Getting various pushes to participate in one of the boycotts tomorrow.
The “meh” response became even more emphatic after reviewing the organizing group’s website.
They list six core principles, all of which are “positive rights.”
Anything that requires another’s effort is not a right. If I’m being forced to provide those things, I am your slave.
I won’t be participating. If you are, you should read up on some of their really coercive means of accomplishing those goals.
I’ve been watching NBC lately after ABC’s debate performance and CVS’s endless string of BS.
They had a report that led in it saying DOGE exists partially to look for waste and that there’s no evidence of.
Excuse me?
Logically, absence of evident is not evidence of absence. With things like fraud in a large program, and government programs tend to be that, there’s some fraud.
There’s been a lot of discontent here in/around home with what’s happening.
There was a good Reason podcast about everything that’s going on with DOGE.
As with so many things, I do find myself in partial agreement. But the strident opposition relies on the assumption that everything is and was okay.
If you truly believe that’s true, I have a bridge you might be interested in buying.
Obviously a lot of what’s been the bit issue the big topic of discussion here inside the Beltway Swamp over the past week has been going on with the various things the kids from DOGE have been finding as they investigate the behemoth that is the US Government.
there’s a ton of things that’d make an average person do a triple0take.
some of it has been hyperbolized, but the underlying issues remain. The corporate media focus on the bits that came out early in the week/late last week about Politico missing payroll.
The easy way to deflect this is to focus on the “good” things USAID did/does.
Maybe there’s things that they were doing that are completely justifiable. But it’s up to Congress to actually do the work, and lay those out. In specifics.
As is usually the case, I’m completely on the outside of “the two” camps. I’m a lot closer to Javier Milei‘s abuela approach.
I didn’t bookmark it, but there was someone who was taking about how USAID really just was a p inter-administration parking space for affluent young people who lost jobs when party control changed in the White House.
I’ll spare my more vulgar immediate responses from earlier in the week while readily admitting they were profane, but cry me a river, y’all.
So many of you have never had to worry about anything, ever.
OrangeManBad and the Nazi South African have screwed everything up. The only media outlet that matters said it, so it must be true.
(Forget all the stuff from the first Trump Administration; all of that was true, too…Random Aside: I see that WordPress has taken to counting a double-space after a semicolon as an error. GFY, y’all. Muscle memory guilt up in typing class….)
Returning to the first job I took after I left radio, I went back to the stations probably about six months after I’d left. I was speaking to the receptionist in the lobby, and the General Manager saw me through her office window. She excitedly ushered me in where she was talking to the station do-owner (her ex-husband).
She asked how I was liking my new job. I demurred and said something about liking a lot of the work I was doing, and things like travel. Even if it was to some less-than-wonderful places.
Her husband hadn’t said much, but was listening to my description. After a couple of minutes, he piped in, “they’re missin’ payroll.”
Shit. How do I respond to that? I didn’t want to confirm that it’d happened a couple of times, already, but been fixed within a few days. A bit of discomfort wasn’t really that big a deal with how much more they were paying me, right?
I’d moved back home after my dad had gone to Iraq again to help my mom care for the dogs and house. I’d met this Virginia Beach college student who, for whatever reason, had taken a liking to me, and I was set to rent an apartment near the Oceanfront.
Until they missed payroll again, and I didn’t have the money for the deposit.
On what, then, can I spend this extra money i have? Oh, I’ll pay off the small student loans I had to attend my state school.
Things moved along, and I tried my hardest to make this tiny company succeed. I was doing work both in product development, but also in capturing business. A significant amount of travel, and they’d just take sometimes months to reimburse me for my expenses.
During that time, too, I was having pain in my left eye. I attributed it to something that happened as my new girlfriend and I were trying to squeeze into her childhood twin bed together, but was probably an MS symptom. I went to an ophthalmologist after the incident (accidentally caught her elbow in my eye; as I said, we were trying to share a bed that was probably too small for me, alone…)
I started getting bills from the various providers I’d seen. Why? The company hadn’t paid our health insurance.
Part of the reason I took the job was to get health insurance, and move off the private plan I was paying a not-insignificant amount for.
Things continued to decline with the business. I continued to spend my own money to try to keep things going. They kept missing payroll, and being late with expense checks.
They didn’t pay the lease on the office where I was working in Chesapeake. I had to participate in an emergency move-out one weekend to make sure everything was gone before it was repossessed.
I was driving to and from Ashland (up near Kings Dominion) four days a week.
We started getting paid in paper checks furiously scribed by the company Treasurer on payday.
When I’d get a paycheck, I’d go to the company’s bank, cash it, and rive back to Bad Newz with a pocket full of cash to deposit into my credit union.
The same sort of thing was happening to the writers at Politico late last week/early this week. If you STFW for “Politico USAID,” you’ll see bits about how it was a rumor.
Debunked.
That they missed payroll, for whatever reason, is a story.
How can an organization that’s supposed to be a gold-standard of journalism be given any credit when they’re failing to meet the bare minimums as an employer? That the story got out so quickly says something, too. When I wasn’t getting paid, maybe, my girlfriend, a couple of close friends, and my parents knew about it. I certainly would have been very upset if any of them had shared that information.
I suppose that in the world of social media, there is no shame about loudly proclaiming that to the world.
But that’s true of so many things, I guess.
There’s things that only a few people need to know. And you do your part as an employer to make sure there’s zero chance of the story ever starting in the first place.
Brother, can you spare a dime? has morphed into “zOMG NAXI MUSK is going to mean I miss….”
Cry me a river.
Or maybe understand that the gravy train is over?
I’m not holding my breath on either.
Part of the reason I didn’t vote for Trump is I think things are too far gone to fix gently. I listen to the Republican sympathizers so optimistic about what’s going on. Are they more deluded than the people upset about the DEI cuts?
Good question.
So back to listening to the folks on Just Asking Questions. Not sure if they’ll be as shocked as the Politico people have been when things don’t work out.
I didn’t write this morning because I was busy working out, then actually working. *crosses fingers* Maybe that’ll more than justify my tentative plan to now work Friday headed in to the long weekend.
I am overloaded, but I do what I can to help as long as I can. I did finish up paying my protection racket to the professional certification cabal until 2030. Will I live that long, even?
It’s what I have to do, I suppose. At the same time, I’m just ready to be done with it all.
Other schtuff…
Following along with curious it, perhaps morbid, what’s going on with The LP.
I seem to recall part of the NeoHippies’ pitch being an end to embarrassment from the party. How’s that going?
I’m not upset that I’m on the outside. I shouldn’t be breathing a sigh of relief knowing that my membership dues aren’t going to pay for the supporter of The Pedo.
But those rallies across the river were awesome, amirite?
This morning started with this.
Pfft.
Yes, largely on account of faith, I’m opposed to abortion; I don’t government should be involved at all before a certain point.
With that, there abortions shouldn’t be funded with money taken by theft (which is what taxes largely are…).
Listened to this. (And apologies for the paywall. I think I still have a freebie subscription if you’re interested email me. But I’m getting strong correlation to the Nixon Administration. Do you remember the assassination attempts on Gerald Ford? I don’t; hadn’t been downloaded yes, but I’m seeing some parallels. It has less to do with the politicians who are in office than it does with just absolutely nuts people in/around California.
Musk put this up on TwitterX
I don’t think Defense is the problem, AntiWar folks.
Okay, I’m stopping now. Might have more tomorrow.
That doesn’t mean that what it’s working on is at all useful.
Listened to this Monday.
My response to Reason was as follows:
I absolutely appreciate the mention of USDS and what Musk wants to do with it.
One of my friends from college worked for USDS’s predecessor, 18F, after he’d decided he didn’t want to go back to Google following an extraordinary amount of work on what’d become G+.
One of the movers behind USDS is Jennifer Pahlka. She wrote a pretty good book about what she did there. Her Substack is “Eating Policy.
Consuming that recently has been frustrating. She, and the sort of people who work at USDS, believe government’s inability to deliver services or fix problems is government service delivery problems.
I worry that Elon thinks that that’s the problem, too. (Jennifer also is big on thinking that government can solve the coming climate apocalypse…)
I mentioned my college friend who worked there; I was the awkward guy on campus campaigning for Harry Browne.
Government Doesn’t Work.
Elon’s reinforces that with his space efforts. So, too, has Space Cowboy Jeff (Bezos).
Agree with Vivek’s concerns about debt and spending, but I’m not sure, like SS/Medicare, that anybody has any real idea what to do about it.
A significant part of what 18F/USDS was doing was in reaction to the failed rollout of healthcare.gov.
The botched rollout of healthcare.gov was really just a point of mild interest when it was going on.
I’m not going to fully revisit my travails with healthcare from 2013-2017ish, but I will say that the big issues with healthcare.gov was that the Exchange plans I paid for with after-tax dollars were very expensive, and would have to be better to suck.
The private plan I had in 2014 was okay, but couldn’t be sold for 2014. The most-expensive Exchange plant we had for 2015, and it would have had to improve to suck. None of the specialists I’d been seeing accepted it, with a few asking if it was a Medicaid plan. Uh, no, I’m paying something like $750/mo. for this.
I do credit Biogen in helping me find plans for 2015-2017 that covered a lot of my care, but it didn’t change the fact that I was still paying north of $500/mo for myself and my undergrad wife. After about my fourth Tysabri dose of year, I’d met all my deductibles for the year.
But I was still paying something north of $500/mo..
So, while the rollout for healthcare.gov wasn’t done well, the fact that the service it was providing sucked doesn’t change.
I don’t know that there’s a good way to fix any of that.
Part of what they were discussing during the Reason show was that there’s a lot of emphasis on really extending work from USDS, but it doesn’t change the fact that government just doesn’t work. You can do an incredible amount of work expanding service delivery, but if the service isn’t good, does it matter?
Well, it’s above freezing now, so hopefully a lot of the remaining ice will sublimate off, and I can go back to exercising as I’d like.
Going to be a bit odd with my wife the return-to-office of the Federal workforce. I don’t think it’s going to affect me directly, but there’s going to be some changes.
The DEI EO might actually help people like me get back to potentially working on the General Schedule? Possibly.
A lot of discussion about what Musk is doing with DOGE, but I’m really looking at it at this point as one of few ways to actually shrink the Federal workforce.
Someone who’s on the DEI staff — is there anything else he/she can do in Federal service?
Well, work at the TSA, perhaps.
Somehow I think a gender studies major might be able to do this.
But there’s not a lot else.
Yes, there’ll be a segment who’ll finally just retire, but I think there’s still many of them who’ve got debt that makes that impossible. Even with an inflation-adjusted pension, paying a the three mortgages would be tough.
Any sort of self-deprivation is unthinkable. That the buying-power of pretty much every single world currency is dropping is a part of it. Why is the Federal government spending more on interest on the debt today than it spends on the military?
Yes, I know, NeoHippies, it’s all about the Military-Industrial Complex. And President Biden harkened back to that in his farewell admonition.
Okay. Whatever. Let me know who you ware so I can ignore you for the rest of my life.
Cannot say enough about how brave saying that sort of stuff is at the WEF.
Dry January ends soon. I did have one drink watching inaugural festivities, but have been good otherwise.
Emphatic “meh.”
I feel like I’ve been busy this week, but probably a good part of that has been spent with the little dog while my wife was away. Stuff like that is pretty much exactly what I envisioned when I decided I wanted her/we should have her.
I accidentally stepped on her foot Thursday night….and she took it as I wanted to play with her.
It’d be an interesting case study to see the takes on the different care styles. I leave her alone for the most part, but we run on my schedule. It’s time for breakfast. It’s time to go out. It’s time for interaction/play. She can push things, but I tend to remain firm, which frustrates her sometimes.
She was very upset that I wouldn’t give her peri-peri chicken. Sorry, sweetie, but this is my dinner. You had yours. I will give you ear scratches after I’m finished, and have washed my hands.
It would have been fascinating to see how we’d have been as parents. I think I’ve written her before why we’re not having kids. Yes, there’s the flippant answer that we know which South Part characters we’d produce, but I can’t do the things
There’s a lot of things I think it’s important for a dad to be able to do that I physically can’t; it probably wouldn’t be fair to him, or me. (Yes, I said, “him;” in something like four generations, there’s about three girls out of probably 25 kids…..)
I started writing this while watching overage of the LA fires.
I was listening to this, and getting angrier by the minute.
Do I feel bad that you and those you love lost things that are dear to you? Of course. But for the past decade-plus, I’ve heard your explain why people like me may not enter the ranks of your affluence. I’m privileged simply because of my sorta-observable race, and gender.
The subject line in the draft was “GFY,” which really summed out my feelings.
That fed into Biden’s farewell address.
I was having trouble finding words to describe everything that was wrong with it.
Ted Oberg, with whom I worked when he was at WAVy/FOX43 in Tidewater gave a glowing review.
It was so adoring that I had to call him out on TwiX. The folks from The Fifth Column had pretty much the same reaction I did, though it was delayed by probably a day and a half.
Same sort of “GFY” reaction.
I understand that Ted was playing to his, and WRC’s audience in DC, but I really think Biden, when talking about a tech oligopoly, was expressing that threatens what he has spent his entire adult life fostering.
You attend a private boarding school. You marry someone of a similar standing. You attend a high-priced private university (think Georgetown, GWU). You produce two kids better than yourself. You buy a property that’ll never decline in value, mortgage it forever, and instead of paying off the loan, you invest in whatever Rep. Pelosi is buying.
The tech bros didn’t do that. Zuck is a f’n dropout. Must stop.
Again, GFY.
Monday should be interesting. We’ll see how things go.
I watched the final bits of Shmoocon.
Lots of the typical stuff I’d expect.
There’s been lots of lessons that have been learned amongst the staff and participants.
You build on others’ previous successes, and end up creating something better.
The assembly of the community, however, is something you really can’t replicate.
I’ve had bits of seemingly-unusual connections. It probably started with my brother marrying one of the Hack-of-Halo staff’s sister. (I don’t know that he’s been around the past few years….he’s actually been b/uilding more humans…)
So, the charge from The Potters was to go find or build something else (using what you’ve learned at Shmoo…).
The personal connections, however, are something I didn’t really create many of.
Do people know me because of my attendance at Shmoocon? Um. Probably not very many.
I am very introverted. When I started attending, I was doing IT work amidst my regular overnight radio duties. There’s a lot of things you can do in the IT world in the middle of the night. When you’re the only person working, so long as the stations are on the air, you can do whatever you need to do.
As things have progressed, however, I’ve had moments where the NoVA groupthink really bothered me. That’s probably a lot of the reason I didn’t want to spend my very-limited funds on coming to DC to participate.
I did enjoy socializing more when I was younger, but that’s kind of worn off as I’ve gotten older.
This year, with my body really betraying me, I spent very little time down on in the rooms.
Could someone do something similar that’s all done with the advances that have come with advances in network technology? We’re doing seminars these hours, then drinking for a few hours afterwards.
At the same time, I wonder how many of the people who were so amped about Net Neutrality in, say, 2011, would have ever been okay with Ajit Pai at the FCC.
I am absolutely amazed at the speed increases. This was supposed to be impossible, so it was terribly important to constrain things into what seemed possible not very long ago.
If you’d asked me in 2014 if I’d ever see Gigabit speeds almost everywhere, I’d have said you were nuts.
I’ll look around, but I’d really like something virtual. I do like drinking my own liquor, showering in my own shower, and sleeping in my own bed.
I can get fascinating food. Maybe thee’s something that can be done to urge people to try things they never have before. Still channeling this.
The trip to DC tended to help me get out of my comfort zone, and try things I wouldn’t have.
So, will I miss Shmoocon? Yeah. But I think there’s ways to find replacement absent staying in a decaying hotel.
And if there’s interesting to watch/listen to, I can write about them.
Headed out early after another fitful night of sleep. I’m not going to disparage the hotel; it’s something else that got really f’d with the pandemic.
I know, I know. If I had my mask on, I wouldn’t notice the loud HVAC, or malfunctioning shower. That I expect those things is another example of my privilege. I would tell you to go check BlueSkeet for confirmation. No, I shouldn’t say that, but it’s really sad that a small fragment of smart people are retreating into their own little world. Was Reddit not enough?
So, onto the talk. I wanted to watch the one on hot dogs, but two of the three channels are cricktets. The one about MLOps is the only one with sound, so that it is. Some information about how AI models are thrown off by stuff from botnet upvotes. (And I’m thinking of the days way back when when some folks were showing off driftnet, which was a program that just displayed images from HTTP sessions. Someone, and I shan’t mention who, wrote a curl script so that it looked like people were looking at some really sick stuff. See the popular section here.)
And the video dropped on that one. Try Build It again. And there’s sound. discussion of embedded device something or the other. They destroyed a printer earlier.
Listening to the stuff about powering over USB-C, using Arduino is interesting. The collection of various RaspberryPIs kind of shows how short my attention level is lately.
I do think kids today are missing out on the elation that comes from making the magic smoke come out of hardware with software you wrote.
And that stream fell down. But now the others are back with audio. Juggle around until next ones start…
And I ended up watching the presentation by the guy from The EFF. I appreciate most of his bits about treaties, and authoritarian governments that are to those treaties.
Lots of back-and-forth with the language of the treaty that allows the signatories do actually do whatever they want despite being parties to the treaty.
Why worry about it at all, then?
That’s kind of what leads me to thinking that every law, every treaty, should have a mandatory end date. If everyone thinks that the principles are good, it shouldn’t be a big deal to pass something similar again.
Do the Russians, Norks, and Mullahs adhere to treaties ratified by previous governments?
I worry, too, about things that end up being backdoors through previously-ratified treaties. I admit that my thinking about that is heavily-influenced by what happened with the pandemic.
No. I won’t carry a vaxport. If you wanna throw me in prison because of that’s what it is. Do it. Do it publicly. Have no shame about it.
I will watch the rest, and give final thoughts as I consider things. I will miss ShmooCon, but some of the things I saw this weekend are reminiscent of some of the things I saw in about 2012/13.
I am happy that there seems to be some pushback against it, but I worry that the pushes after Trump’s election, and with the pandemic, people are getting pushed more into small walled gardens where they don’t see or hear things that they don’t like. I admit I’m kind of guilty in this sometimes, but I really would like to sample lots of different sources, and make up my own mind.
The things discussed places like The Fifth Column, Blocked and Reported, and The Free Press give me a lot of things to consider that are different than the near-uniformity in major corporate press.
*shrug*
So, off to listen to the last bits of this.
No, I’m not feeling that lousy, but my legs really aren’t working well. Switching out heavier laptop bag for smaller Shmoo bag helped, but I was still pretty exhausted with just what I did tonight.
Trying to decide if I want to come back for the final bits of Shmoocon tomorrow.
*checks schedule*
Yeah, I’m gonna go home. There’s not anything I think I’d miss if I wasn’t here in person. Nobody needs to see the staggering guy in an NPC mask. Hardly anybody recognized me, anyway. I don’t think there’d be anything I can really get.
So, in-person chapter closed. I’m happy I’ve done this so many times. A little bit of regret that I lost the inspiration to give a talk, but I’ll probably just sneak off by myself again. I don’t know that I actually attended many of the early ones; I had to get back to Norfolk for my Sunday Night airshaft.
Alcohol was largely eschewed early on, too.
I don’t know that I’ve seen anything very exciting, however. As my health has failed, and my work has gotten farther and farther away from the nuts and bolt, I’ve lost familiarity with the awesome haxxor tools.
I actually was describing something to a INFORMATION SECURITY PROFESSIONAL about reading raw wire data on something that’s going to generate a bunch of network traffic.
Go watch the stuff in … and I stopped myself from saying Ethereal in favor of Wireshark. You’ve done that, right? Uh, yeah, but not in a long time.
Yeah, me either. But it shouldn’t be anything very foreign. You make a suggestion that you know is going to cause a ton of network traffic…turn on Wireshark and watch for a few minutes when you do it to see if things blow up.
Not rocket surgery.
*distacted for a bit with a problem*
Yeah, I’m going home in the morning.
I will miss Shmoocon. Maybe somebody could do something in, say, Ashland near Kings Dominion when the park is closed?
I think I’ve figured out what I need to do to pay Redacted‘s protection racket.
Whether that matters is another question altogether.
Will tune in some things at home tomorrow morning.
