#Executive function theft

[marithlizard]

Fascinating read and YES this is totally a thing. I'm going to have to read more by this person.

[audhd-space]

EXECUTIVE FUNCTION THEFT

Have you guys heard of this term?

I have only discovered that term today from reading this tweet here.

Executive Function Theft (EFT) is defined as:

the deliberate abdication of decision-making, tasks, and responsibilities that are perceived as administrative or repetitive, of lesser importance, or aren’t pleasant or shiny, to another person, with the result that the receiving person’s executive function becomes so exhausted that they are unable to participate in, contribute to, or enjoy higher level efforts.

Source:

[harleymonster]

Oh ho ho, no I'm not doing it! About 3 weeks ago I received an erroneous email about someone being deleted from the work systems within the next month. I haven't been their line manger for months, so I told them they should follow up with their current line manager.

Cut to today, and they've had all access revoked and no longer show on the org chart. Their line manager has asked that I speak to HR to get it sorted because I got the one email. Sure, I got that email but I didn't get the contract extension email, and also I am NOT their line manager. I put my foot down and said I'll send you their contractor number but I'm not speaking to HR. I already explained that this would happen weeks ago and it's not my job in this instance. I'm not getting dragged into it 🤗

[krisrisk]

once again frustrated how peoplemworkin office jobs have no clue of using the systems they're handed and work with every day.

Asked someone to please just add me to their appointment in the calendar, because i didn't have my phone with me. Got a paper card with the date/time of appointment and was told to make my own in my calendar.

"That won't work. I will have forgotten when i get my phone."

"I can write you an email as a reminder."

"Please just add me to the meeting in your calnedar. You already have my email."

"i'm not allowed. It's against company policy."

"You use Outlook. And are not allowed to invite people to appointments?"

"Only people who work internally."

"Are you aware that i won't get access to your calendar? I won't see anything in your calendar. I will get an appointment in MY calendar. With your email. Which i already have."

"I'm not allowed."

😑

This comes from too many companies. People do NOT get trained on how to use Outlook. Or Word. People always claim they know and that they work with it, then use spaces instead of tab stops.

I'm so tired.

[ahedderick]

Trust not trusting

Holy mother of god, I am ready to commit an atrocity. Before starting to paint, today, I took time to pay some bills, check over the tax return packages from our accountant, and look at the tax forms for the trust my late father set up (it gets its Own tax return!). After I checked things over, I scanned the pages of the trust returns (federal and state) that pertain to $ owed for 2024 and $ owed for quarterly estimated payments for 2025.

I then wrote a short email to the person, C, who takes care of the trust at the financial office. C has a poor track record for reading and understanding emails, so I kept it very brief, typed a little chart for the four checks that need to be cut, and attached the scan of the forms that the accountant prepared.

THEN I started painting. After about an hour, when I was having a surprising amount of trouble with gray and black, the phone rang. It was C. She SAID she wanted to double check everything. She ACTUALLY needed me to read the email to her. The email I just sent. The brief, easily-read email that had absolutely all the info in it.

While a random person one meets in the supermarket might have trouble getting federal/state tax for 2024 and quarterly estimated for 2025 straight in their head . . I can't believe that a person who deals with finance professionally would have any trouble with that. However. We had to go through it multiple times before she seemed to understand what was happening.

By that point, I was 175% done. I had to ask. "Is this? the only trust you guys have?" No, she told me, they have lots of them. Are you fucking ALL of them up, or just mine? I did not say, but I very much wanted to.

I just cleaned my brushes. There is no bloody way I can concentrate on mechanical gauges and dials and shadows and highlights after that. I am just. I. I think I am going to go sit by the creek.

TheftofExecutiveFunction.png

[kragehund-est]

you can't just cry "executive function theft" about people asking for sources on your multiparagraph post that demonizes and lies about a group of people. have you never heard of burden of proof? you are insane.

[veluigi]

where's that extremely relevant post about executive function theft!!!

What the “haha millennials can’t even make phone calls” crowd fails to appreciate is that making phone calls is a far more user-hostile and physically uncomfortable experience than it was 15-20 years ago.

[sha-brytols]

(shaking violently and uncontrollably) @mournmage reminded me of the cyberpunk au i've been brainrotting over and now it's everyone else's problems

hawke is a former nomad who moved to night city with their family and became a merc to support them

varric is hawke's fixer and the owner of a dive bar in heywood. the bar also functions as his front for smuggling goods and people across the border (he's actually the guy who snuck the hawke family into the city)

aveline is a war vet-turned street kid-turned ncpd recruit. she's been on the receiving end of the ncpd's abuse and corruption, but still believes there's a place for justice and reform in the force and works tirelessly to change the system from the inside (does it work? no ❤️)

anders is a ripperdoc and ex-corpo medic who was blacklisted from his job for refusing to implant military tech in a patient's head and then in a hysterical turn of events had it planted in his head by the company as retaliation. the chip in question is an engram of a former highly respected military commander who was executed for disobeying orders and trying to defect. he now lives rent free in anders' head and the two are constantly at war over control of his body

merrill is a nomad and edgerunner who was exiled from her family for messing around with technology that they had outlawed. she works as a netrunner for varric, who lets her sleep on a mattress in his bar's storage closet, and is desperately working on a dangerous experimental cyberware project to try to win back her clan's respect and return home.

fenris is an escaped corpo bodyguard who was heavily experimented on with prototype implants by the corporation who purchased him from his family. his biotechnical implants effectively make him a living part of the net, able to phase into the system and physically manifest in cyberspace. his escape didn't come without consequences: a glitch in the system means he can no longer safely disconnect from the net without triggering the bio-implant equivalent of a core meltdown

isabela is a solo who specializes in corporate espionage and theft. after getting a job from the wrong people, she ended up getting a hit placed on her head by one of the most dangerous fixers in the city and is currently laying low and working with varric as a runner until it blows over. she's a habitual thief and, unbeknownst to the rest of the crew, is still currently in possession of the object of her failed heist: a valuable, one-of-a-kind prototype bioware implant that's currently being hunted for across the entire city.

sebastian is a disgraced corpo/rockerboy who was next in line to take over his father's empire when his secret playboy lifestyle was exposed and he was ousted from his family and inheritance. he's since been forced to turn to the merc life to support himself, although his wealthy upbringing often leaves him out of touch with the realities of street life. varric took him in as a singer for his bar after seeing his talent at an amateur night at the local redlight club. he's a skilled sniper who fights using a modified rifle he stole from the family arsenal before being forcibly evicted from the compound.

sydney is a loser who hasn't played cyberpunk in over a year and her knowledge on the lore is patchy at best so if any of this isn't canon compliant yes it is ❤️

[seat-safety-switch]

Copper theft is the fastest-growing industry in our country. Whereas before you had to work an entire week of a job you hate, now you can just head to your local substation and grab some wire. Is it live? Maybe. Are you going to be the first person to get there? Statistically, no. Like Dr. Seuss once said: the early bird gets fucking charred, and then the bird who shows up about 15 minutes later and steps through the pre-cut hole in the fence and over the smoking corpse gets $11.63 in copper.

Now, you might think that it is depressing that so many people in our society are driven to destroying parts of the infrastructure in order to survive. And that is true. Even though running from guard dogs is good cardio, the current state of affairs is meeting few of local government's standards for proper functionality. We all pay for the cost of this theft, from elevated taxes to jacked-up power company service fees. The latter is especially tragic, as the amount that the fees are jacked up would otherwise go entirely to executive compensation instead of replacing some Romex.

Me, I'm doing my part. By driving a car that features as little wiring as possible, thieves aren't lured to steal it, and I won't have to buy more copper in order to replace that stolen wire. The planet will be that little bit happier knowing that an open-pit copper mine on the other side of the planet will fill underground aquifers up with horrific man-made solvents slightly slower due to my reduction in demand. And I've made exciting advancements in the field of using old coat hangers to replace some of that copper, too. I'm not gonna pass up a chance to make some extra money, after all, even if I do have to live with extremely dim headlights and wipers that only work on one side. Thieves made it like this, officer. I'm innocent.

[gallifreyinstituteforlearning]

Unsure if this has been asked before, apologies if it has:

What would the after effects be of a psionic/telepathic "invasion" so to speak?

(AKA what after effects would the doctor have felt ((if any)) after dealing with the midnight entity?)

What are the after-effects of a psionic/telepathic invasion?

When dealing with psionic injuries in Gallifreyans—particularly those resulting from invasive contact with non-corporeal entities—we refer to a broad category of conditions defined under the Psionic Emergency Pathway (PEP).

While official documentation is… sparse (the Doctor famously doesn't complete post-incident reports), we can construct a probable timeline and symptom profile based on established telepathic medicine.

���� Incident Summary: The Midnight Entity

An unknown, non-physical being boarded a sealed passenger vehicle and began exerting escalating influence over its occupants. Its attention quickly narrowed to the Doctor. Key phenomena included:

Vocal echolocation and mimicry

Escalation from repetition to predictive speech

Full synchronisation with the Doctor's vocal output

Attempted identity override (suggested: theft or occupation)

Early-stage motor control hijack

The entity displayed no visible form and no conventional material interface. Its attack relied entirely on psionic and linguistic synchronisation, using echo as a vector for infiltration—essentially, verbal parasitism.

⚠️ During: Psionic Overload in Real Time

Given the suddenness and intensity of the invasion, the most immediate condition would have been an acute psionic overload—a psychic event not unlike being struck by lightning. The Doctor's symptoms suggest the following:

Cognitive flooding: The Doctor's verbal output was being hijacked in real time, likely overwhelming his executive function.

Hyperarousal: His nervous system was likely in a state of acute sensory overload. Bright lights, movement, and—critically—touch may have felt agonising, especially as physical contact during high psionic stress can register as invasive or even violent. Being dragged or restrained likely amplified the sense of helplessness and pain.

Collapse of self–other boundary: As the entity's mimicry escalated, the boundary between 'self' and 'other' began to collapse. This kind of identity erosion isn't subtle—it feels like drowning inside your own skull.

It's crucial to note that this was a non-consensual invasion. Gallifreyans are naturally telepathic and capable of mutual psionic contact—but when such a connection is forced, recursive and predatory, it causes intense psychic trauma.

Had medical staff been present, immediate intervention would have included isolation fields, mental shielding, and emergency grounding protocols. Unfortunately, he got stuck in it for a while.

💢 After: Physical and Mental Symptoms

The Doctor appears to regain full cognitive control following the entity's removal, but several post-event symptoms are likely based on standard PEP cases:

Physical Symptoms (often delayed onset):

Severe migraines: Not just headaches—these are deep, radiating neural pains centred around the epiphysis cerebri (pineal gland), sometimes described as a “burnt light” sensation in the brain. Likely worsened by strong telepathic fields and loud environments.

Nosebleeds / Auditory overstimulation: The Doctor may have experienced sensory rebound—ordinary sounds could have become painfully sharp, triggering vascular dilation and minor bleeds.

Vocal dysregulation: After being hijacked at the linguistic level, many patients may experience lingering 'echoes' in their own speech—accidental mimicry of cadence, or slight stuttering as the speech centre recalibrates.

Fatigue and psionic dissonance: Gallifreyans recovering from psionic trauma may feel out-of-sync with their own thoughts, like the body and mind aren't coordinating properly.

Mental Symptoms (subtler, but more persistent):

Echo hallucinations: The voice of the invading entity may replay in memory like a looped recording, often triggered by stress or quiet environments.

Sleep disturbances / Lucid dreaming: Psionic trauma commonly leads to highly vivid or even semi-telepathic dreams, where the patient re-experiences the event or constructs psychic defences in their sleep.

Telepathic noise: Even after regaining control, residual psionic static may persist as background mental 'chatter' more severe than usual.

Emotional volatility: Anger, paranoia, guilt, or sudden dissociation—these aren't signs of weakness, but common responses to near-possession.

🧬 Long-Term Sequelae: Psionic Microscars

The most likely chronic consequence is the formation of psionic microscars—subtle, often invisible structural distortions in the mind's telepathic matrix. These do not usually impair function, but can:

Trigger minor glitches in psionic reception

Cause ghost echoes (phantom voices or thoughts) under stress

Reduce resistance to future possession-type invasions

Prompt avoidance behaviour

This may help explain the Doctor's notably visceral reaction when encountering it in a later incarnation.

🧾 Summary: What Midnight Did to the Mind

The Midnight Entity attack was psionic, invasive, and likely structurally damaging. The 10th Doctor almost certainly experienced acute overload during the incident and likely carried residual trauma, even if never formally diagnosed.

If this were a standard case presented to a Gallifreyan medical team, treatment would have included:

Immediate Zero Room rest for stabilisation

Neural recalibration via psycho-healer or TARDIS resonance

Regular telepathic check-ins

Long-term monitoring for degenerative changes

🏫So…

Please consult your TARDIS or a Gallifreyan Hospitaller if you've recently been mirrored, mimicked, or temporarily overwritten.

Related:

💬|⚕️The Stolen Earth (10th Doctor): Breakdown of the Dalek shooting scene in The Stolen Earth (4x12).

⚕️🔮Psionic Emergency Pathways

Hope that helped! 😃

Any orange text is educated guesswork or theoretical. More content ... →📫Got a question? | 📚Complete list of Q+A and factoids →📢Announcements |🩻Biology |🗨️Language |🕰️Throwbacks |🤓Facts → Features: ⭐Guest Posts | 🍜Chomp Chomp with Myishu →🫀Gallifreyan Anatomy and Physiology Guide (pending) →⚕️Gallifreyan Emergency Medicine Guides →📝Source list (WIP) →📜Masterpost If you're finding your happy place in this part of the internet, feel free to buy a coffee to help keep our exhausted human conscious. She works full-time in medicine and is so very tired 😴

[fuck-customers]

I get that Executive Function Theft is a thing. But sometimes customers just need to understand the Health Insurance Agent on the phone isn't secretly out to get them.

I spent over an hour on the phone with your doctor trying to get them to respond to a two question PA and they put me on hold for 20 minutes.

I'm sorry I can't guarantee your PA will be processed immediately, but guess what... I was only supposed to wait for 5 minutes. I'm not supposed to call the doctor for you. And threatening me isn't going to make things easier on you.

I'm sorry you need your medication and your doctor doesn't know how to access their own fax server. There is only so much I can do and spending an hour of my time trying to get a doctor to access their fax server isn't an efficient use of my time.

There are literally thousands of other customers who need help. I've already spent an hour on the phone. So guess what it's your medication, it's your health. Your can lay the pressure on your doctor. Because if every Agent did this for every patient we wouldn't get anything done

Posted by admin Rodney

[kaibutsushidousha]

Thoughts on Toshiro?

You know Hitsugaya was the most popular Bleach character at some point but then his popularity started plummeting in the second half and he finished only in tenth at the last one? I think that's very warranted and reflective of his place in the narrative.

Hitsugaya is introduced as practically a protagonist. The Soul Society arc does two plots in parallel: a rescue mission starring Ichigo and a murder mystery starring Hitsugaya. He's our lens into the new world we're curious about and a compelling enough detective character to carry the wholly unsolvable case of Aizen's murder through his emotional investment on it via Hinamori.

But the tragedy that makes itself evident as we distance ourselves from this strong beginning is that Hitsugaya's detective role is a lot more interesting than his actual characterization.

It's not like he got no personality while he was busy being the detective. His character is clearly defined in a way that's even visible in his design. He's the kid captain. The immature prodigy who tries too hard to be respected, and does it through ill-thought methods like enforcing that people call him "captain", never doing anything child-like, and wishing he was taller.

Even after Aizen's case is wrapped as it can be, Hitsugaya's character still stands enough on its own to have a functional arc unrelated to it. His deal is that he learned Bankai even before he joined the Gotei 13, and that put him in a place many people can see he's still not ready to be, but his pride issues drive him to reckless attempt to prove them wrong instead of accepting that he still has a lot to learn.

Hitsugaya's fights stand out in how he's the only captain with a tendency to treat his Bankai as a first resort. He skips steps in Bleach's general "combat etiquette" the same way he skipped steps by learning Bankai before having any combat training. Haste is his most consistent flaw. He almost always opens with his trump card, and said trump card comes with a ticking timer that pushes him to rush his fights all the more.

The bizarrely short-lived "Bankai theft" gimmick of the Blood War is something that affected the entire cast but didn't accomplish much for almost anyone, but Hitsugaya, along with Yamamoto, is one of the two characters that exploited the idea well. The guy lost his go-to tool, the thing that made him special enough to be where he is, and that humbled him enough to make him try to relearn the basics side-by-side with the low-ranks. The idea of experiencing the process that his arrogance never let him take seriously before is really inspired.

The culmination of his arc is the reveal of his Bankai's secret, which is, uh... a great idea with an execution I really have little respect for. Timing is obviously a problem, as there are so many things going on simultaneously at the Gerard fight that no one gets to be star of it, sure, but even if had gotten its own fight, Hitsugaya's opinions on his adult self are a really bad look on him.

Adult Hitsugaya's deal is that he's still too immature to have full command of his Bankai, so after his timer petals run out, he gets aged up into a form developed enough to access his full potential. The idea is simple and effective. The kid rushing to prove his strength is given an ability that rewards patience, and that reward is giving in a style that signals to him that he needs to wait until adulthood before he can be the powerful man he's so desperate to be.

He claims he always hated this hidden side of his Bankai, and that makes sense because it's a slight against the pride that defines him. But this twist recontextualizes his fatal haste in previous into something he's doing to avoid what's honestly pretty inconsequential shame.

It's a point that's really easy to get a better story out of by simply having Hitsugaya be unaware of the twist. He always fights in a hurry, so it'd feel believable if he had never let his petals run out before, and this fight was him as a humbler man learning for the first time how much patience would have benefitted him all along. It would have been the perfect moment for him to reckon with his past mistakes.

But back to the original topic, I feel like the main problem with Hitsugaya's personal challenges and how his arc is handled in last stretch of the manga is that it's too self-absorbed. His driven by the respect he feels entitled to. Aizen's murder investigation, on the other hand, gives him a significantly more likable portrayal because it's him doing something for someone else's sake despite how self-important he otherwise shows himself to be.

To me, Hitsugaya's most interesting moment as a character is when he tells Aizen he doesn't care about losing his rank of captain if that's what it takes for him to kill Aizen. In context, it's a moment of him at the peak of his immature haste, saying we can't be sure he truly meant, but the idea that Hinamori's feelings matter so much that he's willing to discard the source of pride that pretty much defined his whole character is powerful stuff and I really the main direction of his arc was more like this. Nothing wrong with a story about learning to do things right, but a story about learning that other things can matter more than the things you were so hung up about is pretty much always the better way to write outgrowing arrogance.

[harleymonster]

Pet peeve: when someone asks you to do or check soemthing for them that they could easily do or check themselves, eg when someone asks you to check your bank to see if they've paid you because they can't remember. Girl, check your own bank! It's literally less steps and you get an answer immediately.

[clonerightsagenda]

Speaking of which, my executive function theft post is approaching 15,000 notes and no one has commented on me describing the property manager as being "menaced by the skull" yet so idk if they're all taking it in stride or if nobody's reading the whole thing.

[eretzyisrael]

We mentioned an irony of how so many antisemites project their own ambitions of world domination onto Jews. Jews don't want to control the world. (It sounds exhausting!) Judaism is one of the few religions that do not recruit more members. 

But Jews do want to influence the world. God in Isaiah calls Israel "a light unto nations" and that is part of the Jewish ethos.  Not to force anyone to do anything, but to make them want to do the right thing. 

The traditional way that Jews have viewed the obligations of the non-Jewish world is through the Seven Noachide Laws, principles derived and described in the Talmud. They include prohibitions against idolatry, murder, theft, sexual immorality, blasphemy, and cruelty to animals, while mandating setting up a justice system.

Earlier, we briefly mentioned John Selden, the brilliant 17th century English jurist, who saw the Noachide Laws as the basis of natural law - universal moral truths accessible through reason. In De Jure Naturali (1640), Selden used them to create a legal framework, applying them to property rights, personal safety, and governance. His ideas influenced John Locke, further shaping English common law principles. 

In America, James Madison - shaped by the ideas of Selden and Locke - led the writing of the Constitution. In the Bill of Rights, Madison embedded Selden’s natural law principles - justice, duties to others - in protections like the First Amendment (freedom of religion, speech) and Fifth Amendment (due process), ensuring government upholds universal moral duties. Madison echoed Locke in believing that there are pre-existing, universal and divine moral laws. Madison understood that inevitably, different factions that disagree will arise ("The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man") but a well functioning republic can ensure that none of them can dominate the others.  A Talmudic analogy would be Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai, two schools that debated fiercely but were both seen as legitimate expressions of truth. The system endured because it upheld both universal ethics and cultural diversity.  

It is not only the Noachide laws that influenced Western political thought. The Torah itself did as well. Montesquieu derived the idea of separation of powers (a separate judicial, executive and legislative branch) from Deuteronomy, which describes a hierarchical court system along with a "Supreme Court" for difficult cases, separate from the powers of the King.  Madison refers to Montesquieu in his writings on separation of powers. 

From the perspective of Selden and Montesquieu, these Jewish concepts are interpreted from a legal perspective based on universal moral truths. I believe that we need to expand on what these moral concepts are, beyond but underpinning the Noachide laws, based on Jewish writings. These concepts should be publicized to the world as an object of serious study, comparison, debate and (hopefully) adoption. 

[posttexasstressdisorder]

If you want to see what the GOP has in store for the rest of America, visit the Old South

Thom Hartmann

June 27, 2024 5:42AM ET

Photo by Miltiadis Fragkidis on Unsplash

Today is the first Biden-Trump debate and many Americans are wondering how each will articulate their ideas for the future of America.

Republicans have a very specific economic vision for the future of our country, although they rarely talk about it in plain language: they want to make the rest of America look and function just like Mississippi. Including the racism: that’s a feature, not a bug.

It’s called the “Southern Economic Development Model” (SEDM) and has been at the core of GOP economic strategy ever since the days of Ronald Reagan. While they don’t use those words to describe their plan, and neither did the authors of Project 2025, this model is foundational to conservative economic theory and has been since the days of slavery.

The SEDM explicitly works to:

— Maintain a permanent economic underclass of people living on the edge of poverty, — Rigidify racial and gender barriers to class mobility to lock in women and people of color, — Provide a low-cost labor force to employers,

— Prevent unions or any other advocates for workers’ rights to function, — Shift the tax burden to the working poor and what’s left of the middle class while keeping taxes on the morbidly rich extremely low, — Protect the privileges, power, and wealth of the (mostly white and male) economic overclass, — Ghettoize public education and raise the cost of college to make social and economic mobility difficult, — Empower and subsidize churches to take over public welfare functions like food, housing, and care for indigent people, — Allow corporations to increase profits by dumping their waste products into the air and water, — Subsidize those industries that financially support the political power structure, and, — Heavily use actual slave labor.

For hardcore policy wonks, the Economic Policy Institute(EPI) did a deep dive into the SEDM last month: here’s how it works in summary.

Republicans claim that by offering low-cost non-union labor and little to no regulatory oversight to massive corporations, they’re able to “attract business to the region.” This, they promise, will cause (paraphrasing President Kennedy out of context) “a rising tide that lifts all boats.”

Somehow, though, the only people who own boats that rise are those of the business owners and senior executives. The permanent economic underclass is key to maintaining this system with its roots in the old plantation system; that’s why Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina have no minimum wage, Georgia’s is $5.15/hour, and most other GOP states use the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour and $2.13/hour for tipped workers.

It’s thus no coincidence that ten out of the 20 Republican-run states that only use the federal minimum wage are in the Old South.

Anti-union or “right to work for less” efforts and laws are another key to the SEDM; the failed unionization effort last month at the Alabama Mercedes factory was a key victory for the GOP. Unions, after all, balance the power relationship between management and workers; promote higher wages and benefits; support workplace and product safety regulations; advance racial and gender equality; boost social mobility; and have historically been the most effective force for creating a healthy middle class.

Unionization, however, is antithetical to creating and maintaining a permanent economic underclass, which is why, as EPI notes, “while union coverage rates stand at 11.2% nationally, rates in 2023 were as low as 3.0% in South Carolina, 3.3% in North Carolina, 5.2% in Louisiana, and 5.4% in Texas and Georgia.”

Unions also make wage theft more difficult, essentially forcing government to defend workers who’ve been ripped off by their employers. That’s why Florida doesn’t even have a Department of Labor (it was dismantled by Republican Governor Jeb Bush in 2002), and the DOLs in Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina no longer bother to enforce wage theft laws or recover stolen money for workers.

Another key to the SEDM is to end regulation of corporate “externalities,” a fancy word for the pollution that most governments in the developed world require corporations to pay to prevent or clean up. “Cancer Alley” is probably the most famous example of this at work: that stretch from west Texas to New Orleans has more than 200 refineries and chemical plants pouring poison into the air resulting in downwind communities having a 7 to 21 times greater exposure to these substances. And high rates of cancer: Southern corporate profits are boosted by sick people.

Between 2008 and 2018, EPI documents, funding for state environmental agencies was “cut [in Texas and Louisiana] by 35.2% and 34.8% respectively.… Funding was down by 33.7% in North Carolina, 32.8% in Delaware, 20.8% in Georgia, 20.3% in Tennessee, and 10% in Alabama.”

To keep income taxes low on the very wealthy, the SEDM calls for shifting as much of the taxpaying responsibility away from high-income individuals and dumping it instead on the working poor and middle class. This is done by either ending or gutting the income tax (Texas, Florida, and Tennessee have no income tax) and shifting to sales tax, property taxes, fees, and fines.

Nationally, for example, sales taxes provide 34.4% of state and local revenue, but in the SEDM states that burden is radically shifted to consumers: Tennessee, for example, gets 56.6% of their revenue from sales tax, Louisiana 53.3%, Florida 50.9%, Arkansas 49.6%, Alabama 48%, and Mississippi 45.5%. Fees for registering cars, obtaining drivers’ and professional licenses, tolls, traffic and other fines, and permits for home improvements all add to the load carried by average working people.

Republicans argue that keeping taxes low on “job creators” encourages them to “create more jobs,” but that old canard hasn’t really been taken seriously by anybody since Reagan first rolled it out in 1981. It does work to fill their money bins, though, and helps cover the cost of their (tax deductible) private jets, clubs, and yachts.

Another way the SEDM maintains a low-wage workforce is by preventing young people from getting the kind of good education that would enable them to move up and out of their economic and social class. Voucher systems to gut public education, villainization of unionized teachers and librarians, and increasing college tuition all work together to maintain high levels of functional illiteracy. Fifty-four percent of Americans have a literacy rate that doesn’t exceed sixth grade, with the nation’s worst illiteracy mostly in the Old South.

Imposing this limitation against economic mobility on women is also vital to the SEDM. Southern states are famous for their lack of female representation in state legislatures (West Virginia 13%, Tennessee 14%, Mississippi and South Carolina 15%, Alabama and Louisiana 18%), and the states that have most aggressively limited access to abortion and reproductive healthcare (designed to keep women out of the workplace and dependent on men) are entirely Republican-controlled.

Perhaps the most important part of the SEDM pushed by Republicans and Project 2025 is gutting the social safety net. Wealthy rightwingers have complained since FDR’s New Deal of the 1930s that transferring wealth from them to poor and middle-class people is socialism, the first step toward a complete communist tyranny in the United States. It’s an article of faith for today’s GOP.

Weekly unemployment benefits, for example, are lowest in “Mississippi ($235), Alabama ($275), Florida ($275), Louisiana ($275), Tennessee ($275), South Carolina ($326), and North Carolina ($350)” with Southern states setting the maximum number of weeks you can draw benefits at 12 in Florida, North Carolina, and Kentucky, 14 in Alabama and Georgia, and a mere 16 weeks in Oklahoma and Arkansas.

While only 3.3% of children in the Northeast lack health insurance, for the Southern states that number more than doubles to 7.7%. Ten states using the SEDM still refuse to expand Medicaid to cover all state residents living and working in poverty, including Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas.

The main benefit to employers of this weak social safety net is that workers are increasingly desperate for wages — any sort of wages — and even the paltriest of benefits to keep their heads above water economically. As a result, they’re far more likely to tolerate exploitative workplace conditions, underpaid work, and wage theft.

Finally, the SEDM makes aggressive use of the 13th Amendment’s legalization of slavery. That’s not a metaphor: the Amendment says, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” [emphasis added]

That “except as punishment for crime” is the key. While Iceland’s and Japan’s incarceration rates are 36 for every 100,000 people, Finland and Norway come in at 51, Ireland and Canada at 88, there are 664 people in prison in America for every 100,000 people. No other developed country even comes close, because no other developed country also allows legalized slavery under color of law.

Fully 800,000 (out of a total 1.2 million prisoners) Americans are currently held in conditions of slave labor in American jails and prisons, most working for private prison corporations that profitably insource work and unfairly compete against normal American companies. Particularly in the South, this workforce is largely Black and Hispanic.

As the ACLU documented for the EPI, “The vast majority of work done by prisoners in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas is unpaid.” Literal slave labor, in other words. It’s a international scandal, but it’s also an important part of this development model that was, after all, first grounded in chattel slavery.

The Christian white supremacist roots of the SEDM worldview are best summed up by the lobbyist and head of the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution, Vance Muse — the inventor of the modern “right to work for less” model and advocate for the Southern Economic Development Model — who famously proclaimed in 1944, just days after Arkansas and Florida became the first states to adopt his anti-union legislation, that it was all about keeping Blacks and Jews in their places to protect the power and privileges of wealthy white people.

So, if you want to see what Republicans have in mind for the rest of America if Trump or another Republican becomes president and they can hold onto Congress, just visit the Old South. Or, as today’s MAGA GOP would call it, “the New Model.”