Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kindra | Hacker News Reader

Notwithstanding the other awful aspects of all of this, there’s a certain vibe of, “people who don’t understand how a system works attempting to act like they know how the system works and are too cowardly to admit they are breaking everything.”

This just reads like “Character Limit” except replace Twitter with the federal government.

View on HN

To repeat popular quotes, there's a lot of walking up to fences gaily and then tearing them down, and a lot of "Government doesn't work, vote for us and we'll prove it"

Not much to say. If anyone is truly on the fence, please remember this and vote against it in 2026. Vote early, vote often. Vote local. I promise that killing trans people and defunding science is not going to make gas cheaper or anything.

Vote in 2026 (and hope your vote gets counted correctly).

It's like an internet argument spilled out into the real world, with all the posturing and bravado to increase perceived expertise.

Except it's gambling with an entire nation's fortune, instead of likes/votes/reactions.

4chan regime.

It's literally what happened. Twitter is more real than "real politics" now

It reminds me of the Gordian knot myth. All these sages had tried and failed to untie it. Alexander the Great, a true jock, sliced it in half with his sword.

Trump and Musk style themselves after Alexander. They see the complexities of geopolitics, security, culture and economics, and they have contempt for that complexity. They give simple, brutal solutions for hard problems: War in Europe? Force Ukraine to surrender! Slow to change government policy? Fire Federal workers and consolidate power! Too many illegal immigrants? Send them to Guantamo! And it feels active, it feels efficient, it's cathartic, and so their base cheers them on as they take swings at the load-bearing walls of our country. The fulminant narcissism, impulsive mania and willful ignorance are adaptive, to them.

And the names of the sages are forgotten, but Alexander is still known as one of history's great leaders and founder of an empire. It seems the personality traits one would look for in a productive citizen or a nice neighbor are almost antithetical for making it into history books.

Breaking everything? I'm not aware of any huge changes in state government yet. You know, the governments that run everything.

Sometimes the only way to know something is important is to shut it off and see if anyone complains. For example, lots of stories in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9629714. Now certainly the Trump administration could have been more careful, but they only have 4 years so the Facebook motto of "move fast and break things" applies.

> Sometimes the only way to know something is important is to shut it off and see if anyone complains.

These government programs aren't stray servers in a closet.

Even if you believe that these programs should be stopped, it's entirely wasteful to abruptly end them and let their work in progress just crash out and burn.

But it's still a very bad idea to operate this way. There is no rapid feedback loop. The negative effects can be subtle and take years to ripple through the economy and science world.

I wouldn't do this if there were lives at stake. e.g. turning off circuits in a hospital to see which ones are really necessary.

It's a very strong claim to say no lives depend on any federal funding.

All of the important programs have temporary restraining orders. That's actually the standard the judge applies, "is there a possibility of irreparable harm?" (e.g. lives lost). It's not perfect but no system is.

USAID saved thousands and thousands of lives every year. And that is a massive understatement of the suffering and misery USAID prevented.

It’s gone. People are dying because it’s gone.

Downvoted why?

By the by, USAID was investigating Starlink in Ukraine. [0]

CFPB and Twitter “money” [1]

FAA and spacex.

Etc etc etc.

[0] https://oig.usaid.gov/node/6814 [1] https://www.npr.org/2025/02/12/nx-s1-5293382/x-elon-musk-dog...

Hundreds of people now have HIV which could have been prevented from USAID. This number is increasing.

These people also can't afford AIDS medications.

This is just one of many examples.

Your standard given here already isn't being held to in the most basic, obvious ways.

Having a temporary restraining order isn't the same as complying with it. Multiple judges have ruled that they are not.

Have you been paying attention to Republicans over the last 40 years? They don't care if it's useful or important. They don't want government programs to exist.

Trump isn't changing that. Don't kid yourself.

There's certainly an argument that anything the government can do, the private sector can do better. That argument would conclude that the government should indeed not exist, and consequently have no programs. The reality is more complicated, something like the microkernel vs. monolithic kernel debate, but it is hard to say that the current distribution between private and public sectors is optimal.

To be rather abrasive in my response: I believe your view is a waste of air. In case I'm correct how about we cut you off from air for a week and if there's a problem we'll restore it then.

That is how a large portion of the internet works, e.g. in most subreddits certain viewpoints will be instantly banned without any discussion. HN is kind of strange in that respect.

I figured it was a rather apt example of how the turn it off and wait until someone complains doesn't work if the damage done in the wait until it's restored time isn't repairable. The abrasive personal example is because he's ignoring that this view has many people's lives at risk when we talk about programs like usaid.

Thats fine for a sofrware startup because it fundamentally doesn't matter. Who cares if your silly website fails after you experiment, no one gets seriously hurt.

Shutting off the government means that things can be irreparably damaged. Losing a generation of scientists because of random cullings at the NSF will have effects for decades.

In the worst case, "moving fast and breaking things" with the government will kill people. For example, many patients were kicked off clinical trials during the NIH funding freeze. Abroad, the end of PEPFAR could kill untold numbers of people.

> but they only have 4 years so the Facebook motto of "move fast and break things" applies.

Except with the federal government “things” in many instances refers to people’s lives. What’s the acceptable body count to you, as we approach haphazardly and unconstitutionally reducing the deficit?

> the Facebook motto of "move fast and break things" applies.

That’s seriously begging the question of whether a website started to rate the attractiveness of Zuckerberg’s classmates has the same consequences for society if it fails as the government. When you work on something which actually matters, there are virtues other than speed. What the Republicans are doing is like clearing your lawn by setting it on fire, saying they didn’t have time to do anything slower.

It’s estimated that just the USAID cuts alone are on the order of hundreds of children being born HIV positive every day, not to mention the impact of food aid disappearing during a famine, or shutting down the last option for afghan women to get educated:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/opinion/hiv-usaid-freeze-...

The science funding has a lower death toll, of course, but it profoundly disrupts careers and pushes people out of the country. Someone educated in the United States who returns to their home country ends up competing with us and probably won’t come back. The grad student getting cut now will probably end up leaving science entirely (people need to make rent and student loan payments) so we’ll be missing out on their lifetime achievements and also the later-career guidance they would have given the next generation.

The federal government as a whole becomes less efficient because fewer top people will be willing to work for lower pay without job security and every contractor will be pricing in future disruption.

Startups have nowhere to go but up. Large established companies have nowhere to go but down. Why do you think large organizations are so conservative? It's because getting new customers is much harder than losing existing customers. The US government has flaws, but it is phenomenal overall.

This is like taking over Apple and tearing apart its culture and management. Only bad will come out of it.

Oops, the country died. I won't do that next time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com