IHeartBadCode @ IHeartBadCode @fedia.io

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As a liberal I will feel so fucking owned if Trump gets rid of selects the Governor of Florida.

Oh my goodness. I have a hard time getting folks to stop using QRPGLESRC and QCBLLESRC and start using the IFS so that we can put source in places like /home/devname/src. And don't even get me started, we still have DDS defined files even after IBM deprecated them in favor of SQL DDL tables.

The newest IBM i machines (formerly AS/400) even come with git but can't use that because that's too confusing for some still. And oh my goodness, RPGLE now comes with a builtin %upper() and %lower() but folks still using %xlate(), which doesn't work with things like UTF-8. I can't with some of the older devs at my place and I'm not exactly a spring chicken.

All these tools IBM packs in to help people make more modern software and convert the older stuff to more modern implementations, but biggest problem I have is getting others to learn the new stuff and getting legal to be okay with major changes.

That's the fun thing about some of the older systems. Program names were limited to eight or ten characters so you had to get creative with naming within a library (basically the equal of a folder on AS/360 ... AS/400 systems) if it got large.

but Trump might test limits by forcing a Senate recess using a rarely invoked constitutional provision

I highly doubt Trump can use Section III here. This whole story is predicated on a process that’s a massive maybe.

If Section III was a possibility then it’s likely that the Senate would just suspend confirmation hearings and just floor vote instead. No need for Section III to be invoked.

It just makes no sense to even pitch this idea.

It's wild that no one ever had a problem with this with email

Do you work in IT? I couldn't imagine sitting there trying to guide people through IMAP and SMTP settings. Like email has been made a lot easier on that end because most people use an app on their phone that allows them to select from one of the three major providers, they click it, poof all done.

But imagine someone calls you up and is like "hey how do I setup mutt for gmail?" "How do I set up Canary for Microsoft?"

Then imagine someone who has 1/10 of your knowledge trying to set it up. We have to remember that a lot of people are unaware of the file/folder metaphor in computers because a lot of people just "put it in a cloud" and call it done. The tablet/phone era has really eroded a lot of knowledge about systems. I know that seems hard to believe on the Fediverse when we're all surrounded by incredibly knowledgeable people.

More importantly. Farmers can't just stop planting Johnny-on-the-spot and they can't hold their breath until day of. At some point, the United States is going to have a shit ton of food on hand. This is a very big problem when you have way too much food.

There's a cost to growing food and loans are usually taken out to cover those costs, repaying them when the items are sold. But every American cannot just buy all the food that was going to be sold to foreign countries. Not all food can be repurposed and some of the food that will be repurposed for something like fuel or animal feed, all of those have dramatically decreased return on value. So having too much food massively depresses the price of the crop. Which means those loans taken out by farmers come a calling, causing farmers to default and lose their farms.

This is exactly what happened with the American Farm crisis of the 1980s. Many local agricultural banks collapsed, the Farm Credit System took some of the largest losses ever since the Great Depression, grocers began consolidating leading to the handful of grocers that we have today, the industrial farming industry moved in and took a strangle hold that the US is still dealing with, and land speculation in the wake of the massive foreclosures shot through the roof escalating urban sprawl. Having a surplus of food isn't a bad thing, but having way too much food can be the thing that triggers a massive collapse in several economic industries that can have decades long effect.

Even the small rural town I live in used to have four FCS accredited banks, that employed nearly fifty people. All of those banks went defunct in the wake of the farming crisis. The farms out here have all but been completely changed from the independent growers that they used to be, to being contract farming industry owned/family operated. Where there used to be a thriving sorghum farm, it has all but changed into a Tyson contracted industrial chicken farm with long red barns as far as the eye can see.

So quit. You provide a valuable service. Don't do it anymore.

That's what Musk is trying to do. Intimidate folks into quitting. So you're just basically saying let Elon do the thing Elon wants to do.

If Govt services cease to function they fail

Yeah, that's not the outcome anyone should want. When a function fails, we can't just pop it back up when Trump isn't President again. I had to go over this with the Trump term one tariffs. The reason Biden didn't do away with them is because we violated the trade agreement to implement them. Once we violated the agreement, it doesn't matter anymore what anyone does. It's not fixable anymore. We have to go through decades worth of regaining political favor with the foreign country to repair it.

Same thing here. When the service fails, we can't just pop it back up once Trump is no longer in office. If people start to hurt because a function fails, those people are going to be hurting for decades while we try to repair the damage. It's one of those stack of cups kind of thing. It takes a significant amount of time to stack the cups compared to the half a second it takes to knock them all down.

then show why they were made by their absence

All that's saying is that the next two decades should be complete shit for everyone except the insanely wealthy. I would rather not have that lesson, I don't think it's required. I also don't think a lot of people would even learn the lesson even if they experienced it first hand.

Yeah I think that's the frustrating part of this. Either allow elonjet back or get banned for doing this. But having it both ways shows how shit a person Elon Musk is.

If anyone asks, to me, it's THIS aspect of it that's the big problem. Musk is literally doing the thing that he hated about elonjet.

That's not a power the President has. The President cannot postpone them and they aren't included as an emergency power. So he can't call an emergency and suspend elections. And yes, we've got precedent from the Civil War that elections can't be suspended when we're at war with ourselves.

States can remove themselves, but that just means fewer folks arrive in Congress. Unless the President forcefully dissolves Congress, which would require a lot of the military being okay with murdering elected officials, only Congress can have a say on the law.

The President can indicate that they're rigged and what have you. But he only gets away with it, if Congress or the Courts or both goes along with it. That's the only means that doesn't require murdering people. All the other methods will require force. Including the "it's all rigged". California can have their midterm election, certify it, and send their members of Congress to DC. If Trump stops them, they can sue to be rightfully seated. That requires the Courts to go along with it. If the Courts allow them in, but the Speaker won't acknowledge them or grant them a vote, that's Congress going along with it.

The only way the Executive alone prevents a member of Congress from taking their duly elected seat is shooting them in the head. That's it, that's the only means. All the other methods require some other ⅓ of our Government being cool with the heist.

Well until Congress appeals 2 USC § 7, the law indicates that they are indeed on the schedule. But Article II leaves elections in the hands of Congress and the States to deal with. The President is very much excluded from the process.

But I mean, SCOTUS apparently can do whatever they want. So it's literally could be anything at this point. So who knows? But till 2 USC § 7 is removed, that's what puts it on everyone's calendar. And so far, most of the Courts seem to not hold that particular law in question.

I mean it's their loss no matter who they try to blame. The transition team already isn't expecting midterms to go well for Trump, so they're trying to set as much up they can on day one. One of the things Trump wants to bring back is schedule F so that he can start firing people.

There's a problem with tat though. It's statutory language indicates that departments will require a determination for reclassification. Absent that, everyone fired would have an opportunity to file suit and if it's enough of any given State opens the State to file Federal suit to block the executive order.

One of the things they can do to speed things up would be to have those rosters right now to review. But that they're getting blocked because of failure to work with legally required ethics, means they'll be behind the ball on day one. As much as Trump wants to, all those employees have legally binding contracts that require careful consideration to undo them without massive challenge.

With the President-elect's team not looking positive for midterms, they've got a lot of things to get done on their to-do list and not exactly a lot of time to do them in. Trump's agenda is already starting to suffer too much water for too narrow a drain. Every minute he's delayed is putting those to-do items from "getting done" to "must prioritize this list".

But all of this is Trump's scales to balance. He can skip out of the ethics filings but that comes with the cost of having a bit over 70 day delay to get some of the more basic things done. And right now, he's got time on hand. Confirmation hearings aren't going on, which even Republicans in the Senate are going to be asking for favors for their State in order to stomach some of the people Trump is passing over. This is one of the reasons Trump wants to skip all of this and have recessed appointments. Trump isn't interested in playing the favors game, but every single person in Congress has their career to think about long after Trump is gone. They want wins they can go home with.

So waiting to day one means he'll need teams reviewing the employment roster for his schedule F idea and he'll need teams in Congress helping to convince members to get his agenda enacted. He's going to have a lot of stretched thin groups which means getting things done are going to take longer to get done. Time that Trump doesn't have.

So he can blame Biden all he wants, his followers can believe whatever they want to believe. At the end of the day, Trump's agenda either gets implemented or it doesn't. It's a pretty binary outcome. Trump is going to whine about Biden or Democrats when his policy ideas fall apart, that's just how Trump operates. He has no ability to see the issues within himself and learn from them to get better. So there's no stopping Trump from blaming everyone but himself, that's just never going to happen.

So Trump will absolutely say that, the more important thing is his policy not getting any feet.

Republicans are going to cry the whole way for the next four years. That's just who they are. We have to look past that dumb shit and see if things are getting green-lit or waiting on incompetence to clear out. Did Trump get it enacted or not? That's the only thing that matters, all the other shit is just the usual bullshit Republicans cry about. We've long left the whole "meet in the middle" thing, the only thing that should matter is if Trump gets any of his policy enacted or not. The EO stuff, everything he throws is just giving more ideas on which avenues to close off when Democrats take the trifecta next.

Elizabeth Warren once again calls for reform on inconsequential shit. She sits on the Finance committee, how about you pass some real fucking fiscal policy instead of yelling at the Fed because of their legally required monetary policy.

That woman is really high up there for useless Senators.

He won't buy it with his money. He'll buy with our money. DOGE not being an official department and mostly being a independent contractor means they don't have to have the same level of accountability for funds that the Government has (or in the Pentagon's case should have, but nobody in Congress seems to have a spine about stopping the flow of funds until a successful audit happens).

When they talk about shrinking the Government, they aren't talking about getting rid of services, they're talking about privatizing the services. Everyone who keeps thinking "Oh shits going crash if they do that" is forgetting, they'll just turn those services over to private companies that receive tax dollars for providing that service to the public.

I'm pretty Liberal but:

Republicans lack a clear mandate

Is utter bullshit. Republicans were handed very clear victories. Narrow, but clear. All western democracies sent a clear message, the current state of affairs is not good. Every western NATO country that had elections unseated the incumbent government.

Trump’s plans for deportations, ending birthright citizenship, political retribution, and tariffs

This is Trump's fluff that the powers that be will entertain until they hold up more pressing priorities for the Republican party. My take on each one is:

• Deportations — That's going to happen. They've played the blame game too long on it. But it's likely that the admin will find it's Elian Gonzalez moment, wave that as victory and then put the whole thing in the rear view. As "the worse case" has serious economic effects that won't fly high among the others in the party without some Congressional stomach for expanded H-2A, which detracts from more pressing concerns for them.
• Ending birthright citizenship — That's not happening. It is stupid that we're even talking about this. Denaturalization, maybe, but nixing the 14th Amendment? No. The momentum isn't there, people have bigger fish to fry.
• Political Retribution — The people he's targeting aren't idiots and have access to a wide variety of legal counsel. Trump's under the impression that it'll cause them the same amount of headache he had in 2021 to 2024, but the reality is Trump picks shitty lawyers because only shitty lawyers want to represent Trump. Trump routinely doesn't pay people and that's made his legal issues magnify by 10,000 fold. Everyone else doesn't have nearly the same headaches Trump has with legal affairs and it's mostly because Trump stiffs people. Other people actually pay their lawyers.
• Tariffs — I mean it's likely to happen. It'll be a FAFO moment for Trump for sure. But if it gets out of hand, his party might be able to reach concessions with Democrats to end any declaration of an emergency Trump tries to use to authorize the tariffs without Congress. It's going to suck, and I will absolutely enjoy the schadenfreude that comes from it but not really enjoy the jacked up prices of things, but I mean things suck as is. So if it get twice as bad as it is now, I'll only care about half as much as I do now. We all just refuse to address the crux of the issues with inflation so we'll just keep on, keeping on. All of us are too busy blaming political people for inflation to really solve the issue, so maybe in another ten years or so everyone will finally chill the fuck out and we can work on the actual issues. But I'm not holding out hope.

There’s likely to be backlash as voters realize the gap between what they wanted and what Trump plans to deliver.

That's almost a given. It's one of the reasons Republicans are trying to get their ducks in a row for the 119th Congress. But with the narrow majority in the House, it will only take one or two asshats from the Freedom Caucus to fuck it up. And I absolutely feel that they're going to do their usual asshattery at least once during the session. Mike Johnson isn't some visionary, he does well to plan his lunch for the day. With all the to-dos the GOP has, it's going to run into the too much water going down a narrow drain issue.

It's one of the reasons the transition team is trying to break things out into sole EO, requiring law, and direction. It's also the reason Trump doesn't want to deal with the 300 day window on his appointments. He wants them hitting the road right away. People want to think Trump wants recess to avoid hearings. Trump just wants recess appointments so that they can get to work on day one, avoiding the hearings is a nice bonus. They have a lot of things they want to get through and it only goes so fast and they're pretty much betting on midterms being hard to them.

But all that said, THIS:

Republicans lack a clear mandate

Is utter trash. They swept the fucking floor. Us Democrats need to take the L, look around, and figure a path for midterms to make a wide enough push in both chambers. But it ain't going to happen just running around and yelling "TRUMP BAD! TRUMP BAD!" Democrats need to provide a clear policy agenda that is easy to articulate.

Javier Milei’s plan to privatize the Paraguay-Paraná waterway

maniacal laughter GODDAMN! Woo! That fucking Libertarian paradise comes at you fast. Man, Milei is in over his fucking head and the depth of it is slowly dawning on him at about the pace 80 year-olds fuck. All those experts are gone and my boy here is fucking treading water in a slow panic seeing the picnic he's planned in the hurricane.

potentially benefiting multinational businesses at the expense of the local population.

Oh no, that's exactly what it's out to do. Milei is looking for capital injection after his nose dive on inflation. Like all of the austerity, Milei has successfully slowed inflation down drastically, but has done so by basically bringing his country's economy to a damn near halt. That's the easy part. You stop putting any kind of investment into the public, they hold onto their money longer, economy slows and inflation basically flat lines.

The trick is that once you've got the economy this cold and all the fluidity has almost frozen completely, you warm it back up and try to control the thing to prevent another run away inflation. That's the difficult part, because your people have to trust you to play their part and not be scared they'll watch their dollars buy less and less again. And you've got to warm it up, because if it completely freezes, then you leave recession and enter depression where money enters a glacial pace of movement.

The thing I find funny is that the Libertarian paradise puts all the trust completely into the hands of the public. Which given how cold Milei has made his economy, is either the most insane or genius thing ever. But then he does this and, "AH, he wasn't going to trust them after all." He's going to wheel and deal and see where it lands. Problem is that the folks with money know the position he's put himself into. The cards are stacked in the favor of the rich people who Milei wants to invest in his country and boy are they going to play their hand.

Hornsby sang a song about it. "That's just the way it is. Some things will never change. That's just the way it is. Ah, but don't you believe them." Man people are hungry to think this shit ain't going to play out the same way it always does. It amazing the lengths folks go to thinking that. It's shit like this that makes me think hope is one of those bad four letter words.

The Administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) handles:

• Medicare
• Medicaid
• the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP)
• the Affordable Care Act (ACA) health insurance Marketplaces

They are also in charge of:

• Setting the health insurance portability standards for the United States
• The administrative end of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
• Setting the Federal quality standards in long-term care (nursing homes)
• Clinical laboratory quality standards under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) of 1988

So it's not just Medicare and Medicaid, but millions of people within the ACA and including seven million children in CHIPs that he'll be overseeing. Not to mention setting the standards of care for millions of people in nursing homes.

Remember everyone. This guy is going to be Dr. Oz's boss.

Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell reportedly warned that there will be no recess appointments

Recess appointments stopped being a thing in 2016 altogether and really the water source was shut off back in Obama who only got 32 as Pro Forma became popular in Congress.

I am seriously doubtful that the House wants to get rid of Pro Forma nor would they risk a Section III dismissal to appease Trump.

As much as Trump is power hungry, so too are a ton of GOP members of Congress equally hungry.

Yeah, something got in their crawl and Bluesky is on low key TPOT rising.

Someone did a post on it, you can see the map that was done in the picture there with TPOT in blue.

I don't know why they started coalescing on Bluesky, but it is what it is. If they get annoying there, I know how to mute them. But as long as that doesn't also herald the "free speech absolutists" that literally add zero value, I'm cool with TPOT heading to Bluesky.

Besides, I'm more active on Fedi/Mastodon at this point than Threads/Bluesky so it's not really a pressing thing for me. I mean shit, I wouldn't have a problem with Musk's network if he'd clamp down on the utter trash going on over there. Like it's gotten to pure garbage, I haven't the time to block everyone who pops into my feeds that how hard the algo there is pushing the trash.