If you go to the doge website right now, there's a Libs of TikTok tweet shown on the main page. It reads:
The US government only recognizes two sexes: Male and Female. This needs to be changed immediately
There is absolutely a crusade going on, but I certainly wouldn't call it moral.
Following Trump’s second term, the fresh-money establishment saw an opportunity to challenge the old guard. Setting aside their differences, they chose to unite.
https://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-defense-contr...
>The group, which could announce strategic partnerships next month, would seek to bring Silicon Valley-style disruption to an industry dominated by so-called "prime" contractors, such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.
They were soon joined by other tech moguls—Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Gates—who once opposed Trump but now see AI as their chance to wrest power from the old establishment.
The difference between sports and politics is that sports are always a duel, while politics, despite appearances, is always a three-player game.
I'm just saying it's not that deep. There is not a meaning or moral that needs to be understood, there is no reasoning that could make them change their ways.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
[1] Ok, I admit, nobody but me has actually made the intersection between the two yet.
Design for Prevention (2010) ISBN 978-0-937063-05-7
Friends in High Places (1990) ISBN 937063-06-1
Have Fun at Work (1988) ISBN 0-937063-05-3
The New Plague (1986) ISBN 0-937063-03-7
POSIWID is mentioned in the first three works; engineer William L. Livingston authored the latter three.
In other words, there’s no point in arguing about the purpose. If you want the system to do something else, you have to change the system.
For a more traditional phrasing: "actions speak louder than words."
But the projects that are being funded today don’t resemble the ones in the 60s-80s. And thats not to suggest it previously was unbiased and now is politicized, but the parties and their values have changed. So that old bureaucratic organization has a new mission
Giving out crops promoted the idea that market capitalism brought prosperity. That isn’t enough for liberalism which has moved up Maslows hierarchy to meaning and purpose. Physical aid is merely a means for bringing the true goods - social justice, equity, inclusion, education, etc.
Or what to call the side-effects of a system going away.
One of the statistics I read was that the average American judges foreign aid at 31% of the Federal budget instead of the true 1%. In one way, that’s remarkable efficiency: 31x perception. In another way, it gives bad actors in the government an advantage: by cutting a measly 1%, you can rely on uninformed Americans to give you credit for 31x cuts.
seems to be some sort of pathology
Ukraine would have been rejected slightly more politely by Harris. You're elevating a rhetorical difference to obscure that AIPAC primarying two democrats over their stance on israel gave republicans the house.
It sure would be nice to not have just a rhetorical difference over our most shame-ridden ally. But yea, Putin is dog walking trump into checks notes pushing for cutting military and nuclear stockpiles. Disgusting.
I hate Trump, but it's this conspiratorial crap about Putin while refusing to acknowledge AIPAC that makes me know moderates/centrists/maddow-watchers will always cave to ignorance and fear.
Straight from the russofascist playbook.
You can trivially look up donations. It's difficult to link to just AIPAC so I'll just put this here: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/06/09/aipac-republican-do...
Mind you, this is still a stronger case for another state blatantly interfering in our elections than the what $36 million to the NRA and a small buy of facebook ads (~$100k, which is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to domestic interests). And this alleged "kompromat" (good grief, read better propaganda)
I wouldn't say they're "burning things down for the sake of burning things down", though. The truth is somewhere between what you and gp are contending. There's no moral framework, but there is a framework. They're burning things down so that "the free market" can replace the things they burn down and capture the money that used to go towards doing those things for the public good, and instead do those things for a private profit.
I strongly feel like these guys see what happened in Russia and see it as a success: the "weak" soviet union was replaced by a "strong" Putin-controlled Russia. The collapse in living standards, lawlessness, etc, was acceptable collateral damage.
It is kind of funny that the people who complain about the "deep state" with some kind of goal actually create something similar with an actual goal.
If the fear of fascism raised by some is accurate, it seems more likely we'll see these agencies gutted and rebuilt as whatever the Trump administration wants them to be instead. No smaller government, just a different one.
I live in D.C. and many of my neighbors are non-political civil servants of all kinds. All signs point to a dramatically smaller and weaker federal government without congressional action.
Whether these agencies that congress created and funded for decades will continue to exist in any meaningful way is de facto getting decided by congress right now.
The Vought/Musk group has fired 200,000 employees already, and is offloading real-estate as quickly as possible. That action is consistent with gutting, but not rebuilding, these agencies.
So congress either has to exercise its power over the executive to prevent this in the next few weeks, or the loss of capacity will have occurred and rebuilding will take many years and be dramatically more costly than maintenance would have been.
Were those full-time employees or contractors of some type?
Normally I would just look this up myself, but things have been moving so quickly that the info I find is all over the place and I haven't found a short list of sources to trust.
My understanding was that they "offered" early retirement, not sure how much of an option it was versus a demand. I had also heard they cancelled a lot of contract work, I wouldn't consider that being fired but yeah it does still impact people similarly.
That was an earlier wave, but things are moving so quickly it's understandable people are getting confused. The two hundred thousand terminated I referred to above are (roughly) all the employees in their probationary period (which is typically two years, but it varies by position) across the whole federal public sector workforce.
If we were to include contractors (e.g. USAID contractors), more than two hundred thousand people have been terminated by executive action since the start of the administration.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/15/trump-purges-real-w...
Unfortunately this kind of comes with the territory when granting power to an authority - jobs can be created, they can also be taken away.
Whether this is "right" for our country is probably a matter of perspective, but I do feel for everyone impacted directly. This is a pretty shitty situation to find yourself in and I don't know what the job market will look for them short term - if its anything like tech the last year or so its pretty miserable.
Elon is literally closing agencies like the CFPB and USAID down, in defiance of congress and the law. They are working under a legal theory that the president can do that, and are expecting their stacked supreme court to agree with them.
Is he? I mean this as an honest question, things have moved quickly enough that its hard to keep up.
My understanding that they have been temporarily closing offices or stopping work. I wouldn't consider that as "literally closing agencies" though, at least for me that reads as closing them down permanently rather than temporarily closing the doors.
I don't ask this to defend what they're doing at all. I think we could be much worse off if they're only gutting the agencies without closing them completely.
The executive branch has been given an immense amount of authority over the last half century or so, if that is used to rebuild different agencies technically still fulfilling congressional mandates for USAID or CFPB we could be in for a rude awakening.
Authority is fine when you agree with it, but as soon as the wrong person has that same power you may find you wish it was never granted in the first place.
Most of them were pretty weakly defined and they were given legal precedent to define what their own authority was (unless specifically defined by Congress). The departments could be kept with more clear definitions of what they need to do and what success looks like.
That isn't clear yet from what I've seen. Destroying or knee capping departments is one thing rebuilding them as private or functionally private organizations is another level.
If they are planning to do this I don't think we've seen any direct signs of it yet, though I don't know how it could be anything other than fascism at that point.
Because they are, in fact, obviously constitutional. The mechanism for eliminating them contemplated by the constitution is for congress to pass a law eliminating them.
If you disagree with my view on this, perhaps you'll be persuaded by voluminous case law over decades upholding the constitutionality of all of these Federal government agencies in face of challenges of precisely the kind you're motioning toward.
At this point I feel like anyone who disagrees with this should explain how things work in the alternative. If the executive can just unilaterally declare laws invalid, how does anything get done? Why pass laws at all?
There is gray area when Congress says we need a department to manage our education system, for example, and sets a budget. Congress is only approving the spending there, at least to me that means it can be spent but doesn't have to be spent in full.
Now it is the executive branch's job to execute on that department. I think it would be a stretch for them to just not create the department. Their job is to properly and effectively implement what congress asked for though, and it is reasonable for someone coming in to say that what was done in the past isn't meeting Congress's request.
That isn't to say Trump is making a legitimate or reasoned argument in that vein, but the power is there at which point you have a weird legal battle attempting to decide who can make a better case for the success of any specific department. With congress defining little to no metrics for success that battle seems largely to be in the eye of the beholder.
You are welcome to imagine an alternate legal system from first principles, but please do not present it as U.S. law. The question of whether president has to "[spend] in full" has been settled by legislation and litigation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Budget_and_Impou...
> Their job is to properly and effectively implement what congress asked for though
No it is not. Their job as laid out in the Constitution is to faithfully implement the laws. Not "properly and effectively", where what's proper and effective are determined by them. "Faithfully" is the word used in the Constitution.
They are to implement the laws for Congress, and if the executive finds those laws sloppy and wasteful and not proper, he doesn't get to just not do them. Again, I ask you, why pass laws at all if the executive can just decide to not do them?
> but the power is there at which point you have a weird legal battle attempting to decide who can make a better case for the success of any specific department
There is no battle -- it's there in a plain reading of the Constitution, and the impoundment act of 1974 makes explicit. And even what you say is true, there should be more of a process for the Executive branch to do these things; because the power is so broad, in the spirit of checks and balances they should be conferring with the Congress rather than asserting blanket and unchecked authority.
Sure, we can debate semantics here if you want. I'm fine swapping in "faithfully execute" into my prior comment though, that's basically what I meant without going word for word constitutional.
My point remains though. "Faithful execution" is in the eye of the beholder and is up for debate. One person may see the Department of Education as faithfully executing the congressional mandate while another could see it as poorly run, inefficient, or point to our education level relative to other countries. Both would have good arguments to make.
Further, I don't read Congress's power to approve the budget as part of the mandate for a department. Congress isn't saying "spend XX billion and build an education department," they're saying "build an education department and don't spend more than XX."
That can surely be debated in a legal context, but I think you would be hard pressed to find many average people that would read a budget as a "spend every penny" mandate. Many corporations operate this way, and while in my experience people will spend their full budget to avoid a decrease next year they are also well aware of the absurdity of that.
The impoundment law itself was/is controversial and this will surely be challenged in court on those grounds. The question still remains, though, whether any miscarriage of the law us found in departments being shut down. Its too early, mainly because they at least appear to be acting rashly, but that doesn't mean these departments have been faithfully executing to date.
The semantics here are everything, it's the debate. What does the Constitution mean and what was the purpose of America? We've reached ground zero here.
To me, the purpose of America is a government for the people made possible by checks and balances -- separating powers so that they can't be abused, and giving the people ultimate choice.
Maybe you disagree, because that's not what you are suggesting. If we give in to your reading of the Constitution, the executive has the most power of all branches, which shifts power away from the people in a dramatic way.
I've asked you three times now, and you have evaded the central question -- if the executive can pick and choose laws to enforce, defund departments at whim, what is the point of laws at all?
I suspect you haven't answered it directly because you'd have to admit your reading of the Constitution implies a monarchy. And that's why we are debating semantics now, depending on how the words are interpreted we either have a system of checks and balances, or we have unbalanced unchecked power in the executive branch.
> The impoundment law itself was/is controversial
Yeah, it was controversial among people who didn't want to follow the law, and instead wanted to use their power to go around it. The concept of checks and balances is not popular with the people being checked.
Who in their right mind opens up RDP and Citrix servers to public internet in DoE and nuclear research laboratory networks?
Time is running very short. Foreign powers must be assumed to already hold all possible information about the US government, including nuclear secrets, warfare capabilities, emergency plans, and kompromat of all personnel and political oversight.
It won’t be long before the US nuclear arsenal mysteriously disappears.
You can use Shodan yourself to verify.
If you look at the budget, everything is "just pennies" yet somehow it's 2T deficit with 7T total expenditures. If you were to drill into the big programs (Medicare, Social Security, Defense, etc) there are thousands of programs nested within those.
Like it or not someone will need to do the hard work of going line-by-line and accumulating savings to make the budget make sense. There also needs to be a culture shift in gov't. It's not monopoly money---something obvious no?
DOGE exists to cut programs that the current administration does not like. Thats it. Its entirely political.
The whole budget is made up of pennies. It’s a lazy talking point to say they don’t matter and what’s even worse is the politicians see no issue with wasting pennies of tax payer money! Any waste should be condemned.
And like you said you’ll never balance the budget unless you go line by line. As a tax payer I’d love a balanced budget by getting a punch of pennies and keeping core programs the same versus cutting core programs because “it’s too hard” to look at the pennies.
Since we don’t have a definition for waste, going through finding it is an ideological exercise.
What you’re advocating for is an ideological purge for your team, but you wouldn’t be so excited if you didn’t agree with the ideology.
There is plenty of waste in the budget and “nice to have programs”. You only need to look at the list of things being cut.
And of course it’s ideological! People vote for a President with certain values and they follow those. It’s how it’s supposed to work.
> People vote for a President with certain values and they follow those. It’s how it’s supposed to work.
That is not according to the Constitution. The President's role is to faithfully implement the laws. All of them, including the ones he and his voters don't like. He doesn't get to declare laws null and void by not enforcing them. For instance, if voters elect a racist, that doesn't mean it's legal for POTUS to then not enforce civil rights laws.
You want my list? Critical government services. That’s it. Nothing more. I’m sure you won’t see the police, public health, state dept, as waste.
And Republicans were voted in on an agenda to cut this sort of stuff. So sure, it would be great to hold hands on this but that’s not how our system works.
And yes, Congress sets a budget and laws with very high level instructions. The President’s job is to implement.
So when the law says “Congress approves $50B for FEMA in order to provide Americans with disaster relief”, the President has discretion on what “implement disaster relief” looks like. And the President is not forced to spend money on waste or fraud.
So what happens if money is left over? Like all things in politics it comes down to the details. Maybe Trump brings his new budget back to Congress and tells them to pass a much smaller budget. Maybe it goes to court and a new pathway for returning funds is created. I don’t know.
But crying “Constitution crisis!” When the President, with all the powers of the Executive, decides on how to run the Executive (within the bounds of the law), is going to fall flat among voters, especially when the President actions are exactly what the voters asked for.
Nope, I want to defund all of that. I want 0 of my tax dollars going to that waste. Police is abuse. Public health is a fraud. State Department is waste. Our points of view are irreconcilable, we need a system to resolve our differences civilly.
> So sure, it would be great to hold hands on this but that’s not how our system works.
The totality of our laws and system of government were decided iteratively by majorities representing all sides at some point. The President doesn't get to come in and decide all the laws passed by Democrats in the past are "waste and fraud" which seems to be what he's trying to do. The way to change the law is to go through Congress, but of course changing the law is much harder than not implementing.
> Congress sets a budget and laws with very high level instructions. The President’s job is to implement.
His job according to the Constitution is to implement "faithfully", meaning it's not his will that he's carrying out, it's the will of Congress. We already have an IG system to give Congress feedback on whether the agencies are running how they see fit, but Trump just gutted that. That's not the behavior of someone faithfully implementing the laws for Congress, that's the behavior of someone implementing laws for himself.
> But crying “Constitution crisis!” When the President, with all the powers of the Executive
What they are doing is not one of the powers. The Constitution does not allow for this, the law does not allow for this either. They are breaking the law.
For about 99.9999% of those things there's no evidence they were wasteful or fraudulent. They just say they cut those and they claim they are wasteful and fraudulent. So far there has been very little, if any, evidence of that. There have been quite a few lies.
And on top pf that they cut actual critical programs like National Nuclear Security Administration (something they scrambled to undo) which shows that they have very little insight into what they do.
We have people in CA affected by fires, people in Carolina who still need help rebuilding after flooding, people in Hawaii that need to rebuild after their own fires.
Did you know that most of FEMAs budget was spent housing migrants who crossed the border illegally instead of helping Americans affected by hurricanes?
The current situation is one where bureaucrats and NGOs enrich themselves off the back of taxpayers and the problems that actually need solving in our own country go completely unsolved.
We voted to cut all of this garbage, if they can’t spend it wisely then just pay down the national debt, which is at crisis levels BTW, or give it back to the taxpayers.
These are not "Your" tax dollars.
Some of them are other peoples tax dollars that do want this.
So do as my father had and claim that "your" taxes mean you "own" least 1 E4 and a couple of E-2/3's in the military--or whatever your preferred interest is and let the other American tax dollars pay for the things they want. Because You, personally, did not fund the entire US budget. It is not all "your" taxes.
Well then those people can take their money and donate it directly to the causes they care about. They do not need to use my tax money for it.
Yes actually some of this money WAS mine. I paid into this system (actually I was forced to under threat of violence), and I do not want my money being spent on this. I would rather keep my own money or have it used on paying down the national debt.
All money spent by the government is ultimately taxation, if it doesn’t come directly from taxpayers it comes from us in the form of inflation. i.e. printing more money than there is value in the economy.
You were only "forced" to if you wanted to continue to enjoy the benefit of being a US citizen/working in the US. I love a good anti-tax American essay just as much as the next person, but I also love this country and will pay my due even when that due pays for the salaries of politicians and their staff that I don't agree with (I don't want my taxes to pay for them--but life as an adult can be hard); you really do not come off as someone that wants to be a part of that or this country, but on an libertarian island. You may be more interested in Seasteading[0]
If you don't like being a contributing member of the US (who by acts of bipartisanship in US congress decided where the money goes), you are free to renounce your citizenship (assuming you are a citizen) and leave the country; if you are already outside the country then you are almost there, simply hand in your passport and file the paper work at the nearest US embassy. And never pay US taxes again. Problem solved.
$350k (out of $2 million) was given to ASOCIACION LAMBDA. Yes, gender affirming care is mentioned in the description but that could mean almost anything. [1]
If you look at what they promote it's mostly about gender equality and protecting people from violence. Workshops, safe spaces, collecting statistics, some HIV testing stuff. [2][3][4][5]
I'm not saying it's impossible but I haven't seen any evidence and the people making the claims are known chronic liars.
And most of FEMA's budget was not spent on housing illegal migrants. Disaster relief funding is separate and much larger than Shelter and Services Program funding[6][7][8], as ordered by Congress in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023. [9]
[1] https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_72052024FA00001_7...
[2] https://www.asociacion-lambda.org/
[3] https://www.instagram.com/asoclambda/
[4] https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/presscentre/featurestori...
[5] https://gt.usembassy.gov/2023-human-rights-report-guatemala/
[6] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/false-claims-f...
[7] https://apnews.com/article/fema-migrants-nyc-funding-luxury-...
[8] https://www.fema.gov/grants/preparedness/shelter-services-pr...
[9] https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/2617...
How hard is it to understand we shouldn’t be spending money on foreigners when Americans go without? That seems like a basic rule that everyone agrees with.
And “most of FEMA’s money” is a cop out. 0% of FEMA’s money should be spent on anything other than Americans in need after a disaster.
It’s this kind of “oh, come on it’s not a big deal” that resulted in the trouncing the Democrats got. It’s talking down to Americans like they are stupid.
"I-don't-want-to-fund-sex-changes" is an emotional and possibly moral argument, it's made to get people angry at how their money is being spent.
Not wanting to spend money on foreigners at all is a completely different argument, that's generally not made probably because you get similar emotional arguments of feeding starving children. Or you get non-emotional arguments like projecting soft power and fighting disease epidemics before they reach us.
We're a nation of laws. The USAID and FEMA money is set in law by Congress. I disagree with how a lot of money is spent too. But that's why we vote and communicate to our representatives and have them change the law.
Bill Clinton's administration reduced the deficit and had a surplus. It reduced the federal workforce. It decreased spending and increased revenue. But it was done legally by working with both parties and unions and passing bills in Congress.
Yes Congress sets spending, but the executive is responsible for executing on the law. Biden should have gone back to Congress (if needed) and said “no, this money is for Americans”. But he didn’t even try.
Which is why nobody should be surprised so many voters support what Musk and Trump are doing - they are doing what many voters think is the right thing to do.
Americans are just tired of politicians excuses.
There's a FEMA program, created in 1987 for Americans, call the Emergency Food and Shelter Program.
In 2019, during the first Trump administration, Congress passed additional funding for EFSP-H (Humanitarian) to expand the program to migrant families.[1]
Then in 2022, under the Biden administration, Congress decided to move that into a new separate CBP/FEMA program which is the Shelter and Services Program.[2]
I would be all for an administration that forces Congress to create a budget that decreases spending and increases revenue (or at least maintains revenue) in order to decrease the deficit (or at least decrease the rate of deficit growth).
So far there's no evidence this administration is doing that. But we don't have a fleshed out budget bill to look at yet either.
Americans might be tired of politicians' excuses but it's my opinion, from the (lack of) evidence so far, that we're being misled: the rich will get richer, government services will be worse, our democratic rules will be weaker, and the national debt will still increase. Hopefully my opinion is wrong.
[1] https://www.fema.gov/grants/emergency-food-and-shelter-progr...
Cool, so you're cutting all corporate welfare, closing all US military bases in foreign countries, and ceasing sending bombs to Israel then, right? Or does it only count as spending money on foreigners when it's something you don't like?
If they had communicated they wanted to balance the budget to provide for Americans that would be one thing, but they have communicated they will instead cut taxes for corporations with the money saved from Medicaid and foreign aid. Americans will have to go without more.
How hard is to start with this argument? Elon Musk is certainly making more Americans "go without" than he is cutting off "overseas sex changes".
You don't get to dictate that to other people after going on a rant specifically about gay people. I mean you can, but nobody's gonna buy it. You need to realize that perception is reality, and the perception here is you are very narrow minded. More concerned with taking condoms away from gay people than you are with saving your own country from a 20 year old gang of fascists who stole your SSN on a USB stick and stood up a blank WordPress site to brag about it.
— $6.3 million for men who have sex with men in South Africa
See, you can't paraphrase to add (what you view as) negative connotation and then claim "I have nothing against gay people." The money did not go to South Africa with the earmark "so gay men can have sex with gay men." It went to something you don't see the value in. It went to something you think is unimportant. Like HIV medication, or STD prevention, or treatment, or gasp a $.50 condom that maybe prevented a diesease. The takeaway for you is this; your anti-LGBT bias clearly shows through. You are not as middle-of-the-road as you think you are. Sir, you are brainwashed. This is not about cost. This is about regulating others and preventing lifestyles you disagree with from having access to medical care. You think that by deincentivizing LGBTQ activities you can regulate LGBTQ culture. Good luck.
> We voted to cut all of this garbage
Yeah, well we both voted for a lot of this garbage that was created by a BYPARTISAN ACT OF CONGRESS. Your orange clown has no right acting like a king in a country that we all built together. Your vote shouldn't be able to erase all of mine. The government was built with checks and balances. Respect them.
HIV-positive gay men are at a higher risk of transmission for obvious reasons [2] and I can think of a lot of good reasons for the US to want to fight infectious diseases in other countries.
I assume the $6.3 million is really $4.3 million here[3], of which $1.9 million was given to 'OUT LGBT WELL-BEING'[4] for 'ENGAGE MEN’S HEALTH: COMPREHENSIVE HEALTH SERVICES FOR MSM IN SOUTH AFRICA ACTIVITY'.
If you look at the health services they provide in [4] it's testing/screening for HIV, it's HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis, etc. In 2021 they had two mobile health teams providing those services to gay men. [5][page 14]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV_adult_prevalence_rate
[2] https://hivinfo.nih.gov/understanding-hiv/fact-sheets/hiv-an...
[3] https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_72067423FA00008_7...
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20240715043923/https://out.org.z...
[5] https://out.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/OUT_Annual_Rep...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/dry-sex-is-the-african-sexua...
It's like the entire existence of a swath of the population has become about ensuring gay people get no consideration and no trans person ever plays a women's sport. That's it. And, if it takes replacing democracy with fascism, well dammit, it's worth it.
There is no woke mind virus. But there's certainly an anti-woke mind virus.
Trump wants to end all federal disaster relief.
[1](https://stocktonia.org/news/california-water/2025/02/01/trum...)
No, those dollars have been extorted from you fair and square. You have no control over who gets the spoils.
One day you’ll realise and don’t be too hard on yourself then. You were not the only one.
It wasn’t perfect, but it’s going to look like a Utopia after these guys are done with us.
Funny that your sentiments align so closely with theirs, and that you're cheering on our disempowerment as much as they are.
I'm sorry that "Black ops" hurt your feelings, but the world is a rough place. There are meanies out there. We're not perfect, but I'll take America.
But, here's an idea: why don't you get on your soapbox and tell the Russians or Chinese or Iranians to stand down first? Come back and let us know how it went.
Indeed, "Americans" like you seem to be the only ones more excited than our adversaries about the prospect of defanging our national intelligence/security apparatus.
Grow up. Seriously.
The "deep state" is what is in full view with the Trump/Musk/Miller Administration.
Funny to hear people parrot that term, when they clearly have no idea about the machinations of government, national security, etc.
"Deep state" is obviously a bogeyman, manufactured (likely by a foreign adversary) to allow a corrupt regime to destroy our government, our democracy, and our way of life in plain sight.
This term was artificially injected into the political lexicon just a few short years ago, yet the flock has internalized their deep anger around it as if it's been part of a personal, lifelong struggle that has destroyed generations of their families.
Meanwhile, the same leaders who championed the term engage in frank corruption and are openly realigning our nation with adversaries who don't share our national values, by creed.
Your apparent lack of tolerance for things that do not directly serve your self interest is short sighted and foolhardy. It's sad that your way of thinking has carried the day in the US.
Some of the spending probably does fit that description, but I bet if we had a truth oracle that could actually tell us, it would be a lot less than you think.
(I also happen to think that our polity should assist the least fortunate on its own merits, but you may not)
What does this mean?
I want $0 of my tax dollars going to bombs to Israel
I want $0 of my tax dollars spent on military bases abroad.
Let's curtail the big stuff and then we can pinch the pennies, or at least let's compromise and do both.
If your aim is to decrease the number of refugees coming here, USAID is a big lever you can pull.
I don't know how true this is, and if there really is 2.7T of "improper" payments, then yeah that needs to be stop.
The issue is that Musk just makes shit up. All the time, I genuinely think it might be a pathological problem. He lies about everything. He said "full self driving" would be available in Tesla "next year" in 2018, he claimed he'd have stuff on the moon by 2022, he faked a press release about robots, he publicly posted about taking Tesla private to drive up the stock price. I could go on, but I don't want to spend three hours typing this out.
So if DOGE is claiming 2.7T of Medicare fraud, it's tough for me to take it seriously because Musk is known for constantly lying. He also has shown a complete lack of understanding of very basic US civics. So even if he isn't "lying", it's entirely possible that he just doesn't understand what the fuck he's talking about, and declaring all this stuff as superfluous.
Largely the justification is the programs don't do what Musk says they do.
You've got to understand the source of your information is from habitual liars. The Tesla's autopilot [1] marketing video still starts of with "The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself". That person in the driver's seat had to take control of the car numerous times include one time where the car drove off the road and struck a fence. These are not people whose word you can take at face value.
Anybody can throw together a list but it doesn't make it real.
https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_72052024FA00001_7...
> ACTIVITY TO STRENGTHEN TRANS-LED ORGANIZATIONS TO DELIVER GENDER-AFFIRMING HEALTH CARE
This is 2M of my tax dollars that was/is being sent to Guatemala for gender affirming care. Which is sex change operations and hormones.
The quote you have starts of with "Activity to strengthen" which is uh incredibly vague. Like if you provide say _leadership training_ that sounds like an activity that could strengthen an organization as well as create individuals that could organize to promote Democratic values in their home country and promote good will towards the US for helping them out (unlike say what goes on in Iran). So there's so far no evidence it's surgery or pills.
Even if it is strictly gender-affirming care that does not mean it's surgery and pills. Gender affirming care is more vague than that [1].
And then finally, even if somehow none of the funds are for "ADVOCATE FOR IMPROVED QUALITY AND ACCESS TO SERVICES, AND PROVIDE ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT OPPORTUNITIES." (the part you left off) and the funds for "ACTIVITY TO STRENGTHEN TRANS-LED ORGANIZATIONS TO DELIVER GENDER-AFFIRMING HEALTH CARE" are strictly for surgeries; there appears to be ~0.95% of the US identifying as transgender so spending 0.0000002% of the federal budget seems uh fair (or really 0.00000006% of the federal budget because it's over 3 years while the budget is annual).
---
Ol' Musk isn't working at Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity, or any of his other companies right now. He has the time to ask people and figure out if it's actually sex-changes or something else (it's always something else btw).
[1]: https://opa.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/2025-02/gender-affir...
The “services” here is gender affirming care. What does it mean to “advocate”? Why are my tax dollars being used for this?
Yes it is vague, the vagueness just helps to strengthen the argument that this is probably a waste of taxpayer dollars.
> just $350,000
“ONLY 350k”
Dude 350k is a lot of money, and yeah, by canceling the contract we actually saved the American tax payers the remainder of the money. This is great news and we can use that money towards paying down the national debt or returning it to the hardworking American people.
I want none of my tax dollars to go towards any part of the description.
Your argument seems to be “it’s not very much money”. And you’re not understanding that we the American people do not want any of our tax money being wasted on this. This is why you lost the election, and in the long term you will continue to lose future elections if you don’t change the attitude towards this stuff.
Answer the question honestly, if a politician campaigned on promising to send taxpayer money for gender affirming care in foreign countries, do you think that they would get more or less votes on net because of it?
> so spending 0.0000002% of the federal budget
The only acceptable % of my tax dollars that should go to a foreign nation for trans care is 0%.
I pay a lot of taxes, and the signaling from the left is always that I need to “pay my fair share” and that taxes are so good because they are used to pay for roads and bridges and schools etc.
But when we actually start examining where the dollars are going we get into weird arguments about soft power and gender affirming care in foreign nations. And your arguments for paying our fair share don’t hold up at all anymore because these dollars are not even going to help Americans, this is basically charity for foreign countries. It’s easy to be charitable when you’re spending other people’s money. I bet you are not donating your own personal money to “advocate” for gender affirming care in Guatemala.
You should ask Elon Musk since he brought up the program and has the ability to actually ask people on it what it's about.
It should really be telling that the heads of say USAID have been replaced with politically sympathetic individuals and yet they can't surface any memos or etc that are red flags and instead have to rely on portions of headlines?
----
> Dude 350k is a lot of money,
If somebody has a severed artery and also a paper cut you need to ignore the paper cut to repair the artery.
There is a significant amount of time being wasted on saving 0.000000004% of the federal budget. There are straight up 4 solutions to balancing the budget and none of this nickel and dimeing will get close (especially after the next round of Trump tax cuts).
1 - Cut Military
2 - Cut Medicaid / Medicare
3 - Cut Social Security
4 - Raise taxes to pre-Reagan levels
----
> It’s easy to be charitable when you’re spending other people’s money.
1) Elon doesn't pay anything in taxes [1] so he really should't have a say in how they're spent.
2) Compromise / Pork Barrel [2] is largely how congress works; you get votes on things you want in exchange for things other people want. Reneging on things congress as a group agreed to later on is bad faith.
3) There hasn't been any evidence provided that the program wasn't authorized by congress or isn't achieving any policy goals.
[1]: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...
> ACTIVITY TO STRENGTHEN TRANS-LED ORGANIZATIONS TO DELIVER GENDER-AFFIRMING HEALTH CARE, ADVOCATE FOR IMPROVED QUALITY AND ACCESS TO SERVICES, AND PROVIDE ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT OPPORTUNITIES.
It's 2M for a lot of things. And let's be real, you didn't pay 2M in taxes, you don't really get to say this is "your" tax dollars. This is a lot of people's money, and they may want their money to go to these things. Why do you get the final say?
So you've never heard of the Government Accountability Office, huh? This is literally its purpose.
You can audit all of this without immediately shutting down in-flight programs that save lives. You can say "we're going to go line by line and cut programs that we think are not properly spent".
But they in their arrogance, ignorance, malice, or all three, have been on an ideological war against agencies as a whole. Musk brags about trying to destroy 18F and the IRS free file system. They're trying to tear apart the entire department of education. They're trying to fire anyone who isn't explicitly loyal to the wannabe dictator in chief.
And I'll tell ya, it's not because of spending.
Let me be clear: there are right ways and wrong ways to cut spending. Doing it illegally with a bunch of unvetted fake-ass hackers and by stopping all government functions and installing loyalists isn't the way to do it.
>I am so far definitely satisfied with the progress.
I don't think it's good for the country to shut down agencies illegally on a whim, set up the mayor of NYC to be blackmailed at the drop of a hat, pause enforcement of foreign bribery laws, or hire political loyalists as tools of retribution to lead the DoJ and FBI.
But what do I know about helping the middle class or maintaining our place in the world?
Have you… have you ever met a wealthy person?
Second, spending is done by Congress. If you don’t like the spending cut it through proper channels we don’t get to decide not to fund something once’s it’s been allocated.
All the cuts are going to the right place :)
All of DOGE is just "I don't like these programs, so I am going to call them waste". None of those programs are wasteful that you listed, you just don't like them. How about you substantiate how any of these programs are corrupt or wasteful.
The 2024 federal deficit was 1.8 trillion I am willing to bet a donation to GiveWell that 2025 will higher. You want to take the other side?
Also, you think that rich people won't use the government to get more money? Seriously?
But yes, the parties have different definitions of waste, and the Republicans were voted in by voters so they get to determine what is waste right now.
Can’t you see how the system is supposed to work? It’s not one person determining waste, it’s voters electing Trump who then determines what is waste.
Not the way they're doing, no. The Executive's job is to execute the laws passed by governments elected since the founding of the country, by Democrats and Republicans and all other parties. Republicans don't get to come in and just enforce the laws they agree with ideologically. If this is truly how the system works going forward, then when the pendulum swings the next guy will cut everything he doesn't like in the name of rooting out ill defined "waste and fraud" of the opposite party.
We live in a country split down the middle, Congress is split, and Trump was elected at a slim margin of less than 2%. You can't govern a country of 340 million people by ignoring the the priorities of half of them, even though they pay into the system just the same as everyone else. That's why we elect Representatives and have a Congress to debate these things and find compromise.
1. The President isn’t forced to spend money on waste and fraud.
2. Most laws are written incredibly vague and high level. “$50B funding for FEMA as a disaster relief for Americans” leaves the President a hell of a lot of room to maneuver and stay within the wording of the law.
I do agree there is a big question mark on “if the President has fulfilled the law but money is left over, what happens?” or “the President says the law is fulfilled by members of Congress disagree”.
Presumably the courts will hammered out all those details, with restrictions put on the President such that a process is put around it. I also suspect the courts will tell Congress “do your god damn job if you want to specify exact spending”.
The president doesn't have to spend on fraud but he doesn't get to decide lawful Congressional agencies like CFPB and USAID are "waste" by his own metric, and shut them down unilaterally.
> 2. Most laws are written incredibly vague and high level.
And that's why there is some discretion here, often times encoded within the agency itself. If the agency is not doing what it's designed by Congress to do, we have an entire oversight system to handle that. IGs are there specifically for that purpose, but Trump fired them all. How does that advance the mission of finding waste fraud and abuse? Of course it doesn't because that's not the mission, the mission is an ideological purge.
> restrictions put on the President such that a process is put around it.
Under what authority? Trump and Musk claim absolute authority over the executive, so any restrictions would be unlawful in their eyes. In fact they claim the right to have no process whatsoever, which is how they're currently operating.
Those agencies still exist, they have just been shrunked down. For USAID, it's folded under State.
> If the agency is not doing what it's designed by Congress to do, we have an entire oversight system to handle that. IGs are there specifically for that purpose, but Trump fired them all.
No, that's not the role of the IG. The IG is focused on financial and management audits. It doesn't determine whether an agency is fulfilling the law set by Congress.
That's the job of the courts and Congress, which they can still do.
> Trump and Musk claim absolute authority over the executive, so any restrictions would be unlawful in their eyes.
Trump does have absolute authority over the executive. It's in the Constitution. He also has the ability to delegate his authority to US government employees like Musk.
However the President has obligations to execute the laws passed by Congress. Both the legislative (Congress) and judicial (courts) are the check on the executive and have a number of levers they can pull if Trump violates the Constitution.
This is all US civic 101 here.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/money-saved-by-canceling-pr...
The corruption era is very simple: the government won't be allowed to directly provide a service that someone else could make $$$$ by being a middleman for.
It's somewhat ludicrous to have to "file taxes" in the computer era in the first place, but there's a large ideological resistance to both taxes and the government that in some of the more paranoid wings of the country that is well-exploited by the rent-seekers here.
As a comparison, in my country you could submit your own tax return using government supplied desktop software since 1999, and in 2015 that software was replaced with a web product. 1 in 3 people submit their own tax returns using this product.
[0] https://thisisunpacked.substack.com/p/irs-direct-tax-filing-...
Time will tell but there's evidence that some government staff grew inexplicably wealthy while in office which would suggest corruption. Corruption in government is terrible for the average citizen, ask anyone from a country that suffers from a lot of it.
I really fail to see why auditing government spending is a bad thing?
But you know what? All of these agencies are regularly audited. Every year, reports are all published. This is how it works https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/reports-statements/financial...
Elon is operating an ideological mission conducted unprofessionally and with complete contempt for any public oversight.
Those are a bunch of weasel words. You're giving a certain impression yet being vague enough that it's impossible to assess, argue or discuss the validity of that claim.
What evidence? Who are those 'some' staff? What's inexplicably wealthy?
There's a vast difference between government high-ups getting paid well and making money (as high-ups in any large organization might) and government organizations and their leadership and staff being generally corrupt.
Of course corruption is never impossible, partially because it can take forms that may be difficult to discern as such. But it's again impossible to assess that claim without substance.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/us/politics/trump-orders-...
It's barely started and the corruption is everywhere. It's blatant and out in the open, and it's disgusting.
I'm going to a protest today. I encourage others to do the same.
I am not a Trump voter. I agree with the outcome they have stated - reduce stupid spending - but I have no idea thats the true motivation, the true goal and I disagree with the manner in which they are doing it. Just because you agree with the dictator doesn't make it right?
Heck, the Trump admin wants to get rid of income tax entirely, so they're hardly the natural allies of the tax prep industry.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1888326592096547245
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1886092387098796499
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1858872775395426553
If Elon wanted he could fund an opensouce alternative to Turbotax.
I am willing to bet 1k that Intuit's 2024 TurboTax Online and other Consumer Group revenue of $4.4 billion will remain above 4B in 2025.
I might buy that line of thinking for a corporation but the direct file program was about individuals. Elon gleefully tweeted about how that had been deleted. That's a direct give away to TurboTax and H&R Block.
The issue isn't direct file vs TurboTax.
It's whether most individuals should have to file at all.
A few tweaks around employment income and capital gains, and you can do away with filing altogether for most people.
You’re just being obtuse. We can stop now.
The history of lobbying on behalf of the tax prep industry is easy enough to find.
Is drawing a line through Trump's well-professed love of sycophants and people who make him money and that lobbying and motivation, to their current actions, so far fetched to you?
I think taking a wait-and-see approach to things like "Trump wants to get rid of income tax entirely" would be wise until we see where the implementation ends up. In the meantime lets talk about what has actually been done to date.
However it would be pretty insane to argue that a citizen of a country should need to pay money for someone to fill out a basic tax return to pay taxes…
The rest of us hate it.
Complex political issues sometimes just come down to "I want my side to look good and I want the other side to look bad". In a system that treats Silicon Valley billionaires very differently to someone selling lumber in rural Ohio, sometimes that naked tribalism is the only thing that truly unites people in political parties.
Some people hate the IRS self-filing system because it works, and because the "other side" is taking credit for it.
On the other hand, creating an office whose sole objective is to destroy other functioning parts of the government and make it less useful to people? Totally moral.
Don't ask me, I'm not a conservative.
American Conservatives don't believe the government is evil, they believe that not having control over the government is evil. The slash and burning of agencies and departments isn't just due to a deep seated hatred, it's a need for control. And in order to have control you need consolidation.
American Conservatives have no problems with state governments vastly overreaching their authority or punishing cities. They have no issue with potentially taxing workers more to issue tax breaks for corporations. And they have no issue using the government to punish, stalk or harass dissidents.
Governments don't have a particularly good track record, so why give them the benefit of the doubt? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide
According to Rummel, democide surpassed war as the leading cause of non-natural death in the 20th century.
A government that is as weak as possible at least possesses less organizational capacity for murdering you when things inevitably go off the rails.
The state does not have an actual monopoly on violence, and never has. It merely provides a threat of organized, systematic retribution to try to prevent private-party violence. But that illegal violence still happens. Just at a lower rate than it would otherwise.
Remember that the alternative is not paradise, it is not a system that is "on the rails", it's everybody trying to murder you to get ahead. And in that world having a gun doesn't protect you - guns favor the one who shoots first. Does a tiny village from the past where everybody knows everybody and depends on everybody have that problem to a high degree, or need a large government? No. But that's not the world we live in.
Why is your starting point not the default for most reasonable people - that the government is literally people from that society trying to manage their own affairs and to help each other when possible?
Doesn't seem particularly hard to justify that assumption right about now.
Because the government (at both state and federal levels) has been not this for several decades now. Legislative capture is wild stuff.
> Why is your default assumption that government will "go off the rails"?
It kind of is right now...
... but then again, I'm not a conservative ...
This take should lead to less government POWER and involvement in individual lives though and doesn't match with policy that empowers an astronomically sized "defense" budget, lawmakers deciding how every woman everywhere should deal with pregnancy and health issues that affect pregnancy, or giving unbridled, unreviewed access to every citizens personal and financial data to unelected, unaccountable oligarchs.
I actually agree with your take - I have a lot of conservative views like you described about how government is inherently hard and flawed and risky so we should use it sparingly.
We've seen so much flying in the face of this recently that I make a point of not calling republicans conservative anymore, not to be pithy but just to try to bring some grounding to these culture war arguments.
1. To people saying that the government should have a direct way to file taxes. This is an outdated way of thinking. Most ordinary people shouldn't have to file taxes at all. Withholding is sufficient for income taxes and taxes on liquid investments.
2. 18F was an openly partisan organisation. They were likely disbanded not to kill the products they produced, but rather for their inability to remain politically neutral.
It’s normal in many countries to not have to file until your tax situation becomes more complicated.
For most people, your employer handles your income tax on your behalf, your stock broker handles your capital gains tax etc.
It’s an XY problem, and direct file is like the faster horse.
The UK’s Government Digital Service is similar. They’ve got some good examples of doing unglamorous but impactful work -e.g. replacing dozens of different payment processing systems with one quality one, the same thing for sending physical letters, etc.
I also don’t buy Elon’s messaging that a database upgrade will save social security, or whatever.
One of the best examples of this is passport renewal. In the US until very recently you were unable to do this online, either having to print and mail in a form or go in person to an office.
Another example is the work of 18F to allow Americans easy direct filing of their taxes without the need (or cost) of a third party.
It is and was a pretty significant one, now less important compared to a literal seig-heiling nazi running the government.
Last time literal seig-heiling nazis ran a government, it wasn't great.
This is not what Elon is saying or doing or planning to do.
I use many SOPs daily. The principle is that if you can forget everything about it but the name, obtain the documentation, and relearn it, you should do about the same thing as without.
Though you can find SOPs similar to modern from 1950s USSR docs, the U.S. Navy ones like folding SOP or military shower SOP are especially pragmatic.
From the docker file:
curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.3/install.shEdit: Whoops sorry, morning fog
Is that possible? Every commit id includes the hash of the parent commit forming a chain.
Understandably everyone is upset about what "DOGE" is doing. But on top of those harms, the killing of USDS (or at least ending its core mission) is also a real harm.
Although overshadowed by Kubernetes elsewhere in the industry, I suspect that Pivotal's Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service (PaaS)--which the US General Services Administration's (GSA) internal digital transformation consultancy, 18F, adopted[0] in 2015 significantly influenced the software delivery philosophy of the federal government by making trivial heretofore disastrously cumbersome provisioning, staging, and deployment processes. The step away from hand-provisioned virtual machines to elastic, accommodating environments may have made agile development possible in federal offices, bringing our government into the 21st century, only fifteen years late.
I distinctly remember the switch from "here's your VM" to "here's my code," and--as an application developer--I never want to go back.
0. See: https://cloud.gov
"Internal team, what's your current greatest pain point?" -> Make that easier / faster / better
I could be wrong and maybe tons of democrat voters want to see this… But what I’m seeing online indicates otherwise.
>My tax dollars are better spent not having a website in most of these cases.
Blame your rep for it then. We don't set the budget. We vote in people we trust are in our best interest to set such spending.
huh?
Where have we heard this before?
They even broke the USGS earthquake maps. Yesterday morning you could check the site for new quakes anywhere on earth and end up with a really good idea where it was on earth because there were several map styles available as overlays - Terrain, gray scale, street, ocean, etc.
Yesterday afternoon the only map layer available was an ocean layer showing continents, islands, seafloor profiles etc with no place names available at all.
Late yesterday night or early this morning they added another layer, USGS topo, that has generalized landforms and cultural stuff like roads, with enough detail that you can zoom in and find your town here in the USA. The problem is that this layer is totally broken outside the US.
If you are like me and you're monitoring new activity in the Aegean Sea that topo layer is completely broken. If you zoom to a level where you would expect to see individual towns, etc you will find the Aegean Sea labeled as being in the Pacific Ocean and all the coastline and landform data completely broken so that it isn't possible to identify any of the islands that could be affected in the region.
If you look at all the seas in the Mediterranean you will find it labeled as the Pacific Ocean and that label persists all the way across the Atlantic at that zoom level until Bermuda where you can see the Atlantic Ocean label.
Frankly, whoever did this probably has a good start on eating a giant bag of dicks.
Pretty obvious that they aren't sending their best to do their dirty work. These DoGE guys are ultimately expendable and if things go south for the current administration the DoGE guys will need to be absorbent enough to handle all the blame that will fall on them when people begin to be held accountable. They need to be multi-layered Downy guys. The men at the top will slick themselves down with lawyers so it all slides downhill and hang everyone else out to dry once they are past their usefulness date.
It is happening contemporaneously with all the other bullshittery so I think it is a reasonable conclusion that DoGE personnel directed by someone likely unelected and so far unaccountable are the parties responsible.
I'm not sure why someone would intentionally destroy the utility of a site that has been extremely useful, not only for Americans but for people anywhere who needed to understand earthquakes and their local historical seismicity.
I can't remember at time in at least the last 15 years when the site has not worked flawlessly serving data about new and historical seismicity from all over the globe in a way that allowed the user to customize the view to fit their own needs.
I agree with a couple of posters that think this may be an effort to rename the GoM to the GoA since all the place names are missing from the Ocean map and the places names that are present on the USGS topo map are full of stupid errors that suggest that they modified naming of water features and it broke something for their map layer.
As an oil and gas industry person I have to chuckle to think about all the things that have to happen for that industry to ever come into compliance with this bullshit renaming. There are thousands of wells in databases globally named with a Gulf of Mexico nomenclature. That's just the wells. Each of them likely has multiple dozen products with a GoM tag to identify the well it belongs to. There are probably millions of line miles of seismic data from dozens of large and small seismic data acquisition projects, all of which use GoM nomenclature since the standard nomenclature in the industry relates things to a Client, Line, Area, Survey or similar parameters so that if it happened in the Gulf it will have GoM in the name somewhere and in the metadata associated with the project since that is how you geolocate things in the industry. You reference it to an actual physical location known to less than a cm in many cases.
Sounds like a lot of busy work for anyone in the industry and possibly an opportunity for a consultant to step in and handle all the renaming that will need to happen if there is any effort to comply. They'll need to know multiple databases upside down and sideways since each operator manages things their own way. And they'll need to be comfortable sitting idle while the IT guys sort out access permissions for every legacy file and folder once they discover where the data management division has them stored. You'll also be the fall guy if some of the data gets corrupted but, shit happens. Sounds like a sweet gig.
Give us the inside view from your office chair.
I just think that there are lots of incompetent people in government to begin with who could have messed this up in an attempt to rename, and was interested in understanding whether you had inside info about whether it was the people in DOGE. You have a lot of insightful info in your response, but none that looks like a smoking gun to me like "I know someone at USGS who saw it being done", so to me it looks like an accusation that might not stick. That's all. But we're on the same side here.
Thanks for your clarifying reply as it helps to understand where you're coming from.
>I just think that there are lots of incompetent people in government to begin with who could have messed this up in an attempt to rename
As I mentioned earlier up in the thread when you raised concerns about things breaking all the time due to incompetence, this site has a long history of delivering timely information to global users without breaking. When massive changes like the ones that we observe happen which affect how information is delivered those things are routinely announced in advance and users are provided an opportunity to use the "upgraded" version of the service and submit observations about usability, etc so that there is ample time to take user input before it goes live, replacing the old method of data delivery and/or display.
These changes happened between breakfast that morning and early afternoon with no announcements to users that anything on the site would be changed. All these display options disappeared and in their place we initially had a single layer with no place name information at all. A user would need to know some geography in order to be able to figure where the new quakes were occurring.
Sadly enough, that means that some users would see a nice map overlay with dots on it but would not know where those events occurred due to deficiencies in their education.
Since that first set of deletions, another layer was added, the USGS Topo layer and that layer has since been updated to rename a large body of water to Gulf of America and that is the label that appears when the site loads. There are place names, roads, terrain, rivers, etc in that layer so it is easier for even the non-geography nerds to determine where an event occurs relative to their own location.
Other changes have happened and from the changes it is reasonable to conclude that the persons making the changes did not have experience using the GIS software that enables all these useful displays. With that in mind it becomes increasingly unlikely that regular USGS employees made these changes since there obviously are people there at the agency who have all the skills needed to quickly change things without breaking them and the normal process of notifying users of upcoming site changes was not followed.
Overall I think it is unfortunate that you have so little trust in federal government employees. I have a dog in the hunt so I have a window into how things work at the federal level. My spouse has had a decades long career in a federal agency and I can tell you that the individual people in the agency are not usually the problem.
Every time there is a new administration that new administration has the opportunity to nominate new leadership for all the departments. You already know this and have seen it in action. The positions are seen as an opportunity to promote the agenda of the new administration and to reward those who helped them be elected. Too often we see people installed as agency heads who have no background domain experience or worse, they have experience in sectors that did not benefit from following agency guidelines about handling federal monies. They are there to shake things up and they bring a list of things that must be changed to fit the new agenda.
The agency employees have to adjust everything that they do to fit the new agenda and this causes inefficiencies in the system as all existing employees have to be trained on how the new director wants the agency to work and on the new director's guidelines and agenda. I can say that it is increasingly common for an agency to need to educate new directors about what they are constitutionally allowed to do so that some of the new agenda does not force nor does it allow anyone downstream to break any existing laws.
Governments are large. Any time something gets large there is the possibility that inefficiencies develop.
The decision to describe government employees as incompetent is inaccurate in general though I'm sure there are exceptions. You think there are "lots" of incompetent people in government and at any description of "lots" between a couple and thousands you are likely correct.
Don't paint them all with the same brush. Maintaining a government position involves annual training and recertifications, deciphering the meaning behind small changes in the text of rules and guidelines that they must follow, and understanding how to manage groups of people efficiently so that everyone stays engaged in their assigned tasks and meets targets assigned by agency "leadership".
My own definition of "lots" based on years of observations and conversations with someone inside a large federal agency is that the least competent are frequently found at the top of the agency and they bring their own group of managers into the agency in order to pivot to their new agenda. Those lower on the food chain must attempt to adjust or seek a transfer to an agency with less induced dysfunction or to a private entity.
I don't personally think that rate of competence in federal workforce is worse than any other big organization, especially outside of politically appointed leadership. Massive leadership changes can still create operational disruption by offering the opportunity for career brownnosers to demonstrate their fealty by empowering them to force their zeal onto others. I wonder if something like that happened here, where some MAGAt within USGS staff decided to skip a bunch of review process either to make themselves look good or out of fear that they'd look like they're resisting orders.
Isn't renaming a place rather common? Even nations were recently renamed (Swaziland, Macedonia).
Therefore the software (database included) managing the data (used by the USGS earthquake's) probably offers a way to rename a place.
Is there any documentation exposing how to perform such a renaming? Is it up to date and accessible (or did someone modify/hide it in order to annoy DOGE)? Was it not strictly followed by the person(s) who tried to rename this Gulf? Are all technical thingies associated to such a renaming free of major bugs?
If all answers to those questions are "yes" then the person(s) who tried to rename is the sole culprit.
If there is a single "no" then at least another person should be put into scrutiny.
Trying to sea-lion your way through this convo after the person replying to you gave a detailed breakdown of the situation is gross. Don't be a sycophant.
There is no problem from their point of view, they are succeeding from their perspective, and musk's, and trump's and every other anti-america neo nazi shitlicker who got them there.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/thousands-fired-trump-musk-...
The way the government has been run the past decades doesn't work, demonstrably. Every important metric has worsened.
https://archive.ph/2025.02.14-132833/https://www.404media.co...
That's currently how I model my usage of LLMs in code. A smart veeeery junior engineer that needs to be kept on a veeeeery short leash.
LLMs are an eternal intern that can only repeat what it's gleaned from some articles it skimmed last year or whatever. If your expected response isn't in its corpus, or isn't in it frequently enough, and it can't just regurgitate an amalgamation of the top N articles you'd find on Google anyway, tough luck.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_collapse
[2]https://thebullshitmachines.com/lesson-16-the-first-step-fal...
You can't do the same way you do with a human developer, but you can do a somewhat effective form of it through things like .cursorrules files and the like.
Maybe they used Grok ;P
Not my experience at all. Every LLM produces lots of trivial SQLI/XSS/other-injection vulnerabilities. Worse they seem to completely authorization business logic, error handling, and logging even when prompted to do so.
Smells like getting a backdoor in early.
I don't see any CRUD endpoints for modifying the database
https://doge.gov/workforce?orgId=69ee18bc-9ac8-467e-84b0-106... is what's linked to by the "Workforce" header, and it now looks different than the screenshots
BTW, I spent a lot of my career configuring load balancing, caches, proxies, sharding, and CDNs for Plone (a CMS that’s popular with governments) websites.
Not enough detail to say for sure; could be SQL injection, could be credentials exposed in the frontend.
Every generation we make things much easier, lower the bar, and are rewarded when amateurs make amateur mistakes like this.
But, I would love to see details.
Anecdote time (pinch of salt required):
A relative of mine studying accounting went to the Doge site to see the "audit" and "analytics" records that some acquaintance arguing with her said "see the doge site!" for the proof.
What she found when visiting the site was no "audit" at all, but instead a word count of how often objectional terms appear in legislation or government sites. (DEI? Trans? LGBTQ?).
Being in the analytics/data engineering space myself, I was pretty amused to hear that was the quality of "analytics" being done.
Wasn't "word count" the "hello world" example for Hadoop big data back in 2013?
Now it says "Receipts coming over the weekend!"
Next time it's: The site is receipt-ready
A lot of cuts looks “sensical” at first, until you realize things like “cutting magazine subscriptions” are more like “cutting financial news sources off from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau” or “not renewing reputable news subscriptions for people who really need to understand current events”.
And then there’s a lot of DEI/diversity training cuts which feel targeted not at their war on Actually Being Nice to People, but at the groups those trainings help employees serve - cutting DEI for SNAP…so, there’s a reported (haven’t verified but allegedly from USDA data) 5 ethnic groups, as well as “race unknown”, that are enrolled in SNAP. Now imagine how you’d train people to understand, interact with, and help people in different ethnic backgrounds _who need this assistance_. I believe empathy and understanding are incredibly good skills to have in a role like this, and DEI helps train that - for all involved.
The going notion on the right is that DEI is racist, and against white people, but it leaves out the idea that anyone non-white might also need this training? Like, DEI is about understanding differences, and then the right reads it as “understanding non-whites” and get offended that they even have to think about other cultures.
And another cut funding for training on gender, and that training was for an office involved in tech and engineering…a professional field notoriously male-dominant for a long time. Again, it makes sense to me that this kind of training would be good, because I’ve heard the way people in tech talk and act towards women and queer folx, so yeah let’s have some training.
These kinds of programs aren’t meant to tell people what to think - if they can’t empathetically interact with the world, work training won’t change that - but it will tell them that in a professional capacity they need to know how to interact and be productive. In business this is so you make more money, in government it’s how you help more people - including your own employees and also the communities you serve.
So Trump is doing what he said, and the details are grim.
You want to criticize a troll? Be my guest. Criticize away. (Or just downvote and flag.) But if you criticize, do better than false accusation. (There's a fine real accusation to make, namely "you're being a troll"; you don't have to make false accusations.)
Be better than the trolls. Don't stoop to their level.
Now, I agree that in febrile political environments it's better not to rely on sarcasm and satire for communication because it imposes extra cognitive overhead and is subject to misinterpretation, but at the same time 'found the [negative stereotype]' is such a common joke format in American popular culture that it would be foolish to take it literally. It's like objecting to a 'knock knock' joke by complaining that the person is lying about being on the other side of a door.
And putting trolls and their critics on the same level is fundamentally foolish, and a much worse example of feeding trolls. It means attacking the critics for paying the trolls back in their own coin, which inevitably leads to a ratchet effect in favor of the trolls. There's good evidence that being rude to trolls is the most effective way for an online community to maintain itself: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03697
And I know some of those kids probably read Hackernews, so here’s the advice: put away ChatGPT and learn what the fuck you’re doing.
Nah, they'll want reasonable pay, reasonable hours, and won't confuse their boss for a living god. They may even have some self-confidence and morals, which would be a total deal breaker.
The point of DOGE is the disruption. It's a propaganda and political orthodoxy operation under a paper thin pretext of efficiency.
It might give you some contacts, but that’s far from a given. Just because Musk found you useful doesn’t mean he’s going to show loyalty to you, and that’s especially true if the venture blows up politically and you are one of the scapegoats. People don’t get to be billionaires by giving away money to everyone they meet.
working at doge? your resume would be straight in the trash if i came across it.
50% of the country might support this. The software industry, especially the lower levels like engineers and managers, leans left politically.
1. Good experienced engineer
2. Without ethics
3. Happy to be paid below market rate of a good experienced engineer without ethics.
It's not enough to point out that Trump is fascist and therefore bad. You need to go the next step and say why fascism is bad.
(Yes, we've gotten to this timeline, where we have to go back and actually describe why fascism is bad -- where the press is reporting on proposed ethnic cleansing in Gaza with statements like "outlandish plan" and "unrealistic" rather than naming it for what it is: a brutal and immoral plan to exterminate an entire people. Oh, and now we need to explain why that is actually a Really Awful Thing)
You do not need to look far at all to find tiny changes made by past administrations that have had massive unforeseen consequences. We are absolutely cooked.
At least, that's the theory. I don't think America wants to admit that the CCP has their industrial capacity by the balls and can direct it with centralized planning to displace America's EV market or naval tonnage at will. There's an assumption that deregulation will finally be the panacea to America's issues, but we can't pursue that consistent with a policy of global trade. We can't sanction the ICC and demand other countries extradite their criminals to the US. We can't abandon the Human Rights Council and then demand other countries respect our moral authority.
It's going to be another 4 years of the civilized world proving they don't need America. And Trump is going to spend it flattering dictators abroad while everyone else taps their foot waiting for another primary. Stagnation is a best case scenario, a-la 2016 - our saving grace is that most of America's serious adversaries are also hurting quite a bit right now. Trump sitting in the Nixon or Regan seat would have been game-over for America.
What makes you think they’ll respect that law?
Assuming he makes it that long, he’ll have a third term. They’ll make some lunatic reading of the law to justify state legislatures selecting electors. The supine courts will rubber stamp anything.
The GOP's support isn't guaranteed throughout this administration, and they know a successor needs to be found. Amending the constitutional term limit would be a source of bipartisan outcry, because neither party would survive it.
This term is different.
This for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43051135
(EDIT: Looks like others are wondering too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43050833)
Is the newly created user with name "bigballs" who downloads whole government databases a foreign TA or just DOGE? Who knows. Who cares, certainly not the Government.
The data and access gained currently by China, Russia, NK and SA will continue to be useful until and way after the next war.
the payments data would tell a lot about intelligence networks for example or about various Pentagon contractors.
Remember Assange? He did a decade under house arrest for a leak paling in comparison to what happens today. How times have changed.
No, he did a most of a decade hiding out in an diplomatic enclave to avoid legal process, and three years in jail fighting extradition; he spent no time under house arrest.
He spent a decade hiding in an embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden for unrelated crimes, ostensably for fear of what ended up happening in the UK where he was apparently happy to stay while insisting Sweden wasn't safe.
and the people in prison can leave anytime they want - it is just prison guards outside who would shoot them.
> to Sweden for unrelated crimes
And what happened to those crimes in Sweden once he resolved his US issues?
By that standard, given what the guards would do, you would need to also claim that "prison is a death sentence".
He wasn't under house arrest — he went there against the desires of the police force outside who stationed officers there to perform an arrest for skipping bail.
Calling this "house arrest" is akin to calling voluntarily serving on a submarine "drowning" or working in the antarctic "hypothermia": he chose to go there, and to keep staying there. More than that, he chose to commit a new and easy to prove crime by going there.
His argument against going to Sweden, *after having been arrested for the Swedish extradition hearing in the UK*, was a fear of a thing the UK ended up doing, and which it should have been obvious the UK would do willingly whenever the US asked for it. The US has no need to make things more complicated by asking for Swedish involvement given how friendly the UK government is.
The UK is infamous for doing whatever the US tells it to, so if you're afraid of US prosecutorial/extradition overreach, the UK is one of many countries where you don't want to be. Sweden, not so much.
If the US wanted him back in 2010, they could have had him directly from the UK with full support of the UK government, without any of the convoluted extra steps in this conspiracy theory that makes the Swedish judicial system into patsies.
> And what happened to those crimes in Sweden once he resolved his US issues?
The statute of limitations happened. Bits were already timing out even before he overstayed his welcome by Ecuador.
Nevertheless the prosecutors did try to reopen that prosecution and to get the UK to extradite to Sweden first over the US, only to be told no by the judge because the evidence was too old to secure a conviction.
That pre-existing cancellation was why the British didn't feel the need to bother telling Sweden when his asylum was cancelled and he was arrested, much to the annoyance of the Swedish prosecutors: https://www.courthousenews.com/%EF%BB%BFsweden-tells-uk-it-t...
And only after all that had already happened, did the US issues get fully resolved.
>is akin to calling voluntarily serving on a submarine
> he chose to go there, and to keep staying there.
it isn't called "voluntary"/"choosing" if the alternative to the "voluntarily"/"choosing" is a police force desire of putting you into Gitmo (or SuperMax if you're lucky) for life or even capital punishment to politically prosecute you. (Assange's actions weren't criminal at the jurisdiction where he performed his actions. US prosecution of him was pure political and a pure projection of US force beyond US jurisdiction. Crowds of people in US collect classified info from other countries, and US doesn't extradite those people into those other countries. Because jurisdiction matters for determining whether actions constitute a crime. I for example say a a lot of things which are crime in Russia - like calling the Ukraine war a war - which aren't crime in US. Should i be extradited to Russia and face the "legal process" there? And if i caught in a Russia friendly country and hide from extradition in a UK or US embassy it wouldn't be a voluntary choosing to visit the embassy, it would be a "voluntary choice" to stay in the embassy instead of getting treason conviction and 20 years in GULAG - such "voluntarily chosen" stay at the embassy is a de-facto house arrest.)
>The statute of limitations happened.
No. You're again inventing things. Like with your invented definition of the "voluntary choosing" above.
Someone willing to work without morals for money can just be bought by the next highest bidder. Anything they touch should be treated as compromised.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/doge-website-posts-classified-inf...
Why is this not a joke?
Edit: Rethorical question.
> Is there a source for the vacation days thing?
The "vacation days" line seems to be a jokingly hyperbolic prediction. China might have directed more resources (including hackers) toward collecting the data exposed by DOGE and Elon Musk's actions (and might try to widen the crack), but is unlikely to have literally cancelled all vacation days for said hackers.
But I guess that you don't need to find answers externally when stupidity is a much simpler reason
They've created the back doors, I'm sure that the Russians and the Chinese are now in the systems the DOGE people broke.
>Over at OPM, reports indicate that individuals associated with DOGE connected an unauthorized server into the network.
[1]: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/02/doge-as-a-nat...
Is there any evidence that the database for this microblog of a cloud flare hosted website has anything of importance in it?
Are you also (alone) suggesting there's a tunnel from cloud flare (where this is hosted) to some larger government database?
You may want to RTFA: https://archive.ph/wy1Wt
I was replying to what was written. I read this as implying that sensitive (or any) data was available.
> and access data from
Again, is there any evidence that any data was accessible, beyond what is visible on the webpage? If you read the article, the flaw was that anything could be pushed. Could you link a source that says extra data was accessible? Your claim is not made in the above article, and I can't find anything mentioning data access, with a quick search.
I'd wager the person who did the edit goes by the name "roro".
Fascinating—if unfortunate—to see the world's 2 most powerful men basically functioning as walking test cases for classic outcomes when a child is not given appropriate attention/affection and also zero boundaries for socially-appropriate behavior.
The "treadmills" were used to measure the effects of bacteria on shrimp metabolism. Understanding how bacteria affects metabolism, at least to me, sounds like a perfectly valid thing to research. Most people, if they knew the context around that would probably agree, but people are extremely lazy with this stuff, and are really susceptible to stupid catchphrases, so people thought it was a huge waste of money.
ETA:
https://www.npr.org/2011/08/23/139852035/shrimp-on-a-treadmi...
Frankly, something DOGE has shown me is how lazy Musk is. I know he's the CEO of like twenty companies, but if what he's doing with DOGE is any indication, he has absolutely no attention to detail and is completely averse to actually learning or understanding what he's talking about. Like, every effort in DOGE is coming off as decidedly half-assed.
It makes me glad I don't own a Tesla, because I would be terrified to see what kind of corners they cut, and how much of it would end up being completely half-baked and not ready to actually be used. I'm not completely convinced that NASA contracting out to SpaceX is a good idea anymore either.
There's two things you need to make people feel the government is working for them:
* good social policies
* adequate education
One of the US parties has been working for decades to sabotage both, and with the help of the media they've successfully managed to deflect all the blame for it. So no, I don't agree that DOGE is a symptom of a larger problem -- unless you mean that the problem is 50 years of consistently undermining the government.
Why wasn't it fixed?
https://history.house.gov/Institution/Presidents-Coinciding/...
There's also the problem of Democrats being absolutely terrible at organizing and uniting.
The idea being that if common sense prevails and folks realize what a shit show/farce this DOGE thing is.... the underlying issues that allowed DOGE to exist in the first place will be unsolved.
I have no source, no data, nor examples to defend my point, it’s just the vibes.
TikTok, Twitter etc show extremely distorted views of the world, just other bubbles.
Maybe people were voting for him because they were dumb? Or they were lied to?
But neither of those change the importance of understanding what those people wanted.
You can't win elections without understanding what most people actually want.
This despite the fact that Musk is mostly firing investigators who were seeing if his company's were a budget waste. I guess we just have to assume agencies that say "black" are bad and what we really need to spend money on is luxury EV vehicles that can play angry birds. Surely not a conflict of interest.
There is no arguing with people who don't know what they want. This is all propaganda fueled hysteria.
I cant tell if this is intentional irony or poe’s law.
When democrats that are curious about why people vote for Trump, conclude that the voters are dumb or naive, it’s kind of an unintentional demonstration of the kind of thinking that turns people away from the Democratic Party.
The smug "some people are dumb, so I'm going to ignore them instead of being curious" elitism has lost the Democratic party two recent elections.
America has been propagandized to by the wealthy for a century and this is the end result. The world's richest person reforming the government for profit.
This is quite literally what is happening.
- government spending has been rampant and completely disconnected from available funds
- "shutdown" threats, typically a sign that a red line is being crossed, has been treated as political currency
- funds going from taxpayer (individual and corporations) to government, to be redistributed for an ever-increasing list of grants, programs, and studies
- locked-in mega spending areas of the budget showing plenty of warning signs of unsustainability, with nothing being done to address
Even if DOGE is "all for spectacle," I'm having trouble finding the downsides of DOGE's actions for generations coming after us. But maybe someone could help me understand why they feel differently?
Sure, a lot of these agencies are doing wasteful things and there is a lot of room for improvement. Meanwhile, it's a slow and humongous beast that's very difficult to reform.
However, thinking that these institutions have no value is a great mistake. So is thinking that a few teenagers can improve things by firing people and dissolving agencies in the course of a few weeks. Needless to say, there is no historical precedent for something like this working.
You can take the position that it will just get a lot worse before it gets better: "destroy everything and build it from scratch". It's often tempting but almost never a good idea, even for software will projects. On the level of a government, this idea is actually insane and I have no doubt that people will find out why, unless they stop breaking things.
So what are the downsides of DOGE's actions? They are fully upending the Constitutional order of checks and balances. I personally thought it was an okay system, but really it seems like enough people are willing to ignore it, that the Constitution is effectively suspended.
Like sure it'll get you somewhere, but what will you break/lose in the process? And what will you gain?
It's not "all for show", I don't think Americans understand how they're unraveling decades of soft power, eroding the trust they were already losing on the international stage, &c.
The administration has presented no plan to meaningfully cut costs, it is just producing propaganda that people eat up without thinking.
It sure seems like a lot of folks want change. I just wish we had used that momentum to build consensus and empower experts to improve things. Instead, the trolls got the attention and are leading us on a snipe hunt while the rich get ready for another tax break.
It already has. America has in three short weeks burned bridges with multiple countries that will not be rebuilt
In what way is that? I feel that a lot of people who say things like that expect the impossible and don't actually realize how extremely privileged their lives are from all of what a modern society offers them.
oh, but maybe you don't care about any of that, for X reasons; those things may not be important to you, but other things are, like maybe not being swindled by your bank (CFPB) or being able to enjoy visiting a National Park. Or maybe there's nothing that you care about, but there are millions of other people who do care.
I also think the government is inefficient. The median effective tax rate (sales, both halves of FICA, state income, federal income, unemployment, property, gas, "sin" taxes, ...) in the US is in the 40%-50% range, and that's apparently not close to enough to pay for everything. We market ourselves as being a low-tax country, but that's a higher percentage than a median Brit pays (35-45%) and not much lower than Germany (50-60%). France kind of sucks on that front (60-75%), but it's about the worst offender, and at least in those countries you have free healthcare (the cost of which bumps taxes+healthcare to be worse in the US than France even). The US is very expensive if you're not very well-off.
I get that it's more complicated than this, but we went to war back when taxes were 2%. How is it that after 250 years of technological innovation we suddenly need half of everybody's individual output just to keep the country running?
So, what changes has DOGE found? For a couple I agree with (one strongly, one with reservations), my back-of-the-envelope estimates suggest that the median American spends $0.50/yr on penny minting and $50/yr on the EPA. I certainly wouldn't mind $50.50/yr in my pocket (nearly double that in equivalent pre-tax wages).
Pennies do seem useless, and I wouldn't even mind going up to quarters or dollars as the minimum divisible currency unit.
The EPA is a tougher call (if the proposal were actually making it more efficient instead of just gutting it and letting corporations run rampant). On the one hand, I'd be willing to pay much more handsomly than that to actually have clean water, clean air, soil near my home without lead or other poisons, .... On the other hand, $10B+/yr is a lot of money for what the EPA does, and I'm still unable to even buy lead and cadmium free dog bowls and coffee mugs without trusting the manufacturer's pinky promise or testing it myself. Somehow, the "don't poison us with things we definitely know are very toxic" directive doesn't apply if you figure out a new shape to mould that poison into. To achieve the same real-world outcomes the EPA has over the last couple decades, you wouldn't need near that much cash.
Even if I agreed with those whole-heartedly though, and even if DOGE finds an extra $2.5k/yr of my taxes being used on things which don't benefit me at all and I'm callous enough to not care about that money's potential impact on others (which looks like a reasonable upper bound given that the strategy seems to be gutting every department that Trump or Musk doesn't like, and those are a drop in the bucket of the federal budget), I still think the cost of DOGE exceeds those gains. Somewhat equivalently, I'd happily pay $2.5k/yr to make a shitshow like this never happen again.
Why though?
The big one is that Musk and Trump have a history of fraud and abuse for personal gain, and their current actions look much more like a dictatorial power grab than evidence that they finally want to do the right thing. Some examples:
1. Which federal agents are being let go? The ones who investigated Trump after he broke countless laws. He's not trying to hide it; he's seeking revenge on people even tangentially related regardless of how much benefit they do or don't have for the country, when he's the one who broke that many bloody laws in the first place. That matches the hypothesis of "vindictive and power hungry" much better than the hypotheses of "making America great again" or "no worse than the status quo."
2. One of the first things Musk did was download the personal details of every US citizen and inject his own code into the treasury. They already (seemingly) have the power to shut down departments on a whim. What purpose does this extra power serve? It's worse than the status quo (explanation already beaten to death on HN here, I won't elaborate), and it doesn't help with the "making America great again" promise. It _does_ give Elon and any unscrupulus programmers (luckily everybody in DOGE passed their background checks with flying colors...) enormous power though.
2a. He's shipping that data off to MSFT to process it with AI. What in the ever living fuck is going on there? It's hard enough to get the DMV or a court to treat you like a person, and we want to throw current-gen AI into the mix? Have you seen Google's customer support? If I have to make a new gmail account and lose historical data then that's unfortunate. If I'm added to one of the list of real, US citizens ICE has "accidentally" deported because of some hairbrained idea to use more AI in the government....
3. Which departments are being shut down? If you need a hint, it's only departments that help ordinary people and hurt large corporations. Picking on the CFPB as an example, DOGE successfully saved the US $0.8B/yr (yayyy!!), a department which in a single maneuver saved US citizens $4B/yr (5 full years of funding, for reference). Is that making America great again? Maybe you like defrauding vulnerable people by adding overdrafts back to their previously non-overdraftable accounts just to fleece them for a few hundred dollars, but that doesn't look like it adheres to either Trump's or DOGE's stated visions. It, instead, looks like a transfer of power from the people to the newly elected Trump and unelected Musk.
4. Trump controls the house, senate, and supreme court right now. He could at least get off his arse and do that power grab the right way. Getting these changes signed into law would make it much harder for future presidents to revert them. That seems like a good thing if you're trying to make the country better (the stated purpose). A flurry of extra-constitutional executive orders, some of which will stick just because they have to work their way through the courts and because of the sheer volume, serves to increase personal power at the expense of the separation of powers in the government.
And so on. I can't point to a single thing being done and say it looks more like protecting the American people than it does creating a new dictatorship. Some of the actions might benefit me (e.g., I'm happy about the penny thing), but not enough by a long shot to overcome the downsides.
Compromise. It's essential to peaceful co-existence of a group of humans of any size. At some point along the line, America seems to have lost that quality.
The problem is that the republican party has had a "no comprimise" policy for a while. It's like they put the party before the country.
The Republican Party was the one saying “either agree with us unconditionally or you are a Nazi” for the last 10 years?
The Republican Party was the one ignoring the many crimes of Biden’s son because it would hurt the party?
I do not feel the need to compromise with "White Power" or "We need to find a way to safely inject bleach".
You understand this means that the other 75 million people are actually looking to mutilate children, destroy the concepts of sex and gender, abolish all of the police, and are aggressively racist against white people, right?
- Children aren't being mutilated and anyone who believes this is a willing mark or has a toddlers understanding of science
- the concept of "Gender" is actually very important to a lot of trans folks, as it turns out. My "Sex" is about as relevant to my day to day as my blood type, and I think people who obsess about my chromosomes are fucking weird
- We should abolish all the police - got me there.
- White people don't exist as a racial category with any meaningful definition except as a catch-all for groups meant to exclude. It's not a race, it's a country club with a pantone guide.
Hope that helps, and I hope you find whatever it is you are looking for.
(And, as I pointed out, some real ones!)
But, to put a fine point on it, literally zero children are being mutilated (in the context this statement is typically brought about, "children being forcibly transitioned against their will by their parents, including surgery", which is deeply false), but there are white supremacists in the government, without room for equivocation or debate. Even in the context of absurdity, they are not equally absurd claims. You took an accurate portrayal of the right in America (perhaps assuming it was absurd?) and compared it against...the right's propaganda view of the "left". This is why it was not "Obvious".
And, to be clear; conservatives are already saying that! Your average trump voter thinks that there are litter boxes in schools! They literally think that! I'm not going to be nice and lie about their capacity for goodness while they seek to eliminate me and my pals (or, at best, casually don't care about voting for the folks who want to eliminate me and my pals, which, you know? Fuck em.)
Out of curiosity, which parts were 'factually true' assessments of the positions of the 75 million people who voted Democrat last election?
> Y'all really doubling down on this whole "77 million people are white supremacists" huh? > You understand this means that the other 75 million people are actually looking to mutilate children, destroy the concepts of sex and gender, abolish all of the police, and are aggressively racist against white people, right?
You seemed confused and upset that people assumed you believed the things in the latter statement, so I am primarily interested in getting you to understand why I (and a few others, by the looks) thought that.
It is factually true that Donald Trump campaigned on white replacement theory, surrounded himself with people who had ties to white nationalism, and continues to advance causes very important to white and christian nationalists. If you voted for him, you were either uninformed on those topics, informed but didn't care, or informed but agree. By and large, the trump voters I talk to on a daily basis seem to be in the first camp, but willing to defend trump regardless of what he is saying or doing.
It is factually false to suggest that Democrats want to "Mutilate children", or any of the examples you gave. Even the most harsh critic of the police that the democrats have, AOC, unequivocally said that she was against abolishing the police and preferred defunding them and moving their responsibilities to other social services. "Mutilating children" and "Abolish sex and gender" are thought-terminating cliches meant to mis-represent support for trans folk, and "Racist against white people" is a clownshoes bananapants nothing of a racist dogwhistle.
Republicans love to twist and exaggerate, but none of these reflect the policies - either stated or implied through policy - the nature of democratic support. What's more, the democrats have not universally adopted a single person to be the arbiter of their policy, as the GOP has at their last conventions, nor do democrats typically gather with such gusto around a single individual. (as a bernie supporter, I feel like I probably got as much of that as I was going to get, and it was not anywhere near as embarrassingly fawning as what trump receives.)
So, no, they are not equal in the slightest.
If you are prepared to argue that supporting trans kids is mutilating children, or actually saying "Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work." or extending the olive branch to fucking apartheid is not an inherently white supremacist thing to say or do (or that it's not 'all that bad'), then I was misguided, and am comfortable ending the conversation here.
Now, if you want critiques of the democrats? Well, my friend, I have them in store. Perhaps a less absurd, more fitting diss would have been "the other 75 million people are actually looking to ethnically cleanse gaza?" (The republicans want to do that as well, but at least it's a fair diss on the democrats and their actual positions!)
It's possible that their perspective on the outgroup is not entirely "fair and balanced."
As a white American the concept of "racist against white people" is laughable. The right's obsessive persecution complex while enjoying the bounties of the greatest empire of human history is childish in the extreme. Like toddlers, but with the power to destroy all of human civilization.
This is fake news that one search will clear up for you. Please stop repeating it.
> “A question that probably some of you are thinking of if you’re totally into that world,” Trump began, clearly thinking the question himself, “So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light — and I think you said that that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way, and I think you said you’re going to test that, too. It sounds interesting. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that.”
To read this in any other way than "The president suggested we blast people with UV rays or inject them with disinfectant - such as bleach, the disinfectant he just mentioned as being effective" feels like a tremendous amount of mental gymnastics, bordering on willful ignorance. Cross your eyes and maybe I'm being flippant about "bleach", wherein he only merely suggested injecting "disinfectant", which renders him a genius, I imagine?
He ranted about two common disinfectant strategies for inorganic materials and suggested they use them on people, because he's not particularly bright.
Edit: Also worth mentioning that the following day when asked what he meant by that, he did not say "I did not ask about injecting bleach", he said "I asked about that sarcastically".
> I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen … I was asking a sarcastic, and a very sarcastic, question to the reporters in the room about disinfectant on the inside. But it does kill it, and it would kill it on the hands and that would make things much better. That was done in the form of a sarcastic question to the reporters.
So it would appear not even Mr. Trump agrees with your statement.
> I'm being flippant about "bleach", wherein he only merely suggested injecting "disinfectant"
Yes. Fact: trump did not say to inject bleach. He also did not tell the public to inject anything.
I refer to this incident colloquially as "The time trump told us to inject bleach", which would be more accurately described as "The time the president of america was so balls-on stupid that he rambled for five minutes about doctors using bleach and UV disinfectant to fight Covid, a ramble so incoherent that the CDC had to issue a warning to ignore what it appeared he was suggesting."
I have no desire to treat the "intelligence" behind that statement - or those with full throated support of his incredible genius - with any authority.
The "White Power" was the evil (though, quite stupid in its own right) part. The "Bleach" was the "stupid" part of my comment, and I stand by it.
You mean how did the aggressive media find a sentence they could give to their base to get clicks, that he didn’t even say? Give me a break.
Miscommunications happen. Now you’ve been corrected. Stop repeating false claims.
> Miscommunications happen. Now you’ve been corrected. Stop repeating false claims.
I have not repeated this claim. My point is because miscommunications happen, the person in charge should have left it up to experts instead of just riffing, because now his sloppy words will live on forever.
If the left or the right disagree on even language and core cultural issues, they both need to find ways to communicate and evolve that allows for a peaceful coexistence. The notion the other party is a stupid or evil adversary incapable of enlightenment is poisonous, it forbids communication. Even if your adversary is indeed stupid and/or evil, it is far better to talk to them and if not change their mind, explain yourself in a language they understand (that includes a language they don't find outrageous or absurd!), leaving open the door to seeing your point of view. Even if they want to destroy you, it is a much better strategy to show you're not all that bad than escalating or just giving up. Of course, there are always voices that profit from discord, and human nature is perhaps attracted to antagonism. But we shouldn't let that go out of control, for the benefit of everyone.
If we're wrong about something, it's to our profit to learn from an adversary. This is the main lesson I think we should be taking -- even if being wrong is painful or sometimes isolating. Also logically, don't isolate those who think a little differently from your cultural heterodoxy, for the case they might have good reasons you just don't understand yet.
I think the old customs of being, and of course appearing, respectful were in part norms created for this. By behaving respectfully you're showing a willingness to learn and be wrong. By shouting, offending and imposing your opinion you're demonstrating you might be closed to other possibilities even if they are wrong, sometimes for very misguided reasons like ego, pride, or power. It's clearly then particularly important to act respectfully with those who are your adversaries or with whom you disagree (since perhaps you'll be more inclined to hear those who you already mostly agree with).
In summary: communication, compromise and respect.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/02/doge-as-a-nat...
The real trick is that the outrage has to be enough to break through the right wing media smokescreen that's currently gaslighting half the country with "yeah well everything is about to get more expensive, but you actually want this, it's patriotic to be excited about higher household prices because it's all in service of making America great again, whatever that now means!"
And critically, it's not just Fox/OAN/Newsmax that are the problem, it's also the army of thousands of podcasters and influencers who repeat these talking points. Many of Joe Rogan's 11M listeners likely trust what he tells them considerably more than they trust what a talking head on cable says.
Obviously a dangerous game to play, but it’s always safer to do nothing and sink slowly than to start ripping apart the hull at sea in order to fix the leaks. Both strategies have nonzero danger.
It's like removing smoke detectors in a house. Or stopping home inspections entirely.
It won't really cause problems. Heck, it will improve the economy in the short term.
If you really want to make big financial changes, you need a lot more income, or cut serious costs - like a car payment or downsize your house. In the case of DOGE, I haven't seen them touch DoD or any of the massive medical programs, etc.
I kinda expect the senators to prevent it, but we will see.
Have you considered that they are going after the low-hanging fruit, getting in "reps & sets" before they attack programs that have vastly greater inertia and potentially bi-partisan support? DoD and healthcare cover a ton of jobs, and might actually trigger pushback from Congress, in ways that annihilating the CIA's propaganda arm (which is basically a handful of overpaid bougie Dem-leaning "journalists") doesn't.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/wikileaks-usaid-has-been...
The answer is it does matter because it’s funding things both parties have an interest in.
First- Many of the cuts haven't been legally conducted and, rather, represent waste themselves as they are going to disrupt activities and create litigation. So we, the people, will pay at least as much and have less productive results and have to pay for legal fees.
Second- Federal contracts are usually bid on the free market. There's an RFP, bidders, and the best fit wins. It's usually lowest cost while meeting requirements. I'm not sure why selling to the government is not a "real customer."
Third- It's reductive and inflammatory to say that not detailing out the contracts were for was because you would have seen it as wasteful corrupt spending. How would the prior commenter have even known what you see as wasteful and corrupt?
The argument from the right, which I have not seen anyone on the left address directly, is that a very large portion of government spending is laundered to well connected people by way of contracts to NGOs and other kinds of organizations where there is little or no verification that the money is actually being used as claimed. Often tax filings reveal that by its own admission, the organization in question is spending nearly all the money on overhead like travel and administration. Combine this with the fact that so many people go into government jobs with modest salaries but come out being worth 10s of millions of dollars and I have a hard time believing that anything but a wrecking ball is going to fix the system.
We are adding trillions to the national debt every year so we don't have money to waste.
Many politicians go into office promising reforms but until very recently it was always just slight nibbling around the edges, if anything.
First- 49% of national spending goes to Social Security, Medicare and interest payments. The first is a direct payment, the second is very heavily regulated and has a bounty program for fraud waste and abuse, and the third is paid directly to bondholders.
Second- I'm almost certain that most, if not all, government contracts have auditing rights included. So we could audit them if we want, in fact almost every government agency has an inspector general to do just that.
Which, you know, is why liberals on this site and Reddit and Bluesky are so shocked at how many conservatives they have created by silencing them.
Let me repeat I VOTED FOR HARRIS. I just want to get real information! Flag away, censors!
Edit to add: doge.gov is exactly the site we're talking about here; it was offline a bit earlier, presumably while they cleared up the mess from their unsecured DB.
You posted a link to a non-official crypto meme website that contained no useful information about what is actually happening with DOGE the government agency.
The reason we can't tell if what is being cut is waste or not is because the ones doing the cutting are not being transparent and have no accountability.
It isn't an audit if it's just Elon saying "Good" or "Bad" at each thing he looks at and then sometimes posting on the social media site he owns that he "Found a bad one!"
Edit: That also doesn't seem to be the official website, which is doge.gov
The title of the website you linked is "THE DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY COMMUNITY MEME PROJECT"
It has a section on buying/trading crypto, and the linked X account is @doge_eth_gov which has been suspended.
While I agree that the task of figuring out where the real site is (let alone good+real data from it) is much harder than it ought to be... isn't that itself just another data-point? It indicates the whole thing [1] is being managed in a kind of unprofessional chaotic stupidity.
__________
[0] "#DogeGov has no association with the official DOGE Organization. This token is a community-driven meme project designed to raise awareness of government spending and over-regulation. It has no intrinsic value or financial return expectations and operates without a formal team or roadmap. The token is intended solely for educational and entertainment purposes."
[1] "Department" is too misleading but "a private Presidential Commission undergoing a bizarre corporate-inversion to gut an real department and crawl inside its corpse" is too long to say.
Heck, it would at least give them something to do, and feel the money roll and make their choices in Congress mean something again.
On the scale- We're talking about millions of checks a year. You've effectively proposed to ask every congressperson to spend all day signing checks. By doing so, you've also eliminated the time they spend working with constituents on issues, understanding the facts or background of decisions they've made, or even working to find compromises.
On the assumption- There isn't a dollar figure, but there are quite thorough rules. (https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46497) This spells out how the rules are established and what governs it. You can quite easily look up the authorizing legislation for USAID and see the allowed purposes for funds. Definitionally- that makes it not slush funding.
It's the standard you've asked others to be held to in these comments. It's fair to be held to it yourself.
All the relevant documents I should be able to link to have been purged from various Federal sites due to “DOGE” shenanigans.
Congressional appropriations are how money is allocated, regardless of party in charge of Congress or the Executive. If the money is misspent there’s a range of tools available to Congress AND the Executive to correct the problem. But if we're just going to let a group of people decide on their own what is or isn't fraud then, regardless of your political belief system, we're simply fucked.
I saw low income becsuse 100m is pennies for housing. You'll probably get a few neighborhoods if it's brand new housing.
Transparency would have been most important before they started randomly cancelling contracts, but it seems they didn't bother.
We have no idea what they're actually cutting, whether that $100M would have gone to something genuinely useful, or if it was going to some wasteful project.
Well, we do sorta find out, when we hear about a single mother being unable to provide food for her children because she's capriciously and arbitrarily lost her SNAP benefits.
DOGE is a train wreck, and like in any train wreck, a lot of innocent people get hurt, and no one knows what's going on in the midst of the chaos.
Instead, you're getting to debate whether or not something was a good idea after it was already destroyed.
I realize many people don’t believe this, and believe instead that government corruption and waste in the US is non-existent or acceptably low, and we shouldn’t rock the boat.
But if they don’t believe that, their actions make sense.
I guess he got flagged as I was replying, but there's his transparency. The government isn't a private corporation.
As you mentioned DOGE is looping some holes to not disclose their budget nor staff. That's not how the government works.
Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS for $505 Million. What exactly is that? People with AIDS already have housing options. They have the same options as other people. There is literally nothing in that line item that explains why half a billion is needed for that. Where's the report, wheres the description of number of employees to administer, and an explanation of why thats needed.
Another thing: In the period between 2012 and 2019, the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) employees at HUD declined from 8,576 to 6,837, a reduction of 20 percent. This loss of staff presented serious risks to HUD’s ability to meet the needs of its customers, protect against cybersecurity threats, and deliver on the mission.
Where is the backup of that statement - "HUD’s ability to meet the needs of its customers, protect against cybersecurity threats, and deliver on the mission. "
Protecting against cybersecurity should literally be handled by a different org within fedgov!
Also why 2000 more employees? Are they also taking an elevator down the limestone mountain and riding around on bikes to file a loan?
The stories coming out of DOGE are like this, how do you expect me to read this PDF without a ton of cynicism?
It is totally inappropriate for a tax base to fund something over $1M that has nothing backing up what it is for. Let's get rid of FRAUD and ABUSE!
There is literally nothing in that worth flagging. HN users are becoming less tolerant of opposing ideas.
I figured a comment like that is better (and a bit funnier) to to simply disprove than hide. And I didn't need much work to disprove it. Any little nudges to help peope realize that "yes, a good 95%+ of government budgets is publicly viewable" is a good step forward.
Even if you do believe that these agencies are bloated with workers who are doing "unnecessary" work, which is possible, it seems very unprudent to make cuts so quickly. And who is qualified to make these decisions? Elon? Some Tesla or SpaceX engineer who wrote some code and put up a website? Come on. WTF do they know about how all these agencies operate and the downstream effects? You think they're taking the time to really think it through?
Now it's possible that prior to taking office, Trump had people with deep understanding of government operations go through everything, and really think things through, and prepare a list of jobs that could be cut without any impact, but if that is the case, it's never been said. Given who Trump has around him to lead these agencies (McMahon for Dept of Ed? An Oil and Gas Lobbyist for BLM? Really?) that doesn't seem likely.
Move fast and break things works fine for a start-up, and might even be fine for more cultural type stuff ("DEI"), but Dept of Energy?
It's like firing two-thirds of your sysadmins because "well, we haven't had any issues with our servers lately, and no breaches, so those people must not be needed".
> Some of the fired employees included NNSA staff who are on the ground at facilities where nuclear weapons are built. These staff oversee the contractors who build nuclear weapons, and they inspect these weapons.
> It also included employees at NNSA headquarters who write requirements and guidelines for contractors who build nuclear weapons. A source told CNN they believe these individuals were fired because “no one has taken anytime to understand what we do and the importance of our work to the nation’s national security.”
> The agency began rescinding the terminations Friday morning.
Part of the strategy might be:
1. Fire large swaths of the government. Declare victory!!
2. Hire those people back because it turns out that they're actually needed (who would have thought?). But that doesn't get news.
So in the end, things remain the same, but Trump/Elon get the headlines and their followers think they've done an amazing job.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/14/climate/nuclear-nnsa-firings-...
If the systems and Nation is as fragile we have bigger problems than the Chaos Monkey unleashed at the Federal level.
Do people think Nuclear reactors will go unmanaged or Prisoners will go unfed? I suppose it is possible and time will tell.
We were lied to by the Government. The new administration may be lying as well. I think we will all learn a lot.
Considering the powers that be attempted to remove the current President through kinetic means I would imagine he is going to move as fast as possible.
I don't think it's been covered much in American media but President Trump is throwing threats of 25% tariffs on both Mexican and Canadian imports for the last month or so. First it was about how it would make manufacturing move back to the US. Then it was about how Canada is a national threat to the US because we're allowing fentanyl and illegal immigrants to cross in the US. Then it was about how the US was in terrible the trade deal with Canada and Mexico was (it was his deal, the USMCA that replaced NAFTA). Then it was how the US subsidizes Canada because Canada is a failing state and that the US was spending $200 billion a year propping up Canada. Then it was that Canada wasn't meeting it's NATO spending targets. Then it was that Canada is a failed state, and that everything would be better if Canada became the 51st state.
Every day it seemed like his narrative is changing. And when we had our retaliatory tariffs at the ready to cause harm to Republican states, you know what he did?
He blinked. The tariffs for Canada and Mexico were postponed until March. He's been consistent about telegraphing what his actions are going to be, but his justifications are so wildly all over the place that frankly it's probably safe to assume he's lying at least about his motivations.
And if he's willing to lie to one of the oldest allies to the United States, is it really that much of a stretch to think that he could be lying to Americans as well?
This has been my assumption. Trump's superpower seems to be manipulating the media. He gets absurd headlines that take attention away from stories he doesn't want covered.
This whole annexation thing is bonkers. I've never in my life heard anyone suggest such a thing, except for around 1999/2000, when I visited Canada and local papers had editorials fretting that George W Bush's administration was going to annex Canada. I have no idea where they got that idea, since I never heard any American ever suggest such a thing.
very true; not only through distractions, but by a continual bombardment of outlier or outlandish comments (used to be Tweets back in his first term) that it sucks all the oxygen out of the room as the media can hardly keep up -- therefore every story, every front page, is always Trump
like the saying goes for show biz, Trump knows there is no such thing as bad publicity ; though what works for him doesn't work for other politicians because he has a cult-like base and they don't
"We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children"
Because it's a quote by David Lane, and used proudly by neo-Nazis. Please just own the fact that you are Nazi, rather than trying to sanewash your beliefs.
Honestly though, fuck you and your Nazi beliefs. Maybe dang will ban me for saying that, but someone literally sanewashing and defending the 14 Words on Hacker News is insane bullshit. Fuck off.
Your comment is exactly why we are in the situation we are in now.
A ruling under an activist conservative supreme court that Obama opposed. One of Hillary's main credentials for a supreme court pick was that they'd vote to overturn Citizens United. It was a 5-4 court and Scalia had died. Citizens United decided 5-4. But America or at least the electoral college picked trump instead. So we got corruption pretending to be free speech and abortion bans instead.
Democrats could have picked a better candidate to fight Trump but they didn't.
When everyone is yelling "don't let side Y do Z because that will allow W."
This is why. It's a logical fallacy until you're talking to a person who's argument didn't ever change.
I'm sorry, but WTF? What the hell did Obama have to do with that ruling, other than serving as a convenient scapegoat in your story? It was a Supreme Court ruling, and last I checked there was still a separation of powers between the Judicial and Executive. Obama publicly called it a devastating outcome.
Obama appointed 1 of the 4 Democrats who voted in the minority, his only appointee up to that point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_Supreme_Court_can...
So he literally did all he could, subject to the constitution, to prevent this ruling. The logic of mentioning Citizen's United here is like people complaining that abortion rights were taken away during Biden's term. In other words, there is no logic other than a crude misdirect.
Not to say that actually happened. Just pointing it out.
Might have something to do with all this.
> So according to the World Bank (not a Russian source!), Russia just flipped Japan to become the fourth largest global economy in GDP-by-PPP:
After reading this line you can easily identify that author is either propagandist or moron.
This is how Russia "increased GDP":
1 - Paid to restore tons of USSR weaponry garbage to just burn it yesterday.
2 - Funded building of new weaponry that will be burned today.
3 - Moved 5-10% of population to "military economy" building some military crap that have no other use other than get burned tomorrow.
4 - Took 300,000 random people out of real economy via forced mobilization and thrown them on frontlines.
5 - Hired 500,000+ poor or destitute people who had annual salary of $3600. Hired them for $2000 / month and paid them out $40,000 sign up bonus to go die on frontlines.
6 - Killed at least 100,000 of them and paid out $50,000 for each dead body to a family.
7 - Made like another 200,000+ of cripples that wont be able to work like until they die. So more spending.
Economy is booming!
1. The Russian economy is more robust than expected. I recommend RUSI's recent work on the subject: https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentar...
2. Russia only needs to sustain its current war effort longer than Ukraine can sustain its own war effort. Considering that Ukraine is heavily dependent on external aid just to maintain its current ability to lose slowly, and its single most important source of foreign aid is trying to drop it like a bad habit.....signs point to Russia's economy having enough runway to achieve some kind of victory, after which they can dial down the production levels and return labor to the civil sector.
Russia demography was abysmal long before COVID due to pre-WW2 and WW2 ripple effects. And during this invasion country lost like ~500,000 man dead or severely crippled and probably twice that amount to migration.
Basically in a few years country efficiently lost like 3-5% of it's working populaton with another 5-10% moved to produce "munitions" or something that will rot till next big war. Anyone who try to sell this as economy growth is a moron.
And btw it's exactly Japan scenario except for different reasons:
It's not "dumb". The Russian National Security establishment considers a NATO-integrated Ukraine[1] as an Existential Threat. Their cost-benefit analysis is working with different criteria than what you are including in your value assessment.
> Russia demography was abysmal long before COVID due to pre-WW2 and WW2 ripple effects. And during this invasion country lost like ~500,000 man dead or severely crippled and probably twice that amount to migration.
Yeah, Russia's demographics are fucked and I don't think they are doing enough to fix that. But you are leaving out some relevant data: https://unric.org/en/ukraine-over-6-million-refugees-spread-... There's roughly 1 million Ukrainian refugees who relocated into Russia. I don't know the breakdown, how many of those are able-bodied working age men or fertile women, but the point is the math isn't as clear-cut negative as you are presenting.
> Basically in a few years country efficiently lost like 3-5% of it's working populaton with another 5-10% moved to produce "munitions" or something that will rot till next big war. Anyone who try to sell this as economy growth is a moron.
Y = C + I + G is one of the most foundational equations in Introductory Macroeconomics. G = government spending...including stuff like bombs and tanks that sit in storage for decades. Arguing that military spending does not contribute to economic growth is just tilting at windmills.
Here's some reading to support this:
National Bureau of Economic Research: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w15496/w154... During World War II and the Korean War, real GDP grew by about half the amount of the increase in government purchases. With allowance for other factors holding back GDP growth during those wars, the multiplier linking government purchases to GDP may be in the range of 0.7 to 1.0
LeMonde: https://archive.is/UK1MM#selection-2013.256-2017.478 To pay bonuses and salaries, the state spends "between 1,500 and 2,000 billion rubles a year." As a result of the considerable sums spent on the war economy and the payment of contract workers, a largely consumption-led growth has emerged. Gross domestic product jumped 4% year-on-year in the second quarter, according to a preliminary estimate by Rosstat, the Federal Statistics Service, published on August 9. Unemployment is at an all-time low of 2.6%. Based on these macroeconomic parameters, the World Bank placed Russia on its list of "high-income" countries in July.
[1] https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-president-signs-constitution...
(The way Trump's election directly led to "retard" being a common pejorative again hasn't been discussed enough. Just awful.)
Games are written for Windows, therefore webapps should be written with "Microsoft C++" (presumably meaning Visual C++, though I suppose there's an outside chance that he means "Microsoft C/C++", from the early 90s).
He's not new to being... bad at this.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-prev...
(As someone who has worked in both the games industry and Big Tech(tm), yeah, no.)
But having done both, making any game beyond the absolute most basic game in Unity is harder than what 95% of web developers do day to day.
I’m currently in web dev because it pays so much better, but game dev really is more technically challenging than most web dev.
It’s hard to compare average skill levels between the 2 because so many people are drawn to games because they love them and to the web because of the pay. But if I had to guess, I’d put my money on there being a significantly higher floor for game dev.
[0] Which Musk maybe have heard of given he has a bit of experience lurking around automotive tech.
There are some incredible programmers in both big tech and game dev, but big tech has vastly more developers with less pressure to have top-tier talent.
Median developer at both probably represents the same skill because of normal distributions.
Other companies need developers that make applications not anyone can push updates to. Those are also good developers.
There is no single metric for "good" in a field as vast as programming.
The annoyances of IIS were borne by sysadmins, but your developers were probably able to be more productive.
Granted: Google was not so dumb to imagine deploying on NT / IIS. And their reasons for doing C++ were nothing like what Musk is blathering about here.
The biggest issue here isn't even about the technology. It's Musk as management stepping outside of his domain trying to tell the professionals working under him exactly what to do... because he's an egomaniac narcissist.
They still have not successfully purged the database, though the endpoint has been secured.
So many programs and jobs have been gutted so the orange man and his kleptocracy cabinet can get their $4.5T in tax cuts for the ultra wealthy [1]
I’m not impacted but this shit is really tiring. It’s painful to see American public be so ignorant and buy into the neoclassical economic lies.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/house-republicans-budget-blueprin...
Just wait until we have a huge outbreak of Measles or are prescribed essential oils for cancer...
I can't really understand that as it seems obvious to me that they're just destroying parts of the government they don't like. And while there is certainly room for improvement in many areas, whatever they're doing is not going to improve anything, it's only destruction.
This is why DOGE is staffed with young people.
It's easy to convince inexperienced people there's a 2-step plan:
Step 1. Destroy the old.
Step 2. Build the new.
Yet people with experience know that Step 2 requires orders of magnitude more effort and time than Step 1.
So, you have ignorant people breaking things, congratulating themselves on how quickly they're making progress... and then hit Step 2. And realize it's hard. And get bored. And so just, not.
Thus in the end, you're left with a broken pile of what came before, and nothing new to replace it.
Anyone doing this kind of work is not merely ignorant.
The experience of bricklaying will help you think about the future times when you'll have to lay the bricks. Without that experience you may not ever consider those times, especially in a scenario which has you excited about what you are currently doing.
Unfortunately (for all of us, including for their base) this isn’t actually what people want or need, except the ideologues pushing it with a clear understanding of the expected outcomes. The base just infers that the ruin of these “inefficient” programs is a noble end in itself, because their supposed inefficiency is the problem with the programs themselves.
So at least we're not invading Iraq?
I wonder if the DOGE kids will be also sent off to the countryside once they're not useful anymore...
Step 1. Destroy the old
Step 2. ???
Step 3. Profit!
"Build the new" doesn't even seem to be on the table at this point. There's no proposals to replace any of this. At least not public anyway, we know they are replacing all of this with for-profit scams.
Step 2. See? The government doesn't work! Just like we said!
Step 3. "Fix" the problems created from Step 1
Step 4. MAGA eventually realizes the swamp was enlarged and made worse, not drained
And also that the steps here should be reversed. Sure if you are tearing down a building you destroy before creating, but systems aren't buildings. If you are going to create a new system to run the cash registers for your business you don't tear out the old one and worry about building the new one later. First you have the replacement ready THEN remove the old one.
> Step 1. Destroy the old.
> Step 2. Build the new.
Feels very 'cultural revolution'-y
They were even able to account for all their crayons! PT belts on the other hand...
There's a reason the federal budget is several inches of very thin paper. The budget spells out how much money gets spent for various purposes, programs, projects, etc. Of course they don't specify the kind of paperclips the FAA buys. But they will approve or modify the FAA's budget plan which includes $X for office supplies, $Y for an upgrade to the FAA's network equipment in a branch office, $Z for upgrading some nav beacons, and so on.
The executive branch can't defund or "stop spending money on" anything. Nixon decided he just wouldn't spend money on programs he didn't like, and congress very rapidly passed a law that said that the president couldn't do it, because the "power of the purse" rests solely with congress.
It certainly can't stop issuing payments for existing obligations, and it especially can't take money back, which M did a day or two ago to NYC because he read a tweet that said NYC was spending money housing migrants in "luxury hotels", which shockingly turned out to be nonsense...
That's why all of this DOGE crap is such theatrical nonsense. Congress, representing their state's interests and the interests of those who live in their district, via two separate branches, approves all the budgets.
No matter what T and M say, no federal agency can just willy-nilly decide to spend money it's allocated by congress on other stuff.
That's all great in theory: in actual reality those laws are just words on paper, Congress has no interest in asserting its authority, and enforcement rests with the executive.
Republicans who work on bipartisan platforms are punished and primaried.
Jack Welch is the reason corporate America is a shit show, and GE is a joke.
The goal should be messaging to everybody else. Especially those who might like the outcomes of Trump's crimes but would prefer not to have a president that just smashes through the law to get there. A way to help achieve this is to repeat, over and over and over, that Trump's actions are violating shitloads of laws.
Companies can declare bankruptcy and fold their hand: governments, notsomuch.
So...Trump is breaking the law and getting away with it. What else is new?
Yes
He has immunity
BUT... even if the executive is under legal theory constitutionally unitary, it isn’t actually unitary, it consists of individual people who act based on their own perception of legitimacy, and when the President abandons the principle of government of law and not arbitrary individual will in dealing with the courts, well, that also threatens the theoretical infrastructure that binds the people carrying guns in various executive departments to his authority, and we can very quickly end up in one of those highly unpredictable periods of history that produces lots of really neat stories to read about afterwards but is somewhat less pleasant to live through.
They're right now firing all probationary employees at multiple agencies. That is entirely indiscriminate, and almost certainly disruptive to the mission of those agencies.
The actions at NIH and NSF will likely kill a large portion of the scientific research they used to fund. So unless you consider science in general be a waste I think these broad cuts clearly don't target actual waste and abuse.
Compared to what? The Biden administration? Who never even held a press conference for months?
And what evidence? Did you want a downloadable pdf of justification for each cut?
The partisan nature of the criticism is obvious - Trump and Musk are bad, so nothing they do can be good. Produce evidence? Not good enough!
I thought doge was about efficiency, why is he spending resources on the culture war?
There aren’t any examples so far of stuff that is clearly waste and abuse.
If you don't think foreign aid is important for the continued safety of the US then you don't understand soft power and have no business in modern politics.
Sadly the people in charge fit into this category, except for the ones like Marco Rubio who actually do understand this but have no spine and are willing to overlook this stupidity for a seat at the table.
You do know the polio vaccine program in Pakistan where DNA analysis to find Bin Laden was done through USAID? The one that set vaccination back decades?
And now you’re defending it. Amazing.
I think you can get the answer from what they post. Cutting $400M in external contracts for a $10B agencies isn’t cutting major functions of the agency.
To have the argument anyways, I looked back through their posts back to jan 20, and there’s really no information about most of the cuts. I presume that the few things they highlight, eg equity programs or whatever, are the worse of the worst that they could find, cause isn’t that what they’d show us? They could be cutting basically anything behind the scenes, and they themselves may not have a good idea what they’re cutting. As of jan 31st, they claimed to have cut 1-1.2 billion dollars overall. I assume that number is much higher now. Why would I trust that, while fumbling around looking at payment descriptions, one of Musk’s techbro zoomers didn’t hamper or cripple an important function of one of these departments? Where can I find the in-depth information on every cut?
You don’t need to write “the agency will no longer do X” you just need to fire the people doing X. Case in point the EPA and CFPB (which catch fraud among companies but were not worried about that anymore are we)
> but you see a few building leases sprinkled it.
You think agencies cannot lease buildings? And that it's a waste and fraud?
> I haven’t seen anything so far that says “Agency will no longer do X”, but happy to be be corrected.
They have literally unilaterally shut down several government agencies with bogus claims.
* They cut things blindly, eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43046466
It's a clown show.
That's $0.70 per taxpayer (assuming 166M US taxpayers).
Was it worth it?
Now do that 10,000 times and tell me what the total is per tax payer (noting that 40% of taxpayers don’t pay taxes).
I get $14,000 per tax payer, what do you get?
Or unintended 2nd order effects.
Who knows if the final outcome will be an improvement but it resembles fixing a TV by dropping it from a height and hoping.
Where did you get this from in their comment?
Where did this come up?
The only example of waste are the 150 yr old SA recipients. Sure that happens (we’ve been hearing about “welfare queens” for decades) but certainly not something new the DOGE “uncovered “.
And why are we entrusting a bunch of young engineers to identify fraud? They might be qualified to refactor and streamline computer systems but are certainly not qualified to determine what is “legitimate “ spending and what is not.
As far as I'm concerned, "medical debt" is effectively extortion.
If I have some sort of major medical issue, such as cancer, it's absolutely fucked that my choices are to either die or to rack up an extreme amount of medical debt that I might not ever recover from. In either case, my life is ruined.
One manager asked, “What if we train them and they leave!?”
To which a more senior manager quipped, “What if we don’t train them and they stay?”
Yes, you lose some. But not all. And that's how you start.
Among many other reasons:
Subsidizing demand increases prices. When you subsidize university education, you increase the price of it. The metoric rise in inflation-adjusted cost of university education since the 70's or so is strong evidence of this.
If someone wants to major in feminist dance therapy, that should be on their own dime. Using my tax money to fund it is immoral.
>Why not also defund high school and middle school as well? After all, by the end of the 5th grade you should be able to read, write, and do simple arithmetic. Anything beyond that you can fund yourself, right?
I'm actually not entirely unsympathetic to drastically cutting down how much mandatory education we have for kids. There is very little (if any) correlation between the funding amount and actual results. See Abbott districts in Bew Jersey for a stark example of this.
And if they want to major in economics, chemistry, physics, engineering?
I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying wholesale, but "I don't like this tiny corner so throw the whole thing in the trash" is immature, foolish, and self-destructive.
Those at least serve a practical purpose to society as a whole, but even then I still would question taking other people's money by force to fund it.
If you dig deep enough, subjective experience is what we’re often trying to improve. Both science and art contribute to that.
Why is that immoral?
"taking other people's money by threat of lethal force" in the form of taxes is seen as necessary for running society by most people, not a moral failing.
And we are not talking about "party vacations" we are talking about education. Maybe this is a commentary on the state of higher education today, but there are plenty of institutions that offer a quality educational experience here; America has the #1 university system in the world.
"a degree in something useless"
Who determines what is useless? You? Are arts degrees for instance useless? Artists don't think so. They are not typically profitable but that's a different conversation, your qualification was "useless". What makes a degree useless, who determines that, and how?
And even if we just assume a topic useless, how is giving people scholarships to study it immoral?
Presumably the people actually footing the bill
If someone is footing the bill, does that not imply a certain amount of "we don't think this is useless"?
That's a vanishingly small list
The government is doing that, not the dancer. If you consider general taxation immoral, fair enough, but then you're going to have to explain how a country can function without it.
> to pursue a 4 year party vacation
Boy, have I got bad news for you about a lot of students on what you'd consider more worthwhile courses.
> getting a degree in something [THAT I, PERSONALLY, CONSIDER] useless
Fixed that for you.
Subsidizing also increases creates more utilization. You seem to be of the mind that more education is a bad thing. I’m not sure we all agree.
Y'all have the delulu American exceptionalism brain. People will leave if they don't like living here. A loan eill not stop them.
The amount of money and effort required to extradite a person far outweighs the average student loan. Not only that, it is not really a "crime" to not pay your debts. It is a civil violation. The court can seize your property, in limits. You can't seize someones house in some states, and some don't even allow you to seize cars. Even if they can, any given student loan holder may not have either.
If saving money was the goal surely there's be discussion akin to "let's cut the military budget". That's how you'd know they're serious. But as it stands it is clearly just an ideological axe grinder.
(I should note I'm not American, just watching bemused from the sidelines)
No one is serious about “saving money”. It’s just to justify the corporate tax cut.
Every time the administration changes, the heads of all the departments change, and the incoming people are typically pretty ignorant of what the department does. How would a corporation work if every 4 years you rotated the C-suite and 2 levels down, with people from a completely different business sector?
Meanwhile, funding is shifted even more often. Or is just outright cut once every few years.
Meanwhile, every action they take is an official government action. Which means it is LEGALLY REQUIRED to happen in certain ways based on laws written by people who don't think about consequences or how they are enacted.
And it is 2.2 Million people. There are economies of scale here.
So I wonder how this compares to current Google, current Facebook. I've heard people here talking about how messed up those companies are, projects started/stopped at whim, massive investments that get abandoned 2 years later, etc.
Or to banks. Banks don't modernize their software because they can't, not because they don't want to. No wonder the US government has similar issues.
"But Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former Republican director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), said the agencies Musk and Trump have targeted to date account for a tiny fraction of the overall federal budget ...
They are not going to go into agencies that are doing things they like. They are going into agencies they disagree with," Holtz-Eakin, who has participated in past tax and spending negotiations in Congress, told Reuters.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-cuts-based-more-politi...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/02/13/upshot/nih-tr...
Also, plastic straws don't harm the environment. Oooh, science!
Trump and Musk are poised to destroy science research in America. Actual scientists are all scrambling to save their jobs and research.
https://apnews.com/article/house-republicans-budget-blueprin...
Nothing is legitimate about this. Literally everything they are doing is both illegal and completely unconstitutional. They have thrown out the entire rule of law and it is a pure flex of power, a shock-and-awe meltdown that they hope to execute faster than the normal processes can react. They absolutely intend to abolish resistance and they know they can suffer no consequences for it.
Dark times ahead. We're aren't arguing government efficiency or saving money, they are smashing it all.
That preventing a repeat of the damage done to America cities by the national highway system[1], which was used mechanism to literally segregate American cities is also a waste of time and money.
Most of the US significant racial atrocities committed against its own citizens, where either committed by, or with the direct assistance of, the U.S. government (at both state and federal level).
There probably a good discussion to be had on how much should be spent on DEI efforts. But the idea that spending zero really doesn’t make much sense, we know what the consequences of allowing the U.S. government to become entirely occupied by white men. Ultimately a monoculture of people results in a monoculture of ideas, and monocultures never last, something comes along finding some critical weakness that common to every agent in the monoculture, and utterly destroys the organism (in the case of the U.S. government, that might be Trump and Musk). DEI is strategically important because diverse systems are more robust, produce better ideas, and are better capable of surviving extreme shocks. All attributes people should want in their government.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/984784455/a-brief-history-of-...
The reality is that DEI is a campaign to get people aware of implicit bias. It's been proven time and time again that resumes with a name like "Shaniqua" are more likely to be rejected over one with a "John" even when all the qualifications are the same.
But now, of course, with the current political climate, if you're a woman or PoC, you have to be a perfect worker. If you make any kind of mistake, you'll be accused of being a DEI hire.
I suspect we're gonna start seeing this XKCD linked more often over the next 4 years: https://xkcd.com/385/
So how about we start by purging the Senate.
They're cutting a lot more than that, this has been all over the media. One example would be biomedical research via NIH/NSF. This is not just DEI (in whatever overly broad and vague definition they use), but a lot more.
What about this argument people are making in this thread that they're not actually doing any real cutting because they're not Congress? That seems like a stretch.
I would also still support the ADA and its enforcement.
These two ideas are not in conflict. No one is trying to strip the legal rights of deaf people, nor will it happen. That is a straw man/hyperbole.
“ Sec. 2. Implementation. (a) The Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), assisted by the Attorney General and the Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), shall coordinate the termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.”
So… not exactly a strawman.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/endi...
This is an incredibly sweeping generalization. There are a lot of people who voted for Trump because of their perception of his merit/qualifications/plans vs Harris. Pretending they are all brainwashed simpletons not only alienates them but also sets up for future failures. There's a reason these people voted for him. What is that reason? Treating is as some temporary hysteria is just going to keep getting people like Trump (or worse) elected over and over.
The intent of my comment was not to claim that what Musk and co. are doing is good, or that it's bad. It was to point out precisely why the claims in the post I replied to will not convince anyone who is not already convinced.
If the poster I replied to just wanted to vent, fine. But if they wanted to persuade someone on the fence, they have provided nothing towards that.
Nothing, that is, besides the standard appeal to emotion that infests almost all such arguments (on both sides) and is effective on human brains for all the wrong reasons.
You should be worried because the same guys who are resonsible for this web site are now in charge of much more vital systems and there are much bigger threats who just wait do get important data.
I don't remember the quote, but something about them only learning from catastrophe.
Worse. 1.1 million people died in a deadly plague and there's no national mourning, just straight back to the culture war and polarization.
We're not united because they've goaded us into to fighting each other over two topics that really aren't, and there's only two teams to pick from. One was bad, and the other one worse.
Can you blame them? They've been toiling hard for decades while getting poorer and poorer, while the privileged class has lived lives of wealth and comfort from milking these government institutions. Did they care about the vast majority being comfortable or not?
The repubs lost their battles, and decided they wanted to win at all costs. They had people show up to vote, vote in a bloc, volunteer for lower level positions, join multiple different organizations and basically organized them to dismantle the country.
If people can be driven to do that, then its not much to assume that at least a few more people could have done the same thing.
This is, by every metric, completely wrong. We have never been wealthier.
Utopists who run into accumulating problems, closing resource windows and simple limitations of humans (tribal creatures) and the meta-machinery they built, are bound to just run around with their pants on fire.
Mao killed tens of million of his own people because of his misconceptions about farming, economics, and ecology.
Hitler killed millions because of his misconceptions about jews.
9/11 was executed becuase of a small group that were very confused about the basic facts of reality ("god").
There is only delusion + power + conviction. There is no other evil.
They also were under the delusion that the US was a democracy, and hence the general population could be held responsible for the actions of its leaders. Understandable if they had mainly been exposed to US/Occidental state propaganda.
Today I don't think anyone would be inclined to hold such a belief.
I think the missing ingredient is simply not caring about the outcome. It could be because they don't have empathy (sociopaths), or that the society has trained them into normalising obedience to the cause (facsism / communism) or inhumanized their targets (consentration camps).
Acts can certainly be described as "evil", but I don't agree that "evil" is some type of force that affects people.
To go back to my original point, the simplistic equation falls apart if you spend a second looking for counter examples.
Sikhs give free food to any who asks, without expecting anything in return. They are deluded (they do to it please god), and need power and conviction to do so.
I was thinking of the human consequences. In my language they are almost synonyms.
They of course care about the outcome, but not the effect it has on the target group
It's strange how one can normalize cruelty. Just think of how prison rapes are joked about in media and movies, as if it is an accepted consequence of committing a crime. It is a cruel and evil act that many choose to simply ignore because it is so common
Or maybe the Gelatin art crew?
If you believe this, your beliefs are out of step with essentially every Western justice system, which hold murder to be a worse crime than manslaughter. The difference between them is solely the intention.
(I still think it's a bad example even presented like this, and I disagree with GP, but your example seemed wrong)
By "conviction", I understood them to mean a kind of blindness -- an unshakeable belief that what you are doing is right, regardless of what others may believe. That kind of conviction is orthogonal to intention to harm another person. I took the entire thrust of their argument to be that intention to harm another person is neither necessary nor morally important for evil. But that is not how most of the West sees it (as evidenced by the distinction between murder and manslaughter that I pointed out).
If, when they wrote "conviction", they in fact meant "intention to harm another person", then I agree with them. But in that case I'm not sure why they posted their comment at all, since that (namely, the thesis that intention to harm is morally important when actions cause harm) is already the accepted norm, at least in the West.
Manslaughter is when you kill someone without conviction and/or delusion. You can hit someone without the conviction that you need to kill them and they fall really badly and die.
Murder. You can hit someone in self defense where you have no conviction that the person must be killed (because for example they say you had sex with their wife, but you in fact know you didn't, it's a misunderstanding), and you don't have any delusion (you know the attacker is delusional in fact). And then you defend yourself and he dies because he hit his head badly on the way down.
Because that is the only way I can interpret your examples so that they correspond with the legal distinction, which is based on intent to harm and TTBOMK never mentions "conviction". If so, we're in full agreement, since that is already the accepted Western norm and my original comment was based on a misunderstanding, and unnecessary.
But also if so: I'm puzzled why you chose to swap the natural and original word "intent" for a different word ("conviction") that is easily misinterpreted as a quality orthogonal to intention to harm, and about which an interesting but fundamentally wrong argument is periodically made (namely, that it, plus power are sufficient for evil, without any need for intent). I'm also puzzled why you made the initial comment I replied to at all, since it's then a defence of the absolutely uncontroversial status quo. It's like posting that you believe in gravity.
No, I mean "the probability function you ascribe to your beliefs". A person who believes something very weakly doesn't put on a suicide vest to blow up civilians in order to further this belief. A person with a strong belief might.
I thought that after 2016, I no longer do. It's the reverse. Maybe "evil" is a strong word but they are definitely what I would consider "bad people" based on their extreme selfishness. Most pretend to be ignorant, or "low information" in person but they follow news very closely.
Wilful ignorance equates to evil in this case.
The media are absolutely craven, too, constantly normalizing insanity and pretending like even idiotic things are legitimate proposals that should instead be laughed out of the room. Like, maybe the Earth is flat? Let's HAVE THAT DEBATE!!
You're either so dumb you believe every piece of propaganda you are shown, and never notice the harm being done, or you are fully aware of what's happening and you're cheering on the chaos and suffering.
The toil and confusion and nastiness of everyday life under capitalism is not as fun and exciting as an imminent invasion at the southern border or the coming rise of the God Emperor or the final solution to groceries being expensive. Running a soup kitchen and washing clothes for the homeless just hasn't the same attraction as doing nothing by chasing the next Q-drop.
The times are mature to rediscover where the word hacker came from. It never rhymed with billionaire but it seems this website tried hard to change that narrative.
Better people learn about their lack of experience fro a hacked doge site than a hacked paxment system. The ones who will hack that won't be as friendly.
Also, neo-nazis. Not nazis. Nazis were a very real political group. Some are even still alive. None of these teenagers were even born. Their PARENTS weren't even born.
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/06/nx-s1-5289337/elon-musk-doge-...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93q625y04wo
Tell me you really want your personal data in the hands of those people.
How about blaming the people who are actually acting like Nazis, and also the actual self described Nazis who are supporting them and cheering them on and recruiting off of Musk platforming and promoting them, of emptying the word of all meaning, among other much worse things.
The Nazis are pretty successful to have convinced you to debase yourself by sticking up for them and criticizing anti-fascists for simply calling a spade a spade.
So who do you consider worse: the actual Nazis, or people who you believe are emptying the word Nazi of all meaning (boo hoo hoo)? Because you're siding with and defending the actual Nazis from being called what they are. Is there a word for what that makes you?
If not yet, then at what point exactly would allow anyone to exercise their own free speech by calling Musk, a self described "free speech absolutist", transphobic? What more would he have to do, than to actually publicly attack and verbally abuse and humiliate and deadname and misgender and lie about his own child?
How about policing the actual Nazis and bigots and transphobes instead of the people like his daughter who rightfully call him what he obviously is by his very own words and deeds?
Elon Musk’s Transgender Daughter Says He Was ‘Cruel’ and ‘Uncaring’:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/26/business/media/elon-musk-...
Elon Musk's Daughter Attacks Trump's Order, Addresses 'Nazi Salute':
https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-daughter-attacks-trump-ex...
Elon Musk's trans daughter, Vivian Wilson, calls out his Nazi salute: 'Call a spade a spade':
https://www.yahoo.com/news/elon-musks-trans-daughter-vivian-...
Elon Musk’s Trans Daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson Calls Him a “Grubby Little Control Freak”:
https://www.them.us/story/vivian-jenna-wilson-elon-musk-grub...
Elon Musk’s transgender daughter, in first interview, says he berated her for being queer as a child:
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musk-transgender...
If that's the case, you have already lost anyway. Because if that's true you have so many nazis in the US now that the historical Nazis are a rounding error. Do you truly believe that?
> How about policing the actual Nazis and bigots and transphobes instead of the people like his daughter who rightfully call him what he obviously is by his very own words and deeds?
You can't police shit if you are the minority. That's absurd. You can't become the majority by being an ass to everyone on the fence. That's what the left has been doing and driving everyone away.
The left has to take responsibility for the failed tactic of going around screaming at people for wearing sombreros or whatever. After you do that enough, everyone who has been screamed at will want to vote for anyone who are against that crap. And yea, that was Trump.
Or maybe I'm wrong and you really do have 77,302,580 nazis in the US right now. I don't buy that. I have a much higher opinion of the American people.
You're just speaking for yourself, trying to justify your own bigoted beliefs, with the old "you forced me to become a Nazi/racist/transphobe to get revenge on you because you hurt my feelings" defense, not because you take any personal responsibility for what you believe, what you say, who you vote for, whose water you carry, or whose boots you lick.
I didn't force you to defend Elon Musk or claim it's not fair for me or even his own daughter to call him a transphobe. That's all on you. You decided to do that, not me. Before you defend his Nazi salute, post a photo of yourself doing the exact same thing, and put it in a picture frame on your desk at work.
So answer the question instead of dodging it: Exactly WHAT would Elon Musk have to do, that he hasn't already done to his own daughter, that crosses the line and justifies finally calling him a transphobe?
If only I'd stop calling Elon Musk a transphobe, he'd finally start treating his own daughter like a human being who has a right to exist and self autonomy and love and respect from her parents, huh?
You have cause and effect and the direction of time reversed if you believe it's all everyone else's fault that people unfairly call Elon Musk a transphobe, which forced him to act the way he does towards his own daughter.
Or is it your position that nobody should call anyone else transphobic or racist or Nazi, no matter how obviously true it is?
Nazis aren't going to stop Nazing and transphobes aren't going to stop abusing their own children, if only you just respect them and stop calling them names.
Nope. I would have voted against Trump if I had voting rights in the US. Again, you're interpreting my statement of "we shouldn't lie about our enemies" as me supporting those enemies.
Don't you see how absurd that is?
If you wait for unassailable academic applicability, when you finally deploy it your prison guards won't care.
A quick sampling off the top of my head: The First Consigliere throws double Nazi salutes on national TV and smirks in ambiguity when questioned whether he intended it, the President defends a Nazi march as "very fine people", violent private groups serving their political ends have been placed above any (federal) prosecution, and the administration is actively boasting that they will remove undesirables by creating the largest deportation in the entire history of the nation using the same laws abused for the WWII Japanese internment camps.
The label may be rude, but it's not unreasonable... and the more reasonable it is, the better it is to be rude!
You aren't having a debate, its a mental street fight, and you gain respect by proving you know how they think and meeting them there.
Its why I say the dems are always wrong. I know that the only converastion is from using their own facts and then their own values.
The dems are always wrong, they do corruption badly. Trump pardoned 1600 people, and made 2 billion or something from 2 meme coins right before he was inagurated.
What do the dems have to show for it? 6 pardons?
So the Repubs are up 1594 pardons and billions in meme coins?
Did Trump do anything illegal? no! He exercised his powers. See! the dems can't even be corrupt or serve their own self interests effectively.
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY7v0VkYRbANnT...
I innately want to believe that a comprehensive refutation grounded and logic and citations will win the day, but that doesn't seem to be how it plays out.
If you don't believe in facts and truth, you are just as big of a problem as Trump is.
More like... Truth is important to convey, lies are not permitted, but meticulous and detailed truth simply doesn't work against lies with better marketing.
You shouldn't surround your truth with a bodyguard of lies, but just throwing on more Truth as a raw ingredient doesn't advance the cause of people actually adopting Truth.
I like to say that the US used to have "the marketplace of ideas" as a goal, but has now become "the cesspool of ideas", which isn't a good thing.
I don't know what the solution to that is, but I don't think lying is going to get us out of it.
I don’t believe in giving up on that ideal, but I think it’s a fiction in the sense that actually achieving any semblance of a “free marketplace of ideas” is a vastly complex problem we have no capacity to solve right now. Humans aren’t a collection of simple, isolated units, we’re a vast colonial fungus. We struggle to understand individual biological organisms, but we assume that all of humanity talking to itself will be a system transparent to study, that it operates on simple principles. Ask a skilled marketer if he or she believes in the free marketplace of ideas.
Solving the problem would involve building a completely different social system from the ground up. Since we can’t do that, and nobody knows how to start, what I’m suggesting is that people try to study the communication networks as they are now and the memetics people are responsive to and build, carefully and cleverly, narratives which will actually have the practical consequence of bettering people’s lives, and that they use the truth to figure out how to do that and what that narrative should be. It’s not really lies or the truth, I’m calling for a pragmatic attempt to use the extremely flawed communication channels at our disposal to do the best we can.
What’s that mean? In how cool and fun they are? In their capacity to win elections?
Yes, in many respects. See this paper for a good model of the basic behavior: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451
You're surely being obtuse. I'm a progressive independent and even I understand why they are doing it, even if I'm not convinced this is the correct way to do it.
This is why they are doing it: https://www.usdebtclock.org/
It's just their idea of austerity.
But it's definitely malice from Musk, Trump and the rest of the oligarchs. They have for a long time been clear that their plan is to tear down everything and rebuild around themselves and everyone else is a pawn to be used to their benefit. These people are purely transactional, they don't believe in societal goods, just what benefits them must be best for everyone.
> Trump-scandals kinda killed Hanlon's Razor for me: A miasma inseparably blurring the lines between malice and incompetence, lies and ignorance, culpability and insanity, condensing into a greasy alloy which is definitely some amount of evil yet not worth anybody's time to separate and assay.
I refuse to feed the algorithm more pathological input for another denial-of-service attack. For anything from that crowd of repeat-offenders, I declare the answer to be both. If they want to assert something was just incompetence or just malice, the onus is on them to provide the argument either way.
The US government can prop up the stock market for a very long time. Anyone who purchased Puts early on during COVID times found themselves on the opposite side of a suddenly generous Fed that poured hitherto unseen amounts of liquidity directly into the markets. The chickens only came to roost in the next administration, but ai suspect they could have kept at it for 10+ years and still kept inflation under 12-15%
Completely - it's again propaganda vs reality. They keep showing exactly what they believe by their actions, but from.what I see people on the right keep believing their words/propaganda. There is such and echo chamber on the contermporary right it's incredible. No matter how much tangible, see-it-with-your-own-eyes evidence of something is presented, as long as there is a cover story given that denies it people seem to keep believing the story. And then afterwards when it becomes clear that reality was the case and not the story it all swaps over to rationalizations and the cycle begins again with a new topic.
I remember when it was "there is no way this candidate really will do the extreme things he claims. He's just saying them for effect." To "he doesn't really mean he'll work to be a dictator from day one when he says it" "he doesn't really mean vote for him and you'll never need to vote again".
Then when he starts doing it but gives a different cover story it: "Yah he's not really doing that, he's just cutting waste", to what will be "he's not really doing that he's just fixing unfair election procedures" and so on.
Then finally it will be again "yes he actually did those things but here's why its ok and it doesn't change my mind".
Extremely prominent SV backers in the VP side of the administration have said/implied multiple times if it's democracy or their world views, they choose instituting their world views - and somehow people are still making justifications saying "they don't really mean that, they won't really do that." Even with the clear evidence of what's happening now.
Why do people refuse to believe people when they are explicitly stating their intentions?
Sidestepping any specific political topic, this new view of "I'm against the other party's political touch point item that I'd rather throw out 250 years of democracy" is really wild to witness.
This old video from rap news still ring very true. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpMPu5p_QXU
The issue Americans have is that they can't really afford non-discretionary welfare spending.
https://www.investopedia.com/us-debt-by-president-dollar-and...
Also it seems like you're confused by what a budget plan is for, it is what they want to do, not about the past.
Bush ran up a massive deficit from from '00 to '08, which Obama then inherited. The debt increasing under Obama is Bush's fault. The deficit LOWERED under Obama.
But less than his predecessor.
And I didn't vote, I'm not a US citizen or resident.
Congress asked for a debt increase because they plan to cut taxes. The debt hasn't been accrued yet, they plan to cut taxes and it will cost 4.3 trillion.
DOGE isn't trying to make the government better or more efficient. They want to cut programs and staff they're ideologically opposed to which is in theory all government, but in practice all government that doesn't enrich Trump or Musk.
Most government spending is military. DOGE has targeted things like: Meals on Wheels, the Department of Education, National Institute of Health. The evidence I see suggests DOGE wants to implement Project 2025 with Elon's personal touch. An opportunity he paid for with his 270$ his campaign contribution.
Elon's companies are great beneficiaries of government funding. Yesterday the federal government decided to acquire $400 million in armored Teslas. I have no idea what opera in Guatemala you're describing. That sounds like something you would learn on social media. Not very concrete.
Trump was in debt prior to the 2016 election. Had hundreds of millions in debt that he could never pay. Now he's rich and still scamming because ??? I think it's because he's been so criminal he has no choice.
I don't consider it democracy. Democracy has been co-opted through mass manipulation and mind control with social media. Donald Trump and now Elon Musk have found a way to defeat reality.
I'm not a partisan or member of any party. I am American and concerned for our country. The guy who won tried to other throw democracy and hasn't ever admit defeat. I strongly believe there's a good chance Trump or JD Vance will be the last American president.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager
Well the elections weren't free and fair in 2020 either, with COVID being used as an excuse.
And let's not forget Hillary claiming she lost in 2016 due to Russia. Sounds like election denialism.
Did Trumps tax cuts put money if your pocket? They didn’t put money in mine (but Biden’s tax policies - child tax credits - did, ironically).
Yes, the standard deduction effectively doubled. That helped lower my federal income tax, and probably the taxes of anyone who didn't own multiple properties. I'm not a fan of Trump at all, but he did cut income taxes in his first term.
Here's a summary of the impact[0]
> The average tax refund was $90 higher in 2018 than 2017, according to 2019 IRS data. (This statistic covers tax filers who used a version of Form 1040.) However, more detailed IRS data, released February 2020, shows that the refunds were not equally distributed across the population.
> Taxpayers with an AGI of less than $10,000 received 11.5% fewer refunds in 2018 than 2017, and the total value of their refunds was 17% less. (A 2018 analysis from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found single filers who earned minimum wage and had no children were least likely to save on their income taxes in 2018.) Across tax returns with an AGI between $1 and $50,000, taxpayers received 4.5% fewer refunds in 2018 and their refunds were worth 2.7% less.
> Taxpayers with AGI between $50,000 and $100,000 received 2.5% more refunds but those refunds were worth 1.8% less than in 2017. Those with an AGI of more than $200,000 received 45% more refunds in 2018 and the value of those refunds was 203.4% higher. Taxpayers with an AGI of $1 million or more received 216% more refunds than in 2017 and those refunds were worth 394.3% more.
[0] https://www.policygenius.com/taxes/who-benefited-most-from-t...
This has been the status quo for a long time, rather than pay taxes and get it all back in controversial and bloated government contracts (which is what gives the appearance of government spending working) it's better to stay lean and just have them not pay, as this removes the middlemen.
Let a company do it's job and you get people crying about them raping the planet and exploiting workers
Stick a company with red tape, tax them a billion, give them (and yourself) a billion to complete a political project that goes nowhere and it's labeled a great success with people cheering in the street and using it as an example of socialist success for the next 60 years.
I’d be happy if they actually saved real money by cutting the military budget in half, but that’s not going to happen because the US is an industrial-military based economy.
How much did Trump’s 2017 tax cuts lower your tax bills? They didn’t lower mine. I benefited more from Biden’s tax policies (child tax credits) than Trump’s. Even taking it from the point of view of “fuck the gov, fuck climate change and our future, I want what’s mine, now” Trump did nothing for me in his 4 years on power and is doing nothing for me now - gutting a bunch of gov agencies doesn’t put money in my pocket.
The odds of a junkie recognizing good or bad spending is very low.
As for 'juniors', it's not like we've seen this sort of thing before such as those here happy to propel the opinions of so-called 'climate expert / activist' (Greta Thunberg) who didn't finish school and was used by the media as the face of 'saving the planet' and throwing unfounded claims of disaster by 2023, despite a significant lack of understanding of climate change and what she was talking about.
But then again, I have not heard back from Netflix's elite team for a postmortem of that live-streaming disaster which there were no juniors to blame this time despite being inexperienced in delivering live-streaming on their platform reliably.
I wouldn’t do that because I don’t want a felony. I could see some 16 year old working for their their chance at glory.
And I am not surprised some 16 years old doesn't care. I am more surprised HN ctowd doesn't seem to even mention it. 16 years old can learn, but only if there's a culture to teach them.
But I also understand why this would be an enormous temptation for mischief. Should they have reported it another way, ideally one that wouldn’t put them up for CFAA charges? Yeah! Am I the slightest bit surprised someone thought it’s be more fun to deface this one particular site with its especially crappy security? No, not at all!
(Also, “responsible disclosure” itself is hugely controversial. It’s most often used by corporations who’d prefer that the vuln is never, ever disclosed.)
> “responsible disclosure” itself is hugely controversial. It’s most often used by corporations who’d prefer that the vuln is never, ever disclosed.
It is sometimes used like that, but it is nowhere near "most often". Most often, the responsible disclosure results in exactly what it is meant for - fixing the vulnerability and improving security without harming anyone. And supporting this as cultural norm would make such cases even more frequent.
:<
My opinion: Some mistakes will be made but remedied. But overall it's a net positive. As to how much of a positive it is, it need to be see. If the income tax, property tax (and other unavoidable taxes) are eliminated, I'd say America is greater again.
How does Musk get to destroy millions of dollars of investment? These are all government assets. What the fuck is going on here?
Which people? The paramount officers of the executive branch? They actively support it. They quasi-independent inspectors-general in the executive branch departments? Those in areas of concern have been (fairly blatantly illegally) fired, and in at least one case physically ejected by security personnel.
The majority of both houses of Congress? They at least tacitly support it out of partisan loyalty. The courts? They’be issued orders, but ultimately rely on executive compliance or a different part of the executive enforcing those orders, and see “the paramount officers of the executive branch...”, previously.
The electorate? They voted in the people supporting it in the executive and legislature. A sufficient number of safeguards have failed that there is likely no effective recourse within the system, and none of those failed safeguards are likely to reset into their functional state without some extreme force being applied to change their present direction.
Feds getting DDOSed? Nothing new. Public read/write access to a government distributed resource? That needs to be taken offline as a matter of public security.
You cut funding for cancer trials people are already enrolled in, people die.
You cut funding for HIV drugs, patients' viral loads go up. Even if you put the funding back before they die, their viruses have already evolved resistance to the drugs they used to be on.
You cut military aid to US allies, those countries learn the US isn't a reliable ally. Soft power centuries in the making evaporates, just like that.
So? Also, the distinction is moot.
It's harder for supporters to even pretend that you're even minimally competent.
Understand that most of the sentiment expressed here is identical to the pre-digested mass media pablum intended for 100 IQ consumers.
Think of mass media coverage of a subject you're an expert in and how horrifyingly wrong it typically is on so many levels, and try to rectify the two.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43019507
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43003751
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978572
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389 (<-- principles listed here)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42979382
If you take a look at those and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
Trust as you please, but we're moderating HN the same way we always have.
Edit: Actually we wouldn't expect or ask anyone to trust in the first place. I do think it's reasonable to ask regular users to familiarize themselves with the principles by which we moderate the site. Then if you see something that doesn't fit those principles, or if you want to make a case for different principles, we have something to discuss.
These principles go back a long time and have held up well in terms of preserving HN for its intended purpose over the years. If you (or anyone) want to familiarize yourself with them, see the link I marked above. It contains a partial list, and pointers to lots of past explanations.
These posts have a high political index, which given America's current culture wars tends to bring out the kind of behavior which none of us want on HN.
It's a damn tough balancing act.
Also, look at my post history, I'm pretty strongly anti-DOGE. I'm defending Dang because I love HN and appreciate what he is doing under extremely tough conditions.
Here are the guidelines : https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Moderation is decentralized, downvoted comments tend to disappear. Flagging is a power people who have a lot of karma have, if you think are one of them you can vouch (unflag) for a comment. There is one mod, dang Here are the moderator last comments so you can have idea of the work he is doing: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang
This thread on the other hand? There's one comment near the top that mentioned some interesting facts about the U.S. Digital Service, and a second comment that's third from the top that tries with limited success to get people to talk about the hack.
The rest of this thread is just mindless snark. That's fair, DOGE is stupid and deserves snark, but it's a waste of space on the HN front page.
A decent metric for whether something belongs on HN is: is the conversation more interesting than the Reddit equivalent would be? The answer here is pretty clearly an emphatic "no", so I think that this belongs on Reddit instead.
I totally understand why people are knee-jerking, but it's not a conversation and it doesn't belong on HN. We have other forums for knee-jerk snark. I'll be happy to see another DOGE post here the next time there's a topic that has enough meat for a useful conversation to come out of it.
In the meantime, I suspect that dang just left this here to avoid the appearance of silencing the topic. I hope that people who see this come away better understanding why so many of these threads get flagged to death.
I'd still like if threads indicated whether or not flags were turned off. Dang must be tired of answering these questions
I also believe there are a bunch of Musk fanboys on this site that would flag this. Or people who don’t want to understand the implications of what’s going on and avoid anything that’s “political”.
I also trust dang
Don't know how to square these thing either, though
When there's a major ongoing topic like this one, especially when it's divisive, the flags tend to come from a combination of (1) users who flag one-sidedly for what appear to be political reasons, and (2) users who don't think the story is on-topic for HN, whether because it's too sensational / flame-prone, too repetitive, or both. The first is a bad reason to flag and the second is a good reason. When we notice users flagging repeatedly for bad reasons, we take their flagging privileges away.
> Unless the regular users are bots, which seems unlikely
Why do you believe it’s unlikely? Are these regular users whose activity predates GPT3? Personally, since LLMs became commercially available I’ve just assumed that at least 50% of comments on the internet are bots.
I didn't know you take the flagging away. That's not a bad idea.
I've been seeing you defend yourself all over the place these days. Sorry to make you feel like you had to do that here too.
My comment was more one of confusion, to clarify. Reading your comments these last few weeks, I trust in your decisions and those of the rest of the mods. HN is a really good place because of you all.
But I also know Elon is super petty/crazy and doing some monkey business is not above him. And yes, I know that sounds very conspiracy theory of me based on your comment here.
Suffice to say, maybe I'm just reacting to the sea change in HN participation and doing some 'self protection'. I like HN and then I recognize this flagging behavior on mostly just two men. Is there more flagging? Yes, but that's 'background' to me. These things don't square to my mind, so I go off to conspiracy land. Either way, my lizard brain is triggered and whether I like it or not, I can't help feeling 'bad/danger'. Maybe some self-work is needed.
Still, thanks a ton for all the time and the effort yo and the rest of the mod team put in here. I really appreciate it.
Uh, don't. HN doesn't block dumb people from joining the site and commenting.
There are at least 60 recent DOGE stories on HN with comments on. I guess people get a bit DOGEd out. It's probably part of the Trump/Musk strategy. 'Flood the zone' with so many things people can't follow it.
(on zone flooding https://youtu.be/iTSgL_R1CC4)
Are you really looking for evidence?
Isn't that evidence enough that it is possible?
Having a front row seat to the fall of the biggest empire in history is certainly something.
mind you, it's totally legit to ridicule the noob security lapses, but the rest of the sentiment here seems a bit meh
But as for transparency, DOGE isn't at all being transparent about what it is doing. I'd give them an F so far on that.
For example, the recent headlines of the state department trying to buy $400m worth of armored Tesla vehicles was obviously a Democrat plant. It was done under the Biden administration in December, with no chance of fulfilling before the handover. Some.one thought it would be a simple way of making the Trump admin look bad.
You have to always be wary of being misled by the media in today's age. That said, the shit-slinging coming out of Doge has been largely false and illegal. If Congress assigns money to fund impressionist dancers in Pakistan, then that's what it has to be spent on. The real issue here is that to get a bill passed in the US a lot of fluff has to get attached to it. Doge can't unilaterally cancel payments without breaking the law.
Even in the cases I looked at were real corruption is plausible, ie. the money given to the Clinton Foundation, Doge just straight up lied about the amounts and purpose.
Outside of corruption, there is no good reason to move this fast and reckless. At least no good reason for the American people. They are moving this fast because they know what they do is illegal and idiotic and false, and they are trying to drown us in bullshit.
Musk gets a nice kickback for every single link going back to his own website (that is actually corruption), but more importantly, they are building up outrage fatigue for normal people and a frenzy for their fanatics. This is all about paving the way to paint legality as corruption so that they can justify ignoring the courts and Congress going forward.
I bet if you poke around nvidia.com you can find some bad Wordpress sites. Does that mean the GPU engineering is bad?
DOGE is an autocratic power grab, and there's immense risk of damage, whether intentionally or through incompetence.
Is that really how Elon became the President :)
And now, keep in mind that US govt is likely still way more "efficient" than most others on the planet.
For example, you (and by "you" I mean an external party holding a scalpel) can drill down into Executive Branch > Cabinet Level Agencies > Department of Education > Office of the Secretary > Office Of Civil Rights, and think, "Hey, why does the DoE need an office of civil rights? Does it need a 570 headcount? We can save $78M by cutting out that entire office".
I've seen this phenomenon in corporate, where cuts happen to areas that seem like they're not contributing to immediate profits, because their outcomes are long term, and there is enough organizational momentum to go forward for months, if not years, before their absence is noticed. For example, certain types of quality teams, technical/platform teams and employee safety/welfare related positions.
Meanwhile the second section seems to be a tool for dismantling the regulatory system of the US. It is disingenuously called the "Unconstitutionality Index" ignoring the fact that a country cannot be run by a legislature and its acts alone, let alone a constitution.
Hope they used good proxies, because this seems like a felony.
> One of the sources told 404 Media that they were able to push updates to a database of government employment information after studying the website’s architecture and finding the database’s API endpoints.
Oof, not something to put in your article.
Huh, what would be the goal of connecting this database to an API on or near doge.gov? Surely it's not the "actual"/"source of truth" database, more likely a copy: I can imagine the geniuses thought ""let's mirror everything online on a single system so it's easier for all of us to access it and do queries like "WHERE gender NOT IN ('m', 'f') OR race NOT IN ('white')" and get results from all the databases we know of."". (I assume there is no single federal employee database?)
And since the truth is whatever they say nowadays, maybe it IS the "source of truth" database.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke
Yawn indeed.
This logic only holds if they’d have knowledge about websites, as opposed to other topics.
There’s many SDEs with long careers who would make security mistakes on websites, yet nonetheless are tech experts.
What data are you basing this on? Federal websites have an approval process which includes a security review so I’d expect some familiarity with that in your response.
All you had to do was actually read the article; it’s the very next paragraph from the one I quoted.
Would like to see a source on this.
Governments are similar to large enterprises whereby every bit of code going into Production requires a full security, architecture and site reliability review.
There is no doubt bugs in bespoke web applications but for your typical website.
Citation?
