Hacker News Reader

Comment by kemayo | Hacker News Reader

The most charitable interpretation is that Musk's doing what he did at Twitter -- wildly cutting back, and then backing off and repairing when he finds that something he threw away was actually necessary.

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.

View on HN

A key difference is that twitter has (had) users, and users can move to e.g. bluesky once twitter's CEO decides to wreck it. The US has citizens instead, not users, not customers, but citizens, and citizens can't move if they don't like what Elon is doing. There is no Bluesky equivalent of the USA, and citizenship is not a free market.

A country is not a private company in a free market. For some this is hard to understand.

The thing about Charleston's fence is you don't know why the fence was erected. But we do. The government created it, and the government can remove it.

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.

The argument you’re making is potentially valid but we can’t know for sure as it depends on numbers you don’t provide - how much government growth there’s been since 1990.

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.

Which group is it that spends all the money? From this chart it seems like the line goes up under Democrats and down under Republicans. Since the Clinton years.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSD/

To be fair, if you ignore the war, it's not spending that makes the deficit go up under Republicans; it's the tax cuts. It's like announcing you are going to get your household finances together by quitting your job.

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.

> The thing about Charleston's fence is you don't know why the fence was erected. But we do. The government created it, and the government can remove it.

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.

> "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 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.

Well, it would be incredibly ironic if its a musk outage that starts the 2nd American revolution

except when things break, actual people in the country get harmed, and "Repairing" in this case will be privatization

Yes, I wasn't trying to imply that it was a good approach to apply to the US government. ;_;

And the federal workforce outside of the military is only like 4.5% of the federal budget

Of course there's a lot of factors, but the people who defend his cutbacks at twitter often ignore just how crappy the platform has gotten under his relatively tenure.

The challenge is that he is following his values and not the values of the country.

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...

Its not really an interpretation- he has literally talked about this as his playbook dozens of times.

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.

The biggest problem for people like you is that there are plenty governments and companies that are being led by competent leaders that don’t need to wield an axe to effect change. To the people wielding the axe, every problem looks like a tree.

You think breaking things for 10% of Americans is not harmful?

Of course it isn't, for him; that 10% is people who rely on the state, which means the poor. He is not poor, he does not need the state. Until, that is, he has an accident, a surprise, something that derails his "normal" life, and then he will cry that the government wasn't there to save him.

America runs on the myth of "If you work hard enough, you'll succeed.". If you believe this, and you discount the role external factors has played in your life (who your parents are, whether you were discriminated against, that chance meeting with an investor who happened to like the same football team as you and gave you your break), you'll believe the opposite "If you're not successful, it's because you're lazy.", ignoring factors like poor education or hard luck like illness or accidents.

And so the poor get viewed as lazy grifters, while the billionaires are the piously hard-working...

I would point out that former twitter lost both advertisers (you know money resource) and users. Its usability went down. Now the obvious difference is that x dont matter to people in real life, goverment does.

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.

Why are we giving these people charitable interpretations any more? Elon Musk did a full on nazi salute at the inauguration rally; since then he and his cronies have extralegally tried to insert themselves inside the entire american government to cripple the regulations that prevent him and other techno-fascists doing exactly what they want with their effectively infinite money.

You need to call a spade a spade. Occam's razor is being held to the neck of this country.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com