John Skiles Skinner

I don't know if there's such a thing as a "world cyberwar" but I think we are in one? and the US is determined to lose it. 🧵 Yesterday the admin began mass-firing the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the nation's cybersecurity protection across all levels of government. We don't yet know if CISA will survive in any form.

A terrorist targeted federal workers last week. There wasn’t much reporting on it. But I’m not finished thinking about it! 🧵 An anti-vaxxer fired more than 500 gunshots into CDC Atlanta, shattering 150 "blast-proof" windows on 6 buildings. Employees were pinned down in terror.

Most types of business exhibit linear growth. But VC will only fund exponential growth. The result: companies that would create a lot of jobs and actually maintain their products never get funded and never start. If you must hire more to make more product, that's unacceptable linear growth. We live in an exhausting VC hype machine because it's more profitable to repeatedly hype up and cash out of short-term exponential growth spurts than to build something real. Paragraphs by @npub1ynlz...873s

The federal workforce experience

DOGE fired the people who built it, parasitized our organizations, and killed the project. But the Direct File codebase lives on. Paid for by American taxpayers, the code is yours.

404 Media

The IRS Tax Filing Software TurboTax Is Trying to Kill Just Got Open Sourced

Direct File has been open sourced, and its creators have left government to continue working on the "future of tax filing."

I have no doubt that I, a man, have experienced misogyny all my life. "Woman" or "girl" was the most common insult I faced in childhood. Anti-gay slurs, too, but homophobia is simply misogyny again.

Bluesky Social

Tom Coates (@tomcoates.bsky.social)

A few years ago someone told to me that men aren’t taught to be men, they’re just taught to be terrified of being thought womanly, and that thi...

We are oddly selective about the government services about which we will say, they operate at a loss. Commuter rail, we are often told, operates at a loss. But we spend even more on streets and highways, and take in little direct revenue from them. Yet no one ever says they are operating at a loss.

I've been a doomer about DOGE data grabbing, but I'll admit it never occurred to me Musk could fire his way to stealing all copyrighted material ever

The media is going to talk a lot about the pageantry of the Catholic Cardinals, but not much about what the Cardinals actually do: operate the world's largest non-government healthcare organization At ~700 general hospitals in the US, the policy they set is murderously misogynistic 🧵

I taught a US citizenship class to South Sudanese refugees in Nebraska, 2006-2007. Fleeing civil war, they worked arduous jobs at a meat packing plant. Many had no literacy in any language. But they studied hard for a citizenship exam which many native-born Americans would not be able to pass.