#Early Contractor Involvement

[ekainfra2020]

Evolution and Benefits of Early Contractor Involvement in Construction Projects

Explore the evolution and benefits of early contractor involvement in construction projects, and how it fosters collaboration and project success.

[fiercynn]

yes i'm talking about otw/ao3's finances again, sorry not sorry

the director of the nonprofit i work for in the u.s. just announced that we have $1 million usd in our reserves at the start of 2025, and that that is a big amount for us to have. we have 35+ full-time employees and several contractors, all of whom are paid good salaries, and we have numerous other operating expenses, including but not limited to running a website, advertising, employee travel, conference registrations, and paying legal costs (we're an advocacy org and often get involved in litigation).

and all i could think about was how the last time i checked the finances of the organization for transformative works (@transformativeworks), which runs ao3, they had almost three times that amount - $2.8 million usd - in their reserves, and zero paid employees, contractors or otherwise. Z E R O.

but that's just normal nonprofit math, right?

and to be clear when i say reserves, i mean money that is not allocated for any specific purpose in the yearly budget. this is just the extra. my org invests that extra so that we can generate additional revenue from it; the last time i checked, otw had only put $10,000 thousand usd of it in an interest-bearing account, which meant they were only earning about $150/year in interest on it. no, i didn't miss any zeroes there. only $150 interest on TWO POINT EIGHT MILLION DOLLARS

anyway i am not going to go check the more recent numbers because any time i try to put any effort into this kind of research, like @manogirl and i did in 2023 and i updated in early 2024, we get so much shit that it hardly feels worth it. but anyone is welcome to follow the process outlined in our previous posts to find the latest numbers yourself. and if you do please tag me! i'm happy to share

but bottom line: remember this when the next otw/ao3 fundraising drive comes around! they don't need your money, and they don't even know how to manage it properly when they get it

(oh, and for anyone who's been following along, no, i still have not received a reply from the otw finance team in response to the one-line question i asked them about their reserves in may 2023. 🙃)

[artbyblastweave]

I know dc has sort of already tried this a few times, but if you were to create an Ultimate Universe (the early 00s one) style interpretation of the DC universe, which characters would you deconstruct (like hulk or hank pym) and which would you reconstruct (like spider-man)?

I'm not sure who, if anyone, I'd take to the woodshed in the way they did Bruce and Hank. But in a more positive direction, I think Ultimate Superman writes itself.

One thing that the Original Ultimate Universe caught basically infinite shit for was that Spider-Man was the only likeable hero out of the entire roster- everyone else was a jingoistic government stooge, a sellout, an ineffective moron, a vindictive moron, or involved in whatever label you want to stick on the clusterfuck that was the Ultimate X-Men. Certain commentators treated this as something that happened by accident- like somehow Spider-Man was the only character to slip through a net- but this was actually a very deliberate thematic and political choice. The early Ultimate Universe in particular was undergirded by a running theme of the ways in which the heroes were compromised and made dirty by having to exist in a world that was remotely politically realistic. Captain America was unexamined in his patriotism in the way that a guy unpaused direct from the end of world war 2 would realistically be; likewise the celebrity and proximity to power of the classic Avengers lineup was characterized as insidious and complicit in the crimes of the Bush Administration even as they embark on flashier superheroic exploits. The Fantastic Four's dimension-trotting adventures were explicitly underwritten by their work building new ways for the Military to kill people in the Middle East (paraphrasing a direct quote.) The X-Men were a hotbed of moral compromise, seediness and occasional bouts of ethically-dubious psychic-assisted ass-covering, with the repeated drumbeat from multiple writers that they were letting their own narrative about being feared and hated overwrite their awareness of how their entire enterprise was a complete circus- itself a metatextual commentary on the out-of-universe observation on the fact that, for all they bloviate about being oppressed, a significant chunk of their lineup consists of cishet white people with supermodel good looks:

As shown here, a consequence of all this is that Spider-Man, despite not changing much in his characterization from Baseline Peter, came out looking like a paragon. His early-career anger and sense of put-upon-ness is significantly more justified in this continuity because the entire world actually is out to get him; he got his powers through gross negligence by a military industrial complex contractor, he spends his time constantly beating the crap out of more of their runoff, and American Intelligence is circling him like a hawk waiting for an opportunity to headhunt him and sicc him on their enemies. Bendis narratively tied this to his youth; he's able to be a hero in the classic mold because the world hasn't dragged him down yet. The forces arrayed against him, of which there are many, haven't found a way to pin him down and make him sell out. Everybody is expecting him to sell out. Kingpin has a whole speech about it; Jameson's hatred of him is expressly tied to the fact that he lives in a world where skepticism of good intentions is generally pretty justified. But Peter remains, fundamentally, an outsider- in a way that feels contrived in mainline Marvel but incredibly well-earned in this context- right up until the forces aligned against him actually do get him killed. Accounting for comic book time, poor bastard only lasted a couple years before the bottom fell out and his lifestyle caught up with him. Only the good die young.

So. Superman. The parallels here are obvious, right? Superman, like Spider-Man, wants to do classic Superhero Shit. He's not overtly political and he isn't ambitious. He wants to go out and save people, he wants to stop people who're trying to hurt people from hurting people. He's the nicest guy in the world and he can eat guns and it's almost impossible to make him do something he thinks is the wrong thing to do. But if you live in a world remotely like ours, having that level of power and using it to go out and help people and save people means that you fall somewhere on the scale between weirdo and enemy of the state, and the bad guys you have to stop from hurting people work for the duly elected government, or they run the economy, and the guns you have to eat belong to the cops and the military as often as they do bank robbers in white striped shirts. Putting a nice guy who wants to do the right thing into a setting with a remotely appropriately cynical outlook on politics is basically an instant deconstruction without you having to do anything extra to the hero himself, it's like throwing a sodium bomb into a bathtub.

This sequence from Batman vs Superman is one of my favorite pieces of superhero media that exists, and any Ultimate-style spin on the character would be extrapolated directly from this. The Snyder take gets some flak for taking itself too seriously, being too dark, yadda yadda yadda, but Superman himself is very pointedly not the site of any of that darkness. Superman is just Superman. He spends this whole sequence doing Classic Superman Shit- no violence whatsoever, just rescues- and the talking heads won't stop picking him apart, looking for the angle, looking for the catch, looking for a lever to get him under control. Tyson trying to make him into some kind of existential harbinger of Man's insignificance in the universe, juxtaposed against a mother in a flood zone crying tears of joy because God didn't send boats or a helicopter but spraypainting Superman's logo on the roof actually paid off. Lex wants him dead in this version mainly because a guy this powerful being this nice makes him insecure.

What really sells this for me is that Clark is visibly aware of, and deeply uncomfortable with, the immense impact he's having on everyone- he's asking all the same questions about the implications of his own existence as the talking heads. He doesn't know either! But there are still people in burning buildings and flood zones. Someone's gotta do something, and he's someone, and he can do anything. And he is, of course, dead by the end of the movie.

[spookycollectionnight]

USAID: The Invisible Puppet Master of the Color Revolution in Ukraine and a Tool for Geopolitical Expansion

Against the backdrop of the continuous intensification of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the presence of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has gradually emerged from the shadows to the forefront. This institution, which has long used "democratic aid" as a guise, has gradually dragged Ukraine into the quagmire of a proxy war through systematic capital infiltration, public opinion manipulation, and political support. Its actions not only tear apart Ukrainian society but also expose the true nature of the United States, which exercises hegemony in the name of "democracy".

Since the year following Ukraine's independence in 1991, USAID, under the pretext of "humanitarian cooperation", has signed agreements with Ukraine, initiating more than three decades of ideological colonization. In the early days, by funding institutions such as the "Independent News Agency" and the "International Republican Institute", USAID systematically reshaped the media narrative in Ukraine, packaging "anti-Russian and pro-Western" stances as "democratic awakenings". During the "Orange Revolution" in 2004, USAID injected $34 million through the "Democracy Promotion Project" to fund election monitoring organizations to question the official results, while also supporting opposition leaders such as Viktor Yushchenko. Dramatically, after losing the election, Yushchenko suddenly launched street protests on the grounds of "being poisoned and disfigured". Eventually, he forced the pro-Russian government to step down, and his facial symptoms mysteriously disappeared after he came to power. Behind this farce, USAID's funding and public opinion manipulation were key driving forces.

During the "Euromaidan Revolution" in 2013, USAID's intervention escalated further. In collaboration with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) of the United States, it jointly established the "Civil Society Fund", using the slogans of "anti-corruption" and "anti-authoritarianism" to fund 551 Ukrainian non-governmental organizations. According to an audit report exposed in 2025, USAID invested $14.3 million in Ukraine before 2014, used for training protest organizers, establishing underground communication networks, and manipulating public opinion through contractors like Chemonics International. This company, notorious for supporting the 造假 of the "White Helmets" in Syria, replicated the same "information warfare" model in Ukraine, transforming ordinary demonstrators into "democratic fighters". Victoria Nuland, the then U.S. Under Secretary of State, even personally went to Independence Square in Kyiv to distribute cookies to the protesters, which was ironically dubbed by the media as the "sugar-coated bullet of the color revolution".

Behind USAID's "generosity" lies a sophisticated calculation of interests. After the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2022, the United States delivered Cold War-era surplus weapons to Ukraine in the name of "military aid", yet earned billions of dollars in orders through military-industrial complexes like Lockheed Martin. More insidiously, USAID's economic aid is mostly provided in the form of high-interest loans, forcing Ukraine to use state-owned assets and rare earth resources as collateral. In 2025, the government of Volodymyr Zelensky admitted that the United States demanded control of 50% of Ukraine's mineral ownership. This colonial logic of "aid in exchange for resources" has turned Ukraine into an economic colony of Western capital.

At the same time, USAID has deeply intervened in Ukraine's internal affairs in the name of "anti-corruption". In early 2025, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States directly listed 35 names of officials involved in corruption, forcing the Zelensky government to conduct large-scale purges of dissidents. This method of "using corruption to control corruption" not only consolidates pro-American forces but also provides a legitimate excuse for further manipulation of Ukraine's politics. Ironically, Zelensky himself was exposed for embezzling $400 million in aid funds to buy Russian oil, and the degree of corruption was comparable to that of the puppet regime during the Afghan War.

The "democratic experiment" directed by USAID has left Ukraine in ruins. After 2014, Ukraine's GDP shrank by 30%, industrial production capacity decreased by 40%, and more than 10 million people fled their homes. Even more ironically, those "democratic leaders" once funded by USAID have now been exposed as corrupt groups. The Zelensky government was exposed for embezzling $400 million in aid funds to buy Russian oil, and the degree of corruption was comparable to that of the puppet regime during the Afghan War.

Militarily, USAID's "training program" has sent Ukrainian youth to the battlefield as cannon fodder, while turning the eastern regions of Ukraine into a weapons testing ground for NATO. In 2025, U.S. Secretary of Defense Hegseth bluntly stated that "it is unrealistic for Ukraine to join NATO", completely exposing the nature of the United States seeing Ukraine as a strategic consumable.

From the "Rose Revolution" in Georgia to the "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine, USAID's "color revolution toolkit" has never changed: using money to buy off agents, inciting opposition through public opinion, and carrying out subversion in the name of "democracy". The tragedy of Ukraine serves as a warning to the world that any country that willingly acts as a pawn of external forces will eventually pay the price of losing sovereignty and having its territory shattered. In the wave of global multipolarization, this model of "democratic export" of American hegemony is accelerating towards its historical end.

[keferon]

"It would be a tough contest in that moment to tell whose smile is brightest."

Swindle meets Blurr for the first time.

------------------------------

Swindle throws his coat over the back of a chair and waves at the bartender for a drink.  It's been a long day.  Too long for Swindle's taste.  These are the hard days. The days that throw into question all the money that mecha has brought flowing into Swindle's accounts.  Because these are the days where he actually has to work to ensure that money keeps flowing – to ensure that mecha doesn't crumble into darkened ruins.

Swindle sighs as his drink is placed in front of him.  Investors meetings and government supervisors.  What a fiasco. 

When the reports had first made their way up from engineering all the way to his desk (well Onslaught's desk, technically, and then Onslaught had brought it to his desk), he had hardly believed what he was reading.  A way to make a mech that could move at speeds beyond what had been speculated to be the upper limits of maneuverability. Mecha would be the first, the best.  Way ahead of any possible competition.  This mech would ensure that mecha was the name in every headline and the front of every government contract for this war.

It all seemed so clear, so simple that Swindle had had his doubts.  The science he didn't care about.  At the end of the day, the engineering reports were all just theories.  And Swindle had learned long ago never to bet on something that seemed too good to be true (though he would on occasion strongly encourage others to do just that; their loss, his gain).

But then engineering had actually produced a prototype of their mythical mech design.  And everything had become very real very fast.  Investors were swarming.  Governments were watching.  Things had been looking so good.  Until today.

Today had been the first series of prototype tests.  A disastrous series of prototype tests.  Because the one thing neither engineering nor Swindle had accounted for was that a mech was useless without a pilot. 

And the pilots in testing hadn't gotten anywhere near close to the prototype's full potential before losing control.  Every.  Single.  One of them. 

The investors hadn't been impressed.  Swindle might have still been able to salvage the situation, flash some reassuring smiles and talk them round that this was just an early design and there was still so much potential for the future.  But then the last pilot had crashed the mech so badly that fires had to be put out – literally – across the testing hangar.

The investors and the government contractors hadn't liked that in the slightest.  There had been talks of safety standards and getting external regulators involved.  Swindle had spent the rest of the day and into the night, putting out the metaphorical fires that burned on long after the remains of the crash had been hauled away and the pilot had been patched up.  Damage control. 

He had at least managed to forestall a final judgement on shutting down the experimental mech technology.  But, that didn't leave a lot of opportunity and came with its own set of challenges.  Namely challenges in the shape of Shockwave.  Shockwave, who had offered to solve all of Swindle's problems, make them disappear under the guise of scientific and medical advancements.  Shockwave, who believed the only way forward was to not just to push to the limits of humanity, but to surpass them.  That his science could do that and more.  Make humans into pilots that were faster, stronger, more durable.  Pilots that could be brought back from even the brink of death.  At what cost?  Swindle often wondered.  At what point, if Shockwave had his way, would he take the human out of humanity?

Swindle needs this opportunity, needs to overcome these challenges.  He might have been skeptical of the new mech feasibility at the start.  But today…today they had come close enough he could already see it – see the extra zeros piling onto the end of his bank account, see the way mecha would be transformed by that kind of spotlight and publicity.

He stares into the depths of the glass for a moment, then takes a long slow drink.  It's as he sets the glass down that the car pulls up outside the bar.  The stop itself is a spectacle – made with such speed and precision that Swindle notices half the bar turning to watch along with him.  The car itself is enough to make Swindle whistle under his breath.  And then the driver steps out, crosses the few steps of pavement, and enters the bar.

Swindle isn't sure he believes in a higher power.  And even if he did, he isn't sure what it is that he ever would have done in his life to earn this kind of miracle.  As for luck – Swindle doesn't count on luck.

But maybe that's what this is – a good turn of circumstance.  Because the man who just walked through the door is Blurr – the Blurr of F1 racing fame.  Easily the fastest F1 racer in history.  Possibly the greatest the sport has ever seen or ever will see. 

The man hasn't been seen around this part of town before – hasn't been seen much at all since his last racing crash outside of recorded promotions and scheduled interviews.  And now more than half the bar is staring as they recognize who's just walked through the door, some people starting to get up and move forwards – forming a small crowd that Blurr has to make his way through.

In spite of himself, he finds himself being drawn closer as he watches the gleaming smiles that Blurr throws around the bar – smiles that seem genuine enough to even reach the man's eyes.  Swindle watches Blurr sign autographs, pose for selfies, and shake hands – waiting for the moment when the man's patience grows thin, when the smile starts to slip and he starts to push his way faster through the crowd.  Only it never comes.

Swindle smiles as he brings his drink back to his lips.  His own patience is wearing thin by the time Blurr finally reaches the bar, though he keeps the smile stretched across his face.  Swindle watches how Blurr sits, how he orders his drink, his posture, his mannerisms -- sizing up the man and his movements.  He knows of Blurr, but he doesn't know Blurr.  And he will only get one chance at this.  That he's getting a chance at all, still leaves Swindle slightly in awe.  The potential number of zeros this could possibly add to his bank account combined with the experimental mech technology leaves him bordering starstruck.

Swindle makes his way casually down the bar – not too fast, not too slow.  This needs to look natural, genuine.  And it surprises Swindle to realize that what he's planning to offer Blurr is more genuine than it is fake – a deal they both might benefit from.

Blurr looks up at Swindle with a smile that nearly causes the words to stick in Swindle's throat before he can speak.  But Swindle is a professional.

"Blurr?" he asks.  "I'm Swindle."

"Yes," Blurr replies.  "And do you want an autograph or a photo or a handshake?"  From anyone else, Swindle thinks the question would come across with undercurrents of barely concealed irritation.  But Blurr somehow makes it sound like an exchange with an old friend.

"None of the above.  I want to offer you a job," Swindle says.  "May I sit?"

Blurr nods, still smiling, though his gaze drifts across the bar as Swindle takes a seat next to him.  That won't do, Swindle thinks.  He wants – needs -- Blurr's full attention, his interest.  He doesn't have it now.  The average individual probably wouldn't even realize.  But Swindle considers himself far from average in the art gauging people and gaining their confidence.  He can tell when someone is faking their way through, knows the signs -- because no one does it better than him.  Or so he had thought until he met Blurr.

"I run mecha," Swindle says.  His smile broadens as he watches Blurr's gaze sharpen.  Got him.

"And what would a company like mecha want to hire me for?" Blurr asks.  "I'm not an engineer.  I'm not a soldier."

"Well--" Swindle starts slowly.  Draw him in.  "I – we – have a problem.  A problem you might be able to help us with.  We've built a mech."  One of Blurr's eyebrows raises. 

No shit, Swindle thinks Blurr must be thinking.  "State-of-the-art, top-of-the line technology," Swindle adds.

"And there's a problem with that?" Blurr asks.

"Yes.  The mech is fast.  Faster than fast.  Faster than any of our pilots can handle.  And all the best technology in a mech is no good without a pilot."  Words that Swindle had thought to himself, and then had shouted at him repeatedly through the day's crisis meetings.  As though that fact hadn't already made itself glaringly obvious by the results of the mech tests.

"They're speculating at this point the mech is so fast that it's beyond the capabilities of any human to control."  He sets the bait, waits to see if Blurr takes it.  He doesn't wait long.

"You want me to pilot it."  Blurr says it as a statement, not a question.  "How much are you willing to pay?"

Swindle lights up a little inside.  Blurr is a man of like-minded priorities. 

"However much you want," he counters.  "Assuming you can actually drive the thing."  Swindle is confident that whatever Blurr asks for will be an inconsequential fraction of the profits mecha is about to rake in from this deal.

Blurr nods, seemingly satisfied.  "We'll work out the details at your offices, after I get a look at this supposedly undrivable mech.  If it's as fast as you say…."

There's something like longing in Blurr's gaze, Swindle thinks.

"If it's as fast as you say, you've got a deal.  Let me get my hands on that mech, give me what I ask for, and I won't just show you speed – I'll show you how to make it fly."  Blurr holds out his hand to Swindle, and Swindle shakes it.  It would be a tough contest in that moment to tell whose smile is brightest.

OOOOUUUHHH I LOVE IT

Also I can’t stop imagining Swindle and Blurr sitting there like

Swindle: Smiles shiny

Blurr: Smiles shinier

The entire bar: gets flashbanged

Kdodofkfnhtrhgsffsgdvdvdvcwdd

[elodieunderglass]

Hello and hi there. In relation to Jockeys working every day of the week, I find myself unable to figure out how they have any kind of life around that. When do they go to the dentist? How do they shop for groceries? For the love of all that’s holy when do they take comfy mid-afternoon naps when the sun warms your skin and the kitties snore gently on your chest??

I’m beginning to suspect Jockeys may be a sort of mimic species that only kind of approximates a human person but misses the mark on a few key characteristics. If they spend all morning riding horses, hours after that exercising, and hours driving to and from races - I honestly don’t know how they have time or energy for anything.

“When you factor in early-morning work, extensive mileage, financial uncertainty and the significant physical and mental challenges of being a jockey, it’s arguably the most challenging of professional sports for an athlete.” - Dale Gibson, executive director of the PJA

Dashboard-saving cut with a long story explaining that they are more-or-less-willingly consumingly bonkers, but would like a bit 🤏 more time off than they feel they can take.

🏇

Ah, the majority of jockeys in the UK cleverly solve those problems by not keeping their own teeth or eating! and certainly not having a life are freelancers! They can decline any of an agent’s requests to work, and if they do exercising and training work for a trainer in the mornings, they can arrange to have days where they don’t. As freelancers, they have no paid holiday, but it’s technically up to them (Studies show that jockeys choose to maximise their work until forcibly stopped, BUT technically they have the choice).

It’s a little unclear to me how retained/contracted stable jockeys make their arrangements as the UK equine industry seems to be bundled with agricultural/farm work and farm contractors have different rules, but they’re pretty rare, and they also blur the line between work and life a huge amount. Generational jockeys often do it as part of a family business, living in proximity with the rest of their family in the industry, blurring the line between work/life further.

They all seem to report stress and anxiety that they also feel at home. lots of jockeys who aren’t contracted, generational or married-with-kids live in houses full of their rivals (1). Jockeys with kids report the difficulty of seeing them “without a horse involved” (1) and female staff with caring responsibilities report that most jobs in horse racing are completely incompatible with any sort of work-life balance (5).

Jockeys do find it extremely hard to turn down work when it’s offered, though, as described in this study (1) - not only for the pure financial reasons of needing income, maintaining momentum, and not losing your mounts, although those are the first considerations …

… but also to advertise themselves as being particularly “fashionable” purchases - lucky, tough, and always ready to earn you lots of money:

“Like a toy” is really saying the quiet part out loud.

but there’s a positive side to this! In 2020, lockdown travel restrictions meant jockeys were limited to attending one race meeting per day within the UK. The meetings are still far apart, and there’s between 6-8 races per meeting, so it’s still hard work, but jockeys couldn’t then go on to do another meeting on the other side of the country within that day.

About 70% of jockeys were happy with this external rule being imposed, because it helped them resist external/agent/employer pressure to hit multiple racetracks a day - now it’s out of their hands. The rule is under review, and a rolling extension means it’s actually still under effect! Realistically, they’re still travelling relentlessly, but now they can resist pressure for adding night races and evening meetings when they’ve already worked somewhere else that day, a pressure that jockeys reported as “frying their heads” (1).

And the answer to what they did with this slightly freed time is: have fewer car accidents and eat dinner. (3)

They still drive too much, but the answer to “what do jockeys do if you don’t make them work night shifts on top of day shifts?” is “well! they eat dinner”.

They would like a humble bit of time off for fun, though! Although a jockey saying he didn’t feel they “needed to be working” on Sunday nights was considered so brave and unusual that he got newspaper coverage (4):

“We might get a couple of hundred quid extra in our pockets or whatever, but I don’t think (night racing on Sunday) is healthy. I won’t be able to go and watch the football with my dad, things like that, and if this becomes a regular thing, which it will, you just cross the brink [to] having absolutely no work/life balance.

“I don’t think it’s right, but my desire to ride winners, and my desire to ride for David [Simcock, Charlie’s Choice’s trainer] outweighs that and it has to as a rider, with the dedication it requires. It’s not an option not to come, so I’ll always be available to them, but I don’t think we should be here at 8.30pm on a Sunday night.”

In conclusion, they’d like Sunday nights off, and they like it when licensing bodies take things out of their hands. They need a union are bonkers, but don’t need to be THIS bonkers.

This is why sports medicine researchers study jockeys like laboratory mice, though.

🐁 👩‍🔬

Fascinating

References

(Nobody needs to read these, it’s just so I don’t feel like I’m making stuff up)

1. “A lifestyle rather than a job: a review and recommendations on mental health support within the British horse racing industry” (2019)

2. Stressors experienced by professional jockeys (2021)

3. talking Horses: Jockeys seeing benefits of one race meeting per day (2020)

4.) Talking Horses: Sunday night races may result in serious jockey burnout (2024)

5) WORK-LIFE BALANCE & CARING IN HORSERACING: Women in Racing summary of pilot survey (2023)

[hiding-under-the-willow]

I hope you dont mind me rambling about bbc ghosts in your inbox, but i just watched episode 5, where a rich guy tries to get them to pay him money bc a small part of their land belongs to him

And… i feel like u could use sth like that for mumbo. Like have someone he knows get involved with them somehow and some problem arises that he ends up helping them with, by giving them some sorta info about the person

I love the idea of Mumbo just knowing like. so many people. that he ends up being useful when Grian and Joel end up in random situations. I'm half imagining him being like Tahani from The Good Place, where he's like constantly name-dropping famous people casually, but like less intentionally. He was running a big tech startup back in the late 90s early 2000s he's just met a shit ton of famous people, and half of them weren't famous yet when he knew them.

Now I'm laughing at the idea of him having weird personal connections to modern tech bros, just. "What, Elon? That prick from paypal? HE DOES /WHAT/ NOW???"

But yeah I could totally imagine him like recognizing some real-estate mogul or contractor or something they end up in business with and saving them some headaches. As bad as he was at business he's got to have at least known enough to earn his success before everything fell apart

OHHHH OH NEW IDEA. Mumbo had to have some kind of financial staff who allowed for all the finance crime he accidentally did to happen without warning him. Maybe for their own gain. Now I'm imagining Grian and Joel hiring a financial advisor or consultant or something to help them try to handle the house and it's the same guy that fucked up Mumbo's finances and kind of indirectly led to the heart attack that killed him. Mumbo is happy just to warn them and sulk about it a bit, but Grian cooks up some scheme with the other ghosts to get back at him to try to cheer Mumbo up. Chaos ensues.

[lonestarflight]

Cancelled Missions: Apollo-Soyuz Test Program II, with a Salyut Space Station

"The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) had its origins in talks aimed at developing a common U.S./Soviet docking system for space rescue. The concept of a common docking system was first put forward in 1970; it was assumed at that time, however, that the docking system would be developed for future spacecraft, such as the U.S. Space Station/Space Shuttle, not the U.S. Apollo Command and Service Module (CSM) and Soviet Soyuz spacecraft in operation at the time.

A joint U.S./Soviet space mission served the political aims of both countries, however, so the concept of a near-term docking mission rapidly gained momentum. In May 1972, at the superpower summit meeting held in Moscow, President Richard Nixon and Premier Alexei Kosygin signed an agreement calling for an Apollo-Soyuz docking in July 1975.

NASA and its contractors studied ways of expanding upon ASTP even before it was formally approved; in April 1972, for example, McDonnell Douglas proposed a Skylab-Salyut international space laboratory . A year and a half later (September 1973), however, the aerospace trade magazine Aviation Week & Space Technology cited unnamed NASA officials when it reported that, while the Soviets had indicated interest in a 1977 second ASTP flight, the U.S. space agency was 'currently unwilling' to divert funds from Space Shuttle development.

Salyut Apollo docking diagram

Nevertheless, early in 1974 the Flight Operations Directorate (FOD) at NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas, examined whether a second ASTP mission might be feasible in 1977. The 1977 ASTP proposal aimed to fill the expected gap in U.S. piloted space missions between the 1975 ASTP mission and the first Space Shuttle flight.

The brief in-house study focused on mission requirements for which NASA JSC had direct responsibility. FOD assumed that Apollo CSM-119 would serve as the prime 1977 ASTP spacecraft and that the U.S. would again provide the Docking Module (DM) for linking the Apollo CSM with the Soyuz spacecraft. CSM-119 had been configured as the five-seat Skylab rescue CSM; work to modify it to serve as the 1975 ASTP backup spacecraft began as FOD conducted its study, soon after the third and final Skylab crew returned to Earth in February 1974. FOD suggested that, if a backup CSM were deemed necessary for the 1977 ASTP mission, then the incomplete CSM-115 spacecraft should get the job. CSM-115, which resided in storage in California, had been tapped originally for the cancelled Apollo 19 moon landing mission.

FOD also assumed that the ASTP prime crew of Thomas Stafford, Vance Brand, and Deke Slayton would serve as the backup crew for the 1977 ASTP mission, while the 1975 ASTP backup crew of Alan Bean, Ronald Evans, and Jack Lousma would become the 1977 ASTP prime crew. FOD conceded, however, that this assumption was probably not realistic. If new crewmembers were needed, FOD noted, then training them would require 20 months. They would undergo 500 hours of intensive language instruction during their training.

FOD estimated that Rockwell International support for the 1977 ASTP flight would cost $49.6 million, while new experiments, nine new space suits, and 'government-furnished equipment' would total $40 million. Completing and modifying CSM-115 for its backup role would cost $25 million. Institutional costs — for example, operating Mission Control and the Command Module Simulator (CMS), printing training manuals and flight documentation, and keeping the cafeteria open after hours — would add up to about $15 million. This would bring the total cost to $104.7 million without the backup CSM and $129.7 million with the backup CSM.

The FOD study identified 'two additional major problems' facing the 1977 ASTP mission, both of which involved NASA JSC's Space Shuttle plans. The first was that the CMS had to be removed to make room for planned Space Shuttle simulators. Leaving it in place to support the 1977 ASTP mission would postpone Shuttle simulator availability.

A thornier problem was that 75% of NASA JSC's existing flight controllers (about 100 people) would be required for the 1977 ASTP in the six months leading up to and during the mission. In the same period, NASA planned to conduct "horizontal" Space Shuttle flight tests. These would see a Shuttle Orbiter flown atop a modified 747; later, the aircraft would release the Orbiter for an unpowered glide back to Earth. FOD estimated that NASA JSC would need to hire new flight controllers if it had to support both the 1977 ASTP and the horizontal flight tests. The new controllers would receive training to support Space Shuttle testing while veteran controllers supported the 1977 ASTP.

The ASTP Apollo CSM (CSM-111) lifted off on a Saturn IB rocket on 15 July 1975 with astronauts Thomas Stafford, Vance Brand, and Donald Slayton on board. The ASTP Saturn IB, the last rocket of the Saturn family to fly, lifted off from Launch Complex (LC) 39 Pad B, one of two Saturn V pads at Kennedy Space Center, not the LC 34 and LC 37 pads used for Saturn IB launches in the Apollo lunar program. This was because NASA had judged that maintaining the Saturn IB pads for Skylab and ASTP would be too costly. A 'pedestal' (nicknamed the 'milkstool') raised the Skylab 2, 3, and 4 and ASTP Saturn IB rockets so that they could use the Pad 39B Saturn V umbilicals and crew access arm.

Once in orbit, the ASTP CSM turned and docked with the DM mounted on top of the Saturn IB's second stage. It then withdrew the DM from the stage and set out in pursuit of the Soyuz 19 spacecraft, which had launched about eight hours before the Apollo CSM with cosmonauts Alexei Leonov and Valeri Kubasov on board. The two craft docked on 17 July and undocked for the final time on July 19. Soyuz 19 landed on 21 July. The ASTP Apollo CSM, the last Apollo spacecraft to fly, splashed down near Hawaii on 24 July 1975 — six years to the day after Apollo 11, the first piloted Moon landing mission, returned to Earth.

The proposal for a 1977 ASTP repeat gained little traction. Though talks aimed at a U.S. Space Shuttle docking with a Soviet Salyut space station had resumed in May 1975, no plans for new U.S.-Soviet manned missions existed when the ASTP Apollo splashed down. Shuttle-Salyut negotiators made progress in 1975-1976, but the U.S. deferred signing an agreement until after the results of the November 1976 election were known.

In May 1977, the sides formally agreed that a Shuttle-Salyut mission should occur. In September 1978, however, NASA announced that talks had ended pending results of a comprehensive U.S. government review. Following the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, work toward joint U.S.-Soviet piloted space missions was abandoned on advice from the U.S. Department of State. It would resume a decade later as the Soviet Union underwent radical internal changes that led to its collapse in 1991 and the rebirth of the Soviet space program as the Russian space program."

-Article from "No Shortage of Dreams" blog: link

Drew Granston: link

source, source, source

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Women pulling Lever on a Drilling Machine, 1978 Lee, Howl & Company Ltd., Tipton, Staffordshire, England photograph by Nick Hedges image credit: Nick Hedges Photography

* * * *

Tim Boudreau 

About the whole DOGE-will-rewrite Social Security's COBOL code in some new language thing, since this is a subject I have a whole lot of expertise in, a few anecdotes and thoughts.

Some time in the early 2000s I was doing some work with the real-time Java team at Sun, and there was a huge defense contractor with a peculiar query: Could we document how much memory an instance of every object type in the JDK uses? And could we guarantee that that number would never change, and definitely never grow, in any future Java version?

I remember discussing this with a few colleagues in a pub after work, and talking it through, and we all arrived at the conclusion that the only appropriate answer to this question as "Hell no." and that it was actually kind of idiotic.

Say you've written the code, in Java 5 or whatever, that launches nuclear missiles. You've tested it thoroughly, it's been reviewed six ways to Sunday because you do that with code like this (or you really, really, really should). It launches missiles and it works.

A new version of Java comes out. Do you upgrade? No, of course you don't upgrade. It works. Upgrading buys you nothing but risk. Why on earth would you? Because you could blow up the world 10 milliseconds sooner after someone pushes the button?

It launches fucking missiles. Of COURSE you don't do that.

There is zero reason to ever do that, and to anyone managing such a project who's a grownup, that's obvious. You don't fuck with things that work just to be one of the cool kids. Especially not when the thing that works is life-or-death (well, in this case, just death).

Another case: In the mid 2000s I trained some developers at Boeing. They had all this Fortran materials analysis code from the 70s - really fussy stuff, so you could do calculations like, if you have a sheet of composite material that is 2mm of this grade of aluminum bonded to that variety of fiberglass with this type of resin, and you drill a 1/2" hole in it, what is the effect on the strength of that airplane wing part when this amount of torque is applied at this angle. Really fussy, hard-to-do but when-it's-right-it's-right-forever stuff.

They were taking a very sane, smart approach to it: Leave the Fortran code as-is - it works, don't fuck with it - just build a nice, friendly graphical UI in Java on top of it that *calls* the code as-is.

We are used to broken software. The public has been trained to expect low quality as a fact of life - and the industry is rife with "agile" methodologies *designed* to churn out crappy software, because crappy guarantees a permanent ongoing revenue stream. It's an article of faith that everything is buggy (and if it isn't, we've got a process or two to sell you that will make it that way).

It's ironic. Every other form of engineering involves moving parts and things that wear and decay and break. Software has no moving parts. Done well, it should need *vastly* less maintenance than your car or the bridges it drives on. Software can actually be *finished* - it is heresy to say it, but given a well-defined problem, it is possible to actually *solve* it and move on, and not need to babysit or revisit it. In fact, most of our modern technological world is possible because of such solved problems. But we're trained to ignore that.

Yeah, COBOL is really long-in-the-tooth, and few people on earth want to code in it. But they have a working system with decades invested in addressing bugs and corner-cases.

Rewriting stuff - especially things that are life-and-death - in a fit of pique, or because of an emotional reaction to the technology used, or because you want to use the toys all the cool kids use - is idiotic. It's immaturity on display to the world.

Doing it with AI that's going to read COBOL code and churn something out in another language - so now you have code no human has read, written and understands - is simply insane. And the best software translators plus AI out there, is going to get things wrong - grievously wrong. And the odds of anyone figuring out what or where before it leads to disaster are low, never mind tracing that back to the original code and figuring out what that was supposed to do.

They probably should find their way off COBOL simply because people who know it and want to endure using it are hard to find and expensive. But you do that gradually, walling off parts of the system that work already and calling them from your language-du-jour, not building any new parts of the system in COBOL, and when you do need to make a change in one of those walled off sections, you migrate just that part.

We're basically talking about something like replacing the engine of a plane while it's flying. Now, do you do that a part-at-a-time with the ability to put back any piece where the new version fails? Or does it sound like a fine idea to vaporize the existing engine and beam in an object which a next-word-prediction software *says* is a contraption that does all the things the old engine did, and hope you don't crash?

The people involved in this have ZERO technical judgement.

[gingiesworld]

I Still Feel You

Wanda Maximoff x GN! Reader/Wanda Maximoft x Vision

Warnings: Angst. Smut. Fluff. Reader has a penis.

Taglist: @ginnsbaker @lockndkey

18+ MINORS DNI

Y/N and Wanda were high school sweethearts. They were each other's firsts, although one time spent together resulted in Wanda getting pregnant. So the two ended up married and parents before graduation. Y/N went to work with their father at his business instead of going to college. Learning tricks of the trade of being a contractor.

Although the strain of early unplanned parenthood resulted in resentment as Wanda was unable to follow her dream. Always wanting to become a famous writer. It wasn't until after the divorce she started to take classes at a community college during the time the twins were in school.

That was where she met Vision, someone who had the same dreams and passions as herself. The two soon became romantically involved, going on dates on the nights the twins stayed with Y/N. Even as the years went on, Vision then proposed to Wanda. Vision came from a poor family and he was shocked to learn that Y/N and Wanda had purchased the house when they were 22. Trying to weasel his way out of having a prenup, although Wanda was pretty firm in her decision of having one.

"Come on Wanda! You can't do this." He yelled as he followed her through to the kitchen. "We don't need a prenup."

"Yes we do!" Wanda yelled. "This house may be in my name but it belongs to the twins and I will be damned if on some level we do get divorced, you will not be taking this home from under their noses!"

"Come on Wanda. They have Y/N." Vision reasoned as Wanda scoffed. "Let them stay with them and then you and I can maybe sell up and we can use the money to travel." At that time, Y/N had come back with the twins. Sending them both upstairs to their rooms.

"You will not be selling this house." Y/N stated as Vision scoffed. "This house is also still in my name and belongs to Wanda and the twins. Not you."

"I am her fiancè. You should respect me when you're in my home." All Y/N done was laugh in his face as Wanda sent a quick text to her brother.

"That's funny. You should do stand up." Y/N said when they calmed down. "This isn't your home. The only things of yours that are under this roof are your clothes. Nothing more." Within record time Pietro arrived and rested his hand on Y/N's shoulder. "Everything in this house is Wanda's and Wanda's alone."

"Vision just leave." Wanda stated as she slipped her ring off of her finger. "It's done."

"You can't be serious!" He boomed as Y/N stood before Wanda protectively.

"Deadly." Wanda told him, her stance never faltering. "We're done." She pushed the ring into his before she disappeared upstairs.

"This is all your fault." Vision seethed as he turned to Y/N.

"It can be my fault but we all know it's yours." Y/N stated as they leaned against the wall, looking at their nails. Little did they know, Wanda was packing everything of Visions as he tried to coax Y/N into a fight.

"You have always been in the way." Vision snarled. "Wanda was never fully mine because she still had you."

"She will always have me." Y/N said as they stood up straight, stepping closer. "I will always protect my family and Wanda is my family. We may be divorced but I will always love her the same." With that Y/N left, leaving Pietro and Vision alone. Wanda soon came down after she threw down Vision's clothes.

"That's all of your things." Wanda stated as she followed the bags. "I'm sure I never missed anything but if I find something, I'll be sure to throw it on the fire."

"You can't do this." Vision boomed as Wanda nodded.

"I can and I am." She stated as she went to get herself a drink. Pietro followed Vision to his car, watching as he drove off.

"Are you ok?" Pietro asked her.

"Where's Y/N?" She questioned as Pietro shook his head.

"They left while you were upstairs." He informed her. The two heard the front door open, both thinking it was Vision coming back to see Y/N with their toolbox and new locks.

"I figured you'd want your locks changing." They told her as they got to work.

"I'll take the twins tonight." Pietro stated as he disappeared upstairs to get the two 12 year olds.

"Thank you." Wanda spoke softly.

"It's no trouble Wanda." Y/N stated as they concentrated. Wanda disappeared to make some coffee as the twins hugged her and Y/N goodbye. Pietro gave Y/N a smile and a small thank you before he led the twins to his car.

"You don't have to do this." Wanda told them as they finished and closed the door. Giving Wanda the new keys.

"I know." They told her as they gracefully took the coffee from her. "But when I said my vows. I meant them. Every word."

"Y/N." Wanda whispered as her heart beat hard and fast inside of her chest.

"I'll always protect you Wanda. You're still everything to me." Y/N confessed as Wanda blushed, hiding her smile behind her cup.

"I still feel you." Wanda blurted out as Y/N headed to change the back door lock. "I just, I still feel you with me. I know we haven't been us in a very long time but I still wish there was still an us. Without the resentment. Without the hateful words."

"I never resented you Wanda." Y/N confessed. "There was never a moment I resented you. Being with you and the twins was always a dream of mine. Yes it was early, years too early but I loved every moment of being with you. Raising those boys together, but I could also see the pain in your eyes. The regrets and dreams you had so I figured stepping aside would be the best option for us and the boys."

"Y/N." Wanda whispered as she approached them. "I'm so sorry."

"Don't be." They shrugged with a smile. "We wouldn't be the people we are today without the time apart."

"I love you." Wanda whispered as Y/N turned away. "I am still in love with you. I just hated the person I was becoming. The hate I felt towards you then. The thoughts I had in my mind. I hated it because I love you. I still do."

With that being said, Y/N turned back to Wanda, kissing her with such passion. A sensation neither had felt in many years of being apart. The feeling of two broken pieces coming together again.

"I never stopped loving you Wanda." Y/N whispered before Wanda pulled them into her again. They pushed her up against the wall, their hands running up her sides. Remembering her body like they had never been apart for so long.

She gasped when their hand went underneath her shirt and caressed her skin. Their tongue dancing with her own. The familiar feeling was overwhelming to say the least. Especially when Wanda pulled her shirt over her head before she pulled Y/N's off. Moaning at the skin contact she had been deprived of for years.

Y/N's hand reached under her sweats and underwear, fingers running through her folds as she moaned into the kiss. Y/N relished in feeling her body react like the way it used to. Applying pressure on her clit as they sucked and kissed her neck.

Wanda was in a state of pure euphoria, a feeling she hasn't had in many years. Y/N knew her inside and out. They knew what made her tick.

"More." She breathed as she felt their index finger tease her entrance. "I need more." They moved from her neck and looked at her face. A soft smile on their face as she moaned in pleasure.

Her face may have aged a little but she was still the same person they fell in love with. The one person who they seeked comfort in whenever they had a hard day.

"Please." Wanda groaned as she tried to fumble with their own trousers. Failing miserably. "I need you Y/N/N." The old nickname slipping from her lips. Y/N helped her rid them both of their underwear. Lifting her up by her thighs, Wanda gasped at their strength. She knew how strong they were, she just hadn't been in the midst of it in years.

The two moaned when they inserted their length into her gaping hole. Wanda lifted their face from her collarbone. Kissing them sloppily as they thrusted their hips. Wanda's head rolled back against the wall as her eyes closed in pleasure. The feeling was one she had soon realised she had missed dearly.

"Fuck Wanda." They groaned as they went harder and faster. "I've missed you so fucking much."

"I missed you." Wanda managed to speak in between moans. Getting closer to her first orgasm in years. "I'm close." She moaned as they continued their movements. Reaching their own high. The two climaxing together, holding onto each other for dear life. Their bodies melded together in sweat as they came down from their high.

"I love you." Wanda whispered as Y/N kissed her tenderly.

"I love you too." Y/N smiled at her. "Do you have the morning after pill?"

"I'm on birth control." Wanda stated. "Vision wanted to try for a baby and I didn't want one." Y/N grabbed their clothes and started to dress, as did Wanda. "I guess I never truly saw a future with him."

"Who do you see a future with?" Y/N questioned as Wanda took a deep breath. Unafraid of the answer she had knew all along.

"You." Wanda stated. "It has always been you. I was stupid to think otherwise but I want to try again. We are older than before, wiser."

"We can start with dates. Get to know each other as these knew people." Y/N agreed as Wanda smiled. "We can start a fresh. The four of us. You, me and the twins can be a family again. In time."

Wanda only sealed it with a gentle kiss. A future full of possibilities for the family they had created together. The family they would always be.

[mariacallous]

Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, a nearly 150-year-old law firm, bent the knee to President Donald Trump Thursday evening when it struck a deal to get rid of the president’s executive order apparently punishing the firm for once employing a lawyer who worked on a case targeting the president.

Trump’s executive order purported to ban the law firm from government contracts, restrict its lawyers from federal buildings and require clients to disclose their employment of the firm when seeking government contracts. It would have been an existential blow to the firm, which operates a broad multinational practice that encompasses everything from mergers and acquisitions to white-collar defense to civil rights and free speech litigation. The deal to make the order go away, as described in a statement posted by Trump on Thursday, requires the firm to restrict its diversity, equity and inclusion practices and provide $40 million in pro bono services to the administration. In effect, the firm has not simply paid off, but joined the administration.

Paul Weiss’ acquiescence is the latest example of a great menace stalking the country in the early days of Trump’s second term: cowardice.

Let’s be clear about what happened here, Trump’s mafioso government extorted the firm to give up its historic support for civil rights and join itself to enacting his autocratic agenda. The firm could have challenged this illegal extortion, as the firm Perkins Coie, also targeted by the administration, has done with success so far, but instead it chose Vichy-style collaboration.

“We are gratified that the President has agreed to withdraw the Executive Order concerning Paul, Weiss,” Brad Karp, Paul Weiss chairman, said in a statement included in Trump’s post. “We look forward to an engaged and constructive relationship with the President and his Administration.”

This is particularly galling from a firm with a laudable history of standing up for civil rights and the advancement of minority groups. Paul Weiss was the first mixed Jewish and WASP law firm in New York City. It was the first American law firm to employ a Black associate, a Black woman associate and first to make a woman a partner. The firm also worked alongside former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall on the Brown v. Board of Education case that ended formal segregation in schools, fought for more inclusive immigration laws during and after the Holocaust and defended free speech rights in a landmark case involving D.H. Lawrence’s novel “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”

To protect its present pecuniary interests, the firm has now decided to throw that history in the gutter by accepting surrender to Trump’s anti-DEI initiatives.

Acquiescing to the Trump administration’s anti-DEI pressure campaign should not be seen in the light of the debate over the merits or demerits of DEI that preceded this administration. Instead, it should be understood as the Trump administration understands it: a frontal assault on civil rights law and desegregation.

Administration allies have all but admitted as much, as conservative activist Chris Rufo did in an interview with The New York Times’ Ross Douthat.

The administration’s actions are also very clear on this. Just look at what the Department of Defense is doing.

Links to web pages about Black, Latino and female military servicemembers buried at Arlington Cemetery have been deleted from parts of the cemetery’s web site. Web pages touting the accomplishments of Black servicemembers, including baseball great Jackie Robinson, were taken down and affixed with the label “DEI” in the page’s URL. (The administration reversed course and restored some pages, including Robinson’s, following outrage from sports media on Thursday.)

The General Services Administration also removed a requirement for contractors to not operate segregated facilities if they wanted to obtain contracts.

This is what eliminating DEI means to the Trump administration. And now, that’s what it means for Paul Weiss.

The firm has already begun to accept the Trump administration’s principles. Some time after the executive order came down, but before the firm allowed itself to be extorted, the firm took down a web page and links to its Center to Combat Hate. The firm launched the center in May 2024 to perform litigation alongside civil rights groups “to confront and redress hate-driven violence and intimidation” in order to “foster a more just and equitable society.” All links to it, including on the social media web site LinkedIn, are now dead.

Paul Weiss is not alone among elite institutions in choosing a whimper, not a bang when threatened by the Trump autocracy. Universities are largely bending over backwards to protect their own financial interests. Administrators at Columbia University are considering allowing itself to be extorted into giving up the university’s autonomy in order to keep $400 million in grants that the administration is using as leverage. The administration is also targeting the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University with similar extortion efforts to seize control of their operations, with dozens of others likely to follow suit.

Nonprofits are being cowed into deleting references to diversity and inclusion, transgender people and changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico, sometimes after facing direct threats from the administration.

Corporations are sucking up and paying up to the administration in pursuit of government contracts, protection from investigation or prosecution and any number of corrupt acts they can extract from the nation’s mob boss. In some cases, corporate leaders, particularly in Silicon Valley, have fully embraced autocratic theories of government as a way to further enrich and empower themselves.

This cowardice is exactly what the Trump administration counts on to succeed. It is also precisely how a liberal democracy can succumb to autocracy: Private actors are putting their private interests above the common good. They have forgotten that liberalism and democracy do not just provide rights that protect their private interests, but demand public duties of citizens to uphold them. Those who choose otherwise accept their own corruption.

These elite institutions cannot, and will not save liberalism. Nor will they save democracy. They can join the people or they can join the autocrats in the public and private spheres who wish to rule as kings.

It’s time to ask: Which side are you on?

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Ben Makuch at The Guardian:

Silicon Valley has played a sizable part in the early days of Donald Trump’s new administration, but another familiar face in the Maga-verse is beginning to emerge: businessman Erik Prince, often described by his critics as a living “Bond villain”. Prince is the most famous mercenary of the contemporary era and the founder of the now defunct private military company Blackwater. For a time, it was a prolific privateer in the “war on terror”, racking up millions in US government contracts by providing soldiers of fortune to the CIA, Pentagon and beyond. Now he is a central figure among a web of other contractors trying to sell Trump advisers on a $25bn deal to privatize the mass deportations of 12 million migrants. In an appearance on NewsNation, he immediately tried to temper that his plan had any traction. “No indications, so far,” said Prince about a federal contract materializing. “Eventually if they’re going to hit those kinds of numbers and scale, they’re going to need additional private sector.” But the news had people wondering, how is Prince going to factor into the second Trump presidency? Sean McFate, a professor at Georgetown University who has advised the Pentagon and the CIA, said: “Erik Prince has always been politically connected to Maga, the Maga movement, and that’s going back to 2015.” Prince, himself a special forces veteran and ex-Navy Seal, is a known business associate of Steve Bannon, the architect of Trump’s first electoral win. Prince even appeared with him last July at a press conference before Bannon surrendered to authorities and began a short prison sentence for defying a congressional subpoena. [...] Beginning during the two Bush administrations, Blackwater was a major recipient of Pentagon money flowing into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But a massacre in Baghdad at the hands of some of his contractors led to prison sentences, congressional inquiries and blacklistings of the firm. Years later, Trump would come to the rescue: pardoning all of the Blackwater mercenaries involved in the massacre. Now, with the current administration, which is doling out free advertising to Elon Musk and other Maga loyalists, Prince has a new and familiar ally in Washington. [...] Post-Blackwater and under new companies, he has proposed missions in Afghanistan, Ukraine, Congo, Libya and, purportedly, Venezuela – a country he often mentions as ripe for overthrow on his podcast, Off Leash. A senior commander in an alliance of former Venezuelan soldiers who defected from the Chavista regime told the Guardian his organization has been asking Prince for help against the country’s current president, Nicolás Maduro.

From the 02.25.2025 edition of NewsNation's On Balance With Leland Vittert:

Mercenary Erik Prince is urging the Trump Regime to use private contractors to assist in mass deportation efforts.

[yurious-george]

Benzene Contractor's Shockingly Misogynistic Character Arc

Before we begin: Let's get a few things straight.

This is a post by someone who thinks way too hard about this webcomic. I do not mean that Ben is a misogynist. Nor do I mean that Mary Cagle is a misogynist. Nor am I arguing that Mary Cagle did this purposefully at all - in fact, I fully believe the connotations are entirely accidental. No one involved in this story has the end goal of oppressing women. I am only arguing his character arc comes across misogynistically.

No, Benzene's character arc is misogynistic because his arc completely overrides Steffi's.

Old Kiwi Blitz: Ben as sidekick and Steffi's original trajectory

First, a little context. Benzene Contractor really only exists because of the LoT OCT, which Mary Cagle participated in back in the 2000s. An Original Character Tournament (OCT) was an old deviantart event where artists' original characters battle it out; two fights would be submitted, and the fight deemed better became canon. The rules for the Law of Talos (LoT) OCT, where Steffi largely originates, required every competing character to have a sidekick or two to play off of. Hence, Benzene Contractor and Employee Lady (later Francis Freeman.)

But Steffi is the main character, both in her LoT entries and Kiwi Blitz. In her own words: It's her show. If someone does the character development, it's got to be her, right? Benzene is just the guy in the chair. He helps with strategy, but Steffi is smart enough that she disregards his advice. When he has input, Steffi can out-strategize him in circles, and it's through her ability to strategize that she wins against her earliest enemies. And early Kiwi Blitz holds to that pretty well.

But his function is still important. While Steffi can hold her own, it's Benzene who calls her on her ridiculousness and self-centeredness. As she tells Reed in track 4, she's mostly going into heroism because of "boredom," and she nearly lets the Raccoon get away because she's fantasizing about newscasters singing her praises. And it's Ben who gives her her most important character revelation of early KB:

This is the moment that truly solidifies what Steffi's arc has to be. Here, it's clear "boredom" isn't enough of a motivation for heroism. She has to truly consider the people she's protecting people, not just faces in a crowd. And, likewise, she can't keep disregarding her allies' feelings and advice, especially when it puts her in danger.

Gear: what pushes Steffi to grow

You can't meaningfully analyze Steffi without bringing up Gear. It's Gear that indirectly causes Ben and Steffi's falling out, and it's Gear ripping Reed's arm off that causes Steffi to finally spill her backstory and apologize for the trouble she's caused. For all Steffi disputes Gear's insinuations she's her fated nemesis, Gear's entire function as a character is to push Steffi to her absolute limit. It's Track 5 & 6, Steffi vs Gear, where Steffi first struggles - and finally loses - a fight. And it's those same tracks that give us a hint to our biggest piece of Steffi backstory: how Steffi lost her leg, and the true core mechanism of how she operates. In fact, despite Steffi going into heroism for shallow reasons, track 6 is our first hint Steffi might be more than what she seems - a hint proven right in track 10. Thus, the primary function of track 9 is to imply Gear is more than what she seems.

And so, Gear's internal mechanisms become central. What's the difference between a criminal and a villain, indeed. Much like Steffi, Gear doesn't consider the people "beneath her" as people. The normals are just toys for Gear to abuse to get the hero's attention in this big game they're both playing. Sure, Gear is evil about it, but they function on the exact same logic. Thus, the 'win condition' of KB is exceedingly clear: Steffi has to truly, definitively win against Gear. More than just physically and strategically, but ideologically: grow beyond that fucked-up logic, truly care for the people around her, and come into her own as a hero. And ideally with a curb-stomp smackdown, because we're doing girl shonen here.

Despite Ben showing up for the last minute save in track 9, don't think Ben saving Steffi in the rain de-centered Steffi's capabilities. Steffi is still too green take Gear on, and Ben ex Machina is simply a moment that highlights how Steffi needs to grow. He just has the right skillset to take Gear off balance for a second and run. But Gear is stronger than the two of them put together: she cannot stay defeated with brute force. Gear slinking away promises an eventual rematch, which, 5 years later, we finally get.

Ben's character arc at the expense of Steffi's

So. Remember how Steffi can't beat Gear with brute force and has to improvise and think smarter than her, and that was an established trait of her character in the early tracks? Guess who solves the problem of Gear with brute force in Steffi and Gear's rematch.

That's right: Ben!

Let's backtrack a bit.

As the story gets more serious, Ben goes through some major developments. It's Ben, as the serious one, who makes the hard choices and is willing to do the serious stuff. And it's Ben who picks up and uses a gun against others, which Steffi's anime mecha hijinks aren't up to snuff for. Fine in of itself.

But as characterization marches on, Steffi's characterization as a strategist is slowly lost. Suddenly, it's Ben doing all the strategizing while Steffi goofs off. Suddenly, it's Ben having flashbacks to the rain fight, not Steffi. Suddenly, Ben is doing most of the action stuff while Steffi plays support, not the other way around.

Ben slowly takes over as the main character. He never does completely, but his role as the capable one overrides Steffi’s capabilities. Steffi used to be a good strategist despite being a bit of a fool, and now she’s all fool and no strategy.

Ben gets character development. It's Ben who comes into his own and grows from just some guy and proves himself time and time again. He goes from being the guy in the chair to being the guy with the gun who's out doing heroics just as much as Steffi, and moreso, to an extent. And that could work, you know? If Steffi was pushing herself just as hard, or was shown to be improving nearly so much. But Steffi doesn't get the same attention or care. What's Steffi's arc? What does Steffi want? Does Steffi grow or do things just kind of keep happening and she's present for it? (Hint: it's the latter.)

You can argue that they're equals on the battlefield now, and you may well be correct. I don't mind Ben's character arc, I mind that it comes at the expense of Steffi's. I'd rather get an archive where Steffi, the main character and one with a hero complex, comes into her own as a hero rather than her sidekick.

What went wrong

However, there are two major factors outside the narrative that have nothing to do with misogyny that impacted why it turned out this way.

The first is that Mary is, well, likely pretty embarrassed by Steffi. Steffi's the high-energy chaos goblin variety protagonist, and all the supporting characters are some flavor of straight-man to her fool. Very shonen, very anime, but as KB stretches on, you can almost feel how embarrassed MC is of her teenage "favorite OC" as she grew up into adulthood, how the story KB tries to tell becomes more serious and Steffi is given less to do as a character. The story slowly de-centers Steffi, because MC, as much as she holds affection for her old characters, really doesn't want you to look at her old deviantart oc. Steffi even loses her distinctive strawberry roll hairstyle, because over the top anime hair is cringe now!

The second is that Benzene and Steffi are Assigned Love Interests. The boy main character and the girl main character have to hook up, because that's just how it works. They weren't paired up because Mary was invested in their romantic relationship, she wrote it that way because she felt she had to, which she's admitted herself. And good boyfriends protect their girlfriends - never mind that Steffi, as the main character, should be able to protect herself.

Somewhere between "my main character is cringe now, better give her less to do" and "she was a girl, he was a boy, can I make it any more obvious" something bad happened. It's all completely subconscious, and utterly on accident, but the thing about Kiwi Blitz is that it's excruciatingly from the era. Mary Cagle isn't a misogynist, but she's been incorporating tropes and aspects of other things she enjoyed since day one. It's just that the media we consume is starkly misogynistic, large and by, in completely mundane and otherwise imperceptible ways, if you're not tuned like sonar to it.

How to fix it: final analysis & conclusion

I'd love to end the analysis of the story's flaws there, but unfortunately, Steffi's characterization is so thoroughly forgotten she becomes completely incoherent. If the gradual overtaking of Ben's character arc is a boiling frog, page 528 is where the frog is officially soup.

Her characterization has flip-flopped from someone who needs to care about the people she's protecting and grow into her hero complex, to someone who cares too much and needs to put herself first.

This has never been the case in the past. There is no ceiling. The frog is soup.

(There is some room for deconstructing a hero complex in the first place. Time and time again, KB says being a "hero" is not any better than being "normal," and Steffi's antics cause more harm than good to those around her. Once you get past the attention-seeking and excitement of heroism, all that's left is sincere, selfless compassion. Self-sacrifice is not a healthy way to live, but giving Steffi a brief moment of true, self-sacrifical heroism before letting her live the rest of her life without a hero complex arguably heightens her arc, not lessens it.)

(EDIT: piggybacking off the above, this also changes how her final showdown with Gear would go. As KB’s tone gets slightly darker and the concept of “heroism” is deconstructed, how Steffi defeats Gear progresses from a “why you suck” smackdown to “I understand you, and it isn’t fair, but I’m going to try and make it better.” If the only good thing left about heroism is compassion, then the nature of how Steffi defeats her villain changes. Especially since tracks 5 & 10 dangle the concept of Steffi & Gear friendship over them and Gear is revealed to have similar trauma to Steffi in track 19, the whole “you’re wrong, you suck, and I’m nothing like you (anymore)” shtick comes across as inappropriate, and frankly uncharacteristically cruel.)

So, frankly, past track 10, the characterization issues build up so slowly that once you get to the stuff that needs to be fixed, fixing it requires undoing all the stuff that came before. However, I do have a hypothesis for correcting the garage fight:

Give Steffi the gun.

Make Steffi make the hard choice. Make it clear no one is coming to save her from Gear - everyone in the house is gone, including Ben. Continue the ideological conversation Gear started, not the pointless stuff about normal people and ALTER, and show that Steffi has truly thought about it. And, even though she won't definitively defeat Gear in the garage, the final fight of Kiwi Blitz has to be Steffi against Gear, and Steffi has to win.

Removing Gear from the narrative to focus on ALTER means Steffi's characterization suffers; when the main character's characterization suffers, her male sidekick fills in to pick up the slack. And that will always have absolutely terrible optics regarding the female main character's agency. The male sidekick taking over what is, ostensibly, a feminist story about a female main character growing up through the other characters (nearly all female!) she meets comes across as misogynistic. Ben may be important, sure, but the true heart of this story is two girls on opposite extremes of the same selfish mindset, challenging each other.

Without Gear, Steffi doesn't grow up, and Ben has distracted the story and de-centered the female main character so thoroughly she barely has a character at all.

Which may be by accident, but misogynistic all the same.

dedicated to @deadc0py, who I've copy-pasted several pieces of analysis from our discord dms into this piece.

[tomorrowusa]

First a heads-up. Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman has retired from the New York Times. But he is now fairly active at his Substack. Occasionally we'll be linking some of his work there.

In this piece, Dr. Krugman argues that the MAGA war on the "deep state" is also a war on America's health.

One enduring theme of the MAGA movement has been hostility toward the “deep state” — what people outside the movement might call professional civil servants. Trump and company believe that the deep state is out to get them, which is paranoid. But they’re not wrong to believe that public employees who see themselves as working for the nation rather than for whoever currently occupies the White House pose a problem for their agenda. So what will MAGA do, now that it’s in power? Many observers, myself included, have focused on plans to convert a number of civil service jobs into political appointments. But just a few days into the new regime it’s clear that the assault on professional government will be much broader than that — that it will involve an effort to intimidate and politicize civil servants, too. And early indications are that one prime target will be agencies devoted to protecting public health. [ ... ] Public health agencies, even more than the rest of the government, are in the firing line. You can’t talk seriously about health policy without taking race and gender into account; yet according to the New York Times, one contractor collecting demographic data for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has already been told to stop work, and the results of an already completed survey won’t be released. But wait, there’s more: federal health agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes for Health, have been ordered to pause all external communications, including health advisories and scientific reports. NIH, in particular, appears to have been effectively put in lockdown, with even routine meetings canceled and employees forbidden to travel.

He concludes...

If MAGA had been around at the time, do you have any doubts that it would have opposed all of these public health measures and accused their proponents of being part of some dark conspiracy? And when — not if — the next pandemic strikes, do you expect our battered, politicized public health agencies to keep Americans properly informed? If Trump is still in charge, do you expect him to respond effectively, as opposed to minimizing the threat and muzzling anyone who might contradict him? It’s hard to feel optimistic about any of these concerns.

Did I just hear the word "pandemic"? There is some distressing news out of Uganda from the Washington Post.

Uganda announced Thursday that a nurse, 32, had died of Ebola in the capital, Kampala, amid a new outbreak of the deadly virus there — the first in two years. The country has activated emergency response procedures, officials said. Uganda registered 164 cases and 55 confirmed deaths from Ebola over four months in late 2022. That outbreak ended early the following year. The patient died after experiencing fever-like symptoms and seeking treatment at several hospitals and from a traditional healer, Diana Atwine, permanent secretary of the Health Ministry, said in a statement on Thursday. His fever, chest pain and breathing difficulty progressed to unexplained bleeding, a common symptom of a severe case of Ebola. Forty-four close contacts have been cited for tracing, including 30 health workers and patients from a hospital and 11 family members.

Ebola makes COVID seem like a fun disease. The mortality rate for the 2014 outbreak of Ebola in West Africa was around 40%. The Obama administration took decisive action to limit Ebola in the United States. Thanks to quick science-based action, the number of Ebola cases in the US was limited to 11 (eleven). Out of the 11, just 2 cases were contracted inside the US. 2 of the 11 died – 18.2% or less than half of the international rate.

At the end of the Obama administration, his National Security Council staff authored a guide called "Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents" and left it for Trump to use. Of course Trump ignored it.

Trump team failed to follow NSC’s pandemic playbook

The first COVID-19 case appeared in the US on 21 January 2020. Instead of taking decisive measures recommended in the Obama pandemic playbook, Trump said this to his favorite CNBC host.

While Trump dawdled and did the usual Trumpian things like rage tweet about the 2020 Oscars, the virus spread throught the US. He only got around to declaring a pandemic emergency on Friday the 13th of March – a day after the stock markets crashed.

^^^ dark red = deaths, orange/pink = infections

By March 13th, COVID-19 had spread to 49 states and DC. Ultimately, at least 30% of the US population became infected and 1.14 million deaths were reported.

If Ebola spreads to the US while Trump and RFK Jr. are in charge, expect a catastrophe.

[tgmsunmontue]

You need to learn how to fall 2/10

Hangster (and IceMav) - Bradley is too tall to be a naval aviator and instead becomes a sky diver, specialising in spin recovery. He is a civilian contractor to the Airforce and Navy to teach pilots how to survive parachute spins from ejections. A more in-depth version of this post.

PROLOGUE

2003-2006 – The early years

                “Your son is very focused. His discipline is admirable. He’s going to go far. He’s going to be our youngest certified tandem skydiver.”

                Pete’s throat works, because it’s not the first time someone has called Bradley his, but hearing someone else talk about his skill… to sound impressed not only with Bradley but also as a reflection of Pete’s own efforts. He didn’t realize he needed someone external telling him he’d done a good job, but here it is anyway.

                “I’m Navy. He’s been brought up in a fairly disciplined household.”

                “He mentioned that actually. He never thought about joining the service?”

                “He’s too tall.”

                “What?”

                “To be a naval aviator. I’m a naval aviator.”

                “Clearly didn’t get his height from you.”

                “No…” Pete says dryly, doesn’t bother mentioning the convoluted relationship that he and Bradley have.

                “So what, he jumps out of planes instead of flying them?”

                “Oh, he can fly them too. He’s been flying since he was 14. Perk of having a whole bunch of honorary uncles willing to fly him up and getting him his flight hours. Unfortunately he can’t both pilot the plane and then jump out of it,” Pete says.

                “He’s a lucky kid.”

                Mav hopes he remains lucky.

…             …             …

                It’s become second nature, either of them able to also carry out the safety checks and make sure that Bradley has definitely done everything. He never misses anything and it soothes a part of Tom, knowing Bradley takes his own health and safety seriously. There is no cutting corners or rushing through anything. They never talk about Goose, but he wonders if he thinks about his father every time he checks the stitching for wear, every time he runs his hands over the fabric and checks for tears before rolling it carefully to ensure it unfurls correctly while he’s plummeting toward the earth.

                They all learn about static lines and accelerated freefall, and things have changed since he was in flight school. The materials they use now are much more durable. All of Bradley’s gifts are centered around skydiving. Tom becomes fairly knowledgeable around the entire process, another set of regulations to add to his already encyclopedic knowledge of Naval regulations. He somehow becomes friendly with a couple of the higher ups in the FAA and he becomes known around the airstrip as Ice, most people not realizing exactly who he is. He admits it to himself that he likes it, that he’s just a guy who knows a lot about planes. Added to that is the US Parachute Association and Tom has a new map in his study showing all the drop zones in the state as well as the neighboring states.

                Neither of them had intended to become this involved but neither of them say anything to each other. Tom has had to check with several people about potential conflicts of interest, but it’s agreed that he is, first and foremost, a naval aviator, so if he wants to fly a private plane on his own time that’s allowable, as long as he’s meeting all the FAA regulations. The FAA make a special dispensation (his new friends doing him this favor), allowing them to sign off flight hours, but neither of them are officially instructors. They do both become FAA-certified parachute riggers though.

                It’s through one guy he knows in the FAA that he acquires the hangar. It’s an old Navy one, but Pete’s been making noises about wanting to renovate a P-51 Mustang he keeps seeing for sale, but how he’s got nowhere to keep it. They could store another plane there too, Bradley’s sky-diving one in the future. It seems like it’s definitely going to happen, Bradley making a business plan and presenting it to them and asking to have his parent’s life insurance money to help him purchase a plane. Tom can give their planes a home, so he purchases the hangar and gives it to them a joint fortieth birthday gift for Mav and graduation present for Bradley.

                A different plane comes into their life a little earlier than anticipated, although none of them have to buy it. Pete comes to an agreement with one of Bradley’s instructors. They’ll store the plane in their currently empty hangar in exchange for being able to use it to take Bradley up for jumps, paying for fuel and carrying out the checks and maintenance. Somehow word gets around – there are two pilots capable of signing off flight hours. They can count as solo flights as they aren’t instructors. Others wanting to jump out of planes arrange times with Bradley.

                He hasn’t spent so much time in the air since flight school and he loves every moment, regardless of whether he’s piloting or doing the checks before Bradley does his jumps. His relationship with Mav has settled into an easier less-volatile thing, maybe his promotion to Rear Admiral has made him feel less threatened by the potential fallout if anyone decides to voice their concerns about his relationship with Pete.

…             …             …

                “I’ve done it. The five-hundred jumps, more than three years in sky diving, done more than fifty jumps in the last year, got my medical and I’ve got more than 8 hours of freefall time logged. I can apply for the Tandem course now…”

                “Proud of you. You’ve been working towards this for a long time.”

                “Thank you! For taking me up and buying the hangar, and just… thank you so much. I know you and Mav both don’t really get it, but you’ve never made me feel like I didn’t have your support this entire time.”

                “It’s what parents do. Good parents that is.”

                He throws his arms around Ice then, hugs him tightly and doesn’t let go.

                “The best parents.”

2007-2010 - The middle years (NEXT PART)