Things didn’t end well for the last guy…
How bout they just dont show up? The TSA is a fraudulent agency anyway. Pre-9/11 security worked just fine.
We need to teach him to be scared of us.
Good luck. He can afford a personal army to protect him.
There are more of us.
With military-grade weapons? I doubt it.
With how loosy-goosy the US is with weapons purchasing? There’s a chance.
There’s also a chance that Musk’s security forces will spray bullets into the crowd from sniper positions.
Remember when the goverment was first shut down in a long time, if ever before, when Republicans thought it would be a good ratfucker move to harm Obama’s presidency, and it blew up in their faces, and our Country went from a AAAA rated borrower to a AAA borrower due to government disfunction? We seriously need a law that prevents this stupid shit from happening again. Maybe if they don’t pass funding, we just renew the last passed funding. It pisses me off so much. Imagine getting paid a significant amount of tax payer money, a life long sipend, and better health care than most the county, and not even doing your job and letting the goverment shut down. At some point here the lawlessness is going to convince enough people that it seriously doesn’t matter anymore.
Why doesn’t the “no new wars!” gang cut military spending by 65-80%? Defense readiness doesn’t cost $800B/ year.
We seriously need a law that prevents this stupid shit from happening again. Maybe if they don’t pass funding, we just renew the last passed funding
What we do in Australia is of the government can’t pass a budget we dissolve the government and go for elections.
Clearly the MP are not doing their jobs so make them run for their jobs again.Maybe if they don’t pass funding, we just renew the last passed funding.
This is exactly what happened a few days ago in France. While it’s not perfect, it’s still a whole lot better than a shutdown.
Ruining the holidays for a bunch of government employees, not just TSA. I am more worried about air traffic controllers, NASA, NOAA, FDA, the VA (yeah they suck, but a lot of people depend on them and making them work unpaid is definitely not going to improve anything), and thousands of other government employees that will go without pay. The longer it lasts, the worse it will be for the economy.
Damn. Imagine just showing up to work knowing you won’t be paid, with a bunch of other coworkers who are in the exact same socio-economic hostage crisis.
Gotta wonder if there’s some kind of organizational remedy. Like… a collection of workers who could all respond together as a single labor unit to demand a different set of policies on pain of withholding their labor until their demands are met.
I’ve heard of these! They’re called onions!
Like an ogre, they have layers.
I am old enough to remember when Reagan used military and scabs to bust the air traffic controllers’ strike. Hopefully this time people won’t cross picket lines.
There’s no picket lines, because there’s no organizing and no threat of a strike. Reagan did his work and Clinton/Bush/Obama/Trump/Biden made sure it stuck.
More likely what we’re going to see isn’t a single unified organized effort, but a bunch of individuals just walking off the job or phoning it in because they’re too demoralized to continue doing these thankless jobs. Then we may well still need to send in the military as scabs, just on a more permanent basis, since military scabs can’t legally quit.
Mandatory military service in exchange for free public education is already being floated. Canada should build a wall and make America pay for it, cause they are about to have a serious illegal immigration problem.
Mandatory military service in exchange for free public education is already being floated.
Excited to see the biggest rug-pull in US history when that back half fails to materialize.
Canada should build a wall and make America pay for it
The Canadian far-right is such a fucking joke. They want to be American so badly. Far from building a wall, I suspect they’ll be the ones shoving open the gates if we ever get a President deranged enough to try an annexation.
There will be “education,” but the traditional description for it is indoctrination.
Then we may well still need to send in the military as scabs, just on a more permanent basis, since military scabs can’t legally quit
The big difference will be that those jobs can’t be replaced as easily. ATC had quasi-analogous people in the military, and the only real match there is the VA. The issue is the amount of military doctors/nurses working in the armed forces does not compare to the civilian side. For the rest? NASA/NOAA/FDA have one-if-not-none person that may be able to substitute in.
With that thought, I’d be more than willing to place money on this being one of the thrusts of the idiotic doge. Why have national parks? Why care about food and drug quality? Healthcare for vets? Bahahaha, the money overlords care about their own supply, which they can ensure with their money. Everything there is focused solely on the peons, which have no meaning to the people pulling these strings.
Fuck musk and fuck everyone Like him
That said: fuck everyone who works for the TSA, bunch of useless dickheads who take out their anger on those trying to fly while objectively failing to catch basic security failures. Much like anyone who works for an insurance company: they can rot for all I care
Until working is optional I never blame the lowest in the hierarchy. I’ve worked some shit jobs of questionable morality in my time because I had to eat and pay rent and couldn’t gamble having a roof over my head on a better job coming along.
All airport jobs look shit, I mean that sympathetically.
They’re not the lowest in the hierarchy. They’re selling us out, like prison guards.
Eating and paying rent ≠ permission to be a power crazy dickhead just because you can (TSA workers).
We can find a better jobs program than making air travel suck.
If we want to abolish the TSA and move the money into a dramatically expanded AmTrak, I’m here for it.
But if you think the modern era of school shootings and abortion clinic bombings and J6 riots is going to give us a de-securitized airport system, I’d kindly ask you to pass me what you’re smoking.
Fun fact, when you’re a dickhead to people, they usually respond in turn. Stop being a piece of human shit and they’ll be nice too :)
Its the TSA employees that need to hear that, not me
I’m a fucking customer service rep in my normal job, I get that public facing roles suck. I walk up with my ID ready, ready to follow the arbitrary rule changes theyve made in the last few weeks, and use basic politeness even when they’re incredibly rude to my face
Abolish the TSA, they’re entirely useless
fuck everyone who works for the TSA, bunch of useless dickheads
Federal government creates a giant CYA department to account for their massive intelligence failure 23 years ago and now I’m going to be angry at the now-currently-unpaid 23 year old directing me through a metal detector so I don’t try and bring a gun onto a high speed high occupancy mid-air aluminum tube because she isn’t doing the REAL WORK of playing candy crush in a squad car like a proper police officer.
FFS, I’d argue that TSA is the most useful form of police officer currently on duty. I’ve been through my local airport a hundred times and I consistently find them to be polite, patient, and stoic in a way street cops never are.
because she isn’t doing the REAL WORK of playing candy crush in a squad car like a proper police officer.
Your words, not mine, fuck the police and don’t put words in my mouth
FFS, I’d argue that TSA is the most useful form of police officer currently on duty
You’d very much be wrong. While the cops aren’t great by any means the TSA consistently fails audits and has, last I heard, stopped an estimated 0 incidents of terrorism. Cops at least do have track records of stopping some crimes
I’ve been through my local airport a hundred times and I consistently find them to be polite, patient, and stoic in a way street cops never are.
I’m very glad you’ve had that experience, actually. Having flown out of 12 states and 4 countries: US TSA is the rudest and slowest of the security teams 99.9% of the time and it’s not even close
It’s going to be a long 4 years
It may be wrong, but here I’m hoping someone starts a paparazzi site where people anonymously tip off the location of these celebrities and keep track of where they are all the time.
They would shut anything down. I mean Elon even shut down open source reporting of celebrity jet flights.
Meanwhile he would have no problem attaching a bomb collar around everyone’s neck. One that he personally can use to blow them up and does just because he feels like it.
It’s just not on Twitter.
Clicking on mastodon reminded me I have a mastodon account!
Isn’t there a large time desync now?
It varies. Some days it’s better than other weeks. It’s a bot using the best OSInt available for the purpose, but there are inherent limitations.
Possibly far less. Depends on how many missiles get launched.
Just a reminder that Elon Musk is not from the United States.
He’s legally a US citizen by way of his mother.
Nevermind how much “god damn those evil foreigners are at it again” rhetoric makes me gag. Peter Thiel and Marc Andressen are fully American and they suck just as hard. If anything, the problem isn’t Elon, its Stanford University and the endless line of factory produced insane far-right techbro degenerates that it rolls out which gave us our modern hellscape.
…which is why he had to buy a president instead of buy the presidency.
Who in their right mind is going to work without being paid?
They’ll get back pay after the government re-opens. They just can’t get paid during the shutdown.
Because if they don’t do that pro-bono work demanded of them they would be fired.
People who expect to be paid eventually and still need the healthcare? Other than that…
I’m still seeing that the shutdown is looming. Did anything change?
Nope. Elon Musk is still the president.
Lol I meant has the shutdown happened, but thank you for the update.
President Musk flexing his muscles even before puppet inauguration.
One thing I wondered is what would happen if Putin and Musk disagree at some point about what Trump is supposed to do? But the answer is actually easy: whoever strokes Trump’s ego better at the time gets their policy through. Trump lives in the moment.
what would happen if Putin and Musk disagree at some point
Nothing significant. Musk is running on a purely American strain of right-wing revanchism. Trying to deflect all our problems onto Evil Foreign Man is a big part of why the country is as fucked as it is today. We simply cannot let ourselves believe that the fascist strain gripping our country by the taint is American born and bred. So every four years, Republicans accuse the Democrats of being Chinese and Democrats accuse the Republicans of being Russian, and then the parties do old fashioned American Protestant Capitalism to the country while we all writhe in torment, looking for someone else to blame.
I don’t know, I still think Putin has info on Trump that Trump really doesn’t want to be public for whatever reason. So I’m thinking he would defer to Putin.
I used to think that, but there’s nothing Trump could have done that the loony right wing public wouldn’t gleefully dismiss as not important. (Well, apart from a lewd orgy with trans Muslim Mexican immigrants, but I don’t think any of those exist, and Trump would just call it faked anyway.)
Now I think that Putin just rings him up to tell him what a great president he is and all the world admires how strong a leader he is, not like those weak Democrats who (insert policy Putin wants dropped), no, Trump is a strong and courageous leader and everyone can tell how strong and virile he is because he supports policies like (insert policy that Putin wants implemented).
I mean maybe there’s a video of Trump shouting “Yes, shove that big beautiful black dildo in me harder!”, but I don’t think it’s necessary at all. See how easy it was for the North Korean president to get Trump to completely change direction. He just sweet talked him for a bit. Trump is an absolute sucker for someone he perceives as strong telling him he’s great. American foreign policy is at the whim of any world leader who can make Trump feel proud of himself for a week.
Putin probably gave him a few billion to buy him. It’s peanuts money for an oligarch. Putin could reveal the amount and banking details, how much was invested into the different building projects Trump is so proud of.
At this point, I’m not sure that would be enough to sink him.
For him it’s not so much a worry about losing people as it is a personal branding ego thing. He’s payed off people for stuff that was already known and his supporters didn’t care about just to not mention again.
Whether or not the public would dismiss it and whether or not he thinks they would dismiss it are two very different things.
Which does point towards some non-hetero sexcapade, because pretty much everything else he’s famous for already having done.
I still think he’s pathetically easy to manipulate for dictators.
but there’s nothing Trump could have done that the loony right wing public wouldn’t gleefully dismiss as not important.
Young boys. It’s the only thing I can think of that might sway enough of them.
They just wouldn’t believe it. They wouldn’t accept that it was real, and any investigation would either confirm that belief or be obviously political and corrupt.
“There’s a big secret that somebody knows that will totally sink Trump’s career at long last and if we can just find what it is and tell everyone else we’ll win” is a lie liberals have been feeding to one another for thirteen years running.
We have him glad-handing Jeffery Epstein and nobody seems to fucking care. We have him on record paying off prostitutes and taking bribes from the Saudis and implying he’d like to fuck his daughter. We have videos of him saying insane shit about having sex on a yacht during a speech to the fucking Boy Scouts. We have him rambling incoherently about “Eating the Dogs and the Cats” in the middle of a national debate.
But don’t worry, there’s something even deeper and weirder and crazier. And that’s going to make all the difference.
And that’s why he’s friends with Vladimir Putin. It’s certainly not just that they’re both white nationalists who agree with each others’ politics.
You’re right. And now with AI, they have all the plausible deniability they need.
Have you never heard of Nineteen Eighty Four? There is nothing that can sway Trump’ supporters. 2+2=5
I mean… Good? TSA is worthless anyway, they should be shut down forever. I hope it’s one of the first agencies that are completely abolished
As I said elsewhere, those people have kids to feed and forcing people to work without pay is slavery.
So no, not good.
That’s not how this works.
Shutdown doesn’t mean no pay, it means no check issued for non essentials. You get furloughed and don’t work unless you choose to, everyone that is expected to work is covered by supplemental budget.
Out of the loop, what do you mean SHUT DOWN THE GOVERNMENT???
Don’t worry, the DEA will work for IOUs until the matter is settled.
It’s a thing that’s been happening a lot over the past few years where US politicians refuse to sign bills that approve government spending (such as continuing to pay government employees) until their demands about some unrelated thing are met.
I believe the term for this is “political blackmail”.
Why it is accepted and legal, I don’t understand.
Sounds like terrorism to me
No, no, terrorism is when you kill people who have money.
because it’s a tool that can be useful
It shouldn’t have to be useful. This is just a sign of failed governance.
It’s useful in a healthy democracy. Which the US isn’t.
Useful to whom?
TSA agents are ineffectual on the best of days, but without pay? Between that and the amazing production quality at Boeing I’m quite content to not fly anywhere.
i feel sorry for SNL. how will they survive this?
They may not have to.
I hope that US citizens will remember who caused the chaos out of pure spite when the next election comes around.
Why would anyone remember? You clearly don’t remember how often this happens.
This happens constantly and 80% of the time it’s republicans playing games (not being unable to agree, but agreeing and then doing stupid shit because of the tea party or Trumpers or whatever)
The next election will be like the kind they have in Russia.
Not unlikely, indeed. Sorry for you, chaps. We went through this about 80 years ago, and we mostly learned our lesson.
Remember? Mmmmwwwwhahahahaha!
Not a chance, not with the publics goldfish like memory span and media companies pushing their narrative.