Anyone can push updates to the doge.gov website
404media.co
404media.co
The way the government has been run the past decades doesn't work, demonstrably. Every important metric has worsened.
Understandably everyone is upset about what "DOGE" is doing. But on top of those harms, the killing of USDS (or at least ending its core mission) is also a real harm.
Although overshadowed by Kubernetes elsewhere in the industry, I suspect that Pivotal's Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service (PaaS)--which the US General Services Administration's (GSA) internal digital transformation consultancy, 18F, adopted[0] in 2015 significantly influenced the software delivery philosophy of the federal government by making trivial heretofore disastrously cumbersome provisioning, staging, and deployment processes. The step away from hand-provisioned virtual machines to elastic, accommodating environments may have made agile development possible in federal offices, bringing our government into the 21st century, only fifteen years late.
I distinctly remember the switch from "here's your VM" to "here's my code," and--as an application developer--I never want to go back.
0. See: https://cloud.gov
"Internal team, what's your current greatest pain point?" -> Make that easier / faster / better
Where have we heard this before?
They even broke the USGS earthquake maps. Yesterday morning you could check the site for new quakes anywhere on earth and end up with a really good idea where it was on earth because there were several map styles available as overlays - Terrain, gray scale, street, ocean, etc.
Yesterday afternoon the only map layer available was an ocean layer showing continents, islands, seafloor profiles etc with no place names available at all.
Late yesterday night or early this morning they added another layer, USGS topo, that has generalized landforms and cultural stuff like roads, with enough detail that you can zoom in and find your town here in the USA. The problem is that this layer is totally broken outside the US.
If you are like me and you're monitoring new activity in the Aegean Sea that topo layer is completely broken. If you zoom to a level where you would expect to see individual towns, etc you will find the Aegean Sea labeled as being in the Pacific Ocean and all the coastline and landform data completely broken so that it isn't possible to identify any of the islands that could be affected in the region.
If you look at all the seas in the Mediterranean you will find it labeled as the Pacific Ocean and that label persists all the way across the Atlantic at that zoom level until Bermuda where you can see the Atlantic Ocean label.
Frankly, whoever did this probably has a good start on eating a giant bag of dicks.
It is happening contemporaneously with all the other bullshittery so I think it is a reasonable conclusion that DoGE personnel directed by someone likely unelected and so far unaccountable are the parties responsible.
I'm not sure why someone would intentionally destroy the utility of a site that has been extremely useful, not only for Americans but for people anywhere who needed to understand earthquakes and their local historical seismicity.
I can't remember at time in at least the last 15 years when the site has not worked flawlessly serving data about new and historical seismicity from all over the globe in a way that allowed the user to customize the view to fit their own needs.
I agree with a couple of posters that think this may be an effort to rename the GoM to the GoA since all the place names are missing from the Ocean map and the places names that are present on the USGS topo map are full of stupid errors that suggest that they modified naming of water features and it broke something for their map layer.
As an oil and gas industry person I have to chuckle to think about all the things that have to happen for that industry to ever come into compliance with this bullshit renaming. There are thousands of wells in databases globally named with a Gulf of Mexico nomenclature. That's just the wells. Each of them likely has multiple dozen products with a GoM tag to identify the well it belongs to. There are probably millions of line miles of seismic data from dozens of large and small seismic data acquisition projects, all of which use GoM nomenclature since the standard nomenclature in the industry relates things to a Client, Line, Area, Survey or similar parameters so that if it happened in the Gulf it will have GoM in the name somewhere and in the metadata associated with the project since that is how you geolocate things in the industry. You reference it to an actual physical location known to less than a cm in many cases.
Sounds like a lot of busy work for anyone in the industry and possibly an opportunity for a consultant to step in and handle all the renaming that will need to happen if there is any effort to comply. They'll need to know multiple databases upside down and sideways since each operator manages things their own way. And they'll need to be comfortable sitting idle while the IT guys sort out access permissions for every legacy file and folder once they discover where the data management division has them stored. You'll also be the fall guy if some of the data gets corrupted but, shit happens. Sounds like a sweet gig.
Give us the inside view from your office chair.
I just think that there are lots of incompetent people in government to begin with who could have messed this up in an attempt to rename, and was interested in understanding whether you had inside info about whether it was the people in DOGE. You have a lot of insightful info in your response, but none that looks like a smoking gun to me like "I know someone at USGS who saw it being done", so to me it looks like an accusation that might not stick. That's all. But we're on the same side here.
Thanks for your clarifying reply as it helps to understand where you're coming from.
>I just think that there are lots of incompetent people in government to begin with who could have messed this up in an attempt to rename
As I mentioned earlier up in the thread when you raised concerns about things breaking all the time due to incompetence, this site has a long history of delivering timely information to global users without breaking. When massive changes like the ones that we observe happen which affect how information is delivered those things are routinely announced in advance and users are provided an opportunity to use the "upgraded" version of the service and submit observations about usability, etc so that there is ample time to take user input before it goes live, replacing the old method of data delivery and/or display.
These changes happened between breakfast that morning and early afternoon with no announcements to users that anything on the site would be changed. All these display options disappeared and in their place we initially had a single layer with no place name information at all. A user would need to know some geography in order to be able to figure where the new quakes were occurring.
Sadly enough, that means that some users would see a nice map overlay with dots on it but would not know where those events occurred due to deficiencies in their education.
Since that first set of deletions, another layer was added, the USGS Topo layer and that layer has since been updated to rename a large body of water to Gulf of America and that is the label that appears when the site loads. There are place names, roads, terrain, rivers, etc in that layer so it is easier for even the non-geography nerds to determine where an event occurs relative to their own location.
Other changes have happened and from the changes it is reasonable to conclude that the persons making the changes did not have experience using the GIS software that enables all these useful displays. With that in mind it becomes increasingly unlikely that regular USGS employees made these changes since there obviously are people there at the agency who have all the skills needed to quickly change things without breaking them and the normal process of notifying users of upcoming site changes was not followed.
Overall I think it is unfortunate that you have so little trust in federal government employees. I have a dog in the hunt so I have a window into how things work at the federal level. My spouse has had a decades long career in a federal agency and I can tell you that the individual people in the agency are not usually the problem.
Every time there is a new administration that new administration has the opportunity to nominate new leadership for all the departments. You already know this and have seen it in action. The positions are seen as an opportunity to promote the agenda of the new administration and to reward those who helped them be elected. Too often we see people installed as agency heads who have no background domain experience or worse, they have experience in sectors that did not benefit from following agency guidelines about handling federal monies. They are there to shake things up and they bring a list of things that must be changed to fit the new agenda.
The agency employees have to adjust everything that they do to fit the new agenda and this causes inefficiencies in the system as all existing employees have to be trained on how the new director wants the agency to work and on the new director's guidelines and agenda. I can say that it is increasingly common for an agency to need to educate new directors about what they are constitutionally allowed to do so that some of the new agenda does not force nor does it allow anyone downstream to break any existing laws.
Governments are large. Any time something gets large there is the possibility that inefficiencies develop.
The decision to describe government employees as incompetent is inaccurate in general though I'm sure there are exceptions. You think there are "lots" of incompetent people in government and at any description of "lots" between a couple and thousands you are likely correct.
Don't paint them all with the same brush. Maintaining a government position involves annual training and recertifications, deciphering the meaning behind small changes in the text of rules and guidelines that they must follow, and understanding how to manage groups of people efficiently so that everyone stays engaged in their assigned tasks and meets targets assigned by agency "leadership".
My own definition of "lots" based on years of observations and conversations with someone inside a large federal agency is that the least competent are frequently found at the top of the agency and they bring their own group of managers into the agency in order to pivot to their new agenda. Those lower on the food chain must attempt to adjust or seek a transfer to an agency with less induced dysfunction or to a private entity.
I don't personally think that rate of competence in federal workforce is worse than any other big organization, especially outside of politically appointed leadership. Massive leadership changes can still create operational disruption by offering the opportunity for career brownnosers to demonstrate their fealty by empowering them to force their zeal onto others. I wonder if something like that happened here, where some MAGAt within USGS staff decided to skip a bunch of review process either to make themselves look good or out of fear that they'd look like they're resisting orders.
Trying to sea-lion your way through this convo after the person replying to you gave a detailed breakdown of the situation is gross. Don't be a sycophant.
Isn't renaming a place rather common? Even nations were recently renamed (Swaziland, Macedonia).
Therefore the software (database included) managing the data (used by the USGS earthquake's) probably offers a way to rename a place.
Is there any documentation exposing how to perform such a renaming? Is it up to date and accessible (or did someone modify/hide it in order to annoy DOGE)? Was it not strictly followed by the person(s) who tried to rename this Gulf? Are all technical thingies associated to such a renaming free of major bugs?
If all answers to those questions are "yes" then the person(s) who tried to rename is the sole culprit.
If there is a single "no" then at least another person should be put into scrutiny.
Pretty obvious that they aren't sending their best to do their dirty work. These DoGE guys are ultimately expendable and if things go south for the current administration the DoGE guys will need to be absorbent enough to handle all the blame that will fall on them when people begin to be held accountable. They need to be multi-layered Downy guys. The men at the top will slick themselves down with lawyers so it all slides downhill and hang everyone else out to dry once they are past their usefulness date.
There is no problem from their point of view, they are succeeding from their perspective, and musk's, and trump's and every other anti-america neo nazi shitlicker who got them there.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/thousands-fired-trump-musk-...
Is that possible? Every commit id includes the hash of the parent commit forming a chain.
From the docker file:
curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.3/install.shEdit: Whoops sorry, morning fog
However it would be pretty insane to argue that a citizen of a country should need to pay money for someone to fill out a basic tax return to pay taxes…
The rest of us hate it.
Complex political issues sometimes just come down to "I want my side to look good and I want the other side to look bad". In a system that treats Silicon Valley billionaires very differently to someone selling lumber in rural Ohio, sometimes that naked tribalism is the only thing that truly unites people in political parties.
Some people hate the IRS self-filing system because it works, and because the "other side" is taking credit for it.
On the other hand, creating an office whose sole objective is to destroy other functioning parts of the government and make it less useful to people? Totally moral.
Don't ask me, I'm not a conservative.
American Conservatives don't believe the government is evil, they believe that not having control over the government is evil. The slash and burning of agencies and departments isn't just due to a deep seated hatred, it's a need for control. And in order to have control you need consolidation.
American Conservatives have no problems with state governments vastly overreaching their authority or punishing cities. They have no issue with potentially taxing workers more to issue tax breaks for corporations. And they have no issue using the government to punish, stalk or harass dissidents.
Governments don't have a particularly good track record, so why give them the benefit of the doubt? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide
According to Rummel, democide surpassed war as the leading cause of non-natural death in the 20th century.
A government that is as weak as possible at least possesses less organizational capacity for murdering you when things inevitably go off the rails.
Why is your starting point not the default for most reasonable people - that the government is literally people from that society trying to manage their own affairs and to help each other when possible?
> Why is your default assumption that government will "go off the rails"?
It kind of is right now...
... but then again, I'm not a conservative ...
Doesn't seem particularly hard to justify that assumption right about now.
Because the government (at both state and federal levels) has been not this for several decades now. Legislative capture is wild stuff.
This take should lead to less government POWER and involvement in individual lives though and doesn't match with policy that empowers an astronomically sized "defense" budget, lawmakers deciding how every woman everywhere should deal with pregnancy and health issues that affect pregnancy, or giving unbridled, unreviewed access to every citizens personal and financial data to unelected, unaccountable oligarchs.
I actually agree with your take - I have a lot of conservative views like you described about how government is inherently hard and flawed and risky so we should use it sparingly.
We've seen so much flying in the face of this recently that I make a point of not calling republicans conservative anymore, not to be pithy but just to try to bring some grounding to these culture war arguments.
The state does not have an actual monopoly on violence, and never has. It merely provides a threat of organized, systematic retribution to try to prevent private-party violence. But that illegal violence still happens. Just at a lower rate than it would otherwise.
Remember that the alternative is not paradise, it is not a system that is "on the rails", it's everybody trying to murder you to get ahead. And in that world having a gun doesn't protect you - guns favor the one who shoots first. Does a tiny village from the past where everybody knows everybody and depends on everybody have that problem to a high degree, or need a large government? No. But that's not the world we live in.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
[1] Ok, I admit, nobody but me has actually made the intersection between the two yet.
In other words, there’s no point in arguing about the purpose. If you want the system to do something else, you have to change the system.
For a more traditional phrasing: "actions speak louder than words."
But the projects that are being funded today don’t resemble the ones in the 60s-80s. And thats not to suggest it previously was unbiased and now is politicized, but the parties and their values have changed. So that old bureaucratic organization has a new mission
Giving out crops promoted the idea that market capitalism brought prosperity. That isn’t enough for liberalism which has moved up Maslows hierarchy to meaning and purpose. Physical aid is merely a means for bringing the true goods - social justice, equity, inclusion, education, etc.
Or what to call the side-effects of a system going away.
One of the statistics I read was that the average American judges foreign aid at 31% of the Federal budget instead of the true 1%. In one way, that’s remarkable efficiency: 31x perception. In another way, it gives bad actors in the government an advantage: by cutting a measly 1%, you can rely on uninformed Americans to give you credit for 31x cuts.
Design for Prevention (2010) ISBN 978-0-937063-05-7
Friends in High Places (1990) ISBN 937063-06-1
Have Fun at Work (1988) ISBN 0-937063-05-3
The New Plague (1986) ISBN 0-937063-03-7
POSIWID is mentioned in the first three works; engineer William L. Livingston authored the latter three.
Ukraine would have been rejected slightly more politely by Harris. You're elevating a rhetorical difference to obscure that AIPAC primarying two democrats over their stance on israel gave republicans the house.
It sure would be nice to not have just a rhetorical difference over our most shame-ridden ally. But yea, Putin is dog walking trump into checks notes pushing for cutting military and nuclear stockpiles. Disgusting.
I hate Trump, but it's this conspiratorial crap about Putin while refusing to acknowledge AIPAC that makes me know moderates/centrists/maddow-watchers will always cave to ignorance and fear.
Straight from the russofascist playbook.
You can trivially look up donations. It's difficult to link to just AIPAC so I'll just put this here: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/06/09/aipac-republican-do...
Mind you, this is still a stronger case for another state blatantly interfering in our elections than the what $36 million to the NRA and a small buy of facebook ads (~$100k, which is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to domestic interests). And this alleged "kompromat" (good grief, read better propaganda)
seems to be some sort of pathology
I wouldn't say they're "burning things down for the sake of burning things down", though. The truth is somewhere between what you and gp are contending. There's no moral framework, but there is a framework. They're burning things down so that "the free market" can replace the things they burn down and capture the money that used to go towards doing those things for the public good, and instead do those things for a private profit.
I strongly feel like these guys see what happened in Russia and see it as a success: the "weak" soviet union was replaced by a "strong" Putin-controlled Russia. The collapse in living standards, lawlessness, etc, was acceptable collateral damage.
It is kind of funny that the people who complain about the "deep state" with some kind of goal actually create something similar with an actual goal.
If the fear of fascism raised by some is accurate, it seems more likely we'll see these agencies gutted and rebuilt as whatever the Trump administration wants them to be instead. No smaller government, just a different one.
I live in D.C. and many of my neighbors are non-political civil servants of all kinds. All signs point to a dramatically smaller and weaker federal government without congressional action.
Whether these agencies that congress created and funded for decades will continue to exist in any meaningful way is de facto getting decided by congress right now.
The Vought/Musk group has fired 200,000 employees already, and is offloading real-estate as quickly as possible. That action is consistent with gutting, but not rebuilding, these agencies.
So congress either has to exercise its power over the executive to prevent this in the next few weeks, or the loss of capacity will have occurred and rebuilding will take many years and be dramatically more costly than maintenance would have been.
Were those full-time employees or contractors of some type?
Normally I would just look this up myself, but things have been moving so quickly that the info I find is all over the place and I haven't found a short list of sources to trust.
My understanding was that they "offered" early retirement, not sure how much of an option it was versus a demand. I had also heard they cancelled a lot of contract work, I wouldn't consider that being fired but yeah it does still impact people similarly.
That was an earlier wave, but things are moving so quickly it's understandable people are getting confused. The two hundred thousand terminated I referred to above are (roughly) all the employees in their probationary period (which is typically two years, but it varies by position) across the whole federal public sector workforce.
If we were to include contractors (e.g. USAID contractors), more than two hundred thousand people have been terminated by executive action since the start of the administration.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/15/trump-purges-real-w...
Unfortunately this kind of comes with the territory when granting power to an authority - jobs can be created, they can also be taken away.
Whether this is "right" for our country is probably a matter of perspective, but I do feel for everyone impacted directly. This is a pretty shitty situation to find yourself in and I don't know what the job market will look for them short term - if its anything like tech the last year or so its pretty miserable.
Elon is literally closing agencies like the CFPB and USAID down, in defiance of congress and the law. They are working under a legal theory that the president can do that, and are expecting their stacked supreme court to agree with them.
Is he? I mean this as an honest question, things have moved quickly enough that its hard to keep up.
My understanding that they have been temporarily closing offices or stopping work. I wouldn't consider that as "literally closing agencies" though, at least for me that reads as closing them down permanently rather than temporarily closing the doors.
I don't ask this to defend what they're doing at all. I think we could be much worse off if they're only gutting the agencies without closing them completely.
The executive branch has been given an immense amount of authority over the last half century or so, if that is used to rebuild different agencies technically still fulfilling congressional mandates for USAID or CFPB we could be in for a rude awakening.
Authority is fine when you agree with it, but as soon as the wrong person has that same power you may find you wish it was never granted in the first place.
Most of them were pretty weakly defined and they were given legal precedent to define what their own authority was (unless specifically defined by Congress). The departments could be kept with more clear definitions of what they need to do and what success looks like.
That isn't clear yet from what I've seen. Destroying or knee capping departments is one thing rebuilding them as private or functionally private organizations is another level.
If they are planning to do this I don't think we've seen any direct signs of it yet, though I don't know how it could be anything other than fascism at that point.
Because they are, in fact, obviously constitutional. The mechanism for eliminating them contemplated by the constitution is for congress to pass a law eliminating them.
If you disagree with my view on this, perhaps you'll be persuaded by voluminous case law over decades upholding the constitutionality of all of these Federal government agencies in face of challenges of precisely the kind you're motioning toward.
At this point I feel like anyone who disagrees with this should explain how things work in the alternative. If the executive can just unilaterally declare laws invalid, how does anything get done? Why pass laws at all?
There is gray area when Congress says we need a department to manage our education system, for example, and sets a budget. Congress is only approving the spending there, at least to me that means it can be spent but doesn't have to be spent in full.
Now it is the executive branch's job to execute on that department. I think it would be a stretch for them to just not create the department. Their job is to properly and effectively implement what congress asked for though, and it is reasonable for someone coming in to say that what was done in the past isn't meeting Congress's request.
That isn't to say Trump is making a legitimate or reasoned argument in that vein, but the power is there at which point you have a weird legal battle attempting to decide who can make a better case for the success of any specific department. With congress defining little to no metrics for success that battle seems largely to be in the eye of the beholder.
You are welcome to imagine an alternate legal system from first principles, but please do not present it as U.S. law. The question of whether president has to "[spend] in full" has been settled by legislation and litigation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Budget_and_Impou...
> Their job is to properly and effectively implement what congress asked for though
No it is not. Their job as laid out in the Constitution is to faithfully implement the laws. Not "properly and effectively", where what's proper and effective are determined by them. "Faithfully" is the word used in the Constitution.
They are to implement the laws for Congress, and if the executive finds those laws sloppy and wasteful and not proper, he doesn't get to just not do them. Again, I ask you, why pass laws at all if the executive can just decide to not do them?
> but the power is there at which point you have a weird legal battle attempting to decide who can make a better case for the success of any specific department
There is no battle -- it's there in a plain reading of the Constitution, and the impoundment act of 1974 makes explicit. And even what you say is true, there should be more of a process for the Executive branch to do these things; because the power is so broad, in the spirit of checks and balances they should be conferring with the Congress rather than asserting blanket and unchecked authority.
Sure, we can debate semantics here if you want. I'm fine swapping in "faithfully execute" into my prior comment though, that's basically what I meant without going word for word constitutional.
My point remains though. "Faithful execution" is in the eye of the beholder and is up for debate. One person may see the Department of Education as faithfully executing the congressional mandate while another could see it as poorly run, inefficient, or point to our education level relative to other countries. Both would have good arguments to make.
Further, I don't read Congress's power to approve the budget as part of the mandate for a department. Congress isn't saying "spend XX billion and build an education department," they're saying "build an education department and don't spend more than XX."
That can surely be debated in a legal context, but I think you would be hard pressed to find many average people that would read a budget as a "spend every penny" mandate. Many corporations operate this way, and while in my experience people will spend their full budget to avoid a decrease next year they are also well aware of the absurdity of that.
The impoundment law itself was/is controversial and this will surely be challenged in court on those grounds. The question still remains, though, whether any miscarriage of the law us found in departments being shut down. Its too early, mainly because they at least appear to be acting rashly, but that doesn't mean these departments have been faithfully executing to date.
The semantics here are everything, it's the debate. What does the Constitution mean and what was the purpose of America? We've reached ground zero here.
To me, the purpose of America is a government for the people made possible by checks and balances -- separating powers so that they can't be abused, and giving the people ultimate choice.
Maybe you disagree, because that's not what you are suggesting. If we give in to your reading of the Constitution, the executive has the most power of all branches, which shifts power away from the people in a dramatic way.
I've asked you three times now, and you have evaded the central question -- if the executive can pick and choose laws to enforce, defund departments at whim, what is the point of laws at all?
I suspect you haven't answered it directly because you'd have to admit your reading of the Constitution implies a monarchy. And that's why we are debating semantics now, depending on how the words are interpreted we either have a system of checks and balances, or we have unbalanced unchecked power in the executive branch.
> The impoundment law itself was/is controversial
Yeah, it was controversial among people who didn't want to follow the law, and instead wanted to use their power to go around it. The concept of checks and balances is not popular with the people being checked.
The corruption era is very simple: the government won't be allowed to directly provide a service that someone else could make $$$$ by being a middleman for.
It's somewhat ludicrous to have to "file taxes" in the computer era in the first place, but there's a large ideological resistance to both taxes and the government that in some of the more paranoid wings of the country that is well-exploited by the rent-seekers here.
As a comparison, in my country you could submit your own tax return using government supplied desktop software since 1999, and in 2015 that software was replaced with a web product. 1 in 3 people submit their own tax returns using this product.
[0] https://thisisunpacked.substack.com/p/irs-direct-tax-filing-...
Time will tell but there's evidence that some government staff grew inexplicably wealthy while in office which would suggest corruption. Corruption in government is terrible for the average citizen, ask anyone from a country that suffers from a lot of it.
I really fail to see why auditing government spending is a bad thing?
I am not a Trump voter. I agree with the outcome they have stated - reduce stupid spending - but I have no idea thats the true motivation, the true goal and I disagree with the manner in which they are doing it. Just because you agree with the dictator doesn't make it right?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/us/politics/trump-orders-...
It's barely started and the corruption is everywhere. It's blatant and out in the open, and it's disgusting.
I'm going to a protest today. I encourage others to do the same.
But you know what? All of these agencies are regularly audited. Every year, reports are all published. This is how it works https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/reports-statements/financial...
Elon is operating an ideological mission conducted unprofessionally and with complete contempt for any public oversight.
Those are a bunch of weasel words. You're giving a certain impression yet being vague enough that it's impossible to assess, argue or discuss the validity of that claim.
What evidence? Who are those 'some' staff? What's inexplicably wealthy?
There's a vast difference between government high-ups getting paid well and making money (as high-ups in any large organization might) and government organizations and their leadership and staff being generally corrupt.
Of course corruption is never impossible, partially because it can take forms that may be difficult to discern as such. But it's again impossible to assess that claim without substance.
I'm just saying it's not that deep. There is not a meaning or moral that needs to be understood, there is no reasoning that could make them change their ways.
Following Trump’s second term, the fresh-money establishment saw an opportunity to challenge the old guard. Setting aside their differences, they chose to unite.
https://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-defense-contr...
>The group, which could announce strategic partnerships next month, would seek to bring Silicon Valley-style disruption to an industry dominated by so-called "prime" contractors, such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.
They were soon joined by other tech moguls—Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Gates—who once opposed Trump but now see AI as their chance to wrest power from the old establishment.
The difference between sports and politics is that sports are always a duel, while politics, despite appearances, is always a three-player game.
If you go to the doge website right now, there's a Libs of TikTok tweet shown on the main page. It reads:
The US government only recognizes two sexes: Male and Female. This needs to be changed immediately
There is absolutely a crusade going on, but I certainly wouldn't call it moral.
Who in their right mind opens up RDP and Citrix servers to public internet in DoE and nuclear research laboratory networks?
Time is running very short. Foreign powers must be assumed to already hold all possible information about the US government, including nuclear secrets, warfare capabilities, emergency plans, and kompromat of all personnel and political oversight.
It won’t be long before the US nuclear arsenal mysteriously disappears.
You can use Shodan yourself to verify.
1. To people saying that the government should have a direct way to file taxes. This is an outdated way of thinking. Most ordinary people shouldn't have to file taxes at all. Withholding is sufficient for income taxes and taxes on liquid investments.
2. 18F was an openly partisan organisation. They were likely disbanded not to kill the products they produced, but rather for their inability to remain politically neutral.
It’s normal in many countries to not have to file until your tax situation becomes more complicated.
For most people, your employer handles your income tax on your behalf, your stock broker handles your capital gains tax etc.
It’s an XY problem, and direct file is like the faster horse.
Heck, the Trump admin wants to get rid of income tax entirely, so they're hardly the natural allies of the tax prep industry.
If Elon wanted he could fund an opensouce alternative to Turbotax.
I am willing to bet 1k that Intuit's 2024 TurboTax Online and other Consumer Group revenue of $4.4 billion will remain above 4B in 2025.
I might buy that line of thinking for a corporation but the direct file program was about individuals. Elon gleefully tweeted about how that had been deleted. That's a direct give away to TurboTax and H&R Block.
The issue isn't direct file vs TurboTax.
It's whether most individuals should have to file at all.
A few tweaks around employment income and capital gains, and you can do away with filing altogether for most people.
You’re just being obtuse. We can stop now.
The history of lobbying on behalf of the tax prep industry is easy enough to find.
Is drawing a line through Trump's well-professed love of sycophants and people who make him money and that lobbying and motivation, to their current actions, so far fetched to you?
I think taking a wait-and-see approach to things like "Trump wants to get rid of income tax entirely" would be wise until we see where the implementation ends up. In the meantime lets talk about what has actually been done to date.
The UK’s Government Digital Service is similar. They’ve got some good examples of doing unglamorous but impactful work -e.g. replacing dozens of different payment processing systems with one quality one, the same thing for sending physical letters, etc.
I also don’t buy Elon’s messaging that a database upgrade will save social security, or whatever.
One of the best examples of this is passport renewal. In the US until very recently you were unable to do this online, either having to print and mail in a form or go in person to an office.
Another example is the work of 18F to allow Americans easy direct filing of their taxes without the need (or cost) of a third party.
It is and was a pretty significant one, now less important compared to a literal seig-heiling nazi running the government.
Last time literal seig-heiling nazis ran a government, it wasn't great.
This is not what Elon is saying or doing or planning to do.
I use many SOPs daily. The principle is that if you can forget everything about it but the name, obtain the documentation, and relearn it, you should do about the same thing as without.
Though you can find SOPs similar to modern from 1950s USSR docs, the U.S. Navy ones like folding SOP or military shower SOP are especially pragmatic.
But, I would love to see details.
Every generation we make things much easier, lower the bar, and are rewarded when amateurs make amateur mistakes like this.
Not enough detail to say for sure; could be SQL injection, could be credentials exposed in the frontend.
https://archive.ph/2025.02.14-132833/https://www.404media.co...
That's currently how I model my usage of LLMs in code. A smart veeeery junior engineer that needs to be kept on a veeeeery short leash.
LLMs are an eternal intern that can only repeat what it's gleaned from some articles it skimmed last year or whatever. If your expected response isn't in its corpus, or isn't in it frequently enough, and it can't just regurgitate an amalgamation of the top N articles you'd find on Google anyway, tough luck.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_collapse
[2]https://thebullshitmachines.com/lesson-16-the-first-step-fal...
You can't do the same way you do with a human developer, but you can do a somewhat effective form of it through things like .cursorrules files and the like.
Maybe they used Grok ;P
Not my experience at all. Every LLM produces lots of trivial SQLI/XSS/other-injection vulnerabilities. Worse they seem to completely authorization business logic, error handling, and logging even when prompted to do so.
Smells like getting a backdoor in early.
BTW, I spent a lot of my career configuring load balancing, caches, proxies, sharding, and CDNs for Plone (a CMS that’s popular with governments) websites.
I don't see any CRUD endpoints for modifying the database
https://doge.gov/workforce?orgId=69ee18bc-9ac8-467e-84b0-106... is what's linked to by the "Workforce" header, and it now looks different than the screenshots
Anecdote time (pinch of salt required):
A relative of mine studying accounting went to the Doge site to see the "audit" and "analytics" records that some acquaintance arguing with her said "see the doge site!" for the proof.
What she found when visiting the site was no "audit" at all, but instead a word count of how often objectional terms appear in legislation or government sites. (DEI? Trans? LGBTQ?).
Being in the analytics/data engineering space myself, I was pretty amused to hear that was the quality of "analytics" being done.
Wasn't "word count" the "hello world" example for Hadoop big data back in 2013?
Now it says "Receipts coming over the weekend!"
Next time it's: The site is receipt-ready
A lot of cuts looks “sensical” at first, until you realize things like “cutting magazine subscriptions” are more like “cutting financial news sources off from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau” or “not renewing reputable news subscriptions for people who really need to understand current events”.
And then there’s a lot of DEI/diversity training cuts which feel targeted not at their war on Actually Being Nice to People, but at the groups those trainings help employees serve - cutting DEI for SNAP…so, there’s a reported (haven’t verified but allegedly from USDA data) 5 ethnic groups, as well as “race unknown”, that are enrolled in SNAP. Now imagine how you’d train people to understand, interact with, and help people in different ethnic backgrounds _who need this assistance_. I believe empathy and understanding are incredibly good skills to have in a role like this, and DEI helps train that - for all involved.
The going notion on the right is that DEI is racist, and against white people, but it leaves out the idea that anyone non-white might also need this training? Like, DEI is about understanding differences, and then the right reads it as “understanding non-whites” and get offended that they even have to think about other cultures.
And another cut funding for training on gender, and that training was for an office involved in tech and engineering…a professional field notoriously male-dominant for a long time. Again, it makes sense to me that this kind of training would be good, because I’ve heard the way people in tech talk and act towards women and queer folx, so yeah let’s have some training.
These kinds of programs aren’t meant to tell people what to think - if they can’t empathetically interact with the world, work training won’t change that - but it will tell them that in a professional capacity they need to know how to interact and be productive. In business this is so you make more money, in government it’s how you help more people - including your own employees and also the communities you serve.
So Trump is doing what he said, and the details are grim.
And I know some of those kids probably read Hackernews, so here’s the advice: put away ChatGPT and learn what the fuck you’re doing.
working at doge? your resume would be straight in the trash if i came across it.
50% of the country might support this. The software industry, especially the lower levels like engineers and managers, leans left politically.
But if it does, people involved will be the part of unique historical turnaround of a falling empire, and their names will be written in gold.
It might give you some contacts, but that’s far from a given. Just because Musk found you useful doesn’t mean he’s going to show loyalty to you, and that’s especially true if the venture blows up politically and you are one of the scapegoats. People don’t get to be billionaires by giving away money to everyone they meet.
The point of DOGE is the disruption. It's a propaganda and political orthodoxy operation under a paper thin pretext of efficiency.
Nah, they'll want reasonable pay, reasonable hours, and won't confuse their boss for a living god. They may even have some self-confidence and morals, which would be a total deal breaker.
1. Good experienced engineer
2. Without ethics
3. Happy to be paid below market rate of a good experienced engineer without ethics.
It's not enough to point out that Trump is fascist and therefore bad. You need to go the next step and say why fascism is bad.
(Yes, we've gotten to this timeline, where we have to go back and actually describe why fascism is bad -- where the press is reporting on proposed ethnic cleansing in Gaza with statements like "outlandish plan" and "unrealistic" rather than naming it for what it is: a brutal and immoral plan to exterminate an entire people. Oh, and now we need to explain why that is actually a Really Awful Thing)
At least, that's the theory. I don't think America wants to admit that the CCP has their industrial capacity by the balls and can direct it with centralized planning to displace America's EV market or naval tonnage at will. There's an assumption that deregulation will finally be the panacea to America's issues, but we can't pursue that consistent with a policy of global trade. We can't sanction the ICC and demand other countries extradite their criminals to the US. We can't abandon the Human Rights Council and then demand other countries respect our moral authority.
It's going to be another 4 years of the civilized world proving they don't need America. And Trump is going to spend it flattering dictators abroad while everyone else taps their foot waiting for another primary. Stagnation is a best case scenario, a-la 2016 - our saving grace is that most of America's serious adversaries are also hurting quite a bit right now. Trump sitting in the Nixon or Regan seat would have been game-over for America.
What makes you think they’ll respect that law?
Assuming he makes it that long, he’ll have a third term. They’ll make some lunatic reading of the law to justify state legislatures selecting electors. The supine courts will rubber stamp anything.
The GOP's support isn't guaranteed throughout this administration, and they know a successor needs to be found. Amending the constitutional term limit would be a source of bipartisan outcry, because neither party would survive it.
This term is different.
You do not need to look far at all to find tiny changes made by past administrations that have had massive unforeseen consequences. We are absolutely cooked.
This for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43051135
(EDIT: Looks like others are wondering too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43050833)
But I guess that you don't need to find answers externally when stupidity is a much simpler reason
They've created the back doors, I'm sure that the Russians and the Chinese are now in the systems the DOGE people broke.
Is the newly created user with name "bigballs" who downloads whole government databases a foreign TA or just DOGE? Who knows. Who cares, certainly not the Government.
The data and access gained currently by China, Russia, NK and SA will continue to be useful until and way after the next war.
the payments data would tell a lot about intelligence networks for example or about various Pentagon contractors.
Remember Assange? He did a decade under house arrest for a leak paling in comparison to what happens today. How times have changed.
He spent a decade hiding in an embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden for unrelated crimes, ostensably for fear of what ended up happening in the UK where he was apparently happy to stay while insisting Sweden wasn't safe.
and the people in prison can leave anytime they want - it is just prison guards outside who would shoot them.
> to Sweden for unrelated crimes
And what happened to those crimes in Sweden once he resolved his US issues?
By that standard, given what the guards would do, you would need to also claim that "prison is a death sentence".
He wasn't under house arrest — he went there against the desires of the police force outside who stationed officers there to perform an arrest for skipping bail.
Calling this "house arrest" is akin to calling voluntarily serving on a submarine "drowning" or working in the antarctic "hypothermia": he chose to go there, and to keep staying there. More than that, he chose to commit a new and easy to prove crime by going there.
His argument against going to Sweden, *after having been arrested for the Swedish extradition hearing in the UK*, was a fear of a thing the UK ended up doing, and which it should have been obvious the UK would do willingly whenever the US asked for it. The US has no need to make things more complicated by asking for Swedish involvement given how friendly the UK government is.
The UK is infamous for doing whatever the US tells it to, so if you're afraid of US prosecutorial/extradition overreach, the UK is one of many countries where you don't want to be. Sweden, not so much.
If the US wanted him back in 2010, they could have had him directly from the UK with full support of the UK government, without any of the convoluted extra steps in this conspiracy theory that makes the Swedish judicial system into patsies.
> And what happened to those crimes in Sweden once he resolved his US issues?
The statute of limitations happened. Bits were already timing out even before he overstayed his welcome by Ecuador.
Nevertheless the prosecutors did try to reopen that prosecution and to get the UK to extradite to Sweden first over the US, only to be told no by the judge because the evidence was too old to secure a conviction.
That pre-existing cancellation was why the British didn't feel the need to bother telling Sweden when his asylum was cancelled and he was arrested, much to the annoyance of the Swedish prosecutors: https://www.courthousenews.com/%EF%BB%BFsweden-tells-uk-it-t...
And only after all that had already happened, did the US issues get fully resolved.
>is akin to calling voluntarily serving on a submarine
> he chose to go there, and to keep staying there.
it isn't called "voluntary"/"choosing" if the alternative to the "voluntarily"/"choosing" is a police force desire of putting you into Gitmo (or SuperMax if you're lucky) for life or even capital punishment to politically prosecute you. (Assange's actions weren't criminal at the jurisdiction where he performed his actions. US prosecution of him was pure political and a pure projection of US force beyond US jurisdiction. Crowds of people in US collect classified info from other countries, and US doesn't extradite those people into those other countries. Because jurisdiction matters for determining whether actions constitute a crime. I for example say a a lot of things which are crime in Russia - like calling the Ukraine war a war - which aren't crime in US. Should i be extradited to Russia and face the "legal process" there? And if i caught in a Russia friendly country and hide from extradition in a UK or US embassy it wouldn't be a voluntary choosing to visit the embassy, it would be a "voluntary choice" to stay in the embassy instead of getting treason conviction and 20 years in GULAG - such "voluntarily chosen" stay at the embassy is a de-facto house arrest.)
>The statute of limitations happened.
No. You're again inventing things. Like with your invented definition of the "voluntary choosing" above.
No, he did a most of a decade hiding out in an diplomatic enclave to avoid legal process, and three years in jail fighting extradition; he spent no time under house arrest.
Someone willing to work without morals for money can just be bought by the next highest bidder. Anything they touch should be treated as compromised.
> Is there a source for the vacation days thing?
The "vacation days" line seems to be a jokingly hyperbolic prediction. China might have directed more resources (including hackers) toward collecting the data exposed by DOGE and Elon Musk's actions (and might try to widen the crack), but is unlikely to have literally cancelled all vacation days for said hackers.
Why is this not a joke?
Edit: Rethorical question.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/doge-website-posts-classified-inf...
She'll just invite her friend Bashar al-Assad to assist.
I have read on the news he recently became #opentowork.
>Over at OPM, reports indicate that individuals associated with DOGE connected an unauthorized server into the network.
[1]: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/02/doge-as-a-nat...
Is there any evidence that the database for this microblog of a cloud flare hosted website has anything of importance in it?
Are you also (alone) suggesting there's a tunnel from cloud flare (where this is hosted) to some larger government database?
You may want to RTFA: https://archive.ph/wy1Wt
I was replying to what was written. I read this as implying that sensitive (or any) data was available.
> and access data from
Again, is there any evidence that any data was accessible, beyond what is visible on the webpage? If you read the article, the flaw was that anything could be pushed. Could you link a source that says extra data was accessible? Your claim is not made in the above article, and I can't find anything mentioning data access, with a quick search.
I'd wager the person who did the edit goes by the name "roro".
I saw low income becsuse 100m is pennies for housing. You'll probably get a few neighborhoods if it's brand new housing.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/02/doge-as-a-nat...
The real trick is that the outrage has to be enough to break through the right wing media smokescreen that's currently gaslighting half the country with "yeah well everything is about to get more expensive, but you actually want this, it's patriotic to be excited about higher household prices because it's all in service of making America great again, whatever that now means!"
And critically, it's not just Fox/OAN/Newsmax that are the problem, it's also the army of thousands of podcasters and influencers who repeat these talking points. Many of Joe Rogan's 11M listeners likely trust what he tells them considerably more than they trust what a talking head on cable says.
Obviously a dangerous game to play, but it’s always safer to do nothing and sink slowly than to start ripping apart the hull at sea in order to fix the leaks. Both strategies have nonzero danger.
It's like removing smoke detectors in a house. Or stopping home inspections entirely.
It won't really cause problems. Heck, it will improve the economy in the short term.
The idea being that if common sense prevails and folks realize what a shit show/farce this DOGE thing is.... the underlying issues that allowed DOGE to exist in the first place will be unsolved.
Maybe people were voting for him because they were dumb? Or they were lied to?
But neither of those change the importance of understanding what those people wanted.
You can't win elections without understanding what most people actually want.
This despite the fact that Musk is mostly firing investigators who were seeing if his company's were a budget waste. I guess we just have to assume agencies that say "black" are bad and what we really need to spend money on is luxury EV vehicles that can play angry birds. Surely not a conflict of interest.
There is no arguing with people who don't know what they want. This is all propaganda fueled hysteria.
I cant tell if this is intentional irony or poe’s law.
When democrats that are curious about why people vote for Trump, conclude that the voters are dumb or naive, it’s kind of an unintentional demonstration of the kind of thinking that turns people away from the Democratic Party.
The smug "some people are dumb, so I'm going to ignore them instead of being curious" elitism has lost the Democratic party two recent elections.
I have no source, no data, nor examples to defend my point, it’s just the vibes.
TikTok, Twitter etc show extremely distorted views of the world, just other bubbles.
Fascinating—if unfortunate—to see the world's 2 most powerful men basically functioning as walking test cases for classic outcomes when a child is not given appropriate attention/affection and also zero boundaries for socially-appropriate behavior.
The "treadmills" were used to measure the effects of bacteria on shrimp metabolism. Understanding how bacteria affects metabolism, at least to me, sounds like a perfectly valid thing to research. Most people, if they knew the context around that would probably agree, but people are extremely lazy with this stuff, and are really susceptible to stupid catchphrases, so people thought it was a huge waste of money.
ETA:
https://www.npr.org/2011/08/23/139852035/shrimp-on-a-treadmi...
Frankly, something DOGE has shown me is how lazy Musk is. I know he's the CEO of like twenty companies, but if what he's doing with DOGE is any indication, he has absolutely no attention to detail and is completely averse to actually learning or understanding what he's talking about. Like, every effort in DOGE is coming off as decidedly half-assed.
It makes me glad I don't own a Tesla, because I would be terrified to see what kind of corners they cut, and how much of it would end up being completely half-baked and not ready to actually be used. I'm not completely convinced that NASA contracting out to SpaceX is a good idea anymore either.
Compromise. It's essential to peaceful co-existence of a group of humans of any size. At some point along the line, America seems to have lost that quality.
If the left or the right disagree on even language and core cultural issues, they both need to find ways to communicate and evolve that allows for a peaceful coexistence. The notion the other party is a stupid or evil adversary incapable of enlightenment is poisonous, it forbids communication. Even if your adversary is indeed stupid and/or evil, it is far better to talk to them and if not change their mind, explain yourself in a language they understand (that includes a language they don't find outrageous or absurd!), leaving open the door to seeing your point of view. Even if they want to destroy you, it is a much better strategy to show you're not all that bad than escalating or just giving up. Of course, there are always voices that profit from discord, and human nature is perhaps attracted to antagonism. But we shouldn't let that go out of control, for the benefit of everyone.
If we're wrong about something, it's to our profit to learn from an adversary. This is the main lesson I think we should be taking -- even if being wrong is painful or sometimes isolating. Also logically, don't isolate those who think a little differently from your cultural heterodoxy, for the case they might have good reasons you just don't understand yet.
I think the old customs of being, and of course appearing, respectful were in part norms created for this. By behaving respectfully you're showing a willingness to learn and be wrong. By shouting, offending and imposing your opinion you're demonstrating you might be closed to other possibilities even if they are wrong, sometimes for very misguided reasons like ego, pride, or power. It's clearly then particularly important to act respectfully with those who are your adversaries or with whom you disagree (since perhaps you'll be more inclined to hear those who you already mostly agree with).
In summary: communication, compromise and respect.
I do not feel the need to compromise with "White Power" or "We need to find a way to safely inject bleach".
You understand this means that the other 75 million people are actually looking to mutilate children, destroy the concepts of sex and gender, abolish all of the police, and are aggressively racist against white people, right?
It's possible that their perspective on the outgroup is not entirely "fair and balanced."
As a white American the concept of "racist against white people" is laughable. The right's obsessive persecution complex while enjoying the bounties of the greatest empire of human history is childish in the extreme. Like toddlers, but with the power to destroy all of human civilization.
- Children aren't being mutilated and anyone who believes this is a willing mark or has a toddlers understanding of science
- the concept of "Gender" is actually very important to a lot of trans folks, as it turns out. My "Sex" is about as relevant to my day to day as my blood type, and I think people who obsess about my chromosomes are fucking weird
- We should abolish all the police - got me there.
- White people don't exist as a racial category with any meaningful definition except as a catch-all for groups meant to exclude. It's not a race, it's a country club with a pantone guide.
Hope that helps, and I hope you find whatever it is you are looking for.
(And, as I pointed out, some real ones!)
But, to put a fine point on it, literally zero children are being mutilated (in the context this statement is typically brought about, "children being forcibly transitioned against their will by their parents, including surgery", which is deeply false), but there are white supremacists in the government, without room for equivocation or debate. Even in the context of absurdity, they are not equally absurd claims. You took an accurate portrayal of the right in America (perhaps assuming it was absurd?) and compared it against...the right's propaganda view of the "left". This is why it was not "Obvious".
And, to be clear; conservatives are already saying that! Your average trump voter thinks that there are litter boxes in schools! They literally think that! I'm not going to be nice and lie about their capacity for goodness while they seek to eliminate me and my pals (or, at best, casually don't care about voting for the folks who want to eliminate me and my pals, which, you know? Fuck em.)
Out of curiosity, which parts were 'factually true' assessments of the positions of the 75 million people who voted Democrat last election?
> Y'all really doubling down on this whole "77 million people are white supremacists" huh? > You understand this means that the other 75 million people are actually looking to mutilate children, destroy the concepts of sex and gender, abolish all of the police, and are aggressively racist against white people, right?
You seemed confused and upset that people assumed you believed the things in the latter statement, so I am primarily interested in getting you to understand why I (and a few others, by the looks) thought that.
It is factually true that Donald Trump campaigned on white replacement theory, surrounded himself with people who had ties to white nationalism, and continues to advance causes very important to white and christian nationalists. If you voted for him, you were either uninformed on those topics, informed but didn't care, or informed but agree. By and large, the trump voters I talk to on a daily basis seem to be in the first camp, but willing to defend trump regardless of what he is saying or doing.
It is factually false to suggest that Democrats want to "Mutilate children", or any of the examples you gave. Even the most harsh critic of the police that the democrats have, AOC, unequivocally said that she was against abolishing the police and preferred defunding them and moving their responsibilities to other social services. "Mutilating children" and "Abolish sex and gender" are thought-terminating cliches meant to mis-represent support for trans folk, and "Racist against white people" is a clownshoes bananapants nothing of a racist dogwhistle.
Republicans love to twist and exaggerate, but none of these reflect the policies - either stated or implied through policy - the nature of democratic support. What's more, the democrats have not universally adopted a single person to be the arbiter of their policy, as the GOP has at their last conventions, nor do democrats typically gather with such gusto around a single individual. (as a bernie supporter, I feel like I probably got as much of that as I was going to get, and it was not anywhere near as embarrassingly fawning as what trump receives.)
So, no, they are not equal in the slightest.
If you are prepared to argue that supporting trans kids is mutilating children, or actually saying "Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work." or extending the olive branch to fucking apartheid is not an inherently white supremacist thing to say or do (or that it's not 'all that bad'), then I was misguided, and am comfortable ending the conversation here.
Now, if you want critiques of the democrats? Well, my friend, I have them in store. Perhaps a less absurd, more fitting diss would have been "the other 75 million people are actually looking to ethnically cleanse gaza?" (The republicans want to do that as well, but at least it's a fair diss on the democrats and their actual positions!)
This is fake news that one search will clear up for you. Please stop repeating it.
> “A question that probably some of you are thinking of if you’re totally into that world,” Trump began, clearly thinking the question himself, “So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light — and I think you said that that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way, and I think you said you’re going to test that, too. It sounds interesting. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that.”
To read this in any other way than "The president suggested we blast people with UV rays or inject them with disinfectant - such as bleach, the disinfectant he just mentioned as being effective" feels like a tremendous amount of mental gymnastics, bordering on willful ignorance. Cross your eyes and maybe I'm being flippant about "bleach", wherein he only merely suggested injecting "disinfectant", which renders him a genius, I imagine?
He ranted about two common disinfectant strategies for inorganic materials and suggested they use them on people, because he's not particularly bright.
Edit: Also worth mentioning that the following day when asked what he meant by that, he did not say "I did not ask about injecting bleach", he said "I asked about that sarcastically".
> I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen … I was asking a sarcastic, and a very sarcastic, question to the reporters in the room about disinfectant on the inside. But it does kill it, and it would kill it on the hands and that would make things much better. That was done in the form of a sarcastic question to the reporters.
So it would appear not even Mr. Trump agrees with your statement.
> I'm being flippant about "bleach", wherein he only merely suggested injecting "disinfectant"
Yes. Fact: trump did not say to inject bleach. He also did not tell the public to inject anything.
I refer to this incident colloquially as "The time trump told us to inject bleach", which would be more accurately described as "The time the president of america was so balls-on stupid that he rambled for five minutes about doctors using bleach and UV disinfectant to fight Covid, a ramble so incoherent that the CDC had to issue a warning to ignore what it appeared he was suggesting."
I have no desire to treat the "intelligence" behind that statement - or those with full throated support of his incredible genius - with any authority.
The "White Power" was the evil (though, quite stupid in its own right) part. The "Bleach" was the "stupid" part of my comment, and I stand by it.
You mean how did the aggressive media find a sentence they could give to their base to get clicks, that he didn’t even say? Give me a break.
Miscommunications happen. Now you’ve been corrected. Stop repeating false claims.
> Miscommunications happen. Now you’ve been corrected. Stop repeating false claims.
I have not repeated this claim. My point is because miscommunications happen, the person in charge should have left it up to experts instead of just riffing, because now his sloppy words will live on forever.
The problem is that the republican party has had a "no comprimise" policy for a while. It's like they put the party before the country.
The Republican Party was the one saying “either agree with us unconditionally or you are a Nazi” for the last 10 years?
The Republican Party was the one ignoring the many crimes of Biden’s son because it would hurt the party?
This is quite literally what is happening.
- government spending has been rampant and completely disconnected from available funds
- "shutdown" threats, typically a sign that a red line is being crossed, has been treated as political currency
- funds going from taxpayer (individual and corporations) to government, to be redistributed for an ever-increasing list of grants, programs, and studies
- locked-in mega spending areas of the budget showing plenty of warning signs of unsustainability, with nothing being done to address
Even if DOGE is "all for spectacle," I'm having trouble finding the downsides of DOGE's actions for generations coming after us. But maybe someone could help me understand why they feel differently?
Like sure it'll get you somewhere, but what will you break/lose in the process? And what will you gain?
It's not "all for show", I don't think Americans understand how they're unraveling decades of soft power, eroding the trust they were already losing on the international stage, &c.
Sure, a lot of these agencies are doing wasteful things and there is a lot of room for improvement. Meanwhile, it's a slow and humongous beast that's very difficult to reform.
However, thinking that these institutions have no value is a great mistake. So is thinking that a few teenagers can improve things by firing people and dissolving agencies in the course of a few weeks. Needless to say, there is no historical precedent for something like this working.
You can take the position that it will just get a lot worse before it gets better: "destroy everything and build it from scratch". It's often tempting but almost never a good idea, even for software will projects. On the level of a government, this idea is actually insane and I have no doubt that people will find out why, unless they stop breaking things.
So what are the downsides of DOGE's actions? They are fully upending the Constitutional order of checks and balances. I personally thought it was an okay system, but really it seems like enough people are willing to ignore it, that the Constitution is effectively suspended.
I also think the government is inefficient. The median effective tax rate (sales, both halves of FICA, state income, federal income, unemployment, property, gas, "sin" taxes, ...) in the US is in the 40%-50% range, and that's apparently not close to enough to pay for everything. We market ourselves as being a low-tax country, but that's a higher percentage than a median Brit pays (35-45%) and not much lower than Germany (50-60%). France kind of sucks on that front (60-75%), but it's about the worst offender, and at least in those countries you have free healthcare (the cost of which bumps taxes+healthcare to be worse in the US than France even). The US is very expensive if you're not very well-off.
I get that it's more complicated than this, but we went to war back when taxes were 2%. How is it that after 250 years of technological innovation we suddenly need half of everybody's individual output just to keep the country running?
So, what changes has DOGE found? For a couple I agree with (one strongly, one with reservations), my back-of-the-envelope estimates suggest that the median American spends $0.50/yr on penny minting and $50/yr on the EPA. I certainly wouldn't mind $50.50/yr in my pocket (nearly double that in equivalent pre-tax wages).
Pennies do seem useless, and I wouldn't even mind going up to quarters or dollars as the minimum divisible currency unit.
The EPA is a tougher call (if the proposal were actually making it more efficient instead of just gutting it and letting corporations run rampant). On the one hand, I'd be willing to pay much more handsomly than that to actually have clean water, clean air, soil near my home without lead or other poisons, .... On the other hand, $10B+/yr is a lot of money for what the EPA does, and I'm still unable to even buy lead and cadmium free dog bowls and coffee mugs without trusting the manufacturer's pinky promise or testing it myself. Somehow, the "don't poison us with things we definitely know are very toxic" directive doesn't apply if you figure out a new shape to mould that poison into. To achieve the same real-world outcomes the EPA has over the last couple decades, you wouldn't need near that much cash.
Even if I agreed with those whole-heartedly though, and even if DOGE finds an extra $2.5k/yr of my taxes being used on things which don't benefit me at all and I'm callous enough to not care about that money's potential impact on others (which looks like a reasonable upper bound given that the strategy seems to be gutting every department that Trump or Musk doesn't like, and those are a drop in the bucket of the federal budget), I still think the cost of DOGE exceeds those gains. Somewhat equivalently, I'd happily pay $2.5k/yr to make a shitshow like this never happen again.
Why though?
The big one is that Musk and Trump have a history of fraud and abuse for personal gain, and their current actions look much more like a dictatorial power grab than evidence that they finally want to do the right thing. Some examples:
1. Which federal agents are being let go? The ones who investigated Trump after he broke countless laws. He's not trying to hide it; he's seeking revenge on people even tangentially related regardless of how much benefit they do or don't have for the country, when he's the one who broke that many bloody laws in the first place. That matches the hypothesis of "vindictive and power hungry" much better than the hypotheses of "making America great again" or "no worse than the status quo."
2. One of the first things Musk did was download the personal details of every US citizen and inject his own code into the treasury. They already (seemingly) have the power to shut down departments on a whim. What purpose does this extra power serve? It's worse than the status quo (explanation already beaten to death on HN here, I won't elaborate), and it doesn't help with the "making America great again" promise. It _does_ give Elon and any unscrupulus programmers (luckily everybody in DOGE passed their background checks with flying colors...) enormous power though.
2a. He's shipping that data off to MSFT to process it with AI. What in the ever living fuck is going on there? It's hard enough to get the DMV or a court to treat you like a person, and we want to throw current-gen AI into the mix? Have you seen Google's customer support? If I have to make a new gmail account and lose historical data then that's unfortunate. If I'm added to one of the list of real, US citizens ICE has "accidentally" deported because of some hairbrained idea to use more AI in the government....
3. Which departments are being shut down? If you need a hint, it's only departments that help ordinary people and hurt large corporations. Picking on the CFPB as an example, DOGE successfully saved the US $0.8B/yr (yayyy!!), a department which in a single maneuver saved US citizens $4B/yr (5 full years of funding, for reference). Is that making America great again? Maybe you like defrauding vulnerable people by adding overdrafts back to their previously non-overdraftable accounts just to fleece them for a few hundred dollars, but that doesn't look like it adheres to either Trump's or DOGE's stated visions. It, instead, looks like a transfer of power from the people to the newly elected Trump and unelected Musk.
4. Trump controls the house, senate, and supreme court right now. He could at least get off his arse and do that power grab the right way. Getting these changes signed into law would make it much harder for future presidents to revert them. That seems like a good thing if you're trying to make the country better (the stated purpose). A flurry of extra-constitutional executive orders, some of which will stick just because they have to work their way through the courts and because of the sheer volume, serves to increase personal power at the expense of the separation of powers in the government.
And so on. I can't point to a single thing being done and say it looks more like protecting the American people than it does creating a new dictatorship. Some of the actions might benefit me (e.g., I'm happy about the penny thing), but not enough by a long shot to overcome the downsides.
The administration has presented no plan to meaningfully cut costs, it is just producing propaganda that people eat up without thinking.
It sure seems like a lot of folks want change. I just wish we had used that momentum to build consensus and empower experts to improve things. Instead, the trolls got the attention and are leading us on a snipe hunt while the rich get ready for another tax break.
It already has. America has in three short weeks burned bridges with multiple countries that will not be rebuilt
oh, but maybe you don't care about any of that, for X reasons; those things may not be important to you, but other things are, like maybe not being swindled by your bank (CFPB) or being able to enjoy visiting a National Park. Or maybe there's nothing that you care about, but there are millions of other people who do care.
In what way is that? I feel that a lot of people who say things like that expect the impossible and don't actually realize how extremely privileged their lives are from all of what a modern society offers them.
America has been propagandized to by the wealthy for a century and this is the end result. The world's richest person reforming the government for profit.
There's two things you need to make people feel the government is working for them:
* good social policies
* adequate education
One of the US parties has been working for decades to sabotage both, and with the help of the media they've successfully managed to deflect all the blame for it. So no, I don't agree that DOGE is a symptom of a larger problem -- unless you mean that the problem is 50 years of consistently undermining the government.
Why wasn't it fixed?
https://history.house.gov/Institution/Presidents-Coinciding/...
There's also the problem of Democrats being absolutely terrible at organizing and uniting.
If you really want to make big financial changes, you need a lot more income, or cut serious costs - like a car payment or downsize your house. In the case of DOGE, I haven't seen them touch DoD or any of the massive medical programs, etc.
I kinda expect the senators to prevent it, but we will see.
Have you considered that they are going after the low-hanging fruit, getting in "reps & sets" before they attack programs that have vastly greater inertia and potentially bi-partisan support? DoD and healthcare cover a ton of jobs, and might actually trigger pushback from Congress, in ways that annihilating the CIA's propaganda arm (which is basically a handful of overpaid bougie Dem-leaning "journalists") doesn't.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/wikileaks-usaid-has-been...
The answer is it does matter because it’s funding things both parties have an interest in.
Even if you do believe that these agencies are bloated with workers who are doing "unnecessary" work, which is possible, it seems very unprudent to make cuts so quickly. And who is qualified to make these decisions? Elon? Some Tesla or SpaceX engineer who wrote some code and put up a website? Come on. WTF do they know about how all these agencies operate and the downstream effects? You think they're taking the time to really think it through?
Now it's possible that prior to taking office, Trump had people with deep understanding of government operations go through everything, and really think things through, and prepare a list of jobs that could be cut without any impact, but if that is the case, it's never been said. Given who Trump has around him to lead these agencies (McMahon for Dept of Ed? An Oil and Gas Lobbyist for BLM? Really?) that doesn't seem likely.
Move fast and break things works fine for a start-up, and might even be fine for more cultural type stuff ("DEI"), but Dept of Energy?
It's like firing two-thirds of your sysadmins because "well, we haven't had any issues with our servers lately, and no breaches, so those people must not be needed".
If the systems and Nation is as fragile we have bigger problems than the Chaos Monkey unleashed at the Federal level.
Do people think Nuclear reactors will go unmanaged or Prisoners will go unfed? I suppose it is possible and time will tell.
We were lied to by the Government. The new administration may be lying as well. I think we will all learn a lot.
Considering the powers that be attempted to remove the current President through kinetic means I would imagine he is going to move as fast as possible.
I don't think it's been covered much in American media but President Trump is throwing threats of 25% tariffs on both Mexican and Canadian imports for the last month or so. First it was about how it would make manufacturing move back to the US. Then it was about how Canada is a national threat to the US because we're allowing fentanyl and illegal immigrants to cross in the US. Then it was about how the US was in terrible the trade deal with Canada and Mexico was (it was his deal, the USMCA that replaced NAFTA). Then it was how the US subsidizes Canada because Canada is a failing state and that the US was spending $200 billion a year propping up Canada. Then it was that Canada wasn't meeting it's NATO spending targets. Then it was that Canada is a failed state, and that everything would be better if Canada became the 51st state.
Every day it seemed like his narrative is changing. And when we had our retaliatory tariffs at the ready to cause harm to Republican states, you know what he did?
He blinked. The tariffs for Canada and Mexico were postponed until March. He's been consistent about telegraphing what his actions are going to be, but his justifications are so wildly all over the place that frankly it's probably safe to assume he's lying at least about his motivations.
And if he's willing to lie to one of the oldest allies to the United States, is it really that much of a stretch to think that he could be lying to Americans as well?
This has been my assumption. Trump's superpower seems to be manipulating the media. He gets absurd headlines that take attention away from stories he doesn't want covered.
This whole annexation thing is bonkers. I've never in my life heard anyone suggest such a thing, except for around 1999/2000, when I visited Canada and local papers had editorials fretting that George W Bush's administration was going to annex Canada. I have no idea where they got that idea, since I never heard any American ever suggest such a thing.
very true; not only through distractions, but by a continual bombardment of outlier or outlandish comments (used to be Tweets back in his first term) that it sucks all the oxygen out of the room as the media can hardly keep up -- therefore every story, every front page, is always Trump
like the saying goes for show biz, Trump knows there is no such thing as bad publicity ; though what works for him doesn't work for other politicians because he has a cult-like base and they don't
> Some of the fired employees included NNSA staff who are on the ground at facilities where nuclear weapons are built. These staff oversee the contractors who build nuclear weapons, and they inspect these weapons.
> It also included employees at NNSA headquarters who write requirements and guidelines for contractors who build nuclear weapons. A source told CNN they believe these individuals were fired because “no one has taken anytime to understand what we do and the importance of our work to the nation’s national security.”
> The agency began rescinding the terminations Friday morning.
Part of the strategy might be:
1. Fire large swaths of the government. Declare victory!!
2. Hire those people back because it turns out that they're actually needed (who would have thought?). But that doesn't get news.
So in the end, things remain the same, but Trump/Elon get the headlines and their followers think they've done an amazing job.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/14/climate/nuclear-nnsa-firings-...
When everyone is yelling "don't let side Y do Z because that will allow W."
This is why. It's a logical fallacy until you're talking to a person who's argument didn't ever change.
I'm sorry, but WTF? What the hell did Obama have to do with that ruling, other than serving as a convenient scapegoat in your story? It was a Supreme Court ruling, and last I checked there was still a separation of powers between the Judicial and Executive. Obama publicly called it a devastating outcome.
Obama appointed 1 of the 4 Democrats who voted in the minority, his only appointee up to that point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_Supreme_Court_can...
So he literally did all he could, subject to the constitution, to prevent this ruling. The logic of mentioning Citizen's United here is like people complaining that abortion rights were taken away during Biden's term. In other words, there is no logic other than a crude misdirect.
Not to say that actually happened. Just pointing it out.
Your comment is exactly why we are in the situation we are in now.
A ruling under an activist conservative supreme court that Obama opposed. One of Hillary's main credentials for a supreme court pick was that they'd vote to overturn Citizens United. It was a 5-4 court and Scalia had died. Citizens United decided 5-4. But America or at least the electoral college picked trump instead. So we got corruption pretending to be free speech and abortion bans instead.
Democrats could have picked a better candidate to fight Trump but they didn't.
Might have something to do with all this.
> So according to the World Bank (not a Russian source!), Russia just flipped Japan to become the fourth largest global economy in GDP-by-PPP:
After reading this line you can easily identify that author is either propagandist or moron.
This is how Russia "increased GDP":
1 - Paid to restore tons of USSR weaponry garbage to just burn it yesterday.
2 - Funded building of new weaponry that will be burned today.
3 - Moved 5-10% of population to "military economy" building some military crap that have no other use other than get burned tomorrow.
4 - Took 300,000 random people out of real economy via forced mobilization and thrown them on frontlines.
5 - Hired 500,000+ poor or destitute people who had annual salary of $3600. Hired them for $2000 / month and paid them out $40,000 sign up bonus to go die on frontlines.
6 - Killed at least 100,000 of them and paid out $50,000 for each dead body to a family.
7 - Made like another 200,000+ of cripples that wont be able to work like until they die. So more spending.
Economy is booming!
1. The Russian economy is more robust than expected. I recommend RUSI's recent work on the subject: https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentar...
2. Russia only needs to sustain its current war effort longer than Ukraine can sustain its own war effort. Considering that Ukraine is heavily dependent on external aid just to maintain its current ability to lose slowly, and its single most important source of foreign aid is trying to drop it like a bad habit.....signs point to Russia's economy having enough runway to achieve some kind of victory, after which they can dial down the production levels and return labor to the civil sector.
Russia demography was abysmal long before COVID due to pre-WW2 and WW2 ripple effects. And during this invasion country lost like ~500,000 man dead or severely crippled and probably twice that amount to migration.
Basically in a few years country efficiently lost like 3-5% of it's working populaton with another 5-10% moved to produce "munitions" or something that will rot till next big war. Anyone who try to sell this as economy growth is a moron.
And btw it's exactly Japan scenario except for different reasons:
It's not "dumb". The Russian National Security establishment considers a NATO-integrated Ukraine[1] as an Existential Threat. Their cost-benefit analysis is working with different criteria than what you are including in your value assessment.
> Russia demography was abysmal long before COVID due to pre-WW2 and WW2 ripple effects. And during this invasion country lost like ~500,000 man dead or severely crippled and probably twice that amount to migration.
Yeah, Russia's demographics are fucked and I don't think they are doing enough to fix that. But you are leaving out some relevant data: https://unric.org/en/ukraine-over-6-million-refugees-spread-... There's roughly 1 million Ukrainian refugees who relocated into Russia. I don't know the breakdown, how many of those are able-bodied working age men or fertile women, but the point is the math isn't as clear-cut negative as you are presenting.
> Basically in a few years country efficiently lost like 3-5% of it's working populaton with another 5-10% moved to produce "munitions" or something that will rot till next big war. Anyone who try to sell this as economy growth is a moron.
Y = C + I + G is one of the most foundational equations in Introductory Macroeconomics. G = government spending...including stuff like bombs and tanks that sit in storage for decades. Arguing that military spending does not contribute to economic growth is just tilting at windmills.
Here's some reading to support this:
National Bureau of Economic Research: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w15496/w154... During World War II and the Korean War, real GDP grew by about half the amount of the increase in government purchases. With allowance for other factors holding back GDP growth during those wars, the multiplier linking government purchases to GDP may be in the range of 0.7 to 1.0
LeMonde: https://archive.is/UK1MM#selection-2013.256-2017.478 To pay bonuses and salaries, the state spends "between 1,500 and 2,000 billion rubles a year." As a result of the considerable sums spent on the war economy and the payment of contract workers, a largely consumption-led growth has emerged. Gross domestic product jumped 4% year-on-year in the second quarter, according to a preliminary estimate by Rosstat, the Federal Statistics Service, published on August 9. Unemployment is at an all-time low of 2.6%. Based on these macroeconomic parameters, the World Bank placed Russia on its list of "high-income" countries in July.
[1] https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-president-signs-constitution...
(The way Trump's election directly led to "retard" being a common pejorative again hasn't been discussed enough. Just awful.)
Games are written for Windows, therefore webapps should be written with "Microsoft C++" (presumably meaning Visual C++, though I suppose there's an outside chance that he means "Microsoft C/C++", from the early 90s).
He's not new to being... bad at this.
(As someone who has worked in both the games industry and Big Tech(tm), yeah, no.)
But having done both, making any game beyond the absolute most basic game in Unity is harder than what 95% of web developers do day to day.
I’m currently in web dev because it pays so much better, but game dev really is more technically challenging than most web dev.
It’s hard to compare average skill levels between the 2 because so many people are drawn to games because they love them and to the web because of the pay. But if I had to guess, I’d put my money on there being a significantly higher floor for game dev.
[0] Which Musk maybe have heard of given he has a bit of experience lurking around automotive tech.
There are some incredible programmers in both big tech and game dev, but big tech has vastly more developers with less pressure to have top-tier talent.
Median developer at both probably represents the same skill because of normal distributions.
Other companies need developers that make applications not anyone can push updates to. Those are also good developers.
There is no single metric for "good" in a field as vast as programming.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-prev...
The annoyances of IIS were borne by sysadmins, but your developers were probably able to be more productive.
Granted: Google was not so dumb to imagine deploying on NT / IIS. And their reasons for doing C++ were nothing like what Musk is blathering about here.
The biggest issue here isn't even about the technology. It's Musk as management stepping outside of his domain trying to tell the professionals working under him exactly what to do... because he's an egomaniac narcissist.
They still have not successfully purged the database, though the endpoint has been secured.
They hired some cheap Upwork freelancers instead.
So many programs and jobs have been gutted so the orange man and his kleptocracy cabinet can get their $4.5T in tax cuts for the ultra wealthy [1]
I’m not impacted but this shit is really tiring. It’s painful to see American public be so ignorant and buy into the neoclassical economic lies.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/house-republicans-budget-blueprin...
Just wait until we have a huge outbreak of Measles or are prescribed essential oils for cancer...
The times are mature to rediscover where the word hacker came from. It never rhymed with billionaire but it seems this website tried hard to change that narrative.
Better people learn about their lack of experience fro a hacked doge site than a hacked paxment system. The ones who will hack that won't be as friendly.
But it's definitely malice from Musk, Trump and the rest of the oligarchs. They have for a long time been clear that their plan is to tear down everything and rebuild around themselves and everyone else is a pawn to be used to their benefit. These people are purely transactional, they don't believe in societal goods, just what benefits them must be best for everyone.
The US government can prop up the stock market for a very long time. Anyone who purchased Puts early on during COVID times found themselves on the opposite side of a suddenly generous Fed that poured hitherto unseen amounts of liquidity directly into the markets. The chickens only came to roost in the next administration, but ai suspect they could have kept at it for 10+ years and still kept inflation under 12-15%
> Trump-scandals kinda killed Hanlon's Razor for me: A miasma inseparably blurring the lines between malice and incompetence, lies and ignorance, culpability and insanity, condensing into a greasy alloy which is definitely some amount of evil yet not worth anybody's time to separate and assay.
I refuse to feed the algorithm more pathological input for another denial-of-service attack. For anything from that crowd of repeat-offenders, I declare the answer to be both. If they want to assert something was just incompetence or just malice, the onus is on them to provide the argument either way.
You should be worried because the same guys who are resonsible for this web site are now in charge of much more vital systems and there are much bigger threats who just wait do get important data.
Mao killed tens of million of his own people because of his misconceptions about farming, economics, and ecology.
Hitler killed millions because of his misconceptions about jews.
9/11 was executed becuase of a small group that were very confused about the basic facts of reality ("god").
There is only delusion + power + conviction. There is no other evil.
I think the missing ingredient is simply not caring about the outcome. It could be because they don't have empathy (sociopaths), or that the society has trained them into normalising obedience to the cause (facsism / communism) or inhumanized their targets (consentration camps).
Acts can certainly be described as "evil", but I don't agree that "evil" is some type of force that affects people.
To go back to my original point, the simplistic equation falls apart if you spend a second looking for counter examples.
Sikhs give free food to any who asks, without expecting anything in return. They are deluded (they do to it please god), and need power and conviction to do so.
I was thinking of the human consequences. In my language they are almost synonyms.
They of course care about the outcome, but not the effect it has on the target group
It's strange how one can normalize cruelty. Just think of how prison rapes are joked about in media and movies, as if it is an accepted consequence of committing a crime. It is a cruel and evil act that many choose to simply ignore because it is so common
If you believe this, your beliefs are out of step with essentially every Western justice system, which hold murder to be a worse crime than manslaughter. The difference between them is solely the intention.
By "conviction", I understood them to mean a kind of blindness -- an unshakeable belief that what you are doing is right, regardless of what others may believe. That kind of conviction is orthogonal to intention to harm another person. I took the entire thrust of their argument to be that intention to harm another person is neither necessary nor morally important for evil. But that is not how most of the West sees it (as evidenced by the distinction between murder and manslaughter that I pointed out).
If, when they wrote "conviction", they in fact meant "intention to harm another person", then I agree with them. But in that case I'm not sure why they posted their comment at all, since that (namely, the thesis that intention to harm is morally important when actions cause harm) is already the accepted norm, at least in the West.
(I still think it's a bad example even presented like this, and I disagree with GP, but your example seemed wrong)
Manslaughter is when you kill someone without conviction and/or delusion. You can hit someone without the conviction that you need to kill them and they fall really badly and die.
Murder. You can hit someone in self defense where you have no conviction that the person must be killed (because for example they say you had sex with their wife, but you in fact know you didn't, it's a misunderstanding), and you don't have any delusion (you know the attacker is delusional in fact). And then you defend yourself and he dies because he hit his head badly on the way down.
Because that is the only way I can interpret your examples so that they correspond with the legal distinction, which is based on intent to harm and TTBOMK never mentions "conviction". If so, we're in full agreement, since that is already the accepted Western norm and my original comment was based on a misunderstanding, and unnecessary.
But also if so: I'm puzzled why you chose to swap the natural and original word "intent" for a different word ("conviction") that is easily misinterpreted as a quality orthogonal to intention to harm, and about which an interesting but fundamentally wrong argument is periodically made (namely, that it, plus power are sufficient for evil, without any need for intent). I'm also puzzled why you made the initial comment I replied to at all, since it's then a defence of the absolutely uncontroversial status quo. It's like posting that you believe in gravity.
No, I mean "the probability function you ascribe to your beliefs". A person who believes something very weakly doesn't put on a suicide vest to blow up civilians in order to further this belief. A person with a strong belief might.
They also were under the delusion that the US was a democracy, and hence the general population could be held responsible for the actions of its leaders. Understandable if they had mainly been exposed to US/Occidental state propaganda.
Today I don't think anyone would be inclined to hold such a belief.
Or maybe the Gelatin art crew?
Utopists who run into accumulating problems, closing resource windows and simple limitations of humans (tribal creatures) and the meta-machinery they built, are bound to just run around with their pants on fire.
I don't remember the quote, but something about them only learning from catastrophe.
Worse. 1.1 million people died in a deadly plague and there's no national mourning, just straight back to the culture war and polarization.
We're not united because they've goaded us into to fighting each other over two topics that really aren't, and there's only two teams to pick from. One was bad, and the other one worse.
Can you blame them? They've been toiling hard for decades while getting poorer and poorer, while the privileged class has lived lives of wealth and comfort from milking these government institutions. Did they care about the vast majority being comfortable or not?
The repubs lost their battles, and decided they wanted to win at all costs. They had people show up to vote, vote in a bloc, volunteer for lower level positions, join multiple different organizations and basically organized them to dismantle the country.
If people can be driven to do that, then its not much to assume that at least a few more people could have done the same thing.
This is, by every metric, completely wrong. We have never been wealthier.
I can't really understand that as it seems obvious to me that they're just destroying parts of the government they don't like. And while there is certainly room for improvement in many areas, whatever they're doing is not going to improve anything, it's only destruction.
There's a reason the federal budget is several inches of very thin paper. The budget spells out how much money gets spent for various purposes, programs, projects, etc. Of course they don't specify the kind of paperclips the FAA buys. But they will approve or modify the FAA's budget plan which includes $X for office supplies, $Y for an upgrade to the FAA's network equipment in a branch office, $Z for upgrading some nav beacons, and so on.
The executive branch can't defund or "stop spending money on" anything. Nixon decided he just wouldn't spend money on programs he didn't like, and congress very rapidly passed a law that said that the president couldn't do it, because the "power of the purse" rests solely with congress.
It certainly can't stop issuing payments for existing obligations, and it especially can't take money back, which M did a day or two ago to NYC because he read a tweet that said NYC was spending money housing migrants in "luxury hotels", which shockingly turned out to be nonsense...
That's why all of this DOGE crap is such theatrical nonsense. Congress, representing their state's interests and the interests of those who live in their district, via two separate branches, approves all the budgets.
No matter what T and M say, no federal agency can just willy-nilly decide to spend money it's allocated by congress on other stuff.
That's all great in theory: in actual reality those laws are just words on paper, Congress has no interest in asserting its authority, and enforcement rests with the executive.
Companies can declare bankruptcy and fold their hand: governments, notsomuch.
The goal should be messaging to everybody else. Especially those who might like the outcomes of Trump's crimes but would prefer not to have a president that just smashes through the law to get there. A way to help achieve this is to repeat, over and over and over, that Trump's actions are violating shitloads of laws.
Jack Welch is the reason corporate America is a shit show, and GE is a joke.
So...Trump is breaking the law and getting away with it. What else is new?
Yes
He has immunity
BUT... even if the executive is under legal theory constitutionally unitary, it isn’t actually unitary, it consists of individual people who act based on their own perception of legitimacy, and when the President abandons the principle of government of law and not arbitrary individual will in dealing with the courts, well, that also threatens the theoretical infrastructure that binds the people carrying guns in various executive departments to his authority, and we can very quickly end up in one of those highly unpredictable periods of history that produces lots of really neat stories to read about afterwards but is somewhat less pleasant to live through.
Republicans who work on bipartisan platforms are punished and primaried.
They were even able to account for all their crayons! PT belts on the other hand...
https://apnews.com/article/house-republicans-budget-blueprin...
Nothing is legitimate about this. Literally everything they are doing is both illegal and completely unconstitutional. They have thrown out the entire rule of law and it is a pure flex of power, a shock-and-awe meltdown that they hope to execute faster than the normal processes can react. They absolutely intend to abolish resistance and they know they can suffer no consequences for it.
Dark times ahead. We're aren't arguing government efficiency or saving money, they are smashing it all.
Yes, you lose some. But not all. And that's how you start.
One manager asked, “What if we train them and they leave!?”
To which a more senior manager quipped, “What if we don’t train them and they stay?”
As far as I'm concerned, "medical debt" is effectively extortion.
If I have some sort of major medical issue, such as cancer, it's absolutely fucked that my choices are to either die or to rack up an extreme amount of medical debt that I might not ever recover from. In either case, my life is ruined.
Y'all have the delulu American exceptionalism brain. People will leave if they don't like living here. A loan eill not stop them.
The amount of money and effort required to extradite a person far outweighs the average student loan. Not only that, it is not really a "crime" to not pay your debts. It is a civil violation. The court can seize your property, in limits. You can't seize someones house in some states, and some don't even allow you to seize cars. Even if they can, any given student loan holder may not have either.
"But Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former Republican director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), said the agencies Musk and Trump have targeted to date account for a tiny fraction of the overall federal budget ...
They are not going to go into agencies that are doing things they like. They are going into agencies they disagree with," Holtz-Eakin, who has participated in past tax and spending negotiations in Congress, told Reuters.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-cuts-based-more-politi...
Every time the administration changes, the heads of all the departments change, and the incoming people are typically pretty ignorant of what the department does. How would a corporation work if every 4 years you rotated the C-suite and 2 levels down, with people from a completely different business sector?
Meanwhile, funding is shifted even more often. Or is just outright cut once every few years.
Meanwhile, every action they take is an official government action. Which means it is LEGALLY REQUIRED to happen in certain ways based on laws written by people who don't think about consequences or how they are enacted.
And it is 2.2 Million people. There are economies of scale here.
So I wonder how this compares to current Google, current Facebook. I've heard people here talking about how messed up those companies are, projects started/stopped at whim, massive investments that get abandoned 2 years later, etc.
Or to banks. Banks don't modernize their software because they can't, not because they don't want to. No wonder the US government has similar issues.
If saving money was the goal surely there's be discussion akin to "let's cut the military budget". That's how you'd know they're serious. But as it stands it is clearly just an ideological axe grinder.
(I should note I'm not American, just watching bemused from the sidelines)
No one is serious about “saving money”. It’s just to justify the corporate tax cut.
This is why DOGE is staffed with young people.
It's easy to convince inexperienced people there's a 2-step plan:
Step 1. Destroy the old.
Step 2. Build the new.
Yet people with experience know that Step 2 requires orders of magnitude more effort and time than Step 1.
So, you have ignorant people breaking things, congratulating themselves on how quickly they're making progress... and then hit Step 2. And realize it's hard. And get bored. And so just, not.
Thus in the end, you're left with a broken pile of what came before, and nothing new to replace it.
Step 1. Destroy the old
Step 2. ???
Step 3. Profit!
"Build the new" doesn't even seem to be on the table at this point. There's no proposals to replace any of this. At least not public anyway, we know they are replacing all of this with for-profit scams.
Step 2. See? The government doesn't work! Just like we said!
Step 3. "Fix" the problems created from Step 1
Step 4. MAGA eventually realizes the swamp was enlarged and made worse, not drained
Unfortunately (for all of us, including for their base) this isn’t actually what people want or need, except the ideologues pushing it with a clear understanding of the expected outcomes. The base just infers that the ruin of these “inefficient” programs is a noble end in itself, because their supposed inefficiency is the problem with the programs themselves.
So at least we're not invading Iraq?
Anyone doing this kind of work is not merely ignorant.
The experience of bricklaying will help you think about the future times when you'll have to lay the bricks. Without that experience you may not ever consider those times, especially in a scenario which has you excited about what you are currently doing.
I wonder if the DOGE kids will be also sent off to the countryside once they're not useful anymore...
> Step 1. Destroy the old.
> Step 2. Build the new.
Feels very 'cultural revolution'-y
And also that the steps here should be reversed. Sure if you are tearing down a building you destroy before creating, but systems aren't buildings. If you are going to create a new system to run the cash registers for your business you don't tear out the old one and worry about building the new one later. First you have the replacement ready THEN remove the old one.
Wilful ignorance equates to evil in this case.
The media are absolutely craven, too, constantly normalizing insanity and pretending like even idiotic things are legitimate proposals that should instead be laughed out of the room. Like, maybe the Earth is flat? Let's HAVE THAT DEBATE!!
"Those guys walked on the grass. Therefore I'm entitled to demolish the building."
You're either so dumb you believe every piece of propaganda you are shown, and never notice the harm being done, or you are fully aware of what's happening and you're cheering on the chaos and suffering.
The toil and confusion and nastiness of everyday life under capitalism is not as fun and exciting as an imminent invasion at the southern border or the coming rise of the God Emperor or the final solution to groceries being expensive. Running a soup kitchen and washing clothes for the homeless just hasn't the same attraction as doing nothing by chasing the next Q-drop.
I thought that after 2016, I no longer do. It's the reverse. Maybe "evil" is a strong word but they are definitely what I would consider "bad people" based on their extreme selfishness. Most pretend to be ignorant, or "low information" in person but they follow news very closely.
As for 'juniors', it's not like we've seen this sort of thing before such as those here happy to propel the opinions of so-called 'climate expert / activist' (Greta Thunberg) who didn't finish school and was used by the media as the face of 'saving the planet' and throwing unfounded claims of disaster by 2023, despite a significant lack of understanding of climate change and what she was talking about.
But then again, I have not heard back from Netflix's elite team for a postmortem of that live-streaming disaster which there were no juniors to blame this time despite being inexperienced in delivering live-streaming on their platform reliably.
The odds of a junkie recognizing good or bad spending is very low.
Yes, in many respects. See this paper for a good model of the basic behavior: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451
You're surely being obtuse. I'm a progressive independent and even I understand why they are doing it, even if I'm not convinced this is the correct way to do it.
This is why they are doing it: https://www.usdebtclock.org/
It's just their idea of austerity.
I wouldn’t do that because I don’t want a felony. I could see some 16 year old working for their their chance at glory.
And I am not surprised some 16 years old doesn't care. I am more surprised HN ctowd doesn't seem to even mention it. 16 years old can learn, but only if there's a culture to teach them.
But I also understand why this would be an enormous temptation for mischief. Should they have reported it another way, ideally one that wouldn’t put them up for CFAA charges? Yeah! Am I the slightest bit surprised someone thought it’s be more fun to deface this one particular site with its especially crappy security? No, not at all!
(Also, “responsible disclosure” itself is hugely controversial. It’s most often used by corporations who’d prefer that the vuln is never, ever disclosed.)
> “responsible disclosure” itself is hugely controversial. It’s most often used by corporations who’d prefer that the vuln is never, ever disclosed.
It is sometimes used like that, but it is nowhere near "most often". Most often, the responsible disclosure results in exactly what it is meant for - fixing the vulnerability and improving security without harming anyone. And supporting this as cultural norm would make such cases even more frequent.
:<
There have been so many of these types posts that have been hidden from the front page.
Modification of the site is as unauthorized as access to the site -- undefined.
How does Musk get to destroy millions of dollars of investment? These are all government assets. What the fuck is going on here?
Which people? The paramount officers of the executive branch? They actively support it. They quasi-independent inspectors-general in the executive branch departments? Those in areas of concern have been (fairly blatantly illegally) fired, and in at least one case physically ejected by security personnel.
The majority of both houses of Congress? They at least tacitly support it out of partisan loyalty. The courts? They’be issued orders, but ultimately rely on executive compliance or a different part of the executive enforcing those orders, and see “the paramount officers of the executive branch...”, previously.
The electorate? They voted in the people supporting it in the executive and legislature. A sufficient number of safeguards have failed that there is likely no effective recourse within the system, and none of those failed safeguards are likely to reset into their functional state without some extreme force being applied to change their present direction.
My opinion: Some mistakes will be made but remedied. But overall it's a net positive. As to how much of a positive it is, it need to be see. If the income tax, property tax (and other unavoidable taxes) are eliminated, I'd say America is greater again.
Feds getting DDOSed? Nothing new. Public read/write access to a government distributed resource? That needs to be taken offline as a matter of public security.
You cut funding for cancer trials people are already enrolled in, people die.
You cut funding for HIV drugs, patients' viral loads go up. Even if you put the funding back before they die, their viruses have already evolved resistance to the drugs they used to be on.
You cut military aid to US allies, those countries learn the US isn't a reliable ally. Soft power centuries in the making evaporates, just like that.
So? Also, the distinction is moot.
It's harder for supporters to even pretend that you're even minimally competent.
Understand that most of the sentiment expressed here is identical to the pre-digested mass media pablum intended for 100 IQ consumers.
Think of mass media coverage of a subject you're an expert in and how horrifyingly wrong it typically is on so many levels, and try to rectify the two.
I also believe there are a bunch of Musk fanboys on this site that would flag this. Or people who don’t want to understand the implications of what’s going on and avoid anything that’s “political”.
I also trust dang
Don't know how to square these thing either, though
When there's a major ongoing topic like this one, especially when it's divisive, the flags tend to come from a combination of (1) users who flag one-sidedly for what appear to be political reasons, and (2) users who don't think the story is on-topic for HN, whether because it's too sensational / flame-prone, too repetitive, or both. The first is a bad reason to flag and the second is a good reason. When we notice users flagging repeatedly for bad reasons, we take their flagging privileges away.
I didn't know you take the flagging away. That's not a bad idea.
I've been seeing you defend yourself all over the place these days. Sorry to make you feel like you had to do that here too.
My comment was more one of confusion, to clarify. Reading your comments these last few weeks, I trust in your decisions and those of the rest of the mods. HN is a really good place because of you all.
But I also know Elon is super petty/crazy and doing some monkey business is not above him. And yes, I know that sounds very conspiracy theory of me based on your comment here.
Suffice to say, maybe I'm just reacting to the sea change in HN participation and doing some 'self protection'. I like HN and then I recognize this flagging behavior on mostly just two men. Is there more flagging? Yes, but that's 'background' to me. These things don't square to my mind, so I go off to conspiracy land. Either way, my lizard brain is triggered and whether I like it or not, I can't help feeling 'bad/danger'. Maybe some self-work is needed.
Still, thanks a ton for all the time and the effort yo and the rest of the mod team put in here. I really appreciate it.
> Unless the regular users are bots, which seems unlikely
Why do you believe it’s unlikely? Are these regular users whose activity predates GPT3? Personally, since LLMs became commercially available I’ve just assumed that at least 50% of comments on the internet are bots.
Uh, don't. HN doesn't block dumb people from joining the site and commenting.
There are at least 60 recent DOGE stories on HN with comments on. I guess people get a bit DOGEd out. It's probably part of the Trump/Musk strategy. 'Flood the zone' with so many things people can't follow it.
(on zone flooding https://youtu.be/iTSgL_R1CC4)
Here are the guidelines : https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Moderation is decentralized, downvoted comments tend to disappear. Flagging is a power people who have a lot of karma have, if you think are one of them you can vouch (unflag) for a comment. There is one mod, dang Here are the moderator last comments so you can have idea of the work he is doing: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang
I totally understand why people are knee-jerking, but it's not a conversation and it doesn't belong on HN. We have other forums for knee-jerk snark. I'll be happy to see another DOGE post here the next time there's a topic that has enough meat for a useful conversation to come out of it.
In the meantime, I suspect that dang just left this here to avoid the appearance of silencing the topic. I hope that people who see this come away better understanding why so many of these threads get flagged to death.
This thread on the other hand? There's one comment near the top that mentioned some interesting facts about the U.S. Digital Service, and a second comment that's third from the top that tries with limited success to get people to talk about the hack.
The rest of this thread is just mindless snark. That's fair, DOGE is stupid and deserves snark, but it's a waste of space on the HN front page.
A decent metric for whether something belongs on HN is: is the conversation more interesting than the Reddit equivalent would be? The answer here is pretty clearly an emphatic "no", so I think that this belongs on Reddit instead.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43019507
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43003751
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978572
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389 (<-- principles listed here)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42979382
If you take a look at those and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
Trust as you please, but we're moderating HN the same way we always have.
Edit: Actually we wouldn't expect or ask anyone to trust in the first place. I do think it's reasonable to ask regular users to familiarize themselves with the principles by which we moderate the site. Then if you see something that doesn't fit those principles, or if you want to make a case for different principles, we have something to discuss.
These principles go back a long time and have held up well in terms of preserving HN for its intended purpose over the years. If you (or anyone) want to familiarize yourself with them, see the link I marked above. It contains a partial list, and pointers to lots of past explanations.
These posts have a high political index, which given America's current culture wars tends to bring out the kind of behavior which none of us want on HN.
It's a damn tough balancing act.
Also, look at my post history, I'm pretty strongly anti-DOGE. I'm defending Dang because I love HN and appreciate what he is doing under extremely tough conditions.
I'd still like if threads indicated whether or not flags were turned off. Dang must be tired of answering these questions
mind you, it's totally legit to ridicule the noob security lapses, but the rest of the sentiment here seems a bit meh
But as for transparency, DOGE isn't at all being transparent about what it is doing. I'd give them an F so far on that.
For example, the recent headlines of the state department trying to buy $400m worth of armored Tesla vehicles was obviously a Democrat plant. It was done under the Biden administration in December, with no chance of fulfilling before the handover. Some.one thought it would be a simple way of making the Trump admin look bad.
You have to always be wary of being misled by the media in today's age. That said, the shit-slinging coming out of Doge has been largely false and illegal. If Congress assigns money to fund impressionist dancers in Pakistan, then that's what it has to be spent on. The real issue here is that to get a bill passed in the US a lot of fluff has to get attached to it. Doge can't unilaterally cancel payments without breaking the law.
Even in the cases I looked at were real corruption is plausible, ie. the money given to the Clinton Foundation, Doge just straight up lied about the amounts and purpose.
Outside of corruption, there is no good reason to move this fast and reckless. At least no good reason for the American people. They are moving this fast because they know what they do is illegal and idiotic and false, and they are trying to drown us in bullshit.
Musk gets a nice kickback for every single link going back to his own website (that is actually corruption), but more importantly, they are building up outrage fatigue for normal people and a frenzy for their fanatics. This is all about paving the way to paint legality as corruption so that they can justify ignoring the courts and Congress going forward.
DOGE is an autocratic power grab, and there's immense risk of damage, whether intentionally or through incompetence.
I bet if you poke around nvidia.com you can find some bad Wordpress sites. Does that mean the GPU engineering is bad?
Is that really how Elon became the President :)
And now, keep in mind that US govt is likely still way more "efficient" than most others on the planet.
For example, you (and by "you" I mean an external party holding a scalpel) can drill down into Executive Branch > Cabinet Level Agencies > Department of Education > Office of the Secretary > Office Of Civil Rights, and think, "Hey, why does the DoE need an office of civil rights? Does it need a 570 headcount? We can save $78M by cutting out that entire office".
I've seen this phenomenon in corporate, where cuts happen to areas that seem like they're not contributing to immediate profits, because their outcomes are long term, and there is enough organizational momentum to go forward for months, if not years, before their absence is noticed. For example, certain types of quality teams, technical/platform teams and employee safety/welfare related positions.
Meanwhile the second section seems to be a tool for dismantling the regulatory system of the US. It is disingenuously called the "Unconstitutionality Index" ignoring the fact that a country cannot be run by a legislature and its acts alone, let alone a constitution.
Hope they used good proxies, because this seems like a felony.
> One of the sources told 404 Media that they were able to push updates to a database of government employment information after studying the website’s architecture and finding the database’s API endpoints.
Oof, not something to put in your article.
All you had to do was actually read the article; it’s the very next paragraph from the one I quoted.
Huh, what would be the goal of connecting this database to an API on or near doge.gov? Surely it's not the "actual"/"source of truth" database, more likely a copy: I can imagine the geniuses thought ""let's mirror everything online on a single system so it's easier for all of us to access it and do queries like "WHERE gender NOT IN ('m', 'f') OR race NOT IN ('white')" and get results from all the databases we know of."". (I assume there is no single federal employee database?)
And since the truth is whatever they say nowadays, maybe it IS the "source of truth" database.
Would like to see a source on this.
Governments are similar to large enterprises whereby every bit of code going into Production requires a full security, architecture and site reliability review.
There is no doubt bugs in bespoke web applications but for your typical website.
What data are you basing this on? Federal websites have an approval process which includes a security review so I’d expect some familiarity with that in your response.
Citation?