Summary
Trump’s move to defund USAID is causing unintended consequences for American farmers and businesses.
The Washington Post reports that USAID purchases billions in U.S. agricultural products, with American farms supplying 41% of its food aid.
The funding freeze has already halted $340 million in food shipments, leaving tons of wheat stranded in Houston.
Experts warn this decision directly harms American jobs and businesses, as much of USAID’s aid is administered through U.S.-based organizations employing American workers.
Yes. In IT we call this the “scream test”. This feels like that with added corruption.
Incidentally, Musk did exactly that at Twitter. He blamed the developers for his own recklessness (“I was told we had redundancy across our data centers. What I wasn’t told was that we had 70,000 hard-coded references to Sacramento. And there’s still shit that’s broken because of it”) when the infrastructure team strongly warned him ahead of time that this needed to be done carefully to avoid issues.
Which indicates that he learned nothing. Now he’s doing the same to the federal government.
What Musk didn’t isn’t what is acceptable as a “scream test” in IT. “Scream test” is only use after exhausting all other avenues of identifying any live processes still in use. Additionally, its broadcast weeks or months in advance so folks can be on the lookout for a process of theirs that is failing they didn’t know was on the servers in question. Further, the “scream test” is just powering down the server, or possibly disconnecting it from the network. Either task can be un-done quickly to restore service in the event a live process is found that needs to be preserved.
Musk just ripped shit out in the middle of the night with no easy way to restore service. What he did was like ripping out your own organs to see if you die from it? Appendix? Apparently not needed. Liver? Why am I dead now?