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Comment by liontwist | Hacker News Reader

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Do you pay federal taxes? Do you get federal service? Does your government gets federal grant money to fund projects and services? Do you rely on social security payments? Maybe your parents does. What about medicaid and medicare?

Did they stop social security, Medicare, or Medicare?

What will happen when I pay federal taxes?

Medicaid was disrupted last week. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/28/us/politics/medicaid-free...

This is an article about a temporary web server outage.

What a funny coinkydink for it to go down at the exact same time they ordered a "stop all the payments!" directive!

I think economic and social life in the United States will continue.

Economic and social life existed during the Great Depression, but that needn't make it a goal.

Well this just confirms this is hyperbole. Auditing and cutting federal agencies is not going to cause a Great Depression

Where'd you get your economics degree from?

Is that what the economic community is saying will happen?

Would you listen to me if you found out I had one?

Do you pay federal taxes? (Yes) Do you get federal service? (No) Does your government gets federal grant money to fund projects and services? (No) Do you rely on social security payments? (No) Maybe your parents does. (No) What about medicaid and medicare? (No)

My concern level is quite low.

U.S. Treasury bills underpin the financial systems of the world, but most especially that of the United States. This is an ELE for the US.

What exactly is the concern here? Someone is going to rm -rf / on some magical server holding all the t-bills in the world?

This is not a thing that will happen.

You trust these incompetent clowns way more than I do, apparently.

/me points to the "Four Seasons" Press Conference

/me points to Tesla

/me points to X

/me points to any of Trump's business ventures

/me points to Trump's "billionaire" status

I don't trust anyone, least of all an elected official. Was my actual point not clear to you, and this is why you moved the goalposts of the conversation?

Why do you think treasuries are at risk of not being paid?

How about money in the financial system. What would happen if someone makes a mistake, and something causes bond payments to fail?

It is an outside risk, but based on the reporting it seems like they are digging into code of large complex financial systems...

How much do you trust 1 guy to not make _any_ mistakes.

Maybe this is wrong and they are only looking at read only access of the payment system, but it seems sketchy that this is even a risk.

They're in the systems that pay treasury bond holders. If they break something and end up defaulting on bond payments (whether intentionally or unintentionally), it would be the largest global financial catastrophe imaginable.

Just to get technical here, you think the US bond credit rating is based on whether a cron job runs in time? And your fear is they will break the cron and won’t be able to fix the script?

I hope it's more robust than that.

But for all I know, it could be manual. Perhaps Bob runs a COBOL script each morning to pull a list of recipients, which Sally double checks for the various quirks that this old legacy system can produce, before giving it to Jim to run the payment script - with specific parameters for known edge cases - and if there is an error then Jenny from IT knows what to do. Only problem is that Bob, Sally, Jim and Jenny just got fired, the department was ordered to delete their documentation, and the responsibility now lies with some 19 year old with no background in either Finance or COBOL who just showed up on his first day thinking "how hard can it be?"

If it is the program that pays the bills when they are due, then yes, 100%. Why would you think otherwise?

- computers have outages, so I imagine they run them earlier than legally required and have procedure to detect and fix failure - computers have outages so I imagine there are legal procedures for handling issues with bond payments - if they break treasury payments trump will tell them to fuck off - this whole situation is a larp because you associated “treasury” and “bonds” in your mind and imagined that this risk exists

Your argument is predicated on the technologists who are running the technology acting in good faith.

Normally this has been an uncontroversial granted.

Unfortunately this is no longer our reality.

No. My argument is that bond defaulting is a legal status. Not a server outage. And that we are getting into larp territory with no evidence they are tampering with bonds.

Yes, but the fact that it is even a question is absurd.

I guess my thought is that you have a boss that told you to touch a computer system, normally only a few people touch it, because of you make a mistake, your company looses 100 billion dollars.

You make pretty sure that whoever is dealing with that system are experts, you make sure that they do not modify it without following procedures, you double/triple check that their change won't have side affects, you then run the changes on a test system just to make sure.

And yeah, you are only adding a print statement, it should be fine...

But what if it's not.

Move fast and break things is fine if worst case scenario your social media site goes down.

Move fast and break things is less fine when you could fuck up a key piece of financial infrastructure.

I don't have evidence of anything, no one does. We don't have evidence that there won't be any mistakes either.

In the past we could expect reliability, because the system was always reliable, within the processes and systems that people implemented around it.

It seems to me that a lot of those processes have been skipped.

Elon musk and his cronies are taking over the systems that send out every check for the US Government. Based on how well he did with Twitter, the build quality of the Cybertruck, and the last Starship test, are you sure that this team will be able to keep sending out social security checks? How about tax refunds? How about payments to government contractors?

I think economic and social life in the United States will continue.

The reigning liberal ideology foundationally believes that federal spending is existential to every individual. They have no concept of how little it matters to most people. Or how much is actually in the hands of states, counties, and municipalities. It's deep into delusion territory.

The US Treasury and currency aren't important?

In middle school, I learned this was called "assertion without evidence."

What claims do you think needed some extra evidence in that parageaph?

1. The reigning liberal ideology foundationally believes that federal spending is existential to every individual.

2. They have no concept of how little it matters to most people.

3. Or how much is actually in the hands of states, counties, and municipalities.

4. It's deep into delusion territory.

I dont see what evidence would be sufficient to appease you on any of these. I think you mistook an interpretive comment expressing the meaning and value of events.

I think the “middle school” comment is childish, and I think you regularly read and internalize interpretive material without the same expectation.

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