I genuinely though this was gonna be a good year lol. Federal case over, covid mostly over, perfect time to start putting my life back together. The year starts off with the company that acqui-hired me deciding they want to pursue a different business and disbanding the product we spent 9 years building, vaporizing the majority of my net worth in the process. Then things kinda just kept going downhill from there. I get the whole "what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger" but I don't have any plans to fight god.

While I think everyone is aware of how harmful Trump's policies are, what actually scares me the most is the constitutional side of things. We just went very far into uncharted territory. When the constitution was created and the US institutions were constructed, they were built on the belief that the people needed to be protected from the government (think they hit the nail on the head there). But... They put such a strong focus on protecting the people from the government, that a lot of the constitutional limits only apply to the government's powers, not private individuals. Which means that it not only doesn't limit the power of private individuals, but also limits the government's power to rein them in. This got touched on a bit with the whole Twitter misinformation debacle. The government cannot censor you based on your views, but a private platform can censor anyone for any reason. So what happens if a private individual just buys one of the largest online public squares in existence and pledges his unwavering support behind a fascist? Trump could not ask, instruct, or coerce him into censoring political opponents, but he could go "gee, I really hate how many followers my political opponent is getting". And a private individual could just delete that person account of their own free will. Same for a lot of the other amendments too. For the government to search someone's private property, they must show probably cause that a crime is being committed, then argue that before a judge. But a private individual in charge of say, a private social media platform, could just volunteer private user data to the government. As wealth and power becomes more and more centralized, it becomes easier and easier for the government to side-step all of the checks & balances because everything was so focused on "what if the government tries to do tyranny" and not "what if private individuals accumulate power equivalent to that of governments and take the tyranny into their own hands" This all of course assume the constitution even matters anymore, as it's basically only upheld by the shared belief that certain principals are immovable, which kind of hasn't been the case for a really long time. It was just never really tested what exactly happens if someone says "fuck the constitution, and fuck the supreme court"

As bad as I thought the election was going to go, that went so much worse. It wasn't even lightly Trump, it was full on just "yes daddy, please fist me"

I think regardless of how the election goes, all of Europe really needs to rethink tying so much of their security to a country that's always a coin toss away from descending into fascism. Russia taking Ukraine shouldn't rest on the vibes of a bunch of people who can't grasp the fact that the president doesn't set gas prices.

I accidentally double booked my election night party with my browsing foreign real estate party

I started doing independent threat research again, and one thing I always need is IP addresses. It reminded me of a couple years ago I needed IPv4 addresses, so I asked nicely on Twitter if anyone could spare me some, and this ISP gave me an entire /16 (65,536 IP addresses). Everyone was like "on no the IP shortage" meanwhile I had 65 thousand of them pointed to a single server lmao. OG infosec Twitter was the absolute goat.

Non-Americans watching the US struggle to decide between electing a professional career politician or a racist serial sex offender with 34 felony convictions and the IQ of a spoon

Does anyone know much about those account recovery scammers who claim to be hackers who can help you recover lost social media accounts or hack your ex? Are they individuals/small groups or large organizations like the call center scams? There's a couple who've been using my real name to scam people and I'm annoyed enough to take out a couple of low level scammers, but not yet annoyed enough yet to spend time dismantling an entire foreign organization.