This man is doing great work. In addition to the bills he signed so recently, I was interested to learn that Illinois bans libraries from banning books! That’s awesome! He’s making Illinois look more and more attractive to live in!

So I feel like I might have an interesting perspective on this…

All throughout college, I saw graduation similar to how you talk about it. I basically thought I’d show up drunk with my buddies, it would take half the day, and then it’d be over. Maybe I’d actually walk, maybe not.

For context, I graduated in the Spring of 2020, right when COVID first was becoming a thing. My graduation ceremony was cancelled, and replaced by a Facebook Live stream. Same speakers and similar speeches to what had been expected, but really none of the pomp and circumstance.

Now if you would’ve asked me earlier in my college career how I would’ve felt about my graduation ceremony being cancelled, I probably would’ve just shrugged it off. But it actually happened. And I find myself feeling like there is something missing from my time at college. Like there was no real sense of closure for the 4 years I spent there, the countless late nights in the library studying for insanely difficult exams, no real send off for the friends I had in the class outside my close circle.

So I feel differently about graduations now. There’s always going to be extremes, people who take them way too far. But I see the ceremonies themselves as the way for people (friends, families, professors, etc) to show how proud they are of the accomplishments of the students. And I feel like there’s wisdom in acknowledging that the ceremony is how they are trying to express that sentiment to you, and receiving it as intended.

This stunt actually has nothing to do with “fraud” in government spending, but as someone with experience in government procurement, contracting is where the waste is. The government actually doesn’t do too badly when we keep the work in-house. It’s these multimillion dollar contracts to some private company that are where the waste, fraud, and abuse are. Go fucking audit SpaceX. Revisit those contracts. Bet we can save billions every year on just one companies stupid fucking defense contracts. Then go after the rest of these contractors. Threaten to bring the work back in house and see how they react. Follow through and actually bring the work back in house, build the public sector engineering and manufacturing expertise, and see where we are.

I’ve got my personal phone and a government-issued iPhone. The iPhone gets turned off as soon as I leave work in the evening and I turn it back on when I get to work. I only give out my work phone number, so I don’t get bothered when I’m off the clock. It’s pretty convenient tbh.

What are the odds this will still work next week after Google allegedly plans to completely kill the search function and just serve up AI hallucinations whenever you try to look anything up?

I’m very curious what they’d say it needs to pass in order to be “proven”.

And then I’m curious if a pack of ground beef from the grocery store would be able to meet the same standard