Musk also believes (either arrogance, or true belief) that much of this stuff can be figured out from first principals without much need of traditional experts.
I'm sorry but what are these guys working on that's taking precedence over this?
PS: I’m just guessing here. I have no clue how DOGE operates.
Their day-jobs at other various Musk enterprises.
If they shit the bed, which they do frequently, no worries, they’ve already sold the next deal elsewhere and now their firm may be out from that organisation for a year or two and one of the others will come in and screw up for a few years and then they’ll be back.
Incidentally and because this should be a basic competency of government, the Australian government, owing to a huge number of significant scandals including one in which PwC used the information in crafting taxation law and then sold it to international corporations to fucking obliterate any sense of Chinese walls (in which no one has gone to jail and most careers have emerged semi intact, if with a bunch of egg that any self respecting person would go and take a long hard look in the mirror at themselves for having been involved in) - the last 3 years has seen a modest relocation of these basic functions of government internally.
Which one of our political party leaders is now campaigning on removing, in order to bring back the gravy train to the incompetent consulting fucks. (Both our primary party leadership need to have a stern talking to because one side is actively trying to channel MAGA energy, and the other seems unwilling to do anything useful.
So turns out I had a bit to get off my chest, I hope no one found that too boring
> letting them run riot through the most sensitive areas of the federal government
These kids are doing it the first time with little/no oversight it seems. A bit like sending troops into a war with no training.
Source - spent more than half my career as a consultant.
considering that knowledge decays (often rapidly) as a function of time since the last instruction, "experience" seems like it might be of far less value than temporal proximity to a previous college education.
Young people and major feats of achievement are not mutually exclusive things.
I’d be worried about real spies gaining access in person given the confusion of who is doge or not.
I agree with him. Corruption often get a pass when covered in layers of legalize.
Politics vs policy, or something like that?
The expression of power by inflicting suffering is seen as a flex. USAID and its mission are in opposition to their aims — you are to be cowed by power, not be look kindly upon the kindness and mercy of the US.
The idea is that your organization may be doing inefficient or horrible things, but it also has one cute puppy who depends on it. Any time someone wants to shut your organization down, you just point to the cute puppy and say "you wouldn't want this puppy to die, would you?".
This is truly the post truth world. I wouldn’t be surprised if many here who are making counter arguments either hate the US and what it stands for or are outright malicious actors
And if you think USAID is the only place where there are horrible first, second, and third order effects to what DOGE is doing, you're being completely naive. There are huge numbers of people in the federal government who deal with life-or-death matters every day. Air traffic controllers. VA clinicians. What are the consequences of sending these people daily emails telling them they're unproductive and they should quit or get laid off? Telling them that you want them to be "traumatized"?
You should look very deeply into your soul.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Government_Effic...
They chose long ago to block out negative thoughts and information, today is no different.
Do you feel all of these programs should have been funded, or make sense when we are blowing through money and crushing people with inflation? Do you find the concept of auditing these organizations as bad, or is it bad because it's someone else doing it? If so can you explain why these actions weren't taken with the prior administration?
The point being, step out of a partisan hat, or an emotional state of X person is Y. Look at the federal governments spend, fraud, waste, and abuse is prevalent. Someone has to do the hard part and clearly leaving everyone to manage themselves doesn't work. More so when they can't pass their own audits.
I don't take issue with auditing. I take issue with the possible illegal firing of officials that are meant to provide oversight, skipping over security clearances to provide sensitive data access to unvetted indivduals, and attempting to illegally cut spending when only Congress has that authority.
> The point being, step out of a partisan hat, or an emotional state of X person is Y. Look at the federal governments spend, fraud, waste, and abuse is prevalent. Someone has to do the hard part and clearly leaving everyone to manage themselves doesn't work. More so when they can't pass their own audits.
Let's be clear here because I see a lot of MAGA repeating this incorrectly. You are referring to a few agencies like the Pentagon when you say they can't pass their own audits. Most federal agencies have no problem passing their audits and all of those audits are available through GAO. https://www.gao.gov/federal-financial-accountability. The majority of agencies pass GAO audits. In fact if Elon was only targeting agencies that failed GAO audits I would have much less of a problem.
I think you are the one that needs to take off the partisan hat.
Passing an audit of " you spent x at y" isn't the same as "why are we spending X at y". He's doing the later, surely you can agree with that.
As for you partisan hat dig, i'm in fact not. I don't lean or vote how you're implying. In this particular instance, I've seen the excess of fraud, waste, and abuse through multiple agencies and organizations first hand. I've seen the pallets of USAID cash that were handed out without regard. I've also seen the increased prices, the national debt rising, and the general glut of how our government operates. So yes, while I may disagree with the process, the fact is no one else has taken a legitimate attempt at solving this problem. So in that manner I support the cleanse.
Finally, if you want to talk about the 'why' money is being spent, that's congress's domain. If we throw the laws out now then what use are laws. If you want to talk about rising debts, then look at the tax cuts Trump wants to renew that we can't pay for.
Why would the USAID be investigating Musk? USAID primarily focuses on foreign aid, humanitarian assistance, and development programs rather than regulatory or investigative actions.
By the way, the reason the USAID is at the top of the list for DOGE to audit is because they were the most resistant and combative when the idea of them being audited came up. But they won’t be the only ones facing an audit - the administration said they are looking at all agencies. In fact, just today President Trump literally said in a pre-Super Bowl interview that they will be looking at the Department of Defense soon and expect to find billions or maybe even hundreds of billions in waste.
This seems like exactly the kind of broad audit the US government needs, not just at the national level but every level of government.
Musk doesn't have the context or detail on what is wasteful or not. Those decisions are made in Congress. If you believe him you believe you can just look at who is being paid and a short description and identify waste. That notion is idiotic.
Musk and crew aren't informed or qualified enough to make decisions about any of this. They're just ignoring the law and made themselves judge jury and executioner.
Sadly, Musk will just create waste, not fix it.
We have to be clear going into the future. Musk is not doing things this way because he's an idiot, he's doing it because he is waging an ideological war. If he says something is waste and fraud, it's waste and fraud by definition. They don't care about whether there is waste and fraud, they just care about implementing their vision, and "reducing waste/fraud" is apparently the magic phrase that everyone agrees allows them to seize unchecked powers.
One good example of sensationalism from journalists is the claim this is a "Data breach". That's neither true, nor helpful.
This is not accurate. Most jobs in the federal government, including at the treasury, do not require security clearances. You’re confusing background checks, which are very basic, with the different types of security clearances, which aren’t required for something like a financial audit.
I mean at least make it look like this is what you’re accomplishing. They’re not even trying to convince anyone, we’re just supposed to trust.
It's also not a situation of where we are spending money, but why. I have yet to see any reporting that can defend the vast majority of spend in USAID let alone the other organizations. Further when you look at the disclosures of how much money is actually making it to the organizations vs overhead it's even worse.
This is painful and it will impact people, but as a country we have to fix the books. If it goes to far, come election time we elect the people we need to fix it. Ultimately this was something he campaigned on and it's something he's doing. Like it or not, it's been a pretty transparent process.
Not at all. Musk has cherry picked a few things to share. Other than that, we know nothing. And most of what he's cherry picked have been shown to be incorrectly understood. Transparency would be third party auditors who setup a process, executed the process, and documented as they went. We literally have no idea what's going on.
So what you're saying is they have no idea what they're doing. Just cut it and "see what happens" and if it's really bad, "we'll just bring it back." You realize that we won't see the true effects of lots of things for many months and possibly years? It's not binary.
You really haven't seen reporting defending PEPFAR, for example, as a program of USAID? The same org that also track and help prevent Ebola outbreaks? That funded hospitals for innocent civilians in Gaza?
Why is the first priority of the GOP Congress to renew and expand the Trump tax cuts, which the government is estimating to cost at least $4 trillion dollars and will mostly accumulate to the top 0.1%? It's also estimated that it will explode the federal debt.
This is a government by and for oligarchs like Musk. He's attempting distraction while the plan is to grossly enrich themselves.
You were having a discussion about the merits of specific behaviors and when someone pushes back on the merits, you just keep defaulting to "well they won the election."
You've done it multiple times now.
Everyone knows they won the election. Everyone knows the way to win power back is to win the election next time. People are having a discussion with you about the merits of what they're doing with that power currently.
Critics on both sides—whether anti‑Trump or anti‑Elon—tend to focus on slogans or sensational accusations rather than on what really matters: the proper channels of accountability. If you object to how power is being wielded or believe that policies are harming the nation, then the proper remedy isn’t to simply rail against the outcome. It is to participate in the democratic process. Challenge those actions in court, push for legislative reforms, and, importantly, vote for candidates who will implement the changes you want. That is the only non‑ad hoc, non‑refutable solution available.
It may sound repetitive to say “win the election” over and over again, but that is the point. Every time someone dismisses an objection with “they won the election,” they are implicitly saying: “If you don’t like how the current system is working, use the power that the system itself provides.” The legal processes and checks and balances aren’t just theoretical ideals—they’re the only way to address grievances without devolving into personal attacks or populist demagoguery.
So yes. If you don't like CURRENT thing.. you'll have to vote and better convince others your candidates the right one. The team that won is the team with power. Just as with Biden the team that won had their actions, people didn't like it, and here we are.
EDIT: I'd also ad that it's confrontational for you to directly assume people are in a cult because they don't follow your views.
They are likely not legal and have been told to stop by a judge. Vance has suggested ignoring the ruling and Elon is whining about impeaching judges now.
> the proper channels of accountability
Who is exactly is accountable to what is happening right now? Musk? Hahaha. There is zero accountability, transparency, or oversight in what is happening.
> people are in a cult
It's not an assumption. When people follow someone or a group to a religious extreme that is a cult. Everything Trump or now Musk does is somehow explained away in a very 'we were always at war with Eurasia' way. This list is really never-ending, but Trump was going to lower prices (the eggs!) and now he says they are going to go up. MAGA's are about backing the blue, unless Trump is pardoning people who beat police officers. What about Hilary's emails on a private server, but it's ok that Musk loading confidential government data to who knows where. Can you believe Hunter is on the board of a company and may be profiting off his families name? Forget about Trump coin, Kushner getting billions from the Saudis, the list goes on. And it highlights that MAGA doesn't really have any views other than 'our team good, their team bad'.
It's wild to me that people are that into someone like Trump or Musk. I'm not into anyone like that except maybe my family. When Trump said he could shoot someone in the street and people would still follow him, he was right. That also means it's a cult. What would they have to do for you to say throw them in jail?
You're not providing any solution to the actual perceived problem. You're not providing any counters beyond your candidate that failed to get the support necessary to win. You don't have to like it, this is what it is, the left lost not only the election, but your "I know better than you" smarmy attitudes are resulting in those of use that are socially liberal, being pushed further right for a sense of sanity.
At this point the conversation isn't going anywhere and i'm satisfied that we are cleaning out all this graft, you (collectively) are not. We will not agree on this and i'm ok with that. I get it, it sucks losing control of narratives and funds, all I can say is what i've said before, if you don't like it vote for change.
Please elucidate what graft 1) they missed, 2) you've found, and 3) justifies withdrawal of life-saving treatments for millions of people while inflicting enormous damage upon our country's international image?
[1] https://oig.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/0-000-25-0...
Am I to interpret your “well go win the election!” to mean that you (personally) approve of said decisions and their relative priority?
It seems odd you can’t just state that, and instead deflect to a totally different topic of how people win power (which, of course, we all know).
1. Stopping life-saving treatments for 560,000 children
2. Stopping life-saving treatments for another 20 million people
Ganoushoreilly thinks this might be actually the right course of action, because s/he believes the funding is not audited and "there might be fraud." S/he appears ignorant of the easily discoverable fact that this funding was last audited a jawdropping, wildly irresponsible four months ago. By actual independent auditors.
This conversation has delved into hyper emotional responses, i've tried to keep it to the point of topic at hand. I've made it clear we have different opinions and it's not going to change. I'm not engaging further after this.
It's frankly mind-boggling that we can be in the middle of conversation about USAID/PEPFAR, you say "yes I agree with this prioritization," I reply back with what that prioritization actually is, and then you... jump to thinking that I'm talking about half a million children transitioning genders?
Yeah, totally not a cult. Lol.
https://www.state.gov/pepfar-latest-global-results-factsheet...
The fact that the president is taking one extreme, illegal action after the next in rapid succession is itself extremely alarming and unprecedented in American history. The fact that the Vice President has publicly declared that courts have no right to overrule the President's illegal actions is equally alarming.
Go outside, take a walk, breath, it's going to be ok.
That doesn't give him the right to shred the Constitution.
> You have a process to rectify it if you feel so inclined.
A process that the Vice President has said the President is free to ignore.
You're justifying an all-out assault on the Constitution of the US. The President isn't following "the process" - which seems not to concern you in the slightest.
The scandal is now super deep. They just caught FEMA funding another $60 M going to hotels in NYC! Prepare for this to get deeper. I hope they root out all corruption. My hat is off to them, I'm extremely overjoyed they're finally fixing our government. This is the best government the USA has ever had.
It didn't, and I'm disappointed to see that there are people on HN who fall for such absurd falsehoods.
See corrections at the bottom. It's confirmed that $8.2M from USAID and other us gov agencies went to politico!
$44k is nowhere near "most" of USAID's budget. It's less than 0.0001%. If you want USAID to stop subscribing to publications, that's a very minor change. You don't shut down an entire agency over that.
> Also, the $8.2 million figure cited refers to payments in the 12 months leading up to February 2025, not dating back to 2016.
Talk about lying profusely. USAID is an ARM of the CIA, why would you want that?
You said USAID spends most of its budget on Politico and apartments near Langley. Are you going to admit that that was nonsense, before switching to your next argument?
What is there to defend? Congress passed a law saying there must be an international aid agency. Congress appropriated money to that agency with general directives on how it should be spent, and exercises regular oversight over that spending. The grants given by the agency are transparent and publicly availabile.
You or I might not like every grant USAID gives, but that's for Congress to address. In fact, the USAID spending I have the biggest problem with - the arms funding to Ukraine - is specifically congressionally mandated. The largest program after that, I believe, is AIDS prevention and management in Africa, which is a great use of US tax dollars that only a truly evil person would object to.
If you don't like something that USAID is spending money on, the answer is for Congress to exercise its oversight, and possibly change the law to alter how USAID works. The president has no legal authority to shutter the agency. He's required to implement the foreign aid laws that Congress has passed, and those laws say that USAID must exist.
How has it been transparent? They're not releasing any reports or giving any reasoning behind anything other than it's "corrupt". They're being the opposite of transparent, which is by design. And they're moving fast so there is no time to react to it all. It's very clear what's actually going on, you can choose to ignore it all you want, but it's going to hit you personally eventually.
I agree that we should lean into audits and responsibility. The good faith way to do that would be laws passed by congress and executed by the executive.
There is no possible spin that legitimizes current events. I would say we have a constitutional crisis, but it seems like the blitzkreig was successful and the constitution became irrelevant.
No spin is required, the people voted for this. Unfortunately one side wasn't able to convince the people that they didn't need this. That's where we are. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. You make adjustments and move on.
This is nonsense. It's like the police investigating themselves and finding no wrongdoing. You have a separate oversight organization do the audit because of conflict of interest and corruption.
> USAID was a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1886098373251301427?mx=2
> Congress passed the Foreign Assistance Act on September 4, 1961, which reorganized U.S. foreign assistance programs and mandated the creation of an agency to administer economic aid.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agency_for_Int...
I’m very opposed to an executive branch that audits programs they have political problems with, and use these no-oversight audits to kill agencies. That’s just authoritarianism.
If you look at the federal budget, the vast majority of it is spent on a few big-ticket items (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the military). The programs Musk is attacking are a tiny part of the federal budget, and are already transparent, for the most part. You can go look up who is getting what grant from which agency. But it's all peanuts to start with.
This is the end stage of cable news like Fox and social media.
Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, and now, he's operating as if the Constitution and the law simply didn't exist. Birthright citizenship, as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment? Executive order to eliminate it. Agencies established and funded by Congress? Eliminated by Elon Musk with no consultation. Musk hasn't even been confirmed by the Senate, as the Constitution requires. Trump just appointed him czar of everything, and now he goes around firing people and shutting down congressionally mandated agencies.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
Even if entire agencies were bullshit, and that’s incredibly unlikely and unrealistic, it’d do absolutely nothing meaningful to our spending compared to our biggest expenses. This is a problem for a lot of people without backgrounds in economics or who are used to very, very, large numbers. A few billion dollars sounds like a lot, but it’s literally not even a tenth of a percent of our budget.
If they cared about reducing the budget, and finding inefficiencies they would nationalize the healthcare system since we as a nation pay nearly double that of any other country and have worse outcomes. It’s empirical they do not care about efficiency, based on their targets, they care about power. USAID was investigating NeuralLink that’s why it was targeted. Thats it.
Let's see where we are in 6 - 12 months, then if he hasn't touched anyone else I'll accept your point of him not targeting anything of value.
Bad idea: having someone hire a bunch of H1-Bs[0] to take root access onto a bunch of Treasury Department servers and leak everything they get their hands on by asking an LLM to do the work for them
[0] My politics considers migration as a human right. However, since we don't live in that world yet, we have to consider that H1-Bs are hired not for their merit as programmers but for their willingness to wear golden handcuffs in exchange for potential future immigration opportunities.
https://oig.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/0-000-25-0...
I'm all for limited government and shutting down all foreign aid, but this is why I hate Trump and Maga. They ruin everything by playing checkers and not chess. How did Musk not see that sending unvetted kids into the US Treasury was going to blow up in his face.
Now Musk is saying he is going to get Ron Paul to audit the Fed, finally. Does he not see that sending a 90 year old to audit the fed is going to be even more of a clown show?
on the face of it, this sounded absolutely terrifying reading it on wikipedia. But, on closer inspection of the CNN article used as a source
> Farritor was granted access to basic IT including email and Microsoft 365, one of the people said. The chief information office only does a small amount of IT and cybersecurity work for the National Nuclear Security Administration, they said, including providing connectivity and running basic internet services for NNSA’s headquarters. It does not run IT systems for the nuclear agency’s labs controlling the nation’s nuclear stockpile.
Genuinely had me scared for a moment there.
the wikipedia summary of the information could be clearer, as it leaves room for me to make an inference on the statements provided -- but those inferences are based on my own biases and my own fuzzy stupid human brain thing filling in the blanks.
which is exactly why there are links to the underlying source material. so I can go and dive in deeper to see that, actually, my brain filled in the blanks wrong. it's my brain filling in the blanks. no-one else's brain is doing it for me. no-one is "hacking" my perspective. I screwed up by reading into something wrong and making assumptions out of fear. It is my personal responsibility to verify and challenge my own assumptions, especially those based on fears and worries.
basically, it's my own damn fault. please don't blame someone else for something that is my own damn fault.
there are plenty of badly poorly edited wikipedia articles out there -- i was reading one last night which literally had an entire paragraph that consisted of "The BBC released a timeline of events on their website". That was the whole paragraph. No reference for that statement either! This is part of the nature of community based, a.k.a. amateur, created notes. Oh look, an argument for professional fact checking and copy editing appears out of nowhere.
I recently read about how Trump is "crashing" the stock market, and I was like oh crap, but when I checked it was only down a few points. Not only will I now ignore this source, but it's also probably nudged my overall distrust a little bit. Possibly the person writing the article figured it was important enough to warrant notice (it is) but realized no one would pay attention if it didn't sound urgent, so they gussied it up a lot... Imagine how much more dire it was after it got shared a few more times. If I got my news from Facebook then I might have thought democracy had collapsed and roving bands of gun toting anarchists had taken over.
Forbes has a page "realtime billionaires list"[1] where they track the day to day wealth changes. Musk lost $12.5 billion today, Larry Ellison lost $2.8 billion today, Mark Zuckerberg gained $820M today.
When a few points means billions to the people who fund and own media outlets, who are also famously competitive and willing to do anything to make the numbers go up, it becomes more clear why we hear of the market "crashing" but it doesn't seem much different to us. (and that's outside the usual political complaining about everything the 'other' party does, whatever it is).
Let's not pretend like this stuff doesn't have some sort of effect on the conversation, or our ability to have the conversation, or to debate it rationally and from first-principles. At the very least, we are here arguing pedantic minor points whilst the real issues are left un-debated. The purpose of the media should be to distill, enlighten, inform, and definitely not mislead with a very specific agenda which it very clearly does. You point me to any news article from any news outlet, including Reuters and I will show you how they twist literal facts into bias. At this point, I see them as no different than politicians.
Unfortunately for the left-wing intelligentsia, the media, and their allies - the average day to day people are waking up and the general opinion floating around more and more is having the effect of exposing the MO of how the media pushes an agenda (whether purposefully or not).
The mean age is definitely higher than 25, due to a handful of very old (relatively speaking, compared to 25) people including Musk himself.
The median age does appear to be below 25.
Or it can be just arrogance. (In fact, even when it's reasonable, it probably also contains some arrogance...)
No, this is a common fallacy.
The main reason to get crazy rich and successful is statistics: be lucky. I.e., accidentally do the successful things. And usually starting rich helps, so you have the opportunities.
Crazy success is not a measure for capability. There is no correlation. Yes, it is sad, so despite this, the fallacy is a great motivation for many.
Its about assuming most people operate on dogma and heuristics. This is extremely true in my opinion.
By making this assumption, you dispel bad practices and behaviors that might have built up within an organization. Even more importantly you can reveal why certain chesterton’s fences exist.
It falls to pieces when people with this mindset attempt to work up against the constraints of physics, or other unchanging limits. Those limits can be constructed on, and relied upon. Going back to first principles in these cases inevitably results in massive losses in the repetition of the uncountable quiet failure-corners of history.
We will find out which one we are dealing with.
Or the tax code...
>sometimes you really are better off throwing it away and coming up with something reasonable from scratch.
Many people don't understand this and are totally, fully incapable of understanding this simple concept, hence all the opposition
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trum...
Do you have another solution to that, or do you not care about that in a dog-eat-dog way?
> "My answer would be the career bureaucrats"
Why is this used as a slur? There's such a thing as a career diplomat, and we'd hope they would learn more about the country they were diplomat-ing in over that career - who can make things happen in the government, how the consulate can get things done, build relationships with people in power. Similar with a career bureaucrat in principle, having a head full of details about which supply chains are reliable and resilient, which people are experts in border issues or international currency issues or state laws vs. federal laws, building relationships with them.
It's not how it pans out.
>Property taxes impose a cost to the ownership of a property which disincentivizes leaving it empty, which is better for almost everyone else except the property owner.
All that will disproportionately affect the poor not the rich who can actually afford the taxes.
>Do you have another solution to that, or do you not care about that in a dog-eat-dog way?
I do. Property in one thing that I think should be equally divided among individuals, with individuals being able to use/rent in whatever manner they please within certain confines (lots of assumptions here and lots of if and buts, but it's huge discussion).
>> "My answer would be the career bureaucrats"
>Why is this used as a slur?
It is intended to be a slur, infact the word bureaucrat itself is a slur. Being a bureaucrat is a negative skill or a parasite etc. unlike a lot of other specializations. Ofcourse exceptions may exist. Personal questions: have you done your taxes beyond simple salaried income tax? Have you bough/sold property? have you run a small/big business? have you run a payroll? Alternatively are you familiar with the amount of complexity introduced by the govt in the questions I asked you?
That's interesting, and rather goes up against the free markety ideas that the people with the most valuable use for land/property should be able to buy as much of it as they want from people with less valuable uses (who can sell it at market rates). I am interested and do wonder how that might work, and if it would work. Although I note that thing_you_like is allowed to be nuanced and complex, and thing_you_dislike must be bad because it's complex.
> All that will disproportionately affect the poor not the rich who can actually afford the taxes.
That happens when a speeding ticket is a fixed $100. Norway can give speeding fines up to 10% of the driver's annual salary. A bad property tax disproportionately hurts the poor, not all property taxes.
Your parent comment "Perhaps the most important question to ask is not who will gain - rather who stands to lose?" is the entire reason taxes get complicated - because every change is a change that someone gains and someone else loses. Any thing which is paid for by taxes has an argument over who should pay the tax, and how much of it; do parents pay tax for schools? Society benefits from more educated people, so does everyone pay? Is it an income tax because people who benefitted more from education can earn more? Is it part of property tax because family homes need schools built nearby? Solve for something all councillors/senators agree on - after they negotiate, for every thing and every slider.
> Personal questions: ...
They would be relevant if I had said the tax code was in any way optimal, good, efficient, should not be changed, or should not/could not be improved. My position is not that. It is if we give the greedy fat kid free reign to rewrite the rationing system the only expected result is all the food ends up on their plate and none on anybody else's.
We've seen Musk taking union busting actions, we've seen Musk's daughter accuse him of abuse, we've seen Tesla and SpaceX benefit from billions of taxpayer funding while Tesla arranged to pay no income tax on its billions of income, Musk has demonstrated lack of caring for the interests of other humans, the expected outcome of him rewriting the tax code is that he and his companies pay no tax and therefore others pay all of it. We've also seen years of Musk dashing off an unworkable ill-thought-out idea off the top of his head, so after "I pay no tax" the remainder is probably some pre-planned maximally self-interested tax code written by Peter Thiel et al, or some dashed-out-in-ten-minutes wildly unbalanced hopelessly unworkable napkin tweet.
I would like to see laws implemented with test conditions for how we will know if they are working, with a mandatory sunset period for reviewing them and if they aren't meeting the test conditions they automatically expire. I would like to see the tax code be mandatory computer-implementable with low tax filing complexity as a priority consideration.
> "It is intended to be a slur, infact the word bureaucrat itself is a slur. Being a bureaucrat is a negative skill or a parasite etc."
One person's bureacratic parasite is another person's necessary management. I enjoy Yes Minister[1] and am annoyed by the waste it parodies and mocks, but also acknowledge that a necessary and significantly sized part of any large system is the organization and management and implementation of the system itself; the UK's NHS is often criticised for having too many administrators, and at the same time for not having enough administrators to be able to do the work of organizing and making it more efficent on top of the work of keeping it running.
The second system effect[2], "scrap it and we'll start again and do it better", is a well known anti-pattern[3]; the cost of scrapping and rewriting the tax code, all the people through the Inland Revenue, all the accountants and lawyers who need updating, all the forms and paperwork and computer systems and reports and analysis which need refactoring, recreating, translating, documenting, explaining, staff training - staff hiring - the effort and cost is non-trivial, all on the unsupported dream "we will do it better next time".
Your original comment: ">sometimes you really are better off throwing it away and coming up with something reasonable from scratch." why not simply switch that around? First come up with a 'reasonable' tax code from scratch, put it into a bill, and because it's reasonable senators will all support it, then afterwards the old one can be thrown away? Obviously that hasn't happened, and surely the reason is that there is no reasonable alternative that everyone agrees on, and the only way to throw it away and come up with an alternative is to have a single authority force one through and expect it to be one which helps them and their friends and hurts others. Guarding against that is why we have Democracy not Dictatorship in the first place(!) even though Democracy is often inefficient and ineffective.
[1] https://archive.org/details/yes-minister-1980-1984 - a British satire / comedy from the 1980s set where a newly elected government minister finds he's been made head of the Department of Administrative Affairs, a department of 23,000 administrators. Example scene/situation is the new hospital with 500 'seriously overworked' administrative staff and no medical staff or patients: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAk448volww
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
[3] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
While the general impression of free market that is commonly touted does imply what you say, even in its current form people don't carry free market ideas to it's extreme: for example someone could argue that in a true free market you could kill your competitor to gain an edge.
>Although I note that thing_you_like is allowed to be nuanced and complex, and thing_you_dislike must be bad because it's complex.
There are areas where complexity may be needed and not avoidable. (for example a rocket ) . Something similar goes for the land division that I talked about. What I can assure you is that if a land division is not considered, the complexity ( and associated atrocities) are magnified in other areas like the tax code.
>I would like to see laws implemented with test conditions for how we will know if they are working, with a mandatory sunset period for reviewing them and if they aren't meeting the test conditions they automatically expire.
As much as I agree with you on this I don't think it'll happen in practice, simply because most humans are completely incapable of even conceiving those kind of ideas. If you are a developer like me, you are well about the average IQ - so what may seem trivial to you and me is not for the common man or the common elected representative that he elects.
> tax code was in any way optimal
The tax code especially for income tax and property tax, can never be optimal, or if it's optimal it's only for a short time. Because by it's very nature it's predatory. (it's another huge topic as to what can be taxed)
>One person's bureacratic parasite is another person's necessary management.
This mostly true of private companies, less so for a government that writes check to itself.
>I enjoy Yes Minister[1] and am annoyed by the waste it parodies and mocks,
While you did not answer my questions which were directed to you as a person( I assume that most of your answers would be 'no'). I'm glad that you're familiar with "Yes Minister". (I had seen it a few decades back.). Anyway I'm arguing for minimal government and for minimizing any scope creep of the powers that the government may have. Easier said than done. (the mostly legalized and easy to obtain gun ownership in US is one example, which if I interpret correctly was intended to keep the government in check)
Because, I don't think Musk had ever shown issues understanding or even precisely manipulating people's sentiments with bare hands which some of us struggle even with tools, while also there being countless examples him showing lack of understanding of laws, order, code, all such brittle dehumanized systems in general.
All his successes owes to his mastery of orchestrating humans as animals, not machines or humans as intelligent constructs. Why are we nearly dead set that it's opposite of that?
He's long turned about face with that, but that goodwill can die really, really hard (only took until now for Wall Street to very slowly start pulling out). As we see with Donald Trump somehow being relevant some 4 decades after his celebrity fame for a national election.
>Why are we nearly dead set that it's opposite of that?
My impression is that Musk knew to surround himself with good people. Be it coincidence, a Charisma check, or simply throwing cash at them, those people clearly did amazing things and he was the face of it all.
This is more or less the opposite, and his crude behavior navigating government IMO could not have gone worse. He had at least 2 years to sow the seeds and he's instead taking "Drill Baby, Drill" a bit too seriously. I could be very wrong and underestimating him. But he feels more like someone who demands the spotlight, not a mastermind with a precise vision. Those good people are not around him anymore; Trump sure as hell doesn't have a vision past tax cuts for billionaires.
But this audience is more diverse in it's views and is perhaps more willing to challenge it's idols and leaders. Keeping this audience on your side is a constant dialogue where you are constantly challenged and it's a symbiotic-adversarial relationship that results in a stronger whole. Only by getting challenged in a constructive discussion can truly great ideas be born.
But this is hard work and in some sense annoying. Inevitably he gets surrounded by sycophants and yes-men, because these people butter his ego, and comes to realize that there's an audience around who will unquestionably eat up anything their leader says irrespective of it's truthfulness. An audience who doesn't care whether their leaders are good, just that the leader is on their side.
And thus we find ourselves in the current situation, with an entire establishment in the US who will happily broadcast broad faced lies, but these lies are only for their own audience who believes them without question. Or they just don't care at all, because it's not about the truth, it's only about tribalism.
"first principles" doesn't mean "go back to 2 + 2 and reinvent the rest of math".
Musk also did very well by plainly lying (which I would call market manipulation) about Tesla products; the Cybertruck video where Musk claimed it was faster than a Porsche while towing a Porsche was a lie[4]. A 2016 video demonstrating self-driving was faked[5]. Musk's statements about what the Tesla Semi can do were not just generous marketing, they are impossible[6], claiming 500 miles range and PepsiCo reports they can't even carry a load of Lay's potato chips for 500 miles and on heavier loads they can only travel 100 miles. Faked self parking videos, faked SolarCity videos, faked Optimus humanoid robot videos, faked CyberTruck towing an F150 video[7]. The Optimus robots at the October 2024 event were remote controled and remote-voiced by humans[8]. They walk like Honda Asimo robots walked 25 years ago but they're being spun like they are Boston Dynamics killers. Musk's talk of tentacle arms to recharge Teslas never turned into anything (though BYD in China has had public automated electric-car battery-swap stations for years now). Musk's talk of full self driving first promised, what, 2017? turned out to be misleading with cars not even having the hardware to do a good job of it. Musk's early plans for completely automated Model 3 factory faded very quickly with them reverting to humans in marquees.
Yes Musk has done pretty well with investors letting him get away with a lot of broken promises and taxpayers letting him get away with a lot of subsidies and customers letting him get away with a lot of shoddy products. Lucky for him the Tesla engineers were competent true believers(tm) and delivered decent Model 3 and Model Y but that should only give them a similar valuation to other car companies, shouldn't it?
[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-201...
[2] https://itep.org/tesla-reported-zero-federal-income-tax-in-2...
[3] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/10/investing/elon-musk-tesla...
[4] https://www.insidehook.com/autos/no-one-exposes-elon-musk-li...
[5] https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-faked-video-in-2016-pr...
[6] https://www.autoevolution.com/news/tesla-semi-gets-debunked-...
[7] https://dawnproject.com/teslas-history-of-faking-demonstrati...
[8] https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/13/24269131/tesla-optimus-r...
Their jobs and approaches were protected by middle/upper management constructing stories for Musk about how it was revolutionary, and all he heard was agreement.
Fidelity estimates X (Twitter) is worth 80% less than when Musk bought it[1].
The Boring Company has raised ~$795M of investment valuing it at $5.6Bn and in 7 years it has delivered a 2.4 mile tunnel under Las Vegas which cost $48M and $4.5M/year. It was going to use self driving Teslas but actually they pay drivers to drive the cars, to move 1-3 people at ~40 miles per hour, and The Boring Company subsidises it by another couple of million per year. This money could have bought a lot of buses which would move more people more cheaply. Bus Rapid Transit, but worse.
[0] https://seekingalpha.com/article/4487247-how-spacex-makes-mo...
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitte...
[2] https://fortune.com/2023/11/20/elon-musk-boring-company-las-...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boring_Company#Inactive_an...
That's not a good comment, especially in the light of dang's callout at the top of this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42992992 "don't post low-information / high-indignation comments that could just as easily appear in any related thread. Such generic comments make discussion less interesting and more activating.".
The issue is that one can write as many paragraphs as they want, if the goal of those paragraphs is to obscure some basic truths then they will gain:
- laudation from sycophants;
- mere rejection from "basic facts enjoyers".
Your dismissal of Musk's accomplishments and companies for political reasons is also a dismissal of all the people who have trusted him with their time and effort to build all those wonders. What they've accomplished is great, and it obviously would not have happened without him.