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On March 27th, Sahil Lavingia walked into the Secretary of War Suite, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, to attend an all-hands meeting of the Department of Government Efficiency. Lavingia had been a DOGE employee for two weeks, part of a small team embedded at the Department of Veterans Affairs. So far, it had been an unexpectedly isolating experience. Lavingia communicated over the messaging app Signal with another member of the V.A.’s DOGE team, but there didn’t seem to be a Signal channel where he could interact with the rest of DOGE. Instead, Lavingia would watch Elon Musk, who led the initiative, engage with his allies on X. Lavingia told me, “You’d see where the dolphins were swimming—like, now we’re looking at D.E.I. contracts—and so you’d swim there, too.”

Before coming to Washington, Lavingia lived in New York, where he worked at Gumroad, an e-commerce site that he’d founded more than a decade earlier. He wasn’t really a MAGA guy, but he had always thought it would be interesting to work in government, and he admired Musk. In October, at a tech meetup at the New York offices of the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Lavingia talked with someone who later introduced him to a DOGEstaffer. The staffer put him in touch with a DOGE engineer, who connected him with a DOGE recruiter. The calls didn’t last much longer than five minutes. “All the questions were about ‘When can you move to D.C.?’ ” Lavingia said. Eventually, Lavingia told me, he talked to Steve Davis, the president of Musk’s Boring Company, who asked if Lavingia could code. Yes, Lavingia said. A few weeks later, he got a text: a job had opened up at the V.A. “I felt like, O.K., finally, that’s some information,” Lavingia said. He started in mid-March, making an hourly wage of about thirteen dollars.

President Donald Trump formally created DOGE by executive order on his first day in office, rebranding what had been the United States Digital Service, a kind of internal tech consultancy for the federal government. Musk’s allies quickly staffed it: Davis, who had helped Musk overhaul Twitter, effectively became C.O.O., and Chris Young, a Republican political operative who had led Musk’s super PAC, became a senior adviser. On February 2nd, Wired identified six young computer engineers, all in their late teens or early twenties, who were working for DOGE. The young coders, collectively dubbed the “DOGE kids,” had set up shop at the Office of Personnel Management and at the General Services Administration, where, according to Politico, some of them appeared to be living, having furnished four rooms with IKEA beds. That cinched the cultural image. DOGE was the tech industry’s outpost in government, the department that would move fast and break things.

Initially, it was hard to know how seriously to take the new venture, whose name derived from a meme coin. A senior figure at a conservative think tank predicted to me that DOGE would yield nothing more than a government report that would get stuffed away in a drawer. But DOGE staffers were soon identifying contracts to cancel and employees to let go. On January 28th, the Office of Personnel Management sent most federal employees an e-mail titled “Fork in the Road,” which warned of involuntary downsizing to come and offered them the chance to resign with eight months of pay and benefits. (Musk had sent Twitter employees an e-mail with nearly the same subject shortly after he bought the social-media company, which he rebranded as X.) Those who stayed in their jobs were soon required to document, at the end of each week, five things that they had worked on. A series of lawsuits accumulated in DOGE’s wake, but its actions seemed to be producing results. At the end of March, the Times estimated that the federal government had potentially been cut by twelve per cent.

Lavingia and other members of the DOGE team at the V.A. had prepared a list of accomplishments to present at the all-hands meeting. There were about fifty people in the room at the Secretary of War Suite, a surprisingly small number, Lavingia thought, if this was all of DOGE. When Musk walked in, he asked attendees to share their recent victories, and pontificated about how broken the government was. “It was this very surreal scene,” Lavingia said. He tried to engage Musk in a conversation about a project, but “everyone looked at me like I was weird, like, ‘Why are you trying to get feedback from your boss?’ ” At one point, someone asked how many I.T. workers there were at the I.R.S. It turned out to be more than seven thousand. (The agency has a total of around a hundred thousand employees.) A member of DOGE’s I.R.S. team said that he thought the tax agency needed an “exorcist.” “Elon was, like, ‘Wait, seriously?’ ” Lavingia recalled. After a few hours, Lavingia left, disappointed. “It’s almost like this is one of the things you get for working at DOGE,” he said. “You get to hang out with Elon once in a while.”

Lavingia had already grown skeptical of the effort. At the V.A., he’d initially planned to update what he’d been told was an outmoded and fragmented human-resources system, but it seemed to be working just fine. “DOGE never had an information flow that was, like, ‘Hey, Elon wants us to do this,’ ” Lavingia said. “You’re asked to give a lot, but you don’t get any access to information.” In April, he returned to New York, working remotely on improving the V.A.’s internal chatbot, VA GPT. In early May, he gave an interview that was published in Fast Company, in which he said of the government, “It’s not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest. I was hoping for more easy wins.” Not long after that, his access to the V.A. systems was cut off; he was fired.

Later that month, Musk announced that he, too, was leaving DOGE, after a run in which he had impressively stretched the definition of what a “special adviser” to the President could do. In Trump’s White House, with its long red ties and compulsory praise circles, Musk wore novelty T-shirts and baseball caps, and attended meetings with his four-year old son, X, whom Trump pronounced “a high-I.Q. individual.” He installed a Starlink satellite system on the White House roof, and sold Trump a red Tesla on the White House lawn. Trump obligingly climbed into the driver’s seat and assessed the car’s interior. “Everything’s computer,” the President observed.

At Musk’s sendoff in the Oval Office, Trump presented him with an oversized White House key and said that his work on DOGE had “been without comparison in modern history.” But the relationship between the two men, always transactional, had turned into a bad deal for both of them. DOGE had achieved far fewer savings than Musk had anticipated, leaving Trump backing a budget bill that would add trillions to the deficit. Musk’s work for Trump, meanwhile, had alienated liberals and centrists, tanking Tesla’s sales and stock price. In the Oval Office, Musk had a black eye, which he said he’d got after his son hit him in the face. A reporter asked him about a recent Times story alleging that he had used ketamine and other drugs extensively on the campaign trail. Musk said, “Let’s move on.”

Within days, Trump announced that he was withdrawing the nomination of Jared Isaacman, Musk’s business associate, to run NASA, after “a thorough review of prior associations.” Musk called the Republican budget bill a “disgusting abomination,” and later started a poll on X asking if it was time to start a new political party. Trump seemed to take this personally, posting that the easiest way to save money in his budget bill would be to “terminate” the “Billions and Billions of Dollars” in government subsidies that Musk’s companies received. “Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ ” the President wrote. “I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!” Musk responded, “Such an obvious lie. So sad.”

For a few hours on June 5th, the President and the world’s richest man went back and forth, until the fight landed on the subject of many rabid internet disputes—the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. “Time to drop the really big bomb,” Musk wrote. “@realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!” (Trump addressed the claim, telling NBC that he was “not at all friendly” with Epstein.)

At that point, many of the most experienced and talented government workers had left their jobs. Those who remained were often forced to pare back the mission and the scope of their work. Jacob Leibenluft, a senior Biden official, told me, “What DOGE has done, what the Administration has done, is cause a remarkable exodus of talent—of people who have built years and years of knowledge that is critical to the government functioning and who would, under normal circumstances, pass that knowledge on to the next generation of civil servants.”

Lavingia thought that the rupture between Musk and Trump had probably marooned many of the remaining DOGE employees, too, some of whom are still embedded in agencies throughout the federal government. It was also possible, Lavingia told me, that DOGE’s strength and its weakness had the same source. He’d seen from the inside that DOGE had no real internal structure. “At the end of the day,” he said, “DOGE is just Elon.”

Dawn on the Potomac River: rowers, joggers, a quickening column of jets descending toward the runways at Reagan National. Culs-de-sac empty; park-and-ride lots fill; the Beltway clogs hellishly. The federal government is everywhere. It is downtown, in the marble buildings near the White House, a sort of nineteenth-century visual trick to lend the appearance of Greco-Roman permanence to what remains a somewhat tenuous political project. But it is also in the Baltimore suburb of Woodlawn, where ten thousand people work at the Social Security Administration’s headquarters; on the brick campus of the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda; and in the sprawl of the defense contractors out toward Dulles. This is not the political D.C., but the projects are vast. I recently asked a former senior official at the S.S.A. if she’d been worried when Trump won. “Not really,” she said. “My focus was on the solvency crisis.”

Conservatives tend to inveigh against the federal apparatus in Washington; liberals mostly defend it. But the operations of government reflect both Republican and Democratic ambitions. Paul Light, a scholar of public service at N.Y.U.’s Wagner School, has estimated that federal contractors outnumber civil servants by two to one. Elaine Kamarck, of the Brookings Institution, has found that the majority of federal employees now work in security-related fields—thirty-six per cent of them at the Department of Defense alone. For the most part, the U.S. government is organized not to pursue transformative change but to create systems of accountability, and the growth of its expenditures is mostly tied to the sheer scale of what it is keeping tabs on. Federal spending has quintupled since the mid-sixties, adjusting for inflation, to about seven trillion dollars a year. The number of federal workers has basically stayed flat.

People cheat the federal government all the time, in all kinds of ways. Waste exists at every level. In 2011, Boeing was found to have been grossly overcharging the Army for spare helicopter parts; a four-cent metal pin, for example, was billed at $71.01. In 2020, Harvard returned $1.3 million to the Department of Health and Human Services after a public-health professor allegedly overstated how much time she’d spent working on an overseas AIDS-relief grant. Jetson Leder-Luis, a professor at Boston University who studies health-care fraud, told me that, within Medicare and Medicaid, “you get everything from doctors reclassifying procedures to, like, organized crime.”

Leder-Luis likes to cite a study that he and some colleagues conducted on fraudulent billing for dialysis transportation. Medicare has long reimbursed patients too sick to get to dialysis on their own for the cost of ambulance rides. But some unscrupulous actors (Leder-Luis thinks they were mobsters in Philadelphia) realized that it was possible to pay kickbacks to relatively healthy dialysis patients for ambulance rides they didn’t need. Word spread; between 2003 and 2017, Leder-Luis and his colleagues estimated, Medicare spent around five billion dollars on fraudulent ambulance rides. “The F.B.I. has videos of some patients walking in and out of ambulances,” Leder-Luis told me. Dialysis costs make up roughly one per cent of the federal budget. If there was that much fraud in dialysis transportation, Leder-Luis said, imagine how much there is across the entire public sector.

In recent years, wonks in both parties have begun to focus on government inefficiency as a problem. On the center left, the so-called abundance movement calls for a thinning of regulation, to allow the country to more easily create housing and clean energy. On the Trumpist right, the prevailing view is that the government has been overtaken by left-wing ideologues and the only solution is to clear-cut the bureaucracy. Trump spent the campaign promising to purge the federal government of wokeism; his advisers were committed enemies of foreign aid, consumer protection, and the Department of Education. Project 2025, a nine-hundred-page playbook for a conservative President to “dismantle the administrative state,” called the independence of the bureaucracy an “unconstitutional fairy tale.”

The last major campaign to remake the Washington bureaucracy was championed by Vice-President Al Gore, during the Clinton Administration, and developed under the name Reinventing Government. The idea was to bring the public sector up to date with the internet. Kamarck, of the Brookings Institution, was its lead staff member. She leveraged the government’s own expertise: teams of civil servants from other departments were embedded with each agency to streamline and improve its processes. Eventually, the Clinton White House got Congress to pass more than eighty separate laws related to the Reinventing Government initiative. “If you want these changes to be permanent,” Kamarck told me, “the only way to do it is to get them in law.”

DOGE was conceived in something like the opposite fashion. In the spring of 2023, Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur who had recently launched a bid for the Republican Presidential nomination, invited a New York lawyer named Philip Howard to meet with him at his campaign headquarters in Columbus, Ohio. Since the nineties, Howard has been a guru for business leaders interested in civil-service reform. Ramaswamy wanted to test out some ideas for remaking the federal bureaucracy. As the meeting progressed, Howard had the sense of an “over-intelligent mind spinning into some new theory that creates a new reality that’s not actually connected to reality.” At one point, he recalled, “Vivek was saying, ‘I think the President can really shut down agencies.’ I said, ‘You know, Congress establishes an agency. Do you really think the President can just . . .’ And he said, ‘Oh, yes, yes, it’s fine.’ ” Howard later told one of Ramaswamy’s advisers, “I really don’t think Vivek should go public with this, because it’s just not credible.”

A week after the election, Trump announced in a formal statement that “the Great Elon Musk, working in conjunction with American Patriot Vivek Ramaswamy, will lead the Department of Government Efficiency.” Initially, the two co-chairs seemed poised to occupy separate spheres. Ramaswamy would spearhead a deregulation effort; Musk would focus on cost cutting. In a joint op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, they said that they would work closely with the Office of Management and Budget, which is often described as the federal government’s central nervous system. Before the election, Ramaswamy suggested in an interview that the White House could simply fire all nonpolitical appointees whose Social Security numbers began with an even digit or ended with an odd digit. “Boom, that’s a seventy-five-per-cent reduction,” he said. A month later, Musk was asked how much money DOGE might save taxpayers. “I think we can do at least two trillion,” he said.

But during the transition Ramaswamy and Musk increasingly disagreed about how to make the government more efficient. Ramaswamy, who had apparently come around to the fact that significant cuts would require an act of Congress, began meeting regularly with a small group of legislators. Musk mostly did not attend. A source close to DOGE told me that Musk seemed to regard members of Congress as irrelevant, sometimes referring to them as “N.P.C.s,”—non-player characters—the often mute and nameless figures who populate the backgrounds of video games.

Musk was more interested in cutting spending via the executive branch, and spoke often, according to the source close to DOGE, of a need to “control the computers.” In meetings, Ramaswamy resorted to using metaphors from the tech world to emphasize the importance of deregulation, calling the government’s rules “the matrix” and insisting that DOGE needed to rewrite its source code. Musk was unmoved.

On the eve of the Inauguration, CBS News quoted a White House insider saying, “Vivek has worn out his welcome.” The following day, Ramaswamy left DOGE. Musk, in the faintly stuffy office he inherited in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, reportedly installed a large-screen TV, so that he could play video games; he sometimes slept there. A prominent conservative told me that, online, people were devising ways to influence Musk’s efforts. “You do it by tweeting at Elon and sucking up to him,” he said. “He’s like a prism, and all of social media kind of feeds to him through X.” The trouble, he said, was that “Elon goes on these destiny quests, sometimes looking for something that isn’t there, and then a lot of the government is on a destiny quest.”

Danny Werfel spent much of his career in the federal government. He worked as a policy analyst in the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, and as controller at the Office of Management and Budget. Most recently, as Biden’s commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, he was given the rare opportunity to not only run the government but also change it. Congress had pledged eighty billion dollars over ten years to modernize the I.R.S. and bring its collection of taxes up to par with the efforts to evade them. Werfel had expanded the agency’s Large Business and International Division, its enforcement efforts targeting cryptocurrency and high-net-worth individuals, and its investments in artificial intelligence and other technologies. As late as December, 2024, he was still hiring the next generation of civil servants. At the I.R.S.’s annual holiday party, employees were invited to have their photo taken with him; one young man, after the camera clicked, said, “Thank you, Coach!” He was a new hire, right out of college. A decade earlier, he and Werfel’s son had played in the same northern-Virginia Little League. His father, it turned out, also worked at the I.R.S.

After Trump won, Werfel “wasn’t a hundred per cent sure” that the new Administration would continue the I.R.S.’s modernization efforts, but he tried to engage with it in good faith. In early January, representatives from Trump’s transition team and DOGE met with I.R.S. leaders over Zoom to discuss the handover of power. Werfel’s team had rehearsed the scenario, fine-tuning the language that they planned to use. “We said, ‘Look, we know you have a remit for shrinking government from a people standpoint,’ ” Werfel recalled. “ ‘Do we have that right?’ And they didn’t argue—they agreed. We said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if you could do that and also improve or maintain the performance of the I.R.S., and its collections?’ And it was, like, ‘O.K., we’re listening.’ ”

Werfel promised the Trump officials that, with a little patience, the I.R.S. could employ fewer federal workers and bring in more revenue. The more effective tax regime that Werfel had been building was not just funded; it was half assembled, like the Death Star. He urged the Administration to give it time to become fully operational. “Think of it as spans across a stream,” Werfel said. “Some of the spans are complete, and you can drive across and automate. Some of them are only halfway complete, so you can’t drive until you finish the span, and some of them you need to build before you begin.” Werfel proposed that the Trump Administration commit to reducing the agency’s personnel in the course of two to four years, and that it “modernize strategically,” to insure that fewer people didn’t mean less revenue or worse service. “That was our pitch,” Werfel said. “It resonated in the moment.”

Hours after being sworn in, Trump signed twenty-six executive orders, restoring the federal death penalty, withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization, placing a ninety-day pause on foreign aid, and eliminating diversity-equity-and-inclusion programs across the federal government. The executive order establishing DOGE seemed, by comparison, to describe a humble purpose: “to implement the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” Musk, though a frequent presence in the West Wing, was technically an unpaid adviser.

One area of focus for both Musk and the Administration was eradicating what the Tesla founder called the “woke mind virus.” DOGE soon boasted of cutting more than a billion dollars in D.E.I. contracts. But what, exactly, qualified as a D.E.I. program was open to interpretation. At Social Security headquarters, civil servants were directed to scrub mentions of “diversity” and “equity” from grants, publications, and performance evaluations. Laura Haltzel, who was the associate commissioner for the Office of Research, Evaluation, and Statistics, told me, “It was, like, ‘O.K., this is incredibly inefficient. But we’ll get through it.’ ”

For twenty-five years, Haltzel’s office had operated a research-and-grant program to study the effects and the viability of the Social Security system. Recently, the program had been awarding points to potential grantees if they partnered with institutions that served minority populations, such as historically Black colleges and universities. Because of this, Haltzel told me, she was ordered to shut down the entire program, a request that she viewed as absurd. The program was not focussed on race or gender. It predated the term “D.E.I.” by decades. Haltzel’s boss had petitioned the Office of Management and Budget not to end the initiative altogether, to no avail. “They said, ‘You’ve got to kill it,’ ” Haltzel said.

Similar changes were under way at the I.R.S., where workers were deleting references to “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” from the service’s employee handbook. A senior I.R.S. official told me, “If you could measure enforcement actions by month, I bet you’d have seen a significant decline in February, because everyone was worrying about what to do about their jobs.” On February 4th, Musk posted a survey on X: “Would you like @DOGE to audit the IRS?” Two weeks later, seven thousand of the agency’s probationary employees—those who’d been hired in the past year or so—were fired. An I.R.S. employee told ProPublica, “It didn’t matter the skill set. If they were under a year, they got cut.” (A federal court later ruled that the firings were unlawful.)

Many of the fired employees had focussed on curbing tax evasion by the country’s wealthiest people. The Yale Budget Lab estimated “very conservatively” that, if DOGE cut half the I.R.S.’s employees, as it had reportedly considered doing, the reduced workforce would cost the government four hundred billion dollars in lost tax revenue, far more than the savings in salaries. Werfel used the analogy of a backpack: if you are filling a backpack, you start with the thing that is most important to you, and then find room for the rest. “They didn’t start by filling the backpack with efficiency, or collections,” Werfel said. “They filled it with job cuts.”

One evening, his wife wondered what had happened to the Little League player from the Christmas party. It turned out that he had been fired that day; he’d been given an hour to vacate the I.R.S. headquarters. His father had walked him out the door.

Every incoming Administration enjoys an unusual power in its first weeks, since the new Cabinet secretaries have not yet been appointed, and thus cannot yet object to changes at their agencies. The White House’s pause on foreign aid raised a particular panic in the Kinshasa office of the United States Agency for International Development. The following weekend, rebels from the paramilitary group M23 took control of the Congolese city of Goma, part of an ongoing conflict that Congolese citizens had long blamed on Western nations, including the U.S. There were rumors of protests in the capital. Meanwhile, dozens of senior U.S.A.I.D. officials had been placed on administrative leave, scrambling the aid workers’ lines of communication to Washington and clouding the question of who was running the agency.

On the morning of Tuesday, January 28th, many U.S.A.I.D. workers had already sent their children to school on a bus and boarded a shuttle to the U.S. Embassy when they received messages telling them that the situation in the capital might no longer be safe. The vehicles turned around, bringing their passengers back home. According to a senior U.S.A.I.D. official in Kinshasa who filed an affidavit in federal court under the pseudonym Marcus Doe, one U.S.A.I.D. worker reported that protesters were setting fires outside his residence. A little later, he requested an evacuation—his front gate had been breached. On social media, Marcus Doe could see videos of looting, and outside his own home he could hear protesters chanting. He and his wife called their kids inside and locked the doors.

Leaders at the Embassy decided to evacuate the staff, but the executive order pausing foreign assistance had made it harder for U.S.A.I.D. personnel to figure out how to fund their travel. Staffers were losing access to the agency’s internal payment system, and officials in the Congo were reluctant to authorize an expenditure, for fear that they would be accused of circumventing the executive order. Employees sought a waiver from U.S.A.I.D.’s acting administrator, a career official named Jason Gray. It was approved, but only after Marcus Doe and others had started evacuating. “I began to feel an intense sense of panic that my government might fully abandon Americans working for U.S.A.I.D. in Kinshasa,” Marcus Doe recalled. He and his colleagues began coördinating with contacts at other foreign-aid organizations. They made it across the river to Brazzaville by boat that night, with an allotment of one carry-on-size bag per person.

The new deputy administrator of U.S.A.I.D. in Washington was Pete Marocco, a former marine who, during the first Trump term, had left his job at U.S.A.I.D. after subordinates filed a thirteen-page memo accusing him of mismanagement and workplace hostility. In a closed-door meeting with lawmakers in March, the Washington Post reported, Marocco called U.S.A.I.D. a “money-laundering scheme” and said that he was examining whether foreign aid was even constitutional. “What we’re seeing right now is Pete’s revenge tour,” a former senior U.S.A.I.D. official recently told NPR. “This is personal.”

Musk shared Marocco’s dim view of foreign assistance. On January 28th, while U.S.A.I.D. staff were fleeing Kinshasa, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters that DOGE and the O.M.B. had discovered that the Biden Administration planned to purchase fifty million dollars’ worth of condoms for Gaza. Musk posted on X, “Tip of iceberg.” In recent years, U.S.A.I.D., in its efforts to combat H.I.V. and AIDS around the world, has earmarked around seventeen million dollars annually for condoms, including allocations to the province of Gaza in Mozambique; none of the money went to the Palestinian territories. “Some of the things I say will be incorrect and should be corrected,” Musk later said, during an appearance in the Oval Office. “Nobody’s going to bat a thousand.”

By early March, the State Department had announced the termination of more than eighty per cent of U.S.A.I.D. contracts and all but a few hundred of its ten thousand employees. Musk had posted on X that the agency, which was placed under the direct administration of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, was “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.” But it could be difficult to decipher which parts of its mission were progressive and which were conservative. On February 13th, Andrew Natsios, who had been George W. Bush’s U.S.A.I.D. administrator, testified about the cuts before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Natsios had helped lead a faith-based foreign-aid organization, and as the agency’s administrator had increased grants to religious groups. In his testimony, he stressed that many faith-based organizations would close without U.S.A.I.D. funding. Natsios recalled, “I could see the expressions on the Republicans’ faces: ‘Wait a second. No one told us that before. Are you telling me we’re going after our base with these cuts?’ ” He told me that the night before his testimony he’d had dinner with executives from several of the largest Christian N.G.O.s. They were livid. “Ninety per cent of them are on the verge of insolvency,” he said.

The Trump Administration’s campaign against foreign assistance was widespread. On February 28th, Marocco, accompanied by DOGE officials, staged an “emergency board meeting” outside the Inter-American Foundation, which supports civil-society organizations in Latin America and the Caribbean; Marocco announced that he was now the president and C.E.O. and moved to dissolve the organization. On March 5th, officials at the United States African Development Foundation, which invests in small businesses on the continent, managed to keep DOGE officials from coming inside; the next day, the officials returned with U.S. marshals, entered the building, and changed the locks. The following week, DOGE officials arrived at the United States Institute of Peace, an independent nonprofit founded by Congress which works to prevent and resolve violent conflicts around the world. U.S.I.P.’s leadership believed that the institute represented a kind of boundary on the DOGE project—an organization funded by, but not part of, the federal government. (Although most of the institute’s board members are appointed by the President, it was established as an entity separate from the executive branch.) When DOGE officials presented one of U.S.I.P.’s lawyers with a resolution firing the institute’s president, he rejected it as invalid. A few days later, DOGE returned with the police and took over U.S.I.P.’s building. (A federal judge later ruled that DOGE’s actions were unlawful.)

The role DOGE employees played in these closures was not especially technical. But they offered the White House a way to avoid potential bureaucratic obstacles. “The reality is that DOGE has become the instrument for carrying out the will of the President,” a senior foreign-aid official told me. “The game changer for this Administration has been its ability to use this instrument in frankly unlawful ways to carry out its will.”

Before DOGE, U.S.A.I.D. had played a leading role in collecting health data in poorer countries on child and maternal mortality, disease incidents, malnutrition, and access to clean water. Now the ability to gather that information—“the early-warning system for the next pandemic,” as Natsios put it—was gone. A network of aid companies had established a global supply chain for medications, antiretrovirals, and vaccines. It’s now unclear what will happen to the contracts for that system, which cost a few billion dollars a year, paid for by U.S.A.I.D. “There’s no way of doing this stuff without big contractors, because they’re worldwide contracts,” Natsios said. “No N.G.O. can fill that gap.”

DOGE officials were encountering a simple budgetary truth: radically paring back D.E.I. and humanitarian programs didn’t save that much money. U.S.A.I.D.’s spending in the most recent fiscal year had amounted to around forty billion dollars, less than one per cent of the over-all federal budget. But Natsios emphasized that, as a result of the cuts, the U.S. would be confronted with a more challenging world. In the next two years, he expected to see increased mass migration and instability because of famine. He was, he noted, an avowedly anti-Trump Republican. “But the responsibility for this belongs to Musk,” he said. “He is the one getting away with murder.”

By mid-February, small teams of DOGE officials were embedded at most federal agencies. (The original executive order had called for teams of four: one team leader, one engineer, one H.R. specialist, and one attorney.) They were often not a natural fit. A conservative policy analyst who spent time in the Department of Education’s headquarters this winter told me that the DOGE team was largely siloed off, interacting only with a couple of senior staffers, and that its members seemed particularly worried about the possibility of being doxed online. “Your standard political appointee came out of the Heritage Foundation, and has a family and works nine to five and then goes home,” the conservative analyst told me. “The DOGE guys are completely different. They are sleeping in some corner of the building, just looking at their computers. So they’re really seen almost as these exotic animals that can’t be touched.”

Erie Meyer, the chief technologist of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, was at first cautiously optimistic about DOGE. A veteran of the U.S. Digital Service, she had long advocated for more efficiency in government. “I thought, At least the President will have technical people advising him,” Meyer told me. She was a political appointee from the Biden Administration; she had no illusions about her own future. In January, she worked to identify projects that might interest the incoming Administration. Meyer told me, “I basically said, ‘If you want them, here are some easy wins.’ ”

On her last day at the C.F.P.B., Meyer noticed a group of five men wandering around the executive suite; one of them was trying to open the deputy director’s office, but it required a key card. She recognized another from the news—a blond twenty-three-year-old former SpaceX intern named Luke Farritor. Meyer walked out and introduced herself. Were they looking for the printer, she asked, trying to think of an innocuous explanation for jiggling door handles in the executive offices of a government agency. No, a slightly older man, “schlumpy in that D.C. way,” as Meyer put it, told her. It turned out that he was Chris Young, the DOGE leader who’d run Musk’s PAC. He and Meyer made small talk for a minute, and then the group left.

The C.F.P.B., the brainchild of Senator Elizabeth Warren, was created by Congress in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to protect Americans from financial manipulation. Its databases are filled with details of open investigations, including the names of whistle-blowers and their specific allegations. Meyer became increasingly worried about DOGE’s attempts to access the vast stores of personal and corporate data housed at the C.F.P.B. On January 31st, a longtime Treasury official named David Lebryk, who led the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, which sends out payments on behalf of government agencies, resigned after clashing with DOGE officials over their access to the payment system. Lebryk was well regarded across the government, and his resignation reverberated. As a former Social Security official put it, “When it’s, like, ‘Oh, DOGE is trying to get in and Lebryk took a bullet to prevent it,’ that’s pretty concerning, right?”

On February 7th, Musk posted on X, “CFPB RIP.” Later that day, Russell Vought, the director of the O.M.B. and a DOGE ally, sent an e-mail to C.F.P.B. staffers saying that he was assuming control of the agency. Vought, an original architect of Project 2025, has been outspoken about his desire to defund government programs and fire career civil servants. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said in a private speech in 2023. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

Vought ordered all C.F.P.B. employees to stop work; eventually, more than a thousand of them were placed on administrative leave. One of the C.F.P.B.’s leaders e-mailed Mark Paoletta, the general counsel at the O.M.B., asking if the agency could at least resume monitoring companies and “was just told no—you have no authority right now.” The union representing most of the agency’s employees sued, winning a preliminary injunction to halt the dismissals. At that point, the C.F.P.B. entered a kind of zombie state, which an enforcement attorney described as “just turning on your computer to stare at it for eight hours with nothing to do.”

The Social Security Administration was under the direction of Michelle King, a career official who had recently been elevated to acting commissioner, when the DOGE representatives began to arrive, in early February. First came Michael Russo, a longtime tech executive who was appointed as the S.S.A.’s chief information officer; then came a coder named Akash Bobba, who had recently graduated from U.C.-Berkeley. According to a senior S.S.A. official, Bobba arrived “sort of spilling over with laptops and cellphones belonging to other agencies he was already working with.” King and her team grew wary when Russo asked for direct access to the main Social Security data files—among them the Death Master File, on which the S.S.A. records each number holder who has died. The senior S.S.A. official said, “It just was never totally clear what Mike wanted access to the Death Master File for.”

Russo and Bobba were set up in an office, working with a small group of anti-fraud officials from the S.S.A., but Bobba had not yet received the credentials necessary to access the S.S.A.’s data files. Steve Davis, incensed, started reaching out to senior S.S.A. officials. “It was ‘S.S.A has got to be the worst agency in the whole government,’ ” the former S.S.A. official said. “ ‘There’s no reason that this hasn’t happened yet. Make it happen.’ ” Russo demanded that Bobba be allowed to visit the S.S.A.’s main data center. “There is absolutely nothing to see there—a loading dock, some security, a bunch of computers,” the former S.S.A. official said. “But their view was they didn’t trust any of the permanent staff at S.S.A., so they needed Akash to get directly in.”

On February 11th, Musk joined Trump in the Oval Office and told reporters that his team had found “crazy things” happening within the Social Security system, including benefit recipients who were a hundred and fifty years old. Employees at the S.S.A. were mystified—virtually no one who had been dead more than a month was receiving benefits, and certainly not a hundred-and-fifty-year-old. S.S.A. officials, unable to reach Musk or Davis directly, tried to explain the situation to Russo, hoping that what they said would percolate up to Musk. “What was weird about that period was everything seemed to be coming through DOGE, rather than from the O.M.B. or from the White House, but it was almost impossible to get any information up the chain,” someone who temporarily led a government agency this winter told me. “They would never let us interface with them directly, since that was sacred. So it was like a really bad game of telephone.”

That Sunday, Musk posted a chart suggesting that there were three hundred and ninety-eight million active Social Security numbers. “Yes, there are FAR more ‘eligible’ social security numbers than there are citizens in the USA,” he wrote. “This might be the biggest fraud in history.” S.S.A. officials were peeved. A week earlier, a few of them had patiently explained to Bobba that the chart contained not the number of people receiving Social Security benefits but, rather, the total number of people without death records. When officials asked Bobba about Musk’s post, he said, “I told him everything you told me. He just tweeted it anyway.”

Meanwhile, the relationship between King and the DOGE team had deteriorated. On February 14th, S.S.A. leadership placed Leland Dudek, a sixteen-year veteran of the S.S.A., who had been working closely with DOGE, on administrative leave. Dudek posted a defiant message on LinkedIn and spent the weekend searching for a new job. Meanwhile, Davis called another S.S.A. official. “I have the agency’s complete executive roster,” the official recalled him saying. “I’d like you to go through it with me and tell me your thoughts on who should be fired.” King resigned, and Dudek received an e-mail from an official at the Office of Personnel Management notifying him that his administrative leave was lifted and he was now in charge of the entire agency.

Dudek did not think that the S.S.A. should fight DOGE directly. “Elections have consequences,” he wrote in an e-mail to Social Security employees. In March, according to a recording obtained by ProPublica, he urged the staff to be patient with the “DOGE kids.” But he was also committed to keeping the agency functional. The DOGE team wanted to lay off the S.S.A.’s probationary workers. In meetings that included representatives from the O.P.M. and the G.S.A., and congressional staffers, Dudek went through the list of potential layoffs: How many were veterans or military spouses or worked in customer-service positions? Surely, Dudek said, President Trump would not want to let those people go. The total number of cuts dwindled from what might have been fifteen hundred to less than two dozen.

Dudek wanted to keep the checks going out and limit the personnel losses. But, in doing so, he was forced to make compromises. In April, a DOGE official named Aram Moghaddassi, an ex-Twitter engineer who was embedded with both the S.S.A. and the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, sent Dudek a request to take away the Social Security numbers of sixty-three hundred immigrants who had been allowed to enter the country during the Biden Administration. Doing so would make it impossible for those individuals to work legally, open bank accounts and lines of credit, or access government benefits. In a separate memo, the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, explained that the cancellations would “prevent suspected terrorists who are here illegally” from having “privileges reserved for those with lawful status.” Dudek determined that the simplest way to make the change would be to add all the names to the Death Master File, a move he soon authorized. The former Social Security official, who by then had left the agency, told me, “This was the one truly totalitarian thing the agency was asked to do.”

In the five months since DOGE officially began its operations, the scale of its projected savings has steadily dwindled. Musk revised his original promise of two trillion dollars to one trillion. In May, reporters from the Financial Times went through the “wall of receipts” that DOGE had been posting online, which now claims a hundred and eighty billion dollars in savings. They concluded that “only a sliver of that figure can be verified.” The Times, which has made a series of similar findings, reported, “The group posted a claim that confused billions with millions, triple-counted the savings from a single contract and claimed credit for canceling contracts that had ended under President George W. Bush.”

DOGE has reportedly cut more than two hundred and eighty thousand government jobs—U.S.A.I.D. and the C.F.P.B. have been effectively eliminated—and the fate of much of the rest of the bureaucracy is now in the hands of federal judges. But even if DOGE’s accounting is taken at face value, the effort has still slashed less than three per cent of the federal budget. Zachary Liscow, a chief economist at the O.M.B. during the Biden Administration, wasn’t especially surprised by the small numbers. The total cost, including pay and benefits, of all civilian personnel across the federal government, Liscow said, is just four per cent of the budget. The entire non-defense discretionary budget amounts to about nine hundred billion dollars—one-seventh of the total. Liscow, who is now a professor at Yale Law School, said cutting government personnel is unlikely to lead to savings, since fewer people helping with oversight often allows the costs of contracts to balloon: “If, in the name of efficiency, they cut a bunch of I.R.S. employees who pay for themselves many times over, it makes you wonder what motivates them.”

The savings that DOGE uncovered were supposed to help pay for tax cuts—one Trump operative even conceived of “DOGE checks,” through which money would be returned to the public. But the Republican budget in Congress would now add three trillion dollars to the national debt. “It’s a lost opportunity,” Howard, the lawyer and conservative regulatory specialist, told me. DOGE “was not focussed on any vision of how to make government more efficient—just on cutting. They didn’t have any vision of duplication, or of how to create more effective operating systems. You can fire the paper pushers, but if the law says you’ve got to push this paper, and there’s no one left to push it, that’s a formula for paralysis.”

Veronique de Rugy, a leading libertarian thinker at the Mercatus Center and one of the thirty-four named authors of Project 2025, also initially supported DOGE. But she eventually grew disillusioned with what she regarded as its almost singular focus on culture-war issues. In March, she wrote, in an essay for Reason, “For all the talk about cutting government waste and fraud, the DOGE-Trump team seems mostly animated by rooting out leftist culture politics and its practitioners in Washington.” She was especially concerned by the ways in which DOGE seemed to be expanding, rather than curtailing, the powers of the executive. “Being a libertarian right now,” she told me, “is like being punched in the face with your own ideas by a drunk teen-ager.”

Even before Musk and Trump’s blowup, some of DOGE’s main lieutenants, including Davis, were quietly exiting. Their departures offered a reminder of the essential imbalance between the bureaucrats’ enduring stake in the structure of government and the fleeting and contingent interest of Musk’s team. After Musk’s departure, Vought, at the O.M.B., became the face of what remained of DOGE, which made a certain amount of sense: without the new-new gloss of tech, the project would revert to a more mundane, institutional form.

What, then, was DOGE? Part of its pitch was that it would infuse government with talent, replacing diversity hires and ineffective workers with more adept ones from the startup industry. The young embeds who moved throughout the government, whom Musk raved about during his Fox News appearances, were an embodiment of this vision. But, in the end, the quickest way for DOGE to cut the government had nothing to do with technology. Lavingia told me that, during his two months at the V.A., he came to the conclusion that there were not actually so many people sitting around doing nothing. “To be honest, it is often worse in the tech industry, where you have venture money and low interest rates,” he said. “It can be pretty inefficient.”

I asked the former S.S.A. official, who had worked closely with several DOGE coders, what he thought of their abilities. “In general, they were all pretty talented for their level of experience,” he said. “If we’d taken them on as junior hires, they would probably have progressed pretty quickly in a hierarchical organization.” But, by design, they existed outside the civil service, with little guidance on what to do and why. “They all seemed pretty desperate for Elon to say that they were doing good,” the former official said. “There was a lot of ‘What does E. want?’ ‘Did you see what E. said?’ ” The former official compared the situation to the science-fiction novel “Ender’s Game,” by Orson Scott Card, in which a team of children who are invited by the military to play an elaborate video game are unknowingly operating actual weapons of war.

A conservative influencer familiar with DOGE made a similar point about Musk, saying that he’d attempted to transfer the partisanship of social media to the weights and measures of the federal government. “It’s true of a lot of people, and it’s definitely true of Elon, that you live on X and your psychology is merged with the cesspool of the modern internet,” the influencer told me. “Going in and deregulating things and cutting costs might have achieved the policy result. But he’s playing a different sport—getting people to hit him really hard and then becoming a savior to everyone who hates those people.” He added, “It’s not that the vitriol from the other side is an unfortunate side effect—it’s actually the point.”

When I spoke with Lavingia, he reflected on what DOGE had actually achieved. It had been blamed for mass firings and contract cancellations across the government, but, in reality, it had played the role of technological adviser to politically appointed agency heads. “There’s a lot of power that comes in that first hundred days,” Lavingia said. “But DOGE and Elon really mostly had soft power—they didn’t have hard power.” The hard power had come from Trump; the soft power depended on Musk’s influence over him. “The premise of DOGE requires Elon and Trump to really be aligned,” Lavingia said. “And it now seems that was kind of for show.”

[dailyanarchistposts]

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[yourreddancer]

Today in Politics Bulletin 37, 12/31/24

Ron Filipkowski

Jan 1

… Bernie Sanders has called Trump’s bluff on one of the hundreds of promises he made on the campaign trail. While Trump was busy promising everyone everything to get elected, he slipped in that he was going to pass a law to cap interest that credit card companies can charge at 10%. This would be huge for American consumers. Of course, Trump never had any intention of following through with that.

… So Sanders introduced legislation to do exactly what Trump promised. Now we will see if he really meant it, and what his Republican friends in the Senate think after they get a visit from banking lobbyists. Sanders: “During the recent campaign Donald Trump proposed a 10% cap on credit card interest rates. Great idea. Let’s see if he supports the legislation that I will introduce to do just that.”

… Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-IN) was asked why she first announced she wasn’t running for Congress again, but then changed her mind: “Unfortunately, I have to fight my own party because my party is betraying the American people. I was getting PTSD from this job. I think maybe I need to spend more time and get my sanity back. But a lot of people in my district were upset. So I said okay I’ll just let the people and God decide.”

… I agree with her about needing to get her sanity back.

… Steve Bannon continued to hammer away at the Tech Bros on his show: “Sacks, Musk, and Vivek - I’ve taken down bigger guys before.”

… Former George W. Bush Campaign Manager Stuart Stevens, who is now a Democrat, says that people should not ignore the fact that Steve Bannon has turned on Elon Musk: “Bannon is a guy who has defined himself as a thug, and thugs must do thuggish things. I think Musk has no idea what he’s getting into when he gets in a fight with Bannon over this.”

… Stevens then explained that if Bannon is ever able to turn Trump against Musk as he’s trying to do, that could be a big problem for him: “There’s been reporting that Musk was not a student when he got a visa, and when he made his application for naturalization he put false information on that document. That is grounds for revoking citizenship. It happens all the time. One reason why Musk is so obsessed with immigration is because he knows this. I wouldn’t bet against Steve Bannon.”

(NOTE: PRESIDENT BIDEN SHOULD REVOKE AND DEPORT MUSK NOW!!!!!)

… Trump made a rare post on X today. He posts a lot on Truth Social but has averaged only about 1 a week on X. This was today: “Senate Democrats are organizing to improperly stall and delay the confirmation process of many of our Great Nominees. They will try all sorts of tricks starting very soon. Republicans must not allow them to do that. We have a Country to run, and many big problems to solve, mostly created by Democrats. REPUBLICANS, BE SMART AND TOUGH!!!”

… I have a theory that the words he randomly chooses to capitalize is some kind of code to his QAnon followers, but I haven’t cracked it yet.

… Elon Musk bizarrely changed his name on X today to “Kekius Maximus” and changed his profile photo to an alt-right, white nationalist meme that combines the Maximus character from Gladiator with the groyper Pepe the Frog. Kekius comes from the name of a fringe cryptocurrency. It is unknown whether Musk has an ownership stake in that particular coin, but he has promoted others in the past that he does own - including DOGE.

… Meanwhile, Musk addressed allegations that the “Adrian Dittmann” account that constantly praises him, which he reposts and promotes often, is really him: “Suppose for a moment that Adrian Dittmann IS my sock puppet account I use to flatter my main. Isn’t the Left always telling people to love themselves? Or am I just not loving myself in their narrow, conscripted, ‘right’ way? Hypocrisy at it’s finest.”

… This is why happens when a bad human also becomes a ketamine addict.

… Former Trump Press Secretary Sean Spicer posted a poll on X which asked if Republicans agreed with Musk on the H-1B visas or if they agreed with Steve Bannon on it. He got over 92,000 votes, with 67% siding with Bannon over Musk.

… But Musk continued his purge and punishments of right-wing accounts today who disagreed with him on this. White nationalist talk show host Stew Peters (758,000 followers): “Elon Musk is STEALING money from my subscribers and LYING to them. This morning I woke up to find that removed my blue check mark and canceled my ability to have subscribers. My subscribers were told that I canceled my subscription service and they would not be refunded for the next two weeks in which they’ve already paid X for, but which won’t allow me to provide them content. This is intentional deceit and theft.”

… White nationalist Nick Fuentes: “Today X appears to have un-verified 5 more prominent critics of the H-1B program. Their checkmarks were taken, subs were refunded, and character limit reduced. This is now overt political censorship. This comes after the Project Groyper brand account and all of its affiliates were suspended last week.” Sad!

… It might be time for a class action lawsuit. I suggest ‘Racist Broke MFers v. World’s Richest Racist MFer’.

… The stock market under Biden’s economy has been red hot for two years, breaking all-time highs on a regular basis. We are on course to have the best two year performance this century, with the highest returns on investments since 1997-98. The market was up 24% in 2023 and another 20% in 2024. Now we will see how things go with Trump.

… Republican Rep. Eric Burlison says that Trump’s DOJ needs to investigate J6: “We truly had some very disturbing things happen with the FBI and their involvement. They created many entrapment scenarios on American citizens who were just simply patriotic and wanted to express their 1st Amendment rights. Instead, they were enticed and encouraged to do things that they didn’t even know might be illegal.”

… But Burlison wasn’t done: “I also personally would like to see us continue the investigation of the Biden family.”

… AdImpact Politics study of spending in the 2024 election shows total amount spent by both campaigns combined was $3.2 billion, which was $70 million more than 2020. From the day Biden dropped out, Democrats spent $1.45 billion and Republicans spent $988 million.

… The total spent on ads for all US political campaigns in 2024 was $11.1 billion.

… $1.7 billion was spent on House races. The two most expensive races were NY-19 at $50 million and ME-02 at $42 million. Democrats narrowly won both races with Josh Riley winning in NY 51-49% and Jared Golden winning in Maine 50.3%-49.7%.

… $260 million in ads was spent on the abortion issue alone in 2024.

… Former Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman, who lost his primary to George Latimer after pulling the fire alarm in the Capitol and other incidents, told NBC that he may run for Governor of NY or Senate: “I’m a badass motherf—-er. For someone to have to spend $25 million to beat me - that must mean I’m a bad motherf—-er. I must be doing the right thing, fighting for the right things., and they are desperate and scared.”

… Trump’s incoming WH Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt says that she plans to completely remodel the WH Briefing Room. I agree it is a cramped space that is poorly laid out, but this quote made me wonder if it is more than just about the setup: “We’re exploring ways to make sure that room reflects the media habits of the American people in 2024, not the 1980s.”

… Not exactly sure what that means, but I have a feeling it has something to do with getting fringy right-wing podcasters and independent media into the room in front of legacy media.

… NewsNation host Chris Cuomo says one of the reasons Democrats lost the election is because they downplayed the assassination attempt of Trump: “What I found completely appalling and outrageous was how unimpressed lefties were by Trump getting shot in the head. That’s exactly why you lost the election. You are out of touch. You lost the plot about how people feel in the majority. That’s what you did. And that was a perfect example of it. That situation? ‘Well, I think it was just a teleprompter.’ You would have never assessed it that way if you didn’t wish the guy had died.”

… I disagree with the first part of Cuomo’s statement and have no comment on the last part.

… Doesn’t sound like Ivanka Trump will be going anywhere near the WH this time around: “My intention for 2025 is to lean into love, courage, and purpose—and to keep growing through it all. Here’s to fresh starts, deepening relationships, living with presence, being more gentle with ourselves and each other, and the beauty of what’s yet to come!”

… Then she posted a swimsuit photo. Living her best life on Saudi money.

… The Atlantic announced that they are hiring a bunch of new reporters to expand their political coverage for the Trump Administration. Two of the new additions are WaPo reporters Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer with others rumored to be announced soon.

… Matt Gaetz said the biggest reason why Trump got involved in endorsing Mike Johnson for Speaker yesterday is because he was worried about his election needing to be certified on Monday, and the Speaker election is this Friday. Without a Speaker sworn in before J6, the House can’t proceed with certifying the election for Trump.

… Four years ago, Trump wanted the certification delayed on J6 to cause chaos in a desperate attempt to hold on to power. Now he wants to make sure that certification isn’t delayed by the chaos of a Speaker election stretching on into the weekend. Gaetz: “We would have never held up McCarthy two years ago for concessions if a Trump certification hung in the balance. Now it does.”

… Thank you so much for supporting us in 2024. I know it ended up being a tough year. I fear 2025 and beyond will be quite a bit more difficult. When so many are appeasing and caving to curry favor with the new regime, that will never be our approach to dealing with Trump and this Administration because we are clear-eyed about who these people are, and we know what they intend to do. While others surrender, we will never stop fighting. Thanks for joining us in that.

[arpov-blog-blog]

Former President Donald Trump used a dubious accounting maneuver to claim improper tax breaks from his troubled Chicago tower, according to an IRS inquiry uncovered by ProPublica and The New York Times. Losing a yearslong audit battle over the claim could mean a tax bill of more than $100 million.https://audm.herokuapp.com/player-embed/?pub=nyt-core&articleID=trump-audit-buettner-kiel

The 92-story, glass-sheathed skyscraper along the Chicago River is the tallest and, at least for now, the last major construction project by Trump. Through a combination of cost overruns and the bad luck of opening in the teeth of the Great Recession, it was also a vast money loser.

But when Trump sought to reap tax benefits from his losses, the IRS has argued, he went too far and in effect wrote off the same losses twice.

The first write-off came on Trump’s tax return for 2008. With sales lagging far behind projections, he claimed that his investment in the condo-hotel tower met the tax code definition of “worthless,” because his debt on the project meant he would never see a profit. That move resulted in Trump reporting losses as high as $651 million for the year, ProPublica and the Times found.

There is no indication the IRS challenged that initial claim, though that lack of scrutiny surprised tax experts consulted for this article. But in 2010, Trump and his tax advisers sought to extract further benefits from the Chicago project, executing a maneuver that would draw years of inquiry from the IRS. First, he shifted the company that owned the tower into a new partnership. Because he controlled both companies, it was like moving coins from one pocket to another. Then he used the shift as justification to declare $168 million in additional losses over the next decade.

The issues around Trump’s case were novel enough that, during his presidency, the IRS undertook a high-level legal review before pursuing it. ProPublica and the Times, in consultation with tax experts, calculated that the revision sought by the IRS would create a new tax bill of more than $100 million, plus interest and potential penalties.

Trump’s tax records have been a matter of intense speculation since the 2016 presidential campaign, when he defied decades of precedent and refused to release his returns, citing a long-running audit. A first, partial revelation of the substance of the audit came in 2020, when the Times reported that the IRS was disputing a $72.9 million tax refund that Trump had claimed starting in 2010. That refund, which appeared to be based on Trump’s reporting of vast losses from his long-failing casinos, equaled every dollar of federal income tax he had paid during his first flush of television riches, from 2005 through 2008, plus interest.

The reporting by ProPublica and the Times about the Chicago tower reveals a second component of Trump’s quarrel with the IRS. This account was pieced together from a collection of public documents, including filings from the New York attorney general’s suit against Trump in 2022, a passing reference to the audit in a congressional report that same year and an obscure 2019 IRS memorandum that explored the legitimacy of the accounting maneuver. The memorandum did not identify Trump, but the documents, along with tax records previously obtained by the Times and additional reporting, indicated that the former president was the focus of the inquiry.

[warningsine]

Dying is easy; dramatizing the dot-com world is hard. Where is the action in people staring at computer screens, pointing and clicking and typing? Even the costumes, hoodies and such worn by coders, the props of empty pizza boxes and foosball tables and sleeping bags under the desk, lack a certain oomph. At least the finance bros of the ’80s had snappy suspenders, martini dinners, strip clubs and buy-sell pads they could wave around between screams on the trading floor.

The development of online “wallets” might seem particularly bloodless — what, those things you use sometimes to buy stuff on the internet and often forget the password to? — and yet “The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley,” by Jimmy Soni, is an intensely magnetic chronicle in which ambitions and emotions run as red-hot as they did in the Facebook movie written by Aaron Sorkin, “The Social Network.” It helps that PayPal’s origin story, though essentially an ensemble piece, features two of the more complicated antiheroes of our time: Peter Thiel, who has become a significant player in right-wing politics, and Elon Musk, currently the richest person in the world, who makes aggressive forays into the cosmos. Each has previously been the subject of big biographies.

Here, though, interviewed along with scores of PayPal personnel — sometimes known as “the PayPal mafia” for their ruthless insularity — they are just two moneyed young men trying to lasso the moon, and often missing. Or crashing, as they did dramatically when Musk drove them to a meeting with Sequoia Capital in the McLaren F1 sports car he acquired after the sale of an early start-up, Zip2. Thiel compared the excursion somewhat opaquely to being “like this Hitchcock movie,” but it suddenly turned more “Dukes of Hazzard”: The car hit an embankment and sailed through the air “like a discus,” Musk recalls. (He and Thiel walked into the meeting separately but unscathed, despite having forgone seatbelts, not even speaking of the incident.)

Thiel initially thought that “beaming” money between PalmPilots, those chunky and short-lived precursors to smartphones, would be the next big thing; a former Stanford classmate convinced him to focus on email payments instead. Thiel comes off in Soni’s telling as pessimistic, occasionally unscrupulous and fiercely competitive, beating nine out of 10 colleagues in chess even after doing a rare celebratory keg stand. “Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a loser,” he told an early employee, echoing the rhetoric of Donald J. Trump, whose presidential campaign Thiel would later support.

Musk reads as cuddlier and more magnanimous, with the grander vision: to upend and streamline existing financial systems, like Wells Fargo Bank, whose early website had, symbolically, a slow-loading stagecoach and not much else. He calls those systems, with their big empty buildings, outdated mainframes and code, “this herky-jerky frickin’ monstrosity.” He was comically preoccupied with holding onto the domain X.com for his scheme, even after market research showed that customers found it salacious or even sinister. Eventually, he was ousted as C.E.O. of the proto-PayPal while honeymooning with his first wife.

Personal lives barely appear in “The Founders,” in which bragging about sleep deprivation is the coin of the realm. “There’s definitely something about the nocturnal lifestyle for engineers specifically that really opens up the chakras of creativity or code-writing,” Max Levchin — an émigré from Ukraine and another PayPal founder who became a billionaire — told an interviewer for a PBS show called “NerdTV.” In one breakthrough moment, Levchin, a devoted battler of foreign hackers, plays Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries”; other staff members blasted Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It” for inspiration. They shot potatoes against the wall to release tension, and “massacred” stuffed mongooses after an unwanted corporate acquisition. (And they say there’s no reason to return to the office!)

Soni, the co-author of previous books about the mathematician Claude Shannon and Julius Caesar’s enemy Cato, is balanced and fluid in this solo outing, making mundane projects like the creation of an online “button,” or the dawn of CAPTCHA, somehow literary, comparing PayPal’s tale, improbably but effectively, to Dickens and the Bloomsbury group. He captures, and cheers, not any one genius but what Brian Eno called “scenius,” the rare sparks that can occur in certain groups, at certain times, and with lasting effects: The company’s alumni have fanned out to found among other entities YouTube, LinkedIn and Yelp.

Soni does intermittently fall under the sway of business jargon. Space is not just something Musk wants to conquer, but a teeth-gritting synonym for business realms (“the payments space”; “the saturated e-calendar space”; “the financial space”). Teams “gel”; executives “pivot” faster than Regan’s head in “The Exorcist.” And if you drink every time the author uses some iteration of the word “iterate,” you’ll be passed out cold by the end of the book.

But Soni also has a knack for the wry or lovely phrase, as when he describes Musk’s car, treasured as a work of art, taking a “distinctly cubist turn” after the crash or names a chapter about a different C.E.O.’s ouster “The Nut House Coup,” after a bar with discarded shells that crackle underfoot.

The agony over what to call this new product, with the help of a naming firm, makes for a particularly ecstatic chapter. What if it had been christened Cachet, like the Sydney Biddle Barrows escort service; or MoMo? PayPal prevailed thanks to its friendly sound (“a pal has their arm around you”) and double plosives; it also has the advantage of sounding like “people.” (Imagine Barbra Streisand singing: “People who need PayPal…”) More recent competitors in the “payment space,” like Venmo and Zelle, are not mentioned in “The Founders,” but a long battle with Billpoint, the now-defunct payment service once used by eBay, is one of the more fascinating subplots, as is watching eBay circle PayPal like a dirigible worried about getting punctured.

And lest you believe the problems of a few future billionaires doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, Soni appends a coda about the power of PayPal’s “mafia” to inspire that left this reader, at least, in sobs. No finance bro has accomplished that.

[professorvonquack-57]

Hi! Of course, there is so much tragedy surrounding Magica - even in a completely different sense!

‘Origins of a Witch’ (‘Once upon a Sorceress’): Author Maya Astrup's very beautiful but tragic prequel to ‘The Midas Touch’ by Carl Barks. However, hardly anyone seems to have actually read ‘The Midas Touch’. Unfortunately, the prequel has a major logical flaw. In Barks' story, Scrooge and Magica meet very naively. At the beginning, she simply wants to buy just a coin the very rich man has touched. She knows nothing about the ‘lucky dime’ and only learns of its existence from Scrooge himself! It is very clear that she realises the enormous value of this special coin at this very moment, which thus becomes the ‘big bang’ between Scrooge and Magica. Maya Astrup is an accomplished writer, so why was she telling an incorrect story (ending with Magica, who definitely plans to get Scrooge's first dime)? One can only assume that, for editorial reasons, it seemed much more important to fulfil the common Magica narrative (witch - lucky dime - Midas touch) at the end of the story than to construct a logically correct connection to ‘The Midas Touch’. What a pity!

‘The Pact of the Moon’: A wonderful story that would have been worthy of being put around by a really great artist. On the one hand, Francesco Guerrini is able to deliver a pretty nice drawing of little Magica being slobbered on by a big dog and other things - but the green dragon monster in the crystal cave is the worst drawn dragon in a Disney comic of all times! It is totally 2D and doesn't seem threatening at all, nor does it seem harmless once Magica has tamed it. Absolutely no difference. Terrible! Why the hell didn't this guy get another artist to help him with the dragon?

3. Magica - Donald: Do you know this nice story? Story-Code D 2002-229 "The onion rose" / "Die Suche nach der Zwiebelrode" Story: Janet Gilbert, Artist: Francisco Rodriguez Peinado

Duck Musings: The Tragedy of Magica De Spell

Tragedy and the Disney Ducks go oddly hand in hand, and we have examined this in several characters, Gladstone Gander and Donald Duck specifically. When it comes to the most tragic character though, I may have to put my money on Magica De Spell, and this isn’t just me being a simp, though I’ll admit that is part of it.

The comic that sparked this Duck Musing was this scanlation by lettheladylead of a 2021 comic by Giorgio Cavazzano titled “Magica De Spell: Origins of a Witch”, which is… pretty much what it says on the tin, the origin story of Magica De Spell. In it, we learn about what happened to her parents, why she is interested in the Midas Touch, and even where Ratface came from. It’s… kind of a sad comic.

Magica’s parents were killed in a spell gone wrong when she was just a baby, probably barley hatched, and from some of the artwork, it appears that they were more focused on the spell than on Magica. After, her Aunt and Uncle took her in, but tried to repress her magic, since this is the same magic that took their loved ones from them. Magica left after learning the truth and deciding to finish what her parents began, and never did seem to return to her Aunt and Uncle.

It is worth noting that there is an alternate backstory as to why Magica wants the Midas Touch, in the comic “The Pact of the Moon”, it is revealed that Magica was not originally evil, but she forced to make the Midas Touch spell by, what I’m assuming is the Witch Council. This lead her to becoming greedy and unscrupulous, again, not a very happy backstory. She also laments about her niece Minima, and how she hopes her niece doesn’t follow the path she herself has went down.

All of this ties into the tragic situation of her current life, always after Scrooge’s dime, always outwitted by the old man, always one step closer but two steps behind her ultimate goal. One of my favourite comics is “The Journey is the Reward”, where Magica does steal the dime, but ends up returning it because, she literally does not know what to do when she’s done. It kinda reminds of that scene in Fight Club where Tyler Durden was talking about always calling his Dad and asking him on what he should do next. It adds a lot to the tragedy of having an ultimate goal, when you don’t really know what you’re gonna do once you have completed it.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention Magicstone, the strange pairing of Magica De Spell and Gladstone Gander. I’ve mentioned “A Gal For Gladstone” prior, but the big tragedy of the pairing, I think was best explored by, once again, Sarah Jolley, otherwise known as ModMad, specifically in their comic “Enough Time to Fall”, because they’re right, it never would work. Even if Magica stayed in her disguise, it would have to disappear eventually, and what then? It hurts because, in A Gal for Gladstone, they were both genuinely happy, and her plan failed because she was genuinely concerned about Gladstone’s safety. One true moment of joy, and it had to be snatched from her.

I wrote a piece of fanfiction titled “Stuck Together Duck” in which, Magica De Spell and Donald Duck get stuck together, and bond a little, because when you look at the two of them, they are quite similar. Lost their parents at a presumably young age, raised by extended family (Donald in part by his Uncle, but mostly by his Grandma, and Magica entirely by her aunt and Uncle), niblings they look after (Yes that is the neutral term for niece and nephew), honestly, it feels weird that this pairing isn’t more popular, but I digress. It goes to show that, at the core of the evil sorceress, is something a lot more tragic than one might initially think.

It’s also worth noting that Scrooge, doesn’t seem to hate her. In several comics, they work together to stop a bigger problem, like a comet hurdling towards earth, or another magic user stealing Scrooge’s dime. Scrooge has also helped Magica in situations where she would, or has, lost her magic abilities, and in one comic, it’s shown that the two of them send birthday cars to each other. So maybe Scrooge sees something in Magica, and I don’t mean that in a shipping way, though feel free to take it like that.

Well, I made a Magica post that referenced three of Magica’s ships. I think I’m done for now.

To wrap up, Magica De Spell is easily one of my favourite characters, and really getting a chance to explore this aspect of her character was fun, and also a little heartbreaking. Maybe someday, Magica will get a happy ending to her story, maybe her nieces will find a path to follow that she can be happy for, maybe she and Scrooge will become genuine friends, we can always hope… and write fanfiction. Lots and lots of fanfiction.

[new-dinosaurs]

Plocealauda Alström et al., 2023 (new genus)

(An individual of Plocealauda assamica, photographed by J.M.Garg, under CC BY-SA 3.0)

Meaning of name: Plocealauda = Ploceus [genus of weaverbirds including the Asian golden weaver] Alauda [genus of larks including the Eurasian skylark]

Species included: P. assamica (Bengal bush lark, type species, previously in Mirafra), P. affinis (Jerdon’s bush lark, previously in Mirafra), P. erythrocephala (Indochinese bush lark, previously in Mirafra), P. erythroptera (Indian bush lark, previously in Mirafra), and P. microptera (Burmese bush lark, previously in Mirafra)

Age: Holocene (Meghalayan), extant

Where found: Open habitats in Southern and Southeast Asia

Notes: Plocealauda is a genus of larks, a group of largely ground-dwelling songbirds that live in open habitats, mainly in Afro-Eurasia. The members of Plocealauda are among the many larks that were formerly classified in the genus Mirafra. Traditionally, Mirafra included about two dozen lark species that have relatively robust bills and range across Africa, southern Asia, and Australia. However, a new study finds that this classic conception of Mirafra not only includes many more species than other lark genera, but also probably originated substantially earlier than closely related genera.

For the sake of consistency, the authors of this study suggest that Mirafra should be split up into four separate genera. One of these genera keeps the name Mirafra, whereas the old names Corypha and Amirafra are resurrected for two others. For the fourth group, the name Plocealauda has been used in 19th Century literature, but because past uses of this name did not fulfill the requirements of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature to establish a new genus name, the authors of the new study had to formally coin Plocealauda as a new name in their paper for it to be considered valid.

Reference: Alström, P., Z. Mohammadi, E.D. Enbody, M. Irestedt, D. Engelbrecht, P.-A. Crochet, A. Guillaumet, L. Rancilhac, B.I. Tieleman, U. Olsson, P.F. Donald, and M. Stervander. 2023. Systematics of the avian family Alaudidae using multilocus and genomic data. Avian Research 14: 100095. doi: 10.1016/j.avrs.2023.100095

[do-androids-dream-ao3acc]

The things you love or the people you hurt

Donald Ressler was a man of firm moral principles. At least, that's what he had believed for a very long time – amazing, actually, for a man who had once committed murder and disposed of the body twice. Ressler had always convinced himself that this act had been a wake-up call, and after he had joined the FBI, it had been easy for him to squeeze such things into a tight corset of black and white. But then Raymond Reddington came along. He, too, followed a strict code, had a certain moral compass, although he was on the completely opposite side. The black-and-white tones in Ressler's own value system no longer struck out so clearly, so unequivocally in one direction. Ressler learned that gray was a color darker than white but lighter than black. And he learned that he found it extremely attractive.

To be together, they had to steal time, as the saying goes, as if there were an invisible time account. If that existed, they paid into it with lies and withdrew from it with desire. Sometimes, when they had satisfied a mutual craving, Ressler would hide his forehead in the elegant curve of Raymond's neck as if to cool it, although they were both heated. Then he remembered that the doubts were self-chosen, just like the decision to engage in this affair, and that there were no easy answers.

No answers as to why he was both attracted and repelled by the man's silly hat, so much so that his heartbeat would sometimes stop for a second on the street when someone wearing a hat stood in the distance. Until he realized that it was not the hat, but what it stood for: a kind of vain decadence, the exaggeration of a cliché, an anachronism that was supposed to feign a distinguished ambition. Not that Raymond wasn't all that, but really it was about what was under that hat, under the suits and the sometimes awkward posturing.

Reddington had recognized their commonality much earlier than Ressler. That probably shouldn't have surprised Donald. He was far too straightforward, a man from humble beginnings who secretly couldn't help feeling a sense of satisfaction when they caught a criminal who had become rich by doing bad deeds.  

"You want the same thing I want, just by different means," Raymond had asserted.

It had been their first night together. Stolen time, which Reddington had said unconvincingly that not even Dembe knew about. But that was nonsense, because Dembe never left his side, he always knew where Reddington was, protected him from all dangers, even from those that only Dembe thought were a danger at all. Of course Donald was a danger to Reddington, Dembe himself had made that unmistakably clear to him. But Ressler was like a dog that had picked up a scent and would not give up until it had found its cause.  

So that first night he might have been standing outside the door just as much as any other, but he didn't care anymore. He remembered how he had looked at Reddington as if he had said something indecent, although only a few seconds ago they had done things together that Donald, with a little more sense, would have considered extremely improper.

"I want the same thing as you?" he had asked, mockingly.

Reddington, who in those moments bore a rare softness in his features, had let out a hoarse laugh. Then he had raised a hand and brushed a finger over the corner of Donald's mouth, as if he could simply wipe away any remark and perhaps even any doubt.

"You don't seem to understand, Donald," Reddington had explained in his roundabout way, "that we are not so different. Oh, I already know that you are not comfortable with that thought. You think you, with your laws and your command, are above crime."

"And you think you, as a criminal, are above everything. I would say those are two extremely conflicting views."

"No, it's two sides of the same coin," Reddington had asserted, and instead of explaining this any further, he had begun to let his tongue follow his finger. As it turned out, he always managed to stop a possible discussion this way in the future as well.

Ressler was not stupid. He would never have made it this far if he were just a man with a badge and a gun, bluntly carrying out orders and priding himself on being on the seemingly right side of the law. Therefore, he had quickly understood that Reddington had awakened in him a desire that had always been there and had always been suppressed. He had understood, also thanks to Liz, that he was extremely susceptible to physical attraction, and that this was a weakness that others were willing to exploit. And yet he never expected that man, the man with the ridiculous hat and the expensive suits and the overly exclusive taste, would be as attractive to him.

For a while he wondered what exactly it was. The fact that crime paid off after all? That would be like him mourning a wrong choice. One that he would have had, back then, as a boy. Killing a man opened up a dark world. He, however, had chosen the light one. And now everything was gray, but this gray was not dull, not foggy; neither bad nor good. Maybe it was just the sex. The age difference. The thought was uncomfortable, especially after Ressler had been watching a lot of gay porn in the privacy of his own home and mind.

And maybe he would never figure it out either. Maybe there was destiny, after all. Destiny that had decided that his moral principles were very malleable, just like Reddington's. Destiny that had decided for him that he found Reddington attractive in a way he had never believed existed outside of female forms. Secretly, he sensed that there was more. That was what made it so hard, a kind of existential crisis. What if he was as addicted to Reddington's touch as he was to the pills that had been his lifeline for a while? What if the man was simply another form of addiction?

Sometimes, just before they met, Donald would take one of those pills, even if he wasn't in pain. Because in truth he was, he felt pain in areas so deep inside him that no cure could get there. This pain was unbearable, and although Ressler was not a cowardly man, not one to avoid a fight, it was questionable whether this fight could be won. And maybe that was not possible. One day these pills would no longer work, that much was clear. One day he would have to face what he had gotten himself into. One day, Raymond would also have to face what was perceived as justice.

Until then, Donald would lay his head in the crook of Raymond's neck, breathing in his scent, that mixture of a far-too-expensive aftershave and sweat that testified to the effort Donald had put him through.

In a way, that was very satisfying.

[jewish-privilege]

(...)

I was a 12 years old when I was attacked by a mob of children and called "Christ killer" — the same age Jesus was, according to the Gospel of Luke, when he lingered in the Temple of Jerusalem and impressed the elders with his intellect — so this issue is undeniably personal. That wasn't the first or last time I was bullied for being Jewish, but it was the only time I nearly died because of it: Those kids held my head underwater, chanting, "Drown the Jew!"

This incident sprang back to mind  this month as Republicans tried to figure out what to do about Greene, a particularly obnoxious Christian right-winger who has suggested that a "space laser" affiliated with Jewish banking families caused the 2018 Camp Fire in California, expressed sympathy for the anti-Semitic QAnon fantasies, promoted a video that claimed Jews are trying to destroy Europe, posed for a picture with a Ku Klux Klan leader and liked a tweet linking Israel to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

(...)

None of this is surprising for anyone who is familiar with the history of American anti-Semitism. Greene is not an aberration, some inexplicable pimple of hatred that blemishes the American right's otherwise Jew-friendly visage. The American right has long had an anti-Semitism problem, and she's just the latest symptom.

This history of hatred "tells us much more about the anti-Semite than it tells us about Jews," Dr. Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, told Salon. After citing an Israeli historian who refers to anti-Semitism as a "cultural code," Sarna explained that beliefs that vilify Jews as malevolent plotters who secretly control the world have a long history in American political life. "These ideas, which I think many on the left frankly had thought were done and over with, we suddenly see them full blown," he said

Before the 19th century, Sarna explained Jews were stereotypically depicted as being cursed: They were "wandering Jews" for their supposed role in killing Jesus Christ. In the modern era, however, the stereotype emerged that Jews secretly controlled the world and were responsible for everything that a given anti-Semite might regard as sinister. During the Civil War, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant blamed the Jews for cotton smuggling and expelled the entire Jewish community from areas he controlled in Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi. When the populist movement arose to address agrarian economic concerns in the 1890s, Jewish bankers like the Rothschilds were a frequent target among ideological leaders like William Hope "Coin" Harvey.

(...)

There's a direct line between those conspiratorial fantasies ideas from previous decades and the anti-Semitic attacks of the 21st century. "Conspiratorial thinking, by its nature, argues that everything is connected," Sarna explained. "There are no coincidences and it eschews complexity. It believes there are simple explanations based on sinister individuals who are manipulating the universe. Unsurprisingly, in a Christian setting, those are Jews."

Those ideas can evolve — Sarna pointed out that the QAnon belief in a giant child abuse ring run by Jews is analogous to the "blood libel," the medieval myth that Jews used the blood of Christian children for rituals — but the underlying assumptions have been consistent. It just so happens that, in the modern right-wing incarnation, Donald Trump's cult-like following believes that "all the enemies of Mr. Trump are now child molesters."

(...)

[Jewish comedian Larry Charles] brought up community organizer and political theorist Saul Alinsky, a favorite target of the right. "He is almost like the devil in a way," Charles observed. "He's like this radical leftist Jew, he fits all the categories. He checks all the boxes."

"Shooting some of these movies, we would see reasonable people who have this blind spot," Charles said. "They have this crazy belief, and there were all different applications and manifestations of it, that the Jews control everything. That is like a mantra amongst a certain segment of the population."

(...)

With the election of Trump in 2016, those ingrained belief systems — which for many years had been kept outside the American political mainstream — became more prominent, and their adherents more emboldened. David Weissman, a military veteran and former conservative Republican who stopped being a self-described "Trump troll" after a 2018 conversation with comedian Sarah Silverman, told Salon about his encounters with anti-Semitism on the right.

Back when he still supported Trump, Weissman recalled, he got into a "little spat" with an alt-right commentator who calls himself Baked Alaska, who was recently arrested after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Ultimately they moved past it, Weissman said: "We both realized we were Trump supporters" who believed "Democrats were the bad guys." Once he left MAGA world, however, Weissman said "the anti-Semitism definitely escalated" in interactions with his former allies.

"When I became a Democrat, I was called 'the k-word'" and targeted by "anti-Semitic slurs and tropes," Weissman said. Trump supporters sent "memes of me being Jewish in the oven," and "put my name in parentheses," a common tactic used by the far right to target someone for being Jewish.

(...)

"Anti-Semitism certainly did not start with Marjorie Taylor Greene, nor did it start with Donald Trump, but we have seen an exponential increase in violent anti-Semitic incidents during Donald Trump's presidency," Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, told Salon. "That is no doubt related to the fact that he emboldened and aligned himself with white nationalism." She mentioned Trump equating the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville with the peaceful protesters by "commenting that there were very fine people on both sides," refusing to denounce white nationalism and telling the right-wing Proud Boys during one of the campaign debates to "stand back and stand by."

"White nationalism had existed in our country prior to that, and anti-Semitism as an element of it, but white nationalists had never had an ally in the White House until Donald Trump," Soifer said.

(...)

Donald Trump's supposed pro-Israel policies were closely aligned with those of Benjamin Netanyahu, and did nothing to correct for Trump's history of anti-Semitic words and actions. He accused Jewish Democrats of "great disloyalty" toward Israel (feeding into the stereotype that Jews have dual loyalties), removed any specific reference to Jews from a 2017 State Department statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day and has frequently used anti-Semitic dogwhistle terms by opposing "globalists" and describing himself as a "nationalist." When I interviewed Charlotte Pence, the daughter of former Vice President Mike Pence, she talked about her family's love of Israel but refused to answer a question about whether she believes Jews are going to hell — or discuss the creepy messianic theories underpinning the Christian right's support for Israel.

When I asked Larry Charles whether, based on his experiences, there's an opportunity to build bridges with anti-Semites, he was skeptical. "I have not seen a lot of opportunities for bridge building in the situations that I've been in," Charles explained. "The people that I've met through Sacha [Baron Cohen] were very rigid and dogmatic in their prejudices. There was no crossing that gulf with them. There might be tolerance, temporarily. There might be patience, temporarily. But there's no changing that belief."

I hope that Charles is wrong but suspect he is right, which raises the question of how American Jews should react to the Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world. For want of a better alternative, I think the only solution is to be intolerant toward intolerance. House Democrats were right to strip Greene of her committee assignments, but that is not nearly enough. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter need to do more to limit hate speech, even if conservatives cry foul in bad faith (the First Amendment only protects people from government censorship, not consequences from private corporations). Right-wing politicians who attack prominent Jews in ways that can be plausibly construed as anti-Semitic, or by denouncing "globalists," need to lose their funding. People who oppose anti-Semitism must lead boycotts against right-wing media figures who cover for people like Greene, such as Fox News' Sean Hannity.

On a broader level, critics of anti-Semitism must recognize that this form of bigotry is part of America's long history of hate — a history which holds that only white, straight Christian "manly" men have a right to rule — and recognize our responsibility to be allies to African Americans and the Latinx community, Muslims and the LGBT community, women suffering under the patriarchy and the poor struggling to make ends meet. If we limit our empathy merely to other Jews, the implicit message is not that systemic oppression is wrong, but only that we happen to dislike it when our group is targeted. The Jewish tradition at its best instills a moral responsibility to see all the layers of oppression, and align ourselves with its victims.

[Read Matthew Rozsa’s full piece in Salon]

[aegor-bamfsteel]

Who would you fancast for Daemon Blackfyre and Daeron II? I looked through your tags & only saw your fancasts for Aegor, Shiera, and sort of Bloodraven (but we can all say Max von Sydow was perfectly cast). Very good picks. I would like to know about the others. :)

Hello, anon! The post to which you’re referring also has some fancasts for Rohanne, Daena, and Calla (although I’m not completely pleased with Rohanne’s; and I’ve changed my mind with Calla; please substitute her with Marlo Thomas as the cheerful aspiring actress Ann Marie in That Girl, gif below).

I actually have some issues with Max von Sydow as Brynden Rivers, but I’ll explain why under the cut since this post is just a fun exercise (these actors are either deceased or too old for these roles now). As for the characters you’ve asked about, I’ve long had trouble with fancasting Daemon because of his nuances and very distinctive look. I don’t want to just cast Orlando Bloom/Henry Cavill for all these warrior Targaryens, but rather pick someone I think could convey his personality. So if I had to choose:

Robert Redford at his peak in the 60s/70s I think would be the real life equivalent of Daemon Blackfyre, in that his name was used by people in his generation to mean “a man so handsome even The Guys Want Him” (Eustace Osgrey and Dunk both notice how attractive he is, and Dunk only sees his face on a coin). He was a blond, blue-eyed all-American hero equally prominent in romance as in action/adventure, but without the rough edges of a Marlon Brando. Redford was from the New Hollywood era that sprung up following the repeal of the Hays Code, and consequently characters tended to have more explicit nuance. With Redford, his most prominent roles weren’t cookie cutter good guys in the vein of the Hays Code films, even though he was still the character the audience would root for (this is how I see Daemon, as having character flaws but ultimately a better man than the rest of the story’s main male characters): as a spendthrift con artist swindling a violent mob boss (The Sting), or a perpetual outlaw on the run from US marshals (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), or even a skilled writer whose lack of political and moral convictions causes him to lose the woman he loved (The Way We Were). I chose this .gif of The Way We Were because Redford plays the effortlessly talented, socially-adept WASP writer opposite Barbra Streisand’s determined, headstrong Jewish antiwar activist who pushes him to take writing seriously and puts principles over romance; I think that story could fit Daemon and Rohanne (except Daemon and Rohanne do work things out by the end, whereas Hubbell and Katie drift apart). I still have some doubts about this casting, but at this point I’m just relieved I could name one actor who has some Daemon Blackfyre essence.

Daeron II’s fancast and a few surprise casts under the cut:

Donald Pleasence is one of the greatest characters actors of all time (I chose this .gif because he doesn’t have a beard here, and Daeron II was clean shaven). Being shorter than average and prematurely balding meant he didn’t fit Hollywood’s image of a leading man (just like Daeron didn’t fit Westerosi ideals of a martial king), but he used his icy blue eyes and sonorous voice in his portrayal of some of the most iconic characters in popular culture (original Blofeld in You Only Live Twice and original Dr. Loomis in the Halloween franchise). Since he allegedly never turned down a role he was offered, he was in some of the greatest movies ever made and some of the worst, but each time he gave a solid performance. He could make some of the stupidest dialogue ever recorded (1980’s Pumaman) sound sensible and even menacing, which would be an assert for portraying a character with as many contradictions as Daeron II seemed to have. Despite playing many villains, Pleasence also portrayed some heroes or mentors, but always with an intensity of a character that would cross boundaries (no surprise, he was a huge fan of Sir Laurence Olivier). All told, Pleasence is an actor who I think could’ve brought some interesting gravitas and unique charisma to a character I believe on paper lacks both.

Now for some bonuses:

Late 70s/early 80s Orson Welles as Aegon IV fits so well I wouldn’t be surprised if GRRM had him in mind when inventing his appearance (obvious Henry VIII parallels notwithstanding). Most people know Welles as the director and star of 1941 Citizen Kane or the narrator of the 1938 “The War of the Worlds” radio drama that caused a mass panic in the audience, but he had a long career after that (he died 5 days after he completed voice work for Unicron in 1986’s The Transformers: The Movie, incidentally part of one of my favorite franchises). Older Welles was so fond of eating and drinking wine, but so difficult to work with, that director Alexander Jodorowsky essentially bribed him with a Parisian chef to play Baron Harkonnen in a scrapped Dune adaptation. He has Aegon IV’s pointed silvery beard and hair as well as the girth, but is also tall, with a resonant deep voice that scared young children back in the 80s (I imagine that Aegon’s kids and grandkids were afraid of him in his later years). I also like to think Aegon had a charismatic, even learned side that he used to impress women, and I think Welles could pull that off. Aegon IV is a one-dimensional character, more of a device to get the Rebellion plot moving (and attract audience hatred), but if any actor could bring some depth, menace, or even a bit of twisted humor to the role, it could’ve been older Welles.

Bette Davis in All About Eve as Elaena Targaryen is a fancast I’m fond of, maybe because I see Elaena as the jaded older showwoman type who doesn‘t care too much about her romantic life due to her work and has little maternal instinct (and also smokes clove-scented pipes). Davis might not be one of the most physically attractive actresses (although considering I think Kate Hepburn is gorgeous but Wikipedia says she’s “coltishly pretty” what do I know), but she conveys such emotion in her eyes and mouth, or the disdainful way she holds her cigarette; just like Elaena wasn’t the most beautiful Maidenvault princess (although like Davis, she did grow into her looks) and had those same angry eyes. Bette Davis wasn’t afraid to take unsympathetic or even villainous roles at the time of the Hays Code (she even shaved off her eyebrows to play Elizabeth I); she was tough and outspoken, as her epitaph states: She did it the hard way. Margot Channing’s anti heroic character softens a bit toward the end of the film, agreeing to get engaged to a long term boyfriend, and maybe that parallels Elaena’s seeming retirement with Michael Manwoody.

Now for some wank about Brynden Rivers’ casting as Max von Sydow:

I wouldn’t have much problem taken out of context. Max von Sydow is a ruggedly handsome man, with a dignified face and intense stare. It’s understandable why the most beautiful female character in the world was sexually attracted to a character who resembles him. However, there’s nothing in the text that indicates Bloodraven is attractive and a few clues that he isn’t (Dunk calls his birthmark “ugly”, GRRM said he has a “grim and forbidding aspect”). At this point I’d roll my eyes that even the “unattractive Targaryen” is handsome, but then you add Daemon’s (Marvel comic’s Thor) and Aegor‘s (Barry Windsor Smith’s Conan the Barbarian) casting into to the mix and it gets annoying. GRRM stated that Aegor was “handsome in a dark brooding way”, and Daemon is repeatedly said to be so attractive that it’s actually a minor plot point. Neither comic book character model is anywhere near as attractive as Max von Sydow, and this was carried over into Amok’s official artwork for the 3 characters, which GRRM actually approved without comment (except that he considered Daemon “too soft”, rather than anything to do with Brynden or Aegor’s caricature of an angry face). I’m not saying this to be shallow, but it’s another example of how Brynden Rivers isn‘t allowed to be flawed or suffer setbacks, even in the shallow physical sense; just like he’s able to twice duel an exceptional warrior-commander to a standstill despite allegedly preferring the arrow; or being scrawny despite being above average height and capable of drawing 60-80 pounds of draw weight; or continuing to be Hand for decades despite exacerbating major crises; or being allowed to take Dark Sister to the Wall and become Lord Commander despite years of showing he shouldn’t be trusted to lead; he can’t even be physically less handsome than his brothers even when it’s important to the plot. As it is, I’m scratching my head why Daemon is remembered as so attractive and why people are frightened of Brynden’s appearance (Aegor’s appearance isn’t plot relevant, which is a relief because the less I say about angry!emoji!Hagrid the better). GRRM could’ve recommended another comic book character to serve as Brynden‘s face model, or he could’ve kept von Sydow but made Daemon and Aegor’s face models two famous actors—like Robert Redford (famously handsome all American Vice Guy protagonist) and Laurence Olivier (essentially the Byronic Hero/Shakespearean villain king of Hollywood’s Golden Age). As it is, it feels like Brynden is Suetiful All Along—where the text tells us he’s not attractive but he’s shown to be such, and that unattractiveness never stops him from achieving anything—whereas Daemon’s (and Aegor’s to a lesser extent) by contrast is an informed attribute.

Fan wank aside, thank you for being interested enough in my reminiscing about older movie characters to request a sequel post. My ask box is always open, even if I can take some time to respond.

[beautifulbountifulwonderland]

Roots of Veganism

Veganism, while not too old of a concept has been around for centuries except in the form of vegetarianism instead. It can be traced all the way to the Indus Valley civilization that existed during 3300-1300 BCE. Early renowned vegetarians included Indian emperor, Chandragupta Maurya and Ashoka, Greek philosopher Plutarch and even Greek sage, Pythagoras.

 Pythagoras (yes, the one who invented the theorem) is heavily said to have advocated for vegetarianism, albeit a very strict form. He forbade any of his followers from eating beans or wearing wool garments. A student of Plato named Eudoxus of Cnidus wrote that “Pythagoras was distinguished by such purity and so avoided killing and killers that he not only abstained from animal foods, but even kept his distance from cooks and hunters.”

 In addition, those who follow Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism all advocated for plant-based eating as they practiced Ahimsa, which means kindness and non-violence to every single living creature. Ahimsa isn’t just a code of conduct to follow but also a way of life, as it is believed that harm done upon creatures that cannot defend themselves will bring about heavy karmic punishment and prevent one’s soul from attaining nirvana.

 Ital food that originates from Jamaica is food celebrated by believers of the Rastafari movement, originating somewhere in the 1930s. The Rastas are earth-preservers who believe that the food they eat should exclusively come from land. This led to the birth of Ital. Ital, which is derived from the word “vital” is food that is organic, unprocessed and free of additive substances. The Rastas’ choice to eat Ital also holds spiritual meaning for them as they wish to remain as close to nature as possible and forge a closer bond between themselves and the Earth.

 In Eritrea and Ethiopia, those who follow the Orthodox Christian religion abstain from any and all animal products for around 200 days every year, but plant-based meals are still permitted. This is due to their fasting traditions that occur on their religious holidays. For example, many followers will fast every Wednesday and Friday, during Lent in the days leading up to Christmas and multiple cafes can be seen putting up purely plant-based menus only.

  While Donald Watson may have coined the term veganism wayyyy back in 1944, it is abundantly clear that the concept has been around for as long as we can remember and even become part of multiple cultures around the world. Thank you for the read, be sure to follow and stay tuned for more updates!

-Y.V

[ceremonialmagic101]

I want to be a magician

That’s a start. You begin with a daily regime of meditation and other exercises to build the skills you need to perform magick. There are several programs out there and they’re all about as good as any other - Liber O, Liber MMM, Donald Michael Kraig’s “Modern Magick.” They’re all easily findable with a google search. I can send you my own if you want. Do whatever program you pick for at least six months. Then the real fun begins.

— @scrollofthoth

Find a good stick.

You’ll know the good stick in three ways: First, it will not be rotted or punky— it will be solid and strong. Second, it will be not be crooked, but direct.  It will be neither too short and switchy, nor too long and unwieldy.  I will not call it straight, though it has aspects of that in its shaping. Third, it will be queer in some way: it will draw your eye and demand your attention.  It will not allow you to leave without it.  There will be something unusual about it that only you can see.

Once you have the stick, find the knife.

You will know the knife in three ways:

First, it will have two edges, making it more dagger-like than knife-like.  Or maybe it will only have one edge, like a pocket knife. It will have no plastic parts.  Or if it does, then it will have your grandfather’s initials engraved into it, or perhaps the sigil of a former lover.  The initials don’t even have to be your grandfather’s, really, just somebody’s grandfather. Or maybe the knife is just a rock with a sharp edge, or maybe a piece of wood that you’ve whittled with a different knife.  The knife is needed, but not always important.  It’s more important to have one, than that it be a particular kind.

Because the pen is mightier than the sword, you can replace the knife with a feather.  Because words are tools in the hands of a skilled magician, you can replace a feather with a pen.  But you cannot replace a knife with a pen.  No substitutions like that are permitted.  Unless it’s a really, really good pen, like a $400 Mont Blanc fountain pen with a fancy gold nib. Or a pen that the beautiful girl in Spanish class loaned you on the day of the final examination.

Once you have the knife, seek the cup.

The cup is usually seen as a chalice: a hollow hemisphere or half globe atop a sphere or roundel crusted with jewels, attached to a pyramidal base: the hollow basin is an emblem of the Moon, the Sphere below it an emblem of the Sun, and the pyramid an emblem of the Earth. The chalice thus represents the embodiment of the three strands of power — the Lunar current, the Solar current, and the Telluric current, whose intertwining forces are the source of all magic in our world.  

Maybe that’s true. Maybe it isn’t.  You can use a teacup instead, as long as it is YOUR teacup, and no one else’s — and you can borrow someone else’s instead, as long as it is your cup to use for the reasons you intend it.

Once you have the cup, locate the pantacle, or the paten, or the plate. Three words, roughly the same meaning and the symbol — the disc or the disk, the broad lap of Earth, this sceptered isle, the coin of the realm, the material world, the physical representation of all matter.  WHAT IS.

Chances are that in the seeking of the four tools, you’ll find the other necessary components of the work of being a magician: the incense burner, the book of spells, the deck of cards, the lamp for your working table, the working table itself.  You’ll find a slew of sacred texts to yell into the night sky at a crossroads: the Orphic Hymn to the Moon, the Emerald Tablet, the Lord’s Prayer backwards, We Are the Witchcraft, The Aradia, and more.  There will be books of codes and ciphers, texts on prestidigitation and videos on the skills of making coins vanish.  And yes, there will be volumes of history and mathematics, gardening and hydraulics, sigils and seals, the art of summoning spirits into crystals, runes, and more.  You will call the Devil and stand your ground, knowing that to run away is to die — and, since to sell your soul is destruction, you will bargain him down to a few dozen dollars to a homeless shelter, and a steak left near a railroad tunnel at the dark of the moon, and still get your request fulfilled.

When the tools fail you?

Find a better stick.  

— @abwatt

[donaldduckau]

In a world that had everyone having an unique item from a coin to single flower petal that represented the person soul and granting them the use of a gift.

It's common for people to get their unique item around their teens years as they explore more and interact with others but few people already have theirs before that being lucky however there is people who found it really later on in life.

But there are those that don't have a unique item at all with few saying is that the person is hopeless, they haven't looked enougn, the person themselves are too unique to have a physical unique item or the item that meant for them is still waiting to be made.

Donald duck was one of those people that had no unique item despite people thinking his bad luck was his gift through people treated him the same as any average duck.

Meanwhile an Ai in the ducklair 151st floor called uno had been reacting to a pulling feeling like a string tied to his code from the start of his existence was trying to make him follow it but he couldn't.

[internetandnetwork]

UX vs. UI Design – Everything You Need to Know

Oftentimes, people use the terms UX and UI interchangeably, but in reality, these two have very different meanings.

At one point in time or another, we all must have overheard discussions regarding the excellent UX of a product and the lousy UI of a site. But what exactly are these two terms? What are their actual meanings? Is it some secret language that we’ll never know? Or do people just use these terms to sound cool?

Well, perhaps yes to the last question but a big NO to the rest of them. In this blog, we will discuss the difference between UX and UI. Keep reading this blog till the end to know everything about it.

UNDERSTANDING UX VS. UI

Before we start talking about anything, we must make sure that we are clear on the basics. So what are UX and UI? Let’s see.

UX design stands for “User Experience Design,” and UI designs stands for “User Interface Design.”

Both of them are crucial components of a product, and they work closely together. However, notwithstanding their connection, they play very different roles and deal with entirely different facets of the product development process and the design discipline.

Prior to diving into the difference between the two elements, first, let’s go through what the terms UX and UI individually mean.

WHAT IS USER EXPERIENCE (UX) DESIGN?

UX Design can be understood as a ‘human-first’ process that teams use to design digital and physical products.

Donald Norman, a cognitive scientist who coined the term “User Experience,” defines it as a term that circumscribes each and every facet of the interaction between the end-user and the brand and its products and services.

Sounds pretty much clear, isn’t it?

But you might have noticed that unlike what we discussed earlier, this definition does not tell much about what a UX designer does. But then again, similar to any other profession in this world, this too cannot be explained in just a line or two.

Nevertheless, this definition does imply that no matter what the medium, User Experience Design circumscribes all interactions that take place between an active or potential consumer and a business. Being a scientific method, this can be applied to anything ranging from street lamps to vehicles. But, despite being a scientific process, ever since its rise, it has been almost entirely used within the digital fields. One of the primary reasons behind this is the fact that the tech industry began exploding around the period of this term’s inception. UX Design has a fascinating history, and in case you want to know all about its origin and rise, you can always look it up on Google.

Virtually, UX applies to everything that can be experienced – whether it is a website or a coffee/tea maker or even a visit to the mall. As stated earlier, user experience is nothing but all the user interactions with a company, its product, or service. Therefore, UX design refers to all the various components that shape this user experience. A UX designer considers the feelings that the experience evokes in the user and how easily users can accomplish their desired tasks. For instance, in the case of an eCommerce website, the designer may think how easy it is for the users to complete the checkout process while shopping online? Or how easily customers can grasp that vegetable peeler? Or does our company’s mobile banking app allow the users to manage their money well? The end goal of UX design is to build easy, streamlined, coherent, and overall delightful experiences for the users.

Now we will talk about what precisely a UX designer does later in this blog. For now, let’s take a quick peek into everything you should know about UX design in short.

UX design is the way to develop and enhance the quality of all aspects of user interactions with a brand and its products or services.

Even though, in theory, UX design is a non-digital (cognitive science) process, it has been used and defined for the most part by digital fields.

One of the most widespread misconceptions about UX design is that it is about “visuals.” User experience design focuses on the overall feel of the experience.

WHAT IS A USER INTERFACE (UI) DESIGN?

Regardless of the fact that user interface design is an older and more practiced discipline, answering the question “What is UI design” seems like a bit of a challenge due to the wide range of misconceptions surrounding this field.

While the UX design is a cluster of tasks focusing on optimizing a product to make it more efficient and enjoyable for the users, UI design complements or adds the finishing touch to the product. User Interface design focuses on the look and feel as well as demonstration and interactivity of a product.

However, just like in the case of UX, here, too, the company hiring UI designers often and most commonly confuse it with other professions. This misinterpretation is to the extent that entirely different job posts will usually refer to the profession.

Take a look at the job openings for UI designers and go through their descriptions. You will most likely observe interpretations of the profession similar to graphic designing, and sometimes even front end development and branding design.

Meanwhile, if you go through the ‘expert’ definitions of UI design, you’ll predominantly spot descriptions that are partially akin to UX design.

Perhaps you are now wondering which one of them is actually right? – Sadly, none.

First things first, let’s clear this up for good. To begin with, unlike user experience design, UI design is purely a digital practice. A User Interface is a POI (point of interaction) between a user and a digital product or device. For example, your smartphone’s touchscreen, the trackpad you tap on to choose the type of beverage you want from the hot drinks vending machine, or the fingerprint sensor on your devices, all are points of interaction. In regards to websites and applications, user interface design focuses on the look and feel, and interactivity of the product. This process is all about ensuring that the UI of the given product is as intuitive as possible. This means cautiously taking all visual, interactive components into account that the users may come across. A UI designer will consider everything – from imagery, spacing, icons, and buttons to responsive design, color schemes, and typography.

Similar to UX design, UI design is a many-sided and challenging task. It accounts for the transformation of a product’s research, development, layout, and content into an appealing, navigating, and responsive experience for the users.

We will be discussing the whole UI design process and particular tasks that UI designers can expect later in this blog. For now, before proceeding forward, let’s take a quick recap on UI design.

UI design is strictly a digital process that thinks about each and every visual, interactive component of a product interface, such as color scheme, imagery, typography, icons, buttons, responsive design, and spacing.

The ultimate purpose of user interface design is to navigate the users visually through the interface of a product. UI design is all about developing an intuitive experience that does not make the users think a lot.

User interface design transfers the strengths and visual assets of a company to the interface of its products, ensuring that the design is harmonious, relevant, and visually appealing.

Having said that, with these crystal-clear definitions of both user experience and user interface, we are clear on the basics. This brings us to the difference between UX and UI.

Let’s dive in!

KEY DIFFERENCES BETWEEN USER EXPERIENCE (UX) AND USER INTERFACE (UI)

We will try and explain the various parts of a digital product using a metaphor:

Think of a product as the human body – here, the bones of the body portray the code which gives structure to the product. Likewise, the organs depict the user experience design – assessing and optimizing against input to support functions of life. Finally, the user interface design portrays body cosmetics: its demonstration, senses, and responses.

Still, confused? No need to stress out because you are not the only one.

UX and UI are the two most mistaken and abused terms in the digital field. User interface without user experience is like an artist throwing paint onto a canvas without thinking or having any idea. Similarly, user experience without a user interface is like a sculpture’s frame without any papier-mache on it. In order to offer an excellent product experience, UX and UI need to work together closely. They are both equally vital to the success of a product.

In case you have got some space for another metaphor, we would like to clarify the relationship between the UX and UI better:

Suppose you are on a vacation trip and you went to a restaurant to try out the local cuisine. As you step inside, you notice the lavish ambiance – the chairs, tables, glasses, plates, etc. Everything you are seeing is UI. Meanwhile, UX includes everything from delicious food, lighting, service, background music, parking lights, etc. Now, if you exit the restaurant in a happy mood, you experienced a great UX.

We hope you realize the difference between these two now.

Moving forward, keep in mind that UI and UX go hand in hand – you cannot just have “one” of them. Another crucial point to understand is that one does not need to have UX design skills to become a UI designer, and vice versa. UI and UX make up distinct roles with distinct processes and tasks.

In a nutshell, the primary difference that you should remember is that user experience design is all about the overall feel of the experience. While user interface design is all about how the interface of a product looks and functions.

A UX designer thinks about the whole journey of the user to resolve a specific issue: what measures do they take? What tasks do they have to accomplish? How simple and easy is the overall experience? A vast part of their work includes focusing on the types of issues as well as pain points that users encounter and how a particular product may fix them. UX designers carry out comprehensive user research to identify their target users and their needs regarding a specific product. Next, they will map out the entire user journey across the given product, taking into account things, such as IA (information architecture), i.e., the way content is organized and labeled across the product and the types of features a user might require. Ultimately, they will build a wireframe that lays out the skeleton blueprints for the particular product.

Once they have mapped out the bare bones of the product, that’s when the UI designer comes into play to bring it into existence. A UI designer thinks about every visual facet of the user journey, such as all the separate screens and touchpoints that a user may come up against – for example, clicking on a button or scrolling down a web page, or browsing through a picture gallery. Therefore, the UX designer outlines the user journey, and the UI designer focuses on every detail that will facilitate this journey. However, this no way implies that UI is all about looks either. UI designers significantly influence whether a product is accessible and all-encompassing or not. They will ask questions such as how various color combinations can be employed to create contrast and improve readability? Or, what color combinations contribute to color blindness?

Expectantly, you must have now begun grasping the difference between UX and UI design and how they both are indeed two different practices. To sum it up:

User experience design focuses on finding out and resolving the problems users face, while user interface design focuses on developing intuitive, appealing, and interactive product interfaces.

Typically, in the product development process, UX design comes first and is followed by UI design. First, the UX designer outlines the skeleton of the user journey; then, the UI designer completes it with visual, interactive elements.

While user experience can be applied to any type of product, service, or experience, a user interface is firmly limited to digital products and experiences only.

HOW DO UX AND UI DESIGN GO HAND IN HAND?

By now, we have looked at UX and UI as individual terms as well as discussed their differences. Let’s move on to how these two work together. You may be wondering if one of them carries more weight than the other. But the truth is that both of them are equally essential.

A product that looks very pleasing but is too hard to use is an excellent example of good UI but bad UX. In contrast, a product that is very easy to use but looks awful is a perfect example of good UX but lousy UI.

As you must have realized, UX and UI strictly work together. Having one of them work without the other would still make it feel like something is missing. Even though there are hundreds of thousands of examples of excellent products that have only one of them without the other, just envisage how incredibly successful they could have been if they had kept a firm grip on both the practices.

User interface design is like the frosting on the user experience cake. Suppose you think of a fascinating idea for an application that is evidently missing from the market, and its presence could truly change the lives of many. Therefore, to proceed, you recruit a UX designer to carry out inclusive user research and help you ascertain the different features your app must have and how you should map out the complete user journey. Finally, you develop and launch the app. The word is out now that your app provides something that people have been longing for since forever. But as soon as users install the app and open it, they observe that the text on all screens is hardly visible (imagine peach text on a white background). However, that’s not it. Furthermore, the buttons are placed too close to each other, resulting in users accidentally tapping the wrong button repeatedly. This is a perfect example of a poor UI ruining what could’ve been a great UX.

In contrast, have you ever landed on an aesthetically pleasing website and found that besides the fascinating animations and apt color scheme, it is an actual pain to use it? Great UI can never compensate for a poor UX; think of buying an eye-pleasing, delicious-looking cake that actually tastes horrible as soon as you take a bite.

Hence, when it comes to product design and development, UX and UI go hand in hand, complementing one another. Moreover, it is an absolute necessity to get both these facets right with the rising market competition. Thus, whether you decide to become a UX designer or a UI designer, it is beneficial to know both aspects because, at the end of the day, you will be essentially working together.

WRAPPING IT UP

The sole reason why we chose to write this blog is that the two fields – User Experience (UX) Design and User Interface (UI) Design have been repeatedly and unnecessarily mistaken. While these two do work together closely and complement each other in the product development process, they are not the same at all. And hopefully, we have set this straight once and for all through this blog.

When there is something wrong existing in our industries for so long, it is our responsibility to help clear things up. To wrap up, bear in mind that you need to be strong in both these fields in order to help make your product successful in this competitive marketplace. Once you get them right, there is no stopping you.

With this valuable information available at your disposal, we are sure you will be able to get the most out of both practices. So go ahead and implement this knowledge. Make sure to share this information with others who are still using the terms UX and UI interchangeably and not bothering to correct themselves. Happy designing!

Hariom Balhara is an inventive person who has been doing intensive research in particular topics and writing blogs and articles for Tireless IT Services. Tireless IT Services is a Digital Marketing, SEO, SMO, PPC, and Web Development company that comes with massive experiences.  We specialize in digital marketing, Web Designing and development, graphic design, and a lot more.

SOURCE : UX vs. UI Design – Everything You Need to Know

[theparccentralresidences]

Parc Central Residences | Welcome to Parc Central website

For numerous years now, human beings had been attempting to name me to invite if it's miles nevertheless an awesome concept to put money into belongings withinside the United States? I had been shopping for homes withinside the United States for extra than twenty years already. Buying a actual property withinside the United States commenced withinside the past due 80s, after I were given myself worried withinside the mortgage debacle and savings. This become whilst the banking machine withinside the southern states become failing and we even needed to make transactions of the belongings shopping for and promoting with none banking machine, on the grounds that there have been definitely no banks round parc central residences. Now it is as though there are financial institution disaster each twenty years in America. Prices drastically dropped, every now and then ninety five cents at the greenback, after I become shopping for homes. We may even purchase homes five cents at the greenback! There have been even domestic gadgets that we should purchase for as low as $six hundred and more than one thousand greenbacks in keeping with residence. The truth that the Americans are presently going via a primary financial institution disaster, numerous Australians are nervous to take gain of americaA marketplace. Perhaps you do not ought to fear approximately this difficulty in case you aren't going to stay withinside the United States. In the past due 80s, I did spend numerous time with a few Australians who have been looking to store what is left from their capital, the capital that they have got invested withinside the U.S. And after twenty years, I'm doing it again - assisting Australians who misplaced numerous cash, to get out of the US and could nevertheless be capable of maintain the ultimate capital that they have got invested. The American and Australian Culture Differences Why do you observed this occurred? Why perform a little Australians make investments withinside the United States and grow to be being disappointed? Even if we examine approximately 15% returns - 25% returns. I will study that truth for you in a bit at the same time as. But earlier than that, I'd like to head again to studying the variations among the manner Australians do commercial enterprise from the manner the Americans do commercial enterprise. Most of that is mentioned withinside the ee-e book, written withinside the 1970's referred to as, "American and Australian Cultural Differences". In the ee-e book that Donald Trump wrote, "The Art of the Deal", he certainly stated there's no such element as a win-win in commercial enterprise. It has usually been 'I win and also you lose'. Here's the primary important difference, in Australia, human beings come first, then the cash comes second. While withinside the United States, it's miles the alternative manner round, huge commercial enterprise and the huge greenbacks comes first earlier than the human beings. This would not imply that Americans are terrible and we're properly, we certainly have a special subculture. Also, our governing legal guidelines lean that manner. Our Australian subculture and mentality is contemplated in our felony machine, a machine this is shared with each felony and equitable law. Once a decide sees a settlement that he would not like, he can overturn the settlement on the grounds that below the equitable law, this means that honest play law. Unfortunately, this isn't always the way it works withinside the American gambling field. The actual deal is usually at the piece of paper. On the lighter aspect of gambling withinside the US marketplace is, we each can take a seat down down and speak workout a settlement. I may even exchange a part of a belongings withinside the US for most effective $7. As lengthy as we each signal a one web page General Warranty Deed or Warranty Deed, that belongings is offered for $7. And it expenses that a whole lot due to the fact that's what value me to document this on the neighborhood courtroom docket residence and make the purchase. That is the deal whether or not we had a innovative rent choice or an installment settlement. Unfortunately, in case you get into a few terrible terms, you don't have any authorities frame to are available and appears after you. The deal is, the greenback comes first. So, if ever you're in a rustic in which the actual property has an "I win and also you lose" sort of rule, be careful. They do have special set of rules. Here are a few exciting testimonies of what really occurred over the years. Perhaps via way of means of the stop of this article, a few human beings can instill of their heads that americaA won't be the high-quality vicinity to make investments, until, you already stay there. US Property Management A lot of Australians anticipate that americaA Property Management is treated the identical manner as it's miles in Australia. Here, while you purchase or promote a chunk of actual property, it's miles controlled via way of means of the actual property agent. In americaA, the individuals who bought the belongings to you've got got not anything to do with the control. Here, it's miles tough to discover a person who stocks the identical ethical code as in Australia. And if ever you discover one, it's miles costly, and it may drain you financially. Here's an instance. Strangely, the American control groups can in no way deliver your cash to you in Australia. They appear to have a bad mail carrier on the grounds that they lose numerous cheques. What they do understand is, your cheque sinks due to the fact Australia can be Atlantis. Bottom line is, it's miles approximately taking your cash and now no longer assist you to make a profit. If you pick out to head for an awesome control enterprise, a mild bulb can also additionally most effective value 25 cents, however in case you get it installed, it might cost a little you $88. This is due to the fact properly control enterprise withinside the US, most effective use certified human beings, and certified human beings are costly. Since anybody is scared of being sued withinside the US, the belongings supervisor would not use every body who would not have a license, whether or not it's miles a plumbing license, or electric license. Although a mild bulb withinside the US can also additionally ultimate for 15 months, and it's miles certainly reasonably-priced to shop for. However, on the grounds that I had been an absent landlord, I had been charged numerous $88 to have my mild bulb positioned withinside the residence. And sadly, no Americans can exalternate their personal mild bulbs. In Australia, we do numerous stuff the usage of our hands. Americans had been used to being talented to for see you later that they do not anything. When I hire my homes I observed that my rented belongings withinside the US turns into un-rentable whilst: • the carpet is extra than 2 years vintage, and • your house has been painted much less than a yr ago. In Australia, even supposing my vicinity has a 10, 20 or maybe 30 yr vintage carpet, I can nevertheless have it rented, even supposing it hasn't been painted withinside the ultimate five years. This is the motive why emptiness withinside the US is a whole lot better than in Australia. How does this have an effect on the control? We now understand that a rented unit, condo or a residence withinside the US can not be rented out until it's miles in best situation, nearly a brand new situation. This truth expenses cash. My condo homes in Dallas, Texas was vacant. I additionally had a constructing very near SMU campus and the scholars needed to circulate out at midnight. So, I had a team pass in to re-carpet and repaint. The subsequent morning, I had new human beings coming in, at round 10 a.m. This is simply an fee which you have, as a landlord. You additionally have control groups who ensure that they take cash from your pocket. Being continuously charged for numerous structures like, warm water, heating, and air con which become in no way in your house. The Systems That Drains Your Pocket How approximately air con? Most (if now no longer all) of the homes withinside the US have air-conditioning. And air-conditioning is certainly costly. It might be top notch if americaA tenants smooth the filters. Unfortunately, they do not. If that takes place, your air con structures get burn out. It might take some other $300-$four hundred to have your air con coils wiped clean and feature new compressors positioned in. This manifestly drives you nuts! Another scenario is the ice maker. American homes have an ice maker and each time you update it, it expenses $one hundred thirty plus some other $one hundred fifty for the carrier name. That's almost $300. Ice makers will ultimate for twenty-four months. If you've got got 2 to three tenants who continuously exalternate the temperature of the air conditioned homes, this could fry your air con unit. You modify the air con machine on the grounds that you've got got tenants and unfortunately, they do not recognize your equipment. You will grow to be spending a fortune only for your air con and heating structures. What can be preferred withinside the US isn't always the usual in Australia. The control usually receives 10% of the gross income. A lot of American control groups get their kickbacks from the carrier tradesmen who're continuously despatched out to the homes. Obviously, the owner isn't always the concern of americaA belongings control enterprise, the tenants are. Whatever those tenants need, they get. No be counted how careless those tenants are whilst the usage of your equipments, regardless of how continuously they expend your coins waft or profits. These are simply a number of the matters that in no way takes place in Australia. Here in Australia, we serve human beings to stay in is backside of the range, Americans can not be served this manner. Most Americans do not pay their hire. Those tenants who do pay rents withinside the US have a decrease percent as compared to the Australians who do pay their hire. They actually have a ee-e book it is referred to as "500 Ways to Rip Off Your Landlord and Never Pay Rent". This ee-e book expenses $19.ninety five. You are certainly withinside the location of huge commercial enterprise, I make cash and also you do not. A lot of those Americans do not pay their hire. That's how the commercial enterprise is - Americans do now no longer pay their hire! A lot of Australians bumped into those US homes with coins proceeding to refinance later and most effective to get their coins again via way of means of developing extra debt. The homes have been reasonably-priced whilst offered due to the fact you can not get financed. You will want to position all of your coins in there and ultimately deliver out your coins out. If ever the control has left you any cash, they may get it again from you via way of means of charging you all types of jobs that have been in no way even done, like a residence that has in no way been painted. That's how landlords are eaten alive. Also, right here's some thing really well worth understanding, the American roof most effective lasts for 12 years. Ever surprise why the suburbs blow over withinside the storm? That's due to the fact American homes do now no longer have any metal nor cement in them, that are crucial. American homes are product of timber and bricks at the outside. The bricks are not even thick sufficient to maintain up the residence. They are most effective slate fashion brick that is an inch wide. Unlike Australian family brick, round three-four inches wide. This can really maintain up the residence. For the American homes, the timber at the back of the brick face holds up the residence. So the brick is only a fascia plate. What takes place whilst a huge storm comes? It wipes out the complete suburbs of this American residence, certainly due to the fact there aren't anyt any bricks and no cement. What approximately the lavatories? Here's a revelation. They do now no longer have any water nor sink hollow for the water to head all of the manner down. The American lavatory flooring are simply product of plywood, preferred of 5 ply. I exalternate the toilet flooring each four years because it most effective expenses $ 300 - $four hundred...in case you do it your self. Yes, it's miles essential to exalternate the toilet flooring each 4 years, if you failed to understand. As stated earlier, the American lavatories do now no longer have any drainage hollow. So the water sits at the ground that is frequently carpeted. Eventually, it rots, it is why it's miles a need to to exalternate your lavatory flooring each 4 years. Another element you need to understand is that American sewer pipes are 2 inches, now no longer four inches. Expect to be solving blocked bathrooms each so frequently. In order to have it fixed, you'll want to name the Rotor Router man and pay $90. It is the usual manner of solving blocked bathrooms. Your tenants may be blacks, whites or Hispanics. A lot of Australians do now no longer recognize that after they purchase a reasonably-priced belongings, they do now no longer recognize in which they're shopping for those homes. What sort of community it has and such. The Hispanics are top notch. They really pay their hire even earlier than they feed their children. But did you understand that there's this expression referred to as, 'they are tough at the machinery', the Hispanics are honestly tough on a belongings. Perfect instance is, they use lard whilst cooking. Lard is fat. They pour this lard down your sink, which reasons the sink to get clogged. Which manner, that you'll want to name a Rotor Router man each 3 to 4 months. Or perhaps, your coping with agent may be the only to do that paintings for you. Making you spend extra due to the fact they needed to unplug all of your pipes.  I knew this one gents who lived withinside the Sydney suburb of Roseville. He offered fifty two reasonably-priced gadgets. What he failed to recognize become that it become fifty two gadgets of Hispanic residents. This guy ended up financially crippled due to the working prices of the Hispanics. The Hispanics, like to take a seat down withinside the again in their select out up vehicles and shoot their weapons on a Friday or Saturday night time, that is fine. They want to drink lots, and in a few of the States, there's no under the influence of alcohol using legal guidelines. So I might frequently dig a select out up truck out of my swimming pool complete of those under the influence of alcohol Hispanics who drove their select out up via my fence and directly into the swimming pool. What makes it tougher is, majority of those Hispanics do not communicate English at all. And it's miles costly to get tow vehicles at three withinside the morning. The unhappy element is, whilst Australians purchase a belongings in America, they suppose that it has the identical machine and set of requirements as it's miles in Australia. You ought to recall that America is a very special marketplace. They suppose, do and act matters differently. The carpets do now no longer ultimate lengthy, the paint does now no longer ultimate lengthy both. Although it's miles reasonably-priced to color and also you most effective want to spray the paint the usage of spray gun. Nobody makes use of brush anymore due to the fact spray gun is lots less difficult to apply and also you want to repaint after 2 years. Currently, I am helping a female who has a belongings in New York. Her agent positioned the belongings for $1.three million at the marketplace. Even to this day, I do now no longer suppose that her belongings is really well worth everywhere extra than $900,000 withinside the gift marketplace situation of americaA. This agent has produced a again pocket consumer who do not honestly exist. He might really record a person attempting to shop for the belongings, after which now no longer shopping for the belongings. There might be reviews that this residence does now no longer have tenants whilst in truth there was tenants in there for nine months already. The agent collects the cash and places it of their again wallet telling the owner, "I'm sorry, we can not get any tenants". When you do discover which you really have tenants for your homes, your control human beings will maintain telling you there isn't always and they will simply draw off the cash and you will maintain paying the value. The primary concept right here, deliberately or unintentionally, is to make you financially bleed. Until such time that making a decision to promote the belongings again. Surprisingly the control enterprise has a again seat consumer who will take pennies at the greenback. I actually have witnessed this incident such a lot of times. What approximately your lawns? What takes place in the event that they do not get mowed? Your the control enterprise does now no longer contend with this. They do now no longer prepare every body to mow lawns for the reason that metropolis goes to are available and mow the lawns for you. Simply due to the fact they've metropolis codes and ordinances which you want to make your private home appearance smooth and tidy. If you do now no longer make your private home appearance smooth, the metropolis will are available and make it appearance smooth and tidy, then you definitely get charged for $four hundred for having them do this for you. You aren't allowed to park your vehicle at the street, it is the guideline of thumb for maximum elements of America, due to the fact in case you do, you'll be charged any towing expenses. And you currently have a lien to the metropolis. If you're in Australia, you can now no longer discover approximately this due to the fact the awareness might be despatched for your American mailbox or maybe for your American belongings supervisor, that is the standard case. Your American belongings supervisor does now no longer pay it. He is going out of commercial enterprise or certainly destroys it. Since you do not know what is going on on, the metropolis sells your house from below you. The metropolis needs its cash again for its $four hundred lien, and could take your house to foreclosures or even promote you out. This is what you pay attention or watch on past due night time television, the metropolis tax lien sales. This is in which the metropolis owed cash on homes. Next element you understand, they may simply promote your house up and you'll simply discover that they both bought your house or they've condemned it. Your belongings has a burst pipe flooding hassle that is why the metropolis will condemn it. We had the identical difficulty in Dallas, Texas. That is a warm State and it certainly manner that you'll ought to continuously run the ones faucets. So at some point of the wintry weather, if I do not get all my piping blown out, there may be a big danger that my pipes will burst at some point of the wintry weather months. Then I actually have important flood damage. Another time period used for having the pipes blown out is winterizing. This leaves me  options, to have it winterized and value me, or ensure that my faucets are dripping and ensure that the residence is above sixty eight degrees- so as to additionally value me on air con and heating machine jogging 24/7. Oftentimes, you get it wrong. Your pipes will burst at the same time as you aren't round to repair and kind matters out. So the metropolis comes via way of means of, and condemns your house. They will condemn it via way of means of placing a big tape throughout the the front door. Worse is, the homeless human beings will circulate in and could smash whatever's left of it. They may even sue the metropolis in the event that they harm themselves in a metropolis condemned belongings which can also additionally cause having to get rid of your private home from the lot. They will depart you with what's referred to as a PAD. This has occurred lots withinside the United States withinside the early 90's. You can have not anything there however a cement pad. If you study the intense aspect, the cement pad is smooth and easy which will rebuild some other residence. This community is the crowd areas, the drug homes and the residence of prostitutes. Australians aren't used to this. There are some of gun wearing States in America. People both strung out on pills or get shot and those are the reasonably-priced homes that Aussies begin shopping for. If it is the case, maximum of those Hispanics, blacks and the individuals who stay on this community can not purchase it on the grounds that they do now no longer have the 50 grand to spend for this belongings. They can not borrow it due to the fact the loans do not exist. Only element left for them to do is to coins out. Whenever human beings speak approximately those gross yields in America, what they are saying is, this belongings is gross yielding 26%. But it's miles crucial to recall this is earlier than an quantity of your cash is taken out from repairs, maintenance, emptiness and different unexpected prices. My belongings, in which I used to stay, is 17.four % of each greenback in up maintain. It is certainly reasonably-priced to get elements for US homes. If you're withinside the US doing the entirety your self, it'd had been top notch. But in case you really stay abroad, and you've homes withinside the US, it is whilst it is a killer. What will drain you financially is the value exertions of getting a person to do the process at the same time as you aren't round. Another burden overseas landlords want to maintain in thoughts is the airfares, of flying from side to side to americaA, now no longer to say the remote places telecellsmartphone calls and the time difference, if you have to rise up at five:00 am in Australia simply to talk to anyone withinside the control office. Unfortunately, you do not get to talk to anyone, due to the fact anybody has voice mail. The truth which you can not communicate to a stay character drives you nuts. You can even be aware that your cheques may not arrive. That American banks may not cord cash to Australian banks until you've got got crammed out special felony documents. You have an entire bunch of greater office work from the brand new Patriots Act that Bush delivered in. This complete stack of office work will strain you out to the factor which you might certainly need to tug your cash out of americaA again to Australia. Up to now, I do now no longer understand any Australian who made a benefit from shopping for and protecting a belongings withinside the US. But human beings nevertheless name me, individuals who offered homes withinside the US searching ahead to getting a huge profit. Fact is, that day can also additionally or can also additionally in no way come. However, in case you do stay withinside the United States, you'll simply benefit from it. You will earn lots from shopping for and buying and selling homes withinside the US, certainly due to the fact Americans neglect about approximately equity. For them, actual property isn't always an funding car however a customer item, that as quickly as they're completed with it, they could depart and circulate on. If you're withinside the US, you may witness this your self. The Americans will understand that Aussies have now no longer left for Atlantis to stay there, they may recognize that you could display up the following day with a double barrel shotgun, disturbing to get again your cash, so that you could make profits - BUT, this is most effective in case you are bodily there. We can take gain of numerous conditions whilst we're there withinside the US. I made numerous cash after I become shopping for, promoting, buying and selling homes. But we ought to recognize how actual property buying and selling works withinside the US. My goal of writing approximately this nowadays is to apprehend  vital matters. We can also additionally communicate the identical language because the American, however our philosophy approximately commercial enterprise is definitely special-that is, 'they win and I lose'. Majority of Australians who invested in homes withinside the US do now no longer undergo this with out felony battles. In americaA, human beings sue every different. This isn't always approximately simply winning, it is approximately making the alternative man bleed and dry. Whoever offers up first will comply to what the alternative celebration needs. This is the painful fact of actual property commercial enterprise withinside the US. I've visible numerous Australians pass into that enterprise withinside the US marketplace, and could ultimately come again broke, tired and stressed. They do now no longer get whatever close to their returns at all. And yes, your cheques will mysteriously wander off withinside the mail. My final message is, spare your self from this painful experience. If you need to earn cash, you could earn it right here, for your personal backyard, while not having to shop for any airline ticket, handling US corporations, studying and expertise a special country's machine and manner of doing commercial enterprise-the tough manner. Yes, we do communicate the identical language as them, however they do now no longer do commercial enterprise the manner we do. It can also additionally sound attractive and horny to mention that I'm off to peer my residence in Florida, however there are extra negatives than positives on this experience. Find the identical possibilities right here in Australia. When you notice US figures for yield returns, discover what the internet yields and figures of the internet return. Consider the repairs, maintenance, emptiness and different unexpected prices as a way to come your manner. Brace your self from disappointments. Don't say I failed to warn you. This might be your manner of understanding and seeing what homes withinside the US can do to the investor.