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Comment by redcobra762 | Hacker News Reader

...not when the consequences are "people die of starvation because their EBT didn't go through."

Moving fast and breaking things only works when the things you're breaking are low stakes. Grandma not getting her daily pic dump of her grandson is not the same as grandma not getting her groceries.

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People are going to die of starvation from this administration.

People tend to forget that move fast and break things also includes move fast and fix things. No one will starve from this.

How much are you willing to bet on this? Will you be willing to pay into a fund to mitigate suffering caused by this nonsense?

Well,it didn't say anywhere that they are stopping grandma's checks. And if the system is so fragile that grandma will die before getting some human person to resolve her case, then we've got bigger problems than a 25 year old having r/w on the system.

That's a rather cynical take on what may amount to actual human suffering.

The alarmist take is jumping to the conclusion that people will starve from efforts to improve the code behind this system. We can still print paper checks, probably with a simple script in the worst case.

Concern over even a low possibility of a catastrophic event is hardly alarmist.

And what if your assumption about printing checks is wrong? I find no basis for that assumption, by the way.

We're talking about payment system code, not AI targeting for drones. Changes can be reverted, transactions can be stopped, payments can be made other ways.

No they cannot, not legally, and certainly not in a timely manner.

There are simply no mechanisms in place to do what you're saying, nor does there appear to be any willingness to correct errors, given the desire to cut spending. Missed payments may be a feature, not a bug.

> nor does there appear to be any willingness to correct errors

> Missed payments may be a feature, not a bug.

> not legally, and certainly not in a timely manner.

Bad faith magic wand waving, these arguments do not have substance. People/bots are on a bandwagon against change many have been calling for years for. Our treasury system NEEDS an overhaul and there are much bigger problems with this admin to make an issue out of.

You say bad faith, but then you equivocate all "change" like any difference is good, or that Congress ought not be involved in the decisions related to how to spend government money, which is wildly unconstitutional.

I think the claim here is that more actual human suffering is coming out of the status quo which we think needs to be fixed with fairly drastic action.

The Mexican cartels for example do provide aid in predominantly poor parts of the country but there are still many who would say that overall these organizations provide more harm than good.

The US is providing some resources for causes that you and other's support (presumably with a much higher "success" rate than the cartels) but they have also historically funded and perpetuated things that many are not happy with (various conflicts in the middle east come to mind).

Some of us wanted to see dramatic reform and we feel that claims like "grandma is going to starve because she won't get her groceries" are really just an attempt to connect with emotions around the ordeal rather than an honest attempt to point out flaws or discuss potential drawbacks with the current approach.

So shutting down USAID isn't going to cause human suffering?

It won't say on the tin what the negative consequences of breaking what's in the tin will be, it's never that simple in my experience.

There are substantially better ways to solve this problem, so the fact that those better methods aren't being tried screams ignorance and inexperience, which is a problem for critical payment systems.

USAID is being burnt to the ground. Those are "grandma's checks" to a lot of people.

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