Hope Your Apple Pie Was Worth It

quick question...

I want to share a post from The Guardian that was published today.

“Inside the building, staffers said that Doge cultivated a culture of fear.

“It’s an extreme version of ‘who do you trust, when and how?’” said Kristina Drye, a speechwriter at the agency, who watched dozens of senior colleagues escorted out of the building by security. “It felt like the Soviet stories that one day someone is beside you and the next day they’re not.”

People started meeting for coffee blocks away because “they didn’t feel safe in the coffee shops here to even talk about what’s going on”, she added.

“I was in the elevator one morning and there was an older lady standing beside me and she had glasses on and I could see tears coming down under her glasses and before she got off her elevator she took her glasses off, wiped her eyes, and walked out,” she said. “Because if they see you crying, they know where you stand.””

Everyone should read this article about “DOGE” tearing apart USAID (and then read more reporting about how they are being allowed to do the same to other US federal entities). Elon Musk and his minions are violating our highest laws and destroying lives and livelihoods in the US and abroad. USAID is less than 1% of the federal budget— this isn’t about cost-cutting or “investigating fraud”. It’s about cruelty and seeing how much unlawful devastation and psychological warfare they can get away with, with the intention to repeat this process at one federal agency after another. They already have access to IT systems at the Treasury, NOAA, and other agencies, and have taken over OPM (essentially HR for the federal government), using the latter to send demeaning and threatening e-mail blasts to civil servants.

I’m urging everyone who reads this to recognize what’s happening here and how abhorrent and frightening it is. I wager that even most people who wanted Trump back didn’t want a centibillionaire technocrat making unilateral decisions on which parts of the federal government to “feed into the wood chipper” (as he has described his team’s actions at USAID in a recent post on X, The Everything App).

Please call your elected representatives and urge them to act against Musk now— before his actions make our legislative branch totally irrelevant.

I’ve been seeing posts about Musk’s coup-in-progress going around on here, but I feel like a lot of people still aren’t aware of the extent of it, and I really want to help get the word out. I’m heartsick for all the civil servants at USAID and beyond. Some of them, their unions, and some Democratic congresspeople and others are speaking out, but these workers need us everyday Americans to speak out for them, too.

We know that our creators (all 1200+ of you!) are eagerly awaiting the email that will announce the arrival of their auction post and provide a link to the editing form. We should have that for you in just a few more days!

In the meantime, please do not email your edits to us. We hate to say it, but emailing us your edits will not get them done any faster.

Why do we do it this way now? Why not let you use the edit link Google Forms can provide?

Basically: We want/need the spreadsheet with the signup info to be as stable as possible, both while we're getting our scripts set up as signups are coming in, and especially after signups close as we start to process them and create posts. If we use the Google Forms edit link, it doesn't notify us when information has changed, which can jam things up if a cell said one thing the first time our script saw it and says something else now. We also can't turn off editing for individual signups, so if you went to edit it after we generated your post, that edit would not make it into your post.

Which leaves us with changing things manually. While there were limited cases during the signup process where we went in to edit people's signups in the spreadsheet (for example, people with typos in their email addresses), in general it is just much, much safer for us to go in after the fact and edit an individual Dreamwidth post than for us to be mucking about in the spreadsheet with all 1500+ auctions, where one wrong move might delete someone else's information.

If you have a google account, first go to gemini.google.com/extensions and turn everything off.

Then you need to go to myactivity.google.com/product/gemini and turn off all Gemini activity tracking. You do have to do them in that order to make sure it works.

Honestly, I'm not sure how long this will last, but this should keep Gemini off your projects for a bit.