Meritocracy?
Earlier this year, large swaths of the tech industry declared death to DEI and ushered in the era of Merit, Excellence, and Intelligence. I wrote about it then noting that hypocrisy rhymes with meritocracy. They made themselves a website to celebrate each other.
That website has a list of familiar faces if you’ve been paying attention to the random tech people that have donated money to Trump and his super PACs, or were first in line to kiss the ring on Nov 6th.
It seems the hypocrisy continues if you pay attention to Trumps cabinet picks.
https://www.politico.com/interactives/2024/trump-cabinet-picks-2025-tracker/
Nothing says meritocracy like:
- A random fox news host as secretary of defense
- A probably sex offender as attorney general
- An anti-vaxxer as secretary of health and human services.
The list goes on and teaches us that the “m” in bootlicker stands for merit.
Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- Lev Lazinskiy
- Edge Detection with Inkscape
- Spring Security, Webjars, and MIME type error
- Terminal RSS Reader With Nom
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Deeper dive: Were Touch Bar’s problems software rather than hardware? from Unsung
- Joining Cursor from Fatih Arslan
- Pluralistic: Digital sewer socialism (08 Aug 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Pluralistic: Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs go global (29 Jul 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making from Ludicity
- The default person from https://popagandhi.com/
- No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass from Fernando Borretti
- Is it ethical to use AI? from charity.wtf
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
The Swiss Cheese model, pt. 3
After two more serious posts in this series, I wanted to stop somewhere a bit more lighthearted and inconsequential. “Here’a a fun thing you can try,” begins this 13-minute video from Retro Game Mechanics Explained: The premise of the parlor trick the vide...
via Unsung August 31, 2026My Experience Has Nuance, Yours Is a Data Point
Eric Bailey has a fun little post about how we need more than a few icons to express the nuance of our shared human experience. For example, he suggests Netflix provide some feedback buttons to indicate the kinds of experiences we all share consuming and r...
via Jim Nielsen’s Blog August 31, 2026Issue 109 – Reg Crypto
The SEC’s “Reg Crypto” aims to carve out exemptions, the CFTC wields emergency powers to shield prediction markets from state regulators, and a Trump family crypto firm gets a bank charter
via Citation Needed August 31, 2026Generated by openring