever built into a conlang before, like how to express locative existence -- it came up with the example "the fish is in the house" -- versus identity statements, "this traveler is my brother." At one point, it asked me to supply a list of phonemes. I gave it some IPA symbols and asked that it provide a complete lexicon of all the words it had created so far, revised as necessary to comply with the phonemes. It did. I copied all of the responses into a Word document, and now I have 51 pages of notes. Eventually, the AI felt confident to ask if I had anything I wanted to translate. I asked it to give me Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and to create any new words it needed. This was the result:
>Nesiyári neminíyo, welítech, ometétech, dizonká, tlaliyóka. Wamapíya wén nadowétech, tlezítech; moyetokí wén mopa, ikníyotech.
>All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Before I shut it down, I asked how I could save the current conversation to resume development at a later time. It provided me with markdown and instructions to copy it into a text file. Supposedly, I can copy this text back into an AI prompt -- apparently any AI -- and continue work.
To say I am conflicted would be a bit of an understatement. As I said, I really dislike generative AI and was hoping to come out of this collaboration feeling superior. It is still AI crap and nowhere near the quality I want. At the same time, though, I think I have a decent syntax scaffold that I can use to create a conlang with the specific weird quirks I threw into the mix. It galls me, but I think used judiciously, AI may be a tool worth looking at.
I've been looking for cherries at the Safeway in Olympia; it is the season. Very few, and those are really expensive. Normally by early June we are pretty much swimming in them.
What happened? Is this related to the federal government making it impossible for farm-workers to stay in the country? Bad weather? A disease targeting the cherry crop? Locusts? Does anyone from the orchard part of the state have information?
State agency leaders received a dire warning from Gov. Bob Ferguson’s office on Friday (ed: June 5) that they’re headed toward “what will likely be the most challenging budget any of us has yet faced.”
“There will be significant budget shortfalls next biennium in both operating and transportation budgets,” the governor’s budget director, K.D. Chapman-See wrote in a three-page memo.
Chapman-See added: “This year’s revenue forecasts will likely not provide sufficient support for the maintenance of current programs, let alone any expansions.”
She emphasized that it’s still unclear how large a gap the governor and lawmakers will have to solve. But she said that, “A ‘business as usual’ approach will not meet the need of this moment.”
I had never heard the term "apophatic" until this video, but it seems remarkably like how many Friends view the Divine. The idea is that the human mind is limited, so the mental image we build up about God will always be, at best, an imperfect reflection of what God really is. So, we can instead describe the Divine in negative terms, saying "God is not finite" rather than "God is infinite," because our understanding of "infinite" will always be incomplete and imperfect. By removing our imperfect understanding, we make room for a more perfect one.
What I find fascinating about this is that it fits comfortably with my understanding of the Inner Guide as a non-theist Quaker, without dismissing the experiences of others who understand and experience the Divine differently. It's kind of like the blind men and elephant analogy from Hinduism: We all experience the Divine in our own way, but those experiences are only part of what is really there.
Andrew Henry is a scholar of religion. While many of the topics on his channel touch on Christianity, his videos can be very wide ranging and have included Buddhism, Taoism, and ancient religions such as Egyptian, pre-Jewish Canaanite, pre-Islamic Arabian. He has also talked about history, language, the impact AI and aliens might have on faith, and a lot more.
For some reason, the moderators in r/Washington pulled this link. In any case, I am interested in hearing what the Governor plans to do about this.
More blood on Republican hands.
>As Congress finalizes its funding for fiscal year 2027, Republicans are attempting to include five anti-LGBTQ riders in the National Security and Department of State Appropriations Act.
>A rider is an unrelated provision tacked onto a bill that must pass — in this instance, the bill provides funding for national security policy and for the State Department.
>The riders range from restricting Pride flags in federal buildings to banning transgender healthcare, but all aim to limit the visibility and rights of LGBTQ Americans.
From a press release from The European Economic and Social Committee:
>The European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) placed fundamental rights, dignity and equality at the centre of its April plenary session, holding a high‑level debate on Union of Equality: Advancing LGBTIQ+ rights and banning conversion practices.
>The debate was followed by the adoption of two key EESC opinions calling for stronger enforcement of the EU’s LGBTIQ+ Equality Strategy 2026–2030 and a comprehensive EU‑wide ban on conversion practices.
TL;DR: An important commission in the European Union has recommended that the entire EU adopt laws that would ban conversion "therapy." The body will consider this recommendation in mid May.