> The Pentagon allowed U.S. Customs and Border Protection to use an anti-drone laser earlier this week, leading the Federal Aviation Administration to suddenly close the airspace over El Paso, Texas, on Wednesday, according to two people familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details.

Notable: "Thirty-four quality assurance engineers and eight of their managers will lose their jobs"

In that case, the justification was a prerequisite to Congress authorizing a war without losing elections, and then selling it to the US's allies so we wouldn't have to send quite as many troops and thus lose elections. This administration demonstrably doesn't care about justification, authorization, alliances, or elections. So why bother? If they're going to stage an arbitrary Venezuela-like military operation in Mexico because of "cartels", they wouldn't wait for a civilian mass-death event, or for Congress, or regional allies, or public opinion. They didn't wait for any of that in Venezuela.

TBQH this just felt like a cheap and easy way for them to perpetuate the idea that we're always at war with terrorists. Now they're "narcoterrorists", but they're still "terrorists". And this administration might not like obstacles like authorization and due process, but it loves cheap, easy terrorists.

Cut the same angle on the top inside and bottom outside and you can stack shallow foamcore bins in deeper drawers. Lots of other handy uses for an adjustable bevel cutter and foamcore boards.

Getting a little to Arrested Development for me.

> Annie is a software engineer, she told this reporter. She draws a six-figure salary but lives frugally in an “attic cordoned off with curtains” so that she can retire early. She said there was “no way in hell” she’d share her last name, because A) she could lose her job, and B) she did not trust reporters.

> “It is the intention of journalists to lie, which is why we need to not do anything to the journalists themselves, but we need to simply remove them as a class,” Annie said. “Just like Germany does to the extremist organizations.”

This looks a lot like someone eating up the rhetoric of Trump and Musk, who attack “legacy media” daily. It’s especially weird given that the person being discussed is trans and would encounter the vile hatred the far right has towards them. But I think many wealthier people like those in tech keep thinking they won’t be victims of this machine.

1. People being richer already due to Silicon Valley pay, think they’re immune to harm. It’s easy to be in a bubble in SF, where life is good, without truly knowing what it’s like to see ICE kidnapping children in black SUVs on the streets of Minneapolis.

2. If someone is fitting to the dominant demographic group (white, male, straight, born in America to citizens, etc.) then there is little empathy or understanding of what others are going through and what risks they face from the current administration and the far right shift in general.

3. Many people genuinely think they will belong to an ultra rich class in the future. They want to get into that same group through startups or whatever. And they don’t want that opportunity to go away.

4. People in tech skew younger. And the young often lack the maturity to understand how the world truly works. Sure the top 1% pays most of the income taxes. But they are also hoarding most of the capital and profits to begin with, so of course they would be paying most of the taxes. Those in this article view the rich as generous for paying the taxes they do, instead of realizing that everyone else is not competing with the super rich in a fair way, because they have to live paycheck to paycheck and any risk is existential.

When the script says 'turn', they turn, they're actors with no agency of their own, they work for money alone.