Eugh, daylight.

When the base is mad enough to throw them out if they don’t. The Florida special elections didn’t flip any seats, but they showed a 15-point swing away from the GOP in deep red parts of the state. That’s gonna make them sweat. Unless they can sufficiently rig the midterms or sway Trump off his current “crash the economy for lulz” trajectory, it may well be a bloodbath, and that’s the sort of math that starts peeling sycophants away from Trump.

Back in my day us hermit types just did our grocery shopping after 9PM, this is a whole other level.

In anything like a competitive district, a progressive Independent challenger is more likely to split the vote for a milquetoast Democratic incumbent and hand the seat to the Republican challenger. Working within the Democratic primary system has its challenges, but also clears the field so that there’s one clear choice for left-leaning voters rather than two.

First past the post sucks ass, but it’s what we’ve got to live with until we’ve got enough power to change it.

It’s a niche specialization within architecture, and while I enjoy it it’s not quite as cool as it sounds. Labs tend to be designed to a common template around the standard lab bench depth (30") and accepted safe aisle width between 66" and 72". Most of the fun is in equipment planning, and that’s only exciting for a certain sort of Excel jockey 😅

Lab planning is a small enough niche that you really only find us in firms with a national or international reach, and so I’m more often working on projects several states away from me than anything in my own backyard. Travel varies, but other than initial meetings it tends to be hands-off job, so much so that I’m actually a 100% remote worker apart from when I’m on-site for a project kickoff or a site survey.

As for unusual or surprising parts of the job, I have really enjoyed working with some of the PI’s I’ve fitted labs out for. The best has to be a chemist operating a biofuels testing lab, who regaled us with tales of all the times he’d blown up some glassware or singed off his eyebrows in the lab! I was a bit worried for his safety practices, though…

It varies from place to place, but the trend is away from them. I recently did a basis-of-design study for another R1 institution, and they said in no uncertain terms that they wanted to decommission the existing central system in their circa-1990 lab tower. Facilities departments often find them to be a PITA to manage and maintain, versus just requiring researchers to neutralize their acid waste before putting it down the sink, or collecting other hazardous waste to be taken away by a service

Cup sinks in fume hoods used to be more common, but as a lab planner they are pretty rare requests nowadays. If I had to guess, it’s probably to do with the move away from central acid-waste neutralization systems towards procedural controls dictating neutralization/dilution prior to disposal.

I also grew up in Missouri, though I live in Kansas now, and I know several people who fit that description.

The thing that kills me about Missouri is that it used to be a competitive state for moderate Democrata, but the rural chunks of the state fell victim to right wing populism during the Tea Party wave in 2010 and now there’s a whole generation of Missourians whose defining political characteristic is rancorous hate for “liberal” city people. Kansas’ politics aren’t great, either, but at least the rural voters care about farm issues here… In Missouri, particularly south of I-70 where the only real industry they ever had was lead mining, all that’s left is the hate they’ve been fed from right wing assholes.

This psycho was just in the news for attaching her Democratic opponent for “raising a groomer” because one of her grandkids is trans. She makes Marjorie Taylor Green look polite by comparison, and the shame of it is that, given how state-level politics have been trending in Missouri, she’s got a decent shot of winning in the general just because of the magic ®.