Lou Katz @lou@entropyservice.com

The most broken thing the #BrokenTimes doesn't do today: It doesn't cover the NoKings protests on its home page (can you find it?). There is a link to a 6/11 story about other protests. There is plenty of coverage of Trump's fascist parade. The rest of us? No.

Trump Administration Shares Medicaid Data With Deportation Officials: Report https://twp.ai/E695yD

The Soviets waited a good eight months before rolling tanks down the streets of Prague. Trump’s tanks only took five to reach DC.

US dictatorship watch:

- a US senator gets manhandled & detained for asking the interior secretary a question.

- a US citizen is detained on US soil by US marines, without the insurrection act being invoked.

- there will be a military parade to celebrate the Führer's birthday.

Any questions?

American financier Don Wilson invested $100 million in Trump family bitcoin project, Trump Media & Technology Group, through his company DRW Investments - just nine weeks after an SEC probe into his crypto business Cumberland was dropped by the Trump administration

#TrumpMedia #TMTG #DonWilson #DRWInvestments #Cumberland #SEC

https://www.ft.com/content/548161ee-0cfb-4f0c-90ea-b3ff3567f09d

We now have a political assassin impersonating a police officer on the loose in Minnesota, which, aside from being horrifying in and of itself, underscores the danger of the proliferation of anonymous federal law enforcement deployments from a wide variety of unfamiliar agencies conducting aggressive immigration operations across the country.

Is that uniformed person who's stopping you or demanding entry to your home legit or a psychotic vigilante seeking to harm you? It's impossible to know.

@angusm @billclawson @pluralistic To be fair, the repressive death cult also operates a fundraising business.

My kids love their trampoline, but they only spend 50% of the time bouncing up, wasting the other 50% falling down.

That's why I'm not spending another penny on trampoline maintenance until they can improve efficiency and reduce wasted falling time to at most 25%.

This toot is about austerity.

A lot of companies seem to misunderstand the role of pay in hiring and retaining smart people. In my first year at Microsoft Research I listened to a (normally sensible) member of the lab’s leadership team explain that the bonus structure was there to incentivise good research. I looked around the room and wondered who had ever thought ‘well, I was going to do some mediocre research, but for 20% more money this year I will do something world leading!’ My guess: no one.

If you want to hire the best people, you are looking for the people who, if money didn’t matter, would do the job for free because they believe it’s important and care about the outcome. You don’t pay them well to persuade them to work. You pay them well so that they can afford to work on the things that they think are important. If smart people don’t think the things you’re doing are important then you should consider why you’re doing them.

This is especially true for executive compensation. The best CEOs are ones that care about the company’s products and want everyone to use them, not the ones that want to make the most money. This is especially true for non profits where your pool should start with people who care a lot about the organisation’s mission. Paying more (above a certain level) won’t find more of those people it will simply dilute the pool with people who are there for the money, not the mission.

EDIT: A lot of people seem to be misunderstanding this and think this is an argument to pay people badly. It absolutely isn't. If you pay people badly, they will spend a lot if time thinking about money. Your job as a manager is to remove problems. Money removes a lot of problems. But a lot of problems cannot be removed by applying money. If someone competent is being told to do nonsense work that they know will cause problems in the long run, no amount of money will make them motivated. The problems that can be solved with money are the easy ones.

@billclawson @pluralistic Essentially, political power in the US is now divided between a repressive death cult and a fundraising business, and the reason that the death cult keeps winning is because at least you can get people excited about joining a death cult.

The history of Nazis holding rallies in left-wing areas of Weimar Germany, instigating street fights, and then telling the press that only they could save Germany from the "violent communists" seems like an important thing for people to be studying right now.

The #assassinations in #Minnesota highlight a dirty secret hardly ever mentioned in the news: U.S. has 1.1 million private #police officers. There is an unprecedented footprint of privately organized #violence that is doing all sorts of things most people have no idea about. #gunviolence #maga #rightwing #gop #hatred #guns https://bsky.app/profile/equalityalec.bsky.social/post/3lrnm5cu6mk2d #civilliberties #fear #murders #political #politics #secondamendment

If there's anything that illustrated the hollowness of the Democratic Party as an effective opposition for me, it's this.

Yesterday, I watched a video of a sitting US Senator being thrown to the ground and cuffed by fed goons for asking questions of the fed official he has direct oversight authority over.

Within minutes, I'd gotten DOZENS of texts from Dems and Dem orgs asking for $5-$50 to "fight fascism."

That's it. "Are you terrified that your country is slipping into fascism? Pay me."