In the past week or so, the courts have begun to try to set some boundaries on the Musk–Miller–Trump administration’s early blitz of recklessness.
. . .
This judicial review provides at least a small reprieve, hope that some of the administration’s most destructive impulses will be stopped. Or at least pared back. But even with the courts stepping up, and even with the reality of the administration’s ineptitude sinking in, this early Musk–Miller–Trump blitz remains very—maybe irreparably—damaging. Of course, there are a lot of moles to whack: the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are being dismantled at an alarming rate, and the court system is not known for being nimble. The administration is betting, perhaps rightly, that at least some of its thoughtless, lawless efforts will slip through the cracks.
But even if the courts caught them all—and even if every court facing each lawless escapade said, “Nope, that’s not a thing”—still the entire process would be doing serious damage to our institutions. Think of it as someone spoofing your identity and going on a shopping spree with your credit cards. Even if the goon gets caught, you still have to go store by store to argue that the fraudulent purchase wasn’t legitimate and hope the debt is forgiven. And all the while, perhaps long after all the debts are dealt with, the torrent of uncertainty kills your credit score.
Oh damned… for some reason the last 4 backups failed… Crap.
Regardless, it’s 20 minutes of outage. And sure, you look incompetent to your peers and supers, who hopefully, would be on your side, anyways. Or, they are Fascist Toadies, and it’s best you look incompetent. How can someone incompetent sabotage anything?
No, it doesn’t. It requires a few days of not checking a misconfigured backup job. And the misconfiguration is just an “oops”, easily explained away.
How can someone incompetent stay employed in their current role?
If peers and supers are on your side, actions would not need to be explained through incompetence. If peers and supers are not on your side they are going to get rid of you with expediency. Then you can’t do shit either way. For the most part, people don’t really know who is who.
I guess we’ll just have to re-deply from git. No big deal.
Intentionally deleting backups is 100% destruction of govt. property. If we’re talking about simply a “few days” of backups, it’s also not going to do anything meaningful. There’s been pretty much no new development on anything since Jan 20th, so we’d need to be getting rid of backups substantially earlier than that.
Either way, I think you mean well with your inquiry. Hopefully this can help with understanding. >>>
It’s not like that’s on the horizon, anyways.
Ok, cool! They can explain away, and help make the “oops” more plausible…
That is happening, anyways. Thankfully, Public Servants are unionized.
If it’s up to date… Of course, you can slow walk the restores, or even re-deploys… Again, at best, my example was a 20 minute outage. But it’s still an outage.
Ok, so just “accidentally hit a key, and have it back up the wrong directory, and forget to check backup reports…”
I fully understand what I’m saying. And I fully understand what Simple Sabotage means. It doesn’t mean you will be the single thing that stops the machine… But you can muck up the works.