Trump vowed to abolish the Department of Education over the weekend, a promise that has since gone viral on social media, where it was framed by Biden loyalists as totally insane. But a question for the truly horrified, and try to answer quickly: what does the Department of Education do? It was only established in 1980, and today their budget is $68 billion. They have 4,400 employees (who all have a pension). What do they do? Then, what could they do? If someone with vision and $68 billion were placed in charge of dramatically improving our nation’s education, what would be possible? What could we build? Unfortunately, for as long as we conceive of “solving problems” as printing money and hiring Democratic Party voters with no expectation of results, all pensioned for the rest of their life in exchange for loyalty, we’ll never have an answer to these questions.

In a far-ranging interview with The Verge, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan discussed his ambition to fully automate routine workplace tasks with “digital twins” — deepfake AI clones who can respond to emails, make phone calls, and take meetings on your behalf. Why spend time in boring meetings, the pitch goes, when you could have your clone take them while you hit the beach? Admittedly, some use cases do immediately come to mind (office hours, interminable department meetings, etc). But, in general, if a meeting is so reliably inane you can outsource it to a chatbot, maybe the more substantive solution is to have fewer bullshit meetings. In fact, as a rule of thumb: if most of your workday is spent on tasks easily handled by a Zoom clone, your job probably shouldn’t exist. Call it the deepfake bullshit job litmus test — coming soon, we hope, to a government department near you.

Last week, a DC judge sentenced Paulette Harlow, an elderly woman with a debilitating medical condition, to two years incarceration after blocking the entrance to an abortion clinic, where Harlow prayed outside the door. Turns out she violated the FACE Act, a 1994 law that “prohibits threats of force, obstruction, and property damage intended to interfere with reproductive health care services.” Yes, disorderly conduct and false imprisonment have been on the books for decades, but lol those laws can’t be enforced without putting an end to things like BLM riots and Hamas parades. So a new law had to be invented specifically to punish old Christian women. A sad, farcical series of legal convolutions, but at least we found a solution to the road blockades. Next time I’m trapped on the Golden Gate Bridge, I’m telling the cops I was trying to get to my abortion. Clink, clink.

As discerning users of software, Pirate Wires uses Warp for payroll & compliance. Why? We have employees in five different states, and contributors in many more. Every state attempts to outdo the other in hard-to-follow tax and reporting regulations, which is what Warp is designed to deal with. State-level compliance is put on autopilot, meaning we can spend more time writing, and less time working on the business. Consider whether Warp can do the same for your business.

Get started with Warp here.

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