I'm trying to steelman but I really can't think of a non- nefarious justification for this
There were 65,000 cases of salmonellosis in the EU in the most recent data I could find (2022). Thats a lower per capita rate than the US, but definitely not zero.
Being 26 times less worried about something translates, at least for most things, for me, to not being worried about it any more.
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/04/15/nx...
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/04/15/nx...
"The vast majority of chicken processed in the United States is not chilled in chlorine and hasn't been for quite a few years," says Dianna Bourassa, an applied poultry microbiologist at Auburn University, "So that's not the issue."
According to https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11945640/ most of the outbreaks in humans (where exact cause was found) were caused by foreign vegetables.
On other hand countries like Italy find positive samples from 27% of their flocks ( https://efsa.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.2903/j.efsa... ). USA doesn't do testing at that level as far I understand, I only found that 8% of the tested chicken parts have salmonella (https://www.propublica.org/article/salmonella-chicken-usda-f...).
This is one of those things the government does for the benefit of the whole.
Tragedy of the commons - NVD and the CVE project havr been backlogged and facing funding issues for a couple years now, and most security vendors are either cagey about providing vulns in a timely manner (as it can reduce their own comparative advantage), or try upsell their own alternative risk prioritization scores.
Every company will gladly use NVD and CVE data, but no one wants to subsidize it and help a competitor, especially in an industry as competitive as cybersecurity.
Multi-trillion-dollar companies benefit from and contribute to this system, surely they can spare 0.01% of their revenue to this bit of critical infrastruture?
They would, if we made companies pay their taxes.
Yes, you can also run such a system based on donations. But I personally think that such a system is important enough to be paid for by the government. When you run on donations, there will always be conflicts of interest and the risk of running out of funds.
But yeah, Mitre being a private organization that was paid for by the government was a problem.
Steelmanning is a neologism that serves no purpose other than in-group signaling. There was already a perfectly acceptable term for the same concept, one with more nuance and a rich history: Charitability.
The major difference is that charitability is about treating your interlocutor with respect. Steelmanning is about using one's own intellect to make your interlocutor's argument better than them. Because charitability is based on a concept of mutual respect, if somebody clearly doesn't respect you one iota, then why would you be charitable? Steelmanning tries to divorce the person from the argument, and is ironically both arrogant and naive.
This isn't just a rapid disassembly of economic structures, any trust and goodwill is completely obliterated as well.
Threat intelligence firm Flashpoint noted in March 2024 it was aware of 100,000 vulnerabilities with no CVE number and consequently no inclusion in NVD. More worryingly, it said that 330 of these vulnerabilities (with no CVE number) had been exploited in the wild.. Since the start of 2024 there have been a total of 6,171 total CVE IDs with only 3,625 being enriched by NVD. That leaves a gap of 2,546 (42%!) IDs.
A funding shortfall and strain isn't a funding cut. And from what I see there was a funding increase.
2025 article claims 30% increase in 2024 workload, https://www.securityweek.com/mitre-signals-potential-cve-pro...
> According to NIST, while the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) is processing incoming CVEs at the same rate as before the slowdown in spring and early summer 2024, a 32 percent jump in submissions last year means that the backlog continues to grow.
2023
> CISA had previously been supporting the NIST NVD program with approximately $3.7 million per year in interagency funding, which they have discontinued
2024
> While NIST has since reallocated $8.5 million to NVD for fiscal years 2024 and 2025
Assuming that's spread over both years it wasn't as big of an increase as I said, but is still an increase even inflation adjusted.
> 2025 article claims 30% increase in 2024 workload
Underfunding in the face of more workload isn't itself a funding cut.
> While NIST has since reallocated $8.5 million to NVD for fiscal years 2024 and 2025, this funding remains a fraction of the $300 million to $400 million estimated to be needed annually to fully restore capacity, with an additional $120 million to $150 million required to prevent further system “deterioration.”
Did NVD receive 300MM annual funding pre-2024? That would be a 98% funding cut.
MITRE CVE/CWE budget is more transparent than NVD since it's a contract, listed on USAspending.gov.
Now if you want that (even just funding) to be a thing ... you have to go through Trump & Co and pay your bribe to get it back up.
Still shortsighted and stupid, but it's plausible this is intended as leverage to get someone else to pony up.
Why? This administration is not acting in good faith, you don't have to act as if they are. People and institutions doing that is part of how we got here in the first place.
As you say, that's exactly what got us here. But the alternatives are very unclear, and seem deeply unpleasant.
They could attack the non-steelmanned version, but that just opens them up to having their own comments attacked. You quickly get derailed. (It's sometimes called "sealioning".)
They could propose alternatives, but that too is subject to sealioning. Real alternatives are always subject to tradeoffs, and the answer to "how about you do X instead of attacking me?" is always "no".
They could refrain from discussing it, but that just allows the offenses to continue.
So what often happens is that people persist in acting as if this were a sincere discussion, and hope that a majority will recognize the quality of your argument. It's a lousy plan but I don't have much else to suggest.
Surely there's an antibody response.
Why? The decisions are pretty well politically aligned with the ideology which detests the size and scope of the government (realistically, those aspects which the ideologues feel are not in their interest). What is unexpected is the swiftness and the brutality of action, but revolutions tend to be messy, and make no mistake, this is a revolution.
> This is the actions of a foreign bad actor
Now this sounds like a coping strategy: everything is so preposterous it couldn't possibly be homegrown. Foreign influence and underhanded actions are as old as human interactions, but IMO outright plants can't succeed without a massive economic and power asymmetry between the adversaries.
The entire world seems to be able to 'cope' with that assessment.
Trump's actions towards Putin are highly irrational. Maybe he's being blackmailed, maybe he's being bought, maybe he just has likes Putins style but there is a reason people suspect him despite it being unlikely in the general case.
This is exactly the process that conservatives take to privatise services into their own friends pockets. Destroy services until they're ineffective and use it as an excuse to privatise it.
There's no such thing as small government, only large sprawling private services that the government hands money to.
In reality this would never happen so all these people playing steelman are just detached/insulated.
> Why?
It's a sensible practice and good practice
If the steelmanning fails then you can you can be even more confident that it is in bad faith.
The issue we have is that republican every chance they get since the 1970s have cut taxes. And then blamed democrats for causing the deficits. We don't need smaller governments. We need a reasonable tax system that taxes people. It can be progressive like it was before we decided rich people just need it easier than poor people.
Yes, I will pay more taxes sign me up, especially if they can finally fix the roads and fund research. The problem is my taxes as a middle-class person go up and rich people get a tax cut. It's stupid. I like water provided by government utilities, I like planes that don't crash into stuff because there are air traffic controllers. These things used to work because we paid for them. When you buy cheap you get cheap.