DL Open Thread: Tuesday, January 21, 2025

BREAKING: Delaware’s Division Of Social Services Opens Warming Stations.  From today through Friday to provide relief from the frigid temperatures:

Due to the extreme cold temperatures some of our DSS locations will have “warming stations” available Tuesday-Friday 9:00 am-3:30 pm.  This is similar to our cooling stations from the summer.  The warming stations will be in our large conference rooms and will have water, crackers, and chips available to those escaping the cold. Each location should be receiving masks and hand sanitizer as well.  Each warming station will be provided with either a Community Partners Support Unit (CPSU) or State Service Centers (SSC) staff member to manage the warming station.  This means there will always be a staff person(s) in the conference room to monitor.  For locations whose conference room is behind the badged doors, if a person has to leave the room, they will be escorted to ensure everyone’s safety. Transportation will be available to our locations and from our locations to Code Purple and other shelters.  SSC and CPSU are manning the calls for questions relating to the warming stations, but we could still receive questions.   Below are the locations that will house the warming stations. Please begin sharing with anyone you know who may need this and could benefit from the warming stations.

• Claymont Community Center, 3301 Green Street
• DHSS Canby Park Office, 1920 Maryland Avenue, Wilmington
• DHSS Churchmans Corporate Center, 84 Christiana Road, New Castle
• DHSS Blue Hen Corporate Center, 655 Bay Road, Dover
• Smyrna State Service Center, 200 S. DuPont Blvd.
• Laurel State Service Center, 31039 N. Poplar Street
• Anna C. Shipley State Service Center, 350 Virginia Avenue, Seaford
• Thurman Adams State Service Center, 546 Bedford Street, Georgetown

Post-Democratic America–Day One.  Let’s see, pardoning insurrectionists? Check.   Withdrawing from Paris Climate Accords? Check.  Ending birthright citizenship? Check.  Declaring an energy emergency so that we can ‘drill, baby, drill’? Check.   Oh, and declaring war on Trans people? Double check.  All kinds of other weird stuff? Check.  Don’t worry, pretty soon this will all be normal.  As it is in Hungary and other post-democratic countries.

Paul Krugman Shows Us The A Way:

Many people and institutions should and I hope will engage in soul-searching over why those lies succeeded — Democratic strategists, of course, but also news organizations and for that matter anyone trying to inform the public, myself included.

But you should resist the temptation to engage in truthwashing, a close cousin to the sanewashing that may not have been decisive but certainly helped Trump win.

I see that temptation all around — commentators who want to seem relevant starting to say “Well, maybe Trump has a point about migrant crime/seizing Greenland/annexing Canada/whatever.” Before going there, look at yourself in the mirror.

So keep calling out lies, even if — especially if — they’re coming from people in power. I’d like to promise that the truth will win in the end, but I can’t. All I can promise is that those who continue to tell the truth as they see it will find it easier to live with themselves than those who don’t.

Guess It Wasn’t A Trump Bible.

Trump Pisses Off The Cryptos.  Hey, he’s already made billions from his latest coin, what does he care?:

After his team launched the token on Friday evening, the price per coin shot from $6 to more than $70 within about a day. Because two of Trump’s affiliate companies own 80 percent of the total supply of the coin, Trump essentially manifested more than $10 billion in a single weekend. At one point this weekend, Axios estimated that $TRUMP momentarily accounted for about 89 percent of Trump’s net worth, making him one of the richest people in the world. And last night, Melania Trump announced her own coin, $MELANIA.

Throughout Trump’s long history of cashing in on his personal brand, there has never been such a dramatic injection of artificial value. Both $TRUMP and $MELANIA are so-called memecoins. There are no business fundamentals under the hood, no practical use cases to speak of. Memecoins are typically spun up in a matter of minutes, whisked to massively overinflated valuations on social media, and promptly dumped on the suckers who bought in a few moments too late. It’s an incredibly efficient, incredibly predictable, and incredibly predatory playbook.

Although much of the crypto world has been eagerly awaiting Trump’s return to the White House, a new sense of unease has settled over some of the industry’s biggest defenders, who recognize that memecoins don’t exactly reflect well on crypto. Memecoins are “zero-sum,” the investor Balaji Srinivasan, typically aligned with Trump, reminded his followers on X over the weekend. “There is no wealth creation … And after an initial spike, the price eventually crashes and the last buyers lose everything.” Nic Carter, a prominent crypto investor and Trump supporter, reasons that the unease is indicative of a broader panic, a slow-growing sense that Trump can’t be controlled in the way the industry might want.

‘Slow-growing unease’?  Wish my unease was growing so slowly.

Rethink Delaware A Group Worth Watching.  I always liked Anne Canby.  I like what this statewide group is advocating.

A newly formed statewide group formulating a strategy to lobby the state for policies focused on transportation and climate change found an ally Jan. 15 in Sussex Preservation Coalition, which has similar goals at the local level.

The coalition hosted former Delaware Department of Transportation Secretary Anne Canby, a leader of Rethink Delaware, which hopes to sway state leaders on a wide range of interrelated issues, including housing, transportation and the environment.

“I wish a group like the coalition existed 30 years ago,” Canby told an audience at the Lewes Public Library, alluding to her tenure as transportation secretary from 1993 through 2000. “Maybe we have some chances now.”

With the incoming administration of Gov.-elect Matt Meyer and a group of three newly elected Sussex County Council members calling for limits on development taking a majority on the five-member council, both groups hope the ground may be fertile for change.

Delaware Leaders Look At Education Funding Reform:

As opposed to using a “student-based” formula, Delaware is one of few states that uses a “unit-based” public education funding formula. This means that the state allocates funding based on the number of students enrolled, rather than accounting for unique needs of any given student.

Taylor Hawk, director of legislative and political strategy at the Delaware State Education Association, the state’s teacher union, said that although the system is adjusted for grade level and special education status, it fails to generate resources for students with from low-income households or those are still learning English – two populations were Delaware has a larger share than many states.

The current system divides funding into separate pots with strict rules on how it can be used for costs, which limits flexibility and puts a burden on administrators about where they can use the money, said Madeleine Bayard, senior vice president of the Rodel Foundation of Delaware, a nonprofit that has studied public education for decades.

Bayard said there’s an opportunity to move toward something more student-based, and mimic other states that set aside one pot of money with guardrails.

State Sen. Laura Sturgeon, who is chair of the PEFC and the Senate Education Committee, said there’s an opportunity to look at both systems.

“It’s just important to me that we move a little bit away from discussing the two formulas as if they are binary choices, and understand that we have an opportunity to take what works well with any formula and what has worked well in other states with other formulas, and we can build a formula that’s Delaware-specific, and that has elements of both,” she said.

Anyone interested in education should read the entire article.

What do you want to talk about?