https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...
Not every fence still has a use, but I hope they have a good think about what they're doing.
Not every fence still has a use, but I hope they have a good think about what they're doing.
When people express worry over superhuman-AI alignment on forums like this, I find myself wishing they'd shift focus to the fact that we actually already have a problem with the mis-alignment of super-human entities in the form of large corporations and the billionaires who control them. (And yes, governments too; the whole point of our democratic form of government is that it's supposed to keep that behemoth better aligned with the values and will of "the people".)
To me it seems obvious that keeping a misaligned super-AGI from destroying humanity and keeping billionares and large multinational corporations from destroying humanity with climate change in the long-term or just degrading our quality of life (via pollution, wealth inequality, etc.) in the short term are really just differences of degree and not of kind.
But we actually have the latter problem right now, and, as a bonus, if we can figure out better ways of aligning our carbon-based and economic-legal system "overlords" in the present maybe it helps point us toward a better way of aligning our potential silicon-based "overlords" in the future.
oh wait
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_inspectors_...
I'm pretty sure I would pay 2 dollars to not have to deal with any of those consequences.
Those 'costs' to society are 'profits' to the banks. You don't get to have a choice about it. Elon is in charge and he's going with the banks.
We have, in no particular order:
- The FDIC
- The SEC
- The Federal Reserve Board
- The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency
Those agencies regulate banking. Then we can go further and we have:
- The National Credit Union Organization
- The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA)
- The Financial Insurance Office (part of Treasury)
- The Office of Foreign Assets Control
- The Securities Investor Protection Corp.
- The Commodity Futures Trading Commission
- EBISA, ERISA, PBGC for retirement plans...
And we need an additional agency because...?
We don't need the CFPB.
Until someone can answer me that question with a link to a form I can fill out with an agency that has a track record of actually fixing these problems, you've made no progress on convincing me we don't need the CFPB.
It's not obvious to me that some other agency will pick up the same responsibilities. If it happens without a budget change elsewhere then obviously DOGE would be right in cutting this particular agency.
For a recap: https://youtu.be/ovcno7tiZas
He's just going to plant himself at the end of the conveyor belt of fresh cookies with his mouth open, and get rid of everything else.
Musk is going to try and entrench himself so much, that he'll never be able to countenance his opposition winning and removing him. Unless Trump dislodges him first, he's going to be a permanent problem.
I'm not convinced that this is a good strategy when dealing with something with higher stakes than "posting dank memes", though. "Oops, that broke for a few days" matters a lot more when the thing that breaks is, say, paying out money for social security.
That is, as you said, sometimes the fence-that-is-inefficient-processes exists for a reason.
EDIT TO BE LESS SUBTLE BASED ON REPLIES: I think this is bad. Even in the most-charitable interpretation, it is bad. Particularly for the government, but even at Twitter it succeeded at making it smaller but approximately-nobody thinks Twitter is better now.
One step in the playbook is reduce - “if you dont break things 10% of the time then you are not reducing enough” is almost verbatim what he has said, and done, for all of his companies.
I strongly disagree with my fellow Americans that government systems should be immune to this process or that people will be harmed. This sensitivity to perceived harm is a problem in and of itself.
And so the poor get viewed as lazy grifters, while the billionaires are the piously hard-working...
It is pretty obvious that real goal here is to cause maximal harm and destruction. Fascists do better in destroyed countries, Musk does not need consumer protection or functional FBI, he wants them corrupt and weak. Just as he made x weaker.
I am aware that pro-Musk people do not care about ethics, harm, morals or legality. Harm to other people is feature to people like you, I get it.
A country is not a private company in a free market. For some this is hard to understand.
The Twitter analogy is that racist and disinformation posts are perfectly fine to Musk so after gutting all of the teams looking after these things, he was perfectly fine with the large increase in both.*
We shouldn't expect a different outcome with his changes to the government. We should expect large increases in abuses by banks (because regulation was gutted), large increases in racism and disparity in Alabama public schools (because the Department of Education was gutted), etc. etc.
* https://english.elpais.com/technology/2025-02-13/hate-speech...
You need to call a spade a spade. Occam's razor is being held to the neck of this country.
A wild and ruthless cut would mean that the US Government would revert to a similar relative size it was in say, 1990. Back then Debt to GDP was about 60%, now it's over 120%, for measurably worse outcomes, wage stagnation, housing costs, healthcare, education, etc. One vocal group seems to think that we could solve it by spending more money and creating more programs. You know what they say about repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting different results.
There’s two extra nuances too. First, what’s been the corresponding capability growth; and second, what’s been the growth in population served.
It may be that, controlling for these factors, things are more efficient than back then. And to go back would require removing capability that would be missed by some - or be critical due to today’s more complex world.
And they are doing it again. The latest budget proposal involves ~4 trillion in tax cuts and ~2 trillion in spending cuts. Wild for a group that a few months ago was panicking at how much debt we have.
Knowing Bob put up the fence is not the same as knowing WHY Bob put up the fence. You've answered the who, not the why.
That depends on your perspective. I'm sure there are people out there who think that since social security goes to people who aren't economically productive that it's not a thing that matters. I disagree with those people, but defining what matters is critical, and for Musk & co "what matters" is only anything that enriches Musk & co.
Chesterton primarily meant that in terms of traditional morality or other things that have largely already been totally rejected, he denied the existence of divorce because it presumes the state can dissolve oaths which is just to reject the existence of oaths.
Artificial institutions that have existed for a matter of decades don't make sense to apply the fence idea to, that's more about things that have been timeless in humanity that we recently started to reject.
This is true. There are things that, once done, cannot be undone. You can try to fix their consequences. You can change what you do going forward, so that the thing would not be done that way again. But you can't, say, un-kill an executed innocent.
> Artificial institutions that have existed for a matter of decades don't make sense to apply the fence idea to, that's more about things that have been timeless in humanity that we recently started to reject.
It matters a little bit what he originally meant, but not a whole lot. What we mean with the fence is simply that you should do a bit of due diligence before making changes. That applies to all sorts of systems, government or IT, or anything else.
There is no mystery why these institutions that are 30 years old exist, we have the documents and probably the people that formed them still around. We know what they got paid for and what they did. It's a very different thing if we have some cultural historical tradition (say gender roles, alcohol, only males voting, the stuff Chesterton actually talked that were actually issues at the time) that has persisted for centuries or thousands of years being upended because "i don't like it" without understanding it's actual structure.
Here's another good quote (the book is free to read, quotes are no way for actual human beings to think https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/470/pg470-images.html#c... ) >Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, “Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good—” At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.
And before people think "Oh yeah this applies to USAID" this is specifically in the context of people upending historically common beliefs Chesterton viewed himself as a great defender of. If you don't think morality and truthe are real and goodness is a part of nature you are still living in violation of that and that's probably why you have a hard time understanding why people are against things like USAID. Chesterton would be disgusted to be used in such a manner.
You're suggesting the DOGE folks actually read these documents and talked to the people?
> If you don't think morality and truthe[sic] are real and goodness is a part of nature you are still living in violation of that and that's probably why you have a hard time understanding why people are against things like USAID.
I believe morality and truth are real, and that both good and evil are part of human nature, but I still don't understand why people have it in for USAID. Well, I understand why the radical Left has traditionally disliked it, because they see it as advancing US "imperialism", but I reject that rationale. I don't get why American conservatives, who claim to believe in morality and truth (which include principles like "help your neighbor"), and also advancing American interests in the world want to destroy an agency that combines both.
Note: this is separate from the question of whether any particular aid project is worthwhile. I'm sure many aren't, and those should be shut down through the regular political process. This isn't what's happening right now.
It's a problem with bureaucracies. They bloat. They grow. They never shrink.
Byzantine bureaucracies refer to the notion that this got out of hand shortly before the collapse of what remained of the Roman empire at that point. Bureaucracies are also sometimes referred to as Kafkaesque to indicate how nonsensical, illogical, and absurdist bureaucracies can become.
Anyway, the US federal bureaucracy is enormous. It employs massive amounts of people. It's complicated, vast, and very change resistant. The task of doing something about that is so intimidating that no recent previous government has had the nerve to do anything significant about that. They all chickened out and instead just added their own layers of more bureaucracy to the mix. It's easier to add stuff to the pile than to take stuff away from it. So, after a few centuries of that, there's probably a lot of stuff there that barely makes sense to anyone.
The department highlighted in the article strikes me like a good example of a product of such a bureaucracy.
The article barely explains why this apparently very large, expensive, and richly staffed department exist, what it does, and why that is so important. It also fails to outline what kind of budget it has and what the intended purpose of that budget is.
I can't really judge based on this article whether taking a sledge hammer to that department is a good thing or not. The article seems to suggest it isn't but I can't say it's very convincing.
That chat bot that they highlight doesn't strike me as "key technology". Quite the opposite actually. The article raises more questions than it answers here. What was that thing supposed to do? Who was it for? Who backed/approved this? Why? How much did that cost? What else do people in that department do? All reasonable questions to ask.
At < 3 million people this is substantially under its peak and at about its level in the 1960's, and a smaller fraction of the workforce than pretty much everywhere. Wages are 0.9 per cent of the federal budget.
Right, exactly. And neither can Musk, really. So at this point, the answer isn't to just go ahead and take a sledge hammer to it. The correct course would be to actually go through the Congress and ask those very reasonable questions you pose. But Musk doesn't even want to work with with the Congressional DOGE Committee he set up. That's highly concerning.
That's risky in politics because that will be used and abused against you.
"Good" news then, this is already the case! Or should very much be assumed to be the case, following the various GSA hacks.
Obviously, for a government staffed with experienced people, you'll be working with people who know how things work, and an incoming administration will have spent plenty of time outlining a plan of action well in advance of coming into office.
Does that apply to a notorious shitposting edgelord like Musk who is storming around like a bull in a china shop and sees the US as his new plaything? I doubt it - I certainly doubt any level of thinking is involved.
They probably did, if you look at it from a perspective of deliberately ruining the government. It looks like they are trying to reduce the government to nothing more than the IRS. Everything else will either get permanently trashed (any kind of consumer protection), sold off for parts, or contracted out to a private company started by one of their buddies.
Yeah, it might result in a very chaotic transition period, but these people don't care. They are rich enough that it's not going to personally affect them, and in the end they'll end up even richer. The entire goal right now is to do so much damage that it is going to take decades to restore - if it's even possible at all.
Elon Musk (and the billionaire class he represents) doesn't want a functioning CFPB because it doesn't serve him (or them). It will take a little while for them to fully sabotage the IRS and DOE as well, but they're working their way up to it.
Oh, I'm sure the parts that make sure I pay my taxes will function. But yeah, the parts that make sure Elon and Trump pay their taxes? If they aren't broken today, they will definitely be broken tomorrow.
Seems like a forced meta critique.