christian crumlish doing stuff
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Chaos and cruelty
Elaine Godfrey has a thorough and well sourced article in the Atlantic explaining how the current regime is willfully disrupting the functioning of the government and the wellbeing of public servants. I feel for my colleagues who have not yet been illegally fired or forced to quit to preserve their own integrity. Nobody wants to…
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So much winning
Got my first ever attempted maga spam on this blog today. It never made it to my site though. Moderation tools for the win.
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Record store day!
Drove up to Oakland this morning to meet my pals in Rockridge to check out some new vinyl releases for this spring’s record store day at Open Mind Music (and, it turns out, Stranded up the street). After a scare with a lost phone and some very good samaritans we each headed home with our…
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How to weaponize innumeracy
Protests work. They got a family home from Texas to Homan’s home district, and they got the DOGEcrats to back off their plan to shut down Social Security phone lines. Along the way, Yale-educated elite novelist J.D. Vance made this false claim: 40% of calls are fraud
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Tiny Herald
It’s been a while since I rounded up my microblogging / nanopublishing posts, but they have been thinner on the ground as well, I think? Let’s see!
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New sounds of silence
I’ve recently been following this artist on Soundcloud, Sarah Walker, whose specialty is freely reinterpreting standards of the past (many of them from my own formative years) in what I might say is a more contemporary style, reminiscent of popular singer-songwriters of the moment (think Tay Tay, et al.). The premise seems to be imagine…
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Abraham Lincoln did not invent the corndog
Despite what I was informed today, I am told this is actually not true. That topic came up during the “banter” segment of our team coffeeshop, while we were getting the translators set up properly. After that we talked about or own business, thank you very much. Many things are afoot.
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Oligarchs considered harmful
The influence of billionaires over our lives worries me. I recall reading Tom Friedman (who has his own issues but got this one right) discussing the age of superempowered individuals after bin Laden horrified us into endless wars. I remember people in Kauai being, at least initially, relieved when Zuck bought up an old valley,…
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Effective government, please
Efficiency is all the rage, even in the blue states. “Do more with less” is the battlecry. In my day it was “work smarter not harder” but I think harder work harder is the secret sauce in today’s wishful thinking, that and the panacea of frictionless perfect totally not scary nor dangerous AI. But (forgive…
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The west coast bagel cycle
Have I ever told you my bagel theory of coastal arbitrage? It goes a little something like this: Someone fresh from New York City (ideally Brooklyn but honestly anywhere in the tri-state area works) moves to San Francisco or a nearby part of the Bay Area. After poking around for a little while and trying…
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A fresh chance to fork ourselves
Friday evening (of course) a new email went out, still visible to those of us wraiths whose devices continue to function as ersatz radio receivers, with the Good News! that the fork is back on. It’s not that they’re having trouble legally hitting their arbitrary and foolish firing targets, of course. Nor could it be…
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One way or another
Times like these can be oddly exhilarating. I’ve got more irons in the fire than fire right now. There seem to be new possibilities spinning up left and right. I know most ideas never come to full fruition but this period of biggest chaos and widest opportunity has its own sort of euphoric energy associated…
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I miss the FOIA wave
As we read about our clowntastic predatory regime conducting its war planning on unauditable untraceable private networks, I am reminded again of the training I got in info security, the handling of sensitive information, and the ethical expectations for federal employees. At 18F we worked in the open and welcomed scrutiny.
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Getting timey-wimey
I’ll still adjusting to my new non-routine routine, oddly busy for someone on administrative leave from a job I’m losing at the end of next month. On top of job interviews and plans for several different projects outside of regular jobs, I’ve been working hard on the release plans for my record, and we have…
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Caturday
Finished my tax workbook today and sent it over the tubes to the old family CPA firm back in Staten Island to find out if I did my withholding right during my one year of federal employment. I’ve still got bills to pay, a parcel tax coming due, a home office to set right, a…