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Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

Do people just want to rage? Because a lot of what is being said here, and even the article's headline are not supported by what the article says. In particular:

- The workers were never fired. They were put on paid leave.

- They were fully reinstated less than 24 hours after it became clear a mistake had been made.

- The headline is also misleading. The reason for the firing was 'based on administrative codes that “may not have been intentional.”' So it was a "coding" error in the sense of administrative codes, not programming.

The way people are responding to this, and then hyperbolizing each other, just looks like mob mentality. I'm certain this will be downvoted for the exact same reason. People don't want facts.

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For what it's worth, if you get put on a RIF plan then you treat it like a firing. Them being on paid leave isn't them not being fired yet, it's severance.

You're not getting downvoted because "people don't want facts" but because your list is misleadingly incomplete or, in some instances, wrong.

- The workers were put on paid leave pending termination, for procedural reasons (they could not legally be fired immediately).

- Only ten were reinstated, and nobody knows why. The agency that reinstated them (NINDS) is not the same agency that issued the firing (HHS directly)

- The staff in question were explicitly told a "computer error" (quotes as such in the article) led to their termination notices.

This is not how a functioning management system works. It's also not an effective way to operate a government research program. There's no hyperbole here; it's just bad work.

Look at the comments in this post. People think they were fired, because that's what the article claims. You have people in the top post of this thread social mediaizing each other about how now they'll get to renegotiate their contracts, or maybe not even come back, and all this nonsense. Except none of this is true. Similarly, look at how everybody is interpreting "coding error." As the editor certainly intended, everybody is just assuming it means programming, and just jumping off the deep end from there.

Everything I have said would lead a person reading it to understand the facts with near to complete accuracy (I do agree I should have added that they were put on paid leave pending dismissal). Yet in this thread people are discussing the article with basically 0% accuracy, so far as the facts are concerned. And this is a recurring trend in these topics.

This is semantics though. They were for all intents and purposes fired. Being placed on leave pending termination has been the standard playbook for most of these RIFs, and I would bet is what happened to all of the others that were fired at the same time as these researchers and weren't reinstated.

If people interpret something you say in a wildly different way then what happened, then it's not simply semantics. People are talking about issues and other aspects of this that simply do not exist, because they're being actively misinformed by the article's headline. Obviously people should read entire articles and not just headlines, but of course that's not what happens in practice.

If only were an isolated incident, and not the latest in a long train of abuses and usurpations.

Except it's the same in literally all of these articles. Some relatively minor mistake is taken and blown up into some huge degree of maliciousness or unprecedented incompetence. People then 'social mediaize' it all by taking it at face value, and then getting each other even more riled up - exactly like a mob.

It's easy to see where this is coming from because each writer of these sort of articles likely had colleagues and/or friends who were intentionally terminated, and so they're writing with a tremendous chip on their shoulder. But they're doing a disservice to themselves because anybody who is not particularly upset by these changes is going to completely eyeroll each time another one of these articles appears, and those who are genuinely upset are increasingly living in a world detached from reality.

The end result is of course conflict and confrontation, which I suppose is the point. But I don't think this is something anybody would have ever wanted if we imagine how things might look in hindsight, before we get there.

Seems like these idiots are making a lot of ‘minor mistakes’, and people are losing patience.

Basically nobody believes the world is flat. The reason the media, and some people, seem to believe this is because of a simple aspect of large numbers. If 0.01% of people believe the world is flat then in a world of billions that'd be millions of people. It still doesn't change the fact that 0.01% is reasonably called "basically nobody."

In this case they've cut tens of billions of dollars in spending and an immense amount of waste. Even if they were 99.9% accurate by this metric or that, there's going to be many mistakes. And I don't really think people are losing patience. His poll numbers are slightly down but not much more than that and I think that's probably more attributable to his failures to end the Ukraine War, continuing support for Israel, and other such unpopular things.

It's mostly the same people raging. Even the "protests" have been largely farcical rent-a-protest type events.

> Some relatively minor mistake is taken and blown up into some huge degree of maliciousness or unprecedented incompetence

Because this is exactly what’s happening, and there’s some people who are informed enough about it and others who fall for thinly veiled plausible deniability.

The thing is that if you take each of the thousands of “mistakes” made and look at them in isolation, and fully believing the words of this administration, then they might individually seem small.

But when we see thousands of mistakes and the repeated lies of those behind said mistakes, then we recognize it for what it is - a systemic failure.

The repeated lack of accountability from both this administration and its constituents is appalling. It’s not enough that everything is constantly being fucked up. We must also deny, deny, deny. The animosity is obvious, but moreover, it is correct.

The plausible deniability ship sailed long ago. When those in power repeatedly affirm their intent to be malicious, we must believe them. When those in power repeatedly make the same mistakes, we must acknowledge they are not mistakes. We must see this for what it is: a plan, a strategy.

If the strategy seems evil or destructive, that does not mean the strategy does not exist. It means the strategy is evil and destructive.

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