Dismissed Nuclear Bomb Specialists Recalled by Energy Department | Hacker News Reader

Dismissed Nuclear Bomb Specialists Recalled by Energy Department

bloomberg.com

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Something something Chesterton s fence

The fastest way to figure out why a fence was build, is to tear it down.

The Soviet Union did this several times, e.g.

- https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1926/07/the-rus...

- https://www.history.com/news/soviet-union-stalin-weekend-lab...

Non-paywalled alternative on same topic: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

> “Congress is freaking out because it appears DOGE didn’t really realize NNSA oversees the nuclear stockpile,”

This chaos absolutely reminds me of one of the recent-ish stories from Tesla and, as a root cause, basically every story from Twitter since he bought it.

I have confidence in the ability of the Republican party to blow off any notions of shame or collective responsibility. Total control over a badly damaged institution is more appealing than a pluralistic role in a well functioning one for some people, and it is exactly such people that control the party now.

I wonder if he'll need to break something bad enough to get kicked out?

This should definitely be the thing. If anyone still thinks he isn’t an absolute moron, I don’t even know what to say. Firing people because you have no idea what they do is just so spot on for his “I’m the smartest guy in the room so if I can’t figure it out, nobody can”. He is very rarely the smartest guy in the room…

The US is a defacto dictatorship now.

Do you think there will be a presidential election in ~3.75 years time?

Russia has elections, but the elections don't matter. The elections are ritualized consent for a despotic state.

American elections are already ritualized. You can't really vote for an anti-oligarch/regulate corporations candidate unless you're in a couple districts. There are very few "rule of law" candidates. There's no voting based way to get congress persons to stop trading stock.

I think there will be the performance of voting in 3.75 years, but even less substance to it than we already have.

My prediction is there will be but Trump does everything he can get away with to tilt it towards a family member being the next. E.g. executive orders that cause things to go in his favour.

It's interesting that he threw Vance under the bus recently when asked about this. Clearly he has someone in mind already.

At this point, I think the only practical way to get rid of him will be to publicly embarrass Trump about 'President Elon' enough that Trump can't take it anymore.

I feel like public embarrassment only works on those who can feel shame. If his first 4 years of the presidency wasn't enough, then I don't think there's much more the world, let alone the US, can do.

We are beyond that way of thinking. It would be like someone breaking something bad in a dictatorship. Best case they get moved and a similar person takes over.

It is more likely he gets kicked out if he humiliates Trump somehow.

But no nukes have gone off, it’s fine, probably they weren’t doing anything. (The same argument for my Twitter app loads fine, so the fired employees were probably not needed) /s

If nobody is monitoring radiation levels then you can't have any radiation leaks. Simple.

So, this is obviously really bad(TM) when it comes to nuclear technology and security.

That said, I think that the ‘fire them all and let God sort them out’ strategy has a rational economic angle that journalists miss. The cost of all that headcount while you have slow change management vs just fucking around and finding out who’s actually necessary in a corporate setting can make sense, I think. Especially when teams are well entrenched.

Journalists dunk on some CEO who had to rehire five people they needed, the CFO is happy to pay them double + a signing bonus, because the 95 other salaries, management overhead, and presumably political impact of that team is gone.

I’m also of the opinion that even if it may be desirable to some to reset certain programs, that this method won’t translate to government very well; in particular my friends who are federal employees have communicated to me that they are very unused to this sort of treatment, and it’s extremely upsetting — that sort of experience en masse can have huge decades-long impacts in a complex system like the US Federal government.

Admiral Rickover, the father of the nuclear navy and one of the greatest engineers of the last century, purposefully "over" hired. He was a major critic of private nuclear venture because business concerns being above engineering concerns leads to cost cutting pressure and disaster.

We've seen the endgame of the private enterprise model in Boeing. Do we really want our nuclear arsenal and expertise subject to that style of operations?

Nuclear disasters aren't an oops situation. They have the potential for centuries to a millennia of consequences.

Institutional knowledge can be lost or not passed down. Training/onboarding/mentorship/morale/stress/culture are all things which matter and throwing the chaos monkey into that when there is the potential for CENTURIES of disaster is unconscionable.

This is playing with fire, and you are justifying playing with fire. OK, but there's a difference between playing with fire in a fertilizer factory, and playing with fire around a campfire. Playing around a campfire is a learning experience. Playing around in a fertilizer factory you might instantly vaporize and take a portion of your city with you. You might fire all your product devs, but would you fire all your DBAs?!

People are being chosen for positions based solely on loyalty and not expertise. That should scare the living daylights out of you, especially when there is no one with veto power over decisions that any sane person would veto.

Perhaps it makes more sense to start at the top and go from that direction. Does Tesla actually need a CEO, for instance^? What about SpaceX?

^: Probably, but perhaps a better one that actually shows up to work?

Sounds like Muntzing, but to organizations. Remove parts until it breaks, then put parts back in until it works again.

Good for electronics or software, maybe not so good with people since you'll piss people off and eventually find that you can't just put them back.

Fine in a simulation but when there's human targets they may notice they're being shat upon by a tosser and adjust their future behavior accordingly. Put another way: social darwinism isn't side effect free.

If a company did that to me there's zero chance I would go back to them, because it makes it obvious management has no idea what they're doing and the company is probably doomed in the medium term.

You know how there are some things which there is wide agreement that we should be doing (in the private sector, or in the military) but which we can't do because let the institutional knowledge and tooling infrastructure wither away? You can't always reboot your way out of problems.

Nobody in a normal world is used to that.

I guess that maybe in the world of startups this is expected but otherwise you do not wake up in the morning expecting to be fired.

" that sort of experience en masse can have huge decades-long impacts in a complex system like the US Federal government."

I am totally convinced Trump will be the most impactful president since a long time. All the stuff they are doing now will take a very long time to rebuild, if ever (it's their hope that it can't be rebuilt).

In principle I think it would be very good to look at government functions and their efficiency. But you can't just walk around "don't know what this does. doesn't benefit me. Therefore delete". This may work in a corporation where the worst that can happen is that it goes bankrupt. You really don't want the whole country to break down.

> You really don't want the whole country to break down.

You and I might not. Clearly there are people who do.

https://archive.is/u6UQU

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43055119

The US federal government is a gargantuan entity that guarantees the safety, prosperity and happiness of millions of people.

Treating it like a silicon valley tech company is a recipe for disaster.

There needs to be a middle ground between spending a trillion dollars a year for this and having no level of accountability versus treating it like a failing startup

Why so you think there is no accountability? Aside from that isn't some overspending a necessary evil to ensure stability over all else?

Corruption and incompetence. There’s no accountability both because people have a vested interest in there not being any so they can profit off it in shitty ways, and also politics in general are so dysfunctional that any attempts at reform fail. I would argue the dysfunction is also deliberate, again due to corruption

Replace “stability” with “rule of law”.

To pull out the years of weed growth in the garden sometimes some flowers are going to be disturbed (tongue in cheek)

There doesn't really seem to be that many weeds at all. A better analogy is that a bunch of kids have been let loose with chain saws in a well kept garden farm that keeps us all alive.

There's really nothing surprising about this - I remember similar articles at the start of the first Trump administration about how one of the nuclear weapon departments (might have been the same one) had its top people retiring, and multiple Republican senators had to make noise before Trump got around to appointing a replacement. In the same vein, Rick Perry ran on the idea of getting rid of the Department of Energy during the campaign and was picked by Trump to be its secretary. It was explained to Perry at some point that the DOE is not, in fact, just about energy; that someone has to manage, manufacture, design and test the nuclear weapons we have; and that the national labs might be fairly important components of our scientific and technological advantages as a nation. I don't expect any better this time around.

Ya'll need to rename entire government departments to have long self describing titles that are also easy to remember acronyms.

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