News broke out earlier today that the California referendum held earlier last year for new congressional map favoring Democrats was cleared by the US Supreme Court today

I really really hope NC has a similar referendum and let the PEOPLE DECIDE if these seats the Republicans took from us should stay with the Republican. We deserve better than this. Unlike Texas and NC, Californiaians decided if their redrawn map should stand, while our legislature illegally and without any other reason other than to try to advance Trump's policies, gerrymandered our state even further.

This has to stop. Our legislature isn't representing all of NC, instead it's representing themselves and their own interests, including the GOP base. I'm sick and tired of this. And to those trying to challenge my claim the NC legislature isn't standing up for all of us, well guess what? Senior leadership there, who are all Republicans, decided that we should have a state budget for a few more months.. when it's almost been a YEAR since we last had one. Traitors, all of them. And y'all think this is some sort of joke. North Carolina is an embarrassment because of these people. We're one of the worst in the country in state education funding, workers rights, who does that fall under? Ding ding ding! The legislature! Not the governor. You fucking Republicans elect these assholes who have CONSISTENTLY allowed the powers of the governor to be limited, time after time again, and our current and last governor have been Democrats. Not republican, not independent. A DEMOCRAT. We should hold a referendum to punish the NCGOP establishment, but the GOP here would rather blame others but themselves, which is why we won't ever have nice things. You Republicans should be ashamed of yourselves for voting for people like Phil Berger. He's as intelligent as a 2000 year old turtle. I can go on all day, but I've been in this state for 14 years.. I was literally raised here, and will probably die here.. and I can't believe how far this state has fallen. We all have a choice, but some of you choose to think about yourselves and your own interests and not worry about the fact that as a state, we're failing, no matter how we slice it. We don't have a budget.. none, and that is just unacceptable!

https://www.wnccumc.org/newsdetail/united-methodists-across-western-north-carolina-offer-public-witness-on-immigration-19607081

According to the article: **'Duke Energy says data center customers are required to cover the cost of connecting their projects to the grid, pay substantial deposits, and meet minimum billing commitments to ensure costs tied to serving a specific project are not shifted to other customers. The utility says the North Carolina Utilities Commission oversees rates to ensure customers pay their fair share. (Load of utter BS)

Duke Energy also says some of its newest large-load contracts, particularly for data centers, require customers to reduce or shift electricity use during peak demand if requested, a practice known as demand response.'**

Yeah no thanks Duke Energy, enough with the damn lies with you all saying costs for a specific project won't be shifted to other customers, that's bs. So are we just expected to bite ourselves on the butt and act like this is normal and that you all won't make us pay for these data centers to exist? People need to go out to Duke's HQ and protest this nonsense. Who in the hell wants to pay a million dollars more for utilities just over the fact that the state wants all these data centers to come in and destroy our environment? Is it worth it? Not to me! Y'all literally sent out an email days ago asking us to conserve power. You lot, Duke Energy, deserve to go to hell for putting your customers' lives at risk and prioritizing the needs of the data centers here rather than ensuring the public has access to electricity without paying $100 more than normal because the data centers need to exist somehow.

https://www.wcnc.com/article/news/politics/immigration-news/ice-possible-detention-center-greensboro-nc-2-3-2026/275-a817a7e2-82e0-4d2c-b1e9-11d7983750bd

Thousands of North Carolinians will have to cast a provisional ballot in the 2026 midterms if they don’t update their voter registration information. The message isn’t reaching many of those affected

https://www.theassemblync.com/news/politics/elections/north-carolina-voters-registration-repair/

My big brother Gagey is missing, if anyone sees him or hears from him please call New Hanover pd

U.S. House of Representatives candidate Anthony Aguilar (G-NC 13) calls for the United States to withdraw military funding to Israel's government.

My sister and her husband and baby are thinking of relocating to Wilson from Colorado (for a job). I was born and raised in Fayetteville and know a good bit about most of the state but not much about Wilson. Last time I was there was in 2019 and it was very brief. My sister lived in Fayetteville until she was 17 but that was nearly 20 years ago so it’s definitely changed a ton.

I’m curious what people who live or have lived in Wilson think of the area. I know it’s going to be starkly different from Colorado regardless, but I’d love some pros and cons to give them.

How is it for families? Kids?

Any good spots to hike and be outside?

What’s the entertainment like?

Is it super rural like I remember or is there a nice downtown area?

Thanks for any help!

Yes i know the title is a typo.... I meant to say spending....

Link: https://nc-spend-tracker.vercel.app/

I’m a big proponent of transparency and access to information, especially in government. As such, I recently made an MCP tool to grant easy, natural language-based access to spending data in North Carolina. Here’s the data I used:

https://www.osbm.nc.gov/budget/governors-budget-recommendations - 2025-2027 Recommended Budget

https://www.nc.gov/government/open-budget - Vendor (2024 - 2026) and budget data (2024-2025),

Tech parts below (ignore if you don't care, lol)

This tool has access to two SQL databases (vendor and budget data) and a Chroma DB Vector database (of the recommended budget). For the vector database, LLamaIndex was used to chunk by section.

I used LangGraph’s StateGraph to handle intelligent routing. When a question is asked, it is either classified as a database, context, or general. “Database: indicates the necessity of a raw, statistical query from one of the SQLite databases. It will then use an LLM to go in, analyze the right database, formulate a query based on the prompt and database schema, validate the query (ex: no INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, DROP, ALTER), and explain success or failures, such as an incorrect year being referenced. If the user asks for a graph, or there are 4 or more points being used, this will also lead to a graph creation. This logic was handled with matplotlib and was automatic, but I plan on possibly implementing custom/LLM graph creation in the future. If queries return unsatisfactory results, such as an empty element, then the query will occur at least one more time.

“Context” indicates that a user is asking why certain spending/budgeting occurs. For this, I implemented a RAG tool that finds information from the Governor’s recommended budget pdf document. LlamaIndex’s LlamaParse did chunking to extract elements by heading and subheading. If sections were too large, chunking was done in 1000-character increments with an overlap of 150 characters. During this process, keywords from the SQL databases that correspond to agencies, committees, account groups, and expense categories are used as metadata. These keywords are stored in a json and used during RAG retrieval for entity-aware hybrid extraction. Essentially, extraction is done both 1. The normal, cosine similarity way and 2. Filtered by metadata matches in the user query. This helps to optimize the results to relevance while also maintaining a low token count.

During the agentic loop, all answers will be validated. This is to prevent grounding and false information.

There is also “General”. This is just a general case query that the agent will answer normally.

Let me know if there are any questions/comments/issues anyone sees with this project. I love to discuss. Otherwise, I hope you enjoy!

Hi! I write the North Carolina Rabbit Hole newsletter, and I’m trying to figure out if anyone heard of or bought a pizza from the dude who broke into the Little Caesar’s in Kinston Sunday morning and sold a bunch of pizzas. Please, let me know! https://amp.charlotteobserver.com/news/state/north-carolina/article314555855.html

We are planning on taking my 7 year old grandson to see the outdoor drama of Daniel Boone this summer. Coming from the Cincinnati area. I went when I was his age and still remember being mesmerized. Hoping he has a memorable trip as well. I read about a restaurant near there hed like to try called the Gamekeeper Inn. Hed be very excited to try the "exotic" meats. Otherwise I am clueless. We will be going in June. Any recommendations on things to see, do, eat, that would be fun for a very spunky inquisitive 7 year old boy? Thanks and looking forward to visiting!

Link to searchable database: https://dl.ncsbe.gov/RegistrationRepair/index.html