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Comment by bburnett44 | Hacker News Reader

This is such a lame comment. He's looking at publicly available geospatial data, not trying to build a bomb.

He's not looking at, he's gathering

I gather things like this all the time. I'm against DOGE as much as 90% of the US is, but collection of open data for curiosity and interest is really not a thing to focus on.

That's completely fair.

However, i am let's say, at least dubious about the whys of an agency which is wreaking so much havoc need to collect data on us sensitive infrastructure. If you were dealing with drugs, and you told me you buy codeine based pharma products in bulk, i wouldn't think you caught a cold

There are companies that are making bucks selling satellite photos of russian army storage(s) so that it is possible to calculate how much of remaining tanks are in storage. While a single photo of a single storage wouldn't matter on its own, having a clear picture of every russian storage can give you an idea of how many tanks were refurbished and remain in stock

Point of contention - according to a recent YouGov[1] poll, 48% of respondents think DOGE should be kept or expanded, while only 37% think it should be reduced or eliminated. A far cry from 90% either direction. You may be subject to confirmation bias.

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/doge-support-collapsing-poll-elon-m...

I don't really care about a single YouGov poll about what people think about a headline -- that's a shallow approach, misses quite a bit of context, and when used as a summary would rightly be called clickbait. Digging deeper and past propaganda, the activities of DOGE are deeply unpopular to the electorate wholesale, and my 90% claim is easily justified by a groundswell of current and long time understanding of the electorate:

- negative impact to the economy is deeply unpopular [0]

- lying about savings is deeply unpopular [1]

- threatening cuts to entitlement spending is deeply unpopular [2]

How you ask a question, what question you ask, and how you collect data will unduly influence any poll -- event with adjustments.[3] People aren't as fickle as headlines would otherwise lead you to believe.

My take on your oblique reference to "maybe [I] have confirmation bias" is that you are taking the headlines as fact and thus can dismiss anything that doesn't agree with your perspective. This may be mistaken on my part, but if you feel deep inside that it is not, then I encourage you to dig deeper.

[0] "It's the economy, stupid!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1hxNKweJbc

[1] DOGE is not trusted - https://truthout.org/articles/nearly-6-in-10-voters-concerne...

[2] https://www.nasi.org/learn/social-security/public-opinions-o... - Gallup shows opinions are fairly stable even though this source is somewhat dated

[3] Now-infamous Selzer poll https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/03/trump-harris...

The government has whole departments of people whose job it is to be on top of this sort of thing.

Why is it suddenly part of the job description of a junior DOGE employee to build workforce org chart visualization tools and investigate strategic resource datasets? Isn’t that weird to have one brand new government employee doing self-taught random investigations of topics as complex as ‘government workforce management’ and ‘strategic resource analytics’?

> Why is it suddenly part of the job description of a junior DOGE employee to build workforce org chart visualization tools and investigate strategic resource datasets?

That is totally fine to focus on. My point was focusing on the code prior to DOGE existing showing collection of GIS data.

> Isn’t that weird to have one brand new government employee doing self-taught random investigations of topics as complex as ‘government workforce management’ and ‘strategic resource analytics’?

We're in total agreement on this particular point.

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