My partner plus several of my friends work for FEMA and the sentiment is kind of fatalistic these days. Americans have really fucked these people over. Latest "Fuck you" from not just MAGA was the absolute apathy over the furlough except to get upset when TSA tried to halt the precheck lines.

Before that, DHS started firing people by not renewing their contracts on New years eve, barely a peep on the news or social media.

Also DHS handed down a decree that supervisors are not allowed to give anyone a rating higher than 3 (out of 5) for future annual evaluations. Basically a solid 3 out of 5 is a foundation for firing people.

When there is a major "temporal atmospheric deviation" (they're not allowed to say "climate change") at least we might have the national guard but as for FEMA, it feels effectively dead.

Giuliani had the NYC emergency management/crisis center relocated to the WTC despite experts warning him that was a bad idea.

Even the Nazis, the literal ones from the 30s and 40s, were not as inhumane as we treat our homeless, chronically ill, an disabled.

At least they would outright murder them while here they end up dead behind dumpsters or just outside hospitals. I did a lot of volunteer and community work until I had reached my limit of seeing how fucked up things are at the bottom.

not just democracy but whatever is left of the economy will evaporate.

preemptive response to how invincible the US dollar is, a lot of people said the Titanic was unsinkable.

They can't make it to obvious this is the bad place.

Ugh, I don't even want to imagine what it's like being on a cruise ship full of norovirus.

While I am not a big fan of sailing and such, I am one of those rare assholes that absolutely doesn't get sea sick. That said, being surrounded by vomit and shit everywhere would probably be enough to overcome that mild superpower.

Well there was that time an aircraft carrier was taken off the line because of rona, so not too hard to imagine how it would go.

Also the whole "man flu" thing is actually real. Testosterone has been shown to weaken parts of the immune system - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5075254/

This is why federated servers are the best. The "man" can't keep dem der frogs down!

"Alright so this system is called 'testing' but you need to get two seniors to sign off plus a good reason to push an update."

/What about this system?/

"Oh, that's where we do all are actual testing, just be careful not to break it too much."

/Alright, what is it called?/

"Uhm, I think its called prod or something like that. The root password is written on a sticky note on the upper right corner of John's monitor."

/Who is John, the senior dev or something?/

"What? Hahaha no, John is just the summer intern."

A really rough way for Americans to understand these prices is to take the liters/$ price and multiply it by 4. So my friend in Greece who pays 2,22 a liter is actually paying close to $8 a gallon.

More accurate would be 3.73 or about, but 4 is good enough.

When I was younger, I worked exclusively on a v220 (best of the worst) Unix terminal using vi to write programs in c/c++. Yeah I got a little fancy near the end of that with three separate terminals, but the point was I also had memorized an absolutely ridiculous amount of information starting at the syntax rules for four somewhat related languages (bash, c, c++, and whatever the fuck makefile's are) plus hundreds if not thousands of functions in c and c++ without needing to consult documentation or rely on autocomplete to fill in the blanks.

30+ years later I have a command palette tool I absolutely depend on along with degraded typing skills that show whenever I have to type something out completely like a peasant.

I actually don't mind "AI" with coding but really this is all secretly just a surprise attack from the "We don't need to do maintenance and tech-debt isn't a real thing" crowd.

For anyone with any professional/commercial experience knows, the auto-slop factory is a dream come true for management as they just keep pulling the techno slot machine lever over and over until it works and then ship it.

At a bigger picture, everything is or is becoming absolute shit for quality but somehow more expensive. Now software (and hardware) is falling in line and embracing entropy. Wait until that old fogey idiot Linus Torvalds passes on and we'll get AI slop in Linux the minute after the Dr calls it.