So the Machine Takeover is Here...
Feb. 1st, 2025 10:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seawasp... but it's not being done by a rogue AI. Instead it's being done by an arrogant, clueless investor techbro-Nazi working with an old grifter Nazi.
Apparently, employees of Elon's DOGE have taken physical control of the OMB and other computers, which together control literally TRILLIONS of dollars, and of course hold an absolutely incalculable amount of personal and private information for every single citizen of the United States.
Leaving aside whether you think Social Security, Medicare, etc., should even exist, this is the kind of thing that simply cannot be allowed to happen. These people have a week of experience bulling their way through government systems. You don't LET people with that little experience have any kind of operating control over major systems. When IEM gets a new office manager, it takes them a couple MONTHS to fully understand the flow of business, the specific way our accounting system works, the way payroll is handled, etc. -- and IEM is about five orders of magnitude smaller than this.
No one without YEARS of experience, or at least a very deep background in these kind of systems AND a lot of experienced helpers, should be messing with these systems. No one without an AWFUL lot of need should have unlimited access to all that private data, certainly not without a lot of training on what kind of disasters you can cause.
My suspicion is that this is basically just a data theft on the grandest scale ever, with the same consideration for the victims that a ransomware scammer has. They don't care what happens to the systems, but they DO want the data in them.
The problem is that you can't just say "Okay, we'll yank a couple trillion out of the economy today and figure out how to fix it". If those systems crash or are badly screwed up, or simply can't be trusted, you're throwing millions of people instantly into poverty and a lot more into major difficulty. It's one thing if you think you can ease people into a different system, but when you don't care -- people will die.
And on that scale, people will revolt. Violently. With fire.
Apparently, employees of Elon's DOGE have taken physical control of the OMB and other computers, which together control literally TRILLIONS of dollars, and of course hold an absolutely incalculable amount of personal and private information for every single citizen of the United States.
Leaving aside whether you think Social Security, Medicare, etc., should even exist, this is the kind of thing that simply cannot be allowed to happen. These people have a week of experience bulling their way through government systems. You don't LET people with that little experience have any kind of operating control over major systems. When IEM gets a new office manager, it takes them a couple MONTHS to fully understand the flow of business, the specific way our accounting system works, the way payroll is handled, etc. -- and IEM is about five orders of magnitude smaller than this.
No one without YEARS of experience, or at least a very deep background in these kind of systems AND a lot of experienced helpers, should be messing with these systems. No one without an AWFUL lot of need should have unlimited access to all that private data, certainly not without a lot of training on what kind of disasters you can cause.
My suspicion is that this is basically just a data theft on the grandest scale ever, with the same consideration for the victims that a ransomware scammer has. They don't care what happens to the systems, but they DO want the data in them.
The problem is that you can't just say "Okay, we'll yank a couple trillion out of the economy today and figure out how to fix it". If those systems crash or are badly screwed up, or simply can't be trusted, you're throwing millions of people instantly into poverty and a lot more into major difficulty. It's one thing if you think you can ease people into a different system, but when you don't care -- people will die.
And on that scale, people will revolt. Violently. With fire.
no subject
Date: 2025-02-01 03:59 pm (UTC)Access to vastly greater amounts of detailed, high-quality financial data would likely be worth hundreds of dollars per person to a databroker, much greater value than even Musks' expenditure on Twitter.
no subject
Date: 2025-02-01 09:20 pm (UTC)These people have a week of experience bulling their way through government systems. You don't LET people with that little experience have any kind of operating control over major systems.
Turnabout is fair play: this bullshit is exactly what the USA inflicted on Russia circa 1991-99 and on Iraq after the invasion in 2003 -- fresh-faced Harvard MBAs with no prior work experience were parachuted into really senior government positions and told to go hog-wild, they had a country to "fix".
This is the shock doctrine. It's imperialism in action. And in the last spasm of a retreating industrial-age empire, they always apply their colonial methodologies at home (it's why Thatcher is to this day hated in Scotland).
Anyway, a more immediate problem for the US economy is Trump's 10-25% tariff barriers: those costs go right through the system and hit the retail consumer's wallet. It's going to kickstart a wave of inflation, and if he spends the money on tax cuts the inflation ain't gonna come down. Nor are there domestic sources of many of the goods that'll get expensive: the US publishing industry, for example, runs on cheap wood pulp from Canada and China, so that's 25% on the cost of goods of a printed book, right there.
no subject
Date: 2025-02-02 06:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-02-03 01:16 pm (UTC)But boy, this isn't gonna help the release of _Fenrir_ any.
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Date: 2025-02-07 12:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-02-07 05:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-02-12 05:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-02-12 01:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-02-17 12:03 pm (UTC)