Good thing there wasn’t a scorpion in that story.
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Grasping I am for every bit of hope in reach…
So my advice is prioritize calling, even if your script is imperfect. You can just say: “it’s unacceptable to have Elon Musk and his staff in charge of federal payments. It’s illegal.” You don’t need to give a speech or say everything exactly technically right.
Second, and this is harder - I am really trying not to get too emotionally invested in this, mainly because I am pretty confident Musk will not get away with this.
The situation is urgent in the sense that every day Musk is left with access, the harder it will be to undo any code changes his staff have made, and the more data he will have stolen. So that’s why I’m calling every day.
I have read and heard a lot of panic and doomsaying on this, with people claiming that Musk has installed malicious code, including keyboard tracking, backdoors, and the ability to remotely control the systems.
Without control of the payment systems, the doomsaying goes, Congress will no longer control spending, rendering them impotent, and creating a dictatorship with Musk/Trump at the helm.
This where I am taking a breath. My entire career has been spent implementing complex payment systems for governmental organizations, so I would ask everyone to consider a few points:
(1) All payment systems have secure backups, including physical copies. At the absolute worst, post Musk/cronies, OPM can restore systems from back-up.
(2) the US government, notably our security agencies, have entire divisions devoted to cybercrime and counterintrusion. I really don’t think a few 20 year old twits could install software that couldn’t be detected and deleted by veteran programmers.
(3) There have to be contingency plans for paying out funds in the case the Treasury can’t operate. My company has helped 6 person pension funds figure out how to pay 5000 retirees if the payroll file fails. I’m pretty confident we can get federal payments out through other means while Treasury’s systems are being restored.
Over the last 12 hours, Trump has said he will scale back Musk’s access, and a judge has apparently issued some kind of ruling also limiting Musk’s access. The Courts will not allow this to continue, and we can put enough pressure on congress for them to finally put an end to this.
This is terrible and scary, but remember fear gets in the way of focus and action, so please try to limit your doomsaying and focus on making your calls today.
I am so heartened by how active so many of you are. It’s keep me going. This is a time for patriots, and you are earning the title.
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Maybe some more Republicans will wake up to the costs for their voters of what Tramp and Co. are doing.
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Rare thing happened I was not disappointed.
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I’ve never seen the Buffy show, but i know it has fans. Here’s one to put down as potential good news (especially since Whedon isn’t associated with this possible follow-up)
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I’ve only ever seen the one with Donald Sutherland, Rutger Hauer, Paul Reubens, Hillary Swank and Luke Perry.… 
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Same, i haven’t rewatched it since i first saw it as a kid so i don’t know if it holds up but i think it would.
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All you really need to know is that one of character is played by that guy’s brother.
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I never thought about it that way!
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Re, cross-dressing queens; he left out Queen Christina of Sweden.
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Thank you, Costco!
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The ones we lost are unpleasant people.
This is what we need to remind businesses who waffle – unlike Costco – about doing the right thing: the customers you lose are the ones that are the most work and who drive away other customers.
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My company had a “State of the Union” kind of thing last month with the president of the company going over metrics and plan for the near future. In the Q&A someone asked a thinly veiled question about DEI initiatives going away in other companies, his answer was what i expected in that Diversity & Inclusion has been part of our company’s core beliefs since day one. That’s going nowhere and it made me glad.
His thoughts on why some companies might be doing away with DEI was interesting. Not sure how true it is but he thought that some companies started DEI initiatives as an easy way to market the company to either consumers or employees, basically they’re following a trend. And the current trend is to do away with it so despite pissing people off by doing away with it they figure they can retain or increase business by dumping DEI. This sounds about right to me.
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Glad he got convicted…
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It’s well worth seeing.
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