Tom Ward

Watching Andor. Feeling inspired.

Has Elon submitted an email with 5 bullet points indicating what he did at Tesla last week?

Does he have a pulse?

How about Twitter, SpaceX, nueralink, the boring company?

from @electricfutures After several delays, @DOGE has finally posted its purported savings. Why did it take so long to create a simple webpage with a 1000-row table? Who knows! Let's dig in. Headline number: $55B saved. They list the savings per nixed contract. This should be easy to verify then. It's Monday. @DOGE is the laziest, most overpaid bunch of incompetent, unelected bureaucrats we've ever seen. The first thing I did is add up the "saved" column for all canceled contracts and real estate. The numbers are $16.5B and $O.14B, respectively. Odd... Since almost all of the purported savings come from contracts, we'll focus on that.

The single biggest ticket item is a DHS contract listed as saving $8 billion. Wow, that's a huge contract! Actually no, it's $8 million. They must have tried to automate scraping the FPDS form and failed. That means we're down to $8.5B in savings. 3/ The next 3 biggest ticket items are all USAID contracts listed as $655M each, so $2B total. Wow, pretty big. Wait, these are IDVs, not contracts. $655M is the entire set-aside, being triple counted. In the first 5 years, only $73M was awarded, and only 2 years remain. 4/

So we're down to $6.5B in savings, and an alarming trend emerges: @DOGE does not seem to understand how the government contracts they are canceling work. The savings they are claiming are not annual savings, but rather hypothetical savings if we spent every unobligated penny. 5/ And more importantly, they are just getting it *wrong*, with alarming consistency. These numbers are erroneous. This "select group of geniuses" has not double checked even the LARGEST items accounting for the bulk of their claimed savings. This is a sad, pathetic farce Here's the next biggest item: an IT services contract for the Social Security Administration worth $1B. That's a lot of savings! Well, again, this contract spanned 6 years. 80% has already been spent. Ah well, more like $240M in savings spread over the next 3 years. $80M/year.

In 2023, this contract funded 1000 FTEs working $100/hr. Did we need 1000 SWEs working on SSA infrastructure? Probably not - these could be valid savings (disclaimer: no idea what they actually did). But worth noting that these cuts will impact many private sector jobs as well. And if anyone is curious, there are currently 17 lines that say "SEE FPDS" rather than the savings amount, I guess because their automated scraping failed. I did it manually and it took roughly ~10 minutes. But that's too much to ask of super geniuses working 120 hours/week!

helluva thread from the hellsite about the comically bad “savings” doge claims to have found (sorry for the weirdly sized screenshots, I had to squeeze everything into only 4 of them)

4. Burger

And I've got a block button.

Yes. The better question is how to we resolve it? The only two options that the current administration will respond to are a general strike (my vote) or sustained armed protest (which they will inevitably provoke to violence).

Working through planning. Have some creative ideas. Wish I had something concrete but everything is in flux. Everything involves organizing and having numbers. Struggling with how to organize given that tech is fully supporting the current admin.

How to beat MAGA:

Get the base to support candidates so awful that every day conservatives won't vote for them in the general.

bsky.app/profile/mcub...

Mark Cuban seems like a pretty smart dude but this is a bad take.

The door could be blown off it's hinges and 99% of MAGA will never walk through it.

We should be better but not for this reason.

The vast majority will roll over. The system isn't going to save us.

And that article title tacitly gives them credence.

Should instead read something like "congressional Republicans erroneously conclude COVID originated from a lab leak."

Silicon valley was literally founded with military dollars. The original transistor and computer chip companies were all launched as defense projects.

Bunch of welfare queens masquerading as captains of the free market.

And yet MSNBC keeps playing clips of GOP Congress critters claiming it's a landslide without adding context or refuting these false claims...

I'd make a comparison between Trump/musk and Théoden/wormtongue but Théoden was actually redeemable.

It's amazing seeing all of the MSM news anchors flocking here and immediately getting hundreds of thousands of follows.

We've truly learned nothing.

In 2019 the trump admin. spent $775 of your tax dollars per person per day to hold children in detention centers.

The average American earns $228 dollars per day before taxes.

How much of your money will they grift this time?

On MSNBC last night they kept hammering how bad Dems are at messaging.

Next segment they played a clip of a GOP house member starting the election was a landslide, which MSNBC didn't refute.

The popular vote is 2% / 3M votes different right now.

2020 was 5% / 7M votes.

Media is the problem.

The first TW of solar power took 68 years to deploy.

The second TW took just two years ('22-'23).

Our current global instantaneous electricity usage is about 18 TW.

We probably need to deploy about 80 TW to support 100% of electricity needs with just solar.

Thinking we can do it in 20-30 years.

There is an ecosystem (algorithmically driven) on tiktok/Twitter/etc that makes Trump look reasonable.

People aren't dumb. They like good policy but it's very hard to combat a firehose of propaganda.

The only way to win is not to play the game (get off socials) and 70M people won't do that.

At what point should social media posts, comments, RTs, etc. be considered donations in kind for political campaigns?

The impact of socials/algorithms owned by foreign state run entities and obviously biased tech bros has probably been vastly underestimated.

Traditional media and long form content can't compete with tailored algos pumping content 24/7.

Sat down with some Gen Z co-workers before the election as they scrolled their various feeds.

Flattering trump clips were constantly being served up with feel good dopamine inducing shorts.

Biden and Harris deep fakes were interspersed with neutral and negative feed "balancing" content.

Given the amount of new ICE cars that automatically turn off at stops and auto restart... It's amazing that there's still debate on this one.

These assholes are literally trying to do that...

https://www.pipedreamlabs.co/

WTAF...

"The EPA approved a component of boat fuel made from discarded plastic that the agency’s own risk formula determined was so hazardous, everyone exposed to the substance continually over a lifetime would be expected to develop cancer."

I love ethanol... when it's aged in a charred barrel and served near in a highball glass!

Not so much when it's burned in a combustion engine.

Retro Philadelphia Eagles baseball cap.

Go birds!

Antarctic: Sea-Ice Concentration/Extent/Thickness My visualizations: Arctic Climate Seasonality and Variability Arctic Sea Ice Extent and Concentration Arctic Sea Ice Volume and Thickness Arctic Temperatures Antarctic Sea Ice Extent and Concentration...

You can always track my sea ice graphics, like for the Antarctic, even if I am not posting them: https://zacklabe.com/antarctic-sea-ice-extentconcentration/ 🧪

Don't forget the long lived radioactive isotopes!

Hi! I am Chippy, your snacking assistant. Would you like some sustenance today?

Yes No