CYG
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CYG
@readerleigh.bsky.social
Caps hockey fan
Reposted by CYG
"We have a first amendment right to coordinate our market activity" is not going to be a viable claim, guys
BREAKING: RealPage is suing New York, challenging a new state law that bans landlords from using algorithms to set rents.

RealPage claims that its software, which landlords have used to collude on rents, is protected by the First Amendment.
November 26, 2025 at 8:59 PM
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very odd that the Post would write up someone’s speciation as if it’s news. What are we doing here
November 26, 2025 at 11:34 PM
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Hegseth is a dude-bro sporting some questionable tattoos, a creation of television who’s acting as if he won "The Apprentice: The Nuclear-Weapons Season."

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...
Senator Mark Kelly Is in the Wrong Job
He should be secretary of defense.
www.theatlantic.com
November 26, 2025 at 4:02 PM
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Democratic members of Congress who released a video in mid-November telling members of the military that they are not required to follow illegal orders announced Tuesday the Federal Bureau of Investigation has asked to speak with them about the matter.
Democrats threatened by Trump over video say they’re now being probed by the FBI | Arkansas Advocate
Democratic members of Congress who released a video in mid-November telling members of the military that they are not required to follow illegal orders announced Tuesday the Federal Bureau of…
buff.ly
November 27, 2025 at 12:45 AM
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yeah it’s bad that Lizza has been sitting on this for so long but also how cursory and inept was that Vox investigation that not only managed to miss the biggest scandal in the history of American political journalism but affirmatively exonerated her bsky.app/profile/bkel...
So the editor of New York Magazine said there was no bias or ethical problems with Olivia's articles?

Does he still think that?

They should retract all of her stories
November 26, 2025 at 10:42 PM
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Hey, congratulations to all of Olivia Nuzzi’s horny media critic defenders. Heckuva job!
November 26, 2025 at 10:19 PM
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Did you really read this whole long thread? Wow! Go spread the word: DOGE isn't actually over.
The "DOGE is gone" articles are clickbait but this one gets it closer to the truth: DOGE is not gone, it just claims to have "no centralized leadership" anymore -- in other words, its leadership is hiding in an attempt to avoid blame.
DOGE no longer has ‘centralized leadership’ under White House tech team, personnel head says
The team that was altered to house DOGE — formerly the U.S. Digital Service — is also still doing its own technology work across agencies.
www.nextgov.com
November 26, 2025 at 4:19 AM
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They're not esoteric. Any of the conspiracy theories that shaped DOGE's mission can be found easily by browsing Twitter or Facebook for a few minutes. Apparently billionaire brains get cooked by social media in exactly the same way poor people brains do.
November 26, 2025 at 4:15 AM
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Anyway, this is just my experience as a software engineer; I haven't even touched the stuff DOGE did to public health or foreign aid. But from a distance it looks pretty clearly motivated by the same swirl of anti-government, anti-minority conspiracy theories.
November 26, 2025 at 4:11 AM
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DOGE stole the phrase "waste, fraud, and abuse" from government regulations, where it is used to prohibit corrupt contracts, and inverted its meaning:

They use it to mean a leftist conspiracy imagined to engage in the financial corruption that DOGE is actually doing by self-dealing gov contracts
November 26, 2025 at 4:03 AM
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Everything that DOGE touched, they added visible evidence of their assumption that there is a real live DEI conspiracy which can be fought with lawyers and funding cuts

Here it is at the top of the DOJ Civil Rights Division website
November 26, 2025 at 3:54 AM
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They also hunted down all grants that went to any purpose containing "LGBTQ" or similar words. I think it is pretty clear this is the brainchild of a conspiracy theorist who wants to "follow the money" to find out how the imaginary cabal of perpetually triggered leftists gets funded.
The majority of DOGE's "work" is to use LLMs to search federal grants for the keywords "LGBTQ," "BIPOC," and similar, and then to cancel those grants.

They are targeting minorities in the most literal, automated way. The outcomes of this are all over their own website:
November 26, 2025 at 3:44 AM
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I don't think I have to explain that hunting down every instance of "LGBTQ" and "nonbinary" from all government software is the result of a homophobic conspiracy theory. It's not subtle.
November 26, 2025 at 3:41 AM
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I've taken a deep dive into the DOGE bro's open source software code commits to verify they never wrote (or even oversaw) any code beyond culture war messaging. It's all trivial stuff like this: taking out the "nonbiary" option on some form.
November 26, 2025 at 3:39 AM
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Although DOGE occasionally pretended to modernize some computer system, the only non-vaporware changes to software they ever oversaw (mostly they didn't write the code themselves, just leaned on someone else to do so) were to remove "DEI" stuff from government websites
November 26, 2025 at 3:20 AM
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I think the right-wing conspiracy active here is quite old and mundane: the belief that government is full of freeloaders, or full of leftists which are the same thing

As you can see, we all had "lower productivity jobs in the public sector" and a presumed lazy desire for extended vacation
November 26, 2025 at 3:15 AM
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Before we were fired, we were interrogated. This had a very Office Space "so what would you say you do here" vibe, appearing to assume that government employees are ineffective, our systems broken.

They kept announcing things like "performance standards" as though we didn't already have them:
Original Email to Employees
Welcome to opm.gov
www.opm.gov
November 26, 2025 at 3:07 AM
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18F was liquidated at midnight and our website deleted at the same moment, apparently to end our leftist conspiracy. In general DOGE appeared quite preoccupied with the idea that websites, mass emails, etc controlled by longtime government employees would be used to conspire against them.
November 26, 2025 at 3:00 AM
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My group's firing appears to have been a consequence of a right-wing article from 2023 calling us, and I quote, "a cabal of perpetually triggered leftists obsessed with politics and pronouns"

The article echoed around Twitter until Musk saw it, tweeted we were "deleted" which DOGE then implemented
November 26, 2025 at 2:56 AM
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Partisan messages like this violate the Hatch Act and, as nonpartisan civil servants sworn to uphold the law, we would never do this.

But conspiracy-brained people don't know we truly uphold the law, and in this case probably don't even know the law at all.
November 26, 2025 at 2:49 AM
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They thought we, being radical leftists apparently, would put a "DOGE sucks" type of message onto government websites or into government communication systems

My evidence for that: the right did exactly this to government websites. So they were projecting what they planned to do onto us.
November 26, 2025 at 2:44 AM
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One possible motivation to demand access was to steal data, and I think that was a part of it, but also I think DOGE (or Musk, anyway) was motivated by a conspiracy theory:

The belief that government workers would conspire to use the government's computer systems against them.
November 26, 2025 at 2:39 AM
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Musk's people infiltrated the GSA technology arm early on and demanded root-level access to computer systems, trying to circumvent normal security procedures. Here's one example where they pushed so hard they forced someone to resign rather than give in.

Why did they do this?
Musk Ally Demands Admin Access to System That Lets Government Text the Public
A worker resigned in protest rather than giving Thomas Shedd access to Notify.gov, which they said would allow him to see "all personally identifiable information moving through the Notiy system, incl...
www.404media.co
November 26, 2025 at 2:35 AM
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Being among the first interrogated and ultimately fired by DOGE, I certainly felt we were facing the business end of a right-wing conspiracy theory 🧵
DOGE was not a money-saving effort. It was an effort to chase down and prove right-wing conspiracy theories. They went after USAID to prove conspiracy theories about foreign aid. Then they went after SSA to, again, pursue conspiracy theories about Dems paying "illegals" to vote. 1/2
All DOGE accomplished was purging critical government staff, handing private data to outsiders, and sentencing thousands in developing countries to death by gutting USAID.

I don’t say this lightly: if there were any justice in this world, the people responsible for this devastation would be in jail
November 26, 2025 at 2:31 AM
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I am a little tired of being yelled at for this but apparently not tired about: heroin addiction is not RFK’s problem. He’s a sociopath. Most addicts aren’t. Honestly, walk into an NA meeting, grab the first person with a few years to be head of HHS and they’d probably do a better job than Bobby.
This is what happens when you put a privileged, 14 year heroin addict in charge of health. Duh
November 27, 2025 at 12:15 AM