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Comment by ChrisRR | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what parts you're referring to as "clearly bad" because so far I haven't seen any examples of that. What actually seems "clearly bad" is the random stripping of funding with little to no research into the knock-on effects.

The only example I've seen that is potentially is a good move is removing the penny from circulation, but of course that has its own pros and cons.

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well, im a tech bro american living in miami, from poor alabama to a bigger-city life and mid-income from basically working in IT infrastructure and datacenter operations. i've worked my way into some kinda something and worth basically through savings and working a lot of hours and also now operating in a leadership role for a $20B privately owned company. i myself know first hand wasteful spending and putting in minimal effort would have never afforded me where i have gotten today. i lived with roommates, bad neighborhoods in altanta, birmingham, all to save money and get by and build myself up to where i needed to be. so my 1st hand experience or anecdotes will highly sway my own viewpoints, so im saying all of this to say i will not be without bias when it comes to accountability and wastefulness.

now with that all being said, when i see contracts like this:

"Telephone Based Mindfulness Training to reduce blood pressure in black-women" $2million(https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_47PH0825C0001_474...)

"South Sudan Gender Aware Sustainanable Water and Sanitation": $40Million (https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_72066821C00009_72...)

State Department Spending on Social Media Influencers:$4M (https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/FESTIVUS-REP...)

Just some random example of currently killed or going to be killed contracts....I feel like all I had to do is have friends in government to basically just suck money off of the people while adding nothing back to society as a result of it. There are hundreds to many thousands of discovered "projects" and funds with these type of numbers. This is a plague in my viewpoint and does nothing to benefit society and move the needle, which engineers so pride themselves in doing...

I'm confused, I thought we were talking about laying off federal employees. Now we're talking about contracts?

yeah man, you got yourself out of the salt mines of Alabama. So time to pull up the ladder, right?

> "Telephone Based Mindfulness Training to reduce blood pressure in black-women" $2million(https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_47PH0825C0001_474...)

The link you provided indicates funds were for repair to some bridge at port of entry in TX - "YSLETA, LAND PORT OF ENTRY PAVEMENT REPLACEMENT REPAIRS PROJECT, EL PASO, TX AWARD WAS MADE WITH LOW EMBODIED CARBON FUNDING"

> "South Sudan Gender Aware Sustainanable Water and Sanitation": $40Million (https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_72066821C00009_72...)

"tech bro American" doesn't want clean water for people in Sudan and promotion of basic hygiene practices.

https://dt-global.com/projects/afia-wash/

> State Department Spending on Social Media Influencers:$4M (https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/FESTIVUS-REP...)

There's so much wrong with this source material. It is so biased.

All of these "killed" contracts you deem as wasteful yet turn a blind eye to the _billions_ that public companies pour into stock buybacks. Minimal investment back into the company. This only helps _rich_ cunts and foreign investors.

Why can't both points be true at the same time?

Because one of the points is false. A priori, you're right: there could be hideous waste in this area. There probably is, even. But you haven't provided examples of it, and there's no real reason to assume that the wasted effort would be obvious at a glance.

Stock buybacks aren't inherently evil or immoral. They are just like issuing dividends, no difference, and are the reason companies exist: to return value to their equity holders for the equity risk they bear.

They could be a sign of a lack of better projects for the company to invest in.

There's likely something to be said about tying stock buy backs to more stock options for employees, but it'd have to be voluntary rather than regulated.

There's definitely something to be said about CEO compensation relative to worker wages. But that's a civil society discussion, not a government regulation one.

And finally capital gains taxes being lower than income taxes is morally reprehensible, but this one will take quite a bit of work to undo without destroying the US economy due to capital flight out of the country once the law changes

There is waste in every org, but what they are doing is the equivalent of deleting files that contain the word "diversity" in them instead of going through and actually reading the files. Because that would take time and patience. It's a low-brow sledgehammer approach and is hurting people inside and outside the organizations in government. E.g., people handling nuclear safety. It's not just throwing out the baby with the bathwater, it is throwing babies, adults, scalding hot bathwater out onto the people that it was supposed to help.

These tech-bro-americans with very little experience with science, biotech, helping other people, international relations, understanding of how institutional knowledge works, or grant funding cycles and NIH works, are dismantling key infrastructure. It's worse than dumb it's much more terrifying.

I don't know about the mindfulness thing. But If at least want to hear about it before cancelling it. The others though are positive to me.

Water and sanitation are a HUGE issue in developing countries. It's a main disease vector. It's also very common in many places that women have to practically sneak out of the village at night to go to the bathroom (some field) and get raped. Given anything I've heard about South Sudan I'd need surprised if these issues didn't exist there.

Third one is a positive surprise. Propaganda is clearly of increased importance in this century and we must fight the fight.

That's the interesting part about their comment, is that they've instantly assumed that these are pointless contracts based on name alone.

Without looking into it you can't just assume that mindfulness training doesn't have a proven clinical effect on blood pressure, and if it does then it's a good use of money. Preventative healthcare is still healthcare

Helping destitute people get water and sanitation seems like giving to society. It's very typical and likely very effective foreign aid. Probably it got picked here because of "Gender Aware", as if sanitation having gender-related issues is somehow weird.

Your link to the blood pressure reduction project is linking to something totally else, but in general such approaches seem to have some scientific backing. Improving public health seems like benefiting the society.

I wonder how many engineers really benefit society with their work, and how many even actively harm it.

https://bmccardiovascdisord.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11...

To the degree that those contracts represent something farcical, they are a symptom of an upstream problem in decision-making. Is that upstream problem something that can be addressed? Or is the amount of error [0] within an a margin whereupon eliminating it costs more than dealing with it?

0. https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

Blood pressure reduction and water and sanitation both sound like genuine issues though (I don't know what the social media one is about so I couldn't comment.

Do you actually know that those are pointless contracts or are you just making assumptions based on the titles?

Sometimes viewing the world through your own lens is harmful, as you've learned here from the thoughtful replies to your comments. If you haven't traveled to places like South Sudan, haven't been black, and have no real understanding of the psychology of propaganda, then your responses are reactive and uninformed. It's a less-well-understood version of the "deleting" of USAID -- a tiny financial impact even there, but immense human suffering and loss of trust as a result. It's the lack of understanding of the average citizen that has resulted in this emotional, baseless movement we are witnessing.

i guess elon can't run companies and detect inefficiencies, voters should trust this anon internet user instead!

Elon breaks almost every promise he makes and has constantly been proven wrong on the claims he's made in the past month. It astounds me that someone not connected to him would trust him at all

I'm not american, I just genuinely haven't seen any clearly beneficial moves yet

PS. Your green username gives you away

Does he actually run companies?

This is a genuine question; he’s the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, Boring Company, the CTO of Twitter, and the owner of several more companies.

If he’s running five or more companies, and trying to run a government department, how involved can he actually be with running any individual one? They can’t all be full time jobs.

I've heard rumors that at least one of his companies has team whose job is to distract him.

I haven't been a fan of his since he called the cave divers pedophiles for not using his stupid submarine, but I at least thought he actually did stuff.

But with the recent case where he bragged about being in the top 20 Diablo players in the world, only to find out that he paid people to level his character up for him, makes me think that maybe he doesn't actually do anything. I mean, he's bragging and lying about something that does not matter.

No one really cares if the CEO of your spaceship or car company or brain-implant company is good at video games. If it turned out that everyone saw he was bad at Diablo, approximately nothing changes (and potentially people like him even more if he's a good sport about it and laughs it off!), and yet he felt it was important to construct a lie around this so he could brag.

If he's going to brag about a completely insignificant false accomplishment, why should I assume that he's going to tell the truth for stuff that people would actually care about? At this point, I'm erring on the side of "Musk doesn't do anything outside of providing initial funding".

Maybe I'm wrong, that's certainly possible, but he really killed a lot of his credibility.

I think Elon employees a lot of people who sit around and think of ways to be Elon in the most annoying extreme ways possible, then they run it by Elon, Elon nods, and they go do it.

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