There isn’t an obvious public link to this specific message, sent out on Free DC’s list, though their site has plenty of their digital campaign materials about this and other issues they advocate for. I thought it was excellent though. Once again, I think of my passed grandfather, Battle of the Bulge veteran, Republican, who I know would find this use of the military offensive. I’ve reproduced the core of the email I received, including their emphasis and links (minus ActionNetwork’s redirects):

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Yesterday’s AWS outage reinforces an old truth: the cloud is—oversimplified but not wrong—someone else’s computer. This isn’t an argument against cloud adoption. It’s about trust distribution and control boundaries. How much faith do you place in a single provider, how much can you afford to take advantage of their redundancies—or can you afford not to? What’s beyond your control regardless of SLAs? What do those SLAs actually mean? Are you hedging those bets?

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I appreciate the ecumenical critiques. Not to “both-sides” it: there are significant differences and fairly one-sided undemocratic reasons for the complete deadlock, but the clippy sign could very well stand the test of time. I had my ear out for process and not just content critiques from the stage.

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Bruce Schneier lays it out pretty broadly that regular Americans really should be thinking of their personal threat model as living under authoritarianism. It might be uncomfortable to think about. I remember in the past, it was a bit of a no-go to even bring up whether we saw our government as a potential threat in our threat model at a past job. And getting an answer? Well, that was even less fun, given the sensitivity of certain data and the tension of priorities.

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What appeared to be RFK Jr’s old 2024 presidential campaign bus was parked (illegally) outside the Pierce School condominiums in northeast DC on September 16. This location is also known for hosting a crypto party aligned with Trump’s inauguration and being a place Musk and other DOGE figures early in the administration. I have no other context, but found it weird to see. I found it vaguely notable that it happened between RFK Jr’s grilling before the Senate Finance Committee last week and his fired CDC director’s testimony before the Senate HELP Committee yesterday.

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I’ve been thinking about the news lately. (That’s a true statement most days of the week, most weeks of the year.) I’ve been thinking about Jerry of Ben & Jerry’s quitting, because of speech restrictions from Unilever, Ben & Jerry’s parent company. I’ve been thinking about all the backlash on people who mostly either tried to counter the hagiography of Charlie Kirk or perhaps were venting less tactfully (I’ve been known to).

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