I would expect something time-senstive to be solved quickly be the State Department’s IT department.

I can’t imagine why. It’s a slow-moving ship with numerous levels of authorization between The Guy Hitting The Buttons and The Guy Making The Decisions.

They should have been able to do something like this in less time than “days”.

Again, I can’t imagine why. This information isn’t so time-sensitive that they need to respond to it in hours, much less minutes. And the cost of reacting swiftly but clumsily far exceeds the reward for opening a document in a weird format on a State Department computer.

I am quite certain that they are extremely lacking in skilled IT workers lol

I haven’t seen any evidence of this. Unskilled IT workers will just blindly click and install shit without any gatekeeping or cybersecurity. It’s the skilled ones that go slow and steady, verify within sandbox environments before taking any big risks, and deliver a product that isn’t going to blow up in your face after it’s been configured.

Calling it shit is reductive and inaccurate

Anything North Korea does is default assumed incompetently executed, maliciously intentioned, and/or the result of stolen work from a more skilled (western) developer/designer. The American Brain cannot comprehend the existence of a Soviet computer science expert. Certainly not one from a country where the prevailing wisdom is “These stupid foreigners all believe the President has a perfect golf score and never poops. Everyone eats grass because they’re always starving. And their army feeds their Olympic Soccer Team to wild dogs every time a player misses a goal in a qualifying match”.

For what should be fairly obvious reasons, officials at the US State Department aren’t able to easily download and install software from foreign governments. This is doubly true in file-formats that the security system isn’t equipped to screen and vet.

If you were working at a corporate office, you’d have likely run into the same set of hurdles.

There’s an old Bill Gates quote about whether he was worried Windows software piracy in foreign countries was hurting the Microsoft bottom line. He responded, “I’d rather they pirate copies today so we can sell them copies tomorrow.”

Similar logic behind distributing Student copies of windows software on high school / college campuses.

It would tank the value

Temporarily, and not nearly as much as you’d guess.

The appetite for treasuries vastly outstrips the supply.

Canada and the US engage in bilateral trade across the supply chain. And they are on generally good terms with the northern liberal neighbor states.

Canadians would be better off working with their US neighbors to evade tariff collections than increasingly the policing on people who share a broad class interest

Wonder what would happen if that was sold all at once?

Canada would take a massive loss on the sale while the private markets and the Federal Reserve casually absorbs the influx of new notes at a discount.

But Russia is helping fascists across the west seize control

Russians like… Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner, and Steven Miller?

unless we get some real populists across the west, liberal deocracies are going to fall like fucking dominoes

I would look to Albania and the Flamingo Revolution. Or the popular revolts in France and Italy. We’re getting more material democracy in Europe than I’ve seen since the end of the USSR. Trump’s bungling has created global opportunities for the overthrow of bourgeois dictatorship.

The Stephen Crowder tier of right-wing hucksters make money on the “Buy My Merch To Make The Libs Mad” gambit precisely because you’ve got a full panel at MSNBC screaming about Russians being behind everything from Black Lives Matter to InfoWars. This kind of annoying Own-The-Libs bullshit only works because Liberals eat the Evil Foreigners Behind Everything line up with a spoon. It works because so many people are panicked about Russians hiding in the weeds.

“They” also happily parade around with “Trump 2028” hats and bumper stickers that gloat about contributing to climate change, because these things are unsettling to a liberal audience. If nobody cared about Russia, conservatives wouldn’t try to enrage their Lib neighbors by claiming the love Putin so much.

The public has been generally brainwashed into believing the Russians aren’t a threat

Are you fucking joking?

Does make you wonder about all those Flock Cameras going up in the US and Europe.

I wonder how the public would respond if they believed the cameras were accessible by the nefarious Russians or the insidious Chinese?

I think we’re well past “Wake Up, Sheeple”. But good luck getting any three Americans pointed in the same direction.

Amid ongoing genocide in Gaza, systematic Israeli theft occurring in Palestinian civilian homes

You used the Taliban’s miserable treatment of women to justify a 23 year holocaust in Afghanistan.

Now you’re calling a Chinese campaign to educate and elevate women living right next door to Afghanistan a genocide.

Beginning to think you just hate Muslims and want them to suffer.

It is very cringe to see folks who clapped like seals when the US bombed a girl’s school get incredibly mad when someone else builds a girl’s school.

I would be curious to know this uptime relative to any other self-hosted sites.

I remember Reddit and Twitter constantly suffering from uptime issues and they were far more decentralized, with modern infrastructure to match.

Is 95.2% all that far out of the realm of expectation?

the US hasn’t let them

It’s not the US, it’s this big magic rock. Also works to scare away tigers

Say the word “Terrorism” and you can justify almost anything