steve k (spooky)

steve k (spooky)

@stevekovacs.com

Your boy in government (former). USDS VA ED NPS. Tech policy, gov systems, public lands, public everything. Distorted bass, mild pro wrestling experience. Gently, cautiously: Go Bills.

418 followers929 following193 posts

Most people don't know how to process current events because they have no knowledge of the 2012 Google Hangouts default react stickers, such as Farting Kitty, Amorous Santa, and Bunny in Diaper.

steve k (spooky) reposted

This is pretty massive...there are tons of legal cases challenging the firings of USAID/government employees in 2025, as DOGE ran amok, and the revelations here could be really impactful:

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If you're unfamiliar with SF, Agua Vista across from the Chase Center is a good place to watch the sunrise because Crane Cove looks like a Half Life 2 level

Me and the rest of the Warriors taking down a half price orca platter at Old Ebbitt before heading out into the night to do battle with the Penn Quarter Furious Mimes and the Kalorama Killer Llamas and so on and so forth

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com

Trump on DC: "Nobody wanted to eat out. They were afraid. Even if you were in the restaurant, people would walk in and like the Wild West, 'Hold it up!' Everybody is standing there. Can you imagine? A fancy restaurant. They were robbing the whole restaurant. It's crazy."

steve k (spooky) reposted

This week’s main story is about how more and more white nationalists, antisemites, and Nazi sympathizers seem to be integrating into the Republican Party, how some of them are currently running for office, and how old you can be for JD Vance to consider you “a very young boy.”

steve k (spooky) reposted

Lula winning is great for the planet, great for Brazil, and great for people who aren't revanchist assholes everywhere in the world, but let's not forget that it's also going to make some of the worst people on Earth extremely sad and mad. We should enjoy that, as a little treat.

Every new movie trailer AND every modern metal song have something in common: an internal intermission where a THX bass drop goes byuuuuuuuuuuuuuu before a big cinematic finale

steve k (spooky) reposted

JUST POSTED: Today at The NYT we are publishing a major investigation into how President Trump used his executive powers to expose millions of Americans to greater cancer risks. A six month-long investigation built on more than 10,000 pages of FOIA records. Read it www.nytimes.com/2026/10/24/c...

nytimes.comHow Trump Gave the Worst Polluters a Free Pass (Gift Article)The president temporarily waived clean-air rules for industrial facilities that spew cancer-causing gases. Then his appointees worked to gut the regulations altogether.

I have this working theory that Trump is devolving into Bill the Cat. That he remembers his portrayal in the late 80s Bloom County comic arc with some fondness and it is doing a Substance thing to him.

Childish is right; seems like this era of speculative capital was built by men for men adept at mining and reifying their interior adolescent psychopathologies. Hence my next military tech startup, a wearable AI sword which makes a really cool shhhhnnnnk sound when drawn from its AI scabbard.

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As a former DOI-NPS WASO employee let me just say that if you want to do obsessive libbed-out newsposting you can just do it under your own name. Promoting some elaborate fantasy that there are a bunch of GS-12s hunched over a laptop by candlelight in Yosemite doing article reacts is weird AF.

AltWatcher@altwatcher.bsky.social

As we approach the midterms, remember that the Alt National Park Service is a merch sales operation claiming without evidence to be a group of federal employees, and is not a genuine source of news about elections of any kind. Please get your election info from a local, reputable source.

The PHP CVEs are particularly acute in gov, which uses Drupal and WP extensively. The public-facing VA app, eg, is a RoR backend supporting a headless Drupal CMS writing to a React front. Up until a few weeks ago, the entire stack was open source on VA's Github; now not, so remediation isn't public.

IOW, up till now-ish the public could see and audit the actions the VA team was taking to fix the apps and safeguard the critical PII/ PHI/ etc that flows through them. Now, we just gotta trust. Combine that with a millennium worth of recently exited experience across gov, and x by 100s of apps...

WTAF

Gillian Brockell@gillianbrockell.com

ICYMI, LA Taco has parted ways with two of its most fearless ICE reporters, Memo Torres and Izzy Ramirez (@eltragon.bsky.social and @izzymirez.bsky.social on here). Neither says why, but it sounds like it was sudden and involuntary.

Plenty of victories like this over the past 2 years, if you're looking for good news. Advocacy groups and nonprofits (in this case, the National Council of Nonprofits) have been routinely winning in court and beating back the worst of this administration's excesses.

The Washington Post@washingtonpost.com

The Justice Department dropped its appeals of two court rulings that struck down the Trump administration’s restrictions on the popular student-loan forgiveness program for public servants.

I worked on PSLF in 2016 and it's not a perfect program but it can be absolutely life changing when its rules are understood and fairly applied. That said, we shouldn't need it and there should be no such thing as student debt in this country.

Digger, You Can See Everything, Musk, and NAZA in a few days is a lot. There is a thread that runs through them that needs more consideration, something about the desperate, chaotic rush to assemble power from available parts and pieces, not simply to control one's own fate but to become death.

The UCSF Medical UX/ CX layer is among the worst I've ever experienced. Dead ends everywhere, useless chatbots, phone trees that end with "leave your message after the tone," just terrible design choices stem to stern. User forced into guessing institutional intentions/ desires on multiple paths.

We worked very hard at VA to make this kind of thing much more tractable and it's very humbling to experience the bad parts firsthand. I interviewed hundreds of Veterans about their experiences with our systems but definitionally couldn't experience them myself; now I am, vicariously, sort of.

steve k (spooky) reposted

I spoke with both candidates running in NY-21. Anthony Constantino talked to me about his music album 'Thank you President Trump.' Blake Gendebien spoke with me about affordability issues and the impact rising costs are having on the working class in the district www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

theguardian.comSticker tycoon. Trump cheerleader. Rapper. Congressman?Anthony Constantino wants to fill Elise Stefanik’s seat in New York. But his lead in the formerly Trump-loving district is narrowing

Nathan Fielder can't come for you if you're walking the noble path. It is only those who nurture desire who will face Nathan. Want nothing and you will be spared his long looks and obliterating "mm"s.

Broke: The State forces me to pay an annual pittance to fund essential services Bespoke: The State forces my ingrate no-contact children to visit me in a prison van every Sunday to listen to my one act play the Bootstrap Monologues

Politico@politico.com

“I’m old. I’ve paid my home off,” said Ray Warner, a 72-year-old Akron resident. “Why would I pay property tax?” Across the country, homeowners are asking the same question and revolting against property taxes at a scale not seen in a half century.

steve k (spooky) reposted

since California ballots are now out: prop 40 is the billionaire tax, and you should vote yes to stick it to them but both props 41 and 42 are designed to retroactively cancel the billionaire tax because they’re afraid they can’t beat it at the ballot box yes on 40, no on 41 and 42

Last night, You Can See Everything, Apple Van Ness, us and a hundred ish new friends were locked in, jaws on the floor, now completely soul bonded, telepathically linked, deeply aware of each other's cringe, forever