ChickenOverlord
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User ID: 218
we don't want being Catch-22'd to be a death sentence because of stupid bureaucrats/senior management
My favorite recent prominent example of this is the president himself catching a felony because he didn't use campaign funds to pay hush money to a mistress. I realize this isn't an exact description of what happened in that case, but it's close enough for government work.
I commit the same "falsification of business records" every damn week because retarded tax laws around software development require me to precisely track exactly how much time I spend on development of new features vs. maintaining existing applications and I can confidently say that absolutely 0 software devs are accurately reporting how their time is divided between these things.
Cases like Trump's definitely put a "3 felonies a day" sort of fear in me if I ever piss off the wrong DA politically.
My main question is how the hell did they pull this off?
If regulators are willing to turn a blind eye (potentially because of some greased palms) it's incredibly easy. My goto example is a green energy scandal. A company was (on paper) the second largest producer of biodiesel in the US. They were producing 0 gallons and just making numbers up in a spreadsheet to sell to other companies as green energy credits. The EPA had actually inspected their facilities and saw it was obvious they were producing nothing and did... precisely jack shit about it.
The only reason they were caught is because they were parking their sports cars all over their neighborhood, pissing off local families. The local families thought they were a drug dealer, and this triggered an investigation by local LEO that ended up blowing the whole thing up:
An episode of the TV series American Greed covers the scandal in detail.
ChickenOverlord
2d ago
a single federal employee, who got fired for their actions, deciding not to help political opponents during a disaster.
And her underlings who complied with her directions
ChickenOverlord
3d ago
Also provably secure software limits you to a certain subset of the features available in most programming languages, since a lot of things in software/math/logic are inherently unprovable.
ChickenOverlord
3d ago
For a more recent example/counterpoint (though still relatively ancient) look at the Chinese invasion of Vietnam. The Chinese got their asses wrecked in a month or so, where it took the US a decade to withdraw.
ChickenOverlord
4d ago
The modern right doesn't like woke progressives in "peaceful times", but I would imagine that after a natural disaster like a fire or hurricane, that most people, left or right, tend to put their differences aside and help each other out.
That depends on if the "FEMA tells employees to avoid houses with Trump signs" story was an isolated incident or not.
ChickenOverlord
4d ago
Eh, my employer is paying for it and occasionally I learn something new and interesting that I didn't already know.
ChickenOverlord
4d ago
Yes, going back to school for 3 years (to learn things I already know, mind you) is just what I want to do when I'm 40.
I'm 37 and that's what I'm doing. Getting a mostly pointless master's in comp sci since my undergrad degree is in the humanities.
ChickenOverlord
5d ago
I also imagine cell based approaches will be more popular among righties. Even though it's less capable of coordinated action, it's far more resistant to fed infiltration.
ChickenOverlord
6d ago
I'm a rightwing chud who voted for Trump 3 times and I've got bad vibes about the economy too, but maybe that's because I work in tech and am waiting for the AI bubble to pop.
ChickenOverlord
7d ago
Maybe this is a generational thing, but my friends and I are all varying degrees of weebs and have no problem calling each other gaijin (or gwailo when we're in a more Chinesey mood) all the time as a joking insult.
ChickenOverlord
8d ago
How many randomly selected humans (or, shall we say, randomly selected countrymen of yours, so there's a CHANCE its your family members) would you sacrifice to preserve Michelangelo's David?
Zero. But mooks working for a crime syndicate? Quite a few, recovering drug addicts doing it to pay for a kid's surgery be damned.
If killing a bunch of henchmen to get at the person who murdered your kin is sympathetic/justified, how is burning up a painting not just a little sympathetic/justified too?
The henchmen, in most such stories at least, are pieces of human garbage and the world is made a better place with each one the protagonist kills. The priceless work of art being destroyed is a permanent loss for humanity and its culture. The problem with your steelman here is that it presupposes that all human life is equally valuable, or at least that no humans are net negatives on humanity.
I love the scene in Citizen Kane when Kane destroys the shit out of his room. It's very visceral and conveys the emotions he is feeling exceptionally well. So I appreciate it as a story-telling device. But morally, in real life, it is purely destructive behavior and a sign that someone is unable to control their emotions. It doesn't make me think more highly of Kane's character when he goes on a destructive rampage.
ChickenOverlord
8d ago
Are we genuinely weighting the continued existence of the Mona Lisa (of which there are many copies, its not some hidden gem) over a human life at that point?
That's not what is being compared though, rage over the loss of a human life is what is being compared to a priceless painting, not the life itself.
But even then, on various videos of Just Stop Oil and similar protesters defacing works of art, you'll find plenty of commenters whole throatedly supportive of slitting the protestors throats.
ChickenOverlord
8d ago
She won't be allowed to own firearms though, and my experience (with several friends and family that work as prosecutors and defense attorneys) is that criminal law judges and attorneys have a lot of angry people who would like to kill them.
ChickenOverlord
10d ago
Python is still shit, but less shit than it was. And still less shit than JavaScript, of course.
ChickenOverlord
12d ago
I mean the big one that sticks out to me for Obama crossing lines is when he put out a hit list that included American citizens, and then actually killed said American citizen in a targeted strike (also killing said American citizen's teenage American citizen son). He was a terrorist shitbag who deserved to die, mind you, but the right way to do it would have been in a plausibly deniable way through one of our allies like the Brits, not straight up saying "We're going to assasinate this American citizen" and then actually following through.
Anwar al-Awlaki is the American citizen terrorist shitbag in question, by the way:
https://www.motherjones.com/criminal-justice/2010/08/aclu-anwar-al-awlaki/
The only significant leftwing criticism of this came from the ACLU, I don't recall any democrats in congress voicing opposition. Republicans were also generally supportive as well, for shitbag Muslim terrorist reasons.
ChickenOverlord
12d ago
I have nothing against older men who would like to recoup their deferred compensation.
If that's all it was, sure. The problem is that Social Security is effectively a ponzi scheme. Total payouts are far greater than total contributions, with many retirees able to claim roughly 250% of what they paid in as benefits. Social Security was (and is) dependent on population growth because there need to be more people paying into it than receiving it. The only way to fix this is to dramatically lower the amount that retirees get from SS, and that's a political non-starter even after all the boomers die because that means gen x and millennials will be the ones who paid in significant amounts that they won't ever get back.
https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/lifetime-social-security-benefits-and-taxes-2023-update
ChickenOverlord
12d ago
I was hoping the Mormons would be it, but apparently their fertility has collapsed as well?
It's still above replacement, but yes it is dropping as well. Our new prophet (Dallin H. Oaks) mentioned the dropping fertility issues in both society as a whole and among members of the church in our most recent General Conference (back in October), so it's very possible the church will be trying to enact some changes (both culturally and policy-wise) to counteract this. We'll see what happens I suppose.
ChickenOverlord
12d ago
Then the Amish and breeding fetishists will inherit the earth.
ChickenOverlord
12d ago
That's still a lot of fucking going on in those charts, just comparatively less
ChickenOverlord
12d ago
Uv has only been available for a year or two, but it is being adopted extremely quickly (because pip was just that bad): https://wagtail.org/blog/uv-overtakes-pip-in-ci/
ChickenOverlord
12d ago
The Haredi also commit massive welfare fraud, and even if they weren't committing such fraud would still be highly dependent on non-fraudulent welfare. The Amish are probably the better example to emulate here as they do far more to support themselves and to limit reliance on the rest of society. Unfortunately that leads to some rather anarcho-primitivist conclusions.
C# added nullable reference type annotations a few years ago, and if you're strict about actually using them (my Indian coworkers are not, sadly) then you can reliably eliminate 99% of null reference exceptions. When the C# team finally gets around to implementing discriminated unions (in the next decade or three) and we finally have Option<T> there will be actual null safety in C#.
It looks like the recent expose on child care center fraud has led to actual action in response: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/12/30/hhs-freezes-childcare-payments-minnesota/87965467007/
My question is: If a 23 year old guerilla journalist (who was not particularly rigorous in his methods) was able to blow this up, then why didn't legacy media go after this low hanging fruit? I have my own ideas (mostly ideological capture of the media) but I'd like to consider alternative explanations so I'd be interested in hearing your ideas about the failures of traditional journalism here and/or the decision by HHS to cut off funding generally.
Additionally, given that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and Defense are the lion's share of the federal budget, and much of the recent fraud has been Medicare/Medicaid fraud to the tune of billions, how much will this affect attempts at welfare reform? From both sides, both the people pushing UBI and the people trying to eliminate or reduce welfare generally.
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