Please don’t tell DOGE that I’m still using the copy of Acrobat I got for free as a student.
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So the Department of Labor has as much “waste” as a local school system? My understanding (second-hand, so feel free to correct) is that organizations often will buy licenses and have them on hand as they need them. Sometimes they may get these licenses at discount or have multi-user licenses. That they haven’t used these license doesn’t mean they won’t be used, e.g., by new hires who replace people who retire or rotate out.
But OK. Let’s start with the first one. 380 Microsoft 365 licenses is about $30,000 per year? Surely we didn’t need to pay DOGE millions of dollars to find tens of thousands of dollars in unused licenses.
Also, VSCode is free:
But yeah, this seems like a small amount. I actually am pretty happy with that. Thank you, DOGE, for proving the Department of Labor is pretty efficient!
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With these incredible savings, clearly DOGE will not need to slash their budget
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no one wants austerity and it will be hard to endure. But years of using the trial version of winrar was bound to catch up with us as a nation
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$5000 checks a penny at a time
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I mean this faux austerity stuff is the perfect tactic for frothing up their target demographic (AKA folks like my parents, who spent the last forty years passing the same $10K toilet urban legends back and forth at church). Those folks have no idea how much anything should cost once it passes $1000, so it’s easy to have them get outraged when a government agency spends $5000 in what can be remotely spun to be a wasteful way, even when that amount is like a fraction of a fraction of .001% of that agency’s budget. Those folks also don’t care what gets cut, even if it’s important stuff, because they don’t know what’s important, they just assume that any savings is good and that it will result in less taxes for them (it won’t: they need at least 4 or 5 zeroes added at the back of their annual income to ever see a tax reduction).
I’ve been trying to mostly lay off US politics, to the extent that I can, given our news media’s breathless coverage of how Google had labelled provincial parks as state parks.
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As much as I’m nostalgic for the old web, to me it’s mainly the experience that back then, everyone online seemed smart and cool, alternative thinkers. Today my millennial experience is the same more become infected and overrun with the same mediocrity we used it to escape from.
just a contextless forum post to start the morning
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Little did we know that “alternative thinking” for most early web pioneers was either technofascism or unrestricted free market libertarianism.
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Moving to washington has been a full circle move for me. When I was in middle school, I had been illegally adopted and living someplace I didn’t belong and had trouble making any friends because everyone around truly sucked, so my first real friends were made online around 2004. I was “the coolest 15 year old ever” to a bunch of college age kids online in washington, lol. I also got internet later than some in my generation, it wasn’t until 2004 that I really had a stable connection because we were moving a lot. Anyways, those first friends were all in/from Washington. Mainly met them all from Deviantart and Starmen dot net. I didn’t finally visit and subsequently move to washington until 20 years later. Some of them live in Japan now and work in the games industry. Most of them are still pretty prominent online personalities, I guess you could say. The prospect of meeting them kind of opens up my childhood FOMO wound, but also it will be great to talk about those times we used to hang in oekaki chat rooms and how whack shit is now by comparison.
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Time for the department of labor to use Gimp and libre office
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I agreed to a series of arts. My only political work and hopefully my last. I’m going to see how realistic it is to paint pixels that add up to a recognizable image. Moving back to central Illinois has been an experience. The puerile here are the same. They are friendly, jovial and kind, mixed i. Are the same people who are filled with repressed childhood rage. I know it’s not all the rageful who are trump voters. Many of the kind people are too. They were kind before trump and have remained kind after. The only thing that has charged is their buying power and the state of their media. I’m going to try and pixel paint scenes of rural Midwestern Bucolic Americana like Polaroids of fields, water towers, cemeteries and grain bins. The things I grew up around. I have 2 years to do so. I guess I’m not retired anymore.
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I call this art standing between two mirrors art. It seems deep but is just two cheap mirrors. Also the no editing thing is really anti adhd/autistic with poor impulse control
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Northern Ontario just split from us already. I want someone here to be happy
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In a few days I’ll probably do what I did in both 2018 and 2022 and go through an electoral map and see all of the ridings where the vote was split between the right of centre party and the left of right of centre party and the left of right of centre greenwashed party and just smgh my gd head at how goddamned cucked this province is.
You are as goldenhearted as they come but remember I am stupid enough to still want to go back to Toronto when I can…
Also I shudder at the thought of Northern Ontario being split up into more ridings. It ain’t as orange up here as the electoral maps make it appear let me tell you
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Make no mistake, Canada won’t start a fight with the U.S., but you better believe we’re ready to win one.
-Doug Ford
As far as our own desire is concerned, we do not want to fight even for a single day. However, if circumstances force us to fight, we can fight to the finish.
-Quotations from Mao Tse Tung, Chapter 7
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Urbana IL got its first black mayor today. His name is Deshawn and he’s my age. I think I was friends with him in late grade school and early jr high until out social groups pulled us apart. I’m going to try to find out.
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Just utter pundit trash nyt and post. In as many weeks the post and nyt released 2 podcasts with the grossest normalizing trump headlines. I can’t imagine this was collaborated between two papers. Just just idiots having hive mind events.
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I only listen to the daily to get angry for my outdoor winter runs. The passive voice and normalization is great to beat pavement in the cold.
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