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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Here’s what I think is going to happen:

    • someone’s going to bring a case to the SC that results in Obergefell v. Hodges getting overturned. That’s the one that legalized same-sex marriage nationally.
    • this will be used as a test case to force the CA government to comply with something that openly conflicts with and violates the CA constitution.
    • CA will be legally forced to comply.
    • any civil disobedience or refusal from state officials spur more lawsuits to either strong arm or even straight up politically imprison CA state officials as punishment
    • CA maybe tries to secede

    Maybe that’s how CW2 starts, idk.

    Tbh, this could also be done in the context of abortion rights with the numerous states that have passed that, but I think whatever is going to be used as a “test case” for this is going to involve CA, because I’m kinda convinced at this point that Trump and the conservative sphere want to try to make an example of CA to attempt to scare everyone else into line. Who knows. They see CA as a threat, because as a state, it has the 5th largest economy in the world when compared to other whole-ass countries. They want to bring CA fully under their control.



  • Tbh, for me, I’m realizing it’s triggering a sort of sea-change in terms of how I, as a citizen, want to interact with American society.

    Laws, ethics, human dignity and empathy clearly aren’t important to people here. Money and power are. This is fully incongruent with my personal beliefs in a variety of fundamental ways. I’ve tried to aim my career at areas that are going to help better society - that’s a big part of why I work at an oncology-focused biotech now. But like… I’m faced with the realization that this country just doesn’t share my values, and doesn’t actually care that I willingly take markedly less compensation than, say, working at Meta, and it’s primarily because I want to make the world a better place.

    I admit it’s starting to feel like an abusive relationship. I don’t think the world is going to become a better place in my lifetime. It’s going to get a lot worse in a lot of ways. My initial reaction was to begin taking steps to just fully fuck off from this country, and find someplace else with a society that hasn’t fully eaten itself. Try to keep my sanity and ethics in one piece by finding a new society to call home that’s not America.

    But I ALSO have begun to realize in the last couple days that there’s another darker path I could take that denys the society I’ve honestly come to resent pretty strongly the my true capabilities and abusive consumption of my efforts: Malicious compliance. I could just fully jettison my ethical guidelines and engineering principles and simply min/max the absolute fuck out of comp and just retire early. Work for Meta or OpenAI or some health insurance company or whatever the fuck is the absolute most lucrative job I can find and just fully shoot for leadership metrics, not really fucking caring about the toxicity of the management class, the morale or well being of my team, the impact my work has on society, the quality, reliability, and integrity of the code I ship, or any of that ivory tower crap I’ve previously held as crucial elements to my profession. Stop trying to move the needle in the right direction. All gas, no brakes. If this country is determined to not give a fuck, why should I? Why shouldn’t I try to get to a place in my career where I can just retire, or do whatever I want without worrying too much about the personal consequences, because I can just fuck off at my own discretion due to money?

    And the second, darker option has the added benefit that I wouldn’t have to essentially abandon my family here, who are definitely not considering moving away as seriously as I am. My parents are both not in the best of health; maybe I should try to at least spend some more time closer to them before I just fuckin leave - or at least, as long as I can stand it here before the “fuck off and leave” route is truly the only viable option.