Quote Originally Posted by eddiememphis View Post
Just checking in with everyone nine hours into the shut down.

So far, I'm doing OK. I hope everyone else is as well.

Just remember, together, we can get through this.

That's hilarious. My turn...


Well, the sky has fallen and it can't get up.

I've got all of the poor orphan children out on street corners selling apples for a nickel. We should be good - until we run out of apples to sell.

Based on everything I've been hearing from our loving and caring Democrat leaders, I'm totally scare-id right now. How ever will I put food on the table tonight? How will we be able, as a society, to continue to provide for the core necessities like completing further studies into why naked mole rats demonstrate aggressive behavior within their gender neutral test communities? I'd wring my hands if they weren't so frail from my malnutrition this shutdown has caused. Oh, the huge manitee!




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Both parties have gotten us into this too many times through the years - but most especially the Democrats. Right now, the Democratic party is trying to wield power it just doesn't have. They're trying to gen up fear over this situation and fail to realize this is helping the current administration with their goal of cutting the bloated positions within the federal government. I saw an article last night indicating that there are >200k federal employees that are looking to flee their positions because of this shutdown [ETA/Correction: Yeah, so ~130k of the government employees the media are saying are fleeing their positions due to the shutdown are actually those who, last February, accepted the option to leave their positions and get paid for 6-8 months while being on administrative leave]. If that occurs, the administration has indicated that many of those positions, and many more left inactive if this shutdown goes on for very long, will be eliminated.

Is this shutdown an inconvenience? For many seeking government services, yes. Is it catastrophic? Almost certainly not.

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ETA: AI use in the government - As with any tool, it can be helpful but how helpful or how detrimental depends on how that tool is used by the humans behind it. I keep reading article after article about proposed uses for AI. From these I'm left feeling that many feel AI is the end-all-be-all solution to all of our problems and there is a desire to deploy AI and just let it do its thing with as little human intervention as possible. That would be a huge mistake and would most certainly get us into a worse environment than we're in today. So, that's likely what's going to happen.