Executive Orders
President Donald Trump signed the following Executive Orders:
EO 14216 Expanding Access to In Vitro Fertilization
Congress
Lutnick confirmed as commerce secretary
The Senate confirmed businessman, philanthropist and cryptocurrency advocate Howard Lutnick as Commerce Secretary in a 51-45 vote on Tuesday. Lutnick, co-chair of Trump’s 2024 presidential transition team, is the former chairman and CEO of investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald, fintech company BGC Group, and commercial real estate services company Newmark Group. Headquartered in New York, the company lost two-thirds of their employees during the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. Afterwards, Lutnick launched a relief fund for families of the employees who died, a sum of $180M, plus healthcare coverage. The fund now assists victims of natural disasters and other hardships. Watch his opening statement.
National
Musk is reclassified
According to NPR, a federal judge on Tuesday denied an effort by Democratic state attorneys general to temporarily halt the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing data or terminating workers. Her ruling followed a government filing Monday night that Elon Musk wasn’t actually an employee or leader of the initiative, but is instead a “special government employee” who serves as a “senior advisor to the President.”
Chicago EPA workers protest
Also on Tuesday, about 200 fired EPA workers rallied at Chicago’s Federal Plaza to protest the Trump administration’s mass layoffs. According to WTTW-Chicago, one former employee said they were let go because of “inadequate performance” despite having received “exceptional” performance reviews from supervisors. A recent hire, they had moved their entire family to Chicago for the job.
I’m a disabled vet and the only thing I ever asked for from this country was this job, and they took it,” said the former EPA employee, who fought back tears. “I made all the money for my family. We don’t know what we’re going to do.”
Source: WTTW Chicago
Government
Lies, damned lies, and statistics…
In a media conference at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday, Trump announced that more tariffs are forthcoming, with a levy “in the neighborhood of 25 percent” on autos, and 25 percent or more on pharmaceuticals and semiconductor chips. He did not confirm an exact date of implementation.
Trump also reiterated claims made by Musk that millions of dead people are receiving Social Security checks. He read through a chart of Social Security recipients by age bracket, the same chart Musk posted on X late Monday.
But now we’re going really in. People from 130 years old to 139 years old: 3,936,000. Wow. I wonder if people are getting paid with all this. I mean, are these checks — and that’s what we’re checking right now.
People from 140 years old to 149 years old: 3,542,000. A hundred and forty years old and beyond. Now — now we’re really going because we’re looking to break the record by 25 years.
People from 150 years old to 159 years old: 1,345,000. These are in the — by the way, these are in the computer files.
These are — this is what they do well. They’re super — I asked Elon, ‘Who are these DOGE people?’ He said they’re super brilliant computer people and they love the country.
Source: whitehouse.gov News
Trump gave no explanation as to when or how the Social Security data was obtained, other than mentioning Musk and DOGE, and no official data analysis was provided to explain the anomalies.
After changing the topic and reading off a tally of USAID federal funding outlays, he returned to the Social Security data, stating:
But when I saw the Social Security numbers, I said, ‘Wow, that’s really something.’ So, we have — let’s just go above 100 years old. We have millions and millions of people over 100 years old. Everybody knows that’s not so.
Source: whitehouse.gov News
World
Zelenskyy visits Turkey
While in Turkey on Tuesday, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy commented on the US-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia, which began today without any Ukrainian diplomats present.
Any country has bilateral relations with other countries; please, discuss whatever you want, but you cannot make decisions without Ukraine on how to end the war in Ukraine, the terms, or other conditions. And we weren’t invited to that Russo-American meeting in Saudi Arabia.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy , NBC News
The comments were made during a media conference held by Zelenskyy and Turkish President to discuss Turkey’s possible role as a mediator for future discussions about ending the war in Ukraine.
This prompted Trump to respond later with a slew of falsities, including claiming that Zelenskyy has low approval numbers, and that Ukraine started the war:
“But today, I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it three years — you should have never started it. You could have made a deal,” Trump said.
The back-and-forth continued into Wednesday when, during a press conference, Zelenskyy responded:
“We have seen the disinformation, we understand that it is coming from Russia. We understand this, and we have evidence that these numbers are being discussed between America and Russia. That is unfortunate. President Trump, with great respect for him, as a leader of the people who we respect very much, the American people, who constantly support us, unfortunately lives in this disinformation space.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Associated Press
Celebrities
Media
Business
In an exclusive Guardian News report, a new Harris poll indicates that consumers are changing their spending habits to align with their values, with 24 percent of respondents saying they had stopped shopping at stores that didn’t represent their political views. The trend leaned toward GenZ, Black and Democratic voters. Overall, 50 percent of Democrats were said to be changing their spending habits compared with 41 percent of Republicans and 40 percent of independents.
In other news, the announcement last Thursday (Day 25) that Airbnb co-founder and board member Joe Gebbia is joining DOGE has caused some hosts, in the US and globally, to delist their properties in protest, citing concerns over anti-diversity actions by the Trump administration.
Culture
Geek Notes
If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine — Jim Barksdale, former Netscape CEO
The ubiquitous phrase, “garbage in, garbage out,” may apply more to large government databases than anywhere else. Databases are only as good as the data, and a key task for any database administrator (DBA) is normalizing data, which is the practice of standardizing data to reduce errors and improve data integrity.
That’s not an easy task when it comes to databases that have many people, sometimes across multiple agencies, who are entering and modifying data, as well as managing the potential data interactions with differently-structured databases in other agencies.
Furthermore, the front-end interfaces they use to access the database have undoubtedly changed many times over the years, beginning with command line “dumb terminals” to access mainframes, then shifting to PC-based software, then to web-based portals, and often now to cloud-based applications.
Ongoing training is necessary to ensure that employees know how to use the system and enter information correctly. If the department is lucky, they have the budget for vendor-supplied training, but oftentimes that task falls on already-overworked internal staff, sometimes even to non-technical administrative staff.
In a perfect world, a DBA could sit and sift through data all day to correct errors such as duplicate records, spelling errors, empty fields, data in the wrong fields, formatting errors (dates, numbers, etc.), orphaned records (records that aren’t correctly associated with unique identifiers), and other incredibly detailed tasks.
In the real world, however, database upgrades happen as budgets permit, at the whims of those in charge, and most often during agency reorganizations to demonstrate “modernization” of their workflows, usually because of changes in executive management, and performed under time pressures.
As such, new interfaces are deployed that may or many not resemble past ones, data entry fields may disappear, some records may be omitted intentionally to ease migrations, and some fields may have better formatting than in the past so that the data is more consistent going forward. Sometimes, the opposite happens which leaves even more opportunity for poorly formatted data.
A database query is not an analysis, it’s just a data export — like how a carton of eggs isn’t an omelette. And in this case, those eggs are probably sitting in a COBOL Db2 or Oracle database, requiring serious skills.
Without understanding the history of the database, it is impossible to perform any qualitative analysis on the data. Data without analysis is just data, to take it at face value to justify or counter causation is simply interpretative or confirmation bias, or… opinion.
String Board Notes
Further Reading
How Netscape lives on: 30 years of shaping the web, open source, and business; ZDNet; November 4, 2024
10 Minute Actions
- VoteVets has launched their DOGE Tipline and are looking for stories from veterans who have been impacted by spending cuts, layoffs, and other activities from the Department of Government Efficiency.