A comment on the blusky thread went to "five eyes should stop sharing information" which I suspect won't happen, but I could see people thinking it should.
"There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it"
I’ll say this as someone who’s moderately wealthy: this administration is a massive wealth transfer to those with either capital or connections to it. Taking apart these committees means less-regulated telecoms, infrastructure and financial services. If you’re in those spaces, this is great for you.
The size of each of those industries entirely dwarfs the military-industrial bogeyman, which is largely just being transferred from one set of owners (Boeing, Lockheed, et cetera) to another (Musk, Bezos, Lucky, et cetera)
One possible upside of the current situation is that the very obvious corporate ownership of the federal government is dropping the “emperor has clothes” pretense. We are ever closer to simply paying taxes to Buy-N-Large.
If people don’t like it, at least now they can have a practical conversation about it (Luigi notwithstanding). It’s sort of like when Snowden showed us how fucked we were/are.
In theory, it should be easier to understand the reasoning behind the existence of newer fences, but the idea is still to do that step first...
I mean, clearly some people just reject this entire idea as creating too much friction, and I can often see their point!, but I think we can at least avoid saying "it's a good concept, but it just doesn't apply in this case", and be honest about just rejecting the concept.
Chesterton’s fence can never be an argument against creating something new.
The whole point of it is that if you come across a fence then that was the result of a conscious human decision and subsequent effort, which strongly implies there was a reason it was created, and until you understand what that reason was, you’re taking a risk by destroying the fence.
But if there is “nothing” and you’re creating something new, Chesterton’s fence doesn’t apply because the lack of existence of anything was not the result of intentional human design and effort, therefore there’s no evidence that the lack of existence of something “had a reason for it”.
In other words, there is no "nothing". We will always be playing in a sandbox someone else played in before us.
Several (of the new government) have expressed belief that the government is headed towards a catastrophic debt overload. In their view, emergency relief is necessary.
Not arguing for or against this view, but that seems to be what people voted for.
I am a big fan of Chestertons fence but it doesn’t always apply.
If that fence is stopping the school bus from driving off the edge of a cliff, for example, I would absolutely not want to remove it - and you can bet I'll spare a modicum of thought to make sure that's not the case before I yank it out of the way.
A related point is, it’s pretty easy to find people unhappy with current systems. But if you ask them what to replace those systems with, you’ll often find that coalition dissolves.
It's like marking read all your emails. The important stuff will pop back up.
And for the owner, who probably thinks he's co-piloting the strongest government in the world right now and attributes part of that success to the platform he controls, it is functioning magnificently.
..and that is all that matters to him.
You're not, sure. The people who are in charge view the whole apparatus as a machine, and the people doing the work as cogs in that machine.
Maybe you're replying to someone else?
Unfortunate for some people who may be affected by this.
Personally I don't believe that or want to believe that and would rather chalk it up to neo-toddlerism, but there's a chance right?
Investigations are annoying to people who were behind the President at his inauguration.
What risk? There isn’t a consumer liability, and they can control the cybersecurity risk-reward balance they’re exposed to. From their perspective, oversight is the liability.
A good rule of thumb, at least for the next couple of months, is that any rules and regulations that have been criticised by the billionaires, banks or oil & gas industry are likely to be shredded. (The “deep state” stuff is mostly whoever has the king’s ear sort of politics. It’s unclear that had any influence here.)
Or, maybe Im thinking more of advantageous requirements/regulations than oversight per se.
A notable example is SEC mandates on breach disclosures, which will most likely be dead now. Those were a major forcing function to make companies realize security is important. Otherwise, paying a ransom and doing the bare minimum to not get cut by Chubbs or AXA is the norm.
I agree with JumpCriscross on his read of this situation. It ain't great. At least I'm well off enough to weather the negative impacted by a lot of the chaos. Sucks for everyone else.
> The coordination definitely seems to be more of amzn (and similar) employees providing technical expertise to congress and regulators
It's bidirectional. CISA, FBI, and others often get intel or actively take down a botnet or offensive actor, and will percolate this information to security teams at larger organizations before percolating en masse.
For example, when this one APM/data collection tool that almost every DevOps team ik was using was pwned early last year, CISA notified CISOs days before they officially announced it in the news.
Someone who didn’t vote is more in concordance with the current government than someone who voted against it. Actions speak louder than words, and not voting is an action.
But, by definition, not voting is an action rather than absence of one. What you are doing by not voting is giving out a tacit agreement that the people who went and vote get to decide who will be elected.
Following that line of thought, by not voting, you actively chose the current government, no matter what the current government is.
Those that don't care to vote are doomed to be ruled by those who care.
You still have to pay taxes, and perhaps see a government you truly despise making all sorts of decisions that will get the system even more rigged against you.
Not voting out of spite is similar to stabbing your own head to show contempt for your brain when you have a migraine.
"You won't have to vote again" – Trump 2024
https://ogles.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-ogles-propo...
A negligible effect is, mathematically speaking, incalculably higher than no effect.
My Colorado general election ballot contained nothing I could see that would associate me as a registered voter to the ballot itself. Colorado ballots are hand marked, machine readable, and human readable as has been the best and obvious practice since 2000's "hanging chad" debacle. There are certainly "index marks" on the ballots so that the tallying machines can get squared up, but they don't appear different per ballot. I compared to my wife's ballot, just in case.
Why do you ask?
People that vote are not always hush hush about who they voted for, and has nothing to do with can you pick their particular ballot out of the pile. If I tell you I voted for A but B won and now I'm grumbling about the things B is doing, there's no need for discussions about ballots at all.
Just like you don't need to find someone's secret ballot when they're wearing a red MAGA hat.
We haven't done anything quite that irreversible yet.
Our children will pay the price for today's votes. But hey, at least we'll have cheap gas (maybe).
It shouldn't be surprising to anyone here with a functioning brain and is roughly aware of what is going on. Expect more of this.
I think what we're seeing in this moment is the overreach that precedes the backlash, like clockwork.
He's not up for re-election for one, and I'm pretty sure he doesn't give 2F whether Vance gets elected after him or not.
The time for the backlash would have been to refuse to accept the election results and storm the Capitol since that's apparently totally cool to do now.
So the knee jerk reaction of current administration is burning it to ground. Which could actually change something.
An effective administration would be thoughtful about things and reorganize rather than simply cut. So they're either being thoughtful and decided something like state sponsored infiltration isn't good to investigate or are being thoughtless.
One of the reasons a lot of people are worried about this administration is the vibes based policy decisions they seem intent on making. Everything is haphazard, arbitrary and contradictory. Some of it comes down to personal grievance and some of it comes down to favors for people in the business sphere who chose to kowtow to this administration.
If we don’t test or investigate, there are no problems and no crimes eh?
It's probably not a specific decision based on what the individual boards have been doing.
Current South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem wants CISA to be “refocused” on critical infrastructure and to no longer address mis- or disinformation efforts online.
So less/no fact checking, including Trump claims.
Her explanation, moreover, doesn’t make sense. The infrastructure advisory committees are also being disbanded.
So I'm wondering if this is as simple as cost/benefit? Did somebody do the sums and decide the delivery was sub par for spend?
The alternatives are mostly very sad: they're fools. Replacing a process can be beneficial. There's usually overlap.
That would be a very interesting analysis and something to learn from. It would also help prevent similar mistakes in the future. It's really unlikely someone would go to such effort and just keep the results to themselves.
The current techbro CEO squad is a small group of people who got extraordinarily lucky and made a bunch of money.
The techbro CEO squad takes their luck to be ability, and they think the fact that they have more money than other people means that they're smarter than everyone else. Some members of the techbro CEO squad think of themselves as prophets or messiahs.
In addition to this, the techbro CEO squad is addicted to money and its accumulation. This isn't a "I need more money to live a more comfortable retirement" thing, it is a "my sole purpose for being is the accumulation of wealth" thing. They are more akin to machines whose purpose it is to grab onto as much money as possible than they are actual human beings.
The techbro CEO squad's vast wealth has enabled them to surround themselves with an army of staff whose only job it is to make their dreams a reality and execute their orders. There is a vast, impenetrable field of personnel and money that insulates them from the reality of the world.
So, they think that they're better than anyone else to the point of being god-like, they are sociopaths who only care about money, they are surrounded by an army of yes men, and they have lost (or never had) any connection to the average human being and his or her existence.
They believe that any restriction on their ability to accumulate wealth is an assault on their freedom, an enemy to be defeated, an injustice to be made right by any means possible.
Limits on their ability to pollute, protections for employees operating in the heat or cold or around hazardous materials, regulations designed to prevent market manipulation or money laundering, it is all evil and must be destroyed.
They are willing to dismantle any system to get what they want.
Because they think that they are better than everyone else, the techbro CEO squad does not value consensus or institutional knowledge that has led to regulation slowly building up over centuries in response to events and emergencies: if they don't like it, it must go.
So, the slow infiltration of government by the Peter Theil, Andreessen and Horowitz, Musk, (but mainly their servants) and the rest started a couple of years ago and continues to this day.
tl;dr: Billionaires will rape your grandmother's corpse for lower taxes, harvest and sell her organs for a laugh, then label you a woke communist and kick you off twitter for criticizing them.
Really though, competence would create the new "efficient" thing, hire best of the best and get it running before tearing down important security, this is business-leader level incompetence being attempted at global super power scale, we are going to need a new word for businessjerks breaking things they should have never been able to touch