jonathanstephens.blog - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

A new website created by about a dozen federal employees, called “We the Builders,” aims to be a secure outlet for government workers to share stories about how their workplaces are being impacted by DOGE, and a place to explain the real-world impact of its access to government tech systems.

submitted 1 day ago • 155 comments

This whole thread. ✨

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btw, i will tell you this - i have been talking to people all day, and the media is missing, whether intentionally or not, how absolutely, volcanically angry the people who have been fired are, not because they lost their jobs, but because their jobs matter, to us

submitted 2 days ago • 62 comments

The Department of Homeland Security can now spy on you based solely on your “gender identity or sexual orientation.” I’m watching every fucking libertarian or “small c conservative” to judge how full of shit they are news.bgov.com/bloomberg-go...

submitted 2 days ago • 15 comments

It’s gonna be really hard to have these conversations about how to stop this . I’m not being sarcastic or cruel It’s going to be devastatingly hard Because so many folks are having hard realizations, and so many people will be on final straws And they will harm people fast while we try

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Overheard at local watering hole: actual discussion of how fun 45/47's tweets are...and...what?!

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Ok, I'm doing a version of this thread for 🧪 who are new to political conditions where info security is a safety issue: 1. Don't make public lists of people who are engaging in acts of resistance 2. Be weary of calls to advertise acts of subversion 3. Don't live post resistance meetings

submitted 2 days ago • 41 comments

Legendary hater Charles Darwin

submitted 3 days ago • 52 comments

The National Science Foundation fired all its experts. The National Science Foundation. Fired. All of its. Experts. And they weren't even told to! The leadership worked toward the Fuhrer and went beyond the cuts demanded of them in anticipation of many, many more firings—up to half its staff.

submitted 3 days ago • 51 comments

substack.com/@sarahkendzi...

submitted 3 days ago • 17 comments

If you are a cis person please take 2 minutes to do this. Trans people with non-updated gender markers, historical gender marker changes, and X markers are terrified to travel right now; rolling back this policy would mean a lot.

submitted 4 days ago • 4 comments

In 2024, the NLRB filed a complaint against Tesla for interfering in a union drive at their Buffalo, NY assembly plant. Today:

submitted 3 days ago • 79 comments

Super fun to go to a help forum for my CMS and discover someone I know asking the same question. "Oh, wait! I know them! I worked with them. Fun 😀" Emoji's genuine—caused a big smile.

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Five major airlines are suing to overturn a rule from then-Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg that actually holds airlines accountable for damaging disabled people's wheelchairs. New from me at @motherjones.com. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

submitted 4 days ago • 100 comments

The notion that Trump's "I'm king" tweet is "just trolling" or "a joke" presents an opportunity to recreate my just-joking thread (porting it over from the Bad Place): 1. I wrote my PhD dissertation on the social function of humor (in literature & film) and here's the thing about "just joking."

submitted 4 days ago • 114 comments

Just a reminder that fascists, authoritarians, dictators of all stripes destroy archives— books, museums, databases, &c— because those things provide windows onto a plurality of other ways we might organize the world. And so preserving, defending, and spreading that knowledge harms those regimes.

submitted 4 days ago • 9 comments

Super cool.

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"Shopify has laid off the team responsible for its social impact initiatives, including programs to support Black, Indigenous, and women entrepreneurs" reports @thelogic.co thelogic.co/news/exclusi...

submitted 4 days ago • 15 comments

Some good transferable advice in here about the value of setting your own boundaries in good times.

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I find Brian to be the most informed, trenchant, fearless, and literate tech critic/journalist and have a paid subscription to BLOOD IN THE MACHINE and everyone should.

submitted 5 days ago • 9 comments

Trump's lawyers are absolutely flailing in the courts right now

submitted 5 days ago • 240 comments

This Executive Order is not a direct attack on Marbury v. Madison and SCOTUS; it IS a direct attack on the 19 independent federal regulatory agencies, including financial regulators: SEC, FDIC, CFTC, CFPB, NCUA, FHFA, OCC and much of the Fed. It's the next step in Musk making X everyone's bank.

submitted 5 days ago • 9 comments

Quick question! 🙏🏻 Would it be weird to do #WebDev odd jobs? Just comes down to needing cash for bills, no #freelance work booked, and traditional job hunting is moving slowly. Ex: debug weird errors, fix small things, handle tedious chores, review code/designs, build #HTML #CSS #JS prototypes

submitted 5 days ago • 3 comments

NEW: The Trump admin is considering destroying 160 million COVID tests, worth half a billion dollars. This would be a horrible waste. COVID is still around, and causes high levels of illness and deaths throughout the year. Tests are expensive. The government should send them to people for free.

submitted 5 days ago • 40 comments

“The process of searching is the process of learning.” Thread. The process the author describes was never popular, and early Yahoo, not AI, foretold its sunset. But the main point holds true: we learn by searching as we learn by doing, for searching is a form of doing.

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

This commission statement refers to people with Autism, ADHD, asthma, auto-immune disease, and chronic illness as a “dire threat to the American people and our way of life”. This is a manifesto against disability. This is the language of eugenics.

submitted 6 days ago • 840 comments

ADHD thing that isn’t much discussed: Switching gears is really hard. Mixed with the executive dysfunction that often comes with ADHD, this can mean it takes forever to actually go do things, including basic self care things. Like getting up to take pain meds, get food, or even go to the bathroom.

submitted 6 days ago • 3 comments

This was one of the things that always irked me when I started in leadership and the categorical shift away from Craft. Despite what title may say, I never stopped being a designer. I started designing things differently, building teams and orgs. Still design. It's about designing systems.

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

I just wrote a piece called "In Praise of 'Normal' Engineers". (partly paywalled) When people talk about world-class engineering orgs, they usually have in mind orgs that are top-heavy with the most experienced and pedigured talent. This gets it exactly backwards. refactoring.fm/p/in-praise-...

submitted 6 days ago • 3 comments

The wealthiest man in the world who is engaged in a coup of the government is openly stating that his end goal was never about efficiency. It was always about white power and instituting what the new right tech world has called “the event” the moment which governments collapse and they take over

submitted 6 days ago • 40 comments

A woman who’s originally from Venezuela was stopped in Tucson for driving 25 in a 40 zone. Border Patrol arrived, handcuffed her in front of her children. All three were detained, interrogated, threatened with transfer to Guantanamo. Then, they were deported to Mexico azluminaria.org/2025/02/16/v...

submitted 6 days ago • 16 comments

For those wondering, how #disability is affected in all these federal actions on DEIA. (hint: the #DisCO and their families are very much a target)

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

rp'ed for alt

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

"The richest man alive, an actual Nazi and a fucking sicko, who was not elected, is firing tens of thousands of people to further enrich himself and the president he has usurped all to make Americans' lives worse" has to be among the biggest layups of all time for messaging. And yet.

submitted 7 days ago • 16 comments

The enemy.

submitted 7 days ago • 14 comments

When we tell our kiddo about the sky that was never blue, the pool-water coming out of the faucet, the smell of unburned hydrocarbons everywhere, trash on all the roadsides, cars without seatbelts… she shakes her head in disbelief.

submitted 8 days ago • 3 comments

I’d expect we’ll see a lot more of this.

submitted 9 days ago • 83 comments

In other words: the richest man on Earth, who owns a space technology company, is slashing the US government’s space program — with no electoral mandate to do so

submitted 9 days ago • 53 comments

There is always something you can do to gum up the works of fascism. A story. Claude Cahun. The queer nonbinary French-Jewish photographer. Nazis conquered France, were training soldiers on Jersey, where Cahun lived w/their partner, Marcel Moore. They did disinfo & morale smashing via Surrealism.

submitted 9 days ago • 38 comments

We have H5N1 one spreading like wildfire through the animal population, mutating in ways that could make it easier to jump to humans, & we’re eliminating disease detectives? Most people don’t even realize we’re still in the Covid pandemic. How in the heck will we get them to recognize another one?

submitted 9 days ago • 2 comments