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bolverk

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by bolverk

  1. What if the Canadians are just better at hiding things? Did you ever think about that, ya hoser!
  2. We must cultivate our garden.
  3. All your government are belong to Grok (with a healthy dose of irony). Elon Musk Ally Tells Staff 'AI-First' Is the Future of Key Government Agency Sources say the former Tesla engineer now in charge of the Technology Transformation Services wants an agency that operates like a "startup software company." In a Monday morning meeting, Thomas Shedd, the recently appointed Technology Transformation Services director and Elon Musk ally, told General Services Administration workers that the agency’s new administrator is pursuing an “AI-first strategy,” sources tell WIRED. Throughout the meeting, Shedd shared his vision for a GSA that operates like a “startup software company,” automating different internal tasks and centralizing data from across the federal government. The Monday meeting, held in-person and on Google Meet, comes days after WIRED reported that many of Musk’s associates have migrated to jobs at the highest levels of the GSA and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Prior to joining TTS, which is housed within the GSA, Shedd was a software engineer at Tesla, one of Musk’s companies. The transition has caused mass confusion amongst GSA staffers who have been thrown into surprise one-on-one meetings, forced to present their code—often to young engineers who did not identify themselves—and left wondering what the future of the agency’s tech task force will look like. Shedd attempted to answer these questions on Monday, providing details around a number of projects the agency will pursue over the coming weeks and months. His particular focus, sources say, was an increased role for AI not just at GSA, but at agencies government-wide. In what he described as an “AI-first strategy,” sources say, Shedd provided a handful of examples of projects GSA acting administrator Stephen Ehikian is looking to prioritize, including the development of “AI coding agents” that would be made available for all agencies. Shedd made it clear that he believes much of the work at TTS and the broader government, particularly around finance tasks, could be automated. "This does raise red flags,” a cybersecurity expert who was granted anonymity due to concerns of retaliation told WIRED on Monday, who noted that automating the government isn’t the same as automating other things, like self-driving cars. “People, especially people who aren’t experts in the subject domain, coming into projects often think ‘this is dumb’ and then find out how hard the thing really is.” Shedd instructed employees to think of TTS as a software startup that had become financially unstable. He suggested that the federal government needs a centralized data repository, and that he was actively working with others on a strategy to create one, although it wasn’t clear where this repository would be based or if these projects would comply with privacy laws. Shedd referred to these concerns as a “roadblock” and said that the agency should still push forward to see what was possible. Sources say that during the call Shedd tightly connected TTS and the United States Digital Services—rebranded as the United States DOGE Service, or DOGE, under Trump—as “pillars” of a new technological strategy. Later in the meeting, he said that there was no plan to merge the two groups and that projects would flow through them both depending on available staff and expertise, but continued emphasizing the upcoming collaboration between TTS and DOGE. Employees, sources say, also asked questions about the young engineers, who had previously not been identifying themselves in meetings. Shedd said that one of them felt comfortable enough to introduce himself in meetings on Monday, sources say, though Shedd added that he was nervous about their names being publicly revealed and their lives upended. Shedd was unable to answer many staff questions about the deferred resignations, the return to office mandate, or if the agency’s staff would face substantial cuts, according to sources. At one point, Shedd indicated that workforce cuts were likely for TTS, but declined to give more details. (Similar questions were also asked of Department of Government Efficiency leadership in a Friday meeting first reported by WIRED.) Towards the end of the call, sources say, a TTS worker asked if they would be expected to work more than 40 hours per week, to deal with all of the upcoming work and potentially laid off workers. Shedd responded that it was “unclear.”
  4. Ownership of the means of production! When are our free marketeers going to stop this march toward socialism? The three-paragraph executive order tasks the Treasury and Commerce Departments with generating a plan within 90 days for creating a such a fund. Sovereign wealth funds are popular in oil-rich countries like Norway and Saudi Arabia that can invest large budget surpluses in projects around the world. But the United States runs persistent, and widening, budget deficits, and it is unclear where the Trump administration could find the money to seed such a fund. Howard Lutnick, Mr. Trump’s pick to lead the Commerce Department, suggested that the government could take a stake in companies it does business with. ***** “And I think in a short period of time, we’d have one of the biggest funds. And you know, some of some of them are pretty large,” Mr. Trump said. “So, that’s a big deal, huh?”
  5. Next time then: Ontario Premier Doug Ford said earlier Monday that he was ripping up a contract with Elon Musk’s Starlink internet service in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs on Canada. Ford had also said he was also banning the sale of American booze and blocking American companies from provincial contracts. “We have some good news today. We have temporarily averted tariffs that would have severely damaged our economy, giving time for more negotiation and time for cooler heads to prevail,” Ford said in a statement. “With the U.S. pausing tariffs, Ontario will also pause our retaliatory measures.” https://apnews.com/article/canada-trump-tariffs-ontario-musk-2bc1b52b0390aee9686b270606c51573
  6. Have the tariffs on China been called off yet? Are we going to turn around and do this dance with our EU allies next, or in a month again when the month-long reprieve has ended? Are tariffs the new infrastructure week?
  7. It would be the ultimate act of irony if the Texas Sunset Advisory Commission disbanded our fledgling Texas DOGE Agency.
  8. So, GRUhorn, I don't believe you ever got back to me on that question the other day about how many sock accounts you've burned through. Any idea?
  9. We were given explicit and angry instructions, including questioning our ability to understand English and a screengrab from a dictionary, that we are NOT to discuss threatened invasions or even just the broader topic of foreign relations in DT. You guys are gonna get into some big, big trouble.
  10. I don't know what this acronym means, and Google wasn't helpful.
  11. A little light reading on the man just named in charge of USAID right now: Trump ally Peter Marocco behind evisceration of USAid: ‘He’s a destroyer’ Former Trump official reportedly in the Capitol on Jan. 6 now working with the transition
  12. E.P.A. Tells More Than 1,000 They Could Be Fired ‘Immediately’ A spokeswoman for Lee Zeldin, the new head of the agency, said the goal was to create an “effective and efficient” federal work force. The Trump administration has warned more than 1,100 Environmental Protection Agency employees who work on climate change, reducing air pollution, enforcing environmental laws and other programs that they could be fired at any time. An email, reviewed by The New York Times, was sent to staff members who were hired within the past year and have probationary status. Many of those employees were encouraged to join the E.P.A. under the Biden administration to rebuild the agency, which had been depleted during President Trump’s first term. Others are experienced federal workers who had taken new assignments within the agency. Many had been hired to work on programs that Congress created through two recent laws, doing things like helping communities replace lead pipes, remediating toxic sites and funding clean energy projects aimed at reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that are heating the planet. “As a probationary/trial period employee, the agency has the right to immediately terminate you,” the email states. Molly Vaseliou, an E.P.A. spokeswoman, said in a statement that “our goal is to be transparent.” She declined to answer questions about the email, though, including whether Lee Zeldin, the agency’s new administrator, intended to terminate employees and, if so, for what reason. “On his first day in office, he engaged directly with career staff across E.P.A.’s headquarters — spanning two city blocks in downtown D.C. — listening to their insights and perspectives,” Ms. Vaseliou said. “Ultimately, the goal is to create a more effective and efficient federal government that serves all Americans.” At 9:21 a.m. on Monday, E.P.A. employees received another email notifying them of that the agencywide intranet was out of service. Without the internal agency network, employees cannot access documents or other information needed for their jobs. The email from E.P.A.’s Office of Mission Support reads “Access to work.epa.gov is current unavailable” and that technical specialists were working to resolve the issue. It was not immediately clear if the outage was related to efforts to reduce the work force. Asked about the email, Ms. Vaseliou said “There was an outage.” Other federal agencies have been directed by the Office of Personnel Management to submit lists of probationary employees, but E.P.A. workers appear to be the first to receive notice that they may be immediately dismissed. Leaders at the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents unionized E.P.A. employees, called the move a clear attempt to gut an agency that Mr. Trump dislikes. Through the E.P.A., the Biden administration developed aggressive regulations to curb planet-warming pollution from power plants, automobiles and oil and gas wells. “E.P.A. is at the center of the bullseye for President Trump’s vindictive purge of public servants,” said Michelle Roos, executive director of the Environmental Protection Network, a group of agency alumni. She called it “the most chaotic and vindictive transition in the history of the Environmental Protection Agency.” Two E.P.A. employees who received the email said it had caused them to rethink the Trump administration’s offer to federal employees to resign but be paid through the end of September. The employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are concerned about being fired, said they had initially dismissed that offer as untrustworthy. Being informed that their jobs are particularly precarious has caused them to rethink their options, both said. Probationary employees are considered easier to fire because they do not have the full range of civil service protections, but rules still exist, said Marie Owens-Powell, president of the federation of government employees union, which represents about 8,000 E.P.A. workers. “There has to be cause, and the cause can’t be because you’re a Democrat and it’s a Republican administration,” Ms. Owens-Powell said. The union is consulting lawyers about whether the administration can fire workers based on a simple declaration of a change in agency priorities, she said. Ms. Owens-Powell said the Trump administration had placed about 15 E.P.A. employees who were working on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts on administrative leave. She said the next likely targets are those working on environmental justice, or programs to help marginalized communities that suffer from disproportionate amounts of air and water pollution. Staffing at the E.P.A. peaked in 2004 during the George W. Bush administration, when there were 17,611 employees, according to the agency. Those levels ebbed and flowed slightly, but began to take a sharp dip during the Obama administration amid Republican control of the House and Senate. When Mr. Trump entered the White House in 2017, the E.P.A. had 15,408 employees. The following year that number dropped to 14,172 as political appointees reversed regulations, shut scientists out of decision-making and shrank the agency’s budget. The Biden administration sought to reverse those losses. The agency currently employs about 15,130 people around the country, a level slightly higher than when Ronald Reagan was president.
  13. A lot is resting on our judiciary right now.
  14. Two-day-old article: Trump ally Peter Marocco behind evisceration of USAid: ‘He’s a destroyer’
  15. Layering it on A judge in Washington said she would further block the White House’s spending freeze. A federal judge said on Monday that she intended to temporarily block the Trump administration from imposing a sweeping freeze on trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans, adding to the pushback against an effort by the White House’s Office and Management and Budget. The statement by the judge, Loren L. AliKhan of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, came hours after the Justice Department told a federal judge in Rhode Island who issued a similar order on Friday that the government interpreted his order as applying to all spending nationally, not just to funds for the states that brought that case. Together, the signals from federal judges amounted to a two-fisted rebuke of the move by the budget office as an overreach that likely lacked legitimate authority. Judge AliKhan, a Biden appointee, made her statement at the end of a nearly 90-minute hearing on Monday, saying she wanted to file her order before an earlier administrative stay expires at 5 p.m. The case before her was brought by charities and other nongovernmental organizations that rely at least in part on federal grants to operate. The hearing was the latest turn in a fast-moving set of events since the Trump administration issued the spending freeze last week, paralyzing groups around the country and prompting chaos. After the legal challenges were filed, the Trump administration said it had rescinded the O.M.B. memo and asked judges to dismiss the lawsuits as moot. But the plaintiffs have presented evidence that the blanket freeze imposed by the memo appears to remain in effect regardless. On Wednesday, the White House press secretary declared on social media that the retraction of the memo “is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze.” The plaintiffs in the case before Judge AliKhan presented statements from various grant recipients over the weekend that they remained unable to retrieve the funds they had been awarded through an online portal. The Trump administration has portrayed the spending freeze as an effort to make sure that grants and loans do not violate executive orders Mr. Trump separately issued shortly after taking office in which he sought to end several policies he dislikes, like diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. The case is not challenging those orders themselves. But the plaintiffs have argued that the O.M.B. memo went further, in part by barring nebulous concepts not found in Mr. Trump’s orders, like “wokeness” and in part by requiring a blanket freeze. Daniel Schwei, a lawyer for the Justice Department, argued that there was no need for any order because, he said, the government interpreted the one by the judge in Rhode Island as covering the entire landscape. But Kevin Friedl, a lawyer for the plaintiffs who works for the advocacy group Democracy Forward, argued that the order in the Rhode Island case could be lifted at any time, so his clients needed additional relief. Also calling the order “consequential and ill-considered,” he argued that they were being harmed through various means, from a chilling of First Amendment rights to specific problems keeping their doors open without the funds they had been awarded. The litigation is complicated by a lack of clarity about the continued block on funding even after the O.M.B. withdrew the memo. Mr. Schwei argued that if they were instead doing it because of Mr. Trump’s executive orders or as decisions they made for themselves, it would be improper for the judge to use the lawsuit to intervene. Mr. Friedl urged the judge, however, to recognize the “reality” that the freeze was implemented soon after the O.M.B. memo came down. It remained unclear how far-reaching Judge AliKhan’s order would be. Mr. Friedl asked the judge to require, as part of the order, that O.M.B. tell all recipients of its original memo that the freeze had been blocked and that they should roll back any steps they had already taken to carry it out. But Mr. Schwei said that would be “extraordinarily broad” since it would encompass numerous agencies who were not party to the litigation. He asked her to limit any such order to those particular people or groups. “They are requesting this court superintend all federal financial assistance,” he said, and referring to the part of the Constitution that gives Mr. Trump the power to oversee the executive branch, he called the request both an “extraordinary and an overly broad intrusion on agency authority and the president’s Article II authority.”
  16. I like the explanation of how it would be funded: "tariffs and other intelligent things."
  17. Let's pretend for a moment I was named Greg Casar or Vincente Gonzalez, and I was the US rep within whose district Muskolini had significant holdings. Is there power inherent within my office that gives me the means of fucking over that twat's business interests within my district? Or am I simply relegated to finding a bunch of other like-minded folks to do something? I mean, I know a lot of people don't really like Casar, but he sure could be making some noise, as he has the temperament for it. No idea about Gonzales. I dunno if that would be futile, but it's gotta start somewhere with someone.
  18. Administration officials did not say how the fund would operate or be financed, but Trump has previously said it could be funded by "tariffs and other intelligent things."
  19. Midland needs water, so let's drain Lake Brownwood. Sure, that checks out 100%.
  20. It's moments like these when new leaders are born. The Clintons/Obamas/Bidens are all gone. Chuck and Nancy might as well be. I'm not sure how much sway Bernie has nowadays. Young Guns, this is your moment. Do or do not.
  21. Introduced by Andy Biggs (R-AZ). No cosponsors yet (fortunately). https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/86
  22. Blessed be the fruit. Under his eye.
  23. And with that delay, he hoped a few state legislatures would go along with changing their electoral college voters to tip the balance of the election. They called this play the "Green Bay Sweep."
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