Hello!
I slept a full eight hours last night,
but Stuff still Happened.
So what's up?
Let's start off by getting a little bit of perspective.
I feel like we could use that.
Because, and this is true: You're not crazy.
I've never actually said this out loud,
but I'm going to cause it sounds fun to say:
AP-NORC did a poll recently,
basically asking Americans,
Hey, where do you think the government is overspending and underspending?
Now, given everything that's going on right now and given the general rhetoric in
the country, the discourse, if you will,
it's really easy to feel like basically everyone in this country has lost their
minds or maybe you have.
But guess what?
People are far more aligned than you might think.
Across all political affiliations
There was general agreement that we should be spending more on social safety
nets and less...
BOMBS.
SO MANY BOMBS.
the top four things that people agreed we should be spending more on
are Social Security, Medicare, Education and assistance to the poor
With agreements that we
should be spending less on border security,
federal law enforcement and the military, or at least not investing as much.
There's really not much of the, of a "spend less" except for the federal law
enforcement agencies. No one wants them.
In the same polling.
It shows that Americans estimate the government spends about 32% of its annual
budget on foreign aid. That is not true.
The actual percentage of the U S government budget that goes towards foreign
aid is less than 1% of the budget.
So then consider if the average American
thinks that we're spending 32% of the government's funding on foreign aid and
the actual reality is that it's less than 1% and those same people are
complaining that we're spending too much on foreign aid.
They're literally just misinformed.
Now there's going to be the errant edge Lord
who's like, "Oh, 1% is still too much.
Everyone should just be miserable and suffer," but those people,
we can ignore them.
They're not interested in actually being a participant in a functioning society.
So while a bunch of politicians are getting on TV saying that this is what the
American people want,
they want them to just slash everything to ribbons and there should be absolutely
no social safety nets and we should just be walked all over by billionaires.
That's, that's not, that's not actually the case.
The vast majority of eligible voters in the U S did not vote for this
administration. Only about 32% did.
And then again,
consider how many of that 32% literally don't understand a single thing about
how the federal government works or how budgeting works or anything.
And they're just voting for the "R"
Now we know that the MAGA base does not really
drop below the 25% mark.
Like we know that you're never going to get that last quarter of people to agree
with the 75%. That's the baseline. And yes,
And yes, it's distressing to know that one in four people are just living in a fantasy
world where they just are happy that their countrymen are miserable.
But unfortunately for them,
being happy that people that you share a country with are miserable is not policy
and is not sustainable.
Because the reason that they're happy that other people
are miserable is because it hasn't caught up to them yet and it's gonna,
and it already has in a lot of cases.
So while we recall that the average person is mostly just uninformed,
which is still a problem, right?
We can also take a look at what's going on around the world and see that the vast
majority of the rest of the world is also like, Hey y'all, what's going on?
This administration and their reps are being lambasted across the world
Pete Hegseth,
the new secretary of defense got booed by military families on a military base
because they're dumbass anti DEI stuff.
Tesla is seeing double digit drops in sales worldwide while other EV makers are
thriving.
Entire populations are boycotting American products because one,
they don't want to support a fascist and two,
they don't know what the fuck is going on with the tariffs.
So they're just not bothering with it.
It's an actual mess.
And the point that I'm trying to make here is that the average voter is not the
ones that are loudly yelling online about how happy they are that everyone else
is miserable. That's not the average voter.
It definitely feels like it.
It definitely seems like it and they absolutely exist and are a massive problem.
But the average person does not have that much hate in their heart.
They are probably more apathetic and beaten down and not stable currently.
And they probably wish that they had the comforts to be able to pay attention to
what's going on, but they're too busy.
And while it's not really an excuse for just turning the other way and not
paying attention to everything as we march into fascism,
it should still be a little bit of comfort that it's,
it's not just an ocean of insanity.
Ultimately,
all I want you to take away from this is that you're not crazy.
You are not radical. You are not childish. You are not ridiculous.
You are not silly for suggesting that there should be basic needs met in this
country.
So please never let them convince you otherwise,
no matter how much they go on TV and state that reality is not what it is.
Don't let them.
Moving on!
Tech stuff.
Oh no
The United Kingdom wants access to your back door.
Wait, no.
The United Kingdom issued an order to Apple requesting a backdoor access to iCloud
They were like, Hey, Apple,
you know how you have end to end encrypted security now in iCloud?
Fuck you. Give us access to that.
You know how the whole point is that no one
else but the user can access the data. If you could change that,
just a small tweak. Here's our suggestion. We can also access it.
What do you think?
So here's the thing.
iCloud has a feature called like enhanced security or something like that,
that turns on end to end encryption for iCloud storage.
While normal encryption is just like your data is encrypted by the company.
So the company can also decrypt the data.
End to end encryption is the data is encrypted for you and only you can access
the data ever.
It's much better for user privacy for things to be end to end encrypted because
that means the company does not actually have usable data on their servers.
They just have gobbledygook
Ones and zeros. Meaningless!
but to you or anyone that you've granted access,
they can decrypt it and make sense of it.
And so if you haven't given a government those access keys,
they can't do anything.
So Apple has a bit of a history of saying fuck you to the government when they're
asked to break into encrypted systems. You might remember back in like 2016,
I think there was a case where there was a murder and they were trying to solve
the murder and they had the iPhone of the murderer.
And they were like, "Apple get us in"
Or a terrorist. I don't remember.
Point is Apple was like, no,
even in a case where it could help law enforcement,
we're not going to break encryption because the whole point is that we're not
going to do that.
And so the U S has kind of given up on that.
And now the UK is taking a crack and here's the thing.
The UK and the U S are both part of a thing called the five eyes.
And it's basically an agreement to share intelligence between several powerful
countries.
So if the UK gets this backdoor access,
five nations do
[In silly voice] Including the United States of America!
[Normal] Weird
I don't know who said that. That wasn't me.
We do not know where things lie with this.
Apple hasn't said what they're doing and they're talking behind the scenes with
the UK. And we unfortunately,
Apple is still a company and it's still beholden to laws.
So if you use iCloud and you have like sensitive information on there,
it's unlikely that you've got a lot to worry about in this particular instance.
However, if you want to go the extra mile and you really want to lock down your
data and have full control, regardless of what cloud host you use,
I recommend checking out something like Cryptomator.
Cryptomator is a free and open source system that you can use to encrypt your
files on your behalf before they go into your cloud host.
So you've got your files, it encrypts them.
And then it goes to iCloud or Google drive or one drive or whatever.
Then on your other device,
it comes down from the cloud encrypted and cryptometer decrypts it for that device
Ultimately, it lets you have like a extra layer of security just in case all your data ever
got leaked
I'll link to it in a place where links are.
TikTok is back in stores. Kind of. I mean, not kind of.
It is back in stores.
Apple and Google have both put TikTok back in their stores at this point after
the Trump administration has made it clear that they're not going to enforce the
TikTok ban to any significant degree.
Now like this doesn't really change much except for people can now get TikTok
So the whole secondhand market for phones that have TikTok installed is kaput.
BUT
The thing I want to point out here is that Congress passed a law.
The president signed it into law.
The Supreme court upheld the law and we're just ignoring it.
So the next time someone says, Oh, you can't do that. It's against the law.
Asterisk*
It's a dumbass law. I don't agree with it. And also what?
Google is going to use AI to find underage children.
I had to say it in the weirdest way possible.
Google announced in a blog post that they're going to start deploying a machine
learning system that tries to detect minors who may possibly access like adult content.
Here's a quote:
"This year we'll begin testing a machine learning based age estimation model in
the U S this model helps us estimate whether a user is over or under 18 so that
we can apply protections to help provide more age appropriate experiences."
This kind of isn't a whole lot like they already just aggregate everything that
you ever do across all of their services.
They're just going to start feeding that into a, an AI to try to determine like,
is this the pattern of a, of a youngster or a, or an old...ster?
I'm an old-ster
I'm mostly just excited to see who gets a flag on their account saying you're a child.
Cause it's going to cause if anything,
just a wave of people going to social media being like "Google labeled me a child!"
POLICY STUUFF
policy stuff. This has an intro song to now.
That interest song is going away forever.
Let's talk budget.
The GOP has put forth their budget proposal.
It is exactly what you would expect it to be. I don't mean that as like, "ah,
these Republicans!" I mean, as like literally every time Republicans are in
power, they just proposed the same kind of stuff.
So let's go over the high level bullet points.
We've got $4.5 trillion in tax cuts,
almost all of which go to the rich and wealthiest people in the country,
virtually no tax cuts for the middle class or the lowest earners. So that's,
you know,
they want to increase the government's debt ceiling by $4 trillion because
that's a huge concern that the debt's too much
To help with debt,
they're going to cut mandatory spending programs up to $2 trillion,
including SNAP (aka "food stamps"), Medicare, and Medicaid.
They're going to request spending cuts from the committees for energy,
education, workforce, and agriculture.
They're going to ask for increases in spending from committees for the
judiciary, armed services, and Homeland security.
I would reference the poll from earlier and point out that that is the polar
opposite of what people wanted.
Now this is not a done deal. It's still early,
but we're probably going to see something along these lines getting passed.
There's still proposed cuts to like social security and whatnot.
And some moderate Democrats might not be all on board for that.
I just had "some moderate Democrats."
I literally just conflated Democrats and Republicans cause I can't fucking tell
the difference sometimes.
Anyway, I meant to say moderate Republicans.
the Republicans have a very slim majority and they really can't afford to lose
anyone. So they got to make basically all of them happy. Moving on.
Let's talk about the federal slicing and dicing and workforce reduction and whatnot.
On the outset, again, if you're, if you're, if you're new here,
my outlook is we definitely have way too much money in our system that is
unaccounted for!
And we should absolutely be better stewards of our people's money.
And I don't think that's what's happening right now.
Let's talk about what IS happening.
Apparently about 75,000 federal employees took the offer to stop working
now and receive pay through September.
That amounts to about 3% of the federal workforce,
which is not quite the minimum of 10% that they were hoping for.
We have no idea if these people are actually going to be paid.
like this is unprecedented.
And also the people doing this are Trump and Musk who famously don't follow
through with promises to pay people.
The amount of times that Musk has gone to court to not pay former employees is wack.
At the same time,
Elon Musk's doge crew launched a website that was immediately hacked.
It was not secure and somebody was able to change what it said on the website.
And then they published classified information about intelligence agencies in
America on a public website.
Specifically they published employment logistics about an agency that manages
like spy satellites and shit.
So it's the kind of thing where it's like,
we don't want adversarial countries to know what we're doing,
but they just didn't, didn't really think about that and published it.
All the while,
these websites are purportedly being used to be maximally transparent as,
as Musk puts it about everything they're doing. When in reality,
he's just posting every once in a while on Twitter,
which is a private social media platform that he owns and almost always what he
says is dumb bullshit.
For example,
and I've edited this because he literally used the R-slur.
He implied that the government doesn't use SQL SQL. I, however you say it,
I say both
Point being the man full-throated was like, wow,
you are in "R-slur" if you think the government uses SQL,
the government very much does use that a lot.
So the tech genius who is not actually a tech genius at all repeatedly shows us
that he's not a tech genius. And yet people still cheer him on because delusion.
And then,
and then a German security researcher was able to get a snapshot of a big list
of things that Doge was going to say they tackled and got rid of things that
were supposed to be big wins and whatnot.
The list was also specifically rewritten to sound as absurd as possible,
as opposed to listing what the actual contracts and whatnot were.
For example,
one of the bullet points was that they claimed the government quote,
"shelled out tens of thousands to create an army of 2,500
LGBTQI plus allies."
But like, it doesn't,
it doesn't say anything about what that actually means. That could be anything.
That could be anything.
Another example of them spending government spending is "NASA has allocated roughly
$10 million to grants advancing DEI and quote,
environmental justice since 2020"
$10 million since 2020 for environmental justice from NASA says Elon Musk.
I haven't checked,
but I'm fairly certain the multi-billion dollar contracts that Musk is getting
is more consequential
And "environmental justice" literally just means ensuring
that communities aren't being destroyed by toxic waste.
Seems like an okay thing to spend a bit of money on.
And a 10 million is a, is a, is, it's nothing over four years.
So look,
I'm kind of going back to my original theme of like they're doing everything
they can to make it sound like things are absurd and to make it sound like you
are ridiculous for wanting to keep these things,
like creating an army of queer allies.
It's not reality.
They're trying to reword reality.
And so I'll end this segment with the short statement included from the German
researcher who said, "people all around the world care.
You are not alone and #TransRights."
Bonus thing.
As I was putting this together,
it came out that the Trump administration fired so many people so hastily that
they're now trying to unfire some of them,
but can't cause they no longer know how to contact them.
Specifically,
they're trying to rehire people in the national nuclear security administration,
the people who oversee nukes.
"Oops!"
"We fired too many of those people and we can't find them now!"
So you know.
Eric Adams is a hot button again.
New York mayor Eric Adams did a bunch of fraud and crime and took a lot of bribes
and we're aware of this and he's been hit with a bunch of charges over it.
But recently a whole bunch of New York prosecutors have started to resign because
they've been asked to drop the case against him and they're all like, no,
we have so much evidence that he did it.
And then it came out that Eric Adams has approved ice to be able to operate on
Rikers Island, which has not been a thing that they could do since the sanctuary
city laws went into place.
And they came out that Eric Adams has been palling around with Trump's border
czar and they made an agreement.
And so I just have ears, eyes, a beating heart and a functioning brain.
But it sure seems like they said, hey, Eric Adams, we'll drop your charges.
If you comply with ice
But you didn't hear it from me.
LIGHTNING ROUND
160 unexploded WWII-era "practice bombs" were found
buried underneath a children's playground in the UK.
I don't know what constitutes a practice bomb, but according to what I've read,
they can still explode
but, but practice explode.
Luigi Mangione has accepted a $300,000 donation from a bunch of his fans.
And he said, he says, thank you.
An 18 year old dude who was running a swatting for a higher business was finally
caught after causing hundreds of swatting incidents.
He even swatted his own house to throw off the cops.
Igloo, the cooler company, the cooler company, the cool people.
Uh, they're, they're recalling a cooler millions of them because
they might chop off your finger.
A United States aircraft carrier collided with a merchant vessel.
That's that's a hundred thousand ton ship colliding with a 50,000 ton ship.
Miraculously, nobody was hurt.
That's neat.
Sri Lanka recently experienced a nationwide power outage.
The root cause?
A monkey!
A monkey got up all in their power grid business.
And with it didn't have power.
And finally for today, we have video of a man who was swallowed alive by a whale
before being spat out back into the ocean.
He's fine.
I'm not sure if the whale is fine though.
That's gotta be embarrassing.
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of stuff keeps happening.
Head to skh.news for sources, bonus content,
and the coldest glass of water you'll ever drink.
My name is Endeavorance.
I'll be back on Monday.
Take care and be well.