“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.
We want to put them in trauma.”
That was Russel Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget and key author or Project 2025.
Trump also said, "a whole civilization will die tonight".
They've successfully planned and executed a takeover of the US government that will take decades to undo, if it's even possible at all. Of course they are bright, you don't stumble into causing this much damage.
They are simply thoroughly evil. This is easy to mask as "stupid", but stupid people wouldn't be able to be so consistent.
Maybe you've seen something I haven't, but why do you think that regarding e.g. Russell Vought? His primary goal has long been to swing the US towards Christian nationalism, and he has made enormous strides towards that. People like him are well aware of the negatives consequences these decisions have, but to them it's worth the pain.
I can't truly say since I've never talked to him (and I hope it stays that way), but IMO I simply cannot imagine someone doing everything Russell Vought has done to America, without being fairly smart. Maybe he's just acting as a proxy for smart people, but someone behind Project 2025 etc. objectively must be very intelligent.
There's a reflexive tendency to assume that anyone implementing cruel and bigoted policies must also be stupid, regretfully, this is sometimes not the case. As you have so accurately described, it's a very careful and calculated plan to move towards a desired end state. Whether that desired end state goal looks something like Gilead in The Handmaid's Tale, and whether you're supposed to like that, or abhor it, totally other question...
Of course, how could I forget that people's motivations are solely filtered through their reasoning. Obviously no smart person has ever desired anything that brings negative consequences for the people around them, while increasing their own power. That would be too stupid.
Of course they can, but as I already said, you don't stumble into causing this much damage. Damage caused by genuine stupidity would be distributed more randomly.
Free software hasn't concentrated corporate power, explicit policy to enable monopolies did. Without free software, there would still have been consolidation because that was the express objective.
Depending on the job, you can likely be fired without cause anyway. You can pretend to not poke the bear, but in a place that plays power games like that, it doesn't really matter.
Presumably performance matters above all else (although it likely doesn't in such a place). If Emacs actually makes a meaningful difference, then just use it to do your work more efficiently.
You can run a batch/shell script, right? Of course you can. Would you ask for permission to write and run a script? If not (and presumably you wouldn't because that would be silly) then you shouldn't ask to run Emacs. You "own" both and take on all the "risk". There's really no difference.
But really, truly ask yourself, is whatever cause you're working towards (that is, the mission of the company) worth sacrificing your dignity for?
I taught a remedial math class. There are thousands of books for such a topic. I was required by the university to use a specific new edition (something like 9th) from a specific publisher. I went to the university library and found the 2nd edition. The questions were more or less verbatim but in a different order. The lesson portions were more or less the same and tended to be better. I explicitly directed students to this edition, which they could purchase for something like 2$ (vs $150). In 10 years in post-highschool eduction, and 4 institutions, I never once heard or had a teacher do that. It's a choice and the majority of educators don't do it.
Tip for learners: find an early edition of a book. They're often vastly cheaper and much better written. It stands that if a book warrants a 12th edition, then the 1st edition must have been decent enough to get wide adoption. Often revisions are bloat or, when they're not, it's educational to see the difference between then and now (eg Andre Tanenbaum's OS books)
Because I see so many people who believe otherwise, here's a direct quote from a prior contract:
> I UNDERSTAND AND ACKNOWLEDGE THAT MY EMPLOYMENT WITH THE COMPANY IS FOR NO SPECIFIED TERM AND CONSTITUTES "AT-WILL" EMPLOYMENT. I ALSO UNDERSTAND THAT ANY REPRESENTATION TO THE CONTRARY IS UNAUTHORIZED AND NOT VALID UNLESS SIGNED BY THE PRESIDENT OR CEO OF THE COMPANY. ACCORDINGLY, I ACKNOWLEDGE THAT MY EMPLOYMENT RELATIONSHIP MAY BE TERMINATED AT ANY TIME, WITH OR WITHOUT GOOD CAUSE OR FOR ANY OR NO CAUSE, AT MY OPTION OR AT THE OPTION OF THE COMPANY WITH OR WITHOUT ME NOTICE. I FURTHER ACKNOWLEDGE THAT THE COMPANY MAY MODIFY JOB TITLES, SALARIES, AND BENEFITS FROM TIME TO TIME AS IT IS NECESSARY.
Every job I ever held but the unionized ones had some variation of that.
If you're talking about binary files, then it has similar limitations to Git and Mercurial, AFAIK. Fossil, git, and Mercurial are not really designed for large binary files.
Otherwise, in Fossil, any text is just another artifact. Wiki pages can be stored as files in the repo ("embedded") and versioned in the same manner as code files (that is, exposed through the same interface), or tracked behind the scenes (in a separate database, IIUC, with a different interface). Tickets and forum entries are also tracked and versioned similarly to non-embedded docs.
Aside from everything being versioned, the visibility of the objects is quite good. The user interface, both command and web, is light-years better than anything Git related.
I highly recommend you check it out. Even if you find it doesn't meet your needs, many of the design decisions are instructive. I find it quite inspiring.
> only a handful of VCS besides git have ever managed a full import of the kernel's history. Fossil (SQLite-based, by the SQLite team) never did.
I find this hard to believe. I searched the Fossil forums and found no mention of such an attempt (and failure). Unfortunately, I don't have a computer handy to verify or disprove. Is there any evidence for this claim?
i did look into this before writing the post. there's a fossil-users mailing list post by Isaac Jurado where he reported that importing Django took ~20 minutes and importing glibc on a 16GB machine had to be interrupted after a couple of hours. he explicitly warned against trying the linux kernel. the largest documented import on the fossil site itself was NetBSD pkgsrc (~550MB) which already showed scaling issues. so "never did" is fair - not because anyone tried and failed, but because it was known to be impractical and explicitly discouraged.
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.
We want to put them in trauma.”
That was Russel Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget and key author or Project 2025.
Trump also said, "a whole civilization will die tonight".
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