I am the journeyer from the valley of the dead Sega consoles. With the blessings of Sega Saturn, the gaming system of destruction, I am the Scout of Silence… Sailor Saturn.

  • 5 Posts
  • 463 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 29th, 2023
  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23 February 2025English
    8·
    14 days ago

    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):

    A bunch of uninformed rambling

    US states aren’t thought of as countries for good reason, but in the country’s legal framework that kind of how they work – just with a lot of work to make borders almost a non-issue, shared citizenship, shared economy, etc. This means that historically a lot of stuff that would be associated with a country (ID, driving permit, residency, military) either only happens at the state level; or happens at both the state and the federal level.

    In the constitution the federal government is supposed to stick to it’s lane as well: any powers which aren’t explicitly given to the federal government are reserved for the states (10th amendment). Though in practice the federal government has a lot of powers.

    That’s the background and helps explain both the lack of a (compulsory) national ID and how there can be state level election shenanigans:

    For national ID this was indeed a conservative bugbear. They were essentially worried about the government building a dossier on them or something. I don’t remember the details it’s been a long time: Conservatism 15 years ago was an entirely different beast than it is today. It’s kind of hard to even imagine if the conservatives still have the same fears today, if the liberals don’t, or how it would actually play out. Congress being deadlocked for so long means it’s hard to get a vibe on how things would shake out if they started actually passing lots of laws again.

    Oh yeah did I mention congress is deadlocked? This both means that the US is essentially operating on decades outdated laws, and that the legislature’s infighting has lead to a power vacuum that the executive and judicial branch have slurped up (which helps explain the current Elon Musk mess)

    Anyway election shenanigans: States were historically supposed to be, well, states as in closely aligned countries and this was all set up in the days before fast and easy long distance travel and communication (did I mention America is really big?). This means that each state runs it’s own election (which it can do in any legal way it pleases). The outcome of the election is one or more electors, and those electors are who actually send in their choice for president. There have been cases of “faithless electors” who vote for someone besides the party they represent. Oddly this hasn’t really been seen as a big deal (since the parties choose the electors they tend to be pretty loyal).

    The point of the previous paragraph is this is a mess. Like a real mess. It’s law that made some sense 200 years ago (and maybe not even, they were kinda #yolo-ing the constitution at the time) but is really dated. This means there’s lots of room for shenanigans. Can a state legally disqualify voters? Maybe? Sometimes? Kinda? They’re not supposed to be like racist or anything, but determining that depends on a lot of details and shifting supreme court rulings.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 16th February 2025English
    12·
    19 days ago

    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.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 16th February 2025English
    16·
    20 days ago

    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:

    1. 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)

    2. 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.

    3. 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

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

    5. doge.gov shares classified information

    6. 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)