The cat is going to win all of the time. She should get a Cat Dancer. That toy works on nearly every cat. And once she gets the cat out from under the dresser they should put something up under the dresser so the cat can't get under it.
One agency’s two-page Q&A on the process shows just how much time this whole thing is wasting.
Dave Jamieson at HuffPost:
The Trump administration sent another obnoxious email to federal employees ordering them to list their achievements from the previous week, making clear it intends for the bureaucratic memo exercise to be a new weekly ritual for more than two million workers.
The email from the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM, was titled “What did you do last week? Part II.” Like the previous one, it instructed employees to “please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets describing what you accomplished,” and gave a deadline of Monday at midnight.
The first such email was paired with a threat from Elon Musk, the head of President Donald Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, who said nonresponses would be considered resignations. It prompted widespread confusion across agencies, with some department leaders telling workers to reply, and others telling them to ignore it and stay within their agency chain of command.
Follow-up emails shared with HuffPost on Saturday showed some agency leaders falling more in line with Musk after OPM’s second “what did you do last week?” demand.
Leadership at the Department of Homeland Security sent an email to employees Saturday telling them they were “implementing a structured process to submit a brief summary of their key accomplishments from the previous week.” They called the new policy “part of our internal accountability” efforts, and said it would align with OPM’s recent guidance.
Elon Musk still insisting on making federal workers email 5 accomplishments weekly, which is a counterproductive waste of time.
If we couldn’t thwart DOGE’s attack on democracy, we don’t stand a chance against a hostile AI attempting the same thing.
Caroline Orr Bueno at Weaponized Spaces:
As Elon Musk and his crew at DOGE have taken a wrecking ball to the federal government over the past several weeks, I have been doing a little thought experiment, the results of which I will share with you in this article. (They’re not good.) First, let’s get you up to speed in case you haven't been following the rapidly devolving situation in Washington.
Newly elected president Donald Trump tapped Elon Musk to lead a non-existent government agency (DOGE) tasked with reducing government waste. It bears repeating here that this is not a government agency — it’s a “special” agency, according to the Trump administration — and does not have much of any authority beyond what we bestow upon it by accepting its legitimacy. Unfortunately, much of the country, including elected officials in Congress, have decided to play along (at least for now), granting Musk and his crew enough manufactured legitimacy to convince the public to go along with it, too (aka, manufactured consensus).
We’ve heard a lot of talk in recent years about the fragility of democracy and the need to actively reinforce our commitment to democratic values and principles, and this is exactly why those warnings were needed. Timothy Snyder wasn’t just waxing poetic when he told us, ”don’t obey in advance.” He was giving practical advice for situations just like this. Unfortunately, that advice wasn’t heeded by a lot of our fellow citizens.
And so here we are, with a fake government agency being weaponized by an unelected billionaire in an effort to dismantle actual government programs and services.
[...]
As I’ve watched the events of the past few weeks unfold, I have started to notice some interesting and uncomfortable parallels between the way Musk and his crew are carrying out their assault on our institutions, and the way a malicious computer program might try to infiltrate and immobilize, take over, or destroy a computer network. While it may seem that they are acting haphazardly and running around government like a bull in a china shop, it appears to me that there actually is a method to their madness — a method that seems to be rooted in a system of logic that functions a whole lot like artificial intelligence. This is where my thought experiment started to take shape.
“Would this situation really look that much different,” I asked myself, ”if instead of dealing with Musk and his crew of barely-legal college kids, we were dealing with a rogue AI system seeking to seize control and ultimately incapacitate our government?”
The startling answer I arrived at was “no” — it wouldn’t actually look all that different. The main difference is that it would likely be far more inconspicuous if an AI system were carrying out the same agenda as DOGE, because the AI wouldn’t be holding press conferences, taking pictures and video, and documenting its deliberate destruction of government on social media for all to see. It would do its work quietly, unknown to all or most of us, and may not become apparent until it had its tentacles wrapped around all of the systems that keep our government running — systems that control our nation’s finances, maintain critical infrastructure, safeguard public health, warn us of national security threats, and more. If we aren’t equipped as a society to stop an authoritarian takeover of our government led by a billionaire and a group of college kids doing his bidding — and as the past several weeks have shown, we aren’t equipped for that — then we definitely aren’t in a position to be able to identify and stop the hostile takeover of our government, or at least the systems that our government relies upon to function, by an advanced artificial intelligence system. That’s a problem.
[...]
We know that the DOGE team has accessed a number of sensitive government databases and copied or transferred data from at least some of the systems they have gained access to. Although they appear to have read-only access to most systems, they have also sought access that would allow them in some cases to edit sensitive data such as payment records, bank accounts, social security numbers, and more. When they’ve gotten that type of access, they’ve used it to do things like lock career employees at the Office of Personnel Management out of key databases. At other times, they’ve used their access to post classified information online, like when they publicly shared the budget and staffing levels at the National Reconnaissance Office.
In other instances, certain government websites, like the website for USAID, have been taken offline entirely, and have not yet been restored. DOGE also recently deleted information from its own website when it was revealed that its “Wall of Receipts” — which was meant to tout how much money the (non)agency is saving — was actually riddled with errors and miscalculations. Only time will tell how much Musk and his acolytes actually altered the systems they gained access to, but that’s sort of the point. By making it difficult or impossible to track exactly what they’re doing in real time, Musk and his team have essentially bought enough time to make sure they’ll be gone by the time all of their handiwork is uncovered.
There is one other important way that Musk and his crew’s actions mirror those of a rogue AI system, and this one is the most concerning. As Musk has swept through government agencies looking for waste and excess spending, he doesn't appear to be applying any sort of human-centered value system to his decision-making. To him, $1,000,000 spread out to pay 10 salaries is equal in value to $1,000,000 spent on software licenses. It either doesn't matter or doesn't compute to him that taking away $1,000,000 on software licenses will not leave anyone unable to put food on the table or support their family, while mass firings to trim down spending will result in people who lose their homes and experience other unnecessary hardships, many of which will also extend to their families. He also doesn’t appear to understand or care about the potentially dire consequences of cutting back on forest service employees amid intensifying wildfires, or the catastrophic outcomes that could result from firing our country’s nuclear safety workforce. Sure, maybe this time he was able to rehire them before the worst case scenario became our new reality, but how many times is he going to put human lives on the line just to see what happens?
If you think DOGE is bad, wait til you see rogue AI.
“Americans aren’t homeless and sick because of foreign aid, they’re homeless and sick because for 45 years all the money has gone to rich people and they’ve jacked up the price of homes and healthcare, and gotten rid of millions of good jobs.”
“Welcome to the America you voted for, again and again.”
We could have done something and we chose not to again and again.
Welcome to the America you voted for.
Remember, I’m not a Democrat. I blame the Democrats for this, too. The party that represents the right values but never takes real, decisive action to make significant changes needed for humanity to thrive in America. We’ve been going in reverse with marginal gains for decades.
It’s time to fucking clean house.
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