Ah, the same way I deal with issues in my life. Good to know that the tendency goes all the way to the bone.

AOC wouldn’t win Harris the swing vote. I love AOC, don’t get me wrong, but with two women on the ticket, it’s too easy for conservatives to paint the duo as “crazy” or “radical.” Sexism remains alive and well here. People still believe the stereotypes and are easily influenced by dog whistles, especially here in the Midwest.

I hope that we get to the point where this isn’t a concern, but as it stands now, we have never had a woman in charge, and a lot of people are afraid of the unknown, so they wouldn’t like the idea of something new on both the presidential front as well as the VP front.

That’s on top of the fact that AOC is from NY and Harris is from CA. We are already irritated that a majority of people in office (and the country) ignore the “flyover” states even though we do a lot for the country (and have really cool cultural and fun places to visit, but this addendum is clearly biased). It really does matter a lot that Walz is one of us. He gets us in a way that people from the coast states don’t. That will influence a lot of votes, and two midwestern states are considered swing states - i.e. states that Harris absolutely NEEDS on her side.

Swing voters here don’t care as much about deploying the national guard. In fact, it’s lauded by a lot of people, including liberals/democrats. Midwesterners are okay with civil disobedience, but only if it’s not unnecessarily destructive or if there isn’t an attempt to gain simply for yourself (ex: looting). I’m not saying that that is what happened when the guard was deployed or that it’s a realistic or correct belief, but in reality, the media painted it that way, so people believe what they were told. So, very few here are holding something like that against him.

I don’t know of anyone in my region who would consider Walz to be truly controversial, and certainly, they think of him as way less controversial than AOC. They might disagree with Walz’s policies or opinions, but they don’t think he’s controversial. Here, AOC’s painted as a pot stirrer and a crazy lady. To reiterate, I don’t agree with this view of AOC, and I respect her immensely, but it would be foolish to ignore the fact that a lot of other people do agree with it. Walz, because of his race, age, cultural background, and experience, is a thousand times more electable than AOC when you’re looking at it from a national perspective.

Yes! Exactly this!

I am running into this problem at work all the time! I am a Millennial who does corporate training for new recruits in a field that we will almost completely train you on. I.e. you don’t have to have a specific degree or certification because we’ll train you on the job.

I have found that almost all of the Gen Z hires don’t have more than a basic level of computer literacy. They didn’t learn the hard way in middle school that if you don’t save your essay, it will be deleted. They had auto-save. They don’t how to ctrl+alt+delete to get to their task manager to force shut down a frozen program because they (often) used chromebooks or phones/tablets where it was basically an internet machine that could be restarted if need be, but didn’t have more involved software. They have never had to troubleshoot issues with burning data onto a CD (archaic, I know, but our job requires it). They don’t know how to format a lot of things in Word because Google docs does a lot of it for you (or doesn’t even have the option). Hell, they don’t always know what a proper address on a letter looks like because they don’t send snail mail - although this only relates to tech in the formatting and printing of letters.

So now I’m training them on the new material they have to learn for the job, but also computer intricacies that I learned in middle school on my Gateway computer with like 1 gig of ram and floppy disks. When you needed to format something perfectly for school, but nothing was user friendly, you had to learn a lot of weird tricks and workarounds.

They are generally still better at using the computer than Gen X or Boomers, but the Millenials get computers on a different level because we grew with the tech. Gen Z can pick up new software quicker, but still don’t always get how things actually work.

I also thought that as true digital natives, they would know a lot more than they actually do. I agree with the likelihood that we will more than likely have to translate for our elders and the younger generation as well.

Sadly, the low pay for teachers is pretty pervasive across the entire US. My first teaching job paid $36k per year in Wisconsin in 2013. Luckily, rent wasn’t quite so expensive back then, but it’s still an outrageously low income for what is expected from teachers. I don’t know a single teacher who either doesn’t have a second job or a spouse that makes quite a bit of money.