It's easy to judge whether reducing government waste and improving living standards is good/bad (obviously it's good). What will be less enduring is the current Elon-hate which is more based on tribalism and mood than reason.
I don’t even want to begin listing them because it might burn some people, but here goes:
- empathy (cannot sit side by side with ruthlessness)
- honesty (cannot sit side by side with corruption)
- charity (cannot sit side by side with greed)
- morality (cannot sit side by side with amorality)
- peaceful (cannot sit side by side with power hunger, vindictiveness)
Those aren’t exactly culture fits in tech. So, what do we have here? Non-empathetic corrupt amoral greedy power hungry genius. The last trait is the only one you see, for whatever reason.
We are not saints, but we have fucking try a little bit here.
Or people just disagree with you.
> It's easy to judge whether reducing government waste and improving living standards is good/bad (obviously it's good).
What you have described is obviously good. The question remains whether DOGE will achieve those aims, or if it does, whether the side-effects of its work will outweigh the benefits. To go back to the Iraq war, the mission statement of destroying weapons of mass destruction was obviously good. Unfortunately, there were no weapons of mass destruction, and even if there had been, the tremendous chaos and cost of the operation would have been a large price to pay.
I am sceptical that DOGE is really about efficiency in the first place. And even if it is, I am even more sceptical that they will be able to achieve these aims, based on the behaviour that they have shown so far, and based on what I have already experienced of government efficiency initiatives.
The US ruling class periodically senses "blood in the water", and sets things up for a "feeding frenzy" (money and/or power), where a small, well-connected elite engorge themselves on hapless victims.
Iraq and Afghanistan provided such opportunities during my lifetime, and before that, it was the Vietnam war, and history has plenty more examples farther back.
In this most recent feeding frenzy, it appears to me, that the victims are some important (maybe critical) parts of the US itself. A sort of auto-cannibalism, if you will.
Don't be so silly. Outside of a few small areas like fraud, if something is "government waste" or not is often totally subjective Is NASA "government waste"? Arguably it is (though Musk and most of HN would disagree).
I'd argue what Musk is doing isn't "eliminating waste" or "increasing efficiency," but rather implementing a purely opinionated refactoring to match his views.