The 4th.

Sobriety checkpoints only get away with being constitutional if they stop every single vehicle. If cops use any discretion about which car to stop, then it's illegal.

Read the process for yourself. Nobody is saying what you're claiming.

https://www.sec.state.ma.us/ele/elepdf/Election-Recounts.pdf

The process used in MA makes another recount largely pointless.

The way MA recounts work, you have teams of two people for each ballot, and sets of 50 ballots. One reads the ballot and the other tallies. Other people can watch this process from right behind the readers if they're concerned the reader might misread ballots and can protest a call. (This is where the representatives for the protester would be, keeping their own tally.) Protested and ambiguous ballots are reviewed by the board of registrars. (At least 3 on the board.) The lawyer for the candidate that protested is also with that review board, as well.

The ballots in question went through this process, were protested, and 3+ other people reviewed, and determined whether to use the ballot and reading as called. At a minimum, you should have 5 people that just looked at that same ballot, plus observers.

Further action from there is to go to court over specific ballots that had been protested at the time of recount.

It's a pretty solid process.

https://www.sec.state.ma.us/ele/elepdf/Election-Recounts.pdf

Nobody said anything about docking pensions.

I'm advocating for reading the words that I actually wrote instead of making something up just so you can generate a reason to argue.

Nope, it doesn't, but I also think public transit should be 100% public operated. There still wouldn't be a "blank check" any way you did it.

Ask most US employers from 1945 - 1980. Most jobs had pensions until voodoo economics and boomer greed took over everywhere. Fucking Reagan made sure all that stopped when he signed a couple of nasty laws that have been screwing us ever since.

As far as "but what after 25 years"... I don't give a damn. You work to live, not live to work. They can go find someone else to take over. You've put in more than enough.

Every state job pays out a pension, and some of them are 75%-80%. Like the police.

Not legally, but when has that stopped people from complaining about this state doing/not doing something. If the state could keep it, you'd have the same people whining about "money that the state stole from them".

I'm glad we don't do the general fund shenanigans like some states do. I think it's awesome that we pick a budget for the year and then stick to it.

That's about how it works for most every public service job, including military. You put in your years and you get the average of your last few years of pay. I've run across everything from 20-35 years of service to get full benefits.

You don't get blank checks in government. You get budgets that are written and approved before the year starts. In some states the excess would've gone to a general fund. In MA it has to go back to the taxpayers.

SO no, it isn't a "bad contract with our tax money", it's just a pension, like most every other pension anywhere else, both in the US and many other countries. It's how better places take care of their long-term employees.

Yes, that's literally what I said. If you actually knew anything about the Constitution, you would've already known that.

Oh well, guess women and black people can't vote. Oh wait, they can, because you can change things that sucked in the original. Like the Electoral College and allowing political parties to exist.

> So because she won the popular vote, the EC is a sham?

Yes, that's why it's a sham. In an actual democratic system, the most votes wins.

> Dems carried on for months about abolishing the electoral college

Yes, that's because it's a terrible idea that only serves a very vocal minority. None of them are saying "Let's storm the Capitol, execute the people we don't like, and then get rid of the EC.". That's just Republicans.

OK got it, you have no proof and it never happened.

I noticed that you STILL haven't provided any proof. You should try providing proof instead of crying about the well deserved downvotes.

That sounds more on point for modern school administrators.

Considering the Biotech Research Park is across the street, support for renaming the road would not be cheap. They would have either convince Worcester to let only the Umass side to be renamed, let it have multiple names (I'm sure USPS and 911 would love that), or they'll have to buy support from those businesses.

That's a lot of businesses with a lot of stationary, webpages, internal systems, etc, that would need to be updated. They would've had an easier time getting support for renaming North Lake Ave.

They should try taking a lesson from that research park... rename all of their on-site roads with cutesy names, get the city to designate their addresses all off of those, and list their Plantation St address as the number for the site.

The city has a process to get an honorary name for street and blocks of a street. That's still something that could be pursued, and it avoids forcing everybody to rename things.

UMass Medical doesn't even use Plantation Street anyway, they use N Lake Ave for their address.

Yes, it does, but it would still mean raising taxes, and that tends to get voted down.

If you want to change it, circulate a petition and try to get it changed.

https://www.worcesterma.gov/city-clerk/public-meetings/file-a-petition

You're not wrong, but it wasn't used in such an intentional context as you're implying. If North America was entirely uninhabited, the word would've still been used.

It's not a reason to keep using the word for things today, since that's not the common definition people actually know.

Duncan is living in a fantasy world thinking changing a major street name would be cheap and easy. Clearly she didn't even bother to look into the actual details before pushing this...

Plantation was also a term that was used for a settlement in a new region. That's why it was "Plymouth Plantation". The expense is also a very real thing, since it's stationary, signage, changes at every utility company, etc... it would have been really expensive.

The trash bags thing is done in a lot of places. It lets them avoid raising taxes to pay for collection, and you end up paying only for what you want to throw away. You can't just tell the city to figure it out and magic away the expense... the money has to come from somewhere. Curbside pickup can easily be $80/mo.