Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Republicans firmly believe having an abortion is a very personal, very private decision between a woman and J.D. Vance.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

In my day, never was longer.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Second rate reporter says what?

Let me file that under fuck it.

He really is that stupid.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Washington Post’s Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

A norm that restrains only one side really is not a norm – it’s a trap.

The words do not have to be perfect.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

Everybody saw this coming.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

You are here: Home / Politics / Trumpery / DOGESHIT / Checking in on the Broligarchy

Checking in on the Broligarchy

by | 128 Comments

This post is in: 

Let’s check in on the DOGE website:

Checking in on the Broligarchy

The doge.gov website that was spun up to track Elon Musk’s cuts to the federal government is insecure and pulls from a database that can be edited by anyone, according to two separate people who found the vulnerability and shared it with 404 Media. One coder added at least two database entries that are visible on the live site and say “this is a joke of a .gov site” and “THESE ‘EXPERTS’ LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN -roro.”

That seems bad. Wonder what else is going on at the DOGE website?

Elon Musk’s team at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency has posted classified information about the size and staff of a U.S. intelligence agency on its new website, raising bigger concerns about where Musk’s programmers got this information and what they are doing with it.

DOGE, which President Donald Trump created to purportedly root out waste in the federal government, launched its website on Wednesday night with a feature allowing users to “trace your tax dollars through the bureaucracy.” People can navigate through all federal agencies and offices for details about their head counts, budgets and average ages of employees.

That seems worse, but really, now that we have a Russian asset as the Director of National Intelligence, she can just give them all our government info. At least the American people can rest assured their data is safe:

The Internal Revenue Service has now joined the list of federal agencies and offices experiencing life on the “DOGE” side. Two sources told TPM that a staffer affiliated with President Trump and Elon Musk’s controversial “efficiency” initiative left some bewildered and concerned on Thursday as they held their first meeting at the Washington headquarters of the tax agency.

Reuters and other news outlets have reported on the IRS meeting and identified the DOGE staffer involved as Gavin Kliger. A Capitol Hill source who was briefed on the meeting confirmed to TPM that Kliger represented DOGE at the agency. According to the Hill source, who requested anonymity to discuss the meeting, Kliger explained that DOGE wants to get a deep look inside the IRS.

“Their interest was … really across the board, so it included the operation of enforcements, it included taxpayer service in terms of function and the personnel footprint, and they wanted extensive system access,” the Hill source said.

Fuck. They fuck around and screw up the filing and refunds, and a lot of people who voted for Trump and rely on a tac refund to make it through the next few months are going to lose their fucking minds.

Reader Interactions

128Comments

  1. 1.

    WTFGhost

    I’m just going to laugh myself silly if it’s a SQL injection attack.
    It’s *trivial* to avoid SQL injection; you use parameters, and “smoke test” parameter patterns, something that’s easy to do in a…n SQL database. (Sorry: some national standards agency decided it’s “ess-cue-ell” and I learned it as “sequel”. I bet you didn’t know I was such a rebel, saying “A SQL” instead of “an sql”.)

    The moron didn’t even know the government would use SQL databases, MySQL or PostgreSQL, or even Oracle or SQL Server. OF COURSE they would. ANY experience in real COMPUTER SCIENCE would tell you that!

  2. 2.

    Ohio Mom

    I am out of sympathy for anyone who voted for this. I hope their identities get stolen. Some of them are probably due refunds, I hope theirs get lost.

    If it takes all this and more for them to lose their minds, maybe that’s a necessary first step for them finding them.

    As for me, I am spending the rest of my life checking to see if our identity has been stolen yet and our Social Security checks deposited. I really didn’t want another chore.

  3. 3.

    Spanky

    It would please me to no end if the DOGEbags were completely doxxed and their social security numbers published across the web.

  7. 7.

    MobiusKlein

    What can I say.   I’m a person of tech, and now I just want to burn my nerd card.

    Embarrassed, shamed, and gobsmacked

  8. 8.

    New Deal democrat

    They fuck around and screw up the filing and refunds, and a lot of people who voted for Trump and rely on a tac refund to make it through the next few months are going to lose their fucking minds.

    And vote MAGAt next time again, anyway. They will rationalize away *anything*.

  9. 9.

    sab

    It has been decades since I relied on a tax refund as a savings plan. I file jointly and the other half doesn’t set up withholding.

    I do tax prep and this year should be interesting. We still have the debt ceiling issue so that might distract them from fucking with taxes this year.

    I remember when Shrub had retroactive tax changes. All the corporate returns we filed in March were wrong by April Try convincing the clients that the Federal Government not you fucked up and they have to pay for an amended return a month after their timely return.

  10. 10.

    Spanky

    I google “Gavin Kliger DOGE” and it returns me a shitload of dog sculptures. There’s fuckery afoot.

    ETA “Gavin Kliger” by itself returns light fixtures.

  11. 11.

    MobiusKlein

    @WTFGhost: Probably left the database unprotected by firewalls.   Need to setup some network architecture to, you know, not have your memstore not sitting on an address open to the internet

  13. 13.

    H.E.Wolf

    screw up the filing and refunds, and a lot of people who voted for Trump and rely on a tac refund to make it through the next few months are going to lose their fucking minds.

    The enemy of my enemy is [sometimes; tactically; temporarily] my friend.

    I’m fine with them making their elected officials’ daily lives a misery. Saves us having to do it. Although I do remember very fondly the long-ago day when I faxed Mitch McConnell to say his name would be a hiss and a byword. :)

  14. 14.

    MomSense

    All of these nepo-babies just constantly fail up. They don’t know the first thing about how to hustle or how much effort it takes to excel. Melon Hisk would be a nobody without his blood mine inheritance.

  16. 16.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    Although it wouldn’t change the trajectory of things one damned bit but it would be nice if Anonymous hacked the DOGE web site.

    As proof of concept.

  18. 18.

    Lord Fartdaddy (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)

    Oh, they’ll lose their minds all right, but they’ll blame Biden or Pelosi or AOC or somebody. Not Trump. Never Trump. He could shoot his own voters on the street in broad daylight, and they’d lie there, and with their dying breath, they’d tell us all that they had it coming. I hope I’m wrong about the depth of their delusion, but I know I’m not.

  26. 26.

    sab

    My niece, a lawyer in government in DC, was ordered back to work but her office post Covid has been leased out to others. She has no office to return to. This is not unusual.

  27. 27.

    WTFGhost

    @MobiusKlein: Hee! I was lucky, and learned MySQL and memcache at Amazon Web Services, where you can set up the infrastructure pretty nicely, and our best practices include isolation procedures.

    But you’re right – you caught me out :-) – I stopped at my specialty in hopes of having a relevant “first”

  28. 28.

    RSA

    @H.E.Wolf:  I faxed Mitch McConnell to say his name would be a hiss and a byword. :)

    I was lately thinking about how some villains are treated in society…

    Madoff’s biggest offense, aside from destroying people’s life savings, was the way he did it—by fleecing members of the club. Since the scandal broke, I’ve found that his name is pronounced—in New York and Florida, and probably in financial capitals around the world—with a quasi-ritualistic spit, the way Nixon’s once was in many households.

    Donald Trump (spit) and Elon Musk (spit) deserve the same, from everyone.

  31. 31.

    Baud

    @RSA:

    Madoff’s biggest offense,

     
    was not being fascist so you’re allowed to get away with everything without repercussions.

  34. 34.

    YY_Sima Qian

    Tubbard is not just a Russian asset, but very possibly an Indian one, too. While the Trumpian MAGA crew [incompetently] hyper focus on countering “CCP influence” (& leave plenty of carnage in their wake), US interests will be sold down the river for Russia’s, India’s, Israel’s & Gulf States’ benefit.

  35. 35.

    Gvg

    @Ohio Mom: people with serious reasons get whole new SS#s. Witness protection, kids who are adopted are 2 I have encountered. It’s possible after Trump Elon are done we may have to renumber the whole population of the US. I wonder if we could build a system from scratch that was innately harder to steal or forge? Even by the government.

  37. 37.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @schrodingers_cat: It’s a topic of conversation among Chinese (in the PRC) & Chinese Americans, too, & Xi is coming off well in comparison w/ his persistent anti-corruption campaign.

    What a change from a mere decade ago, & hugely ironic given how deeply corrupt the Indian systems is, & how much scope there remains for corruption at mid- to upper levels that is inevitably in the CPC regime’s hard authoritarian system w/o independent checks (despite the serious & persistent anti-corruption campaign that has run a decade+).

  38. 38.

    JoyceH

    @RSA: Scammers always scam their own tribe. You often see a story about someone in some ethnic or cultural group pulling off a big scam and ruining a lot of people and – clutch pearls – worst of all, they were ripping off their own people. But it’s always that way. Scammers scam their own because they know how. They know the vernacular and what will appeal to these folks. And it’s doubly easy to fool them because they come with a built-in trust factor, “he’s one of us!”

  39. 39.

    MobiusKlein

    @YY_Sima Qian: With the new XO saying we won’t enforce the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, US companies will have to pony up $$$$ abroad to everybody looking for some juice

    eta: fixed the FCPA name

  40. 40.

    Starfish

    @Gvg: I think there was an article recently about how SSNs are doing much more than they were ever intended to do and are insecure.

  41. 41.

    Ryan

    My return was accepted 25 minutes after I filed it.  I can only assume that Elmo wasn’t yet at IRS at the time.

  42. 42.

    Ebony

    1. @WTFGhost: I think they are even dumber than you described. The fact that someone from the public got in to their database means that their firewall was open to the entire internet, or worst they didn’t have a firewalls at all!
  43. 43.

    Baud

    @MobiusKlein:

    I don’t know if this is still true, but a long time ago, US corporations were complaining because they said no other country outlawed bribes to other countries.

  44. 44.

    MobiusKlein

    @Baud: Companies that want to do business corruptly complain.

    Will have to see what this year’s Compliance Training says about bribery. (not joking)

  46. 46.

    TBone

    New York Times Pitchbot
    ‪@nytpitchbot.bsky.social‬

    Whether it’s Bill Clinton meeting with Loretta Lynch on the tarmac in Phoenix or J.D. Vance meeting with German neo-Nazis in Munich, leaders of both parties have initiated controversial meetings.

  47. 47.

    theturtlemoves

    @Ebony: It isn’t just the firewall.  I would bet these dipshits are running everything on standard ports and didn’t change the default SA password.

  49. 49.

    Marc

    @Ebony:  SQL injection is fun, essentially all you have to do is put cleverly escaped SQL commands in web form fields intended for names, addresses. and so forth.  No need to bypass any firewalls, you’re already in.  Anyone who has taken a single course in databases would know how to prevent this.  The message here is clear.

  50. 50.

    Steve LaBonne

    They lost their fucking minds long ago, the question is whether Finding Out will help them get them back.

  52. 52.

    The Red Pen

    One of the government departments that you could query the budget and staffing of is the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).

    The budget and staffing of the NRO is classified.

    Sorry… was classified.

  53. 53.

    MobiusKlein

    @theturtlemoves: I figure lack of security may be intentional. So there are no guardrails around modification, access, and security.

    This DB will be (already is) pwoned by 1/3 of the intel agencies out there

  54. 54.

    TBone

    @Spanky: Duck Duck Go, first search result

    https://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-engineer-explains-why-he-works-for-doge-2025-2?op=1

    Gavin Kliger, a former Databricks software engineer who joined Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, published a Substack post on Friday explaining why he walked away from “millions of dollars, prestige, and a life of comfort” in tech to address what he called “institutional failure” and “systemic corruption” in government.

  56. 56.

    New Deal democrat

    @YY_Sima Qian:

    While the Trumpian MAGA crew [incompetently] hyper focus on countering “CCP influence” (& leave plenty of carnage in their wake), US interests will be sold down the river for Russia’s, India’s, Israel’s & Gulf States’ benefit

    I suspect the unspoken part is that a T—-p aligned entity must be allowed to wet its beak, in true mob boss faction.

    How long until T—-p requires the US broligarchs to allow a, ahem, silent partner an ownership interest in their companies (a la the Putin plan)?

  57. 57.

    Ebony

    @MobiusKlein: I’m in tech, and I am not going to take responsibility for these idiots. If people in tech should be embarrassed for what these idiots are doing, shouldn’t all business people be embarrassed and shamed due to Trump? Shouldn’t all Lawyers be embarrassed due to Vance, and Trump’s Department of Justice. Shouldn’t all politicians be embarrassed because of Trump, Vance, and Republicans in general?

    I’m not going to let some script kiddies who don’t even know how to secure a database make be ashamed of my profession. It is bad enough as a woman in tech that I’m erased since everyone is focusing on the techbros. Apparently, women don’t exist in the tech field even though in the early days of computing more programmers were women.

  58. 58.

    Martin

    @WTFGhost: My understanding is that it’s not a sql injection – their API is writable from external sources with no login/password, no certificate, no IP restriction, etc

    Will note the minecraft server I’m playing on right now has more opsec than DOGE does.

  60. 60.

    theturtlemoves

    @Sister Golden Bear: You think they actually have a dev environment?  Please. Next you are going to claim they are actually using version control. This is all written straight in prod, baby!

  61. 61.

    New Deal democrat

    @Spanky:

    Stop surrendering in advance.

    I’d tell you to stop being an asshole, but I suspect that is not possible even in a universe of quantum physics.

  62. 62.

    Baud

    I can’t believe a president who stored stolen top secret documents in his bathroom would allow this to happen.

  64. 64.

    Baud

    Another opportunity for Trump to do a deal with Putin.

    ⚡️Russia arrests US citizen at Moscow airport over alleged cannabis-laced sweets.
    A 28-year-old U.S. citizen was detained at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport after Russian authorities allegedly found food items containing cannabis derivatives in his luggage.

    [image or embed]

    — The Kyiv Independent (@kyivindependent.com) Feb 14, 2025 at 7:40 PM

  65. 65.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @YY_Sima Qian: Not sure if this has been posted at BJ before, but it is an example of MAGA incompetently waging an [ill-advised] Cold War against the PRC (gift link to NYT article):

    C.I.A. Sent an Unclassified Email With Names of Some Employees to Trump Administration
    The list of partial names was provided in an effort to comply with an executive order to trim the federal work force.
    By David E. Sanger and Julian E. Barnes
    Reporting from Washington
    Feb. 5, 2025

    The unclassified list will disproportionally affect China focused  analysts, officers & agents hired in the last couple of years as the CIA reoriented focus of intelligence operations from the ME to the PRC.

  68. 68.

    cain

    Fuck. They fuck around and screw up the filing and refunds, and a lot of people who voted for Trump and rely on a tac refund to make it through the next few months are going to lose their fucking minds.

    Good, because  a MAGA freakout is the only way we’re going to get out of this. Those people can bring a kind of rage that makes pols scared and it needs to be directed to the GOP. It’s the only way we’re going to see a way to stop them.

    Everything we do needs to make sure that we can induce rage – as fast as we can, as much as we can.

  73. 73.

    Steve LaBonne

    @cain: I wish I didn’t agree because I hate all of the avoidable suffering that will occur but I don’t see another way.

  74. 74.

    narya

    @sab: I might maybe want to hire you to look over my filing if you’re available for that kind of thing. I try to figure out my own stuff and usually succeed, but I have something new this year.

  76. 76.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @New Deal democrat: I was thinking more along the lines of “national interests”, but yes, you are absolutely right about the financial corruption aspect of it. Why else would Trump be interested in turning Gaza into a Palestinian Riviera w/o the Palestinians? Why else would Trump be interested in seizing Greenland? & the TechBros will be more than willing to gift a small percentage of the shares (non-voting, to be sure) of their Big Tech & startup firms to Trumpian interests.

  82. 82.

    NotMax

    FYI.

    Two bills were introduced in the Senate that, if enacted, would dramatically increase the price for most electric vehicles. The first bill, sponsored by Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), would eliminate the $7,500 EV tax credit, while a second one from Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) would impose a $1,000 tax on the purchase of any new EV.

    None of this is exactly surprising, except perhaps the timing. After taking office, Donald Trump signed executive orders signaling his intent to eliminate the Biden administration’s electric vehicle policies, which he has falsely labeled a “mandate.” But an executive order was never going to be enough; it was going to take an act of Congress to get rid of it — and now several Republicans have stepped up to get the ball rolling. Source

  84. 84.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @Dan B: charming

     

    @Ned F: I thing of it as Destroy Our Government Everyday.

    but I already said that, days ago.  Just writing more furious haiku and free verse over on the micropoetry feed of blue sky. Venting, I guess.

  85. 85.

    Matt

    It gets better/worse: apparently they posted the NRO budget + head count, both of which are classified NOFORN!

    Everyone involved in DOGE should be put on a one-way flight to Siberia with a cancelled citizenship. They love Russia so much, let the Russians deal with their traitorous bullshit.

  86. 86.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @YY_Sima Qian: But at least we stopped American Imperialism by making sure Harris (or Biden) wasn’t elected…now we have a POTUS publicly fapping about stealing Gaza, Greenland, Mexico etc.

  87. 87.

    sab

    @narya: You can’t hire me because I don’t do paid preparer certification anymore.

    I am a consultant to my firm but not an actual able to sign preparer. l let my CPA license lapse because what with Congress the tax prep training I took was out of date beforeI I even took it. I was tired of paying hundreds of dollars for bad (stale ) tax prep courses just to be certified when I could never be up to date .

    I have forty five years experience at tax prep and tax planning, but I am a bit stale lately.

    If you want me to look I will, but be warned I am out of date.

  88. 88.

    WTFGhost

    @Ebony: Agreed – but, specifically, an SQL injection, in particular, would be gloriously funny because anyone who actually studied computer science would quickly see the situations in which a structured database, with semi-deterministic retrieval times, would be *vastly* superior to NOSQL.

    So you’d *expect* to find any specific major SQL flavor, and search for all places where software queried the database, to verify safety and security.

    Y’all are right, my first thought isn’t firewalls and filters, but, in my defense, I only taught other people to use them – I didn’t go to all the trouble of doing them *myself*. So, I made sure the DB was *isolated*, or I told them “this is an *extreme* danger in production; no, I’m sorry, I don’t know your network, I can’t tell you how to set up security groups and ACLs; yes, I understand that you’re very upset, and probably about to start jumping up and down on your (SQUEE)… phone.”

  89. 89.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @Starfish (she/her): languages? Don’t military personnel sometimes need to learn other languages?

    Don’t they know, speaking a second language makes one smarter, and gives one more neural pathways?

    is it safe to take the dumbing down of America, into the military officers’ training school? God forbid that anyone here should be adept at anything.

    I keep thinking of the joke, speaks 2 languages- bilingual, speaks 3- trilingual. But what do you call someone who Speaks one language? An American.
    Helps with our international standing, as laughing stocks or weak bullies, etc. A great many peoples speak 2-4 languages. Sigh.

    The ROW knows, and is watching.

    English  Über alles…. Good grief.

  90. 90.

    narya

    @sab: I’m not THAT complicated, so yes, I’d like to work out something. I’ll find you here when I have my stuff filled out!

  91. 91.

    sab

    @Ned F: Doge spelled forward is the rulers of Venice and Genoa that their citizens rebelled against every twenty years or so, and overthrew. Just saying.

  93. 93.

    WTFGhost

    @Marc: To quote the XKCD:

    “Did you really name your child
    Robert’; DROP TABLE STUDENTS:

    “Oh, yes, little Bobby Tables, we call him.”

    “We’ve lost all student records – I hope you’re happy.”
    “And I hope *you* have learned to sanitize your database inputs!”

  95. 95.

    WTFGhost

    @Martin: Okay, but, at least that takes some *cleverness*. Not much, but, SQL injection had me worried I might burst my appendix laughin.

  98. 98.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @UncleEbeneezer: It was always blindingly obvious that Biden/Harris are much better than Trump, but part of why we are where we are is because Biden legitimized economic nationalism & PRC containment (& securitization of everything, in the sense that everything was/is viewed through the lens of natsec & Great Power Competition), continued pursuit of US primacy in an age of multipolarity, & continued the perverse way w/ which the US related to the ME (& the ROW outside of the West). Those are all policy choices, choices that reinforce the macro-environment friendly to the nativists & reactionaries.

    Biden & Congressional Dems did not have to go down the path of economic nationalism. They did not have to continue the trade war that Trump started & escalated the tech. war that Trump started. Remember how the Dems criticized the Trump tariffs during the ’20 campaign? How many of the tariffs were rolled back.

    By all means train the fires on the reactionaries waging the counterrevolution (& have been since the Gingrich era), but we want to break out of the cycles of Dems partially cleaning up after the mess caused by the reactionaries, only to have the reactionaries retake power & make worse messes, then our side have to make some serious changes.

  99. 99.

    UncleEbeneezer

    The trailer we are living in had some hideous paint in the bedroom (a gross somewhere between coffee and supermarket-bag brown on the walls) and in the living room (a dark royal blue trim around the windows).  So I’ve been priming and painting yesterday and today, listening to a lot of the music I used to listen to back when I was working for College Pro Painters in 1994.  I forgot how everything always takes twice as long as you hope, when it comes to painting.

  100. 100.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @YY_Sima Qian: It was always blindingly obvious that Biden/Harris are much better than Trump,

    Glad people are FINALLY acknowledging this.  Woulda been nice to see people trumpeting this fact in 2023-24…

  101. 101.

    Marc

    By the way, if we still had a functioning news media, I would probably know this:  Has anyone done any analysis of the employees fired over the past few weeks to see if there are any interesting patterns in race, ethnicity, or gender identity?  That wouldn’t be a terribly hard investigation, but someone would have to actually care enough to call around and try to get a sampling.

  104. 104.

    Citizen Alan

    @UncleEbeneezer: It was always obvious. The creatures who voted for Trump did so because Biden/Harris were both competent and decent and Trump supporters hate those qualities.

  105. 105.

    Martin

    @Kay: Good to see you as well. I’m around, just escaping the horror in Minecraft until things start to settle out. Getting closer.

  107. 107.

    Shalimar

    @schrodingers_cat: Please pie the people who insult you and ignore what they say.  Your voice is among the most valuable here precisely because your experiences are different from the majority.

  108. 108.

    Geminid

    @TBone: He tried to sneak in cannabis-infused marmalade. Those Russian customs inspectors inspectors probably don’t see Americans bringing marmalade in very often.

  112. 112.

    Quinerly

    Haven’t read any threads today so maybe already posted.

    Mother Jones reporting that the acting head of the National Archives resigned today.

    “Speculation at the Archives regarding the next head archivist has focused on Hugh Hewitt and two other candidates: John Solomon, a far-right journalist known for reporting and promoting false claims about Joe Biden’s connections to Ukraine in 2019, and Ezra Cohen-Watnick, a former senior director of intelligence at the National Security Council in the early days of the Trump administration, who was hired by then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn (before Flynn was fired) and later ousted by H.R. McMaster, Flynn’s successor.

    https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/national-archives-head-resigns-as-trump-takes-control-of-records

  114. 114.

    Geminid

    @Shalimar: Ragip Soylu posted a funny German commercial along these lines. It starts with man with a leather bag standing in an airport boarding line. The man stands out among the Germans in the queue on account of his olive skin and neat beard. The lighting and tense music make me think I’m watching an espionage thriller.

    As the man approaches the head of the line, a stern uniformed man eyes his leather bag, and then him. The tension builds as the the official runs the bag through the scanner. Then he opens it up!

    After looking inside the inspector hands back the bag and the man walks down a hall to his plane. The next scene shows him driving up to a house in the Turkish countryside and being greeted by his wife and fwo daughters. They go inside and he puts the bag on the kitchen table and opens it. It’s full of chocolate bars because this is an Aldies commmercial.

    Soylu commented about how he and other Turks have fond childhood memories of their ex-pat relatives bringing chocolate back from Germany.

  122. 122.

    Kelly

    @Kayla Rudbek: I earned a Bachelors in Comp Sci in 1980. I’m kinda uncomfortable with calling software people engineers. It always felt more like a craft. I quit software in 2002 so maybe it’s engineering now.

  124. 124.

    Kayla Rudbek

    @Kelly: if they were real engineers, they would understand that you don’t get partial credit when the bridge falls down or when your program fails to work, and they would actually try to make their programs work to serve their users. I get so annoyed with them doing nothing but pushing bits and bytes around and acting like that makes them kings and gods, and eating up all the funds that we could actually use for solving real problems.

  125. 125.

    Marc

    @Kelly:  They still think they’re engineers.  Most CS grads these days know how to paste together Python libraries into somewhat usable code.  When Josh Hawley was going off about banning open source, I remembered the good old days when I worked for three different Boston-area companies with a total of about 2500 programmers, whose sole products were proprietary compilers and operating system components.  Those companies are pretty much gone, and the programmers mostly dead.  The US software industry is now quite dependent on open source projects.  And few recent CS graduates understand things at the bare metal level these days.

  126. 126.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Martin: Pursuant to our discussion on the Trump Administration coercing TSMC & the Taiwanese government to form  JV w/ Intel and build it up to compete w/ TSMC, reactions in Taiwan is about what you wiild expect:

    Angelica
    @AngelicaOung

    Let me tell you just scrolling the online groups and other Taiwanese media…the reaction to TSMC being pushed into a JV with Intel is 10 times stronger than the Trump tariffs. People are legitimately outraged that Taiwan is being so blatantly stripped for parts and the reaction of our leaders is so flaccid to such a blatant violation.

    Tariffs are one thing. They can be passed on. But technology transfer? Taiwan is being asked to open the kimono and to keep a smile on our face while it’s being done.

  127. 127.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @VFX Lurker: Did you pie the for suggesting that Biden should be replaced as a candidate, or did you pie them for suggesting that Biden & Trump are no different (in policy, temperament & values). I can’t imagine any BJer not voting, voting 3rd party, or voting R in last Nov.

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