I'm increasingly bothered in the last few years in the crisis of ethics in the United States government. It isn't very important to the leaders, and it isn't very important to the voters. I don't think it is a "conservative vs liberal" issue. It isn't about religion. It is about basic morality and doing what is best for a functioning society.

I think about ethics more about once a year when my job has everyone take a small course on ethics. There is a lot of basic and obvious stuff in the course, but a big part of it is that even the appearance of conflicts of interest should be avoided. And I'm sure if this is important for the general workforce, it should be even more important for public figures.

I'm well aware that the government has done unethical things in the past, and some of them were horrific. But I don't remember a time when unethical behavior has been flaunted so openly. The president is fundamentally unethical. He constantly lies and takes open bribes and enriches himself at the expense of the proper functioning of the government. The supreme court is fundamentally unethical and barely tries to conceal taking bribes. The president's political party openly ignores their duty to hold the president accountable for crimes, and participates in them, including sedition. The top leaders of businesses and the press have been obviously captured by money and corruption.

For years we were concerned about "dark money" and who was funding the propaganda and disinformation. Well now we have the richest person in the world openly buying an election and taking over fundamental functions of the government.

This crisis of political ethics is a direct result of a crisis of ethics in all parts of society. I think it flows back and forth like a disease. The voters do not hold the leaders accountable because the voters themselves are not ethical. I don't think supporters of Trump are completely the victims of propaganda. I think they made an unethical choice for selfish reasons. Part of ethics is taking responsibility for making sure you have the correct information when you make a choice. I'm not sure that most are capable of learning that the price of eggs is worth the collapse of being able to trust each other and make progress as a society.

By the way, I think a lot of us are hoping that this open feeding frenzy of greed and dishonesty is part of a pendulum that swings back and forth. But I'm reminded that in 1977 Jimmy Carter was elected to help restore ethics to the presidency. He only served one term as president and was replaced by a highly unethical person who was supported by highly unethical people who created a right-wing propaganda network of talk radio and Fox News.

I wanted to make sure there was a post about this as I only found out about it 3 days ago.

There is a nationwide protest planned for February 5th at every state capitol. Make your own choices on this and stay as safe as you are able, but I do not feel I am overstating things when I say that the United States is in incredible danger right now.

trump will get away with everything we let him get away with. We have seen him back off on various things when there was push back - we are NOT powerless in this at all.

While I dislike sending traffic to Reddit, my personal preferences there pale in comparison to the importance of this. r/50501 appears to be a central communications point for organizing this. I also checked the subreddit for the city I live in and there is an active thread with people coordinating for those who can't make it to the state capitol but still want to protest, going over local laws, issues of if the city requires protest permits, what possibilities to expect or plan for, etc.

If you don't want to, or don't feel safe protesting in person, YOU CAN STILL PARTICIPATE AND HELP. Demonstrating that a large percentage of the population is participating is important, and you can do that by phone and email as well. Call your state representatives offices on Wednesday, February 5th (tomorrow as I type this, but it's nearly midnight).

Look up your state representative here.

Call the United States Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and ask to speak to the office of your state's senator.

If you do attend a protest, plan ahead to the extent you can. Wired had a reasonable article on this subject from 2022. Original Wired link here - it is paywalled though. Archive.is link here.

TL;DR on what to bring from that article:
Small bag or pack, preferably something you won't care about if you lose it.
Water.
Face mask or bandana. COVID is still a thing, and it may be beneficial to not have your face recorded by cameras.
Hat and/or sunglasses - same additional purpose of 'don't make it easy for gov to know who was there'.
Snacks. Plan ahead for food you can eat without needing to sit down for a meal. Protein bars, jerky, bag of fruit, PBJ...
Protest signs. Pick something short so you can write large letters. Make it easy to read from a distance. Maybe bring extras for others who want to carry one but don't have one.
Suitable clothing - it's winter, don't freeze. Consider packing something to change into if you get pepper spray on you - if you're planning for that, wrap it in plastic or the like so your change of clothes doesn't get exposed if/when you do.
Good, comfortable walking shoes or boots. You're going to be on your feet, make it easier on yourself.
Your ID (maybe) - double edged sword. If detained, not having it might keep you held up longer. In some states you may not have to show police your ID if they ask for it - you'll want to look this up for your state.
Your phone (maybe) - double edge sword. Your phone can record abuses and produce a video record to (try to) prove the reality of events. You can communicate, call for a ride, etc... Having your phone on you also means you can be geofenced which makes it much easier to find out 'was this person at that protest'. Surveillance tech capabilities exist, and this is one of them. Be aware of the trade-offs. I don't know if your specific model phone will actually not ping a tower if you put it into airplane mode.
Cash - buy food, pay for a ride, etc WITHOUT leaving easily traceable information from using your credit/debit card.
A power bank - not just for yourself, someone else might need to charge their phone too. Or non-phone camera for those thinking ahead to film but not contantly ping 'this (customer name) was at this protest'.
Misc useful things: duct tape, flashlight or headlamp, ibuprofen (bring a small LABELED bottle to make it at least a teeny bit harder for cops to claim 'no label, those pill could be anything, arresting you for drugs...' - they still could, but a labeled bottle would make your potential day in court that much easier on you..., cartridge-filter face mask (pepper spray), goggles (same reason), pen and paper, sharpie, band-aids / minor medical kit, wet wipes, ear plugs (to help against sonic crowd-control stuff - basically super loud painful speakers, extra face masks for others, copy of emergency phone numbers relevant to you, a card declaring any needed medical info someone might need to know if you can't tell them (asthma attack, anything..), if you have prescription meds you need to take, bring them in the labelled bottle to prove the prescription. Plan for the possibility you may be away for home longer than you plan on.

Also from the article:

Know Your Rights
In the US, it’s entirely within your rights to peacefully demonstrate in public. The basic act of assembling and protesting action by the government is unquestionably protected, according to the First Amendment Coalition, a California-based nonprofit that’s committed to protecting freedom of speech. Also, as a general matter, “people have the right to film or otherwise document things that are happening in the public space,” says David Snyder, director of the FAC. “If police demand that you turn over your notes, I would say that you can assume they don’t have the right to seize that.” That said, if it comes down to a matter of force and you are physically outmatched, you may have to weigh the risks to your immediate personal safety, potentially have your notes or phone stripped from you, and pursue legal action later on. Also, Snyder notes, the First Amendment to the Constitution does not protect protesters who engage in unlawful activity, which includes destroying property or assaulting other people.

Memorize at least one number of someone to call - if you're in jail and need to call someone, plan ahead to know ahead of time who you can trust who DIDN'T go and will be able to take a phone call from you and help you by letting your other family / friends know where you are or arrange bail for you.

Good luck everyone. Make reasonable choices on how much a trade-off you are willing to make on protesting vs your personal safety. Do what you can, because even if you decide to stay home you can still call the capitol switchboard, or keep trying to get through to your state representatives. If the line is busy: GOOD. Let their phones ring unceasingly all day from morning to night.

Edit as I think of other useful things: Instructions on how to clean pepper spray exposure.

I think most people would agree that the internet and technology in general have absolutely gone to shit over the past decade or so. There is no corner of the internet nor of the software world that hasn't been affected by enshittification. Everything exists to serve you ads. Everyone wants to extract as much money from you as possible. Every website is in a race for the bottom as they try to find the lowest effort content that makes them the most money. Every piece of software is pushed out half-baked and/or stripped down to the bare minimum with the rest paywalled or with the devs pinky promising to fix it 5 updates down the road.

Every social medium is just bots. The front page of Reddit is easily 35% easily detectable bots at least and who knows what the rest is comprised of. And it's probably the one that's doing the best at the moment, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, all of them are just bots and propaganda and engagement farming the whole way down. And the worst thing is, they're complicit. Hell, they're actively encouraging it and trying to find ways to make it worse. And I have no doubt Reddit will bend the knee soon enough too (they just banned /r/whitepeopletwitter because Musk made a tweet critical of the sub).

There's probably some element of rose-tinted glasses here, but the old internet was just so much better looking back. Like, early 2000's to maybe 2012, 2013 or so, that was the peak. No colossal data harvesting schemes feeding into algorithms designed to keep you engaged on their site 24/7 for the purpose of shilling you advertisements and selling your data, no mass propaganda, no Dead Internet Theory (which can hardly be considered a theory anymore). Yeah there was shit content, there was tons of it, but I can deal with shit content and petty forum drama and whatnot; what I can't deal with is all the multi-billion dollar corporations trying to shape the entire landscape of the Web into the perfectly minmaxxed cash-generating machine that does as little as possible for as much data and advertising as possible.

Modern software isn't much better. Windows and MacOS are filled with anti-user features, telemetry you just can't turn off, Windows will often just install shit on your computer without telling you. They turn your computer into a walled garden, where you can do what you want as long as you play by their rules, but without giving you any real control over what your computer does. Yeah you can delete system files and brick your laptop if you feel like it, but anyone who's ever tried to permanently disable Windows updates will know that in the end you're not the one calling the shots: Microsoft are. And... Like, that's insane, right? It's running on my fucking computer, it's my CPU doing the work, I want to know what the hell it's doing and not just the parts it lets me see, and if I want it to do something different then I should be able to make it so.

I hate it all. I'm tired. I want out.

These are my problems. Here's what I've done about it so far.

• Obsessive privacy on the web. No Google services. Firefox with as much telemetry turned off as possible. Protonmail and ProtonVPN for everything (and I'm considering getting out of those too with the pro-Trump stances they've been taking recently). As minimal an online footprint as I can get, I make as few accounts as possible and I don't use shared or even slightly related usernames (my username here is an exception as it's my Reddit username, and no, it's not my real name), I delete accounts whenever I can and I GDPR request the services afterward. Virtual cards for online payments as much as possible. Will probably make a Javascript whitelist at some point too. Is all of this overkill? Yes. Why do I bother? Because fuck them.

• As little social media presence as possible. Real life necessitates some amount of social media interaction of course, I have Facebook and Instagram but use them exclusively for messaging. I often see people excluding Reddit from social media but I don't fully agree, even if it's not exactly in the category it still targets a lot of the same psychological weak points in us, encouraging doom scrolling and shaping our opinions through echo chambers and propaganda (it's always important to remember that echo chambers and propaganda you agree with are still echo chambers and propaganda). I still use Reddit admittedly, but I've tried to minimise my usage as much as possible and I'm shopping for alternatives.

• Free and Open Source software as much as possible. I'm all in on GNU these days. Yes, it's a massive pain in the ass. My job unfortunately requires some Windows-only software so I'm running a dual partition but I'm trying to get as much of my computer usage onto Linux as possible (I use Arch btw). Like I said above, it's my computer, if I can't control what it's computing then it stops being my computer, it's at best shared between me and all the developers of the proprietary software I have installed on it.

That's my rant. It's been a long time coming.

There are still things I'm looking to change, especially with how I use the internet. Getting rid of Reddit is the next big step for me, I think. I just can't be bothered with it anymore, but there is still something about it that I love, every time I look through a small niche topic community, or an interesting new hobby sub I've never seen before with years of cool posts for me to go through. And yeah, I do still enjoy browsing through /r/all even when it's 80% shit and objectively bad for my mental health. But at this point the overwhelming mass of utter shit is just not worth digging through anymore. I'm tired.

Tildes is really cool. It reminds me of the old internet, the ideal usage of the Web. I open the site, I see a link to an interesting article, I read it, I give it a like, I read and/or contribute to the discussion in a comments section. I want more of this.

If anyone has any links to cool sites that I should check out I'd greatly appreciate it.

With the way a certain billionaire has taken control of the US Treasury and begun to halt payments, I'm concerned that my T bills will not get paid out when they mature in April.

I'm not really sure there's anything to be done about it, but it's stressing me out. See if I ever invest in them again.

This was inspired by a recent post from Your Local Epidemiologist, where she lays out a set of guiding principles for the blog going forward:

• be a steady guide, trying to avoid whiplash
• providing important context - a broader perspective
• staying grounded in evidence
• being clear about what we know and what we don't know
• approaching issues with empathy

She also references the hazard + outrage framework for risk communication. I come from a safety / risk assessment background, so we usually think of risk = severity x likelihood. But as a communication framework, hazard + outrage seems pretty useful, as talking about risk to lay people is always difficult.

Thinking about one's guiding principles, writing them down, testing them in use, seems really useful to me as a way to be more proactive and less reactive in the way that I deal with the world. So then, the questions on my mind for the Tildes community are:

• what are your guiding principles?
• how did you come by them?
• how have they evolved over the years?

Since this is a text post, I'll put mine in another post below so the responses can thread under it. And since I can never resist a quote, I'll close with:

If you don't stick to your values when they're being tested, they're not values, they're hobbies.
~ Jon Stewart

sorry for dumb question but here it goes: I remember during the first administration, Trump launched some tariffs against us and if I recall correctly, it resulted in the signing of the USMCA which replaced NAFTA.

So, where I get lost is, are these agreements non-binding? Like a country can just choose not to follow them and face no consequences before they expire? Cause I'd assume that what the U.S. is doing breaks the conditions of the USMCA?

and if it's non-binding, then that means that even if another agreement is signed yet again, if Trump wants to throw a new tantrum halfway through his presidency and do tariff wars again, there's nothing stopping him and we'd have to come up with and sign a brand new agreement yet again?

Maybe that's the point of a blitzkreig, but I'm thinking back to 2016 where we saw huge numbers of people taking to the street - the Women's March, anti-Trump marches - to show displeasure for Trump even being elected. In 2020 we saw some of the largest protests ever for BLM, potentially because folks had time to tune in and turn up because of the pandemic. But right now we're seeing an absolute assault on our institutions and it's up against absolute silence. I'm not trying to throw stones, I'm not out demonstrating either. Mostly because there isn't one to join. Does anyone have a theory or understand why we aren't seeing any public mobilization?