Hacker News Reader

Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

They may be smart, and may have won awards, but Musk's techno-thugs are not "the best of us". At best, they're misguided and have fallen for Musk's charisma. At worst, they're actively supporting and abetting the subversion of our democratic government.

View on HN

They are fixing our non-democratic government that has been wasting trillions of our tax dollars, while we have increased homelessness, physical and mental health crisis, and other problems that have been ignored for decades.

The NYT just reported that the federal government lost $236 billion to apparent fraud ("improper payments") in 2023 alone.

The US GAO says "2018-2022 Data Show Federal Government Loses an Estimated $233 Billion to $521 Billion Annually to Fraud"

What Musk is doing is what the majority voted for. To finally put an end the unbelievable waste, fraud and abuse. This is exactly what he said he would do and most Americans are relieved and see hope for the first time in a long time.

I am sorry that you took so much flak in this thread. The HN crowd generally pretends to dislike elitism but this whole thread seems to be questioning the abilities of the engineers and conspiracy theories about billionaires. I interestingly don't see a lot of people defending government spending though. If the DOGE program were done under a different party and perhaps to expand government spending, I imagine the HN crowd would be supportive and defend the engineers.

https://xkcd.com/793/ This is what you are doing. You're assuming all problems are variants of a software problem, because you're a software engineer.

Did it ever occur to you they might not be?

Nah, what Musk is doing is attempting to destroy democracy with no regard to harm it causes to American citizens. Oh, while not caring about what is legal or illegal at all. It is ridiculous to call previous governments "non democratic" while being engaged in what Trump and Musk are doing now. There is about 0 chance the people selected by Trump will improve health, especially so as they are trying to destroy the very agencies that used to protect food safety, the air and so on.

If you seriously think Musk of all people is actually interested in improving the lives of regular Americans, I have a bridge to sell you. He's a liar, a narcissist, and the world's richest man. That is who you're cheering on to take over the finances of the richest country in the world?

> At best, they're misguided and have fallen for Musk's charisma. At worst, they're actively supporting and abetting the subversion of our democratic government.

They can easily be both. They're definitely the latter

Let us also consider just how badly this continues to paint tech and tech workers to the general public. To distrust technology such as all the AI hate we see online.

It's the opposite. This paints tech nerds as the heroes.

To fascists. The rest of us are retroactively apologizing to SJWs who were right the whole time and we did not believed to.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com