@Phil No, it's not, at least not unless the Supreme Court takes us all the way to "unified executive" madness in defiance of all of our history and the plain text of the Constitution, which gives Congress clear roles in the structuring if the executive branch.
As for now, you're just mistaken, but I have no interest in wasting another day going around on it.
@Phil would you feel the same if a hospital you relied upon for dialysis suddenly shut down while no alternative was available? no one owes anything to anyone in your view, i guess. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/26/along-thai-myanmar-border-trumps-decision-to-suspend-foreign-aid-is-deadly-ntwnfb
@Phil we have been through this, and you are delusional. Congress has not agreed, USAID remains law, and the Supreme Court has not weighed in at all other than to stay a requirement to restore some funding pending a hearing Friday.
perhaps Congress *ex post* will bless this lawlessness, we'll see. but as for now, it is black letter plain obvious illegal.
@vic @Phil great! we agree! i'm glad to leave it there.
@Phil lots of lying by that account. remember those condoms? $8B that was really $8M.
when you add the shit you don't like up, it's a tiny fraction of a big number.
@vic @Phil sure. and neither should a for profit. SpaceX for example is logically an arm of the US state.
@Phil if you suddenly stopped feeding one of the families you feed, without any notice at all, when you were perfectly capable of continuing for some time, so that other arrangements could be made, and people starved, yeah, that'd be something like murder. if you did it while committing some other crime — like taking a Congressional mandated agency to the woodchipper — it would be felony murder.
@Phil you are living in denial. USAID works via NGOs and also directly. the US distributes food, operates, funds hospitals, does myriad things. there was a humanitarian waiver by Rubio, but logistics is disrupted because providers who think the waiver applies to them can't get resources via more intermediate workers.
there is a lot of dependency. if we were going to break it, we could have planned a transition, made space for other providers.
these people are murderers of absolute innocents.
@Phil it is. it's probably not murdering the people you mean it to, though (which would include me, i guess). i don't think you have any particular animus against the kids who are dying in Burundi for lack of high nutrient peanut butter manufactured only in the USA, distributed by USAID. https://time.com/7258248/us-foreign-aid-burundi-patients-essay/
it's unsurprising that Musk and Trump are such enthusiastic fans of LLMs.
they hallucinate in roughly the same way.
for visiting heads of state, meeting only with Trump is a bit of a slight. it’d be like getting a meeting only with the Vice President.
you know you mean something to this administration if, like Modi, you get a one-on-one with Musk (or a one-on-one-ish with Musk and a bunch of his kids).
you know how chain restaurants make up their own clappy birthday songs to gather 'round a table and celebrate customer birthdays with?
if i still had local IRL friends, i'd want to make up a song praising federal workers, then get together and troupe from post office to post office to sing and celebrate them.
@BenRossTransit it's interesting how the left crunchy/new-age/sometimes-on-point/sometimes-conspiracist trends of the 1960s-1990s underwent a rightward convergence with 1950s-style fear of anything bigger or deeper than what one man can see and control. people who present as "hippie" are as likely now to be MAGA as not.
@BenRossTransit i think there's a real distinction between downscale and upscale wings of the coalition. the downscale part believes the conspiracy theories, was well portrayed in Dr. Strangelove. the upscale wing does not, but has its own motivations for pretending it might.
the nonfascist political coalition needs to become a bit more Christian in the sense of "whatever the fuck you've said or done in the past, however you've sinned, join us now in our worthy project and you will be welcomed and redeemed."
may the vote be our sacrament.
@ike it sure is! and i'm relieved. (i can see that 1.1.1.3 now resolves my domain. yay!)
i did fix the hole by which people were able to post unauthorized notes at notes.interfluidity.com. but the notes i found there were maybe a bit spammy, but not malware or nsfw. i still don't understand why i would have been blocked.
thanks again for letting me know about this, and figuring out who and how i was being blocked!
i know Musk likes SF, so it's pretty cool that DOGE is like the governmental version of that story "Gambling Device" by Frank Herbert.
people think the “five questions” thing is about evaluating employees, or more cynically coming up with pretexts to fire them, but i think he’s trying to get government workers to generate data in order to train his AI.