According to a filing signed by Joshua Fisher, director of the Office of Administration at the White House, Musk can only advise the president and communicate the president's directives.
German Researcher Captures Contents of ‘DEI.gov’ Before It Was Hidden Behind a Password
404 Media [unpaywalled] “A German researcher captured the contents of the White House’s “DEI.gov” during a brief period when it was not password protected.
The capture shows that the site contains a list of vague, alleged government-funded tasks and their costs, without sources or context, like “$1.3 million to Arab and Jewish photographers,” “$1.5 million for ‘art for inclusion of people with disabilities… DEI.gov redirects to waste.gov [password protected; Elon Musk told reporters on Tuesday that his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is “trying to be as transparent as possible.”
The researcher is Henrik Schönemann, a historian who started the Safeguarding Research & Culture archivalist project, posted screenshots on Mastodon showing the contents. Schönemann also shared the specific site scrapes that he was able to capture, which showed the contents of the site. He told 404 Media he set up a change detection app using PikaPods, and is monitoring changes across hundreds of government websites. When the dei.gov and waste.gov sites were registered 10 days ago, he started tracking them, too.
Before the site administrators added a Wordpress template to the pages, the list was online at those URLs. This list was only online for a maximum of 30 minutes, starting around 4:50 p.m. EST; by 5:23 p.m. on February 11, it was gone from public view, according to the snapshots Schönemann’s app captured
Database and dashboard – activities, groups and businesses supporting democracy through action
- The Team at Horizons Project is keeping up a database about movement activity focusing on the range of activity against various pillars. The Pillars — principled collective action & loving defiance. Subject matter tools, links and resources authored by: government workers; business; faith based initiatives; professional associations; unions. Includes Tactics Used, Links and Further Details.
- See also the CCC Data Dashboard is a comprehensive academic project featuring weekly snapshots of rallies and public demonstrations across the United States garnered from public data. Filter, Search by Date, Event and Political Issue
Assessing Common PINs
Assessing Common PINs – “ABC News analyzed 29 million leaked four-digit PINs from Have I Been Pwned? (a database of exposed credentials from data breaches) and visualized the data using a grid where each square represents a unique PIN.
The brightness of each square indicates the popularity of the code—brighter squares show more commonly used PINs. The visualization reveals three patterns: a bright diagonal line from the bottom-left to the top-right where repeated digits (e.g., “0000,” “1111”) cluster, bright spots around years like “1986” and “2004” suggesting people use birth years, and bright vertical and horizontal lines where PINs follow common keypad strokes, such as “2580” which form a straight line on a phone keypad. This visualization emphasizes how predictable such PINs are, posing significant risks to digital security.”
How an obscure advisory board lets utilities steal $50b/year from ratepayers
Pluralistic: “Two figures to ponder. First: if your local power company is privately owned, you’ve seen energy rate hikes at 49% above inflation over the last three years. Second: if your local power company is publicly owned, you’ve seen energy rates go up at 44% below inflation over the same period.
Power is that much-theorized economic marvel: a “natural monopoly.” Once someone has gone to the trouble of bringing a power wire to your house, it’s almost impossible to convince anyone else to invest in bringing a competing wire to your electrical service mast. For this reason, most people in the world get their energy from a publicly owned utility, and the rates reflect social priorities as well as cost-recovery.
For example, basic power to run lights and a refrigerator might be steeply discounted, while energy-gobbling McMansions pay a substantial premium for the extra power to heat and cool their ostentatious lawyer-foyers and “great rooms.” But in America, we believe in the miracle of the market, even where no market could possibly exist because of natural monopolies.
That’s why about 70% of Americans get their power from shareholder-owned companies, whose managers’ prime directive is extracting profit, not serving their communities. To check this impulse, these private utilities are overseen by various flavors of public bodies, usually called Public Utility Commissions (PUCs).
For 40 years, PUCs have limited private utilities to a “rate of return” based on a “just and reasonable profit.” But in recent years, the “experts” who advise PUCs on rate-setting have been boiled down to a tiny number of economists, who have discovered that the true “just and reasonable profit” is much higher than it’s ever been considered. Mark Ellis was one of those profit-hiking “experts,” but he’s turned whistleblower.
On paper, Ellis looks like the enemy: former chief economist at Sempra Energy, an ex-Exxonmobile analyst, a retired McKinsey Consultant, and a Socal Edison engineer. But Ellis couldn’t stomach the corruption, and he went public, publishing a report for the American Economic Liberties Project called “Rate of Return Equals Cost of Capital” that lays out the con in stark detail: https://www.economicliberties.us/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/20250102-aelp-ror-v5.pdf
