During the trial, Penny’s defense brought in a forensic pathologist who claimed that Neely hadn’t died from being choked but from a “combination of his schizophrenia, synthetic marijuana, sickle cell trait and the struggle from being in Penny’s restraint,

I get that defense attorneys have to work with what they have but goodness am I tired of this argument.

“Your honor the deceased did not die from being shot through the temple, but due to having chronic migraines and exposure to second hand smoke 3 years ago and also walking towards the bullet thus increasing it’s relative velocity slighty”

Ziz helpfully suggested I use a gun with a potato as a makeshift suppressor, and that I might destroy the body with lye

I looked up a video of someone trying to use a potato as a suppressor and was not disappointed.

deleted by creator

The final race to bubble collapse AGI is afoot so Sergey Brin thinks his workers should work 60 hours a week, and churn out LLM assisted code, and be in the office “at least” 5 days a week https://9to5google.com/2025/02/27/sergey-brin-google-agi/

Of course most people don’t have enough money to hire an army of assistants, they have friends and family that they actually like, or they have aspirations beyond babysitting shitty Gemini output every waking hour to further enrich billionaires at the expense of their own health.

But no no, he’s right! Those lazy 40-hour workers (the ones who dodged layoffs so far anyway) are doing the bare minimum and have poor work ethic!

US techno-fascism roundup part the fourth:

1. DOGE is reportedly using AI to assess the “what did you do last week” bullet points form all federal workers

2. Their privacy impact assessment for this had this to say

   The individual federal government employees can opt out simply by not responding to the email

   But Mr. Musk apparently forgot about this as he threatens to fire everyone who won’t respond (stuff like maternity leave be damned I guess)

3. A particularly unhappy person got an AI generated video of Trump sucking Musk’s toes to display on TVs in government buildings.

4. Hey firing people is hard. I know, what if we got the computers to fire people for us!

Excuse me but I need the tech industry to hold up just long enough to fulfill my mid-life-crisis goal of moving to another country. Please refrain from crashing until then.

Thanks.

Usually SSN yes. In recent years airports and secure federal buildings are starting to require “real IDs” / star cards which are state IDs which meet federal identity verification requirements. I couldn’t be bothered with all that since I already have a passport so my driver’s license says “Federal Limits Apply”.

For thinks like bank loans, state IDs are widely accepted.

OK this is just my unresearched opinion as an American but I really don’t know what I’m talking about so keep that in mind and treat it as vibes more than research. It’s messy and I haven’t learned about any of it since highschool (and my highschool left a lot of important parts out):

Media companies continue to impress me with their hard-hitting investigative boots on the ground reporting

Write a brief article titled “ICE Prosecutor Linked to Anonymous White Supremacist X Profile: Report”

The worst part is I can’t tell if that’s not meant to be taken literally or if it is.

Relevant political cartoon (though I feel gross after looking at it)

Yeah, it’s a lot easier to think of a potentially interesting premise than it is to sit down and actually write it out. Also if I’m gonna write something it’ll be something I think is interesting rather than a prompt.

Writing Prompts:

• Pokemon and Digimon are both real and they are at war.
• Fractals are alive and they hate us
• A woman explores beyond the event horizon of a black hole and it’s just very hot and cramped and boring and not at all pleasant
• A company starts a time mine where they mine causality but they didn’t think about sustainability

OK OK you have a point, I hate all of these and I wrote them.

Yeah just saw that. It’s messed up.

I told my job a couple weeks ago that I’m planning to move out of the US. They need me more than I need them so they might actually help with that; but even if a transfer works out I intend to get out this year one way or another, even if it means a study visa instead of a job.

Even if things magically turn around like some people think my mind is set. Irreversable damage has already been done in my mind. I said in another comment that I feel like a stranger in America now (this is, in a weird sense, kind of a freeing feeling).

Yeah I already have a lot of non-US stocks, and next week I’m going to rebalance to make them the majority.

I’m not a finance person. My uncle who’s in the world of international corporate law thinks things will be fine so maybe I’m being a bit cautious but the way I see it there are a few big issues:

• The US government is trying it’s best to implode itself.
• There is a brain-drain effect (or heck, a worker-drain effect in general), it will pick up as things get worse.
• The US government is becoming much more isolationist and detached from the global economy.
• There is a small but real chance that the US government will start one or more major wars over the next decade

All of this also increases the risk of “black swan” events like pandemics, hacks, the US “investing” all the “savings” they “found” into cryptocurrency schemes, large-scale unrest, or god knows what else.

A lot of the reporting is using kids gloves instead of calling out the thinly veiled threats (god our media sucks), but anyone who can connect dots and read the tariffs + greenland + canada 51st state + panama + gulf of mexico news should be able to see Trump’s hawkish expansionist dreams pretty easily.

Is this a matter of not following the news, poor critical thinking, or just so much stuff hitting the fan that it’s hard to keep up?

So about that…

It is quite the feeling seeing the federal government do their best to erase and discriminate against me and other trans people so openly and flagrantly and suddenly. Can’t really put it into words easily. I now feel like a stranger in my own country.

r.e. incompetence look at #9 that I just added :D (I guess I should cut it off there and start collecting stuff for a new comment next week)

US government tech hellscape roundup part the third (ugh):

1. Elon Musk jokes(?) that the government doesn’t use SQL ??? (source, note that his tweet has an ableist slur). I don’t even know what to think about this. Is it supposed to be funny or something? Does he actually believe it?

2. Article: Elon Musk’s A.I.-Fuelled War on Human Agency – People here probably already knew all this; but one of the ways the admin thinks they can fire everyone is by replacing people with AI / automating everything. Some of the social media responses from federal workers are pretty great:

   Really excited to see AI put on some waders and unclog a beaver dam from a water structure for me.

   If I’ve learned anything from all this it’s about how unfathomably based cool a lot of federal workers are.

3. The less fascist / cowed parts of the infosec industry are currently raising the alarm about how insecure this all is. A representative social media post from Gossi The Dog

   I definitely recommend posting about what is happening in the US on LinkedIn as you will quickly learn many of the largest security vendors are staffed by people who have no interest in protecting people, while posting with their employers names.

4. Some federal workers have been fired via emails calling them [EmployeeFirstName].

Edit:

5. Elon Musk The US State Department plans to buy $400m worth of armored Cybertrucks from Elon Musk (nytimes) (Edit: may have been ordered under Biden’s administration)

6. doge.gov has been updated. Mostly just with more useless baby’s first website materials; but they promise a “comprehensive, government-wide org chart” and are hiring “software engineers, InfoSec engineers, and other technology professionals”.

   Aside: I already found two three minor website bugs despite not really looking for them and the website being tiny. But that can’t be right… they’re IT professionals while I’m DEI.

7. Find replace is so hard :( and that’s why the government writes about “gay and rights” to avoid saying the… the… the forbidden t-word of which I dare not speak

8. So about how I said doge.gov gives baby’s first website vibes; it’s database was left world writable lol

9. doge.gov shares classified information

10. Classic Musk “humor”: a “tech support” T-shirt to allude to all of this. The dude really likes custom T-shirts (which to be fair custom t-shirts can be awesome when they’re less bad)