I'm sorry to tell you this, but the sign was lying to you. It is already too late to "turn back the clock" on climate change. The droughts, the floods, the fires: we are already paying the debts of past inaction.
It’s terrifying that data US taxpayers paid for, collected and analyzed in the name of public health, can be removed on a whim. While there are a lot of efforts to archive said data, it would still make it unavailable to Americans who are not tech savvy. Unfortunately, that seems to be the idea, I think.
Isn't this data already inaccessible to those who are not tech savvy? My grandma isn’t visiting any of the data download sites provided by the federal government. She doesn’t even know why she would, or even that such data is available. And if I provide it to her, she hasn’t the skills to do anything with it.
It's a bit like asking whether road signs are effective for Americans who can't read. The signs are there for the people that are using the road, and if you're not using the road you can safely ignore it.
I'm not sure the analogy works: roads were around long before writing, and there are still road users who can't read. That is why pedestrian crossing signals use lights in the shape of a person rather than written instructions.
More like asking whether road signs are effective for Americans who are passengers in cars. No, it doesn't directly do her any good that they're technically accessible since she can't act on it, but it sure as hell affects her life that other people have access to the information provided by road signs.
Luckily, we live in a society of specialists, and while you are laying bricks, public health orgs are generating reports and taking interviews and making these data accessible and meaningful to you.
So, yes, your grandma relies on a data "supply chain" but, nevertheless, it benefits her.
A lot of federal money goes to state and local health programs. For example, consider mammograms. A state will be given a budget to spend on mammograms. The state doesn't do those screenings itself, so it solicits bids from several healthcare organizations. Those organizations create proposals with estimates of the number of residents eligible for free screening in their area, the burden of breast cancer among that group, and whether those potential patients fall into underserved or high risk demographics. All of that comes from high quality data published by the federal government. Those groups pull data from these online data sets.
Your grandma might have gotten free mammograms because of that data.
Agreed that your grandma is unlikely to access the data directly, however that doesn't imply she is not affected by it's removal. As others have noted, professionals your grandma almost certainly depends upon(doctors for example) rely on the data.
If the data is still in the possession of the government (e.g. in backups, on paper) then it is FOIA-able.
I had a gov agency temporarily throw all the materials into a trash can when I requested them and argued that since they were sitting in a trash can they were not available under FOIA.
Yes. It was argued in court that they couldn't be expected to go into the trash to pull out documents. But they were later. The case was settled on some ground, I can't remember what. Maybe they handed over the documents in the end. This was a decade ago, so I'm hazy on what the final outcome was.
A lot of public bodies will play games like this. It's not even clear to me why they do it. It'll be documents that aren't even controversial that they will resist. Ask them what brand of coffee they buy for the break room and they'll immediately get defensive and find some random exemption to apply. Law enforcement bodies are by far the worst, I think because the public are seen as terminal nuisances all the way down through the bodies.
majority of voters have made an ultimate choice. everything has to serve the choice. if you pay tax but don't or can't vote, sorry, it's your own problem.
> Musk is evidently seizing control of the Office of Personnel Management
Suddenly I feel out of the loop when it comes to US politics, how come Musk is suddenly seemingly seizing control of parts of the US government? I don't recall him being on any ballots or anything?
They didn’t exaggerate with “locked federal employees out of their own systems”. That is accurate even if both sets of “employees” and “systems” are non-exhaustive.
Buddy, if I told you that I have fostered dogs from shelters, would you take that to mean that I have fostered all dogs from all shelters? Someone is certainly being ridiculous.
The trouble is, to talk about WHY Musk is attempting to seize control of parts of the US government and why the Trump administration is attempting to censor mass quantities of data would be a political conversation.
Hacker News isn't designed for this. The point at which it becomes mass censorship that computer hackers (in their capacity as The Internet) might take an active role in routing around, is more or less this point: you're quite correct that this is worrying, but up to this point it's been a deeply political conversation and only as it becomes mass censorship and control by technological means, does it become really on-message for Hacker News.
Oh, I don't disagree. I'm getting downvotes as if I didn't think this was Hacker News business. I think it became Hacker News business when unelected guys seized offices and computer systems and started doing… what? We don't know, but there's a lot of data deleting, censoring, and grant-freezing going on.
I'm leaning very hard into an HN 'tone' with this because this is Hacker News. There's other places where I can be a lot more direct, but the HN tone is perfectly valid as a response: being able to think dispassionately is both tactically and strategically useful as long as it's not purely used to obfuscate.
I fear HN folks have been sheltered from a lot of the reality of what's happening and led down the garden path BY intentionally asserting that tone anytime things get too assertive, but the tone still has its uses.
edit: woof! Ok ok, this is fully HN business and always was. Right on. Sorry I even suggested it could ever be otherwise. I didn't give my fellow nerds enough credit :)
> to talk about WHY Musk is attempting to seize control of parts of the US government and why the Trump administration is attempting to censor mass quantities of data would be a political conversation.
In an attempt to keep it non-political: perhaps they (DOGE) are trying to put a "freeze" on the records while they consider who to fire. That would imply DOGE does not trust the people who have access to the records not to alter them in their favor. (Irony, since DOGE is demanding trust themselves.) You might not agree with that reason, but it is a reason.
Musk was appointed as the administrator of DOGE, itself a subordinate "temporary organization" under the United States DOGE Service (formerly the United States Digital Service).
All of this is happening within the Executive Office of the President, which is essentially fancyspeak to mean the government employees working the Executive Branch of the federal government. Those government employees serve at the pleasure of the President; Congress only has very limited influence (namely budgetary influences from the House and certain positions that require Senate confirmation).
So Musk, being appointed as a part of the Executive Branch, derives authority vested in the President of which Trump has delegated some to Musk for the purposes of implementing and enforcing DOGE policies.
Musk for his part also serves at the pleasure of the President, so whatever he does is ostensibly what Trump wants regardless of who actually does it.
> In January 1981, the Jimmy Carter administration settled the court case Luévano v. Campbell, which alleged the Professional and Administrative Careers Examination (PACE) was racially discriminatory as a result of the lower average scores and pass rates achieved by Black and Hispanic test takers. As a result of this settlement agreement, PACE, the main entry-level test for candidates seeking positions in the federal government’s executive branch, was scrapped.[36] It has not been replaced by a similar general exam, although attempts at replacement exams have been made. The system which replaced the general PACE exam has been criticized...
People couldn't agree what merit was, and sued over it. Now it's not only [still] unclear what merit is, but it's also unclear how aligned federal hiring practices are with any platonic ideal of "merit".
Trump and Elon taking a blowtorch to a lot of agencies isn't better, or even good. It looks to me like a different kind of bad that can't be quantified at the moment. Some of the worst of this will be temporary, since various resources are offline so that federal agencies can be compliant with Trump's EOs while they figure out how to change the resources and their databases, or wait for lawsuits to clarify before changing much or putting it back online.
Hiring through a merit system does not imply that the employees' work is meritful.
Congress had over 140 years (1883 to 2024) to carefully balance the rights of civil service workers against the need for top-down executive authority to ensure agencies are effective, in a way that would survive judicial review. Unfortunately, Congress is inept at almost everything. The Pendleton Act, followed by the CSRA, don't seem to have very well addressed the original patronage-based exec-branch staffing issue; as the article describes it, they've only ensured that replacing high-level staff is delayed by a term. Have they also made it too difficult to dismiss lower-level staff if agencies are ever in need of scaling back?
You’re being downvoted but looking from the outside in, Gitmo being scaled up to house 30k people that the administration expects never to be able to repatriate, an unelected billionaire running around destroying institutions and a president actively starting trade wars and threatening occupation with allies looks an awful lot like it.
People aren't downvoting because they disagree about what's happening. They are downvoting because they agree with fascism, but don't like it when people say the truth out loud. It's a fundamental reality of fascism that those who support it will also deflect all valid criticism of their movement.
A majority of U.S. voters chose this. After all that was already known about this admin, they aren't backing down, he's doing what he promised he would do.
It is going to be more catastrophic than I think anyone knows.
I was sure this was wrong, but it's true: according to official state counts, Donald Trump won 49.80% of the popular vote to Kamala Harris's 48.32%. The top 5 was rounded out by Jill Stein (0.56%), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (0.49%), and Chase Oliver (0.42%) [1].
While technically true the difference between 49.8 and 50.01 is quite small and not very interesting. I think the major point was probably that a lot of US citizens don't vote.
He also has the assurance from SCOTUS that he can do no wrong as POTUS. That's a very disconcerting thought about the supposed checks and balances. Now that his party controls both houses, he'll never be impeached for anything he does either. And that was the one limit that Trump was stipulating existed--the only way POTUS could get in trouble was to be convicted in the Senate after the House impeaches. So he essentially is untouchable.
If fascism means secure borders, an end to the kinetic conflict in Ukraine, an end to social media censorship, and a booming economy, more than half the country will vote for fascism. Promises fulfilled or not aside.
"The government of Columbia has agreed to all of President Trump's terms, including the unrestricted acceptance of all illegal aliens from Colombia returned from the United States, including on U.S. military aircraft, without limitation or delay. Based on this agreement, the fully drafted IEEPA tariffs and sanctions will be held in reserve, and not signed, unless Colombia fails to honor this agreement. The visa sanctions issued by the State Department, and enhanced inspections from Customs and Border Protection, will remain in effect until the first planeload of Colombian deportees is successfully returned. Today's events make clear to the world that America is respected again. President Trump will continue to fiercely protect our nation's sovereignty, and he expects all other nations of the world to fully cooperate in accepting the deportation of their citizens illegally present in the United States."
The article we're discussing talks about removal of publicly accessible data. Huge amounts of it. How is that better than "social media censorship"?
At some point you're going to have to stop spouting the bullshit talking points and accept that this administration are actively worse on most metrics that they campaigned on improving.
Indeed 20th century fascist revolutions used the guise of law for their takeover. Following them would include banning the existence of other parties, changing the constitution to give all power to executive, cancelling elections, etc.
I assumed the poster was using facist to mean “bad authoritarian government” - not that trump is actually a disciple of Mussolini style philosophy.
Right now the democratic system is working as designed, minus the incredible power of the executive branch which has been built up since FDR. Obama pioneered this approach to executive order.
>Following them would include banning the existence of other parties, changing the constitution to give all power to executive, cancelling elections, etc.
Let's check back on these in a few years (months?).
Basically, your argument boils down to "you're wrong, the current sitation is not fascist enough yet"?
banning the existence of other parties
They don't need to. Similar to Russia, they will allow the appearance of other parties and elections, but the outcomes will be pre-determined.
changing the constitution to give all power to executive
SCOTUS has already done that: everything the president does is legal by default.
cancelling elections
Again, they won't need to. They proved in November that they already have done the right amount of voter disenfranchisement and gerrymandering to secure a win.
You took that burden upon yourself by choosing to deride the GGP above, who said "The US is undergoing a fascist takeover basically". Don't put this on me, you opened this line of argumentation. I am merely trying to get you to commit to an actual argument with substance rather than deflecting and whining.
Which cabinet position was Musk appointed to? (In fact, in the U.S. the president doesn’t appoint cabinet members, but sure, you don’t understand the basics of how the govt works but you know what fascism is better than experts who’ve studied and written about it for decades).
Is Musk the head of the OPM?
Also, policy cannot break the law and certainly cannot break the constitution. That is fascism. The executive doesn’t get to rewrite laws and the constitution.
There is another comment explaining his appointment.
It’s really hard to argue why the president cannot get advice from anyone he would like. His staff includes anyone he wants to employ. He just can’t freely give them positions of official authority.
> The executive doesn’t get to rewrite laws and the constitution.
the judicial branch is working and can challenge orders and take them to court. And is already doing so.
> That is fascism.
It’s really not. You should study what fascists believed rather than using them as a caricature for bad policy.
> In fact, in the U.S. the president doesn’t appoint cabinet members
What? That's exactly what happens. The president (or his puppet masters) chooses the person, and then they go through a Senate confirmation process. I don't see how this isn't being appointed
I won't argue about immigration here because I don't want to get mired in that shit, but what is common sense about denying the existence of climate change and attempting to destroy/reverse our progress as a nation against it, and further engaging in activities to make it worse rather than alleviate it?
What is common sense about sewing chaos in the federal government, inhibiting it's ability to function? In removing datasets that help us keep track of how effective our actions are?
Not every person in the government is elected. Some positions are appointed. Not one judge from SCOTUS is elected. None of the members of the president's cabinet are elected. They are all Senate confirmed though, which is what's going on now with the current clown show. Somehow, Musk has created a role for himself where he even gets to bypass the Senate confirmation stage. That's the most disconcerting thing to me. Not that I think he wouldn't get confirmed, but the fact that he has this much power totally unchecked.
> the fact that he has this much power totally unchecked.
I think this is just a symptom of the amount of power the office of the president has accumulated over the years. Musk has no authority on his own; he's acting on the authority of the president.
Due to the number of things Congress has delegated to the executive branch over the years, that's quite a lot of unchecked power indeed. But it's not Musk's power, it's the president's.
President add unelected civilians to their cabinet every election.
Did anyone elect Anthony Blinken? Janet Yellen? Lloyd Austin?
None of these people were elected yet have substantial power delegated through the President.
And while these people were approved by Senate vote, plenty of people in the Biden circle weren’t - Chief of Staff, members of the National Security Council, etc.
I would just like to point out that Musk is the richest man in the world and is now directing critical areas of the U.S. government. Surely he doesn't have ulterior motives and is looking out for the average person?
If you look back at Germany in the 19th century, nations like Prussia and Austria had this sort of power struggle between the merchant class and the nobility at the advent of steam power.
in this case the de-facto US nobility (rank-and-file career politicians) are being usurped by the bourgeouise (billionaires like Musk) at the advent of AI and tech by promising the working class a combination of culture war policy and relief from the very capitalist excess they themselves endorse. by reducing congress and senate to a simple debate team (conversely similar to the German National Asssembly) the tech-elite are able to seize power once reserved for the crown.
the question will be, after four years, will they abdicate their power or concentrate it?
>the question will be, after four years, will they abdicate their power or concentrate it?
You honestly think that's a question?
Power corrupts. You saw Trump, who in 2016 said he'd get everything done so he'd see no need to run again, he'd have Made America Great Again. He then tried to rig the 2020 election so he could stay in power, despite saying "if I lose the election you'll never hear from me again", and 4 years later, here we are.
These people are here to entrench themselves permanently.
I know that Trump was something of a bad loser when Biden was elected, and that he encouraged the riots on Capitol Hill, but I had not heard (from the media media here in Britain) that he attempted to rig the election. Could you provide a source for this please?
Possibly a reference to the fake electors plot [0], although there was also the phone call to the Georgia secretary of state asking him to find 11,780 more votes [1], the pressure he applied to his VP to reject the election results [2], the subsequent Jan 6 riot that disrupted the certification...
At least some of these were covered by BBC [3, 4].
He also tried to get the DoJ to label the election as suspicious. Don’t have an immediate reference for that but it was surfaced by the Jan 6 committee.
The Federalist Society has been a 40/50 year project to install a judiciary loyal to this coup project. This mix of Christian nationalist theocracy and unitary executive has been their aim all along.
Yea, these guys don't seem like the kind to do any abdicating, voluntarily.
A lot can happen in 4 years though. Maybe self-inflicted catastrophic wounds will drive down support for Trump enough where it becomes possible for R pols and oligarchs to abandon him. Or maybe they'll choose the dark path, and go farther into repressive authoritarianism to stay in power.
The problem for Musk et al is that they are concentrating power directly to Trump, not themselves. They're shackling themselves to the leopard and betting it will never eat their face.
> Maybe self-inflicted catastrophic wounds will drive down support for Trump enough
They will blame women, minorites and especially trans people for all of that.
And when dust settles, those who supported Trump and Musk will see themselves as primary victims - and will blame minorites, women, democracts and trans people for consequences of their own actions.
Yeah, no. This is a coup and they are all in. They would not be this blatant about taking control illegally and fast if they expected to leave any institutions to still enforce the law against them.
I laughed when those people self-identified as accelerationists... but holly shit! they knew what it means and were honest.
Historically, they are just a bunch of rich morons that got lucky, got power, and decided to stage a coup. This is not some enlightened movement trying to replace the social norms. It's just your run of the mill personal power switch, and the only notable things about it are it's on a country that has been extremely stable before, and those people are stupid enough to willfully destroy it.
> it's on a country that has been extremely stable before
The US is a known bad design, nation builders working for the United States stopped trying to use this design for new countries in the 20th century, it doesn't work. It's inherently unstable and you previously got very lucky, although you have had a civil war and numerous close calls.
It's like oh, why don't we make coal-powered cars. Well because it's a known bad idea. We actually did try that, it's a bad idea, don't do it again.
The core is the President is kept from becoming a dictator by nothing more than norms. If Trump staffs the military with loyalists, there isn’t much anyone can do to make him do anything. Most other countries have power over the military, particularly in domestic contexts, much more shattered.
In those "newer designs" there is no electoral college. Also various alternative electoral systems have been tried. The winner-takes-all system of the US is known pathological and inevitably results in a two party system. Democracies in Europe most often result in many parties and a necessity to form coalitions. Ireland even goes as far as using IRV and STV.
The issue isn't even in how votes are counted, it's in parliamentary versus presidential republics.
The latter inevitably slide towards autocracy. Too much power is concentrated in one person, who is almost impossible to legally remove before their term is up, and who will happily punish dissenters within the party.
In parliamentary republics, every PM is one internal party vote away from being deposed. You tend to see less of the tail wagging the dog in them.
While I absolutely do not like what is happening right now, I cannot agree with your general statement. Could you elaborate?
The US has proper separation of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. The legislative has a per-state and popular representation. Which part of this is "inherently unstable"?
The only part lacking a proper proportional representation (as in a parliament).
The US Executive is way more powerful than the other powers. It can act as it wishes, and consequences only come years later, if ever.
Also, the per-state representation doesn't seem to lead to good results at all. As you said, the popular representation isn't proportional, what is a more relevant flaw than anything before this point on this comment.
And that is before you get into the details that are actually bad. It's incredible that they managed to stay stable with that electoral system, for example.
That said, looks like they will have an almost perfect opportunity to fix some of those in a few years...
Looking at the human nature while interacts with Capitalism, looks like they will try to concentrate it.
I found it shameful that we hold so much a power hungry war while however as Memento Mori teach us, the only certainty is death, and that power is simply gone.
“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives.
They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
> the question will be, after four years, will they abdicate their power or concentrate it?
Musk, Thiel, and their friends clearly intend to consolidate power, and the people they associate with openly advocate for the creation of independent corporate fiefdoms with authoritarian control over society. There is no doubt at this point. These are not good people. They are oligarchs. They are the bitter nerds that just want power for themselves so they can be the bullies.
There are far more nerds (bitter or not) who were not so successful yet are far more clever than these "leaders" are, and they aren't the type to tolerate intolerance...
EV tax credits under the previous administration applied to almost every EV that wasn't a Tesla. They got Tesla its start, though, so the ladder must be pulled up.
Of course, carbon offsets are still a huge cash cow for Tesla, so Musk won't be eager to touch those.
The tax credits were eventually reapplied to Tesla with the changes starting in 2023, but for a while, Tesla had crossed the sales limit so that the credit wasn't available.
The phaseout based on units sold was in place as far back as 2018 since Tesla reached it in July 2018 and GM in November 2018. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (effective August 2022, not 2023) reinstated Tesla's eligibility and disqualified a number of other EVs.
Although the Inflation Reduction Act became effective in August 2022, no EV tax credit was available for new Tesla or GM EVs purchased in 2022, regardless of month. The units-sold threshold phaseout was only lifted for purchases made after 2022.
> EV tax credits under the previous administration applied to almost every EV that wasn't a Tesla.
Your statement might give somebody the impression that somebody in the previous administration singled out Tesla. This is obviously not correct. EV credits were available to all car makers. But there was a limit and Tesla reached their limit first. And later GM did as well.
Musk is not the richest man in the world. Those lists exclude royalty and other individuals who do not want the extra publicity. The Rothschilds are far richer.
There is no evidence — reliable, speculative, or otherwise — that suggests Nicolás Maduro's net worth exceeds even $100 billion. It's more likely in the hundreds of millions, not hundreds of billions.
Even the most aggressive speculative estimates from opposition figures, investigative journalists, or geopolitical analysts do not approach that figure.
No credible leaks (like the Panama Papers or Pandora Papers) have hinted at such vast assets tied to Maduro.
No intelligence reports or financial investigations from entities like the U.S. Treasury, the EU, or independent watchdogs have ever approached figures remotely close to hundreds of billions.
OP's point is that Maduro's authority over the whole country effectively grants him control over the resources and the corresponding net worth. It's a stretch but I can see where they are coming from.
The tech oligarchs want to dismantle democracy, receive a gift of 0.5% of Federal land from Trump and establish their own democracy-free fiefdoms. [1]
The social support system in the US is being dismantled and when people can no longer afford to eat, the ensuing riots will provide the necessary trigger to declare martial law and suspend democracy completely.
How is this not all illegal? How are cease and resists not being put into place? An illegal immigrant, narcissist, billionaire, and many other things is taking over federal agencies and actively purging them for his own ideologies.
I'm surprised that this was not given more attention, despite how much it was given, it should have gotten orders of magnitudes more.
In the US, you can fly multiple planes into skyscrapers, rape three whole kindergartens, and lynch an entire race to extermination. As long as you then win the next election before you get convicted, you're in the clear.
This is the United States of America.
Vulgar examples? The bare minimum necessary to make people remotely feel the severity in their bones. Problem is that no one dares to say them out loud in fear of their reputation, despite it being a good thing to do.
Absolutely. That begs the question though, if Trump has ordered federal employees to make the government efficient and eliminate the weaponization of government, are those employees not obligated to remove Trump and Musk from their current roles?
I see these kinds of comments regularly and am curious: what is your thought process? What makes you think that it's not illegal? What makes you think that legality matters here?
They are saying it's likely illegal but it doesn't matter because the law does not apply to certain people. No consequences for illegal activity will ever touch Trump or Musk.
Well that is my opinion of the situation, but other people had already covered that well enough so I didn't feel the need to. I was curious about what thought process results in the assumption that what they're doing is legal, so I asked.
I cancelled a Model 3 order and went with a different EV a few years ago. I was starting to soften my stance, and considering a Tesla for my next, but at this point, I have a hard time accepting the idea that buying one wouldn't send a message of implicit support.
Ohhhg I think I expressed myself wrongly, I meant for example, the Musk person and his proposals as a public man in politics, should I edit my comment to be more clear?
I think Musk was a bad example, I mean for example, people wants better health care, and some public person and/or politician proposes better prices in prescriptions drugs at a mid term, then that person who was elect does not only holds the power but also is obligated to follow that project.
It's literally to detach the person from the projects, of course times changes and the elected project can not be achieved by an X factor, tho we should have checks and balances in that too.
Today we follow X or Y politician/party but in this polarization we lost the focus that in the end a politician is elected to execute goal/project and not to hold power and then maybe do it.
(I did the, slightly snarky, original sibling comment, but this comment was better to reply to.)
My understanding of your original comment was similar to how 'JkCalhoun understood it, but this comment reads more like "the country show follow through on decided changes" regardless of who is in power. That I agree more with, with exceptions of course. (One example is maybe Obamas connection with "Obamacare" that is still a thing even though he is not in power.) Perhaps another way to put it is to detach the project from the person, but the person will still be linked (in some way) to the project.
Especially when it comes to international policies. For one, international relations and agreements are (normally) much slower moving and longer lasting than internal ones, and if countries can't depend on agreements lasting longer than the current leadership then such countries will see themselves not taken very seriously.
Kind of like if a president signs a trade deal with his country's closest neighbors and then a few years later instigate a trade war against the same countries.
First step would be to apologize to a trans woman for unleashing campaign of harassment for making a small ad for a beer and campaign to boycott that beer. You know, for making them first example of what you will do to those who do not sign to your gender idealogy.
Only paranoid SJWs called Musk a right wing person and here we are, watching Musk fund extreme right clearly proving them wrong. Those SJW were doing this thing whole my life, seems to me. There was always outrage about them accusing an innocent person of bad stuff ... only to turn out they were actually right.
I hate to sound like a conventional cis-man, but this is exactly the sort of situation where conventional cis-man energy is needed:
Where are the CDC people growing a spine to stand up to this? This is obviously bad.
The reason why bullies only understand 1 language (force) is exactly why counter-bullies who also speak that language are needed. And these are (usually) men (and some smaller percentage of women). (I'm seriously not trying to genderize this. I'm speaking of "fighting/disobeying/confronting energy" instead of "nurturing/complying/keeping-copacetic energy". Anyone who's good at that, should exercise it.)
If you have to take good science to the darknet, then fucking do so. That's what it's there for.
"The [Dark]Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." - John Gilmore.
Alternately, move the data hosting to Switzerland, Iceland, or the Netherlands as a data-haven. Hetzner might be OK too, since very-left-wing Germany (while it has an agreement to comply with legal MLAT requests) might savor the opportunity to snub Trumpian requests or stall them indefinitely due to lack of obvious national-security importance.
Sorry, I couldn't get through your third paragraph without hearing the "Team America: World Police" pussies/dicks speech in the background.
But your argument is inherently flawed. Part of the point of government is to regulate and direct the use of force. We have mechanisms that are supposed to apply force to "bullies". The problem is that the "bullies" have co-opted that system to use it for their own ends. This happened gradually so it didn't become obvious until the most recent "bully" decided he didn't even want to pretend that he wasn't in control.
Individuals who directly stand up to this administration will be hammered down with the full force of the government. The best we can hope for is a passive resistance and malicious compliance. That combined with grassroots efforts to fill the media with protests of objectionable policies is probably the best we can do for now.
The only other option is to apply force outside of the system to correct it, but things are not nearly to the point where revolution is the better option.
> The problem is that the "bullies" have co-opted that system to use it for their own ends. This happened gradually so it didn't become obvious until the most recent "bully" decided he didn't even want to pretend that he wasn't in control.
The funny thing is that people have always said this exact thing except paraphrased in various ways (perhaps the term was less "bully" and something more conventionally a universal term of disparagement like "fascist"). I definitely didn't want Obama going after whistleblowers, increasing domestic surveillance and not closing Guantanamo when I voted him in... and I liked his healthcare plan, until it died...
I suspect that everyone says this when the person they didn't want in charge, now is, and starts doing things that their biased media always depicts only the negative side of.
This does not only affect the obvious ideological targets of purging any mention of DEI or gender. One section that is missing seems to be the official vaccine recommendations.
Go to the ACIP page (https://www.cdc.gov/acip/) and click on the "Vaccine-specific recommendations".
Other affected topics are HIV prevention, birth control/contraception, domestic violence and probably many more.
If there's action by an adversary to try and weaponize naturally occurring disease (never mind the prospect of trying to heighten effectiveness of artificially created disease), that would be expected.
Vaccines and healthcare in general are intended as a safeguard against pandemics and mass death. If the goal IS mass death, it makes practical sense to try and delete all health and vaccine information in hopes it's lost forever and the society that uses it is rendered helpless against such events or weapons.
I'm interested to note that HN's commentariat hasn't mentioned the extent to which all scientific research of this nature was immediately defunded: my social media had indirect exposure to a lot of healthcare researchers who were freaking out, many days ago. Did you notice that part or is this the first sign of it that's made its way over here?
I'd note that defunding medicine isn't strictly HN-type content, though mass deletion of data certainly seems to be HN-adjacent. I would think hackers and entrepreneurs would take that sort of thing personally, as it more or less attacks them by starving them of information that could be useful.
"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the national public health agency of the United States. It is a United States federal agency under the Department of Health and Human Services, and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.
The agency's main goal is the protection of public health and safety through the control and prevention of disease, injury, and disability in the US and worldwide."
The problem is that the provenance of that data will be questioned. It’s one thing that researchers will trust and use that data, but that citing these archive sites will fall flat when their conclusions have to exit academia and be subject to extra scrutiny.
> but half the country welcomed this wave of oppression with open arms.
And the other half? They seem to welcome this as well, but with crossed arms. Where are the protests? Seems most people end up writing upset messages on Twitter/Bluesky, but also seems there are no grassroots movements to actually protest the borderline coup that is happening?
Protest doesn't do anything. I marched plenty and it accomplished nothing except letting like-minded people blow off a bit of steam and feel like something we did mattered. If anything it was just a distraction.
According to this[0], they want around 4% of Americans to agree to a general strike. The problem is the people who are most capable of surviving a general strike are not the same group that has the most impact in a general strike.
Wow. My grandfather is turning over in his grave. He suffered not only starvation and homelessness while striking against the coral companies of Pennsylvania, he was also beaten.
If they have instilled this much cowardliness in you they have won. Imagine you’re kid looking at what you wrote twenty years from now and think of how he/she would think of you. Courageous or coward?
People don’t understand how remarkably easy it is to be homeless. Believe me because I was homeless for four years. The fear they have instilled in them is what’s keeping them cowards.
Most rights that workers have today have been earned through protesting (and sometimes the bloody consequence of protesting while the state is resisting wanted changes). Protests only "doesn't do anything" when you don't do it enough or give up. Maybe I'm too European to understand, but the "pacifist" approach of the US working class seems to not be working out great.
Protest works when it’s backed by a threat. “Do what we want or we will remove you from power”. What we have now is “do what we want or we’ll be sad”.
The pitchforks aren’t just for show!!
And I’ve lived in Europe for over a decade now and frankly much of Europe is painfully naive about how much people in power care about protestors waving clever signs.
> And I’ve lived in Europe for over a decade now and frankly much of Europe is painfully naive about how much people in power care about protestors waving clever signs.
I guess the same goes the other way, Americans seems painfully unaware how effective the public's will can be, when you act together. But I think that's to be expected, the US is still relatively new and young, compared to other countries, so lessons others have learned still need to be learned by the Americans themselves. I guess this is what we're witnessing right now.
I'd urge you to look up changes brought by protesting and riots, but I think we both know you're not interested in learning, since you already stated twice you think it's pointless.
Your condescending and dismissive tone notwithstanding, I am curious to hear more about peaceful protests working when they weren't backed with an implicit threat of removing politicians from power.
Ideally, of course, you have a functioning democracy, but I don't really think that describes much of the US at this point (the people who'd protest are mostly in blue states anyway where their votes, even if correctly tabulated, count less). Other examples might be Ghandi, who promoted nonviolence but really only got India's freedom when the British empire was in terminal decline, or the civil rights movement, which happened when the US was a much healthier democracy and swaying public opinion was enough to remove people through elections. You might cite the velvet revolution too, but that also was targeting an empire in decline.
I argue that elections in the US _will not matter_ (Trump's cryptic comments about how Elon knows all about these voting machines and they won Pennsylvania thanks to him are telling....) and in that context protest doesn't do anything because the people in power have nothing to fear if they ignore the protestors.
> when they weren't backed with an implicit threat of removing politicians from power
Normally, in a democracy, when you get a lot of people together complaining about something, it is already an implicit threat of removing politicians from power.
But if you manipulate the electoral system enough, it stops being. The fact that this mostly doesn't work nowadays is loudly telling people all they need to know.
> Your condescending and dismissive tone notwithstanding
I was trying to adopt to your own tone, not sure why you'd feel that it is condescending or dismissive.
> I am curious to hear more about peaceful protests working
Some starting points: 2024 protests in Serbia leading to the resignation of the Prime Minister. 15-M protests in Spain leading to the formation of new political parties and reforms. Velvet Revolution (I know you already mentioned this) leading to the overthrowing of the communist government. The Singing Revolution leading to the independence of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Euromaidan/Revolution of Dignity leading to the ousting of Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine. These are just recent examples, I could go on...
Honest question: Have you attempted to lookup examples yourself, and you didn't find a single example?
Just remember, the most successful protest in recent Europe history has been when about 10% of the Iceland population showed up in front of the administration building with literal pitchforks and torches on their hands.
More recently, don't forget them being completely silent when Breonna Taylor was summarily executed for Kenneth Walker daring to exercise his second amendment right of home defense in the middle of the night. When this movement says "freedom", they mean merely for themselves to do whatever they please - not as a universal societal principle.
It seems like you're missing something pretty basic here, so here it goes:
Government workers going on strike means they're doing what we want them to do, which is nothing. As a Trump voter, I want these federal government workers to stop working so the astronomical waste of our time/money and disturbing of peace stops.
The best work the US government does is when it's doing nothing, because it's hardly working properly unless it's forced to (ICE is an example of government actually working again).
Whether the workers resign, strike/protest, or get back to work implementing MAGA policies in the office, we win.
The good news is that as a Trump voter who is a MAGA believer, you’ve established that you’re ignorant and open to emotional manipulation. You’re the political equivalent of the old lady who talks to the scammers.
So when your glorious day comes, and your State asserts their rights and levies your bank account to pay for your parents medical bills as your filial responsibility, (or whatever your personal tragedy ends up being) you’ll have the feels, and will flip to the next cult of personality.
I like minimal government too. It has a few necessary roles, and foreign aid isn't one. Why are we recognizing that with Ukraine, and Mozambique but not Israel? Keeping the free market working by trust-bustingbis one too. I welcome a true house cleaning, but we are just trading regulatory capture for unregulated corruption. You wanted the land of do as you please, but got the land of do as they please. This is just an authoritarian power grab under the guise of renewal. I could be wrong, but as others have said, the proof will be in how the response to legal challenges to the house cleaning go. If they are ignored or rubber stamped by the scotus no matter how obviously they violate the law, then we know I am right. If some of the move fast and break things gets stopped by the scotus, or the admin backs down when things get challenged as illegal, then maybe this is exactly what we needed. I am not hopeful.
Edit: I think I was being disingenuous about foreign aid, sometimes foreign aid can be necessary to protect the well-being of US citizens. Stopping pandemics early or preventing them. Standing by a treaty so people know our word is good. Maintaining access to a resource our economy depends on etc. I just find it telling that the only foreign aid that was exempted was to Israel.
In 2024, US companies exported $137.8 million to Mozambique, and imported $201.7 million from that country[0]. If that country were crippled by a healthcare crisis, that's less business for companies in the US and other countries that also deal with the US. Supply chains, interconnectedness, and all that. It also helps to have allies across the world. Allies who have close ties with our health agencies, and might tell us about potential outbreaks of infectious diseases. Or terrorist organizations. Also, have you noticed terrorists mostly come from countries with shattered economies and weak governments? Not to mention that STDs are contagious and don't stay home when the host travels internationally.
International politics is complicated. Anyone who shows you a single line item without context is deceiving you. Especially if the number is related to sex and a disease associated with promiscuity. That's a red flag. Their stats may be true, but their stated goal isn't.
I don't think there is any evidence to backup those claims (assuming you're talking about "$50 million sent to Gaza for condoms").
I don't believe you are arguing in good faith otherwise I'd think you'd also be upset about the millions of tax dollars spent so that one man can golf? Which there are actual receipts for [1].
I agree with you 100%, but in the interest of effective discourse it might make more sense to steelman the response. For one thing I have a hard time believing that the best government is one which does nothing, considering the extent to which our lives depend on an intricate web of supply chains, information networks, etc. that require coordination at a high level and may not be best handled by businesses seeking local profit maxima.
But perhaps they're advocating a return-to-the-Earth philosophy with every person (or family) aiming for self sufficiency in a frontier-style economy. I doubt it (when I try to point out that their truck requires a lot more gas than they can refine as a hobby I get pushback), but maybe.
>But perhaps they're advocating a return-to-the-Earth philosophy
Indeed. Not quite as far back in time as you sarcastically suggested, but down-to-Earth enough that Congress stops enjoying absolutely abysmal approval ratings and President Reagan's infamous line of "I am from the government and I am here to help." stops resonating so strongly as a prime criticism.
If we also have to destroy ostensibly useful institutions like NASA to achieve it, well then so be it. As I mentioned in a sibling comment, the chances for more amicable processes have come and gone.
For what it's worth I wasn't being sarcastic. I spent some time in the smallholding/no-till/organic/homesteading world and there are some pretty decent arguments that modernity has done a lot to make us depressed and lonely. I also actually agree that a lot of government funds are wasted or spent poorly, if that counts for anything.
Government is there to protect the people from corporate and foreign control. It's one of the main jobs it does. When I was a kid you couldn't breathe the air in LA, now you can. When I was a kid you could believe the news, now you cannot. Your philosophy of 'Government vs People' is faulty as it is missing those other influences. We will see soon if a smaller, less effective US government is better for the citizens. I have a strong feeling we're not going to like what we find out.
It does. Hopefully people start taking to the streets when the economic calamity (temporary adjustments in Musk-speak) hits.
People slowly figure it out. On HN 2-3 years ago, any critique of Elon would bring out the brigades of simps babbling about autistic genius. That’s mostly gone now.
Starting a trade war has consequences. That mortgage of yours is pegged to 10 year treasury rates. Bend the demand curve for foreign investors seeking safety in US government debt and stuff happens, like real estate bubbles deflating. What happens when foreign investors start dumping loans for vacant NYC buildings on the market because of their governments restrictions?
Look at the the classic Bogglehead investment - VTI. 30% of that portfolio is 10 companies, half of which are extremely vulnerable to foreign action. What happens to Apple stock when there’s a 30% tariff on iPhones?
You have reckless idiots turning knobs and people are going to get hurt. Then they get angry. LARPing right wing morons love to talk revolutions on their podcasts, they may get their wish.
That's not how that works. The situation is set up to attempt to produce 'wild crazy radicals' who can be acted against super-aggressively. Failing to run about throwing rocks is a refusal to provide the guilty parties with exoneration for their acts. In effect, 'grassroots movements' directed by adversaries is what got us here, and is overwhelmingly unlikely to get us out.
I've been monitoring online discussions with some interest and the complete lack of self reflection in left-leaning US population is interesting. People who were writing very nasty things about Russians too scared to destroy their lives by protesting against a brutal dictatorship not that long ago now sit on their asses and do nothing, because "what can we do?". Maybe at least some of them now understand what it's like. My sincere sympathies in any case, we understand you very well.
I voted in the November election. I called my representatives. My plan invited me to a protest over immigrants getting deported.That isn't nothing, but I have very little power on a federal level. The next step is getting involved in local politics and the community, but I am simultaneously moving and live far away.
I can talk to people about it, but the difficult part is not talking but getting people to truly listen.
So yes, ordinary people are limited in their power and capacity even if these adds up.
This is moving very fast, and the sheer amount of chaos they're creating is successfully stymieing the potential responses. The important initial challenges here are the legal ones. And there are already some temporary decisions that should stop some of the blocks on funds.
Now comes the part where we see if the administration abides by those legal decisions or not, and how the final legal decisions here turn out once these cases inevitably land in front of the Supreme Court.
At the point where the administration ignores the courts and laws and continues on with their illegal impoundment, that's the point where you have to protest.
The administration doesn't need to ignore the courts - the courts have building for decades to get to this point, where the unitary executive gets to do whatever they please and the courts exist solely to rubber-stamp the executive's actions.
He was declared immune for all actions he and he alone declares as official.
He will die in office, in his mid 90s. Democracy has been cancelled.
Money - the folks doing this already have a ton of money, and used it in large part to get to this point.
Violence - necessary for change, but against who exactly? anyone trying to be violent against the folks running this will be disavowed by 90% of the rest of the population, and galvanize an outsized violent crackdown against anyone and everyone who even somewhat looks like them.
It’s going to have to get a lot worse before there is appetite to do the things that will actually make it better. people aren’t bleeding enough yet.
That's kind of my point. We're heading directly into Nazi, USSR, and CCP territory and gotta ride this out until another election (if we even have one), someone with money cares (they don't), or we're all ready for violence (it's all the idiots who have guns).
Whatever happened to it!? We are past that at this point. Nonviolent has been normalized for the last, idk, 80 years, very conveniently for the ones in power. It works if we have a functional government and an educated and engaged populace. We don't have any of that. Hold all the signs you want, vote with your dollar, walkout of work and get fired. If it doesn't scare people in power, you're not doing anything meaningful.
What's presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, but because it's important I'll deign to enlighten you with some counter-examples:
- In Nazi-occupied Europe, during World War II, various groups wielded nonviolent resistance (such as hiding Jews) against the Nazi regime and managed to hamper the regime's efforts, and in some cases saved lives. Not ineffectual.
- In Germany, in 1923, the German population wielded nonviolent non-cooperation and strikes (the Ruhrkampf) against the French and Belgian occupation and managed to gain international sympathy and hinder the occupiers. Not ineffectual.
- In Nazi-occupied countries--Denmark (Engaging in public protest and social boycotting, along with acts of noncooperation and striking), Holland (Developing an underground press network, social boycotting, noncooperation, striking, and hiding and facilitating escapes), Norway (Sending letters of protest, maintaining social boycotts, engaging in cultural resistance, noncooperation and creating alternative institutions such as unofficial sports leagues), France (Stalling and obstruction the forced relocation of Jews, noncooperating, developing clandestine media, and demonstrating open defiance, eg wearing the yellow star in solidarity), and Belgium (Hiding and facilitating escapes, noncooperating, and obstructing authorities protected the lives of Jews, made it harder for the Nazis to enforce their policies, and weakened their ability to maintain order)--during World War II, various populations wielded nonviolent resistance against the German occupiers and managed to present a unique challenge to the Nazi regime, which was more equipped for violent conflict. Not ineffectual.
- In East Germany, in 1953, workers and other citizens wielded strikes and demonstrations against the Communist regime, revealing the extent of public dissatisfaction with the working conditions, inspiring groups such as the Volkseigener Betrieb Industriebau's Block 40 section and the Zeiss factory at Jena to make bolder collective demands such as the release of a fellow worker who had been arbitrarily arrested and even inspiring sympathy from Russian/Polish soviet soldiers. Not ineffectual.
- In Russia, in February 1917, striking workers and other citizens wielded massive strikes and peaceful demonstrations against the Tsarist regime and managed to lead to its disintegration. When troops did fire on demonstrators, as occurred in Znamensky and Kazansky Squares, it backfired. The soldiers who obeyed these orders later felt remorse and questioned why they had shot at the crowds. This resulted in mutinies, such as that of the Volynsky Regiment. These troops then went into the streets to proclaim their support for the people. Not ineffectual.
- In the United States, during the mid-20th century, civil rights activists wielded sit-ins, marches, and boycotts against segregationist authorities and systems and managed to dismantle racial segregation, voter disenfranchisement, and discriminatory employment practices. Not ineffectual.
- In India, during the early to mid-20th century, Gandhi and his followers wielded civil disobedience, boycotts, and strikes against British colonial rule and managed to challenge that rule, demonstrating the power of non-cooperation and willingness to suffer for a cause. They won independence. Not ineffectual.
So, now the burden lies on you, really, to demonstrate that our opponent in this moment is somehow more fascist, more cruel, and also more independent of the consent of the governed than any other fascist administration in history against whom nonviolence prevailed or, at least, mitigated.
But in order for me to even read your response, you would have to open by convincing me that you will do something other than sit on your ass and pull in a SE salary until the next election. Because even if nonviolence were ineffectual--and, again, it's not--you could, at the very least, opt out of participation in the socioeconomic systems from which the fascists...
I’m not sure how saying ‘some people succeeded at hiding Jews, didn’t get caught, and somehow survived’ says what you think you’re saying - considering how many millions got on those trains (or were rounded up and put on them!) and got murdered. And how even attempts to just defend themselves (Warsaw Ghetto uprising, among many others) resulted in mass death.
Or all the examples from non-facist regimes, where those regimes were less murderous? Or from pre-Nazi Germany, where it was clearly ineffective at stopping the abuses or the rise of the Nazi regime.
Stalin and the USSR were a huge, murderous problem (Holodomir being just one example), but they also weren’t Nazi germany, yes? And while murderously authoritarian, they were also fundamentally different in many key ways from facists. Notably, they tended to target and destroy ‘their own’ through terrorizing different (and shifting) internal factions, rather than having a more consistent set of ‘out groups’ they were targeting. And for all the problems in the USSR, they were generally pro-labor. It was the intellectuals and property owners they tended to target.
A key differentiator between Nazi Germany and the USSR was essentially that Nazi Germany was pro-big-business (as long as you’re ‘one of us’), and the USSR was pro-worker (as long as you do/believe what we say).
The biggest danger in Nazi Germany was being one of the ‘others’ - if they found you. And it was often a death sentence for anyone trying to hide one of the ‘others’ too. Hiding people, while it did work for a small number of people, was completely ineffective at stopping the larger holocaust. [https://www.npr.org/2019/01/29/689272533/the-invisibles-reve...]
In fact, the holocaust continued up until Hitlers suicide and subsequent German surrender, after the allies had totally obliterated Germany in a war of annihilation they had been forced into, and were literally within shooting distance of his bunker.
> Hiding people, while it did work for a small number of people, was completely ineffective at stopping the larger holocaust.
Ok, that's somewhat goalpost-shifting, because you said "ineffectual," and I showed effect. It satisfies me enough to extrapolate from there.
Edit: Are we to believe, then, that you are taking up arms? Or just waiting to see if it gets so bad that you must? Or, don't you think an ounce of civil disobedience might be worth a pound of civil war?
It was clearly ineffectual at stopping the Nazis, yes? It was also ineffectual at meaningfully impeding their efforts (near as I can tell).
I did everything I could do in the US without getting arrested. I got large portions of my life destroyed in the process. Talking to people, even people that should know better, was basically just pissing in the wind.
I found out years ago that a distant relative of mine (Jewish) left Germany in the mid ‘20’s to immigrate to the US, leaving his entire life behind. At the time, I wondered how he knew, or what could have happened for him to take such a drastic step.
Now I know. I’ve been taking similar steps for years. At least I can provide a Plan B for myself and others.
Maybe that makes me a coward. I don’t know. But I won’t help evil, and I won’t be a pointless martyr for someone else’s idiocy either.
If I had thought taking up arms at the time (or even now) would have accomplished anything except making them more powerful while getting thrown under the bus by anyone that it in theory would be helping, I would have.
But that isn’t the situation is it? Because I’d be a ‘lone wolf’ because there aren’t enough others would can or would stand with me. Yet. Maybe there never will be. Maybe I’m wrong and everything will be fine, yeah?
We’ll find out. At this point, I just want to give double middle fingers to US society and tell everyone to fuck off.
My Jewish family, too, left Europe. In the 1890s—from Ukraine, they left to evade the Tsar's pogroms—Kropotkin had not yet penned "Mutual Aid". Why that wasn't enough writing on the wall for my Austrian and Polish family, I don't know.
You're right that Nazi Germany fell to the tanks of Liberalism and Bolshevism.
There are so many strange and, to be, baseless assertions in your replies that fear we're simply not going to discover common ground in this venue.
They’re just salivating for anyone to protest. Any protest will be a pretext to use violent power, start some marshal law and move ten steps closer of totalitarianism.
A bunch of Americans have been taught that protests only "count" if they don't inconvenience anyone. Laws have been changed to make effective protest impossible. It's legal to ram protesters with your car in Florida, for instance. The cops use force to suppress protests and the media tells everyone your protest was invalid because it broke the law.
If we press the point more aggressively, we'll probably start another civil war. The right holds Rittenhouse up as a hero, and that's not an isolated thing. For decades, average, rank-and-file GOP voters have made jokes and jabs about shooting liberals. It used to be a few tasteless blowhards, but it's commonplace now. See also comments from Kevin Roberts about how the "second American Revolution" will be "bloodless if the left allows it."
There are resistance movements extant and forming, but it's a wicked problem. The size and population of the US requires more resources and participants to make an impact. The speed at which the situation is changing makes it hard to find purchase to do so.
You misread. A lot of us have been warning about this and fighting against it for 10+ years. We have protested, and voted, and passed laws, and conducted investigations, argued in court, impeached him twice, and defended against a legislative coup, and a literal insurrection - every legal, constitutional, and peaceful method was exercised at the federal and state levels.
But at the end of the day a lot of people didn’t listen and voted for this direction instead.
So the people who protested and tried everything for a decade are done. Now we are just waiting for the 70 million people who still support this direction to finally burn themselves on the stove and discover it is in fact hot, just like we’ve been saying. The next protests have to be Republicans and Democrats or there’s no point.
And this half of the country that gets their news from exactly one news source will either never hear about these events or see them repackaged as wins.
To be fair, media consumption is broad and even in the deepest red retirement communities of Darkest Appalachia, no one subsists only on Fox.
In fact there is an active community of very Trumpy libertarians on this very website who pop up in the handful of political threads that make the front page. They seem to be silent here, one hopes maybe they've been given pause.
“It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.“
I'd add that this playbook is running in many parts of the world. Rich people buying medias to shift the average to the right influencing the masses to stop thinking.
More people voted for Trump, but it wasn't half the country. There were a lot of people that did not vote at all. The most accurate would be to say that nearly half of the votes cast went for Trump. That is not half the country
I hear people say this in various forms. No vote is still a vote kind of concept.
If anything it was the 1.6% of votes that went to other candidates that could be seen as a spoiler. You'd have to say that all of that 1.6% would have gone to Harris for it to have been a spoiler though, and I doubt that's the case.
what an ignorant comment. you can be upset that voter turn out is low, but to say people don't count is just knee jerk reaction that does not engage the people that didn't vote into positive conversations about voting in future elections.
Not half the country, depending on how you reason about it it's about a 1/3 or 2/3. Just a smidge more than 50% of voters did not vote for Trump. And numerically more than either Trump or Kamala voters, 36% of the US populace didn't vote in 2024.
Will you trust the 'science' that is performed via the CDC under the Trump administration? Did you trust the 'science' performed under past administrations?
Now, imagine someone holding the reverse position. Who's right? Which government institutions do you find generally trustworthy, and which do you find generally untrustworthy? Has this changed from administration to administration? Do you think your ideological viewpoint has influenced your opinions?
Edit: None of the responders answered my questions. Its impossible for most people to admit political bias, as evidenced here.
These types of false equivalence arguments need to go away. Under Trump norms of career civil servants loyal to doing a good job for the country is being shattered. Institutions that we could trust to be resistant politics are now being weaponized. I would have trusted the CDC under every administration except this one. This administration is demonstrably different.
I guess the reason you're fine with the ideological purge that's happening now is because you mistakenly believe the bureaucracies were always operating in ideological lockstep with the current administration. I suddenly pity you for the fear and distrust you must carry at all times for things you don't understand.
Bizarre argument considering that the only people who did not "trust science" (and the CDC in particular) during the previous Trump administration were Trumpists themselves.
> Like when Biden administration pressured social media to censor information which turned out to be true?
Did the Biden administration go into the offices of social media companies and purge the posts/data?
Every administration pushes back / pressures entities about messages that they think is wrong. Every administration has a message and story that it wants told. It's what press offices are for, for example. Remember, in 2017, when
White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Trump's inauguration had the largest crowd's in history of inaugurations?
But this is about purging raw data that is used for analysis, and not a particular story. (The data can be used to support or debunk a particular message of course.)
To you "screaming and yelling" at a private company that still retains agency over it's content moderation is government censorship, but the government's direct censoring of information is not? Partisan politics has a neat way of twisting one's brain up like a pretzel.
I recall several heads of the CDC auditioning, their answers to representatives would indicate it is/was (mis) information that undoubtedly the new administration would make sure to "purge".
It is becoming very difficult to distinguish justice from crooks in the U.S.
The CDC had lost all credibility anyway, dismantling it wouldn't be a bad idea, maybe not all of it, so that's what we are (not) seeing there.
That only makes sense if everyone downloads every data set in case they need it one day. I unhappily agree that's the case with private companies' data, because any company's not guaranteed to be around tomorrow. But the government should be a steward of the data it collects.
I also wonder how many of these data sets were required by law.
Are. If you are talking about a specific set of information, data is a plural. If you are talking about the concept of information sets, data is a singular.
"Data is stored on a computer's hard drive."
"The data for the experiment are stored on the computer's hard drive."
It is bad for the rest of the world but the rest of the world has an exit. Call your representatives and stop using US dollar for trade. Literally, that one action alone will save a lot of grief for people outside the US.
This is not a joke. What will sting Elon, Trump and crooks the most is losing their wealth. The rest of the world does not need to suffer for these crooks.
Nah, stop using the US$ for trade is as simply as just stop doing it. There's no lack of infrastructure, and plenty of commerce doesn't use it already.
What is hard is desinvesting from the US treasure. You have to sell those somewhere, and if everybody tries, their value will quickly go to 0. But if the US is successful in making their trade-balance positive, this will solve itself without a lot of hardship, it's just a matter of the rest of the world helping them here.
Macroeconomics is not what will show you problems here. The US is inserted itself into every supply chain on the world, but you will only notice this if you look at the details. Maybe we should start with an intellectual property reform...
Hum... What kind of tsunami do you expect to come from some thousands of people holding dollars for a few fewer milliseconds?
That would take a lot of legwork to confirm, but while the US$ is certainly the most used intermediate currency, it would surprise me if it was even used on the majority of the transactions.
“The people” are too stupid to blame unfortunately, they have no idea what’s going on.
Average IQ Americans freebase propaganda and Joe Rogan for thoughts. The Kremlin and the Republican propaganda empire have been paving the way for a Project 2025 Neo Nazi hostile takeover for decades.
John Doe from Florida doesn’t stand much of a chance when every TV, cell phone, and Facebook bot in his state is beaming the world’s largest psy-ops laser-beam at his head for half of his life.
I tend to blame the Fascists. But yea, the future is bleak. We’re cooked in America, at least.
Is it even a con? I mean, these people straight up said what they were going to do if elected, and now they are doing it. I know there are some Trump voters who are now going, "uhh, I didn't think he actually meant all that", but c'mon.
It's too early to tell, but I would not be surprised if later at least a portion of this is found to be "malicious compliance".
For example, President Truman ordered the US military to be (re)integrated. Through malicious compliance, racist officers put their own spin on the orders.
"Well, he didn't say that black officers would get equal access to the officers club, so we won't let them in."
It too a former 5 star general (President Eisenhower) to stamp out the malicious compliance and make it stick.
There was already a case of malicious compliance with the DEI EO on the part of certain US air force personnel taking down material about the Tuskugee Airmen. The new sec def stomped that out within 4 hours.
Beyond a few specific documents, nothing in there requires the CDC to pull down all this data immediately. There is even a section about "progress updates by 120 days".
The CDC is still run by the same people as under Biden. They are the ones that immediately pulled down the data, not Trump hires.
You'll be pleased to know that multiple countries elsewhere do worry about this, and will continue to publish evidence-based recommendations about appropriate drug usage. Every other member of the G8, NATO, AUKUS, and so on, all publish science for free, so as the US declines into a corruption-fuelled failed state, there will be access to that material still. I saw Mexican emergency services helping in Los Angeles the other week during the fires - more mature and capable countries are always here to help, even in very direct ways like this, where the US public sector is too fragile and broken to support their own citizens. There's been a rich history of this happening across Europe and Africa for decades, so others know what to do.
You might think I'm being sarcastic, or patronising or somehow trying to belittle the US. I'm not. That's where the country is now. It's failing in a way we've seen others fail many, many times before. The future is predictable, and it doesn't seem like anybody wants to change it.
An "interesting" consequence of these type of measures of stopping collecting or publishing data will be that soon it will be impossible to tell how much infant mortality, or number of cases of tuberculosis or similar changed with respect to last year. Maybe that is partially the goal.
Well, if your plan is to destroy governmental agencies while being in charge of them, it makes sense to destroy anything that might show you are causing harm first.
I've no doubt things like this will continue to happen. Trump, Musk and co will not stop on their own transforming the US into an authoritarian and likely fascist state. It's now up to the people of the US to stand up and save their democracy. Russia and China must be delighted to see the damage Trump's dealing.
> We weren't able to save our economy from monopolies and tyranny, and now you want us to go stand up against the people with tanks and machine guns!?
Yes, because what's the alternative? To give up and watch? I won't be easy, but if you're not even trying, no one can save you.
> At this rate I expect you'll tell me to stop importing iPhones and Perrier...
No, I won't. I don't tell you what to do at all. It's just my view on the path the US currently is. And I'm hoping, yes, because what happens in/to the US affects the world a great deal.
Interesting to see how quickly the US is going downhill. I’m sure everyone thought “the Roman Empire is too big to fail” yet here we are with a similar mindset about USA.
I’m an epidemiology professor and I write a weekly “weather report” outbreaks [1]. These communication and data blackouts are coming at a bad time. We’re having an unusual flu season—activity has rebounded unexpectedly. I’ve been having to scramble for data, last week by visiting each state health department website. It’s really troubling and consequential.
Reach out to the developer behind 91-DIVOC. That won't cover red states that go dark when and if they do, but it was invaluable to me during the covid pandemic.
I'm a CS professor who used to write and develop the software behind a daily and weekly Pennsylvania covid report. I get the pain here. It's a messy, incompatible jumble without the CDC.
Would you like me to see if there are some CS folks here to provide programming support to help with what you're doing?
I -hope- this is transient but I'm not holding my breath either.
This is intentional. They're mad about the covid response, and want to prevent mask mandates or lockdowns at any cost. At any cost. Including suppressing information about bird flu for as long as possible.
I’m curious about what will happen if they get to the parts of this Project 2025 like agenda that involves telling people to do things, or banning things people like.
We already see that abortion bans are unpopular. When they are put to a vote they lose, even in very red states.
How much more will people take? How will the Joe Rogan dudebro crowd react to banning porn? That’ll be interesting.
I’ve been predicting for years that it’s these guys — the Christian Nationalists / NatCons — who are going to mass confiscate guns. Would that be the third rail?
I mean the current game plan, from what it seems, is to make porn a shameful and taboo thing. Same as abortions as well.
There’s a heavy pro-natalism push for obvious reasons, and I have no idea why, but it feels like current government is trying to fix it through wrong methods. They know they’re royally fucked if people having 0-2 kids max.
Those definitely affect the choice, but ultimately, there’s just no real cultural push to have more kids nowadays. Rich people aren’t having kids either, as you can see in top 10%, 1% brackets. Like, I don’t have a single girl friend that even wants 3 kids. Anyone whom I’ve talked to always has a range between 0-2. Can’t blame them. Giving up at the minimum 6 years of your life for no real benefits kinda sucks.
It's a complex issue. IMHO it's only a real problem when birth rates are consistently below replacement or when they fall way below replacement as they are in a few places like Korea.
In that case, step one is to remove obvious barriers like insane housing prices and pervasive workaholism so that people who want to have kids find it easy to do so. Create a culture that is a supportive environment for families.
I don't see the Project 2025 crowd doing much of that. Many of the billionaires backing the project are pushing work cultures and social policies that will have the opposite effect. Think Musk's "hard core" work cultures are conductive to family formation?
I think it's because their real goal is fundamentalist theocracy and/or fascism. Just like the climate protestors who are actually hard-core Marxists or anti-industrial Neo-primitivists hoping to collapse society to realize their vision, these people are "problemists." The problem is a good thing because it's a hook they can use to sell a whole agenda. Solving the problem without implementing that whole agenda would be, to them, a failure.
Christian Nationalists don't want to fix declining birth rates without implementing Christian Nationalism any more than the people throwing paint on works of art in Europe want greenhouse gas emissions fixed without collapsing capitalism.
> I mean the current game plan, from what it seems, is to make porn a shameful and taboo thing. Same as abortions as well.
Uhhh no, they're pushing to make these things illegal. One is a social norm, the other is utilizing the power of the state to assert a specific opinion.
Nobody complained about downtimes (at least for Atlas Plus) when they started changing “sex” to “sex or gender” / “gender.” Let’s be honest.
I can’t find a single article about this because it was considered normal—they were simply upgrading their system. The level of dishonesty here is astounding.
Let’s wait three weeks. If Atlas Plus is still down, I’ll post an update here.
The data is not disappearing. The data and the related tools have been temporarily removed to be cleaned and brought into compliance with Trump’s executive order (basically removing “gender” or replacing it with “sex”)
That should be the intellectually honest title and that is what is happening.
So lets check in 3 weeks. If data and tools are not back then we can say and complain about data disappearing.
It's The Atlantic. They have no interest in being honest about the topic, telling you why the data is unavailable, or saying when it will be back (once they update the language that bookends the studies). The purpose is to make you angry and think they're burning data because they hate science.
I checked some old data from the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI), and it seems likely that it was removed to comply with Trump’s anti-DEI executive order.
I completely agree that SVI becomes less useful if you strip out the “Racial and Ethnic Minority Status” variable. Just wanted to provide an intellectually honest answer about why this page was taken down.
Let's assume that in 4 years, existing limitations are still in place and a new POTUS is in place. It would be interesting if these edits are soft deletes where they are easily reversed with the next administration, or will they need to go to the backups to restore data.
This ping ponging from one admin to the next on doesn't actually change the science. "The great thing about science is that it doesn't need you to believe it for it to be true." To me, the thinking that the hiding of data is going to make it go away is just one of those things that shows how unintelligent the person with that notion truly is.
This is a blitzkrieg campaign designed to try and get Musk and his people as much control of the digital government as possible before the roadblocks (legal, systematic, etc.) make things too difficult for him. As it stands, his goal is likely a purge of the federal government akin to what he did with Twitter. And the resulting 80% drop in revenue by Twitter is a similar kind of outcome we can expect from his careless meddling.
Except of course, instead of a company nobody cares about losing advertisers and money, lives are going to be lost. The stakes are higher when you start dismantling critical institutions and stuffing them full of loyal incompetents.
It is very plausible that he is also using it to get all the data he wants from this, not just to scrub it. It would make sense given his desire to compete on AGI that he can both scrub this data for public use and feed it to his own training sets.
> Elon Musk staff has been caught installing hard drives inside the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Treasury Department, and the General Services Administration (GSA). His staff encountered resistance when demanding that Treasury officials grant access to systems managing the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to programs like Social Security and Medicare. Tensions escalated when Musk’s aides were discovered at OPM accessing systems, including a vast database known as the Enterprise Human Resources Integration (EHRI), which contains sensitive information such as dates of birth, Social Security numbers, performance appraisals, home addresses, pay grades, and length of service for government employees. In response to employees speaking out, Musk’s aides locked civil servants out of computer systems and offices, with reports of personal items being searched.
Still so stupid in my eyes. This isn't the public sector, you can't just lay off 80% of the government without a hell of a battle with all the representative powers of the US.
Government's already being sued over these actions this weekend. I just hope federal employees ignore all his actions. They don't work for him (and Trump can't fire most of them in retaliation)
655 comments
[ 8.3 ms ] story [ 403 ms ] threadSo far it seems to be working, unfortunately.
If you had a real startup doing real things in healthcare, this is an intentional spoke in your wheels.
So, yes, your grandma relies on a data "supply chain" but, nevertheless, it benefits her.
Your grandma might have gotten free mammograms because of that data.
If the data is still in the possession of the government (e.g. in backups, on paper) then it is FOIA-able.
I had a gov agency temporarily throw all the materials into a trash can when I requested them and argued that since they were sitting in a trash can they were not available under FOIA.
Just curious, did they pull it out of the trash later on?
A lot of public bodies will play games like this. It's not even clear to me why they do it. It'll be documents that aren't even controversial that they will resist. Ask them what brand of coffee they buy for the break room and they'll immediately get defensive and find some random exemption to apply. Law enforcement bodies are by far the worst, I think because the public are seen as terminal nuisances all the way down through the bodies.
Why is the CDC taking down data when it's not required to do so?
https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2025-01-31/exclus...
Nasa took down their applied sciences page and is evidently scrubbing the data
https://www.reddit.com/r/gis/comments/1icqchv/why_is_the_nas...
(https://appliedsciences.nasa.gov/)
Lots of other data sets are disappearing too:
https://mashable.com/article/government-datasets-disappear-s...
There is active discussion of this at https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/
as well as at https://www.reddit.com/r/fednews/
Suddenly I feel out of the loop when it comes to US politics, how come Musk is suddenly seemingly seizing control of parts of the US government? I don't recall him being on any ballots or anything?
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-aides-lock-government-...
Evidently set up an on-prem email server at the OPM to send out their emails asking disloyal employees to resign
https://gizmodo.com/federal-employees-sue-agency-over-new-em...
And is attempting to do the same at the US Treasury (edit: I meant to gain access to/control of, not the email server thing)
https://www.finance.senate.gov/chairmans-news/wyden-demands-...
The twitzkrieg seems to be working.
Hacker News isn't designed for this. The point at which it becomes mass censorship that computer hackers (in their capacity as The Internet) might take an active role in routing around, is more or less this point: you're quite correct that this is worrying, but up to this point it's been a deeply political conversation and only as it becomes mass censorship and control by technological means, does it become really on-message for Hacker News.
Hell, Captain Crunch didn't even use a computer.
I'm leaning very hard into an HN 'tone' with this because this is Hacker News. There's other places where I can be a lot more direct, but the HN tone is perfectly valid as a response: being able to think dispassionately is both tactically and strategically useful as long as it's not purely used to obfuscate.
I fear HN folks have been sheltered from a lot of the reality of what's happening and led down the garden path BY intentionally asserting that tone anytime things get too assertive, but the tone still has its uses.
edit: woof! Ok ok, this is fully HN business and always was. Right on. Sorry I even suggested it could ever be otherwise. I didn't give my fellow nerds enough credit :)
In an attempt to keep it non-political: perhaps they (DOGE) are trying to put a "freeze" on the records while they consider who to fire. That would imply DOGE does not trust the people who have access to the records not to alter them in their favor. (Irony, since DOGE is demanding trust themselves.) You might not agree with that reason, but it is a reason.
All of this is happening within the Executive Office of the President, which is essentially fancyspeak to mean the government employees working the Executive Branch of the federal government. Those government employees serve at the pleasure of the President; Congress only has very limited influence (namely budgetary influences from the House and certain positions that require Senate confirmation).
So Musk, being appointed as a part of the Executive Branch, derives authority vested in the President of which Trump has delegated some to Musk for the purposes of implementing and enforcing DOGE policies.
Musk for his part also serves at the pleasure of the President, so whatever he does is ostensibly what Trump wants regardless of who actually does it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendleton_Civil_Service_Refo...
So remember, when Trump talks about the "deep state," he means workers hired through a merit system.
People couldn't agree what merit was, and sued over it. Now it's not only [still] unclear what merit is, but it's also unclear how aligned federal hiring practices are with any platonic ideal of "merit".
Trump and Elon taking a blowtorch to a lot of agencies isn't better, or even good. It looks to me like a different kind of bad that can't be quantified at the moment. Some of the worst of this will be temporary, since various resources are offline so that federal agencies can be compliant with Trump's EOs while they figure out how to change the resources and their databases, or wait for lawsuits to clarify before changing much or putting it back online.
Hiring through a merit system does not imply that the employees' work is meritful.
Congress had over 140 years (1883 to 2024) to carefully balance the rights of civil service workers against the need for top-down executive authority to ensure agencies are effective, in a way that would survive judicial review. Unfortunately, Congress is inept at almost everything. The Pendleton Act, followed by the CSRA, don't seem to have very well addressed the original patronage-based exec-branch staffing issue; as the article describes it, they've only ensured that replacing high-level staff is delayed by a term. Have they also made it too difficult to dismiss lower-level staff if agencies are ever in need of scaling back?
A majority of U.S. voters chose this. After all that was already known about this admin, they aren't backing down, he's doing what he promised he would do.
It is going to be more catastrophic than I think anyone knows.
[1] https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/2024pres...
(yes, I'm aware of the irony of linking to federal agency data in this thread)
At some point you're going to have to stop spouting the bullshit talking points and accept that this administration are actively worse on most metrics that they campaigned on improving.
I assumed the poster was using facist to mean “bad authoritarian government” - not that trump is actually a disciple of Mussolini style philosophy.
Right now the democratic system is working as designed, minus the incredible power of the executive branch which has been built up since FDR. Obama pioneered this approach to executive order.
Let's check back on these in a few years (months?).
Basically, your argument boils down to "you're wrong, the current sitation is not fascist enough yet"?
banning the existence of other parties
They don't need to. Similar to Russia, they will allow the appearance of other parties and elections, but the outcomes will be pre-determined.
changing the constitution to give all power to executive
SCOTUS has already done that: everything the president does is legal by default.
cancelling elections
Again, they won't need to. They proved in November that they already have done the right amount of voter disenfranchisement and gerrymandering to secure a win.
You are putting the burden on me to argue they are NOT fascist? (whatever meaning you want to attach to that word)
> They proved in November that they already have done the right amount of voter disenfranchisement and gerrymandering to secure a win.
Ah so you think the election was stolen?
> gerrymandering
How do you gerrymander state boundaries?
Is Musk the head of the OPM?
Also, policy cannot break the law and certainly cannot break the constitution. That is fascism. The executive doesn’t get to rewrite laws and the constitution.
It’s really hard to argue why the president cannot get advice from anyone he would like. His staff includes anyone he wants to employ. He just can’t freely give them positions of official authority.
> The executive doesn’t get to rewrite laws and the constitution.
the judicial branch is working and can challenge orders and take them to court. And is already doing so.
> That is fascism.
It’s really not. You should study what fascists believed rather than using them as a caricature for bad policy.
What? That's exactly what happens. The president (or his puppet masters) chooses the person, and then they go through a Senate confirmation process. I don't see how this isn't being appointed
What is common sense about sewing chaos in the federal government, inhibiting it's ability to function? In removing datasets that help us keep track of how effective our actions are?
I think this is just a symptom of the amount of power the office of the president has accumulated over the years. Musk has no authority on his own; he's acting on the authority of the president.
Due to the number of things Congress has delegated to the executive branch over the years, that's quite a lot of unchecked power indeed. But it's not Musk's power, it's the president's.
Did anyone elect Anthony Blinken? Janet Yellen? Lloyd Austin?
None of these people were elected yet have substantial power delegated through the President.
And while these people were approved by Senate vote, plenty of people in the Biden circle weren’t - Chief of Staff, members of the National Security Council, etc.
in this case the de-facto US nobility (rank-and-file career politicians) are being usurped by the bourgeouise (billionaires like Musk) at the advent of AI and tech by promising the working class a combination of culture war policy and relief from the very capitalist excess they themselves endorse. by reducing congress and senate to a simple debate team (conversely similar to the German National Asssembly) the tech-elite are able to seize power once reserved for the crown.
the question will be, after four years, will they abdicate their power or concentrate it?
You honestly think that's a question?
Power corrupts. You saw Trump, who in 2016 said he'd get everything done so he'd see no need to run again, he'd have Made America Great Again. He then tried to rig the 2020 election so he could stay in power, despite saying "if I lose the election you'll never hear from me again", and 4 years later, here we are.
These people are here to entrench themselves permanently.
At least some of these were covered by BBC [3, 4].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Raffensperger_ph...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Pence#Vote_counting_and_s...
[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-55524838
[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-55559172
Why would they? Once they come for the judges and replace them with “real Americans”, there’s no bottom.
A lot can happen in 4 years though. Maybe self-inflicted catastrophic wounds will drive down support for Trump enough where it becomes possible for R pols and oligarchs to abandon him. Or maybe they'll choose the dark path, and go farther into repressive authoritarianism to stay in power.
The problem for Musk et al is that they are concentrating power directly to Trump, not themselves. They're shackling themselves to the leopard and betting it will never eat their face.
They will blame women, minorites and especially trans people for all of that.
And when dust settles, those who supported Trump and Musk will see themselves as primary victims - and will blame minorites, women, democracts and trans people for consequences of their own actions.
Yeah, no. This is a coup and they are all in. They would not be this blatant about taking control illegally and fast if they expected to leave any institutions to still enforce the law against them.
Historically, they are just a bunch of rich morons that got lucky, got power, and decided to stage a coup. This is not some enlightened movement trying to replace the social norms. It's just your run of the mill personal power switch, and the only notable things about it are it's on a country that has been extremely stable before, and those people are stupid enough to willfully destroy it.
The US is a known bad design, nation builders working for the United States stopped trying to use this design for new countries in the 20th century, it doesn't work. It's inherently unstable and you previously got very lucky, although you have had a civil war and numerous close calls.
It's like oh, why don't we make coal-powered cars. Well because it's a known bad idea. We actually did try that, it's a bad idea, don't do it again.
I'd love to read about the new designs.
The latter inevitably slide towards autocracy. Too much power is concentrated in one person, who is almost impossible to legally remove before their term is up, and who will happily punish dissenters within the party.
In parliamentary republics, every PM is one internal party vote away from being deposed. You tend to see less of the tail wagging the dog in them.
The US has proper separation of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. The legislative has a per-state and popular representation. Which part of this is "inherently unstable"?
The only part lacking a proper proportional representation (as in a parliament).
Also, the per-state representation doesn't seem to lead to good results at all. As you said, the popular representation isn't proportional, what is a more relevant flaw than anything before this point on this comment.
And that is before you get into the details that are actually bad. It's incredible that they managed to stay stable with that electoral system, for example.
That said, looks like they will have an almost perfect opportunity to fix some of those in a few years...
I found it shameful that we hold so much a power hungry war while however as Memento Mori teach us, the only certainty is death, and that power is simply gone.
They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
Musk, Thiel, and their friends clearly intend to consolidate power, and the people they associate with openly advocate for the creation of independent corporate fiefdoms with authoritarian control over society. There is no doubt at this point. These are not good people. They are oligarchs. They are the bitter nerds that just want power for themselves so they can be the bullies.
It’s all obvious corruption.
Of course, carbon offsets are still a huge cash cow for Tesla, so Musk won't be eager to touch those.
And Tesla?
https://www.tesla.com/IRA
Source: personal experience, as well as https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/manufacturers-and-mod...
Your statement might give somebody the impression that somebody in the previous administration singled out Tesla. This is obviously not correct. EV credits were available to all car makers. But there was a limit and Tesla reached their limit first. And later GM did as well.
What individual(s)? You just mentioned a family and not an individual. Forbes lists Elon's net worth at $419 billion.
Also, any king or dictator effectively owns their nation’s entire treasury, including all real estate. Maduro, for example, is wealthier than Musk.
Tho in the Maduro sense, which is a dictator that just make sense while he is in power, it's not actually own by him.
Even the most aggressive speculative estimates from opposition figures, investigative journalists, or geopolitical analysts do not approach that figure.
No credible leaks (like the Panama Papers or Pandora Papers) have hinted at such vast assets tied to Maduro.
No intelligence reports or financial investigations from entities like the U.S. Treasury, the EU, or independent watchdogs have ever approached figures remotely close to hundreds of billions.
The social support system in the US is being dismantled and when people can no longer afford to eat, the ensuing riots will provide the necessary trigger to declare martial law and suspend democracy completely.
[1] DARK GOTHIC MAGA: How Tech Billionaires Plan to Destroy America https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RpPTRcz1no
In the US, you can fly multiple planes into skyscrapers, rape three whole kindergartens, and lynch an entire race to extermination. As long as you then win the next election before you get convicted, you're in the clear.
This is the United States of America.
Vulgar examples? The bare minimum necessary to make people remotely feel the severity in their bones. Problem is that no one dares to say them out loud in fear of their reputation, despite it being a good thing to do.
This clearly states the person's feelings (curiosity) about some observations (seeing comments of a particular sort).
Fortunately we have depository libraries, so some key stuff won’t be destroyed by these barbarians. https://www.gpo.gov/how-to-work-with-us/agency/services-for-...
Are you saying something like, "You know I hate everything Musk stands for, everything he does publicly — but he might be an okay guy as a person"?
It's literally to detach the person from the projects, of course times changes and the elected project can not be achieved by an X factor, tho we should have checks and balances in that too.
Today we follow X or Y politician/party but in this polarization we lost the focus that in the end a politician is elected to execute goal/project and not to hold power and then maybe do it.
My understanding of your original comment was similar to how 'JkCalhoun understood it, but this comment reads more like "the country show follow through on decided changes" regardless of who is in power. That I agree more with, with exceptions of course. (One example is maybe Obamas connection with "Obamacare" that is still a thing even though he is not in power.) Perhaps another way to put it is to detach the project from the person, but the person will still be linked (in some way) to the project.
Especially when it comes to international policies. For one, international relations and agreements are (normally) much slower moving and longer lasting than internal ones, and if countries can't depend on agreements lasting longer than the current leadership then such countries will see themselves not taken very seriously.
Kind of like if a president signs a trade deal with his country's closest neighbors and then a few years later instigate a trade war against the same countries.
It's more a way for people to start see politics in the medium long term.
A lot of "woke" people warned it but several ignored as being "political speech" now we pay the consequences.
Where are the CDC people growing a spine to stand up to this? This is obviously bad.
The reason why bullies only understand 1 language (force) is exactly why counter-bullies who also speak that language are needed. And these are (usually) men (and some smaller percentage of women). (I'm seriously not trying to genderize this. I'm speaking of "fighting/disobeying/confronting energy" instead of "nurturing/complying/keeping-copacetic energy". Anyone who's good at that, should exercise it.)
If you have to take good science to the darknet, then fucking do so. That's what it's there for.
"The [Dark]Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." - John Gilmore.
Alternately, move the data hosting to Switzerland, Iceland, or the Netherlands as a data-haven. Hetzner might be OK too, since very-left-wing Germany (while it has an agreement to comply with legal MLAT requests) might savor the opportunity to snub Trumpian requests or stall them indefinitely due to lack of obvious national-security importance.
But your argument is inherently flawed. Part of the point of government is to regulate and direct the use of force. We have mechanisms that are supposed to apply force to "bullies". The problem is that the "bullies" have co-opted that system to use it for their own ends. This happened gradually so it didn't become obvious until the most recent "bully" decided he didn't even want to pretend that he wasn't in control.
Individuals who directly stand up to this administration will be hammered down with the full force of the government. The best we can hope for is a passive resistance and malicious compliance. That combined with grassroots efforts to fill the media with protests of objectionable policies is probably the best we can do for now.
The only other option is to apply force outside of the system to correct it, but things are not nearly to the point where revolution is the better option.
The funny thing is that people have always said this exact thing except paraphrased in various ways (perhaps the term was less "bully" and something more conventionally a universal term of disparagement like "fascist"). I definitely didn't want Obama going after whistleblowers, increasing domestic surveillance and not closing Guantanamo when I voted him in... and I liked his healthcare plan, until it died...
I suspect that everyone says this when the person they didn't want in charge, now is, and starts doing things that their biased media always depicts only the negative side of.
Go to the ACIP page (https://www.cdc.gov/acip/) and click on the "Vaccine-specific recommendations".
Other affected topics are HIV prevention, birth control/contraception, domestic violence and probably many more.
The page I used to look for mask efficiency disappeared too (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7106e1.htm ) but the CDC website still discusses masks so it does not seem to be intentional: https://www.cdc.gov/respiratory-viruses/prevention/masks.htm...
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/index.html
Looks to have been an uninterrupted weekly streak since 1982...
the (still up) archives: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/mmwr_wk/wk_pvol.html
Vaccines and healthcare in general are intended as a safeguard against pandemics and mass death. If the goal IS mass death, it makes practical sense to try and delete all health and vaccine information in hopes it's lost forever and the society that uses it is rendered helpless against such events or weapons.
I'm interested to note that HN's commentariat hasn't mentioned the extent to which all scientific research of this nature was immediately defunded: my social media had indirect exposure to a lot of healthcare researchers who were freaking out, many days ago. Did you notice that part or is this the first sign of it that's made its way over here?
I'd note that defunding medicine isn't strictly HN-type content, though mass deletion of data certainly seems to be HN-adjacent. I would think hackers and entrepreneurs would take that sort of thing personally, as it more or less attacks them by starving them of information that could be useful.
https://www.cdc.gov/acip-recs/hcp/vaccine-specific/index.htm...
edit: It is about this CDC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centers_for_Disease_Control_an...
"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the national public health agency of the United States. It is a United States federal agency under the Department of Health and Human Services, and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.
The agency's main goal is the protection of public health and safety through the control and prevention of disease, injury, and disability in the US and worldwide."
https://fedihum.org/@SafeguardingResearch
https://safeguarding-research.discourse.group/
And the other half? They seem to welcome this as well, but with crossed arms. Where are the protests? Seems most people end up writing upset messages on Twitter/Bluesky, but also seems there are no grassroots movements to actually protest the borderline coup that is happening?
[0] https://generalstrikeus.com/
If they have instilled this much cowardliness in you they have won. Imagine you’re kid looking at what you wrote twenty years from now and think of how he/she would think of you. Courageous or coward?
Good for your grandfather though.
https://coalpail.com/coal-forum/viewtopic.php?t=1422
Most rights that workers have today have been earned through protesting (and sometimes the bloody consequence of protesting while the state is resisting wanted changes). Protests only "doesn't do anything" when you don't do it enough or give up. Maybe I'm too European to understand, but the "pacifist" approach of the US working class seems to not be working out great.
The pitchforks aren’t just for show!!
And I’ve lived in Europe for over a decade now and frankly much of Europe is painfully naive about how much people in power care about protestors waving clever signs.
I guess the same goes the other way, Americans seems painfully unaware how effective the public's will can be, when you act together. But I think that's to be expected, the US is still relatively new and young, compared to other countries, so lessons others have learned still need to be learned by the Americans themselves. I guess this is what we're witnessing right now.
I'd urge you to look up changes brought by protesting and riots, but I think we both know you're not interested in learning, since you already stated twice you think it's pointless.
Ideally, of course, you have a functioning democracy, but I don't really think that describes much of the US at this point (the people who'd protest are mostly in blue states anyway where their votes, even if correctly tabulated, count less). Other examples might be Ghandi, who promoted nonviolence but really only got India's freedom when the British empire was in terminal decline, or the civil rights movement, which happened when the US was a much healthier democracy and swaying public opinion was enough to remove people through elections. You might cite the velvet revolution too, but that also was targeting an empire in decline.
I argue that elections in the US _will not matter_ (Trump's cryptic comments about how Elon knows all about these voting machines and they won Pennsylvania thanks to him are telling....) and in that context protest doesn't do anything because the people in power have nothing to fear if they ignore the protestors.
Normally, in a democracy, when you get a lot of people together complaining about something, it is already an implicit threat of removing politicians from power.
But if you manipulate the electoral system enough, it stops being. The fact that this mostly doesn't work nowadays is loudly telling people all they need to know.
I was trying to adopt to your own tone, not sure why you'd feel that it is condescending or dismissive.
> I am curious to hear more about peaceful protests working
Some starting points: 2024 protests in Serbia leading to the resignation of the Prime Minister. 15-M protests in Spain leading to the formation of new political parties and reforms. Velvet Revolution (I know you already mentioned this) leading to the overthrowing of the communist government. The Singing Revolution leading to the independence of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Euromaidan/Revolution of Dignity leading to the ousting of Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine. These are just recent examples, I could go on...
Honest question: Have you attempted to lookup examples yourself, and you didn't find a single example?
They immediately got what they wanted.
https://www.history.com/news/black-panthers-gun-control-nra-...
Government workers going on strike means they're doing what we want them to do, which is nothing. As a Trump voter, I want these federal government workers to stop working so the astronomical waste of our time/money and disturbing of peace stops.
The best work the US government does is when it's doing nothing, because it's hardly working properly unless it's forced to (ICE is an example of government actually working again).
Whether the workers resign, strike/protest, or get back to work implementing MAGA policies in the office, we win.
So when your glorious day comes, and your State asserts their rights and levies your bank account to pay for your parents medical bills as your filial responsibility, (or whatever your personal tragedy ends up being) you’ll have the feels, and will flip to the next cult of personality.
Edit: I think I was being disingenuous about foreign aid, sometimes foreign aid can be necessary to protect the well-being of US citizens. Stopping pandemics early or preventing them. Standing by a treaty so people know our word is good. Maintaining access to a resource our economy depends on etc. I just find it telling that the only foreign aid that was exempted was to Israel.
International politics is complicated. Anyone who shows you a single line item without context is deceiving you. Especially if the number is related to sex and a disease associated with promiscuity. That's a red flag. Their stats may be true, but their stated goal isn't.
[0]: https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c7870.html
I don't believe you are arguing in good faith otherwise I'd think you'd also be upset about the millions of tax dollars spent so that one man can golf? Which there are actual receipts for [1].
[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/02/05/691684859/government-watchdog...
Hopefully someday you’ll ask yourself why you paid heed to some misinformation nonsense about African condoms and got upset about it.
In the meantime, try to stay away from power tools.
But perhaps they're advocating a return-to-the-Earth philosophy with every person (or family) aiming for self sufficiency in a frontier-style economy. I doubt it (when I try to point out that their truck requires a lot more gas than they can refine as a hobby I get pushback), but maybe.
Indeed. Not quite as far back in time as you sarcastically suggested, but down-to-Earth enough that Congress stops enjoying absolutely abysmal approval ratings and President Reagan's infamous line of "I am from the government and I am here to help." stops resonating so strongly as a prime criticism.
If we also have to destroy ostensibly useful institutions like NASA to achieve it, well then so be it. As I mentioned in a sibling comment, the chances for more amicable processes have come and gone.
People slowly figure it out. On HN 2-3 years ago, any critique of Elon would bring out the brigades of simps babbling about autistic genius. That’s mostly gone now.
What happens next?
Protests get the word out and create comrades.
Starting a trade war has consequences. That mortgage of yours is pegged to 10 year treasury rates. Bend the demand curve for foreign investors seeking safety in US government debt and stuff happens, like real estate bubbles deflating. What happens when foreign investors start dumping loans for vacant NYC buildings on the market because of their governments restrictions?
Look at the the classic Bogglehead investment - VTI. 30% of that portfolio is 10 companies, half of which are extremely vulnerable to foreign action. What happens to Apple stock when there’s a 30% tariff on iPhones?
You have reckless idiots turning knobs and people are going to get hurt. Then they get angry. LARPing right wing morons love to talk revolutions on their podcasts, they may get their wish.
This is too pessimistic. Consider successful grass-roots movements: civil rights and maybe anti-war (Vietnam).
> and is overwhelmingly unlikely to get us out.
In the sense that nothing is likely to get us out? Sure. At some point you need to stand up for what you believe is right, though.
I can talk to people about it, but the difficult part is not talking but getting people to truly listen.
So yes, ordinary people are limited in their power and capacity even if these adds up.
Now comes the part where we see if the administration abides by those legal decisions or not, and how the final legal decisions here turn out once these cases inevitably land in front of the Supreme Court.
At the point where the administration ignores the courts and laws and continues on with their illegal impoundment, that's the point where you have to protest.
He was declared immune for all actions he and he alone declares as official.
He will die in office, in his mid 90s. Democracy has been cancelled.
Money - the folks doing this already have a ton of money, and used it in large part to get to this point.
Violence - necessary for change, but against who exactly? anyone trying to be violent against the folks running this will be disavowed by 90% of the rest of the population, and galvanize an outsized violent crackdown against anyone and everyone who even somewhat looks like them.
It’s going to have to get a lot worse before there is appetite to do the things that will actually make it better. people aren’t bleeding enough yet.
So anyone actually trying to fight back will be destroyed by their own side. Where the folks doing this, won’t be.
There are at least as many ways to respond to repression as there are avenues of repression: https://commonslibrary.org/198-methods-of-nonviolent-action/
- In Nazi-occupied Europe, during World War II, various groups wielded nonviolent resistance (such as hiding Jews) against the Nazi regime and managed to hamper the regime's efforts, and in some cases saved lives. Not ineffectual.
- In Germany, in 1923, the German population wielded nonviolent non-cooperation and strikes (the Ruhrkampf) against the French and Belgian occupation and managed to gain international sympathy and hinder the occupiers. Not ineffectual.
- In Nazi-occupied countries--Denmark (Engaging in public protest and social boycotting, along with acts of noncooperation and striking), Holland (Developing an underground press network, social boycotting, noncooperation, striking, and hiding and facilitating escapes), Norway (Sending letters of protest, maintaining social boycotts, engaging in cultural resistance, noncooperation and creating alternative institutions such as unofficial sports leagues), France (Stalling and obstruction the forced relocation of Jews, noncooperating, developing clandestine media, and demonstrating open defiance, eg wearing the yellow star in solidarity), and Belgium (Hiding and facilitating escapes, noncooperating, and obstructing authorities protected the lives of Jews, made it harder for the Nazis to enforce their policies, and weakened their ability to maintain order)--during World War II, various populations wielded nonviolent resistance against the German occupiers and managed to present a unique challenge to the Nazi regime, which was more equipped for violent conflict. Not ineffectual.
- In East Germany, in 1953, workers and other citizens wielded strikes and demonstrations against the Communist regime, revealing the extent of public dissatisfaction with the working conditions, inspiring groups such as the Volkseigener Betrieb Industriebau's Block 40 section and the Zeiss factory at Jena to make bolder collective demands such as the release of a fellow worker who had been arbitrarily arrested and even inspiring sympathy from Russian/Polish soviet soldiers. Not ineffectual.
- In Russia, in February 1917, striking workers and other citizens wielded massive strikes and peaceful demonstrations against the Tsarist regime and managed to lead to its disintegration. When troops did fire on demonstrators, as occurred in Znamensky and Kazansky Squares, it backfired. The soldiers who obeyed these orders later felt remorse and questioned why they had shot at the crowds. This resulted in mutinies, such as that of the Volynsky Regiment. These troops then went into the streets to proclaim their support for the people. Not ineffectual.
- In the United States, during the mid-20th century, civil rights activists wielded sit-ins, marches, and boycotts against segregationist authorities and systems and managed to dismantle racial segregation, voter disenfranchisement, and discriminatory employment practices. Not ineffectual.
- In India, during the early to mid-20th century, Gandhi and his followers wielded civil disobedience, boycotts, and strikes against British colonial rule and managed to challenge that rule, demonstrating the power of non-cooperation and willingness to suffer for a cause. They won independence. Not ineffectual.
So, now the burden lies on you, really, to demonstrate that our opponent in this moment is somehow more fascist, more cruel, and also more independent of the consent of the governed than any other fascist administration in history against whom nonviolence prevailed or, at least, mitigated.
But in order for me to even read your response, you would have to open by convincing me that you will do something other than sit on your ass and pull in a SE salary until the next election. Because even if nonviolence were ineffectual--and, again, it's not--you could, at the very least, opt out of participation in the socioeconomic systems from which the fascists...
Or all the examples from non-facist regimes, where those regimes were less murderous? Or from pre-Nazi Germany, where it was clearly ineffective at stopping the abuses or the rise of the Nazi regime.
Stalin and the USSR were a huge, murderous problem (Holodomir being just one example), but they also weren’t Nazi germany, yes? And while murderously authoritarian, they were also fundamentally different in many key ways from facists. Notably, they tended to target and destroy ‘their own’ through terrorizing different (and shifting) internal factions, rather than having a more consistent set of ‘out groups’ they were targeting. And for all the problems in the USSR, they were generally pro-labor. It was the intellectuals and property owners they tended to target.
Unlike Nazi germany, where it was more ethnic identity, and willingness to bend a knee to them ideologically. [https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-night-...].
I don’t think we are at that point. Yet.
But striking against Nazi Germany later in the process was clearly a bad idea. [https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/general-strike-amste...]. A common theme in concentration camps was people being forced to work, often to the death. [https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-camp-...]
Nazi Germany was very good for business (at first), as the State actively supported and provided cheap labor to business, among many other kinds of support. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Nazi_Germany]
A key differentiator between Nazi Germany and the USSR was essentially that Nazi Germany was pro-big-business (as long as you’re ‘one of us’), and the USSR was pro-worker (as long as you do/believe what we say).
The biggest danger in Nazi Germany was being one of the ‘others’ - if they found you. And it was often a death sentence for anyone trying to hide one of the ‘others’ too. Hiding people, while it did work for a small number of people, was completely ineffective at stopping the larger holocaust. [https://www.npr.org/2019/01/29/689272533/the-invisibles-reve...]
In fact, the holocaust continued up until Hitlers suicide and subsequent German surrender, after the allies had totally obliterated Germany in a war of annihilation they had been forced into, and were literally within shooting distance of his bunker.
Ok, that's somewhat goalpost-shifting, because you said "ineffectual," and I showed effect. It satisfies me enough to extrapolate from there.
Edit: Are we to believe, then, that you are taking up arms? Or just waiting to see if it gets so bad that you must? Or, don't you think an ounce of civil disobedience might be worth a pound of civil war?
I did everything I could do in the US without getting arrested. I got large portions of my life destroyed in the process. Talking to people, even people that should know better, was basically just pissing in the wind.
I found out years ago that a distant relative of mine (Jewish) left Germany in the mid ‘20’s to immigrate to the US, leaving his entire life behind. At the time, I wondered how he knew, or what could have happened for him to take such a drastic step.
Now I know. I’ve been taking similar steps for years. At least I can provide a Plan B for myself and others.
Maybe that makes me a coward. I don’t know. But I won’t help evil, and I won’t be a pointless martyr for someone else’s idiocy either.
If I had thought taking up arms at the time (or even now) would have accomplished anything except making them more powerful while getting thrown under the bus by anyone that it in theory would be helping, I would have.
But that isn’t the situation is it? Because I’d be a ‘lone wolf’ because there aren’t enough others would can or would stand with me. Yet. Maybe there never will be. Maybe I’m wrong and everything will be fine, yeah?
We’ll find out. At this point, I just want to give double middle fingers to US society and tell everyone to fuck off.
Productive? Probably not. But I’m only human.
You're right that Nazi Germany fell to the tanks of Liberalism and Bolshevism.
There are so many strange and, to be, baseless assertions in your replies that fear we're simply not going to discover common ground in this venue.
Godspeed.
A bunch of Americans have been taught that protests only "count" if they don't inconvenience anyone. Laws have been changed to make effective protest impossible. It's legal to ram protesters with your car in Florida, for instance. The cops use force to suppress protests and the media tells everyone your protest was invalid because it broke the law.
If we press the point more aggressively, we'll probably start another civil war. The right holds Rittenhouse up as a hero, and that's not an isolated thing. For decades, average, rank-and-file GOP voters have made jokes and jabs about shooting liberals. It used to be a few tasteless blowhards, but it's commonplace now. See also comments from Kevin Roberts about how the "second American Revolution" will be "bloodless if the left allows it."
There are resistance movements extant and forming, but it's a wicked problem. The size and population of the US requires more resources and participants to make an impact. The speed at which the situation is changing makes it hard to find purchase to do so.
It is quickly being organized for 2/5/2025 at each state capital.
https://www.reddit.com/r/50501/
But at the end of the day a lot of people didn’t listen and voted for this direction instead.
So the people who protested and tried everything for a decade are done. Now we are just waiting for the 70 million people who still support this direction to finally burn themselves on the stove and discover it is in fact hot, just like we’ve been saying. The next protests have to be Republicans and Democrats or there’s no point.
In fact there is an active community of very Trumpy libertarians on this very website who pop up in the handful of political threads that make the front page. They seem to be silent here, one hopes maybe they've been given pause.
Well, yeah. There’s OAN and Newsmax and the evangelical Christian radio stations when Fox gets too liberal for them.
Trump: 77,168,458 votes (49.9%)
https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-ELECTION/RESULTS/zjpqne...
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/president-re...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/05/us/elections/...
More people voted for Trump, but it wasn't half the country. There were a lot of people that did not vote at all. The most accurate would be to say that nearly half of the votes cast went for Trump. That is not half the country
If anything it was the 1.6% of votes that went to other candidates that could be seen as a spoiler. You'd have to say that all of that 1.6% would have gone to Harris for it to have been a spoiler though, and I doubt that's the case.
you are now part of the problem
Nope, but you've just made it clear you're susceptible to propaganda.
Now, imagine someone holding the reverse position. Who's right? Which government institutions do you find generally trustworthy, and which do you find generally untrustworthy? Has this changed from administration to administration? Do you think your ideological viewpoint has influenced your opinions?
Edit: None of the responders answered my questions. Its impossible for most people to admit political bias, as evidenced here.
Did the Biden administration go into the offices of social media companies and purge the posts/data?
Every administration pushes back / pressures entities about messages that they think is wrong. Every administration has a message and story that it wants told. It's what press offices are for, for example. Remember, in 2017, when White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Trump's inauguration had the largest crowd's in history of inaugurations?
* https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38707722
But this is about purging raw data that is used for analysis, and not a particular story. (The data can be used to support or debunk a particular message of course.)
Censorship was having federal government employees scream and yell at facebook content moderation teams to remove social media posts.
The sad thing is, there is precedent how the government could handle the situation. You still cannot say "shit" on broadcast TV.
It is becoming very difficult to distinguish justice from crooks in the U.S.
The CDC had lost all credibility anyway, dismantling it wouldn't be a bad idea, maybe not all of it, so that's what we are (not) seeing there.
I also wonder how many of these data sets were required by law.
"Data is stored on a computer's hard drive." "The data for the experiment are stored on the computer's hard drive."
Entirely predictable. And well deserved. I say this as someone living and suffering in America.
There is no one else to blame but ourselves. The future is bleak.
This is not a joke. What will sting Elon, Trump and crooks the most is losing their wealth. The rest of the world does not need to suffer for these crooks.
What is hard is desinvesting from the US treasure. You have to sell those somewhere, and if everybody tries, their value will quickly go to 0. But if the US is successful in making their trade-balance positive, this will solve itself without a lot of hardship, it's just a matter of the rest of the world helping them here.
Macroeconomics is not what will show you problems here. The US is inserted itself into every supply chain on the world, but you will only notice this if you look at the details. Maybe we should start with an intellectual property reform...
If you don't mind the tsunami that ensues, sure.
That would take a lot of legwork to confirm, but while the US$ is certainly the most used intermediate currency, it would surprise me if it was even used on the majority of the transactions.
Losing half of their import market and half of their export market would be the worst financial calamity they’ve ever faced.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
This is a very US-style approach; nobody calls their "representatives" in Europe, unluckily.
Average IQ Americans freebase propaganda and Joe Rogan for thoughts. The Kremlin and the Republican propaganda empire have been paving the way for a Project 2025 Neo Nazi hostile takeover for decades.
John Doe from Florida doesn’t stand much of a chance when every TV, cell phone, and Facebook bot in his state is beaming the world’s largest psy-ops laser-beam at his head for half of his life.
I tend to blame the Fascists. But yea, the future is bleak. We’re cooked in America, at least.
Is that maybe to prevent (for example china) from getting the data for AI models, but giving it to the "nice" Stargate?
For example, President Truman ordered the US military to be (re)integrated. Through malicious compliance, racist officers put their own spin on the orders.
"Well, he didn't say that black officers would get equal access to the officers club, so we won't let them in."
It too a former 5 star general (President Eisenhower) to stamp out the malicious compliance and make it stick.
There was already a case of malicious compliance with the DEI EO on the part of certain US air force personnel taking down material about the Tuskugee Airmen. The new sec def stomped that out within 4 hours.
You can read the EO here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/defe...
Beyond a few specific documents, nothing in there requires the CDC to pull down all this data immediately. There is even a section about "progress updates by 120 days".
The CDC is still run by the same people as under Biden. They are the ones that immediately pulled down the data, not Trump hires.
Their goal could be obedience such that
A) the Musk cronies don't come through and truly delete the data (vs, just taking it offline)
B) they don't get fired and can take a stand when "bigger" issues happen. I.e another pandemic.
Or y'know,
C) they want to keep their jobs and decided to just obey.
You might think I'm being sarcastic, or patronising or somehow trying to belittle the US. I'm not. That's where the country is now. It's failing in a way we've seen others fail many, many times before. The future is predictable, and it doesn't seem like anybody wants to change it.
https://www.texastribune.org/2024/12/06/texas-maternal-morta...
We weren't able to save our economy from monopolies and tyranny, and now you want us to go stand up against the people with tanks and machine guns!?
At this rate I expect you'll tell me to stop importing iPhones and Perrier...
Yes, because what's the alternative? To give up and watch? I won't be easy, but if you're not even trying, no one can save you.
> At this rate I expect you'll tell me to stop importing iPhones and Perrier...
No, I won't. I don't tell you what to do at all. It's just my view on the path the US currently is. And I'm hoping, yes, because what happens in/to the US affects the world a great deal.
[1] https://caitlinrivers.substack.com
Would you like me to see if there are some CS folks here to provide programming support to help with what you're doing?
I -hope- this is transient but I'm not holding my breath either.
(feel free to reach out at dga@cs.cmu.edu)
We already see that abortion bans are unpopular. When they are put to a vote they lose, even in very red states.
How much more will people take? How will the Joe Rogan dudebro crowd react to banning porn? That’ll be interesting.
I’ve been predicting for years that it’s these guys — the Christian Nationalists / NatCons — who are going to mass confiscate guns. Would that be the third rail?
There’s a heavy pro-natalism push for obvious reasons, and I have no idea why, but it feels like current government is trying to fix it through wrong methods. They know they’re royally fucked if people having 0-2 kids max.
In that case, step one is to remove obvious barriers like insane housing prices and pervasive workaholism so that people who want to have kids find it easy to do so. Create a culture that is a supportive environment for families.
I don't see the Project 2025 crowd doing much of that. Many of the billionaires backing the project are pushing work cultures and social policies that will have the opposite effect. Think Musk's "hard core" work cultures are conductive to family formation?
I think it's because their real goal is fundamentalist theocracy and/or fascism. Just like the climate protestors who are actually hard-core Marxists or anti-industrial Neo-primitivists hoping to collapse society to realize their vision, these people are "problemists." The problem is a good thing because it's a hook they can use to sell a whole agenda. Solving the problem without implementing that whole agenda would be, to them, a failure.
Christian Nationalists don't want to fix declining birth rates without implementing Christian Nationalism any more than the people throwing paint on works of art in Europe want greenhouse gas emissions fixed without collapsing capitalism.
Uhhh no, they're pushing to make these things illegal. One is a social norm, the other is utilizing the power of the state to assert a specific opinion.
https://www.epicresearch.org/data-tracker/communicable-disea...
I can’t find a single article about this because it was considered normal—they were simply upgrading their system. The level of dishonesty here is astounding.
Let’s wait three weeks. If Atlas Plus is still down, I’ll post an update here.
It sounds like you are conflating a planned information removal with some unspecified amount of upgrade time? Those aren’t equivalent to me.
The data is not disappearing. The data and the related tools have been temporarily removed to be cleaned and brought into compliance with Trump’s executive order (basically removing “gender” or replacing it with “sex”)
That should be the intellectually honest title and that is what is happening.
So lets check in 3 weeks. If data and tools are not back then we can say and complain about data disappearing.
There's no Gender or Sex component to the CDC's SVI methodology why was that dataset removed?
https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/community-stress-resource-center/p...
It's you who is being intellectually dishonest.
I completely agree that SVI becomes less useful if you strip out the “Racial and Ethnic Minority Status” variable. Just wanted to provide an intellectually honest answer about why this page was taken down.
This ping ponging from one admin to the next on doesn't actually change the science. "The great thing about science is that it doesn't need you to believe it for it to be true." To me, the thinking that the hiding of data is going to make it go away is just one of those things that shows how unintelligent the person with that notion truly is.
> Elon Musk staff has been caught installing hard drives inside the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Treasury Department, and the General Services Administration (GSA). His staff encountered resistance when demanding that Treasury officials grant access to systems managing the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to programs like Social Security and Medicare. Tensions escalated when Musk’s aides were discovered at OPM accessing systems, including a vast database known as the Enterprise Human Resources Integration (EHRI), which contains sensitive information such as dates of birth, Social Security numbers, performance appraisals, home addresses, pay grades, and length of service for government employees. In response to employees speaking out, Musk’s aides locked civil servants out of computer systems and offices, with reports of personal items being searched.
Government's already being sued over these actions this weekend. I just hope federal employees ignore all his actions. They don't work for him (and Trump can't fire most of them in retaliation)